“I fag early,” he said, “but then I rise early to go downstairs and sit in the front room and await the mail.” He wasn’t good on the narrow stairs, particularly going down. He considered the postman a friend, knew his name and his history, and the stories about members of his family, talked with him at length. The same with the neighborhood boys. The younger ones were afraid of him, but often hid their fright in giggling when they passed on the sidewalk. Perhaps their parents had told them to mind whom they spoke to.
Missus Davis knew how to keep the little place clean and tidy, but W’s room, the biggest by far, was a thicket, no, a blizzard, of disorder. Manuscripts, letters, note-books and photographs covered every flat surface, including the floor. Dead newspapers were a particular problem. Once his ability to be an active participant in public life faded, W seemed determined to remain a close reader of the New York, Philadelphia and Camden papers, morning and evening, and in this way maintain complete communication with the world of the fully alive. Once having read them, however, he seemed unwilling to part with them, as though by clinging to the news they carried he was clinging to that particular day, which meant holding on to life. In the corners especially, and in the area nearest the foot of the bed, the papers were sometimes strewn shin deep, like snow that had drifted. But it would be wrong to suppose there was no method in all this. By having all his papers of whatever type spread out at his feet all the time, he knew where every piece was to be found, or at least its general whereabouts. I could raise a thousand other examples to illustrate this practice but think now of a specific one, the night he began to tell me about the horrors of the hospitals and became aware that I was starting to become curious about so many other things as well.
“It’s here all right,” he said, “I just need to get a big stick and churn the waters. It’ll float to the surface.” He reached down and neatly extracted what must be one of the most famous and consequential letters in all literature, the one that Emerson sent him in response to the first edition of Leaves in 1855, before I was born: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere …” He allowed me to hold it and examine it closely for a few precious moments while he continued to prospect for the sheet of paper he actually had in mind.
He talked in a quite animated manner as he searched away. “Missus Davis insisted on redding up the room,” he said. “Her meddling, though well intended, threatened to set me back years.” He was smiling under his full gray beard, I could tell. “I had to enjoin her from coming in. Which is, in any event, a stipulation not to be despised, in view of her unblemished reputation in the town and my own pock-marked one— so lustful and unwholesome, you know.” Many have remarked on what they believe was W’s lack of humor, but I often heard him mock himself this way.
It was a very close Camden evening, when the fertilizer plant across the river had ceased sending its signature through the air for another day and with the railroad sometimes causing the room to tremble slightly as he moved about slowly until finding what he sought. It was on the work-table all along. He then sat down in the rocking chair where he liked to write during the day, putting a board across his lap as a desk and with an old-fashioned quill as his pen.
“It’s from one of my boys,” he said. “From the war. A fine youth, from Indiana. I remember him quite well. Sweet of temper and with something angelic in his appearance.” I knew he kept in touch with quite a number of them.
He read the letter aloud in a slow, deep, careful voice. It told of small-town life in Indiana, of crops and children, and reminisced not about the war as such but about what was evidently a long convalescence in Washington and later.
“Was he badly wounded?”
“Oh yes. An amputation that didn’t want to heal. We didn’t expect he would pull through. But look, it’s twenty years on, more than twenty, and if I imagine correctly and am reading between the lines in the way he intends, he is as full of health as I am empty of it, rich in the clean air of the country and the warmth of family.” He paused for a fraction of a moment. “West,” he said. Then he lapsed into a coughing fit. By the time that was over, the subject had changed.
“Was this at Armory Square?” I knew that was the hospital where W had done much of his nursing. I was nearly two generations younger than he was, but unlike most people my age, who had grown up with old men’s war tales and were heartily sick and tired of the subject, I was eager to learn more. I wanted to know as much about W as possible. At times, W and the war became, for me, one and the same thing— inseparable.
“I can picture him yet. An affectionate boy. How lucky to be sent there, if one can be called lucky to be lying wounded and chopped up in such a place. I mean that people called the Armory the model hospital. It was in fact as clean as a whistle, which was not the case with all the others, believe me. The walls were plastered and the floors well scrubbed and swept. There was a great rush to open new hospitals all round the District. The builders got rich fast, throwing up places where the poor boys could bleed and die of dysentery and such.”
He rhymed off the names of the hospitals. There were so many, he said, that the newspapers printed directories of them for the benefit of people who came to town searching for their fathers, husbands, sons and brothers among what W once called the Great Army of the Sick.
“Ones like Finley Hospital and Campbell Hospital were for all intents and purposes like towns, with twenty acres or so of wooden barracks laid out in streets and alleys, numbered and lettered like the capital itself, whole communities of the diseased or badly burnt, a market town for thousands, except that there wasn’t the bustle of a market day, only the motionlessness of the truly mortal, stoic and manly, largely silent, except for the occasional moan that couldn’t be suppressed any longer.
“Carver Hospital really was a kind of city, with city walls and sentries. Oh, there were so many. Lincoln Hospital and Emery and Harewood and Mount Pleasant— lots of them. A fight on the scale of Chancellorsville and they would fill up quickly, the way a good show fills up the theaters and the opera houses.”
