Walt Whitman's Secret

by George Fetherling

  He had a headache much of the time now and was going through a rough patch of deafness. The pains in the lower belly and, most obviously, his constant difficulty breathing, were further unwavering indications of the curtain about to descend. Before the end of the year he had a bad fall when his game leg gave way as he was making a transit of the hallway. Fortunately, he wasn’t on the stairs. But then he could never have been on the stairs without assistance from Warrie, who was quite protective of him and quite considerate as well, sometimes bringing him flowers for the room.

  I marveled at what I saw, just as I marvel at the memory of it now. Despite what he said at times, W wasn’t simply waiting to die. He would, to the best of his capabilities, carry on being Walt Whitman and let Death surprise him as to the exact timing, shutting him up in mid-sentence and stilling him in mid-motion. In the interim, he would write as best he could and show himself to still be part of the world.

  FIFTEEN

  OCTOBER OF NINETY was the worst month to date, and not only for W but also for those who cared for him. The statement is not meant to contradict Dickens’s famous assertion that the worst of times are often the best of times as well. After all, we are alive, and what else matters, especially if, like me in those days or W’s atheistic friends, one carries no brief for the afterlife, at least not for our own. Flora, I apologize if this offends, but I am beyond mere etiquette, lurching toward some type of truth, I hope.

  W’s influence on me was so overpowering that I sometimes felt like a minor colony of his existence, designed to enrich him while leaving me with traces of his personality and a strong desire to emulate his style in all things. It was in this situation that I turned to writing poetry, reams of it as collected eventually in books such as Chants Communal and Optimos. I struggled hard to make it my own but, as I have only recently been able to admit, it came out sounding like W’s poetry retold in prose— possibly in prose translated from the German! It seemed always to declaim rather than reveal or imply. I convinced myself that my poetry was helping to disperse W’s ideas and philosophies to certain small audiences that his may not have reached, owing to the intolerance that still covered his name in some quarters. At this late hour all I can say is what most people in the circle were too considerate to state at the time: that I was blinded by hubris even in thinking that I served such a modest good by steering a handful of uninformed readers to the genuine article.

  A greater contribution, one for which I was more fitted, was the Conservator, the monthly magazine that I founded that same year and edited in partnership with Anne. We called it the Conservator because it would gather together what needed to be saved before it could be disseminated: the ideas and doctrines of Walt Whitman primarily, but with other content as well, writing on progressive political and economic matters, which W was always too courteous to grumble about in my hearing (or, as far as I know, to complain about at all).

  I taught Anne the California case. She picked up almost at once what had taken me months to learn as an apprentice. Her long graceful fingers plucked the leaden characters from the cabinets with the utmost speed and precision. When I praised her for this as we stood side by side setting the type— she wearing a work apron with great aplomb, though it was too big even for me and made me look and feel like a disenfranchised schoolboy— she replied that her nimbleness was “the only surviving residue of all those years of piano lessons.” She pretended to shiver at the recollection. When we think back over decades of love, oftentimes what we remember is not the impassioned pronouncements but such small moments of unaffected joy in the company of the other person (who most likely recalls totally different examples, or possibly none at all). Through our hard effort, the Conservator attained enough subscribers to help us pay the greengrocer and the butcher.

  I have already said something, something brief, about our wedding. Let me now tell you of the love it codified. I wanted Anne to live under the same roof with me, whether as husband and wife or as a couple who followed “the custom of the country,” as I believe the expression had been on the old Western frontier. She would not dare contemplate the latter option. She knew what violent anger the very suggestion would ignite in her father, perhaps the only person alive who could terrify her. Just why she was so frightened of him I was never certain, though he was, I grant you, a forbidding personage. As for matrimony, what can I say except that he envisioned— demanded— a better match for her. Anne and I did not discuss his wishes in detail. From the very avoidance of the subject, however, I concluded that he would almost rather have her (and certainly me) dead than see her become the bride of someone he appeared to think of as a little immigrant Jew. That I was born in New Jersey made me no less of an immigrant in his eyes. And of course it has long been my fate to be considered both a little Jew by those I wished to accept me on other terms and a non-Jew by fully fledged adherents to the faith.

  This was the Autumn that John Burroughs came to town to visit with W. The essayist on Nature was younger than the poet of Democracy by perhaps twenty years but seemed to be catching up to him in appearance if not in chronology. He dressed much as W did, with only a slight variation in the shape of the soft felt hat. He too had a big nose (though smaller ears than W’s) and wore his white beard to the center of his chest. But none of this, or so I sensed, was done with an air of calculation equal to Bucke’s. Why did so many of W’s most ardent admirers end up resembling him? I too was becoming like W, but in other ways that were both more disturbing and less noticeable if not necessarily less comic (read Chants Communal—no, on second thought, please don’t). Sometimes I felt that I had no individuality except that which I copied from W or picked up from Anne whenever I embraced her.

