Walt Whitman's Secret (32 page)

To that same period belongs the visit by Doctor John Johnson, another member of the English race, who had been in correspondence with W for a couple of years. You must know him, I'm sure. I use the present tense, for he is still alive and therefore carries every promise of outliving me, I'm afraid. He is a physician in Bolton, which I am informed is a grime-covered city known for woolen mills and other no doubt horrid establishments. With his friend J.W. Wallace, of the same place, he founded what they mischievously called Bolton College. It is no college at all, but rather an organization of
Socialists who identify a major mystical strain in W's work. I know this interpretation is amenable to you and your own ardent group there in Toronto. In my observation, the spiritual connection to be found in W's poetry takes root most deeply in Canada and in the British Isles and other pink portions of the map, possibly because they are some of the most Protestant of cultures and lack much of what they believe W was able to provide. Doctor Johnson had come over to meet his hero, gaze upon his birthplace and see as many as possible of the sites associated with his subject's other biographical details. Although the Bolton Boys, as W and I called the group, had had some slight contact with the inversionistical literary chaps in London, the two circles were of such different characters that they might almost have been the products of altogether separate countries. Hence their different treatment.

The oddest and certainly the most troublesome of the visitors was the one W referred to as “the Japanee,” though in fact only his mother was from Nippon whilst his father was a German. His name was Carl Sadakichi Hartmann, though he dropped the forename before the end of the old century, as on the title-page of his history of American painting, with which you and your friends might be familiar, or perhaps ought to be. When he first presented himself at Mickle Street, he sought my favor by addressing me in German. His effort was worthless. Although I comprehend the tongue as spoken (and read it rather better), I do not speak so much of it as you might suppose. Father always believed that the old language, like the old religion, should be jettisoned in the New World. Hartmann was a dandy and an aesthete (one of those), not a serious political man in the least. He was tall and so unnaturally thin that when he stood, he arranged his limbs artfully as though they were flowers in a vase; when he sat, he folded in on himself like a pen-knife. His talk was colorful and artistic, but he used a loud cackle for punctuation. In the
presence of his host, he performed a sort of dance of attendance, clutching at every word from W's mouth.

Shortly afterward, unfortunately, he published his memorandum of the encounter in the
Herald
, which had commissioned many of W's poems about public events and had so often been kind in booming his books and platform appearances. He quoted what he contended were W's disparaging summations of other writers. Emerson and Hawthorne, two of the victims, were dead by then. But others, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, outlived their supposed libeler. W of course refuted these untruths, as I believe it was proper for him to do. He may often have resorted to booming himself, as the leaders of literature had long forced him to do by excluding him from their Pantheon, but he was not a man to cowardly deny something of which he was guilty— a different matter from the instinct for self-preservation that caused him to be misleading about the origins of the sex-poems. In any case, Hartmann published subsequent articles feeding off his slight acquaintance with his elder and better, then had the audacity to gather these together in a small book. This time the author was identified simply as Sadakichi, no surname. Such trials of course did nothing to steady W's wobbling health. Certainly W lacked for internal peace when Hartmann turned up in Boston as founder of a Walt Whitman Society there, through which he began to solicit monetary contributions that never benefited W because they never left Hartmann's pocket.

The visitor with the biggest personality of all was of course Doctor Bucke, who arrived in Camden slightly in advance of Spring itself, for 1889 would see W's seventieth birthday and Bucke naturally wanted to be fully on hand for it, bringing all his energy, intensity, inscrutability and, at times, incomprehensibility— and certainly his singular limp, which I once heard someone say made him look like a person walking sideways up one of those very steep streets in San Francisco (whereas
he always made me think of a side-wheeler with only one paddle). He took his medical education in the U.S.A. but had what seems to us Americans one of those curiously modulated Canadian voices.

