WHITMAN CAUGHT SIGHT of a number of literary celebrities going about their business or pleasure in New York—Dickens; William Cullen Bryant, bound for his office at the Evening Post; the country squire James Fenimore Cooper, bound for the courts to teach yet another newspaper editor lessons in civility; the dandy and international favorite Nathaniel Parker Willis; Washington Irving, the first American author to make a living from his work. At the office of the Plebeian, he had a glimpse of an up-and-coming celebrity, the patrician poet and scholar James Russell Lowell, fat and handsome; wearing his auburn hair to his shoulders he looked like a Yankee Keats. They exchanged a few words and parted, not to meet again for fifteen years and more. “Whitman, I remember him of old,” Lowell was to say. “He used to write stories for the Democratic Review under O’Sullivan. He used to do stories then, à la Hawthorne.”
Whitman stood shoulder to shoulder with the Democratic Review writers—Bryant, Whittier, Major D’Avezac, and other believers in “a good time coming”—in advocating progressive measures, in particular the abolition of capital punishment, the subject of a “Dialogue” he published in the November 1845 number. But for the most part Whitman’s contacts with the literary community, even with the Democratic Review group, were random and transient. In addition to O’Sullivan he had dealings of an irregular sort with his former employer Park Benjamin and with a relative newcomer, Thomas Dunn English, author of the popular lines,
Oh! don’t you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?
Sweet Alice, whose hair was so brown,
Who wept with delight when you gave her a smile,
And trembled with fear at your frown?
English was also the founder of the Aristidean, a magazine of “Reviews, Politics and Light Literature” that died under him after only six issues. According to Poe, with whom he carried on a losing feud, this debacle proved English had talent enough as a man of letters “to succeed in his father’s profession—that of a ferryman on the Schuylkill.” Unequal antagonists, grotesquely antithetic talents, Poe and English had one taste, at least, in common: they published Whitman in 1845, English a novelette, two tales, and a cluster of five “Fact-Romances,” and Poe two articles in his Broadway Journal.
“Poe was very cordial in a quiet way,” Whitman recalled, “appear’d well in person, dress, &c. I have a distinct and pleasing remembrance of his looks, voice, manner, and matter: very kindly and human, but subdued, perhaps a little jaded.” Poe had begun to tire of being known as the author of “The Raven.” His dusky phantom vied with the eagle for the title of America’s national bird, and he had become identified with it virtually to the exclusion of everything else he had written. In Lowell’s couplet,
Here comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge.
“Somehow,” Whitman said, the poem “did not enthuse me. . . . Poe was morbid, shadowy, lugubrious—he seemed to suggest dark nights, horrors, spectralities.” Thirty years after they met in the Broadway Journal offices at the corner of Beekman and Nassau streets Whitman developed that impression in a series of images that linked the daylight splendor of New York harbor with the nightmare ending of Poe’s “MS Found in a Bottle”: “the ship is quivering, oh God!—and going down.”
In a dream I once had, I saw a vessel on the sea, at midnight, in a storm. It was no great full-rigg’d ship, nor majestic steamer, steering firmly through the gale, but seem’d one of those superb little schooner yachts I had often seen lying anchor’d, rocking so jauntily, in the waters around New York, or up Long Island sound—now flying uncontroll’d with torn sails and broken spars through the wild sleet and winds and waves of the night. On the deck was a slender, slight, beautiful figure, a dim man, apparently enjoying all the terror, the murk, and the dislocation of which he was the centre and the victim. That figure of my lurid dream might stand for Edgar Poe, his spirit, his fortunes, and his poems—themselves all lurid dreams.
If Emerson spoke for the brave and sunny oversoul of Leaves of Grass, its vital principle of strength, health and hope, then Poe spoke for its id, even though Whitman claimed that at the outset he had rejected Poe’s “dark nights, horrors, spectralities.” “I could not originally stomach him at all,” he said to Traubel. But the nearly two dozen pieces of fiction he published between 1841 and 1845 were as much “à la Poe” as “à la Hawthorne.” * Their ambience of symbol, nightmare, and dramas of the inner soul was only slightly relieved by Whitman’s borrowings in theme and manner from Cooper and Scott as well as from lesser writers. His fiction was derivative and imitative, preachy and didactic; it dripped with false sentiment, cliché, and melodramatic contrivance. Nonetheless the stories are freer and more distinctively articulated than his early poetry; they have a peculiarly intense, dreamlike absurdity, which may have derived from a collision of borrowed materials with imperatives he was not able to acknowledge in frontal ways. In bulk alone the stories represent a creative surge that Whitman was not to experience again until he wrote Leaves of Grass; they earned him his first literary reputation and proved to him that he had been right when he decided to strike off on his own.
