Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and his Brothers in the Civil War, by Robert Roper, Walker Books, $28.00
War opens with a barrage of blood and shells, as “false twilight” falls upon George Washington Whitman’s unit, “the scent of pennyroyals, crushed by soldier’s shoes remained intense,” as Walt’s younger brother navigates America’s critical junctures for identity and union: Antietam, Fredericksburg, Petersburg, and Vicksburg. And War remains aloft, backtracking through the family’s lean years as America saw artisan carpentry work replaced by faster, less disciplined construction as America began to engender itself as a nation of great cities, in particular New York, and we see New York growing as Whitman moved about its river run streets, New York of the busy working class, New York of the freewheeling prostitution days. War is very much about how young George, Jeff and Walt came to embody the restless, ambitious, and independent spirit of America. Robert Roper’s work is an instant classic, mixing poetic biography with well paced war reenactments with the Whitman family narratives of near-poverty, madness and Tuberculosis.
Much of the early book focuses on Walt’s years as an editor, journalist, writer, and man of the streets, prowling Manhattan for inspiration among the Opera Halls and streets teeming with sexuality and energy. Roper is even tempered with Walt’s appetites throughout; he speculates very little and sees no reason too. Roper allows Whitman to be himself, through Whitman’s own notebooks that catalogued men he met in the streets, or later in the hospital wards. Whitman’s sexuality is not ignored, and Roper offers other ways to interpret the data, showing that Walt was interested in people, in humanity, not always a sexual liaison, but liaisons nevertheless. Roper does check Whitman when it comes to what he got wrong about the Civil War, how his later work Drum Taps remains aloof, almost, as if Whitman could not gather the energy to make the horror he witnessed poetic or palpable. “The real war will never get into the books” the poet once said, and indeed Whitman’s frustrated interior monologue about his later writings are evident as Roper shows how Whitman kept putting it off the publication of Taps, adding to it after Lincoln’s assassination, even halting the printing of it after he’d prepared it for publication. “Drum Taps was a success largely because of lack of competition” offers Roper, who points out the dissonance between the written word of the manuscript and the enormity of the Civil War experience for the poet, and his family. He argues Whitman worked, suffered even, to bridge his encompassing vision, but his hesitancy in his letters and his business records show a Whitman striving for something more sublime than he had written. He reminds us that Whitman was a mythmaker, one whose powers failed to capture the enormity of being a solider on the battlefield, and how that failure haunted his later years.
The real war did get written down, not by poets or journalists, but by the soldiers themselves. This is where younger brother George steps in, a recorder of details and short prose that enlarged and informed Whitman’s writing. Often George’s letters were basis for Walt’s journalistic pieces; George keeping a journal and writing letters to his mother, Walt, and younger brother Jeff.
If the early part of Drum is about New York coming into its own, it is also about Washington genesis into a real city, for as Whitman hastens to nursemaid, fretting over his brother, Washington begins to blossom into the creature it is now; the once pastoral town becomes a town of men making deals, manned with armies of clerks, the papermill war machine fueled by bars, prostitutes and the spirit of national crises, its “carpe diem atmosphere.”
At times David McCollough, the voice of Ken Burn’s Civil War reaches out through Roper’s prose, but that’s not a bad thing, it is akin to poets summoning each other’s images and motifs and tones, as it is the occurrence is partly subjective, but this book reads like a gathering of historians continuing a dialogue, focused through the lens of the Whitman family, whom like many other families, wrote a furious pace.
At the center the epistle narrative is family, namely a mother, whose threadbare knuckle experiences gave her a sharp eye and callous hands. This is a woman, whom during the War was nursemaid to her retarded youngest son, Edward, as well as two other brothers, Andrew Jackson who died young after fathering children with an Irish whore, and Jesse whom went mad after a stint of sailing life. This is a woman who kept grandchildren fed, bills paid, with George’s salary. This is a woman who often played nursemaid for Jeff’s children, and watched out for his wife, whose back was prone to chronic pain. Now the Drum of War is a biography fueled by the words of three passionate men and their stalwart mother, who were hungry for news of each other; a modern family flung wide, connecting by post and infrequent visitations.
While Mrs. Whitman served as a touchstone for her children’s experiences, it was George whom all were anxious about. George who had an uncanny knack for living through the worst of the battles this country would ever see; once George’s coat was shredded by raining shells and bullets, though George was never touched, and at Fredericksburg George suffered a cheek wound while his company suffered death and dismemberment. George Washington Whitman made his rounds throughout the war and the Whitman family’s imagination followed at Antietam, The Wilderness, the crater, and the POW camps at Salisbury, NC, and Danville.
Now the Drum of War brings to light the fingerprints the family left upon the country, as younger brother Jeff designed waterworks and helped engineer the prototypes of America’s modern cities, while George’s experience as a seasoned office in the Civil War prepared him to become a successful developer, all on top of Walt’s pioneering verse, TB raising hell among all Americans trying to rise up.
Note: the short form of this review is currently available in the current Delmarva Quarterly, Spring 2009.
Comments