Outlaw Marriages (2 page)

Peter Doyle was born into a working-class family in Limerick City, Ireland, in 1843. When Pete was eight years old, the Doyles boarded a ship and came to the United States, settling in northern Virginia, just a few miles south of Washington, D.C. His father worked as a blacksmith, and his mother took in sewing while also caring for the couple's eight children.
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Little is known of Doyle's early years beyond the fact that his formal education was minimal. When he was seventeen, he enlisted in the Confederate Army. He saw heavy action in several battles and was wounded at Sharpsburg in 1862. Early the next year, he was taken captive and imprisoned for about a month before being released on the condition that he leave the military.
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Doyle then moved to the nation's capital, initially working as a blacksmith's helper at the Washington Navy Yard. His father had died by this point, so he became the head of a household that included his widowed mother and several younger siblings. By 1865, Doyle had landed a job as a conductor on the Washington and Georgetown Railroad line, which traveled along Pennsylvania Avenue.
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Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle met in early 1865 when the older man was a passenger on the streetcar where the younger man sold tickets. “Walt had his blanket—it was thrown round his shoulders—he seemed like an old sea-captain,” Doyle later recalled of their first encounter. “He was the only passenger, it was a lonely night, so I thought I would go in and talk with him. Something in me made me do it, and something in him drew me that way. He used to say there was something in me that had the same effect on him. Anyway, I went into the car.”
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According to Doyle's account, the two men made physical contact within a matter of minutes after they'd met. “We were familiar at once—I put my hand on his knee—we understood. He did not get out at the end of the trip—in fact went all the way back with me,” Doyle said. “From that time on, we were the biggest sort of friends.”
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Whitman going “all the way back with me” meant that the poet stayed on the streetcar until Doyle ended his shift and the two men then spent their first night together. Doyle recalled, “It was our practice to go to a hotel on Washington Avenue after I was done with my car. I remember the place well—there on the corner.” The Union Hotel was at the intersection of what today is 30th and M Streets in the city's Georgetown neighborhood.
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Whitman and Doyle being drawn to each other was, in several respects, a classic example of opposites being attracted. Whitman was forty-five years
old, six feet tall, and heavyset, while Doyle was twenty-one years old, five feet eight inches tall, and slender. Whitman also was a highly literate man, while Doyle had no more than a rudimentary education—the poet soon began tutoring him in spelling, arithmetic, and geography. On top of these other differences, Whitman supported the Union cause, while Doyle had fought for the Confederacy.
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Despite the men being attracted to each other, family circumstances kept them from living together. Whitman repeatedly told his young partner that he wanted them to set up housekeeping as a couple, but Doyle insisted that it was his duty, as the oldest unmarried son, to live with and care for his widowed mother. And so, Whitman had to be satisfied with spending most nights with Doyle, either at the hotel or at the poet's rooming house, while the two men maintained separate residences.
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Beginning the night they met and continuing for the next eight years, Whitman and Doyle were inseparable. The poet wrote his friends about Doyle, describing the younger man as a “hearty full-blooded everyday divinely generous working man: a hail-fellow-well-met.” Flattered by such words, the high-spirited Doyle took to calling himself “Pete the Great.”
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The couple's favorite activity was hiking. “We would walk together for miles and miles, never sated,” Whitman told one biographer. “Often we would go on for some time without a word, then talk—Pete a rod ahead or I a rod ahead. It was a great, a precious, a memorable experience.” Doyle also spoke of these hikes, saying Whitman was “always whistling or singing” to express his pleasure. “We would talk of ordinary matters. He would recite poetry, especially Shakespeare—he would hum airs or shout in the woods.”
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Their most frequent destinations were in or near Alexandria, Virginia. This meant they walked south from downtown Washington, crossed over the Potomac River via the Navy Yard Bridge, and then continued south for a total distance of between five and ten miles, depending on their exact starting and ending points.
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The couple also spent time together while the younger man was working. After Whitman finished his clerk's job for the day, he'd climb aboard Doyle's streetcar and ride along for the rest of the route, positioning himself as close to “Pete the Great” as he could. One observer later described Whitman as “resting against the dash, by the side of the young conductor—evidently his intimate friend.”
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Whitman didn't have much extra money at this point in his life, but Doyle had even less. So the poet sometimes had clothes made for his young partner. There were also occasions when Whitman surprised Doyle by bringing
him bouquets of fresh-cut flowers, much as a doting husband might bring his wife.
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Whitman falling in love had a powerful impact on his writing. Literary scholars have identified several poems—and specific lines from many others—that they attribute to Doyle having become the poet's muse.

The most famous of the works credited to Whitman's relationship with Doyle is his tribute to Abraham Lincoln, “O Captain! My Captain!” This poem became extremely popular soon after Whitman wrote it, the only one of the poet's works to appear in anthologies while he was still alive. Scholars say Whitman wrote the piece largely because “Pete the Great” had been an eyewitness to Lincoln's assassination in Ford's Theatre on Good Friday, April 14, 1865. Doyle later shared his recollections of that night with one of Whitman's biographers:
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“I heard that the President and his wife would be present and made up my mind to go. There was a great crowd in the building. I got into the second gallery. I saw everything on the stage and was in a good position to see the President's box. I heard the pistol shot. I had no idea what it was, what it meant—it was sort of muffled. I really knew nothing of what had occurred until Mrs. Lincoln leaned out of the box and cried, ‘The President is shot!' I needn't tell you what I felt then, or saw. It is all put down in Walt's piece. That piece is exactly right.”
