Authors: Lewis Hyde
When I hear of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was
with them,
How together through life, through dangers, odium,
unchanging, long and long,
Through youth and through middle and old age, how
unfaltering, how affectionate and faithful they were,
Then I am pensive—I hastily walk away fill’d with the
bitterest envy.
In January of 1873 Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke on the left side of his body which left him bedridden for months. As
was by then his custom, he associated his failing strength with his wartime illness. “Had been simmering inside for six or seven years … Now a serious attack beyond all cure.” Four months later, just as he was beginning to be able to walk again, Whitman’s mother died, “the only staggering, staying blow & trouble I have had,” he wrote to a friend.
“Unspeakable
—my physical sickness, bad as it is, is nothing to it.” In February of 1875 he had another paralytic stroke, this one on his right side. After his mother’s death Whitman had moved from Washington, D.C., to Camden, New Jersey, at first living with his brother George and then by himself in a house on Mickel Street. It was the first home he had ever owned, but these were bad years, with Whitman isolated, debilitated, and depressed.
Early in 1876 Whitman met Harry Stafford, an eighteen-year-old boy working in the Camden printing office where Whitman’s book
Two Rivulets
was being set in type. Stafford’s parents owned a farm not far away in the New Jersey countryside, and Whitman soon became their constant visitor. George and Susan Stafford had seven children, and before long Whitman took his place by the fire as grandfather to the whole brood. He took young Harry under his wing. They wrestled and roughhoused together. “Walt, the semi-invalid, drew enough strength from the younger man to pin him to the floor …,” says Justin Kaplan. “They cut up like two boys and annoy me sometimes,” a friend, the naturalist John Burroughs, wrote in his diary after a visit. Whitman was both father and mother to the boy, teaching him to read, offering advice on employment and education, buying him clothes and (for Christmas) a gold watch, asking the print shop to be sure that he learned how to set type, and so forth.
Whitman would have liked to be something more than a parent. “My nephew & I when traveling always share the same room together & the same bed …,” he tells a prospective host. In September of 1876 he gave Harry what was
ostensibly a “friendship ring,” but as the difficulties it stirred up make clear, it was something more besides. Whitman’s rather spare journal entries are all we have to tell the story. Interlined among street addresses and records of petty cash we find:
talk with H S & gave him r[ing] Sept 26 ′76—(took r back)
Nov. 1—Talk with H S in front room S street—gave him r again
Nov 25, 26, 27, 28—Down at White Horse [i.e., the Staffords’ farm]—Memorable talk with H S—settles the matter.
Dec 19— …
evening, sitting in room, had serious inward rev’n & conv’n
—saw clearly …
what is really meant—
—very profound meditation on all—happy & satisfied at last …
(that this may last now
without any more perturbation)
scene in the front room Ap. 29 with H
July 20th ′77, in the room at White Horse “good bye”
And so forth. The relationship did not break off, the two men continued to see each other regularly that year, but Stafford was moody and quick-tempered while Whitman, we may
infer, was perturbed. The ring seems to have remained with the poet. Early that winter, after a visit from Whitman, Harry wrote him an erratically spelled letter: “I wish you would put the ring on my finger again, it seems to me ther is something that is wanting to complete our friendship when I am with you. I have tride to studdy it out but cannot find out what it is. You know when you put it on there was but one thing to part it from me and that was death.” And next we read in Whitman’s journal: “Feb 11 [1878]—Monday—Harry here— put r on his hand again.”
Whitman wanted to marry before he died. His mother’s death seems to have freed him, or spurred him on. Four months after her funeral Whitman sent a friendship ring to Anne Gilchrest, an ardent English admirer who had been pursuing him for years in letters. Three years later, despite Whitman’s cautions, she arrived at the dock in Philadelphia. Whitman could have made a marriage of convenience. The woman was more than devoted to him—she set up housekeeping in Philadelphia, kept a special room for him to stay in, fed him Christmas dinner … But she had completely misread the erotic poems. It was, as it had always been, the unlettered boy whom Whitman sought to marry to his soul, “some low person …, lawless, rude, illiterate …”
One has to admire his unflagging desire. It was an old, lonely, crippled man who got Harry Stafford to wrestle on the floor with him, sleep in the same bed, and accept his ring. And he got some of what he wanted. In later years he wrote to Harry, “I realize plainly that if I had not known you …, I should not be a living man today.” By that time their relationship had cooled. Harry had grown up. A journal entry of June 1884 reads:
H S and Eva Westcott married.
