Walt Whitman's Secret (11 page)

“She's as sweet and dear as an unsoiled flower,” he said, sounding for a moment like a different type of poet entirely. “I am sure she comes first.” And in this way he released me from whatever concern I might have been nurturing and, so to speak, tipped his old sloucher at me as well as her, wishing us both well— together. Although he was by now quite an old dog indeed, perhaps he had learned a new trick any way, simply from seeing so much of Anne, who could defuse awkward situations with the same ease with which she enlivened drab ones.

Inevitably, I keep casting my mind back to my first meeting with W, when Father called him a great man and a great poet and introduced me to him. While hating to be thought of as a European immigrant,
Father never seemed more European than when he spoke of W, whom he admired for precisely the qualities from which W worked so hard to dissociate himself: the idea of literature as a rarefied and genteel occupation, the conduit of philosophy and high ideals, carrying forward the noblest traditions of art and beauty almost older than history itself. Father didn't understand that W was the enemy of literature thus defined and that, at least in his version of events, it was the enemy of him. Father wouldn't have listened to me if I had tried to explain. He had turned away from the Talmudic scholars in his misguided and of course utterly unsuccessful attempt to be perceived as some type of four-square Yankee (in the manner of, to use an example easily at hand, Anne's father). Accordingly, he redirected his admiration to Authors. Yes, in his imagination the initial letter was deserving of the upper case.

Behind my straight face, I was quite amused when W asked me how Father was and then painted what struck me, privately, as a wonderfully comic scene.

“He was here the other day, sitting where you're sitting now. He spouted a great deal of German poetry to me: Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Lessing. I couldn't understand a word of course, but I could understand everything else. Your father has the fire and enthusiasm of a boy. He would have made an actor. I was never so struck with the conviction that if everything else is present, you do not need the word. There he was declaiming away in a language strange to me, yet much of it seemed as plain as if it was English.”

I looked deliberately impassive, and he continued. “Now I understand how people can go see Salvini on stage and not be ignorant of what he is saying in Italian.”

The reference is to the famous Italian actor Tommaso Salvini. Do you know his work? He was much in the news down here then because he made a triumphant return tour of America, playing
Othello, in heavily accented English indeed, to the Iago of Edwin Booth, W's theatrical hero.

Another of our conversations had a similar commencement, but an ending so poignant that I restrained my tears as earlier I restrained my laughter.

“Your father was in the other day,” he began. “We talked about Goethe and Schiller, mostly about Schiller's sickness, his victory over sickness.”

This remark perplexed me slightly. Goethe's friend and brother poet Friedrich Schiller suffered from lunacy and is said to have died of syphilis, conditions over which he conspicuously did not in fact prevail. When W was under way, reeling out things I knew I must keep in my memory until I got home to record them, I was reluctant to interrupt his flow. Perhaps this speaks to a weakness of mine. I believe that Anne, with her innate finesse, could have done better.

“That always impresses,” he went on. “A man's victory over his sickness. I have thought something very interesting, valuable and suggestive might be written about the influence, good or bad, of disease in literature. I mean ‘disease' more than ‘sickness.' The influence of drink in literature might also be written about. It has so many sides, noble and devilish both, that it would need to be rightly interpreted, not by a puritan or a toper (the puritan is only another kind of toper).”

Toper
, you may not know, is obsolete American slang for a drunkard.

“I have almost made up my mind to make some use of the themes myself, though I don't know as I'll ever get to them. So many physical obstacles have dropped onto my pathway in recent years.”

Now he was doing just what he ought not to do, pushing himself in the direction of despondency. He saw the danger and backed away.

“Take my love to your mother,” he said as I prepared to leave after doing my best to lure him away from despair. “And how about Anne Montgomerie? She has not been here for ten days. When she was
here last, she brought me a bunch of roses. They were very beautiful, though not so beautiful as she herself. She has cheeks like the prettiest peach in the orchard.”

How had fate permitted me to find this woman who had both the power to keep me enthralled and the power to make America's greatest poet sound like a schoolboy in the first flush of desire?

   
FIVE
   

W
HAD BEEN HAVING
considerable success getting his poems printed in the newspapers, weeklies and monthlies, including all or most of the best places. He was always skilled at that. Yet since
Drum-Taps
, published the month following Lincoln's murder (as he always called the assassination), his heart had been inclined more in the direction of prose. It seemed to me that around 1865 something important had taken place to change him profoundly— in addition to the end of the war or the murder, I mean, something unconnected to public events. I wasn't certain what or just how. Such was my feeling at the time I enthusiastically accepted Anne's suggestion, resolving to commence a record of my Mickle Street visits. Practically every day, usually after dinner but sometimes in the morning as well, I found him in either the front parlor or the bedroom.

