I
The Long Island Patriot, the newspaper for which Walt had begun working in 1831, when he was twelve, occupied an old brick building on Fulton Street. It had once served as General Israel Putnam’s headquarters. In the basement, along with a stationery shop, was the composing room of William Hartshorne, who had grown up in Philadelphia during the Revolution and rubbed shoulders with some of its heroes; he entertained his apprentices with personal anecdotes about Washington, Jefferson and Franklin. The hand press he used for printing the Patriot’s single sheet of four pages was scarcely more sophisticated than the one Franklin worked a century earlier, and in other ways, too, Hartshorne was a link to a principled past that seemed to be receding with alarming speed during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. “He had the old-school manner,” Walt said, “rather sedate, not fast, never too familiar, always restraining his temper, always cheerful, benevolent, friendly, observing all the decorums of language and action.”
Standing at the type case, the apprentice was instructed by his master in “the pleasing mystery of the different letters and their divisions—the great ‘e’ box—the box for spaces . . . the ‘a’ box, ‘I’ box, ‘o’ box, and all the rest—the box for quads away off in the right hand corner—the slow and laborious formation, type by type, of the first line.” Words formed this way were tangible, vital, the incarnation of thought; when the boy’s thumb pressed the composing stick too hard and pied the line he set, words seemed to show a resistant purpose of their own. More than twenty years later, in another print shop in Brooklyn, Whitman was to stand at the case again; as he set type for the first edition of Leaves of Grass he remembered a kind and patient master:
The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,
He turns his quid of tobacco, and his eyes get blurred with the manuscript.
The Patriot, a weekly founded and conducted as the organ of the Democratic Party in Kings County, reflected none of Hartshorne’s antique constancy. During Whitman’s employment it was the creature of a flamboyant editor, Samuel E. Clement, a tall, hawk-nosed Quaker of Southern antecedents who walked the village lanes in a long-tailed blue coat with gilt buttons and a leghorn hat. As a reward for services rendered the Democratic Party, Clement also held the Brooklyn postmastership (his predecessor was now customs inspector for the port of New York). During his tenure of office at the Patriot the Fulton Street premises were a clearinghouse for the United States mails as well as for political and newspaper business.
In this easygoing atmosphere the young Whitman played pranks on such visitors as Henry Murphy, future Democratic boss of Brooklyn. He felt that Clement was “a ‘good fellow’” and went along for the, ride and for company when the editor drove his buggy out to Bushwick and New Lots delivering papers to country subscribers. Despite his verve and other attractive qualities, Clement managed at one stroke to turn the public and his political patrons against him. He was a grave robber. Loud demands were heard for his banishment, and after a period of simmering down and then oblivion he resurfaced on an opposition newspaper in Camden, New Jersey. What had come to light, in the course of a lawsuit in May 1831, was Clement’s participation in a Poe-like adventure that touched on his apprentice’s deepest springs of terror—
A shroud I see and I am the shroud, I wrap a body and lie in the coffin,
It is dark here under ground, it is not evil or pain here, it is blank here, for reasons.
(It seems to me that every thing in the light and air ought to be happy,
Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough.)
More than twenty-five years afterward Whitman wrote a remarkably detailed account of the Clement affair. “Several gentlemen,” he wrote in the Brooklyn Daily Times in 1857, “were very anxious to have the sculptured counterfeit presentment of Elias Hicks, the renowned preacher of ‘inner light,’ who had then lately [February 27, 1830] died at Jericho, Long Island.” One of the gentlemen was John Henri Browere, of New York, a noted maker of life masks who numbered among his subjects Lafayette, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Dolly Madison; another of the gentlemen was Browere’s son, who inherited his father’s trade secrets and went into the business of casting heads for phrenological examination. Clement and the Broweres stole into the graveyard at night, dug up Hicks’s body, and took a plaster cast of the head and face.
From this mould a permanent one was made and several busts of Elias were formed, quite perfect, it is said. But soon a quarrel arose, in reference to the division of the anticipated profits from the sale of the bust—for the whole thing was as much intended for a speculation as to rescue the likeness of Elias, and transmit it to posterity. The quarrel became at length so exasperated that, either from sullen agreement, or in some crisis of excitement, the moulds and the few busts made from them were all smashed to pieces! Thus ended this singular and in some of its particulars revolting affair.
