Studies in the psychology of sex. Vol. II, Sexual inversion / by Havelock Ellis.

  • Havelock Ellis
Date:
[1915]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Studies in the psychology of sex. Vol. II, Sexual inversion / by Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    74/416 page 54
    The foregoing remarks (substantially contained in the previous editions of this book) were based mainly on the information received from J. A. Symonds’s side. But of more recent years interesting light has been thrown on this remarkable letter from Walt Whitman’s side. The Boswellian patience, enthusiasm, and skill which Horace Traubel has brought to his full and elaborate work, now in course of pub¬ lication, With Walt Whitman in Camden, clearly reveal, in the course of various conversations, Whitman’s attitude to Symonds’s question and the state of mind which led up to this letter. Whitman talked to Traubel much about Symonds from the twenty-seventh of April, 1888 (very soon after the date when Traubel’s work begins), onward. Symonds had written to him repeatedly, it seems, concerning the “passional relations of men with men,” as Whit¬ man expressed it. “He is always driving at me about that: is that what Calamus means?—because of me or in spite of me, is that what it means? I have said no-, but no does not satisfy him. [There is, however, no record from Symonds’s side of any letter by Whitman to Symonds in this sense up to this date.] But read this letter—read the whole of it: it is very shrewd, very cute, in deadliest earnest: it drives me hard, almost compels me—it is urgent, persistent: he sort of stands in the road and says T won’t move till you answer my ques¬ tion.’ You see, this is an old letter—sixteen years old—and he is still asking the question: he refers to it in one of his latest notes. He is surely a wonderful man—a rare, cleaned-up man—a white- souled, heroic character. . . . You will be writing something about Calamus some day,” said W. [to Traubel], “and this letter, and what I say, rnay help to clear your ideas. Calamus needs clear ideas: it may be easily, innocently distorted from its natural, its motive, body of doctrine.” The letter, dated Feb. 7, 1872, of some length, is then repro¬ duced. It tells how much Leaves of Grass, and especially the Calamus section, had helped the writer. “What the love of man for man has been in the past,” Symonds wrote, “I think I know. What it is here now, I know also—alas! What you say it can and should be I dimly discern in your Poems. But this hardly satisfies me—-so desirous am I of learning what you teach. Some day, perhaps,—in some form, I know not what, but in your own chosen form,—you will tell me more about the Love of Friends. Till then I wait.” “Said W: ‘Well, what do you think of that? Do you think that could be answered?’ ‘I don’t see why you call that letter driving you hard. It’s quiet enough—it only asks questions, and asks the ques¬ tions mildly enough.’ T suppose you are right—“drive” is not exactly the word: yet you know how I hate to be catechised. Symonds is
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