Walt Whitman's Secret (2 page)

He said more than once that he favored books that were small enough for workingmen to tuck into their pockets (though this was not a principle of book manufacture he adhered to with respect to the immortal
Leaves
). Lately I have been remembering one of his book-thoughts in particular. It is his observation that as people get older, they can no longer stomach Shelley's romantic idealism, but nod in agreement with that poet's dislike of biography and history, knowing now that he was correct in thinking such books a bunch of bunkum.

He always said that I brightened his day. I see now, as I did not at the time, the extent to which the first crippling event in his brain, back in Washington, had harrowed his spirits. His mother was ill as well, and was living with his brother George and his wife in Camden. Her death, only four or five months after W's medical misadventure, might easily have propelled another such sensitive person into a deep crater of gloom. He was sorely tested all right, but he did not stumble into the darkness. It was at this time, finding himself first lame and then motherless, that he gave up Washington and moved in with George and his family, occupying his mother's former room. He was careful to leave everything just as she had last seen it. He slept in the bed in which she had died, under the same bed linens. These events were playing themselves out around the time of our first meeting. But other than noting his halting step, I knew little about his physical state, and not one whit about his emotional one.

Strange to say, it was as a result of another death in the always troubled and tragic Whitman family that our friendship achieved its next plateau. One of his nephews had died, Walter by name, called so not after his uncle but rather his grandfather. He was under one year in age. Such a tiny coffin to be sealed up in the ground that way,
a thought that came back to me, twenty years ago now, when Anne's and my second child, born the year after our Gertrude whom you know, succumbed to the scarlet fever, months shy of his fifth birthday.

W didn't look especially frail at Walter's graveside service, though he walked with difficulty, like a ship listing slightly to port. I stood behind him in the small knot of mourners. He removed his old sloucher and held it in front of him with both hands as they also gripped the handle of his cane. He was in the same clothes he always seemed to be wearing. His bald head, which I had not seen from that perspective before, was like an old globe from which the continents had been erased. The service over, I expressed my condolences. Despite the melancholic nature of the event, he seemed, as usual, gladdened to see me.

“Horace, my boy, you must tell me how you've been keeping.” His shoulders were stooped and his gait hindered, awkward and a bit unsteady, but his eyes were full of vitality. “I am having a rough passage these past few months, these past few years in fact. News of your doings would well right the balance.”

I had no news to convey other than that I was leaving the
Visitor
to go to work with Father. He understood what I would gain by such a move as well as what I would be losing.

“I never regretted the time I spent on the papers,” he said. “The best training there can be for a writer, in my view. Teaches you concision and sharpness. I had an excellent sit on the
Eagle.
” He was referring to the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
, which he conducted in the late forties. “You learn not to waste words, or ideas either. Everything gets used up properly, like the wood in a stove that's drawing well. It produces heat and leaves pure ash, no cinders, no clinkers, but only stuff that can have other uses later.”

In time, I would come to understand that he parted company with the proprietors of the
Eagle
in an editorial difference of opinion,
having turned the paper into a Free-Soil organ, fighting against the spread of slavery in the West as the territories acquired statehood. Yet later still I learned that during these early years of my acquaintance with him, he was at hazard with his former friend O'Connor over the matter of rights for the freed male Negroes. W did not feel they were yet ready to enjoy the electoral franchise. The issue was complicated to an extent young people today, and especially perhaps all you Canadians and those in the other places where slavery had a far shorter history, cannot warrant. Even I, simply by reason of being his junior by four decades, could not always locate the cognitive bridge-work I needed to understand how the nation's heart had been turned topsy-turvy. W was known to have once supported the theory that the black race would disappear eventually as a result of Evolution. As difficult as it may be for us to grasp, this view was regarded in its day as progressive by certain of the white intelligentsia. Nonetheless, I came to the view that W was more of a champion of the Negroes in theory than in actual practice.

When he quit the
Eagle
, W put out a little paper of his own in Brooklyn, then at the theater one evening, for W was an avid admirer of plays and especially of the opera, he met the proprietor of a New Orleans sheet, the
Daily Crescent
, and went down there to work along with his younger brother Jeff, though he did not remain too long there either. He was too sympathetic to abolitionism for Southern tastes, as in the North he was often too compliant with the slavery scourge to suit any but those who were ultraists on the subject. “Be radical,” I used to hear him say, “but not too radical.”

We differed as much as I dared. Often in the years ahead, I would attempt to nudge him toward Socialist Revolution, but he would have none of it. He used to say that he loved agitation but not agitators. He refused to hear strong unvarnished opinions that were at hazard with his own. He ever denied that the love of the People in his poems
was connected to the political side of life. “But how can you have the one without the other?” I would ask. He would not answer directly. When confronted with a difficult rhetorical challenge, he would retreat into poetry, or the poetry of his conversation at least.

In any case, he had seen slavery with his own eyes along the Mississippi, he said, and I had not. When Socialism triumphs, I would remind him, whites and Negroes shall be as one, without distinction between the one and the other. I could convince him of nothing. He would alter the course of the conversation in a most easy natural way. “The Creole women of New Orleans!” he said to me on one occasion. “How they can make a young man's mercury rise in the tube!” He sometimes told inquisitive literary admirers, especially those from outside the United States, that he had fathered six children out of wedlock in his time. I was correct in scarcely being able to believe this true.

Leaving the funeral service for little Walter, we talked as we walked, with me keeping my stride deliberately short so that our steps would be in harmony. I left him at the spot where Fifth and Stevens intersect, where he said he would get the horse-car. Riding the cars always had been a favorite diversion of his, but now it was a sad necessity as well.

