The Gift (28 page)

The pride out of which Whitman utters poems is not a solitary self-containment. It is active and self-assured, but it is also continuous with the other phases of the self. Just as he enters the gifted state when the lover takes his hand, so the poems come to him when his friend is near. And their utterance is directed outward, a gift meant to “inform” another self. That, at least, is the ideal—described in the poetry and desired in the life.

But we must set the live-oak of this poem beside another tree found in a journal entry from the summer of 1870. At the time Whitman was in love with a young man named Peter Doyle. The relationship proved to be one of the most satisfying of his life, but that summer Whitman was troubled. Disguising the entry by referring to Doyle as “her” and replacing his initials with an alpha-numeric code, Whitman records, first, a resolution to cool his ardor.

He was suffering, ten years later, the same kind of frustrated passion that lies behind
Calamus.
Immediately below this entry we find an “outline sketch of a superb character”:

Whitman could settle at neither pole. Years before this journal entry he had seen that indifferent, perfect tree “uttering joyous leaves,” and he knew it as an image of the being he longed for, “complete in himself.” But he also knew it was impossible, that he came best to song through contact. There is a spiritual path in which the soul ascends in isolation, abandoning all creatures. But this was not the path for Whitman, so hungry for affection and so present in his body. As he grew older Whitman did in fact find a form for his “adhesive nature”; he managed a series of long-lasting, basically paternal relationships with younger men, Doyle being one of them. But to judge from his letters, he wanted more. He wanted to “work and live together” with a man; he wanted to “get a good room or two in some quiet place … and … live together.” He never got it. When he presents himself to the world as “like some perfect tree,” we will be right, therefore, to feel a touch of perfection’s loneliness. All of this vegetable sex—these trees and leaves of grass—carries in it, sometimes,
the disappointment of an animal desire. Even Osiris had Isis to warm his bones to life.

The picture I have drawn of the process of the gifted self began with its inhalation of objects; to turn now to the bestowing phase of this self, and in particular to the poetry as a gift, we must add a new and essential detail: the objects that inform the self are unable to speak. “You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers.” And not just objects—Whitman’s world is also filled with people who cannot speak. He offers them his tongue:

Dumb people, dumb objects. Not everything comes into the world with a tongue, it seems. The poet Miriam Levine, who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in New Jersey, tells me that her family used to speak of articulate men and women as having been “born with a mouthpiece.” Those who can express themselves in speech have been given that mysterious something, like the mouthpiece of a trumpet or the reed of a wind instrument, through which experience is transmuted into sound. Whitman receives the mute into the self in order to articulate what he calls their “buried speech.” He becomes the mouthpiece of the dumb, and not, I suspect, of these objects and slaves alone but of his family and his lovers. This last in particular: in art as in life
Whitman was always attracted to the figure of an inarticulate young man:

Peter Doyle was such an illiterate; Whitman taught him to read and write.

Knowing that Whitman’s art begins in speechlessness, we may find a new meaning in his invocation to the soul: “Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, / … Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvéd voice.” It is the soul that has the mouthpiece, the mysterious ability to translate dumb hieroglyphs into speech.
*
The soul acknowledges and accepts what has entered the self by uttering its name. This responsive speech we call “celebration” or “thanksgiving.” In the fairy tales the spoken “thank you” or the act of gratitude accomplishes the transformation and frees the original gift; so in the poetry, for the soul to give speech to the stuff of experience is to accept it and to pass it along. Moreover, by Whitman’s model, the self does not come to life until the objects flow
through
it. (The increase does not appear until the gift moves to the third party.) Celebratory speech is the return gift by which what has been received by the self is freed and passed along. To open a poem saying “I celebrate myself” is therefore to announce the reciprocation-by-song which will simultaneously assure the life of the self and the liveliness
of what has been bestowed upon it.
*
Or, to put it another way, by Whitman’s assumptions, we shall lose that life which remains unarticulated. This is why the family prizes the child with the mouthpiece (sometimes—not all families want to live!), or why a nation prizes its poets (sometimes)—and this also is the urgency behind Whitman’s attention to the mute: he would assure their lives by giving them speech. He would be the tongue for the “living and buried speech … always vibrating here, [the] howls restrain’d by decorum …”; he would allow his thoughts to be “the hymns of the praise of things,” so that the spirits which have been bestowed upon him—by the unlettered boy, the wood duck, the eddies of fog—will not perish.
^†

Before we describe Whitman’s work more fully in these terms, I should pause to clarify where, exactly, the gift lies in the creation of a work of art. In common usage the term covers three different things, unfortunately. And while I have tried to be more precise in my own usage, some confusion still creeps in. The initial gift is what is bestowed upon the self— by perception, experience, intuition, imagination, a dream, a vision, or by another work of art. Occasionally the unrefined materials of experience or imagination are finished works, in which case the artist is merely a transmitter or medium (the surrealist poets tried to work in this manner; the art of the religious society of Shakers also fits this model, their artists being known as “instruments” and their art as “gifts”). But it is rare for the initial material to be the finished work of art; we must usually labor with it.