Whitman accompanied Harry and his bride to the civil ceremony, consenting in the end to be the father again, the father who gives the boy away, not the lover who may keep him.
The Stafford farm offered Whitman something besides Harry and the opportunity to play grandfather to a family. Not far from the house there was a woods, a pond, and a stream called Timber Creek. Spring, summer, and fall, sometimes with the local farm boys but often alone, Whitman would go down to the water. He would drag along a portable chair and sit beneath a large black oak (“exhaling aroma”), or sunbathe naked (except for his hat—he kept his hat on). He carried pencil and paper and took notes on the trees, the swarms of bumblebees, the song of the locust (“like a brass disk whirling”), the hermit thrush, the quail, cedar apples, a spring that rose from beneath a willow—“gurgling, gurgling ceaselessly … (if one could only translate it)”—and the pond itself with its calamus leaves, water snakes, and birds (“the circle—gambols of the swallows flying by dozens in concentric rings in the last rays of sunset, like flashes of some airy wheel”).
Whitman returned to the self of his first song at Timber Creek. Hobbling down the farm lane early in the morning, he would pause by the tall, yellow-flowered mulleins to examine their woolly stems and the light-reflecting facets of the leaf: “Annually for three summers now, they and I have silently re-turn’d together.” He resumed that participatory sensuality in which “subject” and “object” dissolve to be replaced by a presence, an “invisible physician” he calls it now, whose medicine “neither chemistry nor reasoning nor esthetics will give the least explanation.” He wanted to be healed. “Hast Thou, pellucid, in Thy azure depths, medicine for case like mine?”
he asks the sky. “And dost Thou subtly mystically now drip it through the air invisibly upon me?”
As had been the case for the young Whitman, it was the trees that held this old man’s medicine. A yellow poplar stood near the creek, four feet thick at the butt and ninety feet high. “How dumbly eloquent! What suggestions of imperturbability and
being
, as against the human trait of mere
seeming …
How it rebukes, by its tough and equable serenity all weathers, this gusty-temper’d little whiffet, man …” The trees, like the animals, do not complain of lost love or unsatisfied desire. They celebrate themselves. Whitman began to fantasize about dryads and dream of trees speaking to him. “One does not wonder at the old story fables … of people falling into love-sickness with trees, seiz’d extatic with the mystic realism of the resistless silent strength of them—
strength
…”
Whitman hit upon the idea of exercising his limbs by bending young trees (“my natural gymnasia,” he called them). The first day he spent an hour pushing and pulling an oak sapling, thick as a man’s wrist and twelve feet high. “After I wrestle with the tree awhile, I can feel its young sap and virtue welling up out of the ground and tingling through me from crown to toe, like health’s wine.” He began to sing: “I launch forth in my vocalism; shout declamatory pieces, sentiments, sorrow, anger, &c, from the stock poets or plays—inflate my lungs and sing the wild tunes and refrains I heard of the blacks down south, or patriotic songs …” All during the summer of 1876 he wrestled with the trees.
Whitman’s nursing during the war had opened him to love. It changed his life. We find no relationships before the war like those he later established with Doyle or with Stafford: intense, articulated, and long-lasting. And yet, so opened he was also wounded. Something needing cure appeared in his blood. “To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.” It is the sadness of this life that Whitman
could not cure himself with a human love. A baffled animal, he turned back to his trees in the end. But as he confides to us before he tells his tale of Timber Creek, “after you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains …” Beyond the sadness of this life lies its genius, that Whitman was able to find the give-and-take to heal him, to find a green-force to overcome the blood’s decay. He never married his unlettered boy, but he accepted virtue from an even more unlettered nature and gave it speech.
