The Gift

by Lewis Hyde

  In Democratic Vistas, Whitman ends a similar catalog of city delights saying that they “completely satisfy my senses of power, fulness, motion, &c, give me, through such senses and appetities, and through my esthetic conscience, a continued exaltation and absolute fulfilment.” This sensual participation in the liveliness of the market, along with Whitman’s credo— “all are invited”—means we find in him no reflexive antagonism toward the buyers and sellers. In life as in the poetry, he identifies as readily with the “nonchalant” farmer as with the Yankee “ready for trade.”

  But, of course, Whitman stays seated on top of the omnibus, he doesn’t get down and take a job with the fruit vendor. The wealth accumulated by the men along Broadway is different from that of the man who writes, “I will carefully earn riches to be carried with me after the death of my body …,” or who says that “Charity and personal force are the only investments worth anything.” Whitman admits the traders as a part of his identity, but he is not a trader. They “are not the Me myself.”

  So if by the mercantile spirit we mean the spirit of men who feel their lives are inside the merchandise itself, who must leap from high windows when the stock market falls, then Whitman lacks this spirit. He would still be riding the omnibus, observing their desperation. As for that mercantilism which becomes snared in its own commodities, Whitman has this to say:

  Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking,

  To feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally

  spooning,

  Tickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never

  once going,

  Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the

  chaff for payment receiving,

  A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually

  claiming.

  These lines have occasionally been misread as an expression of solidarity with the exploited, sweating workers. They aren’t that at all. It’s the man who owns the grain bins by the freight depot who gets the chaff; it’s the mice who get the wheat. The key phrase is “idly owning.” Animals are idle owners, the forest god Wotan is an idle owner, and Whitman is the idle owner of all the lights on Broadway.

  Whitman imagined for us an American type I would call the village indolent. The village indolent appears whenever the will to work devours necessary leisure, whenever farmers in the Midwest start plowing at night or cutting down the groves around their homes so as to plant soybeans right up to the windows. Whitman’s idle man stands for the hidden spirit without which no one gets anything from trade. He refuses to do anything but enjoy the fruits of commerce. He eats up all the profits. The harder they work, the lazier he gets. The more money they reinvest in the company, the more he squanders his inheritance. The village indolent, like the religious mendicant, has riches that cannot be distinguished from his poverty. The “poverty” of the mystic is not an absence of material objects; it consists, rather, in breaking down the habit of resting in, or taking seriously, things that are less than God. “‘Blessed are the poor’ is a psychological law,” says the poet Theodore Roethke, “it’s the business of Lady Poverty to confer on her lovers the freedom of the universe.” She gives them the run of the woods. The secret text of the Protestant ethic is this: “You can’t take it with you, but you can’t go unless you’ve got it.” In his detachment from the body of property the village indolent comes into a wealth he will carry after the death of his body. Thoreau still has the run of Emerson’s woods.

  Whether by virtue of such an ideological indolence or not, Whitman himself always distinguished between earning a living and the labor of art. “The work of my life is making poems,” he would declare when Leaves of Grass first appeared and, in old age, would claim that he had “from early manhood abandoned the business pursuits and applications usual in my time and country,” obediently giving himself over to the urge to write poems, “never,” adds a later preface, “composed with an eye on the book-market, nor for fame, nor for any pecuniary profit.” Such remarks may seem a touch ingenuous at first glance; Whitman applied himself to business sometimes, and not just in early manhood, and one can watch his eye alight on the book-market from time to time. But his declarations are not meant to be facts of that sort; they are meant to express the spirit in which he worked, and in that sense they are not ingenuous at all.

  We need only hold in the background our description of the gifted self—and of the social presence of that self and its works—to see why Whitman would separate the spirit of his art from the marketplace. If the merchant hopes to earn a profit in the sale of his commodities, the transaction cannot be a convivial communion, joining “self” and “other.” Commodities must move between reciprocally independent spheres, and the mercantile spirit therefore necessarily supresses the sympathetic faculty and welcomes the brain that divides. Reckoning time and value, marking and maintaining the distinction between self and other—these are the virtues of the mercantile spirit and of the honest merchant who earns his living by their practice. Understood for their power and for their limitations, they are not necessarily toxic to the virtues of the gifted state, but they are distinct from them. I realize that I overstate my case a little—there are times in the creation of the work when the artist reckons and discriminates, just as there are times in the life of the successful merchant when he engages with his customers and imagines their desires. But I am speaking of ruling virtues. The salesman may imagine his buyer’s wants, but in the end, to earn his daily bread he needs some “other” who is not made a part of the self by the transaction. This may be an obvious point, but you cannot make money without calculating value and without the distinction between buyer and seller. Commodities are not adhesive riches as Whitman would have art be. And while the artist must evaluate, reckon, and judge at different phases in the creation of his work, such skills are not the ruling motives of art, at least not by Whitman’s model. For Whitman the self becomes the gifted self—prolific, green— when it recognizes the stuff of its experience, its talents, and the products of its labor to be gifts, endowments. And the work of the artist can only come to its powers in the world when it moves beyond the self as a gift—from the artist to his audience or, in its wider functions, as that “image-making work” whose circulation preserves the spirit of the collective and slowly accrues a culture, a tradition.

