Inner Workings

by J. M. Coetzee

  Without siding with the censors (though to ridicule Comstock for being ‘bewhiskered and paunchy’, as Reynolds does, is hardly to the point – Whitman was bewhiskered and more than a little paunchy himself), might one not argue that, among readers who did not take offence at the Calamus poems, some might have missed the amative content not because they were blinded by preconceptions about what intimacy between men had to consist in but because they did not feel they needed to ask themselves what the amative content of that intimacy might be, that is, because their notion of intimacy did not boil down to what the men in question did with their sexual organs?10

  It is a post-Victorian commonplace that from their early years Victorians were taught to repress certain thoughts, particularly thoughts about ‘the facts of life’, until the very air became clouded with sexual repression. But the anathema on repression is part of the Freudian agenda, one of the weapons Sigmund Freud forged in his intimate war with his parents’ generation. Pace Freud, it is perfectly possible to refrain from having fantasies about the private lives of other people, even of our parents, without having to repress those fantasies and to bear the consequences of repression – the notorious return of the repressed – in our own psychic life. We pay no psychic price when, for example, we refrain from ruminating on ‘the intimate details’, ‘the actual facts’, of what other people do when they visit the bathroom.

  In other words, believing that contemporary readers of Whitman’s poems of love missed what those poems were really about may reveal more about simple-minded notions of what it means to be ‘really about’ something than it reveals about Whitman’s readers.

  Peter Coviello’s response to the question of how Whitman got away with writing poems of same-sex love is more subtle than Loving’s or Reynolds’s but in the end also misses the mark. The attachments that underlie the Calamus poems and the Memoranda, Coviello writes, ‘frustrate the available taxonomies of intimate relations’.

  There has been I think a good deal of misbegotten hand-wringing over these attachments, born partially of a wish not to describe anachronistically kinds of relations – desiring same-sex relations – in terms that were not current in Whitman’s time. But this well-meaning hesitancy oughtn’t to lead us to mantle Whitman’s relations among the soldiers with a counterfeit chastity. (To do this is to forget, in the first place, the relative latitude afforded to mid-century men . . . in an era before the more explicitly punishing language of sexual deviancy had gained broad currency.)11

  Mid-nineteenth-century men did indeed have a freedom that mid-twentieth-century men did not: they could kiss in public, they could hold hands, they could write poems to each other born out of the deepest love (Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ is a case in point), they could even share a bed, all without being ostracised by society or punished by the law. But Coviello’s implicit point seems to be that such behaviour would not have been punished because it would not have been misinterpreted: specifically, it would not have been interpreted as a sign of unchaste hanky-panky with the amative organs when the lights were out.

  The question to ask instead is whether such behaviour would have been interpreted at all, that is, subjected to interrogation for chastity or unchastity. There is a certain sophistication, governed by unspoken social consensus, whose nature lies in taking things simply for what they seem to be. It is this sort of social wisdom, whose other name might be tact, that we are in danger of denying to our Victorian forebears.

  Scholars seem agreed that some time after 1880 a new paradigm of heterosexual versus homosexual, part of what Coviello calls the ‘punishing language of sexual deviancy’, made its way into everyday discourse from the sexological (‘scientific’) literature, and took over as the primary distinction to be made between varieties of the erotic. What paradigm it supplanted is less clear. Jonathan Ned Katz suggests that in early Victorian times the reigning distinction was moral in character rather than sexological: between the passionate on the one hand and the sensual on the other, between high and low, love and lust. Passionate relationships between men or between women were not subjected to interrogation as long as they were of the higher, loving sort.12

  Whitman, born in 1819, was raised in a family of radical Democrats. Throughout his life he believed in an America of yeoman farmers and independent artisans, even though this Jacksonian social ideal became increasingly fanciful as, by mid-century, the new industrial economy took hold and the native artisan class – to say nothing of streams of immigrants from the Old World – were turned into wage labourers in factories.

