| When Whitman told Traubel he wanted to “ram a needle up the ass of . . .,”[1] what exactly did he mean by “ass:” anus, rectum, buttocks? In Walt Whitman’s America, David Reynolds makes clear Whitman was always careful about his language. How much he actually swore is in question, and when he did swear it was of the milder variety (hell, damn, ass) rather than what he called “low conversation, licentious jokes.” Profanity is “a mark of low breeding.” Reynolds also says that in early 1841 Whitman may have been driven from a teaching job in “Southold, a fishing village on the northeastern end of Long Island,”[2] charged with sodomy, tarred and feathered. “Later on, reports of ‘bloody bedding’ would emerge,”[3] Reynolds asserts in parenthesis. Among “Whitman’s victims”[4] may have been Giles Wells. If Whitman did practice sodomy, how could he then have talked about it? Did he have the vocabulary at age 21 to speak in clinical terms of his penis and the young man’s anus? (I think neither word appears in Leaves of Grass.) Did he use more affectionate language, or was there a thrill for him at that age in using “obscenity,” or was such language the common coin?
[1] Helen Price, quoted in Shephard 97. [2] David Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995) p. 70. [3] Reynolds, 70. [4]
Reynolds
70, quoting Katherine Molinoff, Walt Whitman at Southold (Smithfield:
n. p., 1966), n. p. |