The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life After the Life ed. by Robert K Martin (review)

BookReviews 249 I think there is. So did Gerald Aeming, who wrote Hitler and the Final Solution (London, 1985) to show that Hitler was clearly both the architect and the engineer of the Holocaust. So did Ambrose and Bischof and the other historians who produced this volume. The record must be set straight, untruths must be answered, history must be redeemed. This must be done not simply to restore the reputation of a now dead leader, but, more importantly, to setve those men and women who willbother to seek out the truth. Eisenhower and the Gennan POWs proves that Bacque's story was a fairy tale peddled as history. Should not those who disseminated it as history-that-actuallyhappened bear some responsibility for their actions? To what extent should a responsible commercial publisher assume a burden to ascertain the essential accuracy of what it publishes? If Bacque had written a biography of some prominent figure asfull of errors, distortions, and manufactured evidence as OtherLosses, he and his publishers would pay dearly for their libel. But who seeks redress for history itself? History-by-amateurs, history-by-exploiters, history-by-liars, history-by-thoseafllicted -by-presentism have always competed with history-by-historians and always will. But when the general public is as ignorant of history as they are now, the dangers are greater than usual. That is no reason for historians to desist; it is, in fact, all the more reason for them to strive for a place in the public arena. David J. Bercuson Universityof Calgary •••••• Robert K. Martin, ed. The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life After the Life. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. Pp. xxiii + 253. Few poets have been as aggressive as Whitman in willingtheir own immortality. "And as to you, Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to tryto alarm me," he writes toward the end of "Song of Myself." "And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths, (No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)" This both echoes and transcends the Renaissance poet's conventional claim for immortality through his verse. Whitman writes both as a poet and as "a man speaking to men/' When he says death is not the end for him, he means it. Thus the title of this new collection of essays is apt: The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life After the Life. Even more fitting, in this one-hundredth anniversary year of Whitman's death, is the desire of the editor, Robert K Martin, 250 Canadian Reviewof American Studies to avoid a "pious memorial" (xxii) to the poet who Pound said "broke the new wood." "This is not a book intended to look backward as much as forward; it is a book intended above all to understand not a response that took place or even has taken place but one that continues to take place, a constant invention and reinvention .... " (xxii).As a strategy for criticism, this approach mirrors Whitman's own poetic strategy: ''He did not conceive of himself as a poet so much as the generator of poetry," writes Ed Folsom in one essay; "he believed it would be in the encounter with his work that poetry would occur'' (83). The essence of Whitman's "continuing presence" is diversity. A recurring theme is these essays is put succinctly by George B. Hutchinson in his illuminating discussion of the relationship between Whitman and Langston Hughes: Whitman is "the most diversely appropriated American poet'' (17). Just as Whitman travelled the road toward his own identity, Hutchinson reminds us of "the multiple ways in which authors have been received on their textual journeys" (27). The essays herein reflect his multiplicity: topics covered include Whitman and the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa; Whitman and the music of Ned Rorem; Whitman and the paintings of David Hockney; Whitman and the contemporary poets Allen Ginsberg and Thom Gunn. In a sentence that could stand as a caption for the entire book, Hutchinson further writes: "Authors are not unitary figures inhabiting fixed cultural coordinates but are often liminal voyagers upon open roads, transgressors of even our latest pieties" (26...