2
Suspended Pictures
In an early poem called “Pictures,” which can be found in a notebook from “about 1850” and which evidently predates Leaves of Grass, Whitman describes an inventory of images collected in the mind’s eye.1 Although the poem is framed around memory and the process of memorialization, it also casts an intriguing light forward upon Whitman’s life’s work, gesturing toward conceits and concerns that would remain central to his textual project in the decades that followed. Its scope is capacious and in an earlier note Whitman writes that each verse will present “a picture of some characteristic scene, event, group or personage—old or new, other countries or our own country.”2 To find a variation upon the poet cruising—an act, as I have begun to suggest, that is vital to Whitman’s poetics—we need look no further than the following tableau, set in ancient Athens (LG, 560):
Here and there, couples or trios, young and old, clear-faced,
and of perfect physique, walk with twined arms, in divine
friendship, happy,
Till beyond, the master appears advancing—his form shows
above the crowd, a head taller than they,
The scene is demonstrably not New York—or at least not the New York suggested by “To a Stranger,” where the “divine friendship” of love between men is concealed and passing—but it reads as a homosocial idyll that might be conceived as possible even within the glare of the urban everyday, an excavation of a cultural past that projects a possible future. Emory Holloway, in his introduction to the stand-alone published edition of the poem, characterizes “Pictures” as a work that contains the “germ of a number of later poems,” and glosses this scene of walking in ancient Greece as a clear precursor to the “Calamus” section of Leaves of Grass:
There can be little doubt that one of the sources of “Calamus” was Whitman’s early knowledge of Greek friendship, though he may have been unaware when he wrote “Calamus” that Greek friendship also had a sad decadence.3
Holloway neglects to elaborate on the nature of this “sad decadence,” which here sounds euphemistic, like the kind of phrase one might use to describe an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. But this phrase also recalls what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes as that “peculiarly close, though never precisely defined, affinity between same-sex desire and some historical condition of moribundity, called ‘decadence,’ to which not individuals or minorities but whole civilizations are subject.”4 Save for the “master” who is “advancing” somewhat ominously, this moment in “Pictures” does indeed seem “unaware” of any “sad”-ness outside the frame. It is a scene of “divine friendship, happy” which does not trouble over even such matters as gender identification, or specifications as to the nature of these “couples or trios.” In this regard it anticipates Whitman’s later conceptualization of adhesiveness, a term for love between men that he borrowed from contemporary phrenological discourses, and which was legitimated with a pseudoscientific air without any explicit invocation to suggest that adhesive contact goes beyond anything less wholesome than “walk[ing] with twined arms.”
This proto-cruising scene looks back to an imagined construction of antiquity, a cultural precursor to the gay male sexual practices that were becoming legible in New York during Whitman’s lifetime, and as well to the liminal cruising spaces of the Brooklyn waterfront and Pfaff’s, a beerhall on Broadway and Bleecker Street frequented by Whitman that was a known meeting spot for men seeking men. But the symbols of antiquity also look forward in anticipation of unrealized democratic futures. This chapter will be concerned, then, with the importance of looking at Whitman’s work as both a temporal and an erotic phenomenon. Most obviously, I am referring to the optical look between strangers, that crucial instrument of perception in what Whitman terms, in the title of one of the Calamus poems, the “City of Orgies”; a place, indeed, where relations between eyes bear an orgiastic quality. But these acts of looking, for Whitman, are also intimately connected with the visual, and just as this Athenian scene is imagined in a poem called “Pictures,” many of the cruising encounters found in Whitman’s work are rendered in relation to his interests in photography and daguerreotypes. Indeed, this scene from “Pictures” bespeaks a particular mode of aesthetic attention that points to the poet’s fixation with forms of still and moving images. It suggests a temporality that exceeds stillness, a duration (“till”) that unfolds as a succession of motions, “walk[ing] with twined arms” and “advancing.”
If, in “Pictures,” the occupation of a memory palace is a form of conquest, a kind of mental excellence capable of bringing images drawn from sources both cultural and personal into the orbit of a single mind, the poem suggests that this possession also pulls off the feat of suspending these images between the fixity of their representation and the flux of their original iteration. In Whitman’s picture gallery, pictures are hung “suspended” between the process of reification that makes their arrangement on a wall possible and the sensuous immediacy of the lives they contain, scenes of dynamic gesture and movement; a video of the heart, to borrow Christopher Ricks’s phrase, that flashes by.5 Whitman was contemporary with developments in animated photography that would make such a gallery possible, like Muybridge’s work on locomotion in 1877–78, one of the period’s most notable discoveries. This poem predates such developments, and if it is overreaching to claim that it predicts the advent of the moving image as a classifiable object, it nonetheless attests to a capacity to figure motion through movement between lines, rather than frames. Lineation has been a key focus in critical attempts to consider Whitman’s work as protocinematic, where the trademark catalogs of Leaves of Grass suggest parallels with montage. A short 1966 essay by Alice Ahlers is one of the earliest attempts to suggest this relation; she writes that Whitman approximates cinematic “fast motion” by listing “words, images, and ideas one after the other,” and “slow motion” through “repetitious description,” but takes as given that lines and frames easily map onto one another.6 This chapter will instead consider images in Whitman’s writing as tense objects, distributed across the spectrum of the still and the moving, the whole and the part, the dead and the animate. These pairs are not so much polarities as conditions in determinate relation with one another, each recalling or gesturing to their other.
The pictures in Whitman’s imagined gallery attest to the multiplicity of this visual imagination, but they also recall the poet’s actual visit to a picture gallery, where what was striking was a certain visual stillness. In 1846, while he was working as a journalist and editor at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Whitman went to Plumbe’s Daguerreotype Gallery at Broadway and Murray Street in New York City. “You will see more life there,” he wrote in an article about his visit, “more variety, more human nature” than in “any spot we know of.”7 As in “Pictures,” Whitman evokes this space in writing through deictic narration, a surrogate for the “peering gaze” surveying the gallery’s pictures, signaling that “here is one now” and then “another, nearby.” The cumulative effect of this “great legion of human faces, of human eyes gazing silently but fixedly upon you” as you pass from one to the next creates the impression of a “peopled world” experienced as an “immense Phantom concourse.” This journalistic account bears tangible linguistic echoes to the register of poems published much later in the numerous editions of Leaves of Grass, as though his body of work might be conceived of as an extended practice of certain ideas whose respective iterations play out in different lights, or are apprehended through numerous apertures. This notion of the “phantom concourse” in particular anticipates the poetic assemblies that became notable set-pieces in his writing, lists which often—in keeping with the form’s epic roots—unfold as processions, like the “shadowy processions of the portraits of the past users” of machines in “Song of the Broad-Axe” (LG, 158). This relation between processions and portraits, yielding a pageant made up by images, is corroborated by an earlier note outlining the idea for “Pictures”:
Poem of Pictures. Each verse presenting a picture of some characteristic scene, event, group or personage—old or new, other countries or our own country.8
The movement from picture to picture both in the poet’s mental gallery and in Plumbe’s, the former a kind of memory itself and the latter a memory of a place rendered in journalistic prose, puts the persons seeing—both the poet and his reader—in a position of liminal perception, where “old” and “new” collide, and “other countries” emerge. The procession on the “phantom concourse” stages this spatiotemporal blur by leaving the sense of movement ambiguous; do we walk by these pictures, on a guided tour of the poet’s memory palace, or are we fixed stationary as an audience transported to another plane, with the pageant of the living and dead possessing our line of vision? In epic form the catalog typically introduces a pause where the action proper is suspended and the list takes over; it marks an aspect shift within the same narrative world. In “Pictures” this succession of scenes is the main event, without the firm ground of an external reality, which remains present only as the material of memory. Even those images that are culturally or historically corroborable, like “Shakespeare” or “Adam in Paradise” (LG, 561–62), arise within the act of lyric remembering: the things that I have seen, that I have read.