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Whitman's poem portrays Lincoln as a ship captain who dies just as the craft he's piloted safely through a storm—the poet's metaphor for the Civil War—is arriving at its harbor. Literary scholars believe that Whitman chose the sea-journey approach to describe Lincoln's death in an effort to please Doyle, referring back to the Irishman's journey to America. The ship that Doyle and his family were aboard had almost wrecked during a violent storm on Good Friday night.
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A second poem that clearly shows Doyle's influence is the one titled “Come Up from the Fields Father.” The work is unique among the hundreds that Whitman created in that it's the only one that uses a first name—“Pete”—to identify a fictional hero.
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More evidence of Doyle inspiring Whitman can be found in works that appeared in the 1867 edition of
Leaves of Grass
, the first published after the men began their outlaw marriage. Among the specific lines that scholars point to is one about an old soldier burying his “son of responding kisses”—the old soldier is thought to be Whitman, while the son who's being kissed is Doyle. Another line is “Many a soldier's kiss dwells on these bearded lips”—with “these bearded lips” alluding to the facial hair that Whitman wore. A
third line that scholars cite is one that tells of a young man in camp being valued “more than all the gifts of the world”—the phrasing speaks to Whitman's love for Doyle being more important to him than worldly goods.
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For some scholars, the strongest impact of Whitman's relationship with Doyle isn't found in the poems he added to
Leaves of Grass
, but in the works he chose to delete from the 1867 edition. That is, Whitman removed a number of poems that had appeared in the previous edition and that critics characterize as expressing the poet's earlier “self-doubt and despair.” They say that Whitman eliminated these works because he'd now found the love of his life and therefore was in a “more optimistic mood.” In the words of one scholar, “Walt's new-found confidence in love was, in large measure, a result of his satisfying relationship with Pete.”
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Whitman and Doyle began writing to each other in 1868, the first time they were apart after beginning their outlaw marriage. The men were separated because Whitman visited his family in New York, while “Pete the Great” had to stay in Washington to work. Their correspondence continued, off and on whenever they were apart, for almost two decades.
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In the first surviving letter, Doyle exclaimed, “I could not resist the inclination to write to you this morning it seems more than a week since I saw you.” Whitman then responded, “I think of you very often, dearest comrade—I find it first rate to think of you, Pete, & to know that you are there, all right, & that I shall return, & we will be together again.”
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In the six weeks that the men were apart that first time, Doyle wrote at least seven letters and Whitman wrote at least eleven.
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During that period as well as during later ones, Whitman routinely began his letters with the words “My darling” and ended them with phrases such as “Love to you, my dearest boy” or “So long, dear Pete—& my love to you as always.” Doyle ended his letters by writing “Pete the Great” or “Pete X X,” using the X's to represent the kisses he sent his partner.
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The men filled most of their letters with descriptions of the small events in their daily lives, but they also sometimes spoke of their love for each other. In one letter, Whitman told Doyle, “I think of you very often. My love for you is indestructible,” and in another he wrote, “I don't know what I should do if I hadn't you to think of & look forward to.”
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Many letters included erotic passages in which Whitman talked about kissing his young lover. In one instance, “Pete the Great” had complained in a previous letter about his job. The older partner then proposed, in his next letter, how he'd like to take Doyle's mind off his troubles. “All I have to say is—to say nothing—only a good smacking kiss, & many of them—& taking in
return many, many, many from my dear son—good loving ones too—which will do more credit to his lips than growling & complaining.”
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Whitman's correspondence to Doyle also reflected the fact that the poet's literary stature was growing. In 1872, he boasted to his partner that “my books are beginning to do pretty well.” The progress was largely due to the smattering of positive reviews that appeared in the press, such as the
New York Galaxy
stating that Whitman's poetry “means power, health, freedom, democracy, self-esteem, a full life in the open air, an escape from old forms and standards.”
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In January 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke. He was then confined to his bed and had to hire a nurse to care for him.
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Doyle had changed jobs by this point and was now working the evening shift as a brakeman for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Every day he stopped by to see his ailing partner before going to his job. Many years later, Whitman reminisced about those visits. “Pete, do you remember, during my tedious sickness ('73) how you used to come to my solitary garret room and make up my bed, and enliven me and chat for an hour or so—before you went on duty?”
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By the spring, Whitman could no longer afford a nurse, but he still needed someone to care for him. Doyle couldn't do the job because he had to work, so Whitman moved in with his brother George and sister-in-law Lou in Camden, New Jersey. “I think about you every night,” Whitman wrote Doyle once he'd settled in. “I do not miss any thing of Washington, but
your visits
.”
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Doyle applied for a new job as a baggage handler on the railroad line that served New York, so he could move closer to Camden. The baggage job came through, but he wasn't assigned to the New York line but to the one that traveled from Washington to Baltimore, so he continued living with his family in Alexandria.
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“Pete the Great” was determined to keep the outlaw marriage a central part of his life, so he made frequent journeys to New Jersey—sometimes two or three weekends in a row—to see his ailing partner. After one such trip, Whitman wrote gleefully to a friend of how he'd enjoyed seeing the younger man. “Peter Doyle has paid me a short visit of a couple of days—the dear, dear boy—& what good it did me!”
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The couple experienced a major setback in 1874 when a new attorney general was appointed, and Whitman, who'd been on leave from his clerk's job since his stroke, was officially discharged. He tried to reassure Doyle that they'd survive the continued separation. “My darling son, you must not be unhappy about me—I hope & trust things may work so that we can yet be with each other, at least from time to time—& meanwhile we must adapt ourselves
to circumstances,” Whitman wrote. “You keep on, & try to do right, & live the same square life you always have, & maintain as cheerful a heart as possible—& as for the way things finally turn out, leave that to the Almighty.”
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