Walt Whitman's Secret

by George Fetherling

  I think of the comparison because I had virtually no opportunity to speak with Bucke about Pete the Great during our honeymoon, honeymoons being what they are. I looked forward to showing my bride Niagara Falls, but the weather was so foul on the first attempt that we could hear its roar but see very little. We had better conditions the following day, having stayed on in any case so that our baggage, which the railroad had misplaced, could reunite with us. At the Buckes’, all was well. Anne got on splendidly with Missus Bucke and her children, but confessed after a few days that she had overtaxed herself and was once more feeling run-down. And of course both of us were distracted by our worries about W, though I received communications from Warrie and others almost daily and these suggested no further decline.

  Wallace had seemed a likable fellow in his earlier correspondence with me and, like Johnson, proved to be so in person as well. Anne and I got back to Camden two weeks after the wedding and learned that he would be arriving in late August or very early September (perhaps having learned of the notorious mugginess and misery of Summers in New Jersey). He arrived bearing gifts for the strangers he would soon turn into friends. These were presented in the name of the entire Bolton group. They included a beautiful red coverlet for Anne. Being one of those people who could talk himself into the good graces of anyone he wished to see, and get them to impart the information he sought without making himself sound like an interrogator, he proved just as dogged a researcher as his friend Johnson, though he spent most of his time with W. Assuming his means to be as modest as our own, Anne and I were putting him up at the brand-new matrimonial apartment we had rented, where I was astonished to learn that he was intending to keep a literal transcription of every word that came from W’s lips. He spoke of his plan quite freely, unaware of what I’d been doing since March of Eighty-eight. I said nothing.

  Such was his frankness that he kept mentioning what a poor memory he had. On days when he and I had been in W’s presence at the same time, he would ask afterward, “What was that word he used in answer to my question about …?” or “Can you remind me of his opinion about” such and such. One evening I found him busily engaged in working up his day’s notes. Again, he chided himself for not having the type of recollective powers required to set down speech in an accurate fashion. While we talked, he asked if I would like him to read some of his entries, and they were quite good. Don’t think me arrogant if I say they were much as I would have done them, except that he lacked a natural affinity for the American idiom.

  Not long afterward, I was taken aback when, over a cup of tea, he said, “I read some of my notes to Missus Traubel and she thinks them quite like Walt, I believe. But she tells me also that you are doing this same sort of work, and have been for a long time.”

  Motivated by her helpfulness and her openness of heart, Anne had let the cat out of the bag. I resolved to think of the matter that way, rather than in terms of worms that could not be put back in the can. I told him about my manuscripts in some detail and later even read him some patches. I suppose I thought at the back of my mind that the length, breadth and depth of what I was doing would deter him from trying to beat me into print. Two years ago, With Walt Whitman in Camden having come to a halt with changes in the public’s reading habits and the rise in government repression of dissent during (and since) the war in Europe, the Johnson and Wallace collaboration finally appeared. It was entitled Visits to Walt Whitman in 1890–1891 by Two Lancashire Friends. I was happy to see the book for its worthwhile qualities, but honesty compels me to say that I was just as pleased, if not more so, to observe that it found no wider audience than it did and came to light long after my own.

  Sadly, this shows that there was Capitalist competition as well as Socialist co-operation amongst the Whitman circles, a fact that eventually snapped shut the correspondence between Wallace and me, which extended into the present century. Looking back, I am alarmed to see how competitive I myself was about Emerson’s 1855 letter to W. I told myself that I was eager only to rescue it from accidental loss or destruction; I couldn’t admit that I was just as eager to prevent it becoming a part of Bucke’s collection. “No, I haven’t forgotten,” W would say. “It shall be yours when I see it next.” He often claimed to have misplaced it. My hunch was that he knew exactly where it could be excavated with a few seconds’ drilling. I could not restrain my pleasure when I visited one day and found Wallace at the bedside getting W to autograph a stack of photographs. W greeted me with, “Here it is!” The original envelope was all nicked and soiled from so much shuffling around the floor, but inside was folded the communiqué beginning with its famous greeting, with its wise prediction of a long career and its prescient understanding of W’s long foreground. Not only that, but it was in fine condition. Someday had arrived after all.