  My sister, Gussie, she who was born to be a hostess, invited Burroughs to dinner along with Anne and me. She wanted W, assuming he was able to convey himself there with Warrie’s help, to enjoy comfortable surroundings when he conversed with his old friend and admirer. It always amazed and delighted me that Tom, a man of no overwhelmingly obvious literary bent, threw himself so wholeheartedly into these endeavors. Perhaps he wished to learn, or perhaps he simply hoped to hear the authentic table-talk of great men. All of us but Gussie, who was checking on progress in the kitchen, were enjoying ourselves in the parlor, Tom, Burroughs and I on chairs and W on the horsehair sofa with Anne inches away, holding his left hand tenderly in her right. He gazed at her for the longest time, even longer than usual, and then uttered— uttered in a clear voice— words that seemed to turn the air to ice. “I know you, my dear, don’t I? Haven’t I known you somewhere?”

  Tom and Burroughs looked horrified, and I must have appeared the same way to them. Anne, however, did not change expression except in that, as she looked over at us, her eyes widened, like two blue wild-flowers suddenly blooming. Tom punctured the terrified pause in the conversation with an opinion, a piece of news or a pat of gossip. W took in what was being said and even nodded in acknowledgment, but he kept readjusting, re-intensifying, the silent question he put to Anne, as though, given sufficient concentration, he could recollect the precise nature of their acquaintance. She continued to hold his hand, not one bit more tightly than before, but probably, I remember thinking, with a gentle and reassuring current passing from her fingers into his. Cogitating on this later, for the scene obsessed me with its poignancy, I guessed that this was perhaps the same method by which W had raised the pitiable hopes and eased the suffering of wounded soldiers. Bucke, Burroughs and the others could wear their Whitman costumes as they wished, but a part of me had become W. An undetectable breeze had carried a spore from his body to mine, where it had taken root, and now I could see the process repeating itself between the man I so admired and the woman I loved more than speech or written language could possibly say.

  Gussie entered, cognizant that there had been lightning in the room but unaware just what had taken place, and called us to the table. When we sat, with Anne drawing her chair closer to W’s, it was apparent that the
episode had not led to worse. I knew that much when the rest of us laid our linen napkins across our laps and W tucked his into his shirt collar with democratic frontier gusto. Anne and I later determined that she felt the threat retreat even before I did, and Tom was not more than a second behind me.

  “I made the meal myself,” Gussie said to W as she introduced several good sized roasted chickens to her guests. “I am mindful of Doctor Bucke’s comments about the ill effects of too much richness in your diet.”

  “Bucke is a typical scientist,” W replied without a second’s hesitation and obviously in full possession of his senses. “He knows all about things that are knowable, but forgets about the existence of some others that defeat his principles.”

  Burroughs, uncharacteristically, could be heard chuckling softly from deep within his whiskers, and Anne and I smiled in relief. W interpreted our reactions as an ovation, and so began a series of conversational encores on various topics. Everything was back to normal, yet nothing was ever quite the same again. The paradox might have appealed to the man who wrote A Tale of Two Cities.

  No sooner had Burroughs, the equitable and soft-spoken apostle of Nature, concluded his visit towards the end of October than Bucke, the human steamroller, arrived on a whirlwind mission of his own. I found the rapid transition difficult to adjust to. But then, W’s apprehended stroke, a volcano that spit out sparks and emitted some smoke but did not erupt— not this time— was playing harshly with my nerves. Such was what I kept telling myself, using this quite true but simplified explanation to cover, or cover up, a number of other agitations. Some were straightforward: money worries, or the work of getting the Conservator off the ground. Others were deeper, more nebulous, even frightening and dark. Was W’s comradely adhesiveness, though obviously no longer physically lustful, limited to friendships with other males, as many had surmised despite his statements to the contrary? And if it was, had the extraordinary Anne Montgomerie, fearing no one and nothing (save her father) and willing to go anywhere experience might take her— an explorer, you might say, who never set foot in Africa, indeed never left home— inspired him to exempt her from all the restrictions he usually placed on his preference? Obviously, if she for her part loved him, it was a love totally different from that which existed between us as man and woman. But what effect might it have on the relationship she and I shared? or, for that matter, on my association with W or his interconnection with me?

  Reassured that W had eluded further disaster to his health, Bucke was returning to Canada, and asked me if I wished to travel there with him and be his house guest. He must have sized up my predicament, for whatever else he may have been, he was chock full of wisdom and intuition. I asked Anne if she wished to come along, but she said that she should remain in Camden to oversee W’s care while I was away, a matter, barring a real spurt of magma, that consisted of coordinating his assorted doctors and being a sympathetic pair of ears. She seemed sincere in telling me that, yes, I should go, but not for long— no longer than necessary for me to accomplish the thinking I required.

  I then called on W. The day was damp but not cold, so I was surprised to find him in the bedroom wearing his overcoat completely buttoned and the collar turned up. I told him that I needed a rest, as he had needed one when the wounded in the hospitals threatened to overwhelm him. I told him I was going to take his advice about seeing some of Canada but would return soon enough. If he needed me urgently, he could always send me a message at Bucke’s home.

