Inquest on Democracy

WALT WHITMAN. POET OF DEMOCRACY--Hugh l'Anson Faussef--Yale ($3).

This compact, brilliant critical biography is 1) an excellent life of Walt Whitman, 2) a just, if merciless, evaluation of him as poet, mystic and prophet of democracy, 3) an arduous, provocative sermon on the nature and responsibility of democracy and of art. Unlike most Whitman critics, Author Fausset avoids the extremes of most books about Whitman. He neither damns nor admires Whitman for being a homosexual. He does not claim that Whitman's poetry is as great as Homer's or merely a free verse Sears, Roebuck catalogue. He simply tries to explain what Whitman achieved in poetry and mysticism, what he failed to achieve--and why.

Critic Fausset's thesis is simple: if Whitman was a great poet, it was his business to fulfill the responsibilities of one. If he was the evangelist of democracy, it was his business to write a true, not a heretical, gospel. In Fausset's opinion, Whitman never quite succeeded in being either poet or evangelist. He wrote some great poetry and some amazingly energetic verse. But on the whole, he shrank even from such responsibilities as he was equipped to recognize. He perceived a great number of democratic half-truths. He lacked the intellectual equipment or spiritual stamina to make the half-truth whole. Reason: Whitman, the man, was never really whole.

Bisexual. All human beings, Critic Fausset observes, are to some extent bisexual. But Whitman had a great deal more of the woman in him than men normally have. This schism in his nature, Fausset believes, was in part the source of such greatness as he had. It was also the chief source of his failures. Whitman's femininity gave him his tremendous powers for the passive absorption of experience, for sympathy, for the almost bottomless endurance (as in the Civil War hospitals) of massive suffering. But it also accounts for the sentimentality, effusiveness, extreme over-assertiveness, pseudo-masculinity and egoism of many of his poems.

Because he feared and never quite understood himself, because, in all probability, he never felt normal sexual desire in his life, his hunger for the easy comradeship of simple men developed. "More intent on excluding none than on wholely finding one," it was inevitable that he should remain innocent to the end of his days of psychology, character, the true nature of individualism, personality, tragedy, evil--all of which considerably complicate the problems of the poet and of the democratic theorist.

Womblike. Due to the same schism, Whitman never really understood the essential duties of an artist. Real harmony of form is "created from within." It demands "an act of unified being in the artist himself"; the more he enters "into the depths of his own soul, the deeper he [enters] into the meaning of things." And "there [is] no other way of achieving creative insight in place of an external and generalized view." Whitman achieved such insight and such harmony only rarely; notably, Fausset points out, in a sense of death as womblike as his frame of mysticism or the childlike attachment to his mother, which he never broke. Much of the time he substituted, for truly distilled perception, declamations, loud affirmations, a catalogue of beloved objects, and worked in a vocabulary too superficial and meager, and in a formal pattern too loose, to produce anything that can be called true poetry.

His bisexualism also involved Whitman in other difficulties. One can be as hopelessly tethered to flesh by Whitman's sort of "false relish," Fausset observes, as by the Puritanism which he was overreacting against. The errors and half-truths of Whitman's gospel in general are brought out most clearly, Fausset believes, in the celebrations of sex, Children of Adam and Calamus. Whitman "affirmed far too easily the identity of body and spirit . . . and this evasion resulted in an almost complete sacrifice of the distinctively human values to biological forces."

In these poems, Fausset shrewdly remarks, "the faces of men and women in love, the eyes of their intelligence, hardly ever meet." He also finds symptoms of frustrated sexual impulse in Whitman's spurious "primitiveness": "A primitive man may think in his bodily organs. But he would be the last to think about them or to display or exploit them consciously." In short, "to attempt [as Whitman did] to resolve the conflict of self-consciousness and sex by merely sinking to the biological level . . . was to abandon the hope of human integrity without recovering an animal innocence."

War. By 1860 Whitman's work as tne poet-propagandist of democracy (Song of Myself, Song of the Open Road, Children of Adam} was almost finished. Democracy's crisis, the Civil War, was to provide him with the source of his greatest poetry and the great central act of his life. Being a simple man, he liked the glamor of war, liked still more its courage and comradeship. He wrote half-Hitlerish lines on the glories of immolation en masse. He also wrote the maturest poems of his life, possibly the finest that have ever been written about war. And in the hospitals of Washington he lived his gospel of brotherhood more eloquently, truly and bravely than he had ever managed to write about it.

The rest of his life was decline. Like any old soldier, Whitman faced, and faced nobly, a different gambit of heroism: the slow endurance of anticlimax--failing poetic powers, the wrenching death of his mother (for which, at 54, he was as emotionally unprepared as a child), the paralysis which he endured for 20 years of his remaining 27.

Those years were not uniformly dreary. They were warmed by the half-filial, half-erotic friendship of many young men, notably the young Irish streetcar conductor, Peter Doyle. They were cheered by the startling letters of Mrs. Anne Gilchrist. She had read the Leaves and wrote their author: "Nothing in life or death can tear out of my heart the passionate belief that one day I shall hear that voice say to me, 'My mate. The one I so much want. Bride, wife, indissoluble, eternal.' ... O come, come, my darling, look into these eyes and see the long ardent aspiring soul in them."

Orbic. Whitman was still active. He went West, like the nation, and saw the Rockies. Their grandeur reminded him of his own poetry. But he was aging. He began to say he had never read Emerson before he wrote Leaves of Grass (he had), to be a little cadgy about money, to blossom a little senilely at his few remaining birthday parties, to welcome the less fantastic of his admirers. They were not the common workmen he had written for, but those poets and cultivated hangers-on who are the fate of poets in general. He kept adding to Leaves oj Grass. It had become "a habit." He wrote Democratic Vistas, a book of prose more perceptive of the weak spots in U.S. democracy than anything Whitman had written before. He had outlived his pre-Civil War hopefulness, but he was still capable only of vague "orbic" statements about the leadership of "the divine literatus," and preached once again "his old back-to-nature illusion." He still professed his uncritical confidence in the deep instinctive virtues of "the People." Author Fausset believes that this confidence is part of Whitman's pathetic fallacy.

Like his masses, Whitman lacked the self-mastery, the intelligence and the creative idea whereby true democracy becomes possible. He glimpsed "the necessity of bringing the moral sense into a new relation with intelligence," but he could "only link them loosely and hopefully together." He vaguely foresaw "the basic problem of democracy, that of reintegrating the individual in a social whole and converting a semiconscious mass into a community of responsible persons," but "he overlooked the cost of integration, as he had overlooked it in himself." And "his lack of insight into the nature of imagination and the spiritual cost of creating great literature was paralleled by his ignorance of the nature and cost of the 'soul-consciousness,' whose development he insisted, rightly enough, it should be the one purpose of all government in a democracy to encourage."

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