THE LIVING WHITMAN
395
at least as "artificial" as the Psalmist; and the whole happy combina–
tion of thought, movement, feeling and meter is what, after all, makes
Whitman one of the supreme masters of colloquial grace, a major link
between Shakespearean blank verse and modern poetry.
The picture of Whitman as an American Orpheus, doomed to seek
his visionary Eurydice in the inferno of Manhattan, the Civil War and
his own chaotic soul, is greatly enhanced by the accumulated evidence
of a miserable family life. One brother was a drunkard, married to a
part-time harlot, and died at thirty-seven of tuberculosis; another was
syphilitic and died in an insane asylum; another was an imbecile and
epi'leptic. His favorite sister, Chase tells us, "became squalid, eccentric
and unbalanced" and "was given to spells of drunkenness and paranoia."
Whitman's early family life was marked by a kind of "moral and psychic
squalor, anxiety, restlessness and vagrancy. . . ." This
exuberance
of
misery makes Walt's relationship to his Van Velsor mother the more
appealing, and his sublimation of the dangers of such a relationship the
more remarkable. He could never have survived had he not been, in
a most specific sense, the more motherly of the two: "neurotic, riven,
and vividly paradoxical," of course; "the divided, multiple personality,
a shifting amalgam of sycophancy and sloth, of mimetic brilliance and
Dionysian inspiration, of calculating common sense and philosophic in–
sight, of Rousseauistic disorientation and primitivism" (as Mr. Chase
compares him to Rameau's Nephew), but
also,
and always, an extra–
ordinarily self-contained physical being-fussy, hypochondriacal, some–
times even irascible in private with his closest friends, but able in public
to grow steadily more like the imaginary Walt of
Leaves of Grass.
Only
Turgenev and James among his contemporaries show this extreme com–
bination of inward storm and outward calm. Like them, he became a
prime actor in that comedy which the nineteenth century made of the
olympian pretensions of Art And like James, he connived in the fun.
Empson once wrote that when
T.
S. Eliot told a joke in his presence
he was never sure whether to laugh or weep. Whitman's "comedy" is
often of this perilous sort; viz., the time he described for two Wash–
ington newspapers a poetry reading by himself (about which several
New York papers reported that scarcely anyone had heard a word he
said) : "His apostrophe to the Stars and Stripes which floated above
him,
describing them in far different scenes in battle, was most impassioned.
Also his 'Away with War itself,' and his scornful 'Away with novels,
plots and plays of foreign courts!' "
This is Malvolio speaking, not Falstaff. Sometimes the comedy went
