Song of Chuck

The Whitman walking tour by Jesse Merandy was both informative and inspirational. The weather could not have been better as the air was crisp and the sun was shining as we met at stop number 1: the High Street subway entrance. What was most interesting of this spot was that Whitman himself worked here in the Rome Brother’s Print Shop. I particularly enjoyed this because it evoked for me the memory of reading about his work in the printing shop previously, at the age of 12 written about in Walt Whitman’s New York. In this particular passage he states, “What compositor, running his eye over these lines, but will easily realize the whole modus of that initiation? -the half eager, half bashful beginning- the awkward holding of the stick- the type-box, or perhaps two or three old cases, put under his feet for the novice to stand on, to raise him high enough- the thumb in the stick- the compositor’s rule- the upper case almost out of reach- the lower case spread out handier before him- learning the boxes- the pleasing mystery of the different letters, and their divisions- the great ‘e’ box- the box for spaces right by the boy’s breast- the ‘a’ box, ‘i’ box, ‘o’ box, and all the rest- the box for quads away off in the right hand corner- the slow and laborious formation, type by type, of the first line- its unlucky bursting by the too nervous pressure of the thumb- the first experience in ‘pi’, and the distributing thereof- all this, I say, what journeyman typographer cannot go back in his own experience and easily realize it?” (48). As we proceeded to the second location we passed the housing named after Walt Whitman (44-33 Henry Street). The second stop, Plymouth Church, was moving, especially upon entering the old church. It had the feel of being in the past as one of the students sat in the same row as Lincoln did many years earlier. One of the unusual things about the church was that the stained glass made no reference to angels or gods, they reflected men. The church was known for its involvement in the abolitionist movement and was part of the Underground Railroad. It was striking to me to hear that they had reverse slave auctions in where white people would buy the slaves’ freedom. The curator told us of one particular auction that involved “Pinkie”. Like her name, she was very light skinned, as her father was a white man. Being the daughter of a slave woman, she, despite appearance, was still bound to slavery until her freedom was bought at Plymouth Church. New York Magazine writes, “Most notable was the time a parishioner placed a small gold ring in the offering plate for a young slave girl named Pinkie, who returned to the church in 1927 to give thanks (and to return the ring)”(The Plymouth Church of Pilgrims, http://nymag.com/listings/attraction/plymouth-church-of-the-pilgrims/).  Jesse Merandy then lead us down to the Brooklyn Promenade which gave us the vantage point of looking across that river as Whitman did many years ago before the Brooklyn Bridge was built. They say Whitman lived long enough to see the magnificent footings of the bridge constructed, but I am not certain that he ever crossed the bridge.  We could see the waterways in which the ferries moved the residents of Brooklyn to the city of Manhattan.

We further proceeded along the promenade down towards the Eagle Warehouse where Whitman worked for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. I had been aware of the Eagle Warehouse for most of my life but had never made the connection that the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which I was aware of, was printed there, and through this course finding that Walt Whitman wrote for the Daily Eagle. You could tell that part of the building was much older than others and had been added upon over time. It was very cool to be standing on a cobblestone street listening to Jesse Merandy, a Whitman scholar, speak of Whitman. As we attempted to go to our final stop, the Fulton Pier, it was closed due to a film shoot, so we wrapped up the tour there. Some of us went for pizza and some of us went back to school. I returned the next day to the Fulton Pier and stood upon the Pier, closed my eyes, and tried to imagine what it must have been like 150 years ago. Then I read the railing that had embedded in it the words of Whitman.

Walt Whitman and Charles Dickens wrote very different versions of the same story, the story of New York. Whitman, a native New Yorker, wrote with an insider’s mindset to an audience of insiders.  Dickens, A native of Great Britain, wrote from an outside perspective to an audience of other British outsiders. Because of this, the tones of these two texts are very different. Walt Whitman had a very positive view of New York. He saw New York as a united city, a great city. In the first paragraph of Song of Myself he writes, “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”(33). New York for Whitman represented diversity and equality simultaneously and harmoniously. His view of the city was positive, celebrating the culture and humans, celebrating the culmination of perfection, “There was never any more than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now,” (35).