The downstairs room was furnished with a davenport and chairs and decorated with two busts, one of Elias Hicks, the other of W himself. Hicks was the Quaker divine who farmed on Long Island and whose common-sense democratic theology led to a great schism amongst Quakers. When W was a young boy, he heard Hicks, who must have been about eighty years old, preach a lesson, an event that had gained some powerful hold on W's imagination and philosophy.
“Hicksite-ism may be found on every page of the New American Bible,” he said. This was the name he sometimes gave to the immortal
Leaves
in candid conversation, whether in jest or not I can't say. The other conspicuous object in the front parlor was a model of a sailing ship, which I believe had belonged to Missus Davis's late husband.

Although I did not mention that I was now resolved to keep a daily memorandum of his conversations, I was aware soon enough that our relationship had changed on that Wednesday when I jotted my first such entry, trying to find a style that would capture the cadence of his speech, for W's bump of intuitiveness was one of the most remarkable of all his gifts. If he was his own critic, using his experience as a newspaperman to write anonymous praises of
Leaves
and see them published in the press, then his friends were his biographers: his wartime associate O'Connor, whom he hailed for his “Keltic” qualities, and of course Doctor Bucke. Now, knowing that he was in steep though not unchecked decline, he instructed me what to do after he was gone. “When you write about me one day, tell the whole truth,” he would say, unaware— no, I mean “with no proof”—that of course I was writing about him already, every night, as prelude to my reading in Socialism and other subjects, sometimes until the dawn announced itself. He began handing me newspaper cuttings to read and discuss. He extracted letters from the bottomless midden of paper. One was a letter from England more than a decade old concerning some small Whitman controversy of that place and moment between two of his many admirers there.

As he received letters from abroad, so too did he receive visitors from all over, visitors high and low. One pilgrim from the British Isles declared that his two ambitions in America were to meet W and see Niagara Falls, both sites being conspicuous wonders of Nature. Others of the first rank among writers and artists, such as William Michael Rossetti, brother of the more famous Dante Gabriel R.,
took W to be a man of high literary standing, but of course they were not American. In any case, W once spoke of them as “the tribe of the Oxford-Cambridge Israel who have felt that, despite their great scholarship, layers on layers of erudition,” they had something in common with him or at least with the immortal
Leaves
, as though the two could be viewed separately.

Soon he was giving me such letters to take away, knowing, without the subject being raised, that I would transcribe them into the nocturnal journal of our conferences. He always claimed that he'd come upon a certain letter by chance while “mousing” in the hillocks of paper. “I clean house from time to time,” he said, sitting in the bedroom, which in fact showed few signs of such activity. The best Missus Davis could do was to work around the considerably smaller stacks of newspapers and letters in the parlor. At least this way she prevented it from resembling too closely the room above, whose door was always closed and often locked, even when W was inside, a habit that would prove worrisome later on, as his periods of comparative health gave way alarmingly to ones quite different. He went on: “Give you bits— hunt them— that I think might be of service to you. Service or interest. The rest— most of the things— go into the fire.” His gaze floated toward the little round stove. “I know you are jealous of that fire. Well, that stuff is trash, notwithstanding your appetite for it. Trash, trash, trash.” This was mousing in a rather different sense. We were playing a cat-and-mouse game, and I was not the one that purred.

He would speak a brief preface to each piece as he passed it to me. “I want you to have this letter of William's for your archives,” he said one day, giving me one of the letters from O'Connor that he cherished. “It would be valuable enough if it was only William's, but it happens to be more than that. You see the date—1865.” The letter dealt with the defense of W that O'Connor was writing following his
friend's dismissal from the Interior Department, the manuscript that became
The Good Gray Poet.

For the most part W seemed perfectly at ease giving me his treasures. The exception was the famous Emerson letter of 1855. I kept asking if I could take another look at it. He would then claim that he would lay it aside to show me the next time it turned up, which it never seemed to do. This was a further illustration of how he found it necessary to be wily in certain matters. And then there was one instance in which he was only provisionally generous. “Take this away,” he said, thrusting a letter from Tennyson at me. “But take good care of it. The curio hunters would call it quite a gem.” Several times later on he asked for the temporary loan of it. He even sent visitors to my place with requests that they be allowed to read it on the premises.