Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

METAPHORS OF READING
n March 26, 1892, Walt Whitman died in the house he had bought less than ten years before, in
Camden, New Jersey — looking like an Old Testament king or, as Edmund Gosse described him, “a great
old Angora Tom”. A picture taken a few years before his death, by the Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins,
shows him in his shaggy white mane, sitting by his window, thoughtfully watching the world outside,
which was, he had told his readers, a gloss to his writing:
If you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore,
The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or motion of waves a key,
The maul, the oar, the hand-saw, second my words.
Whitman himself is there for the reader’s gaze. Two Whitmans, in fact: the Whitman in Leaves of Grass,
“Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son” but also born everywhere else (“I am of Adelaide … I am
of Madrid … I belong in Moscow”); and the Whitman born on Long Island, who liked to read romances of
adventure, and whose lovers were young men from the city, soldiers, bus drivers. Both became the
Whitman who in his old age left his door open for visitors seeking “the sage of Camden”, and both had
been offered to the reader, some thirty years earlier, in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass:
Camerado, this is no book,
Who touches this, touches a man,
(Is it night? Are we here alone?)
It is I you hold, and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms — decease calls me forth.
Years later, in the “death-bed” edition of the often revised and augmented Leaves of Grass, the world does
not “second” his words, but becomes the primordial voice; neither Whitman nor his verse mattered; the
world itself sufficed, since it was nothing more or less than a book open for us all to read. In 1774, Goethe
(whom Whitman read and admired) had written:
See how Nature is a living book,
Misunderstood but not beyond understanding.
Now, in 1892, days before his death, Whitman agreed:
In every object, mountain, tree, and star — in every birth and life,
As part of each — evolv’d from each — meaning, behind the ostent,
A mystic cipher waits infolded.
I read this for the first time in 1963, in a shaky Spanish version. One day in high school, a friend of mine
who wanted to be a poet (we had just turned fifteen at the time) came running up to me with a book he
had discovered, a blue-covered Austral edition of Whitman’s poems printed on rough, yellowed paper and
translated by someone whose name I have forgotten. My friend was an admirer of Ezra Pound, whom he
paid the compliment of imitating, and, since readers have no respect for the chronologies arduously
established by well-paid academics, he thought Whitman was a poor imitation of Pound. Pound himself
had tried to set the record straight, proposing “a pact” with Whitman:
It was you who broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root —

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Let there be commerce between us.
But my friend would not be convinced. I accepted his verdict for the sake of friendship, and it wasn’t until
a couple of years later that I came across a copy of Leaves of Grass in English and learned that Whitman
had intended his book for me:
Thou reader throbbest life and pride and love the same as I,
Therefore for thee the following chants.
I read Whitman’s biography, first in a series intended for the young which expurgated any reference to his
sexuality and rendered him bland to the point of non-existence, and then in Geoffrey Dutton’s Walt
Whitman, instructive but somewhat too sober. Years later, Philip Callow’s biography gave me a clearer
picture of the man and allowed me to reconsider a couple of questions I had asked myself earlier: if
Whitman had seen his reader as himself, who was this reader Whitman had in mind? And how had
Whitman in turn become a reader?
Whitman learned to read in a Quaker school in Brooklyn, by what was known as the “Lancastrian method”
(after the English Quaker Joseph Lancaster). A single teacher, helped by child monitors, was in charge of
a class of some one hundred students, ten to a desk. The youngest were taught in the basement, the older
girls on the ground floor and the older boys on the floor above. One of his teachers commented that he
found him “a good-natured boy, clumsy and slovenly in appearance, but not otherwise remarkable”. The
few textbooks were supplemented by the books his father, a fervent democrat who named his three sons
after the founders of the United States, had at home. Many of these books were political tracts by Tom
Paine, the socialist Frances Wright and the eighteenth-century French philosopher Constantin-François,
Comte de Volney, but there were also collections of poetry and a few novels. His mother was illiterate but,
according to Whitman, “excelled in narrative” and “had great mimetic powers”. Whitman first learned his
letters from his father’s library; their sounds he learned from the stories he had heard his mother tell.
Whitman left school at eleven and entered the offices of the lawyer James B. Clark. Clark’s son, Edward,
liked the bright boy and bought him a subscription to a circulating library. This, said Whitman later, “was
the signal event of my life up to that time.” At the library he borrowed and read the Arabian Nights —
“every single volume” — and the novels of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper. A few years
afterwards, at the age of sixteen, he acquired “a stout, well-cramm’d one thousand page octavo
volume … containing Walter Scott’s poetry entire” and this he avidly consumed. “Later, at intervals,
summers and falls, I used to go off, sometimes for a week at a stretch, down in the country, or to Long
Island’s seashores — there, in the presence of outdoor influences, I went over thoroughly the Old and
New Testaments, and absorb’d (probably to greater advantage for me than in any library or indoor room
— it makes such difference where you read) Shakespeare, Ossian, the best translated versions I could get
of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen, the ancient Hindu poems, and one or two
other masterpieces, Dante’s among them. As it happened, I read the latter mostly in an old wood.” And
Whitman asks, “I have wonder’d since why I was not overwhelm’d by those mighty masters. Likely
because I read them, as described, in the full presence of Nature, under the sun, with the far-spreading
landscape and vistas, or the sea rolling in.” The place of reading, as Whitman suggests, is important, not
only because it provides a physical setting for the text being read, but because it suggests, by juxtaposing
itself with the place on the page, that both share the same hermeneutic quality, both tempting the reader
with the challenge of elucidation.
Whitman didn’t stay long at the lawyer’s office; before the end of the year he had become an apprentice
printer at the Long Island Patriot, learning to work a hand-press in a cramped basement under the
supervision of the paper’s editor and author of all its articles. There Whitman learned of “the pleasing
mystery of the different letters and their divisions — the great ‘e’ box — the box for spaces … the ‘a’ box,
‘I’ box, and all the rest,” the tools of his trade.
From 1836 to 1838 he worked as a country teacher in Norwich, New York. Payment was poor and erratic
and, probably because school inspectors disapproved of his rowdy classrooms, he was forced to change
schools eight times in those two years. His superiors cannot have been too pleased if he taught his
students:
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand,
nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books.
Or this:
He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.
After learning to print and teaching to read, Whitman found that he could combine both skills by
becoming the editor of a paper: first the Long Islander, in Huntington, New York, and later the Brooklyn