“That is the euphemism, thought polite enough for the parlor, for someone who, miraculously, turned out to have a brain after all even though his father had no money.”
He said this in what sounded almost like a snort.
“Whenever I hear autodidact, I think of auto-da-fé. Both are sentences that cannot be appealed.”
He pronounced the latter term something like Otto Dufy, so that I first thought he was referring to a person, possibly some Alsatian saloon-keeper from his long-ago Bohemian days.
Oftentimes retrospect plays us false, giving us absolute confidence in our memory of events and conversations that in fact did not take place as we remember them, and maybe never existed at all. Certainly, I was eager to engage Bucke in an extended private discussion of the most delicate kind. Just as certainly, I never expected that the meeting would go so well as it did. Until just recently, however, my mind had rubbed out all trace of my second reason for the trip to Canada.
I had become intrigued, and puzzled, by W’s decision to leave the hospitals for an extended stay in New York in June 1864, when the end of the war was not yet in sight and the wounded were no less numerous. Certainly there were family difficulties with which he was obliged to deal, but then the Whitmans were one of those families whose crises were so continuous that one could join in the upheaval and distress at any moment, and leave at any moment, as easily as one could climb aboard a traction car and get off again at the next stop. He chose to remain there for a number of months. Then, in late March, he got a further two weeks’ leave, returning to the capital in mid-April, a couple of days after the president’s murder.
The common explanation, which W implied to his early biographer-friends O’Connor, Burroughs and Bucke, was that he had undergone a debilitating disturbance of the mind, a deadening disruption of the spirit, after such a long time spent tending to his boys and watching helplessly as so many of them lost the struggle with their terrible wounds and afflictions. But I found the tale of this episode, particularly the extension of his visit, difficult to credit as it seemed so out of character. I was never quite able to muster the same faith in the truth of it that others did, not even after I had accepted Bucke’s invitation because I too was suffering a mental exhaustion that, while in no way comparable to W’s wartime one in its intensity, was perhaps of similar design. I had much on my mind, far too much. My labor had been ceaseless, and every day I watched my spirit-father die a little more. The process was continuous and cumulative, the outcome inevitable and hideous. And I worried so about Anne’s reciprocation of my love for her. I wrote her from Canada several times but received only one letter, albeit a long and affectionate one, in reply; it arrived just as I was planning my return home. But my assorted troubles did not banish my— suspicion is too strong a word, so let us say my intuition.
The Canadian trip did what it was intended to do, as I came back feeling more rested; I had repaired, though perhaps only temporarily, the breach in my emotional fortifications. Once again, I was visiting with W once or twice each day, but I looked upon him with eyes that were no longer so well accommodated to watching the vitality leak out of him as gas hisses out of a balloon. I also plunged back into the tasks associated with publishing the new Leaves, which of course we all knew would be the last he would ever see.
“I have had a visitor from Harleigh Cemetery,” he said one day. “We had quite a talk.” It seemed that he was being offered a free burial plot in exchange for writing a poem enumerating the beauties of the cemetery in question. The proposition struck me as tawdry as well as macabre, even for a poet grown accustomed to whipping up emergency elegies and topical odes on receipt of telegrams from editors in New York. I thought the scheme probably redundant as well, since I distinctly recalled his telling me of a plot in another cemetery he had bought and paid for long ago. He said he remembered as well.
“I am very careless of my possessions.” Those were his exact words. “I have a farm somewhere which I have never seen. And lots, the Lord knows where. I am, as you see, a much more possessing man than you have supposed.”
I rejoiced a little at this reappearance of good humor, a sign that his pain was not too severe that day and his lung power not so limited as usual. Of course, I was also making silent wise-cracks to myself: “Perhaps you will be bequeathing these imaginary properties to your many illegitimate children.”