  In Whitman’s prose writings we find his remarks on the functions of the poetry alongside his claims to having “abandoned the business pursuits.” How deeply he felt a conflict between the two may not be clear, but it is clear that he is a man who never exhibited much material ambition. There’s an amusing and typical story from the years he spent in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War. When Whitman first arrived in the capital, he intended to find work as a clerk in one of the departments. To this end he wrote to Emerson asking for letters of introduction to the secretaries of state and treasury. Emerson kindly complied, but by the time the letters arrived, Whitman had discovered he could earn his keep by working a few hours a day as a copyist and freelance journalist; his material wants were few and his energies had been quickly absorbed in ministering to wounded soldiers in the hospitals.

  Emerson’s letters lay undisturbed in the poet’s trunk until eleven months later, when a friend from Boston, John Townsend Trowbridge, offered to deliver the one addressed to the secretary of the treasury, Salmon Chase. Trowbridge happened to be a guest in Chase’s home, “a fine, large mansion,” he tells us, “sumptuously furnished, cared for by sleek and silent colored servants, and thronged by distinguished guests …” The Chase mansion sat diagonally across the street from the house in which Whitman rented his quarters. On visiting this “bare and desolate back room” one winter evening, Trowbridge found it to hold a bed, a cupboard made from a pine box, a few chairs, and a sheet-iron stove; for housekeeping utensils Whitman had a jackknife, a teakettle, a covered tin cup, and a bowl and spoon. Whitman was in the habit of eating from a sheet of brown paper and throwing it in the fire
at the end of the meal. The night of Trowbridge’s visit the fire had gone out in the stove. The window was open to the December air, and the men sat in their overcoats, arguing about literature.

  The next day, upon learning of Emerson’s letter, Trowbridge persuaded Whitman to let him carry it across the street. He presented it to the secretary that evening after dinner. Chase was impressed to see Emerson’s name, but averred that he couldn’t imagine hiring Whitman. “I am placed in a very embarrassing position,” he said. “It would give me great pleasure to grant his request, out of my regard for Mr. Emerson, but …” But Leaves of Grass, it seems, had made Whitman notorious; he was said to be a rowdy. “His writings have given him a bad repute,” Chase concluded, “and I should not know what sort of place to give to such a man.”

  Trowbridge offered to relieve the secretary of his embarrassment by withdrawing the letter. Chase hesitated, glancing at the signature. “No,” he said, “I have nothing of Emerson’s in his handwriting, and I shall be glad to keep this.”

  Whitman’s friend was forced to report that not only had he failed to find the poet a job but he’d lost the letter to boot. Whitman was bemused. “He is right,” he said, “in preserving his saints from contamination by a man like me!”

  Whitman himself had scant desire to become any but an idle owner. He didn’t own a home until he moved to Camden, New Jersey, when he was sixty-five. Until then he had always lived with family, with friends, or in rented rooms. It wasn’t that he was naïve about money. He knew how to get a construction contract, build a house, and sell it. He was always able to find work as a journalist or editor when he wanted it. In the 1840s and again in the late 1860s he held down steady jobs. He was direct and frank when selling a poem (“the price is 4 pounds—$20—in gold and four copies of the number in which it is printed” reads a typical cover letter). He was both frugal and generous. His solicitation of letters from Emerson reveals some craft in the job market. But as the fate of those letters shows, he wasn’t really interested. His aspirations were plain. His fantasy of a house was “a regular Irish shanty …, two rooms, and an end shed.” His letters show he didn’t think of his accommodations in Washington as bare and desolate: “I have a little room, & live a sort of German or Parisian student life—always get my breakfast in my room, (have a little spirit lamp) … walk quite a good deal … go down the river, or off into Virginia …” Whitman spent his days in Washington browsing through the newly built capital buildings, listening to speeches in the Congress, walking the banks of the Potomac, writing poems, and—the main thing—nursing the wounded in the hospitals. “With my office-hunting, no special results yet,” he wrote to a friend. “I cannot give up my Hospitals … I never before had my feelings so thoroughly and … permanently absorbed.” When the war was over and the hospitals were empty, Whitman finally settled into a steady job. It bored him. “A clerk’s life … is not very interesting.”

  III • Saplings

  Whitman had traveled to Washington in December of 1862 to look for his brother George, who the family feared had been wounded during the second battle of Bull Run. While he was in the city he went to Campbell Hospital to visit “a couple of Brooklyn boys” from his brother’s regiment. About a hundred wounded men lay in a long shed with whitewashed walls. Whitman stopped to try to comfort a boy who was groaning with pain. “I talked to him some time,” Whitman wrote to his sister. “He seemed to have entirely give up, and lost heart—he had not a cent of money—not a friend or acquaintance.” Discovering that no one had examined the boy since he was brought in, Whitman went and found a doctor. He sat on the bedside and wrote out a letter that the young man dictated to his family. The boy said he would like to buy some milk from a woman who came through the ward each afternoon, and Whitman gave him the change in his pocket. “Trifling as this was, he was overcome and began to cry.”

