Walt Whitman, poet of democracy

...But then he traveled to the South, I think he lived there a couple of years, and returned to New York where he wrote Leaves of Grass which changed everything...

...It is in that tradition that Turner is working when she drops her lipstick the fhst time Garfield sees her...

...Everyone was the hero of Whitman's poem since he wrote it in relation to democracy, in relation to an ideal of equality among all men on earth...

...It is a song of joy because, unlike Baudelaire and Byron who dramatized their unhappiness in famous volumes, Whitman dramatized his happiness...

...Except for the shape she really wasn't any raving beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her...

...He invented a personage whom he called "Walt Whitman" who was not the one offered to us by his biographers...

...She had been out back, in the kitchen, but she came in to gather up my dishes...

...This Poe never proposed to do, since he was at heart a rather dissolute aristocrat and a great romantic...

...In my opinion, Whitman is the father of all that is modern in poetry...

...Screen II RAZING CAIN THE SHOCK OF AMORAIXFY T HE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE is perhaps the best thing James M. Cain ever wrote...

...Then she went into the lunchroom, but in a minute she was back...

...She jumped like I had cut her with a whip...

...Whitman, on the other hand, never understood Poe either...

...All you can do is make it more explicit...

...Later Whitman published that letter in an edition of erotic poems which caused a great scandal at the time, and this caused a misunderstanding between Emerson and his "benefactor...

...The pin-up's message" was: Look, but don't touch --you might mess my hair, or smudge my lipstick...

...Whitman published an article saying that Poe was good, but that he was like a pianist who struck only the most majestic notes without portraying North American democracy...

...And Whitman also speaks to the one who will read him a hundred years from now, and he imagines that the one who reads him woidd have wanted to be with him personally, and so he says, "And in all likelihood we are together, you and I." "These are, in truth, the thoughts of all men, in all places, and at all times," sings Whitman, and Leaves of Grass is the song of a great individual who is of and belongs to all people, men and women...

...And finally, the third personage is the reader himself which is why when we read Leaves of Grass we identify ourselves immediately with him...

...Poe and Whitman didn't know each other and I think it was better that way...

...There desire for women who were out of reach had to be both kept alive and kept in bounds...

...But no one has thought about the intimate aspects of Whitman's experiment...

...And Emerson continued, "I travel little to New York, but when I do go I shall not miss the occasion to shake the hand of my benefactor...

...Frank tells us all about it in his own words: Then I saw her...

...Because whatever it was--the love for a woman, an erotic experience that for him was mystical, perhaps--afterwards he changed radically...

...And it has been Whitman's successful leap into his songs, the recreation of "Walt Whitman," that makes his Leaves of Grass the poetry of genius...

...Of course he wasn't America's only genius at that time Commonweal: 304 because Poe, to whom we also owe so much, was a contemporary of Whitman...

...He sent a copy to Emerson, who was already famous, and Emerson answered him with a very generous letter saying that Leaves of Grass was the greatest work of intelligence and wisdom that America had so far contributed...

...that is to say, a man is chosen and exalted...

...Certainly the novel's opening, where Frank and Cora are getting acquainted, is Cain at the top of his form...

...Whitman until then was a mediocre journalist who had written a novel against alcoholism and partisan political articles including, strangely enough, a tract in support of slavery...

...In the movie's version of the last scene quoted above, for instance, Frank (Jack Nicholson) doesn't carry off Cora (Jessica Lange) like a caveman retiring discreetly to the cave...

...I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth...

...As Garfield sits at the counter of the diner, a lipstick rolls across the floor...

...The democratic personage invented by him is marvelous...

...Does that mean, then, that there are two Whitmans, the friendly savage and the poor, solitary writer, who invented him...

...At first I thought that that was all Bob Rafelson had done in his new adaptation of the Cain classic...

...This hardly represents progress in the arts when compared to the Cain original...

...Our worst suspicions are confirmed the first time we lay eyes on Turner in the role of Cora...

...Emerson had advised Whitman to exclude the erotic theme...

...a lonely, unhappy man who led a sad life...

...From that moment in 1855 when he published his Leaves of 9Grass and invented blank verse--based on the Psalms, of , course, but very different from them--from that moment, the poetic personage has become one of the greatest feats of the North Americans and their literature...

...He was, as can be seen, just a journalist...

...He throws her right on the kitchen table, where we get to watch them groping and pawing one another while he tries to mount her...

...I shot it right close to her ear, almost in a whisper...

...one feels that the one who speaks isn't Whitman but the reader himself...

...There is more than duality, there is a trinity of Whitmans...

...She looked at me, and got pale, She went to the swinging door, and peeped through...

...His experiment with the trinity of personage in Leaves of Grass was so successful that his own person has been obscured...

...Instead the other Whitman, the Whitman of the poem, is a sort of magnificent vagabond who travels from no man's land to the land of everyone...

...Apparently he sent out letters with false signatures to the newspapers pointing out that Leaves of Grass, despite its clumsiness and the fact that it was written by an uncultured man, was nonetheless a work of genius...

...He knew Poe through his works, and when the latter died, he was somewhat unjust to him...

