Leaves & Leavings

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF WALT WHITMAN, VOLUMES I & II (394 & 387 pp.)--Edited by Edwin Haviland Miller--New York University Press ($ 10 each).

Unlike that of Walt Whitman's captain, the fearful task of American scholarship will never be done. Sixty-nine years after Whitman's death, a squad of 14 scholars is at work on a projected 14-volume edition of his collected writings. The first two volumes consist of 707 letters handsomely printed and annotated, and apparently not so much as a postcard to a landlady has escaped. It is a curious collection, not only for the Whitmaniac or the addict of Americana, but for all who find interest in what a genius talks about when he is not being one.

"America's Greatest Poet." the publishers call him without equivocation; certainly he was the most American poet. From its publication in 1855, Leaves of Grass has been acknowledged by convert or critic as signaling something new and distinctively American. It has been an emancipation proclamation for later generations of U.S. writers as apparently diverse as Thomas Wolfe, Saul Bellow, Henry Miller, James Agee and Jack Kerouac--and for writers anywhere who have felt inhibited by form and classic restraint. Whitman tapped a gusher, and no one reading the letters can doubt that he knew just what he was doing. To a correspondent he gleefully quoted a derisive squib from a critic, which said that he had arrived in New York "carrying the blue cotton umbrella of the future."

Nothing Top-Loftical. Whitman was a great, .puffing manifesto writer, a dogmatist of the "I." In view of this, it is odd that in the most personal of all art forms, the private letter, Whitman should be rather closemouthed. He disdained "top-loftical" correspondence and "fancy words," so that there is a good deal of all-too-plain prose about the Washington weather, small sums of money, and "good grub" at his boardinghouse. The reason for his reticence seems to be that when the poet's private emotions were most powerfully involved, convention made him rein in his rhetoric. The plain fact is that a great number of the letters written by the old buckaroo of the open road, the advocate of "the broad masculine manners of these States," were nothing more or less than love letters to young men. The caution he used in this clandestine correspondence seems to have carried over into his other letters.

The letters cover his youth as a journeyman printer in New Orleans with his brother Jeff, his tour of duty in Washington as clerk in the Treasury and the Indian Bureau of the Interior Department and his stint as a volunteer male nurse in the gruesome military hospitals of the Civil War. Leaving his clerk's desk in the afternoon, "Loving Old Walt" (as he liked to sign himself) checked in at one of the huge whitewashed dressing stations near the capital. It is easy to raise a coarse snigger at the ambiguity of Whitman's motives for playing the male nurse among what he called the "huge swarms of dear, wounded, sick and dying boys." Yet, if he had not visited them, the child soldiery in the wards would, for the most part, have been utterly alone with the horrors of 1860 surgery, infection and anesthesia. He liked to "buss" them and hold hands after lights out, but to the Ohio farm boys lying maimed in the long sheds, a whiskery buss from the poet who brought candy and read letters was probably just one more puzzling event in a confusing war. Whitman knew his own nature, even if the boys did not, and he was at pains to conceal it from the world. (Later he was to boast of eleven illegitimate children.) When peace brought the hospital visits to an end, Whitman kept writing to the boys, although few answered. One exception was Peter Doyle, a veteran who worked as a conductor on the Washington-Georgetown City Railroad. For all his fond words to his "own loving boys" and his pathetic promise to make Pete "a correct speller & real handsome writer," he would get in return something like this: "i cant rite so good as the car is in motion."

Democratic Presence. As the letters show. Whitman was nagged by more than one man's fair share of family troubles. One brother was feebleminded, another alcoholic, another a syphilitic who died insane; a sister was married to an artist and blackmailer of whom Walt wrote as "a cringing crawling snake"; a sister-in-law was a streetwalker; his "loud, tight, crafty" carpenter father was no help at all. Only his sturdy Dutch mother, for all her complaints, parsimony and illiteracy ("Not being boss of your own shanty ain't the cheese," she wrote), gave aid and comfort to her genius son.

Like Robert Frost after him, Whitman was first acclaimed in Britain; in the native land he celebrated, he was long left to push his own barrow. In one letter he is found trying to promote a visit to the U.S. of the prestigious Alfred Tennyson. His letter to the poet is curious on three counts. With its evocation of the "seething mass" of America and its "measureless crudity," it gives a prose version of his poetic vision. As such, its effect was only to scare off a poetic grandee, and it showed a naively crude Marxist notion of culture as a "superstructure." The combination of "wealthy incentive, no limit to food, land, money, work, opportunity, smart and industrious citizens" would surely some day be followed by "great ideas--religion, poets, literature." Such was Whitman's wobbly esthetic, which he was to share with the leading citizens of Sauk Centre, Minn.

If Whitman did not think of culture as an integral part of life but as a top dressing, he insisted that his own art was a totality in itself. In one of the oddest letters ever written by a poet (it is in the third person), he sent to an admirer a blurb for his work, intended to be passed on to his publisher. "Personally," wrote Walt, "the author of Leaves of Grass is in no sense whatever the 'rough,' 'eccentric,' 'vagabond' or queer person that the commentators persist in making him . . . always bodily sweet & fresh, dressed plainly & cleanly, a gait & demeanor of antique simplicity ... an American Personality, & real Democratic Presence, that not only the best old Hindu, Greek and Roman worthies would at once have responded to, but which the most cultured European would likewise."

He added as key terms that would "unlock" Leaves of Grass the words modernness, which could stand today, and ensemble, a word which today seems to belong to the cloak-and-suit trade, but which Walt intended to mean "the idea of Totality, of the All-successful, final certainties of each individual man, as well as the world he inhabits." Many people, to their peril, have taken the flatulent old Faust at his own measure. Were it not for the genius of Leaves of Grass, this sort of thing would have been buried mercifully for the flapdoodle it is. But then, scholars have no mercy.

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