Act I

Setting: The curtain is always up. The play takes place in the parlor/office of Whitman’s last home in Camden, New Jersey. It is a cozy room of a small cottage, with simple, humble, but comfortable, old, midnineteenth century furniture. The furniture includes his large rocking chair, visitors’ chairs, his desk, a wheelchair, and a combination chaise/bed. There are piles of books and papers everywhere.

Time: The entire play takes place in a single day in the autumn of 1891, from morning to dark.

Throughout the play, Whitman will be talking to the audience, except for conversations with people on stage, played by Man and Woman, who arise from Whitman’s memory and thoughts. Changes in scene, time and mood are to be accomplished by uses of lighting, costume changes, rear slide projections, and audio recordings. The suggested slides and recordings can be revised and augmented by the director.

At rise: stage dark. Light up and we see Whitman sitting in the large rocking chair. Morning light is coming in from the windows. Despite Whitman’s white hair and beard, his voice is ten years younger than his age of seventy-two. His body is that of an ill man, no longer physically robust, but he telegraphs great inner power. He is six feet tall, and is dressed in the “workman’s clothing” he liked to wear: a homespun ivory-white shirt wide-open at the collar, revealing a skyblue undershirt, loose trousers devoid of belt loops, held up by a thick belt, and well-worn hiking boots of soft leather.

He is reading a copy of the New York Times. He snorts to himself, then looks at the audience. He is angry.

WHITMAN

(to the audience) Listen to this! The New York Times says my writing is “full of picturesqueness and strength.” But the paper still says my poems are “the reverse of the poetic.” They are banned in the state of Massachusetts, and the Society for the Suppression of Vice burns my book in New York. (He snorts again.) When I first published the same work years ago, the Times said that I “rooted around like a pig among rotten garbage.” Not to be outdone, the New York Tribune said that I “took off my trousers in public.” (He shakes his head in frustration.) I say “published” because I not only wrote the words, but I published them at my own expense. I also helped set the type for the first edition of Leaves of Grass, and operate the press. I could get no publishing house to print my poems. And none would distribute them. My work was deemed “obscene!” Still is. So I carried copies to the bookstores on my back. I sold them on the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Why “obscene?” Well, my message to ordinary men and women is to find the cosmos, whole and complete in each individual. It is denounced as narcissism. My celebration of my body – and yours – is termed “the issue of a slop bucket.” My joining of the soul and body is called “indecent.” As if the only way to celebrate the union is to reduce the soul to the body. I raise the body to the soul! It seems my blasphemy is in seeing God in each man and each woman. (His mood changes. He becomes wry, mischievous.) But back then there was one notice that truly appreciated my call to infinitude in everyday life. I think I can still remember some of it. (Closing his eyes in an effort of memory. We hear a voice offstage reciting the lines.) “Very devilish to some, and very divine to some, will appear the poet of these new poems ...they are ...affectionate, sensual ...undraped, regardless of models, regardless of modesty or law, and scornful ...of all except the author’s own presence and experience ...” Who wrote this anonymous review? I did. You say, of course, “This fellow has not reviewed his work, but himself!” Yes! (He becomes sad, heartbroken.) But there was one critic – I should say two – who hurt me badly. A reporter searched out my brother, George, and asked him about Leaves of Grass. George said, “I saw the book, but didn’t read it at all – didn’t think it was worth reading. Mother thought as I did.” You see, they were cowered by the yawpers who slandered my work. (Pause. Insistent.) But I will be understood before I die! I am determined! The ninth edition of my work will be definitive. Has to be – I’m dying, and not afraid of it. But Walt Whitman, the man, would be understood. In this my supporters have been almost as deficient as my critics. The first famous man to champion my work was Ralph Waldo Emerson, and I was grateful to him. I went to Boston, to thank him. We strolled on the Common for two hours, he the talker and me the listener. (Change of lighting. Emerson appears onstage. Whitman and Emerson walk as if strolling on the Boston Common. Projections of the Common in antebellum times.)

EMERSON

(friendly, fatherly) My dear Walt, I am not blind to the wonderful worth of Leaves of Grass. Remarkable!

WHITMAN

Thank you, sir.

EMERSON

In matter of fact, your writing is the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed to the world. Henry David Thoreau calls it “a trumpet note ringing throughout the American camp,” and I agree.

WHITMAN

You have both been most kind in your public praise of my book.

EMERSON

Your poems, well, they meet a requirement, a demand, I set for American writers.

WHITMAN

What would that be?

EMERSON

Our authors have seemed to me too sterile and stingy in nature. It’s as if they’re too aggressively colorless. They’ve been making our American wits fat and mean.

