Walt Whitman's Secret (4 page)

I
KNEW THAT BEDROOM
better than I knew my own. You climbed eleven scuffed wooden stairs. They sagged in the middle from so many previous residents whose tread most likely was heavy from worry. As you went up, Missus Davis's damned mutt would always bark at you from one of the little parlors below. Sometimes her parrot joined in. Missus Davis was a sea captain's widow who did for W. He paid her nothing, but she got free room and board in perpetuity. Another part of the bargain was that she contributed all her furniture for their common use, as W himself didn't own any furniture when he moved to Mickle Street. Perhaps he had never owned any, or certainly not more than a work-table. Missus Davis's furniture was old and nicked and sturdy, rather like she herself.

At the head of the stairs was a small window that looked out on the backyard. The window had colored glass panes that turned the light red, blue and yellow. This was the only purely ornamental touch in the little place, and of course it was one I noticed only when I visited during the daytime, when attending to our publishing affairs or bringing W the papers. Mornings were often rough for him, but he usually seemed to feel better as the day lengthened. So I usually, but not always, went in the evenings when, although his physical
energy was likely to be low, he became quite frisky of speech, especially after escaping from a nap. In fact I frequently disturbed him when he was still asleep in the small bed with high skinny posts with fancy lathe work.

“Throw your hat on the bedpost,” was what he said heartily as soon as I entered the room on the night I've had it in my mind to tell you about as best I can. You see, he often hung his trousers in that manner, though his own hat, the soft gray sloucher with the high crown and the sweat stains, lay as usual on the round table by the windows, holding down a stack of loose documents. W often wrote on pieces of scratch paper and the backs of envelopes, then pasted the pieces together in a string, a practice he had picked up in the newspaper offices of Brooklyn and New Orleans. A paste pot and brush for that purpose stood on the big writing-table. He had taken off his boots of course but otherwise had fallen asleep fully dressed. The evening was warm and muggy, but he shuffled across the plank floor, struck a match on the side of the stove and tossed it in the firebox. I could see the orange flame shoot up.

“I fag early,” he said, “but then I rise early to go downstairs and sit in the front room and await the mail.” He wasn't good on the narrow stairs, particularly going down. He considered the postman a friend, knew his name and his history, and the stories about members of his family, talked with him at length. The same with the neighborhood boys. The younger ones were afraid of him, but often hid their fright in giggling when they passed on the sidewalk. Perhaps their parents had told them to mind whom they spoke to.

Missus Davis knew how to keep the little place clean and tidy, but W's room, the biggest by far, was a thicket, no, a blizzard, of disorder. Manuscripts, letters, note-books and photographs covered every flat surface, including the floor. Dead newspapers were a particular problem. Once his ability to be an active participant in
public life faded, W seemed determined to remain a close reader of the New York, Philadelphia and Camden papers, morning and evening, and in this way maintain complete communication with the world of the fully alive. Once having read them, however, he seemed unwilling to part with them, as though by clinging to the news they carried he was clinging to that particular day, which meant holding on to life. In the corners especially, and in the area nearest the foot of the bed, the papers were sometimes strewn shin deep, like snow that had drifted. But it would be wrong to suppose there was no method in all this. By having all his papers of whatever type spread out at his feet all the time, he knew where every piece was to be found, or at least its general whereabouts. I could raise a thousand other examples to illustrate this practice but think now of a specific one, the night he began to tell me about the horrors of the hospitals and became aware that I was starting to become curious about so many other things as well.

“It's here all right,” he said, “I just need to get a big stick and churn the waters. It'll float to the surface.” He reached down and neatly extracted what must be one of the most famous and consequential letters in all literature, the one that Emerson sent him in response to the first edition of
Leaves
in 1855, before I was born: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere …” He allowed me to hold it and examine it closely for a few precious moments while he continued to prospect for the sheet of paper he actually had in mind.

