FAMILY FACES

Memorialized in a late poem as “the ideal woman, practical, spiritual, of all of earth, life, love, to me the best” (LG, p. 497), Louisa Van Velsor Whitman was born on September 22, 1795, near Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. Little is known of her rural youth beyond such fragmentary descriptions as Whitman provides in poems, in Specimen Days, in an obscure early “Fact-Romance,” and in the notebooks which served as sources for his writing.4 In one of these notebook entries, he recalls how her father gallantly defied the British during the American Revolution. When a raiding party invaded his stable, Major “Kell” held his ground. Eighteen-year-old Cornelius was acting as a private citizen; the title, bestowed later, was honorific. “As usual,” Whitman wrote, “great courage, will, and coolness, stood him in hand. The swords flourished and flashed around his head—the women were in tears, expect'g he would be killed; but he held on to the mare, and the upshot of it was, the British rode away without her” (NUPM 1:19). After this inspiring beginning, “Kell” settled down to an unremarkable career as a farmer whose passion was horse breeding. The heroic beginning was not fulfilled and Walt Whitman bore the burden, transmitted to him by his mother, of exemplifying the great courage, will, and coolness exhibited by her father in his only notable moment of glory.5 This, then, was manliness: courage, will, and coolness. But was it his mother or his father who exhibited these characteristics? Louisa, remember, could “impersonate.”

Whitman's maternal grandmother Amy Van Velsor presided efficiently over the family hearth, welcoming visitors and then generally receding into the background of a hospitable home. Probably she is the prototype of the elderly woman in “The Sleepers,” who carefully darns her grandson's

Using his grandmother Amy Van Velsor to repair the ravages of a later time, Whitman shows us a “clear” face unmarked by history. But this optimistic portrait of a woman at peace with herself and her surroundings has no depth. The emphasis is on costume, as though all the figures were intent on impersonating a happy family.8

Grandmother Amy as the “Faces” Quakeress leads the peaceful life that Whitman wished could have been his own mother's—a life in which no stoically philosophizing son would need to justify the maternal presence. However, we encounter a significantly less tranquil image of the Van Velsors together in a piece of ephemeral journalism published when Whitman was in his mid-twenties. The story beginning “When my mother was a girl” first appeared in the Aristidean in December 1845. As editor, Whitman reprinted it in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in December 1846, under the title “An Incident on Long Island Forty Years Ago.” Here an older Cornelius Van Velsor is depicted as insensitive to the fears of his wife and daughter and as more concerned with his horse than with their well-being. As the slyly humorous narrative ends, his wife almost chokes him to death “in good earnest” (EPF 325–26). The story initially pivots on Kell's untimely absence from home. Whitman labeled it a “FactRomance,

The domestic confrontation of the “Incident” repeats an underlying motif of the notebook entry describing “Major Kell” as a fearless if minor hero of the American Revolution. In both episodes, Kell alarms the women in his family, but in the earlier episode, the anxiety he causes is justified. The civilian sketch presents a coarsened Kell—he is described as red-faced, laughing, and bluff-voiced. The Revolutionary Kell arouses pride as well as fear, but the civilian Kell is a lout. In both episodes, Cornelius Van Velsor makes women feel anxious, and Grandmother Amy makes Grandfather Kell feel—but how does he feel? At this point Whitman's 1845–46 story ends and the notebook entry written in the 1860s does not attempt to probe Kell's inner life. In both episodes, the women are invested in Kell; they care enough to cry about him. In the “Incident,” however, this care is not reciprocated and Kell's favorite horse is called “Dandy—a creature he loved next to his wife and children—he rode away to attend to it.”

The story reworks a number of urgent family themes, including the anger shared by Whitman and his mother at his grandfather's untimely death. For the historical rather than the fantasized Cornelius Van Velsor seems to have been a stabilizing influence in Walt's uncertain youth and an obvious contrast to Walt's hard luck father. Then, too, hospitable and useful Grandmother Amy died when Walt was about seven and Louisa about thirty. From their mutual perspective, the replacement stepgrandmother was not “a very good investment” (NUPM 1:7 n. 30). Relations between the two families were less close after that time. The Major died in 1838 before Walt was twenty and so far as we can tell the Whitmans inherited nothing from his estate.9 Memorializing him late in his own life, Whitman presents Cornelius Van Velsor as a “solid” role model. But there is a disquieting conclusion when he describes the trips they often took together up and down the Island. Despite their physical proximity, no words are exchanged, no feelings acknowledged. In this account, Kell's old-fashioned “ease” once again did not translate into sensitivity to the disease of others.

Major Van Velsor was a good specimen of a hearty, solid, fat old gentleman, on good terms with the world, and who liked his ease.—For over forty years, he drove a stage and market wagon from his farm to Brooklyn ferry, where he used to put up at Smith & Wood's old tavern on the west side of the street, near Fulton ferry.—He was wonderfully regular in these weekly trips; and

Weaving memories of his childhood and personal and family fortunes in and out of his published and unpublished poetry and prose, Whitman returned again and again to the woman he idealized as a model of familial steadiness and domestic self-control. After her death, he wrote about the “calm benignant face fresh and beautiful still,” but this was the face, too, that drew him into “the coffin” of convulsive, sexualized feelings he could not control. Whitman lived beyond the morbidity of his 1881 “monumental line,” but he continued to turn to thoughts of “the divine blending, maternity” to fuse his various irreconcilable moods (LG, p. 497). This process of idealistic fusion, abetted by culturally encouraged images of mother-worship, had begun early. So too had the inevitable counter-response, the movement away from the coffin out into the sunlight, away from convulsive kisses and toward a more artfully individuated masculine self. In the Long Island “Incident” of 1845, with its undercurrent of free-floating malice, Whitman characteristically describes Louisa as doing her best to soothe her frightened mother, and her cheerfulness is a consistent theme in his various accounts of her reassuring nature. Others found her less cheerful, especially once old age and loneliness had begun to depress her. But whether or not she was always calm and compassionate, stoical and capable, generous and loving—whether or not she was the consistently noble and flowering mother of the Whitman myth—Louisa Van Velsor Whitman was an unusually dependable worker in a world where much was undependable. In this, she was like her father with his market wagon: the wagon that for Whitman served to isolate as well as to provide.

Physically active and proud of her physical and mental endurance, Louisa was generally able to suppress whatever anger she felt toward the men in her life, including the husband who was less steady emotionally than she. At least, there is no record of any mock-murderous outburst on her part such as Whitman attributes to Grandmother Amy after she had been deserted and humiliated by Grandfather Kell. When provoked, however, Louisa was tart-tongued, and one of the ways in which she defended herself against outrageous fortune was by treating young Walt as her confidant. “In the observation of the drama of human nature,” he later wrote, in one of his fabulous self-reviews, “if, indeed, ‘all the world's

In a photograph taken in 1855, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman's mobile expression is difficult to decode. She is simply dressed. The strings of her white ruffled cap hanging down Quaker style, her deepset eyes do not quite meet the camera's gaze. Looking slightly to one side, she appears alternately grim and amused. Either she is smiling slightly, her thin-lipped mouth closed, or she isn't. Her straight, darkish hair is mostly covered by her cap. She looks strong, intelligent, self-possessed, but there is little trace of the physical beauty Walt proudly ascribed to her. Probably the photograph is unflattering, as is the single portrait we have of her husband, in which he looks angry and desperately unkempt. With her athletic body—like all the Whitmans except Eddy she was “good-sized”—Louisa was able to do more housework than many other women. And while Walt's brother Jeff complained of her stinginess at table, Walt adored her cooking. Louisa was tall for a woman of her time, and when he was searching for mother-surrogates to pull him out of his unusually prolonged depression in the 1870s—a depression precipitated by ill health and by feelings of repressed hostility toward the lost mother he had consciously adored—he took pleasure in the company of Susan Stafford, a “good-sized” farm woman whose welcoming home at Timber Creek helped to turn him back from death toward life. “Shape-first, face afterward,” he explained jocularly to her son Harry, Harry himself being part of the cure (Corr 3:361).

Meeting Walt's mother in November 1855, Bronson Alcott described Louisa Whitman as “a stately sensible matron, believing in Walter absolutely and telling us how good he was and wise as a boy, how his four brothers and two sisters loved him, and how they take counsel of the great man he is grown to be now.”10 But the numbers don't add up. Jesse (b. 1818), Walt (b. 1819), Mary (b. 1821), Hannah (b. 1823), Andrew (b. 1827), George (b. 1829), Jeff (b. 1833), Eddy (b. 1835). Including Walt, there were six Whitman brothers. Assuming Alcott remembered correctly, which one of her sons was Louisa eliminating? Her oldest, Jesse, irritable and unstable, who wouldn't listen to Walt? Or her youngest, Ed, mentally feeble and physically lame? Did Walt learn from her his

Despite her great pride in Walt, and his in her, Louisa's was a hard life, its pleasures far from obvious. Losing her husband in 1855, she continued to yearn for a secure home of her own and was only too dependent on her grown sons, including Walt, for handouts. Here is a letter from her later years, written after she had had too much family company for too long. Her son Jeff, his wife Mattie, and their two young daughters were visiting from St. Louis in the fall of 1868. Mattie arrived in mid-October with the girls, Jeff joined them on November 20, and they left in mid-December. Louisa was seventy-three and complaining as usual about the stinginess of her relatives. “O Walt,” the letter begins, using the plaintive “o” that figures so prominently as an emotive signal in his poems,

haint i had a seige they pretended to live up stairs but the provisions was prepared down … they have never paid a cent of rent nor a cent of gas bill nor give me a dollar when they went away they gave me an allapaca dress when they came and Jeff bought me a little mite of a castor that is all about three weeks ago george [another son] bought 20 lb of butter and they have used out of it ever since and matty borrowed 50 dollars of george but jeffy dident settle it they had plenty of money as Jeffy drawed that out of the bank i really think they had ought to give me some but let everything go but i would ask more than 100 to go through the same again burn this letter12

Obviously, Walt did not comply. Louisa's emphasis on pretense is especially interesting given that Walt himself was in Providence, Rhode Island, during part of this time, and writing to Peter Doyle about his success “in the midst of female women” as a “gay deceiver” (Corr 2:62). If Leaves of Grass “is the flower of her temperament active in me,” one element of this temperament was the desire to keep up appropriately gendered

To say this is not to deny the genuineness of the compassion that Louisa, like Walt, could feel for others. Louisa could direct pity outward as well as in, but it was Walt who needed to mythologize the constancy of this element of her character. Thus when the besieging and borrowing Mattie died of lung cancer in February 1873, only several months before Louisa's own death, Louisa explained with pity first for her daughter-in-law and then, increasingly, for herself,

This indirect recrimination may not have hurt, since Walt probably accepted the fact that close friendships among women were the norm. An intimate mother-daughter relationship was to be expected, though here too Louisa describes herself as shortchanged. Louisa's letter suggests that confidences are gendered and that she longed for specifically female companionship, for the empathic discourse of a “female world of love and ritual.”14 Geographically separated from her own daughters, and perhaps emotionally separated as well, Louisa did what she could to cultivate daughter substitutes. One of them, Josephine Barkeloo, wrote to her in October 1872, “it is my bed hour. Good night, you are in your dreams, and I am kissing you in imagination you half awaken and say ‘Is that you—Walter?’ but you are mistaken it was—Yours truly, Joe.”15 It would be nice to think that close friendships with younger women made Louisa's later life bearable, but Joe Barkeloo suggests that Louisa's primary identification was with “Walter,” the name shared by father and son. In this context, “Walter” is Walt, and “Joe” was right. Although she respected the demands of his career, Louisa preferred to have Walt by her side.

Here is another of Louisa's letters, written in December 1865. George Whitman, a former prisoner of war, had been living at home since the preceding

Casting about late in life for a satisfactory myth of origins, Whitman hit on his mother's “Hollandish” and Quaker inheritance. He emphasized her sunny temperament, which shone the brighter in contrast to his father's dour English disposition. Yet there were gaps in the family narrative that genetic or racial discourse was inadequate to explain. If Walt described himself as in certain senses “a stranger in their midst,” Louisa, too, suffered from social isolation. In the letter quoted above, for example, she encodes a double message. On the one hand, she craves sympathy and needs to talk; on the other, her pride prevents her from expressing her hurt to her son George, by whom she feels cruelly rejected. Turning to Jeff for advice, she ignores it. Instead, she carries on as usual, speculating to herself about “what has made him act so,” which has the effect of further isolating both herself and George. Hopelessly, she concludes “god only knows” and fatalistically interprets her son's punishing

Several months before he received the tearful letter quoted above, Whitman, who was visiting in Brooklyn, had written to Nelly O'Connor about his mother's “splendid condition” (Corr 1:270). Undoubtedly Louisa was more splendid because Walt was in the house, but he had always tried to protect her and did his best, even as a child, not to burden her with his troubles. “He was a very good, but very strange boy,” Mrs. Whitman explained to a chance visitor, after her son had become famous.16 Did she mean that he was always studying or that he so rarely asked anything for himself, especially since some of the others were so much more demanding? The myth that Whitman was an idler during his youth is just that. As Sandra Tomc has suggested in her analysis of “literary leisure,” writers other than Whitman “insisted on their exemption from the modern rhythms of labor and accumulation.” She traces the deployment of an “idleness ethic from the early republican to the antebellum periods,” using Nathaniel Parker Willis as her prime example of a conflicted relationship to the middle-class marketplace.17 Whitman, too, sought to uncouple the relationship between class status and the aristocratic fantasy of leisure. But we should not be fooled. During his youth, Walter Whitman Junior, like his mother, was notably hardworking. Louisa recognized as much and was not one of those persons who called him “lazy.”

In any event, the conflicted psychological community formed by Whitman and his mother was written into the fiction published by Walter Whitman Junior in the 1840s. At this time Walter Senior, with his “sound strong body heredity,” was still working and well,18 but Whitman most memorably represents his fictional mother as a widow, and he represents himself as her only son. At some level this exclusionary fantasy would have been gratifying to Louisa. At some level, too, Whitman's transformative narratives expressed their shared, mutually reinforcing ambivalence not only toward Walt's father, but toward some of his brothers. For example, both Louisa and Walt had to contend with the firstborn Jesse, who, in addition to being highly intelligent, was passionate from birth and subject to violent outbursts. Jesse's lack of self-control reinforced the young Whitman's tendency to withdraw into himself; he was never known as a glib talker.19

Walt and Louisa were probably both relieved when as a teenager Jesse ran away to sea, but he suffered a severe head injury in an accident or brawl during the late 1840s, which ended his life as a merchant marine. He drifted during the 1850s, still thinking of the sea, and, according to Jeff, living with an Irish whore.20 By March 1860, he was working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard “again” and wanted to come home “again,” as he seems to have done in the recent past. But Louisa, having rented out part of the house, explained to Walt, “I told him he would have to hire board somewhere as I had hired out so much of the house I had no place for him to sleep” (March 30, 1860). Jesse continued to work at the Navy Yard, and in the summer of 1861 he was working there every day (Corr 1:56). However, when Walt committed Jesse to the Kings County Lunatic Asylum in December 1864, the record of admission stated, “He has been considered somewhat insane by his friends [that is, family] for the last four years.”21 This opinion was shared by Louisa, who in 1863 considered him “deranged,” but no more so than he had been for the last three years. Much about Jesse's “dissipated” history is vague, but at some point after April 29, 1860, when Fred Vaughan visited the Whitmans in Brooklyn, Louisa had “again” found room for Jesse in her crowded home.22 More constantly, she was burdened by her youngest, Ed, who was lame and “weak brained” and institutionalized only after her death.23 The aging Louisa was faced with “two [cases] of grown helplessness,” as Walt called them, and during the Civil War he wrote that her bravery was “beyond the heroisms of men” (Corr 1:183). So why should we expect Louisa to be a stranger to jealousy and bitterness? Given the limited control she had over her life, she had a great deal to be jealous and bitter about. In the many letters she sent Walt during her later years (1863–73), Louisa Van Velsor Whitman represented herself as chronically impoverished. When she had five hundred dollars in her bank account she was afraid to use it, since her children supported her and she experienced her lack of financial independence as infantilizing. While Jeff, for one, thought she exaggerated her poverty, it is easy to understand why she felt forced to hoard and scrimp and save, and to charge her grown children board money when they wanted to come visit—even if those visits were rare, and even if the occasion was a wedding. “When I get desperate I write[,] commit it to paper[,] as you literary folk say,” she explained in November 1863, shortly before describing the heartrending “particulars of Andrew's death.”24 (Her son Andrew died of tuberculosis

As we have seen, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman was semiliterate; she could read and write, but her formal schooling was extremely limited. Time permitting, in later years she enjoyed reading newspapers and magazines and reading and writing letters. She followed the ups and downs of Walt's literary career with great interest and once wrote him that she read a little in his Drum-Taps every night before going to sleep.25 She also enjoyed his poems “Whispers of Heavenly Death” and “Proud Music of the Storm.” As a literary critic, she was strong on family loyalty, commenting to her untalkative, unimaginative son George in 1855 that if Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha was poetry, then maybe so was Leaves of Grass. 26

According to Walt, Louisa was a daring and spirited rider in her youth, of which no further accomplishments have been noted.27 On June 8, 1816, when she was twenty, she married Walter Whitman Senior, six years older than she, whose family lived only several miles away. They moved into a nearby house that her husband had built. He earned a meager living as a carpenter, building houses and barns when he could get the work.28 Their promising first child, Jesse, who disappointed them all, was born about March 2, 1818. Some fifteen months later, “on the last day of May 1819,” Walt was born, as he tells us in “Who Learns My Lesson Complete?”—the 1855 poem that alludes to his mother's womb as the source of his identity, while omitting any mention of his father's role in this presumably immaculate conception. After Walt's birth, there was a child almost every other year, including a male infant who died still unnamed in 1825. The last child, Edward, born in 1835 when Louisa was forty, was, as I mentioned earlier, lame and mildly retarded.

Married for thirty-nine years but virtually silent in her letters on the subject of her feelings about her husband, Louisa was increasingly de-pendent on her growing children both for material and for emotional support. Two of them, Jeff and Walt, plainly adored her, though Jeff commented ruefully, “Work and worry she will and I dont think the power of man can prevent it.”29 Work also emerges as a central issue in the

Whether or not this episode ever happened we shall probably never know. There were remnants of native peoples living on Long Island in Louisa's youth; some of them were itinerant weavers and we have already seen Whitman's reference to his grandmother Amy's straw-bottomed chair—like the one Whitman himself eventually occupied during his paralytic days. But whether or not it happened, this beautiful and disturbing episode presents a strong-willed Louisa for whom the past is more real than the present. The Indian woman by whom Louisa is permanently captivated comes to her looking for work and leaves her looking for work elsewhere. Though her step is described as “free and elastic,” and though “her voice sounded exquisitely as she spoke,” the beautiful stranger cannot accept “remembrance and fondness” for pay. As her letters amply demonstrate, Louisa herself was not satisfied with emotion as remuneration. In a particularly self-expressive letter, she complained to Walt, “i think sometimes i wish i was a hundred miles off.”30 Ironically, in “The Sleepers” the vanishing Indian woman represents the physical

And what of George Washington, the father of his country, whose story precedes Louisa's in “The Sleepers”? What binds “Washington” to Louisa? Nothing, it seems, except the poet's imagination. In Whitman's account, both Washington and Louisa are reluctant to let go of the past and both are defined through a combined logic of fact and romance. In repeating the homosocial elements of Washington's well-known story in Louisa's unofficial homoerotic narrative, however, Whitman heightens the effect. And he has made no attempt to represent himself as Washington's intimate. Instead, he has located the official male tradition further back in time and in public places. Thus the speaker has no privileged access to Washington's history, as he had to his mother's. As befits the sentimental mode, Whitman's Washington weeps copiously. His feelings are expressed through his body. While he encourages physical expressiveness in others, the importance of conversation is correspondingly diminished.

In describing both “the defeat at Brooklyn” and Washington's farewell to his men at Fraunces Tavern, the poet emphasizes that even the father of his country is unable to preserve the intense homosocial bonds generated by war. Similarly, Louisa is unable to preserve the female world of love and ritual associated with a romantic and racialized peace. Following his mother's story, to which he does not respond, there is a violent

Despite the stylistic breaks in the poem's structure, which are intended to open the door to the future, the compulsions of the past linger on. The most emphatic of these breaks occurs as the speaker turns to “an amour of the light and air,” representing himself as both “jealous and overwhelmed with friendliness” (LG 1855, pp. 111–12; italics mine). Normally, these emotions are incompatible, though the word “overwhelmed” rationalizes their union. “Friendliness” is a quality we may feel or receive; Whitman's language does not distinguish between being overwhelmed by his own desire and being overwhelmed by someone else's. This fusion of subject and object is a problem for the poet who possesses a sympathetic imagination and for an actual self in the feeling world. “Friendliness” is also oddly paired with love, though “an amour of the light and air” may provide exactly the kind of inconsequential diversion he needs if he is to extricate himself from the identity confusions that haunt both his waking and his sleeping hours. Finally, the speaker continues to fear too much of a good thing, the good thing identified at the poem's conclusion as a symbolization of maternal presence. Following a diversionary passage, in which all sufferings and sicknesses are charmingly relieved but in which no one speaks to anyone else, the poet expresses his wariness of the night, which he equates with

In analyzing “The Sleepers” from the perspective of Whitman as a psychologically attentive and internally conflicted poet and son, I have suggested that there were times during his youth and subsequently when Whitman viewed both of his parents as heroic victims of circumstance, though in the end he sat down at the table with his mother, while his father remained somehow isolated on a high hill and beyond the lines. Louisa, whose official and unofficial story it is possible to follow in greater detail, may have wished to preserve her ties to the past, but her own mother died when Louisa was little more than thirty and the step-grandmother, as we have seen, was not a “good investment.” For most of her married life, therefore, Louisa was unable to depend on a traditional kinship network. She was also unsustained by a religious community or the power of religious belief—though she occasionally uses the word “god” in her letters. Thus at the time of the death of her son Andrew in 1863, she wrote Walt, “i am composed and calm would not wish him back to suffer poor soul i hope he is at rest.” There is no suggestion of an afterlife for the third son of whom she had recently written to Walt, “you know Andrew always was testy and jelous” (November 1863). “he died like any one going to sleep without a struggle sensible to the last,” Louisa wrote. “just before he died he turned his head and looked at your and georges pictures for some time and then shut his eyes god grant i may never witness another” (December 18, 1863). “i pity Andrew very much,” she wrote, “but i think sometimes how much more those poor wounded and sick soldiers suffer with so much patience poor souls i think much about them and always glad to hear you speak of them i dont think walt after you being amongst them so long you could content yourself from them it becomes a kind of fasination and you get attached to so many of the poor young men” (November 1863). Meanwhile,

Faulknerian in its intensity of family distress, as young children provoke and as brother turns insanely against brother—Andrew himself had threatened to break his niece's neck—Louisa's unsentimental narrative is framed by requests for and complaints about money. Throughout her life, her physical and social aspirations were chronically compounded by her lack of financial independence, which, as we have seen, to a woman of her high spirit was galling indeed. Notably, too, there is only one place in her letters where she appears to be quoting Leaves of Grass. In June 1867, she suggested to Walt that George, the ex-soldier, tired by an overly long walk to and from work and handicapped by lameness in his legs, felt as if “he would like to loaf and live at his ease,” a phrase which echoes the famous opening of “Song of Myself” (“I loafe and invite my soul / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass”).33 As Louisa was quick to point out, George refused to take her advice, returning to work earlier in the afternoon than she deemed necessary. Thus, though she describes herself as having “to work so very hard i feel when i lie down at night as if i should not be able to get up in the morning,” she was judgmental about the hard work of others, including her daughter-in-law Mattie, whose “working on the [sewing] machine so steady hurt her.”

