Shoring up Harry Kemp's reputation, and the dune shack community

Now that 'his' shack is offered to anyone willing to pay and live by the Seashore's terms, let's appreciate the 'Poet of the Dunes,' who was so much more than that

Harry Kemp, by Ellen LeBow

The Cape Cod National Seashore has closed appointment requests from anyone interested in looking over and taking over one of eight dune shacks that hunker into the migrating sand of the Cape’s tip. There has been great competitive interest. Also great local concern. Final bids must be in by the first week of July.

Eight winners must accept arbitrary bureaucratic requirements – no occupancy before Memorial Day or after Labor Day, rent defined by someone somewhere in National Park confines (as if there could be such a thing as “fair market value” for these unique structures), built-in escalations, insurance premiums, no pets, no candles, detailed financials. They then win the right to retreat into funky cabins that for generations have been havens for souls seeking solitude and simplicity.

Years ago the Seashore recognized that a remarkable community had built up around these idiosyncratic shacks; literary, artistic, fringe. Attempts to offer formal standing to this group and culture (not “indigenous” but real), were deflected by National Park higher-ups a decade ago after a multi-year research effort.

That opened the way for this cookie-cutter attempt to max return on historic outlier properties.

The point is not that individuals who have used and protected these shacks for decades deserve special privilege. The point is that free market criteria for who should continue that stewardship refuse to recognize the community that surrounds.

It overturns a core tenet of the Seashore’s enabling legislation in 1961:

The Cape Cod National Seashore was laid atop longstanding towns and cultures whose history and rights must be respected.

Without that promise, the Seashore never would have come into being.

Some wonder whether this “dune shack culture” really exists, or if this is a manipulative way for a small group to protect special privilege. Two thoughts:

First, this is not about ensuring individuals who have lived in and cared for these shacks have that privilege forever. It’s about how best to extend access while respecting traditions and history. I would not expect equal standing with ranchers in Wyoming living within the Tetons and Yellowstone (though I would expect access). In our small cultural way, there is an analogy here.

Second, anyone who thinks dune history and traditions are a fabrication is ignorant. So I am offering an Americana saga to show otherwise.

The simple shack known as Harry Kemp’s (though he did not build it) is about to be leased to whomever best satisfies the Seashore’s generic requirements.

Do we understand who Harry Kemp was, how he came to be “Poet of the Dunes” only after an astounding life and national literary acclaim?

His story provides context for history and unique cultural character now being dismissed and disrespected – ironically like Kemp himself:

Part one

By the end of his life the “Poet of the Dunes” looked the part – weathered, wizened, leathery.

But this was only his last incarnation.

Long before he took to a dune shack in the Provincelands, he was the nation’s “Tramp Poet.” He was riding rails and writing about the road long before Jack Kerouac, bound for glory before Woodie Guthrie. Both owed him a huge literary debt.

He was celebrated by the likes of Upton Sinclair (whose wife became his lover), H.L. Mencken, George Bernard Shaw, and Ezra Pound, among many others.

He was described as his generation’s Walt Whitman, the true original Greenwich Village “bohemian.” He acted in Eugene O’Neill’s first play, wrote a best-selling autobiographical novel and volumes of poetry.

His exploits – what we call “performance pieces,” what he called “spectacularisms” -- earned him headlines in The New York Times. He stowed away on an ocean liner, re-enacted the Pilgrims’ landing (to show the world they came to Provincetown first). He walked from the Cape to Washington DC alone, in 1946, to protest our nation’s dropping the atomic bomb.

Yet for all his achievements, fame and famous associations, at his death in Provincetown in 1960 he was largely forgotten, broken by diabetes and alcohol, a great American spirit shrunken. Still, there was enough controversy to erupt a storm about what to do with his corpse, how to handle his last “spectacularism.”

Just about all that’s left to acknowledge Harry Kemp is his name on a nondescript road in Provincetown — and a rental, oh sorry, dune shack.

This proves that legacies, like life, ain’t fair. If they were, this man would be celebrated.

So here’s to Harry Kemp: 

He was born in Ohio in 1883, raised by a grandmother after his mother died young, before his roaming father settled in the East and sent for him. Kemp inherited the restless gene; at 17 years old, he took work on a boat bound for Hamburg, jumping ship in Australia to become a “swagman,” as the Aussies called a hobo. He then got work on a cattle boat bound for China, reached the Philippines, and from there made it back to the States.

He rode the rails through the West, a young tramp as opposed to a hardened “blowed-in-the-glass stiff.” But that didn’t save him from three months in a Texas jail for vagrancy. These experiences became fodder for his first published article, in a New York paper, about his hard times as a tramp.

He had a yearning for education apart from what the road could teach, reading Whitman, Shakespeare, Keats, Homer. He tried formal education at Mount Hermon, a private school in western Massachusetts. The structure didn’t suit him – few did. He made his way back to the mid-West, championed by an older poet he carefully cultivated. As his own one-man public relations firm, he made sure his coming was noticed:

“Tramp Poet Arrives,” announced the Kansas City Star, story written by a young journalist Kemp befriended on his way to Kansas University. He was described as “the studious hobo” with headlines, “He Reads Homer and is Contented/Arrived by Freight/Ten Cents in Pocket on Arrival.”

Self-promotion, dramatic action, became Kemp’s calling cards. He walked 90 miles to visit one of the nation’s leading writers, William Allen White (of course letting White know of the gambit). This led to a friendship between young poet and literary lion that helped get his early Whitman-esque poetic celebrations published.

It also led to friendship with Upton Sinclair, the great muckraking writer, who saw in Kemp an American voice worth celebrating. The men met in 1911 in a communal setting where terms like “Free Love” were bandied about. Sinclair was a great champion of such notions – until his wife and Kemp began a passionate affair. This became front-page news across the country and led to the Sinclairs’ divorce, further adding to Kemp’s notoriety.

From there it was a short jump to Greenwich Village. Kemp arrived in 1912, adding to the Village’s growing reputation. He was making money publishing poetry, 50 cents a line. He searched out H.L. Mencken for friendship and support, adding to the successful men he cultivated.

Meanwhile, he expanded his notion of “spectacularisms.” In 1913, he stowed away in the first-class section of an ocean liner bound for London -- no ticket, no money. Once at sea, he wrote to the captain, pleading for “the imaginative break” because of the romance of it all.

Had the captain not been receiving telegrams from journalists on both side of the Atlantic who already knew about Kemp’s exploit, he might have been more sympathetic; he put the Tramp Poet to work washing dishes, and threw him in jail when they reached England.

“Jail Kemp as Stowaway,” announced The New York Times. When leading literary lights came to his defense, Kemp wound up returning to New York first class, ticket paid by a benefactor.

He had accomplished his mission, to see London (and meet William Butler Yeats). But as the Times announced in July, 1913 on his return, “The ‘Tramp Poet’ Has Only One Suit, a Handbag, and $11.50.”

They didn’t even need to invoke his name in the headline. Readers knew who he was.

NEXT: ‘THE TRAMP POET’ BECOMES ‘THE POET OF THE DUNES’

With gratitude to William Brevda’s fine biography, “Harry Kemp; The Last Bohemian,” for details of Kemp’s life before his arrival in Provincetown.

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