Walt Whitman's Secret

by George Fetherling

  The downstairs room was furnished with a davenport and chairs and decorated with two busts, one of Elias Hicks, the other of W himself. Hicks was the Quaker divine who farmed on Long Island and whose common-sense democratic theology led to a great schism amongst Quakers. When W was a young boy, he heard Hicks, who must have been about eighty years old, preach a lesson, an event that had gained some powerful hold on W’s imagination and philosophy. “Hicksite-ism may be found on every page of the New American Bible,” he said. This was the name he sometimes gave to the immortal Leaves in candid conversation, whether in jest or not I can’t say. The other conspicuous object in the front parlor was a model of a sailing ship, which I believe had belonged to Missus Davis’s late husband.

  Although I did not mention that I was now resolved to keep a daily memorandum of his conversations, I was aware soon enough that our relationship had changed on that Wednesday when I jotted my first such entry, trying to find a style that would capture the cadence of his speech, for W’s bump of intuitiveness was one of the most remarkable of all his gifts. If he was his own critic, using his experience as a newspaperman to write anonymous praises of Leaves and see them published in the press, then his friends were his biographers: his wartime associate O’Connor, whom he hailed for his “Keltic” qualities, and of course Doctor Bucke. Now, knowing that he was in steep though not unchecked decline, he instructed me what to do after he was gone. “When you write about me one day, tell the whole truth,” he would say, unaware— no, I mean “with no proof”—that of course I was writing about him already, every night, as prelude to my reading in Socialism and other subjects, sometimes until the dawn announced itself. He began handing me newspaper cuttings to read and discuss. He extracted letters from the bottomless midden of paper. One was a letter from England more than a decade old concerning some small Whitman controversy of that place and moment between two of his many admirers there.

  As he received letters from abroad, so too did he receive visitors from all over, visitors high and low. One pilgrim from the British Isles declared that his two ambitions in America were to meet W and see Niagara Falls, both sites being conspicuous wonders of Nature. Others of the first rank among writers and artists, such as William Michael Rossetti, brother of the more famous Dante Gabriel R., took W to be a man of high literary standing, but of course they were not American. In any case, W once spoke of them as “the tribe of the Oxford-Cambridge Israel who have felt that, despite their great scholarship, layers on layers of erudition,” they had something in common with him or at least with the immortal Leaves, as though the two could be viewed separately.

  Soon he was giving me such letters to take away, knowing, without the subject being raised, that I would transcribe them into the nocturnal journal of our conferences. He always claimed that he’d come upon a certain letter by chance while “mousing” in the hillocks of paper. “I clean house from time to time,” he said, sitting in the bedroom, which in fact showed few signs of such activity. The best Missus Davis could do was to work around the considerably smaller stacks of newspapers and letters in the parlor. At least this way she prevented it from resembling too closely the room above, whose door was always closed and often locked, even when W was inside, a habit that would prove worrisome later on, as his periods of comparative health gave way alarmingly to ones quite different. He went on: “Give you bits— hunt them— that I think might be of service to you. Service or interest. The rest— most of the things— go into the fire.” His gaze floated toward the little round stove. “I know you are jealous of that fire. Well, that stuff is trash, notwithstanding your appetite for it. Trash, trash, trash.” This was mousing in a rather different sense. We were playing a cat-and-mouse game, and I was not the one that purred.

  He would speak a brief preface to each piece as he passed it to me. “I want you to have this letter of William’s for your archives,” he said one day, giving me one of the letters from O’Connor that he cherished. “It would be valuable enough if it was only William’s, but it happens to be more than that. You see the date—1865.” The letter dealt with the defense of W that O’Connor was writing following his friend’s dismissal from the Interior Department, the manuscript that became The Good Gray Poet.

  For the most part W seemed perfectly at ease giving me his treasures. The exception was the famous Emerson letter of 1855. I kept asking if I could take another look at it. He would then claim that he would lay it aside to show me the next time it turned up, which it never seemed to do. This was a further illustration of how he found it necessary to be wily in certain matters. And then there was one instance in which he was only provisionally generous. “Take this away,” he said, thrusting a letter from Tennyson at me. “But take good care of it. The curio hunters would call it quite a gem.” Several times later on he asked for the temporary loan of it. He even sent visitors to my place with requests that they be allowed to read it on the premises.

  Four years earlier, shortly after W moved into Mickle Street, thirty of his admirers had banded together and surprised him with the gift of a buggy. The donors included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Twain, John Greenleaf Whittier and Edwin Booth. Holmes, the famous physician and writer, was one of the doctors who always appeared to take to W, perhaps because he was such a good case for study. As for actors such as Booth, W counted himself an omnivorous watcher of plays, both comedies and drama, though this was most true in his New York days before the war, for in Washington he was far too preoccupied with tragedies, the kind performed in the hospitals, and in Camden too limited by the encroachments of age and illness.

  But the soothing effects of his many friendships could not make up for the cumulative effects of all the public abuse he had endured, which marked him for the rest of his life. The critics, he told me that Spring of Eighty-eight, had given him a devil of a time, and he was “even to-day not accepted by the great bogums,” though it could be easily shown that the statement was less true, far less so, than in the past. The disapproval he had accumulated over the years naturally disposed him well toward some writers but not others, and membership in the one category or the other was not determined by literary criteria.

