Jonathan Ned Katz: "Comrades and Lovers," Act I

ENTRY IN CONSTRUCTION

Jonathan Ned Katz: "Comrades and Lovers"

ACT I

LIGHTS OFF; WHITMAN'S FIRST WORDS ARE HEARD IN THE DARK.

WHITMAN:

Love thoughts

SPEAKER 1

love-juice,

SPEAKER 2:

love-odor,

SPEAKER 3:

love-yielding,

SPEAKER 4:

love-climbers,

WHITMAN:

and the climbing sap,

SPEAKER 1:

arms and hands of love,

SPEAKER 2:

lips of love,

SPEAKER 3:

phallic thumb of love,

SPEAKER 4:

breasts of love,

WHITMAN:

bellies pressed and glued together with love.

LIGHTS ON, NIGHT.

SCENE TITLE, PROJECTED OR PRINTED ON PLACARD:

1 Walt Whitman, "Love-thoughts"

WHITMAN AND A "BOY" MOVE CLOSE TOGETHER, ADDRESS EACH OTHER.

BOY:

The wet of woods through the early hours.

WHITMAN:

Two sleepers at night lying close together as they sleep,

BOY:

One with an arm slanting down across and below the waist of the other.

WHITMAN:

The smell of apples,

BOY:

aromas from crushed sage plant,

WHITMAN:

mint,

BOY:

birch bark.

WHITMAN:

The boy's longings,

the glow and pressure

as he confides to me

what he was dreaming.

BOY:

The dead leaf tallings its spiral whirl,

falling still and content to the ground.

WHITMAN:

The sensitive, orbic, underlapped brothers,

that only privileged feelers

may be intimate where they are.

BOY:

The mystic amorous night.

WHITMAN:

The curious roamer the hand,

roaming allover the body,

BOY:

the bashful withdrawing of flesh

where the fingers soothingly pause

and edge themselves.

WHITMAN:

The limpid liquid within the young man,

BOY:

the vex'd corrosion

so pensive and painful,

WHITMAN:

the torment,

BOY:

the irritable tide

that will not be at rest,

WHITMAN:

the like of the same I feel,

the like of the same in others.

SCENE TITLE: 2 Rufus Griswold, "Once licentiousness"

RESPONDING TO THE EARLIER VERSE, GRISWOLD APPEARS WITH LEAVES OF GRASS, SPEAKS TO WHITMAN.

GRISWOLD:

Once licentiousness

shunned the light;

now it writes books

showing how grand and pure it is,

and prophecies

its own ultimate triumph.

TO AUDIENCE, HOLDING UP LEAVES OF GRASS

It is impossible to imagine

how any man's fancy

could have conceived

such a mass of stupid filth.

We leave this gathering of muck

to the laws

which have power to suppress

such gross obscenity.

FIRE AND BR1MSTONE PROPHECY

"Peccatum illud horribile,

inter Christianos non nominandum."

WHISPERS TO WHITMAN

(That vile sin among Christians not to be named.)

WHITMAN AND SPEAKERS RESPOND TO GRISWOLD.

SCENE TITLE: 3 Walt Whitman, "Through me"

WHITMAN:

Through me many long dumb voices,

SPEAKER 1:

voices of the interminable generations of slaves,

SPEAKER 2:

voices of prostitutes and deformed persons,

SPEAKER 3:

voices of the diseased and despairing,

SPEAKER 4:

voices of wombs and the fatherstuff,

SPEAKER 1:

voices of the rights of them the others are down upon.

WHITMAN:

Through me forbidden voices,

SPEAKER 2:

voices of sexes and lusts,

SPEAKER 3:

voices veiled

and I remove the veil,

SPEAKER 4:

voices indecent

by me clarified and transfigured.

WHITMAN:

I do not press my finger across my mouth!

SPEAKER 1:

keep as delicate around the bowels

as around the head and heart,

SPEAKER 2:

copulation is no more rank to me than death is.

SPEAKER 3:

I believe in the flesh and the appetites,

SPEAKER 4:

seeing, hearing, and feeling are miracles,

and each part and tag of me is a miracle.

WHITMAN:

TO BRONSON ALCOTT AND HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WHO APPEAR IN THE NEXT SCENE

If I worship any particular thing

it shall be some of the spread of my body;

SPEAKER 1:

You my rich blood,

your milky stream pale strippings of my life;

SPEAKER 2:

Breast that presses against other breasts

it shall be you,

SPEAKER 3:

Root of washed sweet-flag,

timorous pond-snipe,

nest of guarded duplicate eggs,

it shall be you,

SPEAKER 4:

Mixed tussled hay of head and beard and brawn

it shall be you,

WHITMAN:

Trickling sap of maple,

fibre of manly wheat,

it shall be. you;

SPEAKER 1:

Winds

whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me

it shall be you,

SPEAKER 2:

Broad muscular fields,

SPEAKER 3:

branches of liveoak,

SPEAKER 4:

loving lounger in my winding paths,

it shall be you,

WHITMAN:

Hands I have taken,

face I have kissed,

mortal I have ever touched,

it shall be you.

