Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet

5. Postwar America, Again - Ivy G. Wilson

{ 104 } 5 Postwar America, Again IVY G. WILSON Today in the “cold war” the picture of America which is being presented to the world by the rulers of America is Whitman’s picture. Free individuals, free enterprise, science, industry, Democracy—that is the Voice of America and this at a time when every thinking mind in America is pondering over the outcome of precisely what these terms signify for American and human civilization. The very attempt to represent these as ideals for the whole world is no more an extension of Whitman’s Salut au Monde and Passage to India. C. L. R. James, American Civilization In the wake of World War II, the Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James and the African American writer Ralph Ellison both turned to Walt Whitman in their respective examinations of the meanings of the United States. In James’s manuscript “Notes on American Civilisation” (1950), he finds in Whitman’s attempt to “contain the multitudes” a larger crisis of how the two most dominant world systems at the advent of the Cold War—Soviet-­ style Communism and US laissez-­ faire capitalism—engaged the notion of the “masses” to organize their respective polities. Ellison , writing in the same period, invokes the “Calamus” section of Leaves of Grass in his epic novel Invisible Man (1952) to critique the false pleasures of the poetics of an integrated America when no corollary equivalency can be located in the politics of an interracial America. The examinations undertaken by James and Ellison trace the broader cultural maneuvers in the first half of the century that were consolidating the United States specifically as “America,” Postwar America, Again { 105 } making them seemingly one and the same, and much of the work underwritten by this consolidation necessitated the establishing of a literary field discernible as classic literature. Critics like Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Newton Arvin, and especially F.O. Matthiessen all wrote monographs on key figures of what is now known as the “American Renaissance.” And all of them, in exalting the pursuits of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Whitman to write about the nineteenth-­ century foundations that undergirded an ostensible twentieth-­ century US democracy, evaded questions of blackness and racial formation by circumventing the traces of nineteenth-­ century chattel slavery and its residues in the twentieth century. In his phase as a Marxist-­ Leninist, James too shies away from deep reflections of race in “Notes on American Civilisation ” (later to be published in 1993 as American Civilization), hewing instead to issues related to the particular US dialectic of individualism and collectivism that masked itself under the banner of liberal democracy. While James envisioned Whitman being more akin to the English Romantic poets, Ellison placed him in much the same lineage as did Brooks, Mumford, Arvin, and Matthiessen. But whereas they evaded the black presence in their studies of American literature, Ellison saw this presence as genetic to it, engendering the nation’s cultural matrix and political maturation. Much has been written about Ellison’s own position in the genealogy of African American male writers, most notably as a node in the arc between Richard Wright and James Baldwin, as well as his relationship with white contemporaries, including Robert Penn Warren, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer, but appreciably less attention has been dedicated to analyzing Ellison’s interpretation of the classic writers from the nineteenth-­ century United States. If Ellison’s invocations of Melville and Whitman are primarily elliptical in Invisible Man, his nonfiction prose offers more explicit statements on his reception of nineteenth-­ century Anglo-­ American writers and, significantly, the mutual influence of blacks and whites in the creation of American culture . While Ed Folsom has correlated Whitman and Langston Hughes by examining their respective work on the edge of two national battles—the Civil War and the civil rights movement— { 106 } Ivy G. Wilson this essay stages Whitman as a central figure in the making of Ellison as a postwar writer and critic, with particular emphasis on the immediate aftermath of World War II.1 In taking up the affinities as well as the divergences of their thoughts on language and culture, this essay focuses less on what Whitman’s writings reveal about the nineteenth-­ century United States and more on what Ellison’s engagement with Whitman divulges about the politics of his own cultural project, a project that could not...