Studies in Classic American Literature — WHITMAN
But what of Walt Whitman?
The "good grey poet."
Was he a ghost, with all his physicality?
The good grey poet.
Post mortem effects.
Ghosts.
A certain ghoulish insistency.
A certain horrible pottage of human parts.
A certain stridency and portentousness.
A luridness about his beatitudes.
DEMOCRACY!
THESE STATES!
EIDOLONS!
LOVERS, ENDLESS LOVERS!
ONE IDENTITY!
ONE IDENTITY!
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
Do you believe me, when I say post mortem effects?
When the _Pequod_ went down, she left many a rank and dirty steamboat still fussing in the seas.
The _Pequod_ sinks with all her souls, but their bodies rise again to man innumerable tramp steamers, and ocean-crossing liners.
Corpses.
What we mean is that people may go on, keep on, and rush on, without souls.
They have their ego and their will, that is enough to keep them going.
So that you see, the sinking of the _Pequod_ was only a metaphysical tragedy after all.
The world goes on just the same.
The ship of the _soul_ is sunk.
But the machine-manipulating body works just the same: digests, chews gum, admires Botticelli and aches with amorous love.
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
What do you make of that?
I AM HE THAT ACHES.
First generalization.
First uncomfortable universalization.
WITH AMOROUS LOVE!
Oh, God!
Better a bellyache.
A bellyache is at least specific.
But the ACHE OF AMOROUS LOVE!
Think of having that under your skin.
All that!
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
Walter, leave off.
You are not HE.
You are just a limited Walter.
And your ache doesn't include all Amorous Love, by any means.
If you ache you only ache with a small bit of amorous love, and there's so much more stays outside the cover of your ache, that you might be a bit milder about it.
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
CHUFF!
CHUFF!
CHUFF!
CHU-CHU-CHU-CHU-CHUFF!
Reminds one of a steam-engine.
A locomotive.
They're the only things that seem to me to ache with amorous love.
All that steam inside them.
Forty million foot-pounds pressure.
The ache of AMOROUS LOVE.
Steam-pressure.
CHUFF!
An ordinary man aches with love for Belinda, or his Native Land, or the Ocean, or the Stars, or the Oversoul: if he feels that an ache is in the fashion.
It takes a steam-engine to ache with AMOROUS LOVE.
All of it.
Walt was really too superhuman.
The danger of the superman is that he is mechanical.
They talk of his "splendid animality."
Well, he'd got it on the brain, if that's the place for animality.
"I am he that aches with amorous love: Does the earth gravitate, does not all matter, aching, attract all matter?
So the body of me to all I meet or know."
What can be more mechanical?
The difference between life and matter is that life, living things, living creatures, have the instinct of turning right away from _some_ matter, and of blissfully ignoring the bulk of most matter, and of turning towards only some certain bits of specially selected matter.
As for living creatures all helplessly hurtling together into one great snowball, why, most very living creatures spend the greater part of their time getting out of the sight, smell or sound of the rest of living creatures.
Even bees only cluster on their own queen.
And that is sickening enough.
Fancy all white humanity clustering on one another like a lump of bees.
No, Walt, you give yourself away.
Matter _does_ gravitate, helplessly.
But men are tricky-tricksy, and they shy all sorts of ways.
Matter gravitates because it is helpless and mechanical.
And if you gravitate the same, if the body of you gravitates to all you meet or know, why, something must have gone seriously wrong with you.
You must have broken your main-spring.
You must have fallen also into mechanization.
Your Moby Dick must be really dead.
That lonely phallic monster of the individual you.
Dead mentalized.
I only know that my body doesn't by any means gravitate to all I meet or know.
I find I can shake hands with a few people.
But most I wouldn't touch with a long prop.
Your mainspring is broken, Walt Whitman.
The mainspring of your own individuality.
And so you run down with a great whirr, merging with everything.
You have killed your isolate Moby Dick.
You have mentalized your deep sensual body, and that's the death of it.
I am everything and everything is me and so we're all One in One Identity, like the Mundane Egg, which has been addled quite a while.
"Whoever you are, to endless announcements----" "And of these one and all I weave the song of myself."
Do you?
Well, then, it just shows you haven't _got_ any self.
It's a mush, not a woven thing.
A hotch-potch, not a tissue.
Your self.
Oh, Walter, Walter, what have you done with it?
What have you done with yourself?
With your own individual self?
For it sounds as if it had all leaked out of you, leaked into the universe.