There are many widely dispersed sources for Walt's “lazy” poetic persona, including his own “Sun-Down Papers from the Desk of a School-master” (1840), in which he asserts, mock humorously, “All the old philosophers were loafers,” and “For my part, I have had serious thoughts of getting up a regular ticket for President and Congress and Governor and so on, for the loafer community in general. I think we loafers should organize” (UPP 1:44, 45).34 But surely one source of Walt's loaferish bachelor persona—his sexy dreamer, his “rough” of leisure—was his identification with a mother who, despite her surface cheerfulness (“i feel quite smart considering i have to work so very hard”), was a chronic struggler for success in the form of physical comfort, which she felt had eluded her. Anticipating yet another move in her early seventies, “well Walt,” she wrote, “here we are yet in the same old place but i doo want to get out of it very much indeed there is so many children and not the best i ever see but a continual traveling up and down from morning till night one good thing their dog is dead he filled the house with fleas so maybe we shall get clear of them now.”35

Whatever the difficulties of recovering the “original” and “strangely knowing” Louisa who “excelled in narrative” and had “great mimetic power,” who loved to tell stories, impersonate, and circulate noble advice, the blooming Louisa whose self-confidence in some measure inspired Leaves of Grass and who inspired the poet's lifelong devotion, it is even more difficult to recapture the voice of Whitman's all-but-silenced father. For example, there are no letters from any period that enable us to piece together the “minute particulars” of Walter Senior's life story as told by himself. Instead, there are stray tags filtered through others, which comprise the barest outlines of a life full of struggle and flux, but not without ambition, however imperfectly realized, and not without goodness. “Good luck to you walter dear,” Louisa wrote wistfully to Walt on February 17, 1868. “Dont you remember your poor old father always wished that wish to every one.” But luck was precisely what Walter Senior did not have.

As Louisa reported and as Walt duly noted, this skilled craftsman “would sometimes lay awake all night planning out some unusually difficult plan in his building arrangements” (NUPM 1:24). Yet despite his “extraordinary ability as a natural mechanic, [who was] noted for the strength and symmetry of his work,” Walter Senior was a poor businessman, and late in life Walt was still angry at the conniving Methodist elder, a consummate hypocrite, who had nearly swindled his “poor straightforward father … out of his boots” (WWWC 1:256).36“My old daddy used to say it's some comfort to a man if he must be an ass anyhow to be his own kind of an ass,” Whitman reported to Traubel (WWWC 2:41). But some comfort turned out to be not enough, and it was “in the Whitman breed” to take disappointment hard (WWWC 4:473).

To Traubel, Whitman recalled his father's humor as sardonic and self-deprecating. “My father used to say, a good time to pay your debts is when you have the money. And I can't suggest an improvement over that” (WWWC 7:439). “My father used to say to me in his funny way, ‘Always pay your small debts, whatever you do with your large!’” (WWWC 7:57). Self-deprecating or not, Walter Senior had it in him to assert himself forcefully, as a loner would. Thus, after meeting a “hunted & tormented” soldier from Tennessee in a hospital in 1863, a Union soldier ostracized by his Confederate neighbors who had spent ten months in Southern prisons and who had “suffered every thing but death,” Whitman explained to Louisa, “He is a large, slow, good natured man (somehow made me often think of father), shrewd, very little to say—wouldn't

As he continued to describe his interaction with the soldier, Whitman suggested to Louisa that there was a fanatical quality to the Tennessee Unionist's resistance, and that his rigidity could be viewed as self-destructive and malevolent:

I asked him once very gravely why he didn't take the southern oath & get his liberty—if he didn't think it was foolish to be so stiff &c—I never saw such a look as he gave me, he thought I was in earnest—the old devil himself couldn't have had put a worse look in his eyes—(Corr 1:147)

Shrewd and good natured or foolish and stiff? Where should we place the emphasis? Did Whitman conclude that he was questioning the old devil himself or a rock-firm hero? He could never be sure.

In a later and equally revealing comparison, Whitman identified his father with Elias Hicks, the incendiary Quaker preacher, whose biography he hoped to write but was never able to complete. In November Boughs (1888), Whitman therefore included the following anecdote.

Though it is sixty years ago—and I was a little boy at the time in Brooklyn, New York—I can remember my father coming home toward sunset from his day's work as carpenter, and saying briefly, as he throws down his armful of kindling-blocks with a bounce on the kitchen floor, “Come, mother, Elias preaches tonight.” Then my mother, hastening the supper and the table-cleaning afterward, gets a neighboring young woman, a friend of the family, to step in and keep house for an hour or so—puts the two little ones to bed—and as I had been behaving well that day, as a special reward I was allow'd to go also.37

Hicks was famous and Walter Senior obscure, but both men had been raised on rural Long Island farms and both had been carpenters' apprentices. Both men were fighting a rearguard action against changing economic times. Both were married, both had sons. Here the analogy breaks off, however, since as a young man Hicks experienced a “moral and mental and emotional change,” after which, as he wrote in his autobiography,

There is some question as to whether Whitman's “Come, mother” anecdote reflects a fact or a “fact-romance,” but in any event Walter Senior was not usually able to facilitate his son's entry into the swanky interior of a Morrison's Hotel, where Hicks was speaking, in a “large, cheerful, gay-color'd room, with glass chandeliers bearing myriads of sparkling pendants, plenty of settees and chairs, and a sort of velvet divan running all round the side-walls,” “a handsome ball-room … used for the most genteel concerts, balls, and assemblies.”39 Walt's father was born in the simple West Hills farmhouse near Huntington, Long Island, where “his and his and his were born and lived” (WWWC 7:108), where “books were scarce,” and where “the annual copy of the almanac was a treat” (SD 695). He spent his early youth “near enough to the sea to be-hold it from high places, and to hear in still hours the roar of the surf.” On one side of the farmhouse in West Hills, with its “great heavy timbers, low ceilings, upper chambers,” and “long kitchen,” there was a “beautiful grove of black-walnuts” and “locusts,” and “in the rear a small peach orchard.” Unfortunately, when Walt visited as a little boy summer after summer, “All was in great neglect” (NUPM 1:21). Grandfather Jesse Whitman was long since dead and grandmother Hannah Brush Whitman, despite her “great solidity of mind” (SD 695), could not prosper without him.

Walter Senior was barely into his teens when his own father died. He was then apprenticed to a cousin as a carpenter, an apprenticeship completed in New York City when he was about fifteen (NUPM 1:23).40 He spent the next three years boarding in the city and working at his trade, before returning to Long Island. M. Wynn Thomas explains,

The urban artisan class was that section of the American population which, during Whitman's formative years, was most dramatically affected by the transition to a new stage of capitalism, and especially by the far-reaching social and political consequences of this transition. … Whitman's father was fairly typical of the disoriented artisan of this period, struggling to adjust to the new capitalist conditions. By turns a small-scale employer and a wage earner, he worked only fitfully while alternating between the kind of morose sense of

Walt Whitman was proud of his father's “democratic and heretical tendencies” (NUPM 1:6)—his enthusiasm for Hicks; his subscription to the Free Enquirer, a newspaper edited by the utopian socialists Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright; perhaps even his affinity for Constantin Volney's The Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires, an anticlerical work on which Whitman took copious notes (NUPM 5:2024–27) and on which, as he explained to the agnostic Traubel, “I may be said to have been raised” (WWWC 2:445).42 Whitman was also proud of his father's mechanical intelligence and physical strength. For much of his adult life, however, Walter Whitman was haunted by the specter of economic disaster. For part of it, he was “addicted to alcohol,” and according to one account, Whitman wondered whether this addiction might have been responsible for the physical and mental defects of his youngest brother, Eddy.43 He was often morose and cynical. His youthful dreams, he felt, had not been realized.

Because of the family's precarious economic circumstances, none of the Whitman children had much formal schooling. Walt, after spending six years in the absurdly overcrowded and rigidly regimented Brooklyn public schools, went to work as an office boy for two prominent lawyers when he was eleven.44 Fortunately, the Clarkes, father and son, interested themselves in furthering his education. Edward Clarke, the son, helped him with his handwriting and composition and subscribed to a circulating library for him, so that Whitman was able to revel in “romance-reading of all kinds,” including the patriotic romances of Sir Walter Scott, which he devoured “one after another, and his poetry” (SD 699). This “Arabian Nights” abundance was short lived, for after an intervening stint in a doctor's office of unknown duration, the twelve-year-old Whitman found himself employed in the printing office of the Long Island Patriot, to which his father subscribed. “There,” according to Gay Wilson Allen, “he became interested in journalism, which in turn aroused literary ambitions.”45

Perhaps in the summer of 1831, the precocious Whitman began to contribute “sentimental bits,” now lost, to the Patriot. And there too, he learned to set type from the venerable William Hartshorne, whom Whitman subsequently immortalized in his Brooklyniana essays of 1861–

While Whitman was learning the printer's trade in Brooklyn and New York City, his father continued to pursue his trade as carpenter and builder, “with varying fortune” (SD 700). He built heavily mortgaged houses, and the Whitmans continued to move.47 During some or most of this unsettled period, Walt was living in boarding houses, an arrangement that freed him from his parents' control but which he subsequently described as injurious to young apprentices such as himself. By May 1833, Walter Whitman had moved his family back to the region of West Hills, and by 1834, after another move, the family was living at Norwich. Louisa Whitman, pregnant with the grandly named Thomas Jefferson, was “very ill for a long time” (SD 700). As an apprentice printer and then as a journeyman, Walt continued to publish occasional pieces, now lost, in the local newspapers, and to benefit from access to his employers' circulating libraries. He also got free theater tickets and was an insatiable playgoer. “At first, I remember [he wrote, using the family pseudonym Velsor Brush], I used to go with other boys, my pals; but I afterward preferred to go alone, I was so absorbed in the performance, and disliked anyone to distract my attention.”48 These teenage “Illusions of youth! Dreams of a child of the Bowery!” were curtailed in the spring of 1836 when an out-of-work Whitman—he turned seventeen in May—was forced to join his family in Hempstead, where his father was farming on land that he did not own.49

Moving from the city to the country apparently felt like a terrible defeat, and Whitman later recorded his reaction to this involuntary rustication in the semiautobiographical story “The Shadow and the Light of

(living out of which he had so often said was no living at all)—went down into the country to take charge of a little district school, he felt as though the last float-plank which buoyed him up on hope and happiness, was sinking, and he with it. But poverty is as stern, if not as sure, as death and taxes, which Franklin called the surest things of the modern age. And poverty compelled Archie Dean. (EPF 327)

In the country, “pent up … among a set of beings to whom grace and refinement [were] unknown,” Archie Dean consoles himself by writing long confessional letters, “outpourings of spleen,” to his widowed mother, who, “strange as it may seem to most men, … was also his confidential friend” (EPF 328). But we have no record of correspondence between Whitman and Louisa, who was busy with her growing family.50 Instead, we see an irritable Walter Junior struggling to maintain his equanimity on the edge of other people's lives and to establish some kind of career.51 He was physically large—misleadingly so, he thought, since his emotional life remained cramped and undeveloped—and he was intellectually ambitious. But as he explained to a young friend many years later, “The time of my boyhood was a very restless and unhappy one: I did not know what to do.”52

BOARDING AT THE BRENTONS

As a teacher in at least eight different one-room schoolhouses on eastern Long Island between 1836 and 1841, Whitman received mixed reviews from his pupils and their parents. Some praised his gentleness and innovative methods; others considered him too self-absorbed and dreamy. “Shall I become old without tasting the sweet draught of which the young may partake,” he asked in the first of his “Sun-Down Papers from the Desk of a Schoolmaster,” which was printed in the Hempstead Inquirer on March 14, 1840. “Silently and surely are the months stealing along.—A few more revolutions of old earth will find me treading the paths of advanced manhood.—This is what I dread: for I have not enjoyed my young time. I have been cheated of the bloom and nectar of life.—Lonesome and unthought of as I am, I have no one to care for, or to care for me.” Even after we allow for the fashionable melancholia of Whitman's lonesome bachelor pose, the self-pity seems genuine, the loneliness real.

Whitman's mystic reveries served to carry him “far, far away” from

Like a long forgotten dream, a day of childhood was distinct to me.—I saw every particular tree, and hill, and field, my old haunts. Then leaping off again, remembrance carried me a few years farther on the path; and I was surrounded with the intimates of more advanced youth—young companions to whom I long since gave “good bye.” It is strange how a train of thought will carry a person onward from period to period, and from object to object, until at last the subject of his cogitations bears no affinity to what he first started from.53

Forced to teach school because of economic hard times that severely affected the printing industry in New York City, Whitman had taken up schoolteaching in the country almost as a last resort. Like Archie Dean, he missed the excitement of the city and considered schoolteaching beneath him. Moreover, despite the impression that Whitman sometimes created of detachment and aimlessness (his enemies called him lazy), he had already conceived the desire to distinguish himself, perhaps by writing a sociological treatise, a “wonderful and ponderous book.”54 As one of the first steps toward the realization of his dream of celebrity, he joined the Smithtown Debating Society in the fall of 1837, was promptly elected secretary, and “associated with some of the most prominent men of the town, including two judges, a congressman, a member of the New York legislature, two physicians, two justices of the peace, a dentist, several businessmen, and some prosperous farmers.”55 In the spring of 1838, he started a newspaper, The Long Islander, in Huntington, where he lived over the print shop with his eight-year-old brother George. “I went to New York,” he explained many years later, “bought a press and types, hired some little help, but did most of the work myself, including the presswork. Everything seem'd turning out well (only my own restlessness prevented me gradually establishing a permanent property there)” (SD 919).

In May 1839, Walt's physical and mental restlessness caused him to sell the paper, along with the horse he used to deliver it; he was fond of the horse, a white mare called Nina. By August, he was back in the village

Whitman liked the poem well enough to revise and reprint it in the 1842 New York Aurora under the title “Time to Come.” The reworked poem is more successful in evoking the vague and “unrequited cravings,” “the alternate throbs” of hope and fear that define the overly solemn speaker's “brain, and heart.” Yet despite some willingness to open up his rhymes, and despite the parodic openings provided by his humor—as, for example, in “Young Grimes,” a satire on the dullness of rural family life—throughout this early period Whitman had trouble using the conventional-looking (and-sounding) poems he was writing to express anything other than received opinions in which he himself hardly believed. Though unlike Young Grimes he was refusing to be “a chip of the old block” (UPP 1:2), and more specifically to celebrate the patriarchal family as the foundation of social order, the sense of entrapment expressed in “Our Future Lot” was genuine, but formal solutions continued to elude him. “O, Death!” he wrote in the revised version in 1842, “a black and pierceless pall / Hangs round thee, and the future state; / No eye may see, no mind may grasp / That mystery of Fate.”

Striving for Bryantesque sublimity and not reaching it, lapsing into McDonald Clarke melancholy and looking for a way out of it, Whitman announced in “Sun-Down Paper” number seven, published in September 1840, that he planned to survey “the nature and peculiarities of men” in his “wonderful and ponderous book” (UPP 1:37).56 As a political philosopher, however, Whitman disclaimed all knowledge of woman because, as he explained, “it behoves a modest personage like myself not to speak upon a class of beings of whose nature, habits, notions, and ways he has not been able to gather any knowledge, either by experience or observation.” Whitman went on to ask, “Who should be a better judge of a man's talents than the man himself? I see no reason why we should let our lights shine under bushels. Yes: I would write a book! And who shall say that it might not be a very pretty book? Who knows but that I might do something very respectable?” The rest of the essay is a disquisition on the theme, “I have found out that it is a very dangerous thing to be rich.”

Though uncertainly cadenced, the “Sun-Down Papers” reflect the emerging Whitman's suspicion of the “pleasures of dollars and cents.” Serious and jeering, earnest and campy, they move nervously from subject to subject, as the speaker attempts to formulate a program for personal

In Jamaica, in the summer and fall of 1839, Whitman boarded with the Brentons, an experience that brought him into contact with a woman who failed to appreciate his ostentatiously disengaged, loaferish point of view. According to her daughter-in-law, Orvetta Hall Brenton, whose account is long, but well worth reading,

Evidently, Whitman's self-proclaimed respect for women was a later phase of his development; the sexual symbolism of those provokingly outstretched feet is hard to miss. James Brenton, on the other hand, continued to wish Whitman well and to publish his poetry and prose. “May the smiles of fortune ever attend Walt in all his peregrinations,” he wrote in 1849, a year when he also included Whitman's morbid story “Tomb Blossoms” in Voices from the Press: A Collection of Sketches, Essays, and Poems honoring “practical printers” from Franklin to the then present (EPF 88–89 n).58 (Set in a rural cemetery, “Tomb Blossoms” features a widow with a French-sounding name who tends two graves, since she cannot be sure in which grave her husband is buried. This odd behavior permits the narrator to flirt with a transgressive subplot, in which monogamous marriages are destabilized and men's bodies are thrown

The polarization of the Brentons' responses to their intrusive (to her) but useful (to him) boarder suggests that Whitman's imitation of the ethic of idleness described by Sandra Tomc in her study of literary leisure was more acceptable to men than to women. Men such as James Brenton understood the dangers of overworking outside the home and could romanticize emotional leisure, as well as the privileges of indiscriminate male bonding beyond and beneath the marketplace. But women such as his wife who were confined to their homes and isolated from other women, with children and boarders to care for, could not afford the luxury of loafing and inviting their souls. Male economic nonproductivity was threatening to her and to most American women. A coatless, man-nerless man who would not work probably caused his wife or mother or housekeeper or sister or daughter to work harder. Whether or not this is the case—Ellen Moers, for example, has suggested that women novelists romanticize wealth precisely because they have had so little experience of it—60 on at least one count Mrs. Brenton was dead wrong. For all his social dissatisfaction and satirical self-absorption, moody young Whitman was not as friendless as she believed him to be.

