Walt Whitman's Mystical Ethics of Comradeship , livre ebook

Walt Whitman's Mystical Ethics of Comradeship
Homosexuality and the Marginality of Friendship at the Crossroads of Modernity
Juan A. Herrero Brasas

Published by S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS A LBANY
© 2010 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Herrero Brasas, Juan A.
Walt Whitman's mystical ethics of comradeship : homosexuality and the marginality of friendship at the crossroads of modernity / Juan A. Herrero Brasas.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3011-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Whitman, Walt, 1819–1892—Relations with men. 2. Whitman, Walt, 1819–1892—Friends and associates. 3. Whitman, Walt, 1819–1892—Ethics. 4. Poets, American—19th century—Biography. 5. Gay men—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PS3232.H47 2010
    811'.3—dc22
    [B]                                                                      2009021078
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my mother, whom I love and admire so much, and for aunt Pilar, whose kindness and loving care will always stay with me.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank John Orr, Don Miller, and Bill May of the University of Southern California School of Religion, as well as Lincoln Davis, Javier Anso, Pilar Gómez Aláez, and Todd James and the Capital Group for all the ways in which, at different stages, they supported the preparation of this project. My sincere gratitude goes also to John Mason, former dean of Humanities at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) for his kind encouragement. I am also indebted to Linda Jones, of the CSUN Religious Studies Department, for her technological assistance, which made it possible for me to submit the final draft of the manuscript in a timely manner. Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to the Huntington Library of San Marino, California for providing the resources and environment that were vital for the completion of my book.

Introduction
I n their introduction to David Kuebrich's Minor Prophecy: Walt Whitman's New American Religion (1989), Catherine Albanese and Stephen Stein complain about the total absorption of Whitman's figure by the literature departments as much as about its abandonment on the part of religious scholars. They point out that Kuebrich is the first one to offer an extended analysis of Whitman's work from the perspective of religious studies. 1 The abandonment Albanese and Stein denounce should certainly attract our attention, given that throughout his writings Whitman insists on the primarily religious character and purpose of his poetry. In the cluster of poems entitled “Starting from Paumanok,” he says “I too, following many and follow'd by many, inaugurate a religion, I descend into the arena,” and in all three different prefaces to Leaves of Grass the poet unequivocally states the fundamentally religious purpose of his work. Thus, for example, in his preface to the 1872 edition, he writes that from the time he began elaborating the plan of his poems, and throughout the many different shapes it took, “one deep purpose underlay the others, and has underlain its execution ever since—and that has been the Religious purpose. Amid many changes and a formulation taking far different shape from what I had first supposed, this basic purpose has never been departed from in the composition of my verses.” 2
Whitman's literary activity resulted in the establishment of a new religion of mystical overtones, which served as a source of authority and a vehicle for the implementation of his new morality, the morality of comradeship. Religion, Whitman writes in Democratic Vistas , is at the core of every worthy enterprise: “Is there a great moral and religious civilization—the only justification of a great material one?” 3 Leaves of Grass was meant to be a new gospel, the sacred scripture of a new religion: “I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love [ … ] Know you, solely to drop in the earth the germs of a greater religion,/The following chants each for its kind I sing.” 4 Whitman, indeed, was seen by his initial, and enthusiastic, followers, fundamentally as a religious figure, as the founder of a new spirituality, that of comradeship:
My comrade!
For you to share with me two greatnesses, and a third one rising inclusive and more resplendent,
The greatness of Love and Democracy, and the greatness of Religion.
(“Starting from Paumanok,” 10)
Despite such explicit statements, the fact remains that, for most of the twentieth century and through the present, Leaves of Grass has been understood by a majority of scholars and by the general reader mostly as strictly a literary exercise. This is all the more surprising in light of Whitman's emphatic warning that no one would understand his verses who insists upon viewing them merely as a literary performance. 5 Such warnings on the part of the poet have disconcerted many a literary critic. Paul Zweig, for example, believes Whitman made it hard for the reader to understand the meaning and purpose of his poems, “[o]ne either ‘adhered’ to his book, as his circle of fervent friends (‘the hot little prophets,’ as they came to be known) put it during his last years in Camden; or one did not.” Zweig concludes that this intense partisanship resulted in overheated minds and defensive worship. 6 The “hot little prophets” that Zweig mentions played a crucial role in advancing Whitman's religious message during his lifetime and after his death. Through their activities and missionary writings, they carried out what I will refer to as Whitman's messianic project.
In the religion Whitman inaugurated, he himself played the central role; he was its high priest, its prophet. According to Roger Asselineau, one of Whitman's most authoritative twentieth century scholars, Whitman “dreamed himself as a prophet of a new evangel and it was in that aspect that he portrayed himself.” 7 Whitman intended Leaves of Grass to be an earth-shattering book. As part of his religious enterprise, he was to be acknowledged as the bard America had been longing for. 8 To be accepted and acknowledged —that , indeed, was to be the unmistakable proof of his vocation as a poet. He ended the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass by expressing such a conviction: “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he absorbs it.” 9 Whitman, however, was never fully absorbed by his country during his lifetime, and it was perhaps for that reason that the above statement was deleted in later reprints of the 1855 preface.
During Whitman's lifetime, America to some extent repudiated his poetry. 10 He was repeatedly accused of writing obscene literature, to the point that the sixth edition of Leaves of Grass (1881) was suspended by the editor under the threat of a lawsuit by the district attorney, who considered the book obscene. In 1865, Whitman was even fired from his government job when he was found to be the author of Leaves of Grass (an “indecent book,” according to his superior 11 ). Some parts of Leaves of Grass “are disagreeable to say the least, simply sensual,” Thoreau wrote in a letter to H. G. O. Blake, as part of an otherwise favorable comment about Whitman's book. To which he added: “He does not celebrate love at all. It is as if the beasts spoke.” 12 Emerson himself asked Whitman to suppress some passages of his work, which Whitman refused to do. In any case, the message contained in Leaves of Grass seemed to most of the poet's contemporaries a far cry from religion. Whitman was well aware of this, but rejected the suggestion that his poetry was “wanting in religion.” In old age, he declared to Horace Traubel, one of his closest disciples:
People often speak of the Leaves as wanting in religion, but that is not my view of the book—and I ought to know. I think the Leaves the most religious book among books: crammed full of faith. What would the Leaves be without faith? An empty vessel: faith is its very substance. 13
The character of the new religion that Whitman sought to found was such that only his initiates seemed to understand the underlying message of Leaves of Grass . We know that he attracted homosexual men to his inner circle, with some of them becoming his most passionate disciples and missionaries of his gospel of comraderie. Interestingly, however, it was certain passages in sections of “Children of Adam,” the cluster of poems devoted to heterosexual love, which lacks the emotional intensity of “Calamus,” the homoerotic cluster, that were originally the subject of attack on moral grounds. At that early stage, there was no charge of homosexuality (or rather of sodomy, as it would have been termed at that time) against Whitman, despite the fact that homosexual love is so openly suggested in “Calamus.” The subject of homosexuality was totally sealed to the American mind. In Zweig's words: “It was as if the ‘Calamus’ poems were not read, as if they slipped through blanks in the minds of the readers.” 14 This (relative) cultural blindness of the mid-nineteenth century American public to the homosexual theme may help explain Whitman's boldness in using homosexual imagery in his poems. Such blindness played in favor of Whitman's proposal of a new morality of male friendship.
Whitman's writings were to be the expression of an oracle—a sacred figure leading his people, as in th