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Mutual Impressions
Writers from the Americas Reading One Another
By Ilan Stavans Duke University Press
Copyright © 1999 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9736-6
CHAPTER 1
José Martí on Walt Whitman
José Martí (1853-1895) first joined the cause of independence of his native Cuba in 1868 immediately after Cuba's first battle of independence against Spain. He was sentenced to hard labor for publishing revolutionary periodicals, an experience which resulted in his expose on prison life, El presidio político de Cuba (The Political Prison in Cuba, 1871). His exile to Spain and travels landed him at last in the United States, where he wrote for the New York Sun under the pseudonym M. de S. (In New York, he met Walt Whitman, whom he thoroughly admired.) Martí politicked to garner support for the 1895 U.S. invasion of Cuba and involved himself in the careful planning of the Cuban Revolution, working with exiled generals and raising money for the island's cause. As one of the precursors of Latin America's modernismo, he was one of the leaders of a literary movement which sought to renovate the Spanish language. Martí's major works include three major books of poetry, Ismaelillo (1882), Versos sencillos (1891), and Versos libres (1913), a number of prose pieces about contemporary life in the United States, and a novel under the name Adelaida Ral. His return to Cuba in 1895 was rapidly followed by his death in combat. This essay was first published in El Partido Liberal, Mexico City, 18 April 1887, as well as in La Nación, Buenos Aires, 26 June 1887.
"Last night he looked like a god, sitting in his red plush chair, with his gray hair, his beard on his breast, his smokey eyebrows, his hand on a cane." This is what one of today's papers says about Walt Whitman, the seventy-year-old man to whom the sharpest critics, who are always a minority, assign an exceptional place in the literature of his country and his times. Only the sacred books of antiquity offer a doctrine comparable in language and vigorous poetry to that expounded in grandiose, priestly apothegms, like outbursts of light, by this old poet whose astounding book has now been banned.
Why, of course! Isn't it a natural work? Universities and Latin have made men ignore one another; instead of falling in each others' arms attracted by the essential and eternal, they separate, nagging each other like fishwives at the slightest disagreement; man is molded by a book or a teacher in contact with whom he has been placed by chance or fashion as a pudding is molded by its container; philosophic, religious, or literary schools disguise men as a livery does a lackey; men let themselves be branded like horses and bulls and go around in the world showing their brands. So, when they find themselves in front of a naked, virginal, loving, sincere, and potent man–in front of a man who walks, loves, fights, rows–who, not letting himself be blinded by misfortune, reads a promise of ultimate felicity in world equilibrium and grace; when they find themselves in front of the fatherly, sinewy, and angelic man, Walt Whitman, they flee as from their own conscience and refuse to recognize in this fragrant and superior humanity the prototype of their drab, becassocked, dollish species.
The daily paper tells us that yesterday, when that other adorable old man, Gladstone, had just set his opponents in Parliament right as to the justice of granting Ireland self-government, he seemed like a powerful mastiff standing unrivaled amid the mob of curs at his feet. Thus Whitman appears with his "natural person," his "unharnessed nature with original energy," his "myriad beautiful and gigantic youths," with his belief that "the smallest sprout shows there is really no death," with his formidable account of peoples and races in "Salut au Monde," his determination to "be silent while they discuss, and to go and bathe and admire himself, knowing the perfect fitness and harmony of things." Thus appears Whitman, "who doesn't say these things for a dollar"; who is "satisfied and sees, dances, sings and laughs"; who "has no chair, no church, no philosophy"; that is what Whitman is like compared to those rickety poets and philosophers, one-detail, one-aspect philosophers; honey and water, rhetorical poets; philosophical and literary mannequins.
He must be studied, because if he is not the poet of best taste, he is the most intrepid, comprehensive, and uninhibited poet of his time. In his little frame house, which verges on poverty, there hangs by the window a picture of Victor Hugo, bordered in black mourning; Emerson, whose books purify and exalt, used to put an arm around his shoulder and call him his friend; Tennyson, one of those who sees to the roots of things, sends from his oaken chair in England tender greetings to the "grand old man"; Robert Buchanan, that outspoken Englishman, thunders to the North Americans: "what can you possibly know about letters when you are letting your colossal Walt Whitman's old age pass without honoring him as he deserves?"
The truth is that on reading him, though at first astounded, our soul, tormented by universal pettiness, feels a delightful sensation of recovery. He creates his own grammar, his own logic. He reads in the ox's eye and the sap of the leaf! "That man who cleans the filth out of your house is my brother!" His apparent formlessness, which is at first disconcerting, turns out later, except for brief instants of portentous extravagance, to be like the sublime order and composition of mountain peaks on the horizon.