A FIRST FRIENDSHIP

Unlike Mrs. Brenton, Whitman's Jamaica friend Abraham Paul Leech appreciated his style. He managed to save the nine letters Whitman wrote him beginning in the summer of 1840, most of them from Woodbury, where Whitman was again teaching school. They are primarily diatribes against the stupidity, rough manners, and execrable taste of the local people with whom Whitman was forced to associate and with whom he boarded, along the following lines:

I believe when the Lord created the world, he used up all the good stuff, and was forced to form Woodbury and its denizens, out of the fag ends, the scraps and refuse: for a more unsophisticated race than lives hereabouts you will seldom meet with in your travels.—They get up in the morning, and toil through the day, with no interregnum of joy or leisure, except breakfast and dinner.—they live on salt pork and cucumbers; and for a

Starved for intelligent companionship, Whitman kept up an unremitting litany of complaints. “Send me something funny,” he implored in the same letter of July 1840, “for I am getting to be a miserable kind of a dog”:

I am sick of wearing away by inches, and spending the fairest portion of my little span of life, here in this nest of bears, this forsaken of all God's creation; among clowns and country bumpkins, flat-heads, and coarse brown-faced girls, dirty, ill-favoured young brats, with squalling throats and crude manners, and bog-trotters, with all the disgusting conceit, of ignorance and vulgarity.—It is enough to make the fountains of goodwill dry up in our hearts, to wither all gentle and loving dispositions, when we are forced to descend and be as one among the grossest, the most low-minded of the human race.—Life is a dreary road, at the best; and I am just at this time in one of the most stony, rough, desert, hilly, and heart-sickening parts of the journey.—61

Several weeks later, the future celebrant of the democratic open road was complaining of sunburn after a “huckleberry frolick” with the “ladies and gentlemen of this truly refined place.” Dating his letter “Devil's den, Tuesday, Aug. 11,” Whitman inveighed against “these contemptible ninnies, with whom I have to do, and among whom I have to live.” Additionally, he was angry with Leech for having disappointed him. “Why the dickins didn't you come out to the whig meeting at the court house, last Saturday week?” the letter opens. “I went there, with the hope of seeing you and one or two others, as much as for any thing else.” Describing himself as “an evil spirit” wandering “over hills and dales, and through woods, fields, and swamps,” he exclaimed,

A week or so later, things were no better, as Whitman continued his diatribe against the disgusting material and mental culture he associated with Woodbury and its inhabitants. Leech, a genial and lighthearted correspondent, teased Whitman about his dire fantasies and urged him to return to Jamaica, where they both belonged to a debating society that argued such questions as “Are the British justified in blockading the Chinese ports?” and “Would the establishment of manual labor schools be desirable?” In addition to their mutual acquaintances, the two friends shared a substantial and combative interest in politics: Leech was a Whig, Whitman a Locofoco, or radical Democrat. Mainly, however, Whitman would not be deflected from his sexual and economic critique of “Woodbury,” which he expressed most forcefully in gastronomical terms. Food forms the focal point of many of these letters to Leech. In his letter headed “Purgatory Fields, Wednesday Aug 19,” for example, Whitman wrote,

I have eaten my dinner since the last line over leaf was written; but I don't know that I felt any the better as to good-humour.—What do you think I had for dinner?—Guess, now.—Beef?—no.—Mutton?—No.—Pot-pie?—No.—Salad and iced champagne?—No, no, no.—I'll tell you in the order that it was put up, or rather put down.—Firstly, two cold potatoes, with the skins on, one of said potatoes, considerably nibbled in a manner which left me in doubt whether it had been done by the teeth of a mouse or the bill of a chicken; secondly three boiled clams, that had evidently seen their best days;—thirdly a chunk of molasses cake made of buckwheat flour;—fourthly, a handful of old mouldy pot-cheese, with a smell strong enough to knock down an ox;—fifthly, and lastly, two oblong slats of a mysterious substance, which I concluded, after considerable reflection, must have been intended for bread;—this last would undoubtedly [have] been very interesting either to a Grahamite, or to one fond of analyzing and studying out the nature of the mineral kingdom.—Was n't this a feast for an Epicure?—Think, O thou banquetter on good things, think of such an infernal meal as that I describe, and bless the stars that thy lot is as it is.—Think, moreover that this diabolical compound was wrapped up in

Cutting a pretty “figure,” Whitman now resisted metaphor, as if to show that Woodbury, with its disastrous matter of fact, inhibited unusual connections. When Henry James came to review Whitman's posthumously published letters to Peter Doyle in 1898, he observed that

There is not even by accident a line with a hint of style—it is all flat, familiar, affectionate, illiterate colloquy. If the absolute natural be, when the writer is interesting, the supreme merit of letters, these, accordingly, should stand high on the list (I am taking for granted, of course, the interest of Whitman.) The beauty of the natural is, here, the beauty of the particular nature, the man's own overflow in the deadly dry setting, the personal passion, the love of life plucked like a flower in a desert of innocent, unconscious ugliness. … Whitman wrote to his friend of what they both saw and touched, enormities of the common, sordid occupations, dreary amusements, undesirable food. …64

Whitman's letters to Leech are more self-consciously literary than his later letters to Doyle, but James's remarkable analysis reminds us of the ways in which men can be stranded together, bound by narratives that pivot on the threat or the reality of “undesirable food.” In the early letters, we see the beginnings of a symbolic language and a private code, and the “Purgatory Fields” letter concludes with a plea, “for pity's sake,” for “something or other … in the shape of mental food” from his friend. But it is a code that cannot quite believe in its own powers of association. The setting is still too powerful, the man too full of fury.

In what he called his next “epistolary gem,” however, Whitman equates food with affection and affection with language. “Dearly beloved,” the letter begins, an opening that Arthur Golden describes as an “ironic play on … the marriage ceremony from the Book of Common Prayer.”65 “You must by this time have become accustomed to the semi-weekly receipt of these invaluable morsels; and therefore to deprive you

Apart from Whitman's two brief letters to his family during his trip to New Orleans in 1848, Leech is Whitman's only known personal correspondent before 1857.68 And in addition to saving Whitman's letters, Leech saved several drafts of his side of the correspondence. As a book-keeper, he must have had some formal education, and he seems to have sensed the possibility of a book in the making.69 “A most miraculous production,” he wrote, “a clever piece of intellectual fabric inwrought with blooming flowers from the productive garden of your fruitful imagination.” For his part, Leech was seeking to convert Whitman to Whig politics, though not to the hard cider with which the Harrison campaign was associated. He reminded Whitman to “be a good boy,” and cast him as the more impulsive of the two friends. “Fie upon you boy,” Leech's draft of a letter to Whitman reads. “You are out of your senses. Much learning (no, not learning but wine) hath made you mad. But I do not intend to preach a temp [temperance] discourse on the occasion.” Evidently, Leech saw a freer side to the Whitman who had recently explained in print, “The excessive use of tea and coffee, too, is a species of intemperance much to be condemned.”70

Whatever Leech's reservations about Whitman's politics, his emotional stability, or his drinking habits, he urged him to return to Jamaica so that they might again enjoy their moonlit walks.71 From darkest Woodbury, the histrionic Whitman created the impression that his life was a battle (as undoubtedly it was). From sunnier Jamaica, Leech observed with some degree of satisfaction, “In our part of the country we have no huckleberry frolicks, no bussing matches, no fights terminating in scratched faces and broken combs. As we were when you was here so are we still—a peaceable amicable friendly, loving affectionate kind of people.”

In the fall of 1840, Whitman was rescued from classroom drudgery

But that Place! O, it makes my nerves quiver as I think of it.—Yes, anathema! anathema, curse, curse, upon thee thou fag end of all earthly localities, infernal Woodbury! But I fear I am getting warm.—Let me push the subject no farther.—The fact is, the most distant mention of that diabolical region, that country of buckwheat doughnuts, and pot-cheese, and rye sweet-cake, always makes me fall a swearing.—Faugh!

Though Whitestone was far from perfect—Whitman disliked the “money making spirit” of its leading citizens and hinted broadly at their adulteries—he declared himself “quite happy here,” and refused to succumb to the “splenetic, fault-finding current, on which those Woodbury documents were set afloat.”

Of course, I build now and then my castles in the air.—I plan out my little schemes for the future; and cogitate fancies; and occasionally there float forth like wreaths of smoke, and about as substantial, my day dreams.—But, take it all in all, I have reason to bless the breeze that wafted me to Whitestone.

After an enthusiastic description of the shipping traffic and “fortification under weigh” on Long Island Sound, Whitman introduced an apparently casual erotic fantasy:

A room with a view. A room without women. A relationship with the sun, who “almost seems to kiss me with a loving kiss.” A vision of political and military might as generosity, as shared wealth. Himself as Napoleon, so that he might “load the heads of my friends with golden coronets.” Adequately nourished by surroundings in which fantasy could triumph over reality, Whitman wound down his correspondence with Leech. There were several more letters and some further meetings. The letters were perfunctory. Perhaps the meetings were too. In Whitestone, Whitman may have found a new friend. “We are close on the sound,” Whitman wrote. “We hear the busy clink of the hammers at morn and night, across the water; and sometimes take a sail over to inspect the works, for you know it belongs to the U.S.” (emphasis added). The editorial We? Or Whitman and his new companion? Whether or not such a person actually existed, by the end of the school term in the spring, New York beckoned. Whoever “we” was, it was time for the confused, idealistic, and angry young exile in the provinces to move on.

TWENTY-EIGHT YOUNG MEN

In an extended self-introduction in the 1855 poem “Song of Myself,” Whitman issued a challenging invitation, in which he tried to use literature to demonize the category of the literary. That is, he set himself an impossible task.

In this exemplary passage, Whitman evidently rejects poetry as it had previously been written, othering it as insubstantial and elitist. His poetry

(LG 1855, pp. 26–27)

The life of poetry emerges not just from identity and not just from distinction but from their mutual relationship to some as yet unnamed third figure. That third figure is the democratic poet as autobiographical presence. Neither identity nor distinction has priority in Whitman's sequence; neither identity nor distinction is real without the other. Ideally, the relationship of poet to reader defamiliarizes reading conventions based on authoritarian models of unity. Grounding his literary authority in gender archetypes that include masculine and feminine elements, Whitman wrote to Emerson, and to his own readers, “The mothers and fathers of whom modern centuries have come, have not existed for nothing; they too had brains and hearts.” “Of course all literature, in all nations and years, will share marked attributes in common,” he asserted, “as we all, of all ages, share the common human attributes.” He added, confidently, “What is to be done is to withdraw from precedents” (LG, p. 735).

Romancing Emerson as “dear Friend and Master,” Whitman did not resolve the tension between “distinction” and “the knit of identity” to which his poetry alludes. The project becomes clearer, however, once we take Whitman's family archetypes seriously as models for reading. “Have you ever loved a woman?” he asks provokingly in “I Sing the Body Electric.” “Your mother. … is she living?. … Have you been much with her? and has she been much with you? / Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations and times all over the earth?” (LG 1855, p. 122). The last question in this loaded series is the giveaway. It is too extreme, and the “knit of identity” is less interesting than the “distinction.”

“Wording the future” by showing “the true use of precedents” (LG, p. 740), Whitman angrily sought to withdraw from precedents. Though in Benedict Anderson's terms he was seeking to establish an “eroticized nationalism,”4 and though in his own terms he was seeking to create a “new [sexual] Bible” (NUPM 1:353), as a poet who believed that he lacked intellectual authority (compared, say, to Homer or Shakespeare or Tennyson) he felt that the emotional power of his own distinct experience

In the 1855 and 1856 Leaves of Grass, Whitman's populist “faith in sex” revealed both the confidence and the confusion of a self seeking to redeem an ambivalent personal past. For despite the constancy of his desire to sight that new moral American continent without which the physical continent remained incomplete, maybe a carcass, a bloat, in proliferating masculinities Whitman was unsure what precedents that new moral American continent might sustain. And so, at his most anxious, he seemed to cram his notebooks and his poems with all words, to be afraid of leaving any thing or person out. “Literature is full of perfumes,” he noted, reminding himself that “I follow animals and birds” (NUPM 1:79). And always the lists, looking for a new, purer, and more unbroken language of love: “Breathjuice—Airscents—Airsmells—Air-odor—Loveodor—Airdrifts—Breathsmoke—Airjuice for you—Air-sough” (NUPM 1:195).

In earlier chapters, we observed that Whitman's critique of nervousness about the body, sex, and gender emerged not only out of shrewd readings of popular, mid-nineteenth-century American texts (as David S. Reynolds has described them), but also out of his specific experience of family, work, and friendship.5 For example, though Whitman never directly acknowledged that his early experience, including his reading, inhibited his ability to feel unselfconsciously valued as a person and for himself, he approaches such a confession through figural indirection in “There Was a Child Went Forth.”6 Moreover, as we have seen, his early fiction provides a more detailed (though also screened) account of his role in absorbing his original family's emotional burdens, specifically their inability to meet and fuse. His early fiction indicates that in childhood and adolescence he felt called upon to assuage his mother's loneliness, as he was to do quite consistently in later life: not only after his father's death in 1855 and the marriage of his younger brother Jeff in 1859, but much earlier on. Yet this fiction screens other emotional realities as well. During adolescence especially, Whitman felt that his own inner realities had been insufficiently responded to by both of his parents. They had not, in his terms, “really absorb'd each other and underst[oo]d

As an autobiographical poet with an ambitious social mission, Whitman sought to describe a procreative community to which, in theory, anyone might belong. In 1855 and 1856, this community included men and women working together, as well as men working with and loving men, as well as self-loving men and self-loving women. That the health reformer and poet stigmatized “onanists” (LG 1855, p. 105), venerealees (LG 1855, p. 113), “roues” (LG 1855, p. 120), drunkards, and prurient romances is not necessarily inconsistent with my argument. Partly Whitman favored chastity in the sense of self-regulation, partly he tolerated prostitution. Partly he believed that not all could or would marry and that unmarried people such as himself were entitled to a sex life. Partly he understood that the familiar material body was always subject to silencing, not least by death; partly he believed that the more ghostly spiritual body might realize itself in unknown future spheres. Thus Whitman's attitude toward the defamiliarized body was inconsistent. He was fascinated by the “procreative” potential of the female womb, by the promiscuous power of the hot and sweaty male lover, the “truant” who could not be counted on for very long, and by the darkness he identified with a gentler third term, possibly someone of the neuter gender (LG 1855, p. 107). This mysterious figure was responding to a psychological emergency of ambiguous origin. He was “double,” as was the Whitman who wrote of “my soul and I,” who felt that he was leading both a familiar and an unfamiliar life, and who wanted the one to accommodate the other (NUPM 1:63). Both were necessary to his poetry, with its knit of identity, its distinctions, and its unprecedented “breed of life.”

Both in and out of the game of love and watching and wondering at it, Whitman was influenced by his observations of family life, of the communities of work and friendship to which he had belonged, and of available languages of power. As I have been suggesting, he often translated

the people, like a lot of large boys, have no determined tastes, are quite unaware of the grandeur of themselves, of their destiny, and of their immense strides—accept with voracity whatever is presented them in novels, histories, newspapers, poems, schools, lectures, every thing. Pretty soon, through these and other means, their development makes the fibre that is capable of itself, and will assume determined tastes. The young men will be clear what they want, and will have it. They will follow none except him whose spirit leads them in the like spirit with themselves. Any such man will be welcome as the flowers of May. Others will be put out without ceremony. How much is there anyhow, to the young men of These States, in a parcel of helpless dandies, who can neither fight, work, shoot, ride, run, command—some of them devout, some quite insane, some castrated—all second-hand, or third, fourth, or fifth hand—waited upon by waiters, putting not this land first, but always other lands first, talking of art, doing the most ridiculous things for fear of being called ridiculous, smirking and skipping along, continually taking off their hats—no one behaving, dressing, writing, talking, loving, out of any natural and manly tastes of their own, but each one looking cautiously to see how the rest behave, dress, write, talk, love—pressing the noses of dead books upon themselves and upon their country—favoring no poets, philosophs, literats, here, but dog-like danglers at the heels of the poets, philosophs, literats, of enemies' lands. (LG, p. 737)

“Submit to the most robust bard till he remedy your barrenness,” he counselled. “Then you will not need to adopt the heirs of others; you will have true heirs, begotten of yourself, blooded with your own blood” (LG, p. 734).

Ironically, as Whitman sought to democratize models of reading based on the hierarchical relationship of father to child, he found himself mimicking aggressions which in their threatening intensity he associated with the quick loud word of the authoritarian father (“strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, angered, unjust” [LG 1855, p. 139]). He saw this irritable, obtuse, uncaring father everywhere: in the Congress, in the President's house, in the schools and churches, and in the phallogocentric traditions of an elitist Eurocentric literature which did not understand the first word of the true meaning of love. Turning to the American nation that, in his more pessimistic moods, he experienced as an unreal aggregation of immature individuals with whom he had nothing in common, Whitman emphasized the sacramental status of the human body: anyone's body, but most especially his own. Radically leveling distinctions

(LG 1856, pp. 324–25)

Like the sudden eruption of the “strong, selfsufficient, manly, mean, angered, unjust” father who isolates the poet-hero in “There Was a Child Went Forth,” this unexpected attack on the ambiguously sexed reader/ writer is the poem's emotional center. It resumes the personal and national family usages that have estranged Whitman from the model of serenity he seeks to emulate, as exemplified by the mythologized “eloquent dumb great mother” who “never fails” (LG 1856, p. 325). As a child, Whitman longed to be transported into another environment, in which the harsh line dividing person from person might suggest “contact, junction, the solid marrying the liquid—that curious, lurking something” (SD 796). As an adult, he wished to be shielded from the emotional still-births and psychological abortions produced by the disorder of his many and shortlived homes.

The outraged but also heartsore rhetoric quoted above is taken from the poem later called “Song of the Rolling Earth,” which states flat out that “Human bodies are words” and that “I myself am a word” (LG 1856, pp. 322, 323). In textualizing the body, the poet seeks to reaffirm common human attributes. He also seeks to rob the specifically male body of its masterful social sting. “Were you thinking that those were the words—those delicious sounds out of your friends' mouths?” he taunts us. “No, the real words are more delicious than they” (p. 322). The drive

Both as an antebellum American dissatisfied with his country, and as an erotically curious man adrift with his globalized “Urge and urge and urge, / Always the procreant urge of the world,” in the first two editions of Leaves of Grass the poet famously celebrated his own “live body” (LG 1855, pp. 25, 123) rather than the historical, philosophical, or psychological consistency of his project. Dismissing sexual, familial, national, and literary precedents, he hoped “to cease not till death” but also hoped not to cease as his bitterly disappointed and disappointing father did in the very month in which the first Leaves of Grass was published. Although America could be rhetorically reconfigured as an earth mother who “does not withhold” and is “generous enough,” the first two editions of Leaves of Grass mandate the death of the harshly critical father who could not or would not quell the competing lusts by which his children were driven. In part, then, “faith in sex” is intended to displace a more traditional fear of the avenging Father.

Powerfully repressing personal and national narratives of “[im]perfect health,” in the 1855 Leaves of Grass Whitman sought to meld various discrete audiences into an emotionally unified, organically connected interpretive community: a nation of nations. Living in what Benedict Anderson reminds us was “a society fractured by the most violent racial, class and regional antagonisms,”8 Whitman further repressed narratives that perpetuated the association between manliness, individuation, and aggression. Indeed, the Whitmanic speaker finds psychic wholeness by surrendering to the “feminine” need to re gress. These unifying, unaggressive regressions take many different forms, including the use of the sexually transgressive body as “the origin of all poems” (LG 1855, p. 26). For example, a potentially feminizing body-logic dominates the opening of “Song of Myself.” “Houses and rooms are full of perfumes,” Whitman writes, “the shelves are crowded with perfumes, / I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it, / The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it” (LG 1855, p. 25). Poised here at the start of his great career, the poet/speaker presents us with a multivalent

In fact it might appear that these excessively crowded houses or rooms have no particular owner, and that in belonging to everyone, they belong to no one. Clearly, these spaces are not identified with a particular city or nation, and they would seem oppressively isolated from each other, were they not organized by a common symbolic language whose endpoint, absorption by the maternal night, is death. Though he claims to like this all-pervading, common language as much as the next person, the more highly individuated persona quickly escapes into the out of doors, where he finds a reason for being. That the persona is looking for some kind of authenticating love becomes clearer as we read on into the poem. “The atmosphere is not a perfume,” he writes, “it has no taste of the distillation. … it is odorless, / It is for my mouth forever. … I am in love with it, / I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, / I am mad for it to be in contact with me” (LG 1855, p. 25).

In a number of important ways, this opening departure scene in “Song of Myself” anticipates the subsequent voyage and vision of the erotically deprived twenty-ninth bather who owns the “fine house by the rise of the bank” but who does not own herself. In each instance, love-making occurs in a pastoral setting which liberates both the Whitman persona and the twenty-ninth bather from a home-bound life. Both personae select fantasy lovers who are unaware of their presence, a point to which I will shortly return. In the opening scene, Whitman claims to be in love with the atmosphere; analogically, he implies the boundlessness of his love for human beings undifferentiated by gender. This claim is not fully persuasive; that is, he himself is not fully persuaded by it. Yet his unconventional lovemaking prepares him to violate other erotic taboos, for example the prohibition against anonymous, male-homoerotic sex. Thus in Section 11, the speaker/poet identifies with a woman who wants to make love with twenty-eight undifferentiated young men whom she has never met, whom she knows only through observation, and who are unaware of her presence. The speaker/poet authorizes her anonymous, indiscriminate lovemaking, while inviting readers to eavesdrop on her frustrations. “Which of the young men does she like the best?”

When the persona projects his desire onto such figures as the atmosphere, the magnetic nourishing night, and the coolbreathed earth, he successfully reforms erotic encounters he may have had with particular men and women. The caressable young men of Section 11, for example, are shockingly unaware of the poet/lover's presence. Each unthinking individual is taken unawares, and each is part of a homogeneous group that is equally and unknowingly taken. The fantasy figures are all so friendly. Contrary to what we might expect, there is no enmity between them. Nor is conflict introduced by the speaker and his womanly persona, the twenty-ninth bather.9 Here fantasy authorizes erotic cross-dressing and the speaker remains “the caresser of life wherever moving” (LG 1855, p. 35), a self-conception consistent with his belief that the American bard has nothing to do with special interests, including special sexual interests. As the caresser of life wherever moving, Whitman exposes what Michel Foucault has mockingly called Puritanism's “triple edict of taboo, nonexistence, and silence.”10 But his bathing scene also dramatizes the homoerotic poet's imposition of a further taboo, since male-male desire can be expressed only if depersonalized and negotiated through a female participant-observer. The twenty-eight young men “do not know … [and] they do not think.” Were they to know and think, this scene would have a different outcome.

In the 1856 letter to Emerson and in the first two editions of Leaves of Grass, Whitman begins to claim same-sex desire only to disown it. Consider, for example, the curious dynamic in Section 32, where the speaker moves into his notable French mode, the English language being

Though he has previously been tempted to turn and live with the animals because they are so placid and self-contained, the Whitman persona is unable to let go of civilization and its discontents. The animals whom he has observed, “sometimes half the day long,” have always brought him magical tokens of himself, unlike the people he knows all too well, who lie awake in the dark, weeping not only for their sins but also for their worldly failures, including their failures to gratify the deeply inculcated mania for owning things. Escaping from the city into the country temporarily enables him to move out of this overly demanding, competitive mode, but return visits constitute an aberration. The restless “Song of Myself” persona rarely finds any scene worth lingering over, since he prefers erotic anonymity, for the reasons we have been considering. Adventures into which he enters avidly quickly reinscribe the speaker's need to be in control, as fears of exploitation coincide with fears of being exploited—even in male-homoerotic relationships that are later praised, in 1860, for their democratic potential.

