I
Do you take it I would astonish?
Does the daylight astonish? or the early redstart twittering through the woods?
Do I astonish more than they?
Reading these lines at his desk in Concord, in a complimentary copy sent him by an anonymous author, Emerson almost believed he had seen salvation and could depart in peace. “In raptures,” as a visitor noted, Emerson pointed to a certain “oriental largeness of generalization” as evidence that an American Buddha, the long-awaited national poet, had spoken at last. “So extraordinary,” he told a Boston friend, Samuel Gray Ward, “I must send it to you, & pray you to look it over.” He wondered whether the author had not been “hurt by hard life & too animal experience,” but still praised Leaves of Grass as “wonderful,” “the American poem,” “a nondescript monster,” as he wrote to Carlyle, “which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength.” After some puzzlement over the identity and whereabouts of the new poet, Emerson composed a letter to Walter Whitman, Esq., in care of Fowler and Wells in New York.
Concord Massachusetts 21 July 1855
DEAR SIR,
I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile & stingy Nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our western wits fat & mean.
I give you joy of your free & brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment, which so delights us, & which large perception only can inspire.
I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying & encouraging.
I did not know until I, last night, saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real & available for a Postoffice. I wish to see my benefactor, & have felt much like striking my tasks, & visiting New York to pay you my respects.
R. W. EMERSON.
MR. WALTER WHITMAN.
This five-page salute, Whitman later said, was the charter of “an emperor”—“I supposed the letter was meant to be blazoned,” In the annals of literary partisanship and the laying-on of hands, Emerson’s words are unmatched for their generosity and force, their shrewdness and simple justice. Another insurgent scripture, Walden, published the summer before, had drawn only qualified praise from Emerson. Now he proclaimed the greatness of Leaves of Grass to friends, casual visitors, and far-flung acquaintances. “Toward no other American, toward no contemporary excepting Carlyle, had Emerson used such strong expressions,” said Moncure Conway, the young Harvard Divinity School graduate who was to be Emerson’s first legate to the new poet. “Emerson had been for many years our literary banker; paper that he had inspected, coin that had been rung on his counter, would pass safely anywhere.” Stripped of its marketplace metaphors the same idea was echoed on the other side of the Atlantic by William Howitt, reviewer for the London Weekly Dispatch—“What Emerson has pronounced to be good must not be lightly treated.” Even the Criterion, a high-toned New York weekly that dismissed Whitman’s book as “a mass of stupid filth,” had to acknowledge, apologetically, the quality of its credentials—“an unconsidered letter of introduction has oftentimes procured the admittance of a scurvy fellow into good society.”
Emerson’s letter admitted Leaves of Grass to a meeting of Philadelphia abolitionists where Lucretia Mott, the Quaker preacher, heard it discussed and praised. “R. W. Emerson calls it ‘the book of the age,’“ she wrote to her sister. “It is something Emersonian in style—a kind of unmeasured poetry in praise of America & telling what true poetry is.” She had no objection to the purchase of a copy for her seventeen-year-old granddaughter. The patrician critic and scholar Charles Eliot Norton told his friend James Russell Lowell that he had been alerted to the existence of this “literary curiosity” by the revered Emerson, who had apparently written a letter to the author “expressing the warmest admiration and encouragement.” In his unsigned review in the September Putnam’s Monthly Norton described Leaves of Grass as “preposterous yet somehow fascinating,” a surprisingly harmonious fusion of “Yankee transcendentalism and New York rowdyism” that at times exhibited, in the “rough and ragged thicket of its pages,” undeniable boldness and originality. Norton confessed that he had had to overcome his distaste for the book’s “disgusting” and “intolerable” coarseness. “One cannot leave it about for chance readers,” he told Lowell, “and would be sorry to know that any woman had looked into it past the title-page. I have got a copy for you, for there are things in it you will admire.” (“No, no,” Lowell replied, “the kind of thing you describe won’t do.”) Another member of Emerson’s circle, the clergyman Edward Everett Hale, future author of The Man Without a Country, praised Whitman (in the January 1856 North American Review) for his “remarkable power,” his “freshness, simplicity, and reality,” and for living up to the claims made in the preface. Half a century later Hale was still congratulating himself for having written this review, the first that, in Whitman’s recollection, had done his book anything close to justice.
