Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  The literary medium that links Whitman’s most famous poem with his greatest is Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s celebrated elegy for Arthur Hallam, In Memoriam A. H. H., published in 1850. Whitman’s feelings for Tennyson’s poetry were volatile but intense. He kept up with the English poet’s work from the time Maude was jointly reviewed with Leaves of Grass in 1855. Whitman regarded the older writer with a mixture of affection and competitive envy. He began by calling Tennyson’s poetry “tedious and affected, with some sweet passages,” but by the 1860s he admitted Tennyson’s mastery, memorized and recited his verses, and followed his career with more faithful attention than he allowed other contemporaries. Tennyson sent Whitman money when he needed it; Whitman sent Tennyson a signed portrait of himself. He was flattered when somebody said he looked like Tennyson.

  Whitman would have been keenly interested in In Memoriam, one of the most popular poems of the time, printed in lavishly illustrated editions, with its many “sweet passages” and its undercurrent of homoerotic passion for “My Arthur, whom I shall not see / Till all my widow’d race be run . . .”

  Tears of the widower, when he sees

  A late-lost form that sleep reveals,

  And moves his doubtful arms, and feels

  Her place is empty, fall like these;

  . . .

  Which weep the comrade of my choice,

  An awful thought, a life removed,

  The human-hearted man I loved,

  A Spirit, not a breathing voice.

  —TENNYSON, IN MEMORIAM, XIII

  “The seasons bring the flowers again,” Tennyson sings, but “not for thee the glow, the bloom.” In his long suite of interwoven quatrains the English poet struggles like his American counterpart to find verses worthy of his theme. “I brim with sorrow drowning song,” he laments. Then, like Whitman commiserating with the thrush (“dear brother I know, / If thou wast not gifted to sing, thou would’st surely die”), Tennyson joins the Old World finch, or linnet: “I do but sing because I must, / And pipe but as the linnets sing . . .”

  Whitman’s “Lilacs” benefited from Tennyson’s architecture and handling of themes in In Memoriam, and his “O Captain! My Captain!” profited from the English poet’s nautical figures and quatrain structure. It is ironic that “O Captain! My Captain!” became Whitman’s most popular poem in his lifetime. (During the twentieth century it became one of the ten most widely known poems in the language.) This was the piece everyone asked him to read aloud in public long after he was sick of its singsong cadences. “I say, Damn My Captain . . . ,” he told his friend Horace Traubel. “I’m almost sorry I ever wrote the poem.”

  Whitman was not writing in a vacuum, literary or personal. The chief fact of his existence during that spring and summer was that he was in love with Peter Doyle. Burroughs and Dr. Tindall saw the lovers together on the streetcar and elsewhere, and remarked upon their obvious joy in each other’s company. Whitman was content in what we would now call a stable relationship. This buffered him from the inevitable tremors of misfortune.

  On June 30, 1865, a Friday, Whitman arrived in his basement office and was handed this notice: “Services of Walter Whitman of New York as a clerk in the Indian Office will be dispensed with from and after this date.” Stunned by the sudden dismissal, panicked at the loss of his salary so near the completion of Drum-Taps,he walked the seven blocks through the dust on G Street to the colonnaded Treasury building. He mounted the stairs to O’Connor’s office and showed him the pink slip. O’Connor, furious, stormed downstairs into the office of Assistant Attorney General J. Hubley Ashton and accused Whitman’s boss, Secretary of the Interior James Harlan, who was a Methodist deacon, of singling the poet out for persecution.

  Ashton, who liked Whitman, bearded Secretary Harlan in his den the next morning. While Harlan publicly would insist he had based his decision on his budget, he confided to Ashton that he had discovered a corrected proof of Leaves of Grass in the clerk’s desk drawer, and that he would not have the author of such a book in his department even if the President himself should order his reinstatement.

  During the months and years following, the infamous pink slip became a cause célèbre, as English, French, and American readers chose sides for and against the “persecuted” author. O’Connor himself published the keynote defense, The Good Gray Poet, in January 1866, six months after the incident.