The day before Christmas, a cold and miserable one, Warrie took W and the wheeling-chair out to Harleigh by carriage, a journey of which I had not thought him capable. He looked the place over and selected a large lot, twenty feet by thirty, on a small wooded hill, and was soon designing a stone mausoleum for himself, using a pencil and what scratch paper had come to hand. When he returned with Warrie that day, he looked as though all life had been siphoned from him. Missus Davis was apparently having the same thought, but she gave it voice. She told me that W could not look any worse when he finally did die than he looked right then. I could only nod. Both Doctor Bucke and Doctor Osler were now of the view that their friend should give up Mickle Street and move into a hospital. Nothing came of this, however, partly because he had long ago selected the room in which to die, the one with which I was so familiar.
Because W had so many old friends on the newspapers, and because he used the newspapers to inform the world of himself, his condition was destined to become the kind of ongoing melodrama that editors enjoy. But now stories appeared about the celebrated local author’s plans for eternity. I saved this example from the Philadelphia Press. It has never been reprinted and I suppose never will be, as the publishing world long since lost interest in bringing out further volumes of With Walt Whitman in Camden, in one of which I had hoped to include it.
WALT WHITMAN’S GRAVE
—
The Aged Poet Picks Out a Burial Lot on the Outskirts of Camden
Walt Whitman has chosen a spot for the final disposition of his body, when his life is ended. The place is characteristic of the man. It is located in Harleigh Cemetery, about a mile from Camden, and in the prettiest part of the grounds. It is a natural mound, beneath majestic oaks and chestnut trees, while about 200 feet below a stream of water flows over a precipice from an artificial lake. A driveway, which leads through the woods, winds within a few feet of the spot, and the boughs of the gnarled oaks are spread like arms over the hillock, and touch the greensward on the sides. Back of this piece of ground is the woods, where a footpath leads to the entrance gate.
Walt Whitman has been in poor health of late, never having fully recovered from his serious attack of the grip. Yesterday he was able to take a drive, but upon his return home was prostrated with the exertion, and was unable to see anyone last night. He confirmed the report of the selection of the site and the informant said that many persons had called upon him to make his selection of a burial place at Washington, Philadelphia, New York City and London, but he preferred to rest under the trees in New Jersey, where his friends might visit the grave unfatigued.
So many errors in so few sentences, but even the errors flattered him.
SIXTEEN
WKEPT REVISING HIS WILL. Then he would revise the revisions with a codicil. Tom undertook all the paperwork good naturedly and without charge, having, I suppose, become W’s official counsel, so to speak, the moment he married my sister.
Tom’s friends in the Republican Party and others of like mind couldn’t understand how W could have been, since the beginning of his authorial life, so relatively poor while also being at the same time so famous and notorious. This state of affairs gave even greater meaning to the way he wished to remember his helpers and supporters (such as yours truly and Bucke), his surviving family members and that troublesome third category: his special sentimental friends.
You will already have seen that this hurried manuscript I am writing is informed by the straightforwardness that often characterizes fading fools such as myself. Many view such a forum as one of the compensations (or privileges, or respo
nsibilities— or time-killers) of age. If I am being more candid about W here than in all my published writings on the subject, it can be put down to the hope that as I approach the end of these hasty reminiscences, I am coming to the point of them as well.
As I sit here writing these words, W has been dead scarcely more than a quarter-century. During this time, however, a new generation of critics has begun to explore the motives and meanings of his work with an exactness and freedom not possible earlier. New biographers are appearing who never knew him personally and thus have been beyond the reach of his gentle but artful sleeve-tugging and persuasion. My first reaction to such people was to say to myself, “They weren’t there, they can’t have known.” But of course I was not there in Brooklyn or Washington either, yet I believed I understood. My certainty about such comprehension became stronger as Bucke and so many others have died off, leaving me to suppose somehow— but only for a brief period— that I had inherited their own wisdom just as surely as I did W’s watch. The little waves of corrective honesty, which likewise found expression only in my head, led me to look even more deeply into Leaves, the “Calamus” poems especially, learning to read not between the lines so much as behind them. Having done so, I compliment myself on now having gained a bit of comprehension that I lacked previously. In essence, this is my own little bequest to those of you I so often see described as “the Whitman cult,” the chairmanship of which, mostly unwanted as time wore on, I now relinquish.
