I was now a mature man of about thirty, more thoughtful than before and more settled. I was beginning to ponder questions that my nightly visits raised. It was certainly true that W had endured considerable calumny, particularly of course for what he called the sexpoems in the immortal Leaves, yet he always had had his helpful admirers, of which I myself was one, but only at the workshop level, for I could aid him only by running his errands and performing his literary chores. He was not solely reliant on either his literary friends or his non-literary ones, for he had a gift for remaining in the public eye. He exercised it not out of glory-hunger but rather from an admirable refusal to be shunted aside simply because he was not genteel in word or manner and wrote about comradeship, adhesiveness, manly affection— he gave it many names. For years I wondered whether the practical need to keep his name aloft had, paradoxically, made him more secretive than he would have been without it. Or was the opposite nearer to the truth? Was he so open in order to conceal his secretive nature? I could imagine myself in such a position, because it is one not unfamiliar to Socialists in this country. In any case, it was clearly the war that changed him into what he became. Now that you and I have lived through (in my case, just barely) a time of far greater war, on a more awful scale than previously could ever have been imagined, I believe we can conceive of what those years in Washington must have meant to him.
One day, when he had allowed me to root around on my own in the decaying heaps of documents on the floor, searching for a certain sheet of paper we needed in our work, I found a letter written by him. The salutation was the affectionate but impersonal one of “Dear Friend.” If it was a letter that had been returned to him, there should have been an envelope, for he was meticulous in the calculated mess he made of his quarters and always managed to keep all constituent parts of a document together. Perhaps the letter was never sent. Perhaps it was a draft, though it had no emendations and scratches. Perhaps it was a fair copy that he had made for his records. I scanned it quickly and asked to whom it was addressed. He claimed not to remember, and he asked me to read it to him, slowly, as he lay abed, that he might begin to recall. Doing so, I realized that this was a circular letter sent to acquaintances, soliciting money to help him care for the wounded and the dying in the Armory Square hospital. He described the horrible scenes there with the dispassion that I suppose comes in time from seeing so much and caring so deeply.
He let me take it away with me later. I shall quote from it now.
“I seldom miss a day or evening,” he wrote. “Out of the six or seven hundred in this Hospital I try to give a word or a trifle to everyone without exception, making regular rounds among them all. I give all kinds of sustenance, blackberries, peaches, lemons and sugar, wines, all kinds of preserves, pickles, brandy, milk, shirts and all articles of underclothing, tobacco, tea, handkerchiefs, &cet &cet &cet. I always give paper, envelopes, stamps &cet. To many I give (when I have it) small sums of money— half of the soldiers in hospital have not a cent. There are many returned prisoners, sick, lost all— and every day squads of men from the front, cavalry or infantry— brought in wounded or sick, generally without a cent of money. I select the most needy cases and devote much of my time and services to them. Some are mere lads, seventeen, nineteen. Some are silent, sick, heavy-hearted (things, attentions, &cet. are very rude in the army and hospitals, nothing but the mere hard routine, no time for tenderness or extras). So I go round. Some of my boys die, some get well.”
Then the tone changed abruptly. “O what a sweet unwonted love (those good American boys of good stock, decent, clean, well-raised boys, so near home). What an attachment grows up between us, started from hospital cots, where so many pale young American soldiers lie. For so many months I have gone among them, having long ago discarded all stiff conventions (they and I are too near to each other, there is no time to lose, and death and anguish dissipate ceremony here between my lads and me). I pet them. This does some of them much good. They are so indistinct and lonesome. On parting at night sometimes I kiss them right and left. The doctors tell me I supply the patients with a medicine which all their drugs and bottles and powders are often unable to match in efficacy.”
I looked up at the time-worn countenance of the poet who presented himself to the world as someone as manly as any soldier, or iron puddler, or cow-boy on the plains of the western territories, and who talked much of his numerous illegitimate children, whom no one has ever seen or heard from. Tears were running down the channels of his face. I suddenly sensed what his British correspondents and acolytes evidently understood with their more refined European perceptions. I realized that he had been in love with all those boys.
TWELVE
I SUPPOSE I WAS BECOMING an even better listener, for I began noticing, as I believe anyone would have done, that certain traits were showing up ever more frequently in W’s everyday talk. For instance, when he spoke about the war, the subject of Lincoln would always come to dominate the thread, though I came to see that W wasn’t serious about politics. For him, the subject seemed to consist of a few abstractions, the same ones found in the immortal Leaves, such as Freedom, Democracy and Liberty, which he believed that America could spread around the globe only once all obstacles to trade were pulled down. Predictably, this often led to the despised tariff and the foreigners who wouldn’t listen to America. Usually this meant the hated British Empire, either in whole or in part— the part closest to hand being Canada.
“Canada is a country of characteristics,” he said. “The landscape has characteristics, the people have characteristics.”
I didn’t know what he meant by this. Then he spoke more clearly. He went on to say: “Canada has been injured by its colonial adhesion to England.”
Was his mind noting the kinship of adhesion and adhesiveness?
