Vol. 15 No. 2 · 28 January 1993
pages 14-15 | 3261 words
Manly Love
John Bayley
- Walt Whitman: From Moon to Starry Night by Philip Callow
Allison and Busby, 394 pp, £19.99, October 1992, ISBN 0 85031 908 0
- The Double Life of Stephen Crane by Christopher Benfey
Deutsch, 294 pp, £17.99, February 1993, ISBN 0 223 98820 0
Demurely feline himself, and also the blandest of experts at suggesting but never revealing his own private life, the English writer Edmund Gosse enthused on the resemblance of the aged Walt Whitman to ‘a great old Angora Tom’. The marvellous old poet, with his soft white hair and snowy silken ruff of beard, would have been delighted by the compliment. Philip Callow’s book is the most imaginative re-creation yet made of the poet’s daily physical being, and the photographs of the poet at all ages, from early manhood and the strange Piero Christlikeness of middle age to the bearded and Lear-like sage of Mickle Street, Camden, paralysed in his rocking-chair, admirably complement the text.
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Letters
Vol. 15 No. 4 · 25 February 1993
From Freddy Hurdis-Jones
Anyone who thinks, with John Bayley (LRB, 28 January), that Henry James was always a great admirer of Whitman, should take a look at his criticism of Drum-Taps: ‘It has been a melancholy task to read this book … Mr Whitman’s attitude seems monstrous … because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect; because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages the taste … We look in vain, however, through your book for a single idea … We find a medley of extravagances and commonplaces. We find art, measure, grace, sense sneered at on every page, and nothing positive given us in their stead.’
Freddy Hurdis-Jones
Malta
Vol. 15 No. 7 · 8 April 1993
From Warren Keith Wright
Perhaps, in his sesquicentennial year, we can dispense with citing the denunciations of Henry James, cub critic, as though his literary disdain, once incurred, remained fixed for life. Like other sentient mortals, he some times changed his mind; and his slam at Drum-Taps (Letters, 25 February) dates from 16 November 1865, when the clever carper was 22. By century’s turn his opinion had changed. Edith Wharton recorded that ‘it was a joy to me to discover that James thought [Whitman], as I did, the greatest of American poets. Leaves of Grass was put into his hands, and all that evening we sat rapt while he wandered from “The Song of Myself” to “When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d” … and thence let himself be lured on to the mysterious music of “Out of the Cradle”, reading, or rather crooning it in a mood of subdued ecstasy.’ ‘Oh, yes, a great genius; undoubtedly a very great genius! Only one cannot help deploring his too-extensive acquaintance with the foreign languages.’ (A barb one might have aimed against Hank himself.)
Anyone who reads in chronological order James’s gathered writings on Trollope, or George Eliot, or George Sand or many others (conveniently collected in two stout Library of America volumes) will recognise how the novice reviewer’s sympathies broadened and deepened as the seasoned artist matured. How many of us latecomers were just as assertively mistaken about our elders and competitors, when we were two-and-twenty?
Warren Keith Wright
Arbyrd, Missouri