WHITMAN

(nodding) Ah.

EMERSON

I have great joy in your free and brave thought. I find in your poems incomparable things said incomparably well. Your courage of treatment delights, and your large perception inspires!

WHITMAN

Well, you are very kind, and I thank you.

EMERSON

There is but one caution. One request I would make to you.

WHITMAN

Please do.

EMERSON

In tone, some of your writing ...your Calamus poems, for instance. They are ...untoward. In tone, mind you, not in merit.

WHITMAN

Untoward?

EMERSON

Please understand. When I first read yourpoems, I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion. But their solid nature is a certainty.

WHITMAN

Then what do you mean by “untoward?”

EMERSON

Your superbly graphic descriptions, and great stretches of imagination ...There is a certain delicacy they challenge. (Whitman stops strolling, and he and Emerson face each other squarely.)

WHITMAN

Please make yourself plain, Mister Emerson, I beg you.

EMERSON

One cannot leave your book lying about for chance readers. And one would be sorry to know that any woman had looked at it past the title page.

WHITMAN

I see. You agree with my critics, then, all those who call my poems indecent.

EMERSON

No. Your personal exploration of the boundlessness of the spirit is nothing less than divine.

WHITMAN

Then?

EMERSON

Let them be unimpeded, unburdened. Excise some of the provocative lines that obstruct their acceptance. Or change them.

WHITMAN

(pause) Sir, your argument is complete and convincing.

EMERSON

Well, then.

WHITMAN

(steadfast; stubborn) But I feel more settled than ever to adhere to all of my writings. I will not cut or change a single line. (Lighting change. Emerson disappears. To the audience.) I wish only two things. A readership for the ninth edition, and ...there are those who take liberties with my poems, with my life. “Free love” advocates. And seducers, and sundry other debauchers. And “rugged individualists.” They use my poems for their ends. They misuse them, and my life, too. And I would be understood. I would free myself from many of my admirers. A young man came to see me, about nine years ago. An Irishman. From England. And like me at his age, he’d published at his own expense a collection of his own poems, which are deemed improper. And now, a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which has been denounced as immoral ...and so is selling very well. Oscar Wilde. He paid me several visits, and we got on very well. Until ...(Change of lighting. Oscar Wilde appears onstage. Their conversation builds in intensity.) Yes, yes, yes, I admit it, Mr. Wilde ...

WILDE

“Oscar,” please!

WHITMAN

“Oscar,” then. Yes, I too wore pretty clothes as a young man. How did you find that out?

WILDE

My dear Mister Whitman, you are talked about.

WHITMAN

Would that it weren’t so, if it’s to be gossip.

WILDE

Better than not being talked about. Is that not so? I mean a poet can survive anything but being neglected. Or a misprint.

WHITMAN

(chuckling) Yes, alright, then, I’ll tell you. I wore frock coats, grand hats, a boutonnière in my lapel, and I carried a silver-capped walking stick.

WILDE

My own model!

WHITMAN

No, Oscar, forgive me for saying so, but I am simply not your model, no matter how flattering the idea is to me.

WILDE

I hope then you are not my contrast? One cannot be too careful in the choice of those different from him.

WHITMAN

Well said. And that’s my point. You are much sharper and wittier than I am, and more clever by far.

WILDE

(slyly joking) Careful, my dear Walt. Charity creates a multitude of sins.

WHITMAN

Ah, but ...please don’t be offended ...I did not mean it altogether as a compliment.

WILDE

Oh? How then?

WHITMAN

I mean, Oscar, that you’re a gallant ship. But you’re all sails and no cargo, my young camerado.

WILDE

Really now, if egoists don’t set us an example, of what good are they?

WHITMAN

Let me turn the question back to you. It’s one thing to write smart comedies that tilt at convention with lances of witty words. But for what purpose do you prick men? If it’s only to be “wild,” then let sleeping dogs lie. Let them lie, camerado.

WILDE

But art is the most intense mode of being oneself the world has ever known!

WHITMAN

Then straight to it! Be yourself. But for that, each of us needs find something larger in ourselves than words. Something much larger.

WILDE

I write to be Oscar Wilde. I am famous for being Oscar Wilde.

WHITMAN

You wish to be Oscar Wilde? Good. But don’t you see there is all the difference between the largeness of Oscar Wilde’s soul and the notoriety of his ego? The difference between the small Oscar Wilde and the large?

WILDE

Art for art’s sake, I say. It’s only through art that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence!

