Walt Whitman's Secret

by George Fetherling

  That Bucke’s life was busy there was absolutely no doubt whatsoever. Doing good for the weak-minded remanded to his care was enormously difficult and demanding, particularly if one was forever evading censure, as I imagined he was, for introducing new techniques and ideas. And possibly, but I’m not certain, for being associated with the notorious libertine W, whose very name, as the libertine himself enjoyed remarking, would sometimes be invoked to frighten small children into behaving themselves.

  Bucke of course was at all times minutely aware of conditions at Mickle Street, for he sent letters as well as cards. He kept W engaged in the longer exchanges of the sort the old man had gotten in the habit of maintaining. As he did so, however, he also wrung news from the other members of W’s— what is the proper term? Not circle, for though I have used that description often enough, it sounds far too literary and genteel for the intended purpose. Not coterie or band. Truth to tell, gang is nearer the mark, though the newspapers’ love of sensational crime has given the term an unhealthy cast. Or perhaps the German Ring. In any case, Bucke finally arrived in a frenzy of compassion in February of Eighty-nine, and when I was alone with him, he was extremely candid as to W’s chances. We both knew that the situation was bleak and its termination near, but Bucke’s dark vision had greater power than my own, as he could back up his assertions with medical reasoning and all the terminology that attends it, including generous outbursts of Latin and even, when extra emphasis was warranted, of Greek. He was one of W’s comparatively few friends who were highly educated according to accepted principles, though it was obvious that he filled his days with living as well as with mere learning. In that way, he stood proud of the other gang-members.

  Previously I had usually confined my visits to the hours after supper, by which time the food had lifted W’s energies a bit and he was feeling most rested. Yet following Bucke’s departure, I added morning calls as well. It was remarkable how his condition, rather than simply his disposition or alertness, varied from one end of a day to the other. I do not know whether or to what extent he feared death. He seemed no sadder to be going than he was weary of lingering, but that was sorrow enough for anyone to feel or even, as I did, to experience by direct witness. Perhaps he found some true comfort in the knowledge that his pain was about to end. I hope so. Not to compare myself to him in his condition, but I myself was finding it hard to adjust to his pending absence and the sheer awful permanence of it. My life until that time had been devoid of tragedy, but I knew full well what to expect. I did not know how I might react, then and later; how I might bear up under the grief that events made me practice for, every day, twice a day.

  Bucke’s energy, while perhaps not contagious, did linger in the air for a while following his visit. W had grown to depend on some form of communication from him. He needed the certainty of this communication as well as that of my visits, and other things, to serve the function of little rituals to which he could hitch himself on his last earthly journey, now so surely in its final miles. Even with the benevolent fumes of Bucke’s personality still in our nostrils, he became agitated with worry when days and days went by without any word from Ontario. Looking back, I wonder now, as I did then, why Bucke, who was so well informed, had allowed his friend’s supply of reassurance to be interrupted in this way. I tried to palliate the prevailing atmosphere by repeating that Bucke had taken to cultivating an appearance as much like his hero’s as possible. He had groomed his beard to closely approximate the famously tangled garden of gray that obscured W’s breastbone, had disciplined his hair, if that is a correct verb, to place as much emphasis on his bare pate as possible. He was also dressing in clothing of the color (black) and cut (slightly homespun looking) that had always distinguished W’s own. He was even aspiring to the young W’s deliberately lackadaisical manner, quite singular for someone other than, as W said, admiringly for once, “a Negro tramping along a railroad right-of-way in such a suit of clothes, carrying himself in a free, easygoing, unpremeditated and joyous manner even when no cause for joy was apparent but quite the opposite.”

  I did remark to W, however, that on seeing Bucke, people sometimes asked me whether he was related to the Good Gray Poet. “A long-lost sibling perhaps, come back to claim an inheritance,” I said.

  “Might he not more reasonably be mistaken for one of my children out of wedlock?” W responded in kind. “He is some two decades my junior”—eighteen years actually—“and could well be the fruit of one of my missteps in love. Let’s see, I would have been teaching country school on Long Island about then. But he has traveled in this country a great deal, as you know, just as I have lingered with such easy pleasure in his own.”

  Even as I watched my own head start to become frosted with white like the panes in a shop-window at Christmas, I was always to remain, save for Anne, the youngster of this tight little gang of rogue spirits, for while I myself was born some twenty-one years later than Bucke, I was, at the same time, W’s junior by thirty-nine. This fact caused me to carry on the playful charade.

  “Might not I be another of the unintended ones of whom you have been known to brag with such unselfish shame?”

  I took W’s chuckle as a sign that at this last or at least penultimate extremity, our relationship had reached a fresh plateau of candor. Just as I articulated this thought, silently to myself, he began to cough uncontrollably, a horrible tearing cough from some place near the center of his skeletal framework and deep within his girdle of vitals. Had it persisted with such violence, I realized, I wouldn’t have known what to do, but I was able to stem the deathly noise with a slap on his now sadly convex back and a few sips of water. A man is in a sorrowful state when his own laughter causes him pain.

