Redskin from Brooklyn

THE SOLITARY SINGER (616 pp.)--Gay Wilson Alien--Macmillian ($8).

When Walt Whitman's Drum Taps, a book of Civil War poems, appeared in 1865, a 22-year-old reviewer named Henry James laced into the good grey poet. "To become adopted as a national poet," wrote young James, "it is not enough to discard everything in particular and to accept everything in general, to amass crudity upon crudity, to discharge the undigested contents of your blotting-book into the lap of the public. You must respect the public which you address; for it has taste, if you have not." To which Whitman, for once laconic, snorted: "Feathers!"

James later regretted his brashness, and still later, U.S. readers did adopt Walt Whitman as a national poet, but the clash between the two men dramatized the perennially split personality of American writing. Critic Philip Rahv has aptly defined it as a clash between "paleface and redskin." This is critical shorthand for the interrelated battles of highbrow v. lowbrow, refined sensibility v. raw energy, the tradition-directed writer v. the self-made writer. The palefaces, e.g., Hawthorne, Melville, James, ruled the 19th century; the redskins, e.g., Dreiser, Anderson, Wolfe, Hemingway, Faulkner, rule the 20th. As the first great chief of the redskins, Whitman would take ironic relish in the latest paleface compliment paid him, a definitive biography by New York University English Professor Gay Wilson Allen--the biggest and probably the best of some 50-odd lives of Whitman in print.

A Kiss from Lafayette. Whitman Specialist Allen serves a full-course literary meal, and he takes his time about it, but anyone who sits patiently at his table will leave it fat with facts. Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, near present-day Huntington, Long Island, in 1819, but was taken to Brooklyn at the age of three. His father was a good carpenter but a poor provider, who spouted Tom Paine to his eight children. Walt had a skimpy schooling, and the most dramatic event he later recalled from his childhood was the day Lafayette, on a triumphal visit to Brooklyn, picked him up and kissed him. By 15 Walt was working in a printing office and getting anonymous little pieces published in the old New York Mirror.

The depression of 1835-36 drove the Whitmans out to Hempstead, Long Island, and Walt took a country teaching post. The hours were hard, the pay small ($35 to $40 for a three-month term). Grown to a husky six-footer, Whitman showed no interest in girls, but he did get so chummy with the son of the farmer with whom he boarded that he was chided for it. This was the first of many close male friendships that have led later critics of Whitman to regard him as at least a crypto-homosexual.

Back in newspaper work, he became editor of the New York Aurora two months before his 23rd birthday, lost the post two months later. Young Whitman's writing was prissy and preachy. His first and only novel was a hack temperance tract. Walt's stock advice: "Swear not! Smoke not! And rough-and-tumble not!"

Homer to Seagulls. The rough-and-tumble of newspaper life was Walt's chief fare for the next decade. He got into the habit of going out alone to Coney Island, "at that time a long, bare unfrequented shore," stripping off his clothes, and declaiming Homer and Shakespeare to the seagulls. The literary journals he read were calling for "a Homer of the mass," and Whitman began "simmering, simmering, simmering," with the notion that he could be just that. He holed up with a rickety table in his mother's attic, and in 1855 published, at his own expense, Leaves of Grass.

The reviews were slow to come, and Whitman wrote and planted three of his own, acclaimed himself: "An American bard at last! one of the roughs, large, proud, affectionate, eating, drinking, and breeding." Other reviewers disagreed: "A mass of stupid filth," said one. "A mixture of Yankee transcendentalism and New York rowdyism," said another. In a friendly letter, Emerson sent Whitman his only real rave notice: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." Leaves of Grass sold a known two or three dozen copies out of 1,000 printed; the rest were probably given away.

Undaunted, the would-be Homer of the masses added more "pomes," as he called them, brought out a second edition the next year. It flopped, and a third edition in 1860 did little better. Whitman's candid celebration of the life of the senses was just too much of a shocker to the genteel public for whom William Dean Howells spoke when he wrote: "Generally, people now call a spade an agricultural implement."

Fond Dreams & Leaky Egos. The Civil War cast Whitman in a new role--a sort of male Florence Nightingale to Union soldiers in army hospitals. Seeking a wounded brother in Washington, he was appalled by the negligence and the suffering. He stayed on as a general morale-builder, bringing one boy tobacco, writing a letter for another, or simply holding the hand of some lonesome, homesick soldier. At war's end Whitman brought out Drum Taps, and landed a clerk's sinecure in the Attorney General's office at $1,600 a year, probably the most money he ever made.

A further edition of Leaves of Grass was banned in Boston, but even that failed to spur sales. Whitman was later to write: "I have not gain'd the acceptance of my own time, but have fallen back on fond dreams of the future." A stroke lamed him in 1873, and he lived as a semi-invalid for nearly two decades in his ramshackle home in Camden, NJ. When he died in 1892. his obituaries took up more space than he had received during his whole lifetime. The country had at last begun to warm to him: the fond dreams of the Brooklyn redskin were coming true.

The good Whitman did is clearly indicated in Biographer Allen's pages. Once and for all, he snapped the cultural apron strings binding American writers too slavishly to polite British and Continental models. The harm he did was not wholly his fault. Generations of U.S. writers brought up on the Whitmanly cult of self-expression, but without a Whitmanly self to express, have flooded the basement of American letters with outpourings from their leaky egos.

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