PARADOX OF IDENTITY
385
on which he could both "stand" in the eternity of imagination and
yet move in time, a man like any other, toward a more fully human
significance. This would seem to be the first secret of his pose: he
is
poised,
perfectly balanced as he moves between possibility and the
past-always with the illusion of change as progress, yet never sur–
rendering his freedom to return-between the Long Island shore of
his childhood ("Paumanok") and the world of manly ego across
the bay, the "Mannahatta" and the American continent that were
always for Whitman the waiting and inescapable reaJities.
Whitman's uncertainty, as the imagery here suggests, was al–
ways sexual. The biographical evidence, in itself inconclusive, does
seem to confirm what anyone may easily intuit from the poems: that
Whitman was predominantly homosexual in his elementary responses,
but never, it seems, in overt conduct and perhaps never in his pri–
vate relations. But the most important fact is still that ambiguity
itself, his uncertainty of sexual will, and this in itself indicates-as
seems evident from the auto-eroticism in "The Song of Myself"-a
suspension, possibly life-long, in some childhood phase of introversion
that may never have reached complete inversion. This eroticism,
moreover, was further complicated, as Mark Van Doren has noted,
by a condition of chronic sensory excitability known technically as
erethisia.
Whitman had an abnormal susceptibility to touch: nearly
everyone who knew him well remarked that the skin on his rather
large and languorous body seemed unusually soft and pink; in him,
as he himself liked to say, was "the flush of the universe." By day he
must have felt himself to be, as we have come to know him, the
glowing epitome of health-in the American grand manner he estab–
lished; but by night this same sensuous vitality might easily have
abandoned him to an abysmal sense of deprivation, and in such
moments, we may conjecture, he became not unlike the wandering
sleeper of his poem, lost in an unknown inner "flood" of feeling, a
relentless but nameless and impotent longing. This seems to have
been the darker necessity animating this secretly lonely and anoma–
lous "caresser of life": as he once confessed in a poem, "I had to
let flame from me the fires that were threatening to consume me."
Whitman's adolescence seems almost wholly characterized by
indolence and impressionability-a passivity of mind that produced
in his youth a motley and unthinking imitation of the worldly con-
