Walt Whitman’s California
Walt Whitman’s sister-in-law Mattie gave birth to her second child in 1863, a healthy baby girl with gray eyes like her uncle Walt. “The new baby is immense, & I take to her in proportion,” Whitman wrote to a friend. Mattie’s first child, Mannahatta (“Hattie” for short), was three years older and born around the time Whitman published the third edition of Leaves of Grass. Mannahatta, the Lenape name for Manhattan, appears fifteen times in the 1860 Leaves, and Whitman, proudly a New York poet, describes its poems as “Chants of the Mannahatta, the place of my dearest love.” It is likely, then, that Hattie’s uncle had something to do with her name.
Three years later, he had strong thoughts about what to call her new sister. “I want her to be called California,” continues Whitman’s letter. “She is fully worthy the name. She is large, calm, not pretty but something ahead of that, full of latent fire in the eyes.” Even after Mattie named her daughter “Jessie Louisa,” Whitman’s letters refer to her as “California,” until about the time the family relocated to St. Louis in 1868. “I got thinking last night about little California,” he wrote to his mother. “O how I wished I had her for an hour to take care of—dear little girl, I don’t think I ever saw a young one I took to so much.” Embodied in his young nieces, Mannahatta and California, representing (at least as far as uncle Walt was concerned) America’s east and west coasts, the poet pictured a softer Manifest Destiny, a fledgling future based on immense, familial love.
The state of California was just five years old when he proclaimed himself the “comrade of Californians” in 1855. But the nascent state receives only passing mentions in the first two editions of Leaves of Grass. In 1857 Whitman had nothing short of “The Great Construction of the New Bible” in mind for his magnum opus—but in order to achieve this, Leaves of Grass would need to break out of New York. By the third edition of 1860, Leaves of Grass had grown from twelve, to thirty-six, to one-hundred-seventy-eight poems and as the book expanded, so did the range of Whitman’s vision. California’s presence grows to Whitmanic proportions alongside his beloved Mannahatta. “Take my leaves, America!” says the introductory poem. “Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own offspring; / Surround them, East and West! for they would surround you.” His poems, he claims here, are children of America—like his nieces—and the 1860 Leaves revels in this “East and West” pairing, yawping across an entire continent to bring together the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, “spanning between them east and west, and touching whatever is between them.” An almost overpowering unifying impulse drives the New Bible. “Love” appears over one hundred and fifty times, not including its other conjugations, derivatives, and synonyms. During the Civil War, Whitman took a hiatus from Leaves of Grass, and a new edition did not go to print until 1867.
Unity in a nation, as in a family, demands vigorous love to survive. The 1860 Leaves of Grass praises “California life” for “the stanch California friendship” and “the sweet air.” For stanch, the edition of Webster’s preferred by Whitman around the time offers “firm in principle; steady; constant and zealous; hearty.” A short poem captures how fervently Whitman wanted something of this California “stanchness” for himself, and how he might help nurture it:
A promise and gift to California,
Also to the great Pastoral Plains, and for Oregon:
Sojourning east a while longer, soon I travel to you,
to remain, to teach robust American love;
For I know very well that I and robust love belong among you,
inland, and along the Western Sea,
For These States tend inland, and toward the Western Sea—and I will also.
An early manuscript of the poem does not mention California at all; the “promise” is made to “Indiana, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, and others,” states dubbed “the west” in early 19th century America. At some point before going to print, however, Whitman looked as far west as his eyes could go and California took the lead. His letters from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s anticipate the promised California sojourn, “a journey I have had in contemplation for several years, & which has been two or three times fixed, but postponed,” he wrote in 1872. Sadly, his stroke in 1873 left him partially paralyzed and so the trip never came. He went there in his imagination, though, marking “The flashing and golden pageant of California” in “Song of the Redwood Tree,” first published in an 1874 issue of Harper’s.
His poems, he claims here, are children of America—like his nieces—and the 1860 Leaves revels in this “East and West” pairing, yawping across an entire continent to bring together the Atlantic and Pacific oceans
“A California song!” the poem opens in exclamation. “A prophecy and indirection—a thought impalpable, to breath, as air.” The number of surviving manuscripts related to this poem show something of Whitman’s preoccupation with the theme, with sorting out his idea of California. Like the 1860 poem, “Song of the Redwood Tree” also centers on a promise, only this time it is not the poet making a vow. It is not a promise to, but a promise of. Not a bond, but potential. While his earlier promise was to “teach robust American love,” by 1874 he saw the robustness of California’s passion—perhaps the 17,000 Californians who fought to preserve the Union convinced him (more Californians enlisted per-capita during the Civil War than in any other state). One can imagine uncle Walt looking into the face of his niece and whispering like a spoken lullaby his prophecy for the Golden State: “I see in you, certain to come, the promise of thousands of years… child of the real and ideal… the true America, heir of the past so grand, to build a grander future.”
One hundred years after the first edition of Leaves of Grass, one of those “heirs of the past” stood sighing in a supermarket in Berkeley, “what thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman….” Allen Ginsberg’s imagination places Whitman, “dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher” so naturally into a time and place the elder poet had never seen, “poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.” Fingering the pages of Leaves of Grass, Ginsberg holds Whitman to his promise to teach Californians “robust American love.” But America is not the same. Loneliness permeates. And in his grasping for Whitman among the “solitary streets” of California, Ginsberg asks “Which way does your beard point tonight?” He is never given an answer.
