Walt Whitman's Secret

by George Fetherling

  Walt thinks to say that, although the Doyles live so close by, he doesn’t really know them any more than Pete knows his own relations up in Brooklyn. But he stops himself. That could lead to accusations that each is so ashamed of his love for the other that he thinks it best if family members are never introduced into the life the two of them have together. Besides, Walt is always so weary now and sometimes too deficient in spirit to climb out of his gloom. Pete’s anger will pass, he knows, but his own mood appears to show no sign of elevation. Sometimes he feels a bit angry even with himself. But then he is low-down all over. So much so that he entertains unfriendly thoughts that he does not even bother trying to express yet is somehow pleased to have at hand. They at least prove that he’s still capable of normal animation.

  At length Pete stalks off home. The two don’t meet again before Walt boards the train for New York in a few days’ time. Walt writes a note of reconciliation, reiterating his deep affection for the greatest and closest of all his comarados down through the years. But he doesn’t post it, concluding that the better course is to let time work its wonders. He hopes that a temper that comes up without warning will withdraw with equal quickness.

  In Walt’s absence, Pete’s anger finds expression in behavior rather than words. He goes for angry strolls in President’s Park close by the Executive Mansion, where indeed the president does take some air from time to time in the afternoons before darkness gives the place a different character, a different complexion. Men and near boys— soldiers, deserters without papers, farmhands feeling lonely in the unfamiliar city, all the various types drawn to the capital by the opportunity the war affords them— take their nocturnal exercise there and oftentimes fall into conversation. Pete wanders slowly up and down the footpaths, his boots in need of blacking, his hat level with his brow. There on a bench is a nobby-looking gent in a full cloak of some fine dark material. He looks up to see if he recognizes Pete or, more to the point, whether Pete recognizes him. At close quarters, one can see that his eyes are every bit as dark as his moustache. He has an aristocratic face and a sensitive mouth. One can tell at a glance that he is lithe and athletic under all those clothes. The inevitability is startling.

  FOUR

  AS YOU SEE, I have many imperfections as an author. Believe me, I too am piercingly aware of them, though only now have I gained the knowledge that eluded me for so long without my being conscious of its absence. I refer to how it has been only in the past few years that I have come to accept that my gift was never for making even minor literature but only for reading and appreciating the literature of others. Would that I had comprehended this before publishing those collections of my verse and prose. All of them were failed attempts to work in the manner of W— under the spell of W, one might as well say it— while lacking his invention and authority. The wise student is the one who absorbs the lessons his teacher has to give with no wish to become his instructor’s Doppelgäenger. I have learned this too late in life.

  Only partly by his design, W’s instruction gave my existence much of its purpose and more of its tone, but his passive example provoked an itch for literary expression that I’ve never been able to scratch and so have abandoned— except for these pages I am writing in as much haste as my failing heart permits me, without resort to any research beyond a few diaries and an uncertain memory. I have waited too long to begin the ending of the story and still I prattle on at too great a length. Like you I am sure, I much admire Bernard Shaw for his dramas and comedies that are in essence both Socialist and, to use Charles Fournier’s original term, féministes. I am given to understand that Shaw is known to offer apologies to his correspondents for writing such lengthy letters, explaining that he doesn’t have the time to compose a postal. I am in much the same situation here.

  What I am getting at is that I have no reputation, no credible one at least, for writing or any other art. At this point I am not concerned with this lack, despite the way some of W’s old enemies, or sons of his enemies, try to calumniate against me injuriously by charging me with being overly confident to the point of arrogance, vanity and narcissism, or at the very least braggadocio. Perhaps their criticism was partly true in times past, when I seemed to be the primary bearer, often without much assistance, of W’s banner. It is hardly so now, when I am a vessel that is so nearly empty.