WHITMAN

I don’t believe in “art for art’s sake,” whatever that means. Answer me this. What shines through your wit besides you, my friend? What besides you? Is there an actual you? “Sing me a song no poet has yet chanted. Sing me the universal.”

WILDE

(sniffing disdainfully) I see now why it’s said that when Irishmen die, they go either to heaven or hell, but when an American dies, he goes to ...America. (Pause. Lighting change. Wilde disappears.)

WHITMAN

(to the audience) But he no longer heard me. (Pause. With great regret.) Oh, we talked a lot more, but now words failed us. Two authors, and words failed us. (Musing.) Where did it begin, my own intoxication with words? (His mood changes toward fond remembrance). Mr. Edward C. Clarke! (Light change. Light on Whitman as he walks to the desk and sits in a visitor’s chair facing the desk.) It all began when my folks pulled me from school and obtained a position for me as an errand boy in the law office of Mr. Edward Clarke on Fulton Street. I was eleven years old. (Lighting change. Mr. Clarke appears onstage, sitting behind the desk. Whitman sits with his back ram-rod straight and forward of the chair’s back. He converses in the voice, and with the manner, of an eleven year-old boy. To Clarke:) Yes, Mr. Clarke, I loved the Arabian Nights tales.

CLARKE

You read all of them?

WHITMAN

That’s right, sir, every last one. A real treat!

CLARKE

And what are you reading now?

WHITMAN

Well, sir, now I’m reading Walter Scott.

CLARKE

Sir Walter Scott.

WHITMAN

Sir Walter Scott, sorry.

CLARKE

Ivanhoe?

WHITMAN

Yes, sir. I’m real grateful you enrolled me in the circulating library. Couldn’t have afforded it on my own. And to be honest, sir, I wouldn’t have done it if I could.

CLARKE

(chastising) Ignorance is a powerful thing, Walt.

WHITMAN

(chagrined) Yes, sir I guess so. Miss Evans, at the library? She says I take out more books than anybody. She thinks I don’t read them. But I do. And I like them more than anything.

CLARKE

Did you like school, too?

WHITMAN

Well ...it was tolerable. I had a fine desk, near a window.

CLARKE

What did you read there?

WHITMAN

I guess, sir ...truth is, I didn’t read much in school. Mostly I wanted to be outdoors – I liked that window a powerful lot, sir!

CLARKE

Walt, I want to make a proposition to you.

WHITMAN

Yes sir?

CLARKE

Since you love reading, would you like to learn to write like an educated man?

WHITMAN

(uncertain) Yes sir, I suppose so.

CLARKE

Then I propose the following to you. I want you to write a treatise for me – one each week. Then we’ll examine it together. What do you say to that?

WHITMAN

A ...treatise?

CLARKE

An essay ...a story, so to speak. You can begin with the story of your family, if you like.

WHITMAN

I ...don’t know, sir. What about them?

CLARKE

Tell me about them. Do you have any brothers or sisters?

WHITMAN

Yes sir, three brothers and two sisters. Jesse is the oldest, and I’m right behind him. He’s what Mama calls a “special child.” Not a half-wit, mind you! Just more easy-going than most. She loves him awful powerful, sir, and so do I. And Mama, too, more than anything in the whole world! (Lighting change. Clarke disappears. In his adult voice, to the audience.) Eventually there were nine of us Whitman children. I didn’t write much about my father. Mr. Clarke must have noticed, but he was too kind to mention it. Truth to tell, I had little to write about him. Oh, I loved my father right enough – dutifully. But he seldom revealed anything to me. To this day, I’d be pressed dry before I could tell you much about him. I was named for him, that’s true. And for years I signed my writings, “Walt Whitman, Junior.” Failure eats a man, and I don’t know any man who was as consumed as my father. Not that he didn’t try. When I was four, he moved us from Long Island, where I was born. Where he was born, and generations of Whitmans before him. My father lost what was left of his share of the family land. My earliest memories are of that land: Lilacs everywhere. I still remember the smell of the lilacs. My father moved us to Brooklyn. There was a great economic boom going on there. Its population had jumped to eight thousand! That’s where my father tried building houses – and went broke. From then on – whiskey got him. (Lighting change. Whitman walks to stage left, to a stool before a printer’s rack with typesetter’s plates on them. He sits and begins setting print. His eyes go back and forth between the plates and the audience.)