He does not live in New York, his "beloved Manhattan," his "superb-faced, million-footed Manhattan," which he visits when he wishes to intone "the song of what he beholds in Libertad" he lives, since his books and lectures yield him barely enough to buy bread, with "loving friends" who care for him in a little out-of-the-way country house, from which he goes in his carriage, pulled by the horses he loves, to see the "athletic young men" in their virile pastimes, the "camerados" who are not afraid of rubbing elbows with this iconoclast who wishes to establish the institution of comradeship, to see the yielding fields, the friends who pass arm in arm singing, the loving couples gay and sprightly like quails. So he tells us in his "Calamus," the enormously strange book in which he sings of love between friends: "City of orgies ... Not the pageants of you, not your shifting tableaux, your spectacles, repay me ... Nor the processions in the streets, nor the bright windows with goods in them, nor to converse with learned persons ... Not those, but as I pass O Manhattan, your frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love ... Lovers, continual lovers, only repay me." He is like the old man he announces at the end of his forbidden book, his "Leaves of Grass": "I announce myriads of youths, beautiful, gigantic, sweet-blooded, I announce a race of splendid and savage old men."
He lives in the country, where the man of nature can toil in the free earth, under the tanning sun, but not far from the city, amiable and warm, with its noises of life, its diversity of occupation, its variegated epic, the dust wagons raise, the smoke from panting factories, the all-seeing sun, "the loud laugh of workpeople at their meals," "the flap of the curtained litter, a sick man borne inside to the hospital," the "exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and give birth to babes." But yesterday Whitman came from the country to recite for a gathering of loyal friends his oration on that other man of nature, that great and sweet soul, "that great star early droop'd in the western sky," Abraham Lincoln. All New York's intelligentsia attended in religious silence that brilliant lecture which, because of its sudden breaks, its vibrant tones, its hymn- like fugue, its Olympic familiarity, seemed at times like the chatter of stars. Those sucklings fed on Latin, French, or academic milk will perhaps not understand this heroic graciousness. Man's free and secure life in a new continent has created a wholesome, robust philosophy which is emerging upon the world in Herculean epodes. Only a poetry of togetherness and faith becomes this largest conflux of freemen and workers the world has ever seen, a soothing and solemn poetry which rises like the sun from the sea, burning clouds, festooning the wave crests with fire, awakening in the prolific inland forests the drowsy flowers and nests. Pollen flies, mountain peaks exchange kisses, branches intermix, leaves seek the sun, everything exhales music. Such is the language of piercing light in which Whitman spoke of Lincoln.
Perhaps one of the most beautiful creations of contemporary poetry is Whitman's mystic dirge on Lincoln's death. All nature escorts the lamented deceased to his grave. The stars had prophesied, since a month before clouds had been turning black. There was a gray bird in the swamp singing a desperate song. Between thought and the certainty of death the poet wanders in the mournful fields as between two comrades. Like a musician he arranges, hides, restates these sad themes in a total twilight harmony. When the poem comes to a close it is as though the whole world were in mourning and possessed by the deceased from one ocean to another. We see the clouds, the heavy moon that forebodes the catastrophe, the gray bird's long wings. It is much more beautiful, strange, and profound than Poe's "The Raven." The poet has brought to the coffin a twig of lilac.
Such is his poetry.
Willows no longer wail over graves; death is "the harvest, the opener and usher into the heavenly mansion, the great revealer"; what is, was, and shall be again; the apparent oppositions and sorrows merge with each other in a calm, celestial spring; a bone is a flower. One hears, close by, the noise of suns moving majestically as they seek their definite places in space; life is a hymn; death is a hidden form of life; sweat is holy and the entozoan is holy; men should kiss each other on the cheek when they meet; those who live should embrace withineffable love and love the grass, the animals, the air, the sea, pain, death; souls possessed by love suffer less; life holds no suffering for him who grasps its meaning in time; honey, light, and kisses are spawned together. In the resplendent peace, under the massive, starry vault, to the tune of a soft music there rises over the slumbering worlds stretched like hounds at its feet, a peaceful, gigantic lilac tree!
Every social condition contributes to literature its own expression, so much so that the history of nations can be told more truthfully through their literary movements than through their annals and chronicles. Nature cannot contradict itself; even the human aspiration to find in love, during this life or after death, a perfect type of grace and beauty, shows that the elements which in our present span of life seem disjointed and hostile will, in the totality of life, become happily adjusted. A literature which announces and promotes the ultimate and felicitous accord of apparent contradictions; a literature which promotes through nature's spontaneous advice and teaching, the identity, in a superior peace, of rival dogmas and passions which divide and bloody nations still in a primitive state; a literature which imparts to men's restive spirit so deep-rooted a conviction in definitive justice and beauty that life's distress and ugliness cease to dishearten and embitter them, will not only reveal a social condition nearer to perfection than any known so far, but will provide humanity, thirsty for wonders and poetry, by a fortunate combination of reason and grace, with the religion it has vaguely awaited since it discovered the emptiness and insufficiency of its ancient creeds.