“I used to walk about when I was up there with Bucke and talk with the people. Canada should be on its own feet, asserting the life that properly belongs to it. I should say we on this side of the border are too much inclined to minimize its importance. It is good to get about among other peoples, to not take too much for granted in our superiorities, to take a little off our prejudices and put a little of our admiration there, just so’s we may finally establish ourselves on the right family basis among the nations.”
At the time, I took all this at its face value. But I hear W’s words differently now, thinking of them in light of the late war in Europe and the way our government imprisons, deports, lynches and shoots down Socialists and labor people, or sanctions those who do so, trying to rid the land of anyone committed to change for the better rather than the worse. Canada divorced from Great Britain would be in need of another big friend. Don’t you agree?
Another trait of W’s over this period was that whenever he was feeling particularly unwell, which unfortunately was more and more often as the Winter of Eighty-eight–Eighty-nine drew near, he would urge me to work faster on the Complete Poems and Prose. “Better hasty than posthumous,” he said one day.
Sometimes the ink on the armfuls of galley proof I brought to him was still a bit wet. He would look them over and, all too often, tinker with as well as merely correct them. I always made sure that he had a batch of them on his work-table or at his bedside, for the task aided his concentration and distracted him from his condition. I was used to such chores and half a hundred others, but sometimes his requests astonished me. For example, he decided that he needed a new stove. The old one, which it seems was given to him by one of his sisters after the first stroke in Seventy-three, was not functioning well, and he saw the necessity of keeping his bedroom as warm and snug as possible. I was to keep an eye peeled for something suitable.
“I am likely to be tied right here in this room the whole Winter if I live at all,” he said. “Some days I get doubtful about myself, but I have a notion now that I may drag on several years at my present low level of life. It is a conservative level, conservative to the last degree, but suffices for some purposes
, of which we will make the most we can.”
The Spring of Eighty-nine was a particularly mild one, when the seasonal pleasantness eased ocean travel and seemed to bring an unusually large number of individual British visitors. In their company W kept his views of their Empire politely tucked away and received their veneration with a modesty I believe was sincere. One caller, a professional soldier, had developed an intense admiration for Leaves while in the British army. He was so stiff and bristly that I expected the conference between them to be difficult. But W was able in this case to extend his easy rapport with common soldiers, the younger the better, to a serving officer of great age and higher station, for flattery is a highly effective lubricant. And you might suppose W to have recoiled from knowing that one visitor, Edwin Arnold, was actually Sir Edwin and had one of those accents that cannot help but make a listener feel like a manservant or chambermaid. But nothing of the kind; W was as charming as a no longer terribly strong person could be.
To that same period belongs the visit by Doctor John Johnson, another member of the English race, who had been in correspondence with W for a couple of years. You must know him, I’m sure. I use the present tense, for he is still alive and therefore carries every promise of outliving me, I’m afraid. He is a physician in Bolton, which I am informed is a grime-covered city known for woolen mills and other no doubt horrid establishments. With his friend J.W. Wallace, of the same place, he founded what they mischievously called Bolton College. It is no college at all, but rather an organization of Socialists who identify a major mystical strain in W’s work. I know this interpretation is amenable to you and your own ardent group there in Toronto. In my observation, the spiritual connection to be found in W’s poetry takes root most deeply in Canada and in the British Isles and other pink portions of the map, possibly because they are some of the most Protestant of cultures and lack much of what they believe W was able to provide. Doctor Johnson had come over to meet his hero, gaze upon his birthplace and see as many as possible of the sites associated with his subject’s other biographical details. Although the Bolton Boys, as W and I called the group, had had some slight contact with the inversionistical literary chaps in London, the two circles were of such different characters that they might almost have been the products of altogether separate countries. Hence their different treatment.
The oddest and certainly the most troublesome of the visitors was the one W referred to as “the Japanee,” though in fact only his mother was from Nippon whilst his father was a German. His name was Carl Sadakichi Hartmann, though he dropped the forename before the end of the old century, as on the title-page of his history of American painting, with which you and your friends might be familiar, or perhaps ought to be. When he first presented himself at Mickle Street, he sought my favor by addressing me in German. His effort was worthless. Although I comprehend the tongue as spoken (and read it rather better), I do not speak so much of it as you might suppose. Father always believed that the old language, like the old religion, should be jettisoned in the New World. Hartmann was a dandy and an aesthete (one of those), not a serious political man in the least. He was tall and so unnaturally thin that when he stood, he arranged his limbs artfully as though they were flowers in a vase; when he sat, he folded in on himself like a pen-knife. His talk was colorful and artistic, but he used a loud cackle for punctuation. In the presence of his host, he performed a sort of dance of attendance, clutching at every word from W’s mouth.
