Lawrence must be in the zeitgeist - here's Bloom (another person about whom
I feel a certain ambivalence) talking about Lawrence and Whitman and America
in today's Guardian -

All best

A

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,6000,1669276,00.htm
l

Reflections in the Evening Land

The celebrated critic Harold Bloom, despairing of contemporary America,
turns to his bookshelves to understand the trajectory of his country

Saturday December 17, 2005
The Guardian

Huey Long, known as "the Kingfish," dominated the state of Louisiana from
1928 until his assassination in 1935, at the age of 42. Simultaneously
governor and a United States senator, the canny Kingfish uttered a prophecy
that haunts me in this late summer of 2005, 70 years after his violent end:
"Of course we will have fascism in America but we will call it democracy!"

I reflected on Huey Long (always mediated for me by his portrait as Willie
Stark in Robert Penn Warren's novel, All the King's Men) recently, when I
listened to President George W Bush addressing the Veterans of Foreign Wars
in Salt Lake City, Utah. I was thus benefited by Rupert Murdoch's Fox TV
channel, which is the voice of Bushian crusading democracy, very much of the
Kingfish's variety. Even as Bush extolled his Iraq adventure, his regime
daily fuses more tightly together elements of oligarchy, plutocracy, and
theocracy.

At the age of 75, I wonder if the Democratic party ever again will hold the
presidency or control the Congress in my lifetime. I am not sanguine,
because our rulers have demonstrated their prowess in Florida (twice) and in
Ohio at shaping voting procedures, and they control the Supreme Court. The
economist-journalist Paul Krugman recently observed that the Republicans
dare not allow themselves to lose either Congress or the White House,
because subsequent investigations could disclose dark matters indeed.
Krugman did not specify, but among the profiteers of our Iraq crusade are
big oil (House of Bush/House of Saud), Halliburton (the vice-president),
Bechtel (a nest of mighty Republicans) and so forth.

All of this is extraordinarily blatant, yet the American people seem
benumbed, unable to read, think, or remember, and thus fit subjects for a
president who shares their limitations. A grumpy old Democrat, I observe to
my friends that our emperor is himself the best argument for intelligent
design, the current theocratic substitute for what used to be called
creationism. Sigmund Freud might be chagrined to discover that he is
forgotten, while the satan of America is now Charles Darwin. President Bush,
who says that Jesus is his "favourite philosopher", recently decreed in
regard to intelligent design and evolution: "Both sides ought to be properly
taught."

I am a teacher by profession, about to begin my 51st year at Yale, where
frequently my subject is American writers. Without any particular competence
in politics, I assert no special insight in regard to the American malaise.
But I am a student of what I have learned to call the American Religion,
which has little in common with European Christianity. There is now a parody
of the American Jesus, a kind of Republican CEO who disapproves of taxes,
and who has widened the needle's eye so that camels and the wealthy pass
readily into the Kingdom of Heaven. We have also an American holy spirit,
the comforter of our burgeoning poor, who don't bother to vote. The American
trinity pragmatically is completed by an imperial warrior God, trampling
with shock and awe.

These days I reread the writers who best define America: Emerson, Hawthorne,
Whitman, Melville, Mark Twain, Faulkner, among others. Searching them, I
seek to find what could suffice to explain what seems our national
self-destructiveness. DH Lawrence, in his Studies in Classic American
Literature (1923), wrote what seems to me still the most illuminating
criticism of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Of the two, Melville provoked
no ambivalence in Lawrence. But Whitman transformed Lawrence's poetry, and
Lawrence himself, from at least 1917 on. Replacing Thomas Hardy as prime
precursor, Whitman spoke directly to Lawrence's vitalism, immediacy, and
barely evaded homoeroticism. On a much smaller scale, Whitman earlier had a
similar impact on Gerard Manley Hopkins. Lawrence, frequently furious at
Whitman, as one might be with an overwhelming father, a King Lear of poetry,
accurately insisted that the Americans were not worthy of their Whitman.
More than ever, they are not, since the Jacksonian democracy that both
Whitman and Melville celebrated is dying in our Evening Land.

What defines America? "Democracy" is a ruined word, because of its misuse in
the American political rhetoric of our moment. If Hamlet and Don Quixote,
between them, define the European self, then Captain Ahab and "Walt Whitman"
(the persona, not the man) suggest a very different self from the European.
Ahab is Shakespearean, Miltonic, even Byronic-Shelleyan, but his
monomaniacal quest is his own, and reacts against the Emersonian self, just
as Melville's beloved Hawthorne recoiled also. Whitman, a more positive
Emersonian, affirms what the Sage of Concord called self-reliance, the
authentic American religion rather than its Bushian parodies. Though he
possesses a Yale BA and honorary doctorate, our president is semi-literate
at best. He once boasted of never having read a book through, even at Yale.
Henry James was affronted when he met President Theodore Roosevelt; what
could he have made of George W Bush?

