WALT WHITMAN
The Correspondence, Volume VII
Edited by Ted Genoways. Univ. of Iowa. 192 pp. $44.95
"The public is a
thick-skinned beast," said Walt Whitman, "and you have to keep whacking
away on its hide to let it know you are there." So this month we are
getting a fresh whack on the collective behind with another
supplemental volume of The Correspondence.
We could use the heads-up: Whitman has become a fixed
icon rather than a real, living breathing, poetic presence. Like
jovial, bespectacled Ben Franklin steering his kite in the rainstorm,
or statesmanlike Lincoln gazing at the circumference of our penny, Walt
is packaged according to a rather misleading stereotype: the genial man
of the people, a straw hanging from his lips, his hat tilted at a
jaunty angle. (You'd never guess that the cosmopolitan Whitman read 10
newspapers a day and loved New York opera.) He would not have been
displeased by this misleading image -- in fact, he cultivated it -- but
he could not have guessed its implications. Though he trumpeted a
messianic political and social role for America, he himself has
dwindled to caricature. What has time done to Walt Whitman?
Whitman's current disfavor is partly a question of
style. His rotund, oratorical, occasionally blowsy verse has more in
common with the Psalms than with fashionable haiku. In an era
embarrassed by grandiose swaggering in U.S. foreign policy, Genial
Walt's oracular generalizations about the American destiny and
character are unsettling. We have a smaller, more personal worldview
that favors obsessive "I" poems. Always bigger than life, Whitman sits
oddly with our minimalist era, which prefers cryptic, enigmatic Emily
Dickinson, the other pole in the world of American poetry.
It's curious, then, that we owe Whitman so much: He's
the American granddaddy of free verse, after all, our first great
national iconoclast. Even D.H. Lawrence, who jeered fiercely at him,
finally conceded that our "strange, modern American Moses" was "a great
moralist . . . a great leader." With a passion that matched his
derision, Lawrence called him "Whitman, the one man breaking a way
ahead. Whitman, the one pioneer. And only Whitman."
Well, Whitman has always attracted enthusiasm. He
hasn't always attracted scholarship. Or at least not enough of it to
get his complete oeuvre in print, even a century or so after his death.
This slim, bright-red hardcover, with the interlaced initials "WW" on
the cover, is among the more modest success stories of this season.
It's quietly labeled Volume VII, part of the Iowa Whitman Series.
Edited by Ted Genoways, this is the posthumous
offspring of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, the first volume
of which appeared in 1961. Posthumous, because the general editors and
all members of the advisory editorial board for the project are now
dead. No new members were ever appointed. Scholars continue to prepare
new volumes, though their fate is uncertain. According to the foreword
written by Ed Folsom, our foremost Whitman scholar, the project is now
"hopelessly scattered, fragmented, and incomplete."
Undeterred, scholars continue to make important new
discoveries: A cache of early letters to Abraham Paul Leech of Jamaica
is among the more important additions included here. They throw new
light on Whitman's Civil War years, his friendships, his family
relations, his opinions on such matters as how Spanish heritage will
help shape American identity.
Style is not the only reason for the comparative
neglect of Whitman's oeuvre -- his personal habits were an obstacle to
any kind of organizational system. A visitor toward the end of
Whitman's life described his messy abode at 328 Mickle Street in
Camden, N.J.: "I found Whitman calmly sitting in the midst of such
utter and appalling literary confusion, I wondered for a moment how he
breathed -- vast heaps of everything piled about him. It seemed as
though an earthquake had thrown all the life and literature of the
hour, everything, in fact, into ruins, but the old god."
Odd letters, articles and manuscripts keep cropping up
in the most unexpected places, as well as the usual ones -- auctions,
attics, library special collections and, increasingly, the World Wide
Web, with its online catalogs of libraries and auctions, its databases
for manuscript collections. Surprisingly, 20 of the "new" letters
turned up on www.whitmanarchive.org, the most familiar source of
Whitman manuscripts.
Taken individually, the letters in this volume have a
sort of random, letter-in-a-bottle feel. Among the dozens of brief
notes to publishers, compositors, newspaper editors and fans we have a
hitherto unknown 1862 letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, begging for work
in Washington. The fulsome letters to Leech, about the only ones that
form a kind of ongoing narrative, uncover the pre-Leaves of Grass
Whitman, the poet before he envisioned a generous, all-embracing new
world. They are full of invective, wiseacring, posturing; he loathes
the rural communities where he is employed as a teacher -- he hates the
food, the people, the life:
"I am sick of wearing away by inches,
and spending the fairest portion of my little span of life, here in
this nest of bears, this forsaken of all God's creation; among clowns
and country bumpkins, flat-heads, and coarse brown-faced girls, dirty,
ill-favoured young brats, with squalling throats and crude manners, and
bog-trotters, with all the disgusting conceit, of ignorance and
vulgarity," he gripes in 1840, desperately appealing to Leech to "send
me something funny."