  He presented me with the correspondence that passed between Booth and himself in which he sent Booth a likeness and asked if in return he might have one of Booth’s father, Junius Brutus Booth, the great Shakespearean whom he had often seen on stage. A long time passed before I ever heard him speak of the patriarch’s middle son, John Wilkes, except in connection with the public lecture on the Lincoln murder, which he was asked to give at various times.

  Regarding John Greenleaf Whittier, well, some poets adhere to one another and others mutually repel. It is in the nature of poets to be this way. Whittier was one of the New Englanders everyone read in school. No one would ever think to look there for W, whom you might expect to feel no sympathy for Whittier; but because Whittier supported him, though apart from the buggy fund more passively than actively, W responded warmly. But writers who were safely dead had the strongest claim on him. He read and reread the novels of Sir Walter Scott, who had been born almost two decades before W’s father (who died in Fifty-five, the same year that Leaves first appeared). Not only was Scott safely in his grave, a figure from benign antiquity unable to slander anyone even if he wished, but the grave was on the other side of the Atlantic. Writers closer to W in both chronology and geography, usually ones much younger than himself, could rile him by their existence, most especially if they were more literary. Henry James was “only feathers to me,” he said. But then, whereas Scott was a Scot, James was an American who pretended to be English. When Matthew Arnold, slightly W’s junior, died that Spring, W said to me, “He will not be missed.” Later, when the subject of Arnold came up, he put it this way: “There is no gap as with the going of men like Carlyle, Emerson, Tennyson.” Of Arnold’s work he said, “As poetry it is fragile. It lacks substance.”

  Emerson of course was the one author he admired with almost no
qualification, Emerson who had given Leaves such a hand-up so long ago and who, while he never repeated the tribute, never revoked it either. W thought him “in ways rather of thin blood,” this man who brought the mind to Nature, but I know how important to W their few meetings were. W thought the great New Englander “was born to be but never quite succeeded in being a democrat.” He was, however, an American through and through, the greatest of American idea-men and philosophers, and this was no unimportant thing to W; essential, in fact. He urged Emerson on Anne as a vital subject for study. He was forever advising her and doing little kindnesses for her.

  The distinguished subscribers to the fund for W’s buggy didn’t seem to know that W was sufficiently prosperous to have bought his little frame house on Mickle Street mostly with cash on hand. Still, he was never (as he liked to phrase it) flush with money, and stories about his penury and want appeared in the papers occasionally (sometimes only to be disputed by others). He may have been embarrassed by these appearances, but he gladly accepted the benefits, including a purse collected by poets and authors in England (including Feathers James). The buggy was very much appreciated. All agreed that W should get more air, even if it could no longer be country air except when he managed to visit his young friend Harry Stafford on the Stafford farm.

  W had concluded reluctantly that he was no longer up to hitching and handling a horse himself, so he acquired a young driver named Bill Duckett, to be paid by a yearly subscription from friends. Later, Duckett moved into the small bedroom next to W’s big one, but he came and went. When going the last time, he owed Missus Davis a not insignificant amount of money, for which she took him to court. He was succeeded as a driver by Missus Davis’s son, Warren, like his late father a mariner, whom Walt forever called “a lusty fellow,” one of his highest-ranking compliments. By the time I became so involved in his life, W was out driving only about once a week, despite the fact that another friend had secured a ferry pass for both him and the vehicle.

  “I am getting more and more satisfied by my bed and my chair,” W said. “Which is suspicious.” Yet there were still times when he had greater mobility than usual, and might be said to have resumed being spry, at least for a few hours.

  You expect that most elderly sick people, and I proffer myself as an example, are crotchety when they’re in pain or terribly frightened. This is perfectly understandable but still tests the patience of those who are caring for them (again I confirm, sadly, that I speak from experience, though Anne has never complained out loud). As W was often uncommunicative even on good days, so too was he prone to strong emotion on his bad. Or, rather, there were certain subjects that roused him to praise or condemnation regardless of what type of day he was having when the trigger was pulled.

  One of the touchy subjects was Thomas Eakins, the artist. “Eakins is not a painter, he’s a force!” W said when talking to me about the portrait of him that Eakins had done. They appeared to put up with a great deal from each other. For example, Eakins always addressed W as “Mister Whitman,” much to the latter’s bemused intolerance. W considered even the use of “Walter” an affront to democratic values.

  I wondered whether this bond between Eakins and W might have been rooted in a shared propensity for scandal. Eakins was an exceptionally serious individual, slender but muscled, and had steely eyes that must have terrified his students as they did me. He had been the director of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia before being discharged or asked to resign following accusations of improper conduct. The gossip was pretty thick for a while. It centered on the story that Eakins outraged morals not merely by having female and male pupils together in one class, drawing from the figure, but by yanking off the model’s loin drapery in pursuit of some point or theory, leaving him nude before all.

