Leaves of Grass First and Death-Bed Editions (6 page)

How did a former typesetter and penny-daily editor come to write the poems that would define and shape American literature and culture?

Whitman’s metamorphosis in the decade before the first publication of
Leaves of Grass
in 1855 remains an intriguing mystery. Biographers concede that details about Whitman’s life and literary activities from the late 1840s to the early 1850s are extremely hard to come by. “Little is known of Whitman’s activities in these years,” writes Joann Krieg in the 1851-1854 section of her
Whitman Chronology
(most other years have month-to-month commentaries). Whitman was fired from his job at the
New Orleans Daily Crescent
in the summer of 1848, then resigned from his editorship of the Brooklyn Freeman in 1849. Though he continued to write for several newspapers during the next five years, his work as a freelancer was irregular and his whereabouts difficult to follow. He seems also to have tried his hand at several other jobs, including house building and selling stationery. One wonders if Walt’s break from the daily work routine had something to do with his poetic awakening. Keeping to a regulated schedule in the newspaper offices had been a struggle for him, and he had been fired several times for laziness or “sloth.” Charting his own days and ways—in particular, working as a self-employed carpenter, as had his idiosyncratic father—may well have enabled him to think “outside the box” and toward the organic, freeform qualities of
Leaves.

Purposefully dropping out of workaday life and common sight suggests that Whitman may have intended to obscure the details of his pre-
Leaves
years, and there is further evidence to support the idea that Whitman consciously created a “myth of origins.” In his biography of Whitman, Justin Kaplan quotes the poet on the mysterious “perturbations” of
Leaves of Grass:
It had been written under “great pressure, pressure from within,” and he had “felt that he must do it” (p. 185). To obscure the roots of
Leaves
and build the case for his original thinking, Whitman destroyed significant amounts of manuscripts and letters upon at least two occasions; as Grier notes in his introduction to
Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts,
“one is continually struck by [the] omissions and reticences” of the remaining material (vol. 1, p. 8). Indeed, some of the notes surviving his “clean-ups” were reminders to himself to “not name any names”—and thus to remain silent concerning any possible readings or influences. “Make no quotations, and no reference to any other writers.—Lumber the writing with nothing,” Whitman wrote to himself in the late 1840s. It was a command he would repeat to himself several times in the years preceding the publication of Leaves.

Whitman’s friends and critics also did their share to create a legend of the writer and his explosive first book. In the first biographical study of Whitman, John Burroughs claimed that certain individuals throughout history “mark and make new eras, plant the standard again ahead, and in one man personify vast races or sweeping revolutions. I consider Walt Whitman such an individual” (Burroughs, “Preface” to
Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person
). Others insisted that
Leaves of Grass
was the product of the “cosmic consciousness” Whitman had acquired around 1850 (Bucke,
Walt Whitman,
p. 178) or a spiritual “illumination” of the highest order (Binns, A
Life of Walt Whitman,
pp. 69-70).

What sort of experience could inspire such a personal revelation? For a man just awakening to the inhumanity of slavery and the hidden agendas of the Free Soil stance, witnessing a slave auction might do it. This was but one of the life-altering events that occurred during Whitman’s three-month sojourn in New Orleans in 1848. Another, substantiated by his poetry rather than Whitman’s own word, was an alleged homosexual affair. Several poems in the sexually charged “Calamus” and “Children of Adam” clusters of 1860 are suggestive of an intense and liberating romance in New Orleans. The manuscript for “Once I Passed Through a Populous City” has the lines “man who wandered with me, there, for love of me, / Day by day, and night by night, we were together.” “Man” was changed to “woman” in the final draft of the poem; see
Whitman’s Manuscripts: Leaves of Grass (1860),
edited by Fredson Bowers, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955, p. 64. In “I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing,” the poet describes breaking off a twig of a particularly stately and solitary tree: “Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love” (p. 287). The emotional release of “coming out” might well explain the spectacular openness and provocative energy of
Leaves of Grass
; additionally, Whitman’s identification of his “outsider status” could have helped spark his empathy for women, Native Americans, and other marginalized groups that are celebrated in the 1855 poems.

