Transcript for the Piece Audio version of RN Documentary: For Every Atom Belonging to Me?

?For Every Atom Belonging to Me??

150 years after Walt Whitman first published ?Leaves of Grass,? the 19th century American poet is celebrated anew ? with Dutch translations of his poetry and a post-9/11 novel by Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Cunningham.

Interviews: Michael Cunningham, author ?Specimen Days?
Margaret O?Neill, curator Walt Whitman house
Recordings: Poetry International 2005 ? Whitman in Dutch translations??
1889 Edison recoding of Whitman(?) reading his work
Music: ?The Hours? soundtrack ? Philip Glass
?Song of Myself? ? Special Delivery (Poetry International 2005)

SCRIPT

RN presents Vox Humana presented by David Swatling.

MUSIC1: ?The Hours? - ?For Your Own Benefit?

DAVID: Walt Whitman?s autobiographical jottings called ?Specimen Days? begins in the summer of 1881 with ?a week?s jaunt? to his birthplace on Long Island. ?I write these lines seated on an old grave on the burial hill of the Whitmans of many generations. There is always the deepest eloquence of sermon or poem in any of these ancient graveyards.? The next day he devoted to the ?maternal locality? of the Van Velsor homestead and burial hill, where he wrote: ?The old race of the Netherlands never yielded a more mark?d and full Americanized specimen than Major Cornelius Van Velsor?? (referring proudly to his Dutch grandfather). When I visited Whitman?s house in Camden, New Jersey a few years back, then curator Margaret O?Neill explained how the ?good gray poet? later became obsessed with his own resting place. (1?06?)

VISIT TO WHITMAN HOUSE DUR: 1?50?
FW: Being that this is the house?
LW: ?I do think of that, yes.?

MUSIC/Jazz: ?Song of Myself? ? Special Delivery

DAVID: Walt Whitman needn?t have worried about whether or not he would be remembered?

MUSIC UP

DAVID: Tenor Alan Belk and Dutch jazz quartet Special Delivery performed ?Song of Myself? composed by Henk de Ligt during a special Walt Whitman marathon of new Dutch translations at Rotterdam?s Poetry International 2005.

MUSIC UP

DAVID: Walt Whitman first published ?Leaves of Grass? in 1855 with twelve poems and continued to add to his magnum opus throughout his long life. His final so-called ?death-bed? edition contains over four hundred poems. Near the end of ?Song of Myself? Whitman declaims, ?I am large, I contain multitudes.? The same is certainly true of ?Leaves of Grass.? But try as I might to read it straight through, I always find myself skipping around, finding my own path in this labyrinth of verse. But that?s not a bad way to approach it, according to Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Michael Cunningham, whose latest book invokes the spirit of Whitman.

CUNNINGHAM: I think part of what?s extraordinary about Leaves of Grass is the fact that you are certainly more than welcome to read any one of the nine different versions from start to finish. You are equally welcome to simply read it in bits and pieces. It?s more like ? what would be the creaturely analogy ? a jellyfish than it is like any other animal. It?s a multi-celled organism and you can take bits of it and really get a sense of the whole. I don?t think there is any shame in deciding that you would simply rather not read this entire huge poem from beginning to end. It still works in any of its parts.
DAVID: Internet?
CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, yeah. I mean, Whitman to my mind is the only American writer who has come close to succeeding in writing a book about everything in the world. And you can approach it as sort of a catalogue of all the people and all the things in the world that Walt Whitman knew and take it piece by piece. DUR: 1?30?

MUSIC2 ? ?The Hours? ? ?The Poet Acts?

FROM ?SPECIMEN DAYS? (Whitman 1882)
?If I do it at all I must delay no longer. Incongruous and full of skips and jumps as is that huddle of diary-jottings, war memoranda, nature-notes? all bundled up and tied by a big string, the resolution and indeed mandate comes to me this day, this hour- ?to go home, untie the bundle, reel out diary-scraps and memoranda, just as they are, large or small, one after another, into print-pages, and let the? (lack) of connection take care of itself? Maybe, if I don?t do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed.?

