"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."
-- Walt Whitman
The story of Walt Whitman is the story of America. And so it fittingly begins with a bit of blarney.
On July 4, 1825, the Marquis de Lafayette, the last surviving French general of the American Revolutionary War, was enjoying a victory lap.
More than 40 years before, as a 19-year-old aristocrat with scant military training to back up the honorific "Major General" rank that was a prerequisite of his family's wealth, he had presented himself to Gen. George Washington expecting to be given a command.
At first, Washington was not happy about this -- he wrote to a friend that he had no idea what to do with the presumptuous teenager -- but soon he accepted Lafayette into his inner circle. Lafayette became something of a surrogate son to Washington, as he led American citizen-soldiers into battle against the British Army. Lafayette returned to France to take up a political career informed by the ideals of the revolution. This was not all that well received by restored Bourbon King Louis XVIII, so when, with the 50th anniversary of the nation that he helped birth looming, he was happy to resign from the French legislature and accept President James Monroe's invitation to tour the United States to help revive the "Spirit of 1776."
Despite the auspicious July date, Lafayette's visit to Brooklyn was reportedly a low-key affair. It was "quite informal and old-fashioned, without the crowds and blare and ceremony of the present day," according to an eyewitness report written in the 1880s and published in 1905. Men and women lined both sides of the road leading from Fulton Ferry (site of the future Brooklyn Bridge) where Lafayette came over from Manhattan on a "beautiful, sunshiny day." The reporter estimated the line extended about two miles and that Lafayette traveled the length of it in a yellow carriage, drawn by "four magnificent white horses."
"There was no band of music, and I think, no speechifying," the witness remembered.
"The whole thing was curiously magnetic and quiet. Lafayette was evidently deeply pleased and affected. Smiles and tears contended on his homely yet most winning features."
At one point, Lafayette got out of his carriage to lay the cornerstone of the Brooklyn Apprentices' Library, a small building meant to house what would eventually become Brooklyn Institute -- parent of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Brooklyn Children's Museum. As he did, he noticed a 6-year-old boy standing in the construction zone amid stones and excavations. Lafayette lifted the child up and set him down in a safer area. As he did, he kissed him on the cheek.
That child, the witness alleged, was Walt Whitman. That witness was also Whitman, which is the reason we shouldn't entirely trust this account.
For Whitman, famously unafraid of contradiction, was not always a reliable narrator. "Meditating among liars, and retreating sternly into myself, I see/that there are really no liars or lies after all," he wrote in "All Is Truth" -- a poem he added to the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Initially published in 1855, Leaves of Grass consisted of 12 untitled poems. It was Whitman's lifelong obsession and never really "finished." Depending on how you count them, there were either six or nine editions. The final "deathbed" edition was published in 1892 and contained 389 poems.)
Whitman's memory of being kissed by Lafayette seems fanciful and improbable, though we've all seen that photograph of Bill Clinton shaking hands with John F. Kennedy in 1963. We know Oscar Wilde finagled a two-hour meeting with Whitman in 1882, though what we know of it is based on what the two self-promoting principals said about it in separate interviews (they figured this would double the publicity). Wilde understood what people would imagine when, in subsequent years, he stated "the kiss of Walt Whitman is still on my lips."
But to have been kissed by Lafayette and to have kissed Oscar Wilde? Can we believe it?
Maybe. All is truth.
Whitman has been in the air of late; last year marked the 200th anniversary of his birth. (I meant to write about him then, but Whitman, who left school at the age of 11 to become a printer's devil at a weekly newspaper, would understand the ebb and flow of our trade.)
Most of us have an idea of Whitman, even if we've never read him. We know he was polysexual -- though was he? We could get into a long discussion about what he called "Calamus." Just know he was into free love ("There's no other kind of love, is there?" he once asked) a century before the hippies were.
