by Tom Bissell
But he soldiered on, writing new poems and endlessly tinkering with Leaves of Grass. Little by little, thanks to relentless self—promotion and a somewhat shameless exploitation of his Civil War experiences, he became the Maya Angelou of his day, filling commissions for commemorative poems and sought after by magazine editors for his views. He often concluded his packed lectures with a reading of the hoary chestnut “Oh Captain! My Captain!,” now regarded by Whitman scholars as his silliest. Although it was the favorite of the poet’s unliterary brother George, Whitman himself once complained, “I’m almost sorry I ever wrote it.” It would be this slight Civil War curio, in the uncertain years following Whitman’s death, that kept him fixed in prominent anthologies of post-war American literature.
Whitman was subject to nearly universal critical condemnation during his lifetime, his poems regarded as egomaniacal and obscene. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the premier tastemaker of his time and by all counts a dashing, valiant man who led one of the first black regiments into battle during the Civil War, attacked Whitman repeatedly. He claimed that Leaves of Grass made him “seasick,” and several scathing pieces in prominent magazines assured that Whitman would never be highly regarded in East Coast publishing cozies. Of his foes, Whitman once said they “wanted for nothing better or more than simply, without remorse, to crush me, to brush me, without compunction or mercy, out of sight.”
One of the only critical boosts Whitman received in his lifetime came from abroad. When the esteemed English critic William Michael Rossetti received, as a gift, a remaindered copy of Leaves of Grass, bought from a London book-peddler in 1856, he wrote Whitman a letter of praise. When the 1867 edition appeared, Rossetti wrote publicly that Leaves was “the largest poetic work of our period.” This chance accolade ensured that, for many years, Whitman’s reputation in Europe would be much higher than in the States. It would allow Ezra Pound, in 1909, the paternalistic complaint that American criticism had not yet come to appreciate Whitman’s artistry.
Whitman’s first American champion was William O’Connor, who became a devoted disciple after Whitman was fired by the Department of Interior for being a “dirty poet.” (O’Connor would later ascend to the bone-headed constellation of literary conspiracy theorists by trying to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays.) In the aftermath of Whitman’s sacking, O’Connor churned out, with Whitman’s help, The Good Gray Poet in 1866—a pure chunk of hagiography. The book did much to enlarge Whitman’s fame (if not reputation; it was largely savaged), leading the good gray poet himself to reflect, “I wonder what Leaves of Grass would have been if I ... had never met William O’Connor?”
Whitman’s true champion, though, the man without whom one can say there might be no Walt Whitman, was the bisexual socialist Horace Traubel. When the two met after a Philadelphia lecture in 1886,Whitman had probably never been more famous. Four years earlier, the most recent edition of Leaves of Grass had been banned in Boston, and though its first two printings sold out instantly, support from fringe elements like the New England Free Love League did little to change Whitman’s critical reputation. Before long, Traubel would be serving as Whitman’s amanuensis. Traubel’s greatest accomplishment was Walt Whitman in Camden, a day-to-day compendium of his thirty-minute conversations with the aging poet. His other contribution to Whitman’s survival was his founding, in 1890, of The Conservator, which served as the Pravda of Whitman worship until Traubel’s death in 1919. Rebuking anyone who dared impugn Whitman’s name, it attempted single-handedly to beat back the onslaught from the literary establishment’s broadswords.
But even all this was not enough. One of Whitman’s last poems, “To the Sun-Set Breeze,” was rejected by Harper’s, and appeared in a less prestigious magazine in 1890. The New York Times said in its final review of Leaves of Grass that Whitman could not be called “a great poet unless we deny poetry to be an art.” The same day, the paper printed his obituary. A decade after his death, Walt Whitman’s works were out of print, his worst poem the one trace he left. Only Traubel’s agitation, and a few scolding voices from abroad, gradually forced American criticism to look again at Whitman. If Traubel’s great faith had faltered, Longfellow (or Holmes, or any number of others) might today be regarded as the preeminent American poet of his time.