  When he recovered his bearings, he returned to being morose, and spoke feelingly of the way so many of his old friends had lost their final struggle with the dark angel. This euphemism had been used commonly among his beloved boys in the hospitals so long ago, boys who by the time he said this were men in their forties, their bodies, however well they survived the rebellion, far from the young specimens of W’s constant recollection.

  He spoke of how death had reshaped his world. He saw the numerous fatal casualties just within his own family as the opening of a drama on which his own non-existence would bring down the curtain. And then there was the fact that some of his wartime contemporaries specifically, his fellow non-combatant veterans you might almost say, had also begun disappearing, although most were younger than he was. I don’t believe he knew anyone his own age who had participated in the conflict in ways so profound as his own. Wounded and maimed men certainly, but not ones who emerged from the conflict with a change of spirit in ways that Grand Army of the Republic parades could never fully express. All too soon he and these men would be history together, imperfect as history always is.

  When this thought welled over me then, it remained unexpressed. Yet I knew without saying so that this was another signal that W was enlarging his trust in me. Especially so coming on the heels of all the harmless banter about his children who existed only as a device for deceiving and deflecting the naïfs, the suspicious ones and those who were far too curious. Language always had been the food of his non-bodily existence, but precious little talk was expended for the rest of the day.

  He was certainly living far longer than anyone, medical people and members of the laity alike, had expected. Some elderly persons are too ornery to die when others suppose they should. You must have known instances of this, just as I have. Then there are artists who often must hang on against all the bookmakers’ predictions until they have finished some great work that not only concludes their lifetime of labor but symbolizes and indeed actually completes, with a satisfaction impossible for us to guess, one entire human consciousness (oh dear, I’m sounding like the late Doctor Bucke).

  There was to be one more edition of Leaves, the ninth one not counting piracies, though it was really no more than a needless fattening of a life’s-work tha
t had reached its state of fullness long ago and increasingly was accepted by the world that once reviled it, though W for sanity’s sake still clutched at its rebellious bent and flavor. Although the book seemed to have created him as much as he had created it, I believe it was far from the only thing keeping him alive. Another one, as I steadily came to realize over time, was Anne: a statement that will probably surprise you but I hope will delight you as well.

  How shall I put this? There is a stage, the highest and most profound one, I believe, at which a black man and a white man lose their respective histories of degradations and prerogatives. Without diminishing their pride in what they are— on the contrary, in fact— they become, quite simply, two men who have moved beyond what so obviously separates them and have located the knowledge that they— and we, all of us— are in the same boat, trying to survive while straining to figure out what is so good about the “good life,” that elusive abstraction of the philosophers.

  With the races, so too with the genders. What I learned from W, and also, to give him his due, from Bucke, is that there is a place in our collective existence that lies on the other side of biology, where propagation and pleasure are not the only purposes to which love and desire may be put. There is an attenuation of our sexual beings that can, in persons of sufficient openness and exalted understanding, subsume the mechanical and emotional differences between the male and the female, resolving them in the universal name of humanity, by which I mean the state of being human— and humane. One gender requires the other if it is to transcend the differences that only disunite without enriching. One needs an opposite in order to reach one’s potential, whether alone or in harness. Anne became his opposing pole and made his last years even more trying, and of course more rewarding as well. Just as she was swept away by his magnetism when she first laid eyes on him on a lecture platform, so he himself, I think, was instantly infatuated with her ease and charm. In time, he truly came to love her, without the corrupting carnal need that underlay his relations with the men he loved as well, especially Pete— as I sensed early on and accurately enough but without too much conscious thought. For knowledge in that area came to me slowly, if steadily, as my relationships with W and then with Anne and finally with both of them together as well as singly— relationships of the heart alone in the one instance, of heart-and-body in the other— developed as they did. Do you know the term ménage à trois? It is a coarse and distasteful expression in French, referring to the situation that obtains when two men are attached to the same woman, or, I suppose, when two women share the same man— and, whichever is the case, do so under the same roof. W, Anne and I found ourselves with a similar dilemma (or ecstasy) but with important differences. We all loved one another, though perhaps not equally, and of course only two of us were united in the marital sense, as the third was so far along in his physical decline and so high above us in the almost empyrean way he had transcended mating. Otherwise, it was much as one might read about in the prurient flash sold, rather furtively, by Parisian news-agents. Certainly it was not without its jealousies, at least not on my part, I’m sorry to admit.

  Or, to put the matter in quite a different way, he was ennobled by an inventory of kindness so large that he had yet to dispense it all, and by romantic wounds that he had prodded and examined until they became his finest group of poems, the “Calamus” ones, which healed some of the enormous hurts he had endured. That he found it necessary to keep the circumstances of his creating them away from the broad public was a hideous irony. On the surface he may have betrayed no hint of these large lashing affronts to tranquillity. But to visit him as so many did, and see him trade the companionship of living people for another spoonful of the precious energies he needed to conserve like a miser, was a glum and piteous experience at times. To look in on him and listen to him twice daily as I did, seeing his unabated hope in the face of grimacing reality, was to believe, mistakenly, that he was continuing to die in the orderly fashion that he believed the world expected of him.

