Walt Whitman's Secret

by George Fetherling

  At Carlton Street, they sit and talk in the front room for hours. She describes the property generally and Mazinaw Rock in particular. This is a granite outcropping cast up by the glaciers. It is more than a mile long and, at its zenith, three hundred feet high, accessible by small boat on Mazinaw Lake, which laps demurely at its base.

  “It was a sacred place to the Indians,” she says. “You can see their paintings of beasts and birds, hundreds of them, faintly on the steep granite face.”

  Horace nods approvingly. He remembers how, when Walt was a government clerk in Washington, he actually saw genuine Indian chiefs, in their full ceremonial get-up; they had come in from the West on treaty business. Walt always regarded himself as a commiserative white man. This connection would make Horace even more sympathetic, as though greater sympathy were wanted, with Flora’s wish to, as she explains at length, dedicate the Rock to Walt on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, in 1919, and eventually to build a Whitman Library there where scholars and ordinary enlightened people could come to study and reflect.

  “Flora, go right ahead,” he says at the close of the evening, while warning her of the obstacles in her path. “You will be up against snaps,” he says, taking silent delight in keeping alive one of Walt’s terms for his many critics. “Your best friends will desert you or be indifferent to your work.”

  He sounds as though he is speaking from long and bitter experience gained while spreading the Whitman gospel.

  “But go right ahead, and I will help you,” he continues. “Why, the whole thing is magnificent. Canada’s Gibraltar a monument to Walt! Don’t let anything switch you.”

  She gives him gifts to take back to his wife and their daughter, Gertrude.

  Later she receives a warm note of thanks from Anne that makes her feel as though they are already friends and confidantes, as indeed turns out, magically, to be the case when they meet the following year at the annual Whitman Dinner held in New York on May thirty-first, the great man’s birthday.

  Over the years, Horace has spent many short periods in Canada without being able to explain exactly why but only to note that the country, slowly and eventually, gripped his imagination as it had Walt’s, though Walt supposed it to be a natural paradise unspoiled by industry and Horace likes it for its cities. He has even holed up in Montreal to do some of his writing.

  It is August 1918, four years exactly into the Great War that in Europe is being fought against the Germans but in America is being fought against dissent, and less than a year since the Bolshevik revolution of which Horace excitedly approves. He is in Hamilton, Ontario, a place that he thinks has some characteristics in common with Camden, visiting a Whitmanite couple there who are old friends of his. Flora arrives after a very brief train ride from Toronto to share in his company but is shocked, horribly shocked, when she lays eyes on him again. Horace is ill— sallow-looking, with a slight yellow cast; cheeks sunken; somewhat hesitant and stooped in his movement. She tries to keep from betraying her concern, because Horace himself is speaking as though nothing is amiss.

  “Flora,” he says, “I’ll be at Bon Echo and do anything you want me to do next year except make a speech.”

  She hopes that she can get him to give any number of addresses or lectures, if he is well enough to be present at all and, if so, well enough to speak.

  Anne tries to alter Horace’s unhealthy existence but cannot. Typically he sleeps only four hours out of twenty-four and spends eighteen writing and editing at his small dark office in Philadelphia. The place is in and of itself unhealthy, a rat’s warren of obsolete pieces of paper, including a great many of the very same ones that littered 328 Mickle Street decades earlier. Usually he does not eat with Anne and Gertrude at the house on Elm Street in Camden but snatches a bite at a cheap and brightly illuminated little place before heading back down to the ferry a couple of blocks away. Philadelphia and the other large cities have many more all-night diners than places like Camden possess. In any event, he doesn’t eat on a fixed schedule. Indeed he is reminded of the necessity to eat only when the rumbling of his stomach threatens his concentration. As the Traubels have next to no money, Gertrude wears second-hand clothing, Anne shops at the day-old counter of Camden’s biggest bakers— and Horace will seek out one of the places (it hardly matters which) patronized by taxi-men, soiled doves, coppers, and workers setting out for another day on the seven-to-three shift or just coming off the eleven-to-seven. He will carefully read the menu cards, correcting typographical errors when he finds them, and order the largest amount of the cheapest offering that the coins in his pocket will provide. He has had many a fine meal whose various courses have all been bean or barley soup, a little watery but excellent for the purpose when consumed in volume.

  When he was fifty, he prided himself on having much the same blooming vitality as W crowed about so loudly in his earliest poems. But gradually the situation began to change. In O-nine, while crossing back to Camden on the ferry, he was knocked off his feet by a nervous horse. The frightened animal trampled him, breaking a number of his ribs. While hardly so severe a misfortune as W’s initial brain-attack of Seventy-three, the incident has the same power to foretell the direction the future will take. Horace was a suspiciously long time recovering, with Anne nursing him at home as he chafed to return to his office. From that point forward, he has never had full confidence that his body isn’t planning something else. So there is at least a bit of relief to be found amid all the dread and fear when, in the year the European war breaks out, he is found to have a leaky valve in his heart.

  As he recuperates, Anne tries to keep him from seeing the newspapers, thinking that the news is terribly bad for him, as the war has defeated all hope of a peaceful Socialist world. But his friends visit constantly and they recount and recite the day’s events. Soon, how ever, some of these same visitors are being hounded by the authorities.