ALCOTT AND HENRY DAVID THOREAU RESPOND TO WHITMAN

SCENE TITLE: 4 Bronson Alcott: "This morning with Henry David Thoreau"

ALCOTT ADDRESSES AUDIENCE; THOREAU ACCOMPANIES HIM, FOCUSING ON WHITMAN

ALCOTT:

This morning

with Henry David Thoreau to Brooklyn,

to see Walt Whitman.

I find this Whitman

likely to make his mark on Young America

he affirming himself

to be its representative man and poet.

WHITMAN AND THOREAU EYE EACH OTHER SUSPICIOUSLY; ALCOTT OBSERVES

Thoreau and Whitman

each seemed planted fast in reserve,

surveying the other curiously,

like two beasts,

each wondering

what the other would do,

whether to snap

or run.

THOREAU:

TO ALCOTT, INDICATING WHITMAN

There are two or three pieces

in his book

which are disagreeable

to say the least,

simply sensual.

He does not celebrate love at all.

It is as if

the beasts spoke.

Men have been ashamed of themselves

with reason.

I do not wish

his poems' sensual parts

were not written

but that men and women

were so pure

they could read them

without harm,

that is,

without understanding them.

TO HIMSELF; A NEW THOUGHT

Of course,

if we are shocked,

whose experience are we reminded of?

SCENE TITLE: 5 Walt Whitman, "By silence"

WHITMAN RESPONDS TO THOREAU

WHITMAN:

By silence

the pens of poets

have long connived

at the filthy law

that sex,

desires,

lusts,

organs,

acts

are unmentionable,

to be ashamed of,

driven to skulk out of literature.

SPEAKER 1:

This filthy law

has to be repealed

it stands in the way

of great reforms.

SPEAKER 2:

It is in the interest of women

as well as men

that there should be

no infidelism about sex,

but perfect faith.

SPEAKER 3:

The present diluted deferential love

is enough to make a man vomit;

SPEAKER 4:

as to manly friendship,

everywhere observed in the states,

there is not the first breath of it

to be observed in print.

WHITMAN:

The body of a man or women

is so far quite unexpressed in poems;

SPEAKER 1:

that body is to be expressed,

and sex is.

WHITMAN:

TO JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS, WHO APPEARS IN NEXT SCENE

All theories stagnate in their vitals,

cowardly and rotten,

if they cannot publicly accept, and publicly name,

with specific words,

the things on which all decency,

all that is worth being here for

depend.

SYMONDS, INSPIRED BY WHITMAN'S WORDS, STEPS INTO THE LIGHT.

SCENE TITLE: 6 John Addington Symonds, "Is it not strange?"

HERE, SYMONDS IS TWENTYSEVEN; HE HAS BEEN MARRIED THREE YEARS AND HAS TWO DAUGHTERS; HE'S WELL-EDUCATED, AND COMES FROM AN OLD, ENGLISH, ARISTOCRATIC FAMILY, BUT HE MUST WRITE LITERARY AND ART CRITICISM TO SUPPLEMENT HIS INHERITED INCOME.

HE INTRODUCES HIMSELF TO THE AUDIENCE AS A CLOSE CONFIDANT, FULL OF INNER PASSION

SYMONDS:

Is it not strange I should have read

Whitman's Leaves of Grass only this week?

If I had read it years ago,

and if I had understood,

I should have been

a braver, better, different man now.

The Leaves is not a book.

It is a man,

miraculous in his vigour,

and love,

and omniscience,

and animalism.

and omnivorous humanity.

ELATED AT HIS RECENT DISCOVERY OF WHITMAN'S CELEBRATION OF LOVE BETWEEN MEN

His Calamus poems

treat the whole matter newly.

This man has said

what I have burned to say;

what I should have done

if opinion and authority

and the contamination of vile lewdness

had not ended in muddling my brain.

WITH SLIGHT SELF-MOCKERY

Yet even with these bruised wings and faded petals

it is good to know

that we bear in our breast

the Psyche and Flower

of the noblest

most masculine Democracy.

RAISING HIS ARM TO INTRODUCE THE WHITMAN POEM THAT FOLLOWS

Behold!

