Whitman's advice to the Pynchon List

[Terrance]

Walt was one of the B'Hoys. 

What I like about Walt was that he was one of the b'hoys.  During his
formative years he was a rowdy, a loafer, a fireman, a cab driver, a
dockworker, a b'hoy. The genial wickedness of the b'hoy is what makes
the persona of Leaves so special and so very different from Thoreau or
Emerson. Or even Melville. In a way, one could read Leaves as one can
read Moby-Dick, as American picaresque. Of course I can read Frederick
Douglass as such. I wouldn't be the first. Ever see the film "The Fisher
King"? A bit ham-fisted, surely, but there is this wonderful scene where
Jack is sitting under the golden Sherman in Columbus Circle with a toy
Pinocchio talking about Nietzsche and says that some men, like Walt
Disney, Hitler, are not like the rest of us poor slobs. Anyway, W didn't
find his salt of the earth American Humanism under Emerson's Rainbow
anymore than Melville found his there. 

"How I do love a loafer ... an entire loafer kingdom." 

Between gentility and poverty lurks a certain sloth-uped b'hoy.  



Eulenspiegel7646 at aol.com wrote:
> 
> This is what you shall do:  Love the earth and sun and the animals,
> despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the
> stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate
> tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward
> the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any
> man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and
> with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in
> the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all
> you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss
> whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great
> poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the
> silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes
> and in every motion and joint of your body.
> -Walt Whitman