TEN
THE OLD OLD POEM WALT
History and biography have an odd way of singling out detail, some bit of a life that acquires unexpected significance. Here is one tiny element of Walt Whitman’s life on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn, in the house where his extended family lived from 1856 until 1859. The New England Transcendentalist and father of the author of Little Women Bronson Alcott writes that the poet shared a room with his disabled younger brother Eddie, described variously by biographers as “retarded, probably epileptic,” “mentally defective,” “helpless and strange in his simple-mindedness.” It must have been a stormy household. Walter Whitman Sr. had died in 1855; Walt’s mother, Louisa, struggled to hold together the household in which six of her eight adult children lived. An older brother, Jesse, possessed a violent temper; his fits of rage would eventually cause him to be committed to the King’s County Lunatic Asylum. Walt’s sister Hannah married a painter to whom Walt had introduced her, then isolated herself in hypochondria. Whitman, who was devoted to Eddie, would will the younger man most of his possessions, and ensure that, when Eddie died some years after Walt, the brothers would be reunited in the imposing tomb the poet built for himself in Camden.
When Alcott first came to visit in 1856, with Henry David Thoreau and the abolitionist and social Utopianist Sarah Tyndale in tow, Whitman was not at home. But his mother brought the group into the kitchen, where she praised Walt while baking biscuits. Thoreau, apparently, snatched one from the oven without asking her consent. The group returned the next day, and Walt walked them up to the second-floor bedroom. Alcott noted details of the room: the unmade bed, which still bore the impressions of sleepers; the chamber pot visible beneath it.
The detail I keep coming back to is this: there seems to have been no decoration in the room, save that over the mantel were pasted three images representing figures from classical myth: Hercules, Bacchus, and a satyr. Alcott describes them as mounted on the “rude walls” of the room. He asked Whitman which of the images represented the poet, and, depending on the source one consults, either received a shrug for an answer or a was told by Whitman that he was an amalgam of the three. The visitor drew upon these figures in his unforgettable catalog of impressions of Whitman:
Broad-shouldered, rouge-fleshed, Bacchus-browed, bearded like a satyr, and rank, he wears his man-Bloomer in defiance of every-body, having these as everything else after his own fashion, and for example to all men hereafter. Red flannel undershirt, open-breasted, exposing his brawny neck; striped calico jacket over this, the collar Byroneal, with coarse cloth overalls buttoned to it; cowhide boots; a heavy roundabout, with huge outside pockets and buttons to match; and a slouch hat, for house and street alike. Eyes gray, unimaginative, cautious yet melting. When talking will recline upon the couch at length, pillowing his head upon his bended arm, and informing you naively how lazy he is, and slow. Listens well; asks you to repeat what he has failed to catch at once, yet hesitates in speaking often, or gives over as if fearing to come short of the sharp, full, concrete meaning of his thought. Inquisitive, very; over-curious even; inviting criticism on himself, on his poems—pronouncing it ‘pomes’. In fine, an egotist, incapable of omitting, or suffering any one long to omit, noting Walt Whitman in discourse. Swaggy in his walk, burying both his hands in outside pockets. He has never been sick, he says, not taken medicine, nor sinned; and so is quite innocent of repentence and man’s fall.
Whitman might have chosen the three images, or perhaps Walt and Eddie did so together, but there’s another possibility as well. A young man named Fred Vaughan, who worked on the Fulton Ferry and later on Manhattan coaches, lived with the poet for some time in the Classon Avenue house. Vaughn’s letters to the poet, even many years later, make reference to their cohabitation. In 1874 he writes that he’d “been down past our old home several times this summer” and remembers a letter from Emerson Whitman had received “when we were living in Classon Ave.” It was common for teenage boys like Vaughn to leave their often crowded homes early and apprentice themselves to an older man, or be taken in as boarders. Vaughan’s letters describe his friendship with Whitman’s mother; he takes interest in and encourages Whitman’s work, and reports, delightfully, on attending a lecture Emerson delivered on friendship. The philosopher said, he writes,
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.—There, Walt, how do you like that? What do you think of them setting you & myself . . . up in some public place, with an immense placard on our breasts, reading Sincere Freinds!!!
