THE LIVING WHITMAN
391
heart and soul and which protected him from his weakness by letting
him indulge it in the remote, chaste and harmlessly tactile manner of
an honorary male nurse.
Back in the Roosevelt era, Newton Arvin rejected what he called
"the sicklier and softer moments of his later verse"; but Leslie Fiedler,
terribly wise in the folly of the Left, avows that
" It
is utterly misleading
to imagine Whitman as a populist plein-air poet; for at his best he is
a singer of urban life, like Baudelaire.... It is not to the life-affirmer
we are returning, but to the elegiac Whitman, the poet of death."
Well ... yes and no. "Plein-air" sounds more sinister than "open air":
one imagines a jaded Parisian twirling his mustache in disdain of all
this egregious American health. But if Mr. Fiedler wilI explain how one
can be a "poet of death" and not a "life-affirmer," and how Long Island,
the Hudson and the Atlantic (not to forget the "mossy scabs of the
worm fence, and heap'd stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed") can be
fitted into "urban" poetry, we can be grateful in tum for his amusing
account of Whitman's reputation, and his apt definition of the poetry
as "a pun on the self . . . a continual shimmering on the surfaces of
concealment and revelation that is at once pathetic and comicaL"
Whitman is large-minded, large-moving and instinctively graceful;
these facts have a way of dwarfing everything else, until we can finally
enjoy even the rhythmic excerpts from encyclopedias and atlases, or his
crashing condescension to prostitutes and :
You hottentot with clicking palate! you woolly-hair'd hordes!
You poor koboo whom the m eanest of th e rest look down upon.
You dwarfed Kamtschatkan
...
You haggard, uncouth, untutor'd Bedowee!
You plague-swarms in M adras, Nankin, K aubul, Cairo!
You benighted roamer of Ama<:onia!
We can perhaps even enjoy the decontaminated sex which so often sug–
gests the mating of buffaloes, in which the female seems to be dis–
tinguished from the male chiefly by her smell, or "that indescribable
perfume of genuine womanhood," as Whitman phrases it.
The white whale stilI has life in it yet, still steams majestically
along at the center of our inner seas, however many
Pequods
may have
gone down
in
the century-long hunt. Lawrence's essay is probably the
last telling thrust that Whitman will have to suffer, and this, as Law–
rence readily admits, is the revolt of a natural son against an over-in–
sistent parent, as far as possible from genteel standards of decorum or
