Edward Carpenter and Walt Whitman: 1868-1922

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From Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (NY: Crowell, 1976). Copyright by Jonathan Ned Katz. All rights reserved.

Edward Carpenter was, with John Addington Symonds, one of the two major English homosexual emancipation pioneers, a calling inspired in part by the works of Walt Whitman.

Another iconoclast American, Henry David Thoreau, also influenced Carpenter to turn against commercialism and toward the English socialist movement led by William Morris. Carpenter became a socialist organizer and lecturer, as well as an exponent of Asian philosophy, prison reform, and an early, outspoken advocate of the woman’s and homosexual emancipation movements of his time.

Carpenter's "passionate sense of love," 1864

Edward Carpenter's "passionate sense of love" for males first found overt expression when he was twenty, in 1864, his freshman year at Cambridge divinity school. At that time he discovered others like himself and made, he says, a few special friends "with whom he occasionally had sexual relations.”

Carpenter first reads Whitman, 1868

Four years later, in 1868, Carpenter first read Whitman's poems, in the little garden outside his rooms at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. In 1873, Carpenter's "recoil" from the clerical life "was strengthened by a new enthusiasm for Greek sculpture" seen on a trip to Italy, and also by several "inspiring friendships." In the summer of 1874, he renounced his Holy Order and took a job lecturing in the industrial towns of northern England.

Carpenter's first letter to Whitman, July 12, 1874

The same year, on July 12, 1874, Carpenter wrote his first letter to Walt Whitman, reporting the American poet's profound influence on many individuals in England, relating this to the developing self-consciousness of women and of the working class, and thanking Whitman for legitimizing for him "the love of men:"

My dear friend…

My chief reason for writing {so I put it to myself) is that I can't help wishing you should know that there are many here in England to whom your writings have been as the waking up to a new day…I know that you do care that those thoughts you weary not to proclaim should be seized upon by others over the world and become the central point of their lives… When I say "many" of course I do not mean a multitude (I wish I did) but many individuals – each himself (or herself, for they are mostly women-fluid, courageous and tender) the centre of a new influence. All that you have said, the thoughts that you have given us, are vital-they will grow-that is certain.

In Whitman's writings, Carpenter discerns a new spirit under "the old forms,…reshaping the foundations before it alters the superstructure …For "English respectability" there is almost no hope, says Carpenter; Money and materialism rule:

Yet the women will save us. I wish I could tell you what is being done by them- everywhere-in private and in public. The artisans too are shaping themselves. While Society is capering and grimacing over their heads they are slowly coming to know their minds; and exactly as they come to know their minds they come to the sense of power to fulfill them…

You hardly know, I think, in America (where the life, though as yet material, is so intense) what the relief is here to turn from the languid inanity of the well-fed to the clean hard lines of the workman's face. Yesterday there came (to mend my door) a young workman with the old divine light in his eyes-even I call it old though I am not thirty--and perhaps, more than all, he has made me write to you.

Because you have, as it were, given me a ground for the love of men I thank you continually in my heart. (-And others thank you though they do not say so.) for you have made men to be not ashamed of the noblest instinct of their nature.

Women are beautiful; but, to some, there i s that which passes the love of women.

It is enough to live wherever the divine beauty of love may flash on men; but - indeed its real. And enduring light seems infinitely far from us in this our day. Between the splendid dawn of Greek civilization and the high universal noon of Democracy there is a strange horror of darkness on us. We look face to face upon each other, 'but we do not know. At the last, it is enough to know that the longed for realization is possible-will be, has been, is even now somewhere-even though we find it not…Slowly-I think-the fetters are falling from men's feet, the cramps and crazes of the old superstitions are relaxing, the idiotic ignorance of class contempt is dissipating. If men shall learn to accept one another simply and without complaint, if they shall cease to regard themselves because the emptiness of vanity is filled up with love; and yet shall honor the free, immeasurable gift of their own personality, delight in it and bask in it without false shames and affectations-then your work will be accomplished: and men for the first time will know of what happiness they are capable.

…It is a pleasure to me to write to you, for there are many things which 1 find it hard to say to any one here. And for my sake you must not mind reading what I have written.

On January 3, 1876, Carpenter writes once more to Whitman, asking "Will it ever be that human love …will cease to be a mere name?" Picking up on Whitman's poetically expressed desire to "infuse myself among you till I see it common for you to walk hand in hand," Carpenter says:

Dear friend, you have so infused yourself that it is daily more and more possible for men to walk hand in hand over the whole earth. As you have given your life, so will others after you-freely, with amplest reward transcending all suffering-for the end that you have dreamed. . . . What have we dreamed? a union which even now binds us closer than all thought high up above all individual gain or loss—an individual self which stands out free and distinct, …love disclosing each ever more and more. See, you have made the earth sacred for me.