...Vergil said, "I sing of arms, deeds, and the man...

...The literary ~lestiny of Whitman's followers has been, above all else, to imitate the results of his work, that somewhat popular poetry, that tone that causes him to be less a poet than an orator...

...In the poem "Salut de MOnde," for example, he says, "What do you see, Walt Whitman...

...Nothing could be further from Cain...

...I had what I wanted...

...Inspired by experiences in the bedrooms of New Orleans and on Georgian battlefields it has been essential for the literatures of every continent...

...And I, too, agree with Emerson because I think that Walt Whitman is a benefactor of all mankind...

...When this film was made, America's erotic ideal was still the pin-up, that flossy memory of sex which had accompanied American servicemen overseas...

...Instead of Cain's mussy nymphomaniac, Turner is an icy goddess...

...Myself, I wrote my book Fervor de Buenos Aires under the direct influence of Walt Whitman and wrote that in the book's prologue...

...Poe died without knowing Whitman's poetry but he would have surely thought Whitman's poetry was written in blank verse because Whitman was very stupid and could not write in classical verse form...

...With Whitman we think, as I said before, of an orator of joy, and so the great North American poet has become overwhelmed by his creation...

...And at this point we're only on page six...

...And when Whitman achieves beauty, he achieves it as no else does: "I am man," he says, "I suffered, I was there...

...So the scene where Nicholson grab-asses Jessica Lange in the new Postman may represent progress over the Turner22 May 1981:305...

...Poor Whitman...

...What beauty...

...And Whitman answered him, "If I exclude sex, I have to exclude everything...

...the vision of a lonely, unfortunate man whose life was short of happiness has been replaced by a species of semi-divine hero espousing democracy...

...The MGM version is so wholesome it's almost a perversion of Cain...

...Whitman was fight but he was also audacious because he dared publish his erotic poetry in the Puritan America of 1855 and so his total image suffered for it...

...Now then, the idea of creating a trinity one of whose parts is the reader himself, is an idea that only Whitman has attempted and that no one has thought of imitating, Whitman's style, his intonation, and literary methods have been imitated by Neruda, Carl Sandburg, Lee Masters, and others...

...I bit her...

...Frank is a drifter who has just been hired by Nick Papadakis to work in the gas station attached to Nick's restaurant, and Cora is Nick's wife...

...But perhaps the great difference between Poe and Whitman or, for that matter, Whitman and many other poets and writers, is that the debt we owe Poe is due more to his total image than to any story...

...I had socked one in under her guard, and socked it in deep, so it hurt...

...Then he becomes the exalted personage in the poem, "Walt Whitman, a cosmos, son of Manhattan, turbulent, carnal, sensual, eating, drinking, engendering...

...We know that Cain is in trouble assoon as the credits begin, because the copy of the novel seen in the background is in fact not Cain's slight, trashy pulp fiction, but a massive tome, something at least as epic and pretentious as Gone with the Wind...

...Today, almost fifty years after Cain wrote Postman, you still couldn't top it for sheer raunchiness...

...M OW, DOES Whitman's poetry, more than a literary attitude, represent a form of expression of humanistic-religious truth...

...Yes, because there is a mystical feeling evident in his poetry, an experience which supposedly corresponded with his stay in the South...

...Now then, there was always a hero in epic poetry...

...From now on, it would be business between me and her...

...Bite me...

...He was a great partisan of democracy and he wanted the hero of his poem to be everyone...

...I went out...

...That dream of democracy, what Americans call "the American dream," was the great dream of Whitman, who believed fervently in the possibility of that experiment...

...He had to do that, and it is understandable that he did it because, as I said, he was an unfortunate creature who was alone...

...It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs...

...He retraces its path to the feet of Turner, who, as his eyes slowly ascend her, is wearing, white high heels, white shorts, a white sweater, and an immaculate white turban...

...When we think of Byron, for example, we think less about "Don Juan" or "Childe Harold" than we do about his person...

...Bite me...

...tl, ~ tl She was so close I could smell her...

...In the first place he is the newspaperman of the Brooklyn Eagle...

...They surely would not have been able to get along...

...And when we think of Poe we think of his person, that kind of macabre dandy...

...She might not say yes, but she wouldn't stall me...

...Heroes like Achilles, Ulysses, Roland, and El Cid are some examples...

...I took her in my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers...

...Those verses fall like hammer blows...

...And as for the themes, they, too, would have been distasteful to him: the theme of democracy and common everyday life no doubt would have seemed repulsive to Poe...

...Of course, perhaps only a genius such as Whitman could achieve it, and when one reads Whitman, one immediately understands that he is truly in the presence of a genius...

...But I suppose I would have to admit it's an advance over the earlier Hollywood adaptation, which was done in the mid-1940s at MGM with John Garfield and Lana Turner...

...And among the things he sees is the cowboy crossing the plains with a lasso on his arm, that is to say, he sees "us," his nineteenth century American audience, in some way...

...But none of them created a personage who would be the author and the reader at the same time...

...How come you married this Greek, anyway...

...They were opposites...

...What do you hear, Walt Whitman...