Was it their lack of artifice he liked? Certainly. But in my view he indulged them because they were all fellows from the laboring class, or at least aspired to be. W didn’t have many readers in America among the workers whom he was so often addressing in his poems. He’d had such individuals as lovers, to be sure: his “transportation-men” especially. Yet among his readers he could point to few, leastways few he knew of for certain, who fell in that category of workers that does all the country’s monkey jobs. The workers returned his love, but they didn’t memorize his poems. With their “betters,” it was the other way around. This was one of the frustrations he endured with what, all things taken into account, was saintly patience and forbearance.
Which might well explain his enormous affection for Anne. It was not rooted in carnality, to be sure. So it must have come from the fact that a young woman from a background at least somewhat privileged, by the high standards of a country such as this, admired him, it seemed then, almost as unhesitatingly as a handful of respectable authorial figures and (a different form of admiration) a great many youngsters from the coach yards and docks.
The more I came to understand the erotische side of W’s life, what now would more likely be called his Sexleben— that is to say, the more I followed leads that Bucke was to suggest— the better I understood that I had no cause whatever to be jealous of him even if he had been a healthy man of my own age. Yet for a while I was concerned.
I can still see him as he took leave of his birthday banquet, thanking Gussie, shaking Tom’s hand emphatically, hugging the Harned children— and giving Anne such a protracted and, I thought, lascivious kiss on her mouth as one would never expect to see at any public event but a wedding. Was this a sincere expression of how he felt about her? Or was it intended to reinforce the perception of him as a fellow with bastard children still to be found in the tap-rooms or convents of New Orleans? Perhaps neither. Perhaps a bit of both.
For my part, I was love-smacked, as I imagine many intellectual, progressive and literary men would have been had they found Anne before I did and somehow allayed her unspoken hesitations as thoroughly as I was able to do. Over time, I became more comfortable with W’s affection for Anne, and vice versa. Until then, I was prudent to be worried.
Back in the early days, the candor I and so many others admired in W’s utterances and writings had a different effect on me when directed toward Anne as an individual. Even in the first precarious weeks following the attacks on his brain, when his grip on the world’s assets was obviously so slippery, he managed to be his old self where she was concerned. When Tom was leaving after a ritualistic visit to the Mickle Street sickbed, he was asked to bring no other callers than himself the next day “except for Horace and Agnes”—he never called her Gussie—“and Anne Montgomerie.” That would be innocent enough were it standing all alone. But when Anne had not appeared for two or three days, he asked me to tell her “that if she don’t come to see me soon, I shall think she has gone back on me. I know I have said I won’t see visitors, but she is not a visitor, she is one of us.” Or, most flirtatious of all— and this, mind you, from a man way too ill to impersonate the male equivalent of a coquette—“Kiss Anne Montgomerie for me even if it is not lawful!”
Despite my rational nature, I naively saw a dilemma where there was none. Anne believed that the way W spoke of her and behaved toward her was a touching expression of his advanced ideas, proof of a progressive ideology, one that I, at least, knew existed as much in W’s memory as in the realities then current. When he said, for example, “Tell Anne that I am alive yet, though not lively, and that I may survive the work we laid out to do” and I relayed the message (though tempted not to), she reacted by thinking he was applauding her spirit of independence and compassionate but self-sustaining heart. I was alarmed but not surprised, anxious but not eager, to hear of her visits to Mickle Street at hours when I was at the bank. I did not mention this subject to her lest she question the sincerity of my own commitment to the new face of women’s position in civic, social and political affairs. I did, however, bring up the topic with W after the third or fourth time he mentioned in passing that she had stopped by. I did so casually, and he responded casually.
“Yes, she comes sometimes, brings flowers, kisses me,” he said, “but she doesn’t come enough. You’re always harping on her.” By which he meant that I was playing cupid in my own romantic interest, not someone else’s. He liked running together her forename and her family name, as though it were a compound or were hyphenated in the English way. “What’s Anne-Montgomerie to you, or what are you to Anne-Montgomerie, that you should love each other as you do?”
That quite floored even as it reassured me. Before I could respond in an articulate fashion, he took up the slack with a weak jest.
“A boy can do a sight worse than to have a girl. He may not have a girl. That’s a great deal worse.”
I had reclaimed my speech but not my wits. “And that from a bachelor!” I said.
“Not too much of a bachelor either, if you knew it,” he replied, a bit archly.
The skylarking was at an end and so was conversation. I first thought he was going to say something more on the subject of love or romance. Instead, he shut his lips tightly. He spoke nothing further, so I said good night and went home.
Except for the one missing element, its essay on Elias Hicks, November Boughs was ready to go. I kept nudging him to finish. When nudging failed, I gently implored, gingerly prodded and discreetly begged. He replied with excuses that were altogether sincere, saying that his brain “could not cope with it, gets tired, takes my pen out of my hand. Reading only passively tires me.” Other times he placed blame not on the topic, but on himself. “Hicks is entitled to my best, not my worst,” he said. “My best would be too little, my worst would be an insult.”