What charm in those lines! Fred was clearly a smart, affectionate, and witty young man. In the museum of the history of sex the corridors are, inevitably, dimly lit; we can’t know exactly what went on, save that the sweet congress of bodies is a perennial shaping force in human lives, a spur and joy, and transformative, for good or ill or some marbled marriage of the two. Is that what took place, under the tutelary spirits of three figures of masculine strength, one a hero, one a god of pleasure, one half-man and half-beast? Walt and Fred enjoyed lots of nude bathing in the East River, on the Williamsburg shore. Fred wrote letters to Whitman all his life. One surviving missive, undated, was enclosed in a separate envelope with another letter in the mid-1870s, after Fred had married and fathered four sons.
Walt
Driver hour. I loafing in a Lumber Yard at foot of 35th St—Under the shade of a pile of Lumber and sitting on a lower pile.—Opposite and close to me at the pier head a Barque. In the forerigging flapping lazily in the summer breese are a few sailors clothes. From the galley-pipe between the Main and the foremast issues a cloud of smoke.—One of the men in blue shirt and bare footed has just come from alooft—where he has been loosening the Mainsail which seems to be wet. He has now gone below I suppose to his dinner.—On the opposite side of the river Wmsbrgh—between the every plying ferryboats, the tugs, the Harlem Boats, and mingled with the splash of the paddle wheels—the murmur of the sailors at dinner.—the lazy flap of the sails. the screech of the steam whistle of the tugs, the laugh and wrangler of the boys in swimming—comes a remembrance of thee dear Walt –
With Wmsbgh & Brooklyn—with the ferries and the vessels with the Lumber piles and the docks. From among all out of all. Connected with all and yet distinct from all arrises thee Dear Walt. Walt—my life has turned out a poor miserable failure. I am not a drunkard nor a teetotaler—I am neither honest nor dishonest. I have my family in Brooklyn and am supporting them.—I never stole, robbed, cheate, nor defrauded any person out of anything, and yet I feels that I have not been honest to myself—my family nor my friends
______
One Oclock, the Barque is laden with coal and the carts have come. The old old Poem Walt. The cart backs up, the bucket comes up full and goes down empty—The men argue and swear. The wind blows the coal dust over man & beast and now it reaches me –
Fred Vaughan Atlantic Ave 2nd door above
Classon Ave. Brooklyn
HEARTBREAKING AS VAUGHAN’S RETROSPECTIVE letter may be, Whitman seemed not so sorry to see him go, although they did remain friends. Years later, Whitman was troubled by turbulence in his relationship with Peter Doyle, a Washington, DC, conductor the poet met on his streetcar one wildly stormy night; Doyle described their first encounter famously: We were familiar at once—I put my hand on his knee—we understood. Disturbed by conflict between them, Whitman wrote instructions to himself in a notebook: Depress the adhesive nature—It is in excess—making life a torment . . . Remember Fred Vaughan. But if Vaughan had brought turmoil to the poet, he may also have been a new sort of muse, occasioning an emotional vulnerability not previously in evidence in Whitman’s poems.
HAVING LAID THE GROUNDWORK in these its first two poems—one in praise of sexual congress among the reeds, outside any organized framework of social life, the other a hymn to death, praising mortality as the source of these songs—“Calamus” moves into a series of elegantly set pronouncements—public, visionary, indeed Messianic statements predicting the future of robust love. They are remarkable for their sweeping, unchecked confidence, their faith in the poet’s prophetic position:
For I am the new husband, and I am the comrade.
•
And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades, this calamus-root shall,
Interchange it youths, with each other!
•
There shall from me be a new friendship—It shall be called after my name . . .
•
Affection shall solve every one of the problems of freedom,
Those who love each other shall be invincible,
They shall finally make America completely victorious, in my name.
•
I will make inseparable cities, with their arms about each other’s necks.
These sound like passages from a queer version of the Gospel According to Saint Thomas, a text unknown in Whitman’s lifetime, and read in almost any light their arrogance is dazzling. It helps a little to remember that Whitman is, at least some of the time, conflating himself with his book. The speaker in this stanza from “Calamus” 3 is clearly not Walt but Leaves of Grass itself:
Or, if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,
Where I may feel the throbs of your heart, or rest upon your hip,
Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;
For thus, merely touching you, is enough—is best,
And thus, touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.
I hesitate at these passages a bit less if I view them as a voice crying out for a group that has none, a group that was newly emergent yet barely even seen to exist when these poems were composed. One can read them as acts of performative speech, as when Allen Ginsberg writes, in “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” I hereby declare the end of the War. He means Vietnam, and he means his poem to be the chant and spell that begins to end it; in the space in which his poem is heard, in the new space created by the reception of his words, the War is over.
