One Way of Caring

1

As Randall Jarrell once wrote of Walt Whitman, “baby critics who have barely learned to complain of the lack of ambiguity in Peter Rabbit can tell you all that is wrong with Leaves of Grass.” I have no defense: I’m going to say what I think is wrong with Whitman. But I don’t do it to demean him. All my reading life I’ve loved Whitman’s oddity, his unique feel for language. While the Tennysons and Longfellows strolled along, making it look easy, Whitman reminds me of an acrobat performing a series of backflips, somersaults, and handstands in which he walks upside down as easily as others walk right side up.

But despite the performance, something in Whitman’s vision has gone dead on me—or maybe I’ve gone dead on it. For the last ten years, I’ve been immersed in writing about refugees, and as I’ve come to understand the hard facts of living in a camp—in which a monthly ration cycle can leave many short on food the last week, and thousands may rely on a single borehole for their daily thirty liters of water (an older flush toilet uses seventy liters per person per day)—Whitman’s vision of America has come to seem less embracing than it once did. Despite the poet’s essential generosity, it’s as if our current geopolitical and economic realities have thrown in relief the shortcomings of Whitman’s “barbaric yawp.”

My other impediment is temperamental. Despite Whitman’s often astonishing linguistic invention, there are times when I feel as if Leaves of Grass is something of a rhetoric machine grinding out democracy’s ascendancy over the Old World in order to articulate new kinds of human relation for a new kind of being, humanus Americanus. Only I balk at having to assume what Whitman assumes, I resist his insistence that I submerge my identity in his; I have the sneaking suspicion that all this En-Masse business smells of patriotic snake oil. And to go beyond Whitman for a moment, from the slave rebellions of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner to the Central Park Five, from the Civil War to the War in Iraq, the professed ideals of Americanness have never synced up with American political and economic ambitions.

Given the fragility of the Republic in the 1850s and the oncoming Civil War, it’s easy to understand why Whitman focused so intently on American destiny and fate. But the failure in his vision, for me at least, goes deeper. Whitman’s sense of Americanness is so insular that it can seem like a conceptual trash compacter flattening any least fact or perception that the poet throws into its maw.

This programmatic attitude to other people and other worlds plays itself out in large and small ways: on a private, personal scale, in a passage in “Song of Myself,” Whitman writes, “I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,/And tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.” I don’t think for a second that Whitman means us to take this literally, but even as a sheerly literary construct, there is something a little galling about a speaker who never considers how bride and bridegroom might feel about this intrusion on their privacy, let alone the creepy suggestion of rape as the Bard of democracy’s prerogative. And on a geopolitical level, from Whitman’s poetic account of the Goliad massacre during the Texas Revolution, you wouldn’t know Mexico was involved—there is plenty of detail lavished on the “glory of the race of rangers,/Matchless with a horse, a rifle, a song, a supper or a courtship,” but nary a word about their opponents.

That said, I can perfectly well understand Whitman enthusiasts insisting on the radical nature of Leaves of Grass, in which democracy is based on what Whitman called “amativeness,” the erotic bond from body to body that extends outward into a great communal embrace. But that embrace would seem to end at our borders.

2

In an 1865 review of Drum-Taps, Whitman’s book of Civil War poetry that he later dismantled and incorporated into Leaves of Grass, Henry James says of Whitman about everything that can be said by an overtly hostile reader:

Every tragic event collects about it a number of persons who delight to dwell upon its superficial points—of minds which are bullied by the accidents of the affair. The temper of such minds seems to us to be the reverse of the poetic temper; for the poet, although he incidentally ... uses the superficial traits of his theme, is really a poet only in so far as he extracts its latent meaning and holds it up to common eyes. And yet from such minds most of our war-verses have come, and Mr. Whitman’s utterances ... are ... no exception to general fashion. They are an exception, however, in that they openly pretend to be something better ... Mr. Whitman is very fond of blowing his own trumpet, and he has made very explicit claims for his book.