That good man, Mr. Clarke, gave me words, written words and printed words. And so he gave me means to make my way in the world. When I was twelve, I became a printer’s apprentice at the Long Island Patriot. I took to it naturally, and I became fast at setting type. But I slowed down. You see, I began to read the stories I was setting. Politics, they were all about politics, and I became very interested in that topic. I even went to church because of politics. It was a Quaker Church on Joraleman Street in Brooklyn. It was a fine forum for politics. I became electrified by the ideas of a preacher named Elias Hicks. Mister Hicks taught that the guiding light in life is in the breast of each man and woman, and not in any building or book. And he said it was this light that was meant to guide American democracy. America was destined not merely to be a nation, but an ideal, he said, a light for the world. The notion struck me like lightning! (He stops setting type, and speaks directly to the audience.) At thirteen I became a pressman. A lackadaisical pressman. Every minute of time I could steal away from the presses went to my reading. And now, I was writing too. I had my first piece published in the New York Mirror. I remember the excitement as I watched the big, fat, red-faced newspaper carrier who brought the Mirror to Brooklyn. I got a copy from him, and opened it with trembling fingers. How it made my heart beat double to see my piece in a newspaper. (Pause.) My early published pieces? You don’t know them? (He laughs.) I’m glad. The best thing at that time was that I got to go to theater, and to the opera. You see, the newspaper got free tickets, and I snatched them up. My soul was cast in the fire of Italian opera La Sonnambula! Barber of Seville! I Puritanti! Lucia di Lammermore! I wept with the beauty and passion of it. My boss laughed when I told him. But he kept the tickets flowing to me. (Pause.) The years flew. There I was, eighteen years old, big as a man, and my dream of being a reporter seemed never in sight. I decided to quit journalism. I thought, if I could read well enough to set type, and write well enough for the New York Mirror, then I could teach reading and writing. I went to teaching at one-room schoolhouses in Queens and in Suffolk County. The children were easy, much like my little brothers and sisters. I boarded with the families of some of my pupils. This gave me some of my deepest lessons in human nature. Family life in all its ways. Girls setting their locks for me. Cruel fathers and gentle ones. Sweet women and bitter hags. (Whitman gets up from the stool and moves stage left. Light up there on some rocks and pilings, suggesting a shore. Warm yellow light. He puts a towel around his neck. To the audience.) But mostly what I liked about school teaching was the half days and the long summers. The best were on the East End of Paumanok. That’s the Indian name for Long Island. “Paumanok” is a better fit for my wild life there than puritan-plain “Long Island.” I’d ride out to Orient, and I’d catch a day on a small fishing boat with one of the baymen. They were an isolated race, men, women and children, caring nothing for any company but their own. A wild race, and strong. Admirable! (Pause.) They’re almost extinct now, or worse, entirely changed. In the summers, I’d sail down to Montauk. I spent many an hour on Turtle Hill, near George Washington’s old light house. In those days, I befriended strange, unkept half-barbarous herdsmen there, living, like baymen, entirely apart from civilization. I ate meals with the few remaining Indians. Great meals of quahogs and lobsters baked in beach fire pits. In August, I’d run into the ocean, dive through its surf, and come up with eyes stinging and lungs demanding their due. The sea is a lover, a most determined lover. (We hear a voice offstage reciting the lines.)

Out of the rolling ocean ...came a drop gently to me,

hispering, I love you, before long I die,

have travl’d a long way merely to look on you

o touch you ...”

He breathes deeply, as a swimmer just coming out of the ocean, wiping his face with a towel. Softly, ecstatically.) I surrender, camerado. (Light down. Light up on Whitman sitting behind his desk, feet up on the desk. Change of lighting and appointments to show he is in a different office. He is wearing “dandy clothes”: jacket, hat, shirt, Byronesque cravat. There are fresh papers scattered all over the desk. To the audience.) You know they say printer’s ink gets into a man’s blood faster than whiskey. And like the drunks down on the Bowery, it ran thick in my veins. I’d saved some money from helping lobstermen, baymen, farmers and carpenters. So when I was twenty, I bought a set of used type for the price of lead. I now owned my own newspaper, the weekly Long Islander, in Huntington. I was the paper’s entire editorial staff, reportorial staff, typesetting and press staff! (He chuckles.) And its entire delivery force. But after a while, I felt the lure of Manhattan, the emotion of it. So I had my hair cut to the fashion of European dilettantes, I put on dandy clothes, and got myself a job as managing editor of the Daily Aurora. I was, in fact, at liberty. I arrived at the office at eleven, left at noon, and returned at three to work another two hours or so. My publisher called me the laziest fellow ever to edit a newspaper. And he was right. But only in a way.

Do I contradict myself?

“Very well then I contradict myself.” (He smiles mischievously.)

“I am large, I contain multitudes.”