Whitman was a force of nature, a brawling 19th-century character who took long walks and sang of himself. He loved Abraham Lincoln. He served as a volunteer nurse in military hospitals during the Civil War. He was skeptical of Shakespeare. He never had enough money. He came at his readers with fierce force, in free verse that used everyday words. Maybe his chief insight was that a deep empathy could lead us to universal truths.
He came from a dysfunctional family, members of a Quaker sect who followed Elias Hicks, an early abolitionist who considered obedience to the "Inner Light," the only rule of faith that mattered. Hicks might have defined this as something more like the individual conscience than the presence of Christ, but what's important here is to understand that Whitman was brought up to look inward for instruction, not to blindly follow leaders.
There are some interesting similarities between 2020 America and the 1850s when Whitman decided to devote himself to inventing a specifically American culture. The country was less than 100 years old and had yet to gel. The 19th century was marked by political polarization that produced governmental standstills, widespread corruption in the business world, even rampant, sensationalized depictions of sex and violence in popular culture. But in the 1850s, America's original sin, slavery, had put the country on an unalterable course toward civil war.
Even when the war came, Whitman saw it as an opportunity. He thought the war could be a "cleansing agent" for the culture and that the blood of the hundreds of thousands of young men might be enough to wash away the old, tired world. It might allow us to escape our European hangover. He'd live long enough to understand this didn't happen. Lincoln's assassination hit him hard, and then the world reverted. Complacency and Jim Crow crept in. Still, he thought if we could just sing hard enough ...
In a way, Whitman seems a little like Greta Thunberg, naive but inspiring. Naive -- but not wrong either.
Through his 20s and most of his 30s, Whitman knocked about Manhattan and Brooklyn, scrambling for what he called "the usual rewards." He'd served as the "acting librarian" for the Brooklyn Apprentices' Library, site of the alleged Lafayette kiss in 1835, and in 1846 became the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, where he produced daily columns that mixed reportage and polemic and employed the rolling rhythms and slangy vernacular that would populate his poetry. Whitman cut a dandy-ish figure around New York, and he took the ferry to stroll along the Battery at the South end of Manhattan in the evenings after work (he never claimed to have bumped into Herman Melville or Edgar Allan Poe, who also frequented the Battery in those days).
But he lost that position in 1848 when he became a delegate to the founding convention of the Free Soil Party, a single-issue party which opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories of the United States but did not call for outright abolition or address the question of whether fugitive slaves should be returned to their "legal" masters.
Despite his reputation as a progressive free-thinker, Whitman was very much a man of his time. He opposed giving blacks the right to vote. In 2013, a Northwestern University music student protested having to perform Howard Hanson's "Song of Democracy," which incorporates Whitman's poetry in his lyrics on the grounds that Whitman was a "self-documented racist." As evidence, he pointed to passages in Whitman's essays such as: "As if we had not strained the voting and digestive caliber of American Democracy to the utmost for the last 50 years with the millions of ignorant foreigners, we have now infused a powerful percentage of blacks, with about as much intellect and calibre [in the mass] as so many baboons."
So by 1850, Whitman had decided to answer the call of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had articulated the need for an American poetry less concerned with meter and "supercilious elegance" (to use Whitman's defensive dismissal of Alfred Lord Tennyson, his contemporary and model; compare the tone, pacing and central conceit of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" to Tennyson's Crimean War elegy "Maud"). He would be the man to sing America, by diving deep into himself and pulling out long visceral lines vibrating with hot language. By spilling his guts, by breaking every convention of structure and content, by laying it all out in his "rude American tongue," Whitman would become the American poet and a real contender for the greatest artist this yet-young nation had ever produced.
He was part huckster and con man. Famously, he sent one of the 795 self-published copies of Leaves of Grass to Emerson, who replied with a kind letter that began: "I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed. ... I greet you at the beginning of a great career ...."
