Walt Whitman's Secret (43 page)

All of this made his public existence as extra-troubled as his private one. But he never ceased to practice the point he understood so well: that while an author may fairly try to limit the acid effects of negative reaction, he must never allow fear of unpopularity and worse to distort his purpose in creating. He must write what he knows must be written. I don't believe W was ever really of much account as a newspaper man or magazinist. He was not a vendor of facts. He was a seeker of truth.

From the day Anne suggested that I keep a record of W's conversation to the day of his death was slightly less than three and a half years. What I would give to have been born in, say, Forty-eight rather
than Fifty-eight. That would have made me old enough, barely, to have participated in the war, if only as a drummer-boy. Then I could feel the war in somewhat the same way W's generation, and none more deeply so than he himself perhaps, understood it. I would have been his contemporary and hence his equal. My spirit-father and I were merely coevals, two people who happened to be alive at the same time. I regret these facts just as I regret that I was able to depict him for my readers only as he was during his last phase, when his condition mocked the booming health and bounding vitality he bragged of in the first
Leaves
and made such essential parts of his entire view of the world.

As I sit at this table glancing over these pages, I see that they too sometimes seem cruel for the same reason. W in his years of prime creativity was the person whom I, like virtually everyone else alive to-day, know only from his books. The actual man with whom I spent so many hours, weeks, months and years was long past his peak. He was holding on to life because he loved it so— well, that plus a strong and surprisingly undiminished strain of stubbornness, which he called “cussedness” and regarded as quite a virtue. The gods were unkind to him in his final years, and I suppose I may be seen as equally unkind in my portraits of him in the three volumes of my published journal and now in this eleventh-hour memoir, which has become yet another somber study in decline and decay. What was I to do, and what am I to do now? I tried to aim for the right thing, the true thing. Not knowing how else to act, I shall simply continue until my own flame is snuffed out between two quick wet fingertips, leaving me in eternal darkness.

One visitor to whom W was willing to grant an audience, any number of them in fact, was Doctor John Johnson of the Bolton Boys in the
North of England, as the Boltons were enthusiasts, not critics in either sense of the term. They collected W's works in every conceivable edition and language they could find and made a huge archive of even the most ephemeral newspaper articles by and concerning him. How proud they were of their vast array of Whitman autographs, jots, doodles and stray proof sheets that had been corrected, or not, in some long-ago time and faraway place. Good grief, they had a lock of W's hair (which he might have wished returned, given his spreading baldness, if he hadn't by this point gotten way beyond such worldly vanity). Now they decided to interview as many of W's friends, relations, acquaintances, associates, antagonists and former army-hospital patients as possible. The initiative showed an admirable determination to extend their knowledge. To W's understandably suspicious mind, however, their plan was potentially revelatory in a way he once feared so much, but less and less with each additional year of his survival. In the event, these people did him no harm with what amounted to the literary equivalent of philately or amateur watercolor painting. I'm sure W thought they were a useful counterweight to the Londoners and, in their purblind enthusiasm for his every line and utterance, probably good for business over there. Besides, they were working-class folks, the kind of Englishmen W got on with, quietly admiring the manners and unadorned accents that would doubtless have been totally incomprehensible to the Queen. If they were American rather than British, they would be from New Jersey.

Doctor Johnson was actually a Scot. He was a powerful-looking youngish man with thick dark hair and thick dark clothing. He had a pointed nose below which hung, like a signboard on a storefront, a long and luxuriantly droopy moustache. I should say
has
not
had
, for at last report he was still alive, part of an ever-decreasing number whose most prominent member, other than Doctor Osler, I suppose
is the ancient Burroughs. W liked Johnson, as did Bucke, as did I, as did Anne (who as a reader of people's character was far superior to any of the rest, individually and perhaps even collectively). Johnson was almost disturbingly knowledgeable about the whos, wheres and whens of W's life and career. He solicited a trunkful of reminiscences and impressions, and visited every building in which W had ever worked or resided, or such of them as had survived. He retraced, so to speak, the Stations of the Cross, and then said farewell and went back home.

As Ninety gave way to Ninety-one, I had the feeling that W sometimes seemed to know exactly, possibly to the very day, when his life was going to end, but, like his doctors and nurses, he did not know precisely what he was to die
from.
There were so many possibilities. Doctor Longaker and Doctor Bucke were not in agreement on whether his circulatory system or respiratory one was the weaker. Other candidates were his digestive and disposal mechanisms, and W believed that his heart was losing strength all the while. All of these, or any one of them, made his problems with vision and hearing seem unimportant, for he was dying of something greater than “old age.” One of the many things for which Doctor Osler became so famous was his theory that when a person has two equally serious diseases at the same time, the one is usually the result of the other. W's case was certainly found to illustrate the point. As a patient, he also showed that the number of simultaneous diseases needn't be limited to just two.