In the summer of 1855, when he returned from his vacation on eastern Long Island, he had been greeted by a review of a different sort, prominent but grudging and even mischievous, by Charles A. Dana of the Tribune, Horace Greeley’s managing editor. A one-time member of the Brook Farm commune who had lived on admiring terms with its founder, George Ripley, and with Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dana had retrieved some remnants of idealism from the ruins of that experiment in plain living and high thinking. In the “nameless bard” of Leaves of Grass he recognized an oafish descendant of Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and other “prophets of the soul.” He too praised Whitman’s “bold, stirring thoughts,” “genuine intimacy with nature,” and “keen appreciation of beauty.” But he argued that “the essential spirit of poetry” had found “an uncouth and grotesque embodiment.” “His independence often becomes coarse and defiant. His language is too frequently reckless and indecent,” Dana said, sounding the cry that Whitman was to hear to the end of his days, “and will justly prevent his volume from free circulation in scrupulous circles.” Because of such objections William Swayne, the Fulton Street bookseller listed in the original announcements in the Tribune, had withdrawn Leaves of Grass from his stock and his name from Fowler and Wells’s advertisements. Even Life Illustrated, the firm’s own “Family Newspaper,” said the book was “perfect nonsense,” “a series of utterances” that the public was advised to take or leave, “just as they prefer.” Soon Samuel Wells, more of a businessman and less of a crusader than his partner Orson Fowler, suggested that Whitman omit “certain objectionable passages” or look for another publisher.
At Mickle Street Whitman made an almost casual thing of it when he explained how Emerson’s letter, a private and privileged communication, came to be published in the New York Tribune without the writer’s permission or foreknowledge. He said that when he was walking down the street in New York he happened to run into Dana, who had heard about the letter along the transcendental grapevine, was eager to print it in his newspaper, and wanted Whitman to release the text to him. Whitman refused, but a week or so later changed his mind, having been won over by Dana, who represented himself, with some justification, as “a friend of Mr. Emerson” and therefore in a responsible position to decide what was legitimate and proper for everyone concerned. He printed the letter in the Tribune on October 10 and prefaced it with a brief paragraph that suggested a turning-point in the public fortunes of Leaves of Grass:
We sometime since had occasion to call the attention of our readers to this original and striking collection of poems, by Mr. Whitman of Brooklyn. In so doing we could not avoid noticing certain faults which seemed to us to be prominent in the work. The following opinion, from a distinguished source, views the matter from a more positive and less critical standpoint.
At first cautious and reluctant, just as his phrenological chart had said, Whitman could justifiably claim to have been, up to this point, the unoffending victim of Dana’s good intentions and unreliable assurances.* But once the letter was released he fell on it like a hawk—“I too am not a bit tamed.” The life of his sacred book was in the balance. He sent the Tribune clipping to Longfellow and other celebrities, arranged to have the letter printed in Life Illustrated, and eventually distributed it to editors and critics in the form of a small broadside he printed up. It was headed “Copy for the convenience of private reading only” and changed Emerson’s formal “Mr. Walter Whitman” to “Walt Whitman.”
The letter became part of the fabric of his plans as he prepared the second edition of his book during 1855 and 1856. “Make no puns / funny remarks / Double entendres / ‘witty’ remarks / ironies / Sarcasms,” he instructed himself in his notebook. “Only that which / is simply earnest, / meant,—harmless / to any one’s feelings /— unadorned / unvarnished / nothing to / excite a / laugh / silence / silence / silence / silence / laconic / taciturn.” He vows to “Avoid all the ‘intellectual / subtleties,’ and ‘withering doubts’ and ‘blasted hopes’ and ‘unrequited / loves,’ and ‘ennui’ and ‘wretchedness’ and the whole of the lurid and artistical and melo-dramatic / effects.—Preserve perfect calmness and sanity.” He lists some of his casual acquaintances in New York—
Sam (with black eyes & cap)
Nick (black eyes 40th st—small)
Joe (Canadian-Montreal)
Bill Young (milkman & driver)
George Applegate (tallest)
English Johnny (49th st Jockey cap)
Sam (49th st round shoulders light clothes)
—and also sketches out, in the pride of creation and mastery, his “Sun-Down Poem” (“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”) of 1856:
Poem of passage / the scenes on the river / as I cross the / Fulton ferry / Others will see the flow / of the river, also, / Others will see on both / sides the city of / New York and the city / of Brooklyn / a hundred years hence others / will see them . . . The continual and hurried crowd of / men and women crossing / The reflection of the sky / in the water—the blinding / dazzle in a track from / the most declined sun, / The lighters—the sailors / in their picturesque costumes / the nimbus of light / around the shadow of my / head in the sunset
Further on, along with trial passages for another major new poem of 1856, “Song of the Broad-Axe,” is an entry of a different sort. Enclosed within a large bracket, it occupies a page to itself:
“I greet you at the
beginning of a great
career
R. W. Emerson
Whitman made several layouts of these words on binder’s paper left over from the first edition before he had them stamped in gold on the spine of the second edition around August 1856. Torn out of context, gaudily displayed, this Ali Baba formula appeared to be an endorsement even of new poems Emerson could not possibly have seen. And further compounding what a Boston paper had called “the grossest violation of literary comity and courtesy that ever passed under our notice,” at the end of the book Whitman once again printed the entire letter along with a vaunting essay in the form of a public thank-you:
Brooklyn August 1856.