  The point I am trying to make in my rushed yet long-winded way is that I don’t know why exactly I am writing all this for you rather than for a wider readership, even one as small in the world’s eyes as the Whitman Fellowship. The only plausible reasons are that you are one of the last few people I am likely to meet on Earth and are a woman of advanced progressive views. As you have gathered if you’ve read this far, I wish to pass along, to someone who will truly understand, the fact that the skeleton in W’s closet was not the one outsiders suspected, for the meaning of his Uranianist and adhesive propensities was obvious to anyone, anywhere, familiar with such terms or to those less knowing who probably couldn’t define the words but recognized in their own being the things his words described. Meaning that the supposed revelation W was at such pains to hide from the public while being compelled to reveal it in his work was actually not a secret in the least, but a commonplace truth for limited circulation.

  This manuscript is composed in such haste because the hour grows late. I implore you to receive it kindly even when it contradicts (never deliberately) your own vision of W’s work and thought. I have no wish to come back as a ghost and haunt you (a gentle joke, dear Flora, and not a threat, especially since, as you know, I am not like yourself a follower of spiritualism and never was, though I try to avoid prejudging others’ beliefs— or are they only hopes?). No, I am seeking your patient reading of this because you have worked so hard and long for the rights of women, are an acknowledged leader of the movement in your own country through writings, speeches and most of all actions, and will understand me, supporting yourself with the tools of the seamstress as I have done with those of the writer and printer. Specifically, I pray that you will understand and not be offended by, or be careless with, the story of my marriage to Anne, who would be well within her liberties not to forgive me for saying what comes next: the fact I have finally located the courage to admit what I’ve known in my heart all along— that I am and always have been far more in love with her than she is with me. Can such a union truly be one of equals? Until this moment, all of your male coreligionists, so to call us, have considered ourselves to be your partners in striving for change. We have assumed as your own gender does that all inequality in marriage flows in only one direction, ex the dominant husband and pro the subordinate wife. While of course this is so in virtually all instances, it is not the case in every last one. I cannot illustrate the point for your knowledgeable consideration without being somewhat indiscreet.

  How long now have all of us been reading in the papers and periodicals about the phenomenon of the New Woman, so labeled, who speaks her mind, bobs her hair and strides with utter confidence through the business world and all other such domains to which her mother was denied entry— in fact, was magisterially assumed to have had no interest in being part of? My single contribution to the pool of insight into this matter is to point out that Anne Montgomerie was a precursor of to-day’s New Woman and remains, though the field is crowded now, a genuine original and a marvel besides. I have loved her so dearly for such a long time that I have enriched my merry soul even while abusing my mere body. I silently challenge you, when you again observe Anne and me together in a few weeks’ time, to look into these dilapidated green eyes of mine and say that this is not the case.

  I first espied her in the Spring of Eighty-five, and what a sight she was. W was well settled into Mickle Street, after spending a few years in accommodations he rented farther along on Stevens Street once he had quit, amicably enough, his brother’s house a few blocks away. Our acquaintanceship, mine with him and his with me, was growing steadily, and I guess I was slowly coming to
the realization that I should make its furtherance my principal activity. This is when I sought a job that would afford me food and cover but consume fewer hours and less energy than the invariably hectic and often unpredictable life of a printer. I accepted the offer of a very part-time position as an assistant bookkeeper at a small factory, a place of such little importance as to be unworthy even of description except to observe that one Anne Montgomerie was a supervisor there and a most proficient one. She was twenty-two, five years my junior, born in 1863, the year of the virtually simultaneous victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and of the great defeat at Chancellorsville that equaled either in savagery, but also the time of Lincoln’s declaration granting freedom to the slaves.

