Walt Whitman's Secret

by George Fetherling

  William and Nellie O’Connor lived in a well-maintained house no bigger than Mickle Street but brick, not frame, and in a respectable neighborhood, absent both fertilizer manufactory and railroad tracks. Nellie went alone to pave the way for us upstairs, where the patient lay. Then we were summoned. The sick man sat in an armchair, for after being stricken with the ongoing disease he had suffered a brain incident somewhat like W’s, denying his limbs the use for which our bodies intend them. The resulting absence of exercise had caused him to put on considerable weight, no doubt despite a diminution of appetite. The extra pounds notwithstanding, you could not look into his eyes without appreciating the extreme gravity of his condition. His good nature, though, had not entirely deserted him, and his ironic humor still functioned. He asked if we had come to view the remains, and smiled.

  He told Bucke how often and with what affection W spoke of me in his letters. I was touched. When Missus O’Connor stepped out of the room, he bade me come close, and hugged me and kissed me on the lips and on my eyelids and on the forehead. When he did so, I suddenly smelled the death we had already seen. I knew that I was the pale proxy for W but that I would have to do, and that I would be required somehow to transmit the love to the other sick man back in Camden. He then said that he and W were in constant touch by telepathy.

  Some dying men are tight-lipped. They have only silent conversations with those they hope can hear them through the obstacles of time and distance and perhaps via the agency of faith, for them that have it. Others talk a blue streak. O’Connor was in the latter camp. He evidently had had few visitors, and confronted with our presence decided to uncork the bottle. The need for beneficial company and plenty of it, as well as additional care and strong young men to lift him when necessary, is probably what led Bucke, in his usual tone of unintended authority, to tell O’Connor that he should ask to be moved to a proper hospital. Other than such remarks, we did not speak of his illness and certainly not of the specifics of the disease, which in any case were all too apparent on his countenance. Bucke asked him if he was writing, for all agree that he was a writer of surpassing prose.

  “I cannot,” he replied, a little plaintively, and tears began to seep from the corners of his eyes.

  Bucke replied by saying, “Nonsense. You mustn’t give up on your gift, not when you most need its benefits.” I wonder to what degree, if at all, such statements were part of the vocabulary he used in conversing with the saner sort of lunatic. O’Connor showed no visible reaction, but the subject did lead to talk of other writers.

  To my delight, he reminisced about the young W, whom so few were left to remember, and he recalled for me the dark atmosphere of government offices in wartime when, he said with a smile that was brief but broad, W was a fellow member of the notarial class. He said his own approach to surviving the repetitive work in the face of emotional peril and bureaucratic terror was to throw himself into it purposefully, like a horse that must continue trotting because the blinders circumscribe its awareness of the other possibilities. By contrast, he went on, there was W, whom he described as a charismatic fellow who cut a memorable figure. W was then a healthy man of forty-three or-four, “narrow at the flanks,” O’Connor said, and with a beard that was still more dark than not, as on the frontispiece of the 1860 Leaves. “The red of his face was not bloat (I know that well) but a sort of sun-flush.” All I could think of was Eakins’s photograph of the sick and aged W as fully and unashamedly naked as the day he was born.

  In time, O’Connor had suffered a seemingly sudden and certainly dramatic nervous attack owing to the strain. I asked how W had avoided the same development, as their situations were very near identical.

  “Oh, by not working hard,” he said, a discernible smile reappearing where a few tears had held sway only minutes earlier. “He would come in of a morning, sit down, work like a steam engine for an hour or so, then throw himself back in his chair, yawn, stretch himself, pick up his hat and go out.” Had this not been his apparatus for neutralizing the chaos and sorrow around him, O’Connor said, he would not have had the inner strength left to help all those boys laid out in the wards like railroad ties. Nor, in O’Connor’s view, would he have continued to write poetry.

  Turning to W’s reputation as an artist, he suggested that his friend, while increasingly the recipient of honor and esteem in the nations of Europe, and in the northern Dominion (nodding at Bucke), he was still far from fully appreciated, or often not even tolerated, in his own country.

  The dying man now looked me squarely in the face, his eyes level with my eyes, his nose seemingly in contact with my own, his mouth telling my mouth words it implored my entire body to remember.

  “Horace,” said the transfigured lips, “you must return as my delegate to Walt. Take my body and take my soul with you. Set them down on his doorstep, under his feet, across his pillow, anywhere, so that he may know I have survived whole and entire in the Old Faith. To this message I consecrate your journey back to Camden.”

  This will sound odd, but for a second I wondered whether Pete Doyle, a direct son of the old country over the ocean, had ever managed to free himself from his own theater of candles and incense or had turned back to it, if he had ever truly left, to seek expiation for what nearly everyone save convicts, soldiers and sailors without recourse to females, and certain poetry-writing Englishmen who have such access but refuse it, evidently considers a heinous sin and a soul-destroying terror. You are a forthright woman, sensitive but devoid of most forms of nonsense and not given to squeamishness or timidity, so I trust that I can be frank with you, even bald in my way, when I mention such things. If I have made an error in judgment in doing so, I will implore you to harass me by the use of spirit mediums once I am gone, perhaps even before completing my cri de coeur, if that indeed is what I am writing for you now! You see, I jest.

