M. C. Gardner

M. C. Gardner is a playwright, biographer, and cultural essayist.The Man From Lloyd's is the title of Gardner's T.S. Eliot play. His Elvis play is called A Presley Passion. The Man From Lloyd's concerns itself with the dynamic between the T.S. Eliot and his first wife, Vivenne Haigh-Wood and their relationship with Bertrand Russell. A Presley Passion considers the relationship between Elvis and his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Both plays use music and lyric to develop their respective themes and characters. The Man From Lloyd's features the songs of Eliot's contemporary, Al Jolson. A Presley Passion features the Presley song book.

Gardner's first book Buddha Boogie: The Tautological Paradigm is a structural analysis of Western thought and Eastern scripture. It demonstrates a nexus between the Jewish Tanakh, Vedanta's Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita and Hua-Yen Buddhism's Gandavyuha Sutra and the 7th century's Chinese Patriarchs, Dushun and Fazang, dilations of its tautologies.

Gardner's 2 Volume Compendium on Walt Whitman, Whitman's Code: A New Bible has been selected for serialization by the literary website, AnotherAmerica.org. Whitman was both a public persona: "Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son," and a retiring private one. He called his interior persona the Me myself: "I have not once had the least idea who or what I am." The first was bold enough to self publish and self review the work he offered to his public; the second was known to resort to code to disguise his interior agendas. The most famous of his codes was "16.4". P is the 16th letter of the alphabet as D is the 4th. PD = Peter Doyle, the Confederate streetcar driver that he met after the war and with whom he developed a deep emotional attachment.

The basis for Whitman's Code: A New Bible was another Whitman Code. It was first discovered by his friend, R.M. Bucke in a notebook to which his was entrusted as one of the three executors of the poet's estate. Fragment 14 read: "The Great Construction of the New Bible. Not to be deverted from the principal--the main life work--the three hundred and sixty-five--it ought to be ready in 1859." Bucke conjectured the fragment was written in 1857. 1860's 3rd edition of Leaves of Grass contained 136 poems. The poet also began the program of grouping poems in themaic clusters. He numbered stanzas to give them the appearance of Biblical verse but later dropped the conceit. He made no further reference to the project of coupling his poems to the 365 days of the year as if an "American" Book of Common Prayer. It was thought to be an early organizational plan that was subsequently abandoned in his development of the clusters that grouped his poems in the various succeeding editions of Leaves of Grass.

Gardner noted that there were two types of poems in Whitman's Collection. The Canticles or Solo poems and those grouped in Clusters. The Canticles were major poems that could stand alone (Song of Myself, The Sleepers etc.). The poems of the Clusters and Annexes were thematically related. The only odd group in the Whitman Canon were those poems that were added to editions after his death, by executor Horace Traubel: "Old Age Echoes."

Gardner simply ran the numbers. He discovered that when the 25 "Canticles" and the postumous 13 "Old Age Echoes," were subtracted from the Canonical Count of 402, the remainder was the suggestive total of 364. In the Death-bed Edition of 91/92 Whitman returned an earlier Epigraph, "Come said my Soul" to the title page—the poet concluded his life and work with the completion of an early design of a New Bible--"the main life work--the three hundred and sixty-five."

Gardner's compendium is minimumly invasive to the poet's overall scheme. The order of the clusters and the poems within the clusters constitute over 93% of Whitman's poems. These remain exactly as the poet had decreed and are the basis of Book II. The 25 Solo Poems are collected into a cluster of their own—Book I of Whitman's Code: A New Bible. Gardner compendium is predicated on the poet's preoccupation with Time: I accept time absolutely. The 52 Cantos of Song of Myself and the 365 Clustered poems mirror each other—the singular Walt Whitman reflected in the multiples of the poet's year. The remaining 24 "Canticles" suggest Whitman's day: I see something of God each hour of the 24 and Duly the 24 hours appear in public each day --each hour reflective of God and appearing in public each day.

Walt Whitman, The Mickle Street Vampire examines the influence of Whitman's sex poems (Children of Adam & Calamus) on the imagination of Bram Stoker in his creation of his signature character, Count Dracula. Stoker revered the poet upon reading William Michael Rossetti's 1868 presentation of his poems. He corresponded with him in the 1870s and thrice visited Whitman in the 1880s. The Stoker/Whitman Locus is suggested in a close examination of Whitman's celebrated paeans to death with numerous passages from Stoker's 1897 novel, Dracula.