Its wit notwithstanding—the horse-loving speaker describes himself as “not too exclusive”—Section 32 is an overdetermined example of the Whitman persona's inability to shrug off the intrusive, exploitative social structure by which his passional life has previously been marked. The speaker who earlier fancied himself “Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical” (LG 1855, p. 27) prefers muscular men, but in 1855–56, all of his erotic relationships are represented as transitory. In “Song of Myself,” for example, changes of scene express Whitman's need to abandon thoughts and feelings he cannot endure. He takes his

In Section 3 of “Song of Myself,” the departure dynamic is temporarily reversed, when “a loving bedfellow sleeps at [his] side all night and close on the peep of the day, / And leaves for [him] baskets covered with white towels bulging the house with their plenty” (LG 1855, p. 27). Whitman compares this loving bedfellow to God, who symbolically impregnates him and leaves behind an exquisitely clean food-relic (something like a perfect baby, a perfect homoerotic memory, a perfect book). The speaker, however, is not unambivalently willing to accept this gift because of the psychological vulnerability with which it is associated. Gazing after his departing lover, the speaker's voice turns shrill and he accuses his hungering eyes of prolonging a desire his mind cannot understand. The rational alternative is to “forthwith cipher and show me to a cent, / Exactly the contents of one, and exactly the contents of two, and which is ahead?” Such impersonal exactitude reduces him to despair. This episode, then, defines the sleeping Whitman as an erotic victim and justifies the defensive structure that governs the poem. Abandoned by his beloved male muse, Whitman can only describe himself as “Both in and out of the game [of love], and watching and wondering at it” (LG 1855, p. 28).12

There's no point in loving an unreliable god, and I am suggesting that the traumatized speaker takes himself out of the game of love even when it appears that there are particular versions of this game he might win. However, the reality-testing in which he engages is limited, and he collapses “the real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love.” Probably Whitman means to suggest that when gender does not signify, neither does reality, by which he means history. But when the real determines which differences matter, he himself is not in love. Consequently, he concludes Section 24 with the lines, “Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you, / Broad muscular fields, branches of liveoak, loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you, / Hands I have taken, face I have kissed, mortal I have ever touched, it shall be you.” Evidently none of these fantasy figures responds to him as a coherent person, and this imagination of a psychologically scattered self leads him to say, “I dote on myself. … there is that lot of me, and all so luscious,” and then, “Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy” (LG 1855, p. 49).

Many of these imaginary interactions have a vaguely or explicitly sacramental quality, especially when the speaker is most thoroughly impregnated, as in the brief encounter in Section 3 with a lover who comes “As God,” and in the longer lasting, soulful encounter in Section 5, which is introduced with the plea, “the other I am must not abase itself to you, / And you must not be abased to the other” (LG 1855, p. 28). These lines thematize Whitman's concern with exploitation and humiliation, even when he is alone. In general terms, the speaker is unable to realize himself; in more specific terms, he is unable to trust himself to other men.

In Section 3, for example, the rounded baskets that cause his “house” to bulge prefigure the abnormally swollen white bellies of the twenty-eight caressable young men in Section 11, a passage in which, as we have seen, male-male desire is subordinated to and constructed by the female gaze. In Section 5, as the persona finds himself seized by both the “hand” and the “spirit” of God, he represents this spirit as his own soul, which extorts nothing from him except the willingness to submit. As a consequence of this devotional compromise,

(LG 1855, p. 29)

But this feeling does not last. Feminization cannot be a permanent mode. The “neuter gender” is too threatening.

In “Song of Myself,” physical intimacy does not often produce spiritual intimacy. This point is further emphasized by the triangulation of Section 11, in which the poet/speaker watches a desiring woman who watches the floating, bulging men; the mutuality of the gaze is frustrated, doubly frustrated. Just as the twenty-eight young men are completely unaware of being observed, let alone “seize[d] fast” by the woman's longing, so too the love-starved woman whom they “souse with spray” is completely unaware of the speaker who voyeuristically watches her. The anonymous mode prevails, as does unrealization.

Whitman locates the most fully visionary scene of sexual instruction early in the poem; the marriage of body and soul in Section 5 is never again so fully rendered. From a biographical perspective, one of the interesting features of this passage is its recuperation of the figure of the violent elder brother who rarely, if ever, enters into Whitman's descriptions of his youth but who uncannily reemerges at crucial moments in the poetry: both here and at the conclusion of “Passage to India,” in which Whitman's image of a successful spiritual quest terminates as follows.

(LG, pp. 419–20)

In writing these lines, which were much noticed by Hart Crane,13 Whitman was probably not thinking specifically of his brother Jesse, who ran away to sea when Whitman was about the age of the confused adolescent in “The Sleepers.” The “Sleepers” protagonist searches for his sexual identity on what he calls the “Pier out from the main” (LG 1855, p. 108), strangely imploring, “let me catch myself with you and stay. … I will not chafe you; / I feel ashamed to go naked about the world, / And am curious to know where my feet stand. … and what is this flooding me, childhood or manhood. … and the hunger that crosses the bridge between” (LG 1855, p. 108). These lines have never been effectively glossed, but we would do well to recall Whitman's curious suggestion in “Song of the Rolling Earth” that “Human bodies are words, myriads of words” and that “In the best poems reappears the body, man's or woman's, well-shaped, natural, gay, / Every part able, active, receptive, without shame or the need of shame” (LG, p. 219). Looking to his shameful older brother Jesse as if to a missing pier/peer, Whitman needed to fold this overly passionate missing person back into his songs of the growth of his own emotional and other nature. That he should choose to do so directly in “Passage to India” and indirectly in Section 5 of “Song of Myself” suggests something of the power of the Elder Brother's hold on his imagination, early and late. Suffused with the songs of the second son, Jesse is represented as a composite psychological possibility rather than as a unique historical being. This troublesome brother's ghostly presence continues to inform the text, however, as Whitman piles up “mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen and pokeweed” in a brilliantly improvised ceremony which soothes

Following this astonishing but short-lived integration of body and soul, the speaker moves immediately into the extended meditation beginning, “A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands” (LG 1855, p. 29), a meditation which circles around the themes of procreation and death. The child's apparently casual question unrepresses an attitude toward “nature” the speaker wants to investigate, and the ontological crisis subtly suggested by Section 5 becomes the main theme of Section 6. In dialogue with each other, Sections 5 and 6 underscore the persona's need to be reconciled to the hurtful father we encountered in “There Was a Child Went Forth,” who propels the “fatherstuff at night” before inflicting other blows on his unsuspecting household intimates. The residual language of the soul stabilizes Whitman's faith in sex. Without access to this traditionally authoritative vocabulary, men may propel the fatherstuff at night, but they can never earn the trust of the child who asks, “What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands.” Though Whitman says that he cannot answer the child, he hopes to counteract the excesses of individualism by reanimating the “soul” of a democratic culture.

As a sexually and psychologically transformative figure not yet translated into anyone else's language, Whitman's “soul” is associated with traditional understandings of the Muse and with what we would now call the preconscious mind. This totemistic figure has the power to reconcile him to his experience of “the other I am,” the self-in-society defined by its phantasmal, rather than its real and consequential existence. Sections 5 and 6 of “Song of Myself” thus reflect the visionary poet's uncanny ability to reform himself as part of a crowd, whether that crowd be understood as an eternal religion, an eternal family, an eternal nation,

This was Whitman's erotic double bind: he wanted to be understood but he was afraid of being understood. He had been conditioned to relative anonymity at home during his childhood and youth and he perpetuated this relative anonymity as an adult lover.18 Inconstant in his affections, quick to anger and despair, for Whitman the important issues were connection and control. Cultural prohibitions against male-male physical intimacy may explain some of his anxiety, but Whitman makes the more general point, even in his 1860 Calamus poems, that men and women living in a generationally fragmented culture will need to fight against their depersonalization as lovers. Thus at that moment in “Song of Myself” when a child turns to the speaker, inquiring “What is the grass?” the fullness of the poet's response is therapeutically telling. His willingness to admit what he doesn't know makes him the perfect confidant;

THE FLESH AND THE APPETITES

Through poetry, Whitman entered into a psychologically restorative lyric world in which scenes of erotic initiation could be reconfigured. In this lyric utopia, “the smoke of my own breath” is a sufficient origin, whereas in the tobacco-stained, working world of taverns and farms and houses with which Walter Senior had actually been associated, any working-man's control of his body (and by extension of his social role) had been very limited indeed. Although estrangement between fathers and sons was a common fate in Jacksonian and post-Jacksonian America, Whitman felt it more than most. Ideally, his faith in sex linked him to the past, as well as the future, and he hoped that his poetry of the flesh and the appetites would not betray its domestic, working-class roots.

As the antebellum Whitman resisted the power of the genteel literary classes to shape his professional life, he tirelessly promoted his books, carefully controlling the circumstances of their production and publishing

The following atypical episode, then, is worth pausing over. It sheds further light on Whitman's sense of “democratic” audience. In 1858, Whitman brought the manuscript of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” to an admiring and unconventional domestic circle dominated by Abby Hills Price, a radical feminist reformer whom he had met through a mutual friend in 1856. Abby shared many of Walt's political values, as Ellen O'Connor and Anne Gilchrist were later to do, and her Brooklyn home provided a restful and stimulating alternative to his own. Although he was not eager to be lionized and resisted Abby's attempts to show him off to her guests, he made an exception for George B. Arnold, a former Unitarian minister who dabbled in spiritualism and who lived in the other part of the house. Thus, on the day when Whitman shared the new poem Abby had coaxed him into bringing along, no outsiders were present. (Abby's husband was a self-effacing businessman who seems to have played no part in their teas.) Diffidently, Whitman insisted that Abby and Arnold each read the poem aloud before he agreed to do so himself. When the three readings were over, the poet turned to Abby Price, then to Arnold, then to Abby's astonished teenage daughter Helen, asking each one of them what they would suggest “in any way.” Whitman, who preferred Abby's reading, had already mentioned that the poem was based on a “real incident,” but he did not tell them what it was.22 Even with an intelligent and admiring private audience he trusted, Whitman felt the need to conceal the poem's occasion.

Those assembled probably sensed that his verse, which was “all about

After a long pause he answered somewhat reluctantly, I thought, “Your question, Abby, stirs a fellow up.” Although he would not admit that he had ever been “really in love,” he took from his pocket a photograph of a very beautiful girl (remember, he was still in his thirties) and showed it to us. That is all we ever knew about the original of the picture either then or afterwards, but I well remember the girl's exceptional beauty.23

On yet another occasion, when, as Helen Price recalled, the assembled group was talking about friendship,

[he] said that there was a wonderful depth of meaning (“at second or third removes,” as he called it) in the old tales of mythology. In that of Cupid and Psyche, for instance; it meant to him that the ardent expression in words of affection often tended to destroy affection. It was like the golden fruit which turned to ashes upon being grasped, or even touched. As an illustration, he mentioned the case of a young man he was in the habit of meeting every morning where he went to work. He said there had grown up between them a delightful, silent friendship and sympathy. But one morning when he went as usual to the office, the young man came forward, shook him violently by the hand, and expressed in heated language the affection he felt for him. Mr. Whitman said that all the subtle charm of their unspoken friendship was from that time gone.24

Despite the poet's personal reticence with George B. Arnold and the Prices, there is a correspondence that takes us further into the talk about friendship in which Whitman was participating during these extraordinary times. For in March 1860, while he was in Boston seeing the third edition of Leaves of Grass through the press, the poet offered to send his young stage-driver friend Fred Vaughan some proof sheets in advance of publication. More than any other single gesture, this “kind offer,” as Vaughan called it, indicates the seriousness of Whitman's attachment to him. While Whitman was in Boston, Vaughan heard Emerson lecture on manners and touch on the theme of friendship. According to Vaughan, Emerson said that “a man whose heart was filled with a warm, ever enduring not to be shaken by anything Friendship was one to be set on one side apart from other men, and almost to be worshipped as a saint.”25“There Walt,” he wrote,

how do you like that? What do you think of them setting you & myself, and one or two others we know up in some public place, with an immense placard

The friendship between Whitman and Vaughan did not survive the various pressures—Vaughan's marriage, Whitman's move to Washington—to which it was subjected, but Vaughan's distinction between the theory and practice of friendship seems crucial. Apparently Whitman later felt that he had crossed some boundary with Fred or that Fred had crossed some boundary with him, for when he was at a crisis point in his relationship with Peter Doyle in 1870, he cautioned himself to remember Fred (NUPM 2:890). All we can know for certain is that in Leaves of Grass in 1855 and 1856, Whitman was still working to divest himself of loyalties to any personal audience that might narrow his poetic range, impede his well-publicized love affair with himself, or constrain his aggressive courtship of his country. Most consistently, he wanted to present himself as an American original who was not too original. How this desire played out in terms of his evolving and reforming faith in sexualities rather than in “sex” remains to be considered.

If Whitman's body defines him in the 1855 and 1856 Leaves of Grass, his body, like the American landscape with which it is associated, is not a constant signifier on whose continuity of meaning either he or we can count. For example, he cannot depend on its gendered stability. Whereas male gender is usually defined in terms of erotic choice, there are numerous scenes in the 1855 Leaves that undo that choice: to name but one, the ride with the sexy stallion. In the 1856 volume, as Whitman introduced a more direct vocabulary of male-homoerotic desire, he also gendered himself more emphatically, and it was this latter project that provoked the most contemporary indignation. When he wrote “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” (LG 1856, p. 240), his contemporary audience was not pleased. Even if some of Whitman's avantgarde allies enjoyed his scandalousness, ordinary American readers were intent on maintaining a sex/gender system which was emotionally familiar. We may wonder whether Whitman intended to satirize misogynist sexual norms, but he paid a high price for his uncensored speech.

Even before the 1855 Leaves had been published and reviewed, Whitman was well aware that he was asking readers to reexamine their own sexual values and that this challenge was likely to provoke a literary scandal. After all, when he described his robustly masculine poet in the 1855

During the 1850s, Whitman's attempts to dismantle a binary sex/gender system and to embody male-homoerotic theories and practices were empowered and constrained by the response of his friends to the risks he was taking. For example, his project was defined by an idealizing discourse of the soul about which he professed not to be curious but which he was reluctant to abandon. The relationship between body and soul was one of the topics he discussed in 1856–57 with George B. Arnold, Abby Price's spiritualist friend, and in 1857 he told a Dutch Reformed minister who admired his poetry that he had “perfect faith in all sects, and was not inclined to reject one single one” (Corr 1:43). This rejection of religious orthodoxy was compatible with Whitman's vision of an inclusive rather than an exclusive audience for his poetry and with his purported indifference to conventional forms. Be that as it may, friends such as Fred Vaughan, whom Whitman romanticized in the poetry as “roughs,” were in fact deeply concerned with keeping up appearances. Because of Fred's importance as a representative of Whitman's personal audience during the 1850s, I would like to return to his 1860 letters to Whitman, which include allusions to religion and to money.

Laughingly, Fred described himself and Walt as freethinkers, but when angered by Walt's sluggard manners as a correspondent, he wrote impulsively, “What the devil is the matter,” a phrase that echoes Whitman's language to Abraham Paul Leech some twenty years earlier. When filled with the sentiments of a sincere friend, Fred exclaimed, “I hope to God it [the 1860 Leaves] may be not only a success as regards its typography, appearance and real worth, but also pecuniarily a success.” When Vaughan criticized Emerson's delivery of the “Manners” lecture as strained, hesitating, and repetitious, he noted that Emerson had spoken in Father Chapin's church, a statement suggesting that Fred already knew the minister and that Walt would recognize his name.26 When Vaughan humorously described himself as “under the painful necessity of telling a lie to keep up [Whitman's] reputation,” he demonstrated his

Small wonder, then, that the Whitman who wanted poetry to express the flesh and the appetites also wanted his poetry to exhibit caution. Fred and people like him were an important part of the audience Whitman cared about, the audience that influenced his sense of social mission. In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” the major new poem of the 1856 volume, Whitman asks whether it is possible to live fully in one's time and body while maintaining a purchase on the future. Together, Vaughan and Whitman traveled the ferry route many times. When Whitman accuses himself of erotic cowardice in the poem's most memorable passage, he suggests that his ability to sublimate desire links him to readers yet unborn: to you and me. Although Whitman also subverts this line of argument, as we might expect, the Vaughan who later described himself as “now cursing now praying” was more impulsive than the Whitman who expressed male-homoerotic desire at several removes in verse. Vaughan's later life was filled with tragedy.29 In the 1850s, however, he was hoping to rise in the world and he was hoping that Whitman would help him do it. Fred genuinely wanted the 1860 Leaves of Grass to be a financial success. Here, then, is a nice irony. Vaughan, whom Whitman could romanticize as a “rough,” was deeply conflicted about the “seize the day” undercurrent in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” the poem he or someone like him helped to inspire. By 1862, when he was desperate to have Whitman attend his wedding, Whitman would have been the only guest. Did Whitman support him in yet another hour of chronic need? Was this

During the 1850s, Whitman's immediate personal audience included Fred Vaughan and people like him, whose imagination of the future was sharply bounded by the material limitations of the present. The Whitman persona, however, has a more fluid relationship to the present and to his own body, which is seemingly as variable as the words he uses to describe it. Depending on relational context, Whitman seeks to become more or less embodied, to have a more or less historically situated social identity, and to have a more or less individuated sense of himself as a person not inscribed by language within the postoedipal symbolic order. For example, at the conclusion of “Song of Myself” the speaker tries out the idea that he can outwit death by escaping from his body. Identifying himself with his poem, he imagines that his poem's ending signals his death, voice and life being coequal and coterminous. Working his way around this unfortunate coincidence—for poems do need to end, whereas desire is fantasized as immortal—Whitman claims to shed his body, to effuse his flesh “in eddies and drift it in lacy jags.” “If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles,” the materially decomposing persona explains, anticipating that moment in Dickinson's “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” when mourners “creak across [her] Soul / With those same Boots of Lead, again.”30 The effect in Whitman, however, is very different; he feels affirmed, rather than imposed upon, by the loss of corporeal, emotional, and intellectual identity, since he imagines a rebirth into some larger All. Once the speaker sheds his body, which is conceived as a social limit, his problems of longing and belonging disappear. Whitman hints, however, that these problems will recur, for “I stop some where, waiting for you.”31

Dying authenticates Whitman's claim, announced at the poem's inception, that “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (LG 1855, p. 25). Atomized into his component parts, he shares in a universalized, ungendered identity to which everyone and everything potentially belongs. In seeking to divest himself of the ideologically marked male body, Whitman aimed to liberate himself from the culturally produced, discursively constructed masculinity that it symbolized. Thus if Dickinson was afraid to own a female body because femininity could be read as a grotesque divergence from a masculinized norm, Whitman could represent freedom from the fate of gendered identity as an escape from time and history. To escape from a unique body might be to step

(LG, p. 505)32

Just as a “camerado” does not correspond to a word found in any dictionary, a man who is a book is no longer defined by the corporeal limitations of his sex. Equally, a living book or a living imagination is no longer confined by literary convention. In Leaves of Grass, collapsing the distinction between life and death can encourage other minglings. That is why “To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier” (LG 1855, p. 30).

The pattern of symbolic death and rebirth I have been tracing in Whitman as in Dickinson indicates the need urgently felt by both poets to forge new ways of being in the world. To the extent, however, that Whitman's project depended on his desire to actualize himself in an immediate human community, there was little future for him in disembodiment. More often than not, he suggests that “the supernatural [is] of no account” and that the imagined loss of corporeal presence does not facilitate “perpetual transfers and promotions” (LG 1855, pp. 72, 84). Here we move further into one of the more curious features of Whitman's project: his protestations against technologies of the book that supposedly prevented him from fulfilling his promise of unmediated presence. Let us recall that Whitman served as his own publisher for the 1855 volume, setting some ten pages of the book's type himself. On the first page of the first untitled poem, addressing readers and his ungendered “soul” as one, he moved somewhat abruptly to dissolve the cultural identity that he associated with strangely anxious mappings of the male body. Heartbeat, breath, music, speech, and nonhuman sounds originating in nature provided him with models of erotic and authorial authenticity. These models, like the belched words of his own voice loosed to the eddies of the wind, could not be constrained within existing literary convention. Seeking to undo the constitutive oppositions embedded in the undemocratic language of his culture, at the personal level Whitman was looking for the kind of unoppositional relationship that, as he said, was not

Thus at the start of the second poem in his 1855 sequence of twelve, the poet of “Song of Myself” issued a curious invitation to readers whose own need for democratizing “contact” might be almost as great as his own:

(LG 1855, p. 87)

As Ezra Greenspan points out in Walt Whitman and the American Reader, “A more cautious Whitman would later remove these lines from the poem, but in 1855, his fervor far outpaced his common sense.”33 This is a shrewd observation, and as Greenspan further notes, Whitman was pursuing more than one kind of “unfinished business” in protesting against paper and types. Seeking to alert us to the relationship between typecasting, in the modern sense of stereotyping, and the institutions of authorship, Whitman attacked idealized traditions of reading, hoping to clear the deck of impossible types, who falsely model what we, as a society, are and can be. “Because you are greasy or pimpled—or that you was once drunk, or a thief, or diseased, or rheumatic, or a prostitute—or are so now—or from frivolity or impotence—or that you are no scholar, and never saw your name in print. … do you give in that you are any less immortal?” (LG 1855, p. 88). These are the perfectible people Whitman includes in his democratic community of readers, whereas other authors leave them out.34

We are nevertheless dealing with “a large poet's large inconsistencies.”35 In “A Song for Occupations,” Whitman offers to restore other people's false and fractured lives to an originary wholeness, as he did in “Song of Myself.” But in this later, more pressured narrative, Whitman's anxiety about his ability to reform literary and social convention is more apparent, and he is not content with suggesting that he would like

M. Wynn Thomas has argued that “the loss of the conception of the complete human being is what Whitman vehemently charges his society with,” and that “what Whitman encourages, therefore, is the carrying of preoccupations that characterize private life into the wider public domain.”36 Carrying over those preoccupations involves perpetuating pains as well as pleasures, and we have seen that there was no unwounded private life to which Whitman could unambivalently appeal.37 Emerging from the poem, he felt that his was a thankless task. He had been unable to find his true occupation in fantasies of sexual closeness with other people's lovers or husbands and wives. He needed someone of his own and feared that he was prostituting his talent. As he explained harshly in another self-review, “If health were not his distinguishing attribute, this poet would be the very harlot of persons” (CH 39–40).

