I Am With You Part I: A 7 Part Series on American poetry & writing & the shape of America's poetry & punk to come
Whitman, Helprin, Dickinson, Hemingway, Baldwin, Nico Walker (Iraq War Vet Who Robbed 14 Banks When Back In The U.S.A.) Shelley, Lowry, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Black Lips, Souled American
I: Immersion: Walt Whitman, Mark Helprin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, their respective travels in this great experiment called America1
Walt Whitman is often considered the first American DIY (Do It Yourself) artist. He’s Emily Dickinson, Robert Pollard, R. Stevie Moore, and Robert Musil2 all rolled into one.
Whitman traveled across America most of his life, developing the “proletariat writer” persona that dominated his work, especially Leaves of Grass, the work for which he is (now) best known, though during his lifetime his elegiac poem “When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom’d” for President Lincoln’s assassination brought him both his greatest fame & success.
Leaves of Grass was self-published by Whitman and he went door-to-door selling it. Can you imagine such a thing today, in a climate where people don’t even answer unknown callers?
“Mommy, who was that?”
“A poet, sweetheart, selling a poetry collection with a nonsensical title. Go back to bed.”
Then of course, an entire generation may only know of Whitman through this classic Simpsons scene:
Whitman wrote & rewrote many different iterations of his signature work throughout his life, “[resulting] in vastly different editions over four decades.”
From Wikipedia:
First published in 1855, Whitman spent most of his professional life writing and rewriting Leaves of Grass, revising it multiple times until his death. There have been held to be either six or nine individual editions of Leaves of Grass; the count varying depending on how they are distinguished. This resulted in vastly different editions over four decades - the first edition being a small book of twelve poems, and the last, a compilation of over 400.
Less emphasized by most of Whitman’s biographers, save his first, Horace Traubel, was the sheer amount of nursing and quasi-nursing Whitman did, in an unofficial capacity in a Washington, D.C. army hospital during the American Civil War.
The hospital did not need people with degrees in the Humanities or otherwise, they simply needed healthy men & women to assist with nursing the wounded, consoling the dying, administering morphine & other things when necessary.
Initially enthusiastic about the war, publishing the jingoistic poem “Beat! Beat! Drums!”, Whitman became disillusioned at the carnage he saw in the army hospital in Washington & even more so when his brother George was captured by the Confederacy. Feeling responsible for George’s enlistment because he’d encouraged him so readily, Whitman took care of George for the rest of his life. And his attitude toward war began to change.
Anti-war poems began showing up in Drum-Taps, a work that Whitman initially considered printing himself, presuming that his name alone could sell “500 copies in New York & Brooklyn in three weeks by mine own exertions alone.”
His publisher, however, wanted Drum-Taps, not Leaves of Grass, to be Whitman’s defining work. But all writers experience a zig-zag course in their personal & writing lives. Still extant as of this writing, author Mark Helprin (whose 1991 magnum opus A Soldier of the Great War is both a masterpiece and underlines what I am saying about art. Near the end of the novel, as he nears the end of his life story, Alessandro tells his young companion with whom he has been walking for most of the book, having been kicked off a bus:
And yet if you asked me what [the truth] was, I can't tell you. I can tell you only that it overwhelmed me, that all the hard and wonderful things of the world are nothing more than a frame for a spirit, like fire and light, that is the endless roiling of love and grace. I can tell you only that beauty cannot be expressed or explained in a theory or an idea, that it moves by its own law, that it is God's way of comforting His broken children.
Wow. Comforting His broken Children.
It is just another, deeply beautiful way of saying “You aren’t alone.”
Just another way of saying “I am with you.”
My God. The only other competitors against Helprin I can think of for Most Beautiful Last Page of a Novel will be discussed here. They consist, like a boxing match, of two writers/fighters.
In one corner we’ve got Jack Kerouac. Pre-Bleecker Street fights but drunk all the time so not in the best shape.
In the other corner there is F. Scott Fitzgerald, somehow not dead from his 1940 heart attack. Boxing and feigning, flesh falling off his arms. Hell, he’s more skeleton than fighter. You could say the same of both men. But writers they are and always will be.
You know how I like to “invent” words in BDAATA posts? Approaching the end of Gatsby, Carraway uses the word “orgastic,” which was initially corrected by Fitzgerald’s publishers into “orgiastic.” But that’s NOT what Fitz meant, & he had to fight for a correction to his correction for subsequent editions to say what he MEANT to say, which was “orgastic.”