Many years later he said that the tales had come “from the surface of the mind, and had no connection with what lay below—a great deal of which indeed was below consciousness. At last came the time when the concealed growth had come to light, and the first edition of Leaves of Grass was written and published.” But despite Whitman’s claims to the contrary the tales share with Leaves of Grass a source “below consciousness.” More than any other biographical testimony, they illuminate his inner life from the age of about twenty-one to twenty-six, and taken as a cycle, they represent the working-out of a temporary resolution of forces. He had published the first of these stories in 1841, when he went off to New York alone. With one exception—possibly a reprinting of a story whose earlier appearance is unrecorded—he published the last of them in 1845, when he moved to Brooklyn and lived with his parents again.
Whitman’s stories are basically fantasies about the erosion of relationship and about the terrors of growing up, separation from parents, death (in particular the death of the young), and the obliteration of identity. Typically the hero-victim of these fantasies—call him “Walt”—is a young man prevented from fulfilling himself and even literally destroyed by a father (or symbolic father) who is harsh and arbitrary, given to “cruelty and punishment and whippings and starvation”; sometimes the father is drunk, and then his “intemperance” becomes synonymous with rage, unreasoning hatred, and sexual aggression. The father in “Bervance” plots to have his younger son put away in a lunatic asylum; the teacher in “Death in the School-Room” bullies a pupil to death and flogs the corpse. The father in these stories favors “Walt’s” older brother just as the mother favors “Walt” and finds his “kiss ever . . . sweetest to her lips.” “Walt’s” relationship to his mother is infantile, narcissistic—his life is so intertwined with hers that, from his point of view, their identities and even deaths are indistinguishable. Often the parental background in these stories has been foreshortened: at the start the father is a widower, or “Walt” is alone with his widowed mother. In the latter instance their undivided and unchallenged possession of each other threatens to be as destructive to “Walt” as his father’s enmity and his own terrifying passional self. On all sides “Walt” sees a world of loss, menace and isolation. “Wherefore is there no response?” he asks in “Eris: A Spirit Record,” a symbolic tale of “unreturned and unhallowed passion” (“Eris,” it may be worth noting, is “sire” spelled backwards).
“Wild Frank’s Return,” the second of Whitman’s stories in the Democratic Review, was introduced by an editorial note. “The main incidents in this and another story, ‘Death in the School-Room,’ . . . were of actual occurrence; and in the native town of the author, the relation of them often beguiles the farmer’s winter-fireside.” Whitman’s main source, merely a springboard, was an anecdote Louisa Whitman told about her childhood on the Van Velsor farm near Cold Spring. One morning her father rode off on his favorite horse, “Dandy,” to do business in the countryside. By nightfall, when he failed to return as expected, his wife and daughter became uneasy; later, in the midst of a storm, Dandy returned, saddled, bridled, but riderless. Ghostly footsteps are heard in the house.
The dark hours crept slowly on, and at last a little tinge of day-light was seen through the eastern windows. Almost simultaneously with it, a bluff voice was heard some distance off, and the quick dull beat of a horse galloping along a soft wet road. . . . My grandmother opened the door this time to behold the red laughing face of her husband, and to hear him tell how, when the storm was over and he went to look for Dandy, whom he had fastened under a shed, he discovered the skittish creature had broken his fastening and run away from home—and how he could not get another horse for love or money, at that hour—and how he was fain forced to stop until nearly daylight.
The ghostly footsteps were peaches dropping to the floor from a branch hung over the parlor fireplace. As Whitman retold it in 1846, this “Incident on Long Island Forty Years Ago” ends in laughter.
“Wild Frank’s Return” ends, as it begins, in anger. Frank, about twenty years old and his mother’s favorite, has a “hot dispute” with an older brother over the ownership of Black Nell. The horse is described in terms appropriate to its traditional cryptosexual symbolism: “a fine young blood mare—a beautiful creature, large and graceful, with eyes like dark-hued jewels, and her color that of the deep night.” The father, a Long Island farmer, takes the brother’s side in the dispute, even though it is plain that Frank is the rightful owner.