Certainly Ninety-one, W's penultimate year, is the period I remember most vividly. So much so that I hardly need glance at my old notes. (Which is just as well, as I have finally lost patience with my own penmanship— a crabbed mess of scribbling and squiggles that only Anne, alone among inhabitants of our planet, can make out
as though it were printed from clean type come straight from the foundry. Naturally, I am forming these lines with all the care I can muster lest I vex your own tolerance even further and compel you to hire her as translator!) Yet I do have here before me the text of a memorandum that I copied out for insertion before leaving Camden, feeling that it should be quoted with the strict accuracy that critics often have found wanting in my work.

It is a note of something that Anne said. The occasion was one of W's last outings. Of course, we always feared that each would be his final such venture, but this one came closest yet to being so. It was a small gathering at Tom and Gussie's, not a supper or a dinner but something closer to what people now call a cocktail party, with the guests milling about the house, conversing volubly. I can see Anne there yet, sitting halfway up the front staircase, taking in everything and missing nothing, in her usual manner. I can picture the way her knees were drawn up near her breast and her elbows rested on her upper legs so that she could use her hands to cradle her head in a relaxed and informal way. I even remember what skirt was covering her delicate ankles. I can usually remember what she has worn on any given occasion back through time, though I've never told her this lest she mistake this small expression of my vast love for a
Fetisch.

From her perch, she saw W being assisted along the hallway below, and she experienced what I imagine must have been somewhat similar to the epiphany she had the first time she ever laid eyes on him, that night in Philadelphia, when he balled up his sloucher, rammed it into his pocket and crossed the stage to capture the lectern.

As soon as we left the party, she described the sight of him as he shuffled down the corridor with such difficulty. “It was the most beautiful face I ever saw,” she said. “An expression I have never seen in any other human being. I wished then we might sit there in simple silence, that nothing at all might be said.” That is, nothing to ruin
the impression formed in and of that moment. She understood, even better than I could do, that although he was continuing his ragtag skirmish with death, he was also at peace with the amount of time remaining. I was much moved. I suppose I am an emotional man. But on this occasion, as on so many others both earlier and afterward, I kept my reaction in check so that I would appear to be (as W was so fond of saying) manly. My love for Anne was so strong and finely made a thing that I had a recurring fear that its beauty might render it fragile, like an exquisite porcelain teacup or some similarly precious piece of
chinoiserie.
In this particular case, another factor served to make me withhold my thoughts even from the silent friend, my journal: I was simply too busy in my capacity as W's jitney. Even as I struggled to scratch a livelihood from the
Conservator
and the bank, I was still deeply involved in producing what has come to be called the Deathbed Edition of the immortal
Leaves.
With the utmost difficulty and the ticking of the clock loud in my ears, I managed to have finished copies in my hand by the middle of December, though the book bore the publication date of Ninety-two, the following year.

Events were bubbling all around W's recumbent form. Eakins paid several calls, needing to retrieve his portrait of W, as it was to be shown in the annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Such an odd man, not least in the way his lustful energies performed so important a function in his life as an artist. One result of them was how, like W, though hardly to the same extent, he was visited by scandal now and then. Whereas W at least had tried to contain the public's perception of his long-ago dramatic adventures by placing so much emphasis on manliness and such, Eakins by contrast had few front-parlor skills. In particular, he also lacked one of the talents so
useful to W in both his private and professional existences: the ability to give the press something it would like to publish, thus keeping his name before the readers while also preventing reporters and editors from giving him a more intrusive form of attention that, however well intended, was certain to be harmful. Poor Eakins knew only his classroom and his studio, in both of which I believe he tended to barricade himself. Perhaps he feared making friends lest they break his concentration or force him into conversation that might depend on the use of what's now called small talk, of which he possessed none whatsoever. In fact, he had no middle-sized talk either.

He was a married man, his wife of many years being one of his frequent models, but Bucke explained to me that he was also what is known in the relevant branch of academic inquiry as a
bi-sexualist
, the noun whose adjectival forms are
bisexual
and
bisexed.
Bucke said: “Such individuals appear to be fervently mistrusted by both genders, each of which evidently believes itself sufficiently interesting as to deserve attentions that are undivided.” Yes, Bucke was in and out of Camden frequently that year, fretting over W. And also, as he always did, explaining the mysteries of medicine and science. Such a talent is rare and most useful, though in his case it coexisted with its exact opposite. I mean the eccentric impracticality of his mystical beliefs, which often seemed to me so much codswallop, leavened, he must have thought, by his snappy and sarcastic asides, at least in private conversation. I've long suspected that he knew far more about humanity— the mass of it, but also its humaneness— than he did about real individuals. Once again, pardon my frankness.