A light has risen

which may not be denied.

LIGHTS UP ON WHITMAN. TITLE: 7 Walt Whitman, "Alone I had thought"

AS WHITMAN SPEAKS HE IS JOINED, ONE BY ONE, BY A GROUP OF YOUNG MEN. WHITMAN AND THE SPEAKERS ADDRESS EACH OTHER

WHITMAN:

Alone I had thought --

yet soon a silent troop gathers around me,

SPEAKER 1:

Some walk by my side, and some behind,

SPEAKER 2:

and some embrace my arms or neck,

WHITMAN:

They, the spirits of friends, dead or alive -- thicker they come, a great crowd, and I in the middle,

SPEAKER 3:

Collecting, dispensing, singing in spring, there I wander with them,

WHITMAN:

Plucking something for tokens -- something for these, till I hit upon a name -- tossing toward whoever is near me,

SPEAKER 4:

Here! lilac, with a branch of pine,

SPEAKER 1:

Here, out of my pocket, some moss which I pulled off a live-oak in Florida, as it hung trailing down,

SPEAKER 2:

Here, some pinks and laurel leaves, and a handful of sage,

SPEAKER 3:

And here what I now draw from the water, wading in the pond-side,

WHITMAN: (0 here I last saw him that tenderly loves me -and returns again, never to separate from me, And this, 0 this shall henceforth be the token of comrades -- this calamus-root shall, Interchange it, youths, with each other! Let none render it back!)

WHITMAN GIVES CALAMUS-ROOT TO SYMONDS, WHO TAKES IT GLADLY, HOLDING IT UP TO AUDIENCE]

SCENE TITLE: 8 John Addington Symonds: "I am taking with me to London"

SYMONDS ADDRESSES AUDIENCE, HIS CONFIDANT, WITH URGENCY, ON THE TRAIL OF CALAMUS

SYMONDS:

I am taking with me to London

an introduction

to the American Unitarian clergyman, Moncure Conway,

whose biography of Whitman appeared in the Fortnightly.

From Conway I hope to learn

something more

about the innovator.

I shall not omit

to ask Conway questions

about the substance

of Whitman's Calamus poems

with a view to hearing

what a nest for it

there is in America.

TIME PASSES, HE REFOCUSES; MOOD/LIGHTING CHANGE

I saw Conway.

I could not get him

to say anything explicit about Calamus.

This means that Calamus

is really very important

and Conway refuses

to talk it over with a stranger.

He cannot be oblivious

of its plainer meanings.

If I see Conway again

I shall consult him further

about certain Whitman poems.

FRED VAUGHAN STEPS FORWARD, HIS WORKING CLASS DEMEANOR AND SPEECH CONTRAST WITH SYMONDS' ARISTOCRATIC ENGLISH

SCENE TITLE: 9 Fred Vaughan, "To form the acquaintance"

VAUGHAN:

TO WHITMAN

To form the acquaintance

of any Boston stage man,

get on one of those stages

running to Charleston Bridge, or Chelsea Ferry.

Introduce yourself as my friend.

By the way, Walt,

what do you think of the Common?

You tell me Mr. Emerson came to see you.

I heard him lecture on Friday last.

Though much pleased with the subject,

I did not at all like his strained delivery.

But Walt,

when I thought

how a few days before

he had been so attentive to you,

my heart warmed toward him very much.

I think he has that in him

which makes men

capable of strong friendships.

This theme he touched on,

and said that

a man whose heart was filled with Friendship,

warm, ever-enduring,

not-to-be-shaken-by-anything,

was one to be set on one side

apart from other men.

VAUGHAN AND WHITMAN FORM A TABLEAU REPRESENTING SINCERE FRIENDS

There, Walt,

what do you think of them

setting up you and myself

and one or two others that we know

in some public place,

HE LOOKS AROUND THE STAGE AREA

with a large placard on our breasts:

VAUGHAN HOLDS UP A PLACARD WITH AN ORNATE SIGN: "SINCERE FRIENDS"

Good doctrine that.

WHITMAN MOVES AWAY FROM VAUGHAN TO INSPECT HIS PROOF SHEETS, AND TO DISTANCE HIMSELF FROM VAUGHAN'S INTENSE NEED

I am glad, Walt,

you are succeeding so well with your book.

Send me some of the first proof sheets.

WHITMAN RESPONDS NEGATIVELY TO VAUGHAN'S DEMAND

WHITMAN:

TO VAUGHAN

Are you the new person drawn toward me?

To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose.

VAUGHAN:

How is this, Walt?

I have written to you twice since I heard from you.

ENTRY IN CONSTRUCTION -- TO BE CONTINUED