Bucke of course knew vastly more about him than I, not only as a protective guardian of far longer standing and better provenance than I, but also as a medical man whose decision to take one form of “abnormality” as his specialty might have steered him to some theory of “abnormality” more broadly defined. I know now to surround the word with quotation marks, not to call undue attention to it and most certainly not to sneer, but only to emphasize the truly educational nature of a question in need of answering; one about which I could find no help in books, not English, German or French, and was resigned to never hearing W— the prolific father of all those native New Orleanians!—speak of candidly.
“What is it, do you suppose, that formed the basis of the friendship between W and Pete?” I asked with a naivety that might have sounded real enough.
To-day, at the tail-end of the second decade of the twentieth century, having seen whole societies come through the unspeakable horrors of the great European war whose treaty details are only now being negotiated, you, I or any other sophisticated individual with a smattering of psychological knowledge would answer the question simply: “Homo-sexualism.” A modern person who has lived in Greenwich Village as I have will be familiar with some of its characteristics and representative personalities, for it is a way of living that is no stranger to the arts, connected as it somehow is with the creative temperament, as I have read and been told.
In Ninety, however, the term was unknown to popular usage and probably to learned speech as well. The few who spoke of the matter at all, the British in particular, generally used the term Uranian. Bucke began to talk instead of what he called “anomalous love.” He defined it as the situation in which one person might show a carnal propensity, as well as mere affectionate regard, for another individual of the same sex as himself. He was of course a scientist, albeit an unorthodox one, and he spoke freely of these matters, paying me the compliment of knowing that I would not be repulsed, as most people are, or titillated, as some, but only a few, apparently become.
“Are they not just more feminine, then?” We had left the building that was both his office and family quarters and were strolling past the asylum’s impressive gardens.
“That is a common perception, occasioned partly by the fact that this type of behavior is never spoken of openly by anyone outside human-science, and only seldom by professionals of impeccable credentials in clinical research. Yet it is well known in places and organizations that are peopled exclusively by young men without recourse to women, and sometimes by those not so young as well. Prison warders, if they were guaranteed immunity from scorn in trade for their candor, could tell us much of it, I believe. Military and naval commanders too.”
My mind jumped instantly to W’s work in places like the Armory Square hospital, but also to his love of ships and those who sailed— transportation-men! I needed time to contemplate this information that only Bucke would give me. But I could not do so just then, interrupting his generous and impartial conveyance of this rare learning. Lest I stanch the flow of his talk, I dared not even acknowledge receipt of his gift.
“The word most often used in connection with such practices,” Bucke went on, “is of course sodomy, the type of intimate congress that the overwhelming majority of people condemn by rote as a result of their Bible study. I’ve never been convinced that union of this type is necessarily any more harmful to the body or mind than what passes between husband and wife. I am certain that in some though by no means all cases it would disappear if women were introduced into situations that are now exclusively male. But I am mindful that in most of the world it remains a capital crime, which would be absolutely ludicrous if it were not so horrible.”
I continued to do little but nod attentively.
“I have strayed from your original question,” he went on. “To be sure, some inverted men are effeminate in manner or even dress. But this means only that they do not wish to appear as proof of the exclusively masculine part of our civilization. No, they do not wish to be women. They wish only to be who they are.
“Such men are usually the more passive of any pair. Many share a particular physique that draws the notice of their eventual inamoratos. They are often short and slightly built, and compared to the general run of men you see in the streets, neither so broad in the chest nor so narrow as to the hips. More like birds than mammals, you might say, and like male birds rather than the females, they use their plumage to entice a mate.”
I confess that a startling fascination I felt assisted me in keeping my mouth closed, which Anne will tell you is not my customary way. I did manage, however, to interject another question. “The molly-boys, you mean?”
“That and many other terms. For safety in a world so hostile to their existence, inversionists, if I may coin or claim a term, have constructed a colorful and complex nomenclature and other trappings that allow them to communicate among themselves in ways incomprehensible to the majority, or better yet in ways simply of no interest to the majority at all. As with the Gypsies, as indeed with your religious forebears and other groups in similar circumstances, their world is difficult for outsiders to penetrate.”
(So W had told him of my family.)
“They are almost more secretive,” he said, “than the Rosicrucians of the late Paschal Beverly Randolph …” My expression must have betrayed my ignorance of the figure being referred to. “… the Negro occultist and what is called a trance medium, who did so much for members of his race during and after your civil war.”
He continued to lecture as we walked, crushing fallen leaves with our boot-steps.
“Then there are those others, like the Good Gray Poet, our exquisite acquaintance, who incline differently from the aforementioned mollies. They seek the companionship of men still more masculine in appearance and attitude than themselves. By such means they hope to join the dominant body of opinion while preserving their minority conduct. They try to anchor themselves in a society from which they must nevertheless always stand apart. Like immigrants from a country where English is not spoken, you might say. Their tastes lean toward younger men who commonly are muscular examples from a lower station in life, often to be found working in rough occupations. If one of these older and perhaps, even in Walt’s case, somewhat better off men should happen to be an American and educated, he might well consider such a physical companion to be, bluntly, the more inherently democratic alternative. Our friend epitomizes this.”
