SEVEN

(IS IT NIGHT? ARE WE HERE ALONE?)

Whatever the dead did or did not do in bed is largely irrecoverable. Evidence—if there ever was evidence—has long vanished. Unless someone still living can serve as reliable witness, our knowledge is inferred and provisional, supposition or educated guess. Try to trace the histories of sexualities outside the mainstream and this is even more the case; queer sex leaves no marriage records or genealogies inscribed in family Bibles. Police records and court documents light up a few dark corners, usually in sadly blunt and glancing ways. Letters and diaries help to suggest the contours of a private life, but much remains veiled, the curtains closed. Whoever may have held, touched, or trembled with desire for the poet’s body, and whoever he himself desired, Walt Whitman is language now: millions of books, pixels on computer screens, poems copied out in notebooks, incised in concrete on pavement and piers in New York City, committed to memory or tattooed on skin. His body of work is his only body now, gorgeous, revelatory, daring, contradictory, both radically honest and carefully veiled. Its meanings reside in us, in the ways we readers use these poems as signposts, maps, temporary inhabitations—even, sometimes, dwelling places.

Still, I can’t say that I don’t care, or don’t want to know. Had we a technology for reading whatever subtle energetic impressions the past inscribes, I’d be eager to calibrate the dials to a day in 1855, position the impossible camera above and behind Walt Whitman’s shoulder, and follow him through the course of his day and night. I’d enjoy such an exercise with other poets I love, but at some points, honoring their privacy and our distance, I’d switch off the lens. My need to know Whitman, to track the rambling or purposeful wanderings of his hours, springs from a desire of another order. Granted this impossible act of surveillance, I confess I’d leave the camera on. I need to know.

Why? Let me try to unpack my reasons. In a distinctive way, Whitman’s work begins in the body, in his insistence on his physical presence. I too, he writes in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” received identity of my body. Selfhood begins in the facts of being flesh. Whitman’s work is so much the song of the self that he says of his own book, in a poem of 1860 called “So long!,” Who touches this, touches a man. It’s an odd, compelling notion, that the book is a published and distributed extension of its author’s presence; holding his book, are you touching the poet’s skin? In the line that follows the poet’s voice slips into a more intimate register, a private aside to the reader sheltered in the privacy of parentheses: (Is it night? Are we here alone?) He wants, clearly, to touch us back.

If a book is the voice made permanent—the intersection of the soul and time, as William Everson said, sipping Jack Daniel’s from the pint bottle tucked in his Kiowa vest—then Whitman, in order to be himself, must carry his physicality with him, into the book, into the present moment. A signature characteristic of his voice is the way it seems to inhabit the present, the reader’s moment. I am with you, he writes, and know how it is. How what is? To be present in this moment, to long for the object of desire, and hunger to lose for a while one’s separateness. He understands the terrible poignance of the human voice in time, of the long, steady life of words beside the quick-burning life of the body. I am with you, and know how it is. If ever there was a poet whose work required readers to trust him, to know that he believes what he says, it’s this one. We can’t grant this speaker the intimacy he seeks if we don’t think he means it.

He’s sly, often playful, but no one would describe him as insincere. When he is ironic it’s because he understands the disparity between his homespun diction and casual tone and the gravity of his intent. He can rant now and then, or crack a joke, but his humor is in the service of forging trust:

This hour I tell things in confidence.

I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.

He wants us to know he doesn’t take himself too seriously, does not possess some wisdom that we can’t also possess. He can speak from extraordinary heights (the hand of God is the elderhand of my own) but he is not stuck-up. He wants nothing as much as that we might shoulder our duds and join him, carry his book (nicely pocket-sized, in the 1856 edition) around in our work jackets, and follow the earnest instructions he delivers in his preface:

This is what you shall do: 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, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem . . .

WHITMAN KNOWS how it is to love another body, one like his, and how the startling rush of intimacy when we find ourselves skin to skin can dissolve otherness. His evocations of eros toward and between men have a rightness about them, a felt accuracy. They make me realize the aptness of the phrase “the ring of truth,” as if words chimed when they drew closest to the real.