  As a journalist and newspaper editor in the 1840s and early 1850s, Whitman involved himself from the radical side in the politics of the Democratic Party. By 1855, however, disenchanted with the evasiveness of the Democrats on the issue of slavery, he had dropped out of political life. In their essentials his political beliefs were by now fixed: the world might change around him but he would not change.

  Despite his opposition to slavery, it would be too much to say that in his views on race Whitman was ahead of his times. He was never an abolitionist – indeed he thundered against the ‘abominable fanaticism’ of the abolitionists.13 The point of conflict between North and South was the extension of slaveholding to the new western states. Because slavery was anti-democratic in its effects, because a slave economy was in his eyes the antithesis of an economy of independent yeoman farmers, Whitman supported war against the slaveholders. He did not support the war in order to win for black slaves a rightful place in a democratic order.

  Nor was the condition of the South in the wake of the war a source of celebration to him. He lamented the ‘measureless degradation and insult’ of Reconstruction, he deplored ‘black domination, but little above the beasts’, such as could not be allowed to continue. If slavery had presented a terrible problem to his century, he wrote in an 1876 note to his Memoranda, ‘how if the mass of the blacks in freedom in the U.S. all through the ensuing century, should present a yet more terrible and more deeply complicated problem?’ While he did not reiterate his prewar proposal that the best solution to the ‘problem’ of blacks in America would be to create a national home for them elsewhere, he did not withdraw it either.14

  The long celebratory catalogues of Americans at work that we find in ‘Song of Myself’ and ‘A Song for Occupations’ are therefore tilted toward a diversity in everyday working life that even when Leaves of Grass first came out in 1855 no longer reflected reality: ‘The carpenter dresses his plank . . . / The mate stands braced in the whale-boat . . . / The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel, / The farmer . . . looks at the oats and rye . . .’ Yet it is this vision that Whitman is concerned to project as the future of the nation. To be the poet of America, the national poet, he had to make his vision of a world already receding into the past prevail over a reality increasingly dictated by the market in human labour and by an ideology of competitive individualism. (LoG, p. 41)

  What is most striking in the face of this insuperable task is Whitman’s optimism. To his dying day he seems to have believed that the force that had given birth to the republic, a force to which he gave the name democracy, would prevail. His faith came out of a conviction, growing stronger as his interest in politics waned, that democracy was not one of the superficial inventions of human reason but an aspect of the ever-developing human spirit, rooted in eros. ‘I cannot too often repeat that [democracy] is a word the real gist of which still sleeps . . . It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.’15

  Whitman’s democracy is a civic religion energised by a broadly erotic feeling that men have for women, and women for men, and women for women, but above all that men have for other men. For this reason the social vision expressed in his poetry (the prose is another story) has a pervasive erotic colouring. The poetry does its work by a kind of erotic spellbinding, drawing its readers into a world in which a more or less benign, more or less promiscuous
affection of all for all reigns. Even the call of death in poems like ‘Out of the Cradle’ has its erotic allure.

  It is no wonder that by his middle years Whitman had become enveloped in the aura of prophet and sage (the flowing beard helped), or that he attracted not so much admirers of his poetic art as disciples, Whitmanians, held together by a disaffection from modern life, aspirations toward the cosmic, and a longing for more and better sex. In his biography, Loving suggests that Whitman even introduced to American shores the phenomenon of the groupie, quoting one Susan Garnet Smith from Hartford, Conn., who out of the blue wrote to the gay poet informing him that her womb was ‘clean and pure’ and ready for his child. ‘Angels guard the vestibule,’ she assured him, ‘until thou comest to deposit our and the world’s most precious treasure.’16

  Meanwhile under the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant the United States was descending into the unrestrained money-grubbing and ostentation of the Gilded Age. Whitman saw all of this clearly enough. Nevertheless, in the role of the Sage of Camden and in a spirit of what Paul Zweig calls ‘frozen optimism’ he continued to enounce cosmic-sounding prophecies, to which a reading of Hegel seems to have contributed, of the triumph of adhesive democracy.17

