Walt Whitman's Secret (41 page)

“What I have seen provides no such answers,” he said. He nodded toward the enormous building where I had seen the unfortunates' living quarters. “And in any case, these people are all as crazy as wild monkeys.”

The smart-aleck Bucke had returned, forcing the other back into his hole. I much preferred the latter.

I was hoping to return from Canada having written poetry about it as W had done in his day, but Canada did not speak to me the way it did to him. He loved the land if not the nation built on top of it. He loved those of its people who worshipped him without asking too many difficult questions, but he found the others very un-American (except perhaps the Canadian transportation boys— there must be many of them, though I saw none and wonder now whether he had).

Considering the question at this late date, I believe W must have felt threatened by whatever was foreign. This is a trait I often notice in my fellow native-born Americans especially. Nonetheless he was always drawn to the exotic. As he was not, however, a widely traveled man, he found such exoticism in what were in fact the most humdrum localities. For this is the essence, I think, of his few months' stay in New Orleans when he was already drawing a bead on his thirtieth birthday. The city had been part of Spain and then of France before the United States bought it for cash on the barrel-head, an event still clear in the minds of many older residents in W's time there. I think he was aroused to still be safely within America while easily imagining that he was actually elsewhere. Maybe in one sense he was right to see New Orleans as a special case, for it became a piece of the United States for a second time after the Confederacy collapsed, and I don't know but whether people there may take such matters in their stride, thinking to themselves that one day this too shall pass. Thirty-some years after his tropical passade, he must have had almost the same reaction to Bucke's town up in Ontario.

As someone who was reared in a European family, I by contrast saw the whole continent of North America as exotic, uniformly so, all of a piece, and yet with, if I may be permitted this confusing contradiction, every part different from the rest. The circles printed on the map appear to me as prospects, places to survive in, ones to change and improve upon (an indication perhaps of what Father
called
socialisme
beliefs, evidently believing that their origins are French), busy little outposts of their own in which to blend without surrendering completely, lest one become just another bolt or bushing in the whole contraption. One selects a city as one's bodily address, the spot from which to attend to quite different matters, ones that are no less urgent than they are timeless.

Flora, I know of all the great and good performed by the Caledonian tribe that boasts of you as one of its members. But I do not know what
socialiste
distance you enforce between your origins and your intentions. I trust and hope, and in fact know, for I have an eerily accurate sense of these matters, that you still have many years to live. As my own tenure has shriveled, I have found myself resuming conversation with the Jew who lives inside me. I only hope that my dear late father, should he somehow be absorbing these scratchy lines of mine, will either forgive me or confess that he underwent a similar experience that he thought best to withhold from me at the time.

All of which is to say that I can look back on the events outlined in this private narrative with a clarity denied me at the time I'm now describing and also with a charity that I lacked back then. I am far enough along on my journey to accept incongruity for what it is and then draw correspondences from it. I recognize full well that I have grown more conservative as I have grown more radical. The one does not controvert the other, much less diminish it; it merely illustrates the mechanism. In coming to understand this, I also realize that W was precisely the same. I can know these things without pre-judgment of him or fault-finding in light of all the days that have followed in merciless lock-step sequence. To repeat certain facts about him in any other way would be wrong. I devoutly wish you to hold this in mind when, if I have the strength to bring this narrative to its close, you should be tempted to assess my own limitations.

Such was the confidence of the still somewhat young and relatively healthy man I used to be that I felt it possible to participate in some fashion in W's genius. Instead, I merely parodied it and pilloried myself while doing so. This continued, unwittingly and for the longest time, until about ten years ago, when
With Walt Whitman in Camden
was well under way, the green cloth of its binding a tip of the hat to the immortal
Leaves
as originally published. I felt that this would be my best gift to W's memory. Anne of course helped me to arrive at this conclusion, whereupon she and I decided to suspend the
Conservator.

When I digress in this manner, I betray my age as fully as I underscore your patience, my dear audience-of-one. Nevertheless these days my thoughts do tend to stray, until the stream becomes a delta with countless fingers. In this if not in many other ways I can truthfully claim to be just as W was. I flatter myself that, like him, I always manage to guide my travelers back to the main channel— in this case, my trip to Canada. The topic is an important one.

My visit there was much more successful than I ever could have hoped. It was a roaring success, as W liked to say, throwing his head back in imitation of a certain elderly lion in the Philadelphia zoo with which he was on familiar terms. When the British-Canadian border agent asked me whether I was bringing into the country anything that should be declared, I said no. When asked the same question by his American brother on crossing back, my reply was identical, but I was lying. The brain formulating my deceitful words held a fortune in undeclared intellectual treasure, albeit a kind that could not be spoken of openly.