  But that June the dismissal caused little more than a ruffle in Whitman’s composure as he worked on his poetry and visited his soldiers in the evenings. He had experienced a weekend of anxiety, but thanks to O’Connor’s swift intervention, on Monday morning Whitman was at a new desk, in the Attorney General’s Office, under Ashton’s protection. This was the most comfortable job he would ever have, in a well-lighted office with a southern view of the Arlington Hills across the river; he could even purchase books and charge them to the departmental library.

  By September Whitman had written enough new poetry and culled enough verse from old manuscripts to fill a twenty-four-page duodecimo signature. He arranged with the Washington printers Gibson Brothers to print one thousand copies of the Sequel to Drum-Taps (for a cost much less than the New York printer’s), and ordered the New York binder Abraham Simpson to stitch up five hundred copies of the old sheets and the new ones together. The enlarged Drum-Taps was launched on the market in October, and the official publication date, announced in the New-YorkTribune, was October 28, 1865.

  As always, the reviews of Whitman were mixed. There were a dozen or more. Young Henry James attacked the volume, implying that Whitman had exploited the nation’s trauma for his own selfish purposes. William Dean Howells, personally devoted to Whitman, allowed that “the poet conveys to the heart certain emotions which the brain cannot analyze, and only remotely perceives. ” Yet he denied that Drum-Taps was literary art, declaring, “He [Whitman] cannot be called a true poet.”

  In a comprehensive review, “The Poetry of War,” published in the New York Times, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who certainly knew of Drum-Taps, made no mention of Whitman’s book. And so it fared for this great volume. The publishers Bunce and Hunting-ton, who had offered to distribute the book, withdrew their support. Three months later a reviewer remarked that it “could scarcely be got at a bookstore.”

  All but forty copies have vanished without a trace, and now you could not purchase one for any amount of money. The first edition of Leaves of Grass frequently comes on the market; but Drum-Taps, almost never.

  The brown cloth binding and gold-leaf medallion on the cover were the same as had been designed before Lincoln’s funeral. An alert bibliophile, holding the closed volume, would notice a subtle change in the cut and stained paper: the paper’s edge, which had been plain white, now was flecked with brown, like the breast of the hermit thrush.

  part four

  EPILOGUE: NEW YORK, 1887

  13

  MADISON SQUARE THEATRE: NEW YORK, APRIL 14, 1887

  The “mast-hemm’d” Manhattan of Whitman’s youth had become a behemoth, the international center of financial and industrial power. It was evident in the view of the shoreline from the Navy Yard to Red Hook, where the poet’s beloved ferryboats plied the East River. Where sailing ships had once anchored, now multistoried warehouses of iron and brick ranged along the water-front, beneath the gleaming stone towers and steel span of the “eighth wonder of the world,” the new Brooklyn Bridge.

  Since the beginning of the Civil War the population had almost doubled, to a million and a quarter, the result of surging immigration. As Germans, Italians, and Russian and Polish Jews fled Europe to work in lumber and coal yards near the Hudson River, or toil in the garment and shoe factories southwest of Broadway, Greenwich Village changed almost beyond recognition. The old New York Hospital on Pearl Street had closed its doors long since. The Astor House, where Whitman first saw Lincoln, was in decline, as hotels with elevators, like the marble Fifth Avenue Hotel at Twenty-fourth Street, attracted the well-heeled guests.
The colorful Bowery theaters Whitman once frequented could not compete with the fancy playhouses of Union Square. The Bowery now featured minstrels, sword swallowers, snake charmers, and bawdy shows in the shadow of the ugly, noisy Third Avenue elevated line.

  As newcomers crowded into tenements and once-elegant apartment houses, downtown real estate values plummeted. The glamorous blocks of lower Broadway that Whitman once admired from the top of a bone-rattling omnibus had lost their charm. Horse-drawn streetcars ran smoothly on tracks. Fashionable retailers kept moving north along Broadway in pursuit of the rich, who were building mansions farther and farther uptown. Charley Pfaff had closed his rathskeller, trying his luck in a tavern on Twenty-fourth Street for a while, but failed. Now Pfaff was dead, and so were Henry Clapp and Ada Clare.

