Walt Whitman as Man, Poet and Friend*

            One night Walt said to me:  “I dread a Whitman literature: I’m  afraid of expositors: do  all you can to discourage the explicators.”  And on another occasion he said: “We may be completely forgotten: in that case nothing’s to be provided for: but in the other event, if we should continue, look out for the interpreters: dont let them get in the way.”   But he couldn’t  escape.  He had to go the usual course.  Expositional studies have appeared one after another since his death.  There’s already a whole Whitman literature.  Walt hated the idea of being deified and hated the idea of being explained.  He was far more afraid of being made too much of than of being made too little of.  He was always warning me to beware of the gushers.  It’s an awful job to have to dig your way to an exceptional man through a mountain of biographers.  In some moods he would say that he had just got a foothold: that was all.  In other moods I think he foresaw the inevitable.  I dont quote these memories to discourage Elliot.  Elliot does no talking  himself.  He lets others talk for him.  Outside of a few introductory notes he hands Walt over to his friends.  And these friends on the whole preserve a fair balance of judgment.  Nobody goes  the limit.  And nobody denies him everything.  The night of  the day Walt was buried a bunch of us loafed together at Boothby’s cafe in Philadelphia.  Burroughs was there.  And Bucke.  And Garland.  And Brinton and Harned and Frank Williams.  And some others.  Nobody was crying.  Nobody was mournful.  It didn’t seem to anybody as though Walt was lost.  It seemed almost as if he was for the first time won.  But that night we compared personal impersonal notes much as Elliot has had Walt’s friends do in this memoranda.  And as I now read these characteristic letters, brought nearer to me by being reproduced in the handwriting of Elliot’s correspondents, I seem to repeat in some measure the emotions that stirred me in that reminiscence.  Walt wasn’t a man apart from men.  He was a man among men.  He was not a leader.  Nor a teacher.  Nor a trimmer of lamps.  He disliked being called a master.  “I’m afraid of books about myself,” he said to me.  But I asked him if he didn’t realize that books about himself were bound to multiply.  No; he wasn’t sure of that.  But if they did he’d think each one might make him by so much more impossible and gratuitous.  If I could have done With Walt Whitman in Camden first I might have saved Walt the trouble of writing Leaves of Grass.  But if by some catastrophe Leaves of Grass went out of existence and my book remained the world would know still the sort of book Leaves of Grass was through the sort of man I portray.  Or, rather, through the sort of man who portrays himself in my record.  Elliot has done with his book what I’ve tried to do with mine.  He’s kept himself out of it as much as possible.  I find that as I grow younger in growing older I think less and less of great men and more and more of great peoples.  I single out individuals less and generalize on mobs more.  And this irreverence attaches to Walt as well as to others.  As I grow to love him more as a brother I love him less as a god.  And as he becomes more acutely personal he becomes more fraternally illuminating.  I classify the new Whitman books by their response to this test.  I want them to make Walt a better man and a worse god.  Walt himself says that if you want to understand him you’ll need to apply from him that lesson by which he is himself destroyed.  That is, killed as a god and resurrected as a man.  Elliot has done a job that comes well within that saving horizon.  After all Walt himself might turn out to be a burden and an obstruction carried on as an idolized genius in defiance of his own vehement philosophy.  Von Sternberg, who is one of the masters of music as well as a master of other things including himself, once said to me: “When I hear someone else playing the piano I’ve just got to literally force myself to forget that I’m a player myself.”  He knows too much and too little about the piano.  When I hear another man making love to Walt I have to force myself to forget that I love him myself.  I know too much and too little about Walt.  So I go through this tussle with every Whitman book.  I must force myself to forget what I know about other Whitman books.  I’ve no right to bring myself stale to a book.  I must bring myself fresh to every book.  I cant he honest with the book or with myself if I don’t.  It’s easy to say of writings like these:  This has all been said before.  Just as it’s easy to say in the morning: We’ve had just as beautiful sunrises before.  But we might as reasonably object to more sunrises as to more books.  It’s sort of as if Elliot had brought a bunch of roses into the house.  We’ve had roses there before.  But the perfume of these fresh roses is none the less delicious for that.

T.

*Walt Whitman as Man, Poet and Friend.  Being autograph pages from many pens.  Collected by Charles N. Elliott.  Boston: Richard G. Badger.