After reading Kirsten’s post regarding the Amazon skullduggery, I started thinking about Whitman. An early reviewer, Rufus Griswold (and what a name for a villain: Rufus Griswold!), called Leaves of Grass “a mass of stupid filth,” continuing, “It is impossible to imagine how any man’s fancy could have conceived it, unless he were possessed of the soul of a sentimental donkey that had died of disappointed love.” The Boston Intelligencer seconded Griswold’s opinion:
This book should find no place where humanity urges any claim to respect, and the author should be kicked from all decent society as below the level of a brute. There is neither wit nor method in his disjointed babbling, and it seems to us he must be some escaped lunatic raving in pitiable delirium.
Even Whitman’s best initial backer, R. W. Emerson, who famously wrote “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” advised that the sexual passages from Leaves of Grass be cut. Whitman asked, “But would there be as good a book left?” Emerson replied, “I did not say as good a book, I said a good book.” Years later, Whitman wrote, “If I had cut sex out, I might just as well have cut everything out. . . . The dirtiest book in all the world is the expurgated book.”
Whitman’s friend James Redpath wrote, in a letter from Boston, “There is a prejudice against you here among the ‘fine’ ladies and gentlemen of the Transcendental School. It is believed that you are not ashamed of your reproductive organs.” The prejudice grew; Whitman later lost a government clerkship when it was discovered that he was the author of an “immoral book.” (Whitman’s memory of the dismissal is worth noting. “Don’t ever assail Harlan [James Harlan, the Secretary of the Interior who fired him] as if he was a scoundrel. He was only a fool: there was only a dim light in his noddle: he had to steer by that light: what else could he do?”)
Amazon’s de-rankers, one imagines, are busy beating their noddles. (Beating their noddles: it sounds dirty. De-rank this post, posthaste!) Still, as of this writing, works such as Walt Whitman: A Gay Life, The Erotic Whitman, and Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century remain stripped of their sales rankings. (The Dover Edition of the original 1855 Leaves of Grass is ranked a robust 3,431 in “Books.” I quote from “Song of Myself”: “Magnifying and applying come I, / Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters, / The most they offer for mankind and eternity less than a spirt of my own seminal wet. . . .” As Randall Jarrell noted, “WALT WHITMAN: HE HAD HIS NERVE.”) Perhaps after today’s NPR shaming Amazon will explain itself and scrap the new policy. Otherwise, we may feel cast back into the 19th century, and not only because of the day’s headline:
(From “Song of Myself”: “Did you read in the seabooks of the oldfashioned frigate-fight? / Did you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars?”)
Whitman’s battles with would-be censors continued throughout his life. More than a decade after Harlan relieved him of his clerkship, The Saturday Review skewered him as the author of “a volume of so-called poems remarkable for their absurd extravagance and shameless obscenity.” In 1882 Leaves of Grass was banned in Boston, giving rise to a famous slogan and setting an ugly precedent. One of the lessons of Whitman’s poetry (and, to some extent, his life) is that a person can be large, that a person can imaginatively surge beyond “the swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces.” Amazon is named for a mighty river. Here’s hoping it acts the part.