Meanwhile, they say that your writings are "immoral": and you have to defend yourself against people who will misunderstand your defense as they misunderstood your original words. Need I say that I do not agree with them in the least? I believe on the contrary that you have been the first to enunciate the law of purity and health 'which sooner or later must assert itself. After ages perhaps man will return consciously to the innocent joyous delight in his own natural powers and instincts which characterized the earlier civilizations. I do not understand what it is to be "shocked" by these things: it seems to me childish. But in the meantime it is certain that people do not understand. In some way or other our modern civilization has become narrowed and one-sided. People's minds are dwarfed: one portion of their nature grows up in the dark (and ceases to be healthy). Men have lost the freedom (free masonry) of Nature and are plagued with insane doubts of their Duty. For a time I suppose men must grow up in swaddling bands of morality, and a certain instinct makes them cling to them till they have grown to be greater than, and the masters of, morality. But I think indeed the time has come for people to learn to unwrap these bands, and that from this time there wil1,be a world-wide growth in the direction you have pointed out. So while I regret sometimes that there are things in your writings which make it difficult, sometimes impossible, to commend them to some who might otherwise profit by them, yet I feel it is best that they should be there. Their presence delays the understanding and acceptation of your message, but your message would not be complete without it, and slowly, gradually, increasingly, without end, its grandeur will dawn upon men.

I feel that my work is to carry on what you have begun. You have opened the way: my only desire is to go onward with it. Though it is out of all question to suppose that one generation or ten generations will make much difference in men's minds in the direction of the ideal state, still-to contemplate that ideal and to live slowly translating it into real life and action is quite certainly the only good-and is sufficient. I do not think of anything that I have done except as preparation…

In April 1877, Edward Carpenter left England on his first trip to the United States. On May 2, Carpenter knocked at the door of .431 Stevens Street, Camden, New Jersey. There, in the home of Walt Whitman's brother, Carpenter met the poet face to face. Carpenter's account of this and subsequent meetings, published in 1897, is rather uninspired; the more interesting aspects of their discourse perhaps went unrecorded. A few days later, Carpenter joined Whitman in the country, where he had gone to stay with the Stafford family, whose printer son, Harry, was one of the American poet's great joys. Carpenter seems also to have been quite taken by him.

In May 1880, Edward Carpenter went to live near Sheffield with a working-class friend, Albert Fearnehough-and Fearnehough's wife. Here Carpenter started work on a book of poetry modeled after Whitman's, entitled Toward Democracy, first published in 1883. In 1884, Carpenter made his second trip across the ocean, and on June 7 again visited Whitman. On the morning of June 30, Carpenter paid his last visit to the poet's small house at 328 Mickle Street in Camden, New Jersey, and reports:

We had a long and intimate conversation. He was very friendly and affectionate, and sat by the open window … while he talked about "Leaves of Grass." "What lies behind 'Leaves of Grass' is something that few, very few, only one here and there, perhaps oftenest women, are at all in a position to seize. It lies behind almost every line; but concealed, studiedly concealed; some passages left purposely obscure. There is something in my nature furtive like an old hen! You see a hen wandering up and down a hedgerow, looking apparently quite unconcerned, but presently she finds a concealed spot, and furtively lays an egg, and comes away as though nothing had happened! That is how I felt in writing 'Leaves of Grass.'… I think there are truths which it is necessary to envelop or wrap up.

On October 23, 1885, Carpenter, back in England, writes a "practical" letter to Whitman, announcing his plans to bring out a second edition of Toward Democracy. This was the first edition to include a few poems of overt homosexual inspiration, described by one contemporary reviewer as "not wholesome to read!' Carpenter's letter to Whitman adds:

I send you a photo I had taken a little time ago with a young fellow who is an old friend of mine-in Sheffield-it is not very good of me, though very fair of 'tother one.

On May 15, 1888, Whitman, going through his papers handed Traubel, Carpenter's first letter thanking Whitman for giving Carpenter "a ground for the love of men" (letter of July 12, 1874). Whitman said of this letter:

"It is beautiful, like a confession…I seem to get very near to his heart and he to mine in that letter: it has a place in our personal history-an important place. Carpenter was never more thoroughly Carpenter than just there, in that tender mood of self-examination,… Carpenter is a thoroughly wholesome man-alive, clean, from head to foot."

A few days I& on May 21, 1888, Whitman gave Trubel another latter from Carpenter, commenting:

"The best of Carpenter is in his humanity: he manages to stay with people: he was a university man, yet managed to save himself in time."

