Walt Whitman's Secret (18 page)

T
HE FIRST COUPLE OF MONTHS
following W's strokes were particularly difficult. It was a time of strong emotions all around. I was fully engaged in my courtship of Anne, though courtship isn't a word she or I would have used (it is not a Socialist word). Seeing her, or seeing the two of us together, or simply hearing me mention her from time to time, always brought some animation to W's face. He would smile slightly, and for a second the smile seemed to cover the creases and declivities that ran up and down his face before taking cover beneath his whiskers. It didn't do much for the condition of his skin itself, which, on the days when his natural complexion couldn't make itself seen, was alternately patchy and pasty. But it made him look, for just a moment, younger than his years. This was remarkable because for all of his adult life, judging from the photographs taken at various times, he looked older than the chronological aggregate. No doubt this was mostly deliberate. In any case, he was fond of Anne, fond of how she addressed him and how she behaved in his company, but fond also of her youth.

So long as they were not writers, which is to say competitors, young admirers generally reminded him of his own salad days, which were now moving rather speedily into deepest history. But he put a great deal of thought, you might say, into how he could display his
thoughtfulness to Anne in particular. I'll take an instance almost at random. He was invited to attend a meeting of the Contemporary Club to hear a discussion of hypnotism. He would have liked to go, for though he held no brief for the subject, he did enjoy gathering ammunition for his views. But he was too sick and so signed the invitation card over to Anne, encouraging her to attend not in his place but as a lively intelligence with positions of her own. Such was his renown that she was admitted, making her perhaps the first woman allowed there. The distinction was one that she liked to consider true, so of course it pleased her mightily.

Sometimes he went a bit far in ingratiating himself, as when he gathered some of his own works and asked me to take them to Anne's father when next I went to the Montgomerie place. “It is not as careful a selection as I should have made had I been given more time, but I hope it will do,” he said. “I have never seen the old man, but I wish you would tell him Walt Whitman sends his love.” Lucky for me, Mister Montgomerie was out the evening I called with the goods under my arm, so I could leave the bundle with a straightforward note that couldn't be misinterpreted. The stack did not include
November Boughs
, which was not yet through the press, but shortly afterward W gave me a proof of one of its essays, the one on Robert Burns, which he signed “To Peter Montgomerie,” on the hopeful assumption it would be met with interest when I delivered it to its adoptive home.

W's thirst for writing, in the months after the strokes when he was nursed back to at least a semblance of occasional and relative health, returned even more aggressively than his appetite for food. He had always loved newspapermen and especially the Bohemian character that many of them displayed, for he himself had been a prominent (or do I mean notorious?) New York Bohemian in his day. He cherished the notion that they were laboring men no matter what their shirt collars might say. They loved him in return and often
boomed his books for him— that is, when he did not boom them him self, either pseudonymously or anonymously. In later years I've heard criticism of this practice by people who chose not to understand how he thought of himself as a rebel cast out of the literary elite and needed to make sure that others thought of him that way as well. The audience of those who admire outcasts is far smaller and usually less well-off than the one of those who do not, but it is easier for a person such as him to win their affection. “Many stray dogs are rounded up from the streets and shot,” he said to me, “but some are so wretched that families with little enough to eat decide to take them in, regardless.” I thought he was about to wink at me as the words emerged from his beard.

All this is in support of the idea that he was honest but shrewd, often very shrewd indeed, in his literary dealings. As soon as he was well enough, he directed some of his energy to keeping up the bargain he had made earlier with the editor of the
New York Herald
to supply fresh poems on a regular basis, so many each month, on topics taken from the current news. He also published fairly often in the
Daily Graphic
, a paper in the same city but of the lowest stratum, and the local sheets in Philadelphia and Camden. The
Herald
, however, was a different order of things. He received regular monies for poems commemorating the anniversary of Lincoln's birth and the death of the Kaiser, or the burial of General Sheridan, or ones that described calamitous events in the weather or evoked New York scenes from long ago. They widened his audience no doubt. Being regularly spaced, they came to be expected as a natural component of the paper. They also lifted him a bit, giving him another reason to rise each morning, though always his conversation, and his expression of discomfort and weakness, returned him to the inevitable.

One summer day I mentioned that Anne and I had been on a romp to Wissahickon Creek, which is a smallish stream, about twenty
miles long, I suppose, that empties into the Schuylkill River at Philadelphia. A pretty place.

“That reminds me that years ago I thought some of pitching my own tent out there, squatting, loafing the rest of my life in that vicinity,” he said. Then he added in a different tone, “I cannot be said even now to have wholly given up the idea, though I don't suppose that it matters much where I happen to spend the rest of my days.”

Bucke had found a young man who knew enough of the medical arts to answer all the questions put to him by W, but he stayed only a brief time. Whereupon Bucke dispatched us one named Musgrove, whose primary asset was his size and strength, for he was fully able to carry his patient in his arms if necessary. I thought him a dark manner of man when I first met him and never had reason to revise that impression. He was sullen and often deflected conversation.

When W asked what medications he was being given, Musgrove replied curtly that he did not know, though whether this was because he lacked the knowledge or merely wished to discourage talk, I can't say. Probably both. W refused to swallow what he was offered blindly, and this led to a general suspicion of the younger man by the older. I could see the added damping-down of W's mood as a result. I had no choice but to report as much to Bucke. He soon sent a replacement from his own establishment in Canada, and W picked up a little bit after that.