  Anne’s own emancipation was self-proclaimed and, like that of the Negroes, not fully implemented for reasons outside her control. As I need hardly tell you (of all people), few young women back then labored for wages or salary other than those who taught, nursed or worked behind counters in shops, particularly establishments selling goods of a feminine character. To say the least, there were even fewer women working in manufacturing, much less helping oversee a noisy, smelly plant where men sweated freely and were fluent in profanity. I soon gathered that she had no urgent need of the income. Her father, Peter Montgomerie, a well-known homme d’affaires in Philadelphia, enjoyed more than sufficient prosperity. The family did not live on the Main Line with the filthily well-to-do in their unseemly mansions. They merely inhabited the upper register of the wide and complacent middle swath of society, occupying a large, pleasant house in an equally pleasant neighborhood lined on either side with trees of good parentage that seemed smugly satisfied with their station in the plant world. The Montgomerie place was of the Queen Anne style still popular at that time. It had a high turreted room to one side, facing the street, which was balanced for the eyes’ benefit by a large dormer on the other front corner, indicating the room where the maid and the skivvy slept. Anne, whom the whole household doted on and admired, never wanted for anything but wished to undertake some activity that only cigar-smoking men had done. And she did so, and did it supremely well.

  She was my boss, but I was, in the romantic rather than the Confederate sense of the word, her slave; was so from the moment I first spoke with her. You know her now for the still-slender straight-backed woman of fifty-five whose intelligence penetrates to the heart of whatever subject she addresses. Would that you had seen her as I was privileged to do. Then no more or less than now, her silhouette was tall and elegant, and she was somewhat athletic in her habits. Her face was the ground where fiery determination met exceptional kindness. It was presented as a perfect isosceles triangle decorated with a delicately rounded chin. Her unusually large eyes are blue, as you know, and neither too light nor too dark. They seemed to symbolize her warmth and understanding. She appeared to be the effortless leader in any serious conversation, though she never gave the impression of taking charge. She did not whisper (that was not her way) but had, as you cannot help but know though you might not phrase it quite this way, one of those fleecy feminine voices that leads men, old as well as young, to a mild form of insanity that would have been worthy of study by our departed Doctor Bucke. When I would see her in her partitioned-off office on the factory floor, her almost-flaxen hair would be gathered in the back, giving prominence to her wide forehead of course but also, in some way, I don’t know how exactly, adding emphasis to her aquiline nose and her lips. In other surroundings, her hair was evenly distributed, framing her face so softly and artfully that one (I, in any case) constantly had to resist the temptation to stroke her cheek for the sheer tactile pleasure of doing so.

  Flora, I hope you will not take offense at the way I’ve expressed the facts about Anne’s appearance alone, exclusive of all other significant considerations. But I feel I should at least describe, if I cannot scientifically account for, the effect she had on me. And not on me alone but, as far as I know but wouldn’t be surprised to see confirmed by independent assessors, on every other male adult who fancied himself, deservedly or not, to be smart, intellectually and culturally developed, and gifted in one of the creative arts. As you will see, I do not exclude from this category one celebrated old Uranian adhesivist whose friendships with women before this time had covered the spectrum from limpid fiction (those Creole ladies of old New Orleans) to well-hidden trepidation and even fear (Missus Gilchrist) to a puzzling prurience that was in great measure adulterated by an even more intense regard for male members of the same household (Susan Stafford, young Harry’s mother).

  I am trying to write of her as seen through a young fellow’s eyes in the former century that is rapidly being forgotten, and perhaps in the process writing better than I could do were I not so inspired by the topic, back then just as I am to this day. But I will leave you to decide whether Anne has made my prose jump as high as my now-ailing heart. You, the former Missus Flora MacDonald Denison, have experience in these matters. As you remain a sophisticated woman conversant with the world, you appreciate science and cannot be in doubt as to the biological forces hard at work in the situation I describe. We are, all of us, indentured to biology, especially at the ages she and I were. I trust I won’t repel you when I say baldly that when I saw her rise to her feet in her modest glass-fronted office across the way, as viewed from the even smaller closet-like cubicle I shared with two others, I was overcome with silent speculation as to whether her ankles and calves could truly luxuriate beneath that skirt and what exactly her shirtwaist hid.

