Walt Whitman's Secret (20 page)

Possibly to disguise his lack of progress, he kept making sidetracks to discuss the war, a subject that always had my interest but was coming to seem longer in the retelling than it could ever have been in reality. On this occasion his recollections had what struck me at once as an unnecessary mysteriousness, a fact that was itself mysterious to me at the time. He spoke a bit disjointedly. He said, “My place in Washington was a peculiar one, as were my reasons for being there and my doing there what I did. I met no others there who shared my own motivations, but then I could not at that stage articulate them to myself, so how I could expect others to do so? People went to the capital for all sorts of reasons: to convert, to proselytize, to observe, to do good, to sentimentalize, from a sense of duty or from philanthropic motives. Women preachers, emotional gushing girls.”

This sounded like the beginning of one of the long lists he made so much and so magical a part of his poetry.

“I honor them all. Knew them, hundreds of them, well, and in many cases came to love them. But no one, at least no one that I met, went just for my own reasons, from a profound conviction of necessity, affinity, coming into coldest relations, relations so close and dear, with the whole strange welter of life gathered to that mad focus. I could not expect to do more for my own part at this late day than collect.”

The extremity of his fatigue made him ramble beautifully this way, as though he were trying out the one faculty, speech, that remained to him whole. But I sensed a greater coherence in it than perhaps he intended. He seemed a bit weaker for all the effort, so I was reluctant
to press for qualification, should I have known how to do so. I had the suspicion, however, that he was telling me something about Pete Doyle. I say suspicion. That is the wrong word. I mean instinct.

“I haven't cast out all my devils yet.”

W was referring to his health, though I don't think he honestly believed that illness could ever be cast out, not at this late stage. Some other type of devil, yes, to be sure; for he did in fact rally to finish the Hicks piece. He did not declare an end to it arbitrarily and then, in resignation, send it out into the world to fend for itself. He lowered his original expectations in line with the restrictions imposed by his condition, once satisfied that these actions were reason able in the circumstances. Then I was able to turn over
November Boughs
to the men with ink-stained fingertips.

Tom usually stopped by to see W each day, just as I did in the evenings. Normally he brought one or both of the children with him. W doted on them and they on him, though his beard proved scratchy whenever he hugged and kissed them. Being in the law, Tom was also perforce a man of affairs. He suggested that the publisher, W's old friend McKay, who had lent him some of the money for Mickle Street, price
November Boughs
at one dollar and fifty cents. W, always eager to reach the readers with little income (those who, in his phrase, were “not holding”), thought one dollar and twenty-five the correct amount. He argued that the quarter-dollar was the boundary between ordinary readers— people who were not bookish and whom he valued for just that reason— and the writers, journalists, businessmen, doctors, officials, lawyers and others for whom the price difference was not a determining factor in whether to make the purchase. He also knew that a thousand copies was the
right number to print. He had acquired a sure feel for such matters, he said, and it had helped him to survive in the world.

He was so pleased when, in the last week of August Eighty-eight, two months after the disturbances in his brain, I brought him a stack of the finished books. He held one in his hands, a squarish book of a hundred and forty pages. He flipped through it and took the edge of one page and rubbed it between his thumb and index finger. He held the volume to his nose and inhaled deeply, as though sampling a fine wine or a tasty stew in a hotel dining room. When asked the question, he answered that he calculated the venture would bring him no more than he had laid out for it. I didn't know how literally to interpret this statement, as I had seen with what dexterity he negotiated his way through literary commerce.

Around this time, he showed me the letters from three or four years back that had passed between him and a man who was operating a sort of syndicate for fine prose writing. His correspondent had signed up several important monthlies and a number of the bigger news papers to print contributions on certain topics he would solicit from writers of note— in his words, “from famous men whom newspapers cannot reach— nor afford to pay separately even if they did reach them.” He was commissioning war reminiscences from certain figures who still trod the Earth, and he wished W to write on Lincoln and of course on the wartime hospitals. He evidently labored under the impression that W had actually been acquainted with Lincoln in the usual sense, not just on the spiritual plane. W did not disabuse him, not that I saw, reading the letters. W got twenty dollars per thousand words, the very highest rate, but later came down substantially, and shrewdly, I think, in order to get his copy into still more of the bigger papers and increase his profit in that manner. W asked me to read all the letters aloud so that he could relive his small commercial triumph. Some of the correspondence related to a
memoir of the Bowery Theatre in New York and Edwin Booth the tragedian (both onstage and otherwise).