Here are thirty-two poems, which I send you, dear Friend and Master, not having found how I could satisfy myself with sending any usual acknowledgement of your letter. The first edition, on which you mailed me that till now unanswered letter, was twelve poems—I printed a thousand copies, and they readily sold; these thirty-two Poems I stereotype, to print several thousand copies of. I much enjoy making poems. Other work I have set for myself to do, to meet people and The States face to face, to confront them with an American rude tongue; but the work of my life is making poems. I keep on till I make a hundred, and then several hundred—perhaps a thousand. A few years, and the average annual call for my Poems is ten or twenty thousand—more, quite likely. Why should I hurry or compromise? . . . Master, I am a man of perfect faith.
Even the loyal and resourceful Bucke, utterly flummoxed for once, had to admit that Whitman’s “they readily sold” was “a plain lie.” According to Bucke’s information, the first edition had “no sale” and the second “little or no sale.” “If the reader goes to a bookstore,” Hale had pointed out in his review, “he may expect to be told, at first, as we were, that there is no such book, and has not been.” Whitman himself said he doubted “if even ten were sold” and that he ended up giving away almost all of his first edition to “friends and relatives”—“Oh, as a money matter, the book was a dreadful failure.” It was a “failure” despite the vigorous deployment of his talents as an impresario with one lifelong act to manage. The lessons of P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, General Tom Thumb and the Swedish Nightingale had not been wasted on him.
Whitman supplied friendly journals with the information that Leaves of Grass created “an extraordinary sensation in the literary world on both sides of the Atlantic”—“the emphatic commendation of America’s greatest critic has been ratified by the public.” And it was Whitman who wrote three anonymous reviews of Leaves of Grass that appeared around the end of 1855. “An American bard at last!” he announced in the United States Review. “Politeness this man has none, and regulation he has none. A rude child of the people!—No imitation—No foreigner—but a growth and idiom of America,” he wrote in the Brooklyn Daily Times, and in support of these and similar claims he subjoined Lorenzo Fowler’s reading of the bard’s skull and personality. In the American Phrenological Journal, a Fowler and Wells enterprise, he cited Tennyson’s poetry with admiring tolerance but predicted his own, riding the wave of the future, might yet prove “the most glorious of triumphs, in the known history of literature.”
Skillfully managed, Whitman’s homemade appreciations made news in their own right. A friendly journalist, William Swinton, praised him in the New York Times for the “manly vigor” and “brawny health” of Leaves of Grass. “This man has brave stuff in him. He is truly astonishing.” In the course of several thousand words of careful and sensitive discussion, Swinton reported that “proof slips of certain articles written about Leaves of Grass” had been delivered to the Times office together with a copy of the first edition bound in green and gold and the printed text of a letter in which Ralph Waldo Emerson complimented the author “on the benefaction conferred on society”:
On subsequently comparing the critiques from the United States Review and the Phrenological Journal with the Preface of Leaves of Grass we discovered unmistakable evidence that Mr. Walt Whitman, true to the character of a Kosmos, was not content with writing a book, but was also determined to review it, so Mr. Walt Whitman has concocted both those criticisms of his own work, treating it we need not say how favorably.
Sensation generated sensation, Whitman had learned. So did neglect, if it was conspicuous enough. Later he tended to favor a history in which Leaves of Grass, far from “an extraordinary sensation,” had been greeted in total silence or with howls of derision.
