WHITMAN'S QUEST FOR 'REAL LIFE'

...This book, put together and translated by Professor Beck, together with Ernst Cassirer's Rousseau, Kant, Goethe, published several years ago by Princeton University Press, ought to be in th« library of "every student of the philosophy of Kant, which means every student of philosophy...

...Walt Whitman will be able to cry later...

...Milton R. Konviis is professor of history •* Cotnell University...

...He writes home for copies of the newspaper artioles, chafing at the delays of publication worrying about misprints, asking breathlessly whether or not his full name was printed...

...Although some of Kant's ethical writings had been previously translated, students had to be satisfied with short selections or with the use of library copies of out-of-print books...

...After the bribe Of ice-cream, the "comic reading"—-they were ready for the manly hug...

...He did not dress wounds, but distributed ice-cream, raspberry jelly and gingersnapg to the sick and wounded...

...wrote letters home for the illiterate...

...the mask of the old-maidish do-gooder sits precariously on the passionate lover of boys...

...Whitman's prose is at best uncertain, tending toward turgidity...

...Particularly in the newspaper articles describing his mission, the matter of faet, platitudinous smug voice (we can tell from our vantage point who is all the time behind it) makes for a kind' of high comedy, a joke on everyone concerned: "In many cases, where I find a soldier 'dead broke' and pretty sick, I give half a tumbler of good jelly...

...yet, if only'as a limiting concept or regulative notion, it will outlive all criticisms...

...The boy amputee in particular arouses him, all that maimed and scarcely matured manhood in his hairy embrace...

...Beside the invalid, the boast of "perfect health" asserted in Leaves of Grass took on reality...

...Here it is relaxed into a complete sloppiness that goes far beyond the lapses in grammar which so disturb Oscar Cargill in his introduction, but which he is willing to forgive in light of the "sacred" nature of the work...

...The reference to St...

...Many want tobacco: I do not encourage the boys in its use, but where I find they crave it I supply them...

...a Our Parent: Immanuel Kant Reviewed by MILTON R. KONVITZ CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON AND OTHER WRITINGS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY...

...He had already in the comparatively peaceful fifties begun visiting the bedsides of his beloved bus-drivers in New York hospitals...

...and the kiss printed poems meant nothing...

...he calls it a second "Little Flowers...

...I was there...

...The Cookie' Distributor or the felly Dispenser would be more appropriate though less reverent titles —or if one prefers a somewhat loftier approach, The Faith Healer, fn this volume the Bodley Press has reissued aftejyflfty years, Richard M. Bucke's collection of Walt Whitman's letters chiefly to his mother (enlarged by, two formal communications to the press) about his experiences in the military hospitals of Washington in 1963 and 1964...

...THERE IS SOMETHING ABSURD in Walt as the professionally cheerful YMCA ward visitor...

...3.00...

...Here in one volume are found the great "Critique of Practical Reason," the "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals," "An Inquiry Into the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals," "What Is Enlightenment...

...kissed various "noble" young men to sleep, and all the while, envisioned himself "healthy, hearty, clean, strong" emitting invisible magnetic rays of healing as he stalked the crowded wards...

...Perpetual Peace," "On a Supposed Right to Lie From Altruistic Motives," and selections from "Metaphysics of Morals...

...and the comradeship blossoming on the margin of disease and health was, after all, what he meant, a poetry of action continuous with his published verse...

...and that same hand held the pen of Calumus, singing the loving "camerados," the triumph of the "en-maSse...

...I do not encourage In its use , . ." "a tumbler full of good jelly...

...THE CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE has been subjected to a great deal of criticism...

...It was a role he was looking for: a definition of himself as the source of health in a sick world, and a public form to make clear to everyone his relation to society and the war...

...These, are less the words of the shameless singer of the body, the celebrator of "secret vices," than of the palpably fraudulent Walt who wrote a sentimental novel condemning the evils of drink—under the continuous influence, he later claimed, of whisky...

...yet there is ho freedom from Kant...

...over and over, he proposes it to himself, but without conviction...

...any suspicion of outsidedness seems treasonable...

...By Immanuel Kant...

...He could forget the still slight symptoms of his own illness...

...He has written for Partisan Review and Commentary, and is a frequent contributor to The New Leader...

...yet it is impossible to study ethical theory long without finding oneself in the middle of the Kantian current of thought and exploring the tributaries from that current in the rivers and creeks of neo-Kantian and anti-Kantian thought...

