Walt Whitman's Secret (10 page)

While my hands fumbled and my brain roiled, she proceeded to tell me of the first time she laid eyes on him. He was lecturing, sitting up on the stage in a plain chair that seemed too small for him, waiting for the convener of the event to finish his introduction. “Walt rolled up his old felt hat and stuck it in one of his coat pockets while extracting from the other a few crumpled pieces of scratch paper— his notes. He wore plain black clothes, not of recent birth, and a big floppy black necktie, possibly velvet, tied like a great bow girdling his throat, as though he were about to make us a gift of himself, which I suppose in a way he was. He adjusted his beard and was about to rise to thank his introducer and begin telling us about President Lincoln. But in the second before he got to his feet, a bright yellow light, as yellow as a lemon rind, lit him from behind, blurring the edges of his contour and making him appear to be from some other world. Some world better than this one.”

She looked around at the dining room I had selected with such consideration. “I have no idea what caused this effect, which lasted only a second. The part of me that believes in science mocks the part that doesn't, saying I am a careless and inconstant girl. But I believe some event occurred that permitted me— I don't know
whether others saw it— to see him from the inside out, you might say, to catch a glimpse of the essential spirit that resides just inside his physical body, like the lining of a coat.”

If at that moment I had had a mouth full of roast beef, I might well have choked to death. I recovered my breath and, entreating myself to speak calmly, told her the entire story of my friendship with him, my attachment to him, my entanglement, some would even say my inculpation. She took in every word separately as well as collectively, sometimes looking directly into my eyes. I knew then that we would be lovers eventually. What I did not foresee— for who would have done?—was that W would always seem to be present at the foot of the bed, writing a poem about us in his mind.

Anne had read his poetry in the newspapers and wherever else she could find it. Buying a copy of the most recent edition of
Leaves
, complete with the pleasure of knowing that the parcel had been wrapped in butcher paper by the author himself—“The hand that holds the pen,” I told her, “also knots the twine”—was out of the question. “Father would never allow it, and you can imagine how angry that makes me.” The anger existed only because she said it did; there was no trace of it in her voice (which is not made for anger) or her face (ditto).

There was no mystery about how knowledge of the book's unspeakable salaciousness and debauchery might have seeped (but did not) into the Montgomerie household. In such situations it is customary to terminally suspect the servants, always the simplest course of action when there is blame to be apportioned. Then as now and forever, Anne was a capable and ingenious woman. Our meals together became frequent, and at one of them she told me how she had gone to one of the rare-book dealers' shops off Chestnut Street and placed an order for a copy that she could then pick up there in person to deliver secretly to herself. The proprietor had grown prosperous
and pompous selling long sets of books to matrons who wished bindings that matched their draperies: the Waverly novels, the Life and Letters of this or that famous personage, the more pretentious and generously gilded the better. The bookseller pretended he was unacquainted with the work, and gently, gingerly, questioned her about its contents, in order to discover the— how might he have expressed it to himself?—
sophistication
of the young lady's taste in literature, for however much he might look askance at the request, he did not look down his nose at a paying customer, not one of such filigreed manners and obvious pluck.

“The compromise,” she told me, “was this, which he was able to have sent by a colleague in London.”

Out of her bag came a rather well-used not to say unhygienic copy of
Poems of Walt Whitman
, the harmless selection that W.M. Rossetti had edited back in Sixty-eight for English consumption. W of course never cared for it, and indeed tried to suppress his memory of it as ardently as others suppressed the book itself, or would have done if Rossetti, knowing the strictness of British law in this respect compared to the American, had not sidestepped the contentious poems in the “Calamus” sequence and some other “indecent” writings entirely, leaving not a bowdlerized pastiche exactly but one suitable for the hardier sort of female reader or the curious male one with a wife at home.

“This is actually quite difficult to find,” I told her.

She laughed. “And was accordingly expensive. But my book-smuggling friend and I had entered into a criminal pact.”

A few months later, when we were alone together, I took down my own copy of one of the American editions and began to read her the entire
Leaves
over the course of many nearly consecutive evenings. I betrayed no change of inflection when we came to the disputed verses. I remember reading to her such lines as:

I made bold enough to say that I didn't know what person W was addressing when he wrote this but that I for my own part now thought only of her when I read it, showing the power of poetry to provoke such individual responses and thereby prove its own urgent utility, independent of the poet's intentions. She kissed me warmly and cradled my head. In a later session, I moved right along to the most candid poems, the ones that the most naive of church wardens could instantly see (that was the problem) concerned phalluses and more phalluses. Afterward I reported to W that she did not wince even a little when I reached the passages that the world has outlawed, nor will she.

“Admirable, admirable,” he replied. “For us fellows, what claim short of that can we ever make?”

As my trips to Mickle Street assumed an almost clockwork regularity, often extending into a second visit each day and sometimes even a third, Anne quit her job. Being in the factory, she said, only reminded her that I was elsewhere. What's more, she said, it reminded her that we had been supervisor and supervised, a fact she wished to forget as she desired us to be equals in life not in the present and the future
but retroactively, back to our very beginnings. She then suggested that I begin to keep verbatim memoranda of all my meetings with W, or ones as nearly verbatim as possible. I immediately saw the beauty of the idea. His wonderful table-talk, both melancholy and fixed on the moment, often mixing lofty language with the slang of soldiers and transportation-men, was its own sort of poetry and a priceless gloss on the other kind. I am no biographer, no Boswell, but he could become his own, as General Grant, whom he so admired, had done in his own way and with a style, and a candor, that W thought so worthy of envy.