On one level, James’s idea of a poet as someone who extracts latent meaning as opposed to dwelling on the superficial traits makes hard sense to me. Not everyone has the linguistic gifts to write well about what they’ve suffered. But here I hesitate. Being “bullied by the accidents of the affair” seems to accurately describe a lot of life as it’s lived now—both inside our borders, but even more so, beyond them. If you write about refugees, you find yourself almost always writing about a place where there is a war, will be a war, has been a war. Given that there are something like seventy million displaced people worldwide—more than the entire populations of  France or England—being bullied by events is a commonplace. For the En-Masse of the displaced, whose homes have been bombed to dust, life is almost total accident. Under such conditions, James’s stricture about distilling “latent meanings” from a blockbuster bomb or a heat-seeking missile that kills you and your entire extended family (as happened at Qana, Lebanon, to twenty-eight members of the Shalhoub and Hashim families during the 2006 Israeli–Lebanese war) can feel a little beside the point.

So much so, in fact, that despite the general truth of James’s critique, he misses what is unique in Drum-Taps. As opposed to a latent meaning finely distilled from the superficial traits, what Whitman learned from his experience as a nurse was that the faithful depiction of those so-called superficial traits—the terrible surfaces of death, and wounds-unto-death—are in fact the only “distillation” possible.

3

As Whitman aged, his private views about the place of immigrants and slaves—especially freed slaves gaining political power in a post-Civil War America—displayed deep ambivalence. He both wants to grant them their autonomy as individuals while arrogating them to Americanness. In his poem “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors,” the persona of a Union soldier on Sherman’s “march toward the sea” tries to imagine what an old slave woman brought from Ethiopia might think of the Stars and Stripes. But all Whitman’s soldier can see is her age, her foreignness in her “turban bound,” when he asks “What is it fateful woman—so blear, hardly human?/ ... /Are the things so strange and marvelous, you see or have seen?” At least Whitman has his soldier ask her what she’s seen—but that’s not the same thing as letting her answer.

4

But that’s not quite accurate. In fact, Whitman does let her answer—only the speech he grants her is written in such a stilted, iambic septameter, studded with internal couplets no less, that her speech borders on self-parody. Despite his good intentions, by making her say things like “hither me across the sea the cruel slaver brought,” he makes her sound like an abolitionist’s tract, a kind of poetic rustic, rather than a flesh and blood woman who has something crucial to tell us about her life under slavery. That the speech he grants her seems hopelessly artificial shows how the moral question is also a formal question. Who is given voice and who isn’t, who speaks for whom and who doesn’t, and how other people’s lives and speech are implicated in our own seems to me one of Whitman’s central formal struggles. At his astonishing best, and drawing on all classes and social backgrounds, his genius for a mixed idiom has been unparalleled. Furthermore, his hospitable inclusion of clashing dictions and vocabularies drawn from opera, phrenology, even the sexual hygiene movement of the nineteenth century, made him into a kind of listening post, receiving and transmitting signals from every walk of life and register of speech imaginable. But the older he got, the more 
wedded he became to a particular bard-of-democracy rhetoric that ossified into a manner and diction that could be called “Whitmanic.” The more this voice takes over, the less original and more typically nineteenth century the poems become.

To put it in more formal terms, in his search for a voice that allows his voice to be inflected by other voices, he adopts the stance of a medium, attempting to channel “voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,” and the “forbidden voices” of “sexes and lusts”; while at other times, as in the case of the slave woman, his self-consciousness about his role as the Poet of Democracy flattens the complex nature of individual identity. Rather than removing the veil from “voices veil’d,” he muffles her voice in a different veil—the veil of Whitmanic rhetoric.

You can see Whitman wrestling with just how to remove this veil in a fascinating set of drafts to the 1855 version of Leaves of Grass. In the “Sleepers” section, Whitman attempts to give voice to the figure of Lucifer, a slave bent on revenging himself on his master. Sometimes in the drafts he assumes Lucifer’s voice, other times he says that Lucifer speaks through him. As he tries to find the right formal distance between his own subjectivity and Lucifer’s, he keeps shifting among first, second, and third person, as if desperately trying to allow the slave to speak through him, then repressing him, but then allowing Lucifer’s voice to break out again.