Also, note the similarity between this ending and Kerouac’s ending for On the Road. We have a solitary man, melancholically brooding at the water’s edge. We have a sweeping overview of the country to the West: “somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”
And we have one final image, the solitary figure brooding, one might even say obsessing, over the hero of his life. In Carraway’s case, the man is dead. In Paradise’s case, the man is gone, out the somewhere in America. Here is Kerouac’s last paragraph (if you have not read the book, Dean spends a great deal of time searching America for his drunken father, a wine-alcoholic (which Kerouac contends is “worse than a whisky alcoholic), who makes fly swatters out of coat hangers and wire, sells them, buys wine, then passes out & pisses himself in the bushes. I could guess that Guided by Voices (Robert Pollard’s band) 1996 LP Under the Bushes Under the Stars might be reference to Old Dean Moriarty, but I’d be reaching. Anyway, here is Kerouac’s ending, as elegiac as they come:
"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."
So for Fitz, where the “dark fields of the republic [roll] on under the night,” Kerouac’s sees all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it…”
Kerouac’s “Don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear” is just a similar artistic license to the one Fitz took when he made up the word “orgastic,” a word that fits the idea of a loosely connected, hand-holding, contract singing, afterparty attending, higher echelon caste system, a system he was once a vanguard of when he was both at Princeton, awaiting the publication of his first novel This Side of Paradise, & waiting for the hand of Zelda Sayre in marriage. Such a frenetic & joyless way to stay on top deserves an American word better than simply “orgiastic.” Anyone can have an orgy. Not anyone can be orgastic. Even in his novel, Fitzgerald remained both in awe & highly aware of the exclusivity of certain precincts of American, and later Parisian life.
Here is Fitz’s ending, again, as elegiac as they come, and even more so than Jack Kerouac’s, for the novel titular hero, Jay Gatsby is dead:
And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter-tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning-
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Of course, when Edmund Wilson, a man greedy when it came to the words of others but demonstrated a paucity of original thought edited The Great Gatsby in 1941 he edited the celebrated line “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future, that year by year recedes before us.”
He subsequently explained: "The word orgastic, on the last page I took to be Scott’s mistake for orgiastic - he was very unreliable about words.”
Excuse me? F. Scott Fitzgerald unreliable about words? Sorry Edmund, I don’t buy it. Not for a second. The opening lines of This Side of Paradise do not show a man who cannot write. Just the opposite:
Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while. His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit of drowsing over the Encyclopedia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice O’Hara. In consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory.
I love that “tendency to waver at crucial moments” as well as “in the first flush of feeling that the world was his…”
F. Scott Fitzgerald was a novelist who, from the very first paragraph of his very first book, knew exactly what he wants to say and, more importantly, how he wanted to say it. Edmund Wilson, who never rose to a station higher than that of a book critic (some would call that a failed creator) should have left well enough alone. But his edit remained untouched for years.
It’s only been in the last 40 years or so that you buy The Great Gatsby and get the proper word “orgastic.”
Fitzgerald’s intention was certain. [Maxwell] Perkins had queried orgastic, and Fitzgerald replied that “it expresses exactly the intended ecstasy.”
For a book mainly about decadence & its consequences, let us not wrongly edit words that describe such decadence & ecstasy. Fucking Edmund Wilson.
Now, back to Whitman, who by the end of the American Civil War no longer was the handsome youth he’d been, continued writing handsomely. At least his publishers weren’t so pushy about editing his work. They thought Drum-Taps would be his Zeppelin IV, and make a far bigger splash than Leaves of Grass. He did not advertise it, but it was publicly known that Whitman was working for free in Army Hospitals in Washington D.C. I’m guessing his publisher Peter Eckler “accidentally” gave this info to the “wrong reporter” but soon enough it was local, regional, & then national news.
Whitman was not happy about this. Like any writer, he wanted to be known for his writing, not his extra-curricular activities or his politics. And of course, working at a Union Hospital would mean something to Whitman’s southern readers.
Eckler had also mentioned that Whitman’s new book of poems would be out soon, and was hastily beginning preparations in that manner when Whitman arrived in New York City, very ill from lack of sleep and what we would now call PTSD. Beset by vision of dead & dying soldiers, he returned to the one solace life had given him: writing. Seeing Whitman in such condition, he sent him directly to bed.