  Almost out of the blue, one evening he says to Anne, “If Father were still alive, he’d probably be rounded up as a German-born radical, though he never harmed a soul in his life.”

  In one way, it is perhaps all to the good that Horace will not be around to share in the strange triumph of his friend Eugene Debs. Debs is the unionist agitator sent to prison in Ninety-four on a charge of inciting the great Pullman strike that paralyzed all railroad traffic west of Chicago. He served his sentence in Moundsville, one of the most hellish prisons in the country, but was at least permitted to do some reading and writing there, and made himself a crude desk for his cell.

  Debs has been the Socialist candidate for president of the United States in 1900, 1904, 1908 and 1912. Horace and his circle are proud when, in 1918, Debs makes a speech urging American men to avoid the draft. They are horrified when, in retaliation, he is tried under the Espionage Act and sent to the Atlanta penitentiary. In 1920, while incarcerated there, he runs for the presidency again, as a write-in candidate. In the country of fifty-four million people, he receives an astounding 913,664 votes, a feat made possible partly by the fact that this is the first national election in which women enjoy the franchise. Horace does not live to see this.

  America has waited out the first part of the war until Britain, Canada, Australia, France and others weaken the Germans at staggering costs to themselves. But then in 1917 the U.S. enters the conflict for the final phase. The exact cause and effects are of course impossible to state scientifically, but Anne believes that this development is what has made her husband’s heart condition not only recur, not only worsen, but become permanent.

  Washington enlists itself in the war in April and Horace has a heart attack in June that very nearly kills him. A coincidence? Horace is alone at the time, for Anne and Gertrude have gone to New York to finalize arrangements for Gertrude’s wedding, scheduled to take place there two days later. One day after the heart episode, Horace is feeling strong enough to put in another all-night appearance at the office. When his stomach reproaches him for neglect, he eats a big plate of be
ans at a lunch-room he knows, where he has a lively but disturbing discussion about the war with the waiter, a German who has lost two brothers in the fighting. Then he catches the ferry, only to discover when he gets to Camden that he has just missed the last streetcar. The night is clear and warm, so he decides to walk. Late that evening, he has a second attack similar to the first. Breathing becomes quite difficult and he suddenly finds himself so weak that his arms remain at his sides.

  His friend David Karsner, who is the biographer of Debs, has been staying at Elm Street the past little while, and the following day the two men leave for the ceremony in New York, Karsner convinced that his comrade has had another heart attack but Horace refusing to entertain the idea, much less admit how damaging it was. Looking back, Karsner and Anne will find it incredible that Horace survived the trip. He does his clearest thinking when away from home. So when visiting New York he is able to sort out his honest thoughts. There he comes to terms with the terror he has been trying to avoid and realizes that when the Traubels return home, he must go to Philadelphia and close his office. Shut the place down. Turn out the lights. Lock the door.

  Thus it comes about that he takes his seat at the desk for a final time, and spends a couple of hours letting various Mickle Street relics find their place in his hands. He allows his mind to play over the course of his relationship with W, applying clear reasoning, he hopes, to the question of to what extent, and how and why, his own life was changed forever by their association.

  The overwhelming majority of his Mickle Street notes aren’t written up yet but still sit, and most probably will forever do so, in these cabinets and cartons, wherever they may end up. If he is going to truly follow W’s example, he too must be a seeker after truth. With whatever writing energy might remain to him— perhaps more will come once he has rested for a significant period— he will begin a memoir of everything he still remembers but deliberately has never committed to paper. He doesn’t know how long such a document will be, only that, given the actuarial circumstances that prevail, it must be written quickly; but then he always has been a fast writer, as, in his experience, authors who work through the night usually are. Whether such a thing could be published, at least during what remains of his own lifetime, or perhaps ever, who knows? That will depend on whether tolerance ever returns to America or continues to be chipped away. Perhaps for that reason one of the Canadians or the English should become its guardian. In any case, it should go to someone who loves what W stood for but never made his acquaintance, a natural teacher but a discreet person all the same, someone who is a confident personality without being a censorious or condemnatory individual, someone who might be willing to accept the truth and then understand it— and proceed from there in one fashion or another, basing decisions on whatever conditions may be current at the time. He settles on Flora MacDonald. So resolving, he packs up whatever material he knows he will need to freshen his memory, making a note to have it delivered across the river. Then he takes one last panoramic look at the old place, pulls the chain that operates the green-shaded lamp overhead, and makes his way back to the ferry with the most prudent and conservative slowness.

  Month after month, he takes it easy physically while building up the muscles of the mind. Most of the words come easily enough once he gets into the swim, but the actual act of composition is tiring, particularly as his eyesight is now poor and he must write less quickly than in the past and in a large hand. He works an hour a day, possibly an hour and a half. He has made very substantial progress by the time the leaves have fallen from the trees and the winter of 1918–19 approaches.