He must have thought of this affair again at the end of his life, when he was writing his sketch of Hicks. He had a large plaster bust of him, “one of my treasures,” in the parlor at Mickle Street, and he included a copperplate “portrait of E. H. from life” in November Boughs. “There’s one reason in particular I want this picture to appear,” he explained, perhaps with a trace of sympathy for what Clement had attempted. “With the damnable unreason of a sect the Quakers—too many of them—are fiercely opposed to pictures, music, in their houses. I want this head, therefore, to flaunt itself in the faces of the Quakers who see this book.”
By the summer of 1832 young Whitman had also left the Patriot., to work in the printing office of the opposition Whig weekly in Brooklyn, the Long Island Star. Unlike Clement, the Star’s owner and editor, Alden Spooner, was rooted in the community and a power behind its remarkable growth; he led the fight for the city charter granted in 1834. At a time when stage plays as well as the doctrines of Frances Wright were anathematized in the city of churches, Spooner’s paper was sympathetic to both, gave enlightened attention to science and ideas, lyceum lectures and demonstrations, art and literature, and offered houseroom in its pages to poetry and prose by local authors, some of them quite accomplished. “America has hitherto produced very few writers of distinction; it possesses no great historians and not a single eminent poet,” Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the course of his travels through the United States in 1831 and 1832. “The inhabitants of that country look upon literature properly so called with a kind of disapprobation.” Whitman heard reflections of this sort all through his early years, and eventually he set himself the goal of being not just an eminent poet but his nation’s chosen bard. Meanwhile, the Star did its best to answer the literary challenge, and though serving the Whigs just as the Patriot served the Jacksonian party, it made a serious effort to do more than merely advance political schemes that, according to Tocqueville, were often “very ill-digested” and whipped readers up into partisan frenzies. “As men become more equal and individualism more to be feared,” he said, newspapers would have to become instruments of “intellectual and moral association . . . To suppose that they only serve to protect freedom would be to diminish their importance. They maintain civilization.”
Ventilated by the winds of civilization, change, and the great world, the Star was Walt’s college and trade school, and he graduated a journeyman printer in May 1835, when he was sixteen and practically full-grown; “grew too fast,” he said, but he was proud when others admired his strong, well-shaped body naked in the public swimming bath. He was a peaceful child no longer—he had awakened to manhood, the prospect of death, and
He took as a sign and portent the dazzling Leonid meteor shower he watched in the night sky in November 1833, “year 58 of the States.” “Myriads in all directions,” he wrote in a pre-Leaves of Grass manuscript fragment, “some with long shining white trains, some falling over each other like falling water—leaping, silent, white apparitions around up there in the sky over my head.” His imagination fed on novels, romances, and poetry and on the plays he saw across the river in the theaters along Park Row, Chatham Square, and the Bowery. At first, “a fat-cheeked boy, in round jacket and broad shirt-collar,” he went to the theater in the company of other apprentices. “How well I remember my first visit,” he wrote in 1850. “The play was the School for Scandal. I had a dim idea of the walls of some adjoining houses silently and suddenly sinking away, to let folks see what was going on within. Then the band; O, never before did such heavenly melodies make me drunk with pleasure so utterly sweet and spiritual!” After a while, stage-struck, he preferred to go alone—“I was so absorbed in the performance, and disliked anyone to distract my attention.” From his seat in the pit he saw plays by Shakespeare along with melodramas like Jonathan Bradford, or the Murder at the Roadside Inn; The Last Days of Pompeii; Napoleon’s Old Guard; and the indestructible Mazeppa, featuring an athletic actor and a well-trained horse. At the Bowery Theatre on June 8, 1835, he saw the tragedian Junius Brutus Booth as Shakespeare’s Richard III:
I can, from my good seat in the pit, pretty well front, see again Booth’s quiet entrance from the side, as, with head bent, he slowly and in silence, (amid the tempest of boisterous hand-clapping,) walks down the stage to the footlights with that peculiar and abstracted gesture, musingly kicking his sword, which he holds off from him by its sash. Though fifty years have pass’d since then, I can hear the clank, and feel the perfect following hush of perhaps three thousand people waiting. (I never saw an actor who could make more of the said hush or wait, and hold the audience in an indescribable, half-delicious, half-irritating suspense.) And so throughout the entire play, all parts, voice, atmosphere, magnetism, from “Now is the winter of our discontent,” to the closing death tight with Richmond, were of the finest and grandest.