This tortuous tango between self and imagined other reaches its climax in these self-revising lines:

You You He cannot speak for yourhimself, slavenegro. —I lend you
    him my own mouth tongue
A black I darted like a snake from his your mouth.—

In the draft, many of these words are scratched out—but by leaving them in, it makes the point more clearly about how complex a problem Whitman found it to embody Lucifer’s voice. A rough map of how his consciousness merges and separates from Lucifer would initially show the lines tussling back and forth between Whitman wanting to speak for the slave in the first person; to allowing the slave to speak through him, initially in the first person, and then in the second; to Whitman speaking for the slave (or the slave speaking through Whitman, since the identity of “you” is deeply ambiguous) by darting like a snake from his mouth; to the slave struggling to take final possession of Whitman—which is when the third person shifts to first person, and we hear the plotted revenge from the slave’s viewpoint:

Now Lucifer was not dead .... or if he was I am his sorrowful terrible heir;
I have been wronged .... I am oppressed .... I hate him that oppresses me,
I will either destroy him, or he shall release me.

Damn Him! How he does defile me,
How he informs against my brother and sister and takes pay for
    their blood,
How he laughs when I look down the bend after the steamboat that
    carries away my woman.

Whether or not you’re convinced by the ventriloquism of a white poet inhabiting the reality of a black slave (at least Lucifer talks like a human being, and not a rhyming dictionary, like the Ethiopian woman), Lucifer’s excision from every subsequent edition of Leaves of Grass after 1855 becomes emblematic of how Whitman backed away from his own more inclusive, formal intuitions about who does and doesn’t get to speak.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of Whitman’s rhetoric as it hardens over time in the successive revisions of Leaves of Grass is how a certain coarsening of feeling sets in. The 1855 Leaves of Grass feels like someone struggling to formulate a radically new form of empathy. But by the final 1891–1892 edition, that empathy is hard to extricate from the self-consciously prophetic strain of Whitman’s democratic vistas. For me, local moments of amazingly original diction and perception threaten to be crushed under the armature of the Good Gray Poet.

Most troubling for me, though, is how over the course of his long career, Whitman’s subjectivity threatens to crowd out anybody else’s subjective life.

Agonies are one of my changes of garments;
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels .... I myself become the
wounded person .... 

In Whitman’s failure to ask, in his glib assertion about agony and his sartorial dexterity, isn’t he in danger of overwhelming the subjective reality of the wounded person’s pain?

5

Rather than the rhetorical cymbal crashes in “Song of Myself,” what now catches my ear is the quieter side of Whitman’s writing, which excels at imagistic reportage in Drum-Taps, as well as in the clipped, precise prose of Specimen Days, Whitman’s account of serving as a nurse, confessor, confidant, and friend to wounded soldiers. These books highlight what you could call the journalistic side of his talent. I feel a certain kinship with his impulse to let the texture of experience speak for itself because of my own frequent bewilderment as a journalist. For me to offer solutions or policy prescriptions implies an emotional and historical comprehension that, as an outsider, I do not and will never possess.

Still, James is right in some essential way—to master, grasp, and use “the superficial traits” of a theme in order to extract “latent meaning” and hold it up to common eyes is what great poets do—at least until the Civil War marked the moment of transition from personal valor on the battlefield to a more anonymous, technologically based form of warfare. Whitman was among the first war poets to recognize that the heroic pose is hard to credit when war amounts to nothing but mechanized slaughter. And this process of disillusionment is beautifully mirrored in Drum-Taps, in which Whitman’s first-hand experience of war forces him to reevaluate his own heroic conceptions.

What latent meaning can be derived, say, from caring for a soldier who’s been gutshot so that his pierced bladder makes him wet himself continually until he finally dies after months of suffering? To hold out for a “latent meaning,” in which some generalizable truth is abstracted from the soldier’s death, feels almost obscene. Under such conditions, Whitman declaring that he doesn’t ask the wounded person how he feels, but becomes that person, can seem like nothing but shallow boasting. Worse, he effectively erases that person’s wound. In the latter half of Drum-Taps, at least, Whitman seems to have learned the lesson of the hospitals: that pain is irremediably private, and that asking the wounded person how he feels is one way of caring for him.

6

In Specimen Days, Whitman describes how the United States Patent Office had been hastily converted to a make-shift hospital to care for the wounded after the slaughters at Manassas, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. As you passed down the aisle between beds shoved against display cases, you saw a bandaged head, an abdomen stitched up, a gangrenous leg turned purplish blue and black reflected in the vitrine glass; on either side of the long rows of beds on which the sick, wounded, and dying soldiers lay, rose tall glass cases full of miniature models of all the inventions that had been patented—human ingenuity juxtaposed against human misery.