  SEVENTEEN

  AS W’S END CAME EVER NEARER, finally at a canter rather than a creep, he himself became more sentimental in his love. I am remembering one day at the end of November Ninety-one when Anne and I visited and they kissed each other heartily yet tenderly with the full measure of whatever connected the dying inversionist with the vibrant woman forty-four years his junior. I do not believe that this was merely a proof that she saw him as the father she would have preferred over the one she had been assigned. Beyond that, however, I don’t know what, if anything, it is that I do know as a certainty. As she and I were about to depart, he kissed her again, saying, “Come often, darling. Come often.” As we descended the stairs, he was straining his feeble voice to call out similar sentiments after her.

  As I entered the house on December seventeenth to make my regular suppertime visit, Warrie warned me that W had experienced a terrible day. I went in and found him unable to raise his head from the pillow. But his humor was fit enough, for he dismissed what was clearly a general malfunctioning of the lungs as “premature rigor.” I was greatly worried, and sent for Doctor Longaker. The next day’s Camden Post carried the headline

  WALT WHITMAN’S ILLNESS.

  The Aged Poet Unconcerned as to its Outcome.

  Without giving their names, the reporter who came calling described being met at the door by the “hearty and hospitable” Missus Davis, followed by Warrie, “Mister Whitman’s faithful and courteous attendant,” bearing a note from W. The note read: “I may get over it and I may not. It doesn’t make much difference which.”

  Doctor Longaker came on the scene, Doctor Bucke hurried down from Canada and John Burroughs arrived as well, as did W’s niece Jessie, the first of the family members to reach the house, followed by W’s brother George, to be followed by his wife, a more difficult person. Longaker vouchsafed to me that W’s odds of survival were very poor indeed. The congestion was internally crippling. None of the great amounts he coughed up from the depths seemed to reduce the total; his chest was like a magic well in a children’s storybook. He was often thirsty and sometimes a bit disoriented with fever. With Missus Davis and Warrie, there were more than enough of us to stand watches, like sailors at sea. The Bolton Boys sent me a list of code words to be used to wire them any news without incurring big charges. A message reading only Ontario would mean “No alarm at present,” while Prelude would be “Much worse.” Starry was the cipher to be used for “Likely to be fatal.” Triumph would signal that W had died.

  Doctor Longaker’s prognosis soon became the standard of opinion, for no one, including the patient, was even guardedly optimistic. Bucke, for example, said just after midnight on Christmas Day that he doubted W would make it to sunrise. Of course, when W did in fact meet the morning, he did so in even worse condition and with a slowed heart rate.

  I will not impose the burden of much further graphic detail so as to keep myself from having to relive those weeks and months and to spare you the necessity of reading much more of my prose. I will say only that Doctor Longaker told me in early January that it was a mystery how W continued to cling to life in the face of all medical knowledge. My own theory concerned the part Anne
’s presence played in steering him away from defeat, but I kept it to myself lest it be discounted as unscientific. Three days later W and I had our single most important conversation.

  I came into the room to find him sitting up in bed, his head clear, his spirits not at their worst and his voice rough and scratchy, sometimes perfectly understandable but other times on the level of a mumble. On the counterpane lay a pine box about a foot long and perhaps four inches high and five wide. It was well constructed, joined without resort to nails, and looked rather old.

  He asked after my health and Anne’s, and I after his, though we both already knew the answers.

  “I feel somewhat more nearly hale to-day,” he said. “As for hardy as well, perhaps that is gilding the lily.” We talked about Leaves for a moment and followed with trivialities such as the news.

  Then he got more serious. Not solemn or lugubrious, but sober.