Still, would-be saviors tread dangerous paths, and in fact the wisdom of the seer is called into question; is it possible to be enlightened and so full of yourself at once?
It’s a relief when, in “Calamus” 7, Whitman makes room for self-doubt, one of the great correctives. His usual syntax, with its long, confident strides and mastery of asides, suddenly falls to pieces:
The skies of day and night—colors, densities, forms—May-be these are, (as doubtless they are,) only apparitions, and the real something has yet to be known,
(How often they dart out of themselves, as if to confound me and mock me!
How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows, aught of them;)
May-be they only seem to me what they are, (as doubtless they indeed but seem,) as from my present point of view—And might prove, (as of course they would,) naught of what they appear, or naught any how, from entirely changed points of view…
WHILE NO ONE WOULD WANT to read a lot of that, there’s something engaging about seeing Whitman tumble over himself, his thinking snarled up in qualifications, in this lurching, going-nowhere tumble. What calms this restless barrage is love; the speaker’s anxieties come to rest when he whom I love travels with me. Nation-founding ambitions are set aside, the speaker’s desires salved:
—I am satisfied,
He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.
That line, the final one of “Calamus” 7, is a quiet bombshell. It marks the appearance of love for one person in Whitman’s work. Read within the chronology of the poet’s attachments, he who has satisfied the speaker would seem to be Fred Vaughan. I like knowing this because I want to know Whitman more closely, having been so won by the poems, but the identity of the lover doesn’t matter really, concerned as “Calamus” is with illuminating singular, archetypal moments in the experience of love, placing them into a chain that acknowledges their radicalism, inscribing a letter sent into the future:
To one a century hence, or any number of centuries hence,
To you, yet unborn, these, seeking you.
These, Whitman has announced, are the songs of adhesiveness, of manly attachment, but given his tone and the poems of the opening pages, it’s easy to think he means to celebrate affection between men in a general way. Then, at the end of “Calamus” 7, his windy rhetoric and gnarled syntax seem to come crashing down, a hindrance and obstacle now that what he most requires is this, the sheer fact of his lover’s hand holding his, and what it brings: an end to anxious questioning, to insistent uncertainty.
. . . I am silent—I require nothing further,
I cannot answer the question of appearances, or that of identity beyond the grave,
But I walk or sit indifferent—I am satisfied,
He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.
It’s no accident that the word satisfied appears twice within the span of two lines.
Arriving on the heels of that plain, almost naked moment, “Calamus” 8 marks a crucial point, a pivot, one of those moments in an artistic life when a new path opens and beckons. This twelve-line poem begins with a kind of intellectual and artistic autobiography:
Long I thought that knowledge alone would suffice me – O if I could but obtain knowledge!
Then my lands engrossed me—Lands of the prairies, Ohio’s land, the southern savannas, engrossed me—For them I would live – I would be their orator;
Then I met the examples of the old and new heroes—I heard of warriors, sailors, and all dauntless persons—And it seemed to me that I too had it in me to be as dauntless as any—and would be so;
And then, to enclose all, it came to me to strike up the songs of the New World—and then I believed my life must be spent in singing;
That’s as clear an account of the evolution of a poet’s vocation as we’re likely to find anywhere, and for Whitman it is notably economical, its list uncharacteristically compact. The poet wants to make a single sentence here, albeit a capacious one; he wants us to keep the logic of the poem’s movement in mind, its arc from Long I thought to an account of how he sees things now. Amazingly, he makes an announcement to the North American landscape, declaring a change of heart:
But now take notice, land of the prairies, land of the south savannas, Ohio’s land,
Take notice, you Kanuck woods—and you Lake Huron—and all that with you roll toward Niagara—and you Niagara also,
And you, Californian mountains—That you each and all find somebody else to be your singer of songs,
For I can be your singer of songs no longer—One who loves me is jealous of me, and withdraws me from all but love,
With the rest I dispense—I sever from what I thought would suffice me, for it does not—it is now empty and tasteless to me,
I heed knowledge, and the grandeur of The States, and the example of heroes, no more,
I am indifferent to my own songs—I will go with him I love,
It is enough for us that we are together—We never separate again.
