Walt Whitman's Secret (40 page)

We pushed on until reaching the region whose center is the grandiloquently named London, from whence Bucke conveyed us to the asylum by carriage, and we arrived at the superintendent's home in time for dinner with the gracious Jessie Bucke and their children. The Doctor showed the same white-hot energy in being the host that he seemed to bring, in my observation and experience, to all and any tasks or functions. The next day, a Saturday, he let me into his office to admire the shelves and cabinets of W's manuscripts and published writings. The collection was immense, occupying the entirety of a large wall and extending even into several closets.

He asked me if I knew what W thought of this treasure hoard.

“You doubtless know,” I said, “that the handsome prices some of his early books fetch as rarities drive him around the track, for not one cent of the increase in value is returned to his own pocket. I once tried to use this to illustrate a point about Capitalism, but he was deaf to my parable.”

Bucke smiled and said, “I have heard him rag the collectors all right. But of course he has been very generous with me as he has been with you, and with the boys from Bolton as well, as he knows that we have higher motives than bookselling and that, in our different ways, we are scholars and curators— preservers.”

He told me that his goal was to turn the collection, which takes in photos, albums, letters and so on, as well as books and the manuscripts
that fathered them, into an annotated bibliography. He owned some of W's letters to Harry Stafford and to Pete Doyle. I would have valued a look at the former, for to me Stafford was a minor mystery within the greater mysteries of W's life, but Bucke was highly protective of his collection. As to whether this attitude arose out of some fear that I would steal secrets he was saving for his proposed bibliography or jealousy over my being able to speak with W every single day, I cannot say. Still, I was of course actually quite excited to get a look at the Pete letters, though I had to content myself with an all too brief and closely observed peek. Bucke let me hold them while he stood there. I was able to take in only a little of the content. What I could discern was only that the letters were as W had said or suggested: erratic in content and not particularly revealing of much beyond the unlikelihood of so intense an association between two such dissimilar individuals. To distract me, Bucke continued to chatter the whole time, before whisking me away to tour the grounds and examine what he called his
other
collection. He was referring to the lunatics and madmen gathered together from various institutions elsewhere in Canada. I was permitted to look into several of the cells, as I suppose one must call them, housing some of the most seriously deranged patients. I found everything settled and in good order, with the walls freshly calcimined.

The next day, Sunday, I was dragooned by the distaff side into attending a Presbyterian service in the town, a tidy and resolutely undemonstrative place, while Bucke himself underwent a Catholic Mass, which surprised me. How did he know I was not one of the German Catholics so numerous in my own country and presumably present in his own as well? What had W told him of my background? I was most eager to be the proper house guest, well mannered, enthusiastic and favorably impressed, so I kept my questions to myself, which is to say, I kept the truth of the matter to myself as well. The
truth was that in those days, when I did not protest the practice of religion, I was doing so out of respect for Anne, who clung to at least the appearance of Christian worship as a courtesy, or peace offering, to the savagely Protestant Montgomeries of Philadelphia, especially her father. My own father was somewhat appalled at my caving-in to these niceties, just as his own parents, and their parents before them, would have been horrified at his, and my own, evident abandonment of Hebrew beliefs and traditions. In any case, the following day, being Monday, I felt sufficiently cleansed of sin to bring up the more serious matter of Doyle.

Bucke of course knew vastly more about him than I, not only as a protective guardian of far longer standing and better provenance than I, but also as a medical man whose decision to take one form of “abnormality” as his specialty might have steered him to some theory of “abnormality” more broadly defined. I know now to surround the word with quotation marks, not to call undue attention to it and most certainly not to sneer, but only to emphasize the truly educational nature of a question in need of answering; one about which I could find no help in books, not English, German or French, and was resigned to never hearing W— the prolific father of all those native New Orleanians!—speak of candidly.

“What is it, do you suppose, that formed the basis of the friendship between W and Pete?” I asked with a naivety that might have sounded real enough.

To-day, at the tail-end of the second decade of the twentieth century, having seen whole societies come through the unspeakable horrors of the great European war whose treaty details are only now being negotiated, you, I or any other sophisticated individual with a smattering of psychological knowledge would answer the question simply: “Homo-sexualism.” A modern person who has lived in Greenwich Village as I have will be familiar with some of its
characteristics and representative personalities, for it is a way of living that is no stranger to the arts, connected as it somehow is with the creative temperament, as I have read and been told.

In Ninety, however, the term was unknown to popular usage and probably to learned speech as well. The few who spoke of the matter at all, the British in particular, generally used the term
Uranian.
Bucke began to talk instead of what he called “anomalous love.” He defined it as the situation in which one person might show a carnal propensity, as well as mere affectionate regard, for another individual of the same sex as himself. He was of course a scientist, albeit an unorthodox one, and he spoke freely of these matters, paying me the compliment of knowing that I would not be repulsed, as most people are, or titillated, as some, but only a few, apparently become.

“Are they not just more feminine, then?” We had left the building that was both his office and family quarters and were strolling past the asylum's impressive gardens.

“That is a common perception, occasioned partly by the fact that this type of behavior is never spoken of openly by anyone outside human-science, and only seldom by professionals of impeccable credentials in clinical research. Yet it is well known in places and organizations that are peopled exclusively by young men without recourse to women, and sometimes by those not so young as well. Prison warders, if they were guaranteed immunity from scorn in trade for their candor, could tell us much of it, I believe. Military and naval commanders too.”

