In Walt We Trust

How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself

John Marsh

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781583674765
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Life in the United States today is shot through with uncertainty: about our jobs, our mortgaged houses, our retirement accounts, our health, our marriages, and the future that awaits our children. For many, our lives, public and private, have come to feel like the discomfort and unease you experience the day or two before you get really sick. Our life is a scratchy throat. John Marsh offers an unlikely remedy for this widespread malaise: the poetry of Walt Whitman. Mired in personal and political depression, Marsh turned to Whitman—and it saved his life. In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself is a book about how Walt Whitman can save America’s life, too. Marsh identifies four sources for our contemporary malaise (death, money, sex, democracy) and then looks to a particular Whitman poem for relief from it. He makes plain what, exactly, Whitman wrote and what he believed by showing how they emerged from Whitman’s life and times, and by recreating the places and incidents (crossing Brooklyn ferry, visiting wounded soldiers in hospitals) that inspired Whitman to write the poems. Whitman, Marsh argues, can show us how to die, how to accept and even celebrate our (relatively speaking) imminent death. Just as important, though, he can show us how to live: how to have better sex, what to do about money, and, best of all, how to survive our fetid democracy without coming away stinking ourselves. The result is a mix of biography, literary criticism, manifesto, and a kind of self-help you’re unlikely to encounter anywhere else.

CHAPTER 1

Congratulations! You’re Dead!

Lovers of me, bafflers of graves.

—WALT WHITMAN, “Song of Myself” (1855)

In the first centuries of the Roman Empire, you took your chances being a Christian. Occasionally, some far-flung Roman prefect would rouse himself long enough to bully you or one of your brethren, which could mean anything from exile to, more grandiosely, an appointment with the lions.

In the early years of the third century, a Christian theologian, Tertullian, sought to win religious tolerance from the Roman Empire for his persecuted fellow Christians. In Apologeticus, Tertullian explains that though Christians respected the emperor—at the time, the unusually brutal Septimius Severus—they could not worship him since he was no god, let alone the God. Tertullian then offered some legalistic reasoning about why this should not bother any right-thinking emperor, why, in fact, an emperor should prefer to be thought of as a man and not a god. Only men, Tertullian observes, could be emperors. “To call him god,” Tertullian suggests, somewhat snidely, “is to rob him of his title. If he is not a man, emperor he cannot be.” Tertullian implies that this argument should not come as news to an emperor; he knows in his heart that he is a man and not a god. Tertullian writes: “Even when, amid the honors of a triumph, he sits on that lofty chair, he is reminded that he is only human. A voice at his back keeps whispering in his ear, ‘Look behind thee. Remember thou art but a man.’”¹

East River ferryboat

Tertullian’s description of the emperor’s “voice at his back” may be the source for the belief that during “triumphs,” the lavish ceremonies held to celebrate Roman military victories, a slave would follow behind the returned conquering emperor and whisper in his ear, “Respice te, hominem te memento”: Remember, you are only a man. Or, more simply, the slave is supposed to have whispered, “Memento mori”: Remember, you die.²

In all likelihood, there was no whispering slave. The evidence for it beyond Tertullian’s account is slim, and Tertullian seems to be describing what an emperor must be thinking to himself, not what someone is actually whispering to him. But the image makes an impression nonetheless. Here is no inert skull, the usual reminder of death that later Christians (and Christian painters) would favor, but a living, breathing memento mori. Someone whose job it is to remind you that, at the height of your triumphs, you die.

Triumphant emperors may have needed such a reminder. I do not. Indeed, a slave would be wasting his breath on me, because I think about death, including my own, daily, even more so as I cross the midway of my life’s journey, as Dante put it, and even more so since my wife and I had a daughter a few years ago. As with household chores, my wife and I share the burden of worrying about death. I worry about what would happen if I die; she worries about what would happen if she dies; we each worry about what would happen if the other dies, or what would happen to our daughter if we both die; and, though this is harder to fathom, we try to imagine what would happen (as recently happened to two different acquaintances of ours) if our child should die. In short, we need no one to remind us that we die. We are doing just fine on our own.

Unlike Tertullian, though, we are not Christians. I am not anything, in fact, except an ordinary atheist. As a result, I remember that I die to slightly different effect than do most Christians. For Christians, a memento mori does not just remind you of your mortality but, rather, of which world—this one or the next—you should hold dear. The Ash Wednesday invocation, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” and the command that usually follows, “Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel,” offer a similar reminder. Forget your body, which dies, and forget the earth, through which you’re merely passing. Rather, focus on your soul, which lives on, in heaven or hell, depending on whether you turn toward or away from God.

View of Brooklyn from the foot of Wall Street, 1855

Like a lot of people, I do not believe in a soul distinct from a body, nor in heaven or hell, and I think this world, this life, is the only one we have. So when I think about death, I am reminded that, sad to say, this body, this world, is it. For some, that thought might lead them to follow other Latin maxims, whether carpe diem or, as Horace put it, nunc est bibendum (now is the time to drink). For me, the thought of my own death just leads to simmering despair and, quite frankly, nauseating fear. I confess that my imagination can get carried away. On my deathbed, I wonder, what will be the last thought that passes through my mind? Whose face will be the last one that flashes on my consciousness? What will I regret? And then what? The “total emptiness forever,” as another poet, Philip Larkin, put it.

