Walt Whitman's Secret (37 page)

But at least his voice always seemed to pick up when he spoke of his latest project, a pamphlet to be made from the speeches delivered at the birthday banquet, with an assortment of other pats-on-the-back thrown in. He thought such a thing would be of the greatest possible benefit to the sale of his books, including this new and still larger edition of the
Leaves
that he had in the works for me to engineer. At the time I thought there was something too blatant even for W in the notion of this publicity booklet, which I nonetheless managed to have appear that Autumn under the title
Camden's Compliments to Walt Whitman
, but of course I kept my opinion a private one. Later, I acquired a better understanding of the idea's importance. He saw us noticing that his deterioration continued unchecked. He needed new endeavors, including ones as small as
Compliments
, so modest in size if not in conception, as much as he needed one so enormous and vitally important as the new
Leaves
,
which was to be in two fat volumes. He needed them, as he needed Anne's constant affectionate mindfulness, to keep himself breathing. If he ceased doing what writers do, which is to write and publish, then he ceased to be one and his end would come all the more swiftly. He believed this; so did Anne and I.

Even so, soon after the banquet, any repetition of such an event as that, with all its physical stresses, was rapidly becoming unthinkable. But W was nothing if not tenacious. In fact, he carried tenacity well beyond the point at which it ceases to be bravery and is left to sit as a monument to folly. That Summer, when it was so hot that he had to make his outings in the chair only after the sun had retreated, he managed to visit Philadelphia. A photographer there, Gutekunst by name, wished him to sit for the lens, and sealed the deal by sending a carriage for him, promising the same for the return journey as well. But this show of will on W's part was dwarfed by another, early the following Spring, when he again crossed the river to deliver his Lincoln lecture. On returning, he found the additional bit of strength needed to write out an anonymous account of his appearance for one of the Boston papers. He was the busiest sick man I had ever seen, but likewise the sickest busy one, though I myself may be breaking the first of these records right now. Either way, there was a note of desperation to his actions that was unbearably sad but also somehow admirable.

The search for other matter to supplement the banquet tributes led him to sift roughly through some of his floor-level files again. On mornings when he never rose at all, or got up intending to breakfast but instead spent the entire day lying on the bed fully dressed, he would ask me to gather up great double armfuls of letters and documents, much as one gathers up dead leaves in the Autumn, and deposit them on the bed next to where he lay. This refortified his habit of showing me things from his past, giving them to me to take
away forever, and the practice went on at this rate virtually until the end (but, strangely, without making a significant dent in the mounds that were scattered all about— I seemed to be witnessing some miracle on the order of the Loaves and Fishes). I kept hoping that he would again find the original letter from Emerson about the first
Leaves
, hoping indeed, but never aloud, that he would present it to me. Each time he had a different excuse for not locating it.

He did, however, unearth, and bade me read to him, a letter written to an acquaintance from his Bohemian days in New York, I believe. It was dated “Camden, Nov. 26, ′75” and told of W's struggle to recover from the first debilitating “whack” while still attempting, after three years, to properly set himself up in the latest, and what he seemed to sense was also the last, of his adopted towns. It was no Brooklyn, no Mannahatta, and no New Orleans. With one dipping of the pen, he declared himself “at the end of my rope, and in fact ridiculously poor.” With the next, he was feeling “about as cheerful and
vimmy
as ever,” though he knew his paralysis was for keeps. This was either a draft of a letter he may then have touched up as he wrote it out for mailing, or else the fair copy that he retained for his files, duplicating the text from the original. Hard to say. But it was written on the backs of six scraps of various sizes, one of them the first page of a letter from Pete Doyle on the letterhead of the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad, where he was evidently working back then. It revealed nothing new.

W was not a sentimentalist about his own manuscripts once he could replace them with a book or a cutting from a paper or magazine containing the same piece in more permanent and more readable form. He once confided to me that he thought he had used most of the original manuscript of
Leaves
for other purposes after the first edition was safely in his hands back in Fifty-five. I think it most likely that the leaves of
Leaves
became separated from one another and were
used as scratch paper over the course of some years, being mixed up with scraps and strays from other sources. But I didn't know just what inference could be drawn from W not preserving one of Pete's letters, given that he seemed to have preserved most everyone else's.

About two weeks later, he had me rooting through the tumuli for something when my claw happened to pull up that photograph of Pete and him posing in two chairs facing in opposite directions, W looking especially nondescript, yet mysterious behind his curtain of facial hair, P displaying a condescending little smile. I hadn't lain eyes on the thing in quite a while, and Tom, who happened to be with me, had not known of its existence.

W laughed the moment I held it up. Tom then tried to reproduce Pete's expression. This made W laugh some more (which was good for him, I thought).

“Never mind,” he said, “the expression of my face atones for all that is lacking in his. What do I look like there? Is it seriosity?”

Tom answered. “Fondness,” he said. “And Doyle should be a girl.”

I said nothing, but W emitted another laugh. “Now don't be too hard on him. That is my Rebel friend, you know. We were true comarados in our time.” He added, “Tom, you would like Pete. Love him, in fact. And you too, Horace— especially you. You and Pete would get to be great chums. I found everybody in Washington who knew Pete to be loving him.” W called him “a master character.”

In fact, I had been so curious about this master character from the past that I had long since been asking W's older friends, when I had them alone for a minute, to recall of Pete whatever they could. It was clear to me that Burroughs was the only one who could stand him in the least.