CUNNINGHAM: Specimen Days is, as you know, the title of a sort of loosely organized series of journal entries that range from his walks around Long Island to his work among the wounded in the Civil War. And I imagine he choose the title Specimen Days simple to imply that these are some days in a life ? they are specimens of days ? and other people of course have their own days. But every day in any life is a sort of specimen of all days in all people?s lives. This is very much like what Virginia Woolf was doing in ?Mrs. Dalloway? ? insisting that one day in the life of a relatively ordinary and silly English woman could actually stand in for any day in any life.
DAVID: You brought up Ms. Woolf? Difference between getting into the head of depressed, suicidal, brilliant woman & Uncle Walt?
CUNNINGHAM: Well, I didn?t set myself the task of getting into the head of Uncle Walt. I use Whitman very differently in this book from the way I used Woolf in ?The Hours.? In The Hours I had the temerity to try to enter the consciousness of Virginia Woolf and I am nothing if not ? um ? ambitious beyond my actual abilities. And if the book had called for it, I would have tried to imagine what it was like to be Walt Whitman. But in this book Whitman is more a presiding spirit ? almost a benevolent ghost who haunts the book. So I use his poetry which is probably as good an entry into his mind as anything the poor old novelist might have imagined. DUR: 2?10?

DAVID: ?A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.?

MUSIC3 ? ?Something She Has to Do?

DAVID: The first part of Cunningham?s book, also called ?Specimen Days,? is set in 19th century New York City at the height of the industrial revolution. Lucas, a strange 12 year old boy, is so obsessed with ?Leaves of Grass? that he has taken to memorizing it verse by verse? and then one day?

SPECIMEN DAYS (Cunningham 2005) page 66
Broadway was filled with its lights and music, its departing shoppers and its glad men? Lucas walked among them, looking attentively downward. He saw the tips of boots, the cuffs of trousers, the hems of skirts?
He?d gone along for several blocks when he came upon a pair of boots that seemed familiar, though he knew he had never seen them before. They were workingman?s boots, dun-colored, stoutly laced. They stopped before him. He looked up and beheld Walt?s face.
Here was his gray-white cascade of beard, here his broad-brimmed hat and the kerchief knotted at his neck. He was utterly like his likeness...
?Hello,? he said. ?Lost something??
Lucas had gone looking for money and found Walt. A vast possibility trembled in the air. He answered, ?Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery, here we stand.?
Walt expelled a peal of laughter. ?What?s this?? he said. ?You quote me to myself??
His voice was clear and deep, penetrating; it was not loud but it was everywhere. It might have been the voice of a rainstorm, if rain could speak.
Lucas struggled to answer as himself. What he said was, ?The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them.?

CUNNINGHAM: I think any ?brave new world? is best seen through the eyes of an innocent who can simply take it at face value and convey it without a great deal of judgment. DUR: 20?

DAVID: Each of the three very different parts of Cunningham?s book feature a child or child-like character who spouts Whitman?s verse. And though the poet himself makes a brief appearance only in the first part, he is represented by key figures in the middle section, set contemporary New York, and in the third part ? a futuristic vision of the city.

CUNNINGHAM: Whitman was certainly a visionary poet and he was writing about an America that existed 150 years ago. At its apogee of promise, Whitman was writing about a nation that looked as if it was on its way toward being the most abundant, generous, accepting country the world had ever seen. And of course the America that has developed 150 years later is very, very different. One of the reasons I used Whitman in Specimen Days was for contrast. I knew I would be writing a very much darker, more difficult America and I wanted to keep referring to the great America ? the America that seemed to be poised on greatness ? about which Whitman was so very enthusiastic. I?m not sure what he would have thought about the America of today. I suspect he would?ve responded somewhat differently. DUR: 1?10?

MUSIC4: ?The Hours? - ?Vanessa & the Changlings?

DAVID: ?I dream?d in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole rest of the earth, I dream?d that was the new city of Friends??

