M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Texas A&M University
Presented at the Modern Language Association Convention, San Francisco, December, 1998. Copyright M. Jimmie Killingsworth.
Please reproduce with permission only.
Author's Note: I hope this paper will be the germ of a much larger work on the 'Calamus' poems. Any suggestions will be appreciated.
Historical critics now see that the striking images of the "body electric" in Leaves of Grass—the body charged with sexual energy, open to entreaties of companions male and female, driven by consuming desire, containing the sources of both mental and political power—were not exclusively the product of an inspired individual, but were "socially constructed." In Whitman's time, the sexualized body became a site of anxiety and fascination fully acknowledged and explicitly voiced in medical writing, social purity pamphlets, self-help books, and popular science, as well as pulp fiction, pornography, and underground confessional literature. Only a literary history focused entirely on the literature of parlors, school rooms, and high-brow literary journals could view Whitman's "poetry of the body" as unalloyed in its originality.
But Leaves of Grass remains distinctive not only in the wildness and enduring power of its style of celebrating the body, but also in recording the emergence of a special ethos of modern life, which Foucault has called the "homosexual species." All of what contemporary theory says about discourse and the formation of sociopolitical identity suggests that Whitman was the first gay American. No doubt, there was homosexual experience in his day, but no category of consciousness, no recognizable public "lifestyle," no discourse of gayness. Though other times and other cultures had developed a discourse and social code that provided men who loved other men exclusively with a public life—witness notable instances in ancient Greece and among the Plains Indians in North America—modern Western culture produced nothing of this sort. Nineteenth-century texts dealing explicitly with homosexuality are very rare, even among medical and legal writings. The word gay had at best an underground life as an insider's code, and the clinical word homosexual had no life at all. So, if gay history requires not only evidence of behavior but also a coherent discourse, the words, the code, the style that would make a group conscious and distinctive, Whitman was prehistorically gay, alive in a time of traces, "faint clews and indirections."
The textual history of Leaves of Grass as well as the book's reception among the founders of gay politics, gay literary criticism, and gay history suggests that Whitman provided something like a manual of discourse, the tropic patterns and habits of appeal, a rhetoric that creates the possibility of distinction and identification, a text which embodies the story of gayness coming into conscious expression. The emergence of the "Calamus" poems into Leaves of Grass represents the kind of discursive eruption that precedes the codification of identity terms and public codes. The "Calamus" poet broke with tradition and with his own earlier patterns of representation. The poems Whitman wrote before "Calamus" and even the stories that antedated Leaves of Grass hint frequently at homosexual activity and are often flagrantly homoerotic, but they are relatively well integrated into what James Miller has called an "omnisexual vision." With "Calamus," something changed for Whitman. For one thing, he rarely wrote poems on sexual themes after "Calamus" appeared, themes that he had treated obsessively before. For another thing, he subtlely revised the old poems in such a way as to soften and often obscure images of sexual engagement, in many ways bringing them more into line with the standard established in "Calamus." In previous writings, I have joined others in arguing that Whitman gave up fighting the battle of sexual liberator to become a national poet more amenable to a Victorian readership, that he began to disguise, to code, to blunt the energy of his early sexual politics before he gave up on the project entirely. But what if he stopped writing about sex after "Calamus" because in "Calamus" he found a treatment of his topic that suited him once and for all? I've come to see "Calamus" both as a key text in the history of gay discourse, generating issues of reader response and reception history which require more research and more time than I have to cover today, and as a culmination of Whitman's rhetoric of sexuality, a topic whose broad outlines I briefly trace in this paper.
The special rhetoric of "Calamus" results largely from its isolation of same-sex love from other types of erotic attraction. The group of poems appeared for the first time in the third edition of Leaves of Grassin 1860, in tandem with "Children of Adam," a grouping which attempts a similar kind of isolation for poems of heterosexual love. Mainly adaptations of previously composed poems, "Children of Adam" may best be read as itself resulting from the rhetoric of "Calamus," a record of the poet's effort to balance the intensity of the homoerotic poems. The balancing strategy fits nicely with Whitman's understanding of the difference between male-female love and male-male love, an understanding based on two terms he borrowed from phrenology: "amativeness" and "adhesiveness." In a famous notebook entry written in 1870, he uses his balance terms again to urge himself to suppress a "diseased, feverish disproportionate adhesiveness," apparently his term for homoerotic attraction. Like phrenology, which was a science of balance, of keeping all psychological faculties from developing to excess, the balancing act of his personal life is reflected in the rhetorical balancing of the two sections in the 1860 Leaves. He strained to achieve the effect. At least one of the poems, "Once I Pass'd through a Populous City," could be placed in "Children of Adam" only after Whitman changed the gender of the speaker's lover, "a woman I casually met there who detain'd me for love of me" (WCP 266). The woman was a man in the manuscript version. "Children of Adam" lacks the thematic and stylistic unity of the 1860 "Calamus," which was yet the more closely unified in manuscript. The manuscript version seems comparable to an Elizabethan sonnet cycle in using a series of short lyrics to narrate a story of personal love. No wonder that with the study of the manuscripts, biographical scholars speculate that Whitman had a homosexual affair that broke off in the late 1850s, an affair that would account for the tonal darkness of "Calamus."