...I was there'.'' —the hopeless and dearly bought the poet's essential lie...

...The letters home are hasty, illwritten, full of boring and trivial matter: irrelevant gossip about family and neighbors, endless pleas to dear mother to take it easy...

...The essential interest of the Wound Dresser lies in its character as a case book of the artist's quest to.find a function in society, that will neither falsify his creating personality, or cut him off from the difficult and swarming world of "real lifer" The problem is, of course, not created by a war, but in war time all questions of belonging are fearfully underlined...

...the louder one protests one's freedom, the more certain we can be of the depth of the influence...

...370 pages...

...Purple and sweating, inexorably creeping up toward 210 pounds (though he carefully kept himself down to two meals a day) with a blood-pressure to match, he complains of headaches, temporary deafness and spells of weakness...

...heads towards the breakdown that is the climax of his venture at defining and propagating health...

...and the hand tenderly overlapping layers of gauze on the jacket serves to confuse matters further...

...It is only the young boy, the truly "American" type who inspires Walt to an unhallowed laying on of hands...

...Walt, middle-aged but uncommited by marriage or a regular job, should certainly have volunteered...

...He cannot see any meaning) in becoming a soldier...

...There is also a useful bibliographical note, listing titles #f English works or translations concerned with Kant's philosophy and ethics, plus an eight page index that will <also be welcomed by all students and readers...

...The theory of "adhesive love" and "comradeliness," with its shabby background of phrenology and underground homosexuality, constantly intrudes...

...Once one is exposed to Kant, there is no escape from him: he is like one's parent—there can be no complete emancipation...

...the demand to have his devotion and his powers acknowledged...

...Kant was deeply concerned with the problem and nature of freedom...

...5.00...

...And yet the hand that held the four pound bag of ginger-snaps "bought at a baker's in Seventh Street" is the hand that stroked tenderly the arm-stump crawling with maggots...

...The war made the bus driver no longer.a sufficiently universal symbol...

...and the sense of a vocation makes him especially afraid of being cut off...

...not the authentic Saint but the pseudosaintly crackpot is evoked—rather Mary Baker Eddy than Saint Francis...

...it was the soldier, the country-boy in arms, the radically native American revealed as ill and needing love, that became the noblest metaphor of the people...

...UNTIL THE PUBLICATION of this book, students of Kant have been seriously handicapped by the unavailability of the texts of Kant's ethical treatises and essays in English translation...

...Even his one attempt to move up to the field hospitals nearer the front is abandoned, with a half-hearted statement of principle—and an undertone of simple funk...

...The book also has an excellent 50-page introduction by Professor Beck, in which is compressed a large body of critical judgments and of historical and bibliographical facts...

...Once he turns aside to comment jealously on the young women who would infringe oh his territory: "I am compelled to say young ladies, however refined, educated or benevolent, do not succeed as army nurses, though their motives are noble...

...Even more thin Plato or Aristotle, bis influence fills the crevices and crannies of the mind and will...

...put on his best wine-colored suit, and walked from bed to bed believing (as he had to) that he was a center from which health invisibly streamed: for that vaunt he risked infection, though he was not brave, and catalogued his gingersnaps and jellies thought he was not a fool...

...The book will be welcomed with genuine pleasure and gratitude by all persons to whom the name of Kant is held in sacred veneration...

...Leslie A. Fiedler teaches English at Montana State University...

...And it is for the sake of that vaunt, that he let his beard grow out...

...There is, too, his desire for publicity, for recognition: the articles carefully prepared for the press, listing his pseudo-miraculous cures...

...Kant's ethical views have caused no Copernican revolution...

...Chicago: University of Chicago Press...

...HIS FURTIVE AND HALF-CONSCIOUS quest for lovers is not the only non-Franciscan motive of his two years in the hospitals...

...finding in the bedridden a passive public that would not run away even when he talked poetry...

...Francis of Assisi is even mpre irrelevant than the title...

...What Is Orientation in Thinking...

...The University of Chicago Press deserves praise for engaging Professor Lewis White Beck, of Lehigh University, to prepare a new and complete translation of Kant's most important ethical writings, with the exception of "Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and Sublime" and parts of "Metaphysics of Morals,1' and for presenting the work in a format and in type worthy of the author...

...THE WOUND DRESSER is a thoroughly misleading title for this collection...