Whitman’s personal transformations, as well as America’s political upheaval, characterized the 1840s and early 1850s. His growing political awareness was no doubt inspired by the unprecedented corruption of the day: Vote buying, wire-pulling, and patronage existed on all levels of state and national government. In New York, Fernando Wood was elected mayor in 1854 as a result of vote fraud: In the “Bloody Sixth” ward, there were actually 4,000 more votes than there were voters. And three of the most corrupt presidencies in America’s history-Millard Fillmore (1850-1853), Franklin Pierce (1853-1857), and James Buchanan (1857-1861)—were certain to catch the attention of an aspiring young journalist. “Our topmost warning and shame,” Whitman wrote of the three incompetent leaders, who exhibited especially poor judgment on the issue of slavery.

The debate over slavery divided the country in the decades before the Civil War; even within regions, the answers were not as clear-cut as they would seem once sides were drawn in 1861. According to one estimate in 1847, two-thirds of Northerners disapproved of slavery, but only 5 percent declared themselves Abolitionists. Immediate emancipation, it was feared, would flood the North with cheap labor and racial disharmonies. The word “compromise,” with all its political and moral ambiguities, was a favorite with politicians. Fillmore was responsible for the Compromise of 1850, which admitted California to the Union as a free state but also lifted legal restrictions on slavery in Utah and New Mexico; to satisfy the South, he instituted a stringent Fugitive Slave Law at the same time. In 1854 Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, allowing settlers of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves the issue of slavery. The result was “Bleeding Kansas,” the 1854 congressional election that was decided by 1,700 Missourians crossing the border and casting illegal votes for the proslavery candidate. Additionally, in this crucial year before the first publication of
Leaves of Grass,
fugitive slave Anthony Burns was arrested in Boston, put on trial, and shipped back to Virginia. At a huge rally in Framingham, Massachusetts, William Lloyd Garrison burned copies of the Declaration of Independence, and Henry David Thoreau delivered the powerful address “Slavery in Massachusetts.”

Whitman, too, was incited to protest. Through the 1840s and 1850s, he watched with increasing anger as the Whig Party collapsed, and as the Democratic Party gave itself over to proslavery forces. His editorials throughout this period indicate that his political understanding and stance was becoming more concrete, less forgiving. And in 1850, a series of four political poems appeared, indicating that Whitman had finally stepped away from imitative verse and started investing his poetry with a more personal, immediate voice and message. “Song for Certain Congressmen,” first published in the
New York Evening
Post of March 2, 1850, mocks Americans for considering compromise of any sort—particularly compromise of human rights (before the Compromise of 1850 became law in September, the country debated the status of slavery in the new western states for several months):

“Blood-Money,” published March 22, is an indictment of Daniel Webster’s support of the Fugitive Slave Law; “The House of Friends,” a criticism of the Democratic Party’s support of the Compromise, was published June 14. “Resurgemus,” published two months later, celebrates the spirit of the European revolutions of 1848. The fact that it became the eighth of the twelve original poems in
Leaves of Grass
(1855) demonstrates that Whitman saw this effort as more than an apprentice-poem; indeed, the prophetic, confrontational last lines foretell of the arrival of a Whitmanesque redeemer: “Is the house shut? Is the master away? / Nevertheless, be ready, be not weary of watching, / He will surely return; his messengers come anon” (p. 743).

 

Along with personal revelations and the awakening of a political conscience, a spiritual conversion contributed to the metamorphosis of a Brooklyn hack writer to democracy’s poet: Walt Whitman became a New Yorker.

Of the three types of New Yorkers, “commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion,” writes E. B. White in his essay “Here Is New York” (reprinted in Lopate,
Writing New York: A Literary Anthology,
pp. 696-697). Whitman belonged to the third category. Though born on a Long Island farm, he discovered at an early age that the city fed his soul. When his parents moved back to the country in 1833, the fourteen-year-old boy decided to stay on alone in Brooklyn and work in the printing industry. An employer helped him acquire a card for a circulating library; on his own, he started attending the theater and participating in a debating society. Looking for work during difficult times, Whitman left New York during his late teens and early twenties to teach school on Long Island. He disliked the job and eagerly returned to the world of city journalism in 1841. Until 1848 Whitman bounced from one Brooklyn or Manhattan publisher or newspaper to the next; he reported on local news, reviewed concerts and operas, and wrote his own fledgling poems and short stories. When he was fired from his editorship of the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
in 1848, Whitman made an impetuous decision to try working in New Orleans. Not surprisingly, the now-confirmed New Yorker was back within three months. Later that year, Whitman secured his position in his beloved Brooklyn by buying a Myrtle Avenue lot and building a home on the site (with a printing office and bookstore on the first floor). Though he sold this property in 1852, he continued to call Brooklyn (and occasionally, Manhattan) home until 186X, when he left to search for his brother George, who was wounded at the battle of Fredericksburg, and settled in Washington, D.C.