I suppose it is no wonder Whitman suppressed this poem, excising it from every edition after 1860. He had to, really, since it charted a direction for future work that he declined to take. Could he, in pursuit of a poetry of intimacy, have abandoned his project as American bard? I wouldn’t regret the loss, especially in the poems written after 1860, when an increasingly nationalistic impulse and a sentimental regard for The States softens the risky freshness of Whitman’s earlier work, compromising the sharpness of his vision.
Had he done so, we’d surely have no Walt Whitman Bridge in Philadelphia, no Walt Whitman Service Area on the New Jersey Turnpike, no Walt Whitman Mall in the town of his birth. High school students would not be reading, as they sometimes still do, “O Captain! My Captain!,” a decidedly Victorian performance of grief. His home in Camden would be no museum, and there would have been no money for a tomb. To appropriate a phrase from Elizabeth Bishop, none of these losses would bring disaster. Though his public role as the Good Gray Poet, for well over a century after his death, perhaps even today, has allowed grateful readers to find the bracing openness of a full-bodied freethinker, a man who loved and embraced the body, and honored its joys, if they dug into the thick and cumbersome volume in which he embedded his best work. Had he followed the course he imagines in “Calamus” 8, would we have his poems of intimacy at all?
I love that Whitman imagines—articulately, clearly—the possibility of stepping away from everything he’s done, and becoming a poet he’d barely recognize. A poet solely devoted to singing his love for another man, in 1860? Into what silence would he have spoken? One can intuit the answer to that in the fact that Whitman did, after all, publish the most open of texts of same-sex love in his time, and basically no one noticed; no internal apparatus or position from which to read the poems existed. This lends “Calamus” much of its essential strangeness; a poem is being spoken out of a silence so profound that the poet must invent a vocabulary to name his subject, and imagine an audience capable of receiving the poem. An alien speaks to other aliens he cannot yet see, though indeed they will come. Whitman’s poem summons Oscar Wilde and Edward Carpenter, Bram Stoker and John Addington Symonds; his poems and his name become a signifier for a category of men emerging toward the century’s end, men thrilled beyond measure to find their poet.
But before all that, here, in “Calamus” 11, is one man, speaking to everyone and no one in particular, writing the lyrics he is compelled to write, which have suddenly veered from the oratorical to the evocation of very particular experience, from the big public space of Manhattan streets or the Crystal Palace built for New York’s 1853 Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, to perhaps a tent in the countryside, in paths untrodden, in the growth by margins of pond waters. The man who has been universal lover, unbounded, proud of the scale of his lust, emerges on a more human scale, the size of any of us, caught in the thrall of one other.
And that night, while all was still, I heard the waters roll slowly continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands, as directed to me, whispering, to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness, in the autumn moonbeam, his face was inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast—And that night I was happy.
Good-bye, then, to Hercules, Bacchus, and the satyr; hello to merely human love.
AS A BOY—years before that issue of Time magazine blew into my hands (on the wind coming from the wings of the angel of history?)—I dwelled under the sign of invisibility. I enjoyed successes in school, and had friends I was forever leaving behind as we moved to a new place, but in my heart I was a member of the one-boy tribe of the Not to Be Named.
Hiding my sexuality meant hiding my body. Even physicality seemed to belong to others; masculinity was a church that was closed to me, and though on some level I longed to join, I didn’t have the keys to those locks. I took refuge in being a smart boy, in reading and putting on plays, arenas in which I could excel and thus downplay my failures.
Dramas of inclusion and rejection played out daily at lunchtime and recess. When four smart and interesting fourth-grade girls, skilled jump-ropers who knew many rhymes, would not allow me to be their friend because I was a boy, I didn’t know how to say that I was not a boy in the way they thought. My eagerness must have fueled their impulse to send me away. That would have been 1962, on a playground newly scraped from Sonoran desert, and the memory still burns a little; a sense of inarticulate frustration rises in my chest as I think of it. Such stories, many infinitely painful, are legion in the memories of gay men and lesbians of my generation.
We’re young enough to have escaped the horrors of aversion therapy, mental institutions, and prison, but old enough to have lived through a weird, nearly total silence, an almost complete invisibility so seamless as to seem unthinkable now, as if an entire culture conspired to say that something evident was simply not there. It makes you crazy, for something you know to be true, know from the very core or root of you, to remain unspeakable.
Enforced invisibility made us sick, left us numb or raging, mostly against ourselves, which is why so many took their own lives, and so many others—myself included, at fifteen—tried to.
