Michael Robertson

Audio

Transcript

Ramona Koval: Welcome to The Book Show Michael.

Michael Robertson: Thank you.

Ramona Koval: Let's begin by talking about what it was that people were so taken with when they met Walt Whitman, and in a way perhaps this is tightly bound with what they might have felt when they read his work in Leaves of Grass, because it is written to have the writer amazingly present on the page, with an address to the reader which is intimate, knowing, and so personal, as if you're the only one reading it, and it's as if it was written just for you. But let's begin with the man himself. If he was here with us, in my studio in Australia and in your lounge room in Princeton or whatever part of the house you find yourself, what would he look like and what would I feel meeting him?

Michael Robertson: It's interesting because I think we really have to give two answers to that. One is this young 36-year-old Whitman who publishes the first edition of Leaves of Grass and doesn't put his name on the title page, doesn't put his name on the cover of the book, instead you open the first edition of Leaves of Grass and what you see is an engraving of this idealised working man.

We've all seen those standard 19th century author engravings which are very much from the neck up, giving us the image of this wise middle-class sage, and instead the picture you got in this first edition of Leaves of Grass was of this working man. It showed his entire body, and he's standing there, he's got his shirt open at the collar, you can see his red flannel undershirt underneath, he's wearing his hat, he's obviously standing outdoors, he's got his hand cocked on his hip. He's kind of this mythic, Paul Bunyan, working-class figure. That's the young Whitman of 1855.

And, by the way, Whitman kept...as he would age, rather as authors might do now, he kept the same engraving in subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass. So even as he aged, you would open the book and you would find the engraving of this vibrant, young, working-class, rebellious poet. So that's one Whitman.

And then the other is later in his life he became the good grey poet, and you mentioned how scandalous his poetry seemed to a lot of people, very sexual, so that one of his disciples, William O'Connor, published this essay, 'The Good Grey Poet' to defend him from these charges of salaciousness and obscenity. Because he was actually fired from his civil service job in Washington DC for having written an obscene book, and so his disciples in reaction against that shaped this image of this benign gentleman, and that's the Whitman you see in the famous photographs of him as an older man with a white beard looking very benign.

Ramona Koval: But what if we were in his presence? Tell me about how he would strike us, because there was an...there was an episode of Get Smart called 'Simon the Likeable' where this guy would look at anybody and his eyes would twinkle and everyone would fall in love with him, and that's what I was reminded of when I was reading your book. Everybody loved Walt. Why?

Michael Robertson: I think two things. Number one, these people who came to him came to him primed for something extraordinary. You talked, Ramona, about how personal the poetry is. He says: 'Camerado! This is no book; who touches this touches a man.' And so they came primed for this really ecstatic experience of this magnetic personality, and indeed that's what they found. I think you or I, if we knew nothing about Whitman, meeting him might find him to be a very polite, good-natured, 19th century dandy a bit. He was very careful about his appearance and quite a cordial person in conversation. These disciples I write about in the book came to him primed to find this magnetic charismatic figure, and that's what they found.

Ramona Koval: He was born in Long Island to Quaker parents and he finished his schooling at 11. Did he have writerly ambitions as a young man?

Michael Robertson: He did, but it's extraordinary, it's really one of the miracles of world literature that as a young man he had literary ambitions but he wrote the most conventional bad 19th century rhyming poetry you can imagine, it's just dreadful, and he wrote sentimental short stories, he wrote a temperance novel. Later he claimed that he wrote the thing for money and he was drunk the whole time. And then at age 36, out of nowhere, he publishes Leaves of Grass, this revolutionary book of poetry that's really the first book of modern poetry, it's really the foundation book of modern poetry in the way that Shakespeare is the foundation of modern drama.

Ramona Koval: So why do you think it was so influential and so shocking?

Michael Robertson: One way you could make the comparison that I think might make it vivid is if you think about what the Impressionists did in painting, and before that in the 19th century what viewers expected to see in paintings was this hyper-correct realism, whereas the Impressionists bring you these incredibly vivid colours, they bring you the world as seen through the eyes of the artist, it's no longer a realist painting. Similarly the other great 19th century poets, the Romantic poets, Tennyson, are bringing you this finely wrought world of perfectly formed verse, and then Whitman comes like this great American buffalo, which is what Thomas Carlyle called him, with this raw strength, this free verse, it's unrhymed, it's un-metered, it just really...if you were a sensitive reader in the 19th century you couldn't help but be knocked off your feet by the rawness and immediacy and power and intimacy of this poetry.

