All about Walt Whitman

3.5 Oswald de Andrade, Fernando Pessoa, Aléxis de Tocqueville, Gilberto Freyre

Part 4

As we have mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, now we will try to provide a few hints on how Gilberto Freyre has helped us to understand Whitman and his Leaves better. In addition, how all these elements just mentioned are related. We will show, through Freyre’s view, the similarities between the Brazilian and American systems of slavery and patriarchalism. Finally, we will show the relation between Freyre and Whitman, and how poetry, society and culture are all interwoven. In order to do that, we will quote passages from the preface to The Masters and The Slaves (1984). In his preface, Freyre reminds the reader of some aspects of a typical Big House[1], which is “completed by the slave shed”, and “represents an entire economic, social, and political system”. It is a system of “production (latifundiary monoculture)”; of “labor ( slavery)”; of “transport (the ox-cart, the hammock, the horse)”; of “religion (family Catholicism)”; of sexual and family life (polygamous patriarchalism)”; and finally, of a “bodily and household hygiene ([…] the banana stalk, the river bath […])”, and of “politics (compadrismo)” (FREYRE, 1984, p. lxiii). “Compadrismo”, in this context, can be translated into English by a slang term: back-scratching, which defines a reciprocal beneficial relationship between people, in which land-owners exchanged political courtesy. Nonetheless, our purpose in alluding to these characteristics of the Big House, in the poetic context just described, is to emphasize the presence of the “banana stalk” (the other aspects are addressed by Oswald’s manifestos as well), which appears in the excerpts of poems quoted above, and especially because de Abreu lived on a farm as a boy, since his father and mother were both farmers. He lived on his mother’s farm in the nineteenth century at a time when slavery was a legal institution in this country. Also because around the Big House there usually were a lot of “parrot and birds cages” hanging all around the verandas. Probably there were thrushes in the cages, a fact that is pointed out by Freyre as a typical “local feature”, which surprised every foreign visitor. This custom is reflected in Oswald’s “Brazil wood Manifesto”:

The Brazil wood Poetry is a Sunday dining room, with birds singing in the reduced cage woods, a thin fellow composing a waltz for the flute and Maricota reading the newspaper. In the newspaper you can find all the present.

“The present”, or current events, was what both poet-journalists, Whitman and Oswald, portrayed in their writings.

Following the path of interconnected relations that link various cultures, nations and writers, our research took us to The Masters and The Slaves, Freyre’s masterpiece, which had its origins in his thesis “Social Life in Brazil in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century”. He submitted this thesis to fulfill the requirements for an M.A. degree in the Faculty of Political Science, Columbia University, 1922. In 1931, he was invited by Stanford University to be one of its visiting professors. The noteworthy events took place after the courses, when he left California for New York, traveling throughout the United States. He went back to New York passing through Arizona, then on to New Mexico, and up to Texas (or down, for he was going to the “deep south”), where he saw landscapes that are quite similar to Brazil’s northern backlands. He observed, in those regions, stretches of land where the “vegetation looks like huge pieces of heavy green broken glass, sometimes sinister, stuck into the dry sand” (1984, p.lvi). Proceeding then to the “old slave-holding South”, he traveled through the “sugar cane fields” of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, the Carolinas, and Virginia, which comprise the “deep South”, where he found out that the “patriarchal regime of economy created almost the same type of aristocracy and big house, almost the same type of slave and slave shed as in the north of Brazil and certain parts of the south;” (1984, p.lvi). Finally, he advises those who wish to study Brazilian History:

Knowing the so-called “deep South” is an imposition to every one who studies the patriarchal formation and slave-holding economy of Brazil.  The same influences of production and labor techniques – monoculture and slavery – united themselves in that English part of America, like in the Antilles and Jamaica, to produce similar social results to the ones observed in our country. Sometimes they are so similar that only the accessories change: differences in language, race and form of religion. (FREYRE, 1984, pp. lvi-ii)

Freyre identified specifically where there was a close link between Brazil and the United States: the patriarchal mentality that pervades our society. Furthermore, when invited to become a writer in English, like Joseph Conrad[2] had been, after his friends and professors had realized his writing talent when he was still a student at Baylor University and later at Columbia University, he felt that if he had to become a writer, he would do that in Portuguese, his mother tongue, to which he was mystically connected. He wrote in his diary[3], while thinking of creating a style, but not a fictional style: “Perhaps the continuation of my first efforts of resurrection of a more intimate Brazilian past […] until this past becomes flesh. Life. Defeat of time”. This idea of reviving the past, bringing it to life and overcoming time is present also in Whitman’s poetic program, stated in his 1855 Preface, as these two excerpts show:

[…] re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body [...]