The ability to do the labor is the second gift. The artist works, to echo Joseph Conrad once again, from that part of our being which is a gift and not an acquisition. To speak of our talents as gifts distinguishes them from those abilities that we acquire through the will. Two men may learn to speak a foreign language with equal accuracy, but the one who has a gift for languages does not have to struggle with his learning as does the man who has no gift. Men or women of talent must work to perfect their gifts, of course; no one is exempt from the long hours of practice. But to set out to acquire the gift itself through work is like trying to grow an extra hand, or wings. It can’t be done.

The artist’s gift refines the materials of perception or intuition that have been bestowed upon him; to put it another way, if the artist is gifted, the gift increases in its passage through the self. The artist makes something higher than what he has been given, and this, the finished work, is the third gift, the one offered to the world in general or directed back specifically to the “clan and homeland” of an earlier gift.

Whitman himself imagines the commerce of these gifts as both an inner and an outer activity. He has a strong sense of a reader to whom the poem is directed. That recipient is not always the conventional reader of the book, however; it is just as often an interior figure, Whitman’s own soul—or muse or
genius
or spirit—lover (the one he imagined would meet him in death, “the great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine”). In one of his prefaces Whitman speaks of his poems as having been spoken to him by his soul—but he is dissembling if he would have us believe that these poems are the same as those we find printed on the page. The soul that translates dumb objects into speech does not speak the finished poem, as Whitman’s fat revision books attest. Out of what the soul has offered him, the poet makes the work. And in this interior commerce the finished work is a return gift, carried back into the soul. In a famous letter Keats wrote that the world is not so much a “vale of tears” as a “vale of soul-making.” The artist makes a soul, makes it real, in the commerce of gifts. As when the Roman sacrifices to his
genius
on his birthday so that it may grow and become free spirit, or as with any number of the exchanges we have described, the point of the commerce is a spiritual increase and the eventual actualization of the soul.

Every artist secretly hopes his art will make him attractive. Sometimes he or she imagines it is a lover, a child, a mentor, who will be drawn to the work. But alone in the workshop it is the soul itself the artist labors to delight. The labor of gratitude is the initial food we offer the soul in return for its gifts, and if it accepts our sacrifice we may be, as Whitman was, drawn into a gifted state—out of time, coherent, “in place.” And in those moments when we are gifted, the work falls together graciously. (Not always, of course. For some the work may fall into place regularly, but most of us cut out a thousand pairs of shoes before the elves begin to sew.)

When Whitman speaks of his work in terms of an outer audience, he tells us, to take a key example, that he intended
Leaves of Grass
“to arouse” in the hearts of his readers “streams of living, pulsating love and friendship, directly from them to myself, now and ever.” It seems an odd direction at first: “from them to myself.” As we saw in Whitman’s life, we have before us an artist who is hungry for love. He knew it. He speaks of his desire as “this terrible, irrepressible yearning,” and he speaks of his poetry as the expression of a “never-satisfied appetite for sympathy, and [a] boundless offering of sympathy … this old eternal, yet ever new interchange of adhesiveness …” If we read the next sentence literally, we shall find the source of his need: “The … surest tie between me and Him or Her, who, in the pages of
Calamus
and other pieces realizes me … must … be personal affection.” Whitman is saying, as he said in the poem about the “terrible doubt of appearances,” that the state in which he comes to life requires that he find a reader to whom he may communicate the gifts of his soul. He exists, he is realized, literally, through this completed contact:

Whitman’s confessions of artistic intent reveal the same frustrated yearning that lies behind the
Calamus
poems, and I should not proceed without noting that his neediness sometimes undercuts the work itself. There are some clammy poems in
Leaves of Grass.
We feel a hand on our shoulder, a pushy lover (I am thinking, for example, of a moment in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” when Whitman claims to have
imagined all of his readers before they were born; it seems presumptuous). But in the best poems, Whitman manages that poise, requisite to both art and love, which offers the gift without insisting. He may not have found the love he wanted in life, but it would be wrong to consign his appetites entirely to personal circumstance. Who among us has been sufficiently loved, whose heart has been fully realized in the returning gaze of the beloved?

Let us turn now to the function of the work once it has been given to the outer audience. When Whitman offers his poem to the literal reader, he sometimes addresses him as “O reader of the future.” In part this is a poet’s way of imagining a better audience than the one that was offered him in time, but I think we may also take the phrase as an atemporal invocation to the reader that lies potentially in each of us. Whitman directs his gift toward
our
souls now. He speaks in the prophetic perfect to wake the gifted self in any who would receive his poem. The poet, he says, “spreads out his dishes… he offers the sweet firm-fibered meat that grows men and women.” “This is the tasteless water of souls… this is the true sustenance.” A work of art that enters us to feed the soul offers to initiate in us the process of the gifted self which some antecedent gift initiated in the poet. Reading the work,
we
feel gifted for a while, and to the degree that we are able, we respond by creating new work (not art, perhaps, but with the artist’s work at hand we suddenly find we can make sense of our own experience). The greatest art offers us images by which to imagine our lives. And once the imagination has been awakened, it is procreative: through it we can give more than we were given, say more than we had to say.
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“If youbecome the aliment and the wet,” says Whitman of his poems, “they will become flowers, fruits, tall branches and trees.” A work of art breeds in the ground of the imagination.