Bucke was W's first true biographer if you allow that
The Good Gray Poet
by O'Connor, who wrote with great confidence indeed, better than I do at any rate, and
Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person
by John Burroughs, who wrote (and still writes) quite well for a scientific man, were more in the nature of pamphlets than actual books. Both were brought out after the war. Observe that after first making the acquaintance of my spirit-father— a term that Bucke could have defined much better than I can, though his explanation would have been hobbled by jargon known only to himself— I began calling it “the war,”
the
war, as though there was no other and it was the doing of people my own age. I have always associated with persons older than myself, being interested in serious adult matters, not the nominal things of youth, which I found asinine. Anne aside, I dealt with my elders exclusively. I felt this gave me an advantage in developing as a person, but I was then unaware of the negative effect: the fact that most of them were to die when I was still at least active in body and completely alert in mind, leaving me feeling bereft and friendless. Now that my own end is in sight, at what everyone agrees with me is an insufficiently ripe age, I appreciate how many who might have been my companions will now outlive me without our having communicated in a meaningful way, if at all. I suppose that this could be seen as the wheel completing its revolution.

Of all my distinguished elders, Bucke was certainly the most difficult to get a handle on, and often the most difficult even to comprehend. He was an exporter of ethereal, spiritual and mock-religious talk. Not at all the personality of a scientific Socialist, though he was of a scientific bent of course. He was forthright in sharing his views, if not always helpful in explaining what he was talking about. He once
told W that
Drum-Taps
was a big step down from
Leaves
, allowing one to infer that at least some subsequent books were in turn steps down from
Taps.
I did not agree with such statements, because
Leaves
belongs to its category on an exclusive basis and there are no other books that even brush against it. I'm sure such honest diagnosis is a virtue in a medical man talking to his patients, but it does no credit in dealing with a literary friend.

When Bucke was not saying such things, he was perhaps going overboard in the opposite direction. Put another way, his praise, though not his unanimous reaction to all things, could be, to say the least, fulsome. When, after the usual struggles, the
Complete Poems and Prose
saw the light of day, he wrote to say that “it will be the sacred text by and by. The First Folio of S is valuable but I guess after a little while that an autographed
C.P.P. of W.W.
will lead it in the market.” Bucke was interested in Shakespeare, but not in the somewhat conspiratorial way that W and many others were. The Bard is not one of the god-like mystics in Bucke's
Cosmic Consciousness
, which places W alongside not only Jesus Christ but also Buddha, Saul-who-became-St.-Paul, Plotinus, Mohammad and William Blake. Will from Stratford-upon-Avon was a top student of human behavior, the doctor would say, but hardly a visionary.

When I read the above passage to W, whose eyes were bothering him greatly— another ailment on the mounting list— he chuckled in appreciation. “Maurice is a monster boomer,” he said. “He can make you feel a lot too big about yourself if you don't look out. Dear Maurice!”

Bucke and I, both of us realizing that we needed a deep understanding of each other in our efforts to prolong W's life and uphold his work, decided to do some traveling together, even though this meant being away from W's bedside for one long day. Our assignment was to pay a visit to William O'Connor, who was possibly W's oldest friend he was still in contact with, someone he first met in Boston in 1860:
one of what seemed the few momentous relationships formed
before
and not
during
or
after
the war. When the conflict came, O'Connor too became a clerk in Washington City. Like Burroughs, he worked at the Treasury but continued clerking when the peace came. Now, still in Washington, he was dying. Cancer was the culprit that was stealing his life, and W was eager for first-hand unseasoned news of its terrible progress, however fearful he was of what information might be produced. He thought of making the journey himself in the company of a doctor, but of course was unable to. So it was that on a heavily overcast day Bucke and I crossed over to Philadelphia and took the 8:31 for Baltimore so as to change there for Washington. I had never been in the capital and was startled to see the monuments and buildings I was familiar with from photographs only, and surprised as well by the high percentage of Negroes in the population, much higher than Camden's or Philadelphia's, and the curt relations with them pursued by whites.

