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PARTISAN REVIEW
terribly wrong, and we can't really blame Bayard Taylor for writing
a parody of this equivocal occasion. Whitman was surprisingly shy and
inept as a public speaker. But Mr. Chase's sense of the comic Whitman
is like the sense of Yeats you get from the hilarious preface to
A Vision,
of a poet who, if he can't actually turn every accident and absurdity to
his own advantage, at least appears to be doing so when it counts the
most.
A really definitive book on Whitman would be a monstrosity. In
the Chase and Allen books we have the customary division between wis–
dom and industry, the former an amusing, affectionate, penetrating and
beautifully organized short study, "an essay in 'appreciation' of the cul–
tural-historical sort"; the latter a compendious biographical reference
work of some 616 pages, with notes, appendices and index. Mr. Allen
glows with reliability and an interminably aggressive honesty about
Whitman's sexual life. As a critic, he seems terrified of his own shadow,
to say nothing of Whitman's.
In several touching pronouncements toward the end of his life,
Whitman admitted to a longing for the friendly opposition that Henry
Clapp provided in the Pfaffs basement days, and which Richard Chase
resumes in his book. "Michel Angelo invoked heaven's special protec–
tion against his friends and affectionate flatterers; palpable foes he could
manage for himself." To take Whitman on Chase's discriminatingly gen–
erous terms is to believe in the "indestructible dignity" and "aura of
wistful comedy" of the Camden years, the tragi-comedy sometimes, of
a genuine but devious Old Master, still capable of bilking the martyred
Mrs. Davis out of the largest part of her legacy, but also still capable
of tears of gratitude on the gift of a pony, capable also of enjoying the
"chippering shriek" of two kingfishers or the
«tlup
of a pike leaping
out and rippling the water."
Anyone who has read Malcolm Cowley's strangely heated introduc–
tion to the
Complete Whitman
(Garden City) of 1948 will be grateful
to Chase for his temperate handling of the sexual question. He points
out how little we really know, and how powerfully the evidence points
to a total sublimation of Whitman's bi-sexual instincts. To insist as
Cowley does on Whitman's kinship to the Baron de Charius is to push
matters beyond the point where they yield a return; for the striking
thing about Whitman's behavior with Peter Doyle
et at.
is its openness
and innocence, precisely its lack of the furtive freemasonry of Charlus
and his friends. Whitman, after all, remained on very good-if some–
what abstract-terms with the bourgeois world to which he belonged