Post mortem effects.
The individuality had leaked out of him.
No, no, don't lay this down to poetry.
These are post mortem effects.
And Walt's great poems are really huge fat tomb-plants, great rank graveyard growths.
All that false exuberance.
All those lists of things boiled in one pudding-cloth!
No, no!
I don't want all those things inside me, thank you.
"I reject nothing," says Walt.
If that is so, one must be a pipe open at both ends, so everything runs through.
Post mortem effects.
"I embrace ALL," says Whitman.
"I weave all things into myself."
Do you really!
There can't be much left of you when you've done.
When you've cooked the awful pudding of One Identity.
"And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral dressed in his own shroud."
Take off your hat then, my funeral procession of one is passing.
This awful Whitman.
This post mortem poet.
This poet with the private soul leaking out of him all the time.
All his privacy leaking out in a sort of dribble, oozing into the universe.
Walt becomes in his own person the whole world, the whole universe, the whole eternity of time.
As far as his rather sketchy knowledge of history will carry him, that is.
Because to _be_ a thing he had to know it.
In order to assume the identity of a thing, he had to know that thing.
He was not able to assume one identity with Charlie Chaplin, for example, because Walt didn't know Charlie.
What a pity!
He'd have done poems, pæans and what not.
Chants, Songs of Cinematernity.
"Oh, Charlie, my Charlie, another film is done----" As soon as Walt _knew_ a thing, he assumed a One Identity with it.
If he knew that an Esquimo sat in a kayak, immediately there was Walt being little and yellow and greasy, sitting in a kayak.
Now will you tell me exactly what a kayak is?
Who is he that demands petty definition?
Let him behold me _sitting in a kayak.
_ I behold no such thing.
I behold a rather fat old man full of a rather senile, self-conscious sensuosity.
DEMOCRACY.
EN MASSE.
ONE IDENTITY.
The universe, in short, adds up to ONE.
ONE.
1. Which is Walt.
His poems.
Democracy, En Masse, One Identity, they are long sums in addition and multiplication, of which the answer is invariably MYSELF.
He reaches the state of ALLNESS.
And what then?
It's all empty.
Just an empty Allness.
An addled egg.
Walt wasn't an Esquimo.
A little, yellow, sly, cunning, greasy little Esquimo.
And when Walt blandly assumed Allness, including Esquimoness, unto himself, he was just sucking the wind out of a blown egg-shell, no more.
Esquimos are not minor little Walts.
They are something that I am not, I know that.
Outside the egg of my Allness chuckles the greasy little Esquimo.
Outside the egg of Whitman's Allness too.
But Walt wouldn't have it.
He was everything and everything was in him.
He drove an automobile with a very fierce headlight, along the track of a fixed idea, through the darkness of this world.
And he saw Everything that way.
Just as a motorist does in the night.
I, who happen to be asleep under the bushes in the dark, hoping a snake won't crawl into my neck; I, seeing Walt go by in his great fierce poetic machine, think to myself: What a funny world that fellow sees!
ONE DIRECTION!
toots Walt in the car, whizzing along it.
Whereas there are myriads of ways in the dark, not to mention trackless wildernesses.
As anyone will know who cares to come off the road, even the Open Road.
ONE DIRECTION!
whoops America, and sets off also in an automobile.
ALLNESS!
shrieks Walt at a cross-road, going whizz over an unwary Red Indian.
ONE IDENTITY!
chants democratic En Masse, pelting behind in motorcars, oblivious of the corpses under the wheels.
God save me, I feel like creeping down a rabbit-hole, to get away from all these automobiles rushing down the ONE IDENTITY track to the goal of ALLNESS.
"A woman waits for me----" He might as well have said: "The femaleness waits for my maleness."
Oh, beautiful generalization and abstraction!
Oh, biological function.
"Athletic mothers of these States----" Muscles and wombs.
They needn't have had faces at all.
"As I see myself reflected in Nature, As I see through a mist.
One with inexpressible completeness, sanity, beauty.
See the bent head, and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see."
Everything was female to him: even himself.
Nature just one great function.
"This is the nucleus--after the child is born of woman, man is born of woman.
This is the bath of birth, the merge of small and large, and the outlet again----" "The Female I see----" If I'd been one of his women, I'd have given him Female.
With a flea in his ear.
Always wanting to merge himself into the womb of something or other.
"The Female I see----" Anything, so long as he could merge himself.
Just a horror.
A sort of white flux.
Post mortem effects.
