Walt Whitman's Secret (19 page)

He was not a man in conflict with his own contradictions on such subjects as this or the war. I was obviously too young to fully understand the second of these. Always would be. That is, I was the wrong generation to comprehend how it must have been, great armies, tens of thousands, scores of thousands at a time, each man with his rifle and his blanket roll, moving by foot or by train across great distances to places none of them had ever seen to kill fellows such as themselves. W said he felt the growing obligation with others of his own vintage to set down recollections of the period even if they are not memoirs of the war itself: “evidence of the curious things thrown to the surface in an era of major disturbance.”

The phrase has stuck with me as an apt description of how he fed me material from the museum of himself that was his bedroom, workshop
cum
office. The letters from Bucke (the earliest a book order from 1870 from someplace called Sarnia) were interesting of course, as were those from Burroughs and all the other nearest-and-dearests. But the most curious were those from British admirers who, I see now, in light of developments in my own journey through life, guardedly sought absolution for inverted thoughts they would never confide to anyone except this stranger whose openness in
Leaves
made them trust him. I speak of obvious Uranians such as John Addington Symonds and Edmund Carpenter, writers who once had had a literary movement that they openly called the Uranian Circle. These were men who had been educated at Oxford or Cambridge. W was suspicious of them and annoyed at their persistence. Yet he had all
the time in the world for members of the
other
little Uranian group, up in Bolton, in the North of England.

Was it their lack of artifice he liked? Certainly. But in my view he indulged them because they were all fellows from the laboring class, or at least aspired to be. W didn't have many readers in America among the workers whom he was so often addressing in his poems. He'd had such individuals as lovers, to be sure: his “transportation-men” especially. Yet among his readers he could point to few, leastways few he knew of for certain, who fell in that category of workers that does all the country's monkey jobs. The workers returned his love, but they didn't memorize his poems. With their “betters,” it was the other way around. This was one of the frustrations he endured with what, all things taken into account, was saintly patience and forbearance.

Which might well explain his enormous affection for Anne. It was not rooted in carnality, to be sure. So it must have come from the fact that a young woman from a background at least somewhat privileged, by the high standards of a country such as this, admired him, it seemed then, almost as unhesitatingly as a handful of respectable authorial figures and (a different form of admiration) a great many youngsters from the coach yards and docks.

The more I came to understand the
erotische
side of W's life, what now would more likely be called his
Sexleben
— that is to say, the more I followed leads that Bucke was to suggest— the better I understood that I had no cause whatever to be jealous of him even if he had been a healthy man of my own age. Yet for a while I was concerned.

I can still see him as he took leave of his birthday banquet, thanking Gussie, shaking Tom's hand emphatically, hugging the Harned children— and giving Anne such a protracted and, I thought, lascivious kiss on her mouth as one would never expect to see at any public event but a wedding. Was this a sincere expression of how he felt about her? Or was it intended to reinforce the perception of him as
a fellow with bastard children still to be found in the tap-rooms or convents of New Orleans? Perhaps neither. Perhaps a bit of both.

For my part, I was love-smacked, as I imagine many intellectual, progressive and literary men would have been had they found Anne before I did and somehow allayed her unspoken hesitations as thoroughly as I was able to do. Over time, I became more comfortable with W's affection for Anne, and vice versa. Until then, I was prudent to be worried.

Back in the early days, the candor I and so many others admired in W's utterances and writings had a different effect on me when directed toward Anne as an individual. Even in the first precarious weeks following the attacks on his brain, when his grip on the world's assets was obviously so slippery, he managed to be his old self where she was concerned. When Tom was leaving after a ritualistic visit to the Mickle Street sickbed, he was asked to bring no other callers than himself the next day “except for Horace and Agnes”—he never called her Gussie—“and Anne Montgomerie.” That would be innocent enough were it standing all alone. But when Anne had not appeared for two or three days, he asked me to tell her “that if she don't come to see me soon, I shall think she has gone back on me. I know I have said I won't see visitors, but she is not a visitor, she is one of us.” Or, most flirtatious of all— and this, mind you, from a man way too ill to impersonate the male equivalent of a coquette—“Kiss Anne Montgomerie for me even if it is not lawful!”

Despite my rational nature, I naively saw a dilemma where there was none. Anne believed that the way W spoke of her and behaved toward her was a touching expression of his advanced ideas, proof of a progressive ideology, one that I, at least, knew existed as much in W's memory as in the realities then current. When he said, for example, “Tell Anne that I am alive yet, though not lively, and that I may survive the work we laid out to do” and I relayed the message
(though tempted not to), she reacted by thinking he was applauding her spirit of independence and compassionate but self-sustaining heart. I was alarmed but not surprised, anxious but not eager, to hear of her visits to Mickle Street at hours when I was at the bank. I did not mention this subject to her lest she question the sincerity of my own commitment to the new face of women's position in civic, social and political affairs. I did, however, bring up the topic with W after the third or fourth time he mentioned in passing that she had stopped by. I did so casually, and he responded casually.

“Yes, she comes sometimes, brings flowers, kisses me,” he said, “but she doesn't come enough. You're always harping on her.” By which he meant that I was playing cupid in my own romantic interest, not someone else's. He liked running together her forename and her family name, as though it were a compound or were hyphenated in the English way. “What's Anne-Montgomerie to you, or what are you to Anne-Montgomerie, that you should love each other as you do?”

That quite floored even as it reassured me. Before I could respond in an articulate fashion, he took up the slack with a weak jest.

