Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

Describes a seventy-page French pamphlet by a hitherto unknown French writer and journalist known as R. de Maratray

Asselineau, Roger

AN UNKNOWN FRENCH WHITMANIAC 
ROGER ASSELINEAU 
No BIBUOGRAPHY OR BOOK on the reputation of Leaves of Grass in France 
describes or even lists a thin pamphlet of seventy pages which appeared 
in Paris in November 1934 under the title of Whitmaniana. 1 The author 
was an unknown writer, one R. de Maratray. The pamphlet belonged to 
a series of monthly publications called Bibliotheque de l'Artistocracie (not 
to be confounded with "aristocratie," the cover blurb warns us). The 
purpose of the publisher (the equally unknown Gerard de Lacaze-
Duthiers) was to provide subscribers with an "encyclopedia of contem-
porary thought." It was an eclectic series. The subtitle of Whitmaniana 
was "Retlexions d'un adepte de la morale 'ouverte.'" This "morale" 
was in principle open to all, but it was actually biased towards the Left. 
Among the contributors were authors like Han Ryner (a well-known 
anarchist), Georges Pioch (a well-known pacifist), Victor Margueritte, 
Victor Basch (the President of the "Ligue des Droits de l'Homme"), 
E. Armand (who later became the editor of an anarchist monthly, 
L'Unique),2 and Gabriel Sarrazin (who had published an excellent essay 
on Whitman in La Renaissance de la Poesie Anglaise, 1798-1889).3 
The cover and the title-page of Whitmaniana carry an epigraph 
borrowed from Whitman-"La question essentielle it poser relativement 
it un livre est celle-ci: 'A-t-il fortifie aucune arne humaine?"'-which is 
the translation of a passage in Democratic Vistas: "The true question to 
ask respecting a book, is, Has it helped any human soul?" (Actually Whit-
man was here quoting with approval the Librarian of Congress speaking 
before the Social Science Convention in New York, in October, 1869.)4 
The book opens with a two-page introductory chapter entitled "La 
Mission du Poete": 
Aime la terre, Ie soleil et les animaux, 
Ne deviens pas la proie des richesses, 
Donne a to ute main tendue, 
Protege Ie stupide et Ie fou, 
Consacre a autrui ton revenu et ton travail, 
Deteste la tyrannie, 
Ne discute point Dieu, 
Sois patient et indulgent envers tout Ie monde, 
Ne t'abaisse devant rien de connu ou d'inconnu, ni devant aucun homme ou groupe 
d'hommes, 
Refais l'examen de tout ce que t'ont dit les ecoles, les eglises ou les livres, 
23 
Et repudie tout ce qui peut faire injure a ton arne. 
Alors ta propre chair sera comme un grand poemes, et une fluide generosite 
rayonnera non-seulement de tes paroles mais des lignes silencieuses de ta bouche et 
de ton visage et a travers tes cil et dans chaque mouvement de tes membres et de 
ton corps. 
A footnote specifies that this is a translation of one of Whitman's po-
ems, "To the maker of poems." But where did de Maratray find this 
unknown poem? He does not say. Actually, it is a free translation of a 
passage in the 1855 Preface of Leaves of Grass: 
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give 
alms to every one 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, ... 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.s 
This introductory poem is the starting-point, the text, so to speak, 
on which de Maratray builds the lay sermon which follows. Each of the 
first eleven lines which make up the poem becomes in its tum the title of 
a chapter, and each chapter is an extrapolation of one of Whitman's 
lines. The first chapter thus expatiates on the poet's love of the physical 
world: the earth and the sun, men, and especially animals. The author 
insists there is no reason for excluding animals, and, in order to empha-
size the point, quotes the beginning of Section 32 of "Song of Myself" 
("I think I could turn and live with animals ... "), which he translates in 
rhymed verse, without realizing that it is a sort of treason to do so. He 
also quotes an unpublished poem by his grandfather, J. Fournier-
Maratray, to prove the fundamental good will of lions towards all men. 
In the rest of the book, de Maratray similarly develops Whitman's 
thought, while extrapolating his own views. He approves of Whitman's 
religious inclusiveness and, like him, puts Jesus and Buddha in the same 
portfolio, but he denounces the anthropomorphism and anthropocen-
trism of all established religions. To those who ask if God exists, he 
answers that only God exists and only the spirit is imperishable, thus 
undercutting Whitman's emphasis on the value and importance of mat-
ter. As a result, he emphasizes the spiritualism of Ouspensky in his Ter-
tium Organum. For him there are two races of men: those who are en-
dowed with "cosmic consciousness" (he uses R. M. Bucke's phrase), 
and those who belong to the unenlightened masses. His ideal is the man 
"who sees the cosmos in the smallest leaf of grass." 
Politically, de Maratray offers more practical and down-to-earth 
solutions than Whitman, for he believes in syndicalism and more par-
24 
ticularly in Fourierism (and in Fourier's phalansteries). More presciently 
than Whitman, and helped in this respect by his knowledge of twenti-
eth-century historical developments, he sees the dangers inherent in all 
forms of collectivism. He equally condemns nazism, fascism and com-
munism and exalts Krishnamurti, who, like Whitman, recommends 
against following any leader blindly and says we should acknowledge no 
master. For de Maratray, the source of all evils is greed, the universal 
worship of the Golden Calf, which even the masses are only too often 
inclined to practice. In short, contrary to Whitman, he does not believe 
in the "divine average." He so thoroughly distrusts the masses and is so 
afraid of "Ie roi-Foule" ("King-Mob") that he is willing to accept com-
promises. He thus praises the enlightened philanthropy of American 
magnates (Whitman, after all, did so too), and he has more faith in their 
policy of high wages and redistribution of wealth than in utopian ex-
perimentation, which he believed would lead sooner or later to some 
form of tyranny and exploitation. 
Such are the main points touched upon by de Maratray in his 
Whitmaniana, inspired by Whitman but nonetheless original in several 
respects and produced for consumption by a readership of hard-headed 
French syndicalists who had no confidence in the capitalist press and 
the easily influenced masses living in large unhealthy "metropoles like 
Berlin, New York or Paris." De Maratray was finally a disappointed 
journalist with no Whitmanian faith in "the Hoe press whirling its cylin-
ders, shedding the printed leaves steady and fast" (LG, 200). 
Universite de Paris-Sorbonne 
NOTES 
R. de Maratray. Whitmaniana-Reflexions d'un adepte de la morale "ouverte" (Paris: 
Les Ecrivains Independants, 1934).71 pp. 
2 Armand was present at the Sorbonne when I defended my dissertation on "The 
Evolution of Walt Whitman," and he later wrote an article about it, "Resurrexit Walt 
Whitman," in L'Unique 11 Ganuary/February 1955), 16-18. 
3 Whitman liked Sarrazin's article very much. It was translated by Harrison S. Mor-
ris and published in Horace Traubel, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Thomas B. Hamed, 
eds., In Re Walt Whitman (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1893), 159-194. 
4 See Floyd Stovall, ed., Prose Works 1892 (New York: New York University Press, 
1964), 2:420. 
5 Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition, ed. by Harold W. 
Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York: New York University Press, 1965), 714-
715. Whitman later incorporated this passage, with slight formal changes, in "By Blue 
Ontario's Shore," Section 14 (p. 351). 
25 


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