  Once freed of the position, Eakins was able to throw himself even more into his own paintings, including a portrait of W from life. W sat for painters and sculptors many times, and usually was much pleased to do so. Still, the fact that the results of a painting were so much more difficult to anticipate than those of a photograph was one of which I imagine he was keenly aware. Certainly the Eakins picture, showing W facing to the viewer’s right in three-quarter profile, was difficult for its subject to embrace at first. Eakins’s use of color was different from most people’s, muted but daring, certainly complex— sophisticated, I suppose you would say. Also, W’s mouth looked odd, the lips pursed a bit perhaps under his moustache and whiskers, maybe in a little knowing smile. It was the mouth of a man with secrets; I often saw the expression in real life. In any event, W did come to admire the portrait enormously, calling it the best &cet. Eakins let W keep it at Mickle Street when it wasn’t being shown in a gallery. When W had it in his possession, he sometimes moved it around the bedroom, following the track of the most advantageous light.

  One evening, when he was lying next to the Eakins portrait as though to elicit flattering remarks about either it or the model, he greeted me by saying, “I am growlin’ with a bellyache. What is the use of poetry or anything else if a man must have a bellyache?” Some days he complained that he was tottery when he stood up. Other times he used a different phrase, saying the dizziness had made him feel “uncertain on my pins.” At still others he said nothing of the legs but told, more ominously, of problems with even simple tasks of memory, of difficulties “on the top.” Certain days he appeared quite hard of hearing too.

  Although I might be making it sound as though he bemoaned his fate, he was actually bearing up bravely or at least dispassionately, as though he could distance himself from his ailments and diseases and look at them through another’s eyes. “My blood is so sluggish,” he would say. “My pulse is so slow. But what’s the use of grumbling? Everything don’t come my way, but lots of things do.” When he uttered those optimistic words, however, he was too weak to leave his bed, that is, too weak to work on the book that was bedeviling him.

  He showed me a parcel of newspaper cuttings, copies of old letters &cet., tied with twine. He wanted somehow to translate this careful if carelessly wrapped accumulation into a new book of prose and poetry combined, to be called November Boughs, for he was in the November of his time on Earth, he said. I feared that the calendar might have jumped ahead to early December.

  He struggled to work on the manuscript. “I get up mornings and say: ‘This is the day,’” he told me. “But somehow, before the day is over, I see this is not the day. Yet it will come out, and before long, God— and you too, Horace Traubel— willing, for I shall need you to help me through with this expedition. If you go back on me now, I might as well fold my wings.”

  There was no chance I would go back on him of course. It was part of my job and my duty to serve as the proxy for his pins, just as at other times I had to be a diplomat, gently prodding him to finish writing what he had begun.

  He wanted to compose an essay on Elias Hicks, a task he had been attempting intermittently for about forty years. He said that this was the last piece of November Boughs still not complete. The organization of his thoughts on Hicks, while firm enough in his mind, had yet to be fixed on paper. On several occasions he promised the piece to me the following day, all the while blaming his infirmities and apologizing for how, he said, they had added to my burdens.

  “I thought you said it was ready yesterday,” I would chide him.

  “So I did. So it is. About ready. But sometimes that covers a multitude of cautions.”

  Very soon afterward, news of the imminent book started appearing in the newspapers. “That ought to spur me on,” he said, “though as you know, I am not easily spurred.” I presumed that he himself (though possibly my brother-in-law, Tom Harned) had brought the information to the editors’ attention. I held my tongue. W naturally was anxious that November Boughs appear “before I light out.” I was in favor of whatever would contribute to its speedier birth, while understanding that he himself was the only obstacle to its appearance. As the weeks went by,
he was fully, repeatedly and deservedly apologetic.

  “This will mean a lot of extra work for you,” he said. “It will tie you down every day to some routine. Are we to make a regular arrangement? I haven’t much money, but such money as I have I ought to share with you.”

  “I would not be interested in doing the work for money,” I said.

  “It’s not hire. It’s only a sort of Communism.” He knew how to flatter my principles. “Why shouldn’t we arrange that amiably together?”

  “The arrangement was made long before money was mentioned,” I said, for we had achieved a silent understanding of my rôle long before.

  When he heard this, he drew me near him, wrapped me in both arms and kissed me. “This is a solemn pact to be ratified by love,” he said. “You have saved my book. Of the people I know, you are the most fitted to help me just now. You know books, writers, printing-office customs. Best of all, you know me, my ways and what I need to be humored in.” His gratitude was joyous and childlike.

  As a rule, Tom and my sister Agnes, whom everyone called Gussie, confined their entertaining to Sunday supper parties beginning at about one o’clock so that Tom, who needed to be sharp in court Monday morning, would not be kept up late. But toward the end of May Eighty-eight, when W would be turning sixty-nine, an exception was made. The Harneds invited W, Anne and me, along with quite a number of others, including a big helping of Tom’s fellow Republicans, to one of their Sunday affairs. Having done so, they then turned around and threw W an ambitious party on the actual anniversary of his birth, the last day of the month. That after all was the milestone that most or all of us, not excluding the patient himself, had been by no means certain he would reach.