Walt Whitman's Secret (42 page)

“I have had a visitor from Harleigh Cemetery,” he said one day. “We had quite a talk.” It seemed that he was being offered a free burial plot in exchange for writing a poem enumerating the beauties of the cemetery in question. The proposition struck me as tawdry as well as macabre, even for a poet grown accustomed to whipping up emergency elegies and topical odes on receipt of telegrams from editors in New York. I thought the scheme probably redundant as well, since I distinctly recalled his telling me of a plot in another cemetery he had bought and paid for long ago. He said he remembered as well.

“I am very careless of my possessions.” Those were his exact words. “I have a farm somewhere which I have never seen. And lots, the Lord knows where. I am, as you see, a much more
possessing
man than you have supposed.”

I rejoiced a little at this reappearance of good humor, a sign that his pain was not too severe that day and his lung power not so limited as usual. Of course, I was also making silent wise-cracks to myself: “Perhaps you will be bequeathing these imaginary properties to your many illegitimate children.”

The day before Christmas, a cold and miserable one, Warrie took W and the wheeling-chair out to Harleigh by carriage, a journey of which I had not thought him capable. He looked the place over and selected a large lot, twenty feet by thirty, on a small wooded hill, and was soon designing a stone mausoleum for himself, using a pencil and what scratch paper had come to hand. When he returned with Warrie that day, he looked as though all life had been siphoned from him. Missus Davis was apparently having the same thought, but
she gave it voice. She told me that W could not look any worse when he finally did die than he looked right then. I could only nod. Both Doctor Bucke and Doctor Osler were now of the view that their friend should give up Mickle Street and move into a hospital. Nothing came of this, however, partly because he had long ago selected the room in which to die, the one with which I was so familiar.

Because W had so many old friends on the newspapers, and because he used the newspapers to inform the world of himself, his condition was destined to become the kind of ongoing melodrama that editors enjoy. But now stories appeared about the celebrated local author's plans for eternity. I saved this example from the
Philadelphia Press.
It has never been reprinted and I suppose never will be, as the publishing world long since lost interest in bringing out further volumes of
With Walt Whitman in Camden
, in one of which I had hoped to include it.

So many errors in so few sentences, but even the errors flattered him.

   
SIXTEEN
   

W
KEPT REVISING HIS WILL
. Then he would revise the revisions with a codicil. Tom undertook all the paperwork good naturedly and without charge, having, I suppose, become W's official counsel, so to speak, the moment he married my sister.

Tom's friends in the Republican Party and others of like mind couldn't understand how W could have been, since the beginning of his authorial life, so relatively poor while also being at the same time so famous and notorious. This state of affairs gave even greater meaning to the way he wished to remember his helpers and supporters (such as yours truly and Bucke), his surviving family members and that troublesome third category: his special sentimental friends.

You will already have seen that this hurried manuscript I am writing is informed by the straightforwardness that often characterizes fading fools such as myself. Many view such a forum as one of the compensations (or privileges, or responsibilities— or time-killers) of age. If I am being more candid about W here than in all my published writings on the subject, it can be put down to the hope that as I approach the end of these hasty reminiscences, I am coming to the point of them as well.

As I sit here writing these words, W has been dead scarcely more than a quarter-century. During this time, however, a new generation of critics has begun to explore the motives and meanings of his work with an exactness and freedom not possible earlier. New biographers are appearing who never knew him personally and thus have been beyond the reach of his gentle but artful sleeve-tugging and persuasion. My first reaction to such people was to say to myself, “They weren't there, they can't have known.” But of course I was not there in Brooklyn or Washington either, yet I believed I understood. My certainty about such comprehension became stronger as Bucke and so many others have died off, leaving me to suppose somehow— but only for a brief period— that I had inherited their own wisdom just as surely as I did W's watch. The little waves of corrective honesty, which likewise found expression only in my head, led me to look even more deeply into
Leaves
, the “Calamus” poems especially, learning to read not between the lines so much as behind them. Having done so, I compliment myself on now having gained a bit of comprehension that I lacked previously. In essence, this is my own little bequest to those of you I so often see described as “the Whitman cult,” the chairmanship of which, mostly unwanted as time wore on, I now relinquish.

