Like phrenology and along with phrenology, manifest destiny provided a hopeful hermeneutic, offering assurances of legibility, providentially mandated certainty, self-evident truth. Phrenology presented a version of manifest destiny at the individual level, mapping the head and making it readable, imprinted with a legible future, the individual’s destiny manifest in the very bumps on his or her head. Whitman was greatly attracted to such externalist, self-evidentiary ways of knowing, the valorization of a certain articulacy and eloquence to be found in the available, on the surface, in the overt. His drive, power and originality as a poet derive in large measure from that attraction; the majority and most characteristic features of his work are given over to it. Still, he acknowledges the brain’s “occult convolutions” in “Song of Myself” and promises “untold latencies” in “Shut Not Your Doors.” This makes for a certain tension. One of the things I find most interesting in Whitman’s work is that tension, the unarrestable play between latent and manifest that brings an otherwise hopeful hermeneutic to grief.
It brings it to grief and into an order of non-self-evident import. This is most notably the case in “Drum-Taps,” the poems written in response to the Civil War, whose outbreak was traumatic for Whitman, amplifying and setting in motion many an inner ambivalence and contradiction. It was a conflict in which the nation’s most fundamental contradiction came to the surface and exacted its toll, a contradiction which, as he did other features of the nationality he said the poet should incarnate, he himself embodied in various ways. For one, he refused to accept that the war was about slavery and the status of black Americans, even though he had, over a span of more than a decade before the war’s outbreak, taken stands against slavery and the spread of slavery. In 1846 he supported the Wilmot Proviso, which prohibited slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico, and lost the editorship of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle for doing so; in 1854 he wrote “A Boston Ballad,” a poem protesting the arrest of the fugitive slave Anthony Burns in Boston by federal marshalls complying with the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, a law he spoke out against again in 1856 in “The Eighteenth Presidency!”; he wrote an article exposing and condemning the illegal slave trade in New York for Life Illustrated in 1856. However, he was not, by his own admission, a “red-hot” abolitionist and his record was uneven, especially when the issue was not the status of the institution of slavery but the status of African Americans. While editor of the Daily Eagle, he let the voting down of black suffrage in Brooklyn in 1846 go without comment or condemnation; after the war, he was against universal suffrage, falling out with his longtime friend and admirer William Douglas O’Connor over this issue in 1872. In the 1850s he argued that blacks could never be assimilated into American life, invoking the familiar trope of providential imprint: “Nature has set an impassable seal against it.” For Whitman, the war that George Lamming calls the Slave War was fought not against the degradation of black Americans but against “devilish disunion.” He refers to it always as the Secession War and writes to O’Connor during the conflict: “In comparison with this slaughter, I don’t care for the niggers.”
Repressed acknowledgement of the manifest cause of the war, the enslavement of African Americans, creates curious perturbations. In “Song of Myself,” first published before the war, Whitman portrays himself aiding a runaway slave in section 10, professes love for a black coachman whose “polish’d and perfect limbs” he praises in section 13, then identifies with “the hounded slave” in section 33. In “I Sing the Body Electric,” also first published before the war, he insists in section 7 on the pricelessness and humanity of a slave on the auction block: “In this head the all-baffling brain, / In it and below it the makings of heroes.” However, in a post-war poem, “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors,” included in “Drum-Taps” and first published in 1871, the inchoate and contrary sway of emotions and ambivalences tapped by the war has him wondering why a black woman salutes the flag, referring to her as “so ancient hardly human” and repeating it, “so blear, hardly human,” but regarding her nonetheless as a “fateful woman,” wondering, “Are the things so strange and marvelous you see or have seen?” More curious yet is the moment in “Song of the Banner at Daybreak” when, expressing love for the flag, he sees in it the undulant, serpentine quality attributed in “Rise O Days from Your Fathomless Deeps” to doubt:
O you up there! O pennant! where you undulate like a snake hissing so curious,
Out of reach, an idea only, yet furiously fought for, risking bloody death, loved by me,
So loved—O you banner leading the day with stars brought from the night!
Albeit not altogether unvisited by sweetening, something moves here more than surface conviction. Whitman’s optimism, under duress, wants to rebound, darkened by what the nation has been through. Unhinged hope and the recovery it seeks move into an embrace of captious flutter, a liminal epiphany coded in wavelike hiss (earlier in the poem: “hissing wave”) and snakelike undulacy.