He found, like all men find, that you can't really merge in a woman, though you may go a long way.
You can't manage the last bit.
So you have to give it up, and try elsewhere.
If you _insist_ on merging.
In _Calamus_ he changes his tune.
He doesn't shout and thump and exult any more.
He begins to hesitate, reluctant, wistful.
The strange calamus has its pink-tinged root by the pond, and it sends up its leaves of comradeship, comrades from one root, without the intervention of woman, the female.
So he sings of the mystery of manly love, the love of comrades.
Over and over he says the same thing: the new world will be built on the love of comrades, the new great dynamic of life will be manly love.
Out of this manly love will come the inspiration for the future.
Will it though?
Will it?
Comradeship!
Comrades!
This is to be the new Democracy: of Comrades.
This is the new cohering principle in the world: Comradeship.
Is it?
Are you sure?
It is the cohering principle of true soldiery, we are told in _Drum Taps.
_ It is the cohering principle in the new unison for creative activity.
And it is extreme and alone, touching the confines of death.
Something terrible to bear, terrible to be responsible for.
Even Walt Whitman felt it.
The soul's last and most poignant responsibility, the responsibility of comradeship, of manly love.
"Yet you are beautiful to me, you faint-tinged roots, you make me think of death.
Death is beautiful from you (what indeed is finally beautiful except death and love?
) I think it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of lovers, I think it must be for death, For how calm, how solemn it grows to ascend to the atmosphere of lovers, Death or life, I am then indifferent, my soul declines to prefer (I am not sure but the high soul of lovers welcomes death most) Indeed, O death, I think now these leaves mean precisely the same as you mean----" This is strange, from the exultant Walt.
Death!
Death is now his chant!
Death!
Merging!
And Death!
Which is the final merge.
The great merge into the womb.
Woman.
And after that, the merge of comrades: man-for-man love.
And almost immediately with this, death, the final merge of death.
There you have the progression of merging.
For the great mergers, woman at last becomes inadequate.
For those who love to extremes.
Woman is inadequate for the last merging.
So the next step is the merging of man-for-man love.
And this is on the brink of death.
It slides over into death.
David and Jonathan.
And the death of Jonathan.
It always slides into death.
The love of comrades.
Merging.
So that if the new Democracy is to be based on the love of comrades, it will be based on death too.
It will slip so soon into death.
The last merging.
The last Democracy.
The last love.
The love of comrades.
Fatality.
And fatality.
Whitman would not have been the great poet he is if he had not taken the last steps and looked over into death.
Death, the last merging, that was the goal of his manhood.
To the mergers, there remains the brief love of comrades, and then Death.
"Whereto answering, the sea Delaying not, hurrying not Whispered me through the night, very plainly before daybreak, Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death.
And again death, death, death, death.
Hissing melodions, neither like the bird nor like my arous'd child's heart, But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet, Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over, Death, death, death, death, death----" Whitman is a very great poet, of the end of life.
A very great post mortem poet, of the transitions of the soul as it loses its integrity.
The poet of the soul's last shout and shriek, on the confines of death.
_Après moi le déluge.
_ But we have all got to die, and disintegrate.
We have got to die in life, too, and disintegrate while we live.
But even then the goal is not death.
Something else will come.
"Out of the cradle endlessly rocking."
We've got to die first, anyhow.
And disintegrate while we still live.
Only we know this much.
Death is not the _goal.
_ And Love, and merging, are now only part of the death-process.
Comradeship--part of the death-process.
Democracy--part of the death-process.
The new Democracy--the brink of death.
One Identity--death itself.
We have died, and we are still disintegrating.
But IT IS FINISHED.
_Consummation est. _ Whitman, the great poet, has meant so much to me.
Whitman, the one man breaking a way ahead.
Whitman, the one pioneer.
And only Whitman.
No English pioneers, no French.
No European pioneer-poets.
In Europe the would-be pioneers are mere innovators.
The same in America.
Ahead of Whitman, nothing.
Ahead of all poets, pioneering into the wilderness of unopened life, Whitman.
Beyond him, none.
His wide, strange camp at the end of the great high-road.
And lots of new little poets camping on Whitman's camping ground now.
But none going really beyond.
Because Whitman's camp is at the end of the road, and on the edge of a great precipice.
Over the precipice, blue distances, and the blue hollow of the future.
But there is no way down.
It is a dead end.
Pisgah.
Pisgah sights.
And Death.
Whitman like a strange, modern, American Moses.
