Thesislog

Jonathan Katz is right and illuminating and incredible about so many things. Whitman’s relies to Symonds are not one of them. Katz, who does so much to debunk the notion of an essentialist, transepochal homosexual identity, really refuses to admit that Whitman could be anything but homosexual avant le lettre. He presents Whitman as this figure who has done everything but give a name to being a men-loving man, but in reality Whitman can be distanced from figures like Symonds, Carpenter, or even Charles Stoddard who saw their love for men as in some sense an identity. In the passages which Katz thinks are the clearest demonstrations of Whitman’s homosexuality, and the best evidence for evasion of Symonds’ labels, I see rather a resistance to Symonds’ creation of an identity politics, and dragging Whitman into that identity politics—not a resistance to Symonds communing with Whitman as fellow men-loving men.

Take, for example, this passage where Whitman is talking to Horace Traubel (in italics, cause tumblr hates blockquotes):

Whitman soliloquized: “I often say to myself about Calamus—perhaps it means more or less than what I thought myself—means different; perhaps I don’t know what it all means—perhaps never did know. My first instinct about all that Symonds writes is violently reactionary—is strong and brutal for no, no, no. Then the thought intervenes that I maybe do not know all my own meanings.”

Considering the erotic acts and feelings that Whitman had written about in his man-love poems [Katz claims], and considering his earlier [flirtatious, verging on sexually explicit] correspondence with Stoddard, his mystification here seems ingenuous, and strategic. Admitting that he might not know his own meanings, Whitman conceded that Symonds might have a point about their relevance to men-lusting men. But Whitman simultaneously distanced himself from the sexuality to which Symonds pointed—surely an attempt to confuse and mislead Traubel, and, through him, future critics and readers (Katz 265).

Katz goes on in this vein, attempting to expose a “carefully, consciously calculated” strategy behind Whitman’s remaining “intensely preoccupied with Symonds and with… [his] private inquiries and public writing about the ethical place of eros in relations between men.” But it seems to me as if that strategy only exists if one first proceeds from the point that Whitman had a homosexuality to hide. If Katz’s own research is to be believed, however, there’s no reason to assume that was the case about the poet. Whitman, as Katz has had ample opportunity to underscore in the 260 pages which preface this particular passage, lived in a time before homosexuality (or heterosexuality), when “friendship” and the “love of comrades” and asexual physical affection were construed as completely separate from either the crime of “sodomy” or the procreative activity of the marriage bed. Katz does convincingly portray Whitman’s Calamus poems as struggling to find language to convey what was so much more special about deeply personal and passionate male friendships (which he certainly experienced), but I believe he’s wrong in suggesting that all of Whitman’s oeuvre is about this struggle.

As I’ve had cause to argue many times, Whitman’s political aims, his passions, and his ideas about America and American identity are a great deal broader than male-male eros; furthermore, I believe that, although he cannot be called a feminist, Whitman was interested in a sexual politics which valued both men’s and women’s desire. To suggest, as Katz does, that all Whitman’s poems are poems about men (99) does a disservice to what he did to create an idea of women as (healthily) sexual beings too. If we were to label Whitman anything in the language of 21st-century queer identities (a dangerous practice, of course, since those identities didn’t exist in the 19th century), we might call him militantly and politically pansexual, dedicated to an America in which everyone celebrated the bodies and the souls of everyone. And nothing I’ve read thus far suggests that Whitman reneged on that broad political message later in his life. This is a politics, to be sure, but if anything it is an anti-identity politics, rigorously opposed to dividing American identity or human identity into more specific categories which can (as Whitman saw all too vividly during the Civil War) be ranged in battle against each other.

John Addington Symonds, however, was a different kettle of fish. One of the western world’s first practitioners of what would come to be thought of as “gay history,” and one of the first “gay rights” campaigners, Symonds was an independent scholar and public intellectual (to again butcher the language of the present to serve the interests of the past) who sacrificed a career as an Oxford don to the study and discussion of “Greek” or “Uranian love,” what was beginning to be called “sexual inversion” and what would soon be called “homosexuality.” Symonds’ life was changed when he first read the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass (the first to include the homoerotic Calamus poems) as an undergraduate at Oxford; he felt as if he had finally found a poetic language which spoke to his own difficult-to-express desires. As you may have heard me say before, for the next couple decades he kept up a correspondence with Whitman (then living in New Jersey) in which he badgered the poet in increasingly moving and desperate terms about the true message of the Calamus poems. And it is this correspondence which Whitman is discussing with Traubel in the passage I quoted above.

But while Symonds was enormously invested in discussion of Calamus for personal reasons, it was also because of his career as an advocate for the recognition, understanding, and toleration of men’s love for each other. Katz himself observes that Symonds was clear to Whitman that he “was planning to publish commentary about Whitman and men-loving men… and he wanted the poet’s words for international distribution” (257). I don’t have access to Symonds’ journals or correspondence at present (they’re published, mostly, but I’m miles away from a university library), so I’ll take Katz at his word on this one—but I confess to being surprised that Katz uses this piece of information to suggest that Whitman went to great lengths to “distance himself from the sexuality to which Symonds pointed” per se. Rather, it seems to me as if what Whitman is balking at is not the eroticism, but the identity politics. Unlike much of anyone else at his time (which is what makes him such a fascinating figure to me), Symonds is working to understand and to define male-male erotic desire as a state of being. He was not necessarily certain as to whether it was a medical/psychiatric ailment, or a cultural practice more akin to Greek pederasty, or something else entirely, but his work in the cultural history and scientific present of what would soon be known as homosexuality, often engaging with the mechanism of the state or other dominant cultural institutions in order to do so, suggests to me as if Symonds was creating an identity politics for “Uranian” love.

As such, then, Whitman would have been uninterested in and opposed to endorsing Symonds’ project, which seems likely to have run counter to Whitman’s messages of spiritual and political unity. Given Whitman’s active interest in issues of male-male eros (as in the case of his correspondence with Stoddard) or his own desire for and pursuit of men (as in the case of streetcar conductor Patrick Doyle) it was unlikely that he didn’t actually know or want to engage with the erotic component of what Symonds was driving at. I am inclined to agree with Katz that Whitman was aware of this understanding of Calamus. But where I disagree is the assumption that, therefore, his assertion to Traubel that “I maybe do not know all my own meanings” is necessarily duplicitous. There, Whitman seems to be expressing concern about the identity politics of Symonds project, and coming to understand that the Calamus poems sent a very different political message to readers like Symonds than Whitman had perhaps intended. For Whitman, they were a part of a whole; for Symonds, they were the whole of an entirely new discourse solely about homoeroticism. This was bound to bring Whitman a certain sense of discomfort.

Methodological questions abound, of course, hence my manipulation of the title of one of Symonds’ most famous works (about Platonic pederasty) to signify another problem in how one goes about understanding “Greek love.” For all that he aggressively pursues an anti-essentialism line, it seems to me as if Katz is in many ways still inclined to support the idea that men who loved men before homosexuality were homosexual still have to be understood through some kind of binary: if not hetero/homo, then normative/nonnormative; androerotic/gynoerotic. While Symonds seems to me to be a clear example of a man who was homosexual before homosexuality, Whitman is as far from that construction as it’s possible to be. Perhaps this leads to a more conservative approach to the history of homosexuality on my part, an approach which expects “homosexuality” to have the burden of proof. But if that’s so, well: I’ve always expected that I’m really, for all my alleged radicalism, a conservative at heart. As long as I continue to believe that my methodology and theoretical approach is careful, rigorous, and inclined towards accuracy, it seems as if I can disagree reasonably with Katz and still be on the right track.