Among these inventions were miniature prototypes of rifles, bombs, and artillery—especially rifled gun barrels that used a new and improved version of Minié balls (named after its French inventor), the most lethal wound maker of all. Of the roughly seven hundred and fifty thousand total war dead from all causes, including starvation and disease, it’s estimated that about ninety percent of the two hundred thousand killed in actual combat owed their deaths to the grooved barrel of the Springfield rifle-musket and the new bullets it fired. Conical in shape rather than round, these bullets flew straighter than the round solid shot balls fired by the older pre-Civil War flintlocks, and thus vastly improved the accuracy—and the lethality—of rifle fire at long range. And because the Minié was made of soft lead, rather than driving through the flesh, it tended to splinter and flatten out, seriously lacerating the tissue far beyond the entry point.

As Whitman witnessed, amputation was often the only way to deal with such wounds—which is why, on his very first visit to a camp hospital near the battle of Fredericksburg, he noted just outside the mansion that had been converted to hold the wounded “a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c., a full load for a one-horse cart.”

7

Never notable for his modesty, Whitman estimates that in three years he made “600 visits or tours” to hospitals both camp and field, and “went ... among from some 80,000 to 100,000 of the wounded and sick.” Despite Whitman’s inveterate self-promotion, Specimen Days, in part his record of his time as a nurse, is for me Whitman’s most emotionally complex work, full of the best kind of prose poetry: it really is prose—casual, unforced—but its imagistic compression is astonishing. On March 6, 1865, he writes:

I have been up to look at the dance and supper-rooms, for the inauguration ball at the Patent office; and I could not help thinking, what a different scene they presented to my view a while since, fill’d with a crowded mass of the worst wounded of the war, brought in from second Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburgh. To-night, beautiful women, perfumes, the violins’ sweetness, the polka and the waltz; then the amputation, the blue face, the groan, the glassy eye of the dying, the clotted rag, the odor of wounds and blood, and many a mother’s son amid strangers, passing away untended there, (for the crowd of the badly hurt was great, and much for the nurse to do, and much for surgeon).

The juxtaposition of the ball to the hospital ward is, in its quiet way, one of the most powerful commentaries on war I’ve ever read. No puffing about democracy, no exhorting, no overly intimate gestures. This Whitman is on every page of Specimen Days. It’s an almost ideal idiom to speak about the atrocity of war, in that the rhetorician in Whitman isn’t serving himself, the Self, or any other large-scale hectoring abstraction. The language displays, in Thom Gunn’s words, “A strength so lavish she can limit it.”

8

When you read Drum-Taps as Whitman published it in 1865, a completely independent book from Leaves of Grass, a poem like the well-known “The Dresser,” or the delicate restraint of poems like “Cavalry Crossing a Ford,” “An Army Corps on the March,” and “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown,” are all superb examples of what you might call proto-Imagist poems—but without shying from the need to occasionally assert a lyric I, in which the poet anticipates Lowell’s injunction in “Epilogue,” “Yet why not say what happened?” Here are a few lines from “The Dresser”:

From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand,
I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and
    blood;
Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv’d neck, and side-
    falling head;
His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the bloody
    stump,
And has not yet looked on it.

The delicacy of the last line, in which the poet notices how the soldier can’t bring himself to look at his own stump, achieves, through understatement, such complexity of feeling that the fusion of Whitman’s point of view with the soldier’s is the true fulfillment of the poet’s need to merge with his subject. This stands in contrast to Whitman’s catalogs in Leaves of Grass. Brilliant as they are, I can’t help but feel that he reduces the individual people he describes to types. But in these lines, his persona is in a powerful, tense equilibrium with the man whom he observes. His subjectivity leaves room for not only the soldier, but also for his reader. And most importantly, the privacy of the soldier is intact. Whitman has learned that agony is more than a change of clothes. But then Whitman doesn’t need words like “agony” when, in a plain-spoken idiom that the soldiers themselves might use, he writes as close as he can to the actual physical sensations of the wounded.

9

Back in 2011, when I was writing about a famine that decimated the Horn of Africa, in which a quarter of a million people died, half of them Somalis under the age of five, I was staying at the vast refugee complex in Dadaab located in northeast Kenya close to the Somali border. Thousands of refugees were streaming into the camp week after week, and it had swelled from 250,000 to almost 500,000 in the two years since the famine began.

