Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

Park Rilett, Beverley

English

Victorian Sexual Politics and the Unsettling Case of George Eliot's Response to Walt Whitman

Duncan, Joel

Wilson, Ivy G., ed., Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet

Tuggle, Lindsay

The Afterlives of Specimens: Walt Whitman and the Army Medical Museum

Gosline, Sheldon Lee

"I am a fool": Dr. Henry Cattell's Private Confession about What Happened to Whitman's Brain

Gannon, Thomas C.

Moe, Aaron M., Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 31, no. 4

Loving, Jerome

182
IN MEMORIAM: JUSTIN KAPLAN (1925-2014)
“Did you see the Holloway obit in the NY Times Tuesday?” Justin Kaplan asked 
me in a postscript to his letter of August 6, 1977.  Emory Holloway, born in 
1885, won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1926 biography of Walt Whitman.  Kaplan, 
who had won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his 1966 
biography of Mark Twain, was then working on his biography of the Good Gray 
Poet.  We had struck up a correspondence a year earlier when I learned that 
Justin had received a Guggenheim to write the Whitman biography. It appeared 
in 1980 and won the National Book Award.  When the manuscript was ready 
for the publisher, I was one of a number of people he asked to read the work 
before it went to press.  I was honored and thought I got more benefit from 
reading his life of Whitman than he got from my meager comments on his text. 
Walt Whitman: A Life (he wasn’t altogether happy with that title, as I 
remember) brought the poet to life in a way Gay Wilson Allen’s The Solitary 
Singer (1955) hadn’t. Kaplan focused on the life over the work.  He saw Whit-
man’s life as the stuff of a novel, the story of a fascinating person (which he 
was, quite apart from having written Leaves of Grass) living in the nineteenth 
century—a century in American literature that Kaplan had come to love, 
possibly while studying for a Ph.D. at Harvard under such legendary profes-
sors as F. O. Matthiessen and Perry Miller.  I don’t know how far he went in 
the graduate program at Harvard, but I suspect he was what we used to call 
“ABD” (when such a credential could still mean a job in academe) as he left 
to become an editor at Simon and Schuster.  Looking in vain for somebody 
to write a biography of Mark Twain, so the legend went, he finally gave up his 
search and decided to write the book himself. He knew as much as any of my 
American literature professors at Duke, and he knew it in a rather modern 
way, to my thinking at the time.  Where others found sources and symbolism, 
he found context and irony.  
The first sentence of Walt Whitman: A Life simply bristles with both:  “In 
the spring of 1884 the poet Walt Whitman bought a house in the unlovely city 
of Camden, New Jersey, and at the age of sixty-five slept under his own roof 
for the first time in his life.”  When I visited the Cambridge home of Justin and 
his wife, the novelist Anne Bernays, in 1999, he mentioned to my wife Cathy 
and me that he was judging nominations for either the National Book Award 
or the Pulitzer Prize.  He said that if the first sentence didn’t grab him—cer-
tainly the first paragraph—he would stop and go on to the next submission, 
at least for the first round of his considerations.  (I never forgot that little bit 
of information, and so ever afterwards my initial sentence in all that I subse-
quently wrote was always much better than all the sentences that followed!) 
“Poets of ecstasy through the ages,” wrote Justin Kaplan, who had pub-
lished on the Classics before he wrote about American literature, “rendered 
the consummated marriage of the soul with God in sexual imagery. But 
sexuality as sexuality—‘the desire to copulate’—is a force in Leaves of Grass, 
a work that celebrates the democratization of the whole person, the libera-
tion of impulse and instinct from involuntary servitude” (193). Never mind, 
Kaplan seems to suggest, that mystical union of Body and Soul in section 5 
183
of “Song of Myself”:  Whitman found ecstasy in the mundane.  Kaplan also 
deftly sets Whitman’s sense of sexual liberation in the larger political context 
within which the would-be orator dreamed.  It was probably Kaplan who got 
me to see (and to suggest in my own biography of Whitman) how the idea of 
democracy and the plight of the working person dominate almost every line 
in Leaves of Grass.
In the summer of 1977, I camped out with my wife and two small children 
on Justin and Anne’s beach in Truro, on Cape Cod, for a couple of nights. I 
was spending the summer in Concord, Massachusetts, working on Emerson, 
Whitman and the American Muse (1982), and we couldn’t find an opening at 
any of the Cape motels; so Justin invited us to camp on his beach. Their house 
overlooked the bay in which they both swam every day. More than once I 
walked on that beach with Justin and talked of Whitman.  It seemed such an 
appropriate setting for a discussion of the seashore poet, the author of “Out 
of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life.” 
We became friends ever after, seeing each other at various events involving 
Whitman. I remember being with him in 1980 for the conference at Hofstra 
University, celebrating the 125th anniversary of the first edition of Leaves of 
Grass.  During the banquet, we heard the news that President Carter’s military 
effort in Iran had failed to liberate the hostages.  Reagan would get the credit 
for doing that, though he got little credit (or representation) in at least one of 
the editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, which Justin edited in 1992 and 
2002 (Kaplan was quoted as saying he had done Reagan a favor by including 
so few of his statements). I always thought it a bit odd that a biographer of 
Whitman, who is so unquotable, would go on to edit Bartlett’s.
I last saw Justin and Anne at their Cambridge home over two years ago. 
He was using a walker but was otherwise in high spirits.  We shared a fine 
lunch and a bottle of wine. Life, he joked, was simply “one fucking thing 
after another.”  It was this stoicism, I think, that informed his writing, his 
biographies, which also included a life of Lincoln Steffens in 1974, and When 
the Astors Owned New York (2006), the life of a hotel dynasty and the money-
grubbing lives behind it.  In addition to editing the Library of America edition 
of Whitman’s Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (1982), he also wrote two 
books with Anne—The Language of Names (1997) and their memoir Back Then: 
Two Lives in 1950s New York (2002).  They were a most interesting couple, 
each of whom had grown up as a “hotel kid” in New York City, as I was once 
told by another biographer and a friend of theirs. Anne is descended on both 
sides from Sigmund Freud, and her father, Edward Bernays, was known as 
the “Father of Public Relations.” Well, Walt Whitman became the poet of PR. 
This self-appointed publicist anonymously reviewed his first edition of Leaves 
of Grass (three times) and never gave up his journalistic bent of promoting 
himself in the press (“I celebrate myself and sing myself”).  Whitman “had 
his nerve,” as a later poet remarked, and a later biographer, Justin Kaplan, 
captured that nerve in one of the most compelling narratives we have about our 
Poet of Democracy. For me, Justin Kaplan set the gold standard for biography.
—Jerome Loving, Texas A&M University


Not a member yet

Victorian Sexual Politics and the Unsettling Case of George Eliot's Response to Walt Whitman

Wilson, Ivy G., ed., Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet

The Afterlives of Specimens: Walt Whitman and the Army Medical Museum

"I am a fool": Dr. Henry Cattell's Private Confession about What Happened to Whitman's Brain

Moe, Aaron M., Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 31, no. 4

In Memoriam: Justin Kaplan

Back Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 31, no. 2/3

"Beyond religions and even beyond mankind": Karl Shapiro's Jewish Walt Whitman

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 31, no. 2/3

437

1,261