KATHERINE TYLER AND WALT WHITMAN

Conventionally, the high school junior year for US schools in the subject of English are about American Literature with a heavy emphasis on the writers who seemed to cluster in Concord, Massachusetts, or nearby.  Walt Whitman was a little peripheral but in a culture that never quite admitted he was gay, he was still included as a kind of footnote.

My junior year at Jefferson High School in Portland, OR, a school now made famous by vandals who knocked his statue off its pedestal, was in 1955/56 when we never conceived of such a thing.  We were quite arrogant about being an excellent school, at least equal to Grant High School which has no statue to pull off its base.  Most of his portrayals were on horseback, which is more expensive, and he was, after all, a Civil War figure rather than a Founder.

Anyway, in those years Jeff had a program called Enriched Environment, or some such, “EE” for short, and the classes were taught by the “best” teachers.  Katharine Tyler was the teacher of EE American lit.  Most of the best teachers were Edwardians born before WWI and they were getting close to retirement, so they were a little frail.  Miss Tyler certainly was, and she missed a lot of days because of illness.  While she was gone, a sub came whose assignment was to read “The Leaves of Grass” out loud to us.  We each followed in our own copies, half-asleep until the sub either mistakenly or mischievously, said, “Oh, these next pages I’m supposed to skip.  They’re a little too adult for you.”  Then there would be a great rustling to find the spot.

Whitman's eloquence is so disguised that if you don’t know what his references really are about, you’ll never guess.  We only half-grasped what he wrote.  One part that made a strong impression was about his Civil War service as a nurse to grievously injured young men.  He dressed their wounds after doctors had treated them, he bathed them, he read them their letters from family and helped them write their own, he kissed their brows, and -- if they died -- he held their hands.

Katharine Tyler was tiny with enormous eyes.  She had been far-sighted and had thick glasses that magnified.  Soft-voiced and quick, she could be called bird-like.  By the time she retired, she had married but I never understood whether there had been an earlier marriage.  This husband had been wealthy and she was able to move into the Terwilliger Towers which were very nice apartments for older people.  She joked that none of the residents could keep their slips from showing or their wigs on straight.  She herself remained elegantly orderly.

When I was at Animal Control in the ’70’s, I made contact again for some reason I don’t remember and visited that beautifully furnished apartment.  The husband had died.  She wanted to make a bargain with me.  Her car was in the basement parking but she could no longer drive.  Would I be her chauffeur to various events?  The bait was a ticket to “A Chorus Line.”  Our joint venture was a huge success.

The next night out was a ballet company, but I don’t remember which one.  Part of the evening was conventional, but there was also an experimental dance featuring men, some white and some black, scantily costumed but wildly active.  Miss Tyler — not her married name but her teaching name — had a lot of questions about just what this dance meant in terms of race and sexuality.  I had no answers.

Gradually I began to realize that she thought I was lesbian.  She was neither the first or the only person to think that since I never did “date” boys with marriage in mind, but I was not.  I let it alone as there was a kind of safety in it.  In those days being lesbian was kind of benign.  “Boston marriage”, you know, rather academic and at worst inclined to be feminist.  I haven’t been able to find any biography of Miss Tyler but I can post her yearbook photo.

On my shelves are three Walt Whitman biographies that I’ve read and forgotten or never did get around to read.  I saved them for “later” which is now.  The key one is “The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman” by Gay Wilson Allen (1955, my junior high school year) though the copy I have is paperback (1985) with a new preface (in which “Gay” is his name and not his desire) does confront the question of whether Whitman was “gay”.  He did have a strong bond to his mother and to a boy friend who was thirty years younger, though they were both adults.  Allen was an “on the spot” expert on Whitman in Brooklyn and he lived to 92 which meant a lot of books on the poet.

A second biography is “Walt Whitman, A Life” (1980) by Justin Kaplan, one of the ivy-draped biographers we all admired until recently.  The third is “Walt Whitman, From Noon to Starry Night”, 1993) by Philip Callow, an English working class man and poet who wrote a great many books.  If I weren’t writing so much, I’d sit down and read all three books back-to-back.

This was Katharine Tyler’s gift to me.  My sophomore year the teacher was Martha Shull, who WAS quietly lesbian, and she was the head of the NEA that year.  She gave us modern poetry.  I will never forget her beautifully made up face reading to us the Greek comedy, “The Frogs,” and pronouncing carefully, “Krekekekek, koax koax.”  I have no idea what it meant — it was omnipoesis for frog croaking and it still makes me laugh.  My senior year was a woman whose name I don’t remember.  She was middle-aged and worried.

Until looking through the new preface of “The Solitary Singer,” I had not realized that Whitman’s time was one of astronomical breakthroughs and he welcomed them, expanded to meet them optimistically.  We need to be reminded in these times of wild tumult cosmos-wide, fit for poetry, new science/meaning.  It can be mind opening.