During his convalescence, or perhaps despite it, Whitman wrote eighteen new poems, and convinced Eckler to publish them as a pamphlet to be inserted in Drum-Taps as Sequel to Drum-Taps. He even went to the publishing house himself to ensure that the pamphlet was added to each copy.
The 18 more poems which were inserted into Drum-Taps as a pamphlet-like attachment called Sequel to Drum-Taps (anticipating the Yankee madness for sequels over a century before it came to fruition. Now every damn movie has to have a sequel or some company President gets fired) ,ay have been popular simply as an accident of type-setting (though I do not believe this theory).
On the front page of Sequel to Drum-Taps was “When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom’d,” an elegiac poem for Abraham Lincoln which boosted sales and, according to Whitman’s little Boswell, Horace Traubel, was to be “the final success of his career.”
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass celebrated the body (& nudity & sexuality) at a time when such things were considered off-limits, therefore Whitman’s reputation as an actual poet, a true writer, in his lifetime, was controversial. He would have got on famously with Oscar Wilde.
But, like Wilde, when Whitman saw the darker side of life, he did not run from it, he immersed himself in it & he wrote about it. The same can be said for Wilde, though Wilde was forcibly confined. His “De Profundis” (letter from the depths), written to his lover Douglas one page at a time, for he was not allowed more in his cell or allowed to edit or make fair copy, is nevertheless considered superior to his “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” which he wrote & published after his imprisonment.
The “De Profundis” letter, which contained far stronger writing & philosophical reflection, was entrusted to Robert Ross, another former lover of Wilde’s & even a rival to Douglas. After Wilde’s death in 1900, Ross set to work excised all offensive and/or sexual parts, removed all mentions of the Marquis of Queensberry, & the letter was published, in greatly edited format, in 1905. Reviews were positive save for a few reviewers with axes to grind.
Wilde chides himself in De Profundis for once claiming that he wanted all experiences, when in fact he wanted only pleasurable experiences:
And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom.
And so, with Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Goal,” was thought to be his ultimate post-prison reflection, when in fact “De Profundis” was the stronger, and truer (to borrow a phrase from Hemingway, who would soon be a quite important Ernest indeed.)
Similarly, Wilde’s Drum-Taps has been overshadowed by the shaky imagery of Sequel to Drum-Taps, which seemed to be mimicking a new invention: the camera. Using older art forms to introduce new technology by way of plot points may not be an American invention, as H.G. Wells & Jules Verne’ bibliography can attest, and it soon became a tradition, never mind the books of Robin Cook, to reject technology for a more “authentic” way of capture. This American fascination can be seen in its obsession with the Wild West, where the gun reigned supreme amid chaos, but it was the smartest man who walked away from the flaming Western frontier outposts.
Whitman’s Sequel to Drum-Taps contains a poem called “By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame” in a which a once-enthusiastic soldier must now confront the horrors he has seen on the battlefield & compare it to his naive & youthful enthusiasm in signing up to give those impudent Southerners an ass-kicking. The fitful flame is the rising and lowering of his bravery, enthusiasm, and strength for what he now knows will be a very long, very bloody battle. Like Dickinson, Whitman did not title these works, so their titles are very often just taken from the poem’s first line.
By the bivouac's fitful flame,
A procession winding around me, solemn and sweet and slow—but
first I note,
The tents of the sleeping army, the fields' and woods' dim
outline,
The darkness lit by spots of kindled fire, the silence,
like a phantom far or near an occasional figure moving,
The shrubs and trees, (as I lift my eyes they seem to be stealthily
watching me,)
While wind in procession thoughts, O tender and wondrous
thoughts,
Of life and death, of home and the past and loved, and of those
that are far away;
A solemn and slow procession there as I sit on the ground,
By the bivouac's fitful flame.
(The soldier can’t even tell if the trees around him are just trees or if they contain the enemy.)
like a phantom far or near an occasional figure moving, the shrubs and trees, (as I lift my eyes they seem to be stealthily watching me).
How much longer will this soldier have to look over his shoulder? How long til he can go home again, without smelling of sweat, gunpowder, vomit, and blood (both of his brothers & of the enemy, reminding him…as a later poem in his entry does…Shelley’s “Ozymandias” that we are all equal in the grave.)
