Walt Whitman's Secret

by George Fetherling

  “In March, only two months before Billy left us and less than three before his brother followed suit, the Patent Office, that place of Billy’s death and so many others’, had been the scene of President Lincoln’s second inauguration ball. Down below were the rooms of the Office of Indian Affairs where I had found a new position as a clerk, after failing to get work at the Treasury despite a letter recommending me from Emerson himself, the Secretary saying that my writings had put me in a bad odor. I thought I would be safe in this corner of the Department of the Interior, safe in my cellar of the Patent Office, below where the wards, with their bad smell, now were, beneath the floor that the hems of ladies’ gowns had swept clean on the night of the grand celebration. On the last day of June, however, the new Secretary, part of President Johnson’s cabinet following Lincoln’s murder, ordered my dismissal. Someone had riffled my desk and discovered the Blue Book and evidently shown it to the Secretary, who was a pious and God-fearing Methodist man.”

  W had a faraway look. “Eighteen sixty-five. There’s never been a year with more excess emotion and greater public tragedy. Seventy-three, with Mother’s death and what the doctors kept calling my ictus, was as much as I myself could bear, or so I thought at the time. But Sixty-five was a stroke of the soul rather than one of the body.”

  I presumed he was referring to the assassination and not merely to his dismissal, which actually brought him significant and long-lived sympathy and gave a boost to his renown besides. But I didn’t know the half of it, and couldn’t have imagined then what I now understand. The secrets he carried with him, I mean; secrets he transferred to me, as though they were a strange bequest and a legacy that was stranger still.

  The night I am telling you about here was only one of times beyond number in the Mickle Street bedroom I shall never forget, if for no other reason than I have willed myself to remember, thinking there may still be more to learn from them.

  It was around noon on one of the days when W was feeling good enough to get out. I knew the moment I climbed those narrow steps that he was feeling spry, for he had opened the shutters on all three windows. When he was feeling poorly, all of the windows would be covered and the room darkened; when he was somewhat better and had been working in his rocker, the western-most window would be dark and the other two not. This, however, was the first time I’d seen all three simultaneously being put to the use for which they were intended.

  “I’ve bought us the makings of a lunch,” he said. From the pine shelf he took down a small loaf, one little parcel wrapped in oiled paper and another done up in what I recognized as a page of the Camden Daily Post. He took out his penknife. This was like any other small folding knife carried in the pocket and given the name penknife except that W actually used it on occasion for cutting off the tip of a fresh quill, into which he then inserted a steel nib. In this way he made a concession to the modern-day pen without abandoning at least the look of the instrument that had all but faded from use by, say, the time of the Leaves’ first appearance. Moving about the bedroom, he sometimes bumped into a mountain of books and newspapers, occasioning an avalanche.

  “I haven’t felt this good in five or six years,” he said cheerfully, “not since I went on my big travels and saw the true America stretched out in every direction, there for us to bathe in.”

  He was referring to one of his only two long journeys, if you don’t count the sojourn in New Orleans. The first came in Seventy-nine when he was asked to be the official poet of a small group of dignitaries invited to visit Kansas to help mark the silver anniversary of the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 by which the two places became states.

  “My brother Jeff, whose wife, Mattie, had died a few years earlier, was still settled in St. Louie, an engineer in the waterworks, and I paused there for a family powwow before moving on to Lawrence, where the martyred John Brown fought the pro-slavers in the Fifties. Now, some people tell me they find the Plains monotonous, but I thought every mile fascinating. The time flew by as quickly as the landscape out the windows of the brand-new palace-car, but then it’s always that way when you’re going west, following the possibilities, racing the sun to day’s end.”

  “That must have been your first time west,” I said.

  “Well, Jeff and I came back from New Orleans by way of Chicago, but yes, I know what you mean.”

  “Did you have the urge to go all the way, to California?”

  “Had the urge but lacked the means. Or even the opportunity. Events intervened. Made it as far as Denver, though, a town a mile up in the sky, very lively. But the air’s so thin there that I started having spells, some of them quite bad. I retreated back to St. Louie and forted up. There I had the worst spell since Seventy-three. I don’t mind telling you, I thought it was time to pour the coffee on the campfire. I didn’t get back home”—it pleased me to hear W refer to Camden as his home—“till January. I’d been gone two months.”