I was having a love affair, you see. With Manhattan. I loved the human forest there, and found it thickest at Pfaff’s Rathskeller below the sidewalk on Broadway. There were artists and stage people there, newspapermen and loafers. The great belly-breathing democratic creature! (Light change. There is a knock at the door. To the door.) Come in!

(Enter Woman as Mrs. Alice Dawson. She is about forty-five years old, a society lady. Whitman gets up quickly to greet her. He motions her to a visitor’s chair.)

DAWSON

It is a fine afternoon, sir.

WHITMAN

Yes, ma’am, it is!

DAWSON

Mister Whitman, permit me to introduce myself. I am Mrs. Alice Dawson, President of the New York Society of Washingtonians.

WHITMAN

Delighted. (Puzzled.) And, dear lady, what, I may I ask, is the “Society of Washingtonians?”

DAWSON

Why, a temperance organization!

WHITMAN

(unenthusiastically) Ah, I see.

DAWSON

(anxiously, fearing she has made a mistake in seeking out Whitman) You disdain our cause then?

WHITMAN

No, no, noble work fighting demon rum! Noble work. How may I be of service to you?

DAWSON

Well, we, that is the Society ...have admired your pieces in the Daily Aurora. Most especially your editorials. They reveal – in very plain, clear language – a thickly-textured moral character. Altogether stirring!

WHITMAN

Thank you.

DAWSON

We, that is, my colleagues and I in the Society...we detect in your writings a keen awareness that the best is to be had by each of us looking into our own souls, and from this will come the impetus to action, and the ability to change the world for the better. Tell me, if I may inquire, was yours a religious childhood?

WHITMAN

Well, my dear mother saw things as Quakers do.

DAWSON

(with a sense of having an epiphany) Ah, yes, of course!

WHITMAN

(slight pause) Yes ...well ...thank you again for your kind view of my scribblings here at the Aurora. (He makes a gesture as if to ask where all this is leading.)

DAWSON

I’ll come to the point. The other officers of the Society and I would like to commission you to write a book.

WHITMAN

(surprised) A book? What type of book?

DAWSON

A novel. You see, we are not unaware of our social climate. In that atmosphere – well, let me give you an example. Is it not true that the novels of Mister Charles Dickens do much to enlighten many to the moral needs of society?

WHITMAN

Yes, that’s undeniable.

DAWSON

Exactly! Thus it is that we would like you to write a novel. A story of your own devising, of course. About the evils of spirited drink. In terms so real as to compel the understanding of all classes.

WHITMAN

I see. (Pause.) Mrs.... Dawson, that’s a very appealing invitation, but I normally don’t take commissions. You see, my work here at the paper leaves me little time ...even in a good cause! Truly, truly.

DAWSON

Dear Mister Whitman, I believe in “getting down to brass tacks,” as they say. We are prepared to offer you ample compensation.

WHITMAN

But, as I explained ...

DAWSON

...We are prepared to pay you the equal of your annual salary here at the Aurora, however much that may be.

WHITMAN

That much! That’s an exceedingly generous offer! Exceedingly generous.(Light down on the desk and visitor’s chair. Mrs. Dawson disappears. To the audience.) Well, I took the commission! Now, it was not hypocritical of me. (Playfully.) True, I had nothing against liquor, but I was not overly fond of it either. So I wrote of its evils with as clear a conscience as I could have written about its virtues. Rumor has it that I finished the novel in five days. This is not true. (Pause. Facetiously.) It took three days and two nights. Fortunately, because I don’t think I could take it any longer! At the end of the third day, I took myself straight to Pfaff ’s Rathskeller for relief! In the preface of the book, I wrote, in the name of the temperance society, that “This book will create a sensation akin to the works of Charles Dickens.” It was called, “Franklin Evans – The Inebriate.” What! You’ve never heard of it? (He laughs.)

