WALT WHITMAN: A Life

by Justin Kaplan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 19, 1980

Kaplan's genially broad and eclectic approach to biography, which so 'sPlendidly suited the infinite variety of Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, is only moderately successful with expansive yet narrowly driven Walt Whitman; and this leisurely, quotation-drenched study, though widely detailed and shrewdly researched, somehow ends up seeming more biographical essay than fully committed life history. To some dramatic effect (but no apparent point), the narrative begins with old, ill, self-absorbed Whitman--shabby but proud in Camden, N.J., fawned over by a cultish inner circle, promoting ""W.W."" and Leaves of Grass as ever, living ""at the center of a flame-colored cloud that prevented him from seeing himself plain."" Only then does Kaplan go back to seek, with mixed results, the ""rational line of development that led from the journalist-loafer to the incomparable poet."" Son of a freethinking Long Island farmer/builder (a perhaps-cruel father) and a doting mother, Walt grew up mostly in Brooklyn, influenced--as he lurched from one newspaper job to another--by radical Quaker oratory, Manhattan's urban rhythms, sunny Emerson, demonic Carlyle, dark Poe, grand opera, ""animal magnetism,"" phrenology, Egyptology, the Bible, and, a bore all: ""In the city he explored democracy, and in democracy he explored himself. . . ."" And all these--together with Walt's anxieties about identity, death, and homosexuality (first felt only as blameless ""adhesiveness,"" later semi-recognized in an Eriksonian and poetic crisis, but never fulfilled despite yearning, tender friendships with young men)--exploded in the green-notebook jottings that became the bold, sensual, notorious, suppressed, celebrated, ever-revised and expanded Leaves of Grass. Without projecting much genuine passion for Whitman's work, Kaplan gives close attention to the most personal poems, linking lines to their concrete sources, noting the stylistic retreat in the 1860s--and lie turns with equal curiosity to WW's early fiction, his politics (Free Soil, not abolitionist), Civil War nursing, publishing wrangles, family miseries, and the perils of an up-and-down notoriety (including a tragic would-be groupie from England). But finally this benignly even-handed, almost passive response to Whitman's complexity is less than satisfying; the life here becomes strangely flattened out, with emotional crises drifting in and out almost casually. So: a portrait that's more evocative and ruminating than dramatic or insightful--but a consistently readable one rich in period colors, rangy intellectual grasp, and Kaplan's canny feel for the phenomenon of celebrity.

Pub Date: Nov. 19, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1980

Categories: NONFICTION