Brag and Humblebrag

Walt Whitman​ was a great recycler. He composts himself at the end of ‘Song of Myself’: ‘I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,/If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.’ Leaves of Grass became his lifelong project, expanding over decades. ‘Song of Myself’ appeared in all editions, pipped from the lead as he wrote various introductory ‘inscriptions’ and the poem ‘Starting from Paumanok’ (its title invoking an Algonquian name for Long Island). From its first appearance in 1855 to the ‘deathbed’ edition of 1892, Leaves of Grass grew to include signature works such as ‘Drum-Taps’ (poems about the Civil War), ‘Children of Adam’ (Whitman’s sex-positive sequence ‘singing the phallus’, which got him in a lot of trouble and which Emerson had advised him to cut), ‘Calamus’ (hymns to male intimacy and comradeship which largely flew under the radar if not gaydar) and glories such as ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’ and ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’, an elegy for Lincoln. A shrewd newspaperman with an eye for print markets, he knew the value of reframing, reformatting and reissuing his work.

Whitman stands or falls with Leaves of Grass, yet his prose works exert their own fascination: that book’s several prefaces, the Gilded Age jeremiad Democratic Vistas (1871) and valedictory pieces such as ‘A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads’ (1888). Then there are his many contributions to newspapers over the decades, including curiosities such as the recently rediscovered essay series ‘Manly Health and Training’, published in the New York Atlas in 1858 under the pseudonym ‘Mose Velsor of Brooklyn’.

Specimen Days, recently reissued as an Oxford Classic, is late Whitman, first published in 1882 in a volume called Specimen Days and Collect. It is – in the author’s own cheerfully pre-emptive terms – something of a mess: a ‘melange’, a ‘gossipy letter’, ‘garrulous notes’. Here we find a ‘huddle of diary jottings, war-memoranda of 1862-65, Nature-notes of 1877-81, with Western and Canadian observations afterwards’. The elements of this composite and in part recycled affair include genealogical notices of Whitman’s English (paternal) and Dutch (maternal) ancestors; brief mentions of his early jobs (as a teenage errand boy, journeyman printer, compositor and budding journalist); notes on his dreary years as a schoolteacher on Long Island and his ventures as a newspaperman in Brooklyn, New Orleans and Manhattan.

Specimen Days repurposes Whitman’s Civil War diary, previously published as Memoranda during the War (1875-76), which had itself absorbed several articles published in the New York Weekly Graphic. The book also features his extensive postwar ‘nature-notes’: al fresco diary entries written in Camden, New Jersey and at nearby Timber Creek, where Whitman had retired in 1873 after a stroke. The final section is punctuated with entries from his 1879 trip west (to St Louis, Denver, the prairies and the Rockies), a visit to Boston (where in the summer of 1881 he oversaw what he thought would be the final edition of Leaves of Grass), portraits of luminaries such as Carlyle, Emerson, Poe and Longfellow and ‘final confessions’ which are not – non-spoiler alert – particularly confessional. A champion self-advertiser, maven of the brag and the humblebrag, he announces in the first pages: ‘Maybe, if I don’t do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed.’

Born to a working-class family, Whitman fashioned himself as a kind of American democratic Oversoul: the persona he presented was both representative of and co-extensive with the often violently expanding republic. In ‘Song of Myself’, he zooms from New York to the Texas of the Alamo, saluting ‘Iowa, Oregon, California’ en route. His was a poetics of manifest destiny. The difference between the often overweening spirit animating ‘Song of Myself’ and the notational observations and memoranda of Specimen Days is striking. ‘Song of Myself’ is governed by an endlessly relaunched I/you dynamic (‘what I assume you shall assume’; ‘Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat’; ‘I stop somewhere waiting for you’) – the poet variously buttonholing us, boasting, sidling, questioning, caressing. While there are some ‘dear reader’ apostrophes in Specimen Days (as well as addresses to the moon, a tree and several birds), it has a different vibe from the operatically wrought ‘Song of Myself’.

Even putting aside his egotistical sublime, Whitman can be aversive: the endless talk about physiognomy, manliness, ‘amativeness’ (heterosexual love) and ‘adhesiveness’ (‘manly attachment’), the whole phrenological word-hoard. For all his democratic bonhomie, his vitality sometimes seems a forced affair, a 19th-century relic like steamboats or the telegraph or mesmerism. He can seem a 19th-century Zelig: hugged as a child by the Marquis de Lafayette (French hero of the American Revolution); chatting with General (later President) Zachary Taylor during the Mexican-American War (or so he claimed); exchanging bows (‘and very cordial ones’) with Lincoln as they regularly passed each other in and around Washington during the Civil War.