  As I piece together the fragments of past events, I see that when W returned from that trip, a new chapter in his life was about to be initiated. I refer of course to the way that his health, having improved enough to permit such an excursion at all and seeming to have stabilized at that new level, plummeted treacherously, putting him on the downward slope he was never to leave. But I also mean that this was the beginning of important new friendships and of existing ones deepening and becoming more meaningful to those involved. Around this time he made the acquaintance of William Sloan Kennedy, a local writer in Philadelphia, who would ferry over to spend time with him. You of course know the book he published after W died, Reminiscences of Walt Whitman. Bob Ingersoll, the famous agnostic and rationalist, came into view as well. Maurice, your own friend and mine and one of your leading countrymen, Doctor Richard Maurice Bucke, whom people long thought a genius but under oath couldn’t explain just why, came down from Canada to gather information for the biography he was writing, with W’s assistance, and the two of them attended one of Ingersoll’s fiery orations. W always attracted helpful admirers as easily as stubborn detractors, so that his life was a litany of both favors and gross disservices done for him or to him, respectively. Now, though, is when a strong international circle first formed, made up of figures dedicating themselves to W’s work and thought. So W had to carry less of the daily burden himself, which was just as well, given how his condition kept declining, albeit jaggedly so, with many periods of hope and even laughter during the protracted and relentless slide along the gradient. I suppose you could say I became the sergeant of the army of W’s admirers, an army otherwise made up mostly of officers.

  In the summer of Eighty, after he had spent half a year righting himself from the exertions of the West, W made his second big trip, to Ontario to see Bucke and stay with the Bucke family at their home on the grounds of the insane asylum in the town of London. Bucke was only three or four years into the position as the institution’s director, an appointment that, as you know, saw him through the remainder of his life. This was the only time W ever stepped outside the United States. You know as well as I do the extent to which Bucke saw great mystical significance in W, believing that in him there was some hint of how the human race might evolve in future times, indeed calling him one of the rare figures such as Jesus Christ of Nazareth who prove up the high potential of the mind and spirit. “Prove up” is a phrase our friend Bucke might have used, for as a young man he had prospected for silver in Nevada, before finding himself in medical study and becoming, we’re always told, one of the world’s leading alienists and an expert in the various diseases of the mind.

  W used his penknife to cut the bread into four thick slices. He unwrapped the first paper parcel, containing some cooked beef, and then the second, which housed a block of hard cheese. We discussed Doctor Bucke as we ate our sandwich lunch. “Canada was as America used to be when I was young, long before the war, as long ago as to be nearer Creation than our own time, when city and country lived in harmony and the sky was blue with promise.�
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  He went on in this vein, and mentioned how on his trip home to United States soil he arranged to meet up with Pete Doyle at Niagara and traveled with him, via Montreal, back to Philadelphia, where before too long Pete found a position as a baggage master for the Pennsylvania Railroad. I think W was testing to see if my ears would prick up instantly. They did so, of course.

  Once we finished our luncheon, having consumed all the bread, meat and cheese, W swept the bread crumbs into the wrinkled piece of brown oiled paper, made it into a ball and wrapped it inside the page from the Daily Post, then tossed the result into his little barrel stove. He rubbed his palms together as though to say, “There! That’s done, then!” What he actually said was: “No trace remains. The flames erase.” He wiped his penknife on his trouser leg, folded the blade back up and stuffed the thing into his pocket.

  THREE

  THE DESIRE TO DOCUMENT and the need to conceal. That the tensions between these two urges propel Walt’s life on Earth is so obvious now, as we look back from the vantage point of the twenty-first century. He knows there is no heaven and no hell and won’t even dignify them with capital letters. There’s only a state that your lifetime of dreaming has been preparing you for without your quite realizing it (though some of you have at least suspected). No time as such, but only a long discontinuous story. One never becomes tired of it because, having no body any longer, one never becomes tired of anything at all.

