Of course, Flora, you, like all good members of the Whitman Fellowship, both on this continent and abroad, know the outlines of how the war years came to define him, internally and publicly. But as legend tends to abrade the subtleties, permit me to recapitulate what took place.
George Whitman, a stolid and conventional fellow, devoid of politics and parsimonious with words, had joined a Brooklyn regiment in the first flush of wartime zeal, and after the slaughter at Fredericksburg was listed in the papers as among the wounded. W gave up his life in New York to go to Washington in search of him, knowing that the wounded were sent to the capital for treatment whenever possible. As it happened, George had only a slight wound to one ear. W remained in the city, however, eking out a spare living as a government clerk and copyist while volunteering in the hospitals— visiting “my boys” as he called them, bringing them sweets and small necessities, writing letters for the illiterate ones and those who had lost their hands, reading letters to those who did not know how to read to begin with or had been blinded in battle— cheering them, listening to them, giving them his affection, trying to make their young lives a bit less miserable, taking only their regard in return. Apart from the immortal Leaves, this was the most meaningful work of his life: such is what I sensed he believed. Who are we to contradict him?
To someone such as myself, born just as the pot of politics was about to boil over as war, such stories were remote yet compelling. It was hard to credit that such things actually took place when I was conscious on Earth, that such momentous events and such tumult were coming to pass as I pursued my childish games, oblivious to them (though I do remember the blue stream of soldiers flowing down the streets of Camden).
As you might suppose was almost inevitable given the attacks on Leaves and its author by moralizers and other censorious public men, W was as notorious in Camden as he was in the wider universe, and for all the same reasons. Had he not written, and then kept expanding, what so many considered an immoral book? The stories of his dismissal from small positions in government offices had brought his name before those who otherwise would never have opened Leaves and would not have comprehended a word of it had they done so. For every person who boasted of making his acquaintance, there appeared to be thousands who spoke of him in dire Christian whispers. My parents’ neighbors, including some who were no doubt well-meaning, though most were malicious gossips, insisted on calling Mother’s attention to my friendship with such a “lecherous old man.” To her credit, Mother was alarmed only to the extent she thought was expected of her. Father, predictably, reacted in a similar fashion, and I, thus reassured on this point, privately enjoyed my association with W in a new and additional way.
When I reported some of these conversations to W, couching them in the least accusatory language of course, he replied with what I thought was practiced and perhaps not totally sincere sadness. “I am a prophet without honor in my own land, or indeed in any other.” In truth, this was hardly the case. Later, as we began to spend ever more time together once he moved into his own place at last and I came by almost every evening to check on him, I got to know about the large following of admirers he had on the European continent and in England— and of course in Canada, England’s loyal puppet. They appeared, many of them, to find in Leaves the qualities admired by readers here in America but also those that enraged petty officials and set the tongues of women to wagging over board fences in the back lanes of such places as Camden, New Jersey. Certain English adherents, brothers in the literary arts, were especially persistent in quizzing W about what they perceived as the real meaning of the many references, particularly of course in the “Calamus” section of Leaves, to adhesiveness between men. W always ignored or denied their suggestions.
In a way, I understand the frustrations they must have felt, because for my part, remember, I was never able to get him to own up to being the Socialist he obviously was in Leaves and other works and indeed in some of his actions as well. As he did not read German, W might be forgiven his unfamiliarity with certain texts, though translations of the major ones were available freely. Nor could I get him to discuss the English Socialist writers. He and I talked about books constantly, but the two subjects, politics and writing, never inclined toward becoming one, as I wished. He would tell me of his abiding affection for Emerson, who had done so much to ensure his early success. He talked of Tennyson and of his American opposite numbers whose faces are on the wall of every American schoolroom. But I could never get him to entertain the merits of the great William Morris or Edward Bellamy. Ruskin, being a strict moralist as well as a Socialist and, I admit, a stupefying writer of prose, was out of the question. So too was our own Socialist press here in America. It was as though the fiery abolitionist of the exciting antebellum days had lost his appetite for political theories after the exhaustion of the war itself, which had broken his health as surely as it had done that of soldiers invalided out with some camp fever of whose effects they would never be fully shed.
In short, whenever I would read the immortal Leaves, I saw the soul of a Socialist. W, however, would not admit the truth of my perception but only would gainsay it, almost vehemently at times, just as he did the inferences of those literary dandies in England and other places who, in reading the magnificent poems, perceived a philosophical connection to the ancient Hellenic civilization. In time, I came to believe that he was keeping a crucial secret from the world. My theory was correct, but I long misunderstood just what the secret was.