The same appreciations, along with Swinton’s “expose,” were to see further service in 1860 in Leaves of Grass Imprints, a 64-page promotional pamphlet got up for his third edition. Their authorship was not officially acknowledged until 1893, when they appeared in a memorial volume, In Re Walt Whitman, edited by his literary executors. By this time Traubel and the others had almost learned to live with their mortification. “Walt, some people think you blew your own horn a lot,” Traubel said to him, “—wrote puffs on yourself—sort of attitudinized and called attention to yourself quite a bit.” “Do they say so? Do they? Who are ‘some people?’ What are ‘puffs?’” the old man countered before falling back on the principle he usually invoked on such occasions, that he spoke for his work with better authority than any party of the second part. “I have merely looked myself over and repeated candidly what I saw,” he said. “If you did it for the sake of aggrandizing yourself that would be another thing; but doing it simply for the purpose of getting your own weight and measure is as right done for you by yourself as done for you by another.” He became testier when Traubel quizzed him about his promotions involving Emerson. What made the whole history so distressing was that Whitman had long since repudiated fealty to his “master” and had done so with such gracelessness that the sincerity of his original declaration became suspect. Perhaps having in mind only the senile relic, much given to intervals of mental removal from reality, who was worshiped by the church of Emerson after about 1870, Whitman wrote him off as lacking in “red blood, heat, brawn, animality,” as another literary gentleman in whose work America “not only plays no important figure . . . but hardly appears.” Even more shocking was a statement he made in 1880:
The reminiscence that years ago I began like most youngsters to have a touch (though it came late, and was only on the surface) of Emerson-on-the-brain—that I read his writings reverently, and address’d him in print as “Master,” and for a month or so thought of him as such—I retain not only with composure, but positive satisfaction. I have noticed that most young people of eager minds pass through this stage of exercise. The best part of Emersonianism is, it breeds the giant that destroys itself. Who wants to be any man’s mere follower? lurks behind every page.
“It is of no importance whether I had read Emerson before starting L. of G. or not,” he told the faithful Kennedy in 1887, and he was barely able to control his exasperation. “The fact happens to be positively I had not. . . If I were to unbosom to you in the matter I should say that I never cared so very much for E.’s writings.” *
Traubel was the most persistent of the disciples. “According to your letter to Emerson, you sold all the first edition,” he said and put the problem to Whitman squarely. “I was wondering whether you were not bluffing Emerson.” “You mean bragging? Well—maybe there was something of that sort in it.” Traubel held firm. “I can’t forget, either, that in that same letter you call Emerson ‘master.’ Now you repudiate the word. What did you mean by it then? . . . You didn’t need to play Emerson: he was on your side without it.” “Who the hell talked about playing anybody?” Whitman fired back. “Do you mean to say I’m a liar?” “No,” Traubel said. “I only mean to say that I’d like to know the real reason for ‘readily sold’ and ‘master.’” Whitman retreated. “Maybe if you look long enough in the right place you’ll find what you’re looking for,” another cat with a long, long tail.
But Whitman’s public dealings with Emerson were imperious from the start. He blazoned the letter like a rescript from a royal cousin who—having already discerned the poet’s “free & brave thought,” “courage,” “great power,” and unshakable sense of mission as bard, prophet and oversoul—should not have been altogether surprised to find in him also the naked egotism, “the disdain and calmness,” of saints and tyrants. “I am so non-polite,” Whitman said in 1857, “so habitually wanting in my responses and ceremonies.” His correspondent replied, “I think your judgment of yourself is rather severe”—if Emerson and his aggrieved friends had “expected common etiquette from you, after having read Leaves of Grass, they were sadly mistaken in your character.”
“That was very wrong, very wrong indeed,” Emerson said after his letter appeared in the Tribune. “Had I intended it for publication I should have enlarged the but very much—enlarged the but.” It was “a strange, rude thing” Whitman had done, he told Samuel Longfellow, the Cambridge poet’s younger brother. The distinguished geologist J. P. Lesley believed Emerson had been victimized. Lesley had found Leaves of Grass “trashy, profane & obscene” and “the author a pretentious ass, without decency. I was not a little vexed therefore,” he wrote to Emerson, “when a few days afterward my cousin came in with a newspaper slip containing what purported to be a letter of respect and gratitude to the author over the name which of all others among American good men and thinkers I revere and love as a master and leader of the people. . . . I pronounced it at once ungenuine, a malicious jest.” Friends who visited Emerson when the blazoned second edition arrived in the mail claimed that until that moment they had never seen him truly angry. His later comments on Leaves of Grass were to have an edge of mockery and disparagement, a clear note of “but”: “an auctioneer’s inventory of a warehouse,” for example, “a singular blend of the Bhagvat Ghita and the New York Herald,” “half song-thrush, half alligator.” Yet even in his first dismay over the abuse of a privileged communication Emerson held true to his announced purpose, to strike his tasks and visit New York “to see my benefactor . . . to pay you my respects.”