This intersection between the transitory and lasting speaks to the images in “Pictures,” themselves a jumble of the “old” and “new” which hang “suspended” between the past of their occurrence and the indefinite futurity of their preservation, as portraits “on the walls hanging” and “carefully kept.” Like a daguerreotype gallery, where the portraits are “mute as the grave” but can nonetheless deceive us into identifying “the semblance with the reality” (BDE), these pictures are given new life by being archived in a poem, and some seem more alive still by their seeming capacity to move, described through details that suggest something beyond the still frame. Moving portraits such as these, I argue, are consonant with the experiential and indeed erotic uniqueness of urban modernity, the “City of Orgies” that is home to “shifting tableaus” (LG, 107). Thomas E. Yingling writes, glossing Michael Moon’s work, that “sexuality in Whitman”—as in this orgiastic city—“is intertextual with (and thus not simply a screen for)” other “discursive concerns,” including “democratic and mystical cosmic unions,” as well as unions with images.9
The moving Athenian scene anticipates, as Holloway somewhat cagily notes, those scenes of adhesiveness in “Calamus,” but those scenes themselves wear different faces. In this section of Leaves of Grass, in which the poems whose situations most resemble acts of cruising are to be found, happiness is interlaced with shame, and the familiarity of “divine friendship” is invoked alongside the uncanniness of anonymous encounters, as in “To a Stranger.” The sequence thus makes for an ambivalent whole, in which homosexual desire is at once utopic and estranging. The visual quality of “Calamus” is thus not merely an extension of the image-as-memory mode that a poem like “Pictures” establishes but a statement of intent for the poet in his life’s project. The pictures of encounter that emerge in “Calamus” are a means of recuperating such encounters from the transient temporality of the urban environment and the threats posed by social attitudes which force adhesiveness beneath respectable visibility. This poetics of cruising is thus multiply adhesive, both gravitating around connections between men and in turn yielding its own connectivity between temporalities and “suspended” images. The urban encounter is then invested with futurity through anticipated remembrance and the amorous weight of a submerged and shared past, which makes the strange familiar.
Calamus in the Streets
The Calamus section indeed begins away from “other people.” Its first poem, “In Paths Untrodden,” frames the love between men in relation to a solitary pastoral scene, the “growth by margins of pond-waters”; a “secluded spot” where the poet “can respond as I would not dare elsewhere” and “celebrate the need of comrades” (LG, 97). Since its inclusion in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, “Calamus” has always begun with this poem, which thus establishes metonymically the rural compositional situation from which the sequence arises, itself named after the phallic-like calamus plant growing by these untrodden paths. “Calamus” moves between several locales, from pond-waters to Louisiana (“I Saw in Louisiana a Live Oak Growing,” LG, 108), the “capitol” (“When I Heard at the Close of Day,” 105) and “Manhattan” (“City of Orgies,” 107), the latter of which will be the main concern of this chapter. These settings are cast in a relation whereby the pastoral is coded as a scene of reflection, an escape from the “life that exhibits itself” in other settings, and thus also acts as a taking stock of that life. To be “away from the clank of the world” allows the poet to develop the negatives of the images he has made out of the urban everyday, the pleasures he has been “offering to feed my soul,” rooted in “songs” of “manly attachment” that he “project[s]” along “that substantial life.” This poem exemplifies Michael Snediker’s observation that many of Whitman’s “cruisy” or “proto-cruising” poems figure a “speaker alone,” in scenes of solitude that “rehearse, reiterate, or prepare for earlier and future erotic encounters,” and speak to the act of composition as a reworking of raw material in the roughness of pastoral seclusion.10 It turns snatches of remembered glances into the sensible material of art, which pertains not just to aesthetic form but to its execution as song and celebration, and apostrophizes the democratic potential of “manly attachment.”
The relation between memory, composition, and the rough is metaphorically elastic, and can be conceptualized in terms of written iterations—as in notes or drafts—and the photographic stuff of negatives and images in development. Whitman’s journal of encounters with young men, resembling something like a cruising diary, demonstrates the former. These “pleasures” are in initial and miniature form, made up of situational or physiognomic details that aid remembrance: “Saturday night Mike Ellis—wandering at the corner of Lexington av. & 32nd st. —took him home to 150 37th street, —4th story back room—bitter cold night,” or “James Sloan (night of Sept 18 ’62) 23rd year of age—plain homely, American.”11 Graham Robb writes of these “compressed jottings” as the “dry ingredients that could later be used to produce delicious memories and fill the future society of comrades with bodies and faces,” as if the act of erotic looking is a form of harvesting, giving shape and definition to an idealized future.12 While these “notes of encounter” attest to the role of writing or jotting in the cultivation of “delicious pleasures,” the actual urban “songs” that the poet projects in paths untrodden emphasize the visual dimensions at play amid the “clank of the world.” The poems frame these encounters as scenes or tableaux and emphasize the look or the glimpse as an instrument of realization. Whitman’s rough jottings about the “roughs” he loved, being made up predominantly of young working-class men, preserve specific instances of a mode of vision that the poems celebrate more generally, without names or details, and through their own acoustic iterations.
This mixed metaphorical “clank” is never louder than in “City of Orgies” (LG, 107), the sequence’s most explicit invocation of Manhattan as a site of erotic looking:
City of orgies, walks and joys,
City whom that I have lived and sung in your midst will one
day make you illustrious,
Not the pageants of you, not your shifting tableaus, your
spectacles, repay me,
Not the interminable rows of your houses, nor the ships at the
wharves,
Nor the processions in the streets, nor the bright windows with
goods in them,
Nor to converse with learn’d persons, nor the bright windows with
soiree or feast;
Not those, but as I pass O Manhattan, your frequent and swift
flash of eyes offering me love,
Offering response to my own—these repay me,
Lovers, continual lovers, only repay me.
In its very mise-en-page the poem embodies a distinction Whitman makes in “In Paths Untrodden” between “the life that exhibits itself” and “the life that does not exhibit itself, yet contains all the rest.” To read this poem aloud is to make vocal a bathos of enumeration; the succession of negative particles lends the feeling of a poet stalling or delaying his main observation with counterexamples. The action of loafing here takes a strangely epic turn. The continual negative apostrophes dwell in the bombast of the pageants they claim to reject, which says something of the dominance of the “life that exhibits itself.” These relentless “spectacles” exhibit modes of belonging to the city and offer a conception of the city as a work of art itself, “an anarchic and unstoppable proliferation of images” in which these “shifting tableaus” resemble tableaux vivants, a “series of living and moving images” where the “crowds do not provide a mere backdrop or audience” but are “at the center of the stage.”13
If, as Laure Katsaros writes, the New York of Leaves of Grass “becomes like a living American Museum” akin to the spectacles of the contemporary entertainer P. T. Barnum, this is apprehended less as a maximal blur than as a sight in which desire resides in the shapes the cruiser makes out from within the spectacle.14 It is after all the covert and less exhibiting “flash of eyes” that contains “all the rest”; the only things that can “repay” the walking poet are the successive but singular intimacies carved out within this proliferation. If Whitman claims to make “illustrious” the Manhattan in which he has “lived and sung,” he is remunerated for singing its praises by the fleeting and feelingful encounters with strangers that it allows him. David S. Reynolds writes that Whitman was “appalled in the 1850s when holiday celebrations began to be mass-oriented spectacles by professionals,” and suggests that such illustrious lines elsewhere in his work as “I celebrate myself” (“Song of Myself,” LG, 26) are an attempt to “restore the idea of celebration” back to the “personal.”15 Whitman’s preoccupation with spectacles frames the poem itself as an alternative and personal act of celebration.
And this is not just any celebration, but an orgy. The poem’s first line convenes a site-specific, phonetic “orgy” by merging the sounds found in “walks,” “joys,” and “city.” The word’s association with revelry suggests that the poem’s very cause for celebration also relates to the celebratory, as though looks between strangers are akin to an orgiastic ceremony. In supposing these strangers to be “lovers,” Whitman gets at the erotic resonance of “orgy” and its meaning as sex between multiple people. Consistent to both definitions is a loss of self, subsumed by Bacchanalian ecstasy or a corporeal erotic mass. Read thus, these looks have an imagined physical efficacy in conjoining the anonymous, something that also occurs in “To a Stranger”: “your body has become not yours only, nor left my body mine only.” Whitman’s notion of “adhesiveness” also imagines this potentiality as corporeal, defined as that which “fuses, ties, and aggregates, making the races comrades, and fraternizing all” (although it is important to note that Whitman’s racial politics in his later years markedly veer from this utopic formulation).16 In an 1876 preface Whitman inflects this imagined political adhesiveness with its homosexual resonance, which is described in relation to the “special meaning” of “Calamus”; the “beautiful and sane affection of man for man, latent in all the young fellows” is needed for the “United States” to be “effectually welded together” (LG, 657). This orgiastic “flash of eyes” thus semantically echoes “adhesiveness” and embodies the latter term’s particular relation to love between strangers. “Here is adhesiveness,” Whitman signals in “Song of the Open Road” (LG, 130), and do “you know what it is as you pass to be loved by strangers? / Do you know the talk of those turning eyeballs?”