  Bucke and I stayed for two and one-half hours in all before leaving to catch the three-thirty train. That was on March second. William Douglas O’Connor deserted life on May ninth, aged fifty-seven, thirteen years younger than W when he learned of the news and only four years younger than I am as I write this. W was sadder than I had ever seen him. How did O’Connor’s departure compare with other dark cataclysms? With Lincoln’s murder? With his mother’s death? With what I was coming to sense may have been a violent separation from Pete the Great? I didn’t know the answers to such questions, and I lacked the means of improving my judging ability.

  Another of my duties was to be what I believe is now called a press agent. Formerly W had performed this task for himself, and no one could have done it better. Such was my impression from what had become my rather bulky file of newspaper cuttings. Once, when we were working on Complete Poems and Prose, he told me that the previous evening, after I had left him, when Missus Davis had gone to bed and the house was dark, he was moved by an urge to go downstairs. I did something I virtually never did: I upbraided him. Didn’t he realize how dangerous and foolish that was? Why did he ignore advice from me, Missus Davis and his impressive complement of doctors? Why did he ignore even what his own body was imploring him not to do?

  He looked contrite and said he had made the descent unaided because he suddenly needed a book from the parlor and didn’t wish to disturb Missus Davis. “I’ll never again attempt to make the trip alone,” he said. “Never. I promise.” He said that he spent so much effort slowly navigating the staircase in the blackness that he had exhausted himself, and that he continued to be exhausted even now, a fact that was obvious. For some reason I suddenly had a vision of W the young schoolboy, the one who, or so his adult incarnation claimed, had been part of the crowd welcoming the aged Marquis de Lafayette to Long Island in Twenty-five. This was at the commencement of the old Revolutionary gentleman’s triumphant tour of all twenty-six states, where he might easily have died from being fêted and fed so often and so grandly. One end of life and then the other, with too short a string between them.

  In any event, as W�
�s health worsened still more, it fell to me to make certain that his name continued to be laid before readers’ eyes without permitting them to believe that the famous man was dying. Here, for example, is a piece I prompted the Ledger to publish by imposing on my acquaintanceship with one of the newspapermen across the river, who came to the house but was denied a meeting by W, thereby unwittingly providing me the opportunity to steer the reporting in a certain benign direction without much loss of prominence in the paper as printed:

  Walt Whitman, the “good gray poet,” of Camden, was reported last week to be suffering from a severe cold, necessitating his confine ment to his room. This report was denied at his home, 328 Mickle-street, last night, and it was stated that his health has remained about the same for several weeks past, and that he has not left his room, except at intervals for a short time, since the recurrence of his old illness, several months ago. It was also stated that no serious danger at all is apprehended by his present condition.

  I cannot lie to you by claiming that I wasn’t lying then. W was terribly ill with a malfunctioning of his lungs and chest, some sort of severe failure in his left leg, and what he confided to me in a meek voice was discomfort and even pain deep within the reproductive regions. My supposition was that the last item on the list would have affected him the most, as it would do with anyone but especially so him, as the author of all those hymns to the body that brought him so much in the way of scandal and rejection. These ailments were in addition to his growing shortcomings of memory and vision. These were simply attendants of old age, though Doctor Osler would in form me that they were nonetheless opportunistic ailments that had taken root only because other divisions of the body had broken down.

  Short of the immediate aftermath of the brain seizure that had stolen his mobility, W was now in the worst condition I had seen him suffer through. I find it difficult, however, to remember this fact now, looking back, for the story of his icy slide toward death was doled out a day at a time. The ligatures that joined each day to the next were usually so tenuous that it was difficult to observe the general trend at first hand while retaining a sense of which way the story’s big arrows were pointing. That is the way history is. Like the Chinese water torture, it is released one drop at a time, in a steady pling pling pling, designed to limit our comprehension of the deluge overall. That type of understanding is the job of later historians and of the next generation as a whole.

  I did not always find W in his bedroom, lying either in or across the bed (the sign of a day of weakness) or reading in his chair by the windows (compared to the other, an indicator of a more positive state). Sometimes he would greet me from the front parlor once Missus Davis had taken him firmly by the arm and shoulder and eased him down to the main floor, a task that on other occasions I would be called on to perform. Sometimes I would catch him emerging from the second-floor bath-room, carrying a towel or belting his trousers. His lengthy visits there were audible to all, as he enjoyed singing arias, loudly, while sitting in the zinc tub. Seeing him navigate Missus Davis’s well-worn runner in the hallway gave me a still more accurate sense of the hesitation and difficulty with which he propelled himself along. At the end of the shortest such journey, he would be glad of a rest in the chair or a return to his bed.

