Doctor Johnson was actually a Scot. He was a powerful-looking youngish man with thick dark hair and thick dark clothing. He had a pointed nose below which hung, like a signboard on a storefront, a long and luxuriantly droopy moustache. I should say has not had, for at last report he was still alive, part of an ever-decreasing number whose most prominent member, other than Doctor Osler, I suppose is the ancient Burroughs. W liked Johnson, as did Bucke, as did I, as did Anne (who as a reader of people’s character was far superior to any of the rest, individually and perhaps even collectively). Johnson was almost disturbingly knowledgeable about the whos, wheres and whens of W’s life and career. He solicited a trunkful of reminiscences and impressions, and visited every building in which W had ever worked or resided, or such of them as had survived. He retraced, so to speak, the Stations of the Cross, and then said farewell and went back home.
As Ninety gave way to Ninety-one, I had the feeling that W sometimes seemed to know exactly, possibly to the very day, when his life was going to end, but, like his doctors and nurses, he did not know precisely what he was to die from. There were so many possibilities. Doctor Longaker and Doctor Bucke were not in agreement on whether his circulatory system or respiratory one was the weaker. Other candidates were his digestive and disposal mechanisms, and W believed that his heart was losing strength all the while. All of these, or any one of them, made his problems with vision and hearing seem unimportant, for he was dying of something greater than “old age.” One of the many things for which Doctor Osler became so famous was his theory that when a person has two equally serious diseases at the same time, the one is usually the result of the other. W’s case was certainly found to illustrate the point. As a patient, he also showed that the number of simultaneous diseases needn’t be limited to just two.
Certainly Ninety-one, W’s penultimate year, is the period I remember most vividly. So much so that I hardly need glance at my old notes. (Which is just as well, as I have finally lost patience with my own penmanship— a crabbed mess of scribbling and squiggles that only Anne, alone among inhabitants of our planet, can make out as though it were printed from clean type come straight from the foundry. Naturally, I am forming these lines with all the care I can muster lest I vex your own tolerance even further and compel you to hire her as translator!) Yet I do have here before me the text of a memorandum that I copied out for insertion before leaving Camden, feeling that it should be quoted with the strict accuracy that critics often have found wanting in my work.
It is a note of something that Anne said. The occasion was one of W’s last outings. Of course, we always feared that each would be his final such venture, but this one came closest yet to being so. It was a small gathering at Tom and Gussie’s, not a supper or a dinner but something closer to what people now call a cocktail party, with the guests milling about the house, conversing volubly. I can see Anne there yet, sitting halfway up the front staircase, taking in everything and missing nothing, in her usual manner. I can picture the way her knees were drawn up near her breast and her elbows rested on her upper legs so that she could use her hands to cradle her head in a relaxed and informal way. I even remember what skirt was covering her delicate ankles. I can usually remember what she has worn on any given occasion back through time, though I’ve never told her this lest she mistake this small expression of my vast love for a Fetisch.
From her perch, she saw W being assisted along the hallway below, and she experienced what I imagine must have been somewhat similar to the epiphany she had the first time she ever laid eyes on him, that night in Philadelphia, when he balled up his sloucher, rammed it into his pocket and crossed the stage to capture the lectern.
As soon as we left the party, she described the sight of him as he shuffled down the corridor with such difficulty. “It was the most beautiful face I ever saw,” she said. “An expression I have never seen in any other human being. I wished then we might sit there in simple silence, that nothing at all might be said.” That is, nothing to ruin the impression formed in and of that moment. She understood, even better than I could do, that although he was continuing his ragtag skirmish with death, he was also at peace with the amount of time remaining. I was much moved. I suppose I am an emotional man. But on this occasion, as on so many others both earlier and afterward, I kept my reaction in check so that I would appear to be (as W was so fond of saying) manly. My love for Anne was so strong and finely made a thing that I had a recurring fear that its beauty might render it fragile, like an exquisite porcelain teacup or some similarly precious piece of chinoiserie. In this particular case, another factor served to make me withhold my thoughts even from the silent friend, my journal: I was simply too busy in my capacity as W’s jitney. Even as I struggled to scratch a livelihood from the Conservator and the bank, I was still deeply involved in producing what has come to be called the Deathbed Edition of the immortal Leaves. With the utmost difficulty and the ticking of the clock loud in my ears, I managed to have finished copies in my hand by the middle of December, though the book bore the publication date of Ninety-two, the following year.
