Walt Whitman's Secret (35 page)

With the races, so too with the genders. What I learned from W, and also, to give him his due, from Bucke, is that there is a place in our collective existence that lies on the other side of biology, where propagation and pleasure are not the only purposes to which love and desire may be put. There is an attenuation of our sexual beings that can, in persons of sufficient openness and exalted understanding, subsume the mechanical and emotional differences between the male and the female, resolving them in the universal name of humanity, by which I mean the state of being human— and humane. One gender requires the other if it is to transcend the differences that only disunite without enriching. One needs an opposite in order to reach one's potential, whether alone or in harness. Anne became his opposing pole and made his last years even more trying, and of course more rewarding as well. Just as she was swept away by his magnetism
when she first laid eyes on him on a lecture platform, so he himself, I think, was instantly infatuated with her ease and charm. In time, he truly came to love her, without the corrupting carnal need that underlay his relations with the men he loved as well, especially Pete— as I sensed early on and accurately enough but without too much conscious thought. For knowledge in that area came to me slowly, if steadily, as my relationships with W and then with Anne and finally with both of them together as well as singly— relationships of the heart alone in the one instance, of heart-and-body in the other— developed as they did. Do you know the term
ménage à trois?
It is a coarse and distasteful expression in French, referring to the situation that obtains when two men are attached to the same woman, or, I suppose, when two women share the same man— and, whichever is the case, do so under the same roof. W, Anne and I found ourselves with a similar dilemma (or ecstasy) but with important differences. We all loved one another, though perhaps not equally, and of course only two of us were united in the marital sense, as the third was so far along in his physical decline and so high above us in the almost empyrean way he had transcended mating. Otherwise, it was much as one might read about in the prurient flash sold, rather furtively, by Parisian news-agents. Certainly it was not without its jealousies, at least not on my part, I'm sorry to admit.

Or, to put the matter in quite a different way, he was ennobled by an inventory of kindness so large that he had yet to dispense it all, and by romantic wounds that he had prodded and examined until they became his finest group of poems, the “Calamus” ones, which healed some of the enormous hurts he had endured. That he found it necessary to keep the circumstances of his creating them away from the broad public was a hideous irony. On the surface he may have betrayed no hint of these large lashing affronts to tranquillity. But to visit him as so many did, and see him trade the companionship of
living people for another spoonful of the precious energies he needed to conserve like a miser, was a glum and piteous experience at times. To look in on him and listen to him twice daily as I did, seeing his unabated hope in the face of grimacing reality, was to believe, mistakenly, that he was continuing to die in the orderly fashion that he believed the world expected of him.

John Addington Symonds and other London and Oxford admirers, sitting at inlaid writing-tables in their clubs, persisted in asking him for confirmation of the sexual propensities— I choose that phrase, hoping it is properly neutral— they found encapsulated to perfection in “Calamus.” W ignored them just as he did mere autograph-seekers. Or I should say, in the case of fellow writers, did so to the extent consistent with the simple courtesy that educated overseas readers, in sympathy with the author's perceived intent, quite reasonably expected to be shown. At least they didn't usually show up at the door unannounced, as did many other visitors, whose courtesy calls left him enervated to an unusual degree.

Of course, W's dissembling didn't strike me as an especially satisfying explanation, but only as a failed effort at being disingenuous when in a tight jam, logically speaking. Such were the individual fears of us both, about the near future, the very near future indeed, that loomed above us a day or a week or several weeks or a month ahead, that I felt I had little to lose if I pressed him. I believed that the closeness we had arrived at through surviving various adversities and reverses together allowed me to understand him so much more deeply than I had done early in our curious partnership. The situation emboldened me to be devilish just to see what would happen.

“And what would Pete Doyle from Limerick”—which W had once told me casually was the correct place of origin—“say about your lines in honor of the Queen who had mercilessly and criminally oppressed his people, perpetuating the conduct of queens and kings
back through the long history that the two races of people shared so uneasily—and tragically?”

I tried to utter the words in a more or less conversational tone, and showed, I believe, no trace of either humor or anger, neither of which I actually felt in any case. Yet my words, springing so unexpectedly out of what began as polite chat, seemed to echo in a way that added urgency, and possibly rebellion or defiance, to what otherwise might have been closer to the innocent interrogative that I had intended, whether or not I believed in it.

To the quiet that followed my question, W responded with a silence of his own. He looked at me for one terribly long instant. I could see none of the many possible responses in his melancholic, worn-out and half-dead eyes. He stroked his whiskers with his right hand as though combing them before a mirror.

“Horace, we each of us have reasons to hurry, for the hour grows painfully late, as I do not have to tell you.”

I waited for more words to follow.

