The Gift

by Lewis Hyde

  When I pass to and fro, different latitudes, different seasons, beholding the crowds of the great cities, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, New Orleans, Baltimore—when I mix with these interminable swarms of alert, turbulent, good-natured, independent citizens, mechanics, clerks, young persons—at the idea of this mass of men, so fresh and free, so loving and so proud, a singular awe falls upon me. I feel, with dejection and amazement, that among our geniuses and talented writers or speakers, few or none have yet really spoken to this people, created a single image-making work for them, or absorb’d the central spirit and the idiosyncrasies which are theirs—and which, thus, in highest ranges, so far remain entirely uncelebrated, unexpress’d.

  Dominion strong is the body’s; dominion stronger is the mind’s. What has fill’d, and fills to-day our intellect, our fancy, furnishing the standards therein, is yet foreign … I say I have not seen a single writer, artist, lecturer, or what not, that has confronted the voiceless but ever erect and active, pervading, underlying will and typic aspiration of the land, in a spirit kindred to itself. Do you call those genteel little creatures American poets? Do you term that perpetual, pistareen, paste-pot work, American art, American drama, taste, verse? I think I hear, echoed as from some mountaintop afar in the west, the scornful laugh of the Genius of these States.

  WALT WHITMAN, 1871

  CHAPTER NINE

  A Draft of

  Whitman

  I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift

  of “Leaves of Grass.”

  EMERSON TO WHITMAN, 1855

  I • The Grass Over Graves

  … I guess [the grass] is a uniform hieroglyphic,

  And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,

  Growing among black folks as among white,

  … I give them the same, I receive them the same.

  “SONG OF MYSELF”

  In an 1847 notebook Walt Whitman, then about twenty-eight years old, recorded a short fantasy concerning food. “I am hungry and with my last dime get me some meat and bread, and have appetite enough to relish it all.—But then like a phantom at my side suddenly appears a starved face, either human or brute, uttering not a word. Now do I talk of mine and his?— Has my heart no more passion than a squid or clam shell has?”

  But in truth he feels no desire to share his meal. He’s hungry. No law forbids a man to feed his stomach. “What is this then that balances itself upon my lips and wrestles as with the knuckles of God for every bite I put between them, and if my belly is victor … follows the innocent food down my throat and turns it to fire and lead within me?—And what is it but my soul that hisses like an angry snake, Fool! will you stuff your greed and starve me?”

  I am reminded of the story of Saint Martin of Tours, one of the earliest saints of the Western Church. Martin had a vision as a young soldier serving in the Roman army. Having torn his cloak in half to cover a naked beggar, he saw, the following night, an image of Christ wrapped in the garment he had given away. There are spirits that appear as beggars in our peripheral vision; what we bestow upon them draws them into the foreground and joins them to us. “Song of Myself,” Whitman’s greatest poem, begins with an invitation to the “starved face” of his hunger fantasy. “Loafe with me on the grass,” he says to his soul, “loose the stop from your throat, / … Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvéd voice.”

  Somehow—it is not recorded—he gave the soul its bread. It came toward him as a lover then, not as a beggar or beast. It stretched him on the grass and entered his body. Its throat opened and it began to sing.

  Whitman was born in 1819 into a large family. His father appears to have been a man of independent spirit, a devotee of Thomas Paine and the Quaker dissenters. At one time he had been a farmer on Long Island, but he soon turned his hand to carpentry after moving the family to Brooklyn, where he built plain houses for working-class families. He never made much money. The Whitmans moved from house to house as each was finished and sold to pay the mortgage. Whitman himself began to work when he was eleven, first as a lawyer’s boy, then as an apprentice in a print shop. Like many printers, he developed an interest in journalism. In his late teens he taught school for several years; in the 1840s he wrote for and edited, with some success, newspapers in and around New York. He wrote sentimental fiction and conventional poetry. The mystery of this life, or at least its surprise, was that in 1855 this previously run-of-the-mill writer came to publish Leaves of Grass, a book remarkable both in content and in style. The turn in Whitman’s life has been explained in many ways—that he was inspired by a trip to a phrenologist, that he cribbed it all from Emerson, that he fell in love on a trip to New Orleans, that he’d been reading Carlyle on heroes, that he became enthusiastic over a modern version of Hermes Trismegistus found in a George Sand novel, and more. Each of these explanations is true to some degree (except for the New Orleans love affair). After Whitman died, a friend of his, Maurice Bucke, put forward yet another—that in June of 1853, when Whitman was thirty-five, he had an awakening, a rebirth, a moment of “cosmic consciousness.” Whitman himself never explicitly corroborated Bucke’s thesis, but he does describe such an epiphany in Section 5 of “Song of Myself.” Having invoked his soul, he addresses it:

