Walt Whitman's Secret (25 page)

The Great War in Europe has brought us a fiercely strong central government but one completely devoid of any of Socialist impulse or influence whatever. One, on the contrary, that is more bellicose, more immoral toward its own people and less democratic than any since the one whose horrors were the making— I mean the perfecting— of W's welcoming heart. In size alone its bureaucracy terrorizes, quite apart from policies of materialism and fear that it enforces on behalf of this administration.

It is almost impossible for people to-day to comprehend how much smaller the country obviously was during W's own war— smaller in everything except its armies. Lincoln's Executive Mansion, for example, employed only two secretaries, as they were known: allpurpose civil servants who crossed all departmental and public lines in supporting the president and made certain that everything ran smoothly. John Nicolay was one of them. The other was W's budding friend, young John Hay. They both ended their careers as ambassadors and such.

These men, who had worked for Lincoln back in Illinois and were with him for hour after hour every day at the Mansion until late at night, became his joint biographers. Astoundingly, they produced a life of Lincoln in ten volumes; and I am doubtless one of the few living— barely living— authors who can appreciate an effort so Herculean. The difference is that mine is the story of a great artist and philosopher of democracy and theirs that of the martyred president whose horrible death within days of his ultimate victory made his story as indelible to my countrymen as that of Adam and Eve or Jonah and the Whale. My own books stalled for want of broad interest on the part of both the public and the publishers while theirs became an almost peerless totem in patriotic parlors across America. I never read the entirety of it, but I well recall plowing through some of the volumes as they materialized and discussing my response
with W. After all, he was the friend of one of the book's collaborators and the close observer and loving admirer of its subject.

I had skipped ahead to the assassination, and told W that I considered that part of the work a neglected opportunity.

He agreed. “Yes, it is absolutely without the vivid touches that belong to the event. Hay ought to have been excused from the writing of it at all if he could do no better than that. Besides, as you say, it lacks entirely in perspective and is far too partisan to boot.”

I said that the authors could not concede that Booth, however misguided and however criminal, was obviously driven by more than scoundrelism and derangement. I may have appropriated the comment from Bucke, but I'm not certain. If I did commit a plagiary, I apologize now to the Doctor's shade— or would you prefer I say his spirit?

“You hit another nail on the head there!” W's ready endorsement of my observation surprised me a little. “The authors are not in the least Greek or Homeric. Old Homer, as long ago as that, had the good sense to make Hector a great man, to fill him out, make him expansive— indeed, so remarkably so as to incline some to demur. But it was a true instinct, as necessary at this time as at that one. I think I see through this
Life
of Lincoln a tendency to blackguard the South and the Southern.”

This was a literary way of addressing the problem. But I knew he also spoke from his civilian heart. He looked at me intensely— at me or through me. “This meanness of spirit against old adversaries ought to be altogether gone by this late date.”

Here was my dilemma encapsulated in a few brief sentences. W often spoke of “Booth” and on a number of occasions wrote of him. In the great majority of such instances, however, he was referring to Edwin, the great interpreter of Shakespeare's tragedies. Otherwise, when alluding to “Booth” he meant either the assassin's other
brother, Junius Brutus Booth the Younger, a much lesser figure in the acting profession, or the patriarch in both the familial and the theatrical senses, the original Junius Brutus. He had come from England when W was only a small boy. I am told that he was truly a madman if any of them was (though not dangerous).

Of W's familiarity with the work of the future murderer I knew nothing, but supposed that W must have watched him somewhere, sometime, and so further supposed there was nothing of the experience he wished to communicate or remember. Years later a cutting from a long-ago New York daily turned up in one of the hogsheads of papers we gathered up after his death: a critique he had written of the actor's interpretation of
Richard III.
That play is said to have been the actor's favorite of Shakespeare's works and was most certainly W's as well. W's almost proprietary feeling for it may help explain— who can know?—his uncharacteristic dismissal of the performance. He wrote that Booth's Richard “is about as much like his father's as the wax bust of Henry Clay”—you may not know the reference, Flora: Clay was a Southern senator and perennial candidate for the presidency—“in the window down near Howard-street, a few blocks below the theater, is like the genuine orator in the Capitol when his best electricity was flashing alive in him and out of him.” The piece dates to Sixty-two. I found it crumpled together with one taken from
La Revue Européenne
, evidently a Parisian paper of the period. Its title was “Walt Whitman, poète et ‘rowdy'”—which even W could have translated with precision.

His standard lecture on Lincoln, especially popular on each year's anniversary of the cataclysm at Ford's, was like a miniature annuity for him, the way a sentimental Christmas story, reprinted every year for a few fresh dollars, might be for a very different kind of writer. When
performing
had become difficult for him, he would read it from notes as he sat in a simple chair at the center of the stage. The effect
was especially powerful, because he was alone on a nude stage as Booth had been and occupied the type of chair that old-time theaters such as Ford's arranged in concentric circles and screwed into the floorboards. The fact that W was obviously not a professional actor, nor even, numerous others have opined, a very good reader of his own work before an audience, only added more to the entertainment's evident sincerity, I have been told. He did not imply that he had personally witnessed the assassination, a difficult thing to have achieved as he was up in New York at the time, but he did allow people to infer that he had seen it happen if they were so disposed toward that brand of credulity. In actual fact, as I once heard from his own lips in what he hoped I would take as a casual aside, he had drawn much of the detail from a particular friend of his. The friend, he told me later, was Pete Doyle. He confided this because he knew I already had come to that conclusion.