Build the statue of yourself as high as you want to, bud. You are still dead. Ans your stature has fallen. Yet Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is still around. And around
And of course, a major zig was about to follow the Civil War’s enormous zag. Just as the type-setting was being done on Drum-Taps, President Lincoln was assassinated just five days after the end of the Civil War. He had recently given a speech that trumpeted (but, crucially, did not legislate) voting rights for blacks in the United States, and the nation entered a period of national mourning (save for probably, we can assume, the south).
Lincoln’s inability to write into law the rights of African Americans led directly to the Jim Crow laws, as well as a much slower dismantling of the slavery machine than the North had envisioned. Despite the Emancipation Proclamation’s issue on January 1 1863, the Confederacy & the Union were still at war, and obviously, slave owners kept the Emancipation news from their slaves until it was no longer possible.
On June 19, 1865, when slaves in Texas (and elsewhere in the South) were told they were free, now they believed it. Dancing in the street commenced, along with a few fist fights between bitter white men who thought they still owned the Black man. It wasn’t until last year that the Biden administration officially recognized Juneteenth as a national holiday. June 19th, every year, is the date of African-American emancipation in the United States of America.
Juneteenth was to be the title of Ralph Ellison’s never-finished second novel, the follow-up the ground shaking The Invisible Man which confronted race in America in a manner more daring than Richard Wright’s Native Son, & more eloquent & elegiac than James Baldwin’s non-fiction Notes of a Native Son, a book containing an essay critical of Native Son that ruined Baldwin’s relationship with Wright.
Baldwin was savvy enough to know that criticizing Wright’s novel would anger the man who had once supported him in matters both literary and financial. But he also knew that with the Emancipation of Black people, a new competition would spring up. No longer would it be Black author v White author, but Black writer v Black writer. And black fighter v Black fighter. Jack Johnson v Cassius Clay.
Baldwin knew he was one of America’s best author’s period, Black or otherwise. But his statement “I knew Richard [Wright] and I loved him. [... ] I was not attacking him; I was trying to clarify something for myself,” holds no water. If he was trying to clarify something for himself only, why publish it in his most popular collection?
Ironically, Baldwin’s novels did not find the success his essays and reviews had enjoyed. Save for one review, after a disparaging review of what was supposed to be a Great American Novel & marketed as such, Raintree Counry (1948) by Ross Lockridge Jr, the author killed himself, putting Baldwin in a delicate position. He did not apologize for his bad review, & he applauded Lockridge Jr’s ambition, taking to task instead his editors. There is strong evidence showing that Lockridge’s editors put the writer in a suicidal frame of mind more than Baldwin’s review:
In negotiations that went on through the night, Lockridge and his publisher compromised on a reduction of 50,000 words, which, as he said, “virtually killed me at the time and took all of the sweet out of the prize.” To Houghton Mifflin, he confessed that “six and a half years of effort have played me out and I'm not quite up to it physically.” Nevertheless, he went to work, jettisoning one character and adding another.
According to Wikipedia:
Lockridge began to exhibit signs of mental illness in the fall of 1947. After Life magazine published a ribald excerpt of Raintree County on September 18, he confided to his wife that "I walk past people and I wonder what they think." And, more ominously, "whatever made me think I could get away with it?"
Suffering from severe depression, Lockridge committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning March 6, 1948, shortly after Raintree County's publication. He left behind his wife, Vernice, and four young children. Lockridge is interred in Rose Hill Cemetery in Bloomington, Indiana.
If nothing else, this should have told Baldwin that writing novels was another thing entirely from writing essays. His first novel Go Tell It On The Mountain sold modestly. His second novel, Giovanni’s Room, which told the world that Baldwin carried the double-burden of being both African-American & homosexual, a kind of Black man’s Maurice, except E.M. Forster’s lacked the courage in his lifetime to provoke & initiate the hostility of the very British high-society he so mercilessly pilloried in 1908’s A Room With A View & 1910’s Howards End.
From Wikipedia:
Maurice is a novel by E. M. Forster. A tale of homosexual love in early 20th-century England, it follows Maurice Hall from his schooldays through university and beyond. It was written in 1913–1914, and revised in 1932 and 1959–1960.