The war was the greatest event ever to take place on the outskirts of W's body during the seventy-two years he inhabited it. Everyone understood this, for it was a truth common within his generation and more especially to the younger ones who did most of the fighting and dying. But I believed that the speculations that Doctor Bucke had
entrusted to me so unselfishly would help me to identify, and perhaps even understand, that W's greatest internal event, originating in the mind and merely influencing the body, was unrelated to war except in superficial chronological terms.

Bucke, bless him, was an impossible man. He became an unstoppable spouter of mystical nonsense whenever you needed him to use plain and monotonic language, as when answering some query concerning practical or physical science. At other times, when speculation about mystical and unknowable magic was the subject appropriate to the moment and to his visionary speculations, he would change completely, talking like a shopkeeper who knew little of life on the other side of the counter. Of course, I hardly need to tell you about the Doctor.

Returning to Camden, I resolved to write him a letter that would serve a dual purpose. Superficially, it would be what I had heard W refer to as a meat-and-potatoes letter, thanking the host and hostess for their hospitality. On another level, my letter would employ appropriate circumspection. Draping myself in language clear to the Doctor but pleasantly meaningless to Missus B, I would beg him to point me toward whatever small amount of research had been undertaken, however remote from the main thrusts of scientific inquiry, on the subject of inversionism.

I knew just enough of the scientific world to suppose that such papers would likely be in German. I would no doubt need to conquer many unfamiliar German scientific terms. Possibly, I thought, some inversionistic research might also have been published in French. For someone to whom this tongue is not native, I read and speak it easily enough. I always had to be cautious, however, when dealing with the correspondence, articles and news cuttings sent to W from France or its colonies, as he only pretended to understand the language. Once he even went so far as to dissect the work of his French
translator in some detail! I imply nothing underhanded. He also loved to warble arias, ones from Italian operas in particular, but like most opera singers, or at least those who found their way to the fabled stages of Camden, New Jersey, he understood few of the words (though all of the emotions). He was funny this way. For all the confidence he showed to the world, he was shy and vulnerable in such matters as these. One evening, when I was reading the day's mail aloud so as to spare his tired reddened eyes, he stopped me at a spot where the writer, whoever he was, referred to the recipient, in a most positive and complimentary way, as an autodidact.

“That is the euphemism, thought polite enough for the parlor, for someone who, miraculously, turned out to have a brain after all even though his father had no money.”

He said this in what sounded almost like a snort.

“Whenever I hear
autodidact
, I think of
auto-da-fé.
Both are sentences that cannot be appealed.”

He pronounced the latter term something like Otto Dufy, so that I first thought he was referring to a person, possibly some Alsatian saloon-keeper from his long-ago Bohemian days.

Oftentimes retrospect plays us false, giving us absolute confidence in our memory of events and conversations that in fact did not take place as we remember them, and maybe never existed at all. Certainly, I was eager to engage Bucke in an extended private discussion of the most delicate kind. Just as certainly, I never expected that the meeting would go so well as it did. Until just recently, however, my mind had rubbed out all trace of my second reason for the trip to Canada.

I had become intrigued, and puzzled, by W's decision to leave the hospitals for an extended stay in New York in June 1864, when the
end of the war was not yet in sight and the wounded were no less numerous. Certainly there were family difficulties with which he was obliged to deal, but then the Whitmans were one of those families whose crises were so continuous that one could join in the upheaval and distress at any moment, and leave at any moment, as easily as one could climb aboard a traction car and get off again at the next stop. He chose to remain there for a number of months. Then, in late March, he got a further two weeks' leave, returning to the capital in mid-April, a couple of days after the president's murder.

The common explanation, which W implied to his early biographer-friends O'Connor, Burroughs and Bucke, was that he had undergone a debilitating disturbance of the mind, a deadening disruption of the spirit, after such a long time spent tending to his boys and watching helplessly as so many of them lost the struggle with their terrible wounds and afflictions. But I found the tale of this episode, particularly the extension of his visit, difficult to credit as it seemed so out of character. I was never quite able to muster the same faith in the truth of it that others did, not even after I had accepted Bucke's invitation because I too was suffering a mental exhaustion that, while in no way comparable to W's wartime one in its intensity, was perhaps of similar design. I had much on my mind, far too much. My labor had been ceaseless, and every day I watched my spirit-father die a little more. The process was continuous and cumulative, the outcome inevitable and hideous. And I worried so about Anne's reciprocation of my love for her. I wrote her from Canada several times but received only one letter, albeit a long and affectionate one, in reply; it arrived just as I was planning my return home. But my assorted troubles did not banish my—
suspicion
is too strong a word, so let us say my
intuition.

The Canadian trip did what it was intended to do, as I came back feeling more rested; I had repaired, though perhaps only temporarily, the breach in my emotional fortifications. Once again, I was visiting
with W once or twice each day, but I looked upon him with eyes that were no longer so well accommodated to watching the vitality leak out of him as gas hisses out of a balloon. I also plunged back into the tasks associated with publishing the new
Leaves
, which of course we all knew would be the last he would ever see.