You know the rest of the story as well. How, after he had gone through periods of rising sap and ones of falling leaves, he settled into Mickle Street early in Eighty-four, preparing for his long slow descent. He bought the place for $1,750, the amount of his royalties from recent years plus a five-hundred-dollar loan from his publisher friend George Childs, one of the people who always seemed to turn up at crucial moments to help him through crises (as when he came to the rescue W’s first day in Washington when someone picked the newcomer’s pocket). And of course you know how, two years later, I determined to preserve W’s conversation for posterity— and his papers as well. You see the results in the first three fat volumes of With Walt Whitman in Camden, the only ones for which I have thus far managed, with difficulty, to find publishers. I began accumulating an enormous mass of material: scraps of manuscript and copy, discarded proof sheets, letters and postals he had received, and drafts and sometimes even duplicate fair copies of some that he sent. In the years when he was bedfast and I served as his legs as well as his eyes and ears, I added greatly to the purely literary part of this devoir as I dashed about on our printing and publishing errands, preparing his works in prose as well as verse and overseeing manufacture of the books themselves.
Along with money gifts from admirers and friends, W lived, modestly but never in want, by the sales of his books and his contributions to the newspapers and magazines. He took delight in filling orders for single copies that arrived in the morning mail, wrapping and addressing them for me to take to the post office. “I am like the smith at his forge,” he said. At other times he used the metaphor of the mechanic, the house builder (which he once had been, briefly and long ago) or the small freeholder.
When I went on with my own life’s work, I fancied that I knew more about W than anyone else living except the man himself, but some of the most important pieces of understanding came to me only when he was on the very verge of death. If I could, I would make adjustments to the first three published volumes, but of course I do not have the privilege that W enjoyed of tinkering with and refining books once they had appeared, so great was the difficulty of getting them published in the first place. Even if I could do so, I no longer have the life-energy for such a task. It is all I can do to set down these reminiscences for you to read once I am gone.
Some of the notes and documents I collected and recollections I pried out of others increased my understanding only after I had reflected upon them more deeply. I had sorted through t
hem to make the works you have there on your bookshelf. For example, when I saw W at his little nephew’s funeral, I failed to comprehend that this was only the latest blow of many, what the French call a coup. It was as though it epitomized his relations with his family, which were all about love and loss. To be sure, it helped to show me, as I cogitated on the subject over time, how he must have felt to be living in Camden. To me, it is home and always has been. I have traveled the world in Camden, and have been happy to do so. W was of Mannahatta, as he called it, believing this to have been the usage favored by the original Red Indians there. From the farmland of Long Island as a youth and from the unceasing commerce of Brooklyn when he was a young man, he looked westward to Mannahatta, finally sojourning there with the unspoken intention to remain forever, until the war took him to Washington, with its government offices full of stifled air and its improvised hospitals reeking of horror and the aftermath of horror. He suggested to me many times that the lights of the capital were extinguished forever when President Lincoln was killed. His own began to dim thereafter. And when, later, the man who tended to the needs of the sick became one of the sick himself, he was initially drawn to Philadelphia, a stuffy place as he first believed and later knew it to be, and then just across the river to the family he was reluctant to let know him thoroughly but perhaps felt that he should do so now, given the circumstances— yet could not, not quite.
So the shrinking of his world is what brought him to Camden, a trick of fate for which I am so grateful, as I do not know what purpose I would have discovered in life unassisted by his ready example— that is, other than the cause of Socialist Revolution. Just as once, back in Brooklyn, his great heart had ached for Mannahatta to the west, visible on even the wettest, foulest day and attainable by the simplest ride on the ferry, so it was once more, down here. Philadelphia, on the western bank, is in similar relation to Camden on the eastern, two hemispheres, you might say, linked by ferries waddling back and forth like ducks both day and night. The difference was that Philadelphia was no Mannahatta. The view did not inspire his imagination; it merely reminded him of youth and health, both gone. Sometimes he spoke of the period immediately before Mickle Street as his Indian Summer, and I am glad he had one last warm spell before the Winter of his life began to blow. But we know that Indian Summer is an aberration. There is something artificial about it. It teases us with its tragic impermanence.
Old Philadelphia, believing itself to be the world’s example of dignified commerce and exemplary probity in all matters, has twice held the world’s complete attention: in 1776 of course, and again in 1876, the year of the Centennial Exposition, a period when W and I saw a good bit of each other. I guess that you would have been a young schoolgirl then and might not recall that Seventy-six was a presidential election year as well, the time of the great Tilden and Blaine controversy. I responded acutely to such matters, because I was now the Philadelphia correspondent of one of the Boston papers, earning a bit from my strings even at space rates. W, of course, was losing interest in elections as proofs of the democratic spectacle. I could not convince him to participate actively, much less take a glance at the writings of such people as Charles Bradlaugh, the Socialist parliamentarian over in England. He did read the papers, all of them in fact, and would sometimes respond to faraway events in poetry, as with his poem about the death of Custer (who did not seem much of a hero to me, but I demurred). I suppose he sometimes must have felt himself to be a bit like Custer, for only a short time had elapsed since he had once again been surrounded by hostile critics and publicists intent on massacring his poems. So in Seventy-six he whooped right back at them and rushed out a new edition (the sixth) of the immortal Leaves. He also published a combined work of poetry together with prose pieces, most of which had been in type before but were reappearing in different clothing. The new stock of Leaves was printed for him at the job office of the Camden New Republic. He attended at its birth there, careful to engage and reward the midwifery of the pressman, the binder and even the printer’s devil. These were courtesies I later had to observe on his behalf.
