At the end of Song of Myself, the epic poem at the heart of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman invites us, his readers, to look for him beneath the soles of our boots. In turn, Allen Crawford, the American artist who has taken it upon himself to illustrate Whitman’s 60-page poem, protracting it along the way into 234 elaborately designed pages, hopes that we will find a little of the poet “under his pen”. He knows that it’s pretty “presumptuous” of him to have to attached his own name to Whitman’s, but he hopes to have atoned for this with his labour. And what labour it was! In a brief foreword, Crawford describes the process involved in his book’s creation. Each two-page spread took him between eight and 10 hours to complete; the whole thing consumed 2,560 hours of his life. During the winter, he slaved away in his Pennsylvania basement encased in several dressing gowns, boots and a Russian fur hat. His hands became so sore, he would go to bed with them slathered in cream and covered with a sock “like an ageing baseball player”.
Was it worth it? Yes. This version of Song of Myself is just occasionally tricky to follow, Crawford having “liberated” its lines from their blocks of verse so that they flow freely over the page “like a stream or a bustling city crowd”. But what it lacks in legibility it makes up for in beauty. This is a 21st-century version of an illuminated manuscript: as portable as a Kindle, but a thousand times more lovely. Crawford’s greatest achievement, I think, is to have caught Whitman’s sensibility so well – grand but intimate, earthy but also dreamy – and yet with recourse to contemporary imagery (as he says, not to have done so would have been a disservice to the poet, who wanted to create a form of American verse for the here and now). At one point – “the pleasures of heaven are with me” – an astronaut floats across the page; at another – “I tell not the fall of Alamo” – an old Buick lies rotting in a desert, its tyreless wheels sunk deep in sand; at yet another – “I hear the sound of a human voice/ A sound I love” – a muscular young basketball player is caught in profile.
Crawford’s illustrations – they come in just three shades: a mossy green, a rust-red brown and a serene, deep-water navy – have a rough, pared-down simplicity Whitman would surely have relished, and a sexiness, too. Here are throbbing seed pods, exuberantly fleshy toadstools, clam shells the size of a human torso. Even the curved handle of a pistol seems half to throb, as if it were made not of wood and horn, but of human flesh. Crawford has created precisely what he set out to, delivering to a new generation a passionately heartfelt tribute to the Good Gray Poet, but also a book that feels like a work of art in its own right.
