Half Bakery: some thoughts on Whitman

In 1860, Whitman received this letter:

Know Walt Whitman that thou hast a child for me! A noble beautiful perfect manchild. I charge you my love not to give it to another woman. The world demands it! It is not for you and me, is our child, but for the world. My womb is clean and pure. It is ready for thy child my love. Angels guard the vestibule until thou comest to deposit our and the world's precious treasure. Then oh! how tenderly, oh! how lovingly will I cherish and guard it, our child my love. Thine the pleasure my love. Mine the sweet burden and pain. Mine the sacrifice. Mine to have the stinging rebuke, the shame. I am willing. My motives are pure and holy. Our boy my love! Do you not already love him? He must be begotten on a mountain top, in the open air. Not in lust, not in mere gratification of sensual passion, but in holy ennobling pure strong deep glorious passionate broad universal love. I charge you to prepare my love.
I love you, I love you, come, come. Write.

Susan Garnet Smith

Hartford, Connecticut

Instead of responding, Whitman annotated, "? insane asylum." Whitman had two sisters and five brothers. Of those, Jesse died in a lunatic bin, Hannah was neurotic and possibly psychotic, Andrew was a life-long lush wedded to a prostitute, and Edward, mentally retarded. The author of Leaves of Grass also had his moments of, let's say, suprarational exuberance, to misfilch Alan Greenspan. Thus we have this exchange between Whitman and Horace Traubel, the compiler of a 9-volume daily account of The Good Gray Poet:

"Why did you write '? insane asylum' there?"

"Isn't it crazy?"

"No: it's Leaves of Grass."

"What do you mean?"

"Why--it sounds like somebody who's taking you at your word."

"I've had more than one notion of the letter: I suppose the fact that certain things are unexpected, unusual, makes it hard to get them in their proper perspective: the process of adjustment is a severe one."

"You should have been the last man in the world to write 'insane' on that envelope."

There is a gap between the voice of "O Hymen! O Hymenee!" and a flesh that was "never bothered up by a woman...his disposition was different. Women in that sense never came into his head," so claimed Peter Doyle, one of his homosexual squeezes, but the most basic split here is between poetic persona and prosaic man. In Whitman's poetry, the black man is also considered fraternally, as an equal, but Walt the editorialist could write, "Who believes that the Whites and Blacks can ever amalgamate? Nature has set an impassable seal against it. Besides, is not America for Whites? And is it not better so?" Onward, then, with Westward Expansion:

COME, my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready;
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

[...]

All the past we leave behind;
We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Heave-ho the red man. Sorry 'bout that. Since "the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem," English and white America shall rule, with lesser tribes swept into the gutters. Traubel transcribed our bard, "The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated: it is the law of races, history, what-not." It's destined:

Great is the English speech...what speech is so great as the English?
Great is the English brood...what brood has so vast a destiny as the English?
It is the mother of the brood that must rule the earth with the new rule;

Sounds almost like Project for the New American Century... More than any other individual, Whitman defines and embodies America to the rest of the world. His Leaves of Grass may not be "the new bible," as characterized by its author, but it's certainly the most illuminating guide to the American spirit. Just as no man can match his self-presentation, no country equals its own myth, but when that opera is as magnificently seductive and inspiring as Leaves of Grass, the discrepancies and shortfalls become even more jarring.

Hounded by another female admirer, the English Anne Gilchrist, Whitman tried to fend her off with, "My book is my best letter, . . . my response, my truest explanation of all." Undeterred, she sailed for three weeks to Philadelphia to marry him. Like Susan, she was no doubt hot and bothered by passages such as this:

A WOMAN waits for me--she contains all, nothing is lacking,
Yet all were lacking, if sex were lacking, or if the moisture of the right man were lacking.

The moisture of the right man was lacking, all right, yet Anne should have heeded the admonition of Fleetwood Mac, "Players only love you when they're playing." Like the still unburied, crotch grabbing King of Pop, Whitman wasn't quite the same lover off stage. Such is life, such is America.










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