Rereadings Page 6

  “Can you believe that?” I asked. “‘I feel the hot moisture yet that he left me’!”

  “Yuck!” they replied.

  My students weren’t being obtuse or perverse. They were right to be skeptical. Under a lot of the circumstances of reading and rereading, there is something endlessly suspicious about Whitman; the endlessness of the suspicion is, in fact, one of the indications of his stature. The tremendous access of reality, the constant presence of incidental beauty, and the lines themselves, tense with meaning yet so relaxed, are never sufficient to protect us from the invasiveness of the all-or-nothing Whitman proposition. And his enthusiasms spring from, and bear the mark of, the choicer elements of the freakish era in which he lived: phrenology and P. T. Barnum; animal magnetism and hydropathy; harebrained schemes to invade Canada; manifest destiny; the Mexican War (of which Whitman was an egregious journalistic booster, and about which Grant, a sober political realist of great integrity, said, “For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation”); ham actors; chautauquas; the Burnt-Out District; the inexorable march to Fort Sumter. This is the frenzied atmosphere of which “Song of Myself” is the exuberant, exhaustive, and—except for rare clunkers like “You should have been with us that day round the chowder–kettle”—perfect embodiment. Approached in the wrong mood, or from the wrong angle, it can all seem a little too much.

  But what angle was right? Sitting at the seminar table, I sensed that I wasn’t doing justice to this poem, which I had read and marveled over since the age of sixteen, when, as a freshman myself, in an introductory poetry course similar to this one, I’d encountered it in the anthology we were assigned, The Mentor Book of Major American Poets, a book I still have. The poem had never shaped my writing. On the life I lived in the years after college, though, it had exerted a powerful subterranean influence. The last time dust and ash from a cataclysm had fallen on my car had been in May of 1980, when Mount Saint Helens had erupted. Temporarily homeless, I was living in my 1970 Volkswagen bus (red, with a gold hand-painted top), which I parked at night in a small, long-abandoned drive-in theater, surrounded by the trees of the Coast Range, in South Beach, on the central Oregon coast. My life then had been one that Whitman not only would have approved of but had practically invented: my occupation was Jeffersonian (I was a commercial salmon fisherman, though not an entirely effective one); my central ideas were pantheistic; my friends were “powerful uneducated persons”—Whitman’s children of Adam. (Looking back now, I see the way I was living as almost comically Whitmanesque, though I was as convinced about what I was doing in those days as I’ve ever been.) I woke up that May morning to find a fine coat of gray dust, carried two hundred miles west by the weather and clotted a little in places because there had been an early-morning squall, covering my car. Mount Saint Helens had had its victims, too, though that dust, unlike this dust, had seemed to be one of the unambiguous blessings of nature.

  I had, therefore, a small personal stake in the poem, in the appeal of its creed and the validity of its imperatives. How was I going to justify it to these skeptical children? A little confused, I let the discussion go on without me for a minute or two, feeling that slightly vertiginous panic which teachers at a loss for words feel. Then, in repudiation of the word “pantheism,” which was bouncing around in my head and calling up images of the Pacific seen from Yaquina Head and of Yaquina Bay bristling with salmon boats (and flushed out, maybe, by the emotions of the past six days—emotions that, though they ranged from grief to rage, were suffused with a sense of powerlessness), I had an insight. I’d reread the Puritan divines from Edwards to Emerson over the past summer; I’d reread Justin Kaplan’s biography of Whitman; I had picked, sometimes inattentively (there’s a lot of dreck there), over the entire Whitman corpus. But something about the poem had escaped me—had, in fact, until that moment, always escaped me. I took out the copy of the Bible I’d brought to class in order to read, if we had time to look at “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (“Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!”) Saint Paul’s telling the church at Corinth that now we see through a glass darkly but then we will see face-to-face. I told my class that “Song of Myself” was understood in the collective critical mind as a pantheistic poem, an ardent poem, a revolutionary poem, but that it was actually a poem of the severest orthodoxy and hardness, and coldness, even; that it was understood as a mystical poem, an “Eastern” poem, a Vedantic poem, but that while many things in it might justify such an interpretation, its structure, its inner body, its circulatory rhythms, suggested something else. Whitman was, I told my students, far closer to Edwards than he was to Emerson (Emerson, for that matter, was far closer to Edwards than he was to Emerson). For all his empathy and his eroticism, for all his modernity and his gee-whiz mastery of the vocabulary of nineteenth-century popular science (the employment, for example, of the word “oscillating” to describe the bodies of flying seagulls in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”—how did he come up with that?), Whitman was in the business of writing something admonitory and militant and ancient and Western. The text he was expounding was this one:

  Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,

  In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.

  For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.