Protesting any barrier to intimacy with readers whom he was trying to imagine as perfectly responsive to his desires, Whitman took on the transparent identity of “the largest lover and sympathizer that has appeared in literature” (CH 39). But this was a phantasmal existence, in which the poet experienced himself as a “gigantic embryo or skeleton of Personality” (Corr 1:246). Singing the flesh and its appetites, he warily underscored his physical and emotional remoteness from the very readers on whom he was depending for identity. “My final merit I refuse you,” he announced firmly, “I refuse putting from me the best I am. / Encompass worlds but never try to encompass me, / I crowd your noisiest talk by looking toward you. / Writing and talk do not prove me, / I carry

As Tenney Nathanson has suggested, “It would clearly be illegitimate to treat biographical material, in the particular form of Whitman's personal anxieties, as the exclusive determinants of the poet's presence. But we can point to such material as one crucial source of Leaves of Grass.”38 We can never understand all of those personal relationships that produced either Whitman's “faith in sex” or the anger he expresses toward the audience addressed within the 1855 and 1856 poems. It is nevertheless worth remarking (as Paul Zweig has beautifully done) that even before Walter Whitman Senior's death in July 1855, Walter Whitman, Junior, was functioning in all but name as the head of his family—together, of course, with his mother. In some ways, Whitman's role as surrogate father and, by extension, surrogate husband was inconsistent with his role as emerging poet; in other ways, the psychological pressures attendant on this role intensified his quest for an ampler life of his own. As Whitman began to impersonate his working-class father in his persona as working-class poet, the impersonation recreated not the father he had known, but the father he wished he had known, who could authorize

Words of approval, admiration, friendship. This is to be said among the young men of These States, that with a wonderful tenacity of friendship, and passionate fondness for their friends, and always a manly readiness to make friends, they yet have remarkably few words of names for the friendly sentiments.—They seem to be words that do not thrive here among the muscular classes, where the real quality of friendship is always freely to be found.—Also, they are words which the muscular classes, the young men of these states, rarely use, and have an aversion for;—they never give words to their most ardent friendships.39

It is also worth remarking that Whitman's younger brother Jeff, whom he took to New Orleans, and whom he described to Traubel as his only “real brother” and “understander” (WWWC 3:541), had begun to seek an ampler life of his own.40 Jeff turned twenty-three in July 1855, and while still sharing many of Walt's enthusiasms, including the Italian opera, he too associated music, vocalism, and love.41 We do not know when Jeff began to court Martha Mitchell (Mattie), whom he married in February 1859 and whom he then brought to live in the Whitman home on Classon Avenue, but Jeff and Mattie were engaged for several years before their marriage.42 Afterwards, Jeff continued to interest himself in Walt's career and, inspired by Walt, the young couple named their first

Whether or not Whitman's sense of social isolation was intensified by Jeff's marriage, his hunger for words of “approval, admiration, friendship” had certainly preceded it. An exclusively domestic audience could never satisfy him; his ambitions had always been larger. “The pay on Saturday night,” he wrote in the 1855 “Song for Occupations,” “the going home, and the purchases; / In them the heft of the heaviest. … in them far more than you estimated, and far less also, / In them, not yourself” (LG 1855, p. 96). Whitman's nighttime excursions to New York provided one avenue of escape from the “not yourself,” from the potentially depressing domestic pressures to contribute and conform. So too did visiting hospitals, walking in the city, opera-going, reading, and writing poetry, praised by Emerson for its originality, in which he promised to offer “no representative of value—but [to] offer the value itself” (LG 1855, p. 89).44

As he successfully defended himself against the merger of his personality into the limiting occupations of the Whitman family, the “friendly” poet hoped to see infinite possibilities in ordinary men and women and in himself. “This is what you shall do,” he wrote in the 1855 “Preface” to Leaves of Grass, “Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families” (LG 1855, pp. 10–11). The pressure is palpable, the solution absurd. In the following year, Whitman continued to renegotiate his strained relations with “the muscular classes,” and with the well-to-do. Thus in The Eighteenth Presidency! he addressed himself “To Editors of the Independent Press, and To Rich Persons”:

Circulate and reprint this Voice of mine for the workingmen's sake. I hereby permit and invite any rich person, anywhere, to stereotype it, or reproduce it in any form, to deluge the cities of The States with it, North, South, East and West. It is those millions of mechanics you want; the writers, thinkers, learned and benevolent persons, merchants, are already secured almost to a man. But the great masses of the mechanics, and a large portion of the farmers, are unsettled, hardly know whom to vote for, or whom to believe. I am not afraid to say that among them I seek to initiate my name, Walt Whitman, and that I shall in future have much to say to them. I perceive that the best thoughts they have wait unspoken, impatient to be put in shape; also that

The pamphlet was never published, James Buchanan was elected, and the “government sublime” Whitman hoped to inaugurate remained a distant dream.

Seeking to free himself and his country from economic tyranny and political confusion, Whitman insisted that good feelings could be inspired by “A few light kisses. … a few embraces. … a reaching around of arms, / The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag, / The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hillsides, / The feeling of health. … the full-noon trill. … the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun” (LG 1855, p. 26). Such feelings could not be purchased. Nor could even more powerful sexual feelings be predetermined, disciplined, or contained. “The words of the Body!” he wrote, “The words of Parentage! The words of Husband and Wife. The words of Offspring! The word Mother! The word Father!” (Primer 4). Then, further on, “The blank left by words wanted, but unsupplied, has sometimes an unnamably putrid cadaverous meaning. It talks louder than tongues. What a stinging taste is left in that literature and conversation where have not yet been served up by resistless consent, words to be freely used in books, rooms, at table, any where, to specifically mean the act male and female” (Primer 20).

Likely there are other words wanted.—Of words wanted, the matter is summed up in this: When the time comes for them to represent any thing or any state of things, the words will surely follow. The lack of any words, I say again, is as historical as the existence of words. As for me, I feel a hundred realities, clearly determined in me, that words are not yet formed to represent. Men like me—also women, our counterparts, perfectly equal—will gradually get to be more and more numerous—perhaps swiftly, in shoals; then the words will also follow, in shoals.—It is the glory and superb rose-hue of the English language, any where, that it favors growth as the skin does—that it can soon become, wherever that is needed, the tough skin of a superior man or woman. (Primer 21)

Toughened by words, whose therapeutic force he freely acknowledges, Whitman traced the origin of sexual feelings back to childhood; linking sexual frankness and moral courage, he sought to attribute his book's self-declared healthy-mindedness to his physical and spiritual intimacy with his mother, with mothers in general, with children, and with everything humble, inarticulate, and unformed. “The little one sleeps in its cradle,” he wrote perfectly unobtrusively, “I lift the gauze

(LG 1855, p. 30)

As Whitman tracked the career of a blade of grass from the hands of a child into the realm of pure symbol, he thought of the grass as itself a child, “the produced babe of the vegetation,” and as “the flag of [his] disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.” Yet this “uniform hieroglyphic” also resembled “the beautiful uncut hair of graves” (LG 1855, p. 29). As hope and despair interpenetrate in the lines quoted above, even the little one sleeping in its cradle needs a fuller defense against social aggression than the poet alone can provide. Lifting the gauze to take a closer look and becoming the child's protector—or, in the words of his early story, the child's “champion”—the poet is nevertheless responsible for introducing the danger he makes it his mission to deflect. Paradoxically, those silent brushes with social aggression and death (as exemplified by the flies) speak to us of feelings we can only guess at. For example, would Whitman like to be the sleeping babe? Is that why he lifts the gauze? Does he secretly resent the little one's access to the mother, or his lack of a consciousness of danger, especially those dangers associated with the adult eye and hand?46 What happens to the sleeping babe once the silenced speaker departs? In Whitman's imagination, is the emerging child permitted to have a life independent of him? These emotional issues are similarly vexed in the longer passage quoted above. As the speaker directs our attention to his tenderness, he hints at darker feelings attached to those whom he cannot both know and protect. The “offspring taken [too] soon out of their mothers' laps” are like the young men whom he has inexplicably lost. Will others follow?

Despite the urgency of his “language experiment” (DBN 3:729 n), which tries to brush away death—to disperse its emotional power—without perpetuating Christian conventions of a God-centered afterlife, in the passage quoted above the poet emphasizes that he has no effective guides in his struggle. The fathers and mothers are victims, too, and their surreal language has no meaning. Enormously enlarged details aside, all that resonates is a shared, domesticated helplessness. Under these circumstances, small wonder that many of Whitman's critics were unwilling to credit either the intelligence or the morality of his project. Whitman's struggle against death was dependent on a secular life force he associated with “Echoes, ripples, and buzzed whispers. … loveroot, silkthread, crotch and vine” (LG 1855, p. 25). His critics, believing in their own superior solidity and soundness, needed, as Whitman too sometimes did, more literally to “get what the writing means” (LG 1855, p. 43).

“His language is too frequently reckless and indecent,” noted the first official reviewer, Charles A. Dana, in the New York Daily Tribune, “though this appears to arise from a naive unconsciousness rather than from an impure mind. His words might have passed between Adam and Eve in Paradise, before the want of fig-leaves brought no shame; but they are quite out of place amid the decorum of modern society, and will justly prevent his volume from free circulation in scrupulous circles.” Dana granted that there was “much of the essential spirit of poetry beneath an uncouth and grotesque embodiment” (CH 23). “Politeness this man has none, and regulation he has none. A rude child of the people!” protested an anonymous reviewer in 1855 (CH 46). (The reviewer turned out to be Whitman himself.) “For the purpose of showing that he is above every conventionalism,” Edward Everett Hale explained in the North American Review, “Mr. Whitman puts into the book one or two lines which he would not address to a woman nor to a company of men” (CH 51). Writing to James Russell Lowell in an 1855 letter, Charles Eliot Norton observed decisively, “There are some passages of most vigorous and vivid writing, some superbly graphic descriptions, great

Unlike Thoreau, most early readers had no doubt whose experience they were being reminded of. An anonymous reviewer (Whitman again) announced that “To give judgment on real poems, one needs an account of the poet himself”:

Very devilish to some, and very divine to some, will appear the poet of these new poems, the Leaves of Grass, an attempt, as they are, of a naive, masculine, affectionate, contemplative, sensual, imperious person, to cast into literature not only his own grit and arrogance, but his own flesh and form, undraped, regardless of models, regardless of modesty or law, and ignorant or silently scornful, as at first appears, of all except his own presence and experience, and all outside the fiercely loved land of his birth and the birth of his parents, and their parents for several generations before him. (CH 45–46)

It was characteristic of Whitman to introduce his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents into an anonymous self-review to authorize his offenses against “politeness and good breeding.”48 “A Bachelor, he professes great respect for women,” Bronson Alcott noted with some wonderment after meeting Whitman in the fall of 1856. “Of Scotch descent by his father; by his mother, German. Age 38, and Long Island born” (CH 65). Alcott got some of his facts wrong: the Scotch, the German,

He had told me on my former visit of his being a house-builder, but I learned from his mother that his brother was the house-builder, and not Walt, who, she said, had no business but going out and coming in to eat, drink, write, and sleep. And she told me how all the common folks loved him. He had his faults, she knew, and was not a perfect man, but meant us to understand that she thought him an extraordinary son of a fond mother. (CH 65–66)

This account eerily juxtaposes the “naive” domestic values represented by Louisa Whitman with the aggressive “masculine” values represented by Whitman's lusty Greek prints. Taking us into forbidden territory, Alcott depicts a talkative mother who turns aside her son's most provocative statements, who nevertheless hints that she knows more than she lets on, and who, if Alcott's language is to be believed, is a secret snob. Airily excusing Walt's faults, whatever they may be, Louisa insists on her own zone of privacy, while correcting his misrepresentations of his contributions to the family. So what were Walt's faults? His failure to make the kind of money the family needed to escape from being “common folks,” as he pursued the poorly paid business of poetry rather than the potentially lucrative business of house-building? Or his failure to share the rich inner life that informed those poems with her? For Louisa, with her intuitive worldliness, surely knew that a poet's life consisted of more than eating, drinking, writing, and sleeping. Yet if she had any thoughts of her own about the provocative prints on the rude walls of the male dormitory with the unmade bed, Walt's mother certainly never hinted to Alcott or to anyone else that she had any interest in the sexual thematics of her son's life or work. Later, though, in a letter written from Burlington, Vermont, where she was visiting her daughter Hannah and still following her own inner light (a house in the country), Louisa raised the unlikely but to her threatening idea that Whitman might marry.49 This letter illuminates Whitman's interactions not only with his mother but with other members of his personal audience, the audience of unidentified family members, friends, and lovers transfigured and rewritten into the imaginary planes of the poems we have been examining. In particular, this letter brings Whitman's sister Hannah, with whom he was closely identified, back into the family picture from which she is usually erased. As he explained in “A Backward Glance O'er

THE TWENTY-NINTH BATHER

As Whitman struggled to place his faith in sex as a source of pleasure rather than pain, and to free himself from the role of erotic victim, the example of his sister Hannah's tormented marriage was much in his mind. Hannah Whitman Heyde, the younger sister to whom Whitman was deeply devoted, was married in March 1852 when she was twenty-eight years old. Born on November 28, 1823, she is a possible model for the reclusive, fantasy-ridden “twenty-ninth bather” in “Song of Myself” we visited earlier in this chapter. For no apparent reason, Whitman surrounds this figure with iterations of the number twenty-eight, which he described as the age at which he began to write Leaves of Grass, and critics have exercised their ingenuity in explaining its allegorical significance. Many of these explanations link the number twenty-eight to the female menstrual cycle or to the lunar calendar. I would like to propose that the number twenty-eight was further determined because of its association with Hannah's birth date and age at the time of her marriage, and to see where this speculation takes us. I intend to suggest that Whitman's empathic identification with Hannah as an erotic victim influenced his understanding of the democratic poet's social mission, and that the healing touch he attributed to his “unseen hand” in Section 11 of “Song of Myself” was partly inspired by his desire to free his sister from the false body of her married life.

Shortly before he resigned from the Brooklyn Daily Times in late June 1859, and at the very moment when (it appears) he was returning to intensive work on the Calamus sequence, Whitman published an editorial on the theme of sexual repression, which examined the frustrations of single women. Attributing to them “a shameful sense of ignorance—a vague, eager desire for knowledge,” he suggested that “It is hard to fast when so many are feasting,” and he inquired whether we can really expect unmarried women “to drown forever the reproaches of Nature, that will make herself heard.” “If not,” he continued, “surely the most phlegmatically proper of her sex does sometimes feel sad and

In asking “Can All Marry?” Whitman asserted that unmarried men have a “thousand and one safety-valves to superfluous [erotic] excitement,” such as “the counteracting resources of bodily and mental exertion,” but in Section 11 of “Song of Myself” these masculine resources seem far from sufficient. In fact the emotional power of the story depends on our awareness of the narrator's dilemma, which links him to his richly dressed heroine and triangulates the scene. Like her, Whitman as narrator wears a mask, the mask of the detached observer who seems to accept heterosexual norms for young, friendly, and unthinking men. In his “lonesome” lyric, Whitman's designated audience expands to include a woman who is structurally unable to hear him when he addresses her. As a literary character, she is unable to respond to the poet who “see[s]” her, and in seeing her, tries to imagine a way to make her desire visible to others.

(LG 1855, p. 34)

Splashing in her room while bathing as Hannah Whitman might have done and as Whitman might have seen her do, the twenty-ninth bather becomes the poet who becomes her in the line, “An unseen hand also passed over their bodies.” This hand (writing) reconfigures erotic identities that are both culturally and personally specific. Identities fuse as they disintegrate, turning on a word, “hand,” which includes the first syllable of her first name, Hannah, and which forms an off rhyme with her last, Heyde. So far no one has considered Hannah (Heyde) as a possible source for this (hiding) vignette, perhaps because Hannah owned no fine house at the time of her marriage, did not live on a river, was not known to engage in group sex, did not literally share a hand with Whitman, and so forth. More generally, biographical critics have not found Hannah a compelling figure and have been content to write her off as neurotic and hysterical.

As Whitman tried to rewrite traditions of the body that separated men from men, women from women, and women and men from each other, Hannah's actual experience provided a formidable challenge. For by the time the 1855 Leaves of Grass was published, she was beginning to settle into a life of mutual torment with her husband Charles, a French-born landscape artist to whom she had been introduced by Walt, her adored older brother. At one time Walt thought well enough of Charlie Heyde to bring William Cullen Bryant to his Brooklyn studio, but eventually he came to see Heyde as “a serpent,” “a viper,” “a damned lazy scoundrel,” a “constant spear in his side,” a “skunk,” a “bug,” a “leech,” and “the bed-buggiest man on the earth” (WWWC 3:500, 2:493, 7:369, 7:23, 3:498). Little is known about Hannah's life before this disastrous marriage, except that she liked flowers, had an interest in fashion, was probably good-looking, and was more of a reader than the other Whitmans except for Jeff. We also know that while he was in New Orleans, Whitman trusted her with money (Corr 1:33, 36). Hannah was eager for an education, but her subsequent claim to have attended a “select school in Brooklyn” and a girls' boarding school in Hempstead, Long Island, was probably a reverie rather than a reality.51 Like her mother, she was very conscious of what might have been, and she remembered all those rich acres the ancestral Whitmans had, over the years, lost.52 Ironically, Hannah, who survived her husband and who

As early as 1844, Whitman seems to have been predicting trouble for Hannah. In the sketch “My Boys and Girls,” which he published in the aptly titled Rover, the narrator mentions an untrustworthy “child of light and loveliness” who makes him uneasy because he finds her blooming before her time and sexually provocative. This fantasy child is described as “a very beautiful girl, in her fourteenth year.” “Flattery,” we are told, “comes too often to her ears.” Working within the sentimental convention that associates sexual experience, childhood, and death, Whitman notes, “From the depths of her soul I now and then see misty revealings of thought and wish, that are not well. I see them through her eyes and in the expression of her face.” Here he prefigures his later knowledge of sexual fantasy in the 1855 Leaves of Grass, in which he comments on his ability to see through other people's masks and disguises, whether they want him to or not. But in this early sketch, the narrator is afraid to merge his point of view with Hannah's or to express his sexuality through hers. He remarks paternally and fraternally,

It is a dreary thought to imagine what may happen, in the future years, to a handsome, merry child—to gaze far down the vista, and see the dim phantoms of Evil standing about with nets and temptations—to witness, in the perspective, purity gone, and the freshness of youthful innocence rubbed off, like the wasted bloom of flowers. Who, at twenty-five or thirty years of age, is without many memories of wrongs done, and mean or wicked deeds performed? (EPF 248)

There is some question as to when this sketch was written, but Hannah's subsequent fate, coupled with her tales of a romantic elopement at sixteen, as well as her other self-representations and misrepresentations, would seem to justify Whitman's concern. Interviewed by Horace Traubel

In fact Hannah prided herself on having participated in the artistic circles frequented by both Walt and her future husband, who had already met William Cullen Bryant even before Walt brought Bryant to Heyde's studio. Eventually Heyde became an artist of some modest distinction, and according to Katherine Molinoff had written “a small volume of very bad verse” by the time Whitman brought him home to meet Hannah.57 But Heyde's personality deteriorated during his marriage, a deterioration abetted not only by his problems with Hannah but also by his problems with alcohol and his career. The change in Heyde's personality can be seen in his correspondence with Whitman. For example, just after Whitman had been in Boston in 1860 seeing the third edition of Leaves of Grass through the press, Heyde wrote to him pompously but encouragingly,

As his own troubles intensified, Heyde began to bombard the Whitmans with abusive letters. He was also excruciatingly jealous of Walt's growing reputation, and by 1866 “that fool Heyde,” as Walt told his mother, had written a “long letter to [Henry Jarvis] Raymond, editor of the N. Y. Times,” identifying himself as Whitman's brother-in-law and disparaging Leaves of Grass. “In it he said ‘Walt was a good fellow enough-but’—& then he went on to run down Leaves of Grass, like the rest of 'em. … Raymond seemed to think the man was either crazy or a fool, & he treated the letter with contempt. … The puppy thought I suppose that he could get his letter printed, & injure me & my book” (Corr 1:303). (Heyde had apparently been provoked by William Douglas O'Connor's spirited public defenses of Whitman [Clews 224].) Months before writing to the Times, however, he had intemperately written to Whitman, complaining bitterly about his wife,

Hannah never learned to cook and she was an erratic housekeeper at best, but Heyde's self-pitying invective left the Whitmans in no doubt about his character. “Walter i have had a letter from heyde the most awful one yet,” Louisa reported in March 1868. Then, three weeks later, “Walter. … i had a letter or package from charley … three sheets of foolscap and a fool wrote on them.” That little conceited fool, she called him. The same old Charley.

Though partly silenced, Hannah left enough of a written record to suggest that she had a lively mind, a sympathetic heart, and a fatal fascination with self-recrimination. Abject and depressed, she unburdened herself to the Whitmans through the mail, and during the recurrent crises which surrounded her, she longed to leave her controlling, irritable,

As a childless, unhappily married woman with, in her own view, “no talents [and] very little education,” Hannah depended on her family for emotional support.59 Visits were few and far between, but her brother's career was crucial to her self-esteem.60 Just as Whitman's narrative of personal and national identity was informed by an audience that included her, so Walt as the author of Leaves of Grass wanted Hannah Whitman Heyde to believe in the coming day of the “organic equality” of the sexes, without which, as he noted in his open letter to Emerson, “men cannot have organic equality among themselves” (LG, p. 739).61 In the 1855 “Song for Occupations,” the poet characteristically insists that “The wife—and she is not one jot less than the husband” (LG 1855, p. 89). Heyde thought differently and told Hannah as much, though not so much at the level of abstraction as at the level of personal attack. Hannah vividly described their quarrels in her letters home, and despite her self-distrust, she tried to believe that a husband and wife were, in her words, “one as good as another.”62 As she struggled to accept the “ups and downs” of a marriage that all too often brought out the worst in both partners, Hannah Whitman Heyde lamented the fact that she had placed her whole dependence on a single volatile individual who seemed unaccountably intent on humiliating her. In the early years of her marriage, she told the story of a romantic escapist who loved a certain person ardently and whose love was not returned. The 1855 and 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass do not linger long over the plight of a vulnerable individual, ill at ease with the “uppertendom,” who suffers from jealous despair.63 Appropriately reconfigured, that story would unfold in the next book as Whitman's own.

