Walt Whitman's Secret (31 page)

I outlined what I believed from my own reading of the papers to be the crux of the controversy, and he spoke on the opposing side. “Well, let them go on. Let them push it as hard as they choose. Let them run up their walls, obstructions, laws, as high as they choose. In the end they will settle for the best results. We will in fact pluck the flower of free trade from the nettle of protectionism. As an individual I feel myself imposed upon, robbed, trampled over, but I can still urge patience, patience. Let them push their theory to the breaking point. For break it must.

“I myself once fell afoul of an experience with Customs officers on the Canadian border. Happily, Bucke was along and extricated me. He took the officials aside and seemed to settle it that my baggage was not to be disturbed. Gave them a few dollars for their trouble. The whole thing was quite a source of wonder to me— intrusive, baffling. What struck me most of all was Bucke's ease, suavity, composure, négligence, a sort of taking it for grantedness coolly expressed in the way he assumed the manner of a born, tired traveler.”

Then he slid from admiration of Bucke to anxiety about the circumstances. “It seemed to me then as it had before, and always has since, that here lay one of the worst evils of the system: its encouragement of lying, bribery, misrepresentation, hypocrisy, just as in the Temperance prohibition and other special cases. Yet this is a side
of the situation no one considers.” He spoke of corruption as “not a fiscal problem, it is a moral problem, and one that plagues the largest humanities.”

It was somewhat unusual for him to get wound up in this precise way, rather than vent his fear and displeasure in brief staccato bursts, and it probably was not altogether good for his health, which I could measure by referring to nothing more than the new lines and ruts in his kind old face and the way his clothing now hung on his frame. This time, however, he went on and on, along a conversational path with many twists and turns. For example, he was fuming about the inequity of the British Empire's copyright laws. He described them as evil, for this issue of course was one that affected him, and prominent American writers generally, in the pocketbook.

I was now a mature man of about thirty, more thoughtful than before and more settled. I was beginning to ponder questions that my nightly visits raised. It was certainly true that W had endured considerable calumny, particularly of course for what he called the sexpoems in the immortal
Leaves
, yet he always had had his helpful admirers, of which I myself was one, but only at the workshop level, for I could aid him only by running his errands and performing his literary chores. He was not solely reliant on either his literary friends or his non-literary ones, for he had a gift for remaining in the public eye. He exercised it not out of glory-hunger but rather from an admirable refusal to be shunted aside simply because he was not genteel in word or manner and wrote about comradeship, adhesiveness, manly affection— he gave it many names. For years I wondered whether the practical need to keep his name aloft had, paradoxically, made him more secretive than he would have been without it. Or was the opposite nearer to the truth? Was he so open in order to conceal his secretive nature? I could imagine myself in such a position, because it is one not unfamiliar to Socialists in this country. In any
case, it was clearly the war that changed him into what he became. Now that you and I have lived through (in my case, just barely) a time of far greater war, on a more awful scale than previously could ever have been imagined, I believe we can conceive of what those years in Washington must have meant to him.

One day, when he had allowed me to root around on my own in the decaying heaps of documents on the floor, searching for a certain sheet of paper we needed in our work, I found a letter written
by
him. The salutation was the affectionate but impersonal one of “Dear Friend.” If it was a letter that had been returned to him, there should have been an envelope, for he was meticulous in the calculated mess he made of his quarters and always managed to keep all constituent parts of a document together. Perhaps the letter was never sent. Perhaps it was a draft, though it had no emendations and scratches. Perhaps it was a fair copy that he had made for his records. I scanned it quickly and asked to whom it was addressed. He claimed not to remember, and he asked me to read it to him, slowly, as he lay abed, that he might begin to recall. Doing so, I realized that this was a circular letter sent to acquaintances, soliciting money to help him care for the wounded and the dying in the Armory Square hospital. He described the horrible scenes there with the dispassion that I suppose comes in time from seeing so much and caring so deeply.

He let me take it away with me later. I shall quote from it now.

“I seldom miss a day or evening,” he wrote. “Out of the six or seven hundred in this Hospital I try to give a word or a trifle to everyone without exception, making regular rounds among them all. I give all kinds of sustenance, blackberries, peaches, lemons and sugar, wines, all kinds of preserves, pickles, brandy, milk, shirts and all articles of underclothing, tobacco, tea, handkerchiefs, &cet &cet &cet. I always give paper, envelopes, stamps &cet. To many I give (when I have it) small sums of money— half of the soldiers in hospital have not a
cent. There are many returned prisoners, sick, lost all— and every day squads of men from the front, cavalry or infantry— brought in wounded or sick, generally without a cent of money. I select the most needy cases and devote much of my time and services to them. Some are mere lads, seventeen, nineteen. Some are silent, sick, heavy-hearted (things, attentions, &cet. are very rude in the army and hospitals, nothing but the mere hard routine, no time for tenderness or extras). So I go round. Some of my boys die, some get well.”