Wild Frank’s face paled with rage and mortification. That furious temper which he had never been taught to curb, now swell’d like an overflowing torrent. With difficulty restraining the exhibition of his passions, as soon as he had got by himself he swore that not another sun should roll by and find him under that roof. Late at night he silently arose, and turning his back on what he thought an inhospitable home, in [a] mood in which the child should never leave the parental roof, bent his steps toward the city.
Frank runs off to sea. “His poor mother’s heart grew wearier and wearier. She spoke not much, but was evidently sick in spirit.” After two years Frank comes back, has a cool reunion with his brother in a village tavern, and accepts the loan of Black Nell for the journey to his parents’ farm. On the way he stops to rest under an oak tree and becomes drowsy; time passes unnoted, a mist veils the landscape; Frank sleeps through a thunderstorm. Frank’s sleep is a sort of negative conversion, the opposite of the summer loaf in the grass and the ecstatic illumination Whitman was to write about in Section 5 of “Song of Myself.” “Thus in the world you may see men steeped in lethargy,” the narrator comments, “while a mightier tempest gathers over them.” Frank sleeps on “like a babe in its cradle,” but Black Nell, whom he had tethered to his wrist with “a piece of strong cord,” starts up in fright,
an image of beautiful terror, with her fore feet thrust out, her neck arch’d, and her eyes glaring balls of fear. At length, after a dazzling and lurid glare, there came a peal—a deafening crash—as if the great axle was rent; it seemed to shiver the very central foundations, and every object appeared reeling like a drunken man. God of Spirits! the startled mare sprang off like a ship in an ocean-storm! Her eyes were blinded with light; she dashed madly down the hill, and plunge after plunge—far, far away—swift as an arrow—dragging the hapless body of the sleeper behind her!
Wild Frank’s “return” is an act of revenge against the family, his mother in particular.
The clattering of a horse’s hoofs came to the ears of those who were gather’d there. It was on the other side of the house that the wagon road led; and they open’d the door and rush’d in a tumult of glad anticipations, through the adjoining room to the porch. What a sight it was that met them there! Black Nell stood a few feet from the door, with her neck crouch’d down; she drew her breath long and deep, and vapor rose from every part of her reeking body. And with eyes starting from their sockets, and mouths agape with stupefying terror, they beheld on the ground near her a mangled, hideous mass—the rough semblance of a human form—all batter’d and cut, and bloody. Attach’d to it was the fatal cord, dabbled over with gore. And as the mother gazed—for she could not withdraw her eyes—and the appalling truth came upon her mind, she sank down without shriek or utterance, into a deep, deathly swoon.
The “fatal cord,” like its umbilical counterpart “dabbled over with gore,” is the real or symbolic instrument of “Walt’s” death in other stories. It becomes the hangman’s rope in “Richard Parker’s Widow” (1845), much of which Whitman lifted verbatim from a published account of a mutiny in the British Navy in 1797: the same episode and its central character were to inspire Herman Melville’s Billy Budd. Somewhat like Wild Frank, Parker, “in a fit of despondency,” left his family and became a common seaman. “Gentlemanly in his manners,” “the bravest of the brave,” when the crews of several warships mutiny for just cause Parker is chosen their leader and spokesman, a rebellious son confronting a stern father. Parker is tried before a naval court-martial and sentenced to be hanged. “He said nothing to his mates on the forecastle but ‘Good-bye to you!’ and expressed a hope that his death would be considered a sufficient atonement, and would save the lives of others. He was then strung up at the yard arm, and in a few moments dangled lifeless there.” Melville’s Billy Budd is a redemptive drama of love, justice, and an innocence like that of “young Adam before the Fall,” “a child-man.” Whitman, typically, concerns himself with the rights of sepulture and recounts in disproportionate detail the widow’s efforts to rescue the body of the hanged man from the anatomist’s knife. (In Whitman’s treatment it scarcely matters whether she is Parker’s wife or his mother). With her own hands she digs up the corpse from its shallow grave in the churchyard, takes it with her to London, and keeps it in her room until the Lord Mayor prevails upon her to give it burial at Whitechapel.