“Hmmm.” I’m afraid that’s all I could offer by way of thanking him for giving me this newfound understanding. I urged him to carry on with his ideas.
“You know as full well as I what our friend wrote in ‘Song of Myself’ most of a lifetime ago. That he was ‘Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshy and sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, no sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest.’”
Bucke then apologized if the quotation so long in his memory did not come out letter-perfect.
I will never forget the little thing that happened next. There was a bird-sound in the tree nearest to us. We glanced up distractedly just as a male blue jay, like an actor on stage who is flawless in the timing of his exits and entrances, took flight and disappeared.
“Those lines from the poem were more than a description of their author as he wished to be seen,” Bucke continued. “They were a setting-down of the ideal he needed to become in order to inhabit the other half of himself. In picking the words he chose, he was, without necessarily being aware that he was doing so, summoning, beckoning, what the words were naming. They were a sort of advertisement, a flash of colorful feathers aimed, unknowingly of course, at attracting the person with whom he would build his nest and make for both of them a sanctuary in a world so full of predators.”
“He was advertising for a Pete Doyle?”
“Quite so, my friend.”
We walked back to the superintendent’s house, silently
at first.
“Did your study of these matters,” I asked, “arise in the first instance from your admiration for Walt or from a different or an additional source?”
I was wondering, mistakenly of course, whether his own interest went beyond the clinical. I can admit this now that he is dead, now that I am following behind the departed so closely that it is pointless for me to be guarded. But in an instant, his talk switched from the expository to the more discursive.
“You will not believe how much conditions at this institution have improved in the time I have known it,” he said. “This is not a boast but a fact. When I arrived, for example, patients caught practicing onanism had their arms pinned behind their backs for days, weeks and even months. Such cruelty. What became of those few who engaged in acts of sodomy I cannot say. Records were never kept or else were neutered or destroyed. The nearest I could come to the truth was the statement that what helped the patients to reform their ways also protected the institution from scandal and from retribution, both public and bureaucratic.”
“What did you do?”
“I ordered an end to harsh treatment, whether named or unnamed, and policed enforcement of the new direction.”
“Have there been subsequent instances of this inversionistic behavior?”
“A few.”
“Tell me, do you believe that this inversionism in men is carried in the blood of families or learned, perhaps through mimicry and by force of the different values of cultures very unlike our own?”
“Geneticism or acquisition? Involuntary or consciously chosen? That is a good question, but no one has the answer to it.”
“What way does your instinct incline you? From having observed and studied the relevant inmates in your care?”
“What I have seen provides no such answers,” he said. He nodded toward the enormous building where I had seen the unfortunates’ living quarters. “And in any case, these people are all as crazy as wild monkeys.”
The smart-aleck Bucke had returned, forcing the other back into his hole. I much preferred the latter.
I was hoping to return from Canada having written poetry about it as W had done in his day, but Canada did not speak to me the way it did to him. He loved the land if not the nation built on top of it. He loved those of its people who worshipped him without asking too many difficult questions, but he found the others very un-American (except perhaps the Canadian transportation boys— there must be many of them, though I saw none and wonder now whether he had).
Considering the question at this late date, I believe W must have felt threatened by whatever was foreign. This is a trait I often notice in my fellow native-born Americans especially. Nonetheless he was always drawn to the exotic. As he was not, however, a widely traveled man, he found such exoticism in what were in fact the most humdrum localities. For this is the essence, I think, of his few months’ stay in New Orleans when he was already drawing a bead on his thirtieth birthday. The city had been part of Spain and then of France before the United States bought it for cash on the barrel-head, an event still clear in the minds of many older residents in W’s time there. I think he was aroused to still be safely within America while easily imagining that he was actually elsewhere. Maybe in one sense he was right to see New Orleans as a special case, for it became a piece of the United States for a second time after the Confederacy collapsed, and I don’t know but whether people there may take such matters in their stride, thinking to themselves that one day this too shall pass. Thirty-some years after his tropical passade, he must have had almost the same reaction to Bucke’s town up in Ontario.
As someone who was reared in a European family, I by contrast saw the whole continent of North America as exotic, uniformly so, all of a piece, and yet with, if I may be permitted this confusing contradiction, every part different from the rest. The circles printed on the map appear to me as prospects, places to survive in, ones to change and improve upon (an indication perhaps of what Father called socialisme beliefs, evidently believing that their origins are French), busy little outposts of their own in which to blend without surrendering completely, lest one become just another bolt or bushing in the whole contraption. One selects a city as one’s bodily address, the spot from which to attend to quite different matters, ones that are no less urgent than they are timeless.
