Walt Whitman's Secret

by George Fetherling

  The search for other matter to supplement the banquet tributes led him to sift roughly through some of his floor-level files again. On mornings when he never rose at all, or got up intending to breakfast but instead spent the entire day lying on the bed fully dressed, he would ask me to gather up great double armfuls of letters and documents, much as one gathers up dead leaves in the Autumn, and deposit them on the bed next to where he lay. This refortified his habit of showing me things from his past, giving them to me to take away forever, and the practice went on at this rate virtually until the end (but, strangely, without making a significant dent in the mounds that were scattered all about— I seemed to be witnessing some miracle on the order of the Loaves and Fishes). I kept hoping that he would again find the original letter from Emerson about the first Leaves, hoping indeed, but never aloud, that he would present it to me. Each time he had a different excuse for not locating it.

  He did, however, unearth, and bade me read to him, a letter written to an acquaintance from his Bohemian days in New York, I believe. It was dated “Camden, Nov. 26, ′75” and told of W’s struggle to recover from the first debilitating “whack” while still attempting, after three years, to properly set himself up in the latest, and what he seemed to sense was also the last, of his adopted towns. It was no Brooklyn, no Mannahatta, and no New Orleans. With one dipping of the pen, he declared himself “at the end of my rope, and in fact ridiculously poor.” With the next, he was feeling “about as cheerful and vimmy as ever,” though he knew his paralysis was for keeps. This was either a draft of a letter he may then have touched up as he wrote it out for mailing, or else the fair copy that he retained for his files, duplicating the text from the original. Hard to say. But it was written on the backs of six scraps of various sizes, one of them the first page of a letter from Pete Doyle on the letterhead of the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad, where he was evidently working back then. It revealed nothing new.

  W was not a sentimentalist about his own manuscripts once he could replace them with a book or a cutting from a paper or magazine containing the same piece in more permanent and more readable form. He once confided to me that he thought he had used most of the original manuscript of Leaves for other purposes after the first edition was safely in his hands back in Fifty-five. I think it most likely that the leaves of Leaves became separated from one another and were used as scratch paper over the course of some years, being mixed up with scraps and strays from other sources. But I didn’t know just what inference could be drawn from W not preserving one of Pete’s letters, given that he seemed to have preserved most everyone else’s.

  About two weeks later, he had me rooting through the tumuli for something when my claw happened to pull up that photograph of Pete and him posing in two chairs facing in opposite directions, W looking especially nondescript, yet mysterious behind his curtain of facial hair, P displaying a condescending little smile. I hadn’t lain eyes on the thing in quite a while, and Tom, who happened to be with me, had not known of its existence.

  W laughed the moment I held it up. Tom then tried to reproduce Pete’s expression. This made W laugh some more (which was good for him, I thought).

  “Never mind,” he said, “the expression of my face atones for all that is lacking in his. What do I look like there? Is it seriosity?”

  Tom answered. “Fondness,” he said. “And Doyle should be a girl.”

  I said nothing, but W emitted another laugh. “Now don’t be too hard on him. That is my Rebel friend, you know. We were true comarados in our time.” He added, “Tom, you would like Pete. Love him, in fact. And you too, Horace— especially you. You and Pete would get to be great chums. I found everybody in Washington who knew Pete to be loving him.” W called him “a master character.”

  In fact, I had been so curious about this master character from the past that I had long since been asking W’s older friends, when I had them alone for a minute, to recall of Pete whatever they could. It was clear to me that Burroughs was the only one who could stand him in the least.

  “One of your powerful uneducated persons,” I said to W.

  He shot back jovially, “Just that, a rare man, knowing nothing of books, knowing everything of life. A great hearty full-blooded everyday divinely generous workingman, a hail-fellow-well-met.” Then he went too far. “Maybe too fond of his beer now and then, and of the women, but for the most part the salt of the earth.”

  I kept my tongue in my firmly shut mouth, having no wish to upset W or perplex Tom. W meanwhile kept right on.