So many university men, said Whitman,

"rather sympathize with the struggles of the people--but they are for the most part way off-remote: they only see the battle from afar. Carpenter manages to stay in the midst of it."

On December 6, 1888, Traubel says Whitman was writing a letter to Carpenter, from whom, earlier that day, a visitor had arrived with an introduction. Whitman mistakenly told Traubel that Carpenter had visited the United States three or four times-apparently Carpenter had made a strong impression. Whitman continued:

"Carpenter is a youngish man … Italian in appearance: radical of the radicals: come-outer: one of the social fellows in England who get constitutions by the ears-stir up thought, progress…. I question at times: isn't there too much of this? too much crying, screaming, for progress? Shouldn't the brakes be put down?" But he "always rejected" his "suspicions." He came "around inevitably to" his "optimism."…

W. said Carpenter had "come of wealthy parents." "The father died:… Edward came in for his share of the patrimony: quite a show able share it was, too." C. had been "much attached" to a young man whose "great ambition had been to get a farm of his own to work, to live upon: Edward encouraged him. When he came into his money Edward invested in land: the friend was married: the three lived together…What would "come out of Carpenter's life" was "'yet to be developed."

Whitman added:

"These vivid young fellows-what are they going to lead us to? The world abounds with 'em: earnest, astute, clarified, wanting to act, seeking progress, progress, progress-the fever of the age!" Then he laughed. "After all" was he "not as radical as the most radical of 'em?"

On December 29, 1888, Whitman gave Traubel another Carpenter letter (of January 3, 1876, see page 360), part of which was suspiciously missing:

The signature was cut out. Consequently some of the writing on the other side of the sheet is gone…[Whitman] called it "one of Carpenter's early fine letters'- adding: "He was never nobler than then, in that period of interrogating enthusiasm."

Carpenter's letter began with a reference to one of Whitman's more explicitly homoerotic "Calamus" poems, and went on to speculate about a future world of love. Whitman comments:

"Edward was beautiful then-is so now: one of the torch-bearers, as they say: an exemplar of a loftier England: he is not generally known, not wholly a welcome presence, in conventional England: the age is still, while ripe for some things, not ripe for him, for his sort, for us, for the human protest: not ripe though ripening. O Horace, there's a hcI1 of a lot to be done yet: don't you see? a hell of a lot: you fellows coming along now will have your hands full: we're passing a big job on to you.

In 1894, the year after John Addington Symonds's death, Edward Carpenter began to publish through the Manchester Labour Press, a socialist printing plant, a series of three pamphlets: Sex-Love; Woman; and Marriage. In January 1895, Carpenter's fourth pamphlet, Homogenic Love and Its Place in s Free Society, was published "for private circulation only" by the same Labour Press. Homogenic Love is a classic, early defense of homosexuality, "homogenic" being Carpenter's alternative to "homosexual"-a term he objected to because of its half-Greek, half- Latin derivation. In this essay, Carpenter suggests that the "special function" of same-sex unions i s the "social and heroic work" of generating philosophical concepts and ideals which help to transform human lives and society.

Using Whitman's sexual politics as a point of reference, Carpenter further suggests a connection between feminism and Lesbianism-especially in the United States:

It is noticeable…that the movement among women for their own liberation and emancipation, which is taking place all over the civilized world, has been accompanied by a marked development of the homogenic passion among the female sex. It may be said that a certain strain in the relations between the opposite sexes which has come about owing to a growing consciousness among women that they have been oppressed and unfairly treated by men, and a growing unwillingness to ally themselves unequally in marriage--that this strain has caused womankind to draw more closely together and to cement alliances of their own…such comrade-alliances-and of a quite passionate kind-are becoming increasingly common, and especially perhaps among the more cultured classes of women, who are working out the great cause of their sex's liberation; nor is it difficult to see the importance of such alliances in such a campaign. In the United States where the battle of Women's independence has been fought, more vehemently perhaps than here, the tendency mentioned is even more strongly marked.

Carpenter's public work as a leader of a movement for homosexual freedom had begun. It was gaining momentum when the conviction of Oscar Wilde in April 1895, caused a reactionary panic, which held back the homosexual emancipation movement in England for some time.

In July and August of 1897, Carpenter published, in a London journal called The Reformer, a long essay on homosexuality titled "An Unknown People." In the same year, Carpenter's anonymous sexual history, written by himself, appeared as "Case VI" in Sexual Inversion by Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds. The Ellis-Symonds book was first published in Berlin, in German, in 1896, then in London, revised and in English, in 1897. The first English edition included Symonds and Ellis's names as coauthors on the title page, but the Symonds family and executor Horotio Brown, fearing scandal, succeeded in buying up and destroying almost all existing copies. A second edition of 1897 removed Symonds's name as coauthor of the text, as did all subsequent editions. Brown also prohibited the publication of Symonds's sexually explicit autobiography until 1976.