No writer’s critical woes are more famous than Herman Melville’s. “Melville took an awful licking,” Charles Olson wrote. “He was bound to. He was an original, aboriginal. It happens that way to the dreaming man it takes to discover America.” Any novelist smarting from a vicious review is inevitably reminded of the disdain to which Moby-Dick first appeared. The story is used to illustrate the Potemkin village in which criticism is permanently decamped. Full knowledge of the story reveals just the opposite. The critics succeeded beyond their pettiest dreams of killing Moby-Dick.
Melville seems to have anticipated the troubles he would face. When he finished writing Moby-Dick, he wrote to Hawthorne, “I have written a wicked book, and feel as spotless as the lamb,” suggesting he was aware of the inherently conservative notions of novelistic form his book then defied. “When big hearts strike together,” he went on to Hawthorne, “the concussion is a little stunning.”
He had some reason to feel buoyant. His first books, Typee and Omoo, were critical and popular successes. Typee, in particular, thanks to its frank descriptions of native sexual practices, made Melville, for a time, a most unlikely literary heartthrob. His early success was harpooned by the failure of Mardi in 1849.When he offered Mardi to a friend, he wrote in an accompanying letter: “[It] may possibly—by some miracle, that is—flower like aloe, a hundred years hence—or not flower at all, which is more likely by far, for some aloes never flower.” In dire need of money, Melville cranked out the novels Redburn, about his cabin-boy experiences, and White-Jacket, a reformist fiction concerning, of all things, naval flogging. His reputation as a reliable sea-story spinner restored, he turned his freed-up intellect toward writing Moby-Dick.
Moby-Dick is the first true American novel, an affront to every retiring habit of mind that prevailed in the nineteenth century. As Melville’s first biographer, Lewis Mumford, noted: “[Moby-Dick] is not Victorian; it is not Elizabethan; it is, rather, prophetic of another quality of life.” Despite the unwieldiness of the novel (it first appeared in three volumes), Melville’s publisher was hopeful about the book’s success. Moby-Dick had appeared a few months earlier in England, and Melville and his publisher waited with glistening expectation for the one review that truly mattered, that of the London Athenaeum, a journal read avidly in Boston and New York publishing cliques. It is either immensely heartening or unbearably distressing to know that publishers in Melville’s day were also helpless before the judgment of a single, inexplicably important critical organ. Today of course, that monolithic power belongs to the New York Times Book Review. When Athenaeum’s review appeared, it proved fatal to Moby-Dick’s success. “Our author,” it read, “must be henceforth numbered in the company of the incorrigibles who... summon us to endure monstrosities, carelessness, and other such harassing manifestations of bad taste as daring or disordered ingenuity can devise.” Blood was in the surf, and American critics fell over one another to carve off a piece of Moby-Dick’s beached carcass. While very few of the reviews were as scathing as Athenaeum’s, some even grudgingly acknowledging Melville’s odd brilliance, the book was a disaster. It went out of print, 36 years later, with a total of 3,180 copies sold.
Melville’s critical standing was not helped by the publication of Pierre the following year. The reviews it received were so damning Melville gave into a depression from which he never fully recovered. When he died of heartbreak in 1891, the ever-obliging New York Times got his name wrong in its obituary, though Melville’s death did stir a brief flurry of reappraisals that kept Moby-Dick barely afloat in the American literary underground.
As with Whitman, Melville was more prized as an artist in England, thanks largely to the efforts of Henry S. S
alt, virtually the only person to write critically about Melville between 1890 and World War I. Salt was a member of a luminous British literary circle that included George Bernard Shaw and J. M. Barrie, and apparently his passion for Melville infected them. Shaw’s letters from the period mention Moby-Dick in furtive tones normally reserved for samizdat, and Barrie modeled Peter Pan’s Captain Hook on Melville’s Ahab. In 1907, Oxford University Press issued an edition of Moby-Dick in its “World Classics” line. The press’s editors had invited Joseph Conrad to write an introduction, but he was not convinced of the book’s (then) status as a minor classic. “A rather strained rhapsody with whaling for a subject,” Conrad said, “and not a single sincere line in the 3 volumes of it.” The edition did not sell well, and soon went out of print.
