“There is Nothing but Immortality!”: Walt Whitman and The Book of Heavenly Death (1905)

In his 1910 collection Optimos, the American poet Horace Traubel ventriloquized an auctioneer, selling off a dead poet’s “wares”: his dreams, hopes, promises. There are few takers:

No one to bid where so much may be bought?
You would not buy this man in his life — I thought you would buy him in his death.
No? Well the judges somewhere judge — I do not:
I check off all these effects for heaven — let them ascend with their owner :
Those would have made you free.

It was barely a metaphor. For the last twenty years, Traubel had been serving as the literary executor of Walt Whitman, and had been his amanuensis for almost twenty years before that. He put out editions of Leaves of Grass; founded a socialistic Whitman journal, The Conservator; published a Bosworthesque nine-volume memoir titled With Whitman in Camden. In short, he tried desperately to keep the older man’s memory alive. For Traubel, Whitman was not just a poet but — as the poem above implies — a seer, a font of wisdom, a source of knowledge on life and death.

Nowhere is this conviction clearer than in The Book of Heavenly Death, from 1905. In this short work, Traubel compiled choice excerpts from Leaves of Grass that spoke to Whitman’s conception of immortality. An opening preface adds context from the two’s conversations: “What Spinoza said concerning God, ‘to reason about God is to deny him,’ Whitman said about immortality, to reason about immortality is to deny it” (xvii). According to scholar Harold Aspiz, Whitman, like his contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James, believed immortality to be real because there is an (almost universal) human instinct that it is. For the transcendentalists, immortality was a matter of faith, but available to those who would simply look. Traubel again:

With him immortality was not an argument. It was a vision. Life does not answer the questions of reason. It answers the questions of sight. There was no because or therefore in Whitman’s revelation. Everything about Whitman was this: See. See life. See love. See the soul. See the continuance of identity. See the past. See the future. See the sympathies. See. See.

The phrase “heavenly death” was one of Whitman’s; it appears several times in the poems collected here. Yet Traubel must have been thinking most particularly of number 86, which ends:

I do not doubt that wrecks at sea, no matter what the horrors of them, no matter whose wife, child, husband, father, lover, has gone down, are provided for, to the minutest points,
I do not doubt that whatever can possibly happen anywhere at any time, is provided for in the inherences of things,
I do not think Life provides for all and for Time and Space, but I believe Heavenly Death provides for all.

Traubel had been friends with Whitman since he was a teenager, when he had joined the circle of young men that gravitated around the poet after his move to Camden, New Jersey. Reading the foreword to The Book of Heavenly Death, one still feels the endurance of that youthful admiration, even as he built a career of his own in socialism and journalism. (In the introduction to a 1912 edition of Leaves of Grass, he wrote of Whitman that “my small boy wonder is having my man’s confirmations”.)

Perhaps that explains the resolute esotericism of this collection: Traubel’s own conviction about Whitman’s stated ideals, coupled with a refusal to see Whitman’s human frailty. Aspiz points out that in compiling the collection, Traubel left out those of Whitman’s poems about death’s relationship to war or to sex — and perhaps most incriminatingly, “nearly every passage in which death is associated with violence, terror, and pain.” For Aspiz, Traubel was attempting to make Whitman a saint, and there is certainly something of that in Traubel’s description of Whitman’s 1892 demise:

‘He is dead!’ said [Alexander] McAlister [Whitman’s physician], ‘practically dead—see,’ and he lifted the fallen eyelid and touched the ball of the eye, which was fixed and showed no sense of impact. But at 6:43 came the last. The heart was still! No contortion, no struggle, no physical regret — and the eyes closed of themselves and the body made none of the usual motions towards stiffening out — towards rigidity. By and by McAlister and I together laid him decently and reverently straight. I laid his hand quietly down — something in my heart seemed to snap and that moment commenced my new life — a luminous conviction lifting me with him into the eternal. [The writer Thomas Briggs] Harned murmured, ‘It is done,’ and I could not but exclaim, ‘It is triumph and escape.’

Traubel had his own escape in 1919, on a trip to Bon Echo, Ontario, where he and the Canadian suffragette Flora MacDonald Denison had created “Old Walt”, a massive monument to Whitman, today mostly faded. Denison later wrote that, a few days before his death, Traubel told her of a vision he’d had of the great man, calling to Traubel to “Come on”. Maybe he had the last stanza of The Book of Heavenly Death in his mind:

I swear I think there is nothing but immortality !
That the exquisite scheme is for it, and the nebulous float is for it, and the cohering is for it !
And all preparation is for it — and identity is for it — and life and materials are altogether for it !