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"Heroic Spiritual Grandfather": Whitman, Sexuality, and the American Left, 1890-1940

2000; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/aq.2000.0004

1080-6490

Bryan K. Garman,

American Literature and Culture

When Horace Traubel visited Walt Whitman in the early evening on 16 December 1888, he roused the poet from bed and, as he did nearly every day for the final five years of Whitman's life, recorded their conversation. Aside from Traubel's encounter with an Irish immigrant, who predicted that Whitman's fame would one day rival Christ's, their rehearsal of that Sunday's events was unremarkable. Following his doctor's orders, the convalescing poet had taken healthy doses of wine and milk and had "two cups of tea and some toast" for dinner. He reviewed his mail, maligned Camden's postmaster, and instructed Traubel to send copies of the "'complete' Whitman" to a host of acquaintances. As it so often did, the discussion turned to politics. Whitman expressed his disapproval of United States trade policies with Canada, then asked Traubel where he stood on the ideological spectrum. The poet feared that his visitor "must be on the outer line--far out where the worst rebels are." He was right. Traubel, who often tried to convince his mentor that America's democratic promise could only be realized through socialism, replied by asking the poet if he was "satisfied with things as they are." When Whitman indicated he was not, Traubel wondered if he could envision "a way out" of his disappointment. The old man "look[ed] forward to a world of small owners," but Traubel asserted that a world of "no owners at all" might be even better. The suggestion stunned the poet. "What do you mean by that? no owners at all?" he mused. "Do you mean common owners--owning things in common? . . . it sounds best: could it be best?" 1 [End Page 90] At times, Whitman was clearly sympathetic to Traubel's argument. He cursed "the God damned robbers, fools, stupids, who ride their gay horses over the bodies of the crowd," and predicted that their egregious actions would one day "drive us into an inevitable resentment, then revolt, of some sort." "Sometimes, I think, I feel almost sure," he said in uncertain terms, "Socialism is the next thing coming: I shrink from it in some ways: yet it looks like our only hope." 2 Such radical statements were the exception rather than the rule, for most of Traubel and Whitman's sparring matches ended with the poet chastising his understudy for his "radical violence." "You must be on your guard," he cautioned. "Don't let your dislike for the conventions lead you to do the old things any injustice. . . . Be radical--be radical--be not too damned radical." 3 Traubel recognized that his efforts to convert Whitman to the socialist gospel were unsuccessful. When in 1919 Joseph Gollomb of the Evening Post Book Review asked Traubel if the Good Gray Poet would support the recent Bolshevik rebellion, he admitted that "No 'ism' could pin down Whitman. Might as well try to give shape to the atmosphere." 4 This realization did not, however, prevent Traubel from launching a persistent and largely unexamined attempt to transform the poet into the prophet of socialism. Beginning in 1890, he became the point man in a cultural movement that prescribed Whitman's democratic representations for the social malaise caused by capitalism. By the early 1920s, he and a cohort of Whitmanite socialists transmitted their namesake's political vision to a new generation of radicals who identified the poet as their "heroic spiritual grandfather." 5 With Traubel's help, Whitman became a conspicuous part of the literary Left's "usable past," profoundly shaping the terms of its debates and supporting its political priorities. While the Left was deeply committed to overturning the economic order, male cultural workers alloyed Whitman's construct of manhood with his homoerotic formulation of solidarity to forge a culture that functioned primarily to protect the interests of male laborers. Their rhetoric of male bonding challenged the competitive ethos of capitalism and opened the possibility...