  “Most literary men, as you know, are the kind that the hardy and genuine man would not go far to see, but Pete fascinates you by the very earthiness of his nobility. Yes, you fellows will know him. You, Horace, must particularly make it your point to come into relations with him. You will know him, both of you, and then you will understand that what I say is wholly true and yet is short of the truth.” His coyness had achieved a new plateau; I wasn’t sure what to think or believe.

  “When shall I ever meet him?” I asked in an absolutely innocent tone of voice.

  “Oh, there will come a time,” he said.

  At which point I changed the subject to the late war, a topic calculated to keep W going for however long he had the strength to do so.

  I believe he probably would have been more candid with me on the Pete business if Tom had not been along. Such at least is what my instinct told me, for he did, in his fashion, feed me tiny tastes of what he knew I wished to know— knew but would not acknowledge, if I was reading him correctly. For example, during another visit not long afterward, he began by saying that he had found something else that might interest me, as indeed his discoveries always did.

  “Do you know who this is?” he asked, handing me a horizontal photograph, evidently recent. It showed a boy or young man with cropped hair shaved high above the ears, lying on his belly, stretched on the floor in a state of nudity, contemplating a flower vase that he held in one hand. The central fact of the picture was not the lad’s face, which was turned away from the viewer at a slight angle, but rather his bare posterior looking like two perfectly round melons sliced down one side and spliced together. I shook my head.

  “Look again. Do you not remember the buggy that was precursory to the wheeling-chair?”

  “Bill Duckett!” I said, first in triumph, then in mild confusion.

  “Indeed it is. This is another of the photographic studies Eakins makes for his students or for himself alone, I’m not certain which it is in this case, as the pose is not anatomical in the way of others I have seen. Not one of his standing figures for demonstration purposes, you see, but a complete work in itself, artfully arranged and lit.”

  I acknowledged that this was so, that this was art and not an entry made for one reason or another in a visual note-book. I handed it back. He laid it beside him.

  “Eakins was kind enough to strike a copy for me, knowing my interest in fellows who work vehicles, all kinds of vehicles.”

  I thought this was a reference to the outings he used to make with Duckett. I can see them yet, Duckett, wearing a derby, holding the reins loosely in one hand, W, in his sloucher, beside him on the seat with a blanket athwart his lap.

  Flora, do you know what in German is called a Fetisch? Originally, as I understand it, the word referred to a Negro talisman. Certainly it most usually implies the excessive and perhaps irrational worship of an object, and not, as in the case of W and his young transportation-men, of a profession and those who practice it. Yet I felt then that W’s decided preference was a devotion carried to extremes and might be squeezed in under the same heading. Would he have wished such a photograph if the model had not been, as W and I knew him, a buggy driver? Admittedly the job hardly ranks with those of railroad engineers or seamen aboard steamers, but it does involve forward movement for some commercial goal, and that was one of the characteristics W favored. Doubtless I would learn of others later on.

  These days of course I see myself
in my own memories of Mickle Street. When I called in the mornings, I usually found him eating his breakfast, eagerly expecting its delivery or waiting for Missus Davis to come and retrieve the bowl, plate and cup. At other times he had next to no appetite, and the afternoon did not make good on the morning’s promise. Sometimes I was able to call at mid-afternoon and often found him sitting contentedly in the wheeling-chair outside the front door. He would be taking the sun and conversing with Missus Davis’s mongrel or with neighborhood children. Later, indoors, he might complain of the noise in the street or, even on warm days, of the chill. Early one evening I arrived to find him absent, and waited until I heard the approach of Ed, pushing the chair. The passenger asked to be deposited at the window in the front parlor, where he could go on observing his fellow citizens at their own eye level rather than from above, in his bedroom.

  He had been taking the fresh air down by the river, which he called his oldest friend. I suppose he meant that rivers in general were his oldest friends, for how could he sit on the busy banks of the Delaware, watching the ferries come and go, staring across the way to the big inviting metropolis, without being reminded of the view from Brooklyn toward Mannahatta?