One of Whitman’s manuscript fragments introduces a boy who has quarreled with his mother and fallen asleep “with the tears of foolish passion yet undried upon his cheeks.” He dreams he has become rich and powerful, with the world at his feet, and is summoned to her deathbed but arrives too late. “He bent down his ear to the cold blue lips and listened—but the cold blue lips were hushed forever.” He remembers the times he tormented her by allowing her to believe he had drowned or disappeared. “Now for two little words, I pardon, that proud rich man would amost have been willing to live in poverty forever.” In another fragment “Walt” has powers of clairvoyance. “He very often knew days beforehand of a death that should happen, and who it was and how it came to be. This terrible consciousness came to him irrespective of place or occasion.” In the grip of this consciousness he sees his sister in her linen shroud. He also sees himself in a shroud and is a spectator at his own funeral, an irresistible adolescent fantasy, as Tom Sawyer knew, that allows him to savor injustice and exercise retributive power over adults; it also allows him a way of mastering his fear of death.*
“Whitman is a very great poet, of the end of life,” D. H. Lawrence said. “A very great post-mortem poet, of the transformations of the soul as it loses its integrity. The poet of the soul’s last shout and shriek, on the confines of death.” Leaves of Grass was the accommodation with death Whitman tried but failed to reach in his fiction. Even in the wastelands of these narratives there are passages of the most vivid and emotionally charged writing he had as yet been capable of, a complex texture of reference, symbol, and confessional parallel that looks ahead to the poetry. The title of one of the stories, “The Tomb Blossoms,” is in itself a central Whitman trope, one of the constitutive metaphors of Leaves of Grass. (“Walt’s great poems,” said Lawrence, “are really huge fat tomb-plants, great rank graveyard growths.”) In the village burial ground described in “The Tomb Blossoms,” “Walt” meets a “withered female,” the widow Delaree, “a very old inmate of the poor-house,” “a native of one of the West India Islands.”
With the careless indifference which is shown to the corpses of outcasts, poor Delaree had been thrown into a hastily dug hole; without any one noting it, or remembering which it was. Subsequently, several other paupers were buried in the same spot; and the sexton could only show two graves to the disconsolate woman, and tell her that her husband’s was positively one of the twain. . . . The miserable widow even attempted to obtain the consent of the proper functionaries that the graves might be opened, and her anxieties put at rest! When told that this could not be done, she determined in her soul that at least the remnant of her hopes and intentions should not be given up. Every Sunday morning, in the mild seasons, she went forth early, and gathered fresh flowers, and dressed both the graves. So she knew that the right one was cared for, even if another shared that care.
Widow Delaree’s flowers were
fresh, and wet, and very fragrant—those delicate soul-offerings. And this, then, was her employment. Strange! Flowers frail and passing, grasped by the hand of age, and scattered upon a tomb! White hairs and pale blossoms, and stone tablets of Death!
“Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring,” the great poet was to write. “This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers”; death was “an old crone rocking the cradle,” a “dark mother.” But the widow with her basket of leaves and buds was not the only one “who panted for the long repose, as a tired child for the night,” “Walt” concludes, anticipating the invocation to “lovely and soothing death” in his elegy for Abraham Lincoln. “The grave—the grave. What foolish man calls it a dreadful place? It is a kind friend. . . . I do not dread the grave. There is many a time I could lay down, and pass my immortal part through the valley of the shadow, as composedly as I quaff water after a tiresome walk. For what is there of terror in taking our rest?”
But it was only through poetry that Whitman learned to walk with his terror as a friend. The “low and delicious word death,” “word final, superior to all,” became his mantra, like Lear’s
Never, never, never, never, never
and he repeated it until he achieved stillness of mind. A mother endlessly rocking the cradle, the sea
Lisped to me constantly the low and delicious word DEATH,
And again Death—ever Death, Death, Death,
Hissing melodious, neither like the bird, nor like my aroused child’s heart,
But edging near, as privately for me, rustling at my feet,
And creeping thence steadily up to my ears,
Death, Death, Death, Death, Death.
Which I do not forget,
But fuse the song of two together,
That was sung to me in the moonlight on Paumanok’s gray beach,
With the thousand responsive songs, at random,
My own songs, awaked from that hour,
And with them the key, the word up from the waves,
The word of the sweetest song, and all songs,
That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet,
The sea whispered me.
So he was to write in 1859. Meanwhile he whistled in the graveyard.