While the twenty-ninth bather in “Song of Myself” emerges out of Whitman's imagination, as do the twenty-eight young men who are to some extent based on his brothers, I have tried to show that the poet identified with his sister Hannah, that he did see her, as he claimed to

As an artist in words, Whitman tried to give his readers something other than a sentimental token of home to which they could “seize fast.” In his 1856 open letter to Emerson, he suggested, as we have seen, that “the courageous soul, for a year or two to come, may be proved by faith in sex, and by disdaining concessions.” The conditional tense of this statement is interesting, for a year or two to come is not so very long, and the idea that as a faith healer he could move easily between the body politic and the body personal was going to be difficult to sustain. Whitman concluded his blustery apologia with an allusion to “passionate friendliness,” and with obsequious flattery of his “dear Master.” In the 1855 and 1856 Leaves of Grass, Whitman had not decided on the meaning of sex in his own life, but his faith in himself as an experimental poet with an ambitious social mission had been firmly established. And so he signed off boldly, as “walt whitman,” and as one still curious about why “manly friendship, everywhere observed in The States,” remained so “unseen” in language (LG, p. 739).

ENFANS D'ADAM

Of course, the Enfans d'Adam sequence has no exclusive purchase on apparent illogicality, for the volume as a whole has little in common with the hierarchically organized “cathedral” structure recommended by Tyndale as a model. But considered as an inquiry into the relationship between desire and social forms, the Enfans d'Adam sequence is unusually subject to multiple interruptions, or silencings, even for Whitman. For example, in the second poem of the sequence, the speaker moves from “singing the phallus, / Singing the song of procreation, / Singing the need of superb children, and therein superb grown people” to “Singing what, to the Soul, entirely redeemed her, the faithful one, the prostitute, who detained me when I went to the city, / Singing the song of prostitutes.” The first poem had concluded with a seemingly lovely image of democratic sexual politics: “By my side, or back of me, Eve following, / Or in front, and I following her just the same.”12 In the mental and physical space between poems one and two, Eve disappears, as do all women, along with the image of Whitman as a follower. After a brief excursion into phallic preening, praise of procreation, veiled homoerotic tenderness, and veiled autoerotic shame, the speaker's diffuse “muscular urges” are now located within a desiring but degendered body. From this mythic location Whitman produces the “true song of the Soul, fitful, at random” (LG 1860, p. 288).

This dehistoricized, disembodied speaker searches for some essential

Whatever his conscious ideological intent, Whitman recounts a turning away from rather than toward emotional and sexual intimacy, even as he seeks ontological clues that will focus homoerotic longings he is not yet willing to claim as his own. Appropriating biblical myth, and comparing himself both to Adam and Adam's descendants, he calls for “Potent mates, daughters, sons” (LG 1860, p. 287) without quite calling for potent wives. Because women cannot really be trusted, he addresses himself to “the perfect girl who understands me—the girl of The States” (LG 1860, p. 290). Yet throughout the Enfans d'Adam sequence, which emerged out of a dense and densely sexist historical context, Woman functions mainly as an inferior power position; the title itself diminishes Eve's importance. Whitman had first introduced Adam and Eve, those traditional exemplars of patriarchal marriage, in the last (and worst) poem of the 1855 Leaves, now called “Great Are the Myths,” which he dropped from the much revised and expanded volume in 1881. “Great are Adam and Eve. … I too look back and accept them” (LG 1855, p. 142), he wrote, without being able to do so. Several pages later, after praising the cultural supremacy of English speech (“the mother of the brood that must rule the earth with the new rule”), he introduced a list comprised of such lawful pleasures as “commerce, newspapers, books, freetrade, railroads, steamers, international mails and telegraphs and exchanges,” including “marriage” as one of “the old few landmarks of the law,” an antipassional positioning if ever there was one (LG 1855, p. 144). Evidently Whitman's list of social institutions that are not to be “disturbed,” however disturbing they may be, begs the following question. How can commerce, newspapers, marriage, and other competing

(LG 1855, p. 145)

With this 1855 poem, Whitman dismantles marriage, reducing it to a mere legality. Yet he proves himself an unreliable revolutionary. First, he insists that throughout human history the same ideals have governed interpersonal relationships, and he seemingly approves of these traditional norms of social organization. But second, he suggests that to question a single part of this habitually organized project is to precipitate the collapse of the whole. He himself is unwilling to risk this total reconfiguration of the moral imagination, yet as a “perfect judge” he hopes that we won't believe him when he declares that he has “absolute faith.” He both wants and does not want to perpetuate his “odd” self-revisions, which reflect competing loyalties. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, Whitman encourages a resisting reading. His declarations of faith are assaultive, and the poem appears not to have an immediate occasion. Perhaps Whitman was reading something (a letter?) or had just heard something that sent him over the edge. Representing himself as a naive believer in all the myths that have governed human history, including the immortality of the soul, the poet circumvents such conventional genres as the love lyric, the political or social satire, and the religious or philosophical meditation, to inscribe something significantly more abstract: an appeal to death itself as the joiner, destined to hold all the social parts together, even when—especially when—the poet himself cannot imagine their integration. If the speaker cannot or will not distinguish between just and unjust laws, and between “marriage, commerce, newspapers, books, freetrade, railroads, steamers, international mails and telegraphs and exchanges,” how much more cynical about the structures that govern intimate human relations can we expect him to become? And so the 1855 Leaves of Grass ends with the words, “Death is as great as life.”13

Five or so years later, dreaming of himself as a supremely potent lover of his medium, language, which even in his despair he had called “the

(LG 1860, p. 289)

This particular interruption hearkens back to his interaction with the faithful prostitute, and it appears that the speaker feels enslaved by his dalliance with the female form. The slave's body is unmarked by gender, but I have always assumed that Whitman had a male slave body in mind, since the function of the figure is to divert us from his imaginary fusion with the feminine. Other readings are of course possible, and the self-abandonment motif may go in a number of different directions, especially in the direction of the love-slave.15 But to my ear there is nothing erotic about this passage, although Whitman, in dissolving the slave's body into its component parts, may also be trying to redeem it for his “divine list,” his democratic catalogue of unfallen children of God.

After seeking to extricate himself from a racial and sexual trap, which in its attempt to collapse binaries also reinscribes them, Whitman turns to the reader for help, and then returns to his attempt to write persuasively about the love of real men for real women by swearing fidelity to

The most moving (in the sense of emotionally compelling) poem in the sequence famously exists in two radically different versions. Its emotional appeal is partly dependent on this liberating doubleness.16 As published in 1860, “Once I passed through a populous city” presents the speaker as a man with a memory he cannot or will not shake off. For whatever reason, he has separated from “that woman who passionately clung to me,” who held him “by the hand,” mutely imploring him not to go, “with silent lips, sad and tremulous” (LG 1860, p. 311). Though his destiny takes him elsewhere, stereotypically all he remembers is her. A romantic ballad of hopeless love, the poem links idealized love and guilt, as Whitman identifies with the woman whom he has abandoned and who still faithfully keeps his shrine. In its manuscript form, however, Whitman's woman is a man and the poem reads as follows.

(UPP 2:102)17

There are minor differences between the version Whitman published in 1860 and the manuscript version first published by Emory Holloway in 1920: for example Whitman's male lover has a silent lip, whereas his female lover has silent lips, a difference that now signifies in relation to Luce Irigaray's classic essay, “Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un” [“This Sex Which Is Not One”].18 There are also minor differences between both versions and the text Whitman eventually settled on as definitive in 1881. But the tonal difference is most marked in two directions. Whitman

Although we have already seen Whitman romanticizing both rudeness and ignorance, as Wordsworth (among others) had taught him to do, here this aggressive judgment unsettles the poem. In condescending to his beloved, the speaker flirtatiously exploits him. So this description is uncomfortable on two counts. It indicates Whitman's lack of erotic self-confidence—we hear him wondering: Would a youth full of manners and learning want him?—and it belittles the beloved's intelligence, while seemingly praising his style. Rudeness was one of Whitman's major erotic tropes, and it functions brilliantly in such poems as “I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing,” from the Calamus sequence, where the idealized tree's look, “rude, unbending, lusty,” makes the speaker think of himself (LG 1860, p. 364), or at least of his hopes for himself, if he could only learn to relax and enjoy life without subjecting it to too much analysis. Along related lines, in “I Sing the Body Electric,” the third poem in the Enfans d'Adam sequence, Whitman had taunted the reader, “Do you know so much yourself, that you call the slave or the dull-face ignorant?” (LG 1860, p. 297), a question marking the difference between book-learning and heart-learning, identifying racial and ethnic prejudice with the wrong kind of egotism, and pointing sentimentally toward a democracy of feeling which might rescue the body politic from its various diseases. While ignorance was not always attractive to Whitman, the homoerotic fantasy of a rudely unconventional and lawless friend, censored in the published version of “Once I passed through a populous city,” powerfully reemerges in the preceding poem, Enfans d'Adam number 8, in which Whitman writes,

(LG 1860, pp. 310–11)

Perhaps the (male) prostitute, the low person, and the dearest friend are one and the same. Perhaps the speaker's encounter with the (female) prostitute prepares him for other sexual adventures. But whether or not the prostitute is a man, the male lover clearly is. And in this poem, Whitman's beloved friend is outside the law because, it seems, he has nothing to lose and doesn't know any better, unlike the speaker whose self-esteem and reputation are at stake. Whitman says that he will play a part no longer, but lawlessness, rudeness, and illiteracy don't come easily to him. As an intellectual, he hopes to learn how to consort with nature's darlings, dance with the dancers, drink with the drinkers, and so forth. Here is the journalistic Whitman looking for new material, broadening his horizons. But the journalist-poet who is in the wrong (now right) part of town is unwilling to give up his morally privileged point of view. He knows what's indecent and what isn't; though he would like to have the power to redefine obscenity, he would be a fool to believe that such power actually inheres in him—a fool, a madman, or an ego-obsessed poet. Versions of this story and these feelings remain in the manuscript draft of “Once I passed through a populous city,” in which Whitman similarly counts on a lower-class other to initiate him into a world of loose delights. Though he chose not to publish the male-gendered version of his narrative of “passing,” a new psychological and literary style about which he was deeply ambivalent had been forced upon him. In the Calamus sequence, as Robert K. Martin observes, Whitman continued to “search for a form for the expression of love between men.”20 The elegiac tone persists, for in Whitman's experience male-male love both banished melancholy and induced it. Looking to the future, however, the poet hoped that his partial confessions would spare others the pain and reinforce the pleasure that had inspired his art. And so he forged on, for American purposes and for his own, redefining his relation to liter-ary tradition, to his audience, and to a conflicted self.

CALAMUS

There have been suggestions that “I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing” was drawn directly from Whitman's experience in New Orleans, and it seems likely that this poem was based in part on the love affair Whitman had in that Southern city with a vulnerable youth whom he seduced and abandoned. This youth reminds him of himself. The poem's landscape is pastoral and dreamlike; the isolation of the setting mimics the frightening, unbounded solitude Whitman tends to associate with urban rather than with rural life. The tree signifies primarily as a solitary singer, and Whitman feels some understandable resentment about his tree-rival's capacity for self-reliant utterance out of a seeming void. Despite the poet's identification with his symbol, this tree can't really be humanized, for to be human is not merely to take up space, to talk, and to feel happy, but to need a society of like-minded friends. Resenting and coveting the tree's self-sufficiency, Whitman maims and appropriates what he can, and, carrying it back to his room, drapes the now-broken twig with moss. As a curious token of manly love, Whitman's incomplete art work reminds him of his absent “friends,” while underscoring the rivalry that troubles male-male affection.21

In this brilliantly lit yet shadowy poem about what it means to be human, to be a poet, and to be a public figure, Whitman distinguishes himself from his leafy precursor through his need for intelligent affection. For this is a poem in which Whitman, with his self-divisions, despairs of ever finding the beloved, intuitive, and knowledgeable life companion for whom his heart aches. Rudeness and lustiness are not all. Moreover, to the extent that Whitman romanticizes the tree's freedom from the conventional rivalries of male gendering, he introduces a covertly racialized other, tropically dark and glistening, whose power he wishes to appropriate.22 Whitman's fashionable melancholy functions to conceal his imperial designs. Although he “naturally” suffers from the sentimental heartsoreness that seems neverending, he returns to his room with his spoils. Taming the public rival, Whitman replicates the symbolic logic of the humiliation-driven male economy from which he seeks to escape and against which he needs his dream-friends to defend him.

As we might expect, the rivalry that emerges as a key component of male bonding for the Whitmanian subject remains an obstacle to love in other poems of the Calamus sequence. Sentimental revery provides a buffer against such rivalry but ultimately proves insufficient. Throughout

In Enfans d'Adam, for example, the poet had proposed “sex”—actual and figurative—as a solution to the problem of defining a significant, culturally mature literary vocation in America. Sex functions more obliquely in Calamus, but as I suggested a moment ago, there is plenty of revery designed to reconfigure the anxiety-producing, competitive, or even punitive structures of desire that impede or preclude male intimacy. For example, in Calamus 19, which immediately precedes “Live-Oak,” the speaker redefines bravery to include heart-courage, and begins by asking the implied listener or reader, “Mind you the timid models of the rest, the majority? / Long I minded them, but hence I will not—for I have adopted models for myself, and now offer them to The Lands.” As America's new male model, Whitman emphasizes his unglamorous white working-class affiliations when he directs our attention to his “swarthy and unrefined face,” unkempt beard, “brown hands, and … silent manner … without charm.” However unprepossessing these attributes—I take it that his tired “gray eyes” are not particularly alluring—this speaker poses no threat to the superior class status of the fantasized listener.24 His beard is unclipped on his neck, but woolly and benign. Far from exemplifying the lawless energies described and mocked in “We Two Boys” (Calamus 26), this less commanding speaker is intent on pleasing and being pleased. “Yet comes one, a Manhattanese,” he writes, “and ever at parting, kisses me lightly on the lips with robust love, / And I, in the public room, or on the crossing of the street, or on the ship's deck, kiss him in return; / We observe that salute of American comrades, land and sea, / We are those two natural and nonchalant persons” (LG 1860, p. 364).

Whitman's erotic reveries are not confined to the United States alone.

Similarly, in “Long I thought that knowledge alone would suffice me” (Calamus 8, which Whitman never reprinted), the speaker overflows national boundaries (“Take notice, you Kanuck woods”), but the effect is very different. Renouncing his mission as America's imperialist bard to romp with the “One who loves me [and] is jealous of me, and withdraws me from all but love” (LG 1860, p. 354), he explores a more privatized, dependent, and feminized mode. In this subsequently suppressed poem, the speaker begins by recounting the history of his career, which he distorts in order to emphasize the drama of his self-transformation. The claim is that he had previously been uninterested in erotic relationships and motivated solely by a patriotic creed. (That the democratic poet had been frustrated by an unresponsive national and international audience remains implied rather than directly stated, like so much else in this superbly elliptical and tonally ambiguous self-portrait.) As he searches impatiently for a new kind of knowledge, the emerging homoerotic poet is frankly flattered by his lover's jealous need to withdraw him from, as he puts it, “all but love.” Lover X is “jealous of” Whitman in several senses. Most obviously, he wants Whitman for himself and demands all of his sexual energy, attention, and affection. Less obviously, as a representative of the homoerotic private sphere, he feminizes Whitman, and this influx of femininity at first proves authenticating for the speaker, who is now out from behind a mask.25

That Whitman could not drop this mask for any length of time is part of a larger and by now well-known story. The British man of letters John

Perhaps late in 1871, Symonds initiated the correspondence by sending Whitman a copy of his Love and Death, inscribed on the title page, “To the Prophet Poet / Of Democracy Religion Love / This Verse / A Feeble Echo of His Song / Is Dedicated” (Corr 2:158). A cover letter noted that the poem “is of course implicit already in your Calamus, especially in ‘Scented herbage of my breast.’” Whitman responded warmly in late January 1872, calling the poem “beautiful & elevated,” saying he had “read & reread” it, that he considered it “of the loftiest, strongest & tenderest,” and that “I should like to know you better.” The letter concluded, “Pray dont think hard of me for not writing more promptly. I have thought of you more than once, & am deeply touched with your poem.” Despite this auspicious beginning, the correspondence culminated, as I have suggested, in one of the sorriest episodes in Whitman's life. In August 1890, Symonds wrote,

In your conception of Comradeship, do you contemplate the possible intrusion of those semi-sexual emotions & actions which no doubt do occur between men? I do not ask, whether you approve of them, or regard them as a necessary part of the relation? But I should much like to know whether you are prepared to leave them to the inclinations & the conscience of the individuals concerned?

A mild enough question, but Whitman responded emphatically,

Ab't the questions on Calamus pieces &c: they quite daze me. … that the calamus part has even allow'd the possibility of such construction as mention'd is terrible—I am fain to hope the pages themselves are not to be even mention'd for such gratuitous and quite at the same time entirely undream'd & unreck'd possibility of morbid inferences—wh’ are disavow'd by me & seem damnable. (Corr 5:72–73)

Though a number of critics have amplified Whitman's response to suggest that he had his reasons (as undoubtedly he did), the fact remains that Whitman's fears got the better of him. In his letter of August 3, Symonds specifically asked Whitman to endorse the decriminalization of consenting homosexuality between adults in England and the United States, which he refused to do.

That Whitman could not publicly abandon his heterosexual persona for any length of time is very much part of the history of “Long I Thought” (Calamus 8), which in setting forth the antagonism of public and private spheres seems to choose the latter as having definitely the better claim. Yet the speaker who turns from the politics of poetry to the politics of male-male marriage will find that more intimate politics equally demanding. As Symonds noted in his 1890 essay “Democratic Art,” “No individual man can be wholly original,” and the bard who celebrates male homoeroticism as the bonding emotion of nations cannot wholly exclude women from his project.28 Nor does he unambiguously want to. In representing the intimate and physical love of male comrades and lovers, Whitman eases the tension between public performance and private perversity by a legitimating refeminization of male-male love. This tension is further eased by tropes of marital fidelity, comradeship, and brotherhood which mystify the politicized gender anxieties aroused by homoerotic relationships and which further defend Whitman against the unresponsive audience he leaves behind.29 We may be forgiven for suspecting that the quasi-marriage into which Whitman enters in “Long I Thought” will quickly reproduce the undemocratic gendered anxieties of the public sphere. But this is knowledge from which the poem seeks to defend us.

Surely the speaker's world elsewhere cannot last long. Nor do we steadfastly want it to. The community he forms with his lover is founded on jealousy; we are right to suspect that jealousy will undo it.30 For the moment, however, the poet who had turned to literature for his knowledge of male heroism—“the examples of old and new heroes … of warriors, sailors, and all dauntless persons” and who was further inspired by the idea that “it seemed to me that I too had it in me to be as dauntless as any—and would be so”—happily finds himself put to the test of a real attachment (LG 1860, p. 354). There is a sense, then, in which his lover's jealousy is reassuring, as it was to Symonds, who described the poem as a trumpet call and was puzzled to discover in 1867 and subsequently that the poem which first “thrilled” him had disappeared from

Whitman never answered, but critics have often suggested that because the Calamus poems seek to lend public significance to homoerotic and homosexual attachments, Whitman excluded from Leaves of Grass the “all but love” poem we have been considering, along with several others that subvert the patriotic mystifications of his homoerotic project.32 These mystifications include a brilliantly heterogeneous vocabulary whose daring confrontations are already pronounced in “Starting from Paumanok,” the “Proto-Leaf” or long new opening poem of the 1860 volume, on which, his notebooks show, he had been working for many years. Phrenology, religion, the Anglo-American male friendship tradition, fancy French imports, garden variety romanticism—the off-shoots of such radically disparate material cultures wind and twist around one another in “Paumanok,” recreating identities, part historical, part fanciful, that might authentically populate those curiously empty lands seized by the white man and poet from his displaced Indian brothers. Whereas the Indian father who sits dumbly smoking with his friends in “Song of Myself” seems narcotized by the illusion of male power, the poet trapped by love but conscious of his own entrapment reclaims the center from his literary rivals. “Not he, adhesive, kissing me so long with his daily kiss,” Whitman writes,

(LG 1860, p. 13)

“After what they have done to me, suggesting such themes.” Here the note of outrage is unmistakable, yet the greedily neologizing 1860 poet continues to hope that “Affection shall solve every one of the problems of freedom,” that “Those who love each other shall be invincible,” and that “They shall finally make America completely victorious, in my name” (LG 1860, p. 349). The fear already announced in this opening poem is that manly affection might rob him of his manhood and that the experience of loving another man might confine him to the margins of American life. Yet just as Whitman looks beyond Manhattan and the already aging cities of the Eastern seaboard to a romanticized “inland America” dreamily inhabited by the “tan-faced prairie-boy” whose youthful docility he fancies, so Whitman looks beyond the historical

(LG 1860, p. 7)

Let us return to the multiple ambivalences of the Calamus sequence. The lyricist who renounces the public sphere is not sure that he can trust the muse who ties him to a more spiritual, politically marginalized, and homoerotic world. Thus whereas “Long I Thought” counterpoints the loss of political agency and the access of erotic power, the next poem takes a closer look at the unofficial marriage into which the speaker has entered, while emboldened by the touching belief that “It is to be enough for us that we are together—We never separate again” (LG 1860, p. 355). “Hours continuing long, sore and heavy-hearted” (Calamus 9, later excluded from Leaves of Grass) explodes this privatized trope of eternal fidelity and suggests that Whitman was right to be wary of the lover who demanded the sacrifice of his ambition. Now it is Whitman's turn to be jealous, sleepless, physically agitated, and all the rest of it. “Pacing miles and miles, stifling plaintive cries,” he finds that his erotic value has diminished in giving up “all for love.” During these “sullen and suffering hours” while he contends with shame, he asks poignantly,

I can testify to the fact that not everyone sees himself or herself reflected in this poem, which evoked a laugh and the response “poor guy” from an unsympathetic seminar I once taught. Yet for the humiliated Whitman, this question—has any other man ever felt the same not only out of like feelings but out of a like occasion—holds the key to others.