But I met Dickens once, strolling down Broadway. I confess. I went on like this for a while. Even after I received my best newspaper “sit.” I became editor-in-chief of the Brooklyn Eagle. But at the Brooklyn Eagle I began to write political editorials about the hottest issue of the day: the free soil controversy. Very earnest editorials. You see, we’d just finished the war with Mexico. The issue was whether the great territories we took from Mexico would allow slavery, or whether they would be free. Well, Congress voted down a bill saying they’d be free – all of ‘em: California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Utah. I was inflamed by this. I took to the free-soil issue like a lover embraces his bride! I wrote ferocious articles trumpeting the Movement’s slogan: “Free soil, free labor, free men!” I became a notorious “barn burner,” as they called us. The southern slave states were threatening all hell. (Loud and defiant.) “Let the fire come!” I shot back in my editorials. “Let lose the firestorm!” (He reflects on his zealotry with obvious sadness. He repeats in a now softer, anguished voice.) Let the fire come! (He is lost in the past, obviously troubled by the memory of this easy invitation to carnage of the Civil War. He recovers himself.) Where was I? ...Oh yes. I don’t know what effect my armchair heroics had on the Brooklyn Eagle’s readers. But it had a definite effect on the paper’s owner. He fired me. (Pause.) It was just as well. I decided to see some of the United States. So I applied for a far-away position. And I got one. I became a staff writer on the Daily Crescent. In New Orleans. The Deep South! I took my fifteen-year-old brother, Jeff, with me. (Projections and sounds of antebellum New Orleans.) In New Orleans, I loafed about the levees of the Mississippi River with the old river men, getting acquainted with their life. I wrote about them. I lounged with southern dandies in the city’s fancy hotels, and wrote about them too. Elegant gentlemen. But they were too fond of bourbon, and too quick with derringers and daggers they hid under their silk vests. I became a camerado to oyster men and auctioneers. (He reflects and repeats the word.) Auctioneers. (He regains himself.) I wrote about all these, and more. Sailors from around the world, come to fetch cotton and molasses. Rowdy dock workers. But my articles were thoughtlessly clapped together. Slipshod, in fact. My mind wasn’t in them. Not after a certain day. (Lighting change. Whitman stands up, straightens his spine, and takes a breath.) You see, my brother and I stopped at an auction. The auctioneer rattled on just like those in the Fulton Fish Market and in the farm fields on Long Island. (He imitates the rat-a-tat-tat cries of auctioneers, complete with body language and gestures.) Five hundred! Five! I hear five! Five! Five-fifty! Five and fifty. Six hundred! ! Six, six, six, do I hear ...Six hundred and fifty! Do I hear ...But Jeff didn’t laugh the way he did at grown men haggling over fish. And I didn’t race ahead in my mind thinking how much I’d pay for a beautiful chestnut mare if I had money. No. (Lighting change. Projections of a slave market.) We stood fixed as stone statues. “Blackfish” were for sale here. African blackfish. And black “mares.” Jeff shook up and down like a man in a winter rain. And my back ran with sweat. I gagged at the sight. Hard looking overseers stood near us. They were in from the plantations for the sale. And their fine, smooth, rich bosses were there too. I wanted to shout: “Auctioneer! Don’t you know what you’re selling, you incompetent fool!” I wanted to shout: (Lighting freeze. We hear a voice offstage shouting the lines.)

Have you ever loved the body of a woman? Have you ever loved the body of a man?

Do you not see these are exactly the same to all in nations

and times all over the earth?

...If anything is sacred the human body is sacred!”

(Lighting shift. Sadly, ashamed.) But Jeff, he just trembled. And me? The champion of the free-soil movement? The “barn burner?” ...I remained dumb. (Lighting change. Whitman walks stage left. Light up on some cotton bales. He sits on one. He talks to Jeff, who appears onstage, sitting with him. Projections: New Orleans riverfront at night. To Jeff.) I don’t take to a fifteen-year-old drinking, and when we left New York, I promised Mama I’d watch over you. But tonight ...You’re still shaking a bit. (He hands Jeff a bourbon bottle.) Here, take a swig.

JEFF

(takes a swig, and coughs. He hands the bottle back. Sadly.) Look at that moonlight playing on the river. Still and peaceful as can be. Walt, tell me true, will it ever be abolished?

WHITMAN

(takes a swig of bourbon, and shivers from its fire) Yes, Jeff, some day. Has to be!

JEFF

When?

WHITMAN

I don’t know, Jeff, I just don’t know. These southerners, they’ll never give it up. They call it their “peculiar institution.”

JEFF

What does that mean?

WHITMAN

They made it the rock on which their whole way-of-life stands. They’re afraid of losing everything. No slaves, no cotton. No slaves, no sugar. No slaves, no jobs for white folk either. They’re afraid of the black folk too.

JEFF

But these people are in chains!

WHITMAN

They’re afraid of what the slaves would do to ’em if they ever got free. There’s as many black folk here in Louisiana as white, did you know that?

JEFF

Then we’ll have to force the question, and damn them if they fight!

WHITMAN

(he shifts his body uneasily and sighs) I don’t know, Jeff, if it comes to war. A fellow down at Pfaff’s Rathskeller, he went all through West Point. He says the whole place speaks in southern accents. The south’s been going for the regular army since George Washington.

JEFF

They say he owned slaves.

WHITMAN

Yes, it’s true.

JEFF

Jefferson too?

WHITMAN

(he nods, and says sadly) Yes, Jefferson too.