  Walt Whitman’s dream of America’s momentous destiny had come true in ways that did, and did not, please him. The triumph of the North in the war had hastened change that was no doubt inevitable: greater industrialism (commanded by capital), finer technology in the service of industry, Federalism, and the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of a few. Nowhere were these developments more conspicuous than in the New York of the Gilded Age, when the Tweed Ring controlled City Hall for the convenience of businessmen, and the income gap between the rich and the poor was about to inspire an effective uprising of organized labor. For as long as Whitman could recall, Manhattan had been a bustling borough; but the population boom brought a new intensity. Now there was a sense of urgency, sometimes desperation, in the streets, as men and women hurried about their business.

  Twenty-two years after the assassination, Abraham Lincoln had become a perplexing memory that was, like the terrible war over which he had presided, for most people best forgotten. Five Presidents had come and gone since Lincoln’s murder, and now the anniversary of the tragedy was no longer noted in the newspapers except on rare occasions such as this one advertised in the New York Times theater section:

  MADISON SQUARE THEATRE

  A. M. PALMER . . . . . . . . . . . Manager

  THURSDAY AFTERNOON

  April 14, at 4 o’clock

  Complimentary Testimonial to Mr.

  WALT WHITMAN

  on which occasion he will deliver a lecture on

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  it being the 25th anniversary of the assassination

  Tickets $1.50 and $1. For sale at Brentano’s, at

  the theatre, and by J. B. Pond, Everett House

  It is proof of the public’s short memory that Albert Marshman Palmer, who had helped Whitman during the war, and J. B. Pond, the impresario with imperial whiskers who was promoting the event, were trumpeting it as the “silver” anniversary of the assassination, which was three years off. Couldn’t people count, or had they really forgotten the year of the calamity? Well, this was show business. Sarah Bernhardt was in town, playing in Theodora, and Augustin Daly’s company was celebrating its one-hundredth performance of Taming of the Shrew starring Ada Rehan, John Drew, and Otis Skinner. So if a slight inaccuracy in the display ads might bring luster to the event and fill a few more seats, what was the harm in it? A. M. Palmer was not wholly above such sleight-of-hand dealings.

  The years after the war had not been kind to Whitman, although he looked, in repose, like a god. Reporters routinely used “Jovian” to describe his head, images of which appeared everywhere, from signed photos sold in souvenir shops to the embossed lid on the box of the cigars named after him. The looks were deceiving. In 1873 a stroke deprived him of the use of his left arm and leg, only a few months before his mother’s death, which he called “the great dark cloud of my life.” He had to give up his government job in 1874. For a while he moved into her rooms in Camden, New Jersey, where she had gone to live with George, preserving them just as they had been when she was alive. In 1875 another stroke damaged his right side, and chronic rheumatism left Whitman— according to Burroughs—“a mere physical wreck” at fifty-six.

  Nevertheless, through his writings, self-promotion, the pitting of friends against enemies and even friends against friends, he developed uncanny power, the mystical authority of a vain invalid. Dr. Silas W. Mitchell, the eminent neurologist who diagnosed Whitman’s vascular pathology, recalled: “He was the most innocently and entirely vain creature I ever knew. The perfect story of his vanity will, I fancy, never be written. It was past belief.” The Whitman of Camden was not the angel of Armory Square Hospital. Now he was a man on a very different kind of mission—to ensure his immortality. He burnished his image until it shone, widespread and inextinguishable.

  Dependent upon his family and friends for financial and physical support, Whitman mustered his remaining energies to cultivate the power of his personality. He wrote poems and memoirs, and devoted much of his time to fueling international debate over Leaves of Grass. In this he was highly successful. Attacks came regularly—in 1881, Anthony Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice banned his book—and Whitman prevailed upon friends worldwide to defend him. He never lost the potent charisma that pervaded the world through Leaves of Grass and the appealing portrait photos that he had printed by the gross, signed, and sold or gave away to a growing coterie. Proselytes came from all over the world to visit the eminence in his cluttered study, shake his feeble hand, and wait for any words of wisdom that might fall from his lips in desultory conversation. He covered his knees with a wolf-skin robe. With his cane he pointed to a photo of Lincoln on the wall. Visitors went away spreading the gospel of Whitman.