From this new kind of reading and from some external experiences of my own in recent years, I have learned from W's posthumous example that secret alliances of the heart are often accumulative, not sequential. One of them does not entirely supplant another. It is quite possible and indeed quite common to love more than one person simultaneously, though not equally perhaps. Residual feelings for the past always affect the present. All nature is a process, not a delineated fact. So it was that in his last months W would decide to eliminate this beneficiary, restore that one and change the pecking order of the others. He was grappling with the fact of simultaneity as well as with the fact of cumulativeness. The latter, I can see at this late date, is why
he continued to publish
Leaves
in so many different editions, most having new poems but with some of the older ones revised or retitled.

I am of course no critic of literature, only a publicist of that part I personally have found most important, but what I take from the “Calamus” poems, at which I have now squinted so intensely for such a long time, is that they address three individuals, not one nor a group or type. The first I figure to be Fred Vaughan, the car conductor who would lose himself in Canada, seeking invisibility perhaps. W spoke of him hardly at all, certainly not to me. But something of him remains in the poems like the impression of an extinct creature found in a fossil. Then of course Pete the Great, the other streetcar man. I have no smidgen of doubt whatever that when their eyes met on that horse-car in Washington nearly five and a half decades ago, it was the announcement of W's great love of a lifetime and possibly of Pete's as well. Vaughan I never saw. Pete I got a look at only after W's death; he was always unknowable to me and even to Bucke, with whom he had dealings, as well as to all those amateur Walt-detectives from England.

The third ghost is Harry Stafford, at least subordinately a transportation-man, an agricultural one otherwise. I had perfectly cordial relations with him for years, but in many ways know him the least of all. W had watched him grow to maturity and was on terms of intimate friendship with his parents, to whose farmstead he often went, as he put it, to freeload. The whole business was complicated in ways I can't imagine. It can only have been made more so by the fact that W's period of greatest affection for young Harry overlapped with his lingering and anguished regard for Pete. In the course of W's incessant will-making, Harry fell in and out of favor. He survived, however, in the version that truly became the
last
will and testament (and which also, for the first time, remembered Susan Stafford, his mother).

You of course recall what Emerson wrote to W about the first
Leaves
, for I suppose all of us have committed the letter to memory:
“I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start.”

The two were not then personally acquainted of course. Therefore I risk imputing to the sage of Concord greater percipience than becomes the memory of even Transcendentalism's founding father. Still, I speculate as to what in this instance Emerson might have been referring to, on an intuitive plane, as his pen moved across that sheet of paper, the one I continually pestered W to let me read again and whose survival as a document I hoped he would entrust to me. Without actually knowing any but the few facts W had given him, Emerson might, I put it to you, lady of the jury, have been alluding to a mystery. The mystery of how a less than totally distinguished newspaper drudge, one who had left positions under circumstances that were cloudy rather than clear, could have emerged as such a surprising poet— or as a poet at all, given that so many of the world's other great ones lapse into redundancy or silence by thirty-six. That was W's age when he raised his head so high above the democratic crowd to yell that he was indistinguishable from it. There is no answer to this conundrum except perhaps accepting the “long foreground” as one of emotions as well as experiences. Beyond that there remains only acceptance that we do not possess the particulars or have need of them. What we do have is the proof of his courage, and this is of course more significant.

W understood that he had no useful rôle to play as a soldier; the valor I speak of was of a different order than that revered by fighting men. It is one that continued to be tested long after General Lee's surrender at Appomattox, in fact for the rest of W's life. Given his vast body of work, the emphasis on the “Calamus” poems is undeniably greater than it ought to be, even though these are certainly among his greatest writings. At first I was merely intrigued by them. That is the word. In time, as my own life has sometimes
taken unanticipated turns and twists, I have come around to seeing them as the final and indisputable proof of W's brand of gallantry, a far rarer sort than that seen on the old American battlefields or even on our own ones in Europe, where grass has scarcely begun to hide the scars inflicted on the landscape.

Throughout his poetry-writing years, he tried to distract people from a nature that combined adhesiveness with what his old phrenological friends called amativeness, both prerequisites, I suppose, to Bucke's idea of inversionism, or at least a way in which it might be better understood. To avoid the tar-bucket or the lynch mob's noose, he was reduced to tales of children born out of wedlock and a certain flexibility as to whether pronouns should be masculine or feminine. But just as he had to limit the hatred of those who reviled him, he had also to repel offers of acceptance from those most certain to love him for what he was. Such was the case especially with the London aesthetes. I believe that he thought, but would never say aloud, even to me, that the damn English were just too smart for their own (and certainly
his
) good, that their society was more intelligent than ours over here, and that its members knew how to read in a way that Americans did not.