The book was not published until 1971, a year after Forster’s death. Maybe the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde was on his mind, maybe he just thought it was none of his business, but he clearly lacked the bravery (both real social bravery & literary bravery) to bring the book out as he still breathed.
Baldwin bravely published Giovanni’s Room in the United States, through Dial Press, in New York, in 1956, also to tepid reception. Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone received a scathing review in The New York Times by none other than Mario Puzo, who also took the time & ink to give Baldwin a writing lesson on the peril’s of writing in the first person (unless that person is unique, like Faulkner’s Benji in The Sound & the Fury. Puzo makes no mention of the fact that Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is written in first-person by a narrator with no idiosyncrasies whatsoever. Aside from one thing missing, Jake is your average WWI soldier returned home. Still, Puzo gives Baldwin a writing lesson, which seems now to be an openly racist attempt to tell an impudent Black writer why his writing does not work. The false tone of weariness put on by Puzo is surpassed in its rudeness only by the fact of the lesson itself being in the most widely read newspaper in America. To say Baldwin was humiliated would be a fair assumption:
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is written in the first-person singular, the "I" person, perhaps the most misused, most misunderstood technique today, from its irrelevance in Mailer's The Deer Park to its crippling effect on Styron's thought and style in The Confessions of Nat Turner. It doesn't do Baldwin any good here because the "I" person should never be used in a novel of social protest, which this is. Why? Because it doesn't work.
Okay, Mario. Whatever you say. Now, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone was released in 1968, at the height of the Civil Rights Era and who better to take down an African-American writer a notch or two than an Italian-American?
Baldwin’s novels are undergoing a critical re-assessment but I must admit, I was unable to finish both Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone & Just Above My Head because I was bored. It is the short story “Sonny’s Blues,” where a non-musician brother (Baldwin often wrote about brothers) goes to see his brother play for the first time and is…quite simply, blown the fuck away by the power of the music:
All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.
Again, that we. That “I am with you.”
Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin’s biggest success, was released one whole year before Kerouac’s On the Road. I mention this only because the surreptitious-but-very-real same sex love hinted @ in the final published version of On the Road, in which Sal flatly states, regarding Dean (Neal Cassady) going after Carlo Marx (Ginsberg) that “Dean was attacking him with a great amorous soul such as only a con-man can have.”
In Sal’s mind, Dean’s homosexuality was situational & done only when to his advantage (for he needed to stay in Denver.) But the intellectual canyon between the two is obvious in a conversation between Sal & Carlo:
“Dean and I are embarked on a tremendous season together,” [Carlo tells Sal] “We're trying to communicate with absolute honesty and absolute completeness everything on our minds. We've had to take benzedrine. We sit on the bed, crosslegged, facing each other. I have finally taught Dean that he can do anything he wants, become mayor of Denver, marry a millionairess, or become the greatest poet since Rimbaud. But he keeps rushing out to see the midget auto races. I go with him. He jumps and yells, excited. You know, Sal, Dean is really hung-up on things like that.”
Carlo thinks that he & Dean are having honest-to-goodness telepathy sessions. Dean wants a roof over his head & “keeps rushing out to see the midget auto races.”
I cannot think of an “affair” so singularly one-sided, even the Lewinsky-Clinton one. Although the President was sexually selfish, receiving blowjobs & giving nothing in return. Perhaps he whispered in her ear that him returning the favour would be “unPresidential.” Yet Lewinsky tried to give Bill things that would interest him in ways other than just sexually.
From the Irish Times (I’m half Irish, so yes, I read the Irish Times):
She [Lewinsky], he [Clinton] recalled, had given him "a particularly nice book for Christmas, an antique book on presidents. She knew that I collected old books and it was a very nice thing.”
And he, on another occasion, had given her a special edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Lewinsky considered the Whitman gift “the most sentimental gift he had given me,” she told her inquisitors. “It meant a lot to me.”
You cannot make this shit up. During the biggest Presidential scandal of the 1990s (though terrorist events would soon completely overshadow the impeachment trial, similar to how the January 6, 2021 Storming of the Capitol would overshadow Trump’s impeachment), the President of the United States gave his illicit lover a copy of Walt Whitman’s once-controversial-but-now-PG-13 Leaves of Grass.
“Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric,” remain the most body-obsessed of the Whitman tome. The second title is confusing. It took me years, like Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It In People, to “get.”