The dark tone comes from the sense of alienation that creeps among the genial optimism of earlier poems and seems to qualify the universalizing boasts of the "friendly and flowing savage" who was the speaker and dominant character of the longest poems in the 1855 and 1856 editions. In many ways, the "Calamus" persona seems more like the characters to whom the 1855 speaker offers encouragement and aid: the twenty-ninth bather, the sleeper troubled by erotic desire, the sufferer of unrequited love. The earlier poems suggest a full sympathy between the confident speaker and his fellow human beings as well as a deep identification with nature. In an exemplary moment, the speaker of "Spontaneous Me" identifies "real poems" with his own penis—"this poem drooping shy and unseen that I always carry, and that all men carry" (WCP 260). In one sweep, he equates writing with the natural act of regeneration and makes the poet the representative of "all men." The poem metaphorically associates natural objects with the sexualized body of the poet, creating a distinctively phallic landscape:
Spontaneous Me, Nature
The loving day, the mounting sun, the friend I am happy with,
The arm of my friend hanging over my shoulder,
The hillside whitened with blossoms of the mountain ash . . .
The rich coverlet of the grass, animals and birds, the private untrimm'd bank, the primitive apples, the pebble stones,
Beautiful dripping fragments, the negligent list of one after another as I happen to call them to me or think of them. . . . (WCP 260)
The "friend I am happy with" mentioned here is of unnamed gender. The context suggests male even though the poem, first published in 1856, was always part of "Children of Adam" after 1860. The placement is rhetorically consistent, however, for whenever Whitman treats sexuality either as a general form of attraction or as heterosexual or "procreative," he metaphorizes freely in all directions, finding analogs of the experience of his own body in all of nature. In "Children of Adam" and in such longer lyrics as "Song of Myself" and "The Sleepers," the implication is that the speaker's own libido is justified by the presence of analogs in nature; it is "natural."
With "Calamus" comes a major shift in perspective. The same images bear new significances. The "branches of live oak" in "Song of Myself," for example, mirror the rooted phallic power of the speaker, but in "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing," possibly the first poem composed for "Calamus," which was called "Live Oak, with Moss" in the manuscript version, the confident link of the poet with the natural world has been broken. The manly branch of the tree hung with moss still reminds the poet of his own body, but he cannot honestly complete the heroic identification. He says, "I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing all alone there without its friends near, for I knew I could not" (WCP 279).
The poem details the process by which the poet switches from a metaphoric to a metonymic or associational rhetoric. He no longer identifies himself with the object of nature but keeps a twig of the tree twined with moss as a "curious token" that helps him think of "manly love." Rather than deeply connected with nature, as heterosexual love appears to be because of its functional relation to procreation, homosexual or "manly" love bears a more complex and subtle relation to nature, which includes a recognition of difference--difference from the procreative standard. The "kosmos" poet of "Song of Myself" could proclaim, "These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands" (WCP 204), but the "Calamus" poet has lost the connection and the confidence. In a poem ultimately omitted from Leaves of Grass but included in 1860 as "Calamus 9," he laments:
Sullen and suffering hours! (I am ashamed--but it is useless--I am what I am;)
Hours of my torment--I wonder if other men ever have the like, out of the like feelings?
Is there even one other like me--distracted--his friend, his lover, lost to him? (LGC 596)
The association of erotic love with the outdoor world remains present in "Calamus": the forlorn speaker of "Calamus 9" still "withdraw[s] to a lonely and unfrequented spot"; the speaker of the opening "Calamus" poem "In Paths Untrodden," takes as his setting "the growth by the margins of pond-waters,/ Escaped from the life that exhibits itself" (WCP 268); the waters of the ocean whisper "to congratulate" the speaker on the approach of his lover in "When I Heard at the Close of the Day" (WCP 277); and the central image of the group, the calamus plant, is itself a phallic symbol. But the free-flowing metaphorical identification with the world and "omnisexual vision" are gone. Nature has become an environment, something that surrounds and suggests, rather than a bank of justifying identifications. It whispers rather than shouts approval.