  So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.

  O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

  The drama the poem enacted was the triumph over death.

  To think, however accurately, that you’ve had a peak-in-Darien experience, that you’ve come across something so simple and inevitable it is presumptively true, can be pretty exhilarating. The class period ended on my suspended trumpet note, we broke up, and I walked away in the grip of a revelation. It was as if I had dreamed up the structure of the benzene ring or discovered the gravitational force. Of course. “Song of Myself” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (the 1856 Paradiso with Manhattan as the city on the hill) were as allegorical as the Divine Comedy and were as enmeshed in the same cosmic narrative, though now abstracted. “I stop some where waiting for you,” Whitman says at the end of “Song of Myself,” and there he was. The triumph over death. Almost a dozen people I knew who worked in the buildings had escaped; two I knew, who had been leading lives as ordinary as my own—lives that might just as well have been my own—hadn’t. Their stories, and the stories of all those others, bouncing between the two absences in the skyline—back and forth, back and forth—gave the depression and grief an uncontainable energy. And always, when I thought I was back to myself, alone with myself, there were, available to automatic glances from many corners in my neighborhood, and from points along which I traveled, the sickening absences in the skyline.

  I taught “Song of Myself” again that week. I went and talked about Whitman on Thursday evening, at the invitation, proffered months before, of Alice Quinn, The New Yorker’s poetry editor, to a class she teaches at Columbia. These were graduate students, and many were longtime residents of the city. They were somber and uninterested in disputes, and listened quietly when, after a half hour of preliminaries, I laid out my argument. I began with the fireman passage, lines 843 to 850 in the 1855 edition. Work your way around the strange terrain the poem has just traversed to arrive at this point, I told them. The border begins at these extraordinary lines (709—14):

  Swift wind! Space! My Soul! Now I know it is true what I guessed at;

  What I guessed when I loafed on the grass,

  What I guessed while I lay alone in my bed … . and again as I walked the beach under the paling stars of the
morning.

  My ties and ballasts leave me … . I travel … . I sail … . my elbows rest in the sea-gaps,

  I skirt the sierras … . my palms cover continents,

  I am afoot with my vision.

  Notice the psychic tension, amounting to what some might call insanity. A catalog follows. What he guessed at long ago in the poem, when he loafed on the grass, is that the “smallest sprout shows there is really no death,” that “All goes onward and outward … . and nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.” But something has happened between those assertions and this catalog, which is twin of the catalog that begins at line 257 (“The pure contralto sings in the organloft”), the magnificent aria of the human occupations. The earlier catalog was in the third person. This one is in the first person: “I am the hounded slave … Hell and despair are upon me”; “I visit the orchards of God and look at the spheric product” (spectacular, that “spheric product”); “I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself.” The first catalog was sunny and ideal, and melodic, as were the assertions of the good news of death. This one is Whitman’s Liebestod, beginning in a derangement of the senses (“my elbows rest in the sea-gaps … my palms cover continents”), continuing in spasms of disintegrative energy, and culminating in episodes of destruction and violence—the fireman, “the fall of grenades through the rent roof,” the massacre at Goliad. “It cannot fail,” Whitman insists through the images of suffering and death that crowd around the last third of the poem. “To any one dying … . thither I speed and twist the knob of the door”; “O despairer … I dilate you with tremendous breath”; “The weakest and shallowest is deathless with me.” Everywhere the verse is fragmentary, self-erasing; it “oscillates” wildly. The triumph over death leads to the again sunny and spacious assimilations (“And any man or woman shall stand cool and supercilious before a million universes”) that end the poem.

  I told the class that Whitman shows us who he really is here. Here—not in the doctrine of the poem but in the distribution of its energies, in the jagged, feverish expansions of the writing—he reveals himself not as the pantheist, the mystic, the sage, but as the Christian soldier setting out to harrow the underworld. Many people have pointed out the sea change in the poem, I said, but until now no one has guessed at what it means. Blissfully unaware of whether this last statement was true or not—I’ve always made sure to stay ignorant of the Whitman critical literature—I ended there, took some questions, thanked the assembled students, and went home. But I was filled with my idea for days, and didn’t really begin to let it go until the bombing started and a new kind of somberness, a new watchfulness, replaced the one that we New Yorkers had been living with in the weeks following the attack. I don’t know whether my rereading of the poem in the light of the terrible event can hold water far beyond that event, or whether, when I read it the way I did, it was my intelligence at work rather than the universal feelings of depression and powerlessness working on me; somehow, as I passed further into what people insist is a new world, “Song of Myself” just seemed more inscrutable than I had ever given it credit for being, and even richer and more profound. “I too am untranslatable,” Whitman says at the end, and he is probably right. But seeing the poem in the way I saw it helped me. It gave me a way to hold the event in my mind, to come closer to it and not be afraid. I’m grateful to the poem, and to the coincidences that required me to reread it.