(WHITMAN, 1996, p.11)

[…] Without effort, and without exposing in the least how it is done the greatest poet brings the spirit of any or all events and passions and scenes and persons some more and some less, to bear on your individual character as you hear or read. To do this well is to compete with the laws that pursue and follow time. […] Past and present and future are not disjoin’d but join’d.  The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet. (WHITMAN, 1996, pp.12-3)

Coherently, these ideas appear in his poetry as well, when he calls the body and parts of the body as the real poems, and “what we call poems being merely pictures” (“Spontaneous Me”, WHITMAN, 1996, p.260) of the real poems: men, women, children, nature, and the nation, as he sings in “I Sing the Body Electric”, from “Children of Adam” (1996, pp.250-58).

Then, Freyre, similarly to Oswald in literature, was making, with his many friends and collaborators, a revolution in Brazilian sociology and anthropology, bringing Brazil to a new and modern scientific era[4]. Both authors were pointing to the same direction after all: the union of a nation toward a better future, healthier, and free from old fashioned customs that hampered our progress, which can only be achieved by a deep awareness of our multifaceted character of a multiethnic and multicultural country. Speaking of a multifarious society, we must take into account that Freyre made a conference in the city of Rio de Janeiro, at the Society of Friends of America, on the 22^nd of May, 1947, called “O Camarada Whitman”[5] (“Comrade Whitman”). In this conference, Freyre said that:

Men who are really great are those who seek or can combine antagonisms, instead of embodying the exclusive ideal or interest of a class, of a race, of a nation, of a sect, of a creed. Whitman was himself an orchestra-man, affected by or through whom diverse and even contradictory ideals were expressed.

This is why Whitman is “a poet still more for today than for his time. It is the American people of today – of all Americas and not only the English one – who are absorbing him today.” We can not say that Freyre was wrong, not even now. On the contrary, now is the right time for Leaves of Grass to appear in our language with strength, now is the time for Whitman to come to our land, for the present time in Brazil is still very similar to the United States of the nineteenth century, politically speaking. Besides, we need something more reliable than politics to help us look for a better present and future. Unfortunately, this similarity in politics is from a negative point of view. However, we are not talking about how the political system is organized; we really mean the social damages caused by dishonest conduct by its members and what this misconduct can do to the life of the nation. In 1863, after having lived for a month in Washington, and been visiting and helping wounded soldiers in improvised hospitals around the city, and getting his first job at the Paymaster’s office, the poet could already notice that Washington was a place for procrastination. Although he was working “on the top floor of a large building”, as Allen (1955, p.287) describes Whitman’s initial time there, “with a grand view of the Potomac and Georgetown”[6], the poet “could not enjoy the view for the misery he daily witnessed among the soldiers”, who came from the hospitals to collect their pay only to find that there was no pay for them. The poet, who was working there part time in order to have the rest of his time for his writing and visiting the sick men, using his pay to provide his own livelihood and buy food and writing paper for them, had to see men, who were giving their lives to defend the nation, spend weeks in the capital city of the country and be denied their own income. Unfortunately, he had to witness this large mass of common men become sad, distressed and even sicker, because they were neglected by the Government of which they were servants.

Whitman had gone there in search of his brother George, who had enlisted in 1861, and was wounded in December, 1862. Whitman “did not know” that his “sympathy for the sick and discouraged would make it impossible for him to leave Washington” until the end of the war, and indeed until the following decade (1874, when he moved to Camden, N.J.). Whitman predicted his own future in his 1855 Preface, when he wrote that:

[…] This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families […] (WHITMAN, 1996, p.11)

