America's Gentle Giant

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their house and street life was trival and commonplace. Ralph Waldo Emerson

WALT WHITMAN was an American genius. He brought originality to an imitative literature, cutting and hewing poems out of the city streets and country ponds of a vast America. "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem," he said in the 1855 preface to his masterwork, Leaves of Grass. Never before had an American writer captured this relationship between the word and the state, the poem and the nation. Emerson wrote Whitman a few weeks after the publication of Leaves of Grass, saying he found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed."

In a nation that ached for its own literature, Whitman contributed a poetic miracle, though not everyone at the time embraced him or his work with the same adulation as the well-established Emerson. In fact, many dismissed Leaves of Grass as an immoral book. Whitman himself never seemed entirely satisfied with the controversial collection, which he said allowed him to sound his "barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."

To study Walt Whitman is to examine 19th century America, amidst its industrial clacking, economic growing pains, and political and social tension. Justin Kaplan appropriately spends a good part of his splendid biography creating the contexts for Whitman's experiences. On May 31, 1819, Kaplan tells us, Napoleon was dying of cancer on St. Helena, Virginian James Monroe was strutting about a rebuilt White House in knee breeches, a financial panic was threatening the young nation--and Walter and Louisa Whitman had their second child, named after his father but always called "Walt" by members of the family.

Kaplan's ability to establish Whitman's relationship with America, the only continuous union in his unmarried life, gives his biography an Emersonian twist. Covering the terrain of Whitman's life in about 400 pages, Kaplan repeatedly and judiciously quotes his subject's poems, prose, letters and diaries to lend his biography not only authenticity but a Whitmanesque spirit that a historical and strictly narrative book would have lacked. Thus, much of Walt Whitman: A Life is interior, approaching Whitman's experience through his own descriptions.

JUST AS WHITMAN spent a lifetime reordering words and poems in his own work, so Kaplan's biography seems marked by rearrangement. The author devised a scheme highly appropriate to the life of his subject. The book opens in the spring of 1884 with a tired and white-bearded Whitman, who has just purchased a house in unlovely (Kaplan's word) Camden, N.J. This is the Whitman who splashes in the bathtub, sleeps late, and depends on a cane to move around. In the second chapter, Kaplan describes Whitman's last days. The rest of the biography takes Whitman's life in chronological order from his birth in chapter three, so our last picture of the poet frames the 65-year-old moving into his Camden house. Kaplan's stately and elegant concluding line leaves us with a Whitman not deceased but wonderfully alive: an old man who never married and had no heart's companion now except his books, he rode contentedly at anchor on the waters of the past.

A large man, six feet tall and about 200 pounds, Whitman's body was "rosy and soft, like a child's," and he liked "to keep a bowl of flowers by him." Kaplan illuminates the multifaceted personality of this husky and gentle man. The author depicts the 12-year-old apprentice printer in Brooklyn, the intinerant newspaperman, the Long Island country school teacher, and America's first urban poet, sharing many secrets along the way--including Whitman's taste for buckwheat cakes, beefsteak, ovsters, and strong coffee.

And Kaplan does not recede from the question of Whitman's sexuality. With the tools of the psychohistorian, the author recognizes the significance of Whitman's search for his sexual identity. Still, he doesn't overemphasize this side of the poet. While Kaplan unobtrusively reminds us that the "I" of Leaves of Grass is almost as often as woman as a man, on the other hand, he later analyzes Whitman's masterpiece in more universal terms. Kaplan sees the centerpiece of Whitman's life as both a "Whitman at his best, and when he is at his awful worst--windy, repetitious, self imitative--one loves him for that too, he is so unworried, non-chalant..."

This is by far the most analytical the author becomes, and it bespeaks the enthusiasm of the biography. Kaplan believes that Whitman must be understood on his own terms, and this recognition allows the poet and his voice to emerge naturally out of the biographical narrative. Whenever Kaplan does choose to intervene, he enhances his portrait with appropriate comparisions, or soft-spoken but astute analysis. In one case, Kaplan contrasts a friendship between Whitman and an intimate acquaintance, Peter Doyle, to Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in the cabmen's shelter in Ulysses, and Nathanial West's own "Peter Doyle" holding hands with Miss Lonely hearts at a speakeasy.

WITH SUCH dexterity and literary aplomb, the author justifies another Whitman biography. Though the first was written in 1850, even before Leaves of Grass, and many have followed, Kaplan's biography creates the density of Whitman's life in contemporary terms and with the aid of new materials--previoulsy unavailable private papers of Whitman and his friends--available to him. At a time when America questions whether or not it is still the light of the world, it refreshes and reassures to discover a man who did beleive in the President as a redeemer, and democracy as a catalyst for love. A child of expansion and of manifest destiny, Walt Whitman embodied a sprit that no longer pervades the American consciousness. Kaplan revives Whitman and his dreams, revealing democratic vistas that have become blurred in our own time.