. . . no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.³

Because of these appalling prospects, though I might often think of my death, at the same time I tend not to linger over it for very long. It is simply too horrifying to contemplate. When you die, you will no longer be. The light will go out, and the darkness will overwhelm you. Everything shall become nothing. The total emptiness forever. It seems so terribly cruel: to be given life only to have every last speck of it taken away.

Who wants that drink now?

Walt Whitman is remembered as a poet of many things: the city, democracy, the human body, sex, even the Civil War. Few remember him as a poet of death. That is a mistake. In many ways, death is his great theme, though he treats it unlike any poet then or since.

That was why I found myself, one overcast June morning, aboard the East River Ferry. The East River, with its view of Manhattan to the west and Brooklyn to the east, provided Whitman with the scene for his great poem about transcendence and immortality, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” I dragged myself to Brooklyn and boarded the ferry because I wanted to live where Whitman lived, see what Whitman saw, and feel what he felt—or what remained of it. Not just because I wanted to know Whitman better, or bask in the aura, though there is something to that, but because in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” Whitman suggests that if you could see what he sees and experience what he experiences, these shared visions and experiences would reveal the hidden scheme of the universe. More important still, he promises that they would reveal how each of us, both our living and our dying, fits into that scheme. “To die is different than anyone supposed, and luckier,” Whitman writes in “Song of Myself,” from 1855, and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” from 1856, comes about as close as Whitman ever comes to showing why death is different—and luckier—than everyone supposes.⁴ And though I cannot, finally, accept Whitman’s comforting thoughts about death, his other reflections on the nature of the universe, especially its indifference to property, can make us feel better—less fearful and, possibly, less angry—about dying.

I.

In the 1850s, the ferry from Brooklyn to Manhattan across the East River meant almost everything to Whitman. An aficionado of opera, the theater, and the chaotic city life of Manhattan, Whitman in the afternoons often left Brooklyn, where he then lived, and traveled by the Fulton Ferry across the East River to Manhattan. In later years, he would recall his “passion for ferries.” “My life,” he noted of this time, “was curiously identified with Fulton Ferry, already becoming the greatest of its sort in the world for general importance, volume, variety, rapidity, and picturesqueness.” He recalled that “almost daily, I cross’d on the boats.” On board, Whitman befriended the boat pilots. “The Balsirs, Johnny Cole, Ira Smith, William White, and my young ferry friend, Tom Gere—how well I remember them well,” he wrote in 1882.⁵

In 1883, however, not long after Whitman fondly recalled his friends the boat pilots, the Fulton Ferry was being made all but obsolete by the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. Symbolically, the bridge towered above the Fulton Street landing in Brooklyn. Increasingly anachronistic, the ferry would stop service altogether in 1924. In June 2011, just in time for me to retrace Whitman’s journey, New York Waterway, a private company, partnered with the city to restart ferry service across the East River, and riders today take the exact route Whitman did in the 1850s.⁶

The ferry may travel the same route Whitman did in the 1850s, but it surveys a far different scene. In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman lovingly catalogues the visions that dazzled him as he chugged across the East River. “I too many and many a time crossed the river of old,” Whitman writes, and

Look’d toward the lower bay to notice the vessels arriving,

Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me,

Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor,

The sailors at work in the rigging or astride the spars,

The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine pennants,

The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilot-houses,

The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels,

The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset,

The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome crests and glistening,

The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite storehouses by the docks,

On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank’d on each side by the barges, the hay-boat, the belated lighter,

On the neighboring shore, the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night,

Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow light over the roof tops of houses, and down into the clefts of the street.⁷

Today, by contrast, you see far less. Most of the ships are gone, and the sailors, too. From the deck of the ferry, if you look toward the lower bay, as Whitman did, to the south and southwest, down the Brooklyn coastline, you see cars along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the barren docks and the spires of cranes of the Red Hook Container Terminal. In the bay itself, perhaps the most notable sight is the ventilation building on Governor’s Island that serves the Brooklyn–Battery tunnel. Way off on the horizon, peaking behind the skyscrapers of the financial district, is the Statue of Liberty, dedicated in 1886, long after Whitman had left the city.

Truth be told, the view does not inspire. I am not sure even Whitman could make poetry out of the BQE. And the Container Terminal looks like the parking lot for a superstore no one frequents. If I were less concerned about offending Whitman, I would call the whole vista ugly.

Even so, you can see enough to glimpse what Whitman saw. The gray walls of the granite storehouses are still there, the docks are still there (sort of), and you can still make out the rooftops of houses and the clefts of streets. Most important of all, though, the river is still there.

Why does what you see from the East River Ferry matter? Because, Whitman believes, what you see confirms your immortality. Unlikely as it may seem, Whitman suggests, in these things—buildings, docks, river, even the BQE—you can see why you will live forever. For Whitman, they testify to the provident design of the universe, and they make plain that death is not death but rather a form of rebirth. “It avails not,” Whitman asserts early in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “neither time or place—distance avails not.”⁸ Similarly, Whitman implies, death, which separates us from time and distances us from everyone and everything else, also avails not. In other poems written just before “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman develops his reasoning about why this is so, but for him, his journey across the East River confirms the intuitions he outlines elsewhere. Death avails not. It is of no use. It does not accomplis...