Ramona Koval: Why did people see it as the new bible? In fact you say that Whitman intended it to be seen as a new bible.

Michael Robertson: He really did. I think most poets put forward their books as aesthetic offerings, and Whitman really...when he came out of this silence...you know, he's been this hack journalist, this hack poet, we don't hear from him, he's virtually invisible from the historical record for a few years, and then suddenly at age 36 he comes out with this book of poetry, and it's a book of poetry that wants to transform your life. It's poetry that claims to offer this new religious, spiritual vision. He wants to transform the way you see the world. So it's this revolutionary, spiritualised poetry, and he really imagines that it's a new scripture. When he publishes the third edition in 1860 he's writing in his notebook and he says 'It should be ready any month now, the 365...' you know, like 365 numbered verses of a bible or something.

Ramona Koval: I wanted to start talking about some of the people that you describe, you follow the paths of nine of his principle disciples, and in a way they all represent a slant on the kind of person he attracted. They're representative of groups really but they are all writers, I suppose, so you had access to what they thought and what happened. But most of these people thought that Whitmanism would become a religion, and I wanted you first to describe this enormous movement at the time towards a spiritual life. What was happening to fuel it, what was going on?

Michael Robertson: We'll speak today now a lot of...people will say, 'I'm spiritual but not religious,' and we tend to think that that's a post-1960s thing, but that actually begins in the 1830s with Emerson and transcendentalism, this distinction between religion, which is institutional and credal and orthodox, and spirituality which is individualistic and mystical and pluralist. People see that Christianity is being challenged by new discoveries in science, the discoveries of Darwin, the discoveries in geology. They think that they are entering a post-Christian age, but they don't turn to purely scientific, materialist secularism, instead they're searching for some kind of spiritual new direction.

So people turn to...you know, the 19th century is the age of all these new religions; Christian Science, Mormonism, Theosophy. It's an enormously fertile age for these new religious faiths, and sort of on the left wing of this, on the liberal side of this, you get Whitmanism, this sense that Leaves of Grass is a new, more appropriate, democratic scripture that, unlike the Hebrew bible or the New Testament, celebrates the body, celebrates the equality of men and women, celebrates sexuality, celebrates democracy.

Ramona Koval: Just before we talk about the English woman Anne Gilchrist who in 1876 sailed from England with her children and her house full of furniture (she put the furniture on the boat) to marry him, she decided to marry him...just before we talk about her, I might just read a little bit of the poetry that she'd read that kind of convinced her that he was her guy. I'll just read a few lines:

...love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching,
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious nice,
Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh'd day.

Phew! It's pretty hot, isn't it.

Michael Robertson: Is it, it still is after 150 years.

Ramona Koval: That's right. So okay, let's talk about Anne Gilchrist. What was she like?

Michael Robertson: This is fascinating, and if you read Whitman biographies you'll come across references to her, and they tend to be very dismissive and slighting references. One biographer calls her 'that pathetic Victorian lady'.

Ramona Koval: But she was a science writer, she was quite a gal.

Michael Robertson: She was a brilliant woman. She was widowed young, in her early 30s, her husband was the first biographer of William Blake, he left his biography unfinished. She completed it for him. It's still one of the standard reference works on William Blake, the Gilchrist biography. She worked, as you said, as a freelance science writer. She was a close friend of the Rossetti family, of the Carlyles, of the Tennysons...this was not some crank. She was a distinguished upper middle-class British literary figure.

Ramona Koval: So tell us how she found herself at this point, on the voyage, and what Walt Whitman's part in this arrangement was, because I think he was giving mixed messages.

Michael Robertson: He was indeed. It's an extraordinary story. Her friend William Michael Rossetti, the brother of the artist Dante Gabriel and the poet Christina Rossetti, edited an English edition of Whitman and he gave it to his friend Anne Gilchrist, she read it, and she wrote Rossetti back this amazing letter. She says 'I could scarcely breathe when I was reading these poems. These words have become electric streams...do you think I might write to Mr Whitman?' And eventually she does so, and here she is, a widow, she's in a culture that denies women's sexuality, and she reads the words of this American poet who celebrates women as sexual creatures, celebrates women as the full equals of men, celebrates women as the intellectual equals of men, and she feels...she knows that in the United States Whitman is regarded as an obscene poet, that he's not esteemed, that he is living in poverty in Camden, New Jersey, and she thinks 'I'm the one who understands him'.

