Books: Baffled Critic

WALT WHITMAN’S POSE—Esther Shephard—Earcourt, Brace ($3.75).

In his early life Walt Whitman was a conventional poet of modest gifts, a Brooklyn editor, author of a dull temperance novel, a Democrat, a radical. In the Civil War, after years of drifting, he found himself, and for a brief period became the great spokesman for the spirit of radical humanitarianism. But the exact steps of his transformation are not known and even the biographical details of his life are confused, as Whitman apparently intended they should be.

Last week Mrs. Esther Shephard (Paul Bunyan) advanced a new theory to account for Whitman’s change. She says that he read George Sand’s The Countess of Rudolstadt. The epilogue of that typical romantic novel tells of a seer who dressed in humble clothing, preached the doctrine of man and in his inspired discourse composed “the most magnificent poem that can be conceived.” Deciding to do the same thing in Brooklyn, says Mrs. Shephard, Walt spent the rest of his life “imitating, in his dress and utterance, a character in a French work of fiction.” But he was always afraid he was going to be found out. So the poor devil spent his time deceiving his friends about the source of his inspiration, carefully neglected to say that he had read The Countess of Rudolstadt (although to confuse critics he praised George Sand’s other novels) and hinted at a dreadful secret in his life.

To say that this theory leads Mrs. Shephard into difficulties is an understatement: it practically floors her. Pursuing it with the vehement, triumphant air of a gossip on the trail of scandal, she gives pages of evidence that Whitman contradicted himself—which he never denied— pages to show that despite his professions of all-embracing love he had explosions of temper, pages to show that he wrote a lot of nonsense and that his disciples wrote even more.

That Whitman might have been inspired by the powerful social movement at the time of the Civil War, that he might, for a few years, at least, have been a real poet, Author Shephard will not admit. Says she, the whole thing was a pose, based on a second-rate French novel. As a result, her book is likely to stand as a carefully documented, well worded, 453-page demonstration of its author’s unfortunate inability to understand Whitman, his poems, or his times.