A one-word entry in Emerson’s day book for December 11, 1855—“Brooklyn”—may be the only record he kept at the time of their first meeting. Emerson called at the little wooden house on Ryerson Street. They talked for an hour or so and went off to eat dinner in New York and after, on Whitman’s urging, to drink beer at Fireman’s Hall, a noisy social club on Mercer Street. “Emerson’s face always seemed to me so clean—as if God had just washed it off,” Whitman said. He understood why Carlyle, on first meeting Emerson, had called him an “angel,” “a beautiful transparent soul.” When he was next in Brooklyn, probably in February 1856, Emerson called again, and they had dinner at the Astor House. But before these encounters, Emerson sought out information from others about “the strange Whitman,” “our wild Whitman,” “a wayward, fanciful man.”
II
“As you seemed much interested in him and his work,” Conway wrote to Emerson in September 1855, “I have taken the earliest moment which I can command . . . to give you some account of my visit.” After a talk with Emerson, Conway had bought a copy of Leaves of Grass at Fowler and Wells’s Boston branch on Washington Street and read it on the night steamer to New York. The next morning he looked Whitman up in the Brooklyn city directory and called at Ryerson Street; Mrs. Whitman directed Conway to the Romes’ printing office. “I found him revising some proof. A man you would not have marked in a thousand; blue striped shirt, opening from a red throat; and sitting on a chair without a back, which, being the only one, he offered me, and sat down on a round of the printer’s desk himself. His manner was blunt enough also, without being disagreeably so. . . . He seemed very eager to hear from you, and what you thought of his book.” He was amused to hear from Conway—his first official literary visitor, he said—about the Reverend Mr. Cyrus Bartol, a prominent Boston Unitarian, who had started to read aloud from Leaves of Grass in polite company but was so embarrassed that he abandoned the experiment. Apparently a man of leisure, Walt accompanied Conway to the ferry and crossed over with him. He swaggered when he walked, kept his hands in his outside pockets, and greeted as friends and equals fruit peddlers, ticket-takers, and roustabouts that he met along the way—“laboring class,” Conway noted. “He says he is one of that class by choice, that he is personally dear to some thousands of such . . . who ‘love him but cannot make head or tail of his book,’” a paradox that often bothered Walt. The next day Walt and Conway dined in genteel circumstances at the Metropolitan Hotel with Conway’s sister and a friend of hers. Both young ladies had been exposed to passages from his book and were eager to meet him; they found his manners good and his talk entertaining. “I went off impressed with the sense of a new city on my map,” Conway concluded, “just as if it had suddenly risen through the boiling sea.”
Also put up to it by Emerson, Samuel Longfellow, then pastor of the Second Unitarian Church in Brooklyn, made overtures to Whitman through a mutual friend. To his surprise Whitman paid him an unannounced visit. Wearing his usual knockabout clothes the poet turned out to be “not in the least boisterous in manner,” although he persisted in keeping his hat on while he sat in the minister’s parlor on Pierrepont Street—
I cock my hat as I please indoors or out.
He talked freely about growing up on Long Island, his experiences as printer, newspaper editor, and now publisher of his own book. He was preparing a second edition, which Fowler and Wells were still willing to distribute for him, and meanwhile writing a series of articles—about the opera and Dr. Abbott’s Egyptian Museum—for the firm’s Life Illustrated. Longfellow was charmed, yet found him “not so handsome a person as his verses are handsome.” “Isn’t it a quite wonderful book?” he wrote to Hale, whose review he had just read. “Such quick and live senses, such love of men, boys, women, babies, trees—all things that are. So keen to see, so vigorous to touch with right words. Such marvellous little pictures in two or five words. Such human tenderness at times.”
Unlike many poets, Longfellow might have noted, Walt dedicated his tenderness to no single lover but to a collectivity of about thirty million souls, the American church, for whom he was writing a Bible. In the course of the great illumination at the heart of Leaves of Grass it seemed that Walt had leaped directly from his discovery of identity and vocation to a conspicuously ample stage of generativity, and he had done this, as far as one could tell, without having experienced sustained intimacy With any one person.
O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!
he told his readers in one of the new poems of 1856:
Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you will be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,
I have loved many women and men but I love none better than you. . . .
The hopples fall from your ankles.*
But the tender lover, teacher and liberator also had a savage side. When he looked at the turmoil of American politics in 1856 and observed the slaveholding interests apparently coercing an entire free people into the “hopple, the iron wristlet, and the neck-spike,” whispers and caresses gave way to a rhetoric of tumors, abscesses and running sores. In the White House Franklin Pierce “eats dirt and excrement for his daily meals, likes it, and tries to force it on The States,” Whitman wrote in “The Eighteenth Presidency!” a pamphlet that he wrote, set in type, and offered in proof sheets 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 re-produce 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 about 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 character, pride, friendship, conscience of America have yet to be proved to the remainder of the world.