Shortly afterward, unfortunately, he published his memorandum of the encounter in the Herald, which had commissioned many of W’s poems about public events and had so often been kind in booming his books and platform appearances. He quoted what he contended were W’s disparaging summations of other writers. Emerson and Hawthorne, two of the victims, were dead by then. But others, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, outlived their supposed libeler. W of course refuted these untruths, as I believe it was proper for him to do. He may often have resorted to booming himself, as the leaders of literature had long forced him to do by excluding him from their Pantheon, but he was not a man to cowardly deny something of which he was guilty— a different matter from the instinct for self-preservation that caused him to be misleading about the origins of the sex-poems. In any case, Hartmann published subsequent articles feeding off his slight acquaintance with his elder and better, then had the audacity to gather these together in a small book. This time the author was identified simply as Sadakichi, no surname. Such trials of course did nothing to steady W’s wobbling health. Certainly W lacked for internal peace when Hartmann turned up in Boston as founder of a Walt Whitman Society there, through which he began to solicit monetary contributions that never benefited W because they never left Hartmann’s pocket.
The visitor with the biggest personality of all was of course Doctor Bucke, who arrived in Camden slightly in advance of Spring itself, for 1889 would see W’s seventieth birthday and Bucke naturally wanted to be fully on hand for it, bringing all his energy, intensity, inscrutability and, at times, incomprehensibility— and certainly his singular limp, which I once heard someone say made him look like a person walking sideways up one of those very steep streets in San Francisco (whereas he always made me think of a side-wheeler with only one paddle). He took his medical education in the U.S.A. but had what seems to us Americans one of those curiously modulated Canadian voices.
Bucke was W’s first true biographer if you allow that The Good Gray Poet by O’Connor, who wrote with great confidence indeed, better than I do at any rate, and Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person by John Burroughs, who wrote (and still writes) quite well for a scientific man, were more in the nature of pamphlets than actual books. Both were brought out after the war. Observe that after first making the acquaintance of my spirit-father— a term that Bucke could have defined much better than I can, though his explanation would have been hobbled by jargon known only to himself— I began calling it “the war,” the war, as though there was no other and it was the doing of people my own age. I have always associated with persons older than myself, being interested in serious adult matters, not the nominal things of youth, which I found asinine. Anne aside, I dealt with my elders exclusively. I felt this gave me an advantage in developing as a person, but I was then unaware of the negative effect: the fact that most of them were to die when I was still at least active in body and completely alert in mind, leaving me feeling bereft and friendless. Now that my own end is in sight, at what everyone agrees with me is an insufficiently ripe age, I appreciate how many who might have been my companions will now outlive me without our having communicated in a meaningful way, if at all. I suppose that this could be seen as the wheel completing its revolution.
Of all my distinguished elders, Bucke was certainly the most difficult to get a handle on, and often the most difficult even to comprehend. He was an exporter of ethereal, spiritual and mock-religious talk. Not at all the personality of a scientific Socialist, though he was of a scientific bent of course. He was forthright in sharing his views, if not always helpful in explaining what he was talking about. He once told W that Drum-Taps was a big step down from Leaves, allowing one to infer that at least some subsequent books were in turn steps down from Taps. I did not agree with such statements, because Leaves belongs to its category on an exclusive basis and there are no other books that even brush against it. I’m sure such honest diagnosis is a virtue in a medical man talking to his patients, but it does no credit in dealing with a literary friend.
When Bucke was not saying such things, he was perhaps going overboard in the opposite direction. Put another way, his praise, though not his unanimous reaction to all things, could be, to say the least, fulsome. When, after the usual struggles, the Complete Poems and Prose saw the light of day, he wrote to say that “it will be the sacred text by and by. The First Folio of S is valuable but I guess after a little while that an autographed C.P.P. of W.W. will lead it in the market.” Bucke was interested in Shakespeare, but not in the some
what conspiratorial way that W and many others were. The Bard is not one of the god-like mystics in Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness, which places W alongside not only Jesus Christ but also Buddha, Saul-who-became-St.-Paul, Plotinus, Mohammad and William Blake. Will from Stratford-upon-Avon was a top student of human behavior, the doctor would say, but hardly a visionary.
When I read the above passage to W, whose eyes were bothering him greatly— another ailment on the mounting list— he chuckled in appreciation. “Maurice is a monster boomer,” he said. “He can make you feel a lot too big about yourself if you don’t look out. Dear Maurice!”
Bucke and I, both of us realizing that we needed a deep understanding of each other in our efforts to prolong W’s life and uphold his work, decided to do some traveling together, even though this meant being away from W’s bedside for one long day. Our assignment was to pay a visit to William O’Connor, who was possibly W’s oldest friend he was still in contact with, someone he first met in Boston in 1860: one of what seemed the few momentous relationships formed before and not during or after the war. When the conflict came, O’Connor too became a clerk in Washington City. Like Burroughs, he worked at the Treasury but continued clerking when the peace came. Now, still in Washington, he was dying. Cancer was the culprit that was stealing his life, and W was eager for first-hand unseasoned news of its terrible progress, however fearful he was of what information might be produced. He thought of making the journey himself in the company of a doctor, but of course was unable to. So it was that on a heavily overcast day Bucke and I crossed over to Philadelphia and took the 8:31 for Baltimore so as to change there for Washington. I had never been in the capital and was startled to see the monuments and buildings I was familiar with from photographs only, and surprised as well by the high percentage of Negroes in the population, much higher than Camden’s or Philadelphia’s, and the curt relations with them pursued by whites.
Walt Whitman's Secret Page 21