Ramona Koval: Of course, because she's read this bit where he says:

Among the men and women, the multitude,
I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs,
Acknowledging none else, not parent, wife, husband, brother, child,
any nearer than I am,
Some are baffled, but that one is not—that one knows me.
Ah lover and perfect equal,
I meant that you should discover me so by faint indirections,
And I when I meet you mean to discover you by the like in you.

I mean, really...that's an invitation, isn't it.

Michael Robertson: It is, and you and I can look at that and understand how it's a literary strategy, but you can imagine to Anne Gilchrist...

Ramona Koval: It was a personal note.

Michael Robertson: It was a personal note. She's convinced that she is the only person who really understands this poet, the fact that he's living alone and ill and impoverished in Camden brings out her nurturing impulses, and she writes him this extraordinary letter saying 'I am yet young enough to bear three children, my darling'.

Ramona Koval: He writes her a note back eventually...but you know, you just have to say he didn't have very good advice here: 'I am not insensible to your love. I too send you my love. Do you feel no disappointment because I now write so briefly.' That is, I'll write you a longer letter later. 'My book is my letter, my response, my truest explanation of all,' which is a really nice way of saying thanks but no thanks, just read the book. But she doesn't take that for an answer, does she.

Michael Robertson: No, she doesn't. She keeps up her letters to him, and in 1873 Whitman makes a fatal mistake. It's a terrible year for him, he suffers a paralytic stroke, he's paralysed on his left side. His mother, to whom he was extremely close, died. His sister-in-law, to whom he was extremely close, died. And so I think in a bid for sympathy, knowing this woman is safely distant in England, knowing that she adores him, he takes a ring off his finger, encloses it in an envelope and he says, 'I send you this ring with my love.'

Ramona Koval: Uh-oh. What else is a girl supposed to think?

Michael Robertson: Exactly. So she begins making her plans to emigrate to America. It's not a totally irrational thing for her to do because her eldest daughter wants to be a physician and it is impossible at this time for a woman to get a medical degree in England. In Philadelphia, which happens to be just across the river from Camden, New Jersey, there is the first women's medical college in the United States, the Women's Medical College of Philadelphia. So Gilchrist's rationale is that her daughter will come to the United States and get her medical degree and she will meet her soul mate.

Ramona Koval: Well, we'll have to cut to the chase because we just don't have all day but we could talk all day about this. So they meet finally, and almost immediately it seems that she clocks him and she says, okay, you're obviously the type who'll be my friend rather than my lover. And she sets up this household, to which he comes. And you call it a kind of Whitlamist boarding house; he's there all the time, eating with the family, being a friend of the family.

Michael Robertson: Yes, he eats dinner with them every day, he spends the night there frequently...

Ramona Koval: In his own room though.

Michael Robertson: In his own room. It's a soft berth for Whitman but it's also at the same time a genuine friendship, they did become genuinely close. And when Anne Gilchrist died of breast cancer some years later, he wrote her this extraordinary tribute poem. Whitman only wrote two tribute poems in his life, one was for his mother and one was for Anne Gilchrist, and he calls her 'my most noble woman-friend'.

Ramona Koval: Yes. Then there were the men who were struck by Whitman's ideas of passionate relationships between men, a sort of amativeness and comradeship. You say that no woman could throw him off balance, but men were another matter.

Michael Robertson: It's hard for us to conceive how different ideas about sexuality were in the 19th century, but the word 'homosexual' did not exist. Lacking the vocabulary, there was nothing but the language of the police court and the insane asylum of sodomy and buggery, these horribly negative terms, negative concepts. Whitman knew that the love he felt for other men had nothing to do with that, it was, he felt, as pure and noble and as divine as man's love for woman, and his poetry in I think some of the most beautiful, tender love poems in the English language, talks about love between men.

Ramona Koval: People were writing to him and trying to get him to say what he meant in these poems. They spent years and years saying 'But do you mean...what do you mean?'

Michael Robertson: Exactly. There's two ways to interpret that. Whiteman refused to be pinned down about the meaning of these poems that we now unquestionably recognise as homoerotic, and people said 'Is there a sexual dimension to these? Is there a physical dimension to the love between men?' Because in this era, it was the late 19th century, the word 'homosexual' doesn't exist, but nevertheless there's this new science circling around, this notion of the homosexual temperament. There are scientists in Germany particularly who are trying to establish a typology of sexuality. So they're trying to get Whitman to declare himself to be in this special category. Whitman, I think, is resisting saying that I'm one of a minority, instead his agenda is to say this love exists in all men, and he sees it as the basis of American democracy, at the basis of international friendship, this love between men. He strategically leaves it undefined.