This phrase seems to describe both the verbal talk of those whose eyeballs are turning (the gazing strangers) and, more strangely, the verbal expressiveness of the eyeballs themselves, as though glancing—that paralinguistic feature of encountering strangers—nevertheless possesses a secret ocular language. Like the “surely” of “To a Stranger,” the “balls” harnessed to the “eye” here place a kink in the verse, resulting in a markedly more visceral moment wherein we imagine eyes not as features of a face but instead as isolated from a body, and this potential violence of disembodiment will be a concern later in this chapter. Simmel identifies the “eye-to-eye look” as a predominant feature of the metropolitan experience, an interaction which developments such as public transportation have enforced between strangers. It is something that “intertwines human beings” (as per an orgy) but leaves no “objective trace,” unlike “the word spoken and heard.” The “talk” of eyeballs is thus not literally audible, nor is it “transmissible,” being “dissolved directly in the event.”17 This untraceable quality accounts for the address of Whitman’s question, “Do you know,” and the sense that this talk is rendered in a language understandable to some and not others. The difficulty in hearing it is no doubt compounded by the “swift flash,” and knowing the “talk” thus amounts to wresting meaning from ephemeral and irruptive moments of apprehension.
This precarity is an important diversion for the cruiser, and the predominance of looking and passing by in the city can also be wielded as a means of assimilation, as in another Calamus poem entitled “A Glimpse” (LG, 112):
A glimpse through an interstice caught,
Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the
stove late of a winter night, and I unremark’d seated in a
corner,
Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently
approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold
me by the hand,
A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking
and oath and smutty jest,
There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little,
perhaps not a word.
The poem’s first line positions it ekphrastically; a voice explains a tableau glimpsed only through an “interstice,” “caught” like a snapshot through an aperture focused, with “glimpse” also bearing the archaic meaning of a “momentary shining, a flash.” The vantage point laid out in the first line at once suggests the impossibility of Whitman peeping at himself through this interstice, as though this poem were a desirous fantasy, and also dictates the reader’s position in relation to this image. The partiality of this viewpoint is figured in the poem’s play between lines and the overarching single sentence, as though the crack in the wall through which this poem is visible similarly delineates its grammatical parameters. Yet this singularity can contain multitudes; Michael Moon identifies “interstitiality” as a framing device through which Whitman can represent “fulfilled homoerotic desire,” which can be concealed from the public glare by this word’s sense of the “only intermittently or fleetingly perceptible.”18 This form of duplicity, the sense that the poem’s tableau can mean multiple things according to the knowledge of the spectator, in turn dictates the extent to which its homoeroticism goes “unremark’d.” Like the spectacles of “City of Orgies,” the surrounding theater of acceptable masculinities—“drinking and oath and smutty jest”—provide a camouflage or distraction from the poem’s main event, and call to mind a proto–gay bar like the aforementioned Pfaff’s, where Whitman would drink and meet men in the 1860s. This interstitiality is also analogous to the “swift flash” of peripatetic apprehension outside of the bar and in the public glare of the city, which is also silent (“speaking little”) and passing, as in “To a Stranger.” That very silence allows queer interaction to be double-tongued; on the one hand it is merely a look between strangers; on the other, the first step in a cruising encounter. This gets at the dual meaning of “passing” in that such partiality allows interactions to “pass” as a palatable form of kinship to the uninitiated. As an image captured interstitially, “A Glimpse” suggests that even within a quasi-photographic capture of a scene there is always more than meets the eye.
The textual activity of a poem thus enacts the sense in which the “talk” of “turning eyeballs” is a site whose multiplicity of meanings is helped along by its leaving no “objective trace.” Unlike the “word spoken and heard,” this talk finds furtive home in the poem itself. This negotiation of “talk” also provides a way of understanding the “objective” speech of Whitman’s cruising poems, in particular his play with pronominal lyric conventions, as being similarly double-tongued, cruising the reader who is in the know. In an essay on “Calamus” and lyric, John Hicks writes that “the persona adopted by the poetic I seems to follow from the you Whitman seeks to address rather than the other way around,” and that frequently in poems in which the addressee is unspecified, “the default referent” of this indeterminate you becomes “you yourself—the reader.”19 This play with apostrophe is present in “To a Stranger,” whose address to the “Passing stranger” describes both someone its speaker passes in the street and the strange reader passing through this text. But this expanded apostrophe is more particularized than that of a “default referent.” In other words, Whitman is not just cruising any reader here. The poem “Among the Multitude” (LG, 115), both in its published form and in a suggestive manuscript, tantalizes its “you” by gesturing to a certain readerly knowledge:
Among the men and women the multitude,
I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs,
Acknowledging none else, not parent, wife, husband, brother,
child, any nearer than I am,
Some are baffled, but that one is not—that one knows me.
Ah lover and perfect equal,
I meant that you should discover me so by faint indirections,
And I when I meet you mean to discover you by the like in
you.
Berlant and Warner write that “making a queer world has required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form.”20 Like “City of Orgies” and “A Glimpse,” this poem situates itself in the midst of traditional categories of kinship, that of “parent, wife, husband, brother,” as a way of demarcating a “divine” subjective difference. It thus amounts to another instance of Whitman’s poetics of deferral. This difference is again legible in terms of knowledge, and the sense in which it follows that if “that one knows me” then he must also be versed in the “talk” of “turning eyeballs,” without which others are “baffled.” Turning eyeballs can also suggest a portrait of reading, eyes scanning across lines of text, and the focus upon a secret talk hermeneutically flirts with the reader, and extends the challenge of taking up the position of the special “one” who can fill in the poem’s gaps. Its omissions of gender, or of an explicit erotics, invite us to follow the poet’s “faint indirections.”
This is made clear in an earlier, more directly addressed manuscript version dated 1857–59, and titled “To Those One Who Will Understand”:
Among the men and women
of all times, [I perceive that] you pick me
out by secret and divine
signs, [You know me—you draw close]
You acknowledge none else—not
parent wife husband, friend,
any [nearer or dearer to you] than I am. -
Some are baffled—but you are not baffled—you
know me. —
O young man! O woman! O
my lover and equal! I
meant that you should discover me [so] by my faint
indirections,
And I, when I meet you, mean
to discover you by the
same in you. —21
The “O . . . !” apostrophes of this version are tempered into an “Ah” in the published version, whose longer lines render the poem now as a fluid and incipient coming into being where the heavily punctuated manuscript and its short lines suggest a more fragmented visual experience, of eyeballs turning more sharply. The “one” of “Among the Multitude” becomes “you,” the reader, an addressee who by entering into the solitary act of reading this poem is supposed different from the other “men and women of all times” who may come to encounter it. By introducing the direct address from the start, as opposed to holding off until the second and final stanza in the published version, Whitman renders the space of the poem more explicitly as both that of the urban multitude but also the space of reading, and it yields an encounter between text and reader in which the phenomenological proximity to one another surmounts even those relations that are notionally “nearer and dearer.” But this draft is again a contested interpretive surface, and cruises us insofar as it only yields its meanings to us if we apply a secret knowledge and follow its “indirections.” Whitman’s crossed out “O young man! O woman!” is one such red herring. To state that the use of an indeterminate gender of address is merely a way of hiding the underlying and solely male “comradeship” would simplify such use, and ignore its queerer elasticity. Michael Davidson observes that the “eternal debate” over Whitman’s sexuality has been “framed within an identitarian (and heterosexist) logic,” the notion that if he is “interested in stevedores and boat captains” he is “therefore not interested in women.”22 This kind of masculinist framing misses the larger democratic implications of Whitman’s self-declared poetic project and his avowal of writing “poems of women entirely as much as men” (“A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” LG, 482). Davidson instead turns his attention to Whitman’s “cross-dressing” as a nuanced feature of his poetic language, with specific reference to the twenty-ninth bather section of “Song of Myself,” where the poet adopts a “feminine position in order to participate erotically with other males” and in so doing puts forth a more complex version of “new emerging sexual categories” in a manner that invites queering.23
Like “Among the Multitude,” “To a Stranger” also remains available to a more conventional heterosexual reading, but bears its queer resonance in the openness to be read alternately. Its blurring of gender (“he I was seeking, or she I was seeking”) is cognizant of what “you,” its reader, does or does not know. Written into these poems is a demand that we do more than glimpse them, or conversely that we are able to “know” them with only a glimpse. In response, they claim to know us through our own act of looking. The city poems stand out in “Calamus” not only because they represent specifically the “comradeship” between strangers, but because the experiential model offered by looking at strangers in cities lends these poems a reflexivity, and the sense that they are themselves thinking about how to represent homoerotic desire in a poem and the importance of the reader in such representations. These poems discover a way of glancing back at their reader through celebrating and harnessing fleetingness. Read together as a sequence in isolation, these poems begin to proffer a coherent poetic strategy of confession through indirection that blends the mystery of flirtation with the solidarity of intimacy. Their sense of gay pride is not that of pageants or parades but of the city’s more private processions; the flashes of eyes that sustain the sexually curious walker with the suggestion of abundance and possibility, along with snatches of togetherness, however transient, to be recalled and enjoyed in solitude.