JEFF

But how could they?

WHITMAN

I don’t know, Jeff, I don’t know. They were the most noble of us. I just don’t know. Mama named you after Jefferson, and George after Washington. (Pause.)\

JEFF

What’re we gonna do? I’m missing home real bad.

WHITMAN

I think we should stay here a while longer. We’d better get to know these people. They’re Americans too, no sense pretending otherwise. (Pause.) Besides, we don’t have the money yet to leave. (Light down on Jeff and he disappears. Whitman moves to his desk, and sits behind it. To the audience.) We stayed in New Orleans only three months. Back home, I naturally went for a job as a newspaper man. But not just any newspaper. I became editor of the most contentious of all papers. Maybe the most hated paper, too. The Brooklyn Freeman. It was the voice of the Free Soil Movement. (Sounds of voices arguing in the background. Whitman becomes exasperated.) Never was a noble cause served so stupidly! Endless bickering was the anthem of the Movement. And backbiting. And the abolitionists, they were worse, the abolitionists were worse! Their superior self-righteousness made for superior poison. They’d talk of war, alright. But the way they fought each other and the free-soilers, you’d never know how they’d have stamina left to fight the South. And all the while, I was called “the mouthpiece” of the Movement, so I was blamed by all sides. As far as outsiders went, they called me “agitator.” Then there were those who just called me ...other things ...(Sounds of voice shouting “Nigger lover!” Sounds fade.) I watched my back on the streets and in the taverns. (He sighs. Pause.) I was tired of being a screech-eagle journalist. I resigned from the paper, sick to death of all of it. And I was shying from a great, hissing rattlesnake. Civil war. In my parting editorial, I wrote, “I disdain and defy my enemies as ever.” (Pause.) The truth is I disdained myself. Out west, they have a saying about “seeing the elephant.” It means facing down something terrible, that can’t be helped. Civil war. I needed time to muster up my courage before the beast charged. He’d come soon, I knew. He’d come raging in full cry, shaking the ground, tusks like lances, aiming for blood! Just who was I to provoke this beast? (Pause. Projections of locales, trades, to indicate time passing.) I’d made so many enemies during my year editing The Freeman that I couldn’t find another position at all with any newspaper. So I did odd jobs for a few years. But the heart of my life was in writing. Writing which I showed to no one, no one at all. I wrote poetry, in a notebook, which I kept in a drawer. New poetry. A new form of poetry. My poems weren’t bound up in the rusty chains of rhymes and meter. I wrote free poetry – no rhymes. And no regular meter. “Free verse,” they call my poems now. I wrote in the cadences of my own heart! The sonorous sound of a free spirit! The spirit of all that I’d lived and seen and encompassed. I put away dandy clothes forever. (He takes off his cravat and changes jackets to his working man’s jacket.) And I dropped the “junior” from my signature. I was coming to myself. Walt Whitman! My own voice giving expression to my own spirit. My free spirit, open, limitless, pointing to the endless spirit in each of us, you no less than me. I said it to women as well as men. Yes, women too! Women must be freed from the unhealthy air which hangs about the word, “lady.” American girls must be raised to become the robust equals, workers, and practical and political deciders with men! I invite you each to your own great spirit. Men and women. I seduce you, yes! But, not I, not God, can set your sails on this boundless ocean. Only you. (Challenging; roaring.) “What’s that?” I say to myself and say to you. Too busy making money? Too busy chasing the dog-tail of your little self? Too busy sheltering in safety, reaching no farther than your own skin? My great spirit roars back to me, “Fool! Will you stuff your greed, gorge your vanity, pacify your fear, and starve me!” I finally went back to journalism. I covered the convention of my own Democratic Party. (He gets up and paces the room, anger growing in him at the memory.) It turned my stomach, and I vomited it up in editorials. (He reaches into the desk drawer for a clipping. Light change. Perhaps projections of an animated gathering of men. He reads it silently – we hear a voice offstage reading it aloud.) “The members of the convention were, seven eights of them, the meanest kind of bawling and blowing office-holders, office-seekers, pimps and conspirators, murderers and fancy men, clerks and contractors, mail thieves and gamblers, slavecatching bounty hunters and pushers of slavery, lobbyers and spies, bribers and carriers of concealed weapons – pimpled men, scarr’d inside with vile disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people’s money and harlots’ money twisted together. All of them born freedom-sellers.” (He angrily crumples the newspaper clipping and flings it away from him. Light change.)