The second source of Whitman’s poetry is queer sexuality then, and it pervades his work in unprecedented, remarkable ways. He is a citizen of modernity, and his book speaks from subject positions and perspectives that had not yet been inscribed in our literature. He seems to stand near the heart of things, in the heat of an erotic merge, a radiant sense of connection to the bodies of others, but also to be a perpetual outsider. Sexual life carries him beneath the social surfaces, reveals the flesh beneath the uniforms, and calls appearances into question, disrupting what’s assumed to be true.

I don’t mean just physical acts, pleasure, or the force of desire, but rather the way a proscribed sexuality gives access to the sort of perceptions and understandings that the twentieth-century critic Herbert Marcuse called “extra-societal insights.” Writing about marijuana, Marcuse suggested that the drug would only allow its users to see into their culture and its assumptions from the outer edge, as it were, while it was illegal. A joint you bought at a state-licensed dispensary, then, would most likely teach you as much about your country and your times as drinking a beer might. But an illegal one’s another matter; stepping outside the bounds of the acceptable sets us apart, and sets us thinking. What is criminal about what I am doing, and why is it prohibited? Do I feel different when the law says I am? Who gains, who loses from this law? How is it enforced? What is it supposed to accomplish, and what does it actually do? What are its unintended effects, and are they truly unintended?

If visionary experience had led Whitman to a boundless identification with all of life, then his desires both deepened that identification and set him apart. They inked within him a profound faith in the possibilities of communion, and a seemingly unquenchable loneliness that his poems attempted to heal. Eros is, after all, one of the gates to what Mary Oliver has called “the furnace of meaning in the human story.”

WHAT IT MEANT, to be a man who loved and desired men in Whitman’s day, isn’t an easy question to answer. Psychology was fairly early on in its project of medicalizing personality; the binary division of human yearnings established by the world-splitting words homosexual and heterosexual hadn’t happened, and wouldn’t till the 1880s and ’90s. (The term homosexual proceeded heterosexual in print, a sure sign of the discipline’s interest in establishing what was abnormal.) This is not to say that human beings discovered a whole new range of sexual practices near the end of the nineteenth century—imagine!—but rather that they began to think of what they were doing differently, and to categorize themselves in new ways.

A well-known dance hall in lower Manhattan offered, for example, the opportunity for men to dance with other men—specifically with men in drag, who were referred to as “fairies.” To dance with a fairy did not make you a fairy, and presumably when the fairies took off their dresses and washed their faces they were, once again, men. Both roles, “man” and “fairy,” were a behavior, and did not constitute an identity. It seems likely that nineteenth-century American life provided many opportunities for such “behaviors.” Passionate friendships (like the one between Whitman’s hero Abraham Lincoln and the yet-to-be president’s roommate of four years, and lifetime friend, Joshua Speed) were widely accepted and idealized, between women and between men. Cities like New York were packed with young men who’d left the farm behind for jobs; they lived in rooming houses, sharing beds in close quarters. Whatever sexual play went on in these circumstances seems to have gone on without being named. What caused Whitman’s poems to scandalize his audience, and eventually cost him his clerical job working for the Secretary of the Interior, were his portrayals of heterosexual coupling, then-shocking depictions of women who felt, and enjoyed, sexual desire. Readers in our time may have to work to find these passages in Whitman’s poems; his women are far more concerned with producing strong babies and nourishing milk than they are with enjoying themselves. Victorian readers—who idolized and sentimentalized mothers—were so alarmed by Whitman’s strapping and fertile Amazons that they mostly missed the far more erotic passages about male lovers. Perhaps because for them what we’d call “homosexuality” had not been named, and thus remained largely unreadable.