Another reason for which Whitman is needed in the tropics is that a scene that shows simple people who serve their own country being mistreated by their own Government, which is supported by the tax paid by these same people, is a daily sight in Brazil, especially in the big cities of our homeland. In this sense, we could use Canby’s expression here (1943, p.164), who says that the evils of “national politics” are “malodorous”. Although he was referring to a specific aspect of the American political system, the “presidential convention”, we might use the term to describe the mismanagement of public resources in general, both in the U.S. and Brazil, which leads to unsatisfactory services provided by the State. Apart from the personal and literary record of what the poet felt when he saw the vivid effects of the war on the American people, he also left a historical and political analysis of the fratricidal events that lacerated the country in a document called “Origins of Attempted Secession” (WHITMAN, 1996, pp.1018-24; included in “Specimen Days and Collect”), in which he shows that both the North and the South[7] were responsible for the war as much as for slavery, for both sides had interests in it. The importance of this document for the poet’s career is that it demonstrates that he was not a naïve person, nor was his belief in democracy a mere fantasy. Despite the moral horrors that he describes, he ultimately believes that only democracy can offer practical solutions to these problems, for he never lost his faith, especially in the common people. This is why we decided to include a large part of it as an annex to our work. Also to show that even if Whitman was not so interested in practical politics as a close observer after 1860, as he remarks in “Origins of Attempted Secession”, he never lost his ability to see his country critically. His sympathy for the common man is one of the aspects highlighted by Freyre in his conference, but his capacity for inclusion was such that he could never obliterate it in himself, which is also emphasized by our sociologist:

Whitman was one of those in whom the idea or sentiment of synthesis, which will characterize the world of tomorrow, appeared early. He who exalted the “divine average” […] always opposed, to the democratic principle of average, the somewhat aristocratic principle – in the sense of exaltation of quality – of personality. The creative personality who is aware of its power to create, synthesize, interpret differences and antagonisms.

[…] This was what was let out of Whitman in his books: a personalistic and fraternal sense of life and community that was so intense that sometimes it seemed like crazy homosexualism, when it would only be bisexualism sublimated into fraternalism. There was in Whitman no poet, and even less an impersonal, inhuman, esoteric man of letters, separated from his condition of man, person, politician. Poet, politician and man formed in him a set of inseparable activities and conditions. In this he was like a Hispanic. Hispanics are more like this: whole personalities from whom you can only isolate the writer or artist, the politician or mystic, by killing in the intellectual, in the artist or in the public man the person or private man, such is the way the nerves of one continue in the other. When Whitman said one day in a quite Whitmanlike fashion, characterizing one of his books:

“Camerado, this is no book
Who touches this touches a man”

he spoke English that looks like it was translated from Spanish or Portuguese.

Thus, this “whole” Hispanic personality called Whitman who did break away from tradition, but did not deny or forget it, only needed forms and shapes which corresponded to the new world, to the new vision of it, to its dynamics, and especially to its human developments, material progress and geographical expansion. In this manner, developing new poetic forms was the natural consequence for a poet who was not separated from his human and political dimensions. When he spoke of “superior models” in the 1855 Preface, he meant to say these new forms, new approaches to what was new in the world. Although he respected traditional forms of poetry and its themes, they did not seem fit to approach the reality of America in the nineteenth century and to describe American life or see it “one step nearer”, to quote Emerson again. We can exemplify this by quoting (Henry Wadsworth) Longfellow, a “traditional prosodist”, placing him side by side with Whitman, so that we can compare their poetic products (the next section will provide some information about the former).

However, before we do that, we must add a few words about these authors. We believe that is Whitman a “synthesis”, a man, journalist, poet and politician all embedded in one whole indivisible personality, as well as the writers mentioned in this section, Oswald, Pessoa, Tocqueville and Freyre, being Oswald and Freyre considered with especial relevance to our country. These last two should be considered especially for the fact that they are remarkable Brazilians and for the reason that they are more similar to Whitman in the sense that they express in full our multiculturalism, multi-ethnicity and religiousness. As we are reminded by Tocqueville in the previous quotations, interbreeding or miscegenation is an essential step towards peace between races, which means that cultural blending is an important part of it. Actually, the mixing of cultures is an important aspect of bringing distant races near. This broader view of Whitman and Leaves of Grass is what these authors have taught us, showing that we can not separate literature from culture and society. This is the deeper sense of humanity that they all bring us; that we all have a trace of the races that make up our nationality in our soul or in our body, which is the factor that in the end promotes peace within a country. This has an “en masse” effect as well as an effect on the individual, beyond the sole aesthetic value of one’s poetry or prose works. All this work must bring a higher sense to the individual too, as the poet chants in section 50 of “Song of Myself”: “There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me. […] It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life—it is Happiness” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.246). As a last word to this section, we will quote a passage by Harold Bloom, on Whitman, this “so considerable a humanist” (1995, p.264):