“One of your powerful uneducated persons,” I said to W.

He shot back jovially, “Just that, a rare man, knowing nothing of books, knowing everything of life. A great hearty full-blooded
everyday divinely generous workingman, a hail-fellow-well-met.” Then he went too far. “Maybe too fond of his beer now and then, and of the women, but for the most part the salt of the earth.”

I kept my tongue in my firmly shut mouth, having no wish to upset W or perplex Tom. W meanwhile kept right on.

“Most literary men, as you know, are the kind that the hardy and genuine man would not go far to see, but Pete fascinates you by the very earthiness of his nobility. Yes, you fellows will know him. You, Horace, must particularly make it your point to come into relations with him. You will know him, both of you, and then you will understand that what I say is wholly true and yet is short of the truth.” His coyness had achieved a new plateau; I wasn't sure what to think or believe.

“When
shall
I ever meet him?” I asked in an absolutely innocent tone of voice.

“Oh, there will come a time,” he said.

At which point I changed the subject to the late war, a topic calculated to keep W going for however long he had the strength to do so.

I believe he probably would have been more candid with me on the Pete business if Tom had not been along. Such at least is what my instinct told me, for he did, in his fashion, feed me tiny tastes of what he knew I wished to know— knew but would not acknowledge, if I was reading him correctly. For example, during another visit not long afterward, he began by saying that he had found something else that might interest me, as indeed his discoveries always did.

“Do you know who this is?” he asked, handing me a horizontal photograph, evidently recent. It showed a boy or young man with cropped hair shaved high above the ears, lying on his belly, stretched on the floor in a state of nudity, contemplating a flower vase that he held in one hand. The central fact of the picture was not the lad's face, which was turned away from the viewer at a slight angle, but
rather his bare posterior looking like two perfectly round melons sliced down one side and spliced together. I shook my head.

“Look again. Do you not remember the buggy that was precursory to the wheeling-chair?”

“Bill Duckett!” I said, first in triumph, then in mild confusion.

“Indeed it is. This is another of the photographic studies Eakins makes for his students or for himself alone, I'm not certain which it is in this case, as the pose is not anatomical in the way of others I have seen. Not one of his standing figures for demonstration purposes, you see, but a complete work in itself, artfully arranged and lit.”

I acknowledged that this was so, that this was art and not an entry made for one reason or another in a visual note-book. I handed it back. He laid it beside him.

“Eakins was kind enough to strike a copy for me, knowing my interest in fellows who work vehicles, all kinds of vehicles.”

I thought this was a reference to the outings he used to make with Duckett. I can see them yet, Duckett, wearing a derby, holding the reins loosely in one hand, W, in his sloucher, beside him on the seat with a blanket athwart his lap.

Flora, do you know what in German is called a
Fetisch?
Originally, as I understand it, the word referred to a Negro talisman. Certainly it most usually implies the excessive and perhaps irrational worship of an object, and not, as in the case of W and his young transportation-men, of a profession and those who practice it. Yet I felt then that W's decided preference was a devotion carried to extremes and might be squeezed in under the same heading. Would he have wished such a photograph if the model had not been, as W and I knew him, a buggy driver? Admittedly the job hardly ranks with those of railroad engineers or seamen aboard steamers, but it does involve forward movement for some commercial goal, and that was one of the characteristics W favored. Doubtless I would learn of others later on.

These days of course I see myself in my own memories of Mickle Street. When I called in the mornings, I usually found him eating his breakfast, eagerly expecting its delivery or waiting for Missus Davis to come and retrieve the bowl, plate and cup. At other times he had next to no appetite, and the afternoon did not make good on the morning's promise. Sometimes I was able to call at mid-afternoon and often found him sitting contentedly in the wheeling-chair outside the front door. He would be taking the sun and conversing with Missus Davis's mongrel or with neighborhood children. Later, indoors, he might complain of the noise in the street or, even on warm days, of the chill. Early one evening I arrived to find him absent, and waited until I heard the approach of Ed, pushing the chair. The passenger asked to be deposited at the window in the front parlor, where he could go on observing his fellow citizens at their own eye level rather than from above, in his bedroom.

He had been taking the fresh air down by the river, which he called his oldest friend. I suppose he meant that rivers in general were his oldest friends, for how could he sit on the busy banks of the Delaware, watching the ferries come and go, staring across the way to the big inviting metropolis, without being reminded of the view from Brooklyn toward Mannahatta?

Ed, who had been one of Bucke's protégés, returned to Canada to pursue the study of veterinary medicine. I then spread the news of the sudden opening to Bucke and to all the other doctors who were nearer to hand. After some fumbling, the job was bestowed on Missus Davis's foster son, Warrie Fritzinger. “Warrie” was affectionate for “Warren,” and he had been an able-bodied seaman. The able-bodied part proved useful in lifting and sometimes carrying W, who however no doubt placed greater emphasis on the other part of the description. The match
was a sound one. At one point Warrie even went to the Philadelphia Orthopedic Hospital to learn the science of massage, to improve the way he administered what W, who found in them some temporary relief, referred to as “pummelings.” Warrie was also a student of the violin. W found his playing salubrious as well. (I found it less so, and once had the misfortune to be present when the dog joined in.) Warrie also did much-needed jobs of carpentry around the house. I believe he might have apprenticed as a ship's carpenter, for his skill was at making what was very strong rather than attractive to look at.