Whitmaniana Memorial Collection by William Sloane Kennedy

THE WILLIAM SLOANE KENNEDY MEMORIAL COLLECTION OF WHITMANIANA "As I see more of Sloane, I am impressed with his strong, remarkable, moral nature - his moral intellectual nature if I may call it; and when I speak of his moral nature, I don't mean morals but that highest something which makes life steadfast and ample ... " - Walt Whitman in Camden So spoke WhItman about his fnend William Sloane Kennedy on whose life he had made a deep impression. Kennedy admired and revered the genius in Whitman as much as he was fond of the person. His opus magnum The Fight of the Book for the World and his Reminiscences of WaIt Whitman attest to this. William Sloane Kennedy was 29 years old when he met Walt Whitman. He had just written the poem Fireflies, an experiment in verses without terminal rhymes, when an acquaintance brought him a copy of Leaves of Grass. Kennedy wrote that when he read it he: " ... was wild with enthusiasm and wrote an account of the Whitman poetry and philosophy for the Californian, which I sent to Walt. He read it and was impressed with it and sent me a Christmas present of his book. I was charmed by his kindness and became from that moment a devoted disciple till his death." 1 In his biographical notes for Grover, Kennedy writes of his employment as journalist for The American in Philadelphia. During this time he often took the ferry to call on Whitman. He describes that he was "being possessed by a strange and inwardly fiery feeling and love for the man, which I never felt for any other.'" They would walk over to Philadelphia, Walt leaning on Kennedy, and they had wonderful conversations during these walks. He remembers that Whitman never spoke ill of anyone, which was in contrast to Kennedy's caustic nature. During the eighties Kennedy worked for the Transcript and wrote his biographies of Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes and others. In 1896, four years after Whitman's death, he saw his Reminiscences of WaIt Whitman published in England and Scotland. Whitman had read the manuscript and approved of it. During the same year, Kennedy published his The Fight of a Book for the World. In it he not only gave tribute to Whitman, but also described the reception Leaves of Grass received here and abroad. When Kennedy was in the United States, it was his habit to escape the northern winters in either California or Winter Park, Florida, where he met and befriended Grover. Rollins College's President Hamilton Holt had made him Professor of Books and Director of the College Library. Grover persuaded Kennedy to leave the College a legacy to memorialize his friendship with Whitman. At first Kennedy was not too keen on the idea of giving a college or university anything, since he had a lasting antipathy for academic institutions. Grover, ever so persistent, persuaded him that an endowment fund for Whitman books, to be housed in the College's Library, would be an appropriate memorial to the Whitman-Kennedy friendship. Reluctantly, Kennedy asked Grover to write something that could become a codicil to the Kennedy will. Grover eagerly drafted a document which in essence bequeathed the residue of the estate to Rollins. The College would pay Mrs. Foote, Kennedy's sister, a five percent interest on the fund as a life time revenue. Kennedy was neither satisfied nor amused by this suggestion. His lawyer wrote a bequest for an endowment of $10,000 into Kennedy's will, which would come to Rollins College after Mrs. Foote's death. The interest of the Fund was to be spent exclusively for books by and about Walt Whitman. Shortly before his death Kennedy signed the altered will. Kennedy's bequest was received by Rollins College in 1930, and for the rest of his life Grover watched over the Fund's expenditures. He constantly fought faculty and administrators who wished to divert Kennedy Fund money to purchase books in other fields. Rollins, like many other small Liberal Arts institutions, experienced serious financial difficulties during the thirties and the Library's annual budgets were barely equal to the yearly income of the Kennedy Fund. Grover's successor, William F. Yust, tried desperately to use some of the Kennedy money for urgent purchases that would support the general curriculum. He even went so far as to contact Judge Harvey F. Remington, President of the Rochester, New York, Public Library, for a legal interpretation of Kennedy's will. 3 Grover did not waste time either. He wrote to many prominent library directors, asking for their expert opinions about the administration of endowment funds and gathered a respectable corpus of support letters for buying only books by and about Whitman. When the Duke University Library announced the gift of their Whitman Collection in 1943, Rollins Librarian Joseph D. Ibbotson tried again to divert monies from the Kennedy Fund to general book purchases. 4 His reasoning was that the substantial collection at Duke would fulfill research demands within the Southern States, and there was no need for Rollins to compete with building a collection that would never equal the one at Duke. President Holt, under pressure from Grover, upheld the ruling that the Fund can be spent only for Whitmania (sic).5 Grover always wanted to have a first edition of the Leaves of Grass for the Collection. In 1935 he had the opportunity to acquire one from the estate of Katherine Holland Brown, the novelist who had died in Orlando several years previously. The book was valued then at $2000 and the income from the Fund was only $400 annually. Grover tried to manipulate the Library Committee and the seller of the estate to agree to a deal to pay for the book in yearly installments of $200 each but Rollins Librarian Yust refused his consent to it. This was not the end of the story. Grover tenaciously kept pushing for the purchase. The College finally bought the Brown copy of Leaves of Grass in January 1945 from Harry Brown, cousin of Katherine Brown for the sum of $500. 6 Grover retired in 1951 at the age of 81. Until his death in 1965, he was 94 then, he held on to his self-appointed authority over the Kennedy Fund. One of the valuable purchases he negotiated, was a group of Henry Scholey Saunders items, many of them typewritten and mimeographed and bound by Saunders' careful hand. In general, the collection is eclectic. After Grover's death, the selection of items to be bought rested mainly with the librarians, who did solicit suggestions from the English department. When Charles Feinberg and William White visited the Rollins Library in 1980 to view the Collection, they were pleased with what they saw, especially the Traubel and Bucke typescripts found favor. Both gentlemen contributed to the Collection through gifts from their holdings. During the past twenty-five years, the collection policy has been to buy all current items contributing to Whitman scholarship, but not to pursue the Antiquarian Market for extravagant purchases. The only exception to this rule was the addition of a postcard written by Whitman to William Sloane Kennedy. When Kennedy agreed to make his bequest, he spent little time thinking about the details connected with the gift. To him it was a monument to the poet and to their friendship. Rollins College is glad to share the use of this gift with Whitman scholars and aficionados. Kathleen J. Reich ENDNOTES: 1 Rollins College Archives. The Edwin Osgood Grover Papers, Correspondence with William Sloane Kennedy. 2 ibid. 3 Rollins College Archives. Library Papers (60B-5k) Letter from Wm. K. Yust to Judge Remington, Nov. 20, 1935. 4 Rollins College Archives Library Papers (60B-5k) William Sloane Kennedy Trust Fund. Letter from Joseph D. Ibbotson to President Holt, May 29, 1943. 5 ibid. Letter from Holt to Ibbotson, 31 May, 1943. 6 Ibid. Letter from Harry H. Brown to Hamilton Holt, December 29, 1944 and Letter from Holt to Brown, January 12, 1945.

Note written by Kathleen J. Reich