Walt Whitman: A Gay Life
Gary Schmidgall
Walt Whitman is twice found consulting with a phrenologist in Gary Schmidgall's bracingly argumentative new volume on the great American bard. The once popular science of phrenology promotes the notion that the physical aspects of a person's head reveal much about the inner workings of his mind and spirit. Ideas cannot be seen as abstract, said the phrenologists, they are tied to the body. Much in demand in their 19th Century hay-day, phrenologists would place their hands to clients' skulls in order to understand the content of their souls.
Acting as a sort of literary phrenologist, Schmidgall (The StrangerWilde: Interpreting Oscar) draws clear connections between the life of the mind and the life of the body in Walt Whitman: A Gay Life, examining how the writer's art is linked to his homosexuality. Kaleidoscopically organized and utterly unorthodox in its content—including a largely irrelevant section on Whitman's fascination with opera and a surprisingly poignant memoir explaining Schmidgall's personal affinity for his subject. The book rises above mere audaciousness in its incisive dovetailing of literary analysis and biographical research. Amidst his showily, playful structure, Schmidgall makes a compelling, logical argument against traditional views of Walt Whitman.
In a prickly survey of past Whitman commentary, Schmidgall takes note of those who openly scorned the poet because of his homoerotic content (including Emily Dickinson, who refused to read Leaves of Grass because she "was told he was disgraceful," the prominent columnist Rufus Griswold who called it a "mass of stupid filth" and the administration of Harvard, which banned Whitman's work until years after the poet's death in 1892) but reserves his most vituperative sallies for the great mass of academics and critics who have simultaneously celebrated Whitman's work and squeamishly neutered its sexual aspects.
The literary establishment, Schmidgall argues, has been willing to canonize Whitman as long as it does not have to recognize the importance of homosexuality to his work. The general view, he suggests, is that classic American literature and homosexuality are mutually exclusive realms.
Faced with the undeniable greatness of Whitman's art—his grand, plain-spoken democratic vision, his images of the individual as powerful and worthy, his descriptions of American life as somehow majestic even in its quotidian details, and his innovative free-verse structure which changed this country's poetry forever after—critics have chosen to do ridiculous dances around Whitman's hard-to-overlook images of tumescent phalluses and embracing men rather than attempting to integrate them in their praiseful readings of his work.
In his 1860 poem, Native Moments, Whitman writes:
Give me now libidinous joys only! Give me the drench of my passions! Give me life coarse and rank! To-day I go consort with nature's darlings—to-night, too, I am for those who believe in loose delights—I share the midnight orgies of young men...
As in virtually all of Whitman's works, the eroticism here is highly ambiguous, but certainly lends itself to homosexual readings. Yet, Schmidgall points out that esteemed Whitman supporters have bent over backwards to avoid such interpretations.
He sneers at the preeminent living American literary critic, Yale's Harold Bloom, who published his opinion that Whitman never had homosexual relations. And he comments extensively on the most recent major biography, prior to his own, David Reynolds' acclaimed 1995 Walt Whitman's America, ridiculing the author for suggesting that Whitman's poetry sometimes makes him sound like a womanizer and discounting those "midnight orgies of young men" as "uninhibited gatherings that working class comrades enjoyed" and remarking that Whitman "had an eye for female beauty" without providing any evidence in support of this claim.
While his poetic line-readings are as inherently biased as any individual reader's, Schmidgall provides plenty of biographical evidence to support his assertions. He plumbs Whitman's diaries and letters, among myriad other documents, to create a deliciously vibrant chronicle of the poet's gay passions, which he threads through the acute analysis that makes up the bulk of the book (Be forewarned, this is not a narrative biography. Readability suffers, at times, from the author's focus on making points rather than telling a story).
Ironically, while it is Whitman's private writing that allows Schmidgall to make a once-and-for-all case that the poet was gay, Whitman himself grew wary about letting his homosexuality become known to general readers. His most sexually radiant works, particularly the Calamus poems in Leaves of Grass, were rewritten and re-published throughout his life, becoming less direct in their language- and less artistically satisfying—as Whitman, in light of growing success, cautiously tried to downplay the very essence his best pieces.
Schmidgall's mid-book litany of men with whom Whitman likely had romances and sexual encounters is rather monotonous at times, but the quantity of his examples and the evident depth of his research serve to lend Walt Whitman: A Gay Life an undeniable cultural power. Previously enshrined as a great American writer, Whitman is clearly established by this book as not only having been a homosexual, but, more importantly, as having drawn on his sexuality as a major inspiration for his art. Schmidgall argues so well that it seems undeniable: Whitman's gayness and his greatness are one.