  Let me illustrate my thesis about our Walt. Never has there been a writer more concerned with leaving a complete archive of himself. He was so devil-may-care, so indifferent to posterity, so willing to take his chances come what may, so totally unconcerned with the space he would free up by dying, and in the meantime so alive in every moment, that to prove it he left behind a warehouse-load of note books and letters, diaries and journals, manuscripts and jottings, all carefully worked up or worked over to reveal the untrue and conceal the true when necessary. In private writings he wrestled with feelings. Reviewing these sentences in later life, he decided they were too indiscreet for others to read after his death. He might have burned them in the stove. Instead, he scratched out letters, making he into she and his into her, but fooling no one, about as sophisticated as the number-substitution code a child could crack: 16.4, the sixteenth letter of the alphabet and the fourth. One can hardly expect others to believe a lie one doesn’t believe oneself.

  It was the same with likenesses of himself. He missed no opportunity to go before the lens. Nearly a hundred and fifty photographs are known, about the same number as there are ones of Lincoln, for example. He was one of the most photographed figures of his day, and certainly the most photographed artistic one (though Wilkes, if he hadn’t died at twenty-six, might have matched him in the end). Such was Walt’s obsessive pride in his own humility that he needed to spread the doctrine of his modesty by visual means for all to see.

  Everyone knows the story of the famous butterfly picture. It was the frontispiece of Leaves, the 1889 edition. Walt wears his soft high-crowned sloucher and a big thick cardigan and sits outdoors, supposedly, in a rustic chair inside a photographer’s overheated studio in 1883 in bucolic Ocean Grove, New Jersey. Having complete trust in the poet, a butterfly has landed on Walt’s forefinger. Not even Francis of Assisi has equaled that. Walt said later that the picture showed “an actual moth” that was his friend. When Walt died, his three executors, Bucke, Horace and Horace’s brother-in-law, Tom Harned (for you need a lawyer in a group like that), cleaned out that hovel of a room on Mickle Street, grabbing papers from the floor by the double-armful and stuffing them into hogsheads from a cooperage. Under one wodge of carefully planted detritus they discovered a cardboard butterfly on a wire ring.

  Following the custom of his time, Walt gave photos of himself to callers and admirers, using only the most recent of his sequential personae, as Walt the young rough metamorphosed into Walt the democrat, good gray Walt the tender but manly caregiver, and Walt the sage, practically Confucian in his ancientness and wisdom. He also donated his photograph to charitable causes. When a visitor requested it, he would inscribe the picture with an appropriate and practiced sentiment. When he went to date pictures, however, his imagination took wing. Up to his old tricks again, fooling only himself except in one all-important area.

  Here I am thinking of two photographs of Walt and Pete Doyle together. The better known shows the pair of them facing each other in two chairs arranged like a love seat. Tall Walt slumps a bit, stares into space purposefully, arms folded, while little Pete the Great, hair swept back so his hat will fit, tan coat, arms hanging loosely at his sides, stares at his soul mate. So handsome just a few years earlier, strong of chin and piercing of eyes, dangerous, trouble, he’s now begun to turn jowly, pasty-skinned, someone who’s started to keep count of how many times he can cum in a single night, both with a snoot full of whiskey and without— compare and contrast. Walt fixed the photo as 1865, the year he said they met, or 1866, when what proved to be the path of the future already had made itself known. He had good reason for wanting you to think it was then and not earlier.

  The other photo, which is commonly considered to be post war, was taken over the winter of 1864–5 by a photographer in the District, and shows Walt seated, hands in coat pockets, looking away, toward the West and Democracy no doubt, and Pete, left arm on Walt’s right shoulder, full moustache, staring straight ahead like the soldier he had been so recently, determined, wiry and strong, a real example of what Walt Number One sold himself as being: one of the roughs, not a “kosmos,” to use his word, but certainly one of the roughs.

