Mailer and Whitman

An Interview on Democracy in America

Abstract

Walt Whitman and Norman Mailer were both exceptionally interested in the tenets of democracy. This creative “interview” between two historic American democrats presents a range of perspectives on the complexities of their thought (and art) that has not been seen before. One major goal of this interview is to present Whitman in his own words, allowing for occasional elisions, transitional phrases and sentences, and similar unobtrusive devices of coherence and clarity, so that modern readers might measure for themselves the currency and significance of our most Emersonian poet’s ideas on American democracy. The means to this goal of allowing Whitman to speak his own words is rooted in his prose, none more so than Democratic Vistas, his “Preface” to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, and the rendition of his late-life conversations with his Boswellian acolyte Horace Traubel, published over decades in nine volumes as With Walt Whitman in Camden. Readers decide for themselves the relevancy of Whitman to twenty-first century America. As one contemplates that relevancy or lack of it, one might want to keep in mind that the hope for the progressive evolution of a culture is not necessarily limited to a sealed time capsule labelled “Nine-teenth-Century Idealism.” Everyone who ever dissented, protested, or placed his or her body as “a counter friction to stop the machine,” in Thoreau’s formulation, in the quest for humane change from the injustices of the status quo has, and today still does, accept the proposition that things can get better (not that they will but that they can).