Sipping tea late one night in the camp kitchen, the generator humming, wind-blown sand curtaining the horizon, I sat thinking about an old man I’d met (by “old” I mean he was somewhere in his forties, since the average lifespan for Somali men is fifty) after spending the afternoon in one of the secondary schoolrooms at Dadaab. He’d been present while we talked about poetry, and though he’d said nothing, he was introduced to me after the class as a Somali poet. Like many of the older men, he had dyed his beard with henna to a bright orange. Tall, imposing, and exceedingly gaunt, he had motioned me over to where he stood at the edge of the camp soccer pitch, a sandy barren field with two net goals at either end, and through a student named Abdi, we began to talk.

He told me he’d come from Mogadishu to escape the violence that had gone on for twenty years. Like many in the camp, he’d witnessed the murder of a family member, his brother, by a rival clan. They’d taken his brother out into the street, made him kneel, and shot him in the back of the head. The man had no idea why they hadn’t murdered him at the same moment, but fearing his brother’s fate, he’d fled to Dadaab. Spending what little money he had for a ticket, he crowded onto a bus packed with other Somalis in similarly desperate situations. Their few bundles clutched under their arms, they huddled together, hoping that they wouldn’t be stopped, beaten, and robbed—either by al-Shabaab, an Islamic militia fighting to overthrow the provisional government, or the notoriously corrupt Kenyan border police. Then Abdi explained that the man was a traditional Somali poet, in that he improvises his poems on the spot, and that he had a poem he wanted me to hear. He began to sing in a high nasal voice, “the Land Rovers in the camp motor pool get better food and water than a lion. How can this be, how can this be?” Of course he was referring to the ration shortages—in order to feed the huge influx of new refugees, the per family food allowance had been cut back.

And then he began singing how America should help the Somalis, how America is like a mother, but when you ask her for bread she gives you a stone. He sang how America is like a lover who has kept him waiting twenty years, until now he’s an old man, how his friends and relations die in the camp and are buried in the bush where hyenas eat the bones, or the rain comes and washes the dead out of their graves.

10

In Huntington, Long Island, Walt Whitman’s birthplace, stands a statue of Whitman. Located outside the Walt Whitman Shops’ main entrance, and right in front of Saks Fifth Avenue, the statue is somewhat distorted, a twice life-sized Marvel Comics Superhero Whitman. But despite the Bard’s Hulk-like aura, it’s clear that the sculptor labored hard to replicate the poet in one of his most iconic photographic poses: his trademark slouch hat, his long beard, his head tilted back to look at his raised arm and extended index finger on which a butterfly has perched. But there is no butterfly: where has it flown to, one wonders, and why?

On the one hand, you could say that this statue, and the mall it could be said to tacitly endorse, confirms that everything Whitman warned against in “Democratic Vistas” has come true. In that long, rambling, speculative piece on the future fate of the Republic, he excoriates America for the

blind fury of parties ... entire lack of first-class captains and leaders ... the plentiful meanness and vulgarity of the ostensible masses ... the wily person in office, scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of prosperity, the demonism of greed, the hell of passion, the decay of faith, the long postponement, the fossil-like lethargy ...

To my mind, this is as accurate a portrayal of the current state of the union under Trump as we’re likely to get.

But on the other hand, the statue’s sheer unlikelihood, its comic absurdity even, is also touching. The business and political interests that put up the money for the statue would seem to have fallen under the spell of Whitman’s rhetoric, and now his statue stands there as what? Ostensibly, a monument to Whitman’s genius, to artistic aspiration? Or perhaps they meant it as more of a civic gesture, a desire for culture, continuity with the past? But it’s hard to ignore the context of the mall, which makes Walt seem like a triumphant consumer lovingly in thrall to American capitalism and greed.

However that may be, when I think now of the old Somali poet’s poem, and of the fact that not only he, but everyone in the camp, was literally on the brink of starvation; when I consider how Ilhan Omar is repeatedly attacked and ridiculed, after having seen for myself the actual conditions she grew up in for a time, conditions that the Somali poet has had to endure his entire life, it’s hard not to agree with Whitman’s bitter assessment above.

And so I wonder what Whitman would make of the old poet’s song, let alone his plea for American help. The Somali poet has been waiting for twenty years to get to the head of the list to even be considered for resettlement to “these united states.” Given that fact, how can he assume what Walt assumes? And even if he were transported tomorrow, and he looked for the Good Gray Poet under his sandals, what kind of America would he find?