In “singing the body electric,” even the words “electric” & “electricity” being new words when Whitman added them in 1861, Whitman went over different parts of the body and “sang their praises” in such a, may I say, “electrifying” manner, that he “Sings the Body Electric.” He praises the body, despite its ephemeral corporeality, in all its differences between people, in its sheer aliveness (I’ve written before than when I would see my ex-wife after an extended period of not seeing her, she looked so alive…as if lit from within by some kind of intrinsic determination. Determination I don’t for a moment doubt she possesses. When you can only think of someone & not see them, they can take on a two-dimensional quality that is as inaccurate as it is disagreeable. Seeing her again, though I may never do, always seemed like a “reissue,” like someone, or something, that “thing” being her mere presence, “sung her body electric” and those bluegreen eyes were deep bluegreen, ultramarine, turquoise & indigo & names for colours not invented yet.
My God I miss her so fucking much.
ANYWAY, there you have it. MORE people, in this case Monica feeling sad and thwarted, holding hands across time, Walt Whitman & Monica Lewinsky, the latter trying to force herself to be content with a President’s penis in her mouth & no other sexual aspect to the relationship (unless they did fuck & a prior agreement was reached, a briefcase full of cash delivered, opened, & turned her way, and she accepted the money because it’s America and America is not neutral. America is something that happens to Americans. It grinds them down into thoughtless cogs. And perhaps by taking the money Lewinsky saw for herself a different life, perhaps an idle one spent in libraries, perhaps in front of the television. But it was Whitman who provided the most “sentimental” gift Clinton ever gave her.
Let me again return to Mark Helprin, who worked on the Dole campaign until he got kicked off. He was disillusioned at what he saw was a bunch of people trying to keep their positions, not get a man elected. Also, in a brilliant & wide-ranging interview with Harvard Magazine he “ticks off his [other] liabilities: “I don’t remember people’s names; I hate to make small talk; I cannot tell a lie; and I don’t have money to spend. Plus, I was in the Israeli Army, I’m Jewish, and I’m short!”
Although Helprin’s hint that his “straight-line” game may have given John Cheever his idea for “The Swimmer” seems to me unrealistic (the man admits in that article that he never goes out, & in twenty years of living where he does in Virginia, he has accepted just one dinner invitation.) But this straight-line game is a great metaphor:
From Harvard Magazine:
Helprin does not like it smooth, and never has. Ever since he was a small boy he has practiced what he calls “straight-line walking,” i.e., walking from one point to another as the crow flies, heedless of whatever obstacles may intervene“through houses, ponds, and streams, trespassing, going through barns and places you shouldn’t be. I’d crawl through brambles and over rocks, slog through muddy, disgusting marshes and reeds, over railroad tracks and dams,” he says.
“Mostly people adjust their course to take the easy way,” he explains. “Something appealed to me to take the harder way. The reward would be that you have tremendous friction and texture; if you have to encounter all these things, you get wet, cold, muddy, and scraped. You learn, you feel, and you see you do things you wouldn’t have done.” He says this straight-line walking may have given John Cheever, a neighbor in Ossining, the idea for his short story “The Swimmer,” in which a suburban husband returns to his house by swimming across the backyard pools of his neighbors.
The above interview is from 2006, when Helrpin still had a literary pedestal on the back pages of the Wall Street Journal. He contradicts his own straight-line game himself:
Disparaging the administration has made Helprin a heretic on the Journal’s ideologically conservative editorial page. But consistency presents its own problems, Helprin explains, drawing an analogy to driving a car: “If you’re consistent when the road curves, you’ll crash.”
Back to Whitman for a minute, a man who ended his life unsure about his place in America, never mind history. He’d encouraged a war whose brutal effects he later saw both in his family, in the wounds carried by his brother George, and on infantry soldiers he’d never see again.
It was the randomness that bothered him. If, as Helprin suggests, hardship or truth or art of life is God’s way of taking care of His broken children, Whitman could see no pattern in the hurting & in he pain. In Washington D.C., he forced himself to take care of the wounded, working in shifts so long that his own health began to decline.
He immersed himself in American life, violent or pastoral.
Today you can choose in the hallowed silence of great libraries or sitting on your laptop which Whitman you wish to read. The early, pre-Civil War editions of Leaves of Grass, which preserve that idealistic & youthful Whitman. He is aged 35 here.