  Knowing the difficulty I was having raising money to pay for nursing, Bucke had somehow persuaded a young man named Nathan Baker, who worked at the Canadian asylum, to come down to Camden. When he left in order to pursue medical studies (Doctor Osler gave the address to his graduating class), Bucke sent Eddie Wilkins, a fine young man, selfless and intelligent, with a companionable personality as well as a strong physique. Most likely it was Osler who brought in Doctor Daniel Longaker of Philadelphia to examine W on a regular basis, recording the many diseases and their symptoms, relieving the suffering that attended them and throwing impediments in their path where he could. Doctor Longaker was a worthy of the Society for Ethical Culture. I am not certain whether the Ethical Culture doctrines found favor in your own country. If they did, Doctor Bucke would surely have been at the forefront, I imagine. In the United States such groups formed in all the great cities. Their common basis was the belief that ethical behavior lay at the heart of all the organized religions and that the pursuit of such an approach in all departments of life was the proper substitute for what goes on in churches, synagogues, tabernacles, gospel halls, Quaker meeting-houses, and any number of temples and mosks. I need not say that W, though he was not a joiner and said he never had been, found such non-theistic views agreeable. He was true right to the end to whatever combination of non-beliefs he held dear, though he may have been wavering. Once I came upon him sitting in his chair reading a big old leather-clad Bible. He looked slightly embarrassed, telling me that he read it frequently as the source of so much of our literature rather than as insight into God or the Lord (or even as a source of comfort for its familiar and reassuring words, which is what I imagine he was seeking).

  One evening when I arrived at the house, his first question was, “Where have you been to-day?” I believe he took a vicarious pleasure, the only sort he could practice by then, in my hum-drum traipsing from a chair at the library to my stool at the bank, from post office to grocery to newspaper stand.

  I told him that I had gone for a pleasant walk across the river with a friend of mine.

  He pressed for the details.

  Then he responded by telling me what I already knew. “I walked great walks myself in the Washington days. Often with Pete Doyle.

  “Pete was never a scholar,” he continued, reconfirming the blatantly obvious. “We had no scholarly affinities. But he was worldly, an everyday workingman.”

  In those photographs of him that I had seen, Pete looked no different from the other thuggish Hibernians found everywhere in the country. I have never visited the island nation whence they originate, but I knew the statistics showing that they had been the main practitioners of immigration and new growth to America until overtaken somehow by the clearly less fertile German migrants, such as the Traubels. Even the German Catholics bred far fewer children than the Irish with whom they shared dogma. I suppose this is because the Germans are industrious and gifted in business, so it is constantly said, and thus stand in contrast to the Irish, whose great contribution to civilization has been the whiskey they distill but whose main exports to America’s shores are young men so full of the stuff that work suffers when it cannot be avoided altogether.

  Continuing on, W pronounced Doyle a companion who was (and still is?) “full to the brim with the real substance of God.” This statement almost left me prostrate. He then contrasted the abundant perambulations he and Pete shared with the relatively infrequent ones he engaged in with his friend O’Connor during the same period. Of course in the latter case there was clearly an intellectual bond being forged, based upon their shared interest in books and writing. Its continuation on the additional grounds of shared ideas in other areas was a later development. So W explained, adopting the tone of crystalline candor that he took to whenever the spirit moved him to truly open up instead of merely reminiscing or recounting events. These moments became the real joy of all the Camden conversations I came to cherish.

  “At that time,” he said, “for the first two or three years of the war, William O’Connor was warm, earnest, eager, passionate— warriorlike for the anti-slavery ideas. He was immersed, suckered in. This in some ways served to keep us apart, superficially apart. I can easily see now that I was a good deal more repelled by that sentiment, by that devotion in William, than was justified, for I am not temperamentally suited to having any truck or trade with fashionable movements. With these latter-day confirmations of William’s balance, of his choice, of his masterly decisions— the fruit of later eventuation, the later succession of events— there has come to me some self-regret, some suspicion that I was extreme or at least too lethargic in my withdrawals from William’s magnificent enthusiasm.” He paused, looking spent. “Years have
added luster to the O’Connor of that day.”

  I wished I could induce him to apply the same honesty to the subject of Pete Doyle and whatever others like Doyle there may have been and must have been, though clearly Pete was a special case. There is only one such attachment in a single lifetime, or so sentimentalists tell us. Mine was and is Anne Montgomerie, just as his, I have not the smallest doubt, was Peter Doyle, late of the Confederate army and who knows what other rightly maligned and constantly misunderstood associations.

  It may be, I thought, that there will never come a time when I can put to W the questions that now occupied such a prominent place in my mind. In any event, I knew that this was not that moment. This, rather, was a time for comings and goings. It was a time of frequent visitors who, by being briefly present, worked in favor of his spirit even as they further eroded his strength, and of contemporaries, some of them long-time compatriots, whom he saw drop away, snapped up by death in a manner that could not help but make his last days all the sadder.

  THIRTEEN

  BUCKE, THE MERCURIAL bombastic Bucke, so mysterious because he was mystical, so overpowering because he was enthusiastic to a degree ordinarily found only in Hell’s-fire preachers and underhanded stockjobbers, was promising (or threatening) to come down from Canada for another visit. Every few days a postal would arrive, announcing his imminent arrival, followed quickly by others that cited inevitable delays. “He has been coming every day since last September,” W said with a lightness of tone that could not obliterate the bed of anxiety over which it was lain.