The American Party, a haven for proslavery politicians, had chosen ex-President Millard Fillmore as its candidate in 1856, and the Democratic Party the chicken-hearted James Buchanan, both of them “disunionists,” Whitman raged, political corpses that had been padded, painted and lifted out of putrid graves by “spies, blowers, electioneers, body snatchers, bawlers, bribers, compromisers, runaways, lobbyers, sponges, ruined sports, expelled gamblers, policy backers, monte dealers, duelists, carriers of concealed weapons, blind men, deaf men, pimpled men, scarred inside with the vile disorder, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people’s money and harlot’s money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combings and born freedom sellers of the earth.” In 1856 the former Democratic regular and Tammany stump speaker was to give his vote to the first presidential candidate of the Republican party, the soldier-explorer John C. Fremont. “The Eighteenth Presidency!”—Leaves of Grass restated as campaign literature—declared a faith that was to be put to the test all too soon. “What political denouements are these we are approaching? On all sides tyrants tremble, crowns are unsteady, the human race restive, on the watch for some better era, some divine war,” he said, five years before the first cannonade in Charleston Harbor. “No man knows what will happen next, but all know that some such things are to happen as mark the greatest moral convulsions of the earth. Who shall play the hand for America in these tremendous games?”
The most successful literary couple in the United States in 1856 were the biographer James Parton, an acquaintance of Whitman’s, and his wife Sara, known to a doting public as Fanny Fern. Hawthorne admired her moralizing sketches; the tendriled cover design of Leaves of Grass, and the germ of Whitman’s title as well, may have been borrowed from her Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio. Parton’s first book, The Life of Horace Greeley (1855), sold about 30,000 copies within six months of publication and sent him on his way to become the preeminent biographer of his time. And so when Samuel Wells began to consider divesting himself of Leaves of Grass he suggested, quite sensibly, that Whitman apply to the Partons, “who are rich & enterprizing” and to their publishers, Mason Brothers of New York.
As a pupil at Catharine Beecher’s school in Hartford Sara earned the nickname “Sal-Volatile.” Her impetuousness, mercurial changes of mood, and hypersensitivity to criticism, along with her coquettish pride in her auburn ringlets and regal manners, had become more pronounced with age. She was forty-four in January 1856, when she married Parton, her third husband and eleven years her junior, and the early years of their marriage were tempestuous and quarrelsome. From the start Sara cast her eye on Walt in a cherishing way. She had not yet read his book, she wrote in her column in the Ledger on April 19, 1856 (“Peeps from Under a Parasol”), but she admired his “muscular throat,” his broad shoulders, “that fine, ample chest of his,” and his voice, “rich, deep, and clear as a clarion note. In the most crowded thoroughfare, one would turn instinctively on hearing it, to seek out its owner.” Two days later she sent a clipping of this item to Walt along with a hand-delivered note.
You are delicious! May my right hand wither if I don’t tell the whole world before another week, what one woman thinks of you.
“Walt”? “what I assume you shall assume!” Some one evening this week you are to spend with Jemmy [Parton] & me—Wednesday?—say.
She addressed herself to Leaves of Grass in her column on May 10. Where Emerson has spoken, “my woman’s voice of praise may not avail,” she said, archly, considering that each week half a million readers of her column in the New York Ledger were in the habit of hanging on her words. She spoke of her “unmingled delight” in the book and extended to the author “the cordial grasp of a woman’s hand.” She found nothing “limp, tame, spiritless” about these leaves, created by a “glorious Native American” who had put aside his labors with chisel, plane, and hammer to write them and set them in type with “toil-hardened fingers.” What made her review even more remarkable for 1856 was that, as a woman, she declared her unmingled delight even in poems in Leaves of Grass already notorious for “coarseness and sensuality.” She admired them because they painted nature nude, celebrated the healthy, living human body and paid tribute to woman as “the bearer of the great fruit, which is immortality.” “My moral constitution may be hopelessly tainted or—too sound to be tainted, as the critic wills, but I confess that I extract no poison from these ‘Leaves’—to me they have brought only healing. Let him who can do so shroud the eyes of the nursing babe lest it see its mother’s breast.”
With such publicity Walt inevitably became a Topic—like William Lloyd Garrison, Fanny Kemble, and Henry Ward Beecher—at Brooklyn soirées in 1856. “I was not their kind,” he said about Samuel Longfellow’s circle, “so preferred not to push myself in, or, if in, to stay in.” But Longfellow managed to recruit him from time to time, and although Walt had little to say at these gatherings he was nonetheless the center of attention, according to Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May, then a fledgling author of thrillers. Survivor of high-principled experiments in living, of Pythagorean diets of squash, turnips, and cold water, Alcott had responded to leaves of Grass when he first read it as if twenty years were suddenly subtracted from his age and he had broken his life-long vows about alcohol—his empyreal prose took on a Whitman bluster.