But Emerson's letter didn't jibe with most of the reviews -- Leaves of Grass was called a "moral cesspool" by one critic. One of the kinder ones acknowledged the poems' originality but suggested they were "shaped on no pre-existent model out of the author's own brain. Indeed, his independence often becomes coarse and defiant. His language is too frequently reckless and indecent though this appears to arise from a naive unconsciousness rather than from an impure mind."
Whitman's brother George didn't bother to read the book.
But there were some strong reviews, an unsigned review in Whitman's old newspaper the Eagle began:
"Here we have a book which fairly staggers us. It sets all the ordinary rules of criticism at defiance. It is one of the strangest compounds of transcendentalism, bombast, philosophy, folly, wisdom, wit and dullness which it ever entered into the heart of man to conceive. Its author is Walter Whitman, and the book is a reproduction of the author. His name is not on the frontispiece, but his portrait, half-length, is. The contents of the book form a daguerreotype of his inner being, and the title page bears a representation of its physical tabernacle. It is a poem, but it conforms to none of the rules by which poetry has ever been judged."
Whitman probably wrote that review himself. Which doesn't make it any less accurate.
Most authorities accept that he also wrote glowing reviews of his own book for the United States Review, the Brooklyn Daily Times and favorably and anonymously compared himself to Tennyson ("the bard of ennui and of the aristocracy") in an essay in the American Phrenological Journal. ("Critics and lovers and readers of poetry as hitherto written, may well be excused the chilly and unpleasant shudders which will assuredly run through them, to their very blood and bones, when they first read Walt Whitman's poems. If this is poetry, where must its foregoers stand? And what is at once to become of the ranks of rhymesters, melancholy and swallow-tailed, and of all the confectioners and upholsterers of verse, if the tan-faced man here advancing and claiming to speak for America ... typifies indeed the natural and proper bard?")
One of the more intricate and just plain weird reactions was in the Saturday Press, which initially published an unsigned favorable review of the book followed a few weeks later by one which urged the poet to kill himself:
"If Walt has left within him any charity, will he not now rid the taught and disgusted world of himself? Not by poison, or the rope, or pistol, or by any of the common modes of suicide ... let him search the coast of his island home until he finds some cove where the waves are accustomed to cast up the carrion committed to them, and where their bloated bodies ride lazily upon the waters which humanity never disturbs, and casting himself therein and at last the companionship for which, in death as in life, he is best fitted."
Both reviews may have been written by Saturday Press editor Henry Clapp, Jr. who was one of Whitman's early champions (in just over a year, the publication ran more than 40 stories about Whitman and his work). In his dotage, Whitman told his tireless interviewer, Horace Traubel, whose transcriptions of his conversations with Whitman, published as With Walt Whitman in Camden, eventually ran to nine volumes and more than 5,000 pages. Clapp understood that the next best thing to having people enthusiastic about your work was to have them fired up about hating you. It didn't matter what they say about you so much as they kept talking about you.
Anyway, Emerson's encouragement led Whitman to quickly put out a greatly expanded edition of the book in 1856, with the older poet's endorsement embossed in gold leaf on the cover. Emerson objected to his private correspondence being exploited in such a manner and, by 1860, when a third edition of the book was published with many conspicuously erotic poems added, began to be more critical of Whitman's work.
All this would simply be amusing had Whitman not been the real thing.
But just because he was extraordinary -- Wallace Stevens called him the "American Moses" -- doesn't mean there wasn't a heavy dose of P.T. Barnum in him as well. Maybe there had to be, maybe there's always a little carny in the pure products of America.
It's hard to imagine American culture without Whitman. Bob Dylan is Whitman, though more koanic and less generous. You find Whitman's rhythms in Hunter Thompson, James Ellroy and Allen Ginsberg, who wanted you to think he was nothing less than Whitman reborn.
That "barbaric yawp" he sounded over the rooftops of the world -- that's our legacy. It stands in contrast to another great American, Emily Dickinson, who also worked at inventing a new language, though hers was more compressed and spooky.
That's our mode, our style. For better or worse, we excavate ourselves.
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Style on 01/19/2020