Richmond held the crown aloft, and cried, “The day is ours; the bloody dog is dead.” Like a green waterfall, the Bowery’s crepe curtain came down to a tempest of hand clapping—“no dainty kid-glove business, but electric force and muscle from . . . full-sinew’d men.” It had been an unforgettable evening of “fire, energy, abandon” that stirred the young Whitman to the keel of his being. He felt a dilation of plenitude and possibility, he was intoxicated with the human voice:
O what is it in me that makes me tremble so at voices?
Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her I shall follow,
As the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid steps, anywhere around the globe.
Booth’s genius “was to me one of the grandest revelations of my life,” a lesson in “artistic expression” and “electric personal idiosyncrasy”—“As in all art-utterance it was the subtle and powerful something special in the individual that really conquer’d.”*
He said that the first time he ever wanted to write anything enduring was “when I saw a ship under full sail, and had the desire to describe it exactly as it seemed to me.” As an apprentice he wrote “sentimental bits,” then “a piece or two,” not now identifiable, in the New-York Mirror, a “celebrated and fashionable” weekly of literature and the fine arts edited by George Pope Morris, the popular author of “Woodman, Spare that Tree” and “By the Lake Where Droops the Willow.” Walt waited impatiently for the fat, red-faced carrier who delivered the Mirror in Brooklyn, and he opened and cut the pages with trembling fingers. “How it made my heart double-beat to see my piece on the pretty white paper, in nice type.” By the time he reached twenty-two he had published, in addition to his routine journalism work, ten didactic essays written “From the Desk of a Schoolmaster.” The series title of these pieces, Sun-Down Papers, anticipates the great “Sun-Down Poem” of 1856, in later editions titled “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” He had also published about a dozen poems, most of them dealing with ambition, pride, and the vanity of human wishes; their titles are explicit enough—“The Love That Is Hereafter”; “The End of All”; “We Shall All Rest at Last”; “Our Future Lot”; “My Departure”; “The Punishment of Pride.” “O, many a panting, noble heart,” he wrote in the opening stanzas of “Fame’s Vanity” (1839),
Cherishes in its deep recess
Th’hope to win renown o’er earth
From Glory’s priz’d caress.
And some will reach that envied goal,
And have their fame known far and wide;
And some will sink unnoted down
In dark Oblivion’s tide.
But I, who many a pleasant scheme
Do sometime cull from Fancy’s store,
With dreams, such as the youthful dream,
Of grandeur, love, and power—
Shall I build up a lofty name,
And seek to have the nations know
What conscious might dwells in the brain
That throbs aneath this brow?
Ego confusion intermittently surfaces in these poems along with a terror of drift, lawless imperatives, and the obliteration of identity. Even the best of them are wooden and imitative and show a consistent, perhaps uncompromising lack of promise that could be redeemed only by a radical transformation—a quantum surge—in language, vision, and the self, and by a faith that new beginnings are always possible. (“There are such things as fountains in the world,” Coleridge said, even in the desert.) Walt appeared to be unworried. “Nobody, I hope, will accuse me of conceit in these opinions of mine own capacity for doing great things,” he wrote in a “Sun-Down Paper.”
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?
As a description of Leaves of Grass, “very pretty” and “very respectable” may serve as one measure of the extent of Whitman’s eventual self-transformation.
His apprenticeship over, in the spring of 1835 he found work as a typesetter in New York. When, as an old man, he looked back over his traveled roads he did not say, and probably no longer remembered, whom he had worked for or where he lived; a year of his life went up in the smoke and flames of the city’s history. A terrible fire that summer was to devastate the printing and publishing district alongside City Hall Park. The new brick buildings put up in a recent period of expansion and prosperity were too high to be reached by fire brigade ladders and hoses; walls buckled and collapsed into the streets. Several thousand workers, suddenly thrown out of work, found themselves in worse straits after a second fire in December, a calamity that Philip Hone, in the consternation of the moment, called “the greatest loss by fire that has ever been known with the exception perhaps of the conflagration of Moscow.” Seven hundred buildings around Wall Street were destroyed, among them the Customs House and the domed Merchants’ Exchange with its oval trading hall and heroic statue of Alexander Hamilton; United States Marines and armed militia patrolled nineteen burned-out blocks against looters; property owners, businessmen, investors and insurance companies were ruined; the value of the property and goods destroyed was estimated to be $20,000,000.