Ramona Koval: Yes, he kind of comes across as a sexual omnivore in his work, but there seems to be 100 years of mystery about what he did in his own room. He had a special fondness, it seems, for younger men of the lower classes. And I know he had this democratic cast about him. Might this also be seen as a liking for 'rough trade' in the 21st century?

Michael Robertson: You could say that but I would disagree, partly because of Whitman's own class background. Remember, the British men who were so entranced by Whitman came from upper middle class backgrounds, they had gone to Oxford in the case of John Addington Symonds and Oscar Wilde, Cambridge in the case of Edward Carpenter. Wilde was enchanted by Whitman, made two pilgrimages to Camden to see him during his US tour.

Ramona Koval: And you say 'Oscar gave Walt class and Walt gave him manliness'.

Michael Robertson: It's exactly what happened because people couldn't understand what Wilde, who they saw as this highly sophisticated Englishman, could see in Whitman whose image was that of this rough, crude, vibrant American poet. I think it was exactly that, that each of them gave the other what he needed, that was what really drew those two very dissimilar poets together.

Ramona Koval: But Walt was having a long relationship with that guy on the tramcar, wasn't he.

Michael Robertson: Exactly, the real love of his life was this streetcar driver in Washington DC...

Ramona Koval: A streetcar named desire.

Michael Robertson: Yes, his name was Peter Doyle, he was an Irish immigrant, completely uneducated, and whereas these Englishmen, it might be fair to say had an interest in rough trade...John Addington Symonds took up with a Venetian gondolier...Whitman came from a working class background, and these young men who he felt most comfortable around were men like his brothers, like the boys and men he had known as a young man on Long Island and in Brooklyn, they were like family to him, and he calls them in his letters...it's always the language of 'son', 'brother'. I think he feels this family closeness. They're not literary people, they're people like his own family, and this Peter Doyle the tramway driver...and Doyle has no interest in literature, but he meets Whitman's need for that immediate human connection.

Ramona Koval: You say Whitman saw having sex with men as a way of not being bourgeois.

Michael Robertson: No, I say that about Wilde. I think that's very much a Wilde thing, whereas Whitman doesn't talk about sex between men, instead he talks about affection and love between men as being the basis of democracy. He said it is through this affection of man for man that binds together the American nation. And it's so interesting that during the civil war he really finds his vocation as a volunteer nurse.

He goes down to Washington DC, walks into these hospitals where I think most of us would just be appalled by the scenes of agony and suffering in a civil war, a time when basically all they knew to do for horrible wounds was to amputate. It was a bloody, awful scene that Whitman encountered daily in these hospitals, but he gave himself up to it.

He estimated that he saw as many as 100,000 soldiers during the war as a volunteer nurse, and he was just drawn to these young boys, not necessarily in a sexual way, although not not sexually, but in this incredible intimacy; he would sit with them, he would hold hands, he would write letters for them. And we have these letters he wrote to the parents of these young civil war soldiers who died, they are heartbreaking, and he doesn't write as Walt Whitman the famous poet, he just says 'I'm a friend, I'm a visitor to the hospitals and I want to tell you how your son died, he died like a man, he died like an American to save the Union, you can be proud of him'.

Ramona Koval: Michael, there was that psychiatrist, Richard Bucke. He has an obsession with Walt Whitman. He wrote about his life, and you say that this book 'turns New York harbour into a Sea of Galilee, frequented by the saintly carpenter of Brooklyn.' Apparently his only vice, according to Bucke, was that Whitman read the newspaper, that was his only vice. To complete the parallel he needed a crucifixion, so he includes lots of bad reviews. Tell us about Richard Bucke.

Michael Robertson: He's perhaps one of the most eccentric of the disciples. He certainly went the furthest in his belief that not only was Leaves of Grass a new scripture, which a lot of the disciples see that in a metaphoric sense, it's a spiritual book, but Bucke really believed that Whitman was the messiah, he really believed that every 1,000 or 2,000 years there comes along an exceptional religious figure; the Buddha, Jesus, Walt Whitman. He saw that as the succession. He more than any of them believed that Whitman was a messiah who had come to inaugurate a new phase of consciousness.