He made another will to reflect the new realities, leaving his money and goods to his brother Eddie, who was nearly mute and had a mind little better than an infant's, and to their sisters, that they might use the inheritance to help take care of him. W asked me and my brother-in-law, Tom, to be the executors of his literary remains, along with Bucke. The will named young Harry Stafford and Pete Doyle among those marked for bequests. The former was to receive W's gold watch and chain, though it was not a terribly good timepiece.
The latter would get only the silver one, inferior in all particulars as to both appearance and mechanism.

No doubt in acknowledgment of the document's eventual consequences, Eddie was brought to Mickle Street for a visit while W's niece and sister-in-law were moving him from one asylum to another. Through the courteous patience of Missus Davis, he was to stay the night.

He made a sorry spectacle. His eyes looked dead and stared out from a face even deader. He could not support his head on either side at will, as you and I do. “He inclines heavily to starboard” is how W put it. He had but a single expression, one of absent disinterest, and did not pick up his feet when he walked but slowly slid the soles of his shoes across the plank floor. I had observed how W kissed his brother Jeff when they met, kissed him fully. With Eddie he merely held the visitor's hand. Eddie spoke few words and they were not always easy to comprehend. They were either simple nouns or infinitives, widely spaced. “His conversation, if that it is, is well leaded,” said W, slipping into the jargon of the composing room as he often liked to do. From such grunt-like sounds one was left to deduce the drift of Eddie's thoughts.

The two Whitmans sat up until late evening in the company of Missus Davis, until W asked her to escort Eddie to his bed.

“Good-bye, boy,” W said. “I will send for you soon again. You shall come whenever you choose.” But it wasn't to be.

Later he remarked this to me: “Eddie appeals to my heart, to my two arms. I seem to want to reach out and help him.”

Not that these two situations could be compared, but this was the way the small band of us felt about W.

Eddie apart, W was cheered by visitors, both those in bodily form who climbed the concave stairs and those whose corporality was exclusively postal and were slid under the front door rather than walking through it. One of the second sort enlivened me even more than it did W. It was a copy of one of the British journals with an essay headed “Walt Whitman as a Socialist Poet.” W said he read it to see whether he was being slagged (he admitted there was no disrespect intended) but also to see how he looked “to one who views all things from the standpoint of a Socialist.” He looked at me impishly from over his reading spectacles as he said that. That night, when I added the day's memoranda to the manuscript I had begun, these were his words as I reconstructed them: “I find I'm a good deal more of a Socialist than I thought I was, maybe not technically, politically so, but intrinsically, in my meanings.”

I found this utterance a great relief and affirmation. I would have urged him to expand upon it, but somehow, I'm not sure how, this exchange led smoothly to one about poetry instead. The question will sound asinine, but I asked whether there will be more poets coming along (I knew there could be no more quite like him).

“I am neither the first nor the last,” he replied. “There will be more and greater poets than have ever been.”

“What kind? Your kind?” I was refining my question.

“I don't know about that,” he said. “Some
free
kind for sure. The stylists object to me, but they lack just what Matthew Arnold lacks. They talk about form, rules, canons, and all the time forget the real point, which is the
substance
of poetry.”

He went on that he has never sought the big audience because he knows that the message of
Leaves
will spread. “The book is like the flukes of a whale: if not graceful, at least effective, never super-refined or ashamed of the animal energy that imparts power to expression. Even Goethe, in loving beauty, art and literature for their own
inherent significance, is not so close to Nature as I conceive he should be. I say this with all due respect to Doctor Bucke, who reads Goethe in the German and declares to me that I have but very little conception of Goethe's real place in the spiritual history of the race. Well, maybe I have. I care less and less for books as books and more and more for people as people.”

He told me that he never kept diaries. But as I would learn, he did in fact do so for various periods, especially his summer in Canada with Bucke. Rather, he said, he maintained a thick day-book wherein he jotted thoughts and lines of verse. Just as he always found excuses for not showing me the famous Emerson letter again, so he refused to let me read the day-book. It lay temptingly out of bounds, each day at a different spot in the room, an indication he was still using it daily as both a place of deposit and one from which to make withdrawals. He had a habit of patting its binding. This was the raw material of his writing, and without writing he would be nothing, as he well knew; he was aware that I understood this as well. Still, the stuff he
did
let me see was often remarkable enough.

The presents he enriched me with! For example, a photograph, taken in New York during the war, of his brother George in what W called “his sojer clothes.” It caused me to remark that I could not conceive of W himself in any army. He reared up, adamant almost to the point of violence on the subject of his pacifism.

“Yet they say you condoned the war,” I interjected softly.

“They say that, do they?” He sounded angry.

Sometimes he took this disputatious tone. I put it down to the ache of his infirmities. Tom once brought up the debate about restricting immigration. He pointed to strong opposition to the proposed limitations, not only among businessmen in need of cheap labor but also among many ordinary citizens who nonetheless chose to remain silent in public. W, who opposed the limitations, flew off the handle. “Well,
here's someone who spit it all out,” he said of himself, accusing those who did not so expectorate as being lacking in courage. “Contract labor, pauper labor: I have no fear of Americans. Not the slightest. America is for one thing only— and if not for that, what? America must welcome all: Chinese, Irish, German, pauper or not, criminal or not.” He went on at length, becoming quite heated.