Without tenure in the printing trades, unable to find satisfactory work in any other trade, Walt soon became an economic casualty of this disastrous year—it was a foretaste for New Yorkers of the long economic depression that lay ahead. He left the city at the beginning of May 1836 and spent the month with his family. “Long ago we lived on a farm,” George Whitman said, and he recalled an instance of the stubborn finality that he associated with his brother. “Walt would not do farm work. He had things he liked better—schoolteaching, for instance.” Between farming and teaching the choice was clear; still, as Walt suggested in a story called “The Shadow and the Light of a Young Man’s Soul,” it may have been with dread and a sense of defeat that he took up the first in a series of irregular and poorly paid appointments as a country schoolmaster on Long Island. In the aftermath of the fires of 1835 the story’s hero—“unstable as water”—ransacks “every part of the city for employment,” gives up and becomes a schoolmaster. “When the young Archibald Dean went from the city—(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.”
II
Seventeen when he first stood behind the teacher’s desk, Whitman was younger than some of the seventy or eighty farmers’ sons who were his pupils. He had been hired to wield a paternal authority in leading or driving them through a “bare and superficial” curriculum of reading, writing, grammar, arithmetic and geography. Education in the country districts was as poverty-struck and grudgingly maintained as the schoolhouse itself, a cheerless, drafty one-room structure without a bell, a clock or a stove—like a farm outbuilding, it had a crude batten door with a padlock. “To teach a good school,” he later said, “it is not at all necessary for a man to be inflexible in rules and severe in discipline. Order and obedience we would always have; and yet two of the best schools we ever knew appeared always to the casual spectator to be complete uproar, confusion and chaos.” He did not go so far as Emerson’s friend Bronson Alcott, who, when physical chastisement was called for at his school in Boston, had the child strike the teacher, but he retired the birch and rule he had experienced as a boy, played twenty questions with his scholars, engaged them in general discussions, told them stories, had them do exercises in description and mental arithmetic and memorize poetry. Charles Roe, a pupil in the school at Little Bay Side, near Jamaica, was to remember him with “respect and affection . . . We were all deeply attached to him, and were sorry when he went away.”
George Whitman too, his pupil for about a year, said it was generally agreed that “Walt made a very good schoolmaster.” But it was also said he was too easygoing, appeared not to have his heart in his work, and spent much of his time musing and writing. The same school examiners who had been casual about his qualifications when they hired him were probably unimpressed by what they saw on visits to the schoolroom; only a few of the eight or nine quarter-year teaching appointments Walt held between 1836 and 1841 were renewed.
The customary rewards of country schoolteaching, he said, were “poor pay,” “coarse fare”—sometimes a pickled hog’s head with an olla-podrida of fried turnips, potatoes and cabbage—and a straw mattress with little privacy in the homes of his pupils’ parents; he was once invited to bed down with a sick cow. He recalled long winter nights of loneliness and boredom when he would escape the family circle and go back to his teacher’s desk to drink solitary hot toddies and play doublehanded checkers. Once, he said, “I had a literary fit, and wrote a story.” The title of his story, “Death in the School-Room (a Fact),” speaks for itself. It was only years later that he decided that the common practice of “boarding round”—“moving from house to house and farm to farm, among high and low, living a few days alternately at each”—had been “one of my best experiences and deepest lessons in human nature behind the scenes, and in the masses.”
Country schoolteachers were “apt to be eccentric specimens of the masculine race.” The Island farmers and tradesmen and their families—“hospitable, upright, commonsensical”—regarded him as more of a puzzle than most of their itinerant boarders. He was big and muscular, but he moved slowly and with a curious indolence. Others bustled; he waited. “Of all human beings, none equals your genuine, inbred, unvarying loafer,” Walt wrote in 1840. “What was Adam, I should like to know, but a loafer?” Boarding round, Walt led an interim existence and drew on what he claimed was a family trait, “the ability to tide over, to lay back on reserves, to wait, to take time.” (It was because of this same “lethargic waitingness,” he said after the Civil War, that George was able to come out alive after five months in Confederate military prisons.) He described his own patient and moratory character in some early notes for a story:
This singular young man was unnoted for any strange qualities; and he certainly had no bad qualities. Possessed very little of what is called education. He remained much by himself, although he had many brothers, sisters, relations, and acquaintance. He did not work like the rest. By far the most of the time he remained silent.
