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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2013
Although James's first published response to Whitman's poetry, an 1865 review of Drum-Taps, was dismissive, he expressed a profound affinity with the poet later in his career. This essay considers how his reading of two volumes of Whitman's correspondence in 1898, in particular The Wound Dresser letters, are crucial to James's reevaluation of Whitman and may be seen to be exerting pressure in The American Scene (1907). Through also examining a key event of the year previous, when James's Civil War memories were reignited by the dedication of the Robert Gould Shaw memorial in Boston, I suggest reasons for his changed relation to Whitman's aesthetic project. My argument focusses on how Whitman's epistolary and poetic treatment of the wounded body reformulated vital representational and emotional issues for James, and made Whitman an active presence for him during his 1904–5 American sojourn. James makes no explicit comment about Whitman when he details his journey in The American Scene, yet the poet's influence can be felt in the way James writes about recently erected Civil War monuments by Saint-Gaudens, in New York and Boston, and Whitman is also acknowledged by the stylistic memorial, in this work, that James builds for him.
1 James, Henry, The American Scene (1907), reprinted in James, Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America (New York: Library of America, 1993)Google Scholar, chapter 4, 497–99; hereafter cited in the text as AS.
2 O'Hara, Frank, “Music” (1959), reprinted in The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, ed. Allen, Donald (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1995), 210Google Scholar. The poem begins, “If I rest for a moment near The Equestrian/pausing for a liver sausage sandwich in the Mayflower Shoppe,/that angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf's/and I am naked as a table cloth, my nerves humming. / Close to the fear of war and the stars which have disappeared.”
3 See Wilkinson, Burke, The Life and Works of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (New York and Gerrards Cross: Dover Publications, Colin Smythe Ltd, 1985)Google Scholar, 322; and Fahs, Alice, “The Feminized Civil War: Gender, Northern Popular Literature, and the Memory of the War, 1861–1900,” Journal of American History, 85 (March 1999), 1461–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1488. Fahs cites a significant example of this relation in Roosevelt's 1899 essay “The Strenuous Life,” and unsurprisingly Roosevelt's response to the Sherman statue was in marked contrast to that of James; in a 3 August 1903 letter to Saint-Gaudens he proclaimed, “Your Sherman is the greatest statue of a commander in existence.” Wilkinson, 327.
4 James's sense of the monument can be read in light of recent American hostilities; along with his brother William and friend William Dean Howells he was a member of the American Anti-Imperialist League that had protested the 1899–1902 Philippine–American War.
5 The full titles and details of these volumes are respectively Whitman, Walt, Calamus: A Series of Letters Written during the Years 1868–1880 by Walt Whitman to a Young Friend (Peter Doyle), ed. Bucke, Richard Maurice (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1897)Google Scholar; Whitman, , The Wound Dresser: A Series of Letters Written from the Hospitals in Washington during the War of the Rebellion, ed. Bucke, Richard Maurice (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1898)Google Scholar. For James's review and two notices see James, Henry, Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 629–34Google Scholar, 660–63. 670–73. His reference to Whitman in Notes of a Son and Brother (1914) occurs in his description of visiting an army camp, Portsmith Grove, Rhode Island, during the early part of the war. James, Henry, Notes of a Son and Brother and The Middle Years: A Critical Edition, ed. Collister, Peter (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011)Google Scholar, chapter 9, 248–54.
6 James's meditations on heroic and commemorative monuments appear elsewhere in his work; his remarks on the Sherman statue can be usefully contrasted, for example, with a description of the statue of Marcus Aurelius, in the 1873 travelogue “A Roman Holiday,” while a scene in The Bostonians (1886) set in Harvard's Memorial Hall, which was dedicated to the university's Civil War dead in 1874, suggests the multiple individual and social narratives that may be evoked by commemorative sites.
7 Works useful to this study include Pickering, Paul A. and Tyrrell, Alex, “The Public Memorial of Reform: Commemoration and Contestation,” in Pickering, and Tyrrell, , eds., Contested Sites: Commemoration, Memorial and Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 1–23Google Scholar; Savage, Kirk, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in Nineteeth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Connerton, Paul, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The definition of war memorials as sacred sites is advanced by Edkins, Jenny in Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 92–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Pickering and Tyrrell note that the phrase “collective memory” derives from the work of Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. and ed. Coser, L. A. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992)Google Scholar.