The relation of particulars to the general preoccupied Whitman throughout his career, politically and aesthetically: this was, after all, how he understood the crisis of the Civil War. Thus his constant rumination on the Union and its component parts, the states; his defence of the American democratic ‘bulk average’ against the ‘feudal’ lionisation of exceptional men (by Carlyle, for example); his proclivity for ‘specimens’, cases that would both individualise and typify. In Specimen Days, he pursues them in all their physiological, biological, medical, botanical, geographic, sexual and taxonomic flavour. As he saunters around Brooklyn and Manhattan, boarding omnibuses on Broadway and carousing with bohemians at Pfaff’s saloon, he undertakes a kind of cruising for specimens. (Or rather, his cruising inevitably yields them.) When he visits wounded soldiers during the war, he glosses them as ‘some specimen cases’ (as one entry from 1863 has it): ‘In one of the hospitals I find Thomas Haley, company M, 4th New York cavalry – a regular Irish boy, a fine specimen of youthful physical manliness – shot through the lungs – inevitably dying – came over to this country from Ireland to enlist – has not a single friend or acquaintance here.’

His anatomies of gazes – exchanged with soldiers, workers and indeed Lincoln – point to an emotionally charged epistemological technology, a method of apprehension and classification, a queer blend of appraisal and prospective intimacy. Whitman was himself meant to become a very particular kind of specimen: his brain was donated to the American Anthropometric Society, of which he was a member, where it would join other 19th-century worthies’ brains in a collection known as the ‘Brain Club’. An incompetent pathologist failed to seal the specimen jar properly and the brain spoiled.

Specimen Days presents itself as a response to an unnamed friend ‘insisting’ on some biographical details. Its mode is often casual, with supposedly unrevised yet freely recycled materials; it is compulsively notated yet retains an improvisational air. The rapid run through memories of Whitman’s early life modulates into the Civil War entries, ‘mostly verbatim transcripts from Notes on the spot and at the time’. They record Whitman’s years visiting camps and battlefields and nursing the wounded in various makeshift hospitals around Washington. These entries have a hallucinatory intensity and give a month by month, sometimes day by day, sense of the vertiginousness of the war, its changing fortunes, specific battles, the horrors of disease, amputation and mass death. They are both a record of serial encounters and a form of impassioned remembrance; they are also a peculiar litany offered under the sign of Union, the wounded inspected and presented as specimens of national manly virtue – this is the case whether they are Union or ‘secesh’ soldiers. It was important for Whitman that the Civil War be understood as an internal conflict, the field on which the ‘new virtue’ of Union was violently tested and secured. Thus his investment in Lincoln: ‘UNIONISM, in its truest and amplest sense, form’d the hard-pan of his character.’

During the war, the keen-eyed observer of Whitman’s earlier work – the haunter of the Long Island shore, the journalist, the flâneur – was brought into a new arena. One aim of the Memoranda was to make the hospital a theatre of war equal to the battlefield: ‘The hospital part of the drama … deserves indeed to be recorded.’ This was in part a non-combatant’s attempt to rise to the horrific, galvanising moment: ‘It seem’d sometimes as if the whole interest of the land, North and South, was one vast central hospital, and all the rest of the affair but flanges.’ Reading these entries, one can’t help but feel that Whitman’s Unionism sometimes becomes a grossly assimilative machine, as he adopts a prematurely post-partisan stance, rapidly absorbing the Confederate dead into the Union: ‘the dead, the dead, the dead – our dead – or South or North, ours all, (all, all, all, finally dear to me) – or East or West – Atlantic coast or Mississippi valley.’ (Too soon, Walt!)

Despite mention of ‘secession slavery, the arch-enemy personified’, ideological conflict recedes in the Civil War entries; indeed, it barely surfaces. What is foregrounded is the pathos of (white) male youths near death, the stoicism of ‘our boys’, a spectacle of suffering desperately redeemed by the hard-won Union victory. Occasionally the soldiers seem grist for Whitman’s visionary mill:

Every now and then, in hospital or camp, there are beings I meet – specimens of unworldliness, disinterestedness, and animal purity and heroism – perhaps some unconscious Indianian, or from Ohio or Tennessee – on whose birth the calmness of heaven seems to have descended, and whose gradual growing up, whatever the circumstances of work-life or change, or hardship, or small or no education that attended it, the power of a strange spiritual sweetness, fibre and inward health, have also attended.