“One of the greatest things about Walt,” George recalled, “was his wonderful calmness in trying times when everybody else would get excited. He was always cool, never flurried.” But Walt’s composure was more willed than organic, and George had witnessed vivid exceptions. Once, when Walt was out in a boat fishing in a pond near the family farm at Babylon, a neighborhood boy, Benjamin Carman, provoked him by throwing stones in the water and rowing across his lines. Walt met him ashore and thrashed him with his pole. The boy’s father brought charges of assault, but they were dismissed, on the grounds the boy deserved worse, and, according to George, “Walt even gave the fellow a devil of a licking after the trial . . . He was a muscular young man at that time—very strong.” In later years Walt was to be seen kicking a politician down the stairs, manhandling a verger in a church, and grappling with a carpet-bag senator who insulted him; these demonstrations of explosive temper were memorable because they were infrequent and because he had been trying so hard to cultivate Quaker peaceableness.
For the most part, the Islanders found him mild enough in demeanor, correct in his language and conversation, simple in his living habits and the way he dressed. In his plain black suit he could have passed for an impoverished divinity student if he had not been “rather atheistic” in his views, as Roe said, and openly contemptuous of churchmen, churches, and doctrinal matters in general. He did not care much about public opinion—“Never mind what they think,” he told his mother—and the villagers left him alone. At recess he played baseball with his pupils, and when school was out he was politely friendly with the young men of the village and played cards with them once in a while. He never danced or flirted with girls even though, boarding round with large families in districts where young men without barnyard muck on their shoes were in short supply, he had plenty of opportunities; some teachers he knew of had made good marriages that way and were set for life. “The girls did not seem to attract him. He did not specially go anywhere with them or show any extra fondness for their society,” Roe once told Horace Traubel, “seemed, indeed, to shun it.” Until he left Long Island for good and was free to explore the beckoning island of Manhattan, women remained “a class of beings of whose nature, habits, notions, and ways,” Walt wrote in 1840, he had “not been able to gather any knowledge, either by experience or observation.”
Between teaching jobs he lived at home and accepted “stormy scenes” and recriminations as the price he had to pay for refusing to do farm work. Otherwise, he and his father managed to coexist on even, although guarded, terms. “I don’t think his father ever had an idea what Walt was up to, what he meant,” George said. With his sisters and younger brothers, on the other hand, Walt assumed—perhaps, in unacknowledgable striving, even usurped—his father’s role. It was “as if he had us in his charge,” George said, and he added, “Now and then his guardianship seemed excessive. . . . He was like us—yet he was different from us, too.” He was their companion, playmate, and counselor, but as an early sketch, “My Boys and Girls,” suggests, he entertained explicit fantasies about being their parent as well.* The claim he made to John Addington Symonds in 1890, “Tho’ always unmarried I have had six children,” was anticipated in the first sentence of this sketch: “Though a bachelor, I have several boys and girls that I consider my own.”
Whitman published “My Boys and Girls” in 1844 but probably wrote it long before then, during his family’s stay in Babylon. Four of his brothers and sisters—George, Jeff, Andrew and Hannah Louisa—figure in it by name and by their relative ages in 1835–1836. Walt’s other sister, Mary Elizabeth, born in 1821, appears unnamed as “a very beautiful girl, in her fourteenth year”; with an implicit dread of sexuality, the sketch looks with foreboding to a time when this “child of light and loveliness” will lose her “purity” and “the freshness of youthful innocence.” (“Who, at twenty-five or thirty years of age,” asks the narrator, “is without many memories of wrongs done, and mean or wicked deeds performed?” Whitman was twenty-five when he published “My Boys and Girls.”) The sketch mentions another child who, like Louisa’s fifth-born, died in infancy and, in a period when infant deaths were common, was hardly mourned: “It was not a sad thing—we wept not, nor were our hearts heavy.” As always, Jesse is excluded from Walt’s family picture; also excluded, but for other reasons, is Eddy, an infant at the time of writing and intellectually an infant ever after. Another of Whitman’s imaginary “children” invokes a familiar homoerotic theme, the deaths of young men:
Very beautiful was he—and the promise of an honorable manhood shone brightly in him—and sad was the gloom of his passing away. We buried him in the early summer. The scent of the apple-blossoms was thick in the air—and all animated nature seemed overflowing with delight and motion.
