Walt Whitman's Secret (30 page)

“Is this not competing with yourself?” I asked him.

“Not in the least,” he replied. “You have yet to sharpen your sense of these matters on the whetstone of long experience.”

As I was silently going through the letters he had given me, he asked me to read them aloud, as his eyes were bothering him that day. As I did so, he interrupted to reminisce about Redpath, recounting how the man he called Jim had offered to lend him money and sometimes did so.

“He was one of your radical crowd.”

“Why don't you say ‘our crowd'? Don't you belong with us?”

“Yes, yes, I do,” he said, laughing a little. “But sometimes I think some of you fellows have outstripped even me in the way you flaunt your red flag of revolt.”

“Do you mean that for a rebuke or a blessing?”

“For a blessing to be sure,” he said.

I went along with him for harmony's sake. In his old age just as in the days of Lincoln, W was a Republican. Mind you, toward the end of his life I did hear him criticize the Republicans, but only in the sour process of itemizing events in the day's news. No doubt he voted for President Arthur but against President Cleveland. Personally, I saw no difference between them and voted for neither— nor anyone else, ever, until Eugene Debs came along. As we had such important work before us, I had no intention of speaking up in such a way as to lower his admiration of my curatorial talent. Later I came to realize that he had no choice but to try to please me. I was all he had, and he was old and sick. I understand these things so much better now.

That Summer was particularly hot and bothersome. Keeping the windows closed meant stifling. Keeping them open meant letting in
the smell of the fertilizer plant and the racket of the railroad. One night W complained of having been “melted.” All day he had been unable even to read proof, so that the
Complete Poems
was already behind its admittedly optimistic schedule.

“As to the ordeal of this book, perhaps of any of my books,” he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead as he did so, “I feel on the whole like Abe Lincoln, who would not growl over the scars and the losses but thought that the government was lucky to come out of its troubles alive.”

Lincoln seemed to come up in his talk with ever greater regularity. When he again told me his Lincoln stories, I didn't know if he was unconsciously repeating himself or merely trying to lay particular emphasis on what Lincoln had meant to him, and continued to mean. One day we fell to discussing his Lincoln lecture, which was to be included in the omnibus edition. I remarked that it was still very vivid after all these years, as though in his mind the events surrounding the assassination had taken place only yesterday.

He stared strangely for a second and then spoke slowly. “As you know, Pete was in the audience, watching the play. He heard the report of the pistol, saw the younger Booth drop from the box and land, paws down, on the stage, heard his arrogant slogan and watched him scurry across and disappear into infamy.” He met my eyes when he added: “I have never been shy on the matter of Pete's attendance.”

In actual fact this was one of the most remarkable mentions of his friend that he had ever made in my hearing. Pete was never in the present tense but seemed always to be hovering in the distant background of W's recollections. Here, however, was a statement about a time long ago that suddenly seemed remarkably alive. Then W retreated, falling once more into recounting their innocent friendship. “We were the closest of comrades,” he said, “during the
war, in Washington City, and later.” This sounded like something one would say in the witness box, trying to clear oneself of a criminal charge.

I have no experience of war myself, but I understand that the pressures of wartime do often invest friendship with a special degree of intensity. Perhaps it is born of fear, or at least uncertainty. Loneliness may play a part as well, as might the simple excitement of living even a passive part in that which the news comprises.

I was still as determined as ever to get him to tell me more about Pete. By the counterfeit equanimity in W's voice whenever the name came up, I suspected that his Rebel friend was some sort of key to another aspect of W's life, the part that we all live out when dropping off to sleep at night or lying newly wakened in the morning with our minds racing but our feet not yet ready to be planted on the floor. That is, I believed I knew what the secret must be but had almost none of the details. In the end, my suspicions did not prove wrong but only woefully incomplete.

Some days he was languid. Most days he was in some degree sick. But there were others, however infrequent, when his blood was beating its way around the body's racecourse. On those days, he wrote. He wrote his news-poems, as I called them, the ones about public events and the passing of national heroes, for which the newspapers compensated him quite well. Other times he wrote prose, albeit with more difficulty. Writing poetry seemed to add to his temporary vitality whereas writing prose seemed to subtract from it.

However discontinuous his literary output, his flow of wonderful talk was unimpeded. I remember one evening in particular when my visit coincided with a magnificent rainstorm that seemed to energize
his body in somewhat the same way poetry did his mind. I was about to turn the knob on the door of his room when a loud celebration of thunder began. I had no sooner entered, expecting to find him in his sickbed, when a great jagged bolt of lightning revealed him standing at the center window instead, his bald head silhouetted against the northern sky as steel sheets made of rain beat against the pane and went splashing over the sill. He knew I was behind him, for his unspoken thoughts were suddenly given voice. I heard him conclude, “— one-thousand-three. The lightning struck very close, my boy, very close indeed. How sweet it is!”