He talked in a quite animated manner as he searched away. “Missus Davis insisted on redding up the room,” he said. “Her meddling, though well intended, threatened to set me back
years.
” He was smiling under his full gray beard, I could tell. “I had to enjoin her from coming in. Which is, in any event, a stipulation not to be despised, in view of her unblemished reputation in the town and my own
pock-marked one— so lustful and unwholesome, you know.” Many have remarked on what they believe was W's lack of humor, but I often heard him mock himself this way.

It was a very close Camden evening, when the fertilizer plant across the river had ceased sending its signature through the air for another day and with the railroad sometimes causing the room to tremble slightly as he moved about slowly until finding what he sought. It was on the work-table all along. He then sat down in the rocking chair where he liked to write during the day, putting a board across his lap as a desk and with an old-fashioned quill as his pen.

“It's from one of my boys,” he said. “From the war. A fine youth, from Indiana. I remember him quite well. Sweet of temper and with something angelic in his appearance.” I knew he kept in touch with quite a number of them.

He read the letter aloud in a slow, deep, careful voice. It told of small-town life in Indiana, of crops and children, and reminisced not about the war as such but about what was evidently a long convalescence in Washington and later.

“Was he badly wounded?”

“Oh yes. An amputation that didn't want to heal. We didn't expect he would pull through. But look, it's twenty years on, more than twenty, and if I imagine correctly and am reading between the lines in the way he intends, he is as full of health as I am empty of it, rich in the clean air of the country and the warmth of family.” He paused for a fraction of a moment. “West,” he said. Then he lapsed into a coughing fit. By the time that was over, the subject had changed.

“Was this at Armory Square?” I knew that was the hospital where W had done much of his nursing. I was nearly two generations younger than he was, but unlike most people my age, who had grown up with old men's war tales and were heartily sick and tired of the subject, I was eager to learn more. I wanted to know as much about
W as possible. At times, W and the war became, for me, one and the same thing— inseparable.

“I can picture him yet. An affectionate boy. How lucky to be sent there, if one can be called lucky to be lying wounded and chopped up in such a place. I mean that people called the Armory the model hospital. It was in fact as clean as a whistle, which was not the case with all the others, believe me. The walls were plastered and the floors well scrubbed and swept. There was a great rush to open new hospitals all round the District. The builders got rich fast, throwing up places where the poor boys could bleed and die of dysentery and such.”

He rhymed off the names of the hospitals. There were so many, he said, that the newspapers printed directories of them for the benefit of people who came to town searching for their fathers, husbands, sons and brothers among what W once called the Great Army of the Sick.

“Ones like Finley Hospital and Campbell Hospital were for all intents and purposes like towns, with twenty acres or so of wooden barracks laid out in streets and alleys, numbered and lettered like the capital itself, whole communities of the diseased or badly burnt, a market town for thousands, except that there wasn't the bustle of a market day, only the motionlessness of the truly mortal, stoic and manly, largely silent, except for the occasional moan that couldn't be suppressed any longer.

“Carver Hospital really
was
a kind of city, with city walls and sentries. Oh, there were so many. Lincoln Hospital and Emery and Harewood and Mount Pleasant— lots of them. A fight on the scale of Chancellorsville and they would fill up quickly, the way a good show fills up the theaters and the opera houses.”

At the peak, he said, there were seventy thousand boys and men being put up and cared for in some fashion, as best as could be done in the circumstances, far more people than the whole population of the city before the war. Imagine!

“The convalescent camp might have ten thousand at any one time. The city ran short of the new Wheeling ambulances, so named after the place where the factory for them was. Some people called the vehicle a Rosecrans ambulance, for General Rosecrans, knowing conditions in the field the way he did, had suggested the design.”

“What the French call an
hôpital ambulant?
” I interjected.