WHITMAN CAME OF AGE IN THE 1840S. Either his character was shaped by the decade or happened to be a perfect fit; the expansive, optimistic curiosity of the times was superbly suited to his own. New York and Boston in particular were seedbeds for new movements centered on human betterment. Among the poet’s friends and acquaintances were feminists, advocates of free love, champions of nude sunbathing and communal living, advocates of high-fiber diets and of what we’d now call “health food,” independent publishers, students of the newly translated Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, and activists committed to a host of progressive social causes. These disparate projects had in common a belief in human perfectability. Even phrenology, a pseudoscience that fascinated Whitman, bent in this direction. Phrenologists proposed that the physiognomy of the human head revealed everything about us; whether particular points on the scalp were raised, flat, or depressed indicated the strength or weakness of intellect, intelligence, sexual desire, the capacity for friendship, and so on. This sounds woefully deterministic until one learns that phrenologists believed it possible, through effort, to change the contours of the head. Practice exercising your courage, discover bravery within yourself, and the concomitant spot on the head would reflect the transformation within.

Whitman thrived in this bohemian milieu, and “Song of Myself” in particular is threaded through with bits of reference to what he gleaned from his reading, from lectures and conversations concerning the new thinking, the intellectual fashions of the day. His work as a journalist brought him into contact with what was new in New York life, with the shows and performances, the fashions and styles that held the limelight of the hour, and his first great poem seems a synthesis of all this, the work of a representative soul of a new world ordering, filtering, and celebrating the vital stuff of his moment.

For all his exuberance, and despite the remarkable forthrightness of his poems, there remains a sense of the veiled, of the necessity of indirection. Slippage between stanzas so we’re not quite sure who a pronoun refers to, resonant metaphoric details in which things seem eroticized without clear referents—these gestures seem to cloud the direction of desire just enough to create uncertainty. Or to allow only those “in the know” to read the homoeroticism of the poems.

Since homosexuality didn’t exist as a defined concept, in 1855, it wasn’t illegal. But it was inadmissible; there was no lexicon for it. The poet’s notion of the love of comrades, understandable to his times as “passionate friendship,” became inscrutable as soon as eros was introduced. That “men” danced with “fairies” might be tolerated if not accepted or embraced, but the notion of two men as loving, sexual equals wasn’t even figured in the classical models of same-sex relations that the nineteenth century largely regarded as antique error. To write a poetry any more direct than Whitman’s would have been an anomaly of such proportions that it probably never would have been published, even self-published, but simply would have fallen out of sight. How far can a poem depart from its times, when there is no intellectual, cultural, or social framework for it, and thus no means for it to be received? “Song of Myself” strides far ahead of its times, but it cannot leave its moment behind entirely.

But Whitman isn’t only protecting himself with his veils and feints. He wants the Walt Whitman who speaks in this poem to be a representative man, a New World everyman.

These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,

If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing . . .

Therefore the speaker must be inclusive, responsive both to women and to men; he must be able to slip into all sorts of identities, finding himself in each. If the core of aliveness in each of us, what Whitman calls the Me myself, could speak, then this would be that energy’s voice. It’s the oddly impersonal core of the self, looking out through any of the infinite eyes that Being opens to look at itself.

And there’s another problem, too. Whitman wants to be both a sexual radical and a sage. In the former role he wants to tear the doors from their jambs and celebrate the dawn:

Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,

Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.

He also wanted to be widely admired, publicly celebrated, and most of all loved, as the title that came to rest upon his shoulders, the Good Gray Poet, came to suggest. “Good Gray Poets” do not describe the dawn as a wash of illuminated semen shot across the atmosphere. I’m not at all sure these two positions are compatible, or reconcilable, and their contradictory pull must have been a lifetime’s source of conflict, and sometimes of compromise.

The years between the beautiful, eccentric first edition of Leaves of Grass and Whitman’s death in 1892 saw a sea change in the ways human behavior, sexual and otherwise, was understood. Psychology was out to cure human ills, or at least categorize them, through a process of medicalizing personality. Identifying the abnormal was a means of defining health, and increasingly medicine defined for us all the ways we might be wrong. The phrenologists’ cheering (if rather nutty) notion of the malleability of the skull gave way to a biological determinism, in which the slope of the forehead or the distance between the eyes might be indicators of permanent weakness or deviance from the norm, and racial characteristics were read as indicators of intelligence or moral character. It isn’t much of a step, really, from there to sterilization, euthanasia, and some of the twentieth century’s greater crimes.