Same age as me as I prepare to self-publish & busk on the streets of Toronto, trying to sell my book, which is not hastily prepared thriller, but a long-ass novel that tries to figure out whether memory helps or hurts. Nostalgia stabs at me & even happy memories hurt. The shards of my youth hurt when, of if, I pick them up & study the.
If the technology from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind existed, & I could have my relationship with my now ex-wife erased from my mind, I think I would do it. The young Whitman would, seeing no reason for holding on to darkness. Malcolm Lowry & Oscar Wilde would keep it for literary fertilizer.
But you see, in the very last Leaves of Grass edition Whitman oversaw put it all in. Leaves of Grass, perhaps unfinished, with Robert Musil’s sincere sympathies, but also both Drum-Taps with its “let’s go to war!” enthusiasm & Sequel to Drum Taps with its cries of Gods broken children who just want a hot meal, a soft warm bed, and the war to be over.
By the end of his long life - Whitman lived to be 72, no small feat in the 19th Century, dying in Camden, New Jersey, a place that would come to have great American significance in years to come, as an example of poverty & desperation without limits. And then came crack-cocaine in the 1980s (this is not a conspiracy theory, there is ample proof that the American government distributed such drugs, or left such drugs un-impounded in such neighbourhoods, so that they would decay & die faster, its residents sometimes killing each other over amounts of money as small as twenty cents.
This can all be read about in an excellent series by reporter Matt Katz (a series so excellent it was actually plagiarized by the once saintly figure on the left, Chris Hedges)
But Camden is on its way back to something resembling a neighbourhood.
You can’t have summer without winter. No pleasure without its lack, or perhaps even pain. No warmth unless you’ve felt the cold.
And the Walt Whitman who died in 1892 knew this. He finally knew this. That happiness is a moment, not a state. And war is a horror, not a triumph.
But let’s get back to no pleasure with pain, no warmth without cold.
As Butt-Head, as American a character who ever existed, along with Hank from King of the Hill, created by the same man, Mike Judge, a great name for a man who judges the times we live in, and judges them to suck.
I cannot find the exact clip, but in one episode Butt-head asks his pal Beavis with eyes-wide-shut stoner sincerity: “If everything was good, how would you know what sucked?”
And with that, let’s move on to Emily Dickinson, a kind of Beavis & Butt-Head poet, in terms of rarely, if ever, leaving the house.
We’re gonna Hail to the Thief this post in that aach titled section gets its own “other” title. Section I’s “other title” is “Fuck Jeff Bezos & Elon Musk.”
Recently Elon Musk told the Irish Times that he & Grimes often have these “are you more crazy than me?” arguments. What do Bezos & Musk talk about? “Are you more rich than me?”
I know space, the final frontier, is where we must travel is we, as a species, wish to outlive the star that sustains us. We’ve got about 4 billion years & we’ve got these fuckin cucks trying to do it for us?
They’re all Gavin Belson from Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley, computer geeks who couch their technological aims in world-saving highfalutin bullshit talk. Gavin’s most revealing statement could have come from the mouth of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk.
Or maybe even this guy, if he has any money left. MySpace Tom!
“I don’t know about you people, but I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do.”
I’d rather stay here and go extinct than have Musk or Bezos or Myspace Tom or Zuckerberg save me. FUCK THESE PRICKS.
Again, if I can quote from Part I of my novel, which is Miles playing detective. He’s made a deal with Jacob. Monday to Friday, he will pull the night shift looking for a comic book, a priceless comic book, Jacob’s Mom accidentally threw away. On Saturday’s they search for Miles, who is over two weeks late returning from his final (and only) military assignment in Alert, Northwest Territory:
I logged on to MSN Messenger in 2008 just out of morbid curiosity. There were more people on there than you’d think. Bands with hotmail addresses who never signed out. I messaged ever person. Not one answer. Phones ringings on a dead planet.
I love that last line, the sheer suburban & global vacancy it conjures up. If you hate it, good for you. At least you can think for yourself.
I know Musil wasn’t a Yankee, but his blend of procrastination and perfectionism makes him an honorary American in the vein of Kubrick, Kerouac (for all the “original scroll” legend, Kerouac obsessively chiseled, edited, & rewrote. Hundreds of iterations exist of On the Road. The lack of success of later Kerouac works, save for The Subterraneans, can most likely be attributed to his lack of editing, re-editing, re-writing, & so forth