of the night....
“My beloved put his hand in by the hole of
the door and my bowels were moved for him.”
And then the phrases: “her lips are like a thread of scarlet” … “her love like an army with banners”; but American puritanism is more timid even than its purblind teachers.
It was commonly said at the time that Whitman had led a life of extraordinary self-indulgence: rumor attributed to him half a dozen illegitimate children and perverse tastes to boot. I think such statements exaggerated or worse: they are no more to be trusted than the stories of Paine’s drunkenness. At any rate, Horace Traubel later declared to me that Whitman’s life was singularly clean and his own letter to John Addington Symonds must be held to have disproved the charge of homo-sexuality. But I dare swear he loved more than once not wisely but too well, or he would not have risked the reprobation of the “unco guid.” In any case, it is to his honor that he dared to write plainly in America of the joys of sexual intercourse. Emerson, as Whitman himself tells us, did his utmost all one long afternoon to dissuade him from publishing the sex-poems; but fortunately all his arguments served only to confirm Whitman in his purpose. From certain querulous complaints later, it is plain that Whitman was too ignorant to gauge the atrocious results to himself and his reputation of his daring; but the same ignorance that allowed him to use scores of vile neologisms, in this one instance stood him in good stead. It was right of him to speak plainly of sex; accordingly he set down the main facts, disdainful of the best opinion of his time. And he was justified; in the long run, it will be plain to all that he thus put the seal of the Highest upon his judgment. What can we think and what will the future think of Emerson’s condemnation of Rabelais whom he dared to liken to a dirty little boy who scribbles indecencies in public places and then runs away and his contemptuous estimate of Shakespeare as a ribald playwright, when in good sooth he was “the reconciler” whom Emerson wanted to acclaim and had not the brains to recognize.
Whitman was the first of great men to write frankly about sex and five hundred years hence, that will be his singular and supreme distinction.
Smith seemed permanently better though, of course, for the moment disappointed because his careful eulogy of Paine never appeared in the “Press”, so one day I told him I’d have to return to Lawrence to go on with my law work, though Thompson, the doctor’s son, kept all my personal affairs in good order and informed me of every happening. Smith at this time seemed to agree with me, though not enthusiastically, and I was on the point of starting when I got a letter from Willie, telling me that my eldest brother Vernon was in a New York hospital, having just tried to commit suicide and I should go to see him.
I went at once and found Vernon in a ward in bed: the surgeon told me that he had tried to shoot himself and that the ball had struck the jaw-bone at such an angle that it went all round his head and was taken out just above his left ear: “it stunned him and that was all; he can go out almost any day now.” The first glance showed me the old Vernon: he cried:
“Still a failure, you see, Joe: could not even kill myself though I tried!” I told him I had renamed myself, Frank; he nodded amicably smiling.
I cheered him up as well as I could, got lodgings for him, took him out of hospital, found work for him too and after a fortnight saw that I could safely leave him. He told me that he regretted having taken so much money from my father, “your share, I’m afraid, and Nita’s; but why did he give it me? He might just as well have refused me years ago as let me strip him; but I was a fool and always shall be about money: happy go lucky, I can take no thought for the morrow.”