It would be unforthcoming not to mention at this juncture the evident masturbatory echoes in this account of desire; a bank of remembered visual material wherein the poet is seen “projecting them along that substantial life,” the prolonged life of fantasy, and giving fulfillment to the brief or the partial. Sam Ladkin, in an essay on Whitman and onanism, writes of the “inherent” and “contradictory” utopianism of masturbation, “the crisis caused by its own tendency towards satisfaction that models fulfilment even as it’s energized by the palpable lack of that which it desires.”24 The city poems of “Calamus,” traveling between the furtive and the ecstatic, satisfy themselves with generative ways of responding to lack. They make imagination interstiality’s bedfellow, filling in gaps in vision or shortages of consummation with the fantasy of fulfillment, which feeds individual self-pleasure and in turn gestures to the future pleasure of the polis. Much of the work on Whitman and masturbation rightly centers the body of the poet himself as the locus of political potentiality, as in Michael Moon’s classic study of the poet’s “dissemination.” Moon situates the “corporeal-utopian program” of Whitman’s writing, its metonymic principle of substitution in disseminating its author’s bodily presence, as a response to the “devaluation of bodily life that his culture was in the process of imposing on its inhabitants” in the 1850s.25 This devaluation derived from a fear of the “imminent dangers” seen as “threatening the integrity of the American body politic.”26 Seen in the light of the anti-onanist discourses of the male purity movement, the sheer corporeality of Leaves of Grass becomes a reassertion of embodiment, of self-pleasure as political pleasure at the very moment of its vexation. Tropes of fluidity, and of composition as ejaculation, abound in Whitman’s writing, and M. Jimmie Killingsworth reads the 1856 “Bunch Poem (Spontaneous Me)” as the author figuring his poems as “‘bunches’ of semen he had tossed from himself.”27 If the more obviously masturbatory poems involve an absorption in the self, whose self-pleasure is the occasion and the medium of a reader’s encounter with him, the cruising poems of “Calamus” might then offer premasturbatory “glimpses” or apprehensions that reassert the role other bodies play in onanistic fantasies and illuminate the way the urban cruiser becomes attached to them as a mental activity. Conceiving of them thus is also to place them in dialogue with another strain of the Calamus sequence that has a wildly different tenor, juxtaposed with the celebrations of adhesiveness and erotic looking. The poems of the body that accompany the poems of the city, crudely categorized, echo the masturbatory resonance of Whitman’s larger sense of corporeal substitution. But through this dialogue they also make apparent a darkness attending homosexual desire, and the substitution of semen for another bodily fluid, one whose extraction is a process of some violence.
Cruising for a Bruising
Whitman writes, in “Trickle Drops” (LG, 107):
Trickle drops! my blue veins leaving!
O drops of me! trickle, slow drops,
Candid from me falling, drip, bleeding drops,
From wounds made to free you whence you were prison’d,
From my face, from my forehead and lips,
From my breast, from within where I was conceal’d, press
forth red drops, confession drops,
Stain every page, stain every song I sing, every word I say,
bloody drops,
Let them know your scarlet heat, let them glisten,
Saturate them with yourself all ashamed and wet,
Glow upon all I have written or shall write, bleeding drops,
Let it all be seen in your light, blushing drops.
The long lines of this poem trickle, spilling across boundaries in Whitman’s peculiar lineation, such that it cannot quite be called enjambment. Its spillages of blood, and blood as ink, are not brought into structural regularity nor plugged until the poem’s end, which signals its unfolding over only one sentence. As with “In Paths Untrodden” and its courting of the pastoral, this poem’s anatomical texture plays a metonymic role within the Calamus sequence, concerned as it is with commenting upon the composition of “every page” and the songs that “I sing.” Whitman makes a virtue of injury, as though a violence inflicted unto himself yields a greater verisimilitude; these are “confession drops” after all, falling “candid” from incisions deliberately “made” to bleed them. It seems, in fact, that at one point this schema may have taken the place of the pastoral as the sequence’s presiding image. In a series of notes around 1860, the year “Calamus” first appeared in Leaves of Grass, the poet scribbled a list of possible titles for the section including “Drops of My Blood,” “Flames of Confession,” “Nature Flames” and even “Verses of Evil,” seeming to take, perhaps unconsciously, a leaf out of Baudelaire’s book of evil’s flowers.28
These titles speak to a spectrum of confessional modes; a poet being bled, a poet putting forth flamboyant spectacles of confession or the revelation of his “Nature,” or else one turning verses which figure evil and depravity. “Trickle Drops” brings together the first few of these textures, figured as drops of blood which “glow,” their light ignited by reading. Although preoccupied by the act and tropes of writing, this poem seems at once oblivious to reading yet aware that its own drops are confessional phenomena, insofar as confession implies an interlocutor whether real or imagined. This poem’s sense of confession is far different to that of the cruising poems, for its imperatives “Let them know your scarlet heat” and “Saturate them with yourself all ashamed and wet” seem directed not only at the preceding list of “page,” “song,” and “word” but at a distant readership, a “them.” Absent here is the sense of textual indirection, replaced instead with a type of physiological nudity, “all ashamed and wet.” This poem sits in a strange intratextual dialogue with “Here the Frailest Leaves of Me” (LG, 112), which resides later in “Calamus” and similarly transfigures the text as corporeal but instead appears anxious about the exposure of something evil, perhaps, in the poet’s inner nature. It reads:
Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting,
Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose
them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.
These lines present contradictions both to the cruising poems, which wield shame and secrecy rather than bemoaning them, and to “Trickle Drops,” which voices an active choice to “expose” and relishes the pain of doing so. If “Trickle Drops” gets drunk off the pain, this poem marks the hangover—frail, regretting and forgetting about the flagrancy and confessions of the night before, keen to shuffle back into the closet. At first glance this interplay between confession and shame, imagined as both wounding and textual, seems at odds with the dexterous negotiations of candor found in the cruising poems. And yet, one source of this poem’s anxiety is not knowing who will come to read it, thus leaving it exposed to danger. These uncertainties possess a kinship with the anonymity of cruising and the fear that a stranger could turn on you or turn you in. Like the cautious cruiser, the poem has future woundings in mind. Implicit in Whitman’s demarcation that this poem embodies him at his “frailest” is the hope that readers will invest in this metaphor to such an extent that they treat the text with the delicacy they would a frail human body, and refrain from wounding it further.
Perhaps they might even nurse it. The shared ground between candor and eroticism is not only found in these Calamus poems but emerges strangely in Drum-Taps, the 1865 sequence which recalls Whitman’s days as a nurse in Washington during the American Civil War. A striking late stanza in the poem “The Wound Dresser” (LG, 261) reads:
I am faithful, I do not give out,
The fractur’d thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen,
These and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in my
breast a fire, a burning flame.)