These Whitman lines took on a darker resonance after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. And recently, a new wave of what?s been dubbed ?post-9/11 fiction? has emerged from the ashes: ?Saturday? by Booker Prize author Ian McEwan begins with an airplane on fire descending toward Heathrow Airport; New York novelist Jonathan Safran Foer?s ?Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close? centers around a young boy whose father perished on 9/11. And disasters past, present and future abound in Michael Cunningham?s ?Specimen Days.? But does he think of his book as ?Post-9/11 fiction??

CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, in a funny sort of way. I certainly had the idea for the book before 9/11. I simply wanted to write a book that sort of traced the arc of technology, beginning in the Industrial Revolution and ending in an imaginary future involving genetic engineering and cloning and interstellar travel. But by the time I got to work, 9/11 had occurred and so it became a book that was certainly about 9/11 among many other things. I never imagined leaving it out. It?s hard to think of writing a book set in New York or anyplace in America in contemporary times and not refer to 9/11. ?Any novel is both about and not about the grand historical events that are taking place around it. The novelist?s job as far as I can tell is to tell the story of particular lives in the midst of conflagration and enormous historical change. That?s certainly true of Jonathan?s book. It?s true of Ian McEwan?s book. It is simply the novelist?s province to tell stories about how it was for these people during ? the fall of Rome, or the Civil War or post-9/11.
DAVID: Is there a time when its too soon to write about it?
CUNNINGHAM: I?ve thought about that. No, I don?t think so, though I am aware of the fact that there is traditionally a considerable lag factor between a historic event and it?s depiction in novels. It took almost twenty years for there to be interesting novels or movies about the war in Viet Nam. And for reasons I don?t fully understand, we are all right on 9/11. By 9/12 I think some writers were getting to work on their novels that dealt in one way or another with 9/11. As to the idea that there is some sort of enforceable waiting period ? the idea that we simply must hang back and take it all in and then write our nostalgic memoirs of 9/11 in the year 2030 ? I say, ?Nonsense!? Though I have noticed that American critics have been extremely hard on the novels that concern 9/11. But those critics will be all dead, gone and forgotten and all these books ? the good, the bad and the indifferent ? will still be around. DUR: 3?25?

DAVID: ?Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.?

MUSIC5: ?The Hours? - ?Why Does Someone Have to Die??

SPECIMEN DAYS (Cunningham) from Part 2
The woman was sixty or so, sitting straight as a hat rack in the grungy precinct chair. Her white hair ? arctic white, incandescent white ? was pulled into a fist at the back of her long, pale neck. She wore a shapeless coffee-colored dress and a man?s tweed jacket with the sleeves turned up at the wrists?
Cat said to the woman in the chair, ?They tell me you?re Walt Whitman.?
?The boys call me that,? the woman said. Her voice was strong and surprisingly deep; her diction was precise.
?It?s an unusual name for a woman,? Cat said.
?I?m an unusual woman? I?ve come to tell you that it?s starting.?
?What is it that?s starting??
?The end of days.?
?Could you be a little more specific??
?The innocents are rising up. Those who seemed most harmless are where the danger lies? ?Urge and urge and urge, always the procreant urge of the world.?

DAVID: The second section of ?Specimen Days? - called ?The Children?s Crusade? ? involves a female incarnation of Whitman leading a small band of child suicide bombers terrorizing post-9/11 New York City.

CUNNINGHAM: You know, to my mind, any suicide bomber is to some degree a child ? though they may be physically adult. I think anyone who would kill him or herself and whoever happens to be around is seeing the world in childlike terms ? as easily divisible into good or evil. I think anyone who would do something like that is obeying a strict set of laws which admit to little of the ambiguity ? the humanity ? and the empathy that is to me the mark of an adult. I just knocked a few years off their ages. But I don?t feel that their fundamental nature is different from that of any suicide bomber. DUR: 1?00?

DAVID: ?Over the carnage rose prophetic a voice,
Be not disheartened, affection shall solve the problems of freedom yet,
Those who love each other shall become invincible??