  I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,

  How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,

  And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,

  And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.

  Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,

  And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,

  And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,

  And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,

  And that a kelson of the creation is love,

  And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,

  And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,

  And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.

  It is of little account for the story I wish to tell whether this infusion, this lovemaking between the self and the soul, happened in fact or in imagination; either way we may begin. We have two gifts already. The sequence of events implies that Whitman shared the bread with his soul, and now the soul has given him a return gift, its tongue. Their commerce is an exact parallel to the one I described earlier between the Roman and his genius, an interior give-and-take between a man and his tutelary spirit. In this case, though, the man is a poet and the spirit is a poet’s soul. Whitman’s account of their commerce constitutes the creation myth of a gifted man. In the circulation of gifts Whitman becomes a poet, or, to put it another way, through the completed give-and-take he enters a way of being, a state, in which an ongoing commerce of gifts is constantly available to him.

  Whitman’s hunger fantasy differs from all later accounts of his intercourse with the soul in its underlying tension. And one of the first things we can say about the gifted state which his epiphany initiates is that this tension, the “talk of mine and his,” falls away. As gift exchange is an erotic commerce, joining self and other, so the gifted state is an erotic state: in it we are sensible of, and participate in, the underlying unity of things. Readers are usually struck by Whitman’s bolder, more abstract assertions of unity—“I am not the poet of goodness only, / I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also”— but the real substance of the state Whitman has entered lies in the range of his attention and affections:

  I … do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else,

  And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me,

  And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.

&nb
sp; One of the effects of reading Whitman’s famous catalogs is to induce his own equanimity in the reader. Each element of creation seems equally fascinating. The poet’s eye focuses with unqualified attention on such a wide range of creation that our sense of discrimination soon withdraws for lack of use, and that part of us which can sense the underlying coherence comes forward:

  The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,

  The married and unmarried children ride home to their

  Thanksgiving dinner,

  The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a

  strong arm,

  The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and

  harpoon are ready …

  The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of

  the big wheel,

  The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day

  loafe and looks at the oats and rye,

  The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm’d

  case,

  (He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his

  mother’s bed-room) …

  Whitman puts hierarchy to sleep. He attends to life wherever it moves. He would be useless in that ethic’s-class dilemma mentioned earlier in this book: deciding which member of the family to throw from the sinking lifeboat. All things carry equivalent worth simply by virtue of their existence, be they presidents or beetles rolling balls of dung. The contending and reckoning under which most of us suffer most of the time—in which this thing or that thing is sufficient or insufficient, this lover, that lover, this wine, that movie, this pair of pants—is laid aside. You may relax,

  The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,

  The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are

  in their place,

  The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.

  Having fallen into this state, Whitman resists being drawn back into that part of the mind which reckons value or splits things apart. He refuses commerce with what we might call “the brain that divides” or with any spirit which might divorce him from his newly wedded soul, or which might—to fill out the list with Whitman’s typical unities—divide men from women, human beings from animals, the rich from the poor, the smart from the dumb, or the present from the past and the future. In a striking passage toward the beginning of “Song of Myself,” Whitman declares his satisfaction with his awakening and asks rhetorically:

  As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side

  through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the

  day with stealthy tread,

  Leaving me baskets cover’d with white towels swelling

  the house with their plenty,

  Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and

  scream at my eyes,

  That they turn from gazing after and down the road,

  And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,

  Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two,

  and which is ahead?