It is not enough to say that my exhaustive and exhausting project of recording W's conversation for posterity was Anne's idea, for the labor that followed was in some measure a collaboration between us. In the earlier stages particularly, whenever I came away with an especially fulsome or meaty stack of W's papers, she would sit with me to read through the material and analyze it. She read everything closely and offered up suggestions as to what should be in type as part of the text or else, in several instances, tagged for eventual shipment to the engraver's one day for reproduction in facsimile. When I was writing of events at which she herself had been present, but not at other times, she would help to rejuvenate my memory or offer gentle and seemingly casual suggestions about some of my phrasing. She was a better editor than I am an author. She was and is a natural.

“You should be writing this, not I,” I told her more than once as I contemplated the growing miscellany of papers on the table. “Barring a few months here and there, I've spent the entirety of my working life to date in printing and publishing. The pattern does not appear as though it will be broken. But you have better …” And I searched for the words: “… flair, instinct and economy in many such matters than I possess.” (She herself never had to search for the right words, for she already possessed them all.)

“Nonsense,” she would say. “I bring to the task only what an avid reader does.” She said this in a self-mocking way, suggesting that she had only a head full of nothing but the sort of novels published to entertain women and keep the subscription-libraries in business. This jest of course showed how different she was from most other women, certainly from most of those known to me, or known to people who were known to me, that she could speak so lightly of what she worked so hard to relieve: the plight of women.

Both of us were young, I was healthy enough to tax my body with absolute impunity in late nights of work, and these were some— many— of our happiest times. I miss them, but find comfort in the memory of them, just as W did in his war stories, horrible though some of them were, and his dwindling number of old reliable friends and his mostly private recollections of young men who vanished as they grew up. I see this so clearly now that he has been gone all these years, having taken his personality with him or left it in the open, uncovered, to evaporate. But then he left it to all of us in the pages of books, his own that he made from the dialogues with his heart and the discourses in his mind, and my own, pasted together from whatever he said aloud.

Anne's and my first years together were full of love and laughter. I recall the time she seized mischievously upon some of the incongruous juxtapositions in the unusually large load of papers I carried home from Mickle Street. She closed her eyes meaningfully and laid her right palm flat atop the pile of paper and mimicked the tone of a spiritualist in a trance (forgive me, Flora, perhaps I should have written “a mind-reader in a carnival show”).

“I am receiving a strong impression now,” she said, imitating a disembodied male voice. “An image is being transmitted. And a second one, and now yet another. I see two sheets of costly linen stationery. Beautifully worded messages— questions?—are written on them in
equally beautiful cursive hands. They are from— yes, from esteemed and revered poets who despise each other cordially in a land far away, across an ocean, I think. I perceive plainer ones as well, written with a pencil stub, from boys who disappeared into the uncharted spaces of the West, gobbled up by Democracy. Then, what is this? A manuscript, mayhaps? No, a laundry ticket? Ah, it is a receipt from a livery stable. The date comes into focus now: Eighteen sixty-one. The Other Side is communicating with me quite fully now. There is a page torn out of an unknown book, a woman's recipe, an advertisement from an unidentified newspaper turning dry and yellowy, and some hard object, small and round, with perforations. Oh yes, I see, a button from the fly of a gentleman's trousers. But the energy— the energy dissipates. And is gone.”

Then, the psychic power having drained her earthly strength, she pretended to swoon, one languid wrist draped athwart her forehead. She actually feigned a collapse to the floor. As she did so, the hem of her skirt blossomed outward in a circle, like the petals of a flower. She pulled me down with her and we laughed. We rolled on the rug a few times. Flora, am I telling more than you wish to hear? Well, it is less than I need to remember.

Her other imperishable contribution to what is now
With Walt Whitman in Camden
, volumes one through three, with the others, still in rough note form, to follow eventually if at all, is that W was so taken with her— and she allowed him to be. As a result, he was even more voluble with her than with me, whether she and I visited together or she on her own. She had the knack of elevating his spirit when he had cast himself down into the dark pit of his imagination. I wondered whether these changes had to do with the natural desire, evidently found in him as much as in all men differently inclined in their leanings, to emit or discharge charm, or attempted charm, in the presence of many if not all or even most women of a certain type.

One day he gave me one of his books that my collection lacked, and then generously offered to sign it with a sentiment of friendship. I said I would prefer that the inscription be to Anne. He smiled about as broadly as I believe a very sick man can do and wrote, “Anne Montgomerie from the author WW” followed by the date. I instantly perceived why he wrote out such a
pro forma
dedication, the kind one would send to a complete stranger who asked for a signature in a copy sent through the mails. He did not want to risk embarrassing me, of revealing me to some later owner of the book, far in the future when all of us are gone, as the emotional equivalent of a cuckold. The phrase is completely overblown, and I would scratch it out if the act would not make a mess of the page. But I cannot come up with a more telling metaphor right this instant. He blew on the wet ink to dry it and handed the book back to me, still open at the flyleaf where he had written. As he did so, he let me know what he felt but, for the best of reasons, dared not put on paper.