8 Robert Gould Shaw, son of well-known Boston abolitionists, took command of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment in the spring of 1863. After intensive training, the regiment was sent to South Carolina, where Shaw readily accepted the challenge of testing his troops by leading an advance on Fort Wagner, outside Charleston harbour. The ensuing battle resulted in defeat, heavy losses for Northern forces, and Shaw's death. By order of the Confederate commander and contrary to military protocol he was buried in a common grave with his soldiers. Yet although as a military action the battle was disastrous it served as powerful propaganda for the Union cause and as confirmation of the martial courage and patriotic loyalty of black soldiers. Shaw's reputation was also immediately defined as that of a valiant, heroic youth who had sacrificed himself to a noble belief; Charles Sumner rightfully predicted that his “death will be sacred in history and art.” Two useful sources for accounts of Shaw and the Fifty-Fourth are Duncan, Russell, ed., Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Burchard, Peter, One Gallant Rush: Robert Gould Shaw and his Brave Black Regiment (New York: St. Martin's, 1965)Google Scholar. Duncan also gives a brief account of how numerous writers and poets have commemorated Shaw, both previous to and after the monument's erection, the most famous of which latter group is Robert Lowell in his poem “For the Union Dead.”
9 The Correspondence of William James, Volume III, William and Henry, 1897–1910, eds. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, with an Introduction by John J. McDermott (Charlottesville, VA and London: University of Virginia Press, 1997), 5.
10 James, Notes of a Son and Brother, Chapter 9, 251. By “the spot of their vividest passing,” James is referring to the fact that the route of the parading Regiment led them to Boston Common, where they paused for an hour long review and where speeches were given in their honour. James uses alternate spellings for his brother's name: Wilky or Wilkie.
11 James, William, “Robert Gould Shaw”, in Memories and Studies (New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1911), 37–61Google Scholar, 37.
12 Wharton, Edith, “The Spark” (1924), in Wharton, Old New York (London: Virago Press, 1985), 175–226Google Scholar, 194. It should be noted that a central figure in this story is Walt Whitman. Although Whitman is present only through the memory of one character and the impassioned reading of another, the tale's representation of different reactions to him reflects how a new generation of educated readers began to endorse his work in the 1890s.
13 Paul A. Pickering and Alex Tyrrell, in Contested Sites, 7, cite the work of Pennebaker, J. W., Paez, Dario and Rime, Bernard, eds., Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997), 12–17Google Scholar, whose studies have shown that monuments are often erected immediately after a traumatic social event, such as a war, and in twenty- to thirty-year cycles thereafter.
14 Blight, David W., Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 150, 170, 208–9.
15 William James, 57, 60.
16 James, Henry, Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984), 680–81Google Scholar; hereafter cited in the text as LC.
17 On 7 June 1897 James wrote to his old Boston friend Frances Rollins Morse, begging for news about “the revelation of the Shaw Memorial.” He explained that even in London, in the “depths of one's own being,” he had been able to breathe “the air of the old war time” and observed the relief he felt in speaking with someone “whose memories are so much identical with my own” (referring to his London neighbour Sara Darwin). Henry James: Letters, ed. Leon Edel, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984), Volume IV, 47.
18 James records his visit as taking place in August 1862, although this may not be accurate; see James, Notes of a Son and Brother, 248–49 n. 519.
19 Ibid., chapter 9, 249, 253.
20 Dimock, Wai-Chee, discussing James's relation to Whitman in “Three Wars: Henry James and Others,” plenary presentation at the International Henry James Conference, Newport, 2008, Henry James Review 30 (2009), 1–9Google Scholar, 4, fails to take account of James's intricate autobiographical self-construction when she remarks of the incident at Portsmouth Grove, in Notes of a Son and Brother, “even back then, it was not a first, not an inaugural event, but … preceded by something else and interfused with something else – another author, another genre of writing.”
21 While the only two poems James cites in his review, “Shut Not Your Doors” and “From Paumanok Standing I Fly Like a Bird,” may justify this charge, it is notable that the most elegiac poems in Drum-Taps are not mentioned.
22 [June 1883?] Horne, Philip, ed., Henry James: A Life in Letters (London: Allan Lane, Penguin Press, 1999), 148–49Google Scholar. Perry's article, “An American on American Humour,” St. James's Gazette, 5 July 1883, dated “Boston, June 1883,” 5–6, defines the “animating spirit” of American literature as one in which “all traces of aristocracy, of the past, are valueless.” Mark Twain and Whitman are discussed as two men involved “in the task of destroying conventions,” which Whitman performs “with a mystical seriousness … [as] the constructive side of this spirit.” The passage to which James refers, from Specimen Days and Collect (1882), is cited by Perry to illustrate Whitman's “definite dissatisfaction with recognizable literary methods.”
23 Wharton, Edith, A Backward Glance (New York and London: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1934)Google Scholar, 186.