  “Horace, my boy, you of course know of my most recent will. There is one more bequest I must make. It is a bequest to you, as it may complete your work with me, in the same sense of the phrase that I am completing my own labor on this Earth. I have not bothered Tom this time to make a new document for me, because I want this gift to be a private matter between us. No one else is to know of it. No one else can know of it. What I’m giving you doesn’t even belong to me in the strictest legal sense of ownership, but I have been storing it for a great many years, hiding it in fact. I brought it with me to Camden when I first came here. Yesterday I got Warrie to retrieve it from its hiding place.”

  Well, this certainly sounded intriguing; he surely did know how to tell a story. I sat attentively and said nothing.

  “Where shall I begin? Where can I begin?”

  In general terms, I knew now what must be coming. W was tidying up all his unfinished business and I was part of it. “Pete Doyle?” I asked.

  There was a pause.

  “Yes, Pete.”

  He told the story everyone now knows of the Washington City horse-car on that snowy night during the war, and how he would continue to take the same car other evenings, hoping always to engage Pete in more conversation. That led them to drink together at the Union Hotel in Georgetown, a place that had returned to its original use, having been transformed into yet another hospital for the wounded at some stage. When not in the tap-room, they would cross the Navy Yard Bridge to tramp along the Maryland shore of the Potomac and even take the ferry— W and his love of ferries!—to Alexandra, on Virginian soil. Flora, forgive me, I don’t know how much of this geography you’re familiar with.

  “Whether we were getting half-loaded, as I confess we did on occasion, or marching along country roads, we would talk. Our talk was endless, back and forth it went, freely exchanged. Someone overhearing us might have said our conversation was incessant, which it was— when we weren’t singing instead. Sometimes I would recite passages from Shakespeare or sing snippets of arias. Pete with his natural honesty of statement said he liked hearing the music of the first but enjoyed the ‘tunes’ of the other, while understanding nothing of either. Ours wasn’t a great intellectual sympathy, but a great unaffected one of a much rarer and more important kind.”

  His voice was starting to lose the clarity of only a few minutes earlier, becoming a low rumble, the result of lingering fatigue. I didn’t want to wear him down or tire him out. He wasn’t telling me what had happened between the two of them, but I was uncertain whether I should interject any questions less I scotch the feeling of the moment. I decided to take the risk.

  “Was yours what might be called an intimate association?” I asked.

  “An intimate friendship to be sure.” A pause in such a way that the momentary silence became another species of question. “I understand the direction you are taking. While I don’t wish to be coy— and before not very long I will have no further need to be— I can say that such intense fellowship as Pete and I had, during the war especially, often ripens quickly into an ever greater bond. Those are the best friendships, in fact.”

  “I have read some of the letters that passed between you that Bucke got from Pete.”

  “Well, then you know. In the main, they are not letters on lofty subjects. They are bits of news and what you might call domestic gossip.”

  “The Lincoln murder. We know of the happenstance that put Pete in the theater that night. What more did he tell you of it than you were able to make use of for the Lincoln lecture?”

  His voice sank further and he coughed and floundered for a few moments. Was it his voice I was overtaxing with these questions, or something else?

  Again he sounded growly, but not from meanness. I sensed that he had begun to feel the relief of impending weightlessness, as the secret was about to be lifted from his shoulders.

  “Horace, you would have made a fine inquisitive lawyer, just like Tom. I can see how you would break the resolve of an elderly witness, trying to force a confession of guilt but not wishing to appear to be doing so, posing instead as just an honest counselor attempting to get to the bottom of things.” He said this, however, in a wry tone, unmistakable even with his voice in its present condition. “Or a reporter of the very first rank, which I suppose you are.”

  I said nothing (a lawyer’s trick or a reporter’s?), so he was forced to resume.

  “Lincoln saved These States from disintegrating and ultimately disappearing from the map of Liberty. Its location at the center of that map is after all what brought your own family here escaping oppression.”

  (I thought to myself, “We can debate that another time.” Then I realized there would of course be no other time.)