  Pete comes from Ireland. And “times are bad in Ireland,” people say. This was one of those timeless statements, comparable with observing out loud that the weather has been unsatisfactory of late. His parents marry five months before the first baby is born. Elizabeth and Mary, his sisters, perish in the Great Hunger, which starves a million Irish to death and drives away a second million. As they enjoy doing, the Doyles and their neighbors blame the b——dy Proddies, the godd——ed English. Pete’s father, a blacksmith, emigrates first, taking John, who’s been promoted to eldest child on the death of his brother, also named John. Pete and his mother plus an assortment of three other brothers follow in time. Each easterly gale makes off with another piece of the ship. Pete’s mother keeps her rosary in her hand the whole time, every hour, every day; the beads impress themselves on the skin of her palm. After copious prayers, this second load of Doyles arrives largely intact on Good Friday 1853 and immediately gives thanks to the Blessed Virgin— or everyone does except Pete, who only moves his lips. He is taught by the Jesuits of St. Mary’s in Alexandria but shows no aptitude for what they desire him to learn. He is a scrapper.

  The Doyles thought they could fool the hard times simply by changing continents, but they are mistaken. The hard times track them down and visit them like the Flood, so the family removes to Richmond, much farther south, in the heartland of Virginia rather than along its tawdry top. Father finds work in the Tredegar Iron Works, where many immigrants from Ireland and Germany labor along with the slaves. The Tredegar works will become the Confederacy’s major source of cannon, virtually the only one in fact. By that time Pete, seventeen, is in the Fayette Artillery of Richmond, most of whose guns are graduates of Tredegar, though two are esteemed relics, as they saw service in the Revolution, which indeed makes them almost holy. They were gifts to the Americans a generation earlier from the elderly Lafayette on his nostalgic tour of the Republic. It was on that trip that the old marquis, reviled in France, revered only in America, made a stop in Brooklyn to lay a cornerstone. As part of the ceremony he is introduced to a gang of Sunday school boys. One of them is Walt, age six, a curious child.

  By the time Pete’s unit fights in the Peninsula Campaign, Pete has become a corporal, rewarded for his useful temper and fighting spirit. At one point he is detailed to help track down deserters from the ranks. At Antietam and elsewhere, he and Walt’s
brother George face each other across the field of battle. His comrades help to cover Lee’s withdrawal to Virginia and are the last to cross the river. Pete himself is one of the lucky ones at Antietam, as he is merely wounded.

  A few documents survive. “This day personally appeared before me a Notary Public for the Said City in the State aforesaid, Peter Doyle, and made oath that he is not a Citizen of the Confederate States, that he was born in Ireland, in the Kingdom of Great Britain, and that he came to the Confederate States of America in the Spring of 1860, that he came from the City of Washington, D.C., where he had lived for three or four years that being the first place he stopped at after arriving in the United States. That he came to the City of Richmond, Va. in the year 1860 in search of employment, and remained in the said city until 1861 when he joined the Fayette Artillery (Capt. Cabbell) for one year, and was mustered in the service of the Confederate States where he has remained ever since. That he has never acquired domicile in the said Confederacy, that he owns no property, never paid taxes nor voted in said Confederacy, and that he has no family. He asks the Hon. Secretary of War to discharge him from the Army of the Confederate States.”

  A fortnight later, “the affidant, Peter Doyle, further states on oath that he joined the Fayette Artillery (Capt. Cabbell’s company), on the 25th day of April, 1861, and that he does not intend to acquire a permanent residence in the Confederate States of America and that he intends to return to his native country (Ireland), as soon as an opportunity will afford his doing so. Sworn and Subscribed to me this 31st day of Octr. 1862.”

  Four others from his unit, including Poitras, a Canadian, and Baccigal, from Sardinia, receive discharges as aliens. Pete’s attempt too works like a charm, the way lies frequently do. Thirty-five others desert. Pete is out of the army by the time those who remain fight at Fredericksburg, where George Whitman gets his wound from a fragment of a Southern artillery shell. Pete, with a bad fever, is in a hospital in Richmond when, having failed to leave Virginia as promised, he is arrested as a deserter. Four months after that, he has quit the South for Washington when he is again arrested, by Union troops this time, for “entering & attempting to enter our lines, from the insurgent states, without a permit from the Federal authorities,” him a penniless and benighted subject of Her Majesty, whom he despises, a refugee fleeing the war. The British legation asks William Seward, whom most Americans hate worse than Pete hates the Queen, to investigate. The judge advocate rules that Pete is one of a number in the Old Capitol Prison who are “poor Irishmen who fled from Richmond to avoid starvation [and] will not take oath of allegiance, but will give sworn parole,” which they do.