Having just reread James's The American Scene (1907), I amuse myself, rather
grimly, by imagining the master of the American novel touring the United
States in 2005, exactly a century after his return visit to his homeland.
Like TS Eliot in the next generation, James was far more at home in London
than in America, yet both retained an idiom scarcely English. They each
eventually became British subjects, graced by the Order of Merit, but
Whitman went on haunting them, more covertly in Eliot's case. The Waste Land
initially was an elegy for Jean Verdenal, who had been to Eliot what Rupert
Brooke was to Henry James. Whitman's "Lilacs" elegy for Lincoln became
James's favourite poem, and it deeply contaminates The Waste Land.

I am not suggesting that the American aesthetic self is necessarily
homoerotic: Emerson, Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Faulkner, Robert Frost after all
are as representative as are Melville, Whitman and Henry James. Nor does any
American fictive self challenge Hamlet as an ultimate abyss of inwardness.
Yet Emerson bet the American house (as it were) on self-reliance, which is a
doctrine of solitude. Whitman, as person and as poetic mask, like his
lilacs, bloomed into a singularity that cared intensely both about the self
and others, but Emersonian consciousness all too frequently can flower,
Hamlet-like, into an individuality indifferent both to the self and to
others. The United States since Emerson has been divided between what he
called the "party of hope" and the "party of memory". Our intellectuals of
the left and of the right both claim Emerson as ancestor.

In 2005, what is self-reliance? I can recognise three prime stigmata of the
American religion: spiritual freedom is solitude, while the soul's encounter
with the divine (Jesus, the Paraclete, the Father) is direct and personal,
and, most crucially, what is best and oldest in the American religionist
goes back to a time-before-time, and so is part or particle of God. Every
second year, the Gallup pollsters survey religion in the United States, and
report that 93% of us believe in God, while 89% are certain that God loves
him or her on a personal basis. And 45% of us insist that Earth was created
precisely as described in Genesis and is only about 9,000 or fewer years
old. The actual figure is 4.5 billion years, and some dinosaur fossils are
dated as 190 million years back. Perhaps the intelligent designers, led by
George W Bush, will yet give us a dinosaur Gospel, though I doubt it, as
they, and he, dwell within a bubble that education cannot invade.

Contemporary America is too dangerous to be laughed away, and I turn to its
most powerful writers in order to see if we remain coherent enough for
imaginative comprehension. Lawrence was right; Whitman at his very best can
sustain momentary comparison with Dante and Shakespeare. Most of what
follows will be founded on Whitman, the most American of writers, but first
I turn again to Moby-Dick, the national epic of self-destructiveness that
almost rivals Leaves of Grass, which is too large and subtle to be judged in
terms of self-preservation or apocalyptic destructiveness.

Some of my friends and students suggest that Iraq is President Bush's white
whale, but our leader is absurdly far from Captain Ahab's aesthetic dignity.
The valid analogue is the Pequod; as Lawrence says: "America! Then such a
crew. Renegades, castaways, cannibals, Ishmael, Quakers," and South Sea
Islanders, Native Americans, Africans, Parsees, Manxmen, what you will. One
thinks of our tens of thousands of mercenaries in Iraq, called "security
employees" or "contractors". They mix former American Special Forces,
Gurkhas, Boers, Croatians, whoever is qualified and available. What they
lack is Captain Ahab, who could give them a metaphysical dimension.

Ahab carries himself and all his crew (except Ishmael) to triumphant
catastrophe, while Moby-Dick swims away, being as indestructible as the Book
of Job's Leviathan. The obsessed captain's motive ostensibly is revenge,
since earlier he was maimed by the white whale, but his truer desire is to
strike through the universe's mask, in order to prove that while the visible
world might seem to have been formed in love, the invisible spheres were
made in fright. God's rhetorical question to Job: "Can'st thou draw out
Leviathan with a hook?" is answered by Ahab's: "I'd strike the sun if it
insulted me!" The driving force of the Bushian-Blairians is greed, but the
undersong of their Iraq adventure is something closer to Iago's pyromania.
Our leader, and yours, are firebugs.

One rightly expects Whitman to explain our Evening Land to us, because his
imagination is America's. A Free-Soiler, he opposed the Mexican war, as
Emerson did. Do not our two Iraq invasions increasingly resemble the Mexican
and Spanish-American conflicts? Donald Rumsfeld speaks of permanent American
bases in Iraq, presumably to protect oil wells. President Bush's approval
rating was recently down to 38%, but I fear that this popular reaction has
more to do with the high price of petrol than with any outrage at our Iraq
crusade.

What has happened to the American imagination if we have become a parody of
the Roman empire? I recall going to bed early on election night in November
2004, though friends kept phoning with the hopeful news that there appeared
to be some three million additional voters. Turning the phone off, I
gloomily prophesied that these were three million Evangelicals, which indeed
was the case.