That he could not grapple with Hicks on days when he was at his weakest was natural enough. “It now takes all my energy merely to get to the chair and back to the bed again,” he told me.
My sense was that he feared I might grow impatient. In this he was incorrect. Another “young” man might have done, but not I. Instead, I encouraged him to talk about Hicks, hoping he would find it easier to rewrite his own conversation as prose rather than tackle composition straight on.
“I knew the habitats of Hicks— my grandparents knew him personally so well— the shore up there, the whole tone of life at that time and place. All of it is so familiar to me. I have got to look upon myself as sort of chosen to do a job as the Hicksite historian. I have seemed, to myself at least, to be particularly equipped for doing just this thing and doing it as it should be done. Now it threatens to go up in smoke.” He sighed not with his lungs and voice box alone but with his whole silent body.
“Do you know anything about the method of the Quaker meetings?” he asked. He didn’t give me time to answer. “Well, if you do, you know that they never take a vote. They discuss questions, one this side, one that. Or sometimes most of them on one side and only a few on the other. Then the moderator— I believe they call him that, at any rate the man who presides— announces the result, yes or no, as he sees it in the balance of feeling. It is remarkable, I think, that in the history of the sect these decisions have never in a single instance been appealed. If there is not a pretty ardent leaning one way or the other, the moderator reserves judgment. That is the only guard. They seem to select their most judicious men for the place, men who cannot be swayed by momentary passions, interests, prejudices, or even sympathies.
“What all this comes to is that just that sort of a debate is going on in my mind now, whether to condemn or save the Hicks, whether to send it to the printer or throw it into the stove.” For just a second he flicked a one-eyed glance at the old round stove. “A debate not to be put into figures or votes, but real, with a decision pending which I must abide by at last. Tell the printer to give me until Monday. This is Thursday. Till then it will be a life-and-death struggle. For al
l these years I have had it in my plans to write a book about Hicks. Now here I am at last, after all the procrastinations, stranded, with nothing but a few runaway thoughts on the subject to show for my good resolutions. Well, if I can’t do all I started off to do, maybe I’ll be able to do some little toward it, give at least some hint, glimpse or odor of the larger scheme.”
The following day too, he was once again drained of energy, complaining of “great languidness, feebleness, weariness.” Fortunately, the languor did not affect his talk, which as delivered was that of a healthy man. He limited himself to a single visitor besides myself: Susan Stafford, mother of Harry Stafford, who had come and gone in his life several times but of whom I never got a fixed impression as I did of Pete Doyle. Missus Stafford, he said, was “not literary. I account that one of her merits.” Literary or not, she knew the Leaves and in fact had read all his books.
The subject of swimming came up when I saw him that evening, and he told me about his boyhood exploits as “a first-rate aquatic loafer.” This led him to ask if I knew the painting Swimming by his friend Eakins. As he put the question to me, he seemed to motion with his head to Eakins’s portrait of him, which that day occupied pride of place on a plinth of books stacked upon the writing-table. I confessed that I was not familiar with it.
“It is not one of his large pictures,” he said, “but it is magnificent. It shows a scene toward the close of a long hot summer’s day. Four or five boys are swimming in a river— no doubt our own river, here.”
I was pleased whenever I heard evidence that he had come to think of Camden and its environs as our rather than your.
“They are gloriously but unaffectedly nude, nude in their brotherhood and their humanity, as they dive from some rocks by the shore and frolic with one another. They are slender and muscled. They remind us how like a piece of fruit the body is, reaching the perfect state of ripeness that is all too brief. Eakins caught them at that moment, before they had any awareness that the ultimate end of the process is to rot and fall from the branch.”
He looked sad. Sadder than his norm, I mean. I imagined he was thinking not only of death but of the loss of so much freedom that was prefacing his own.
“Eakins painted himself into the picture, I think. He is the mature figure, also nude, swimming toward them with a certain determination. He works a great deal from photographs, you know. He is himself an excellent photographer in the sense of not being too artistic about it.”
Such talk, whether to himself or aloud, was doubtless another factor deflecting his progress on Hicks. He did, however, manage to complete small clusters of new paragraphs about Hicks and feed them to me for putting into their proper places. November Boughs was still growing, but sometimes sideways rather than up. The following Saturday, for instance, he added further new material for the essay but ended up excising more than he put in by vaporizing all the references to George Fox, one of the founders of the Quaker faith back in England. Later, he restored the Fox material to the book but stuck it in a different place. I persevered with aggressive good nature.
Possibly to disguise his lack of progress, he kept making sidetracks to discuss the war, a subject that always had my interest but was coming to seem longer in the retelling than it could ever have been in reality. On this occasion his recollections had what struck me at once as an unnecessary mysteriousness, a fact that was itself mysterious to me at the time. He spoke a bit disjointedly. He said, “My place in Washington was a peculiar one, as were my reasons for being there and my doing there what I did. I met no others there who shared my own motivations, but then I could not at that stage articulate them to myself, so how I could expect others to do so? People went to the capital for all sorts of reasons: to convert, to proselytize, to observe, to do good, to sentimentalize, from a sense of duty or from philanthropic motives. Women preachers, emotional gushing girls.”