In 1898, George Merrill moved in with Edward Carpenter, and the two lived together as lovers for thirty years, until Merrill's death in 1928. In 1902, Carpenter edited and first issued lolaus: An Anthology of Friendship, one of the first collections of homosexually relevant documents of male-male intimacy. Carpenter's Days with Walt Whitman (1906) is surprisingly silent on the subject of homosexuality. But in the same year, an expanded fifth edition of Carpenter's previously published love's Coming of Age for the first time included a chapter on homosexuality - the essay, "An Unknown People," now revised and re-titled "The Intermediate Sex." In 1910, Carpenter first published an essay on important connections between homosexuality and religion in early civilizations (reprinted in 1911 in G. Stanley Hall's American Journal of Religious Psychology and Mucation). In 191 4, this article became part of Carpenter's book, Intermediate Types among Primitive , Folk, a survey of anthropological research into homosexuality among native peoples and in classical Greece and medieval Japan. In 1916, Carpenter published My Days and Dreams, "autobiographical notes" explicit about his homosexuality, though they deemphasize its personal and political import.

In 1922, Carpenter read a paper on Whitman before the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, "the only official organization formed by English male homosexuals in the early part of the twentieth century. Two years later the society published Carpenter's paper as the pamphlet Some Friends of Walt Whitman: A Study in Sex Psychology. Here Carpenter i s more explicit about Whitman than he was ever before in print. Whitman's "Calamus" poems, says Carpenter,

illustrate and give expression to what we would now call the homo sexual passion -which passion, although at that time ignored and unacknowledged by the world, was burning fiercely within him and pressing for deliverance.

Carpenter criticizes Symonds for asking Whitman if he accepted the fact that his poems might stimulate physical relations among men. Whitman, says Carpenter,

could hardly with truthfulness deny any knowledge or contemplation of such inferences; but if on the other hand he took what we might call the reasonable line, and said that, while not advocating abnormal relations in any way, he of course made allowance for possibilities in that direction and the occasional development of such relations, why, he knew that the moment he said such a thing he would have the whole American Press at his heels, snarling and slandering, and distorting his words in every possible way. Things are pretty bad here in this country; but in the States (in such matters) they are ten times worse. Symonds ought to have known and allowed for this, but apparently did not do so.

Carpenter said that Symonds's question to Whitman, and Whitman's answer, "has given a handle to the reactionary folk and a push in the 'direction of Comstock and his crew." (The American Anthony Comstock and his followers in the Society for the Suppression of Vice, formed in the 1870s, were crusaders against obscene literature, abortion, and paintings of the nude.) Carpenter continues:

We must remember, too, how different, the atmosphere on all these matters was then [1891] (especially in the U.S.A.) from what it is now [1924] in the centers of modern culture, and in places like Oxford and Cambridge and London, where you can nowadays talk as freely as you like, and where sex. variations and even abnormalities are almost a stock subject of conversation.

Personally, having known Whitman fairly intimately, I do not lay great stress on that letter. Whitman was in his real disposition the most candid, but also the most cautious of men. An attempt was made on this occasion to drive him into some sort of confession of his real nature; and it may be that that very effort aroused all his resistance and caused him to hedge more than ever.

Carpenter emphasizes:

There is no doubt in my mind that Walt Whitman was before all a lover of the Male. His thoughts turned towards Men first and foremost, and it is no good disguising that fact. A thousand passages in his poems might be quoted in support of that contention…

Carpenter discusses Whitman as a prophet of a developing homosexual emancipation movement of general social import:

In the case of Whitman–united as he was by must intimate ties to one or more men-friends, we see already the emergence of a new organic inspiration and a new power of life. His poems radiate this power in all directions. Thousands of people date from their first reading of them a new era in their lives… Thousands date from the reading of them a new inspiration and an extraordinary access of vitality carrying their activities and energies into new channels. How far this process may a go we hardly yet know, but that it is one of the factors of future evolution we hardly doubt. I mean that the loves of men towards each other-and similarly the loves of women for each other-may become factors of future human evolution just as necessary and well-recognized as the ordinary loves which lead to the…propagation of the race. If so, we may' safely say that we see here in operation a great power which is already playing its part in molding the world, and one which we are morally bound not to deny and disown, and not to run away from, at the risk of denying our humanity and committing the sin, so execrated in the New Testament, of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost.