The year was 1895, when merely three years had passed since Whitman’s demise. Horace Traubel, Whitman’s close friend and literary executor (as well as self-appointed keeper of his legacy), wrote a letter to one of the Bolton Whitmanites (the UK-based fans of Walt Whitman), J.W. Wallace.
In said letter to Wallace, dated June 13th, Traubel mentioned another letter, which he had received from Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke, where he is told of a pamphlet published by Edward Carpenter in 1894, under the title Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society.
In Homogenic Love, while aiming to prove that homosexual individuals were as normal as everyone else (this is, after all, the late nineteenth century, and laws on homosexuality as a well as moral views of it are extremely prejudiced – the trial of Oscar Wilde, in the UK, is a paramount example of it) Carpenter wrote, on page 27, that,
“Walt Whitman, who certainly had the homogeny instinct highly developed, was characterised by his doctor, W. B. Drinkard, as having “‘the most natural habits, bases, and organisation he had ever met with or ever seen’ in any man. ‘In re Walt Whitman,‘ p. 115.”
Traubel, who has seemingly not read Carpenter’s pamphlet, manifests his displeasure at the insinuations that it contains about Whitman’s sexuality (see the letter below).
Image Details
Letter from Horace Traubel to J.W. Wallace, 13 June, 1895. From the collections of Bolton Archives and Local Studies / Bolton Library and Museum Service.
I tried my hand at transcribing the letter, which is something that I left incomplete because I find Traubel’s handwriting to be quite difficult. The gist of it, however, is the reiterative dismissal of renewed suspicions regarding Whitman’s sexuality. Please let me know what you think, feel free to use it, complete it… And remember: you saw it here first 😉
Nevertheless, suspicions about Whitman’s non-conformity to the heteronormative practices that characterized the ideals of masculinity not only of the nineteenth century, but also of the American W(hite) A(nglo) S(axon) P(rotestant) culture and of the (inherited) Christian traditional morality, began already during his lifetime. A relevant example of these suspicions is available in a letter from John Addington Symonds, a preeminent British “biographer, literary critic, and poet in Victorian England, was in his time most famous as the author of the seven-volume history The Renaissance in Italy. But in the smaller circles of the emerging upper-class English homosexual community, he was also well known as a writer of homoerotic poetry and a pioneer in the study of homosexuality, or sexual inversion as it was then known.”1
Writing to Whitman from Davos on August 3rd, 1893, while searching for a confirmed shared ideology, Symonds speaks to the homoerotic content of the “Calamus cluster” of Leaves of Grass, saying, among other things, that
I agree with the objectors I have mentioned that, human nature being what it is, & some men having a strong natural bias toward
persons of their own sex, the enthusiasm of “Calamus” is calculated to encourage ardent & physical intimacies.
But I do not agree with them in thinking that such a result would be absolutely prejudicial to social interests, which I am certain that you are right in expecting a new Chivalry (if I may so speak) from one of the main & hitherto imperfectly developed factors of the human emotional nature. This, I take it, is the spiritual outcome of your doctrine in Calamus.2But I do not agree with them in thinking that such a result would be absolutely prejudicial to social interests, which I am certain that you are right in expecting a new Chivalry (if I may so speak) from one of the main & hitherto imperfectly developed factors of the human emotional nature. This, I take it, is the spiritual outcome of your doctrine in Calamus.
Whitman’s reply,3 dated August 19 of the same year, refuted said interpretation of his poems, stating:
that the calamus part has even allow’d the possibility of such construction as mention’s id terrible–I am fain to hope that the pages themselves are not to be even mention’d for such gratuitous and quite at the time undream’d & unreck’d possibility of morbid inferences–wh’are disavow’d by me & seem damnable.
Further, in an attempt to confirm his adhesion to heteronormative practices and dispel all doubts about the matter, Whitman adds the famous paragraph,
Tho’ always unmarried I have had six children–two are dead–One living southern grandchild, fine boy, who writes to me occasionally. Circumstances connected with their benefit and fortune have separated me from intimate relationships.
A this stage, I believe it is relevant to transcribe the note attached to this letter, by the editor of Whitman’s correspondence:
The original of this famous letter is apparently not extant, and for the first time the entire letter, which may have been rearranged and altered slightly in the final version is reproduced.
On August 3, using Havelock Ellis’. references tot he comradeship in The New Spirit as an introduction to a matter which gravely (and personally) concerned him, Symonds proceeded to ask a series of questions such as no one had put to the poet before: “In your conception of Comradeship, do you contemplate the possible intrusion of those semi-sexual emotions & actions which no doubt do occur between men? I do not ask whether you approve of them, or regard them as a necessary part of relation? But I should much like to know whether you are prepared to leave them to the inclinations & the conscience of the individuals concerned? . . . I agree with the objections I have mentioned that, human nature being what it is, & some men having a strong natural bias toward persons of their own sex, the enthusiasm of ‘Calamus’ is calculated to encourage ardent & physical intimacies. But I do not agree with them in thinking that such a result would absolutely be prejudicial to social interests” (Feinberg).4
If W W was upset by Symonds’ questions about the implications of “Calamus,” he was offhand at the beginning of his reply, perhaps deliberately so. That, however, he took the trouble to compose a draft letter–with an artfully deceptive sentence at the conclusion–indicates that this was no offhand answer.
Symonds’ reply on September 5 concealed his disappointment. As a disciple he thanked the poet for stating “so clearly & precisely what you feel about the question I raised.” But his opinion remained unchanged: “It seems to me, I confess, still doubtful whether (human nature being what it is) we can expect wholly to eliminate some sensual alloy from any emotions which are raised to a very high pitch of passionate intensity” (Feinberg). The same reservation appears in Studies in Sexual Inversion (1897):5 “No one who knows anything about Walt Whitman will for a moment doubt his candour and sincerity. Therefore, the man who wrote ‘Calamus,’ and preached the gospel of comradeship, entertains feelings at least as hostile to sexual inversion as any law-abiding humdrum Anglo-Saxon could desire. It is obvious that he has not even taken the phenomena of abnormal instinct into account. Else he must have foreseen that, human nature being what it is, we cannot expect to eliminate all sexual alloy from emotions raised to a high pitch of passionate intensity, and that permanent elements within the midst of our society will emperil the absolute purity of the ideal he attempts to establish” (1964 ed., 186). [See footnote number 5]
Embroiled in controversy from the very start, Whitman’s official sexual orientation, put out as a disclaimer of sorts, was far from being settled among his biographers and admirers (and continues to be problematic to this day). Despite not assuming his homosexual orientation publicly, Whitman’s poetry as well as his definition of democracy appear to have been unwilling or, at least, unconscious, testaments to his truth.
Unclarity notwithstanding, it is worth noting that a public confession of what, for the time, was considered transgressive sexual behavior, would have most certainly converted Whitman into a social outcast. Legally, however, matters were more nuanced, as, according to William N. Eskridge, “even if Whitman had engaged in anal intercourse (for which there is no evidence), it is most unlikely that he would have been arrested for violating the state [of New York’s] sodomy law, for its operational purpose was to regulate sexual assaults. […] This suggests that sodomy laws filled a regulatory gap as regards what we would today consider nonconsensual sex.”6
- Source: Andrew C. Higgins. “Symonds, John Addington [1840–1893],” The Walt Whitman Archive. ↩︎
- Source: “John Addington Symonds to Walt Whitman, 3 August 1890,” The Walt Whitman Archive. ↩︎
- Source: Walt Whitman. The Correspondence, vol. V: 1890-1892. Edited by Edwin Haviland Miller, pp. 72-73. ↩︎
- [Italics in the original; this is the transcript of a draft, which was acquired by Charles E. Feinberg, an avid collector. The Charles E. Feinberg Collection is presently housed at the Library of Congress; please see here for further information)].
See also the note to letter 2278 (the number assigned to this letter by the editor of The Correspondence, on “Appendix A: A List of Manuscript Sources and Printed Appearances,” where, among other things, it reads that “2278. Draft letter in Feinberg” (p. 323). ↩︎ - The quote that follows does not appear in Studies in Sexual Inversion (although the correspondence cited here is addressed in this volume as well), but rather on p. 116 of Symonds’ 1896 book A Problem in Modern Ethics, where Whitman’s work is presented as one where same-sex love is openly invoked.
It is not, however, impossible that the editor used a volume containing both works; hence I refrain from calling this a misquote. Considering the magnitude of the work at hand, nevertheless, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Haviland Miller might have mistakenly cited something. ↩︎ - Eskridge, William N. Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861-2003. Kindle ed., New York: Viking, 2008, p. 20. ↩︎
The (In) Famous Academic 