I went home regretting even more than usual that I could never have been acquainted with him in his prime. I know that I had seen a remarkable but, alas, a momentary change come over someone who at that time was often unable to do so much as venture down the stairs. He was a prisoner now. He mainly talked about the past, as I imagine all prisoners do, reminiscing about when they were free.

Not long before, he had made still another will. I could see it sitting out in the open where it was sure to get mislaid among the poems, scraps, self-rejected bits of prose, yellowing newspaper cuttings and open books, both face up and face down, that tottered in piles or were spread on the floor but that might have been jammed into boxes if all the boxes weren't already stuffed. He had few possessions other than this poor little house, but he was rich in pieces of paper. As time went on, he became even more extravagant in unloading so many reams of stuff. He gave me or at least showed me many personal family letters, but not the correspondence with his mother. He spoke of her frequently and in reverent, yes, that is the word, terms. I asked if he wrote to her often back in Brooklyn during his Washington days, when he was so busy with the wounded and maimed (and with Pete, I said only to myself). Yes, and he had all those letters, he said. “They're here. I've got 'em. They came to me after she died.” His eyes,
both his droopy one and the other, still flickered whenever he spoke of her being dead. “A hundred or more,” he continued, “scrupulously kept all together, still about somewhere with my manuscripts.” I was certain that he kept them, possibly in a casket made for that purpose, behind the blockaded door, in that room where his treasures were housed with such care as to contradict what I came to believe was the studied disorder of his living quarters.

“The reality, the simplicity, the transparency of my dear, dear mother's life was responsible for the main things in the letters as in
Leaves of Grass.
” This was a surprising revelation if not merely rhetoric and grieving. “How much I owe her! It could not be put on a scale. It could not be weighed and it could not be measured or even be put into the best words. It can only be apprehended through the intuition.

“
Leaves of Grass
is the flower of her temperament active in me,” he went on. “Mother was almost illiterate in the formal sense but strangely knowing. She excelled in narrative. Had great mimetic power. She could tell stories, impersonate. She was very eloquent in the utterance of noble moral axioms, was very original in her manner and her style.”

I can only say that the fruit had not fallen far from the tree.

“I wonder what
Leaves of Grass
would have been if I had been born of some other mother,” he said.

From his asylum in Ontario, the alarmingly forthright yet mysterious Doctor Bucke wrote to make inquiries of his faraway patient and hero. “I should like to hear that you are gaining strength,” he wrote. “I do not hear that. How is it?”

This was not on one of those days when W was able to write, so he asked me to reply for him. “How is it? I don't know,” he said. “Do
you? Tell Maurice we've given up guessing here. Let him make a guess in Canada.” He said this with a trace of contempt.

Flora, you should know that W had a two-sided relationship with your country. He put the geographic Canada on a pedestal, praising the frontier freshness of its air and water, not to mention its Indians and wild animals. Everyone who knew him must have heard him recount the Summer he spent with Bucke up there. It was pointless to contradict him with the supposition that Canada must have a great many localities very much like Mickle Street, tucked away in some place such as Montreal or Quebec City, where there was a railroad within one's hearing and a fertilizer plant within the range of one's nose. He would not be budged.

Yet he could become rancorous about Canada's society and government. He seemed to believe that Canada is not a democracy. He once told me this was so. I suppose he meant that it is not a republic like America. He was suspicious of the Queen and her ministers, who he believed were plotting against the United States in some way.

I didn't disagree with him often, but I did mention that people from our nation had tried to invade Canada, not the other way around.

“The Fenians, yes, that is true, but they were Irishmen hoping to strike at England at one remove to win freedom for their own land.” He added, softly: “I have on occasion wondered whether Pete was not involved with them in some way. He was drawn to secret societies, you know, and had seen so much violence that the habit of violence never became a stranger to him.”

“I didn't think of the Fenians,” I replied. “Did not the United States itself invade Canada once or perhaps twice?”

“Once certainly, in the Revolution. I know of no other. Ancient history in any case. Remember whom we were fighting then, and for what.”

Only much later did I recall what little I knew about the War of 1812.

This conversation that day took on a piquancy because President Cleveland had just given a speech, a very harsh speech, about our fierce dispute with the Canadians over the fisheries. When I brought this up, W asked me to explain to him what I understood of the matter. I was surprised, for he still read the newspapers as an almost religious observance, and there was a time when he could have passed a daily examination on their content.