Amidst the discomfort of witnessing the poet eroticize the soldier’s wounds is an intricate metaphorical schema which aligns those wounds with the speaker’s sexual confession. Earlier in the poem the recollected space of the hospital is rendered as a unique form of refuge, a space apart from the everyday exterior where “the world of gain and appearance and mirth goes on” (260). The furtive confession of the poet’s desire exists in a strange mimetic relation to the open wound he is dressing, for it too is dressed and contained within the parentheses that separate it from the site of physical contact: “These and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in my breast a fire, a burning flame)”; the heat of desire, the flames of confession. The utterance “I do not give out” can mean both not to take rest, as a conscientious nurse, but also not to speak out or declare, to keep the secret desire for the soldier “deep in” his breast through punctuation just as he dresses the soldier’s deep abdomen wound. In unpublished notes for a lecture on Whitman’s Drum-Taps, J. H. Prynne notes a similar moment in the “original printing” of “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown” (LG, 256) where “the long verse lines” could “mostly not be fitted unbroken into the page format; all but the first and last (shorter) lines were broken, with justified left and right margin.”29 The “longest line of all” took up “three lines of type, and was broken by a hyphen,” as here:
At my feet more distinctly a soldier, a mere lad, in
danger of bleeding to death, (he is shot in the ab-
domen;)
Prynne writes that the “alert reader will notice that a small sharp piece of metal (the piece of type bearing the hyphen, made of lead like a bullet) has broken into the body of the word (the medical, not commonplace word) for this soldier’s stomach, just where the enemy bullet has inflicted the death-wound.”30 Wounding becomes multiplied once again, suggested as contiguous with reading by the mimetically violent lineation that organizes that reading. The soldiers’ wounds in these poems prove a canvas for Whitman to project the potentially wounding nature of his own exposure, his being read, and figured through punctuation as forms of erotic openings themselves. The wound dresser of the former poem’s title is in this way seen to be dressing, or preventing, his very own wounds, as the parenthesized final lines corroborate: “(Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested, / Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips).” Like the sense of wounding as exposure in “Trickle Drops” and “Here the Frailest Leaves,” poems which frame the Calamus cluster as a form of torturous confession, the wounds of this poem also seem inflicted by the potential revelation of homoerotic desire. But “The Wound Dresser” elaborates upon the unfolding of such wounding by suggesting that in engaging in perceptual interaction with an erotic object, in this case a wounded soldier, one runs the risk of being glanced back at, a glance that could make a laceration much like the wounds in question, and just as candid and revealing; “so sickening, so offensive,” or a verse of evil. Desire’s ability to glance is thus related specifically to an object’s capacity to incorporate and reflect back the abject or forbidden desire that the looker confers upon it; upon a vulnerable corporeal surface that in being close to death is on the very brink of animism.
While this moment of wounding erotic contact is rendered in an immediate present tense, its temporal framing as the recollection of an “old man bending” who comes “among new faces” illuminates the way that it is pains, and not just “pleasures,” that “develop later” in our “inner darkroom.” The gap in which such development arises might even be the pain’s root, as in the way that “shame,” as Michael Snediker writes in response to Sedgwick, occurs in the “distance between selves,” between “a ‘younger self’ and the self that currently is writing,” such that the “younger self might be experienced not only as having written those ‘younger fictions,’ but as a ‘younger fiction in his own right.’”31 The act of remembrance is also an act of composition, of writing a younger self into being through memory’s unfolding, and this poem suggests that shame’s inherent “after”-ness, a negative affect which always intervenes after the experience of a more positive one, like enjoyment, allows it to exceed the parameters of immediate or proximate succession and survive over the course of many years, perhaps even intensified by such longevity. This memory, shaped by shame, also unfolds with a proleptically cinematic quality, in “silence, in dreams’ projections.” This phrase frames the poem’s final section, as though the conjuring of “dreams’ projections” is efficacious, bringing about the act of “returning, resuming,” and offers an experiential surrogate for the lingering “kiss[ses]” that dwell on the poet’s “bearded lips.”
The visual dimension of recollection as a form of montage enacts the possibility of return for old wounds, or memories with their own punctums. In “The Wound Dresser,” the image as a trace of experience is intimately linked with confession and exposure, within a process of self-revelation that has the capacity to “pierce” across time and space, and which reveals something of, or to, the person in the throes of recollection. The metonymic frame of “Trickle Drops,” for example, comments reflexively on the activity of “Calamus” using a painterly dimension, whereby the textual and acoustic are seen as a form of image practice made up by dripping, just as a drop only trickles after it has dropped and found a surface. “The Wound Dresser” speaks to the manner of remembrance which informs that very anxiety about confession and has a haptic dimension, of being touched or pierced by memories or sensations, which also gestures to the autoerotic imperative of touching yourself. The war on onanism bears a relation to the Civil War’s battlefield in Whitman’s writing, and is consonant with the trademark proximity he draws between the body and the body politic. Sam Ladkin reads the Civil War poems—alongside Rob Halpern’s 2012 collection Music for Porn, which takes them as a chief influence—as another of Whitman’s defenses of masturbation, which is seen as a form of fecundity in which the nurse’s “excessive generosity” is posited as an “onanistic seed to be spilt on the territory of the Civil War dead.”32 The extended temporality of “The Wound Dresser,” in which images of martial intimacy are preserved over time, speaks to the preservationist instinct of onanistic fantasy. Whitman’s love for the soldiers offers him a way to sing the songs of “manly attachment” in the most politically tense of contexts, and the sensory textures of wounds and touches provide him with a vivid palette for figuring the power of shame and the release of revelation, which are matters woven throughout the prewar Calamus sequence alongside its more optimistic cruising pictures. But what the nurse and soldier dynamic of “The Wound Dresser” ultimately provides is a recuperated metaphorical portrait of the love between men as a human good, one that extends also to Whitman’s relation with his reader, which I will explore at greater length later in this chapter. The Washington battlefield may at first glance feel a long way from Manhattan, the city of orgies, but correspondences between them come to light with the shared emergence of another pseudoscientific discourse. Like “adhesiveness,” this discourse fascinated Whitman, and it took multiple forms as an interpersonal category of perception, an atmosphere of potentiality, and a form of occult healing all at once. Most of all, it offered a telling figuration for his own poetics.
Adhesive Magnetism
In an 1863 letter written to Le Baron Russell from Washington, two years before the first appearance of “The Wound Dresser,” the poet writes that
I feel much possessed with the wounded & sick soldiers—they have taken a powerful hold of me, & I am very happy among them—it is perhaps the greatest interchange of magnetism human relations are capable of.33
Whitman is here using the term “magnetism” in its connection with mesmerism, a contemporary occult practice related to hypnosis that was posited as a form of medical healing. Animal magnetism refers to “an invisible, superfine fluid existing in and around all objects of the universe,” and “its proper or improper distribution within any individual explained that person’s state of health or disease.”34 The magnetist conceives of the “the body as a magnet,” seeking “to activate the human magnetic poles” in order to “send the fluid coursing properly” by “touching the patient,” “rubbing the afflicted portions of the patient’s body” or “simply by making passes in the air above them,” in effect trying to approximate the “effect produced by magnets.”35 Whitman had long believed in the capacities of animal magnetism, having written an editorial in the New York Sunday Times in 1842 that answered affirmatively to the question of his title, “Is Mesmerism True?”36 This later reference in the letter abstracts the word magnetism from the particulars of its practice, for rather than being a weighted dynamic between healer and patient it is here conceived of as an “interchange,” one in which the patients have too “taken a powerful hold” over their healer. This is consonant with the exchange at play in “The Wound Dresser” where the eponymous healer observes his own wounds while healing those of the soldiers.
As that poem attests, there is also an erotic valence in this mutual healing, an ultimate good in “human relations” whose remit is not only spiritual but sexual. Magnetism as a personal or sexual variable is more often related to a sense of health and virility, as Whitman’s other journalistic writing on this word suggests. He did not only write about the mesmeric dimension of magnetism, as in his 1842 piece, but about its more common usage as a term for mysterious individual charisma that forms attractions between people, as if a sibling to adhesiveness administered as a therapy. The guide “Manly Health and Training, with Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions,” serialized in the New-York Atlas in 1858 and published under the pseudonym Mose Velsor, was recently discovered to be written by Whitman. In it, magnetism is described as an aspirational state, as something to be attained through the physical and mental training exercises that the guide advocates. One section begins with the questions “What do you suppose is the reason that some men have so much more power over the masses than other men? —such a ‘personality’ that they can hardly appear in a crowd, or a room full of people, but their influence is felt?”37 What is it “at the bottom of the curious magnetism” such men possess? The difference that training makes is what distinguishes one man from one another, or one man from his pretrained self, who is in the first instance remarkable only in his unremarkability, someone “nobody finds it a pleasure to be near” nor “feels anything like delight from the magnetism of his voice, for there is no magnetism about it—he does not attract women, nor men either,” and “going up and down, through the city [ . . . ] he is without vigor, without attraction” (226).