Who is the dunce who maintains that poetry is not indispensable to nations? Some people are so short-sighted that they think a fruit is nothing but rind. Poetry, which unites souls or disbands them, fortifies or fills them with anguish, uplifts or defeats them, which gives to or takes from men hope and courage is more necessary to a people even than industry. Whereas industry provides the means for living, poetry affords the desire and the strength to live. What is to become of a nation of men who have lost the habit of thinking, with faith, of the significance and scope of their actions? The best, those whom nature has anointed with the sacred thirst for the future, will lose in a painful, muted undoing, all incentive to bear the ugly sides of life; and as for the masses, the vulgar, the children of lust, the common, they will breed empty offspring without sanctity, raise mere instruments to the category of essential faculties and will confuse the soul with the bustle of an ever incomplete prosperity, the soul whose incurable affliction only finds satisfaction in the beautiful and the great.
Liberty should be blessed, among other reasons, because its enjoyment affords modern man–previously deprived of the calm, the stimulus, and the poetry of existence–that supreme peace and religious well-being which an orderly world brings to those who live in it with the pride and serenity that free will brings. Look beyond the mountains, you poets who water deserted altars with childish tears!
You thought religion was lost because it was changing form over your heads. Arise, for you are the priests. The definitive religion is liberty. And the poetry of liberty is the new cult. It is poetry that soothes and embellishes the present, infers and illumines the future and explains the ineffable purpose and seductive goodness of the universe.
Let us hear what this hardworking, contented people sings; let us hear Walt Whitman. Self-assertion raises this people to majesty, tolerance to justice, order to happiness. He who lives according to an autocratic creed is like an oyster in its shell, which only sees the prison which holds it and in the darkness believes it to be the whole world. Liberty gives wings to oysters. And what, heard from inside the shell, seemed an uproarious battle, turns out in the open to be the natural flow of sap in the world's vigorous pulse.
To Walt Whitman the world was always as it is today. That a thing is, is sufficient reason for its having to be, and when it no longer should be, it will no longer be. What is no longer, what can no longer be seen, can be proved by what is and can be seen; because everything is in everything and one thing explains another; and when what now is is no longer, it will in turn be proven by what then will be. The infinitesimal collaborates with the infinite and everything is in its place, turtle, ox, birds, those "wing'd purposes." It is as fortunate to die as to be born, because the dead are alive: "no array of terms can say how much he is at peace about God and about death!" He laughs at what we call disillusionment and he knows the vastness of time, which he accepts absolutely. All is contained within him; all of him is contained in all; if another is debased, he is debased; he knows he is in the ebb and flow of every tide; no wonder he is proud, feeling himself to be a living and intelligent part of nature! What does he care if he returns to the womb that bore him, and the loving moist earth converts him into the useful vegetable or the lovely flower? He will nourish men after having loved them. His duty is to create; the atom that creates is of divine essence; the act of creation is exquisite and sacred. Convinced of the identity of the universe, he sings the "Song of Myself." This song of himself is woven out of everything: of creeds that quarrel and pass, of man who breeds and toils, of animals who help him, oh! those animals among which "not one kneels to another, not one is respectable or unhappy, nor sweats nor whines about his condition." He considers himself heir to the world.
Nothing is alien to him and he takes everything into account: the snail that drags itself along, the ox that gazes on him with its mysterious eyes, the priest who defends part of the truth as though it were the whole truth. Man should open his arms and then press everything against his heart, virtue as well as crime, filth as well as cleanliness, ignorance as well as wisdom; in his heart everything should fuse as in an oven; above all he should let his gray beard grow. But, to be sure, "we have had ducking and deprecating about enough." He scolds the unbelievers, the sophists, the chatterers: procreate instead of quarreling, add to the world! Create with the reverence with which a devout believer kisses the altar steps!
He belongs to all castes, creeds, and professions, and finds justice and poetry in all of them. He measures religions without wrath, but believes the perfect religion to be in nature. Religion and life are in nature. If there is a sick person in the house, he will tell both the doctor and the priest to go home: "I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will ... I will open windows, love him, speak to him in his ear; you will see him cured; you are words and grass, but I am stronger than you because I am love." The Creator is "the Lover divine and the comrade perfect"; men are camerados and the more they love and create the more they are worth, even though whatever occupies their place and time is as good as anything else; but let everyone see the world for himself, for Walt Whitman, who feels within himself the world since its beginning, knows, from what the sun and open air have taught him, that a sunrise reveals more than the best book. He thinks about the orbs above, desires women, feels himself possessed of a universal, frantic love. He hears rising from the scenes of creation and the toils of man a concert that fills him with joy, and when he looks toward the river at the hour factories are closing and the setting sun tints the water, he feels he has an appointment with the Creator, recognizes man is definitively good and from his head, reflected upon the surface, he sees rays of light emerging.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mutual Impressions by Ilan Stavans. Copyright © 1999 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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