Then the tone changed abruptly. “O what a sweet unwonted love (those good American boys of good stock, decent, clean, well-raised boys, so near home). What an attachment grows up between us, started from hospital cots, where so many pale young American soldiers lie. For so many months I have gone among them, having long ago discarded all stiff conventions (they and I are too near to each other, there is no time to lose, and death and anguish dissipate ceremony here between my lads and me). I pet them. This does some of them much good. They are so indistinct and lonesome. On parting at night sometimes I kiss them right and left. The doctors tell me I supply the patients with a medicine which all their drugs and bottles and powders are often unable to match in efficacy.”

I looked up at the time-worn countenance of the poet who presented himself to the world as someone as manly as any soldier, or iron puddler, or cow-boy on the plains of the western territories, and who talked much of his numerous illegitimate children, whom no one has ever seen or heard from. Tears were running down the channels of his face. I suddenly sensed what his British correspondents and acolytes evidently understood with their more refined European perceptions. I realized that he had been in love with all those boys.

   
TWELVE
   

I
SUPPOSE
I
WAS BECOMING
an even better listener, for I began noticing, as I believe anyone would have done, that certain traits were showing up ever more frequently in W's everyday talk. For instance, when he spoke about the war, the subject of Lincoln would always come to dominate the thread, though I came to see that W wasn't serious about politics. For him, the subject seemed to consist of a few abstractions, the same ones found in the immortal
Leaves
, such as Freedom, Democracy and Liberty, which he believed that America could spread around the globe only once all obstacles to trade were pulled down. Predictably, this often led to the despised tariff and the foreigners who wouldn't listen to America. Usually this meant the hated British Empire, either in whole or in part— the part closest to hand being Canada.

“Canada is a country of characteristics,” he said. “The landscape has characteristics, the people have characteristics.”

I didn't know what he meant by this. Then he spoke more clearly. He went on to say: “Canada has been injured by its colonial adhesion to England.”

Was his mind noting the kinship of
adhesion
and
adhesiveness?

“I used to walk about when I was up there with Bucke and talk with the people. Canada should be on its own feet, asserting the life
that properly belongs to it. I should say we on this side of the border are too much inclined to minimize its importance. It is good to get about among other peoples, to not take too much for granted in our superiorities, to take a little off our prejudices and put a little of our admiration there, just so's we may finally establish ourselves on the right family basis among the nations.”

At the time, I took all this at its face value. But I hear W's words differently now, thinking of them in light of the late war in Europe and the way our government imprisons, deports, lynches and shoots down Socialists and labor people, or sanctions those who do so, trying to rid the land of anyone committed to change for the better rather than the worse. Canada divorced from Great Britain would be in need of another big friend. Don't you agree?

Another trait of W's over this period was that whenever he was feeling particularly unwell, which unfortunately was more and more often as the Winter of Eighty-eight–Eighty-nine drew near, he would urge me to work faster on the
Complete Poems and Prose.
“Better hasty than posthumous,” he said one day.

Sometimes the ink on the armfuls of galley proof I brought to him was still a bit wet. He would look them over and, all too often, tinker with as well as merely correct them. I always made sure that he had a batch of them on his work-table or at his bedside, for the task aided his concentration and distracted him from his condition. I was used to such chores and half a hundred others, but sometimes his requests astonished me. For example, he decided that he needed a new stove. The old one, which it seems was given to him by one of his sisters after the first stroke in Seventy-three, was not functioning well, and he saw the necessity of keeping his
bedroom as warm and snug as possible. I was to keep an eye peeled for something suitable.

“I am likely to be tied right here in this room the whole Winter if I live at all,” he said. “Some days I get doubtful about myself, but I have a notion now that I may drag on several years at my present low level of life. It is a conservative level, conservative to the last degree, but suffices for some purposes, of which we will make the most we can.”

The Spring of Eighty-nine was a particularly mild one, when the seasonal pleasantness eased ocean travel and seemed to bring an unusually large number of individual British visitors. In their company W kept his views of their Empire politely tucked away and received their veneration with a modesty I believe was sincere. One caller, a professional soldier, had developed an intense admiration for
Leaves
while in the British army. He was so stiff and bristly that I expected the conference between them to be difficult. But W was able in this case to extend his easy rapport with common soldiers, the younger the better, to a serving officer of great age and higher station, for flattery is a highly effective lubricant. And you might suppose W to have recoiled from knowing that one visitor, Edwin Arnold, was actually Sir Edwin and had one of those accents that cannot help but make a listener feel like a manservant or chambermaid. But nothing of the kind; W was as charming as a no longer terribly strong person could be.