Magnetism properly attained, Whitman goes on to write, is animal magnetism, “the indescribable charm which belongs to some of the finest and most spirited animals, with flashing eyes, fine action [ . . . ] that we see sometimes in the brutes” but “seldom see in the case of men,” and the “marvellous effects” of this magnetism “play invisibly out of him, wherever he moves, upon men and women in all directions” (227). That the walk, “springy and elastic,” is again taken as an exemplary gesture of magnetism makes it difficult not to think of the erotic landscape of “City of Orgies” here, the “flashing eyes” like the “swift flash of eyes” of that poem, with the “walk” a medium of expression “as I pass.” Whitman’s divergent uses of the word “magnetism” in his Civil War letter, his 1842 editorial, and his men’s health guide illuminate a shared ground between meanings seemingly opposed. On the battlefield it is a form of healing but also, “The Wound Dresser” suggests, an attraction to the act of healing and the soldier’s vulnerability. On the street it is an attraction to power and vigor, an individual charisma which nonetheless refers back to magnetism’s meaning as healing, for what is made visible is a picture of health and a potentiality in “human relations.” These accounts of magnetism are different ends of a spectrum upon which what is magnetic depends on an individual’s sensibility about what is “attractive” and what “repulsive,” and also suggest that the mesmeric and men’s health definitions are not so different after all, in that they are both gesturing to some kind of “interchange.”
And yet are these respective meanings simply, as it were, interchangeable? The “meeting of glances” that govern this interchange and, to return to Benjamin’s scrap, the aura, operates differently in the various contexts in which Whitman mobilizes it: the street, the sick bed, and the site of reading itself. Just as “magnetism” accounts, somewhat uncomfortably, for the wounds sustained by soldiers in conflict, on the one hand, and the wounds of the confessional poet on the other, the aura lingers at a strange intersection of political and erotic meanings. Halpern, in a gloss on the “perverse social alchemy” Whitman constructs out of homoerotic battlefield “affections,” writes,
Aura concentrates in the figure of this fallen soldier so attractive so repulsive. Sometimes he’s barely perceptible stalking the periphery of all I see but always available for contrary ends fundamental ambivalence of the body. A whole metaphorics of love and war my phalynx of clichés converge around his vulnerability to penetration.38
Animal magnetism gravitates around the actual presence of an aura, that “invisible, superfine fluid,” and Halpern’s account speaks to the way such a belief is abstracted as a means of describing someone’s personal magnetism. The perversity of this reading lies in the way that it yokes together these meanings; the fallen soldier’s magnetic aura emanates from his need of aura as a medium of healing, a sign of his evident sickness and thus vulnerability to further violation. The interpolation of Whitman’s “so sickening, so offensive” from “The Wound Dresser” spells out the conflicts in this desire—attractive because it’s repulsive, but also a repulsive attraction—and marks it as a fetish. The soldier, in this regard, is an apt figure for the aura’s multiplicity as a phenomenon whose very endangerment as an object confers it with a capacity to retaliate and wound back.
Power is taken as ambiguous in this formulation. It is not distributed simply, or simply weighted in favor of the nursing, magnetizing, or masturbating subject; the wounded object, vulnerable to the glance of this mediating subject, still answers with a glance. The soldier, Ladkin writes, is an “obstinate figure of ambivalence, over whom (and into whom) libidinal energies run rampant.”39 Rendered in the “present” of Halpern’s text he is foregrounded amid the “imaginative exploitation of a sexual fantasy, which involves the expression of the past of the masturbating subject (the reason a particular figure of lust is chosen), and the aspirant longing of the future (actually having that allegorical figure), but knows, too, that there can be no easy shift from longing through imagining to having.”40 This discomfiting slippage between wounding, yearning, and writing—all of which cohere within the oddly capacious parameters of “magnetism”—ultimately lights upon the operations of Whitman’s text itself. The poet’s devoted avowal of an “interchange” with his reader is simultaneous with an awareness that “there can be no easy shift from longing through imagining to having.”
Like the aura, Whitman’s text courts closeness and distance, and poses questions about its own reproducibility. A concern about the deadening effects of reproduction is palpable at several moments in Leaves of Grass; as Whitman writes in an early version of “A Song for Occupations,” “I pass so poorly with paper and types, I must pass / with the contact of bodies and souls” (LG, 177). Such statements of aesthetic failure are counterbalanced with a belief in textual animism, and in the efficacy of the metonymic principle of substitution. And yet this latter devotion is often vexed and liquid, an anxious and masturbatory exchange between text and reader made legible through blood and semen. It is the simultaneous openness and recalcitrance of Whitman’s text that makes it available to queer readings and rewritings like Halpern’s. The copresence of solicitous candor and unsettling corporeality raises the stakes of Whitman’s textual cruising and suggests that the temporal line the poet seeks to draw from text to reader simultaneously traces a history of violence; a queer terrain of shame and pleasure that is once again made visible with recourse to images.
Whitman in the Sheets
Magnetism, being a central tenet of Whitman’s visit to Plumbe’s portrait gallery in 1846, had yet another role to play in the poet’s imagination. This visit demonstrated to him a certain ground shared between strangers and portraits that was later to be illustrated in the city poems of “Calamus.” This gallery was a place to see both daguerreotypes and people, a place “commonly known” among the “crowds continually coming and going,” and was thus also a place to be seen (BDE). Whitman begins his review with reference to
the fashionable belle, the many distinguished men, the idler, the children—these alone are enough to occupy a curious train of attention. But they are not the first thing. To us, the pictures address themselves before all else.
These are two distinct forms of attention, of looking at persons on the one hand and at portraits on the other, but for Whitman they cohere in a hierarchy, where the absorption demanded by the “address” of the pictures distracts us from the hubbub of bodies and faces that surround them. Plumbe’s gallery, Katsaros writes, “had become a fashionable spot for the urban flaneurs in mid-nineteenth century New York.”41 As far as it is possible to draw an equivalence to flânerie in New York at this time, Whitman shares in the activity of the urban physiognomist, and looks both at the figures frequenting the gallery, as above, and the cast of characters he finds in the portraits, like the “woman, perhaps just married.” In describing these images thus, Whitman seeks to claim for the portraits a certain vitality, and supposes that they are no less alive than the living social types observing them. In a later paragraph he seeks to account for this potency:
There is always, to us, a strange fascination, in portraits. We love to dwell long upon them—to infer many things, from the text they preach—to pursue the current of thoughts running riot about them. It is singular what a peculiar influence is possessed by the eye of a well-painted miniature or portrait—It has a sort of magnetism. We have miniatures in our possession, which we have often held, and gazed upon the eyes in them for the half-hour! An electric chain seems to vibrate, as it were, between our brain and him or her reserved so well there by the limner’s cunning. Time, space, both are annihilated, and we identify the semblance with the reality. —And even more than that. For the strange fascination of looking at the eyes of a portrait, sometimes goes beyond what comes from the real orbs themselves. (BDE)
This “beyond” suggests some form of cognitive dissonance on the part of the viewer, who is beguiled by the interpersonal trompe l’oeil that the portraits stage such that their response exceeds what is proportional to these “orbs themselves,” and thus what is art-critically orthodox. Do these eyes then also emanate “beyond” the frames which contain them, and suggest signs of life in seemingly dead objects? Unlike the “swift flash of eyes” of “City of Orgies,” frequenting a gallery space or having an image in “our possession” allows the absorption of “dwell[ing] long upon them,” all the better to enjoy the “electric chain” that seems to emanate from them, a “sort of magnetism.” That word again. Magnetism is here made local to the eyes, to be found within a nexus of mystery and familiarity where what is magnetic is the verisimilitude of a portrait’s eyes, which are engaged in a slippage between the real and the representational such that the former may even usurp the latter. And yet this magnetism is also continually cast as foreign: “strange fascination,” “peculiar influence.” Personal magnetism may be attained, Whitman’s “Manly Guide” suggests, by training, but as an outward performance it must also remain “indescribable,” must not expose the seams of its own attainment, just as the limner’s creation of eyes is an act of “cunning” and concealing mediation. This mystery is a question, too, then, of life and death, and what is uncanny to Whitman is that these images are simultaneously vital and “life-like” while being “mute as the grave.”
