Lost in the Customhouse: Authorship in the American Renaissance

Epilogue

Epilogue uring the fall of 1989, soon after drafting the Dickinson chapter in this book, I had the opportunity of teaching as a Fulbright lecturer at La Sorbonne Nouvelle (Universite de Paris-III) and-because Walt Whitman was one of the topics to be covered on that academic year's national examination-giving lectures on the Good Gray Poet at about a dozen universities around France. American professors on their first visits abroad are often surprised at the lack of student participation in class and learn to attribute it to the greater formality of the student-professor relationship in Europe and to the fact that the student is supposed to communicate his or her questions to the visiting professor in what is (to the student) a second language. What surprised me on my third academic sojourn abroad (once to Leningrad and twice to Paris) was how eagerly and intelligently my French students did ask questions. Of course, they had a strong need-to-know because of the agregation, a massive preliminary to qualifying for the doctorate in literature. They asked me, for example, how Whitman originally implemented the ideas of Emerson, what philosophers he had read, what edition of Leaves of Grass to study, why the poet kept rewriting and expanding the same book, what is the poet's reputation in the United States today, what is the structure of "Song of Myself" (anybody's guess), and so on. One question posed repeatedly (after class) by my French students struggling to take in as much information as possible for the agregation was the following . It was first asked in Paris, and then in Bordeaux, [ 2 1 1 ] Epilogue and then in Nice, where I was showered with questions. "If you had to choose one book to learn as much about Whitman and his work as possible in a relatively short period of time, what book would that be?" In the United States, the question is equivalent, of course, to asking what material will appear on the exam. Students will be students the world over, but the French version of the old student question intrigued me because it reminded me that Whitman was an enormous topic and as such only one of several large areas of literature and history that the students had to master for one of their most important examinations. Other topics on the syllabus that year as well as in years past had been, for example, only one novel or play per author, but in Whitman's case one title (and not even all its poems) meant many books because Leaves of Grass had gone through six official, significantly expanded editions and nearly a dozen reprintings equipped with supplements and revisions during the poet's lifetime. Even a direct answer to the question (if SUC}l were possible) was problematic. Should I have suggested the second volume of Roger Asselineau's biography of the poet, which in the best French tradition treats the work separate from the life? Even here Asselineau's study depends on his first volume indirectly. I could have recommended Gay Wilson Allen's definitive life of the poet (meaning that an analysis of the works is woven into the biography), but a more systematic treatment of the poems is to be found in Allen's New Walt Whitman Handbook (1975), and naming both would have broken the rules of this challenging French question. A work that seemed to fit better its confining limits was James E. Miller, Jr.'s Critical Guide to "Leaves of Grass" (1957) or, since "Song of Myself" was receiving most of the attention, a work by the other Miller of Whitman studies, Edwin Haviland Miller's recently published Walt Whitman's "Song ofMyself': A Mosaic ofInterpretations (1989). The reader conversant with Whitman scholarship will note that with the exception of the last title named here, all these are old books by established scholars (as is Edwin Haviland Miller with his multi-volume edition of The Correspondence [1961-67] and the study entitled Walt Whitman's Poetry: A Psychological Journey [1968]). These individuals along with others retrieved Whitman's reputation from the New Critics alld their scorn in the 1920S and 1930S for biography and the poem with ragged edges; they established the first reliable texts and launched the first modern theo- [ 2 1 2 ] Epilogue ries about Leaves of Grass. Their humanistic approach to a poet who found...