Walt Whitman
On the subject of Walt Whitman, the author of Leaves of Grass, Hector Charlesworth, the editor of Saturday Night magazine, was of two minds.
In Whitman's lifetime, just as now, many hailed him as America's greatest poet, or at least as the first modern one. In his final decades and in the first two following his death in 1892, he was the subject of an international cult, one that he had encouraged, somehow, tacitly yet avidly at the same time. Whitman societies, "fellowships" and study groups flourished in Europe, Britain and of course the United States. But perhaps nowhere were the so-called Whitmaniacs more fervent than in Canada.
It was in London, Ont., that Dr. R.M. Bucke, the head of the London "insane asylum," wrote the first biography of Whitman. It was also there that he went on to produce his book Cosmic Consciousness. It postulated that the human mind and spirit have been evolving towards what might almost be called super-beings possessing super-souls with supernatural capacities for unity and love.
As case-studies, Bucke used, among others, Jesus, St. Paul, the Prophet Muhammad - and Whitman. (He had a farm team as well, with second-stringers including Moses, Isaiah and Socrates. Less well known than his work on Whitman is his habit of performing strange gynecological surgeries.) In Toronto all this while, Whitmanites conducted séances, receiving both poetry and prose in response to their entreaties at the Ouija board. I read transcripts of some of these sessions when I was researching my novel Walt Whitman's Secret. Let us say that Whitman's talent declined alarmingly following his death. All of which makes Charlesworth's ambivalence most unusual.
Writing in the 1920s, Charlesworth allowed that "no man who ever lived had a deeper relish for both ordinary human character and the magnificence of Nature" than Whitman did. He even went so far as to say that "Whitman's gusto of approach to every sensation that constitutes human existence stamps him as an original in whom interest will not die." Such statements are on the one hand. On the other hand, he couldn't decide whether Whitman's "impatience of literary forms and exact expression was due to the surge of tremendous emotions or to ordinary laziness." He quoted with no disapproval the suggestion that Whitman was a "literary troglodyte."
Today, Charlesworth is remembered, when he is remembered at all, for a different and vastly more heinous heresy - his infamous attack on the Group of Seven as the "hot-mush school" of painting. This is significant, for the disease of Whitmania was prevalent among certain members of the Group (think of Lawren Harris's visual mysticism) and, through them, in Emily Carr.
As Carr lived until 1945, this means that devotion to Whitman was a recognizable strain in Canadian cultural life for more than 50 years following his death. Such devotion ran parallel to - and in many cases was inextricably bound up with - the other prevailing heterodoxies of the day, some of which were eventually adopted by mainstream society. To believe in Whitmanism was also to believe in socialism, vegetarianism, agnosticism, women's and human rights, the Single Tax, theosophy, and the occult. Conveniently ignored was the fact that Walt Whitman was a gay carnivorous Republican who was highly ambivalent about women, didn't believe in ghosts and was opposed to giving ex-slaves the right to vote.
A number of Canadians played roles in Whitman's life, including a coach driver working in Boston who was for quite some time his primary romantic partner. At one point, Sir William Osler, no less, was Whitman's physician. In 1880, Whitman went to London, Ont., to spend time with Dr. Bucke. This was the only occasion he ever set foot outside the U.S. After spending a summer in Ontario, Whitman became rapturous about the geographical Canada. But in fact he loved only the part that was outdoors and visible from a train window. He knew next to nothing about the society, its culture or its history. Perhaps this was just as well, as in this way he didn't have to reconcile his "love" of Canada with his detestation of the British Empire in all its forms.
Over the years, Leaves of Grass ran into censorship problems, mostly because of the homoerotic content of a section called the "Calamus" poems. Yet it's hardly true to say that Whitman was a prophet without honour in his own land. It's simply a case of his being more consistently honoured in other places. German critics detected a certain intellectualism in his work. The French imputed to him a genius not entirely unlike that which their great-grandchildren would discern in Jerry Lewis. In Britain there were two Whitman circles, separated by class. In the North of England, working-class admirers devoted decades to Whitman-worship, even treating a lock of his hair almost as though it were a bone fragment of some especially revered saint. In London, by contrast, a group of gay Oxbridge-educated writers such as Edward Carpenter, John Addington Symonds and Edmund Gosse kept pestering him to come out of the closet - which he refused to do.
Canada was a different situation. His Canadian disciples - found everywhere but especially in Toronto, with sub-sects in such cities as Hamilton and Peterborough - were no less fervent or loopy than their opposite numbers elsewhere. Here is an example: During his summer in London, where the Free Press happily published his poetry, Whitman was introduced to Henry Saunders, a local 16-year-old. Saunders would spend the rest of his long life collecting Whitman's works and ephemera and self-publishing Whitman books and booklets almost beyond number, some in editions of as few as four copies, which he bound himself. For sheer size, his greatest Whitman project was the republishing of clippings about Whitman. These filled 219 volumes totalling 20,000 pages.
Whitman provoked a different kind of loyalty in Edmund E. Sheppard, the disputatious founder of both Saturday Night and the Toronto Daily Star. Sheppard published Whitman's poetry whenever the opportunity arose and when possible ran his picture or at least mentioned him apropos nothing at all. (One entry reads, in its entirety: "Walt Whitman was of Netherland descent and his grandmother was a Quaker. The poet himself is said to show distinctly his Dutch heritage.")
Sheppard, a native of Owen Sound, Ont., was educated in the U.S. and eventually retired there, and in between had been a rough-and-ready stagecoach driver in the American Southwest. He was, to say the least, devoutly pro-American in his sympathies, as were most of other Canadian Whitmanites. The Great War fought to preserve the Empire made the country proud of itself, leading to the important wave of Canadian cultural nationalism in the 1920s. Yet it also turned some of the nationalists away from the imperial ideal that had cost so many lives. It drew them instead towards raucous American-style populism and the culture that it spawned. The phrase "democratic ideals" was their code for this set of beliefs.
When I set out to write a novel that would use Walt Whitman as a conduit for a parable about Canada, I disliked him intensely. His flag-waving (flag-raving, you might almost say) had long driven me crazy. He seemed to me the precursor of everything that Fox News, for example, symbolizes in our own day.
But over the course of four years (and six or seven drafts), I came to feel sympathy for his countervailing virtues. He denied people's hostility, and the odds against him, to scratch out his ideas and put them in permanent form. Who could wish for a better epitaph?
George Fetherling is the author of Walt Whitman's Secret (Random House Canada).