I remember one summer, in crisis, being at Nantucket with a friend who was absorbed in fishing, while I read aloud to both of us from Whitman and recovered myself again. When I am alone and read aloud to myself, it is almost always Whitman, sometimes when I desperately need to assuage grief. Whether you read aloud to someone else or in the solitude, there is a peculiar appropriateness in chanting Whitman. He is the poet of our climate, never to be replaced, unlikely ever to be matched. (BLOOM, 1995, p.270)

Whitman is the poet of the American climate, however, as pointed out by Freyre, Whitman is not only the poet of the English America, he is the poet of all Americas.

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[1] The main house on an estate is called a Manor, or Manor house; however, we use the word Big House because this was the word used in the American translation (FREYRE, 1946).

[2] Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), Polish-born British novelist. His works include Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (1902), and Nostromo (1904).

[3] FREYRE, Gilberto. Tempo morto e outros tempos: trechos de um diário de adolescência e primeira mocidade (Dead time and other times: passages from a diary of adolescence and beginning youth), 1915-1930. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1975. 268p. The Gilberto Freyre Foundation website has been of immense value in providing us with plenty of information that otherwise would be impossible to gather in so tight a time, especially biographical information. It is all available at: <http://www.bvgf.fgf.org.br/portugues/index.html>. Accessed on May 3, 2007.

[4] Freyre wrote in his Preface to The Masters and The Slaves: “It was as if everything depended on me and on those from my generation; on our way of solving secular [worldly, temporal] questions. And of Brazilian problems, there was none that troubled me more than that of miscegenation” (1984, p. lvii).

[5] The complete text of this conference is available at: <http://www.bvgf.fgf.org.br/portugues/obra/discursos.html>; accessed on 7 January 2008.

[6] Georgetown is a neighborhood located Northwest of Washington D.C., along the Potomac River waterfront. Historically, it was a separate city, preceding the establishment of the city of Washington and the District of Columbia, which are in fact a single entity. It is like Brasília, the capital of Brazil, which is a Federal District.

[7] Whitman’s position agrees with Tocqueville’s, as the latter describes it in Chapter XVIII of Democracy in America, in the section titled: “SITUATION OF THE BLACK POPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES, AND DANGERS WITH WHICH ITS PRESENCE THREATENS THE WHITES”. Although they are a bit long, it is important to quote theses passages here, so that we can have a clear view of both men on the same issue: “As slavery recedes, the black population follows its retrograde course and returns with it towards those tropical regions whence it originally came. […] Although the Americans abolish the principle of slavery, they do not set their slaves free. To illustrate this remark, I will quote the example of the state of New York. In 1788 this state prohibited the sale of slaves within its limits, which was an indirect method of prohibiting the importation of them. Thenceforward the number of Negroes could only increase according to the ratio of the natural increase of population. But eight years later, a more decisive measure was taken, and it was enacted that all children born of slave parents after the 4th of July 1799 should be free. No increase could then take place, and although slaves still existed, slavery might be said to be abolished.

As soon as a Northern state thus prohibited the importation, no slaves were brought from the South to be sold in its markets. On the other hand, as the sale of slaves was forbidden in that state, an owner could no longer get rid of his slave (who thus became a burdensome possession) otherwise than by transporting him to the South. But when a Northern state declared that the son of the slave should be born free, the slave lost a large portion of his market value, since his posterity was no longer included in the bargain, and the owner had then a strong interest in transporting him to the South. Thus the same law prevents the slaves of the South from coming North and drives those of the North to the South.

But there is another cause more powerful than any that I have described. The want of free hands is felt in a state in proportion as the number of slaves decreases. But in proportion as labor is performed by free hands, slave labor becomes less productive; and the slave is then a useless or onerous possession, whom it is important to export to the South, where the same competition is not to be feared. Thus the abolition of slavery does not set the slave free, but merely transfers him to another master, and from the North to the South.”

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