  John Addington Symonds and other London and Oxford admirers, sitting at inlaid writing-tables in their clubs, persisted in asking him for confirmation of the sexual propensities— I choose that phrase, hoping it is properly neutral— they found encapsulated to perfection in “Calamus.” W ignored them just as he did mere autograph-seekers. Or I should say, in the case of fellow writers, did so to the extent consistent with the simple courtesy that educated overseas readers, in sympathy with the author’s perceived intent, quite reasonably expected to be shown. At least they didn’t usually show up at the door unannounced, as did many other visitors, whose courtesy calls left him enervated to an unusual degree.

  Of course, W’s dissembling didn’t strike me as an especially satisfying explanation, but only as a failed effort at being disingenuous when in a tight jam, logically speaking. Such were the individual fears of us both, about the near future, the very near future indeed, that loomed above us a day or a week or several weeks or a month ahead, that I felt I had little to lose if I pressed him. I believed that the closeness we had arrived at through surviving various adversities and reverses together allowed me to understand him so much more deeply than I had done early in our curious partnership. The situation emboldened me to be devilish just to see what would happen.

  “And what would Pete Doyle from Limerick”—which W had once told me casually was the correct place of origin—“say about your lines in honor of the Queen who had mercilessly and criminally oppressed his people, perpetuating the conduct of queens and kings back through the long history that the two races of people shared so uneasily—and tragically?”

  I tried to utter the words in a more or less conversational tone, and showed, I believe, no trace of either humor or anger, neither of which I actually felt in any case. Yet my words, springing so unexpectedly out of what began as polite chat, seemed to echo in a way that added urgency, and possibly rebellion or defiance, to what otherwise might have been closer to the innocent interrogative that I had intended, whether or not I believed in it.

  To the quiet that followed my question, W responded with a silence of his own. He looked at me for one terribly long instant. I could see none of the many possible responses in his melancholic, worn-out and half-dead eyes. He stroked his whiskers with his right hand as though combing them before a mirror.

  “Horace, we each of us have reasons to hurry, for the hour grows painfully late, as I do not have to tell you.”

  I waited for more words to follow.

  He opened his meek and sweet old mouth, now much misshapen by time, and through the aperture in his rapidly thinning whiskers, the good gray beard of the man who had made himself a figure of legend with generous assistance from his motley coalition of madmen, visionaries, charlatans, geniuses, inverts and occasionally some man’s bored wife, said that while each of us had reason to act in haste, we should not cease to cultivate assiduity and evenness of effort.

  “Be patient, my fine young friend. Be patient.”

  In the quiet that then recurred, in that bedroom with all its jumble and perfectly preserved disorder, we could hear that Mickle Street was receiving a fresh coat of rain.

  FOURTEEN

  BY 1888, WHEN I FOUND my true place in W’s orbit, he already had an extraordinary array of doctors and other medical people attending to his health, or rather to his astonishing lack of it. Sitting atop the roost of course was Doctor Osler, who took him on as a patient when he came down from Montreal to Philadelphia in, I believe, Eighty-four. In those days of course he had yet to be given the noble title he continues to enjoy over there in Oxford or London. I use the present tense, for surely I cannot have somehow missed news of Sir William’s passing. The press, even the Camden Courier, would have made quite a story of that event. Like W himself, as it gives me a shiver to realize now, I cling to the newspapers most doggedly. They are my link to the world of the active, the mobile and the robust, people who can look at the future and see more than their own extin
ction.

  I don’t know when Osler was first called the Father of Modern Medicine, a distinction I understand he has disputed, or indeed when he became the single most famous physician in the world, but even when he had W in his care he was already far famed as a singular individual, destined for greatness if indeed not already invested or infected with it. I recall him as a small-boned man; his feet in particular were tiny. By contrast, his forehead, protecting all that brain, covered quite an expanse. He was most neat and orderly. W was the first to admit how fortunate he always had been in his doctors, yet he found the depth of Osler’s humanity even greater than the breadth of his learning. To W, who said this to me one evening, Osler was someone who, “though a Canadian, is yet Southern and French. He shows indications of both.” All attempts to elaborate on this observation for my benefit left its meaning no less obscure.

  There was strangeness about W’s pronouncements on the northern origins of those who had them. He asked once whether I had observed “the Canadian” that underlay the features of Doctor Bucke’s face. Again, I questioned what he meant.

  “I cannot say, but it is there,” he said. “You will know it someday. You’ll get up there, tramp about, see the Doctor, then come to know what I mean.”

  Even after accepting a far higher position at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Osler, who himself became quite a literary figure as well, still saw W from time to time, though others assumed his function once the Good Gray Poet’s diseases and afflictions tightened their conspiracy against him during the three years and a bit that I served as (in Anne’s phrase) his recording angel. Doctor Longaker I believe I have mentioned. There was also Doctor Henry Cattell, a friend of Eakins, who taught at the university, and then, in Camden itself, Doctor McAlister— Alexander McAlister. All good men, good men indeed. W needed all such help he could attract and muster.