  Ed, who had been one of Bucke’s protégés, returned to Canada to pursue the study of veterinary medicine. I then spread the news of the sudden opening to Bucke and to all the other doctors who were nearer to hand. After some fumbling, the job was bestowed on Missus Davis’s foster son, Warrie Fritzinger. “Warrie” was affectionate for “Warren,” and he had been an able-bodied seaman. The able-bodied part proved useful in lifting and sometimes carrying W, who however no doubt placed greater emphasis on the other part of the description. The match was a sound one. At one point Warrie even went to the Philadelphia Orthopedic Hospital to learn the science of massage, to improve the way he administered what W, who found in them some temporary relief, referred to as “pummelings.” Warrie was also a student of the violin. W found his playing salubrious as well. (I found it less so, and once had the misfortune to be present when the dog joined in.) Warrie also did much-needed jobs of carpentry around the house. I believe he might have apprenticed as a ship’s carpenter, for his skill was at making what was very strong rather than attractive to look at.

  Now that I see these words, I realize that they might describe W just as well. His muscles had turned to India rubber long before, as was bound to be the case since he lacked the strength, agility and most of all the wind necessary for exercise. His hearing, particularly on his “bad elevation,” was a hit-or-miss thing, but more so outdoors than in his room, where the walls contained and thus focused the sound. His eyesight, too, became even less than it had been. Formerly he had asked me to read letters and things to him because he enjoyed experiencing the words that way (as poets perhaps often do); now there was no doubt an additional and more practical reason. What was most strange was the way his beard was thinning dramatically, giving his face, indeed his head, an entirely new outline, revealing a countenance that had been hidden from the world for decades. I was reminded of the ghostly outlines of those no longer extant chimneys and staircases you often see on the side of a surviving house when the one that once adjoined it is pulled down in some money-making scheme. Yet despite all this, and I know that I dance with cliché here, his spirit retained its strong pulse most of the time. When I think back on that Autumn and Winter of Ninety, I confront a torrent of images and little episodes that make me, and dear Anne as well, smile at their proof of his contradictions even as they also recall the depth of his justifiable melancholy.

  Not only was he dying, but others he loved were dying with him or, all too often, a little in advance of him. First came Charlie Pfaff, owner of the beer hall on lower Broadway where the healthy young poet of yore jousted and sparred with fellow writers and artists, including the actress Ada Clare, to whom an unknowledgeable person might suppose he was romantically appended. Charlie was a last link to a past that likewise had not survived. And where there was not actual death, there was more sickness aplenty. Hannah, his favorite sister, took ill (though she outlived W by nearly a decade), and W wrote often to comfort her.

  A much different and unknowable case was that of Harry Stafford, he of the piercing look from underneath dark eyebrows. In his youth he had shared a close but, so it struck me, closely guarded relationship with W, who performed the paternal rôle and Stafford the filial. Père et fils. My understanding is that when W, in need of fresh air and the other commodities of Nature, stayed at the farm of Harry’s parents, much communal swimming took place. Harry was now a married man with children of his own, and on occasion he called at Mickle Street, once after a severe if also somewhat mysterious sickness had debilitated him. He reported that his condition had caused him to quit his railroad job (as W’s vaunted Quakers would have said, he was a transportation-man “by convincement”). W advised him to rent a property where he could take up farming in place of railroading. The labor, while much harder, was also perforce far healthier, he said. Stafford did so, and recovered. I suppose one can’t help but absorb some medical wisdom if brought down by as many diseases and ailments as W had been hard done by for so long. Once recovered, though, Stafford wished to continue in agriculture, maintaining the health of his newly restored body, but the lease on the farm expired and he lacked the means to renew it. Left with out resources, he returned with his wife and their two young ones to his parents’ home. Whereupon some break occurred between him and W, I don’t know what or how. After Stafford left following his next visit to No. 328, W chastised Missus Davis for letting “every specimen of riff-raff” into the house. Scolded her with the lightest possible touch, of course, given that the recipient of this displeasure was so demonstrably gentle and kind a woman. (When later, at Christmas, he presented her with a simple gold ring, you’d have thought that no one had ever before behaved toward her with such thoughtfulness.)