Walt’s exercise of a pseudo-parental role already extends beyond the members of his family. He has begun to acknowledge “the need of comrades,” the central theme of his “Calamus” poems. Strangely naïve as well as strangely knowing, covert as well as unconsciously revealing, he yearns to become all things to younger men—father, brother, lover, friend; he becomes restive under the restraints society imposed on the expression of his yearnings.
Then there is J. H., a sober, good-natured youth, whom I hope I shall always number among my friends. Another H. has lately come among us—too large, perhaps, and too near manhood to be called one of my children. I know I shall love him well when we become better acquainted—as I hope we are destined to be.
Looking back to this period, Whitman once told Nelly O’Connor that “the grown-up son of the farmer with whom he was boarding while he was teaching school became very fond of him, and Walt of the boy, and he said the father quite reproved him for making such a pet of the boy.” Even in this summary version the phrase “quite reproved” suggests a residue of anguish on Whitman’s part. Nelly deleted the episode from her published memoir, but it is at least compatible with a story originating in Southold, where Whitman taught for a while, that he got into trouble there and was forced to leave. * And the same farmer’s-son episode appears to figure in two short stories Whitman published in 1841, just after he gave up teaching for good. In “Bervance,” a father becomes jealous of his son’s intimacy with a resident tutor and plots to have the boy put away in a lunatic asylum. The second story, “The Child’s Champion,” has a happier ending. The hero, John Lankton, becomes the protector of a twelve-year-old farm apprentice. He rescues the boy from the attentions of drunken sailors in a saloon, and takes him to his room, where they spend the night in each other’s arms. An angel, “a spirit from the Pure Country,” blesses their union with a kiss. Lankton is reborn. His love for the boy “grew not slack with time.”
Like Lankton before his regeneration, Whitman nearing twenty “lived without any steady purpose.” Like Archibald Dean, the country schoolmaster of “The Shadow and the Light of a Young Man’s Soul,” he lacked “energy and resolution” but was “not indisposed to work, and work faithfully, could he do so in a sphere equal to his ambitions.” He explored this “sphere” at Smithtown, where he taught school for two terms in 1837–1838 and was one of the organizers of a debating society. Its members were the town’s achievers, present or future doctors, lawyers, businessmen, holders of public office; they elected him secretary. Such societies, from Benjamin Franklin’s Junto Club on, had served Americans as gymnasia for mental exercise and substitutes for theatrical entertainment. The habit of public argument acquired in these societies left a peculiar impress on the native character, Tocqueville said. “An American cannot converse, but he can discuss. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say ‘Gentlemen’ to the person with whom he is conversing.”
Wednesday evenings in the schoolhouse on the green, the Smithtown debaters addressed themselves to the role of nature and nurture in the formation of character, the rights and wrongs of capital punishment and unrestricted immigration, the injustices done the Indians by the European settlers of the continent, the relative merits of Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots, and the achievements for good or evil of the late Emperor of the French, Napoleon Bonaparte. Like their counterparts elsewhere, the Smithtowners also debated issues that were to have a more electrifying importance for Walt Whitman, chrysalid poet of self and nation. At a meeting of the Transcendental Club in Boston in October 1836, Emerson, Alcott, Orestes Brownson, and George Ripley had discussed a familiar topic, “American Genius—the Causes which Hinder Its Growth Giving Us No First-Rate Productions.” The following August, Emerson, then a thirty-four-year-old clergyman, addressed the members of the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, gathered in the wooden meetinghouse of the First Parish, Cambridge, and announced a new age. “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close,” he said.
We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall no longer be a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defense and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.