  This serendipitous encounter drew on so many elements of Whitman’s personality that he soon abandoned his plans to return to New York. It not only touched his sympathy and generosity but gave him a chance to “emanate”—to heal through attention and affection—and to fulfill one of his roles as a poet, committing to paper the speech of the illiterate boy. He began to visit the hospitals daily. He wrote to friends in Boston and New York soliciting contributions so he could buy things for the soldiers, and soon he had settled into the routine that was to last all through the war—living in a rented room, working three or four hours a day at odd jobs, and visiting the hospitals.

  He would arrive in the late afternoon and stay late into the night. Sometimes he would appear just before supper carrying a pot of food and go through a ward with a spoon, “distributing a little here and there.” He discovered a store where he could buy homemade biscuits and cookies. He acquired a haversack and walked his rounds dispensing crackers, oysters, butter, condensed milk, newspapers, dressing gowns, and more. At the Armory Square Hospital six or seven hundred men lay wounded:

  I try to give a word or a trifle to every one without exception, making regular rounds among them all. I give all kinds of sustenance, blackberries, peaches, lemons & sugar, wines, all kinds of preserves, pickles, brandy, milk, shirts & all articles of underclothing, tobacco, tea, handkerchiefs, &c &c &c. I always give paper, envelopes, stamps, &c … To many I give (when I have it) small sums of money—half of the soldiers in hospital have not a cent.

  Once in the summer of 1864 he bought ten gallons of ice cream and, like someone’s grandfather, carried it through all fifteen wards of Carver Hospital, giving a little to everyone (“Quite a number western country boys had never tasted ice cream before”). Always he would sit and take dictation, writing letters home for the men who couldn’t write, adding at the bottom of the page, “The above letter is written by Walt Whitman, a visitor to the hospitals.” He also wrote to the parents of soldiers who died. Sometimes he would read aloud to the men, individually or with the whole ward gathered around—the news, reports from the front, popular novels, the Odyssey, passages from Shakespeare and Scott, and his own poems.

  One of Whitman’s letters from the second year of the war describes what by then must have been a typical visit. The day is a Sunday and he arrives at the hospital in the midafternoon. He spends the evening feeding men too wounded to feed themselves. He sits by a man’s bed, peeling a peach, cutting the pieces into a glass, and sprinkling them with sugar. He gives small sums of money to a few—“I provide myself with a lot of bright new 10ct & 5ct bills … to give bright fresh 10ct bills, instead of any other, helps break the dullness of hospital life.” The men retire early, between eight and nine o’clock, and Whitman stays on, sitting in a corner to write his letter. “The scene is a curious one—the ward is perhaps 120 or 30 feet long—the cots each have their white mosquito curtains—all is quite still—an occasional sigh or groan—up in the middle of the ward the lady nurse sits at a little table with a shaded lamp, reading—the walls, roof, &c are all whitewashed—the light up & down the ward from a few gas-burners about half turned down.”

  On his very first visit to Washington, strolling near one of the hospital buildings, Whitman had suddenly found himself standing before “a heap of feet, legs, arms, and human fragments, cut, bloody, black and blue, swelling and sickening— in the garden near, a row of graves.” What went on in these hospitals was often literally horrible, and the horror was part of what drew Whitman to the work. The hospitals were so informal and understaffed that Whitman was able to participate in almost all the details of life in the wards. He sat through the night with dying men. He cleaned wounds (the men brought in from the field sometimes arrived with maggots in their wounds), and he attended operations. He stood by as the doctors amputated the leg of Lewis Brown, one of the soldiers he had become fond of.

  There is a creepy fascination to such horror—the kind that draws a crowd to an automobile accident—and that must have been part of its impact on Whitman. But beneath fascination, and beneath Whitman’s own obsession with death, lies yet anot
her reason why people are drawn to hospital work: to be in a place where children are born or where men and women are dying or suffering in extremis is to be close to the quick of life. Those who do not become inured to the work often find it strangely vitalizing. Death in particular focuses life, and deepens it. In the face of death we can discriminate between the important and the trivial. We sometimes drop our habitual or guardian reticence and speak clearly.

  This last, at least, was one of the ways Whitman himself chose to explain why he became so deeply involved with working in the wards. He had stumbled upon a public form for his affections, a way for him to become “undisguised and naked” without retreating to the woods. Of his manner in the hospitals he writes, “I have long discarded all stiff conventions (death and anguish dissipate ceremony here between my lads & me)—I pet them, some of them it does so much good, they are so faint—lonesome—at parting at night sometimes I kiss them right & left—The doctors tell me I supply the patients with a medicine which all their drugs & bottles & powders are helpless to yield.” The presence of death allowed Whitman a wider emotional life than he had ever had (a conjunction to which we shall have to return in a moment).