It is commonly thought that the centenary of Melville’s birth in 1919 laid the red carpet for Moby-Dick’s new American appreciation. While this is partly true, that rug would have remained obdurately furled without one breathtakingly random incident. The influential critic Carl Van Doren happened upon an ancient copy of Moby-Dick in a used bookstore sometime in 1916. He subsequently wrote an essay on Moby-Dick that deemed it “one of the greatest sea romances in the whole literature of the world.” The essay caught the eye of D. H. Lawrence, then in the midst of writing Studies in Classic American Literature, his still-seminal attempt to rip away American literature from the smothering Velcro of European critical prejudice. He too included an essay on Melville’s masterpiece in his overview, and it remains one of the most entertaining pieces of criticism ever produced: “Nobody can be more clownish, clumsy and senticiously in bad taste than Herman Melville, even in a great book like Moby-Dick.... So unrelieved, the solemn ass even in humor. So hopelessly au grand serieux, you feel like saying: Good God, what does it matter? If life is a tragedy or a farce, or a disaster, or anything else, what do I care? Let life be what it likes. Give me a drink.” Lawrence’s essay was the first indication that, much like the doubloon Ahab nails to the Pequod’s mast, Moby-Dick is prismatically appropriated by each generation of readers. When first published it was viewed as an insane grab bag of religious allegory. In Lawrence’s time, it was the first novel to show Europe where the hands stood on the clock. Later it would be a source text for the New Critics, then the litter box for post-colonial theorists. In 1927, Moby-Dick’s status all but assured, E. M. Forster devoted to it a long, cautious appraisal in Aspects of the Novel, and Melville’s greatest work, as we today know it, was born 76 years after its initial publication.
Emily Dickinson achieved critical and popular acclaim much earlier than Whitman or Melville, though final validation did not occur until well into the twentieth century. “Just how good is she?” one critic demanded, with growing frustration, long after the appearance of the groundbreaking 1955 edition of Dickinson’s poems. Despite the relatively sudden acceptance of her work after her death, Dickinson’s survival is the least likely of all, subject to family quarrels and fortuitous breaks.
Dickinson’s life is the stuff of biographers’ night terrors: so many relationships, and so much shadowy speculation concerning them. Dickinson’s brilliant letters, less than a tenth of which survive, are often as nebulous as scripture. Dickinson’s brother Austin is probably the most significant figure in her Amherst home life. Most similar of all the Dickinsons to Emily in temperament (though least similar in taste and intellect), Austin’s adulterous personal life would form the unlikely impetus that gradually forced Dickinson’s poems into public prominence.
Dickinson’s invincibly sedentary love of home is, from our modern standpoint, rather pathetic. Her letters from Mount Holyoke (which she left after three terms) ache with sonorous longing for Amherst. When she arrived back home, she wrote: “Never did Amherst look more lovely to me & gratitude rose in my heart to God, for granting me such a safe return.” (Mount Holyoke is ten miles from Amherst.) Within a few years of Dickinson’s homecoming, Austin would begin a relationship with Susan Gilbert, whom he would eventually marry. Recently, scholarly eyebrows have raised at Susan and Emily’s relationship. Susan exchanged with Dickinson many letters, some of which are strikingly erotic. But like much of Dickinson’s life, these are speculative matters. For the next several decades, Dickinson did little but write letters and poems, very occasionally traveling, with her younger sister, Lavinia, to Washington and Philadelphia, among other far-flung locales. Vinnie, as Lavinia was known, was utterly unlike her sister. Dickinson called Vinnie her “Soldier & Angel,” and Vinnie responded with a devotion that would not abate in the coming unpleasantness.
In 1881, a brilliant young woman named Mabel Todd moved to Amherst with her professor husband. Austin and Susan immediately welcomed the Todds into their Amherst salon, and an open-secret affair between Austin and Todd began. Despite her great intellectual gifts, Todd came to Amherst very much untouched clay. Her literary aspirations to become a novelist made her uniquely susceptible to the legends already shrouding Austin’s increasingly sequestered sister. Two months after arriving in Amherst, she wrote: “I must tell you about the character of Amherst ... a lady whom the people call the Myth.” Within a year, Todd and Dickinson would be exchanging lengthy missives, flowers, and gifts. Sometimes Todd would sing in the Dickinson house for Emily, who listened upstairs, composing poems on the spot. Thus Dickinson and the woman who eventually edited the first volume of her work never met face-to-face. An odder relationship in the history of American letters would be hard to fathom.