At the peak, he said, there were seventy thousand boys and men being put up and cared for in some fashion, as best as could be done in the circumstances, far more people than the whole population of the city before the war. Imagine!
“The convalescent camp might have ten thousand at any one time. The city ran short of the new Wheeling ambulances, so named after the place where the factory for them was. Some people called the vehicle a Rosecrans ambulance, for General Rosecrans, knowing conditions in the field the way he did, had suggested the design.”
“What the French call an hôpital ambulant?” I interjected.
“If by that you mean a two-horse affair with two rows of shelves in the cab, then that’s what it was. They could slot twelve boys in there, six on either side, but it was a tight squeeze. They were far better than the enormous wagons that the army had to hire when the numbers kept rising, letting the freighters and even their teamsters get rich too. You’d see long trains of wagons waiting at the steamboat dock to pick up the stretchers and litters coming over from Virginia. They’d haul ’em up Seventh Street. After a while people didn’t pay any attention. It got so folks in the street didn’t give a glance at the strings of Rebel prisoners coming back either, terrible worn-out and bedraggled boys, flaxen-haired and good-looking, many of them, with ill-matched pieces of uniform, in fact no two dressed alike so not really in uniform at all, sometimes so dirty you couldn’t tell what color they’d been wearing when they set out.
“Rebel wounded, too. We took them in and they were treated. I used to visit boys from North Carolina and Mississippi and Alabama, country boys far from home, and I’d give them the same care and cause for hope as I did the others.”
Before the war, W wrote in a poem that he was the poet of the master and the poet of the slave, of the North and the South equally, the one the same as the other. I wanted to ask him now if he sti
ll had such feelings, if he remembered them, when he was nursing the Secessionist wounded. But what left my mouth was a more specific and direct question, for in his chronology he was about to begin a new chapter, about which I had been wondering for months.
“Is that how you met Pete?” I asked, trying to show my non chalance.
He knew that I meant Pete Doyle, for there was only one Pete. I was fascinated to get some biographical particulars about this mysterious individual who, I understood, was an Irishman who fought on the Rebels’ side, making his friendship with W an improbable thing, I believed. I had heard his name mentioned by others a few times around Camden, only briefly and sometimes in a hushed or knowing tone.
W’s eyes could not conceal what his whiskers hid. He was not the sort of talker who pauses once his conversation is in flood, but he stopped this time for a moment, noticeably.
“No, Pete the Great came later.” He found a little chuckle to go with the words, coating them lightly in chocolate. “I’ll tell you about him.” He meant: “—someday.” And then: “Good old Pete!”
Thereupon he rose from the rocker and went to the corner of the room where the discarded but carefully preserved paperwork was deepest at that moment. In using the imaginary big stick to stir up the piles, he came up with something else that he wished me to see. It was a crude little bibelot of a thing that he had fashioned by folding sheets of stationery in two, cupping each one inside the others and putting a few stitches through the gutter to hold the pages together. He had glued a paper label on the front cover. The whole thing was dog-eared, worn and soiled, as though it had gone through a war. It had. This was one of the homemade memorandum-books W had carried in Washington. It was full of things he jotted down about the soldiers. He would scribble their names, ages, where they were from, the nature of their wounds, and what they wished or badly wanted or needed— postage stamps, horehound candies, underclothing.
“My method,” he said, “was to first of all get a good night’s rest. In the morning I’d bathe, give my clothes a brushing and try to work myself into the best frame of mind. Singing bits from the great arias seemed to give me the extra push I needed. Then I’d set off to the Army Paymaster’s Office to do my bread-work. The job there was steady and not taxing. Some days there were long lulls when I could lift the top of my desk and work on the Blue Book.”
This was his nickname for the 1860 Leaves, bound in blue cloth. He kept a master copy in which he made his revisions for the next edition. His emendations were methodical in the sense of being constantly ongoing. “Clerks had to pay attention. In my case, I had to be very careful to keep from letting my best copybook hand slip into the quick scrawl you’re all too familiar with, as are compositors everywhere who have cursed my penmanship for years.”
It’s true, his script was slanty and jagged, with some strings of letters run together like a row of slum dwellings collapsing into one another. Many people confronted with it found it difficult to decipher. But this was usually the case only with intimate associates, for the issue of legibility arose mostly in connection with quick notes to himself or to others or in hasty fragments of verse— ideas and literary images caught on the wing, as you might say. The more formal sorts of letters were generally quite readable. The more important the stranger to whom they were addressed, the more they seemed to have been laid out not by W the venerable poet but by W the long-ago schoolmaster or W the short-lived house carpenter. That is, they showed either the clarity needed for the slate on the schoolhouse wall or the precision of pencil marks showing where the saw must cut.