William and Nellie O'Connor lived in a well-maintained house no bigger than Mickle Street but brick, not frame, and in a respectable neighborhood, absent both fertilizer manufactory and railroad tracks. Nellie went alone to pave the way for us upstairs, where the patient lay. Then we were summoned. The sick man sat in an armchair, for after being stricken with the ongoing disease he had suffered a brain incident somewhat like W's, denying his limbs the use for which our bodies intend them. The resulting absence of exercise had caused him to put on considerable weight, no doubt despite a diminution of appetite. The extra pounds notwithstanding, you could not look into his eyes without appreciating the extreme gravity of his condition. His good nature, though, had not entirely deserted him, and his ironic humor still functioned. He asked if we had come to view the remains, and smiled.

He told Bucke how often and with what affection W spoke of me in his letters. I was touched. When Missus O'Connor stepped out of the
room, he bade me come close, and hugged me and kissed me on the lips and on my eyelids and on the forehead. When he did so, I suddenly smelled the death we had already seen. I knew that I was the pale proxy for W but that I would have to do, and that I would be required somehow to transmit the love to the other sick man back in Camden. He then said that he and W were in constant touch by telepathy.

Some dying men are tight-lipped. They have only silent conversations with those they hope can hear them through the obstacles of time and distance and perhaps via the agency of faith, for them that have it. Others talk a blue streak. O'Connor was in the latter camp. He evidently had had few visitors, and confronted with our presence decided to uncork the bottle. The need for beneficial company and plenty of it, as well as additional care and strong young men to lift him when necessary, is probably what led Bucke, in his usual tone of unintended authority, to tell O'Connor that he should ask to be moved to a proper hospital. Other than such remarks, we did not speak of his illness and certainly not of the specifics of the disease, which in any case were all too apparent on his countenance. Bucke asked him if he was writing, for all agree that he was a writer of surpassing prose.

“I cannot,” he replied, a little plaintively, and tears began to seep from the corners of his eyes.

Bucke replied by saying, “Nonsense. You mustn't give up on your gift, not when you most need its benefits.” I wonder to what degree, if at all, such statements were part of the vocabulary he used in conversing with the saner sort of lunatic. O'Connor showed no visible reaction, but the subject did lead to talk of other writers.

To my delight, he reminisced about the young W, whom so few were left to remember, and he recalled for me the dark atmosphere of government offices in wartime when, he said with a smile that was brief but broad, W was a fellow member of the notarial class. He said his own approach to surviving the repetitive work in the face of
emotional peril and bureaucratic terror was to throw himself into it purposefully, like a horse that must continue trotting because the blinders circumscribe its awareness of the other possibilities. By contrast, he went on, there was W, whom he described as a charismatic fellow who cut a memorable figure. W was then a healthy man of forty-three or-four, “narrow at the flanks,” O'Connor said, and with a beard that was still more dark than not, as on the frontispiece of the 1860
Leaves.
“The red of his face was not bloat (I know that well) but a sort of sun-flush.” All I could think of was Eakins's photograph of the sick and aged W as fully and unashamedly naked as the day he was born.

In time, O'Connor had suffered a seemingly sudden and certainly dramatic nervous attack owing to the strain. I asked how W had avoided the same development, as their situations were very near identical.

“Oh, by not working hard,” he said, a discernible smile reappearing where a few tears had held sway only minutes earlier. “He would come in of a morning, sit down, work like a steam engine for an hour or so, then throw himself back in his chair, yawn, stretch himself, pick up his hat and go out.” Had this not been his apparatus for neutralizing the chaos and sorrow around him, O'Connor said, he would not have had the inner strength left to help all those boys laid out in the wards like railroad ties. Nor, in O'Connor's view, would he have continued to write poetry.

Turning to W's reputation as an artist, he suggested that his friend, while increasingly the recipient of honor and esteem in the nations of Europe, and in the northern Dominion (nodding at Bucke), he was still far from fully appreciated, or often not even tolerated, in his own country.