  Though Whitman had only a rude formal education, it would be a mistake to think of him as uncultivated or intellectually parochial. For most of his life he was pretty much master of his own time, and used that time to read omnivorously. Despite his pose as a working man, he hung around with artists and writers as much as with what he liked to call roughs. During his years as a newspaperman he reviewed hundreds of books, including serious works of philosophy and social criticism. He followed the main British reviews and was up to date with currents in European thought. In the 1840s he fell under the spell of Thomas Carlyle – as did many other restless young people – and took on board Carlyle’s critique of capitalism and industrialism. The failures of the European revolutions of 1848 jolted him badly. Of the writers of his day, the two who influenced him most deeply and to whom he found it hardest to acknowledge his indebtedness were an American, Emerson, and an Englishman, Tennyson.

  Though he proclaimed, and indeed trumpeted, the cultural autonomy of America, he was sorely attracted by the idea of a triumphal lecture tour of England. If such a tour never took place, it was not because he lacked adherents in England but because as a form of entertainment the celebrity lecture never caught on there as it did in the United States. For the sake of publication in England he submitted to having Leaves of Grass purged of its more risqué items, something he never allowed in the United States.

  To collect one’s poems, to bring out a Collected Poems, does not mean to republish all the poems one has written in a lifetime. By convention, the collector is entitled to revise old poems and quietly omit those he or she no longer cares to acknowledge. The Collected Poems is thus a handy way to shape one’s own past.

  Whitman seems to have had it in mind from the beginning that Leaves of Grass would be an ongoing Collected Poems, growing and changing as his self-conception changed. It went through six editions in all, several of which occur in variant forms as Whitman had new poems stitched into already printed volumes. It is hard to know – and in a way it is a mistake to ask – which of the six is the best, the one we ought to read to the exclusion of others, since they represent six formulations and reformulations of who Walt Whitman was. A simple example: whereas in 1855 he was ‘Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos’, by 1881 he was ‘Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son’.18 (‘That [Whitman] was a kosmos, is a piece of news we were hardly prepared for. Precisely what a kosmos is, we trust [he] will take an early occasion to inform the impatient public,’ wrote Charles Eliot Norton in a review of the 1855 edition.)19

  The rule of thumb in the scholarly world is to take an author’s last revision, his or her last word, as definitive. But there are exceptions, cases where the critical consensus is that the late revision is inferior to or even traduces the original. Thus we tend to read the 1805 version of Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude in preference to the 1850 revision. In much the same way, one might argue in favour of reading Whitman’s early poems in their first published form, since his tendency after 1865 was to revise in the direction of the ‘poetic’ (i.e., the Tennysonian) in the hope of winning a wider readership.

  Whitman intended the sixth edition of Leaves of Grass to be the definitive one. Published in Boston in 1881, the edition was withdrawn from sale when threatened with prosecution on the grounds of obscenity. Whitman found himself a new publisher in Philadelphia, where its sudden notoriety did wonders for the book’s sales.

  This sixth edition contains some three hundred poems, grouped together under themes and in numbered series. Its core consists of the survivors of the twelve-poem first edition of 1855, principally the long poem later titled ‘Song of Myself’, plus ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ (added in 1856); ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’ and the amative poems (added in 1860); and ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ and the ‘Drum-Taps’ poems (added to various issues of the 1867 edition).

  This core is not large. Despite all the labour he put into reevaluating and revising and re-ordering and retitling and reissuing his poems, and despite the claims he liked to repeat in his later years that there was a hidden, cathedral-like structure to Leaves of Grass toward which he had all his life been groping, it seems likely that, except to specialists, Whitman will always be known for a few individual poems rather than as the author of a single great book, the new poetic bible of America.