The movement away from strong appeals to nature toward weak appeals to nature is paralleled by a shift from appeals to natural history toward appeals to social history. In "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "A Woman Waits for Me," Whitman relies upon the language and concepts of biological science, notably evolution, to provide grounds for celebrating the omnisexual body. But in "Calamus," appeals tend to be based on the poet's claim to distinction within the realm of social history. The key poem on this theme is "Recorders Ages Hence":
Recorders ages hence,
Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive exterior, I will tell you what to say of me,
Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tenderest lover,
The friend the lover's portrait, of whom his friend his lover was fondest,
Who was not proud of his songs, but of the measureless ocean of love within him, and freely pour'd it forth,
Who often walk'd lonesome walks thinking of his dear friends, his lovers,
Who pensive away from the one he lov'd often lay sleepless and dissatisfied at night,
Who knew too well the sick, sick dread lest the one he lov'd might secretly be indifferent to him,
Whose happiest days were far away through fields, in woods, on hills, he and another wandering hand in hand, they twain apart from other men,
Who oft as he saunter'd the streets curv'd with his arm the shoulder of his friend, while the arm of his friend rested upon him also. (WCP 275-76)
The poem reprises all the main "Calamus" themes, showing the range of emotion and the depth of Whitman's changes in self-concept. The theme of alienation takes a prominent place, appearing as a melancholic sense of difference ("the sick, sick dread"), as joy over the lovers' isolation ("they twain apart from other men"), and as a sense of distinction based on historical uniqueness: the speaker is not just a tender lover but is the very model of tenderness, the "tenderest" of all.
The tenderness is accompanied by a new caution on the part of the "Calamus" poet. No longer the confident boaster of the early poems, breaking free of social and poetic convention alike, the "Calamus" poet tends to appropriate and subvert convention rather than destroy it, as Michael Lynch and others have shown in studies of Whitman's use of the "friendship convention" and elegiac themes as a code for homoeroticism. Moreover, there appears in the "Calamus" rhetoric a movement away from the claim of full disclosure (the promise of "Song of Myself" to go "undisguised and naked") toward a complex interplay of revealing and concealing a "secret" at the center of identity. In the 1855 Preface, Whitman had argued, "The great poets are also to be known by the absence in them of tricks and by the justification of perfect personal candor. . . . How beautiful is candor! All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor" (WCP 19). Even in the 1855 Preface, there exists some tension between the great poet's traits of "sympathy" (the tendency to merge with others) and "prudence" (the tendency to balance self-assertion with self-protection). But sympathy, honesty, and the drive to confession and self-display rule the day in 1855 and 1856. In "Calamus," confession does not flow, but is painful and dangerous, yet equally transformative, like a ritual blood-letting, as we see in the poem "Trickle Drops":
From my breast, from within where I was conceal'd, press forth red drops, confession drops,
Stain every page, stain every song I sing, every word I say, bloody drops,
Let them know your scarlet heat, let them glisten,
Saturate them with yourself all ashamed and wet,
Glow upon all I have written or shall write, bleeding drops,
Let it all be seen in your light, blushing drops. (WCP 278)
Nor can confession be complete, for the poet is uncertain not only of his connection with nature but also of his relation to other men. The feelings expressed in "Calamus 9" of 1860 ("Hours Continuing Long") are those of the closeted gay, sending out sensitive feelers in an attempt to connect with others of his kind:
Hours of my torment--I wonder if other men ever have the like, out of the like feelings?
If there even one like me--distracted--his friend, his lover, lost to him?
Is he too as I am now? Does he still rise in the morning, dejected, thinking who is lost to him? and at night, awaking, think who is lost?
Does he harbor his friendship silent and endless? harbor his anguish and passion?
Does some stray reminder, or the casual mention of a name, bring the fit back upon him, taciturn and deprest? (LGC 596)
Finally even this level of confession was too much for Whitman. He excluded this poem from later editions of Leaves of Grass. And his revisions tended to obscure the original narrative thread of "Live Oak, with Moss," to hide its possible origins in personal experience. In biography as well as bibliography, he replicated the form of alternately revealing and concealing the depths of his heart. As Gary Schmidgall has shown in great detail, Whitman taunted Horace Traubel with the promise to tell a "secret" that would explain himself better than any other. He never fulfilled the promise.
These movements, then, characterize the rhetorical shift that "Calamus" undertakes in Leaves of Grass: the movement from strong appeals (metaphoric identifications) toward weak appeals to nature (metonymic associations), the movement from appeals to natural history (as in the concept of evolution) toward appeals to social history (as in the concept of distinction), the movement from rejecting existing literary conventions toward appropriating and subverting such conventions, and the movement away from claims of full disclosure toward a complex interplay of revealing and concealing a "secret" at the center of identity. This last shift hints at the depth of the changes. In his History of Sexuality, Foucault mentions a "metamorphosis in literature" that has occurred in modern times: "we have passed," he says, "from a pleasure to be recounted and heard, centering on the heroic or marvelous narration of 'trials' of bravery or sainthood, to a literature ordered according to the infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself, in between the words, a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage" (59). In the five short years between 1855 and 1860, in the shift from a rhetoric of omnisexuality to a rhetoric of gayness, Whitman embodied in his own verse something like this cultural passage. The attempt to recover an heroic sexual politics of liberation by using confession and full disclosure to advantage yielded to a recognition of the pain and alienation that accompanies confession, the urge to reveal chastened by the need to conceal, the joy of identity mingling with the ambivalent emotions that come with distinction and difference.
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