Cloth is cover, capricious cover, as fitful turning out as in. The flag’s flutter and flap attest to agitant intangibles. Robert Farris Thompson, in Face of the Gods, discusses the Kongo derivation of the flag altars maintained by the Saamaka of Suriname, descendants of eighteenth-century maroons:
The Kongo contribution to the flag altar, the nsungwa, held by a processioneer at a funeral, is a towering staff onto which a narrow strip or strips of cloth are tied at the very top. To honor the dead, processioneers shake and elevate nsungwa in the air. The cloth strips atop these staffs encode mambu (words, matters, problems) that the living seek to communicate to the dead; one activates the attention of the other world by “waving the words” (minika mambu), a basic Kongo metaphor for spiritually activated admonitions. This ritual act “vibrates” (dikítisa) cloth-coded prayer, so that the ancestors cannot fail to comprehend. … Finally, for Kongo, motion imparted by wind to flags directly demonstrated ancestral presence. Banganga (ritual experts) phrased this belief in the following way: “The wind on the flag is a vibration shared by the two communities, the living and the dead.”
Earlier, the poem, in its dialogue between Child and Father (speaking parts are also given to Poet, Pennant and Banner), recalls section 6 of “Song of Myself,” where the child’s question “What is the grass?” is answered, “I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.” The flags in “Song of the Banner at Daybreak” are woven of different stuff, threatening to woo the Child away from acquisitive progress and material pursuit, “valuable houses, standing fast, full of comfort, built with money,” what would eventually be called the American way of life. The Child says of the flag:
O father it is alive—it is full of people—it has children,
O now it seems to me it is talking to its children,
I hear it—it talks to me—O it is wonderful!
O it stretches—it spreads and runs so fast—O my father,
It is so broad it covers the whole sky.
The Father tells him, “Cease, cease, my foolish babe,” tells him to look at “the well-prepared pavements” and “the solid-wall’d houses” instead. Then Banner and Pennant instruct the Poet:
Speak to the child O bard out of Manhattan,
To our children all, or north or south of Manhattan,
Point this day, leaving all the rest, to us over all—and yet we know not why,
For what are we, mere strips of cloth profiting nothing,
Only flapping in the wind?
Spiritually activated admonitions, the flags’ flap and flutter disburse reminders of manifold latency, maroon intangibles ever bettering manifest capture. How striking that an African way of knowing should assert itself where the knowingness of Africans was anything but held to be self-evident.
Elizabeth Bishop. Brazil, 1954. Photograph by J. L. Castel. Courtesy Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries, Poughkeepsie, New York.
Elizabeth Bishop’s Prose:
Atmospheres of Iden
tity
Sven Birkerts
THE WRITING OF A MASTER always makes us reflect, again, on the mystery of writing—how it happens, what it is. For a master reminds us with her every sentence that while prose can be, in some cases, improved, there are no directions or guides for “rightness,” that quality that strikes us as an embodiment beyond all analysis, as a form of being that has surpassed its orchestration of moving parts. Here we include—but do not confine ourselves to—verbal texture, rhythmic movement and modulation, diction, the selection and placement of detail, the presentation of situation and the decision about digression versus elision that is renewed at every pen-stroke.
The best prose, masterly prose, is a window onto the self of the writer—not the self enslaved by the contingencies of the moment, but the self more essential: the self that looks out artlessly from the photographs of the child, or that feels like a thing gathered and hoarded behind the concertedly thoughtful poses of the adult. How is it that one self writes one way and another completely differently? The sentences of different writers move—even breathe—differently. Nouns have different weight depending on what sort of medium they are suspended in. A certain sensibility will always insert the qualifying phrase, the discriminating twist, as if to say that with enough pressure, enough care, the words can map the least iridescence on the shifting scales of the world. Another will approach to pounce, or grip by main force, then suddenly round on himself, breathing in essences and exhaling them as a kind of cloud formation.
I think of Orwell, or Hazlitt, or Hoagland, or M. F. K. Fisher, or any number of other writers whose worlds I happily inhabit and who are entirely exclusive of one another. How completely, I wonder, does a given reflection or episode take its character from the mode of narration? And how much of what we regard as narration is just a more or less oblique transposition to the page of the mysterious formations of the self? In other words, is there really any world to be encountered in a writer’s prose, or do we go to that prose to feel how the complex projections—manifestations—of the author’s sensibility merge with or ricochet off our reading selves? Could these engagements with books really be the occasion for the subtlest linguistic intimacies, with subject matter merely serving as a legitimizing pretext? And what if it were so?
I have had these inklings and questions in mind recently because I have been reading the prose of Elizabeth Bishop. Reading it to discover what it says, yes, but also in order to study the deeper manifestations of the how of the saying. I first opened The Collected Prose because I wanted her particular impressions of things—her childhood, Brazil and so on—but I soon found myself more occupied with the atmospheres of identity that seem to hover everywhere around the matters presented. Something about Bishop’s writing made me feel as if I were in contact with the self behind the sentences, almost as if the reverie induced by my reading were not merely adjacent to but contiguous with her own language impulses.
Bishop, it should be said, is a great poet, alive across a generous spectrum; as a prose writer she is brilliant, but only in the narrowest way. In her various memoir essays and stories she brings forward, over and over, the soul of the child she was—either directly, in writing about childhood memories, or indirectly, by filtering some other subject (travel in Brazil, her friendship with Marianne Moore) through the scrim of an innocent’s sensibility. This, as will be seen, is operative even on—especially on—a syntactical level.