(In any case, his hand was far better than my own, I hasten to say. I have observed, however, in going back over early papers, that mine was better in extreme youth, rounder and more perpendicular, but steadily descended into crabbedness as I became W’s friend. To the point, as you can see, Flora— at least I hope you can see, and make out the meaning beneath the poor appearance of the words on the page— I now scribble like a physician instructing his dispenser to prepare some poultice, potion or elixir.)
W went on. “Then, with the day’s labor done sometime in the afternoon, I would take up my haversack and be off to make my rounds.” The haversack was a black canvas bag on a long strap, like the ones common soldiers carried, stuffed with the requested items for that day, plus whatever special foods, books &cet. he thought they might like. W used his own salary to these ends, less only what he put aside for his room and board and what he sent home to his mother. More importantly, he was a master of shaking contributions from the prosperous and patriotic citizens, so that sometimes he would arrive at the hospitals with food baskets and flasks of brandy, and even cash itself. “I brought them the brand-new ten-and twenty-five-cent notes, all crisp and clean, thinking used bills might remind them of that which they needed to forget.” Looking back, it is little wonder he was so successful publishing and selling his own books, as for so much of his career he was forced to do. He threw his energy and talents into a good cause. Sometimes the cause was the plight of the wounded; at other times the cause was the immortal Leaves.
“I would dress wounds,” he said. “I had to learn not to show my shock at what awaited beneath the bandages, which oftentimes were yellow from the infection they covered up. Some of the boys wouldn’t permit anyone but me to change their dressings. They trusted me. I purposely kept my hair long and my whiskers full and bushy; the farm boys and woodsmen and sons of the frontier among them were less comfortable with people too citified in their grooming. And I talked to them as an uncle would whom they were especially close to. Conversation was the essence of my medicine. Sometimes I even got one of them to let out a laugh, but I didn’t turn away from or ignore the ones who wept. Many times boys asked me to hold their hand. Many others didn’t need to ask. When I came in to find someone new in a bed where I had known a familiar face only the day before, I discreetly inquired of the details and later wrote to the mother or wife, or sister, using my notarial hand of course, for I knew that what I sent would be saved and be passed along through the family in years to come.”
W was not one to treat his war stories as yard goods. He did visit the past quite often, though, and when he did so, there were certain topics that could be counted on to transport his emotions. One was the Patent Office both as it had been early in the war, before the losses mocked everyone’s worst expectations, and as it became again later, near the end. You may know the building. It is in the manner of a Greek temple, and it is huge. W said: “Its rooms had echoes, and the echoes were the cries of the dying.” Around the great hall were tall glass cabinets where the scale models of new steam engines and other inventions were displayed as proofs of Man’s imagination, creativeness and talent at resolving problems. Between these cabinets, beds had been set up for young men with wounded bodies, many of whom were dying— proof of Man’s lack of skill at resolving problems. The Patent Office was only one of numerous public structures taken over temporarily for the use of the sick and maimed. (At one point, though not for very long, there apparently were cots in the aisles of the House of Representatives. Good God.)
“The Patent Office was an especially poignant place,” said W. “The smell of death was strong there.” Why it should have been more obvious there than at the other hospitals he visited I cannot say, unless he meant that it was one of the last government properties converted for use as a warehouse for the dying, not one of the first, so that its patients were mostly those who had managed to escape injury until the end of the fighting was nearly at hand. But I dared not interrupt him, as he was about to tell me a remarkable tale.
“There was a soldier named Billy Prentiss, nineteen years of age. The surgeons had taken off his right leg, but the stump never healed properly. His eyes were like glass marbles in the days that followed, and I knew by looking into them that he wouldn’t pull through. I sat with him many an evening. He was very weak. We talked, though his speech was not always logical, owing to the morphine they gave him. One night
he was sweating something terrible. I mopped his face with my kerchief and he took my hand and brought it to rest on his cheek and kept it there. He wished me not to go. When he released me, he suddenly spoke, clearly, coherently, and in a stronger voice than before. I remember his exact words. ‘I hardly think you know who I am,’ he said. ‘I don’t wish to impose upon you. I am a Rebel soldier.’
“‘You tell me something I did not know,’ I answered him. ‘Be assured it makes no difference. Rebel and Union men are as one to me.’
“He pulled on my forearm and I bent low, thinking there was something more he wished to tell me, but in a whisper. But when I was near, he kissed me on the lips. I kissed him in return.
“The story becomes still more tragic. Young Prentiss had an older brother, a young Union colonel. Officers ran young in those days. I found him in one of the other wards. He spent much of his time there praying with intense passion. Both had been struck down in the siege or stalemate at Petersburg that dragged on for ten months in all and at a horrible cost. I visited Billy daily for two weeks, and then he died. It was May of Sixty-five, a month after the war ended. The life went right out of him before he could be reunited with his brother, who was in horrible pain as well but was discharged, as the fighting was over, and transferred to a more permanent bed in my dear Brooklyn. There he too died shortly thereafter, sometime in June. They hailed from Baltimore, where their situations and then their reunion can scarcely have been unique, for perhaps no other state than Maryland supplied a higher percentage of its men to the two opposing armies.
Walt Whitman's Secret Page 3