At the same time, a growing subculture found in Whitman’s work a mirror of their own lives, a compatriot and a prophet. Hadn’t he asked to be a leader, and called for his camerados to join him? He must have felt pressured from both sides, so to speak—from those readers who loved the most popular of his poems, the rhyming and sentimental elegy for Lincoln, “Oh Captain! My Captain!,” the most popular of Whitman’s poems in his own lifetime, and from those who also walked or wanted to walk on paths untrodden and find “Calamus lovers” of their own in the open air. This would have been a difficult contradiction to negotiate, nearly intolerable.

This perhaps explains why he claimed, absurdly, to have fathered six children with a mistress in his twenties in Louisiana. Or why he changed the pronouns in many of his drafts, and why he vehemently denied, to the British theorist of sexuality John Addington Symonds, who put the question directly, that he was attracted to men. Whitman died in 1892, three years before the trials of Oscar Wilde put the crime of “gross indecency” on the international stage, when Wilde’s impassioned defense of same-sex passion rang out to generations to come but fell on the deaf ears of magistrates. It was a nightmarish fate; Wilde lost everything, home, marriage, career, his reprehensible boyfriend Lord Alfred Douglas, and served two years in prison, condemned to hard labor that destroyed his health. He died, destitute, two years later in Paris. Whitman, of course, could not have known any of this was coming, but I’d guess the chill in the air had already begun to coalesce, as those cultural forces anxious about matters of decency, fearful of change, sought out a new enemy.

IN SUMMER 2017, in London, I saw an exhibition at the Tate Britain called Queer British Art, 1861–1967, a brilliantly curated show that ranged from fey pre-Raphaelite paintings of androgynous boys to splendidly modernist portraits of stylish women with severe haircuts, to Francis Bacon’s tortured lovers, their bodies and spirits broken on invisible racks. I was energized by the show, thrilled by its intelligence, but there was one object there that oppressed me from the moment I saw it, and whose memory will not leave me alone.

It was not a work of art at all, but a narrow wooden door, with a small square opening at eye level divided by a grid of interwoven metal bars. It took me a moment, even after I read the informational panel, to register what it was: the door of Wilde’s cell, taken from Reading Gaol when that hellhole was demolished. It was awful in part because it was so narrow. Everyone who met Wilde remarked first on his charm and his size; though the delicacy of his manner and his prose might lead one to expect otherwise, he was a big man, over six feet and amply proportioned. They must have squeezed him, again and again, through this tiny door, and how big could that cell have been? The nightmare of the large body in that tiny space, those years of confinement . . . It was an unredeemable, inescapable emblem. Though this was surely not what the curator had intended, its terrible gravity tried to cancel the affirmation, the wit and beauty or shameless glamour or camp of everything else in those gallery rooms. It did not succeed, not entirely. But it held its own, hell portal, nowhere gate, the sign of everything that wants to erase us.

ON HIS AMERICAN TOUR IN 1882, Oscar Wilde was twenty-seven years old. He sought out Whitman, then sixty-two, because the British edition of Leaves of Grass, a selected version edited by William Michael Rossetti that omitted some of the more overtly sexual poems, had become a sensation among readers of poetry, freethinkers, and members of an emergent subculture of gay men who saw their newly named sexuality (Urnings, inverts, Uranians?) celebrated in the poet’s work. Whitman, presumably expecting a dull appointment with an admirer or perhaps a lightweight, merely clever writer, privately asked his assistant Horace to leave them, then return in half an hour and show Mr. Wilde to the door.

But when Horace appeared, Whitman told him to take the afternoon off, as his services would not be needed, and Walt and Oscar proceeded upstairs to continue their private visit over several hours. “He is a fine large handsome youngster,” the poet wrote, in a letter to a friend, and “he had the good sense to take a great fancy to me.” Though Horace preserved some notes that must have been dictated by Whitman later, of what the poet and his visitor actually said we know, of course, nothing.