In his newspapering days, W was a prolific reviewer of books, plays, concerts, lectures and all types of exhibitions, as well as of politics and crime, those staples of journalism. Now, at the other end of his life, he found it difficult if not impossible to stop pronouncing on the merits or deficiencies of what fell before his eyes every day. For example, he could seldom let pass without commentary the old letters and other documents he had salvaged from the unwept corners of his bedroom to put in my hands. Whenever he was being particularly charitable this way, I would ask once again to see the Emerson. He would find some excuse or change the subject. In time I almost came to believe that on the next occasion he would inform me that Missus Davis's dog had eaten the thing.

Talking was his last pleasure. Fortunately, all of us who were his friends loved to listen to him. Beneath his discursiveness and casual language, he was discriminating and sharply critical, no less of himself than of others. About this time, someone began producing a calendar that featured quotations from W's work on each leaf (a venture that in a way seems now to have presaged the later appearance in the marketplace of Walt Whitman Cigars). W called the calendar “a dubious experiment. I don't shine in bits. There are no ‘gems' in
Leaves of Grass.
” He meant rather that the book was a life being lived, a process not an object, a river not a pond or lake.

It was my duty to keep the out-of-town leaders of his loyal circle informed about his condition, as when I would write to Bucke up in Canada, as the doctor had insisted I do. This correspondence was related partly to the nurses who would always be present in W's life. The patient knew that his friends were paying for them, but I didn't want him to know that I was orchestrating the effort, trying to get various people to pledge small monthly sums for as long as necessary.
I didn't want to keep secrets from him as he did from me, but neither did I wish him to feel that he was even more dependent on me now than before. So he became distant with me when Bucke stupidly mentioned to him in a letter that I had been discussing my spirit-father's health in my own correspondence.

“I don't want Bucke to know the worst until the worst is frankly hopeless,” he said to me when I pressed him about his reaction. “He worries over bad news. Write him in a cheerful vein.”

“Lie to him?” I asked.

“Well, lies don't help, I suppose. But don't tell him the evil until there's no more good to talk about.”

One day he showed me letters from the great actress Ellen Terry and from Bram Stoker, the right-hand man of Sir Henry Irving, the actor-manager, and other new discoveries: two more of the homemade note-books he carried with him to the hospitals. I asked him if he had the letters he no doubt had written to his mother back in New York during his years in Washington. Surely these would be a valuable source of understanding about his experiences, even though he might have wished to withhold certain scenes and descriptions from her. Yes indeed, he replied, saying that he retrieved them, hundreds of them, following her death. Using Pete's old cane to steady himself, he led me to a door that I had supposed, if I had thought about it at all, was a closet. He asked me to remove the large mound of stuff that blocked it: the usual documents and old newspapers. Once I had shifted all the treasured rubble, he let me into a small room, once perhaps a dressing room, full of books and files. This was the musty warehouse of W the writer who so often had had to be his own publisher as well. There were long identical rows of his own books and below them open cartons of unsorted papers.

He began to draw aside some of the contents by the handful. He passed me a photo he had found. Although only a couple of years old,
it was a tintype, not one of the many more modern types of photograph, showing W seated, legs crossed, behatted and holding the very same cane. Standing behind him, one hand resting on either W's back or that of the chair, was Bill Duckett, the thin young man who had not yet achieved his majority and left Mickle Street under a cloud.

“A sweet boy,” W said. “Eakins was very fond of him, you know. Used him as a model not long ago.”

“He painted him?”

“I can't say. But he took photographs of him, for the benefit of his art students.”

“You mean photographs of the figure?”

“Oh, yes. Even for a painter, Eakins is especially unblushing with respect to the nude, as you know. This has provided the two of us with some interesting conversation, particularly when I too submitted to his lens.”

“You posed undraped for Eakins?”

He didn't answer but found a picture to show me. “It is one of a series and he allowed me to keep a print. You see, he would photograph his anatomical models in six or seven different standing poses: hands atop head, facing the camera, side view, back to the camera, and so on.”

It was W all right, from his bald dome to his crooked feet, and wearing not one stitch in between. He stood looking right into the lens with one arm behind his back.

I was shocked, for though I had frequently seen him in
déshabille
, I certainly had never lain eyes on his generative appendage. I was shocked in another way as well. Although the picture could not have been more than a few years old, it illustrated all too vividly how W had deteriorated— decayed.

He saw me thinking this and beat me to the gate. “This is what a man of sixty-five or so looks like, my young friend, as you will come
to know all too well. Note the involuntary tonsure, the sunken chest, the flabby belly and spindly legs. But is it not a beautiful piece of machinery all the same?” He put the photograph back in its box. “This I believe I shall hold on to, if you don't mind.”

That was in August of Eighty-eight. The following month he determined that he was no longer able to go about as he had done before the strokes and so made arrangements to sell the horse and gig. A clergyman of all people, a moralizing, book-burning firebrand no doubt, paid a hundred and thirty dollars and promised he would treat the horse well. W didn't leave 328 Mickle Street again until the following May.

   
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