Dickens, on the other hand, wrote a much more bleak review. Although his review in From American Notes for General Circulation begins with a middling to positive review, “Was there ever such a sunny street as Broadway?” and “Heaven save the ladies, how they dress!” (52), it quickly degenerates into a darker and more scathing attitude of New York. Where Whitman focuses on human advancement, Dickens chooses to write about the slums and a holding prison called The Tomb. The guards of The Tomb are described as having a laissez-faire attitude. When asked about the prisoners’ right to exercise, the guard replies, “Well, they do without it pretty much”(55). The prison is dark, unkempt, and named The Tombs for a very specific reason. Upon questioning the guard about the origin of the name, Dickens receives this reply, “Some suicides happened here, when it was first built. I expect it come about from that.” (57). The source of the prison’s name is not the only thing that horrifies Dickens; he also takes time to write about both the fact that the prisoners’ clothes are kept strewn about the floor because of the lack of hooks, and also about a boy who is being held in the prison, not because he has committed a crime, but because he is being held as a witness against his father. This last bit of information contrasts sharply against the picture of a civilized city painted by Walt Whitman.

But Dickens’ does not stop with the depressing description of The Tombs; he even goes so far as to describe the inhabitants of New York as different types of animals. The working classes become “pigs” who are only concerned with their own well being and recognize each other by sight instead of conversation. Alongside the pigs are the “dogs”, which one is led to believe are the criminals of New York. Wall Street’s portrayal is particularly poignant presently as Dickens’ writes, “Many a rapid fortune has been made in this street, and many a no less rapid ruin” (53). In conclusion, although Dickens and his literary ability were welcomed to New York with pomp and celebration, he did a great disservice to the city by describing only the negative aspects and generally ignoring the positive sides described exhaustively by Whitman.

The passage from Leaves of Grass of the “29th Bather” speaks of 28 young men bathing by the shore with a voyeur amongst them.  When I first read the passage, I felt that Walt Whitman was the actual voyeur by the way that he described the entire scene, as if he were looking through the window. I believe, in reading this passage, that he is the woman admiring the men, but to disguise his homosexuality he disguises his view in the form of a woman. As the passage proceeds, the word “she” becomes absent half way through the text. The line, “twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.” I think refers to his disguised homoesexual tendencies over the first twenty-eight years of his life before he began to write Leaves of Grass. The line, “Where are you off to lady? for I see you,” I think refers to him acknowledging the homosexual part of himself. The next line, “You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room”. It is as though he will not allow his homosexual tendencies freedeom until the next line where he joins the men, “Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather, The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them”. The rest of the passage is filled with erotic references of men as, “little streams pass’d over their bodies”, “young men glissen’d with wet”, “bending arch” and the most provacative line, “they do not think whom they souse with spray”.

There are many points of view on the use of the number twenty-eight and the symbology of the female figure. One of these opinions is that of the author Vivian Pollack who writes in The Erotic Whitman that the female figure represents Walt Whitman’s younger sister to “whom he was deeply devoted” (114). In associating it to his sister, she speaks of her, Hannah Whitman Heyde, birthday being on the 28th of the month, her being 28 years of age at her time of marriage, and the 28 day menstrual cycle of women, or the lunar calendar. Hannah Whitman Heyde was unhappy in her marriage and Pollack suggests that, “the healing touch he attributed to his ‘unseen hand’ in section II of ‘Song of Myself’ was partly inspired by his desire to free his sister of the false body of her married life”.

There are others who support my thoughts that Whitman was expressing discretely his homosexual desires. As discussed in “Sex Objects: art and the dialects of desire” by Jennifer Doyle, she touches upon Gavin Butt’s work “Between you and me: Queer Disclosures in the American Art World” and his be;ief that this “segment has become a touchstone in gay literary studies, in part because it contains some of the most explicit homoerotic writing in Whitman’s poetry”. In conjunction with this, Hilton Als sees this “she” presence as “a conduit for homosexual expression and desire”. Although I see Pollack’s idea as both valid and interesting, surrounding actual numbers, I side with the other authors who see “she” as Whitman’s disguised homosexuality.