After Dickinson died in 1886,Vinnie pressured anyone possessing an ounce of literary acumen to do something about her sister’s orphaned poems. Susan initially agreed to edit them, then backed out, claiming the poems would never sell. Vinnie turned, among others, to the same Thomas Wentworth Higginson who had assailed Walt Whitman. As Vinnie was aware, her sister’s correspondence with Higginson began in 1862, after the appearance of a Higginson essay in The Atlantic called “Letter to a Young Contributor,” which assured that editors are “always hungering and thirsting after novelties.” Dickinson was thirty-one when she sent along a short letter and four poems, asking Higginson, famously, if her “Verse is alive.” Although he offered Dickinson some guarded praise, Higginson said to The Atlantic’s editor, “I foresee that ‘Young Contributors’ [sic] will send me worse things than ever now.” In the following epistolary exchanges, a strange friendship formed. In time, Higginson came to see Dickinson as a remarkable, if not publishable, talent, and despite occasional reluctance served her as a valuable friend. Although he spoke at Dickinson’s funeral, Higginson declined Vinnie’s plea to edit her poetry.
In desperation, Vinnie approached Mabel Todd. Todd had many reasons for turning Vinnie down, her own literary ambitions among them. But she was deeply depressed with Amherst and her battles with Susan. Dickinson’s troubled, eerie poems seemed, as she later wrote, “to open the door into a wider universe than the little sphere surrounding me.” Actually faced with transcribing the poems—sheer illegibility and Dickinson’s grammatical peculiarities making it immensely difficult—soon convinced her she could not manage the job alone. She contacted Higginson herself, who told Todd that, while he admired Dickinson’s verse, he deplored its undisciplined form. Only after listening to Todd read some poems aloud did Higginson, at long last, assent to involvement. The growing toxicity between Austin, Susan, Vinnie, and Todd complicated the editing process, as did Higginson’s stuffy insistence on titling Dickinson’s poems. “Because I could not stop for Death” appeared in 1890’s Poems under the Higginsonian title of “The Chariot.”
Their task completed, Higginson sent the poems to Houghton Mifflin, where they were quickly rejected as “queer.” Humiliated, Higginson more or less bowed out from the publishing process, and after months of failure and negotiation, the firm Roberts and Brothers agreed to publish Dickinson’s poems, requiring that Vinnie pay for the printer’s plates. After an ordeal whose vicissitudes could have derailed the project any number of times, the poems were pub
lished in 1890. Public reception was immediate. Poems would go through eleven printings within the next two years.
What, then, do we have to thank for the survival of American literature’s three greatest figures? Remaindered copies bought from book peddlers. A man, sitting at his desk, an oxidized copy of a forgotten novel beside him, cobbling together an essay with no idea of what it would accomplish. The lovely devotion of solitary women and men. Essays published at the right time, in the right journals or books, noticed by the right people. Clearly, these are not the props of fate. They are, rather, the stagecraft of chance.
The comfort we take in these writers’ survival is undercut by some quietly nagging questions: How many novels did Carl Van Doren’s hand pass over to find Moby-Dick? How many poets’ work sits moldering in New England attic trunks, no one having lobbied on its behalf? What of a novel like Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, a beautifully searing reproach to federal treatment of Native Americans? Ramona actively changed American history, something neither Melville, Whitman, nor Dickinson’s work can claim. Ramona was praised when it first appeared, not the least by Jackson’s friend Emily Dickinson, who wrote, “Pity me, I have finished Ramona.” Ramona lives on, of course, much in the way of Moby-Dick before 1917—a minor classic attended by the tepid enthusiasm of a few. We may laugh at Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s antique taste today, but that taste once belonged to everyone. Is it impossible to imagine what unpredictable events might allow us a shocked recognition of that taste again?