  Throughout my three half-days of work each week, I made a point of engaging her in conversation. I forged urgent questions about some invoice or misplaced payment so that I could run with it to her side of the shop floor, stepping around the mysterious clanking machines. She was always patient and even-tempered, though I have no doubt whatever that she saw right through my pathetic ruse. Anyone would have done. I like to think she smiled inwardly at my clumsiness, which was at once so helpless and so hopeful. Here I was, far shorter than she, dark to her fair, an American-born foreigner without a family of long-established Yankees to ratify my existence. My hair had yet to droop this way or even to begin graying en route to going white. It was obvious that I had not quite grown into the moustache I wore, which of course was in those days dark as well and had yet to turn downward at the corners of my mouth, making me look sorrowful and unkempt even when in fact I am at my happiest and most dandily groomed. In short, I was annoyed that here I was, not a Jew according to Jewish law, enjoying none of the uplifting cultural, ritualistic and, yes, religious benefits of Jews as I have come to appreciate them in old age and following Father’s death, but a Jew nonetheless in her eyes, as I was sure must be the case.

  She betrayed nothing of the matter, but I thought I could almost hear her mockery. I need not say that this first appraisal, of someone who after all is even more of a democrat than I, proved absolutely mistaken. I discovered all this only after I had marshaled my skill with the language, a smaller one than her own, as I learned to my chagrin, and secured her agreement to have dinner with me. She had first countered my invitation by suggesting a luncheon instead to discuss the firm’s finances, saying that she couldn’t possibly step out with me socially as I was an employee. So I immediately gave in my notice and repeated my proposal.

  If she found my priorities a bit startling, she found my perseverance flattering in a way, though I feared it would potentially give her ammunition for even greater disdain in the future should I turn out to be the same awkward dullard at table that I appeared to be when seated at the cluttered desk covered in the ledgers and a monstrous German device called the Arithmometer. This mechanical innovation had ranks of keys, more like a lilliputian Linotype than what in those days, I’m sure you remember, we called a typewriting machine, for typewriter was the term for the operator, not the thing on which she performed— another sterling opportunity having opened up for independent females not averse to the menial, the repetitious and the ill
-paid. There was a large black handle on the side of the infernal Arithmometer that one pulled, causing the addition or subtraction to take place and get recorded. Three times out of four I couldn’t get it working properly.

  I digress because I believe I clearly hear what I imagine you are asking: “How did the person as he describes himself here ever win her hand?” The answer is that I did not; it was won for me. As I was determined that the first meal we shared should be on her native terrain and not my own, we went to an establishment in Philadelphia that served a great deal of roast beef, cooked Yankee-style, which is to say without discernible flavor. We exhausted whatever chat we possessed about the factory almost before reading the bill of fare, and were talking about the other part of our lives. She told me about her family, and I, cautiously, told her about my own. She said that Camden seemed the most surprising yet most familiar of places, being little more than an arm’s length from Philadelphia but separated from it by something more fundamental than a mere river. “When I was growing up here, I never had reason to cross,” she said. Then she told me about a remarkable old poet known as Walt Whitman who had been living in Camden for years, and how “his poetry is just like the city, invigorating in ways you thought were familiar yet had never experienced, or been able to experience, until seeing what he himself saw through his own eyes.” I was flattened and flabbergasted, almost literally unable to speak.

  While my hands fumbled and my brain roiled, she proceeded to tell me of the first time she laid eyes on him. He was lecturing, sitting up on the stage in a plain chair that seemed too small for him, waiting for the convener of the event to finish his introduction. “Walt rolled up his old felt hat and stuck it in one of his coat pockets while extracting from the other a few crumpled pieces of scratch paper— his notes. He wore plain black clothes, not of recent birth, and a big floppy black necktie, possibly velvet, tied like a great bow girdling his throat, as though he were about to make us a gift of himself, which I suppose in a way he was. He adjusted his beard and was about to rise to thank his introducer and begin telling us about President Lincoln. But in the second before he got to his feet, a bright yellow light, as yellow as a lemon rind, lit him from behind, blurring the edges of his contour and making him appear to be from some other world. Some world better than this one.”