  “No one exceeded me in admiration for Lincoln,” he went on. “By which I mean, not even in the all too brief periods when he was enjoying his topmost level of support. I was vocal about it. You’ve never lived through a war, my boy. You can’t imagine what the reality of it was day upon day, the politics, the whole atmosphere and feel of it, not simply dispatches from the battle-fronts. You might say it assumed its own form, as both religion and disease. It entered every conversation just as it filled every newspaper. The District was a city besieged, as well as the besieger of its nemesis. Of course you already know all this from what I later wrote.

  “Now Pete had all the virtues of very young men: manliness, quickness, a reckless disregard for his safety based on the belief— until it was proved wrong, as it was for my hospital boys— that he was invincible. But despite the hard life he had led, his responses were not yet always tempered by his experiences: the corresponding weak spot of the young. He was prone to sudden floods of temper. I could picture him entering into brawls with his fellow Rebel soldiers from time to time, and perhaps doing likewise with the patrons of Northern saloons. To see him in his town clothes he was not especially athletic looking, but he had a powerful chest and strong arms.”

  I had to move my chair closer as his voice was curving downward again. I could see the way he was expending his energies, and it moved me deeply, as it does now to recall.

  “He was given to periods of stationary blackness as easily as to ones of touchiness, when he could not be approached without caution. I was one evening speaking of Lincoln, talking of the war and political affairs of the day, when he seemed to erupt in flames.”

  Here he paused to let more breath accumulate in his damaged lungs.

  “He was accusing me of loving the president more than I did him. He was being absurd of course, in the grip of an angry fit. Lincoln was an impressively tall and straight-backed man whose face made an art of homeliness, but those were my only opinions on his physical person as distinct from his convictions and philosophy. Pete stormed out of my room. More than once in a single evening, in fact. I resolved to show greater grasp of his piques and vexations. But some damage had already been done, and more was to follow.

  “Horace, I won’t be able to talk much longer. I don’t have the wind and am unsure even of my will. So I will come to the head of the matter. When we r
esumed our bond, but on a slightly less happy and less constant basis, he let me know, by dribs and drabs, that he had become acquainted with Edwin Booth’s brother, the darkly handsome one. When he was in the right state to tell me, but wishing to tell me so as to do me no injury, he revealed that he had, in a way, rejoined the Struggle. Booth had recruited him for a conspiracy to kidnap the president and hold him hostage. The way in which he revealed this to me, with his head almost bowed, suggested to me that his being raised in the Roman faith, even though he no longer subscribed to its precepts or dogma, had left him with the idea that any form of transgression was erasable with enough confession and penance.

  “Naturally, I advised him never to repeat to anyone else what he had told me in the confessional of my boarding-house and with all swiftness to distance himself from J.W. Booth. I presume he took the first advice, but evidently he didn’t accept the second.

  “I was unwell at the time with the lingering consequences of an unusual fever I seemed to have contracted from the wounded. I was in my latter forties, but this was the first time my body had let me down in such a way: a warning of what was to come, I would learn to my sorrow. Also, my family in Brooklyn was experiencing difficulties once again. What’s more, I wanted to find just the right printer for stereotype copies of Drum-Taps. Leaving Pete in what I hoped, and what certainly seemed to be, a calmer state of mind, I therefore went to New York.

  “Four years after the whole glorious hell began, I was on my leave, up in Brooklyn again looking after family matters, when I read the first news of Lee’s surrender. And so too, a week after that, getting ready to address the cooked breakfast Mother had prepared, I picked up the paper and saw the telegraph news of Lincoln’s murder the previous evening. For the rest of the day I went up and down the old streets, watching shopkeepers tacking up black crepe. I grabbed newspapers. I brought home every morning and every evening edition. The boldest, blackest headline in one of them was A TERRIBLE TRAGEDY!, which indeed it of course was. There was a feeling of tragedy in my heart as well when I read that Booth was the killer, though I did not know how an abduction had become an assassination or what part Pete might have played and what the condition of his mind must be.”