From this new kind of reading and from some external experiences of my own in recent years, I have learned from W’s posthumous example that secret alliances of the heart are often accumulative, not sequential. One of them does not entirely supplant another. It is quite possible and indeed quite common to love more than one person simultaneously, though not equally perhaps. Residual feelings for the past always affect the present. All nature is a process, not a delineated fact. So it was that in his last months W would decide to eliminate this beneficiary, restore that one and change the pecking order of the others. He was grappling with the fact of simultaneity as well as with the fact of cumulativeness. The latter, I can see at this late date, is why he continued to publish Leaves in so many different editions, most having new poems but with some of the older ones revised or retitled.
I am of course no critic of literature, only a publicist of that part I personally have found most important, but what I take from the “Calamus” poems, at which I have now squinted so intensely for such a long time, is that they address three individuals, not one nor a group or type. The first I figure to be Fred Vaughan, the car conductor who would lose himself in Canada, seeking invisibility perhaps. W spoke of him hardly at all, certainly not to me. But something of him remains in the poems like the impression of an extinct creature found in a fossil. Then of course Pete the Great, the other streetcar man. I have no smidgen of doubt whatever that when their eyes met on that horse-car in Washington nearly five and a half decades ago, it was the announcement of W’s great love of a lifetime and possibly of Pete’s as well. Vaughan I never saw. Pete I got a look at only after W’s death; he was always unknowable to me and even to Bucke, with whom he had dealings, as well as to all those amateur Walt-detectives from England.
The third ghost is Harry Stafford, at least subordinately a transportation-man, an agricultural one otherwise. I had perfectly cordial relations with him for years, but in many ways know him the least of all. W had watched him grow to maturity and was on terms of intimate friendship with his parents, to whose farmstead he often went, as he put it, to freeload. The whole business was complicated in ways I can’t imagine. It can only have been made more so by the fact that W’s period of greatest affection for young Harry overlapped with his lingering and anguished regard for Pete. In the course of W’s incessant will-making, Harry fell in and out of favor. He survived, however, in the version that truly became the last will and testament (and which also, for the first time, remembered Susan Stafford, his mother).
You of course recall what Emerson wrote to W about the first Leaves, for I suppose all of us have committed the letter to memory: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start.”
The two were not then personally acquainted of course. Therefore I risk imputing to the sage of Concord greater percipience than becomes the memory of even Transcendentalism’s founding father. Still, I speculate as to what in this instance Emerson might have been referring to, on an intuitive plane, as his pen moved across that sheet of paper, the one I continually pestered W to let me read again and whose survival as a document I hoped he would entrust to me. Without actually knowing any but the few facts W had given him, Emerson might, I put it to you, lady of the jury, have been alluding to a mystery. The mystery of how a less than totally distinguished newspaper drudge, one who had left positions under circumstances that were cloudy rather than clear, could have emerged as such a surprising poet— or as a poet at all, given that so many of the world’s other great ones lapse into redundancy or silence by thirty-six. That was W’s age when he raised his head so high above the democratic crowd to yell that he was indistinguishable from it. There is no answer to this conundrum except perhaps accepting the “long foreground” as one of emotions as well as experiences. Beyond that there remains only acceptance that we do not possess the particulars or have need of them. What we do have is the proof of his courage, and this is of course more significant.
W understood that he had no useful rôle to play as a soldier; the valor I speak of was of a different order than that revered by fighting men. It is one that continued to be tested long after General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, in fact for the rest of W’s life. Given his vast body of work, the emphasis on the “Calamus” poems is undeniably greater than it ought to be, even though these are certainly among his greatest writings. At first I was merely intrigued by them. That is the word. In time, as my own life has sometimes taken unanticipated turns and twists, I have come around to seeing them as the final and indisputable proof of W’s brand of gallantry, a far rarer sort than that seen on the old American battlefields or even on our own ones in Europe, where grass has scarcely begun to hide the scars inflicted on the landscape.