The controversy about the supposed indecency of Leaves seems only to have flared up again with the so called Centennial Edition but did much to enlarge interest in his work, especially in England, where many literary fellows defended him with public praise or wrote to him privately in support as they subscribed to the books. I say “fellows,” but there was at least one formidable woman amongst them: Missus Gilchrist. She was determined to immigrate to our shores so she could become W’s friend in person rather than by post. I think W was as much alarmed as flattered at the prospect of a woman crossing the ocean for his favor. She took passage anyway, bringing along her husband and two children and staying for about three years, setting up a sequence of households that W would visit, sometimes for months. In the fullness of time, the son became an artist and returned to America on his own, once painting a picture of W and his mother having tea together. The daughter, however, disliked W from the outset, believing he was a publicity-seeker, deluded by vanity. The aversion was mutual.
When I say that I eventually came to understand a part of W not visible to the generality of acquaintances, either on the page or in the flesh, I take into account the complex nature of some of his friendships, for W was an enthusiastic and considerate friend to those whose lives he took it upon himself to share and help protect. For example, Mister and Missus Stafford tenanted a farm south of the city. W enjoyed their company and especially that of their young son Harry, whom he took under his wing and sometimes called his honorary nephew. W believed the country air at the Staffords’ beneficial to his health, as was evidently the case, though when his reallife nieces (the daughters of his brother Jeff) visited and he took them to the Exposition, he had to borrow a new device: a wheeling-chair, as people called it then. Later we needed to acquire one of his own. It had a wicker seat. At first he could propel himself by slowly spinning its two big wheels in such a manner as to strengthen his by then sunken chest. Later he required the assistance of pushers, including former patients in the soldiers’ hospitals, the Stafford boy (who always wore a gold ring W had given him), a sequence of paid nurses and of course yours truly. The various parts I played in his life made me realize eventually that I must leave off lithographic work and find some sensible and unfulfilling position that would be regular as to wages and hours and thus, by its very rigidity, allow me the freedom to carry out my real job in life, one that carried no lofty title, or any title at all, and was made up of assisting the great man in any way that might arise.
TWO
IKNEW THAT BEDROOM better than I knew my own. You climbed eleven scuffed wooden stairs. They sagged in the middle from so many previous residents whose tread most likely was heavy from worry. As you went up, Missus Davis’s damned mutt would always bark at you from one of the little parlors below. Sometimes her parrot joined in. Missus Davis was a sea captain’s widow who did for W. He paid her nothing, but she got free room and board in perpetuity. Another part of the bargain was that she contributed all her furniture for their common use, as W himself didn’t own any furniture when he moved to Mickle Street. Perhaps he had never owned any, or certainly not more than a work-table. Missus Davis’s furniture was old and nicked and sturdy, rather like she herself.
At the head of the stairs was a small window that looked out on the backyard. The window had colored glass panes that turned the light red, blue and yellow. This was the only purely ornamental touch in the little place, and of course it was one I noticed only when I visited during the daytime, when attending to our publishing affairs or bringing W the papers. Mornings were often rough for him, but he usually seemed to feel better as the day lengthened. So I usually, but not always, went in the evenings when, although his physical energy was likely to be low, he became quite frisky of speech, especially after escaping from a nap. In fact I frequently disturbed him when he was still asleep in the small bed with high skinny posts with fancy lathe wo
rk.
“Throw your hat on the bedpost,” was what he said heartily as soon as I entered the room on the night I’ve had it in my mind to tell you about as best I can. You see, he often hung his trousers in that manner, though his own hat, the soft gray sloucher with the high crown and the sweat stains, lay as usual on the round table by the windows, holding down a stack of loose documents. W often wrote on pieces of scratch paper and the backs of envelopes, then pasted the pieces together in a string, a practice he had picked up in the newspaper offices of Brooklyn and New Orleans. A paste pot and brush for that purpose stood on the big writing-table. He had taken off his boots of course but otherwise had fallen asleep fully dressed. The evening was warm and muggy, but he shuffled across the plank floor, struck a match on the side of the stove and tossed it in the firebox. I could see the orange flame shoot up.
Walt Whitman's Secret Page 2