MUSIC6: ?The Hours? - ?Tearing Herself Away?

SPECIMEN DAYS (Cunningham) from Part 3
A black man looked up at them when they entered? He must have been seventy. A cascade of smoke-colored beard spilled over his chest. He wore a battered, broad-brimmed hat pulled down to his shaggy gray brows?
?My name is Emory Lowell.?
Simon?s circuits buzzed? He said, ?Thruster holding me tight and that I hold tight! We hurt each other as the bridegroom and the bride hurt each other.?
Emory stared at Simon with avid, feral eyes.
?Oh my lord,? he said. ?You?re one of mine, aren?t you.?
?I guess I am,? said Simon.

DAVID: The last part of Cunningham?s ?Specimen Days? is set in a post-apocalyptic New York 150 years in the future. Humans co-exist with lizard-like extraterrestrials and androids, like Simon, implanted with a ?poetry chip? by their creator in an attempt to add ?some moral sense? to their existence.

CUNNINGHAM: I have a complicated relationship to technology. It makes me nervous as I think it would any citizen who?s aware of what?s going on around him. At the same time, do I have a computer? Yes. Cell phone? Yes. I-pod? Yes. Do I have 17 assorted high-tech gadgets in my apartment which I use and love? Yes. I think we are on the brink of enormous changes that probably have as much to do with biology as they do with technology. I can?t help but notice that a surprising number of writers are turning up with speculative fictions. Ishiguru, Atwood. Suddenly all over the place, we who have no communication with one another are writing something like science fiction. And I think it has something to do with the vast changes that we understand ourselves to be on the brink of.
DAVID: ?Surprising about your writing ? are you a SF fan ? or challenge?
CUNNINGHAM: I am a fan of science fiction and I actually believe that some of the most adventuresome, interesting, fabulous writing is being done by science fiction writers at the moment ? certainly in America. And I?m very much aware of the fact that some of those thinly veiled little autobiographical novels about being dumped by ones girlfriend which are over there in the serious section which everyone I know has read are very slight compared to some of the epic tales of imagination and philosophy and metaphysics that are read by almost no one I know because they?re in that other section ? the science fiction section. It?s considered frivolous and I think people are dead wrong about that. I actually think its one of the most promising directions in which 21st century literature is headed. DUR: 2?25?

MUSIC7 ? The Hours - ?Choosing Life?

DAVID: ??Specimen Days? ends with a lone survivor riding West into the sunset, speaking aloud lines from Whitman?s ?Song of the Open Road?:
?The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.?

CUNNINGHAM: Any novel, any of the novels I admire is to some extant about survival. I think one of the things novelists are doing and have been doing since novels have been written is chronicling the ability ? the remarkable human ability to survive the very worst things that can happen to people. It?s part of what?s interesting about us as organisms ? our adaptability, our capacity to live through impossible losses and ? for some of us anyway ? to live on. DUR: 43?

MUSIC UP

DAVID: And the poet?s voice lives on? literally, if a recording taken from a damaged 1889 Edison wax cylinder is actually Walt Whitman. No one can be absolutely sure. But as Kees ?t Hart, editor of the new Dutch translation of ?Leaves of Grass? said, when introducing it at Rotterdam?s Poetry International, I like to think it?s really him.

WHITMAN RECORDING DUR: 35?

DAVID: ?his barbaric yawp still sounds over the roofs of the world. And a plaque in front of the tomb he designed for himself in Harleigh Cemetary reads:
?I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.?

MUSIC UP

?For Every Atom Belonging to Me? featured author Michael Cunningham. His novel ?Specimen Days? is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Except for the piece by Dutch jazz quartet Special Delivery, the music was composed by Philip Glass for the film version of Cunningham?s Pulitzer Prize novel ?The Hours.? Special thanks to Rotterdam?s Poetry International and the John Adams Institute in Amsterdam. The program was produced by David Swatling, with sound engineer Jon Nieuwenhuis.

Vox Humana is a Radio Netherlands presentation.

Back