“A boy can do a sight worse than to have a girl. He may
not
have a girl.
That's
a great deal worse.”

I had reclaimed my speech but not my wits. “And that from a bachelor!” I said.

“Not too much of a bachelor either, if you knew it,” he replied, a bit archly.

The skylarking was at an end and so was conversation. I first thought he was going to say something more on the subject of love or romance. Instead, he shut his lips tightly. He spoke nothing further, so I said good night and went home.

Except for the one missing element, its essay on Elias Hicks,
November Boughs
was ready to go. I kept nudging him to finish. When nudging failed, I gently implored, gingerly prodded and discreetly begged. He replied with excuses that were altogether sincere, saying that his brain “could not cope with it, gets tired, takes my pen out of my hand. Reading only passively tires me.” Other times he placed blame not on the topic, but on himself. “Hicks is entitled to my best, not my worst,” he said. “My best would be too little, my worst would be an insult.”

That he could not grapple with Hicks on days when he was at his weakest was natural enough. “It now takes all my energy merely to get to the chair and back to the bed again,” he told me.

My sense was that he feared I might grow impatient. In this he was incorrect. Another “young” man might have done, but not I. Instead, I encouraged him to talk about Hicks, hoping he would find it easier to rewrite his own conversation as prose rather than tackle composition straight on.

“I knew the habitats of Hicks— my grandparents knew him personally so well— the shore up there, the whole tone of life at that time and place. All of it is so familiar to me. I have got to look upon myself as sort of chosen to do a job as the Hicksite historian. I have seemed, to myself at least, to be particularly equipped for doing just this thing and doing it as it should be done. Now it threatens to go up in smoke.” He sighed not with his lungs and voice box alone but with his whole silent body.

“Do you know anything about the method of the Quaker meetings?” he asked. He didn't give me time to answer. “Well, if you do, you know that they never take a vote. They discuss questions, one this side, one that. Or sometimes most of them on one side and only a few on the other. Then the moderator— I believe they call him that, at any rate the man who presides— announces the result, yes
or no, as he sees it in the balance of feeling. It is remarkable, I think, that in the history of the sect these decisions have never in a single instance been appealed. If there is not a pretty ardent leaning one way or the other, the moderator reserves judgment. That is the only guard. They seem to select their most judicious men for the place, men who cannot be swayed by momentary passions, interests, prejudices, or even sympathies.

“What all this comes to is that just that sort of a debate is going on in my mind now, whether to condemn or save the Hicks, whether to send it to the printer or throw it into the stove.” For just a second he flicked a one-eyed glance at the old round stove. “A debate not to be put into figures or votes, but real, with a decision pending which I must abide by at last. Tell the printer to give me until Monday. This is Thursday. Till then it will be a life-and-death struggle. For all these years I have had it in my plans to write a book about Hicks. Now here I am at last, after all the procrastinations, stranded, with nothing but a few runaway thoughts on the subject to show for my good resolutions. Well, if I can't do all I started off to do, maybe I'll be able to do some little toward it, give at least some hint, glimpse or odor of the larger scheme.”

The following day too, he was once again drained of energy, complaining of “great languidness, feebleness, weariness.” Fortunately, the languor did not affect his talk, which as delivered was that of a healthy man. He limited himself to a single visitor besides myself: Susan Stafford, mother of Harry Stafford, who had come and gone in his life several times but of whom I never got a fixed impression as I did of Pete Doyle. Missus Stafford, he said, was “not literary. I account that one of her merits.” Literary or not, she knew the
Leaves
and in fact had read all his books.

The subject of swimming came up when I saw him that evening, and he told me about his boyhood exploits as “a first-rate aquatic
loafer.” This led him to ask if I knew the painting
Swimming
by his friend Eakins. As he put the question to me, he seemed to motion with his head to Eakins's portrait of him, which that day occupied pride of place on a plinth of books stacked upon the writing-table. I confessed that I was not familiar with it.

“It is not one of his large pictures,” he said, “but it is magnificent. It shows a scene toward the close of a long hot summer's day. Four or five boys are swimming in a river— no doubt our own river, here.”

I was pleased whenever I heard evidence that he had come to think of Camden and its environs as
our
rather than
your.

“They are gloriously but unaffectedly nude, nude in their brotherhood and their humanity, as they dive from some rocks by the shore and frolic with one another. They are slender and muscled. They remind us how like a piece of fruit the body is, reaching the perfect state of ripeness that is all too brief. Eakins caught them at that moment, before they had any awareness that the ultimate end of the process is to rot and fall from the branch.”

He looked sad. Sadder than his norm, I mean. I imagined he was thinking not only of death but of the loss of so much freedom that was prefacing his own.

“Eakins painted himself into the picture, I think. He is the mature figure, also nude, swimming toward them with a certain determination. He works a great deal from photographs, you know. He is himself an excellent photographer in the sense of not being too artistic about it.”

Such talk, whether to himself or aloud, was doubtless another factor deflecting his progress on Hicks. He did, however, manage to complete small clusters of new paragraphs about Hicks and feed them to me for putting into their proper places.
November Boughs
was still growing, but sometimes sideways rather than up. The following Saturday, for instance, he added further new material for the essay
but ended up excising more than he put in by vaporizing all the references to George Fox, one of the founders of the Quaker faith back in England. Later, he restored the Fox material to the book but stuck it in a different place. I persevered with aggressive good nature.