Children are still bullied for their difference and vulnerability, and not a month goes by but some poor soul who doesn’t conform to the codes of how a man or woman is supposed to dress or walk or speak is murdered on the street. But the world has shifted, in my lifetime, with dazzling rapidity. In a city like the one I live in (that city being New York, I have to acknowledge there is no other city quite like this one) it’s possible to feel that the gender of one’s lover is an inconsequential matter, which is where liberation is supposed to lead: to what was once forbidden becoming ordinary.
Gestures of consolation or attempts to instill courage always run the risk of oversimplification. It’s too easy to think that once narrow-minded prohibitions are overcome, love and desire are smooth sailing. As if. That’s one reason rainbow-decked celebrations of pride, splashy and fun as they are, have a tinge of the naïve about them. Leaving the question of the solidity and nature of the identity we’re proud of aside, there remains the fact that freedom to love and have sex with those you choose is in fact freedom to be yourself in notoriously complex realms. From the inside, we know what a confusing, difficult, enthralling terrain utopia can be.
Queer Utopia, the late theorist José Esteban Muñoz said, is always a horizon, configured in our desires, informing our actions and dreams, never exactly reached. True I guess for any utopia, but the ideal has a special poignance for those who have lived far from it; it shimmers up ahead, a kind of aura, the future’s shining rim glimpsed above or around our best actions and intentions, our best hopes.
Whitman configures that imagined perfection as a city, a parallel Manhattan, a possibility already latent inside the physical city. Here is the first known version of “Calamus” 24, as found in Whitman’s handwriting:
I dreamed in a dream of a city where all men were like brothers,
O I saw them tenderly love each other—I often saw them, in numbers, walking hand in hand;
I dreamed that was the city of robust friends—Nothing was greater there than manly love—it led the rest,
It was seen every hour in the actions of men of that city, and in all their looks and words. —
And this is the version Whitman published, in 1860, as “Calamus” 34:
I dreamed in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth,
I dreamed that was the new City of Friends,
Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love—it led the rest,
It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,
And in all their looks and words.
The changes are telling. All men were like brothers, / O I saw them tenderly love each other has been replaced with an assertion of the city’s invincibility, and a suggestion that it will be attacked by the whole of the earth—because of that tender love? Is it only in the dreamed city that these lovers are truly safe? The phrase City of Friends seems a bit pale to my ear; it might be a motto for a welcoming Midwestern town, or a Quaker summer camp.
The forthright manly love is gone, replaced by a less specific robust love, and further abstracted by the unnecessary the quality of. This isn’t a beautiful solution to the problem Whitman faced, which was how to say what he meant in a way that it could be read both by insider and outsider, each finding related but distinct meanings there. But it is a canny one: robust suggests health and energy without implying gender. The nearest dictionary yields a remarkably Whitmanian list of synonyms: strong, vigorous, sturdy, tough, powerful, solid, muscular, sinewy, rugged, hardy, strapping, brawny, burly, husky, heavily built. The word’s Latin root refers to the oak, a tree evoked elsewhere in “Calamus” as an emblem of a solitary figure of longing, praised by the poet as rude, unbending, lusty.
Finally, robust needs to be seen in the context of this sequence, named after a plant that grows in Long Island’s marshy ponds and wetlands, its tall stalk bearing a seedpod like a cattail’s but particularly phallic in appearance. The pond where it grows is figured as a cruising site on earth and, for Whitman, a location of erotic connection in the spirit realm as well:
. . . a silent troop gathers around me,
some walk by my side, and some behind, and some embrace my arms or neck,
They, the spirits of friends dead or alive—thicker they come,
A great crowd, and I in the middle . . .
This is the gathering place of the living and the dead men who have been members of a secret brotherhood, comrades, camerados, and Whitman anoints himself their singer, their poet, and grants them the token of their identity:
And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades—this calamus root shall,
Interchange it, youths, with each other!
I CAN’T READ THIS without thinking of Muñoz’s notion of a Queer Utopia, that edge of promise essential to our lives, a gleaming possibility always up ahead, the glimmer never to be fixed in place. Never solidified, but not erasable either.
“My America is still all in the making,” Whitman once said to Horace Traubel. “It’s a promise, a possible something: it’s to come: it’s by no means here. Besides, what do I care about the material America? America is to me an idea, a forecast, a prophecy.”