Later that day, I had to cross over to Philadelphia. Coming back, I saw W on one of the hard benches of the ferry, resting his clasped hands on the handle of his cane, enjoying the river air and the other passengers' evident health and abundant liveliness. W was even fonder of ferries than he was of the horse-cars, and could rhapsodize about locomotives as well. He said that each ferry had its own distinct personality and that his favorites were the
Wenonah
and the
Beverly
, though as a lifelong Camdenite I could see no difference between them at all and now cannot remember which one we were aboard. What I recall, rather, is an elderly Negro flower-seller who had evidently been
unsuccessful in the city and was returning with visible dejection to the Jersey side with her stock of unsold blooms. I bought them all, for they were offered at distressed prices, and presented the entire bouquet to W. As I did so, I thought that I was probably being forward, and would be seen by him and anyone who was watching as a silly young man; but W pronounced himself delighted, and the worry fell from my countenance. He bade me sit with him as we chugged across the Delaware. We talked until interrupted by the sudden cessation of forward momentum and the reassuring clicks of the ratchet wheel as it swung the landing stage up flush with the deck and the passengers began to form a line, eager to return to their homes.

As we hobbled through Camden with our backs to the river, W suddenly said, “Spring emancipates me.” He certainly always seemed or acted much younger in Spring than he had in the Autumn and Winter months preceding, as though the clock were running backward temporarily; but this may be true for all of us, especially those who are not entirely well. At such times W enjoyed watching games of baseball. He and I would sit on the unforgiving seats and become part of the crowd. “It is fitting and inevitable that our national game should have taken root during the war,” he said. “It was played by the boys of both armies, you know. Another of those little proofs that the fight was not between two different peoples, as some charged in the excesses and weariness of the moment, but between siblings who had loved one another once and would do so again.” He saw the essential democracy of the game of course, and watched attentively as the players bantered among themselves and every so often emitted little bursts of motion, and emotion. “To be out in the open air, in the free open air with the breeze on your skin, watching young comrades enjoying manly pursuits, is second only to being such a young comradely fellow yourself once more.” He said this with enthusiasm and without remorse at the passing of time, though everything in
its way reminded him of the past. At one ball game he returned to the connection, one that existed in his own mind at least, between the game and the war. “When I look out upon such vigor and virtue,” he said, “I'm reminded of all the boys in Washington back then.” During the war, he meant. Uniquely so for a poet of his day, he made the war and its immediate aftermath the central experience of his life and his later writings.

Of course, Flora, you, like all good members of the Whitman Fellowship, both on this continent and abroad, know the outlines of how the war years came to define him, internally and publicly. But as legend tends to abrade the subtleties, permit me to recapitulate what took place.

George Whitman, a stolid and conventional fellow, devoid of politics and parsimonious with words, had joined a Brooklyn regiment in the first flush of wartime zeal, and after the slaughter at Fredericksburg was listed in the papers as among the wounded. W gave up his life in New York to go to Washington in search of him, knowing that the wounded were sent to the capital for treatment whenever possible. As it happened, George had only a slight wound to one ear. W remained in the city, however, eking out a spare living as a government clerk and copyist while volunteering in the hospitals— visiting “my boys” as he called them, bringing them sweets and small necessities, writing letters for the illiterate ones and those who had lost their hands, reading letters to those who did not know how to read to begin with or had been blinded in battle— cheering them, listening to them, giving them his affection, trying to make their young lives a bit less miserable, taking only their regard in return. Apart from the immortal
Leaves
, this was the most meaningful work of his life: such is what I sensed he believed. Who are we to contradict him?

To someone such as myself, born just as the pot of politics was about to boil over as war, such stories were remote yet compelling.
It was hard to credit that such things actually took place when I was conscious on Earth, that such momentous events and such tumult were coming to pass as I pursued my childish games, oblivious to them (though I do remember the blue stream of soldiers flowing down the streets of Camden).

As you might suppose was almost inevitable given the attacks on
Leaves
and its author by moralizers and other censorious public men, W was as notorious in Camden as he was in the wider universe, and for all the same reasons. Had he not written, and then kept expanding, what so many considered an immoral book? The stories of his dismissal from small positions in government offices had brought his name before those who otherwise would never have opened
Leaves
and would not have comprehended a word of it had they done so. For every person who boasted of making his acquaintance, there appeared to be thousands who spoke of him in dire Christian whispers. My parents' neighbors, including some who were no doubt well-meaning, though most were malicious gossips, insisted on calling Mother's attention to my friendship with such a “lecherous old man.” To her credit, Mother was alarmed only to the extent she thought was expected of her. Father, predictably, reacted in a similar fashion, and I, thus reassured on this point, privately enjoyed my association with W in a new and additional way.

When I reported some of these conversations to W, couching them in the least accusatory language of course, he replied with what I thought was practiced and perhaps not totally sincere sadness. “I am a prophet without honor in my own land, or indeed in any other.” In truth, this was hardly the case. Later, as we began to spend ever more time together once he moved into his own place at last and I came by almost every evening to check on him, I got to know about the large following of admirers he had on the European continent and in England— and of course in Canada, England's loyal puppet. They
appeared, many of them, to find in
Leaves
the qualities admired by readers here in America but also those that enraged petty officials and set the tongues of women to wagging over board fences in the back lanes of such places as Camden, New Jersey. Certain English adherents, brothers in the literary arts, were especially persistent in quizzing W about what they perceived as the real meaning of the many references, particularly of course in the “Calamus” section of
Leaves
, to adhesiveness between men. W always ignored or denied their suggestions.