Walt Whitman & the Irish. .

Taylor, Andrew

Joann P. Krieg, Walt Whitman & the Irish. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000. xv 273 pages. Stg.[pounds sterling]16.95 (Paperback).

Joann Krieg's book attempts to locate Walt Whitman within an Irish and Irish-American cultural context. Krieg places the poet among a network of republican sympathizers on both sides of the Atlantic; she writes in detail of the impact of the Civil War on Irish Americans; and offers a number of portraits of Whitman's admirers in Irish literary circles (Wilde, Stoker, Dowden, Lady Gregory). The book is overflowing with dates and facts, to the extent that at times Whitman himself gets lost in the contextual mire. Few attempts are made to offer fresh readings of Whitman's poetry; instead Whitman and the Irish presents a synthesis of existing historical and biographical material to make some very large claims for the centrality to Whitman of Ireland and the large Irish diaspora on the eastern seaboard of the United States.

Although the arrangement of the book is 'geographical rather than biographical' (chapters are devoted to the Irish-American presence in New York, Boston, Washington, and Camden), there is an insistent chronological drive to the narrative that throws up contexts that are frequently forced. For example, the involvement of the Irish in New York's politics is described, 'when the Irish helped elect Mayor Fernando Wood in 1854, the year before the first Leaves of Grass'. This is an uncomfortable and arbitrary yoking of the two elements of Krieg's title; the relevance of the connection is unclear, other than to remind the reader of the publication date of Whitman's book. The book is uncertain of its readership and the kind of knowledge its readers might possess. The first chapter offers a rapid canter in eleven pages through Irish history from the eleventh century to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. This is brisk, bullet-point stuff, already familiar to anyone with a passing interest in Irish studies. It could be argued, of course, that the chapter serves as a skeletal framework for what is to come, except that chapter two offers more of the same: a time line of all things Irish that had an impact on Whitman's life. Initially, then, Krieg's book reads like a textbook aimed at students with little or no background in Irish history. Subsequent chapters undermine this impression, as we become immersed in a broad and highly detailed analysis of the geographical locations on which Krieg chooses to focus.

Indeed it is the breadth of the book that is at the same time one of its merits and its largest flaw. There is no doubt that Krieg is well-read in the culture of the period - she brings together a wealth of fascinating material and anecdote to flesh out her pictures of Whitman's various social scenes. But at times the reader is left to wonder at the relevance of this detail to the stated subject of her book. Several pages are devoted to an explanation of the mid-nineteenth-century vogue for phrenology and physiology as a means of determining character. 'The influence on Whitman of these theories is clear', Krieg writes. But a few lines later we read: 'What this meant to his developing thoughts about the various ethnic groups arriving in the United States, the Irish in particular, is not certain'. Asserted clarity swiftly becomes laboured doubt, and phrenology and its offshoots are abandoned by the text.

Potentially of most interest is the discussion of the Irish-American response to the Civil War. Krieg describes the delicate position many Irish Americans in the North trod between on the one hand a desire to demonstrate patriotism that might lead to their more general acceptance within the country, and on the other a strong opposition to abolition, 'an action taken to protect their status' in the face of economic competition from African Americans. All too easily Krieg rushes to simplify this situation by a telling authorial insertion: 'Irish opposition to abolition was also viewed, incorrectly, as proof of either an inability or an unwillingness to act in a democratic fashion' (my emphasis). Quite why such a view is incorrect is not offered. The undoubted bravery of the many Irish Americans who fought in the Civil War on behalf of the Union is enough, it seems, to wave away any further investigation into the very mixed motives for their involvement in the conflict in the first place. Krieg links Whitman wit h the Irish through his own uncomfortable response to abolitionism. Unwilling to subscribe to a political ideology that was seen as limiting and narrow in its scope, Whitman's philosophy instead sought to dissolve divisive identities - sexual, class and racial. Abolitionism set out to inscribe an identity, to accord it status. For very different reasons, then, Irish Americans and Whitman stood outside the Boston abolitionist culture of the Civil War years. Krieg, however, is keen to remove those differences: 'There is some evidence, however, that Whitman may have understood the position of the Irish in their antiabolitionist stance'. Differences are elided in an ongoing attempt to forge a connection between poet and people.

The book demonstrates a curious combination of assertion and speculation as Krieg brings together Whitman's life and a wider Irish-American and Irish political scene. 'If he cast around for literary precedents, High Henry Brackenridge's Teague O'Regan in Modern Chivalry ... must surely have come to mind'; 'Whitman's association with the Irish poor may have stemmed from an early association with them in Brooklyn'; 'Whitman's improved perception of Irish police may also have been helped by his deep attachment to Peter Doyle and his family'. Of course, a little careful tentativeness is an admirable quality, but Krieg's book suffers from an overabundance of such supposition masquerading as social history. The way in which the author attempts to draw Whitman into the focus of Irish-American life is often clumsy and unconvincing. For example, before quoting from Whitman's poem 'To Think of Time', in which he describes movingly the funeral of a stagecoach driver, Krieg writes: 'The driver is memorialized in words th at well might apply to any one of the city's Irish drivers'. Certainly many of the New York drivers were Irish American, but there is no indication in the poem of the nationality of this particular driver. What Krieg does is to substitute speculation for dose reading. There is nothing wrong with reminding the reader of your subject, but at times a creeping form of Irish exceptionalism is to be found in these pages, throwing a protective barrier around the Irish in America as if they themselves were not participating in a much wider and more diverse urban social experiment.

Far too often the book retells some very familiar stories. Nothing new is added to the tale of Oscar Wilde's visit to Whitman in 1882 that cannot be found in Richard Ellmann's biography, and Swinburne's change of heart from being Whitman's loyal disciple to his harsh critic is also already well-documented elsewhere. Several pages are devoted to Swinburne, the relevance of which to Whitman and Irish culture only becomes apparent when Krieg constructs an imaginative chain of events to explain the English poet's volte-face. Swinburne is brought into the focus of the book by the possibility that Wilde described his meeting with the ageing poet as something more than just a conversation. Oscar's narrated sexual indiscretions are posited as responsible for Swinburne's loss of sympathy. All this is speculation of course, but it is speculation that, as elsewhere, is offered as plausible explanation that ties Whitman's reputation ever more firmly within an Irish framework.

The strongest section of Krieg's book is the final chapter, where she focuses on Whitman's readership in nineteenth-century Ireland and his resonance for the Irish literary revival. Although Leaves of Grass was banned by Trinity College Library, Edward Dowden, Trinity's professor of English and an ardent Whitman advocate, emerges as a fascinating figure, deserving a study of his own. Anglo-Irish by birth and political perspective, Dowden's admiration of Whitman was based on a rejection of a narrowly-conceived nationalist literature. Unlike Yeats, who at least initially saw in Whitman a model for a national bard, Dowden's Whitman was not confined merely to national borders; it was instead 'a vision of a common life of the whole human race. Krieg carefully establishes the literary scene of late nineteenth-century Dublin, deftly examining a range of material connected to Whitman hitherto largely ignored. When she allows herself to focus on this specific aspect of Whitman's reception Krieg writes with confidence and authority. Unfortunately far too frequently her book is hampered by an uncomfortable combination of familiarity and wishful thinking.