This sounded like the beginning of one of the long lists he made so much and so magical a part of his poetry.
“I honor them all. Knew them, hundreds of them, well, and in many cases came to love them. But no one, at least no one that I met, went just for my own reasons, from a profound conviction of necessity, affinity, coming into coldest relations, relations so close and dear, with the whole strange welter of life gathered to that mad focus. I could not expect to do more for my own part at this late day than collect.”
The extremity of his fatigue made him ramble beautifully this way, as though he were trying out the one faculty, speech, that remained to him whole. But I sensed a greater coherence in it than perhaps he intended. He seemed a bit weaker for all the effort, so I was reluctant to press for qualification, should I have known how to do so. I had the suspicion, however, that he was telling me something about Pete Doyle. I say suspicion. That is the wrong word. I mean instinct.
“I haven’t cast out all my devils yet.”
W was referring to his health, though I don’t think he honestly believed that illness could ever be cast out, not at this late stage. Some other type of devil, yes, to be sure; for he did in fact rally to finish the Hicks piece. He did not declare an end to it arbitrarily and then, in resignation, send it out into the world to fend for itself. He lowered his original expectations in line with the restrictions imposed by his condition, once satisfied that these actions were reason able in the circumstances. Then I was able to turn over November Boughs to the men with ink-stained fingertips.
Tom usually stopped by to see W each day, just as I did in the evenings. Normally he brought one or both of the children with him. W doted on them and they on him, though his beard proved scratchy whenever he hugged and kissed them. Being in the law, Tom was also perforce a man of affairs. He suggested that the publisher, W’s old friend McKay, who had lent him some of the money for Mickle Street, price November Boughs at one dollar and fifty cents. W, always eager to reach the readers with little income (those who, in his phrase, were “not holding”), thought one dollar and twenty-five the correct amount. He argued that the quarter-dollar was the boundary between ordinary readers— people who were not bookish and whom he valued for just that reason— and the writers, journalists, businessmen, doctors, officials, lawyers and others for whom the price difference was not a determining factor in whether to make the purchase. He also knew that a thousand copies was the right number to print. He had acquired a sure feel for such matters, he said, and it had helped him to survive in the world.
He was so pleased when, in the last week of August Eighty-eight, two months after the disturbances in his brain, I brought him a stack of the finished books. He held one in his hands, a squarish book of a hundred and forty pages. He flipped through it and took the edge of one page and rubbed it between his thumb and index finger. He held the volume to his nose and inhaled deeply, as though sampling a fine wine or a tasty stew in a hotel dining room. When asked the question, he answered that he calculated the venture would bring him no more than he had laid out for it. I didn’t know how literally to interpret this statement, as I had seen with what dexterity he negotiated his way through literary commerce.
Around this time, he showed me the letters from three or four years back that had passed between him and a man who was operating a sort of syndicate for fine prose writing. His correspondent had signed up several important monthlies and a number of the bigger news papers to print contributions on certain topics he would solicit from writers of note— in his words, “from famous men whom newspapers cannot reach— nor afford to pay separately even if they did reach them.” He was commissioning war reminiscences from certain figures who still trod the Earth, and he wished W to write on Lincoln and of course on the wartime hospitals. He evidently labored under the impression that W had actually been acquainted with Lincoln in the usual sense, not just on the spiritual plane. W did not disabuse him, not that I saw, reading the letters. W got twenty dollars per thousand words, the very highest rate, but later came down substantially, and shrewdly, I think, in order to get his copy i
nto still more of the bigger papers and increase his profit in that manner. W asked me to read all the letters aloud so that he could relive his small commercial triumph. Some of the correspondence related to a memoir of the Bowery Theatre in New York and Edwin Booth the tragedian (both onstage and otherwise).
In his newspapering days, W was a prolific reviewer of books, plays, concerts, lectures and all types of exhibitions, as well as of politics and crime, those staples of journalism. Now, at the other end of his life, he found it difficult if not impossible to stop pronouncing on the merits or deficiencies of what fell before his eyes every day. For example, he could seldom let pass without commentary the old letters and other documents he had salvaged from the unwept corners of his bedroom to put in my hands. Whenever he was being particularly charitable this way, I would ask once again to see the Emerson. He would find some excuse or change the subject. In time I almost came to believe that on the next occasion he would inform me that Missus Davis’s dog had eaten the thing.
Talking was his last pleasure. Fortunately, all of us who were his friends loved to listen to him. Beneath his discursiveness and casual language, he was discriminating and sharply critical, no less of himself than of others. About this time, someone began producing a calendar that featured quotations from W’s work on each leaf (a venture that in a way seems now to have presaged the later appearance in the marketplace of Walt Whitman Cigars). W called the calendar “a dubious experiment. I don’t shine in bits. There are no ‘gems’ in Leaves of Grass.” He meant rather that the book was a life being lived, a process not an object, a river not a pond or lake.
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