Throughout his poetry-writing years, he tried to distract people from a nature that combined adhesiveness with what his old phrenological friends called amativeness, both prerequisites, I suppose, to Bucke’s idea of inversionism, or at least a way in which it might be better understood. To avoid the tar-bucket or the lynch mob’s noose, he was reduced to tales of children born out of wedlock and a certain flexibility as to whether pronouns should be masculine or feminine. But just as he had to limit the hatred of those who reviled him, he had also to repel offers of acceptance from those most certain to love him for what he was. Such was the case especially with the London aesthetes. I believe that he thought, but would never say aloud, even to me, that the damn English were just too smart for their own (and certainly his) good, that their society was more intelligent than ours over here, and that its members knew how to read in a way that Americans did not.
All of this made his public existence as extra-troubled as his private one. But he never ceased to practice the point he understood so well: that while an author may fairly try to limit the acid effects of negative reaction, he must never allow fear of unpopularity and worse to distort his purpose in creating. He must write what he knows must be written. I don’t believe W was ever really of much account as a newspaper man or magazinist. He was not a vendor of facts. He was a seeker of truth.
From the day Anne suggested that I keep a record of W’s conversation to the day of his death was slightly less than three and a half years. What I would give to have been born in, say, Forty-eight rather than Fifty-eight. That would have made me old enough, barely, to have participated in the war, if only as a drummer-boy. Then I could feel the war in somewhat the same way W’s generation, and none more deeply so than he himself perha
ps, understood it. I would have been his contemporary and hence his equal. My spirit-father and I were merely coevals, two people who happened to be alive at the same time. I regret these facts just as I regret that I was able to depict him for my readers only as he was during his last phase, when his condition mocked the booming health and bounding vitality he bragged of in the first Leaves and made such essential parts of his entire view of the world.
As I sit at this table glancing over these pages, I see that they too sometimes seem cruel for the same reason. W in his years of prime creativity was the person whom I, like virtually everyone else alive to-day, know only from his books. The actual man with whom I spent so many hours, weeks, months and years was long past his peak. He was holding on to life because he loved it so— well, that plus a strong and surprisingly undiminished strain of stubbornness, which he called “cussedness” and regarded as quite a virtue. The gods were unkind to him in his final years, and I suppose I may be seen as equally unkind in my portraits of him in the three volumes of my published journal and now in this eleventh-hour memoir, which has become yet another somber study in decline and decay. What was I to do, and what am I to do now? I tried to aim for the right thing, the true thing. Not knowing how else to act, I shall simply continue until my own flame is snuffed out between two quick wet fingertips, leaving me in eternal darkness.
One visitor to whom W was willing to grant an audience, any number of them in fact, was Doctor John Johnson of the Bolton Boys in the North of England, as the Boltons were enthusiasts, not critics in either sense of the term. They collected W’s works in every conceivable edition and language they could find and made a huge archive of even the most ephemeral newspaper articles by and concerning him. How proud they were of their vast array of Whitman autographs, jots, doodles and stray proof sheets that had been corrected, or not, in some long-ago time and faraway place. Good grief, they had a lock of W’s hair (which he might have wished returned, given his spreading baldness, if he hadn’t by this point gotten way beyond such worldly vanity). Now they decided to interview as many of W’s friends, relations, acquaintances, associates, antagonists and former army-hospital patients as possible. The initiative showed an admirable determination to extend their knowledge. To W’s understandably suspicious mind, however, their plan was potentially revelatory in a way he once feared so much, but less and less with each additional year of his survival. In the event, these people did him no harm with what amounted to the literary equivalent of philately or amateur watercolor painting. I’m sure W thought they were a useful counterweight to the Londoners and, in their purblind enthusiasm for his every line and utterance, probably good for business over there. Besides, they were working-class folks, the kind of Englishmen W got on with, quietly admiring the manners and unadorned accents that would doubtless have been totally incomprehensible to the Queen. If they were American rather than British, they would be from New Jersey.
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