  In his youth he had pursued the world through the medium of poetry. Now the literary world came to him: Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, Joaquin Miller, Moncure Conway, Bram Stoker, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and many more, made the pilgrimage to Camden to honor the author of Leaves of Grass. Others from across the sea paid their respects by mail: Tennyson, William Michael Rossetti, Edward Dowden, and John Addington Symonds. Swinburne praised Whitman in the early 1870s, then later recanted, writing, “Mr. Whitman’s Eve is a drunken apple-woman, indecently sprawling in the slush and garbage amid the rotten refuse of her overturned fruit-stall . . .” It was all one. As Henry Clapp had taught him: “Better to have people stirred against you if they can’t be stirred for you.” For Whitman the waters of reputation would never be still. The same year that Emerson left him out of his anthology Parnassus (1875), the Irish critic Standish O’Grady, in a review in Gentleman’s Magazine, called Walt Whitman “the noblest product of modern times.”

  Peter Doyle had faded from his life, a sad, inevitable loss. The two men had changed greatly since their meeting in 1865, when Whitman was healthy and Doyle was just a youth. They never lost their fondness for each other. But the relationship could not survive the difference in ages, the separation, and the poet’s severe illness. In June 1875 Whitman wrote to Doyle, from Camden to Washington, that he thought it was unlikely he would recover from his strokes. Whitman was giving the young man permission to get on with his life.

  They continued to visit each other, at longer and longer intervals. The pain of losing Doyle was assuaged somewhat when, in 1876, Whitman met and befriended a seventeen-year-old type-setter, Harry Stafford. Stafford’s parents owned beautiful farm-land near the healing waters of Timber Creek, New Jersey. There, from 1876 to 1884, the poet spent much of his time in good weather refreshing his health and spirits.

  When Harry Stafford married Eva Wescott in 1884, his place in Whitman’s affections and business affairs was soon filled by young William Duckett, a long-faced, gangly boy from the Camden neighborhood. That year Whitman purchased a little house on Mickle Street, and Duckett moved in with him. In 1885 the Philadelphia lawyer Thomas Donaldson, at whose home the poet was a frequent guest, raised the funds to buy Whitman a horse and buggy, so he would not feel so confined. Donors such as Mark Twain, John Greenleaf Whittier, Edwin Booth, and Oliver Wendell Holmes contributed a total of $320, enough to purchase a sleek two-seater phaeton with leather upholstery, a sorrel named F
rank, a halter, and a buggy-whip. Thereafter Bill Duckett was known as Whitman’s driver. The old man’s relationship with the youth, as with his other paramours, was shrouded in secrecy.

  By the 1880s the poet had become not so much a literary lion as an object of adoration and awe. The inner circle of devotees was a curious mix of old friends, physicians, lawyers, wealthy capitalists, writers, and intellectual eccentrics. The old friends included William O’Connor, despite their decade of estrangement over Negro suffrage (Whitman had thought the Fifteenth Amendment premature), and the faithful John Burroughs. Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke, a Canadian who first visited Whitman in 1877, wrote a biography of him in 1883, and later authored the classic study of genius and mysticism Cosmic Consciousness (1901), in which Whitman joins Jesus Christ, Muhammad, St. Paul, Dante, and Blake as an exhibit.

  Orator Robert Ingersoll (the Great Agnostic) and poet and publisher Richard Watson Gilder beat the drum for Whitman in New York. From England came Anne Gilchrist (the widow of William Blake’s biographer Alexander Gilchrist), hopelessly in love with Whitman, and writers Edward Carpenter and Oscar Wilde, both plying Whitman for a confession of his homosexuality, which he refused. There was the American lawyer Thomas B. Harned, who would amass a priceless collection of Whitman manuscripts and relics, and several would-be Boswells. Foremost among these was the indefatigable Horace Traubel, who shadowed the poet, interviewing him by the hour and recording his every word, producing at last the mammoth nine-volume With Walt Whitman in Camden.