*
In the trajectory of Whitman’s life one can discern a tendency toward a more disincarnate spirituality. As an old man he wrote that
Leaves of Grass
was a collection of songs of the body and that he had thought of writing a second book to indicate that “the unseen Soul govern[s] absolutely at last.” And yet, he says, “It is beyond my powers,” adding that “the physical and the sensuous … retain holds upon me which I think are never entirely releas’d …”
*
When Whitman later tried to raise money for his work in the Civil War hospitals, a friend wrote to him from Boston: “There is a prejudice against you here among the ‘fine’ ladies and gentlemen of the transcendental School. It is believed that you are not ashamed of your reproductive organs and, somehow, it would seem to be the result of their logic—that eunuchs only are fit for nurses.”
*
The quahaug is the same one that appeared in the fantasy of the hungry soul: “Now do I talk of mine and his?—Has my heart no more passion than a squid or clam shell has?”
*
The poem from which these lines are taken is the one about which D. H. Lawrence made his perceptive comment, “Whitman is a very great poet, of the end of life.” The remark is often quoted without its context so as to imply that Whitman is
only
a poet of death. But the context is the same as the one I am setting up here. “… Of the end of life,” says Lawrence, and he adds, “But we have all got to die, and disintegrate. We have got to die in life, too, and disintegrate while we live … Something else will come. ‘Out of the cradle endlessly rocking.’”
*
To speak of procreation as a bestowal, Whitman is forced to abandon his habitual evenhandedness toward the sexes. The male self ejaculates sperm, the female gives birth to babies.
*
There are other “speech centers” in the self besides what Whitman is calling the soul. The intellect can speak—it can describe the known world, it can draw logical conclusions. But it cannot
create
speech for the mute. It is a gesture of the wakened soul to offer articulation to the speechless content of the self. “The talkers … talking the talk of the beginning and the end” cannot do it; only soul, imagination, muse,
genius
can do it.
*
When I speak of celebration, I do not mean that all our art must be a cheery affirmation. To utter sorrow and loss is also a responsive speech, and a form of celebration. I use the term broadly, of course, as when we speak of “celebrating” the anniversary of someone’s death. “Sadness, in order to sing, / Will have to drink black water,” says the Spanish poet José Luis Hidalgo. No one welcomes the black water of grief, but it too, when it comes, may be accepted and articulated. Spoken sorrow— or despair, or longing—descries the shape of the lost. We keep alive through speech the spirit of what we do not have; we survive, spiritually, by uttering the names of the dead and the names of what we need but cannot find. (There is little of this in Whitman, by the way. Only in
Calamus
and in some of the old-age poems do we feel him trying to name what he could not find. He is primarily a poet of praise, “I keep no account with lamentation,” he wrote early on. By that same token, however, some of his sorrow remained mute and some of his intensity never came to life).
†
In an account of a center serving the Jewish elderly in California, the anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff offers the following observation about storytelling; “Stories are a renewal of the word, made alive by being spoken, passed from one to another, released from considerations of correctness and law … Rabbi Nechman of Bratzlav ordered that all written records of his teachings be destroyed. His words must be passed from mouth to mouth, learned by and in heart. ‘My words have no clothes,’ he said. ‘When one speaks to one’s fellows, there arises a simple light and a returning light.’”
The oral tradition—stories, songs, poems passed from mouth to mouth— keeps the gift of speech alive. The poet Gary Snyder, asked in an interview why the oral tradition is so weak in the United States, answered: “Because of the stress on individual names and the emphasis on keeping a text pure.”
Each of these preoccupations—the one a concern of the market, the other a concern of the academy—treats our art as proprietary works, not gifts.
*
This is one reason we cannot read an artist’s work by his life. We learn something when we read the life, of course, but the true artist leaves us with the uncanny sense that the experience fails to explain the creation.
*
As it is, for example, in Mao Tse-tung’s political aesthetic where “work in literature and art… is subordinated to the revolutionary tasks set by the Party…”
*
Justin Kaplan, Whitman’s most recent biographer, says that Whitman’s symptoms suggest severe hypertension and, perhaps, mercury poisoning from overdoses of calomel.