Meeting Walt face to face for the first time in October Alcott recognized in him “the very God Pan,” “an extraordinary person, full of brute power, certainly of genius and audacity,” who, to Alcott’s delight, came right out with it and boasted that he spoke for America and its institutions, that he had never been sick a day in his life or taken medicine and was “quite innocent of repentance and man’s fall.” When they had dinner together at Taylor’s Saloon on Broadway early in December Walt said he was planning to go to Washington soon to report on the activities of “the pigmies assembled there at the Capitol.” As for full-sized men and women he appeared to believe, if Alcott understood him correctly, that although America was pregnant with them she could presently show only two, Emerson and himself.
Walt was a guest at Longfellow’s house a few days after Christmas, when Alcott, itinerant transcendentalist sage, conducted one of his celebrated “Conversations,” Orphic and metaphysical rites of sometimes stupefyingly elevated discourse, chiefly monologue. Alcott noted that Walt, who was wearing his trouser bottoms tucked inside his cowhide boots, endured the evening “very becomingly,” although he was “not at home, very plainly, in parlours, and as hard to tame as Thoreau.”
Henry Thoreau, temporarily employed as a land surveyor at Eagleswood, a nearby Fourierist community, had joined Alcott in New York a few days after Buchanan’s election victory. They shared a room at Dr. Russell Traill’s Water Cure and Hydropathic Medical College, spent a day with Horace Greeley on his Chappaqua farm, and on Sunday crossed over to Brooklyn to attend services at Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church. Thoreau was fidgety during the sermon on universal justice, delivered with Beecher’s accustomed unction, uplift, and eye on the box office (as Whitman said, “We may well doubt whether he is not making people Beecherites instead of Christians”).
After midday Sabbath dinner with the merchant Richard Manning, a friend of the eminent Unitarian divine William H. Channing, Thoreau and Alcott walked to Classon Avenue, where the Whitmans had recently moved, and in Walt’s absence visited with his mother. Walt had his flaws, she admitted, but he had always been wise and good, much looked up to by his brothers and sisters as well as by any number of “common folks.” He had retired from housebuilding and now “had no business but going out and coming in to eat, drink, write, and sleep.” She believed in him “absolutely,” Alcott noted. While they were talking in the kitchen Thoreau helped himself to some of her biscuits from the oven. (“He was always doing things of the plain sort—without fuss,” said Walt.) They left with the assurance that her son would be at home the next morning and happy to see them. That evening at Manning’s house Alcott organized a Conversation on the subject of divine, human, and savage attributes. Mrs. Sarah Tyndale, a Germantown abolitionist whom they had met at dinner—Alcott described her as “a solid walrus of a woman”—spoke for the human, citing in particular the candor and compassionateness of women. In any case she preferred Thoreau’s savages to Alcott’s blessed Jesus, in her view a “fancy man” short on gumption.
She went along with Alcott and Thoreau the next day. Walt showed them up the narrow stairs at Classon Avenue to the attic room he shared with Eddy. Their common bed was still unmade; the chamber pot beneath sat practically in full sight. Walt, it was clear, exhibited the insouciance and rectitude he cherished in animals. A rough worktable and chair stood by the single window; there was a small pile of books on the mantelpiece. Pasted on the bare wall were prints of Hercules, Bacchus, and a satyr. “Which, now, of the three, particularly, is the new poet here?” Alcott asked. Walt declined to be questioned about the pictures, hinting, as Alcott understood, that perhaps he saw himself as Hercules, Bacchus and satyr combined, a sort of pantheon.
Pictures aside, he seemed not only eager to talk about himself but reluctant to have the conversation stray from the subject for long. While his visitors tried to accommodate themselves in this cheerless coop, Walt told them a great deal about himself, his daily baths (even in the coldest weather), his passion for the opera, Broadway omnibuses, their drivers and, above all, his writing. He lived for nothing else but to “make poems,” he told them, pronouncing the word “pomes,” and had recently brought out a new edition of Leaves of Grass, a copy of which he presented to Thoreau before the morning was over. These days he was in the grip of another creative surge and at the rate that he was going would soon need a third edition with about eight times as many “pieces” as the first. All in all, in place of this account of himself, he might just as well have recited a passage from “Song of the Broad-Axe”:
Arrogant, masculine, näive, rowdyish,
Laugher, weeper, worker, idler, citizen, countryman,
Saunterer of woods, stander upon hills, summer swimmer in rivers or by the sea,
Of pure American breed, of reckless health, his body perfect, free from taint from top to toe, free forever from headache and dyspepsia, clean-breathed,
Ample-limbed, a good feeder, weight a hundred and eighty pounds, full-blooded, six feet high, forty inches round the breast and back,
Countenance sun-burnt, bearded, calm, unrefined,
Reminder of animals, meeter of savage and gentleman on equal terms, . . .