  In the first edition of the poem it is God who shares the poet’s bed and leaves the baskets of rising dough. In an early notebook, Whitman, thinking of various heroes (Homer, Columbus, Washington), writes that “after none of them … does my stomach say enough and satisfied.—Except Christ; he alone brings the perfumed bread, ever vivifying to me, ever fresh and plenty, ever welcome and to spare.” Each of these breads, like that of the hunger fantasy, is a gift (from the god-lover, to the soul), and Whitman senses he would lose that gift were he to “turn from gazing after” his lover and reckon its value or peek to see if the baskets hold whole wheat or rye.

  Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age

  vexes age,

  Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things,

  while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and

  admire myself.

  In abandoning the brain that divides, Whitman quits as well all questioning and argument (what he calls “talk”). I do not mean he is silent—he affirms and celebrates—but his mouth is sealed before the sleepless, pestering questions of the dividing mind. “Master,” Whitman wrote in a preface addressed to Emerson, “I am a man who has perfect faith.” Faith does not question. Or, to give the matter its proper shading, faith is the aftermath of questioning—not the answers but the quitting of doubt. It is an ancient wisdom that questioning itself postpones or prohibits faith. In a Buddhist sutra a monk comes to the Buddha saying he shall abandon the religious life unless the master can answer his questions. Is the world eternal, or isn’t it? Does the saint exist after death or doesn’t he? Are the soul and the body identical or are they two things? The Buddha says he does not hold to either side of any of these questions, for they are “questions which tend not to edification.” Two lines from Kabir, the fifteenth-century mystic poet, make the same point:

  The flavor of floating through the ocean of deathless

  life has quieted all my questions.

  Just as the tree is inside of the seed, so all our diseases

  are in the asking of these questions.

  Several times in Leaves of Grass Whitman tells us of periods in his own life when he could not feel his perfect faith. “I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,” he confides to the reader in one poem, “I too knitted the old knot of contrariety.” One of the love poems suggests the content of Whitman’s questions—and tells how they were quieted. The poems gathered under the heading Calamus address themselves, in Whitman’s terms, to “the passion of friendship for men,” to “adhesiveness, manly love.” They are quite clearly the record, sometimes frank and sometimes veiled, of Whitman’s frustrated love affair with a man in the late 1850s. A poem called “Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances” lists the doubts he suffers when he cannot feel “the equanimity of things”:

  … That we may be deluded,

  That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations

  after all,

  That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful

  fable only,

  May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men,

  hills, shining and flowing waters,

  … are … only apparitions …

  But, like Kabir, Whitman found something to dissolve his doubt:

  When he whom I love travels with me or sits a long

  while holding me by the hand,

  … Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom,

  I am silent, I require nothing further,

  I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of

  identity beyond the grave,

  But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied, He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.

  We have now seen three situations in which Whitman falls into a gifted state. Reckoning and dividing, talking and doubt, all leave him when his lover holds his hand, when the god-lover shares his bed and gives him the baskets of rising dough, and when the soul plunges its tongue into his breast. Note that in each of these cases Whitman’s body is the instrument of his conversion. The intercourse that leads him to the gifted state is a carnal commerce, one of bread and tongues, hands and hearts. Whitman is what has traditionally been known as an enthusiast. To be “enthusiastic” originally meant to be possessed by a god or inspired by a divine afflatus. The bacchants and maenads were enthusiasts, as were the prophets of the Old Testament, the apostles of the New, or, more recently, Shakers and Pentecostal Christians. Enthusiasts, having received a spirit into the body, have never been hesitant to describe their spiritual knowledge in terms of the flesh, to speak of “a sweet burning in the heart” or of a “ravished soul.” Whitman is no exception, as all our examples so far illustrate. He takes his own body to be the font of his religion:

  If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the

  spread of my own body, or any part of it,
<
br />   Translucent mould of me it shall be you!

  Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you!

  Firm masculine colter it shall be you!

  You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings

  of my life! …

  My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!

  Root of wash’d sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you!