“If by that you mean a two-horse affair with two rows of shelves in the cab, then that's what it was. They could slot twelve boys in there, six on either side, but it was a tight squeeze. They were far better than the enormous wagons that the army had to hire when the numbers kept rising, letting the freighters and even their teamsters get rich too. You'd see long trains of wagons waiting at the steamboat dock to pick up the stretchers and litters coming over from Virginia. They'd haul 'em up Seventh Street. After a while people didn't pay any attention. It got so folks in the street didn't give a glance at the strings of Rebel prisoners coming back either, terrible worn-out and bedraggled boys, flaxen-haired and good-looking, many of them, with ill-matched pieces of uniform, in fact no two dressed alike so not really in uniform at all, sometimes so dirty you couldn't tell what color they'd been wearing when they set out.

“Rebel wounded, too. We took them in and they were treated. I used to visit boys from North Carolina and Mississippi and Alabama, country boys far from home, and I'd give them the same care and cause for hope as I did the others.”

Before the war, W wrote in a poem that he was the poet of the master and the poet of the slave, of the North and the South equally, the one the same as the other. I wanted to ask him now if he still had such feelings, if he remembered them, when he was nursing the Secessionist wounded. But what left my mouth was a more specific and direct question, for in his chronology he was about to begin a new chapter, about which I had been wondering for months.

“Is that how you met Pete?” I asked, trying to show my non chalance.

He knew that I meant Pete Doyle, for there was only one Pete. I was fascinated to get some biographical particulars about this mysterious individual who, I understood, was an Irishman who fought on the Rebels' side, making his friendship with W an improbable thing, I believed. I had heard his name mentioned by others a few times around Camden, only briefly and sometimes in a hushed or knowing tone.

W's eyes could not conceal what his whiskers hid. He was not the sort of talker who pauses once his conversation is in flood, but he stopped this time for a moment, noticeably.

“No, Pete the Great came later.” He found a little chuckle to go with the words, coating them lightly in chocolate. “I'll tell you about him.” He meant: “—someday.” And then: “Good old Pete!”

Thereupon he rose from the rocker and went to the corner of the room where the discarded but carefully preserved paperwork was deepest at that moment. In using the imaginary big stick to stir up the piles, he came up with something else that he wished me to see. It was a crude little bibelot of a thing that he had fashioned by folding sheets of stationery in two, cupping each one inside the others and putting a few stitches through the gutter to hold the pages together. He had glued a paper label on the front cover. The whole thing was dog-eared, worn and soiled, as though it had gone through a war. It had. This was one of the homemade memorandum-books W had carried in Washington. It was full of things he jotted down about the soldiers. He would scribble their names, ages, where they were from, the nature of their wounds, and what they wished or badly wanted or needed— postage stamps, horehound candies, underclothing.

“My method,” he said, “was to first of all get a good night's rest. In the morning I'd bathe, give my clothes a brushing and try to work myself into the best frame of mind. Singing bits from the great arias seemed to give me the extra push I needed. Then I'd set off to the
Army Paymaster's Office to do my bread-work. The job there was steady and not taxing. Some days there were long lulls when I could lift the top of my desk and work on the Blue Book.”

This was his nickname for the 1860
Leaves
, bound in blue cloth. He kept a master copy in which he made his revisions for the next edition. His emendations were methodical in the sense of being constantly ongoing. “Clerks had to pay attention. In my case, I had to be very careful to keep from letting my best copybook hand slip into the quick scrawl you're all too familiar with, as are compositors everywhere who have cursed my penmanship for years.”

It's true, his script was slanty and jagged, with some strings of letters run together like a row of slum dwellings collapsing into one another. Many people confronted with it found it difficult to decipher. But this was usually the case only with intimate associates, for the issue of legibility arose mostly in connection with quick notes to himself or to others or in hasty fragments of verse— ideas and literary images caught on the wing, as you might say. The more formal sorts of letters were generally quite readable. The more important the stranger to whom they were addressed, the more they seemed to have been laid out not by W the venerable poet but by W the long-ago schoolmaster or W the short-lived house carpenter. That is, they showed either the clarity needed for the slate on the schoolhouse wall or the precision of pencil marks showing where the saw must cut.