They are not totally mute, however, for they have a “text to preach,” and arise from the magnetic “current of thoughts running riot about them.” This text is not an exposition so much as an extension of the image’s mysteriousness, and can be pieced together only through “inference.” In the poem “Out from Behind This Mask” (LG, 321–22), published thirty years after this account of the visit to Plumbe’s gallery, Whitman turns this “strange fascination” about portraiture toward his own visage. The poem refers to an engraving by William J. Linton, which was itself based on an 1871 photograph of the poet taken by George C. Potter, that faced “The Wound Dresser” in the 1876 edition of Leaves of Grass. This poem in some sense makes literal work of rendering an image as a “text to preach,” and yet it is appropriately enough less a narration or explanation of that image than it is a further muddying of the waters through lyric address. At the head of an early manuscript draft of the poem, there can be seen an explanatory line, excised from the final published version, that speaks back to the sense of an arrested glance that goes “beyond” the parameters of portraiture:
(On an engraved head, a Portrait “looking
at you.”)42
As seen on the manuscript this line seems to play the role of subtitle, written in a smaller hand and placed in parentheses underneath the title proper as if it delineates what the poem to come is “on.” Nonetheless, it reads curiously: an “engraved head” seems an almost violently material description, and what of the quotation marks around “looking at you”? They suggest an elsewhere, an attribution that is other than that of the surrounding lines. Perhaps it is a form of interpolation, as though this quoted description of the way portraits look “at you” implicitly refers back to a statement the speaker once heard or read. Or perhaps these marks announce a metaphoricity, and frame this sentiment as a figure of speech: this portrait is “looking at you,” as it were.
In posing this question—who said this? —and thus introducing an ambiguous note, the quotation marks recast this description as a question: can portraits look? Given its somewhat anomalous presence in an unpublished draft, this moment teases at the tensions involved in our relation to images. W. J. T. Mitchell writes of a “double consciousness” in human thought, and wonders why people “behave as if pictures were alive” while simultaneously ready to “assure us they know very well that pictures are not alive,” and suggests that the “usual way of sorting out this kind of double consciousness is to attribute one side of it (generally the naïve, magical, superstitious side) to someone else and to claim the hardheaded, critical, and skeptical position as one’s own.”43 Whitman’s aside about portraits “looking” thus seems to posit this poem as a response to or “on” this claim, implicitly attributed to “someone else.” Except there is nothing “hardheaded,” “critical,” or “skeptical” about this poem; in both its manuscript and published versions, “Out from Behind This Mask” is effusive about the power of images—often it “goes beyond.”
Confronting his own portrait, Whitman remarks upon this “common curtain of the face contain’d in me for me, in / you for you, in each for each,” which is figured numerously as “This heart’s geography’s map, this limitless small continent, / this soundless sea” (LG, 321). In the schema of this poem, the face—as captured by a portrait—is the particular site of his famous assertion in “Song of Myself” that “I contain multitudes” (LG, 77), a multiplicity laid out as cartography or as synecdoche, a “condensation of the universe” in the visage. This metaphysical largesse tells us little about the sense in which a portrait “looks at you,” however; one can easily stare at a map without any sense of an animating force that reciprocates our glance. The sense of vitality presumed by a returned look arises not from universality but rather an unreadability thereof, rendered “soundless,” with “passionate teeming plays” that are “by this curtain hid!” (LG, 321). Under this aspect, to contain is also to withhold, and the requisite activity of reading a face without certain answers as to its essence is what can make looking at portraits unnerving. It is felt as the sensation of being looked back at, reflecting back an uncertainty, for we are not granted possession of the image. Michael Fried writes of such a contradiction in relation to Diderot’s art writing and the sense in which paintings “presuppose the existence of a beholder” and must “stop him in front of itself,” holding “him there in a perfect trance of involvement,” while nonetheless relying upon the beholder’s negation to achieve this, for “only by establishing the fiction of his absence or nonexistence” can “his actual placement before and enthrallment by the painting be secured.”44 Fried’s particular application of this contradiction to eighteenth century works focuses on subjects “engrossed or absorbed in action, activity, or state of mind,” as if they are “oblivious to the beholder’s presence,” but it also speaks to the case of the sitter who is nevertheless aware of the beholder.45 This subject shoots a glance “from behind” a “mask,” offering an interiority that is “in mystic hand wrapt.” He is a subject who does not so much negate the beholder as establish a parity with them, instantiating a precarious exchange between their respective gazes and making palpable the sense that each is as alive as the other.
Bringing together ekphrasis with the act of lyric address, “Out from Behind This Mask” enacts the portrait’s capacity to return a look. The closing lines of the manuscript version read: “From these to emanate, to you, whoe’er / you are, / These burin’d eyes—a Look.”46 These are adapted in the published version to incorporate Whitman’s signature reach across time, and read “These burin’d eyes, flashing to you to pass to future time [ . . . ] from these/ to emanate, / To you who’er you are—a look” (LG, 322). The word “burin’d,” as the conduit for this “flashing” across time, speaks multiply. It suggests both the tool of the engraver and the poet’s pen, but it also echoes “buried,” a word itself buried within this one. This latter resonance gestures not only to the metaphorical buried eyes of the text—its avowed capacity to answer with a glance—but to the relationship between inscription and death. The inscription of the poet’s presence into immortality is, after all, a form of burial, and the text serves to mark out the time and space of his lost presence in the hope that a reader might look closely enough—as a diligent viewer would at a portrait in a gallery—to resurrect it. Though “Out from Behind This Mask” is less graphic than the “wound” poems, it attests similarly to the violent and difficult aspects of representation as it is scored and “burin’d” on the page for the attention of future readers.
Another portrait of Whitman inverts this poem’s optical violence and makes good upon the subtitle of its published version (“To Confront A Portrait”). This image is perhaps the best-known visual representation of Whitman, and it has been in the imaginary of his readership since it first appeared as an engraved frontispiece for the first edition of Leaves in 1855. In 1888, Horace Traubel reported that Whitman had the following to say of this image while discussing “portraits of himself”:
I was sauntering along the street: the day was hot: I was dressed just as you see me there. A friend of mine—Gabriel Harrison (you know him? ah! yes! —he has always been a good friend!)—stood at the door of his place looking at the passers-by. He cried out to me at once: “Old man! —old man! —come here: come right up stairs with me this minute”—and when he noticed that I hesitated cried still more emphatically: “Do come: come: I’m dying for something to do.” This picture was the result.47
Something of the insouciance surrounding this composition is there in the image itself, in which the poet stands with a hand on his hip and the other in his pocket, though it also contains other, less casual notes. Whitman himself speaks about the different ways this image seems to be coded, explaining to Traubel that many “think the dominant quality [ . . . ] is its sadness” (506–7).
And yet, despite its well-known associations, Whitman’s later comments to Traubel about this image lend it an unusual and indeed confrontational resonance:
the worst thing about this is, that I look so damned flamboyant—as if I was hurling bolts at somebody—full of mad oaths—saying defiantly, to hell with you!48
The way this image might flicker across the breadth of an affective spectrum—emanating sadness, flamboyance, or anger depending on the beholder—is consonant with this strand in Whitman’s writing whereby a “look” is mysterious and as rich in possibility as it is short on any simple legibility. This “flamboyant” comportment, full of “mad oaths,” seems more the remit of the incensed preacher than the kind of sauntering or effete charisma associated with the word flamboyance. Perhaps in this instance, then, “flamboyant” obliquely takes on its etymological relation in French to flames, which are echoed by those “hurling bolts” and the extremity of “to hell with you!”
The image’s air of mystery is compounded by the fact that it was published in the 1855 edition with no name attached to it, thus approximating for its reader the sense of a chance urban encounter that was the basis of its composition. Readers would only discover that it was one “Walt Whitman” upon reading “Song of Myself,” with its declarations of the author’s identity. If the daguerreotype portrait is not directly illustrative of the writing it precedes per se, it nevertheless seems to offer a form of visual evidence for the subjective presence announced by the poem’s opening lines: “I celebrate myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (LG, 26). The self the poem celebrates is metaphysical and amorphous, made up of shifting atoms which share in the same phenomenal stuff as its readers, who in the process of this interaction come to assume not only the atoms of this speaker, intersubjectively, but the discursive assumptions he puts forward. In this regard, the portrait seems to provide early readers of Leaves of Grass with a fleshly manifestation of a subjectivity otherwise too large and inclusive to be contained; a visual anchor amid the atomic. After all, the poet writes later in “Song of Myself,” “Writing and talk do not prove me, / I carry the plenum of proof and everything else in my face” (LG, 48).