  I watched all such fluctuations from a distance and in a state of puzzlement, and while continuing to perform my duties, was also able to keep pursuing my curiosity, hoping that the time for a discussion franker than any W and I had shared previously would come before Death commenced rapping at his door. I feared this was meant to be a closely run thing.

  I was charged, but truthfully had charged myself, with the formidable task of keeping all the key figures in the drama of W’s decline, and equally in the wonderfully inspiring story of his persistence, in touch with me and, through me, with one another.

  So it came about that I heard that, yes, Pete Doyle was indeed living in Baltimore, though whether working for the same railroad as before, or working at all, I did not know. I thought of going there to track him down. How difficult could it be? But I hesitated, of course, knowing that W would feel that I had stepped outside my boundaries.

  J.W. Wallace was, with his friend Doctor John Johnson, leader of the Whitmanite study circle in Bolton over in England, the group that prefigured the various Whitman cells and fellowships, including of course your own Canadian one and excluding, naturally, the fraudulent effort planned by Sadakichi Hartmann, whom W continued to regret having ever met with. Like Doctor Johnson, Wallace seemed to me a perfectly congenial fellow from the provinces, a person of laboring-class stock. In Ninety-one he was over in America to extend his researches into W’s past doings. I found him easy to talk with, and one day I let slip what I knew of Pete’s whereabouts in vague terms. As I had not thought to pledge him to secrecy, Wallace later passed along the information to W, who was eager to interrogate me about the matter.

  He contrived to be off-hand about it. Turning from friendly remarks about Wallace and his group, he said: “And before it passes out of my mind, Horace, let me ask you something. Wallace says you report Pete Doyle is in Baltimore. This is entirely new to me. I did not know of the change. The noble Peter! I hear but little from him. Yet that is not to wonder, for I never did hear much.”

  “Did he not at one period write you often?”

  “Oh
no, his letters were never frequent. He is a mechanic, an instance of the many mechanics I have known who don’t write or won’t write and are apt to get mad as the devil if you ask them to. But I always humored Pete in that respect. It was enough for me to know him, and I suppose for him to know me. I did most of the writing. He is a train-hand, and like all transportation-men, he is necessarily a wanderer.”

  I took this in.

  “Wallace wants to see him,” he continued. “He is a collector, collecting not simply scarce copies of my books but the acquaintance of most everyone I have known. You must put your heads together and see if a meeting with Pete can’t be arranged.”

  His voice was unruffled and convivial, but I did not take these words literally, for I comprehended the threat that was hidden in them at no great depth, embedded like sharp bits of iron baked into a cake.

  On his death-bed, W executed a codicil to his will. In it, he revoked the bequest of his gold watch to Pete and the silver one to me. Now the gold went to me and the silver one to Harry Stafford, with Pete the Great receiving nothing. I take from this several suppositions. First, that perhaps W and Pete had some final contact of which I never learned, some correspondence exchanged and quickly destroyed in the new stove, perhaps even some unsuccessful reunion, carefully held when I was not around and of which I was never told. Another conclusion, which I am now in the unfortunate position of being able to confirm from my own present experience, is this: that the body outlives, what shall we say?, physical amativeness, but desire in turn outlives the body.

  The double-decker Leaves on which I labored at W’s direction was in large part a stereotyping of the previous one. In that sense it was not a true edition at all, not as genuine bookmen would see it— that is, no fresh setting of type. It was, however, to have appended to it a sequence of new poems, written over the past two years and continuing into the present. He decided to call this section “Good Bye My Fancy.” I was staggered when I first read the title piece with which we are all now so familiar, the poem in which he bids farewell to his creative life, the soul of his existence that he was watching go dark— except that the lines themselves had been pushed up from the deepest and most fertile part of his imagination in a way that perhaps (I hoped) gave lie to their literal intent. This time he did not tarry in having the new writing ready for me to mark up for the plant. There was none of the agony of finishing his essay on Hicks. This time the agony was in what the writing was actually saying.