When the Whitman family first moved to Brooklyn in 1823, it was a village of around 7,000 inhabitants. Paintings such as Francis Guy’s Winter Scene in Brooklyn (1820) depict its country lanes, free-ranging chickens and pigs, and clapboard barns. By the time Leaves
of Grass
was published in 1855, Brooklyn had become the fourth-largest city in the nation. Manhattan, too, had rapidly expanded; its population rose from 123,706 in 1820 to 813,669 in 1860 (Homberger,
The Historical Atlas of New York City
, p. 70). City life, largely confined to the area below Fourteenth Street in the first decades of the nineteenth century, moved so rapidly northward that plans for a “central park” (starting at Fifty-ninth Street) were proposed in 1851. Travel around the city was facilitated by several new rail lines, five of which were incorporated in the 1850s; and “the number of omnibuses shot up from 255 in 1846 to 683 in 1853 (when they carried over a hundred thousand passengers a day)” (Burrows and Wallace,
Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898,
p. 653). People were flocking to the city from the outside: While 667,000 immigrants arrived in the United States between 1820 and 1839, 4,242,000 came between 1840 and 1859. “By 1855 over half the city’s residents hailed from outside the United States,” note Burrows and Wallace (pp. 736-737). Most of them were impoverished peasants and workers from Ireland and Germany.

Visitors and residents alike were quick to comment on the negative aspects of the city’s social and economic boom. British actor Fanny Kemble marveled at the diversity of the city’s population in her 1832 journal, but was outraged by the prejudice and racism she witnessed (Lopate, pp. 25, 27). Touring New York in 1842, Charles Dickens was taken aback by the treatment of the poor, as well as the pigs roaming noisy, filthy streets (Lopate, pp. 57-58). Thoreau spent a few months in the city in 1843 but was appalled by the crowds: “Seeing so many people from day to day one comes to have less respect for flesh and bones,” he wrote to a friend. “It must have a very bad influence on children to see so many human beings at once—mere herds of men” (Lopate, p. 73). Poe mocked the dirty dealings of city businessmen in “Doings of Gotham,” a series of articles written for out of towners in 1844. And native New Yorker Herman Melville was the first to capture the urban alienation still felt by Manhattanites, in his 1853 tale “Bartleby the Scrivener.”

Writing for Brooklyn and New York newspapers for much of the 1840s and part of the 1850s, Whitman was employed to take note of the changes and report on the city’s big events. He wrote about the opening of the Croton Aqueduct in 1842, which brought running water to city residents; he commented on the Astor Place Opera House riots, in which more than twenty people were killed in 1849; he attended the opening of the Crystal Palace on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street in 1853. But his interest in city life extended beyond his duties as a reporter. After work, he’d leave his office on “Newspaper Row” (just east of City Hall Park) and take long walks, wandering through the “Bloody Sixth” ward and the crime-infested, impoverished streets of Five Points. Another favorite activity was “looking in at the shop-windows in Broadway the whole forenoon .... pressing the flesh of my nose to the thick plate-glass” (“[Song of Myself],” p. 65), especially with the opening of so many elegant photography studios in the 1840s. The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities and the Phrenological Cabinet of the Fowler Brothers and Samuel Wells were other frequent destinations. To cover longer distances, he rode the omnibuses up and down the glorious avenues, singing at the top of his lungs. Whitman started carrying a small note- book, jotting down his thoughts during his daily morning and evening commutes on the Brooklyn ferry. And somewhere along the way, he fell in love with the noise and filth, crowds and congestion, problems and promise of New York.