Whitman visited the wounded for three years, distributing money (given to him by wealthy supporters) and food, writing letters home on the soldiers’ behalf, soliciting their needs (and occasionally those of ‘lady-nurses’). Among the requests:

D.S.G., bed 52, wants a good book; has a sore, weak throat; would like some horehound candy; is from New Jersey, 28th regiment. C.H.L., 145th Pennsylvania, lies in bed 6, with jaundice and erysipelas; also wounded; stomach easily nauseated; bring him some oranges, also a little tart jelly; hearty, full-blooded young fellow – (he got better in a few days, and is now home on a furlough.) J.H.C., bed 24, wants an undershirt, drawers and socks; has not had a change for quite a while; is evidently a neat, clean boy from New England – (I supplied him; also with a comb, toothbrush, and some soap and towels; I noticed afterwards he was the cleanest of the whole ward.) Mrs G., lady-nurse, ward F, wants a bottle of brandy – has two patients imperatively requiring stimulus – low with wounds and exhaustion. (I supplied her with a bottle of first-rate brandy from the Christian commission rooms.)

Itemisation here takes on a liturgical quality – sanctifying what the boys and men were asking for, what they said before dying, the depth of their gazes, their stunned loneliness.

There are awful passages – about piles of amputated hands and feet – and the effect is of a strange, violent, barely suppressed horror suffused with gothic moonlight. As the war approached its end, the buildings that had been commandeered as provisional hospitals reverted to their original use, inducing a kind of vertigo, as when Whitman writes of the ball celebrating Lincoln’s second inauguration in 1865:

6 March – I have been up to look at the dance and supper rooms, for the inauguration ball at the Patent office; and I could not help thinking, what a different scene they presented to my view a while since, fill’d with a crowded mass of the worst wounded of the war, brought in from second Bull Run, Antietam and Fredericksburgh. Tonight, beautiful women, perfumes, the violins’ sweetness, the polka and the waltz; then the amputation, the blue face, the groan, the glassy eye of the dying, the clotted rag, the odour of wounds and blood.

What doesn’t​ much show up in Specimen Days: Black people (enslaved or free), women, Indigenous people. Whitman’s prewar experiences of volatile Democratic party politics; his postwar work at the Bureau of Indian Affairs (from which he was fired for his ‘indecent’ writings). His difficult, unmoored years after the war. His many love affairs with men. What it was like to be writing, and to have written, the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Here, we get a few intriguing titbits. We can credit the book, at least in part, to the conversable omnibus drivers of mid-19th-century Manhattan, or so Whitman suggests parenthetically in Specimen Days: ‘(I suppose the critics will laugh heartily, but the influence of those Broadway omnibus jaunts and drivers and declamations and escapades undoubtedly enter’d into the gestation of Leaves of Grass)’.

Whitman leaps over the immediate post-war years and moves on to the most compelling section of Specimen Days, the entries begun in the 1870s during his partial recovery from his stroke. This calamity ultimately turned him towards a new kind of nature writing. If his incessant salutes to health and manliness run the risk of bordering on proto-eugenics, you also find throughout his work a core string vibrating with sensitivity to weakness, sickness, injury, vulnerability (see, for example, the runaway slave, the taunted prostitute, the suicide in ‘Song of Myself’). The nature-oriented section of Specimen Days traces the biographical arc of a man ageing, often infirm, warding off depression, fortifying himself: ‘Shall I tell you, reader, to what I attribute my already much-restored health? That I have been almost two years, off and on, without drugs and medicines, and daily in the open air.’

Whitman gives himself over to outdoor composition, his passion for note-taking revived: ‘Wherever I go, indeed, winter or summer, city or country, alone at home or travelling, I must take notes – (the ruling passion strong in age and disablement, and even the approach of – but I must not say it yet).’ He had a habit of inscribing his age as well as his body in his works. In ‘Song of Myself’ (as of the 1881-82 edition), Whitman is forever ‘37 years old in perfect health’. In Specimen Days, we encounter the poet at 60, then 63, 64, just shy of 70, an old man, ‘half-paralytic’. Beyond its elliptical, fragmentary nature, its outdoor set pieces, its complex ecological ruminations, its portraits of Lincoln and other representative men, Specimen Days offers a subtle and accumulative reckoning with illness, disability and ageing.

