Possessed by Memory

by Harold Bloom

  Isaiah 34:4

  And here is the great trope of human mortality from Homer:

  …why ask of my generation?

  As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.

  The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the fine timber

  burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.

  So one generation of men will grow while another

  dies….

  Iliad, Book VI, lines 145–50, Lattimore translation

  Virgil, imitating Homer as always, does not better him yet does something powerful:

  thick as the leaves that with the early frost

  of autumn drop and fall within the forest,

  or as the birds that flock along the beaches,

  in flight from frenzied seas when the chill season

  drives them across the waves to lands of sun.

  They stand; each pleads to be the first to cross

  the stream; their hands reach out in longing for

  the farther shore. But Charon, sullen boatman,

  now takes these souls, now those; the rest he leaves;

  thrusting them back, he keeps them from the beach.

  Aeneid, Book VI, lines 310–19, Mandelbaum translation

  Dante goes beyond his beloved Virgil and rivals Homer:

  But those forlorn and naked souls changed color, their teeth chattering, as soon as they heard the cruel words. They cursed God, their parents, the human race, the place, the time, the seed of their begetting and of their birth. Then, weeping loudly, all drew to the evil shore that awaits every man who fears not God. The demon Charon, his eyes like glowing coals, beckons to them and collects them all, beating with his oar whoever lingers.

  As the leaves fall away in autumn, one after another, till the bough sees all its spoils upon the ground, so there the evil seed of Adam: one by one they cast themselves from that shore at signals, like a bird at its call. Thus they go over the dark water, and before they have landed on the other shore, on this side a new throng gathers.

  Inferno, Canto III, lines 100–120, Singleton translation

  I have juxtaposed these dark passages in a book I published many years ago, A Map of Misreading (1975). But there I was concerned with John Milton and his precursors, whereas here my interest is in the Whitmanian difference. Begin again with the title Leaves of Grass. Whitman, a Hicksite Quaker Bible reader, kept in mind an extraordinary trope from 2 Isaiah:

  The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field:

  The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.

  The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.

  Isaiah 40: 6–8

  Whitman is much more interested in the metaphor of the grass as flesh than in leaves as comprising our individual mortality. He never feared dying, a personal attribute, but also Epicurean and Lucretian doctrine, which holds that dying is real and can be very painful but the pain ends, and death is simply nonexistence. Whitman wavered on this, yet seems to have finally settled on the vista that we survive only in our works and in the loving memory of others. As the prophet of human immediacy, Walt Whitman stresses the eternal now.

  Walt as a healer can speak in the accent of the Christ who comes as physician to cleanse us inside and out. An Epicurean Christ seems an oxymoron and returns us to the complexity of Whitmanian metaphysical materialism striving against an Emersonian transcendentalism:

  I have heard what the talkers were talking….the talk of the beginning and the end,

  But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

  There was never any more inception than there is now,

  Nor any more youth or age than there is now;

  And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

  Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

  Wallace Stevens interpreted this perceptively when he had his Whitman sing, “Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.” As a prophet, Whitman is interested in the here and now and not in the last things.

  Urge and urge and urge,

  Always the procreant urge of the world.

  Out of the dimness opposite equals advance….Always substance and increase,

  Always a knit of identity….always distinction….always a breed of life.

  To elaborate is no avail….Learned and unlearned feel that it is so.

  Sure as the most certain sure….plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,

  Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,

  I and this mystery here we stand.

  “This mystery” is the real Me or Me myself:

  Clear and sweet is my soul….and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.

  Lack one lacks both….and the unseen is proved by the seen,

  Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.

  Showing the best and dividing it from the worst, age vexes age,

  Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.

  Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,

  Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.

  I am satisfied….I see, dance, laugh, sing;

  As God comes a loving bedfellow and sleeps at my side all night and close on the peep of the day,

  And leaves for me baskets covered with white towels bulging the house with their plenty,

  Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,

  That they turn from gazing after and down the road,

  And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,

  Exactly the contents of one, and exactly the contents of two, and which is ahead?

  Whitman chants that nothing is final and that no man shall see the end. He and the moment share perfection, and he admires both. In his ecstasy, he breaks into dance, laughter, and song and gives us a remarkable image of God, as much of a loving bedfellow as Ishmael was to Queequeg. I never cease my wonder at the startling image of God leaving behind him baskets of white towels to bulge Walt’s house. But then the passage turns even wilder. Whitman turns upon himself and seems to chide some rift in his self-confidence. That fissure is then identified as the struggle between the three components of Walt Whitman’s consciousness and being: his self, his real Me, or Me myself, and his unknown soul. There is a homely charm in God as Walt’s lover who generously leaves for him those bulging baskets of white towels. Whitman and his siblings were living with their mother and father, and one gathers that clean towels were not in heavy supply:

  Trippers and askers surround me,

  People I meet….the effect upon me of my early life….of the ward and city I live in….of the nation,

  The latest news….discoveries, inventions, societies….authors old and new,

  My dinner, dress, associates, looks, business, compliments, dues,

  The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,

  The sickness of one of my folks—or of myself….or ill-doing….or loss or lack of money….or depressions or exaltations,

  They come to me days and nights and go from me again,

  But they are not the Me myself.

  Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,

  Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,

  Looks down, is erect, bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,

  Looks with its sidecurve
d head curious what will come next,

  Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it.