Bucke in his professional life was a psychiatrist, he was a physician, he was the superintendent of the London Ontario lunatic asylum, but it was a hard time to be a psychiatrist because there was really little they could do to treat the insane. So he turned all his energy to his books on Whitman, this biography of Whitman, Ramona, that you read from, and this amazing book called Cosmic Consciousness, and he believed that the Buddha and Jesus and now most of all Walt Whitman was the exemplar of this new cosmic consciousness which would take over the world, and people would read Whitman and attain a new level of consciousness.

Ramona Koval: So we said that Whitman intended his work to be the new bible, but how did he feel about being the new Jesus?

Michael Robertson: He thought Bucke went too far.

Ramona Koval: Just a little.

Michael Robertson: But on the other hand he was an older man at this point, he was not rich or famous, he lived in this extraordinarily modest house in Camden, New Jersey, in a working class neighbourhood. A train ran right down the middle of the street, it was noisy and dirty...

Ramona Koval: Sounds like 'away in a manger' so far.

Michael Robertson: Perhaps, and here comes Bucke, the most fervent of the disciples, telling him, 'Walt, you've written the bible of the next 1,000 years.' Whitman, hungry for praise, I think on the one hand he thinks Bucke goes too far, on the other hand he's lapping up this praise and adoration.

Ramona Koval: How did all the disciples get on with each other? Because they seem to be coming from different angles.

Michael Robertson: They did indeed, and the most temperate and the most famous of them in his time, John Burroughs, who was a nature writer who in the 19th century was much more popular than Thoreau, much better known that John Muir. John Burroughs was enormously well respected nature writer. He frankly was embarrassed by Bucke, he tried to keep Bucke away from Whitman, and he was a little embarrassed by the outlandish claims of the more fervent of the disciples. He himself had this more sedate, I'll call it a Unitarian religious vision, and he wanted to keep Whitman in that kind of respectable Unitarian transcendental camp.

Ramona Koval: I'm a bit sad for Anne Gilchrist. Did she ever find another boyfriend?

Michael Robertson: No, after three years in Philadelphia her daughter received her medical degree, it gave her a convenient excuse to say farewell to Whitman and go back to England, but one of the last things she did before her death was to write this beautiful essay called 'A Confession of Faith' and it's about Walt Whitman. But she got past her personal belief that...

Ramona Koval: So she turned into a nun in the religion of Whitman.

Michael Robertson: Yes, she went beyond the 'Whitman meant this message for me', and she said she says this is a message for all humanity, this message of democracy and equality and belief in the beauty of the body and sexuality. And in that last essay 'A Confession of Faith', she kind of opens up Whitman's message, takes it away from herself and opens it up to every reader. It's a beautiful essay.

Ramona Koval: What happened after his death?

Michael Robertson: There was a period when they really saw themselves like the 12 apostles after the death of Jesus. In England there was an extremely interesting group, there was a group in Melbourne, Australia, led by a man named Bernard O'Dowd that tried to establish informal churches of Whitman. They held celebrations on his birthday. It was a fledgling religious movement, but it did not survive past the First World War, and I think it's partly because they didn't have the institutional structures and partly because after the First World War departments of American literature start flourishing and Whitman gets taken into the literary canon and they want to silence these rather embarrassing 19th century disciples.

Ramona Koval: Interesting. Then they've got that journal The Conservator.

Michael Robertson: Yes, published by Horace Traubel who was Whitman's volunteer secretary during the last years of his life. Traubel visited Whitman every day for the last four years of his life, kept a record of it, it comes to two million words, it takes up nine volumes, but his notion was, gee, if only somebody had done this for Jesus, how glad we would be to have a record of his every word. So it's this complete, unedited, nine-volume discussion of absolutely everything that was happening in Whitman's life during Traubel's visits to him.

Ramona Koval: And the journal went on to just publish everybody's recollections and opinions and it was the Walt Whitman book of everything.

Michael Robertson: It was exactly that and it was trying to keep alive the flame of this non-academic, fervent, spiritual view of Walt Whitman, and Traubel kept that flame burning until his death.

Ramona Koval: Well, what an interesting group. And of course he's seen as the great American poet now. And it's been fantastic talking to you today.

Michael Robertson: Thank you, it's been a pleasure Ramona.

Ramona Koval: We've been speaking with Michael Robertson, and the book is called Worshiping Walt: The Whitman Disciples, it's published Princeton University Press.

Publications

Title: Worshipping Walt: the Whitman Disciples

Author: Michael Robertson

Publisher: Princeton University Press