  I had some more commerce with Whitman in the aftermath of the attack. That October, I read from him at one of the many memorial events in New York. I had only five minutes—many people were reading—so I chose some passages from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” The passage I ended with was this one:

  Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm’d Manhattan?

  River and sunset and scallop-edg’d waves of flood-tide?

  The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter?

  What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as I approach?

  What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face?

  Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?

  We understand then do we not?

  What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted?

  What the study could not teach—what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish’d, is it not?

  ARTHUR KRYSTAL

  Kid Roberts and Me

  The Leather Pushers, by H. C. Witwer

  H. C. Witwer’s 1920 novel The Leather Pushers went for a song at a recent auction of boxing books and ephemera at New York’s Swann Galleries. One of six books in Lot 51, which included Budd Schulberg’s The Harder They Fall and Harold Ribalow’s World’s Greatest Boxing Stories, it was not among the sale’s more celebrated titles. My paddle was up at eighty dollars, again at ninety, and then I made my mistake. I began to think. Five of the books didn’t matter to me, and ninety-five dollars is pretty steep for a book that isn’t a collector’s item. On the other hand, I had been looking for The Leather Pushers for fifteen years, which comes to about seven dollars a year, counting the buyer’s premium. While I was considering all this, the lot was sold to a man one row in front of me for a hundred dollars.

  Had I been wearing ten-ounce gloves, I would have beaten myself up. I was a piker, a cheapskate, a dope. But perhaps all was not lost. During the break I approached the newest owner of The Leather Pushers and wondered whether he might consider parting with it for a fair price. Naturally, he cocked his head at this. Did I know something he did not? Having satisfied himself that I was neither a collector nor a dealer, merely an eccentric, this splendid fellow, a partner in the brokerage house of McFadden, Farrell & Smith, announced that he would make a present of it. I, of course, wouldn’t hear of such a thing. He, of course, would hear of nothing else. A week later Witwer’s novel arrived in the mail.

  An exultant moment, yet not without a vague anxiety. Suddenly I wasn’t sure that I wanted to revisit a book I had left behind such a long time ago. Instead of devouring it, I was content simply to handle it, a well-preserved 1921 cloth edition of 341 pages with a cover illustration of two fighters flailing against a splattered red-and-white background. True, I could not resist glancing occasionally at the first paragraph, which to my relief was competently written; but then I’d put the book aside, as if not to push my luck. Finally, after a few nights of dithering, I took it to bed. I surged past the first paragraph, the first page, the second, and gradually it came to me: the reason that I had hunted it down long after forgetting just about everything in it.

  To be honest, I had even forgotten the book’s title and author. This was a novel I had last read in 1961, when I was fourteen, and aside from the hero’s name—his ring name: Kid Roberts—all I could remember was that he had gone to Harvard; that his tycoon father naturally deplored his brutal vocation; that the beautiful and classy girl who loved him also deplored his brutal vocation; and that Harvard notwithstanding, the Kid went on to become the heavyweight champion of the world. I was fourteen, what did I know?

  Maybe because it had been borrowed from a classmate or maybe because the sixties had efficiently sutured off my adolescence, I forgot all about the novel. So complete was its obliteration that I actually picked up a paperback copy of The Leather Pushers at the auction preview without any bells going off. Only the name “Kid Roberts” on the back cover alerted me to the fact that this was the book. A moment later, the cloth edition turned up.

  Recovering memories is a mysterious process. Fifteen years earlier, while I was explaining to a bemused young woman my interest in boxing and boxing literature, the name Kid Roberts, without warning, without the slightest tectonic shift in memory, suddenly burst from oblivion. One moment the book wasn’t there, the next instant it was, and though the charac
ters and plot were all muddled, I remembered distinctly how it felt to have read it. I was nuts about the book. It was what stories and reading stories were all about. And by God, I was going to find it.

  I saw myself as a svelte Caspar Gutman traveling the world over in search of the black bird. But without benefit of title or author, mine was a rather messy quest. I asked around—but the people who knew literature didn’t know beans about boxing books, and the people who knew boxing didn’t read all that much. I checked out every secondhand bookstore in every city I visited, looking for—well, anything that might lead me further. I found plenty of rare books that way, including a copy of Conan Doyle’s The Croxley Master and Other Tales of the Ring and Camp, but no novels about a fighter named Kid Roberts. One winter afternoon in the multi-lampshaded reading room of the New York Public Library, I ran my eye down tiny-lettered columns in old volumes of Books in Print. What was I looking for?