Walt Whitman's Secret (39 page)

W's influence on me was so overpowering that I sometimes felt like a minor colony of his existence, designed to enrich him while leaving me with traces of his personality and a strong desire to emulate his style in all things. It was in this situation that I turned to writing poetry, reams of it as collected eventually in books such as
Chants Communal
and
Optimos.
I struggled hard to make it my own but, as I have only recently been able to admit, it came out sounding like W's poetry retold in prose— possibly in prose translated from the German! It seemed always to declaim rather than reveal or imply. I convinced myself that my poetry was helping to disperse W's ideas and philosophies to certain small audiences that his may not have reached, owing to the intolerance that still covered his name in some quarters. At this late hour all I can say is what most people
in the circle were too considerate to state at the time: that I was blinded by hubris even in thinking that I served such a modest good by steering a handful of uninformed readers to the genuine article.

A greater contribution, one for which I was more fitted, was the
Conservator
, the monthly magazine that I founded that same year and edited in partnership with Anne. We called it the
Conservator
because it would gather together what needed to be saved before it could be disseminated: the ideas and doctrines of Walt Whitman primarily, but with other content as well, writing on progressive political and economic matters, which W was always too courteous to grumble about in my hearing (or, as far as I know, to complain about at all).

I taught Anne the California case. She picked up almost at once what had taken me months to learn as an apprentice. Her long graceful fingers plucked the leaden characters from the cabinets with the utmost speed and precision. When I praised her for this as we stood side by side setting the type— she wearing a work apron with great aplomb, though it was too big even for me and made me look and feel like a disenfranchised schoolboy— she replied that her nimbleness was “the only surviving residue of all those years of piano lessons.” She pretended to shiver at the recollection. When we think back over decades of love, oftentimes what we remember is not the impassioned pronouncements but such small moments of unaffected joy in the company of the other person (who most likely recalls totally different examples, or possibly none at all). Through our hard effort, the
Conservator
attained enough subscribers to help us pay the greengrocer and the butcher.

I have already said something, something brief, about our wedding. Let me now tell you of the love it codified. I wanted Anne to live under the same roof with me, whether as husband and wife or as a couple who followed “the custom of the country,” as I believe the expression had been on the old Western frontier. She would not dare contemplate the
latter option. She knew what violent anger the very suggestion would ignite in her father, perhaps the only person alive who could terrify her. Just why she was so frightened of him I was never certain, though he was, I grant you, a forbidding personage. As for matrimony, what can I say except that he envisioned— demanded— a better match for her. Anne and I did not discuss his wishes in detail. From the very avoidance of the subject, however, I concluded that he would almost rather have her (and certainly me) dead than see her become the bride of someone he appeared to think of as a little immigrant Jew. That I was born in New Jersey made me no less of an immigrant in his eyes. And of course it has long been my fate to be considered both a little Jew by those I wished to accept me on other terms and a non-Jew by fully fledged adherents to the faith.

This was the Autumn that John Burroughs came to town to visit with W. The essayist on Nature was younger than the poet of Democracy by perhaps twenty years but seemed to be catching up to him in appearance if not in chronology. He dressed much as W did, with only a slight variation in the shape of the soft felt hat. He too had a big nose (though smaller ears than W's) and wore his white beard to the center of his chest. But none of this, or so I sensed, was done with an air of calculation equal to Bucke's. Why did so many of W's most ardent admirers end up resembling him? I too was becoming like W, but in other ways that were both more disturbing and less noticeable if not necessarily less comic (read
Chants Communal
—no, on second thought, please don't). Sometimes I felt that I had no individuality except that which I copied from W or picked up from Anne whenever I embraced her.

My sister, Gussie, she who was born to be a hostess, invited Burroughs to dinner along with Anne and me. She wanted W, assuming he was able to convey himself there with Warrie's help, to enjoy comfortable surroundings when he conversed with his old friend
and admirer. It always amazed and delighted me that Tom, a man of no overwhelmingly obvious literary bent, threw himself so wholeheartedly into these endeavors. Perhaps he wished to learn, or perhaps he simply hoped to hear the authentic table-talk of great men. All of us but Gussie, who was checking on progress in the kitchen, were enjoying ourselves in the parlor, Tom, Burroughs and I on chairs and W on the horsehair sofa with Anne inches away, holding his left hand tenderly in her right. He gazed at her for the longest time, even longer than usual, and then uttered— uttered in a clear voice— words that seemed to turn the air to ice. “I know you, my dear, don't I? Haven't I known you somewhere?”

Tom and Burroughs looked horrified, and I must have appeared the same way to them. Anne, however, did not change expression except in that, as she looked over at us, her eyes widened, like two blue wild-flowers suddenly blooming. Tom punctured the terrified pause in the conversation with an opinion, a piece of news or a pat of gossip. W took in what was being said and even nodded in acknowledgment, but he kept readjusting, re-intensifying, the silent question he put to Anne, as though, given sufficient concentration, he could recollect the precise nature of their acquaintance. She continued to hold his hand, not one bit more tightly than before, but probably, I remember thinking, with a gentle and reassuring current passing from her fingers into his. Cogitating on this later, for the scene obsessed me with its poignancy, I guessed that this was perhaps the same method by which W had raised the pitiable hopes and eased the suffering of wounded soldiers. Bucke, Burroughs and the others could wear their Whitman costumes as they wished, but a part of me had become W. An undetectable breeze had carried a spore from his body to mine, where it had taken root, and now I could see the process repeating itself between the man I so admired and the woman I loved more than speech or written language could possibly say.