It is telling that this “plenum” coexists, defensively, with “everything else,” on a face whose daguerreotype reproduction signifies a certain multiplicity through a posture of reticence, not quite providing “proof” of one authorial affect over another. The poet’s assumption that physiognomy offers a form of proof is contiguous with his interest in photography as a democratic form that can record faces with minimal embellishment, unlike the artistic mediations involved in painting. And yet the presence of “everything else” muddies the picture. The sense that contact between the leaves and their readers enacts a form of atomic communion is later developed in Whitman’s text as a form of anthropomorphic presence across generations, for “this is no book / Who touches this touches a man” (“So Long!,” LG, 424). Another Calamus poem, “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand” (LG, 99), casts this intimacy of touch in terms analogous to the affective mysteries of the 1855 daguerreotype:
Whoever you are holding me now in hand,
Without one thing all will be useless,
I give you fair warning before you attempt me further,
I am not what you supposed, but far different.
[ . . . ]
For these leaves and me you will not understand,
They will elude you at first and still more afterward I will
certainly elude you,
Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught
me, behold!
Already you see I have escaped from you.
This poem offers a textual equivalent to the image of a speaker who narrates verbally his reticence to be understood or indeed read, for “in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead” (99), and the reader holding his book “in hand” has little hope of unlocking his mysteries.
While the erotics of this metonymic construction are self-evident, they are made almost comically literal by Ted Genoways’s discovery of certain alterations made to the 1855 frontispiece while being prepared for publication, where “small differences” between variants “all result from one major change: a significant enlargement of the bulge in Whitman’s crotch.”49 The historical observation of this enlargement lends an anatomical specificity to the notion of touching a man, homing in on quite where or what the reader’s hand is holding, and is consonant not only with the numerous moments in Leaves of Grass which worship virility, but with the “Manly Health” guide. The magnetism of shared assumption which opens “Song of Myself” inheres—his guide suggests—in the “subtle virtue of physique,” the male body the site of “such a ‘personality’ that” its agent “can hardly appear in a crowd” without exerting some interpersonal power.50 Physical health is touted as a clear-headed form of ostentatious masculinity, a way of attaining some “heroic presence,” while simultaneously cast as “subtle,” among a man’s most “secret” aspirations and whose “marvellous effects play invisibly out” (227). This confused double of a “heroic” visibility and a magical furtiveness conjures an erotic sense of concealment, of presence announced through something withheld. A large part of such a connection, Whitman continues, “lies in the department of sexuality; here a fund of vigor is a main part of a manly being, through many years” (although this “very citadel of manhood” and personality is compromised, he warns, by venereal disease) (225). This “citadel” suggests the common metonymic substitution of the penis for masculinity itself, “manhood,” through which the enlarged frontispiece image can be read. The poet’s ambivalent expression is thus offset by his markedly less ambiguous bulge, a presence created out of what “elude[s]” and what protrudes. As with cruising, it is about showing just enough for an onlooker to invite you “right up stairs with me this minute,” to bend Whitman’s account of Harrison’s words. Or, as Frank O’Hara’s “common sense” goes, on the subject of poetic measure, “if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you” (“Personism: A Manifesto,” CP, 498).
The prospect of consummation with Whitman’s text writ large, then, as the sum of its various (body) parts, is characterized by an ambivalence: that it seems at once to recoil from and seduce its reader. Motifs of mystery and obfuscation are copresent with moments of direct and solicitous address, just as graphic tropes of corporeal splitting and dissemination are offset by seemingly evidentiary or synecdochic images of the poet’s body. To receive the poet’s advances, then, is to occupy a curious, and no doubt queer, position. Tyler Bradway’s recent theorization of the affective politics of what he terms “bad reading” seeks to “uncover a broader genealogy of queer reading that pre-exists, develops alongside of, and complexly engages with the emergence of queer theory as an academic discourse.”51 Bradway chooses a number of postwar “queer writers” who use “experimental form to configure and solicit modes of bad reading [ . . . ] modes of reading [that] often appear degraded because they are infused by and predicated on affect, or because they invest in affects” such as “love” and “pleasure” that “simply fail to count as critical within the idioms of critical theory.” But might such a queer genealogy be traced even earlier, to Whitman, whose text perhaps also “proleptically speaks to queer theory’s recent reconsideration of its own reading practices” (194)? At first glance, Whitman’s writing hardly seems continuous with that of the twentieth-century “experimental” writers Bradway focuses on, like Kathy Acker. (Though Whitman, at least in the context of his own historical reception, is no doubt also an “experimental” writer). Yet does Whitman’s text not also seek, like these more obviously resistant texts, to “go beyond” critical orthodoxies? Though he may not be “unreadable” in a manner akin to a postmodern aesthetics of difficulty, Whitman nonetheless engages a rhetoric of unreadability that troubles the directness of his lyric address, or rather redirects his textual erotics as one of indirection (103).
This erotic resonance is derived from a poetics of touching and looking through which Whitman imagines a masturbatory relation with his reader. The potency of this eroticized model of reading to a sexually liberated gay readership would seem self-evident. Michael Moon writes compellingly of Whitman’s work as a protoform of gay pornography and illuminates its pertinence as a corpus which advocates sex radicalism in the light of the HIV/AIDS crisis. He writes of the way that “the author of Leaves of Grass” offers himself “as imaginary lover [ . . . ] to the reader with a directness of appeal that I had then otherwise encountered only in relation to some of the more engaging models in the full-color nude photographs in the gay-male sex magazines I had discovered around the same time.”52 Moon incorporates into his discussion a drawing by Andy Baird of a teenage boy masturbating “as he looks down, tongue extended, at his erect penis,” while “in the upper left-hand corner of the picture, beside the boy’s inclined head, the artist has inscribed Whitman’s famous closing words: ‘Camerado, this is no book, / Who touches this touches a man.’”53 The wit of Baird’s picture lies in the visual gag that there is “no book” there, for the boy does not “read and masturbate.” But as Moon writes, what this image “depicts is not only a boy masturbating,” but a “picture of a book that is in Whitman’s words ‘no book,’ which is not only Leaves of Grass but any book or text that by design negates itself in the production of some kind of bodily/erotic contact between reader and author.” In other words, the preservation of some interpersonal magnetism in the reproduction of a textual object involves an act of disappearance, a simultaneous absorption in the text that demands of its reader an imaginative projection into the realm of images to consummate the fantasy of communion.
Another instance of the poet’s disappearance illuminates the stakes of his textual erotics, and this takes place, not accidentally, on the street-level stage of cruising. In “Poets to Come” (LG, 14), a call to arms for future poets to complete his literary project, to make good on his “one or two indicative words,” he writes:
I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a
casual look upon you and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you.
The directness of Whitman’s erotic appeal to his readers is illustrated here with a scene resembling the beginning of a cruising encounter, which possesses a potency not only of indirection but incompletion. The “casual” and inscrutable look demands a response amounting to the work of making something of it, proving and defining it, thus giving some longevity to the transient temporality of an urban encounter. The teasing quality of such a look, which might be written off as merely or flimsily flirtatious, is rewritten here as a potent call to arms to be a better reader of Whitman’s text, its potential for masturbatory pleasure only granted by a renewed relation to the “book” that is a “man.”
“Poets to Come” offers a tantalizingly neat and self-reflexive account of magnetism, variously conceived. This poem seems to refer, intratextually, to the thread of sexual encounters in “Calamus,” but it also speaks to Whitman’s afterlife as a poet who is famously available for queer critics and cruisers alike. Graham Robb writes that, from “the 1860s” onwards in “Britain and America,” Whitman himself became a code-word, his work the “password primeval” that could be “flashed out” to potential partners to signal mutual understanding.54 Much more recently, in September 2020, theater critic Jesse Green noted in a magazine piece on Whitman that the poet’s frontispiece portrait shows “his hips, hat and eyebrows all cocked,” and “his lanky frame in a louche slouch that any gay man in Brooklyn Heights today [ . . . ] would take as a welcome, a come-on, a song of himself.”55 That Whitman’s text and image have become in some way a part of the semiotic practice of cruising speaks to his fate as a writer whose importance pertains not only to the literary canon, but to the lived experience of his queer readers. While Whitman’s text, in soliciting its reader into an affective and even sexual relation, may exemplify a queer resistance to critical elucidation or assimilation, it nonetheless still betrays a belief that such reading will be generative, even reproductive. Because the erotic resonance of “Poets to Come,” which arises from a lack awaiting completion, pertains not merely to reading but to the creative continuation of Whitman’s work for future generations of poets. Indeed, poets from the modern American tradition and beyond have hardly failed to follow Whitman’s word, and in the next chapter he will meet, somewhat ambivalently, with the glance of Langston Hughes. Perhaps this is no great surprise for such a strange and amorphous writer. “Whoever you are,” and wherever, Whitman suggests, he will be one step ahead, his face averted yet somehow still looking at you.