Harry Kemp: 'Tramp Poet' becomes 'Poet of the Dunes'
From national fame to a lost legacy, and a dune shack treated as a piece of real estate
(In Part One, Harry Kemp emerged from “vagabond tramp” to become one of the nation’s celebrated writers, setting the stage for his arrival on the Cape.)
Part two
In 1916, Kemp and his new wife made their first trip from Greenwich Village to Provincetown. Per usual, Kemp had a strategy for how to make the move:
He put a classified ad in The New York Times announcing that an anonymous well-known poet would trade a manuscript of unpublished work for use of a summer cottage.
That didn’t work, but Kemp and his wife found a place anyway.
Kemp acted in “Bound East for Cardiff,” Eugene O’Neill’s breakthrough play staged on a wharf in Provincetown Harbor, described as the founding of “American” theater. Returning to the Village after the summer, he began writing scores of one-act plays, staging alongside O’Neill and others, prominent enough so the New York press referred to Kemp (not O’Neill) as “the spiritual leader” of Village bohemians.
Kemp’s first novel, “Tramping on Life,” published in 1922, solidified his national reputation. The bestseller drew on experiences and friendships, names changed only slightly. People referred to it as “romantic vagabondia” and “realistic hobohemia.” Old friend William Allen White thought it deserved a Pulitzer Prize. If it sounds a lot like Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” that arrived to great acclaim decades later, that is no coincidence.
Both books were strung together vignettes more than a sustained story, Kemp’s even more so, and here is a clue as to why his literary reputation hasn’t survived; the man’s life and performances seem more dramatic than his words. He sensed it, once noting, “My only capital is my personality.”
Provincetown kept drawing Kemp back. By the late 1920s he was in the dunes for long stretches. His “shack” was 10 feet square, built by a former Coast Guardsman as a chicken coop. It was less than a mile from where O’Neill lived and worked in the early 1920s, but O’Neill was gone to enduring fame by the time Kemp settled in.
Kemp wrote poetry, a second autobiographical novel, and a novel about Provincetown (“Love Among the Cape Enders”). But he never matched the success of his first fiction.
He transformed himself from “Tramp Poet” to “Poet of the Dunes,” continuing his “spectacularisms,” signing books with a sea gull’s feather for a quill, donning a black cape to parade around town.
And he could still muster a national statement:
In March, 1946, he donned a sandwich-board sign and began walking to Washington DC. On the front his sign read, “The Atom’s Power for Peace, Not War.” On the back, “One Man Against the Atom. On to Washington.” Along the way, he sold copies of his poems.
In November, 1947, intent on debunking what he called “the hoax of the rock,” Kemp created his first reenactment of the Pilgrims’ landing in Provincetown. It became an annual event until his death in 1960. Every year he convinced friends to dress in Pilgrim garb and recreate events like “the first washday” on American shores. His role: Watch over the women with a musket on his shoulder.
It was all about highlighting Plymouth as a fake interloper; he mailed a bottle of sand to the governor of every one of then-48 states, with a couplet attached:
“Not on Plymouth Rock but on Provincetown sand
The Pilgrim Fathers first came to land.”
When he heard that a Mayflower replica was going sail from England to Plymouth to reside, he sent threatening cables to Winston Churchill and Queen Elizabeth, informing them that he planned to arm a Provincetown fishing boat with cannon that would fire across the Mayflower’s bow and force her to the Cape if history was ignored.
It was the poet of the dunes who was ignored.
By the late 1950s, Kemp was played out. He had published “Poet of the Dunes,” a collection of verse inspired by the sandy world to which he had withdrawn. But hard living and alcohol had worn him down, diabetes was a constant worry, and he was having difficulty getting to and from his shack. Then he was evicted from the little apartment in town where he spent the coldest months.
He was rescued by Sunny Tasha, his closest confidante, who built a shack replica on her hill in the east end of Provincetown, behind her home. She moved him into that equivalent in April, 1960, and he never tromped the dunes again.
Kemp made Sunny his executor, and exacted a promise: Don’t let the corpse “stink in the grave,” as he put it. Cremate.
Sunny put out the word: Visit Harry if you want, but much as he will profess his thirst, don’t bring him alcohol. On the night of August 5, 1960, a crowd came by to visit the infamous character with a big jug of wine. They left Harry with the jug. He finished it and himself.
Kemp once called the church a “social vampire.” Nevertheless he had made friends with the Roman Catholic priest in town, and he was famous enough that there would be prestige in him joining the faithful in the Catholic burial grounds. That’s what the priest moved to do.
But Sunny had made a promise she intended to keep: She sent the body to be cremated in the mid-Cape.
At the instruction of the church, state police intervened, removed the body from the crematory and brought it back to Provincetown for burial. But Sunny refused to back down. Supported by signed documents and a tape recording of Kemp’s instructions, she faced down both church and police. It was an ugly scene but she gained control of the body, and fulfilled Kemp’s wish to not “stink in the grave.”
Harry Kemp’s last unwitting “spectacularism” needed a closing scene. Sunny took care of that as well:
She spread half of the ashes in the dunes. The other half she scattered around MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, stomping grounds for many Kemp escapades as the transplanted home of the Provincetown Playhouse.
A few years later, Harry’s chicken coop shack blew apart in a hurricane. Sunny rebuilt it on the same footprint, and to this day her family has taken care of it, repaired it, used it, and shared it. This is one of eight shacks now offered by the National Seashore in real estate transactions.
If you believe one of Kemp’s last poems, “Dune Revenant,” even that insult will not erase his presence:
I said, “When I’m alive no more
“And my soul at last goes free,
“You’ll find me walking on the dunes
“And down beside the sea.
“So, if you glimpse a wavering form,
“Or front a vanishing face,
“You’ll know that I’ve come back once more
“To my accustomed place!”
A great column, Seth. Much more enlightening than some other things written about Harry.
History of place through a person.