  (2005)

  15 William Faulkner and his biographers

  ‘NOW I REALISE for the first time,’ wrote William Faulkner to a woman friend, looking back from the vantage point of his mid-fifties, ‘what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to have made the things I made. I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know why God or gods or whoever it was, selected me to be the vessel.’1

  The disbelief Faulkner here lays claim to is a little disingenuous. For the kind of writer he wanted to be, he had all the education, even all the book-learning, he needed. As for company, he stood to gain more from garrulous oldsters with gnarled hands and long memories than from effete littérateurs. Nevertheless, a measure of astonishment is in order. Who would have guessed that a boy of no great intellectual distinction from small-town Mississippi would grow up to be not only a famous writer, celebrated at home and abroad, but the kind of writer he in fact became: one of the most radical innovators in the annals of American fiction, a writer to whom the avant-garde of Europe and Latin America would go to school?

  Of formal education Faulkner certainly had a minimum. He dropped out of high school in his junior year (his parents seem not to have kicked up a fuss), and though he briefly attended the University of Mississippi, that was only by grace of a dispensation for returned servicemen (of Faulkner’s war service, more below). His college record was undistinguished: a semester of English (grade: D), two semesters of French and Spanish. For this explorer of the mind of the post-bellum South, no courses in history; for the novelist who would weave Bergsonian time into the syntax of memory, no studies in philosophy or psychology.

  What the rather dreamy Billy Faulkner gave himself in place of schooling was a narrow but intense reading of fin-de-siècle English poetry, notably Swinburne and Housman, and of three novelists who had given birth to fictional worlds lively and coherent enough to rival the real one: Balzac, Dickens, and Conrad. Add to this a familiarity with the cadences of the Old Testament, Shakespeare, and Moby-Dick, and, a few years later, a quick study of what his older contemporaries T. S. Eliot and James Joyce were up to, and he was fully armed. As for materials, what he heard around him in Oxford, Mississippi turned out to be more than enough: the epic, told and retold endlessly, of the South, a story of cruelty and injustice and hope and disappointment and victimisation and re
sistance.

  Billy Faulkner had barely quit school when the First World War broke out. Captivated by the idea of becoming a pilot and flying sorties against the Hun, he applied in 1918 to be taken into the Royal Air Force. Desperate for fresh manpower, the RAF recruiting office sent him to Canada on a training course. Before he could make his first solo flight, however, the war ended.

  He returned to Oxford wearing an RAF officer’s uniform and sporting a British accent and a limp, the consequence, he said, of a flying accident. To friends he also confided that he had a steel plate in his skull.

  He sustained the aviator legend for years; he began to play it down only when he became a national figure and the risk of exposure loomed too large. His dreams of flying were not abandoned, however. As soon as he had the money to spare, in 1933, he took flying lessons, bought his own plane, and briefly operated a flying circus: ‘WILLIAM FAULKNER’S (Famous Author) AIR CIRCUS,’ ran the advertisement.2

  Faulkner’s biographers have made much of his war stories, treating them as more than just the concoctions of a puny and unprepossessing youth desperate to be admired. Frederick R. Karl believes that ‘the war turned [Faulkner] into a storyteller, a fictionist, which may have been the decisive turnabout of his life.’ (p. 111) The ease with which he duped the good people of Oxford, Karl says, proved to Faulkner that, artfully contrived and convincingly expounded, a lie can beat the truth, and thus that one can make not only a life but a living out of fantasy.

  Back home, Faulkner drifted. He wrote poems about ‘epicene’ (by which he seems to have meant narrow-hipped) women and his unrequited longings for them, poems that, even with the best will in the world, one cannot call promising; he began to sign his name not ‘Falkner’, as he was born, but ‘Faulkner’; and, following the pattern of the male Falkners, he drank heavily. For some years, until he was dismissed for poor performance, he held a sinecure as postmaster of a small station, where he spent office hours reading and writing.