As Whitman becomes a meditative naturalist, he dramatically announces his turn ‘away from ligatures, tight boots, buttons and the whole cast-iron civilised life – from entourage of artificial store, machine, studio, office, parlour – from tailordom and fashion’s clothes – from any clothes, perhaps’. He salutes the bees, ‘those crooning, hairy insects’, and hails the sun ‘streaming kissingly and almost hot on my face’. Of the song of the locust: ‘what a swing there is in that brassy drone, round and round, cymballine – or like the whirling of brass quoits.’ The cataloguing impulse of ‘Song of Myself’ manifests here in richly sensuous prose, as when Whitman echolocates himself mid-afternoon on 9 February 1878 in ‘one of my nooks south of the barn’: ‘The perpetual rustle of dry corn-stalks, the low sough of the wind round the barn gables, the grunting of pigs, the distant whistle of a locomotive, and occasional crowing of chanticleers, are the sounds.’ It’s as if he is re-sounding his earlier note in ‘Song of Myself’: ‘Now I will do nothing but listen.’ Such sensory data-gathering recurs in his noticing ‘perfumes’ and odours. He wanted ‘a certain aroma of Nature’ and here he catches it.

Whitman’s nature notes reveal a sometimes doleful cast of mind below the delightful notations of the present: of birdsong, trees, the frolics of two kingfishers, the specifics of the evening sky. These entries are filled with appealing asides and pungent phrasings – as when he mentions his ‘favourite dish, currants and raspberries, mixed, sugar’d, fresh and ripe from the bushes – I pick ’em myself.’ We are offered catalogues of steamboats on the Hudson, snatches of conversations heard on the ferry across the Delaware River, lists of wildflowers and favourite trees.

In one extended entry (‘A Sun-Bath – Nakedness’), he presents himself genially and mock-heroically undertaking his self-administered course of physical therapy. On 27 August 1877, he made his way to his favourite dell:

It was just the place and time for my Adamic air-bath and flesh-brushing from head to foot. So hanging clothes on a rail nearby, keeping old broadbrim straw on head and easy shoes on feet, havn’t I had a good time the last two hours! First with the stiff-elastic bristles rasping arms, breast, sides, till they turn’d scarlet – then partially bathing in the clear waters of the running brook – taking everything very leisurely, with many rests and pauses – stepping about barefooted every few minutes now and then in some neighbouring black ooze, for unctuous mud-bath to my feet – a brief second and third rinsing in the crystal running waters – rubbing with the fragrant towel – slow negligent promenades on the turf up and down in the sun, varied with occasional rests, and further frictions of the bristle-brush – sometimes carrying my portable chair with me from place to place, as my range is quite extensive here, nearly a hundred rods, feeling quite secure from intrusion, (and that indeed I am not at all nervous about, if it accidentally happens).

We get other similar depictions of Whitman alone, exercising, ‘hobbling’, declaiming Shakespeare, singing ‘the wild tunes and refrains I heard of the blacks down south, or patriotic songs I learn’d in the army’. The miscellaneous quality of the work also allows for such singular visions as this: ‘I had a sort of dream-trance the other day, in which I saw my favourite trees step out and promenade up, down and around, very curiously – with a whisper from one, leaning down as he pass’d me, We do all this on the present occasion, exceptionally, just for you.’

Whitman presents these nature notes as the result of a failed poetic project, the alternative to what might have been a poem:

My plan in starting what constitutes most of the middle of the book was originally for hints and data of a Nature-poem that should carry one’s experiences a few hours, commencing at noon-flush, and so through the after-part of the day – I suppose led to such idea by my own life-afternoon now arrived. But I soon found I could move at more ease, by giving the narrative at first hand.

One would rather have these shimmering entries than another laboured, aspirationally world-historical poem. And there is something appealing about his Prospero-like abjuration of literary working-up: ‘Nature seems to look on all fixed-up poetry and art as something almost impertinent … Literature flies so high and is so hotly spiced, that our notes may seem hardly more than breaths of common air or draughts of water to drink.’ This apparent modesty is as rhetorical as the most florid bid for literary distinction. One of Whitman’s recurring motifs is his imagined dissolution of himself into a prospective commons. (‘I depart as air.’) Breathe him, drink him, look for him under your boot soles.

Specimen Days reminds us of the extent to which Whitman carried forward a legacy of democratic revolution: in his admiration for Thomas Paine (whom his father knew), his anti-clericalism, his hailing of ‘the severance of … government from all ecclesiastical and superstitious dominion’, his bashing of ‘apologists for plutocracy’, his commitment to ‘radical human rights’. A close reader of Hegel, a self-fashioning vector of the Spirit of the Age, he continues to contain unsynthesised and unsynthesisable multitudes.