Flora, I know of all the great and good performed by the Caledonian tribe that boasts of you as one of its members. But I do not know what socialiste distance you enforce between your origins and your intentions. I trust and hope, and in fact know, for I have an eerily accurate sense of these matters, that you still have many years to live. As my own tenure has shriveled, I have found myself resuming conversation with the Jew who lives inside me. I only hope that my dear late father, should he somehow be absorbing these scratchy lines of mine, will either forgive me or confess that he underwent a similar experience that he thought best to withhold from me at the time.
All of which is to say that I can look back on the events outlined in this private narrative with a clarity denied me at the time I’m now describing and also with a charity that I lacked back then. I am far enough along on my journey to accept incongruity for what it is and then draw correspondences from it. I recognize full well that I have grown more conservative as I have grown more radical. The one does not controvert the other, much less diminish it; it merely illustrates the mechanism. In coming to understand this, I also realize that W was precisely the same. I can know these things without pre-judgment of him or fault-finding in light of all the days that have followed in merciless lock-step sequence. To repeat certain facts about him in any other way would be wrong. I devoutly wish you to hold this in mind when, if I have the strength to bring this narrative to its close, you should be tempted to assess my own limitations.
Such was the confidence of the still somewhat young and relatively healthy man I used to be that I felt it possible to participate in some fashion in W’s genius. Instead, I merely parodied it and pilloried myself while doing so. This continued, unwittingly and for the longest time, until about ten years ago, when With Walt Whitman in Camden was well under way, the green cloth of its binding a tip of the hat to the immortal Leaves as originally published. I felt that this would be my best gift to W’s memory. Anne of course helped me to arrive at this conclusion, whereupon she and I decided to suspend the Conservator.
When I digress in this manner, I betray my age as fully as I underscore your patience, my dear audience-of-one. Nevertheless these days my thoughts do tend to stray, until the stream becomes a delta with countless fingers. In this if not in many other ways I can truthfully claim to be just as W was. I flatter myself that, like him, I always manage to guide my travelers back to the main channel— in this case, my trip to Canada. The topic is an important one.
My visit there was much more successful than I ever could have hoped. It was a roaring success, as W liked to say, throwing his head back in imitation of a certain elderly lion in the Philadelphia zoo with which he was on familiar terms. When the British-Canadian border agent asked me whether I was bringing into the country anything that should be declared, I said no. When asked the same question by his American brother on crossing back, my reply was identical, but I was lying. The brain formulating my deceitful words held a fortune in undeclared intellectual treasure, albeit a kind that could not be spoken of openly.
The war was the greatest event ever to take place on the outskirts of W’s body during the seventy-two years he inhabited it. Everyone understood this, for it was a truth common within his generation and more especially to the younger ones who did most of the fighting and dying. But I believed that the speculations that Doctor Bucke had entrusted to me so unselfishly would help me to identify, and perhaps even understand, that W’s greatest internal event, originating in the mind and merely influencing the body, was unrelated to war except in superficial chronological terms.
Bucke, bless him, was an impossible man. He became an unstoppable spout
er of mystical nonsense whenever you needed him to use plain and monotonic language, as when answering some query concerning practical or physical science. At other times, when speculation about mystical and unknowable magic was the subject appropriate to the moment and to his visionary speculations, he would change completely, talking like a shopkeeper who knew little of life on the other side of the counter. Of course, I hardly need to tell you about the Doctor.
Returning to Camden, I resolved to write him a letter that would serve a dual purpose. Superficially, it would be what I had heard W refer to as a meat-and-potatoes letter, thanking the host and hostess for their hospitality. On another level, my letter would employ appropriate circumspection. Draping myself in language clear to the Doctor but pleasantly meaningless to Missus B, I would beg him to point me toward whatever small amount of research had been undertaken, however remote from the main thrusts of scientific inquiry, on the subject of inversionism.
I knew just enough of the scientific world to suppose that such papers would likely be in German. I would no doubt need to conquer many unfamiliar German scientific terms. Possibly, I thought, some inversionistic research might also have been published in French. For someone to whom this tongue is not native, I read and speak it easily enough. I always had to be cautious, however, when dealing with the correspondence, articles and news cuttings sent to W from France or its colonies, as he only pretended to understand the language. Once he even went so far as to dissect the work of his French translator in some detail! I imply nothing underhanded. He also loved to warble arias, ones from Italian operas in particular, but like most opera singers, or at least those who found their way to the fabled stages of Camden, New Jersey, he understood few of the words (though all of the emotions). He was funny this way. For all the confidence he showed to the world, he was shy and vulnerable in such matters as these. One evening, when I was reading the day’s mail aloud so as to spare his tired reddened eyes, he stopped me at a spot where the writer, whoever he was, referred to the recipient, in a most positive and complimentary way, as an autodidact.
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