Song of Chuck

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.

Upon registering for the class, I immediately bought the three books required. Not knowing which book would be first, I began with Walt Whitman’s New York: From Manhattan to Montauk. I immediately fell in love with his work as my family has been in Brooklyn since the 1800s, so I feel some kinship to the time and places he refers to. I visited my mother today and she showed me the purchase invoice of the fruit and vegetable business of my great-grandfather in Park Slope dated 1890. Our family has a large plot of land in Greenwood Cemetery where we have been burying our dead since the late 1800’s up until current times. I’ve always been eager to know more about my Brooklyn history, and Walt is filling in some of those blanks. His detailed descriptions of the people and places in Brooklyn give a real sense of what the times were like. In Walt Whitman’s New York he goes into great detail of early Brooklyn. I was particularly proud that Whitman says that Brooklynites come from the Dutch. According to Whitman, “Be it remembered, too, that the Dutch were ahead of all other races in their regard for moral and intellectual development” (5).  At another point he writes, “The official records of Brooklyn are to be traced back, in an unbroken line, as far as 1671” (4). Upon getting up to speed and realizing that we are beginning with Leaves of Grass I found a whole different style of writing which I enjoy in a different way as I find it intelligent and filled with depth. After finding out that Whitman dropped out of school early, it made his writing all the more astounding for me. At the age of 44, I consider myself not particularly educated, although intelligent, and it is refreshing that someone lacking the formal education of the time could have done so much to affect the portrayal of history. Another way in which I identify with Whitman is that in the 1850’s he built and sold houses in Brooklyn. I have also been buying, renovating, and selling houses in Brooklyn for the past 20 years. Another way in which I can relate is that I have renovated houses while my family is still living inside in my early years of real estate investing. I knew very little of Walt Whitman’s life until the introduction of this class into my curriculum except for the fact that many places in Camden, New Jersey were named after him including the Walt Whitman Bridge. I began my real estate career in Camden, New Jersey buying handy man specials and repairing them for resale. When I told people that I was taking the class they asked me where Walt Whitman was from and I quickly responded, “Camden, New Jersey”. It was quite a pleasant surprise to find that he actually spent most of his life in Brooklyn, New York. Although I am enjoying The Leaves of Grass (Song of Myself), I truly look forward to delving deeper into Walt Whitman’s New York: From Manhattan to Montauk.