Gussie entered, cognizant that there had been lightning in the room but unaware just what had taken place, and called us to the table. When we sat, with Anne drawing her chair closer to W's, it was apparent that the episode had not led to worse. I knew that much when the rest of us laid our linen napkins across our laps and W tucked his into his shirt collar with democratic frontier gusto. Anne and I later determined that she felt the threat retreat even before I did, and Tom was not more than a second behind me.

“I made the meal myself,” Gussie said to W as she introduced several good sized roasted chickens to her guests. “I am mindful of Doctor Bucke's comments about the ill effects of too much richness in your diet.”

“Bucke is a typical scientist,” W replied without a second's hesitation and obviously in full possession of his senses. “He knows all about things that are knowable, but forgets about the existence of some others that defeat his principles.”

Burroughs, uncharacteristically, could be heard chuckling softly from deep within his whiskers, and Anne and I smiled in relief. W interpreted our reactions as an ovation, and so began a series of conversational encores on various topics. Everything was back to normal, yet nothing was ever quite the same again. The paradox might have appealed to the man who wrote
A Tale of Two Cities.

No sooner had Burroughs, the equitable and soft-spoken apostle of Nature, concluded his visit towards the end of October than Bucke, the human steamroller, arrived on a whirlwind mission of his own. I found the rapid transition difficult to adjust to. But then, W's apprehended stroke, a volcano that spit out sparks and emitted some smoke but did not erupt— not this time— was playing harshly
with my nerves. Such was what I kept telling myself, using this quite true but simplified explanation to cover, or cover up, a number of other agitations. Some were straightforward: money worries, or the work of getting the
Conservator
off the ground. Others were deeper, more nebulous, even frightening and dark. Was W's comradely adhesiveness, though obviously no longer physically lustful, limited to friendships with other males, as many had surmised despite his statements to the contrary? And if it was, had the extraordinary Anne Montgomerie, fearing no one and nothing (save her father) and willing to go anywhere experience might take her— an explorer, you might say, who never set foot in Africa, indeed never left home— inspired him to exempt her from all the restrictions he usually placed on his preference? Obviously, if she for her part loved him, it was a love totally different from that which existed between us as man and woman. But what effect might it have on the relationship she and I shared? or, for that matter, on my association with W or his interconnection with me?

Reassured that W had eluded further disaster to his health, Bucke was returning to Canada, and asked me if I wished to travel there with him and be his house guest. He must have sized up my predicament, for whatever else he may have been, he was chock full of wisdom and intuition. I asked Anne if she wished to come along, but she said that she should remain in Camden to oversee W's care while I was away, a matter, barring a real spurt of magma, that consisted of coordinating his assorted doctors and being a sympathetic pair of ears. She seemed sincere in telling me that, yes, I should go, but not for long— no longer than necessary for me to accomplish the thinking I required.

I then called on W. The day was damp but not cold, so I was surprised to find him in the bedroom wearing his overcoat completely buttoned and the collar turned up. I told him that I needed a rest, as he had needed one when the wounded in the hospitals threatened
to overwhelm him. I told him I was going to take his advice about seeing some of Canada but would return soon enough. If he needed me urgently, he could always send me a message at Bucke's home.

“In that case,” he said, “you will be in the finest pair of hands.” And with those words, as huge piles of papers were turning to compost at his feet, he gave me one of his secular all-purpose blessings and wished me a safe and restorative trip.

The evening before Bucke and I caught our train, Anne and I attended a lecture by “Colonel” Bob Ingersoll at the Horticultural Hall in Philadelphia. The event was a benefit for W, who was persuaded to attend, though he was as pale as an eggshell and all too frail-looking up there on the stage where Warrie had positioned him. A large crowd listened to Ingersoll orate on “Literature and Liberty” for an hour and three-quarters; it was easy to lose oneself in the rhythms of his eloquence. The house was full, resulting in a net profit of nearly nine hundred dollars. No doubt the turn-out owed much to the controversy that preceded it. The spectacle of America's most despised agnostic agitator raising money to help America's most immoral poet naturally led to an effort to deny them the use of the auditorium; the attempted eviction failed, but not before triggering considerable publicity. Anne and I had been asked to join a very small number of people sitting on stage with W. I felt slightly ridiculous seated there in a straight-backed chair, but Anne was the very picture of radical poise.

I noticed right after boarding the train that Bucke traveled, and I suppose long had done so, with a copy of the immortal
Leaves
to consult for its beauties and profundities and also no doubt the visionary properties that interested him even more. I picked it up for a few
moments when he had nodded off to sleep for a short time somewhere in the state of New York, and turned to “By Blue Ontario's Shore” and “Summer Days in Canada,” two of the poems that W had returned with from his spell at the Buckes' a decade earlier. “Summer Days in Canada” is the less magnificent of the pair though magnificent all the same, but I could not match their images of high Summer with what I was seeing in late October, when the trees were scarlet and the sky slate-gray.