  When he needs another big shot of new surroundings to get him through the wrenching details of W’s own last illnesses and diseases, he and Anne accept an invitation to visit radical friends in Connecticut. There another attack strikes him, one the doctors are convinced comes closer to stopping his heart altogether than the previous ones combined. He has walked with a slight limp to his left leg ever since that horse fell on him, and the latest heart episode had made the stiffness more pronounced. He must now drag the leg behind him as he pulls himself forward with a cane, this man who used to race up several flights of stairs to reach the office, for the building has no elevator. His mind goes back to Doctor Bucke’s crippled limb, and this helps him remember still more. Despite the fact he is getting far less exercise, he loses weight rather than gains it. Perhaps this is the effect of his diet. The doctors back in Camden all tell him that he must ask the heart to carry around as light a load as possible without becoming so thin as to compromise his system in some new way.

  Two important tasks remain. He and Anne move to New York for a few weeks to bask in the presence of their infant grandson and lift some of the burden from the boy’s parents, Gertrude Traubel Aalholm and her husband, Malcolm Aalholm, both musicians. They move into a rooming-house on West Twentieth, around the corner from the Aalholms. A week into their stay there, Horace suffers— no one knows what to call it. Not a heart attack in the sense of pain or even discomfort, nothing to do with the left side as distinct from the right, but just a sudden and deep weakness that leaves him facing a new level of disability. His mind, however, remains vigorous. His manuscript moves forward.

  He and Anne accept the kind invitation to share the Karsner living quarters, the basement and ground floor of an apartment building on Beekman Place, right on the East River. Horace is delighted to be able to write at the very desk that Debs made in prison. It occupies pride of place in the front room, where Horace can look out directly onto the life of the river and the Brooklyn waterfront in the distance. The similarities between past and present are becoming eerie. Worse than eerie— frightening. Especially at night when he lies in bed next to Anne, when fear of dying in his sleep keeps him awake, and alive, until some force delivers another morning right on schedule. Writing through lameness and weakness, always fearful of new outrages against his body yet accepting of them as well, remembering the old days, seeing Brooklyn when his eyes open and likewise when they shut, thinking about the war, he wonders whether some angel, or devil, has taken hold of him, forcing him to end his own days as W ended his. The room actually looks a bit like Mickle Street, except that it’s clean and neat as a pin. In whose past is he being held prisoner, his own or the other person’s?

  He even finds himself beginning to sound much more like W than he had years ago when he used to consciously attempt such mimicry, producing an approximation of the strange juxtaposing of suspicion and admiration that W himself so often provoked in people of both classes. For example, the verb to freeload. The Traubels are acutely aware of freeloading on the Karsners, and embarrassed by it. One day, after the freeloading enters its fourth week, Horace is playing with Walta Whitman Karsner, who is three going on four, when without warning the feral dogs attack once again and bite into his heart with their sharp white teeth. But he survives one more time. Barely, but he survives.

  The Brevoort Hotel at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street is where the leading Whitmanites gather for a dinner each May thirty-first. This time, two hundred people will be celebrating W’s centennial, and Horace is determined to be there, however much further damage he might do himself in the process. He knows almost everyone at the tables; from the gossip network that is even more efficient than telegraphy, they know that he is dying. As if to reinforce the point, he eschews the head table and sits at the back, by the door, in case he should have another meeting with the snarling mastiffs.

  The event is taking place immediately prior to passage of the new Espionage Act and the Palmer Raids, in which American citizens such as Emma Goldman are forcibly deported (in her case to Russia, where over the next decade she will lose many of her radical admirers, temporarily at least, by exposing the horrors still taking place there routinely, long after the Revolution). Even that young man named Hoover in the Treasury Department is a few months away from compiling lists of thousands of Reds and radicals. The atmosphere in the country is such that matters
similar to these, rather than the literary and spiritual small talk of past years, dominate most of the speeches. Only one guest, someone with whom Horace has corresponded for years but meets now for the first time, speaks with eloquence of W’s views on writing and society: Helen Keller. At the apex of the evening there is a lengthy tribute to Horace, who replies to the compliments as best he can, though by now his voice is low and muffled, as though W’s voice, as it was at the very end, were being superimposed over his own.

  Flora’s dedication of the Rock at Bon Echo does not follow hard on the celebrations in May, for she has planned the event for August, one of only two months on the calendar when tourists foreign and domestic can take good weather for granted in that part of Ontario. For Horace, though, this will be the climax of everything. Rough as it is, his manuscript is three-fourths finished, and he has got through the night at the Brevoort without incident. His spirit and mind are peppy even if his corporeal self is not. Some friends headed for the same destination go with him and Anne to Grand Central. Lest any dull-witted people miss the gods’ irony, he is wheeled to the platform in what’s now simply called a wheelchair. He has a slight heart attack en route to Montreal.

  The reason Bon Echo is as unspoiled as Flora’s literature promises is that it is terribly remote and difficult to get to. At Windsor Station in Montreal, you leave the Canadian Pacific from New York and take a westbound train about two hundred and fifty miles to a place called Napanee, which sits a few miles north of Lake Ontario. From there you wait for a train to take you straight north to Kaladar, a distance roughly equal to that between Kaladar and your destination. The country is made of granite, limestone and thin soil, the lakes look cold and deadly. God help the people who farm here, but many do.