During these unnaturally prolonged hours of his torment, he sees no way out of his romantic obsession except, as Elizabeth Bishop later suggested with some irony, to “Write it!”33 Thus the next poem in the sequence (Calamus 10), which is addressed to “You bards of ages hence!” seeks to discriminate more finely between various types of poems and poetic identities.34 But he no longer feels like a leader of his nation's moral imagination, and his prophetic “American” poems seem to bear no relationship to those motivated by erotic possessiveness. Nor does he care to be remembered by them. Unfortunately, the “tenderest lover” is also the sorest and most vulnerable. This erotic victim (unlike the poetic strong man) is filled with “the sick, sick dread lest the one he loved might secretly be indifferent to him” (LG 1860, p. 356). Indifferent to place, his happiest hours are spent in privatized rural settings, “through fields, in woods, on hills, he and another, wandering hand in hand, they twain, apart from other men.” Or sauntering the city streets, with his arm over his friend's shoulder, his friend's arm over his.

In his identity as private lyric poet, Whitman offers to take us down “underneath this impassive exterior,” but since he doesn't really trust succeeding generations to draw their own conclusions about his turbulent inner life, he composes an epitaph for himself. And it is a flattering one, if somewhat dictatorial.

Despite his representation of himself as a blameless victim, the problem of social trust persists. What if the future bard (or “recorder,” in the more neutral language that prevailed) sees something other than tenderness beneath the speaker's impassive exterior? What if in addition to seeing prohibited male-male desire he or she sees an emotional volatility that may not be wholly ascribed to a homophobic culture? Previously Whitman has described himself as arrogant and deceitful. Will the unknown recorder remember these weaknesses and suspect that Whitman's sexual attentions are short-lived? If so, how will he or she respond? Who is the empowered reader/recorder to whom Whitman makes his incomplete confessions?

The third of the problematic poems subsequently excluded from Leaves of Grass raises precisely this question.

(LG 1860, pp. 361–62)

At first glance, the act of loving strangers seems to be a highly forgivable crime of which to accuse himself, if all he does is love them from afar. Yet sudden sexual temptations had interested Whitman at least as early as Franklin Evans, and in the first edition of Leaves of Grass the poet had asked, “If you meet some stranger in the street and love him or her, do I not often meet strangers in the street and love them?” (LG 1855,

We may read “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” as suggesting that a broadly humanist mission precludes particular male-male homoerotic attachments. The poem both affirms and denies the value of individual sexual experience. The masculine poet-persona who places his faith in the masculine or feminine reader of the future is troubled by his own erotic cowardice in the present. He is a “solitary committer,” a masturbator (NUPM 1:231; LG 1856, p. 217). Despite this fault, which was vividly demonized by antebellum medical and moral discourse, the great renunciation of homosexual love Whitman makes in secret is empowering. Because of his self-discipline and his suffering, he is able to imagine himself fusing men, genders, nations, and races together. Within the less heroic compass of “Who is now reading this?” a secret love is a deforming love.

In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” the temptation renounced by the Whitman persona is brilliantly rendered. When he hears the young men who call him clearly and loudly by his nighest name as they see him “approaching or passing,” and when he feels their arms on his neck as he stands, “or the negligent leaning of their flesh” against him as he sits, or sees “many I loved in the street, or ferryboat, or public assembly, yet never [tells] them a word,” he emerges to testify that, whatever his particular fleshly temptations, he “lived the same life with the rest,” and that every social being performs a part, “The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like, / Or as small as we like, or both great and small” (LG 1860, p. 384). Moreover, at this potentially alienated moment, when the poet looks back on “the actor or actress,” he suggests that something escapes from the web of socially constructed or performative identity, that there is a real me capable of resisting its painfully compromised moment. In most poems of the Calamus sequence,

Calamus 40 makes this point by contrasting “That shadow, my likeness, that goes to and fro, seeking a livelihood, chattering, chaffering,” with the writing self never doubting “whether that is really me.” The writing self continues to thrive “among my lovers” at the end of the Calamus project, whereas in “As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life,” both the “real me” and an equally hostile eternal self block Whitman's access to substantiating types of “athletic love” (LG 1860, p. 341). Consequently, his confidence in the coincidence of writing self and erotic self collapses; antagonists multiply, and the real me is “real me.” This excessive typography underscores Whitman's conviction that there will never be any permanent community in which he can recognize himself as a familiar and acceptable (loving) person. He knows nothing and believes that “no man ever can” (LG 1860, p. 197). There are no young men to whom he may speak, no young men on whom he may lean. In the absence of this youthful community of men, Whitman experiences himself as a posthumous writer, his dead lips oozing forth words that may have a certain superficial charm—they glisten and roll—but that lead nowhere. Whereas progress usually depends not only on distance from the past but on movement toward a goal, in “As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life” the speaker is trapped in an unreal crossing. Isolated from the young men who call him “Walt,” he is haunted by the “sobbing dirge of Nature” (LG 1860, p. 199). This female-identified voice of lamentation cannot feed his soul. As Michael Moon has suggested, Whitman's Leaves of Grass project was designed to merge social and erotic experience.36 While this merger is not fully achieved in the Calamus sequence, the events recounted, even when bitter and painful, are rarely described as unreal. Whitman recognizes the self that has been thwarted in love because he remembers the self that has succeeded. Memorably, in Calamus 11,

These memories fortify him for the future. And so the cycle ends:

The project of realizing a self is ongoing, and it is possible. Even death does not thwart it, because the language of real (that is, commonly agreed upon) hope is conceived as more powerful.

Nevertheless, the Calamus poems reinscribe differences the visionary Whitman was determined to deny. As previously noted, Whitman distrusted that “individualism, which isolates,” unless it could be made to speak to “adhesiveness or love, that fuses, ties and aggregates, making the races comrades, and fraternizing all” (DV 949). His theory of democracy rejected the claims of “destructive iconoclasms,” and he insisted in Democratic Vistas, his postwar sexual manifesto, that “democracy alone can bind all nations, all men, of however various and distant lands, into a brotherhood, a family” (DV 948). Whitman's class-binding democracy always depended on his faith in the People, whereas many of the most interesting Calamus poems reflect his distrust of ordinary readers, not just of “the literary classes.” This distrust is especially marked in poems that explore the paradoxical social fate of two together. These autobiographical-sounding poems critique the negative consequences of male-male romantic obsession, as well as the intolerance of a homophobic culture. Such intense relationships reinscribe the isolating individualism Whitman's Leaves of Grass project was intent on revising.

We would therefore do well not to exaggerate the strategic differences among the first three editions of Leaves of Grass. I have been describing Whitman's progress toward speaking the love that dare not speak its name, but in making heterosexuality public in 1855, 1856, and 1860, he was not simply leading us toward the promised land of male-male love. As Richard Rorty contends, Whitman was deeply critical of the negative consequences of sexual repression, but Rorty fails to remark that Whit-man was also intent on telling a life story that was full of contradiction.37 Consequently, Whitman never lets us linger for long in a pure sexual utopia, especially since he sees sexuality as partly constituted by sadism. Even after the physically attractive butcher-boy of “Song of Myself” puts off his killing-clothes, he “sharpens his knife at the stall in the market.” The narrator enjoys his “repartee and his shuffle and breakdown”—the

As I have been suggesting, in the second (1856) edition of Leaves of Grass Whitman tends to emphasize the relationship between sexual love and social cohesion rather than the “destructive iconoclasms” of individual romantic obsession. This is true even of “Song of the Open Road,” a companion piece to “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” and more idiosyncratically expressed. In “Song of the Open Road,” Whitman suddenly explains,

(LG 1856, p. 229)

“Here is the efflux of the soul,” he continues,

As we might expect, the notebook passage is concerned with men alone. (The brackets indicate Whitman's deletions.)

Why [are] be there men I meet, and [many] others I know, that [when] while they are with me, the sunlight of Paradise [warms] expands my blood—that [if] when I walk with an arm of theirs around my neck, my soul [leaps and laughs like a new waked child] scoots and courses like [a caressed] an unleashed dog [caressed]—that when they leave me the pennants of my joy sink flat [from the] and lank in the deadest calm?

After an interval, and noting that he is writing at home while his brother Jeff is practicing the piano, Whitman alludes to “Some fisherman,” “some carpenter,” “some driver,” “men rough, [rough], not handsome, not accomplished.” Then he asks,

Like “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and “Song of the Open Road,” this early notebook entry reworks the problems and promise of malehomoerotic

In part because of the excessively moralistic language, Whitman de-leted “Who is now reading this?” from subsequent editions of his book. Thus one critic contends that “this [poem] is the clearest expression of homosexual guilt ever to appear in Leaves of Grass,” while another sug-gests that Whitman internalized the homophobia of his culture.40 These are good observations, but Whitman talks about loving strangers in other poems (for example Calamus 18, “City of my walks and joys!”), about not understanding himself, and about harboring evil impulses. He had already warned readers away in Calamus 3 (“Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand”), and to the extent that he was defending himself against official persecution such as he encountered in Washing-ton, D.C., in 1865 and in Boston in 1881, Calamus 3 was equally dangerous.41 Similarly, Calamus 12 warns readers in no uncertain terms against idealizing him, and in the rather gruesome Calamus 15, he urges

(LG 1860, p. 374)

M. Jimmie Killingsworth points out that after the war Whitman con-sidered eliminating other poems from the sequence, as evidenced by the markings in his so-called Blue Book.42 We can never know for sure why Whitman decided to eliminate Calamus 16. But in other poems that link sexual repression and social aggression, Whitman is less critical of him-self, and in that sense the split between the public and private Whitmans is less extreme. There are other Calamus poems which describe hopelessness, for example Calamus 28, “When I peruse the conquered fame of heroes,” in which the speaker is filled with the “bitterest envy” when he reads “of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was with them, / How through life, through dangers, odium, unchanging, long and long, / Through youth, and through middle and old age, how unfaltering, how affectionate and faithful they were” (370).43 But here Whitman is a sym-pathetic reader of his own troubles. Finally, the spoiling-for-a-fight tone of Calamus 16 sets it apart from later statements such as Calamus 39, which eventually concluded with the touching parenthesis, “(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return'd / Yet out of that I have written these songs)” (LG, p. 134). The parenthesis makes all the difference. Whitman could not always believe in himself and he could not always trust his audience. Through writing, he nevertheless hoped to create an enduring erotic community which might justify the psycho-logical and perhaps physical risks he was taking. In the 1860 Leaves of Grass, there is always more than one faithful reader, even if there is only one lover. Even in Calamus 16, the speaker continues to imagine that “a

We are now in a better position to understand what Whitman meant by “the problems of freedom” in the 1860 Leaves of Grass, problems he proposed to solve through male-homoerotic love rather than by “lawyers … an agreement on a paper … [o]r by arms” (LG 1860, p. 349). Whitman, I think, was referring to the freedom of one “modern” person to harm another and to the freedom of any “modern” individual to harm himself. His homosocial, homoerotic, and homosexual “democracy” was a psychological and political construct. It neutralized his character-istic suspicion of male-male intimacy and affirmed the social value of non-coercive, sympathetic affection between men. The boundaries between homosocial, homoerotic, and homosexual relations were constantly re-defined by his literary project; he transgressed these historically familiar limits joyfully and at his peril. In his attempt to “plant [sexualized] com-panionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America,” Whitman fan-tasized that he and his comrades would master the world, “under a new power.” He also feared that these new masters would master him. Thus he resisted not only the heterosexual “tie[s]” that “band stronger than hoops of iron,” but the homoerotic ties that band men together as well. We will never know how Whitman would have desired to “impress” others had homophobia not been part of his world. The poet who “saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing” and who ironized style as performance was himself mocked by a “real me” that denigrated his achievements in literature and in love. Despite the power of this depressing specter, which he could not fully overcome, in the 1860 Leaves of Grass Whit-man's democratic “faith in sex” was emphatically extended to include male-homoerotic love. The first two editions of Leaves of Grass had shown the way, and this extraordinary third book revealed a powerfully autobiographical writer who, as he struggled to find happiness for him-self, encouraged others to embrace the “real reality” of their own contradictions (LG 1860, p. 344).

The Civil War and After

Drum Taps has none of the perturbations of Leaves of Grass.

January 6, 1865, to William Douglas O'Connor

(Corr 1:247)

I feel quite well, perhaps not as completely so as I used to … but I think I shall get so this spring—as I did indeed feel yesterday better than I have since I was taken sick last summer.

January 30, 1865, to Thomas Jefferson Whitman

(Corr 1:250)

As you see by the date of this, I am back again in Washington, moving around regularly, but not to excess, among the hospitals. … My health is pretty good, but since I was prostrated last July, I have not had that unconscious and perfect health I formerly had. The physician says my system has been penetrated by the malaria—it is tenacious, peculiar and some-what baffling—but tells it will go over in due time. It is my first appearance in the character of a man not entirely well.

February 6, 1865, to John Townsend Trowbridge

(Corr 1:254)

Could you give me a little further information about my brother Capt. George W. Whitman, 51st New York … Why did not he, & the other officers, 51st N. Y., come up with the main body, for exchange? Were the other officers 51st there at Danville [Prison], time you left? Please tell me all you know, or think probable, on this subject of why they did not come? Have they been sent further south, to avoid ex-changing them, or are they still at Danville? Was my brother really well & hearty?. … Do you know whether my brother got letters & boxes we sent him? Was he in the attempt to escape, Dec. 10, last? My dear sir, if you could take a leisure half hour & write me, soon as possible, what you know on these, or any points relating to my brother, it would deeply oblige me—

February 27, 1865, to Captain William Cook

(Corr 1:255)

---

154

I write a few lines to tell you how I find the folks at home—Both my mother & brother George looked much better than I expected—Mother is quite well, considering—she goes about her household affairs pretty much the same as ever, & is cheerful.

My brother would be in what I would almost call fair condition, if it were not that his legs are affected—it seems to me it is rheumatism, following the fever he had—but I don't know—He goes to bed quite sleepy & falls to sleep—but then soon wakes, & frequently little or no more sleep that night—he most always leaves the bed, & comes downstairs, & passes the night on the sofa. He goes out most every day though—some days has to lay by—He is going to report to Annapolis promptly when his furlough is up—I told him I had no doubt I could get it extended, but he does not wish it—

I am feeling finely—& never enjoyed a visit home more than I am doing this.

March 26, 1865, to William Douglas O'Connor and Nelly O'Connor (Corr 1:256–57)

I am stopping longer than first intended, as I have decided to print the book, and am now under way with it. The grand culminations of past week impress me profoundly of course. I feel more than ever how America has been entirely re-stated by them—and they will shape the destinies of the future of the whole of mankind.

April 7, 1865, to William Douglas O'Connor

(Corr 1:257–58)

After four agonizing years the Civil War was over. Richmond had fallen on April 3, Lee had surrendered to Grant on April 9, and on April 15 Whitman was in New York seeing his small book Drum-Taps through the press. But what Whitman later called “the foulest crime in history known in any land or age” had already stained the presidential box at Ford's Theater (LG, p. 339). So on that stupefying Saturday morning, Whitman and his mother exchanged the papers silently. Neither of them

In Washington the night before, Peter Doyle, who was attracted by celebrities and liked the theater, had gone to see the play, the President, and his wife. For his commemorative Lincoln lectures, which began in 1879, Whitman drew on Doyle's eyewitness account of the shooting, among other sources.2 Oddly enough, however, the poem he completed by mid-September 1865 omits all direct reference to the violent human intervention that ended Lincoln's life.3 The symbolism of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd”—the broken sprig, for example, that the persona offers to Lincoln's coffin at the end of Section 6—alludes obliquely to a premature ending. But a premature ending is not necessar-ily a historical outrage or a political injustice. Thus until the poem's final climax when, as Ed Folsom notes, Whitman “faces the horrifying results of the war,”4 the imagery seems to be working to exclude vulgar local associations, to exclude the trivial in favor of the exalted.

Critics have tended to assume that in “Lilacs” Whitman sought to avert his gaze and that of his readers from the specifically human deed wrought by John Wilkes Booth. As the “wound-dresser” poet, so the story goes, Whitman was seeking to promote a national psychology of peace. And there was no need for him to restate the obvious. His au-dience knew the unnarratable fact: Lincoln had been brutally assassi-nated.5 Without denying the validity of this reading, in what follows I would like to suggest that dominant discussions of “the poet's attempts to resolve for himself and the nation the panic-struck vision of Lincoln's assassination as a black horror” have not yet fully accounted for the subtlety of Whitman's griefwork.6 His cunning omission of the assassin's hand serves to problematize, as do other anti-occasional elements of the poem, the esthetic and erotic complexity of Whitman's bereavement, which includes anger, as we might expect, although the genealogy of this vengeful feeling is perhaps surprising.

With its nostalgia for the unclouded serenity of an earlier political, literary, and spiritual life, “Lilacs” takes its time about its strange revelations.7 As he memorializes a culture's earlier ways of knowing, includ-ing its ways of sexual knowing, Whitman resists the desocialization—in psychoanalytic terms the castration—to which his “comrade lustrous with silver face in the night” (LG, p. 337) has been subjected. Michael Moon explains,

What is perhaps most important to notice about the whole range of modes of relationship represented in Leaves of Grass is that the social and the sex-ual are usually not oppositional categories in them, nor is the social con-ceived of as being essentially nonerotic while the erotic is consigned to the re-stricted orbit of what the culture considers the sexual. It is the effect of the entire project not only to eroticize the social realm but also to socialize the culture's construction of the erotic as the highly anxiogenic realm of the inti-mate, the private, the shameful, the concealed, the destructive.

If, as Moon further argues, “the drama of the speaker's coming to terms (to the degree that he does) with the death of Lincoln and all the losses of the war that Lincoln's death is made to represent is related to the ‘drama’ of the origins of sexuality in the individual subject,” then Whit-man's understanding of mourning, and of the relationship between mourning and art, is necessarily pressured by his understanding of sexu-ality.8 To a greater degree than Moon cares to acknowledge, however, in “Lilacs,” and by extension in the 1867 Leaves of Grass, Whitman so-cializes the realm of grief by depersonalizing the realm of the sexual. Moon stresses “the text's repository of signs drawn from infantile erotic experience”: “holding and being held, holding and releasing … and a traumatic rupture between the phases of each of these processes.”9 I pre-fer to emphasize the speaker's pride in his ability as an artist to subju-gate his adult trouble and, by extension, to discipline his body. Grief, he informs us, returns each spring following the arrival of certain hopeful natural signs; grief renews itself, but tears do not flow unremittingly. This paradoxical opening is ripe for plunder, and reading the poem now we cannot help but hear the Eliotic echo: April is indeed the cruelest month. Galway Kinnell, however, hears another part of the story when he observes that in “Lilacs” “the grief is too thoroughly consoled before the first line is uttered.”10 Along somewhat similar lines, Christopher Beach contends that the poem “belie[s] Whitman's radical persona: that of a cultural iconoclast seeking to dismantle or overturn the dominant forms and values of the English and European literary traditions.”11

These objections notwithstanding, “Lilacs” is Whitman's most astutely

Rather than representing a relational norm in Whitman, the erotic pairings depicted in a number of the “Calamus” poems (for example, “When I Heard at the Close of the Day,” or “We Two Boys Together Clinging”) are excep-tional. They are also highly problematic in the broader context of the project, because they are alternately represented as being so satisfying that they iso-late the erotic subject from all but one other person, or so painful that they isolate him altogether.12

When Whitman finds his “boy of responding kisses” on the battle-field, he is able to fantasize a relation of lovers and perfect equals that satisfies him completely. As we have seen, finding an adult man was an-other matter, beginning even before the 1855 Leaves of Grass. The point is not that Whitman chronically used or abused the young men who fell in love with him, but rather that, as poet and person, he was working to free himself of heterosexual relational norms based on the anxiety-producing model of the patriarchal family. “Lilacs” thus takes on a for-midable challenge. Peter M. Sacks has shrewdly suggested that Whitman did not want to reestablish traditional fatherhood in the text, nor did he intend to affirm “the kind of figure traditionally essential to elegiac con-solation,” “a highly differentiated, totemic figure of authority and jus-tice.”13 Although a full-scale critique of Whitman's bellicose mode in Drum-Taps lies beyond the scope of this chapter, it is evident that the poet who was writing “Lilacs” in the self-conscious character of “a man not entirely well” was seeking to spare himself, as well as the nation, from further suffering.