  These last five lines, giving a vision of the Me myself, have an American magic in their stance and metric that prophesies our later poets, from T. S. Eliot on to John Ashbery. Unlike Walt Whitman—one of the roughs, an American, the outward self—this figure is androgynous. It awakens memories in me that go back seventy years, to an undergraduate attachment I had to a young lady from Kentucky who was a kind of female Huckleberry Finn. Myself very clumsy, then as now, I admired her grace of movement. She had a way of standing a little off balance and bending her arm on some rest that was not there. The side-curved head, charming in the aura of her long red hair, always seemed both detached and involved. Both of us had recently turned seventeen, and we were both content to maintain an affectionate friendship, seeking not to go further. I have a lovely memory of her taking me to the Cornell apple orchards, where we gathered fallen apples. Following her family tradition, she made a wicked applejack, which helped us get through the dreadful Ithaca winter. Twenty years later, I lectured on Whitman in Louisville. She was in the audience and invited me home to dinner with her husband and children. I like to think that Walt Whitman might have taken to this association with his marvelous lines about the Me myself.

  Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,

  I have no mockings or arguments….I witness and wait.

  I believe in you my soul….the other I am must not abase itself to you,

  And you must not be abased to the other.

  There is an intricate balance in this vexed relation between the soul and the real Me. It is as though the persona of the rough Walt or Me myself had the task of keeping soul and inner self from a master-slave conflict. Whitman’s vision of a momentary reconciliation of his three psychic components is now frequently and rather weakly misread as a homoerotic encounter:

  Loafe with me on the grass….loose the stop from your throat,

  Not words, not music or rhyme I want….not custom or lecture, not even the best,

  Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

  I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning;

  You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,

  And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my barestript heart,

  And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.

  This is one of the oddest of embraces. Myself and the Me myself are in a curious, rather Tantric entwining that defies our usual expectations.

  Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth;

  And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,

  And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,

  And that all the men ever born are also my brothers….and the women my sisters and lovers,

  And that a kelson of the creation is love;

  And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,

  And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,

  And mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen and pokeweed.

  Whitman is very precise at distinguishing the Me myself from the ephemera of the everyday. His psychic cartography—my soul, my self, the real Me or Me myself—remains one of the major difficulties that our apprehension has been slow to assimilate. I once speculated that Walt was driven to his triad of psychic entities as a reaction formation to the influence of Emerson on most American conceptions of the soul. That seems to me now too diffuse. There was of course an element of the family romance in Whitman’s sense of inner divisions. Walter Whitman Sr. lay dying even as “Song of Myself” was being composed. Less than a week after Walt published Leaves of Grass, his father died.

  My self in Leaves of Grass is a fiction, Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, an American. This outward, vital self is less consequential than the homoerotic real Me/Me my self, but even that confessional reality finally counts for less than Whitman’s crucial trope, his fourfold soul, comprising Night, Death, the Mother, and the Sea.

  That has been a metaphor throughout the literary history of the globe. Whitman captures it, to his peril, because he desired, like all great poets, to assert his own power over the universe of death. Not even Dante, Shakespeare, or Milton could accomplish that. Outward sense will always triumph over the strongest imaginative wills. The Whitman of the second edition (1856) and of the third (1860) version of Leaves of Grass goes on battling in this war of poetry against the abyss. In Drum-Taps (1865), the warrior becomes the wound dresser and eloquently subsides.

  After Lincoln’s death, Whitman added a Sequel that included his magnificent “Lilacs” threnody. That sublime elegy both for the martyred President and for his own poetic self can be read as Whitman’s yielding to the inexorable power of Night, Death, the Mother, and the Sea. But in “Song of Myself,” we hear Walt Whitman in the glory of his strength:

  A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;

  How could I answer the child?….I do not know what it is any more than he.

  I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

  Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

  A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,

  Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

  Or I guess the grass is itself a child….the produced babe of the vegetation.

  Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,

  And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,

  Growing among black folks as among white,

  Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

  And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

  Tenderly will I use you curling grass,

  It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,

  It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;

  It may be you are from old people and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,

  And here you are the mothers’ laps.

  This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,

  Darker than the colorless beards of old men,

  Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

  O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!

  And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

  I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,

  And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

  What do you think has become of the young and old men?

  And what do you think has become of the women and children?

  They are alive and well somewhere;

  The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

  And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,

  And ceased the moment life appeared.

  All goes onward and outward….and nothing collapses,

  And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

  There is something magical and majestic in this gentle, gracious fantasia on the grass. Whitman begins by following the adage of Epicurus: “The what is unknowable.” But then he launches a cavalcade of brilliant tropes. The grass mutates from the optimistic green flag of Walt’s disposition to the flirtatious handkerchief of God. Since the question is a child’s, the grass itself becomes a child.
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  The vista expands to a hieroglyphic, interpreted by Whitman as an equalizing factor among races, nations, and social classes. At the next line, which is a poem in itself, the speaker becomes like one of Yeats’s denizens of Byzantium, a mouth that has no moisture and no breath, but that can summon breathless mouths: “And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” Homer has no such trope but might have envied it. Sparked by that superb line, Whitman mounts to a rhapsodic celebration of his own desires and of maternal mortality:

  This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,

  Darker than the colorless beards of old men,

  Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

  Walt Whitman is aware that he is following the Biblical style of parataxis, or employing brief statements and coordinating conjunctions, placed side by side so that there is no rhetorical subordination. There are thirty-three words in these wonderful lines, and only five are of more than one syllable. The monosyllabic effect suggests Hemingway, who, like Whitman, derives his style from the King James Bible.

  I never quite get over the recitation of this tercet. Whitman can be the uncanniest of poets, and here he sounds at once estranged and at home. The vista should be grotesque but is somehow hallowed. At first encounter this can seem surrealistic. It is too strong for that, and too reverent. Our mothers and our fathers have gone to grass, and their mouths are too faint to be heard.

  That is difficult and magnificent. But there are many Whitmans, and I cannot choose among them even in “Song of Myself”:

  Shall I pray? Shall I venerate and be ceremonious?

  I have pried through the strata and analyzed to a hair,

  And counselled with doctors and calculated close and found no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

  In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less,

  And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.