Thoreau had so far been mainly silent, but he could not have been put off by Whitman’s egotism alone. (“I should not talk so much about myself,” he had said in Walden, “if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.”) But neither was he willing to try his strength against the other’s. Observing the edgy traffic between them, Alcott was reminded of “two beasts, each wondering what the other would do, whether to snap or run.” He decided that either Henry was afraid Walt would steal his woods and wild creatures or Walt had recognized that for once he had met his match in Henry, “a sagacity potent, penetrating, and peerless as his own,” an ego as unbiddable, an eye as hawklike. (Emerson surmised that perhaps Henry’s “fancy for Walt Whitman grew out of his taste for wild nature, for an otter, a woodchuck, or a loon.”) Later in the course of what turned out to be a two-hour visit they went downstairs to the parlor, where they could be reasonably comfortable. Alcott tried to engage Walt and Henry in conversation with each other. After one relatively prolonged exchange—Walt remembered it as “a hot discussion”—they lapsed into formal compliments. Henry departed with Alcott, leaving behind with Walt a new friend and admirer, Sarah Tyndale.
Describing the encounter twelve days later, Thoreau confessed that Whitman “is essentially strange to me,” a strangeness compounded by Whitman’s claim during their talk that “I misapprehended him. I am not quite sure that I do.” “Among the few things which I chanced to say,” Thoreau reported, “I remember that one was, in answer to him as representing America, that I did not think much of America or of politics, and so on, which may have been somewhat of a damper to him.” Thoreau took a much more radical view of the issues involved in “The Eighteenth Presidency!” (“It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one,” he had said in Walden, “but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.”) Each had his own vector of self-willed resistance to a trade- and conformity-minded society.
A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,
If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the world,
Walt proclaimed, and Henry, who knew about huts and life reduced to simplest terms, could approve the sentiment, if not the precise words in which it was put. “Great” was one of Walt’s cherished words, while “true” was one of Henry’s, and correspondingly Henry’s style of dissent was often cool, mocking and precise, nervous and spare. Politics of the sort Walt concerned himself with seemed to Henry “something so superficial and inhuman that practically I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all.” And as for obligations to the democratic mass—“I feel that my connections with and obligations to society are still very slight and transient.” His gibe about America, politics “and so on,” intended partly as a corrective to demagogic rant and naïve optimism, seemed to Walt only to reflect a disagreeable trait that Thoreau, in most respects an admirable person in word and deed, an ally, shared with the mighty Carlyle: “disdain” for ordinary people, “inability to appreciate the average life,” altogether “a very aggravated case of superciliousness.” Walt came to believe that literary New Englanders in general were snobbish, reserved and antidemocratic—“Emerson is the only sweet one among them and he has been spoilt by them”—although Thoreau, like Emerson and Alcott, had come considerably more than half way to meet him.
Thoreau had his asperities and his cold side, there was no doubt of it. “As for taking Thoreau’s arm,” a Concord woman remarked, “I should as soon take the arm of an elm tree.” It was the elm-tree Thoreau whom Whitman saw, not the hot convert who later carried his copy of Leaves of Grass like a red flag through the streets of Concord. A month after their meeting, Thoreau was still discovering in “Song of Myself” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” not only “more good” than he had known for a long time but the force of revelation. Whitman’s “alarum or trumpet-note ringing through the American camp” Henry was to hear again when Captain John Brown rode on Harpers Ferry.
A prude when it came to sexual matters, Thoreau found “two or three pieces” in Leaves of Grass “which are disagreeable, to say the least; simply sensual. It is as if the beasts spoke. I think that men have not been ashamed of themselves without reason. No doubt there have always been dens where such deeds were unblushingly recited, and it is no merit to compete with the inhabitants. But even on this side he has spoken more truth than any American or modern that I know. . . . He occasionally suggests something a little more than human. You can’t confound him with the other inhabitants of Brooklyn or New York. How they must shudder when they read him!” Thoreau had neither snapped nor run. “Since I have seen him I find that I am not disturbed by any brag or egotism in his book. He may turn out to be the least of a braggart of all, having a better right to be confident. He is a great fellow.”