My mind jumped instantly to W's work in places like the Armory Square hospital, but also to his love of ships and those who sailed— transportation-men! I needed time to contemplate this information that only Bucke would give me. But I could not do so just then, interrupting his generous and impartial conveyance of this rare learning.
Lest I stanch the flow of his talk, I dared not even acknowledge receipt of his gift.

“The word most often used in connection with such practices,” Bucke went on, “is of course sodomy, the type of intimate congress that the overwhelming majority of people condemn by rote as a result of their Bible study. I've never been convinced that union of this type is necessarily any more harmful to the body or mind than what passes between husband and wife. I am certain that in some though by no means all cases it would disappear if women were introduced into situations that are now exclusively male. But I am mindful that in most of the world it remains a capital crime, which would be absolutely ludicrous if it were not so horrible.”

I continued to do little but nod attentively.

“I have strayed from your original question,” he went on. “To be sure, some inverted men are effeminate in manner or even dress. But this means only that they do not wish to appear as proof of the exclusively masculine part of our civilization. No, they do not wish to be women. They wish only to be who they are.

“Such men are usually the more passive of any pair. Many share a particular physique that draws the notice of their eventual inamoratos. They are often short and slightly built, and compared to the general run of men you see in the streets, neither so broad in the chest nor so narrow as to the hips. More like birds than mammals, you might say, and like male birds rather than the females, they use their plumage to entice a mate.”

I confess that a startling fascination I felt assisted me in keeping my mouth closed, which Anne will tell you is not my customary way. I did manage, however, to interject another question. “The molly-boys, you mean?”

“That and many other terms. For safety in a world so hostile to their existence, inversionists, if I may coin or claim a term, have
constructed a colorful and complex nomenclature and other trappings that allow them to communicate among themselves in ways incomprehensible to the majority, or better yet in ways simply of no interest to the majority at all. As with the Gypsies, as indeed with your religious forebears and other groups in similar circumstances, their world is difficult for outsiders to penetrate.”

(So W
had
told him of my family.)

“They are almost more secretive,” he said, “than the Rosicrucians of the late Paschal Beverly Randolph …” My expression must have betrayed my ignorance of the figure being referred to. “… the Negro occultist and what is called a trance medium, who did so much for members of his race during and after your civil war.”

He continued to lecture as we walked, crushing fallen leaves with our boot-steps.

“Then there are those others, like the Good Gray Poet, our exquisite acquaintance, who incline differently from the aforementioned mollies. They seek the companionship of men still more masculine in appearance and attitude than themselves. By such means they hope to join the dominant body of opinion while preserving their minority conduct. They try to anchor themselves in a society from which they must nevertheless always stand apart. Like immigrants from a country where English is not spoken, you might say. Their tastes lean toward younger men who commonly are muscular examples from a lower station in life, often to be found working in rough occupations. If one of these older and perhaps, even in Walt's case, somewhat better off men should happen to be an American and educated, he might well consider such a physical companion to be, bluntly, the more inherently democratic alternative. Our friend epitomizes this.”

“Hmmm.” I'm afraid that's all I could offer by way of thanking him for giving me this newfound understanding. I urged him to carry on with his ideas.

“You know as full well as I what our friend wrote in ‘Song of Myself' most of a lifetime ago. That he was ‘Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshy and sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, no sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest.'”

Bucke then apologized if the quotation so long in his memory did not come out letter-perfect.

I will never forget the little thing that happened next. There was a bird-sound in the tree nearest to us. We glanced up distractedly just as a male blue jay, like an actor on stage who is flawless in the timing of his exits and entrances, took flight and disappeared.

“Those lines from the poem were more than a description of their author as he wished to be seen,” Bucke continued. “They were a setting-down of the ideal he needed to become in order to inhabit the other half of himself. In picking the words he chose, he was, without necessarily being aware that he was doing so, summoning, beckoning, what the words were naming. They were a sort of advertisement, a flash of colorful feathers aimed, unknowingly of course, at attracting the person with whom he would build his nest and make for both of them a sanctuary in a world so full of predators.”

“He was advertising for a Pete Doyle?”

“Quite so, my friend.”

We walked back to the superintendent's house, silently at first.

“Did your study of these matters,” I asked, “arise in the first instance from your admiration for Walt or from a different or an additional source?”

I was wondering, mistakenly of course, whether his own interest went beyond the clinical. I can admit this now that he is dead, now that I am following behind the departed so closely that it is pointless for me to be guarded. But in an instant, his talk switched from the expository to the more discursive.

“You will not believe how much conditions at this institution have improved in the time I have known it,” he said. “This is not a boast but a fact. When I arrived, for example, patients caught practicing onanism had their arms pinned behind their backs for days, weeks and even months. Such cruelty. What became of those few who engaged in acts of sodomy I cannot say. Records were never kept or else were neutered or destroyed. The nearest I could come to the truth was the statement that what helped the patients to reform their ways also protected the institution from scandal and from retribution, both public and bureaucratic.”

“What did you do?”

“I ordered an end to harsh treatment, whether named or unnamed, and policed enforcement of the new direction.”

“Have there been subsequent instances of this inversionistic behavior?”

“A few.”

“Tell me, do you believe that this inversionism in men is carried in the blood of families or learned, perhaps through mimicry and by force of the different values of cultures very unlike our own?”

“Geneticism or acquisition? Involuntary or consciously chosen? That is a good question, but no one has the answer to it.”

“What way does your instinct incline you? From having observed and studied the relevant inmates in your care?”