Events were bubbling all around W’s recumbent form. Eakins paid several calls, needing to retrieve his portrait of W, as it was to be shown in the annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Such an odd man, not least in the way his lustful energies performed so important a function in his life as an artist. One result of them was how, like W, though hardly to the same extent, he was visited by scandal now and then. Whereas W at least had tried to contain the public’s perception of his long-ago dramatic adventures by placing so much emphasis on manliness and such, Eakins by contrast had few front-parlor skills. In particular, he also lacked one of the talents so useful to W in both his private and professional existences: the ability to give the press something it would like to publish, thus keeping his name before the readers while also preventing reporters and editors from giving him a more intrusive form of attention that, however well intended, was certain to be harmful. Poor Eakins knew only his classroom and his studio, in both of which I believe he tended to barricade himself. Perhaps he feared making friends lest they break his concentration or force him into conversation that might depend on the use of what’s now called small talk, of which he possessed none whatsoever. In fact, he had no middle-sized talk either.
He was a married man, his wife of many years being one of his frequent models, but Bucke explained to me that he was also what is known in the relevant branch of academic inquiry as a bi-sexualist, the noun whose adjectival forms are bisexual and bisexed. Bucke said: “Such individuals appear to be fervently mistrusted by both genders, each of which evidently believes itself sufficiently interesting as to deserve attentions that are undivided.” Yes, Bucke was in and out of Camden frequently that year, fretting over W. And also, as he always did, explaining the mysteries of medicine and science. Such a talent is rare and most useful, though in his case it coexisted with its exact opposite. I mean the eccentric impracticality of his mystical beliefs, which often seemed to me so much codswallop, leavened, he must have thought, by his snappy and sarcastic asides, at least in private conversation. I’ve long suspected that he knew far more about humanity— the mass of it, but also its humaneness— than he did about real individuals. Once again, pardon my frankness.
The sense everyone had, that the long drama, at times melodrama, of W’s life was finally and surely approaching its conclusion, was confirmed by a surge of invitations to symposia and other events, none of which he could accept, and the arrival of ever more visitors. More ominous were the honors. Another portrait of W, the one by John Alexander, was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum in New York. From that same city came William O’Donovan, an Eakins colleague or acquaintance, who wished to sculpt a bust of the dying man. This proposal meant repeated appearances. Later, O’Donovan engaged a student of Eakins to take a series of photographs of W in his rocker. They still make for sad viewing to-day.
W complained that the call
ers were giving him headaches and aggravating his deafness. But when he forced himself to rally enough for a spin in the wheeling-chair with the ever-loyal Warrie as navigator, Warrie reported that the passenger found life in the street confusing and that the unfiltered daylight weakened his vision even more. I understood the significance of the fact that, as testimonials and trophies continued to pour in, W, for perhaps the first time in his life, tried to ignore them.
Never had so many of his poems been published in so many different prestigious journals in so short a time. Some editors ran special sections on him. These read well enough, but I thought they were suggestive of the ribbons made by the local mill at which Anne eventually had to take a position (writing the firm’s advertising copy and causing sales to increase, I need hardly say). The company specialized in those long, broad and tastefully fancy ribbons that are attached to funeral wreaths and bear such sentiments as “From a Friend” or, what’s more in the style of my home state, “So Long Our Pal Walt From The Brotherhood Of Hod Carriers And General Laborers Local No. 17 Newark New Jersey.”
To return to my original point in the way that sick old men must always discipline themselves to do, it was at this exact moment, smack in the middle of all this crepuscular terror, that I experienced the single happiest day of my life. I have mentioned it some pages back, but I am feeling a bit stronger this morning, so permit me to elaborate upon it. In a change of heart not far short of a brazen miracle, Anne announced that she no longer had any doubts about our becoming married. Indeed, she felt we should have the ceremony quickly, “as our engagement, at least in the less formal sense of the term, has now gone on so long.”
My delight blocked out all other concerns and kept me from trying to understand this volte-face. She had been looking pale and tired of late, a fact I put down to the Mickle Street situation, which was jangling the nerves of all of us who were witnessing it up close day after day. I nonetheless understood that the agent of her decision was her father across the river. They were still fundamentally at odds on almost every matter. Perhaps while continuing to fear him she had also wearied of doing so, and in that way stepped up her defiance to the point of saying to herself, “I shall marry Horace, just as my heart urges me to do, and Father be d——ed.” She told me that she didn’t wish him to give her away or even be invited to the ceremony. Strangely, though, she did desire that a minister officiate. To me, this illustrated how her increasing defiance went hand in hand with her ongoing ambivalence about the Montgomeries, Philadelphia, allegiances based upon the class system, and everything that went with them; sometimes, surely, such an extraordinary woman could hardly escape being complex beyond the comprehension of us less remarkable men. She and I agreed that I would ask my father if we might have the event take place in the Traubel home (where the suggestion was of course received with cries of joy and, to my well-hidden amusement, what I interpreted as a sigh of relief).