  “In that case,” he said, “you will be in the finest pair of hands.” And with those words, as huge piles of papers were turning to compost at his feet, he gave me one of his secular all-purpose blessings and wished me a safe and restorative trip.

  The evening before Bucke and I caught our train, Anne and I attended a lecture by “Colonel” Bob Ingersoll at the Horticultural Hall in Philadelphia. The event was a benefit for W, who was persuaded to attend, though he was as pale as an eggshell and all too frail-looking up there on the stage where Warrie had positioned him. A large crowd listened to Ingersoll orate on “Literature and Liberty” for an hour and three-quarters; it was easy to lose oneself in the rhythms of his eloquence. The house was full, resulting in a net profit of nearly nine hundred dollars. No doubt the turn-out owed much to the controversy that preceded it. The spectacle of America’s most despised agnostic agitator raising money to help America’s most immoral poet naturally led to an effort to deny them the use of the auditorium; the attempted eviction failed, but not before triggering considerable publicity. Anne and I had been asked to join a very small number of people sitting on stage with W. I felt slightly ridiculous seated there in a straight-backed chair, but Anne was the very picture of radical poise.

  I noticed right after boarding the train that Bucke traveled, and I suppose long had done so, with a copy of the immortal Leaves to consult for its beauties and profundities and also no doubt the visionary properties that interested him even more. I picked it up for a few moments when he had nodded off to sleep for a short time somewhere in the state of New York, and turned to “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” and “Summer Days in Canada,” two of the poems that W had returned with from his spell at the Buckes’ a decade earlier. “Summer Days in Canada” is the less magnificent of the pair though magnificent all the same, but I could not match their images of high Summer with what I was seeing in late October, when the trees were scarlet and the sky slate-gray.

  We pushed on until reaching the region whose center is the grandiloquently named London, from whence Bucke conveyed us to the asylum by carriage, and we arrived at the superintendent’s home in time for dinner with the gracious Jessie Bucke and their children. The Doctor showed the same white-hot energy in being the host that he seemed to bring, in my observation and experience, to all and any tasks or functions. The next day, a Saturday, he let me into his office to admire the shelves and cabinets of W’s manuscripts and published writings. The collection was immense, occupying the entirety of a large wall and extending even into several closets.

  He asked me if I knew what W thought of this treasure hoard.

  “You doubtless know,” I said, “that the handsome prices some of his early books fetch as rarities drive him around the track, for not one cent of the increase in value is returned to his own pocket. I once tried to use this to illustrate a point about Capitalism, but he was deaf to my parable.”

  Bucke smiled and said, “I have heard him rag the collectors all right. But of course he has been very generous with me as he has been with you, and with the boys from Bolton as well, as he knows that we have higher motives than bookselling and that, in our different ways, we are scholars and curators— preservers.”

  He told me that his goal was to turn the collection, which takes in photos, albums, letters and so on, as well as books and the manuscripts that fathered them, into an annotated bibliography. He owned some of W’s letters to Harry Stafford and to Pete Doyle. I would have valued a look at the former, for to me Stafford was a minor mystery within the greater mysteries of W’s life, but Bucke was highly protective of his collection. As to whether this attitude arose out of some fear that I would steal secrets he was saving for his proposed bibliography or jealousy over my being able to speak with W every single day, I cannot say. Still, I was of course actually quite excited to get a look at the Pete letters, though I had to content myself with an all too brief and closely observed peek. Bucke let me hold them while he stood there. I was able to take in only a little of the content. What I could discern was only that the letters were as W had said or suggested: erratic in content and not particularly revealing of much beyond the unlikelihood of so intense an association between two such dissimilar individuals. To distract me, Bucke continued to chatter the whole time, before whisking me away to tour the grounds and examine what he called his other collection. He was referring to the lunatics and madmen gathered together from various institutions elsewhere in Canada. I was permitted to look into several of the cel
ls, as I suppose one must call them, housing some of the most seriously deranged patients. I found everything settled and in good order, with the walls freshly calcimined.

  The next day, Sunday, I was dragooned by the distaff side into attending a Presbyterian service in the town, a tidy and resolutely undemonstrative place, while Bucke himself underwent a Catholic Mass, which surprised me. How did he know I was not one of the German Catholics so numerous in my own country and presumably present in his own as well? What had W told him of my background? I was most eager to be the proper house guest, well mannered, enthusiastic and favorably impressed, so I kept my questions to myself, which is to say, I kept the truth of the matter to myself as well. The truth was that in those days, when I did not protest the practice of religion, I was doing so out of respect for Anne, who clung to at least the appearance of Christian worship as a courtesy, or peace offering, to the savagely Protestant Montgomeries of Philadelphia, especially her father. My own father was somewhat appalled at my caving-in to these niceties, just as his own parents, and their parents before them, would have been horrified at his, and my own, evident abandonment of Hebrew beliefs and traditions. In any case, the following day, being Monday, I felt sufficiently cleansed of sin to bring up the more serious matter of Doyle.