Emerson’s “American Scholar” address, said Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was present that day in the meetinghouse, was “our intellectual Declaration of Independence.” Later that year, at a public meeting in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, another orator touched with heavenly fire, Wendell Phillips, paid tribute to a courageous editor, Elijah Lovejoy, murdered by a pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois; the abolitionist cause had found its martyr and its champion.
“Have the arts and sciences flourished more under a Republican form of government than any other?” Whitman argued and carried the affirmative with the Smithtown debaters. “Is the system of slavery, as it exists in the South, right?” He was an emancipationist then and later, not an abolitionist, but he argued and carried the negative. Intoxicated with oratory, the human voice, and for a while with party politics, Whitman was to envision a career for himself as “wander speaker,” a public teacher—“The greatest champion America ever could know”—discoursing on public issues to the President, the Congress, and the people. In Leaves of Grass a lonely poet often seems to be “addressing a meeting” and tasting “the orator’s joys”:
To inflate the chest, to roll the thunder of the voice out from the ribs and throat,
To make The people rage, weep, hate, desire, with yourself,
To lead America—to quell America with a great tongue.
When Whitman’s teaching appointment at Smithtown ran out, he returned from dreams of oratory to newspapering. He bought a used press and a case of types, rented space above a stable, and in June 1838 went into business as founder, publisher and editor of a Huntington weekly, the Long Islander. His father, who had some cash in hand after recently mortgaging the farm, may have been a backer, with George, Walt’s assistant but also a “part proprietor,” holding his proxy. When the first number came out on June 5, 1838, a week after Walt turned nineteen, the Long Island Star wished its former apprentice well, warning him, however, that he may have taken on a dubious business enterprise—“Few country places feel a proper pride in sustaining a newspaper.” As Whitman later acknowledged, there was not a great deal for any country place to sustain in the usual “dingy” compilation of advertisements (often, like subscriptions to the paper, paid for in potatoes and cordwood), columns scissored out from metropolitan journals, and local stories that chronicled “the details of a big pumpkin or a three-legged cow.” No file of the Long Islander under Whitman’s editorship survives, but two items—his earliest known published writing—were reprinted in the August 8, 1838, issue of the Long Island Democrat, a Jamaica newspaper for which he was soon to work:
Our neighbor of the L. I. Star intimated some time ago, in his peculiarly pleasant style, that though in Suffolk county, the harvest had not been very good, in the Whig counties generally it had never been quite abundant. Whatever the condition of the summer produce may be, we believe the fall crops in this county have hitherto been semiannually of so abundant and peculiar a nature as quite to excite the ire of the Brooklyn editor.
The second item, titled “Effects of Lightning,” was in the pumpkin and cow tradition:
At Northport, on Saturday, 28th ultimo [July], an unfortunate and somewhat singular accident occurred from the lightning. Mr. Abraham Miller of that place, had been in the fields, engaged in some farm work, and was returning home, as a storm commenced in the afternoon, carrying in his hands a pitchfork. A friend of his who was with him advised him not to carry it, as he considered it dangerous. Mr. Miller, however, did not put down the fork, but continued walking with it; he had gone some distance on his way home, and had just put up the bars of a fence he passed through when a violent clap of thunder, occurred, followed by a sharp flash. The acquaintance of Mr. Miller was slightly stunned by the shock and turning around to look at his companion he saw him lying on his face motionless. He went to him and found him dead; the lightning having been attracted by the steel tines of the fork, had torn his hand slightly, and killed him on the instant.
“Everything seem’d turning out well,” Walt said about his Huntington newspaper. “Only my own restlessness prevented me gradually establishing a permanent property there.” His own master for the first time in his life, he was careless of schedules, money and toil, the villagers said, devoted instead to books and other pastimes, like the game of ring toss he and George played in their office for stakes of a mince pie or twenty-five cents. Along with the press and types Walt had bought a white mare named Nina. Once a week when he first published the paper, later less regularly when his interest waned, he rode her along the inland and shore roads from Huntington to Babylon, Smithtown and Commack, and delivered his copies to the farmers. He stopped to visit with them in the hayfields; sometimes they asked him to stay for supper and the night—“I never had happier jaunts.” There were other jaunts then, daylong excursions to the Atlantic shore, that were to remain in his memory and shape his imagination. “It is a universal summer custom on Long Island,” he wrote in 1845, “to have what are called ‘beach-parties.’” The young men ran dancing and laughing along the sand, bathed in the surf, fished, dug clams, speared messes of fat, sweetmeated eel. He loved swimming, of a passive sort—“I was a first rate aquatic loafer,” he recalled. “I possessed almost unlimited capacity for floating on my back.” Cradled, rocked and drowsing, his body rolling “silently to and fro in the heave of the water,” he lay suspended between the depths and the light, between the unconscious and the world of necessity. Poets and painters of Whitman’s century took up the subject of young men bathing—Gerard Manley Hopkins in “Epithalamion,” for example; Seurat in “Une Baignade”; and Eakins in “The Swimming Hole”—and it became familiar in English poetry around the time of the first World War. But Whitman, in Section 11 of “Song of Myself,” was to create its most loving and lyrical evocation: *
Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.