24 Letter of 10 October 1903, in Henry James: Selected Letters, ed. Edel, Leon (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 348.
25 The brevity of this review makes further speculation cautious, but it is tempting to consider whether James was aware of Whitman's belief, as expressed in Democratic Vistas (1871), that “intense and loving comradeship” would “counterbalance and offset … our materialistic and vulgar American democracy” and help effect its “spiritualization.” Cited by Erkkila, Betsy, “Whitman and the Homosexual Republic”, in Folsom, Ed, ed., Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994), 153–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 166.
26 Hill, Geoffrey, “Alienated Majesty: Walt Whitman,” in Haynes, Kenneth, ed., Collected Critical Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 506–17Google Scholar, 513.
27 Specimen Days (the volume to which Perry makes reference) also testifies to Whitman's troubled reflection on the disturbing frequency with which the Civil War dead were unidentified.
28 “[A]bjectly familiar and undressed” may also recall the forms of prone, hospitalized soldiers; it could thus be read as conflating mothers and sons, poet and soldiers, in consequence of a sympathetic intimacy in which the poet's very bodily posture and costume assumes the helpless forms to which he is exposed.
29 Although there is no published documentation of James having received a photograph of the Shaw memorial from William after requesting one, his 7 June 1897 letter to Frances Rollins Morse reveals that the same morning he saw “a big reproduction” of the relief in Harper's Weekly; he admiringly described it as “extraordinarily beautiful and noble.” Edel, Henry James: Letters, ed. Edel, Volume IV, 47.
30 Whitman, The Wound Dresser, 123–24, hereafter cited in the text as WD.
31 Kirk Savage persuasively makes this argument in Standing Soldier, and stresses how, “While warfare had become increasingly estranged from ordinary experience, the monuments represented the war in deliberately ordinary, imaginable terms.” Ibid., 184; see esp. 164, 176–78, 183–84.
32 Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, ed. Bradley, Sculley, Blodgett, Harold W., Golden, Arthur, and White, William, 3 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1980), Volume II, 479–82Google Scholar; titled “The Dresser” in 1865.
33 Rowe, John Carlos, “The Body Poetic: Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps,” in Rowe, , At Emerson's Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 145–61Google Scholar.
34 Ibid., 153–54; similarly, Sweet, Timothy, Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of Union (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)Google Scholar, 6, reads Drum-Taps in terms of how the “body of the soldier disappears into the ideological discourse of the state.” It should be noted, however, that Whitman's tones of spiritual and social transcendence are far from unique and can be measured against similar recuperations of the dead in Civil War practices of mourning and burial. see Faust, Drew Gilpin, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 82–83Google Scholar, 99–100, 163.
35 See, for example, Vendler, Helen, Poets Thinking (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who stresses the intimacy of Whitman's voice, or Dougherty, James, Walt Whitman and the Citizen's Eye (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, who likens the best poems of Drum-Taps to an eyewitness's attempt to represent the fugitive or undocumented experiences of the war.
36 James, Notes of a Son and Brother and The Middle Years, chapter 7, 199. Collister speculates that James's account of his brother's return “has been affected … [by] the Shaw Memorial” (199). This is certainly justifiable, but needs to be qualified in regard to the numerous Civil War monuments James observed during his return to America; it is likely he also noticed the many “standing-soldier” statues erected by this time.
37 I am grateful to Robert Leigh Davis's understanding, in Whitman and the Romance of Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 84–85, of the “discrepancy between public and private orders of meaning” as central to this poem, and as the manifestation of a refusal “to participate in the forgetfulness necessary to transform death into exemplum.”
38 Whitman, “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” in Volume II, 491–92. There are only minor changes in punctuation, in the phrases cited, between the 1865 version and subsequent publications of this poem.
39 As a consequence of the renewed critical attention to Whitman gathering momentum in 1890s America, James may have had occasion during his visit to discuss the poet's work. See Price, Kenneth M., Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who details the late nineteenth-century resurgence of interest in Whitman in his chapter “Imagining Whitman at Harvard.” Wharton was also a great admirer, although her notes for an intended critical work on Whitman (Beinecke Library, Yale University) disappointingly give no clues of any conversations she might have had with James about him.
40 Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in Volume I, 217–25; there are minor changes in punctuation, in the cited phrases, between the different versions of this poem.
41 The effect of this passage is not unlike that described by I. A. Richards in “talking of a writer we have known” and “feeling that he himself is by far the most important part of the audience,” of someone speaking “so that in their judgement and reflection he [the writer] is active.” Richards, I. A., “On TSE: Notes of a Talk at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, June 29, 1965,” Sewanee Review, 1Google Scholar, T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), 74 (Winter, 1966), 21–30, 21.