A review of ’Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples’ (Princeton University Press, 2008) by Michael Robertson, professor of English at The College of New Jersey.
By Michael Redmond Lifestyle Editor
In 1913, in the midst of waging the modernist war in English literature, Ezra Pound took time to write:
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman —
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root —
Let there be commerce between us.
Pound even had a go or two at Whitman’s inimitable style, albeit spiced with a pinch of satire in this example:
O generation of the thoroughly smug
and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth
and heard ungainly laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
and do not even own clothing.
In “Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples” (Princeton University Press, 2008), Michael Robertson has written a fascinating book on those who thought of themselves as nearest and dearest to Walt Whitman (1819-1892) — incontestably “America’s greatest poet,” if only we could decide what that means.
We’ve seen quite a few substantial biographies of Whitman, and they score the various points their authors intended to score, but Mr. Robertson’s book takes a new and altogether refreshing direction by introducing us, in some depth, to Whitman’s true-blue disciples, the carriers of the torch — well, a small forest of torches, actually, burning for different causes.
These early devotees, like all Whitman devotees ever after, found in Whitman’s work the Whitman they were looking for, even though they might not initially have been aware of it — the Whitman who, in the telling Quaker phrase, “speaks to their condition.” By acquainting us with the “conditions” of these Whitman contemporaries, Mr. Robertson illuminates a poet who chose to describe himself as “a Kosmos,” and also sheds light on the poet’s enduring appeal over the generations.
Except as metaphor, perhaps, we do not tend to think of poets as spiritual leaders or prophets. Mr. Robertson shows that many of Whitman’s early admirers did think, literally, seriously, in those terms — Whitman as a new Christ, with “Leaves of Grass” as a new testament, revealed to America, a new world, for the dawning of the new age, the democratic.
This is less strange than it sounds when you consider, as the author does, that 19th-century America gave birth to Joseph Smith and The Book of Mormon, Mary Baker Eddy and “Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures” (Christian Science), plus Emersonian transcendentalism and spiritualism — and made room for a passel of religious and spiritual imports ranging from the venerable to the lunatic.
To Whitman’s credit, he wrote, “I call to the world to distrust the accounts of my friends, but listen to my enemies, as I myself do,/ I charge you forever reject those who would expound me, for I cannot expound myself,/ I charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me,/ I charge you to leave all free, as I have left all free.”
If anything, it’s precisely that heady freedom — of “spirituality, politics, sexuality, and gender identity,” in Mr. Robertson’s catalog — that makes Whitman the quintessential American bard and makes sense of the passionate adherence a diverse group of devotees maintained throughout their lives.
I have to thank Mr. Robertson for thoroughly disabusing me on the subject of Anne Gilchrist (1828-1885), a woman I had heretofore thought of as, well, more than a little crazed. In 1876, following a long correspondence, this brilliant, accomplished and altogether remarkable woman — a widow — packed three of her children and all of her furniture aboard a ship and set sail from Britain with the avowed purpose of becoming Mrs. Walt Whitman. Unasked by the poet, of course, absolutely not sought after — he was astounded.
It was a daft thing to do, surely, as Anne Gilchrist herself quickly realized, but Mr. Robertson’s book makes clear that she had other fish to fry. Her older daughter, Beatrice, wanted to study medicine, and there wasn’t a medical school in ýPage=015 Column=001 OK,0000.00þ Britain that would admit a female. But Beatrice had won admission in Philadelphia, where her brother, Herbert, pursued an interest in painting — studying under no less than Thomas Eakins.
All’s well that ends well. Anne Gilchrist set up a surrogate-family household for Whitman in Philadelphia. He relished it. When the Gilchrists returned to Britain, three years later, the poet was morose.
Was Whitman the marrying kind? A river of ink has been spilled on that question — and the answer is, most likely, no.
So that means Whitman was homosexual? Well, the word didn’t exist at the time, and the concept was so murky that he could write some of the most extraordinary man-to-man love poems in the world’s literature and hardly anybody noticed, while his frankness about man-woman sexuality was sufficient to ruin his reputation and get him fired from a job.
But did this lifelong bachelor sleep with women? No one knows. In fact, no one has succeeded in proving that Whitman ever had sex with anybody. But he did write this: “For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,/ In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me,/ and his arm lay lightly around my breast — and that night I was happy.” One phrase, otherwise gratuitous — “under the same cover” — gives the game away, I think.
The man-to-man poems were noticed by certain readers, to be sure. Across the pond, historian John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) spent some 20 years trying to get Whitman to be specific about their meaning, and when Symonds finally had him backed up against a wall, Whitman wrote, “Tho’ always unmarried I have had six children — two are dead — One living southern grandchild, fine boy, who writes to me occasionally …”
“Never have two sentences spurred so many biographers to such futile investigations,” Mr. Robertson writes.
An early theorist of homosexuality, Symonds was a husband and father who found personal fulfillment only in gay relationships. Oscar Wilde, who visited Whitman twice in Camden (they got on famously), was a husband and father, too. But another of Whitman’s early disciples, the English writer and social activist Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) — like Symonds, a noteworthy figure in the emergence of the modern gay movement — never married, and lived happily with a lover, George Merrill, in a 30-year relationship that ended with Carpenter’s death. Here we see, clearly, the future arriving.
The bedroom issues may be the hot topic, but sex is just part of the story.
A coterie of British admirers – all straight men, presumably, who wanted nothing to do with any gay message that Whitman may or may not have been sending – bonded together under the poet’s inspiration in a fellowship dedicated to the idea that men ought to drop their guards and truly be intimate friends with one another, heart-to- heart friends, sans romance, sans sex. It’s still a revolutionary idea.
The mystical/spiritual side of the Whitman phenomenon was carried forward by the eminent Canadian psychiatrist R.M. Bucke (1837-1901), who argued in all seriousness that the poet was the 35th known example since the dawn of history of a human being having attained “cosmic consciousness” (Bucke popularized the phrase) — thus Whitman was right up there with Moses, the Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus, among others. No kidding.
Then there’s the story of Horace Traubel (1858-1919), a Camden kid who started out running errands for the poet and ended up as the principal conservator and promoter of the Whitman gospel, the veritable pope of Whitmanism.
Traubel’s major claim to fame was “Walt Whitman in Camden,” nine fat volumes recording their daily conversations over a period of years, but he was one busy fellow — Traubel was involved in the founding of the Ethical Culture movement, in running a monthly Whitman magazine, and in a plethora of socialist causes. For Traubel, the answer to any question was socialism, and one reads with astonishment that by 1912, “more than twelve hundred socialists (had been) elected to public office in the United States, (and) the leading socialist magazine had 750,000 subscribers … “
Which is not to say that Whitman was a socialist, however. Mr. Robertson records that the poet would back away when Traubel worked him over about private property, but the socialists nonetheless claimed “Leaves of Grass” as a self- evident socialist manifesto. Eugene V. Debs was a huge fan.
Whitman’s actual views? “(He) held fast to the Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer, the notion that American democracy was to be ensured by broadly diffused ownership of land and property,” Mr. Robertson writes. How American democracy was to prevail against monopoly capitalism and the excesses of corporate power was not a subject Whitman ever proposed to address.
Michael Robertson, a professor of English at The College of New Jersey, has written a rich, memorable book. He wears his considerable erudition lightly, and he writes like a dream. Bis, bis.