He opened his meek and sweet old mouth, now much misshapen by time, and through the aperture in his rapidly thinning whiskers, the good gray beard of the man who had made himself a figure of legend with generous assistance from his motley coalition of madmen, visionaries, charlatans, geniuses, inverts and occasionally some man's bored wife, said that while each of us had reason to act in haste, we should not cease to cultivate assiduity and evenness of effort.

“Be patient, my fine young friend. Be patient.”

In the quiet that then recurred, in that bedroom with all its jumble and perfectly preserved disorder, we could hear that Mickle Street was receiving a fresh coat of rain.

   
FOURTEEN
   

B
Y
1888,
WHEN
I
FOUND
my true place in W's orbit, he already had an extraordinary array of doctors and other medical people attending to his health, or rather to his astonishing lack of it. Sitting atop the roost of course was Doctor Osler, who took him on as a patient when he came down from Montreal to Philadelphia in, I believe, Eighty-four. In those days of course he had yet to be given the noble title he continues to enjoy over there in Oxford or London. I use the present tense, for surely I cannot have somehow missed news of Sir William's passing. The press, even the
Camden Courier
, would have made quite a story of that event. Like W himself, as it gives me a shiver to realize now, I cling to the newspapers most doggedly. They are my link to the world of the active, the mobile and the robust, people who can look at the future and see more than their own extinction.

I don't know when Osler was first called the Father of Modern Medicine, a distinction I understand he has disputed, or indeed when he became the single most famous physician in the world, but even when he had W in his care he was already far famed as a singular individual, destined for greatness if indeed not already invested or infected with it. I recall him as a small-boned man; his feet in particular were tiny. By contrast, his forehead, protecting all
that brain, covered quite an expanse. He was most neat and orderly. W was the first to admit how fortunate he always had been in his doctors, yet he found the depth of Osler's humanity even greater than the breadth of his learning. To W, who said this to me one evening, Osler was someone who, “though a Canadian, is yet Southern and French. He shows indications of both.” All attempts to elaborate on this observation for my benefit left its meaning no less obscure.

There was strangeness about W's pronouncements on the northern origins of those who had them. He asked once whether I had observed “the Canadian” that underlay the features of Doctor Bucke's face. Again, I questioned what he meant.

“I cannot say, but it is there,” he said. “You will know it someday. You'll get up there, tramp about, see the Doctor, then come to know what I mean.”

Even after accepting a far higher position at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Osler, who himself became quite a literary figure as well, still saw W from time to time, though others assumed his function once the Good Gray Poet's diseases and afflictions tightened their conspiracy against him during the three years and a bit that I served as (in Anne's phrase) his recording angel. Doctor Longaker I believe I have mentioned. There was also Doctor Henry Cattell, a friend of Eakins, who taught at the university, and then, in Camden itself, Doctor McAlister— Alexander McAlister. All good men, good men indeed. W needed all such help he could attract and muster.

In May Eighty-nine, Ed Wilkins took W for a long push in the wicker-seated invalid's chair. Returning from this, his first outdoor adventure since the previous June, W announced that he would try to duplicate the activity each day. I and others tacitly assumed, though
none of us spoke directly of such a motive, that he was adopting the practice in order to build up his endurance for the big do scheduled to take place on his birthday. On the thirty-first of the month he would turn seventy. That was the event for which he had no doubt been anxiously preparing long before he and I had entered each other's lives in any meaningful way. With eight others, some of them members of the gang, others political and business friends of Tom's, I organized a large banquet in Camden to celebrate the anniversary that W feared he would never attain (and he was not the only one). The event was to be called the Feast of Reason (a compromise title) and would unfold at Morgan's Hall at Fourth and Market, a former Odd Fellows meetinghouse that had become, after enlargements and extensive renovations, what young people to-day would term the ritziest place in town.

Here is a terrible admission for a Socialist to make: I had learned that committees seldom function at acceptable levels of efficiency and moreover that I am rarely at my best as a member of one, or at least not of a large one. In some ways, the dinner that resulted from this assembly of worthies resembled what might have come to pass if God, rather than barking an order, had assigned Moses the task of striking a board that would entertain the possibility of proposing a list of possible Commandments, no fewer than eight nor more than twelve.

For example, Anne was radiantly furious with me for days afterward once she discovered that she was to be the only woman seated with two hundred men at the enormously long linen-draped tables arranged in neat ranks. I first tried to pass the blame to Tom's banker friends on the committee, saying that they were not aware they were being rude but were simply not accustomed to dealing with women in the exercise of their daily business. When that didn't wash, I switched to Tom's Republican Party colleagues. “They do not value women,” I said accusingly, “because women do not yet exercise the
franchise, though let us hope that this tyranny of denial will end soon, as seems to be in the cards.”