The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [112]
Discouraged, distracted—for the one I cannot content myself without, soon I saw him content himself without me.
I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d; Yet out of that I have written these songs.
We don’t know what went wrong, but Whitman clearly didn’t get what he wanted. One of the finest of the Calamus poems presents Whitman’s “leaves” in a new context, that of loneliness and love:
I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the
branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous
leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of
myself,
But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves
standing alone there without its friend near, for I
knew I could not …
The pride out of which Whitman utters poems is not a solitary self-containment. It is active and self-assured, but it is also continuous with the other phases of the self. Just as he enters the gifted state when the lover takes his hand, so the poems come to him when his friend is near. And their utterance is directed outward, a gift meant to “inform” another self. That, at least, is the ideal—described in the poetry and desired in the life.
But we must set the live-oak of this poem beside another tree found in a journal entry from the summer of 1870. At the time Whitman was in love with a young man named Peter Doyle. The relationship proved to be one of the most satisfying of his life, but that summer Whitman was troubled. Disguising the entry by referring to Doyle as “her” and replacing his initials with an alpha-numeric code, Whitman records, first, a resolution to cool his ardor.
TO GIVE UP ABSOLUTELY & for good, from this present hour, this FEVERISH, FLUCTUATING, useless undignified pursuit of 164—too long, (much too long) persevered in,—so humiliating … Avoid seeing her, or meeting her, or any talk or explanations—or ANY MEETING WHATEVER, FROM THIS HOUR FORTH, FOR LIFE.
He was suffering, ten years later, the same kind of frustrated passion that lies behind Calamus. Immediately below this entry we find an “outline sketch of a superb character”:
his emotions &c are complete in himself irrespective (indifferent) of whether his love, friendship, &c are returned, or not
He grows, blooms, like some perfect tree or flower, in Nature, whether viewed by admiring eyes, or in some wild or wood entirely unknown …
Depress the adhesive nature It is in excess—making life a torment All this diseased, feverish disproportionate adhesiveness.
Whitman could settle at neither pole. Years before this journal entry he had seen that indifferent, perfect tree “uttering joyous leaves,” and he knew it as an image of the being he longed for, “complete in himself.” But he also knew it was impossible, that he came best to song through contact. There is a spiritual path in which the soul ascends in isolation, abandoning all creatures. But this was not the path for Whitman, so hungry for affection and so present in his body. As he grew older Whitman did in fact find a form for his “adhesive nature”; he managed a series of long-lasting, basically paternal relationships with younger men, Doyle being one of them. But to judge from his letters, he wanted more. He wanted to “work and live together” with a man; he wanted to “get a good room or two in some quiet place … and … live together.” He never got it. When he presents himself to the world as “like some perfect tree,” we will be right, therefore, to feel a touch of perfection’s loneliness. All of this vegetable sex—these trees and leaves of grass—carries in it, sometimes, the disappointment of an animal desire. Even Osiris had Isis to warm his bones to life.
The picture I have drawn of the process of the gifted self began with its inhalation of objects; to turn now to the bestowing phase of this self, and in particular to the poetry as a gift, we must