RADICALISM TODAY
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dialectic, drama, finally intelligence itself- all are impossible without
a sharp sense of contraries and oppositions. Why should a culture of
contradictions not glory in being what it is?
As
Whitman gloried in
America and in himself because both were contradictory.
Now, it is Whitman who is most often cited, erroneously, as the
mediator of opposites, the great salubrious healthy man of equability
-me imperturbe,
and so on, the first critic so citing him being Walt
Whitman himself. But on other occasions Whitman much more
convincingly proclaims himself "agonistic," self-polarizing, not to
mention neurotic. And because they did not understand or appreciate
this latter Whitman, D. H. Lawrence and Brooks misinterpreted him
as the great reconciler and middleman.
In
Studies in Classic American Literature
Lawrence says that
Whitman was the first great American writer to point the way toward
the necessary reconciliation of spirit and matter, intelligence and
instinct. As he expressed it, "Whitman was the first to break the men–
tal allegiance. He was the first to smash the old moral conception,
that the soul of man is something 'superior' and 'above' the flesh.
Even Emerson still maintained that tiresome 'superiority' of the soul.
Even Melville could not get over it. Whitman was the first heroic
seer to seize the soul by the scruff of her neck and plant her down
among the potsherds." So far so good. But Whitman does not say
to the soul, as Lawrence makes him say, "There, stay there!" What
Whitman really says is:
«Don't
stay there! Fly free, disentangle,
define yourself as soul and not as potsherd, and when you get too
uppity or too thin and hungry for want of life among the potsherds,
I'll plant you down again." When his mind is working properly,
Whitman is a free spirit, a dialectician. In the end, Lawrence (great
man that he was) is a rather turgid moralist. Sorry, I seem to be
giving a lecture. Do you follow me, Silverman?
-Yes, I think so. What you say is very interesting. Except I
don't go along with that last bit about Lawrence. I have read
Ameri–
ca's
Coming-of-Age;
but I confess I did not understand it very well.
Some of the remarks about Longfellow and Hawthorne were amus–
ing. But I thought on the whole the book was-well, too extreme;
that's not quite the word I want.
-Perhaps I can help you, by recalling some of Brooks's remarks
on Whitman. This is what he says: "we have the rudiments of a