Suffering takes many forms, however, and as Robert Leigh Davis observes, in Whitman's Civil War writings there are multiple ironic lay-erings: “‘enemies’ are at the same time ‘brothers,’ ‘sisters,’ ‘fathers,’ ‘friends,’ and ‘lovers.’”14 In attempting to distinguish enemies from friends, a project that had been to some extent abandoned in the Calamus sequence, Whitman the artist (who claimed that “Drum Taps has none of the perturbations of Leaves of Grass”) had begun to minimize the impor-tance of the body. Under the pressure of Civil War, the social and the sexual

As he sentimentalized the lost leader, the “comrade lustrous with sil-ver face in the night” (LG, p. 337), Whitman nevertheless stopped short of celebrating the instruments of Civil War. This is an important consid-eration, and I should like to explore its erotic dimension further. Writ-ing for himself and as his own first reader, in “Lilacs” Whitman creates an idealized community of lovers who for the time being are not ene-mies. This temporary community is organized by death, since death alone has the power to interrupt a phallic narrative which identifies the male gender with social aggression. In the Calamus sequence, the poet of comrades had already written and rewritten a homoerotic pastoral from which personal aggression had been imperfectly exiled. But whereas Calamus is mainly pressured by the persona's inconstant affections, to-gether with those of his lover(s), the postwar poet discovers in death the “Spirit Whose Work is Done.” Reluctantly, he finds himself and the nation eerily empowered by the loss of a leader who, in his absence, can be reimagined as universally and personally beloved. Thus, as Benedict Anderson might have predicted, Whitman's imagined community origi-nates in a powerful repression of memory, the memory of a confused po-litical and sexual life before death.16 This necessary forgetting facilitates the emotional reorientation and deep attachment between men and be-tween men and women Whitman had long been seeking. The erotic poet humbled by loss discovers in shared grief a personal and national bond that democratizes social and psychological difference. Whitman's powerful

After visiting the White House on October 31, 1863, Whitman recorded in his diary, “Saw Mr. Lincoln standing, talking with a gentleman, ap-parently a dear friend. His face & manner … are inexpressibly sweet—one hand on his friend's shoulder, the other holds his hand. I love the President personally” (DT xviii–xix). These are the words of a man who wistfully watches other people's friendships and who romanticizes for-bidden loves. Composing a sonorous hymn to endangered devotion that transformed the assassination from a political to a natural and even mythic event, Whitman was writing out of the context of earlier affec-tional losses, including the failure of his relationship with his father and the probable loss during the late 1850s of more than one idealized Cala-mus lover. He was also writing out of the more immediate failure of his love affair with the American public. His books had not sold, and despite his admiration for the common soldiers whom he encountered during his hospital visits, the fact still rankled. Though in Washington he had some ardent admirers, including John Burroughs to whom he was indebted for his knowledge of the reclusive hermit thrush (“likes shaded, dark, places in swamps—/ is very shy / sings in May & June—/ not much after June / is our best songster” [“Hermit Thrush,” NUPM 2:766]), his words were mainly unheard by the nation at large, and Whitman's erotic anxieties were reinforced by his professional marginalization.

As a Lincoln lover, however, Whitman admits no erotic rivals. Living beyond time, under no temporal circumstances can he be displaced by his beloved's beloved, and he celebrates an erotic life inviolable by third parties. This fantasy of imperial selfhood nevertheless proves, is prov-ing, and has proved remarkably unstable. “Lincoln” in death becomes the speaker's permanent possession, but “Lincoln” in death also becomes the speaker's permanent loss. The tenuous balance that Whitman achieves between erotic expression and erotic self-suppression is con-tinually threatened by a number of historical factors, including, in the more or less real world, the demonstrable rivalrous intervention of John Wilkes Booth, who notoriously figures in the poem through his absence. Evidently Whitman is determined to expunge Booth from his text: both his national, political text and his timeless, unconscious text. But here Whitman discovers that silencing Booth is easier said than done. Insofar as “Booth” represents unanchored, free-floating aggression—that which

Like other ardent Northern Unionists, Whitman had initially entertained substantial and, in the event, realistic reservations about Lincoln's abil-ity to hold the country together. At one time, he hubristically imagined that Lincoln could profit from the benefit of his political advice. “Bro-chure,” he projected: “Two characters as of a dialogue between A. L.—n and W. Whitman.—as in? a dream—or better? Lessons for a President elect—Dialogue between W. W. and ‘President elect.’”17 Commenting on the fabled Lincoln-Douglas debates in August 1858, he observed that “of the two, Mr. Lincoln seems to have had the advantage thus far in the war of words.” But he supported Douglas, to whom he looked to reinvigorate the moribund Democratic party. And it was Douglas rather than Lincoln who, Whitman hoped, would organize “a great middle conservative party, neither proscribing slavery … nor fostering it.”18 Before the war, then, Lincoln struck him as too extreme in his op-position to the South's peculiar institution.

Moreover, the radically competitive Whitman was prejudiced against the institution of the presidency, disputing as he did the concept of “Supremes.” “I praise no eminent man—I rebuke to his face the one that was thought most worthy,” he announced in the 1860 consciousness-raising poem “Myself and Mine,” a rather transparent example of his envious need to feel good about himself, and a poem in which he vowed “To speak readily and clearly—to feel at home among common people.” “It is ended—I dally no more,” he wrote,

Paradoxically, the antebellum Whitman was both a statesrighter and a Unionist, and in the “Proto-Leaf” to the 1860 Leaves, he had declared, “I will make a song for the ears of the President, full of weapons with menacing points, / And behind the weapons countless dissatisfied faces” (LG 1860, p. 10). With good reason, Whitman hated Buchanan, but his antipresidential diatribes were part of a larger politics in which there had to be room at the top for the ordinary men and women whom he imag-ined as his readers. “Have you outstript the rest? Are you the Presi-dent?” he inquired. “It is a trifle—they will more than arrive there every one, and still pass on” (LG 1860, p. 50). Thus, he had asked:

Along with the 1855 “Preface,” the first three editions of Leaves of Grass are filled with this kind of language: antipatriarchal, anti-establishment, and antipresidential. There is also a self-interested, demagogic edge to Whitman's rhetoric. When the “Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall” (LG 1860, p. 115), power shall be transferred not just to any poet but to Whitman in particular.

Associating presidents with tyrannical fathers as he does in “Song of the Broad-Axe,” where he urges that children are to be “taught from the jump … to be laws to themselves, and to depend on themselves” (LG 1860, p. 133), Whitman also announced in the “Apostroph” to the “Chants Democratic” of the 1860 Leaves, “O you grand Presidentiads! I wait for you!” (LG 1860, p. 108), which is not surprising considering that he had always been reluctant to jettison a vocabulary of personal loyalty based on the model of family ties. This model, as we have seen, generated fantasies of perfect brotherhood and fatherhood, included a weeping George Washington, enabled Whitman to address Emerson as “dear Friend and Master”, and could accommodate other “supremes,” such as God. (On perfect motherhood, see the next chapter.) In any

Whitman first saw Lincoln in person in mid-February 1861. From the top of an omnibus, he observed a silent, sulky crowd observing the black-clad president-elect in front of the Astor House on Broadway. Though Lincoln's life was already being threatened—both Lincoln and his wife feared that he would never return to Springfield alive—at the suggestion of New York Senator William Henry Seward he was deliberately taking a circuitous route on his journey to the capital, so as to rally support in the North. “The crowd that hemm'd around consisted I should think,” Whitman recalled in his anniversary lecture,

So frenzied were the ferments of the time that in the homiletic 1860 poem beginning “Respondez! Respondez!” Whitman had commanded apocalyptically, “Let Death be inaugurated! / Let nothing remain upon the earth except the ashes of teachers, artists, moralists, lawyers, and learned and polite persons! / Let him who is without my poems be as-sassinated!” (LG 1860, p. 168). It was galling to the poet who called himself the Answerer to find his ideas slighted, ignored, or even violently rebuffed by America's thinking elite. Whitman could play a part no longer; he was incensed with a little success.20

Following his own move to Washington in December 1862, Whitman was able to observe Lincoln more closely. The two men were never in-troduced and never spoke, but Whitman often saw the president as he was driven through the streets of Washington in his carriage. And he be-gan to identify with Lincoln's plight. Writing to his friends Nat Bloom and Fred Gray, whom he called his “gossips & darlings,” on March 19, 1863, Whitman noted:

I think well of the President. He has a face like a hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep cut, criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion. My notion is, too, that

“I had a good view of the President last evening,” the poet, who re-mained concerned for Lincoln's safety, wrote to his mother on June 30, 1863:

He looks more careworn even than usual—his face with deep cut lines, seams, & his complexion gray, through very dark skin, a curious looking man, very sad—I said to a lady who was looking with me, “Who can see that man without losing all wish to be sharp upon him personally? Who can say he has not a good soul?” The lady assented, although she is almost vin-dictive on the course of the administration, (thinks it wants nerve &c., the usual complaint). (Corr 1:113)

This complaint was shared by Whitman's brother Jeff, who found Lin-coln indecisive, “not a man for the times, not big enough … an old woman.”21 For his part, Whitman tried not to blame Lincoln for Union losses. “I believe fully in Lincoln,” he wrote to Abby Price as Meade was unable to slow the Confederate advance across Virginia's Rapidan River; again, Whitman employed the ship of state metaphor that figured prom-inently in his letters home: “Few know the rocks & quicksands he has to steer through” (Corr 1:163–64).

The ship of state metaphor also figured prominently in one of Lin-coln's recurrent anxiety dreams, which, despite its murky symbolism, the president himself considered an omen of Union victory. And so it hap-pened that on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, when Lincoln held his last cabinet meeting,

General Grant, who attended the meeting, was asked for late news from Sherman, but had none. Lincoln remarked that it would come soon, and be favorable, for last night he had dreamed a familiar dream. In a strange in-describable ship he seemed to be moving with great rapidity toward a dark and undefined shore. He had this same dream before Sumter, Bull Run, Antie-tam, Murfreesborough, Vicksburg, and Wilmington. Matter-of-fact Grant remarked that Murfreesborough was no victory—“a few such fights would have ruined us.” Lincoln looked at him curiously and said, however that might be, his dream preceded that battle.22

So Whitman's fears for Lincoln's safety, as expressed in his most pop-ular poem, “O Captain! My Captain!” and as represented by the thor-oughly conventional ship of state metaphor, had a dense history in the poet's thoughts and in the president's. With good reason, then, both Mutlu Konuk Blasing and Kenneth M. Price refer to Lincoln as Whit-man's political alter ego.23 He had not always been so, but so he became. As a political person, however, Whitman was making what Jahan Ra-mazani calls “the prototypical elegiac leap from particulars to redemp-tive abstractions.”24 To write his way out of those historically specific divisions and self-divisions we have been examining, Whitman allied himself emotionally with the reclusive hermit thrush who, whatever else he may be, is clearly his artistic alter ego in “Lilacs.” Whitman addresses this bleeding other as “dear brother,” reminding him in somewhat ar-chaic diction, “If thou wast not granted to sing thou would'st surely die.” The language recalls the voice of the bereaved mockingbird in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” but following the Civil War, Whit-man understands even more acutely not only that poetry, in and through communion with others, may forestall spiritual death, but that “song” arises from parting. “Sooner or later,” ceremonies of departure epito-mize the human condition.

“Must not worry about George, for I hope the worst is over—must keep up a stout heart,” Whitman had cautioned himself in a notebook entry written early in 1863. But then he had exploded, “My opinion is to stop the war now” (NUPM 2:548–49). Whatever his reservations about Lincoln's leadership, by the end of October he explained to his mother, “I have finally made up my mind that Mr. Lincoln has done as good as a human man could do—I still think him a pretty big President” (Corr 1:174). Thereafter, he continued to reiterate his support for a be-leaguered president, although it could be argued that he was almost equally taken with General Grant, “the most in earnest of any man in command or in the government either” (Corr 1:211). “Others may say what they like, I believe in Grant & in Lincoln too” (Corr 1:213). By May 6, 1864, he was convinced that

Grant has taken the reins entirely in his own hands—he is really dictator at present—we shall hear something important within two or three days—Grant is very secretive indeed—he bothers himself very little about sending news even to the President or Stanton—time only can develope his plans—I still think he is going to take Richmond & soon, (but I may be mistaken as I have been in past)—(Corr 1:219–20)

Many of these contradictory attitudes toward Lincoln and male hero-ism are exemplified by a letter Whitman wrote to his mother follow-ing the assassination. On May 25, he praised the new president, Andrew Johnson, extolled Grant, who had been instrumental in effecting the ex-change of Captain George Whitman from a Confederate prison camp, as “the noblest Roman of them all,” and proffered an oblique dismissal of both leaders, Johnson and Grant, with the statement, “but the rank & file was the greatest sight of all” (Corr 1:261–62). So the point is not that Whitman was more or less indifferent to Lincoln before John Wilkes Booth changed history. The seeds of his Lincoln cult had been planted, as had the seeds of a Grant cult. But following Whitman's attitudes in his contemporaneous writings, we are far from a vision of Lincoln as “the grandest figure yet, on all the crowded canvas of the Nineteenth Cen-tury,” as he became in the somewhat ironically titled “Personal Remi-niscences of Abraham Lincoln.”25

Nevertheless, Whitman's finest Lincoln elegy, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” is strikingly free of such particularizing detail as he could have provided from personal observation, from the firsthand accounts of others, or from his reading—had he wished to memorialize the historical Lincoln. As Helen Vendler has noted, “Lilacs” does not really contain “Memories of President Lincoln,” which is the title of the Leaves cluster to which the poem was eventually assigned.26 Other ele-gists provided “memories” of President Lincoln, evoking his rise from obscure origins, early losses, “cunning with the pen” (the phrase is Rich-ard Henry Stoddard's), proverbial honesty, penchant for telling humor-ous stories, hatred of slavery, clemency toward the South, and political martyrdom—to name just a few themes in the voluminous Lincoln lit-erature of the postbellum era.27 Instead, Whitman histrionically fore-grounded himself as the leading character in Lincoln's drama and dis-solved the actual Abe into a national panorama of lost men. Given this dramatic repression of Lincoln's personal history and particular quali-ties (“the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands” does not really qualify in the way of particularizing historical detail), and Whitman's al-most complete repression of the murder as murder, it is evident that the poet's literary aggression had targets other than Booth. In short, Whit-man's historically conditioned distrust of powerful men was so great as to covertly determine the structure of any serious poem that he might write in praise of a fallen leader.

How does one compete with the honored dead, the dead whom one

I am suggesting that “Lilacs” has two emotional projects: transcend-ing grief and transmuting aggression. When the speaker praises the dead president as “the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands” or as his “dear,” then “dearest” comrade, he is specifically denying Lincoln's political power and robbing him of his phallic force. Vaguely reminis-cent of Wordsworth's Lucy, “Fair as a star, when only one / Is shining in the sky,” Lincoln is associated with the evening star Whitman later called “voluptuous Venus … languid and shorn of her beams, as if from some divine excess” (SD 806). Just as in the opening poem of Wordsworth's “Lucy” sequence a dropping moon portends her death (“‘O mercy!’ to myself I cried, / ‘If Lucy should be dead!’”), so too in “Lilacs” the star's disappearance portends the president's death, stagily.30 In keeping with the poem's ambiguous emotional project, Whitman's “lustrous” orb is both masculinized and feminized, empowered and disempowered, pos-sessing the brilliance of a masculine supreme tempered by the obscurity of the feminized dead.

The persona's need to evade his aggression, to cover it all over with

At the same time, however, Whitman's still-powerful need to compete with his beloved, with “Lincoln,” erupts in Section 15 when he compares the welfare of the living and the dead. Such comparisons were con-ventional in sentimental literature, where, as in Susanna Rowson's novel Charlotte Temple, they usually functioned as devices to resolve other-wise irreconcilable political and literary conflicts.31 The belief that the dead are better off than the living also influenced how people thought about hardship. Consider the memoirs of Private Henry Robinson Berke-ley, a Confederate soldier who, like Peter Doyle, was a member of a Vir-ginia militia unit when the war began. Unlike Doyle, Berkeley lasted out the entire conflict, although he was captured in March 1865 and impris-oned at Fort Delaware, Delaware. Along with other Southern prisoners, he was released in mid-June on the condition that he take an oath of al-legiance to the United States government. Berkeley was a Virginia na-tive, and the son of a farmer. Though his future occupation was school-teaching, he was not a particularly reflective man and was thoroughly demoralized by the war's conclusion. He was convinced that Lincoln should have been in church rather than at the theater on that fatal Good Friday and was personally embittered by the rough treatment he and other Confederate prisoners received in the weeks following Lincoln's death, when there was talk of a national conspiracy afoot that caused Confederate prisoners to be subjected to further reprisals.

Searching for a way to conclude a diary that had become a record of his humiliations, Berkeley, who was by then waiting in Richmond for a ride back to his home in Hanover County, recorded:

As I had an hour, I thought I would walk a little way down Main Street and take a look at the burnt district. One could hardly tell where Main Street had been. It was one big pile of ruins from the Custom House to the wharf at Rocketts. At this point, the Yanks had collected all kinds of debris of war: cannon, muskets, bayonets, cartridge boxes, swords, broken guncarriages, broken

In the midst of a still unfolding narrative, Berkeley's question—“Is it better with them or with us?”—cannot be answered. A Yankee-dominated life may no longer be tolerable for him, and as he steps to-ward the Depot, his shattered affections lie with the heroic dead. Whit-man, with greater freedom to shape his narrative, and less deference to an outcome-determining God, cannily and categorically asserts that whereas the living remain and suffer, the dead are fully at rest:

(LG, p. 336)33

Perhaps, after all, Whitman did feel some guilt about not having served in the war, guilt that provokes an unequal, even inelegant competition with the dead for primacy of suffering. Although he claims to have fled forth into “the hiding receiving night that talks not,” his flight from lan-guage into “unconscious scenery” is countermanded by the evidence of his text (LG, pp. 334, 333). Whitman's marked assertion of subjective privilege may also be intended to block other memories, specifically the failure of consciousness to sustain itself under the pressure of trau-matizing events. Whitman, for example, represses telltale memories of the hospitals, and of his personal crises in ministering to the wounded young soldiers whom he tried to comfort, with varying success. Joining hands with two ambiguously gendered companions, his “comrades in the night,” the oblivion-seeking speaker is prepared by “the song of the bird” to encounter the unorthodox parent whom he has always feared, the “Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,” and whom he now welcomes as a “strong deliveress” (LG, pp. 334, 335).

As he abandons his “war of words” and bids farewell to the deeply gendered poetry of the politically marked body, the “Lilacs” elegist

(LG, p. 335)

In voicing his chant of fullest welcome to the unknown mother, Whit-man celebrates both the return to the intersubjective intimacy he associates with a feminine origin (“And the body gratefully nestling close to thee”) and the heroism of all those who, like him, persist in clinging to the familiar in the face of the unimaginable. Furthermore, in emphasiz-ing that the male dead do not suffer, the poet carves out an important role for the grieving wife and mother, with whom he is unambiguously identified. Faced with devastation, he holds both men and women ac-countable for their work of memory, “there in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.” This work proceeds beyond the borders of a bru-tally phallic economy, taking the Whitman persona, then, into a coun-try he has glimpsed before. Reconnecting with a maternal origin, Whit-man seeks to free himself and his nation from the violence engendered by a patriarchal past. This return is, however, as Ramazani and others have suggested, not without its cost, and in the next chapter I examine this matter from a somewhat different perspective.

“The death of the late President,” Abraham Lincoln had declared in July 1850, following the sudden death of Zachary Taylor, whom Whit-man had seen in New Orleans, “may not be without its use in remind-ing us that we, too, must die. Death, abstractly considered, is the same with the high as with the low; but practically, we are not so much aroused to the contemplation of our own mortal natures, by the fall of many undistinguished,

While suffering eventually defines the poem's richly complex idiom, Whitman stresses that life, “The miracle spreading bathing all,” emerges out of death, and that art must accommodate both. Throughout “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” as the speaker confronts both loss and aggression, there are ebbs and flows in his access to physical and psychic power. Cruel hands hold him powerless; he uses his hands to break off a sprig of lilac with its flower; he contributes his sprig of lilac to the coffin that slowly passes and then to all conceivable coffins, dis-covering joyously and paradoxically the copiousness of nature in his feverish efforts to celebrate death; he imagines himself as a tomb deco-rator hanging pictures on the walls of “the burial-house of him I love” (LG, p. 332); he holds hands with the thought and the knowledge, with the anticipation and the retrospective awareness of death; he hymns “the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death” in Section 14 (LG, p. 334); and, following his visionary experience in Section 15, he frees himself from “the hold of my comrades' hands” (LG, p. 336). Finally, in Section 16, his hands are at rest and he leaves the lilac with heart-shaped leaves “there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring” (LG, p. 337). He doesn't need to break it or to use it to smother his grief. He can afford to leave it alone.

Can it be, then, as Harold Bloom has wickedly suggested, that hands are more than merely totemistic in “Lilacs” and that the poem is centrally

(LG, p. 329)

Bloom further explains that “the cruel hands are Whitman's own, as he vainly seeks relief from his repressed guilt, since the death of Father Abra-ham has rekindled the death, a decade before, of the drunken Quaker carpenter-father, Walter Whitman, Senior.”37

However implausibly lurid, Bloom's father-centered analysis accounts for the fact that Whitman writes like a man whose social world has col-lapsed because of his hero's death. This melodramatic perspective, as Bloom hints when he refers to “the supposed elegy for Lincoln” and then, several pages later, to the “elegy for President Lincoln,” reinforces our sense of the speaker's covert antagonism toward all undependable lovers—especially those who, like Whitman's father, proved themselves to be merely mortal. Hence, in part, the speaker's willingness to be seduced by death, the “Dark Mother.” If “Lilacs” takes as its subject the dream of an enduring socioerotic community, it tests this deeply personal fantasy against public history, and against the tragic history of American slavery. To the extent that this vividly imagined community turns out to be white and male, the dark mother is necessary to complete it. By the same token, the dark mother, the only dark person in the poem, remains a mystery. As a person, she cannot be known. However we choose to read this figure—does she exemplify the Africanist pres-ence?—it is clear that the concept of motherhood in the poem and in nineteenth-century America was subjected to extraordinary stresses. In the next chapter, I would like to consider some of them, as Whitman continued to seek personally gratifying solutions for the problems of de-mocracy and of America, which, in Democratic Vistas, he proposed to employ as “convertible terms.”