Nobody, perhaps not even Wilkes himself, understands what his plan actually is.

To O'Laughlen and Arnold, he is unstable and often exasperating but unswervingly loyal to the Struggle whose death rattle he, they and everyone else can hear growing louder by the hour.

To Surratt, who also goes by such names as Harrison and Armstrong, among others, Wilkes is a person much like himself, though a more perfect representative of their rare type. The others are plodders, but we are plotters, he says to himself. That Richmond has never rewarded us properly for our cunning, intelligence and bravery speaks ill of those in charge there and their entire conduct of the Struggle these past four years.

Payne, the name under which they know Powell, who as the situation requires also carries on business as Wood, Kensler or Hall, is
more difficult to gauge. He is tall, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, like an heroic statue slightly larger than life, and, like any statue, he keeps mute. The way he says little about himself or anything else creates the impression that he knows a great deal, as indeed, Wilkes believes, must be the case. The cliché about keeping one's cards close to one's vest does not apply to Payne. He has memorized the entire deck. The information is safe inside his brain, to which he alone has the combination.

As for Herold, people have been telling him his entire life that he is slow-witted. He can't rule out the possibility that they are right, but isn't really sure. Certainly his is not a lively imagination. He first goes by the name Smith. Wilkes suggests he try harder, but that's the best he can come up with, so he is assigned a name: Mister Boyd. Whatever his limitations, though, he is more prepossessing than Atzerodt, who rechristens himself Azworth. When told that this is too similar to his actual name, he panics. Eventually he alights on Atwood, a name he recalls hearing somewhere. Maybe someone of that name came in wanting a carriage repainted, a wheel greased or an axle replaced. He can't remember.

Mister Atwood is one of those people who appears as though he has tuberculosis when he doesn't and looks at a distance as though he must smell bad, which at close quarters he actually does. The uninitiated can't really tell if he's been drinking or not because he acts slightly drunk even when sober. He can't help it. But his colleagues know that when he has in fact been bending an elbow, his speech sounds slightly German in a way that it does not otherwise. He's never quite clean-shaven and never quite bewhiskered, but perpetually looks as though he hasn't been near a razor in several days and hasn't been to sleep either.

Herold knows Wilkes is not just rich but famous. That's what everybody understands. That's what people say. He is proud to be
acquainted with such a figure. When he is with Wilkes, he is with an important personage and wonders what it would be like to be his uncommon friend. Yet Atzerodt harbors no such illusions, has no capacity for speculation. Wilkes generally treats him no better than he would a mongrel dog foraging in the street, yet also gives him small sums of money from time to time. Wilkes is a moody man. When he is moody onstage, he is taken to be an artist. When he is moody at other times, he can frighten even those who know him best.

Most of these people, and there are many others— dozens or maybe scores, in more minor roles, whose names, real or made up, will never be known— are prevented from meeting one another unless and until such becomes absolutely necessary. That is essential in such an operation. The trick is that they be kept on a string of just the right length, like Irish Pete, knowing in advance what their job will be, perhaps, but not how it fits into the big plan.

Yet they are members of a gang, or a company of players, in a way that none of them quite realizes. Wilkes is busy all the time, running between cities, meeting people, reconfiguring his plot as the texture of events changes. One of his activities is buying horses, trading horses or getting others to do so for him, then stabling them at various establishments. Aside from himself, so resplendently handsome, and Payne, a virtual giant (much like the Baboon), and of course Atzerodt the troll— aside from such examples as these, the generality of men tend to look alike, but every horse is different. Wilkes is now the owner of a small and high-spirited bay mare, blind in one eye, with a mane as shiny and black as his own and a perfect white star on her forehead. No one ever forgets such an animal. No one remembers the rider. Let me see, Constable, I should say he was a man of average height and physique and oh yes, one other thing: his clothes were either black or brown, and he may not have been wearing a hat when I saw him.

Wilkes's various horses pass through the hands of many members of his group, with several of whom, including Pete, he has found reason to exchange notes. They are not exactly please-come-to-tea-on-Tuesday notes, but they appear equally innocuous in their rightful context. Later, however, much could be read into the very fact of their existence. Wilkes knows full well that blackmail is the surest form of insurance, and moreover that the most effective means of eliminating potential turncoats is to blackmail them without their being aware of it at the time.

Ten days have gone by since the ceremony on the Capitol steps, and Wilkes invites Surratt, along with one of Missus Surratt's female boarders and the woman's young daughter, to accompany him to Ford's Theatre. Payne goes with them. The play is English,
The Tragedy of Jane Shore
, an early eighteenth-century piece written, so its author believed, somewhat in emulation of Shakespeare. It is best enjoyed from the upper box that hangs over stage left: a big treat for mother and child. They enjoy the experience immensely for its story and its costumes respectively. Wilkes and Surratt keep stealing all-consuming glances at the entrances and exits, each taking measurements in his mind. Payne, however, while alert to everything around him, betrays no reaction whatsoever.