She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.
Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.
Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.
Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.
The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair,
Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.
An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies.
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.
The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray.
The “beautiful gigantic swimmer” of Leaves of Grass, “swimming naked through the eddies of the sea” and viewed through the water’s green lens or in blood-stained turbulence, makes a first appearance in the literary prose of Whitman’s Long Island period.
I felt myself carried along, as it were, like some expert swimmer, who has tired himself, and to rest his limbs, allows them to float drowsily and unresistingly on the bosom of the sunny river. Real things lost their reality.—A dusky mist spread itself before my eyes.
A current of associations carries him along to “a regular and most sentimental fit of . . . Low Spirits.”
Shall I become old without tasting the sweet draughts of which the young may partake?—Silently and surely are the months stealing along.—a few more revolutions of the 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.
Some of his companions at beach parties were dreaming of girls who had captured their hearts, but he fell into the reveries of William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” and wondered, How shall I face death? With Bryant’s lines and phrases echoing in his mind, he composed a poem, “Our Future Lot,” and set it in type at his Huntington newspaper office.
This breast which now alternate burns
with flashing hope, and gloomy fear,
Where beats a heart that knows the hue
Which aching bosoms wear;
This curious frame of human mould,
Where craving wants unceasing play—
The troubled heart and wondrous form
Must both alike decay,
Then cold wet earth will close around
Dull, senseless limbs, and ashy face,
But where, O Nature! will be
My mind’s abiding place?
After a year of vagrant management, increasingly subject to such reveries, Whitman’s backers sold the Long Islander out from under him. The new proprietor made a point of explaining that under his predecessor the paper had been virtually “discontinued.” “Came down to New York (after selling Nina) in the summer of 39,” Whitman noted, job-hunted, again found nothing there, and retreated to Jamaica, thriving gateway town along the route of the Long Island Rail Road. He worked for the Democrat and lived in the house of its editor, James Brenton, who liked him and believed that Walt had promise as a writer of stories and poems but no notion of what it meant to work regular hours—unless summoned after the midday meal, he might spend entire afternoons looking at the sky, a study in indolence and irresolution. Brenton’s wife complained that Walt was always “under foot” in the house, always “sitting around” in his shirtsleeves and that he ignored her two small children, even seemed to resent them as intrusions upon his solitude. Brenton was sorry, nonetheless, when Walt left the Democrat and went back to teaching school, at Little Bay Side near Jamaica, at Trimming Square and Woodbury, both near West Hills, and during the winter and spring of 1840–1841 at Whitestone, within sight of the farms at the northern extremity of his eventual goal, New York. Whitman’s two terms at Whitestone, the last teaching he was to do, survive in his records in the form of a notebook entry, “Winter of 1840, went to White stone, and was there till next spring,” and a letter of reference, written in his plain and conventional hand, on behalf of someone otherwise unknown:
Miss Clarissa Lyvere has been assistant teacher in this school for several months past, and I would cheerfully testify to her competence and her general capability as a teacher. Her knowledge of the ordinary branches of a common school education is complete, and I unhesitatingly recommend her to any and all who may desire a good teacher for their children.
WALTER WHITMAN
Whitestone School
March 30 [1841]
Like Herman Melville, a schoolteacher before he shipped out for the Pacific whaling grounds that year, “with nothing particular to interest me on shore,” Whitman had waited in the schoolhouse for better opportunities to come. In May he went to New York again, but this time, as he wrote in another early poem, there was to be “No Turning Back.”