When I told W the news and how it had come up so quickly, like the most benevolent Summer storm you could possibly imagine, he was happier than his condition had allowed him to be for— actually, for as long as I had known him. What a pity, he said, that he himself could attend only in spirit, not in body, given the general agreement by everyone with day-by-day knowledge of the situation that his numerous ailments (the word is hardly satisfactory), which previously afflicted him in an orderly sequence, a few each day or each week, had now combined all at once. Before I could react intelligently, he insisted we hold the ceremony in his room, where, he said, all would be welcome. He offered to draw up a wedding document to which all those present, perhaps twenty of us all told, could affix our signatures. He would try to revive the unaffected and democratic beauty of the copyist’s script by which he had earned his bread in Washington, he said. Anticipation of the event as well as the event itself perked him up to the extent that he was able to pay a weekend visit to his tomb, ordering changes to the stone lettering above the massive door. I went along. So did Bucke, who had just arrived.
Father suggested, and I, Anne and then W all agreed, that the only possible choice of a minister was the Reverend John H. Clifford of the Unitarian church in Germantown. He often built his sermons around lines from Leaves and was as close as possible to not being a clergyman at all while still meeting all the legal and institutional requirements. With that resolved, the pace accelerated even more. Anne seemed just as delighted with the progress as I was, though she hoped, she said privately, that Missus Davis might find some method of at least moving the paper residue of a long and busy life to one side of W’s room or the other. “Otherwise there will be no place for people to sit,” she said. “Or to stand, for that matter.”
She was nearly correct. The only one who sat was W. In my mind’s eye, I see him there yet, assisted from bed to rocker, decked out in his best suit of democratic clothes, both serene and highly animated (as much of either as a sick person can be), seeming to consolidate within himself the rôles of best man, maid of honor and both proud parents. All the while he smiled so broadly that I thought I saw the tip of his beard curled upward like the toe of an elf ‘s shoe. Beneath our happiness, though, we knew that he was exhausting one of his last reserves of energy.
Bucke’s visit was partly to confer with Doctor Longaker and others about the state of W’s health. They pooled their observations to essay a prognosis with which, sadly, no one familiar with the patient’s precipitous decline could disagree. Bucke had to get back to his asylum soon, and Anne and I accepted his invitation to accompany him so as to have a wedding trip, albeit a quick one: our wedding night would in fact come a few days after the wedding itself. I was as nervous as all those bridegrooms in flash fiction are said to be.
The night before Bucke, Anne and I boarded the train together, he to his berth and we to our compartment, I was visiting Mickle Street, where I became somewhat terrified by a horrible suspicion. Something hinted at by a new look in W’s eyes suggested that perhaps he thought it his duty, as a spirit-paterfamilias, to whisper to me about the things new husbands are supposed to know relative to how they should conduct themselves in— how shall I put this?—“the boudoir.” That would have been at once rather more than merely risible and also the signal for buffoonish laughter, given that, as Anne and I had long since been doing business as a fully fledged couple, I possessed more understanding of such relations than he could possibly have dreamed of having. That is, unless, by some magic, his unwed mothers in New Orleans should turn out to be more than mere characters in his own unwritten fictional account of his various doings on Earth. I swear I do not believe that my hunch and foreboding misread his intention, one that, if carried out, would reinforce the claim to the manliness that he pursued through the corridors of his imagination. What saved me the embarrassment but otherwise scared me greatly was the fact that he accidentally set fire to some of the papers on the floor, unaware that he had done so until I managed to stamp out the flame with my boot. Naturally, this increased my remaining apprehension— my concern about leaving him. But Anne and I had responsibilities to ourselves.
For the whole trip, she and I were scarcely ever out of each other’s sight. So, once we were settled in at the Bucke residence in London, I had no opportunity to continue my earlier conversation with him on the subject of inversionism. I got only one brief additional look at Pete Doyle’s letters, and it did little to further my understanding of either their author or recipient.
We were delighted to find on our return so many notes and letters of congratulation from near and far, including one from Doctor Johnson in Bolton and another from his co-leader there, James William Wallace, known as J.W. It was evidently the latter’s turn to sail over to America to pursue more of the field research that Doctor Johnson had undertaken during his own stay. Wallace was about five years older than me. Pardon once again, I should say is; it is my bad but understandable habit to assume that everyone from the past has predeceased me. He looked as English as he sounded, and I suspected that hi
s speech would have seemed almost as curious to a sophisticated Londoner as it did to people in Camden. His elliptical face was very narrow, yet he seemed to have the beginnings of a second chin. He was clean-shaven except for sideburns (or burnsides as W still called them, a reference to the wartime general with whom the vogue originated); they extended the whole way to his lower jaw. He wore small wire spectacles for his large eyes to peer through, and was seldom seen without a derby, pronounced darby, worn squarely on the head, not aggressively askew like Pete Doyle’s in that old photograph.
Walt Whitman's Secret Page 29