I will not report here on the stuff of Bishop’s prose, except to affirm that much of it retails impressions from her girlhood years, especially the period when she lived with her grandparents in a village in Nova Scotia. The other pieces—her witty memoir of working at a correspondence school for would-be writers, her introduction to the diary of Helena Morley, etc.—finished as they are, lack the special intensity that derives from her efforts to write her way back into the earlier epochs of her life.
Interestingly—and tellingly—a selective tissue-sample approach to the writing does not do violence to some larger integrity, not much anyway. Bishop’s prose does not, as does the prose of so many other writers, ride on accretion. Her unique ability, which is directly bound up with her limitations in the genre, is to render the world as if seen through the eyes of a preternaturally watchful child. There is a powerful—and fruitful—tension on the page between the highly receptive senses and the countering force, the fear, that would keep the world at a manageable distance.
Here is a passage from her autobiographical essay, “The Country Mouse”:
Grandpa once asked me to get his eyeglasses from his bedroom, which I had never been in. It was mostly white and gold, surprisingly feminine for him. The carpet was gold-colored, the bed was fanciful, brass and white, and the furniture was gold and white too. There was a high chest of drawers, a white bedspread, muslin curtains, a set of black leatherbound books near the bed, photographs of Grandma and my aunts and uncles at various ages, and two large black bottles (of whiskey, I realized years later). There were also medicine bottles and the “machines.” There were two of them in black boxes, with electrical batteries attached to things like stethoscopes—some sort of vibrator or massager perhaps. What he did with them I could not imagine. The boxes were open and looked dangerous. I reached gingerly over one to get his eyeglasses, and saw myself in the long mirror: my ugly serge dress, my too long hair, my gloomy and frightened expression.
I offer this paragraph in order to make a few observations. First, that it, like most of the other paragraphs in the essay, is excerptible. We don’t require background information: the prose does not refer backward, nor does it ride on the surge of anticipation. A portion of the world is registered, described, almost as if a camera eye had lopped off one full portion of the past and would soon be taking the next.
But this is no mere surface oddity. The writing embodies the perceptual movement, and this verges—here and elsewhere—on dissociation. We feel almost no sense of cumulation or causal connectedness. Rather: one thing, another, another. The Humean world, the child’s world. Intense, not yet grounded in the explanation-making impulse.
Reading, we are affected by the calm tone—uninflected, utterly unemphatic—as well as by the simplicity of the expression. Colors are white, gold and black. The chest of drawers is merely “high,” the black bottles “large.” Nor are the presumably mysterious machines regarded in any way that reflects a child’s deeper curiosity; only the surfaces are grazed. Moreover, the sentence constructions are passive, the syntax parsimonious in its means (“The boxes were open … ” “There were also medicine bottles … ”).
But how could it not be so? The little girl is terrified—by life, by loss. She is living with her grandparents because her mother has been institutionalized—she is reflexively compelled to hold the looming particulars of the adult world at a distance, even if the natural movement of a child’s sensibility would be to get in close, devouring each protruding bit of matter. How differently Nabokov would have written it! But then he, as a child, was lord of the dacha. From Bishop’s presentation we glean intuitively, without having to be nudged, that these are the observations of a child who is stepping hesitantly into a foreign space; she will not linger to investigate because she is deeply cowed. Her only actual brush with the surface of things comes late, when she reaches “gingerly” to get the eyeglasses.
Bishop’s technique here is in some ways similar to that used by Hemingway in his fiction, though his adaptation of primer constructions was more stylized. Hemingway deployed his repetitions and pruned back observations to suggest the badly damaged nerves and depleted responsiveness of his characters. Bishop, by contrast, transmits an almost arrested innocence—a self struggling to stave off further news of the adult world. The black bottles are not, just then, understood to contain whiskey, though Bishop sees fit to tell us that she realized this later; the possible purposes of the machines remain unplumbed.
It is natural, of course, that a writer seeking to recreate the childhood scape
from the inside would use the stylistic devices at her disposal. But what we discover as we read on is that Bishop has, perhaps unconsciously, adapted these very same options for her other purposes as well, in the process producing a prose that could be called “faux naive”: not primitive—Bishop is too enamored of the natural surface for that, but syntactically restricted in a way that keeps the surface simpler than her mastery of diverse means might otherwise allow.
In 1967, Bishop wrote an essay, “A Trip to Vigia,” in which she narrated a visit she had undertaken with a shy Brazilian poet to a town some hundred kilometers distant from where she was then living. Here we see a different sort of convergence of matter and method. This is a travelogue, and what is a travelogue but a sequential showcasing of the world as it offers itself to the senses? The best ones—and Bishop’s is delightful in every way—give evidence that new sights and experiences have broken the crust of habit. The renewal of perceptual clarity is seen, invariably, as a return to a state of prior innocence.
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