Walt Whitman's Secret

   
ONE
   

I
NEVER SAW THE MAN
whose spirit-child I became when he didn't actively appear to be dying. He was a person who, for all the emphasis he placed on vigor and robust manliness, started his decline early and continued on the downward path during all the time I sat with him and listened and asked him to teach me. His descent into death was especially rapid during his final three and a half years, when I was preserving a record of his conversation. What I am about to say might seem cold-hearted to anyone else who might read these lines, but I know that you, dear Flora, will comprehend my message with the perfect and honest clarity for which you are known. The simple fact is that W was growing thinner and more feeble at the same rate as my manuscript of his table-talk (bed-talk might be a better term) got thicker, meatier and stronger— as though all things in the Universe were suddenly in balance.

I was not yet fifteen years of age when my father, Maurice Traubel, a lithographer and engraver with his own little shop, told me that a famous poet, a great man, had come to live in Camden and that we should be proud to have him in our city. My mother, Katherine, a native of Philadelphia across the river, had renounced the Christianity in which she had been reared, then married a Jew who himself had repudiated Judaism some time earlier. For Father
had no special affection for the ways of the Hebrews back in Frankfurt or here in America. “Why should I be permitted to do one day the same acts I am then forbidden on another?” he would say. “I see no rational sense in it, and I reject it.” He did not wish to be considered a German in the new land any more than he had wished to be thought of as a Jew in the old one. This attitude became part of my inheritance from him, though I was of course not considered a Jew because Mother wasn't one. Unlike most people, I recognize the revision of one's personal history as the necessary removal of an obstacle that cannot be overcome by other means. The longer I live, and as you know, I am approaching the end of the process, the more I discover how much I have resembled my father even while I was struggling to become like W instead.

The idea of a famous American poet, the most American one of all, as many said, right in our midst filled Father with admiration, for he never lost that love of art and learning that is supposed to be a traditional and some say almost mandatory part of Jewish life. In that spirit, he took me with him to pay our respects at the house at 322 Stevens Street. This was the home of George Whitman, W's younger brother by ten years, the one who had fought in the war of secession and suffered a wound, and who now earned his living manufacturing pipe.

W, who was to become the other half of my life, was seated in the parlor, wearing a comfortable suit of clothes. His shirt was open at the throat. His vest had rolled lapels, and an inexpensive watch chain, with no fob, stretched across one side. He had a sensitive mouth and a generous portion of nose, and his hair had retreated most of the way back, giving him a forehead like a cupola on some large public building. His white beard, though wispy in spots, was also long and fully shaped, obscuring the exact outline of the face beneath. He had the habit of combing his whiskers with his fingers as he spoke. His
complexion was slightly pink, like a certain type of sea-shell, suggesting a level of health that in fact he could no longer claim to possess. He seemed impossibly old to me then, an antediluvian figure, some ancient god speaking with the authority of long and everlasting experience. In truth, he was fifty-four. Now that I myself am not much older than that, I understand all too well how illness can cause one to fade so quickly and prematurely, though his ill-health differed from my own. My own disease is knowable; it can be circumscribed. His could not be understood or even defined, not until the post-mortem examination that I attended almost two decades later.

Father asked W how he was faring.

“Middling, middling,” he said, without real conviction and certainly without the sincere optimism he was to project in later times, worse times. “The left leg's gimpy.” He stretched it out straight, then bent over and patted it once, treating it like a faithful dog. “The arm, not so bad.” His speech was clear, unaffected by the episode that had taken place in his brain. It was one of those strong voices but was nonetheless soft and well modulated, rather than rough or raucous. He told Father that he was inclined to dizziness now whenever he rose, however slowly, though the problem was less acute when getting to his feet from a seated posture than from either a prone or a supine one. “The blood settles in pools,” he said, “like petroleum collecting in the Earth.” The words are exact, though of course they were uttered a number of years before I began to write down everything he said to me. Well, almost everything.

Looking back, I know he enjoyed our visit, the first of so many, because my family had come from Europe. W was infatuated with the idea of people forsaking the Old World with its timeless animosities and systems of tribute and packing up for America where they could fill their lungs with oxygen and make their own way without assistance or impediment. That Father respected the rôle of the writer
was another attribute in the eyes of W, for he felt that he was an out cast among the literary personages of his own country, as on the evidence he often had been and to a certain extent continued to be. The fact that Father was a part of the printing trades also counted for a great deal. To W, writing and printing were two ends of the same stick, a connection not to be broken but rather to be celebrated. Most of all, he enjoyed having visitors. It seemed to me, in what is called the egoism of youth, that he was especially welcoming to me right from the beginning.

When I quit school, he said to me, “You have wisdom far beyond your few years to have done so,” adding: “I was a schoolmaster myself once upon a time, on Long Island, and I know the deleterious effects of school upon young noggins.” Soon afterward, when I told him that I was learning how to set type, he smiled warmly, knowing that I was aware how he himself had helped set up the first edition of
Leaves
after he had amputated his own formal education. Soon I was working in the job shop of the
Camden Evening Visitor
and indeed had become its foreman, promoted to the position when I was only sixteen (though I confess that the
Visitor
was hardly a big enterprise nor commercial printing its largest component by any means, to say nothing of the fact that the wages were not enough to have lured a married man).

W often remembered autobiographical details divorced from their place in the sequence of living. Perhaps he had been this way even before the stroke of Seventy-three, I don't know. Only in later years did I feel that I had a full command of what he had done and where he had been at particular times and of just generally how everything fitted together. At first I was aided in this process by
The Good Gray Poet
, which his friend O'Connor wrote in 1866, the year after the war, to protest W's dismissal from his clerkship at the Interior Department in Washington for having promoted immorality in the immortal
Leaves.
Ultimately, though, the knowledge, the understanding, the
knowing
, came to me slowly, grew inside me as I spent so many hours, days and weeks— years almost, if one were to string together all the time continuously— listening to him talk. W was by way of being a professional talker. I, by contrast, was his own professional listener.

When he was living on Stevens, I would make a point of stopping by after work, especially on warm sunny days that I knew might find him sitting on the front stoop. Then we would talk about books on and on. I was of the tender age at which we self-educators have a dire thirst for reading, one that cannot be entirely slaked except perhaps by decrepit maturity. I was happy to take in literary chat, which he could spool out hour upon hour, pleased to have his opinions regarded with such enthusiasm. For as I was not merely becoming self-educated but self-radicalized as well, my ears received with some satisfaction much of what he had to say. Unfortunately, I kept not even a simple diary in those early days, yet I recall a good many of his revelations and pronouncements, for they showed me that we were (or so I thought at the time) members of the same political congregation.

He said, for instance: “The persons who are interested in poetry alone, estranged from most other forms of useful expression, cannot explain why Homer and Virgil are as much different as they are alike. They can't see how the one man was moved to song while the other set out, with utmost calculation, determined to sing, the feelings of the heart be damned.” Such utterances were part of W's more general dislike of the literary professors and literary professionals, a subject that could, paradoxically, occasionally drive his pronouncements somewhat beyond the limits of what he actually knew to be true. I once heard him say that he hated polite literature the same way Generals Grant and Sherman had hated warfare: because it was Hell. But the metaphor he chose required some clarification. So he launched into a kind of oral post-scriptum. “Unlike Grant, I am not a West Pointer,” he explained. “That is, not the literary equivalent
of a West Pointer. I have received no commission for I am not of the officer class, nor could I ever have become so. I have risen through the ranks to whatever small position I now possess (or possesses me).”