Our politics began to be contaminated by theocratic zealots with the Reagan
revelation, when southern Baptists, Mormons, Pentecostals, and Adventists
surged into the Republican party. The alliance between Wall Street and the
Christian right is an old one, but has become explicit only in the past
quarter century. What was called the counter-culture of the late 1960s and
70s provoked the reaction of the 80s, which is ongoing. This is all obvious
enough, but becomes subtler in the context of the religiosity of the
country, which truly divides us into two nations. Sometimes I find myself
wondering if the south belatedly has won the civil war, more than a century
after its supposed defeat. The leaders of the Republican party are southern;
even the Bushes, despite their Yale and Connecticut tradition, were careful
to become Texans and Floridians. Politics, in the United States, perhaps
never again can be separated from religion. When so many vote against their
own palpable economic interests, and choose "values" instead, then an
American malaise has replaced the American dream.

Whitman, still undervalued as a poet, in relation to his astonishing
aesthetic power, remains the permanent prophet of our party of hope. That
seems ironic in many ways, since the crucial event of Whitman's life was our
civil war, in which a total of 625,000 men were slain, counting both sides.
In Britain, the "great war" is the first world war, because nearly an entire
generation of young men died. The United States remains haunted by the civil
war, the central event in the life of the nation since the Declaration of
Independence. David S Reynolds, the most informed of Whitman's biographers,
usefully demonstrates that Whitman's poetry, from 1855-60, was designed to
help hold the Union together. After the sunset glory of "When Lilacs Last in
the Dooryard Bloom'd", the 1865 elegy overtly for Abraham Lincoln, and
inwardly for Whitman's poetic self-identity, something burned out in the
bard of Leaves of Grass. Day after day, for several years, he had exhausted
himself, in the military hospitals of Washington DC, dressing wounds,
reading to, and writing letters for, the ill and maimed, comforting the
dying. The extraordinary vitalism and immediacy departed from his poetry. It
is as though he had sacrificed his own imagination on the altar of those
martyred, like Lincoln, in the fused cause of union and emancipation.

Whitman died in 1892, a time of American politics as corrupt as this, if a
touch less blatant than the era of Bushian theocracy. But there was a
curious split in the poet of Leaves of Grass, between what he called the
soul, and his "real me" or "me myself", an entity distinct from his persona,
"Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, an American":

   "I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
   And you must not be abased to the other."

The rough Walt is the "I" here, and has been created to mediate between his
character or soul, and his real me or personality. I fear that this is
permanently American, the abyss between character and personality.
Doubtless, this can be a universal phenomenon: one thinks of Nietzsche and
of WB Yeats. And yet mutual abasement between soul and self destroys any
individual's coherence. My fellow citizens who vote for "values", against
their own needs, manifest something of the same dilemma.

As the persona "Walt Whitman" melted away in the furnace of national
affliction in the civil war, it was replaced by a less capable persona, "the
Good Grey Poet". No moral rebirth kindled postwar America; instead Whitman
witnessed the extraordinary corruption of President US Grant's
administration, which is the paradigm emulated by so many Republican
presidencies, including what we suffer at this moment.

Whitman himself became less than coherent in his long decline, from 1866 to
1892. He did not ice over, like the later Wordsworth, but his prophetic
stance ebbed away. Lost, he ceased to be an Emersonian, and rather weirdly
attempted to become a Hegelian! In "The Evening Land", an extraordinary poem
of early 1922, DH Lawrence anticipated his long-delayed sojourn in America,
which began only in September of that year, when he reached Taos, New
Mexico. He had hoped to visit the United States in February 1917, but
England denied him a passport. Lawrence's poem is a kind of Whitmanian
love-hymn to America, but is even more ambivalent than the chapter on
Whitman in Studies in Classic American Literature.

"Are you the grave of our day?" Lawrence asks, and begs America to cajole
his soul, even as he admits how much he fears the Evening Land:

   "Your more-than-European idealism,
   Like a be-aureoled bleached skeleton hovering
   Its cage-ribs in the social heaven, beneficent."

This rather ghastly vision is not inappropriate to our moment, nor is
Lawrence's bitter conclusion:

   "'These States!' as Whitman said,
   Whatever he meant."

What Whitman meant (as Lawrence knew) was that the United States itself was
to be the greatest of poems. But with that grand assertion, I find myself so
overwhelmed by an uncomfortable sense of irony, that I cease these
reflections. Shelley wore a ring, on which was inscribed the motto: "The
good time will come." In September, the US secretary of state Condoleezza
Rice was quoted as saying at Zion Church in Whistler, Alabama: "The Lord
Jesus Christ is going to come on time if we just wait."

© Harold Bloom 2005


Alison Croggon

Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com