WHITMAN

(to the audience) I was in these years, in turns, angry and despondent! I wrote the only truly bitter poem of my life. (Light shift. We hear a voice offstage reading the lines.) Let the faces and theories be turn’d inside out! Let meanings be freely criminal, As well as results! ...Let ...meanness, treachery, sarcasm, hate, greed, indecency, impotence, lust, be taken for granted above all! (Light shift.) Oh, you won’t find this poem today in Leaves of Grass. But it was in every edition until I removed it from the type plates with my own hands, some twenty years later. It took me that long to get over it. I wrote a pamphlet in my years of despair. “Are not all political parties played out?” I asked. And I answered, “yes.” (Lights fade. He moves about the room, pacing. Keep light on Whitman. Projections and sound.) These were terrible years. The free-soilers and pro-slavers were killing each other out in the Kansas Territory. And the Supreme Court in Washington threw oil on the fire. Seven of the nine judges said slavery was legal in all the territories. I still recall the exact words. The good judges said that Negroes had “no rights which any white man is bound to respect.” (Pause.) No rights! (Light shift. He continues to pace. Projections of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.) Only one light shone in all this darkness. In ‘fifty-eight I read of a series of debates going on in Illinois. Senator Douglas was running for reelection. He was debating his challenger up and down the state. So I first heard of Abe Lincoln. Douglas took a stand for the people of the territories deciding the slavery issue for themselves. Mr. Lincoln answered that “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” and that “This government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” I was electrified, electrified! Democracy had finally, at long last, found a leader. But I was scared. I was scared to death of the implications of Lincoln’s honest ideas. Oh, Mr. Lincoln lost the election. But his time was coming fast. He ran for president and was elected. South Carolina’s militia immediately surrounded Fort Sumpter. President Buchanan did nothing. My heart sank. But Lincoln, on the day he took office, he called the South’s bluff. He told them Fort Sumpter, and the Union, would be defended. Well, the Southerners started shooting. Mr. Lincoln called for volunteers for the Army. (Pause. Anguished.) Most senior officers in the U.S. Army stabbed him in the back and went over to the Confederacy. (Light change. Projections of Union troops on parade, and of Civil War battlefield dead. He stands still.) I took stock of myself. I didn’t enlist for good reason. I want you to understand this. Oh, I was forty-two years old. Years of sitting behind a desk during days, and in taverns at night. I was flabby. I recoiled from the mirror. White hair coming in. Shoulders drooping. But worst of all, I experienced dizziness, trembling and a bad feeling and deafness, which left me very tired all the long day. Had to do with a whack I suffered inside my head. Like a great sunstroke. Two years before the war. Oh, I registered for the draft, but I knew I was unfit. I made a vow to purge and spiritualize my body. And I kept it, my friends. To this day. No more drinking. No more eating of fat meat. No more midnight second dinners. But the afflictions never left me. Not all these years. I cheered the boys marching off to crush the rebels. Clean, fresh uniforms. Bright new silver-barreled muskets like mirrors in the sun. The ladies tied a length of rope to each musket. Each volunteer would capture a reb soldier and bring him back to us with his hands tied behind his back. Can you imagine that? The war would blow over in sixty days, they said ...Until the terrible beating we took at Bull Run. Our army fell back to Washington, blood-soaked and in panic. I read the long lists, column after column in the newspapers, of our killed and wounded. I wept. In the next six months, we lost every time we locked horns with the rebs. I grew numb at the lists of dead and wounded. Thousands of names. Then in December, I saw my brother’s name on the lists. “George Washington Whitman.” Young George was wounded in the terrible beating we took charging the heights at Fredericksburg. He had enlisted, and was now lying in an army hospital in Washington. I set out for there the next morning. (Projections: Civil War wounded, including amputees.) War hospitals were set up all over town, you see. In government buildings, private homes, and tents – everywhere. It took the army some time to find George’s name. The list ran to over forty thousand names just in Washington. I was referred to a great brick mansion on the river front. I came to a large tree, about ten yards from the door. Under it there was a great naked heap of amputated arms, hands, and legs. Some of the feet still had boots on ’em. (Light change. Light up on chaise/bed. Whitman stands next to the chaise/bed and speaks to the audience.) Both floors of the mansion were crowded with wounded. Everything was impromptu, no system at all. I found George upstairs. He was sitting on a cot, and reaching to help a man next to him who was coughing really bad. (Whitman acts this out with George, who appears onstage, at the chaise/bed as if it is an Army cot. He helps George lift the imaginary man to a sitting position to ease his breathing.)

GEORGE

Help me with him!

WHITMAN

(to the audience) His blanket slipped down, and I saw his uniform. He was a captain in a Mississippi regiment. After a time, he stopped coughing. He nodded in thanks to us, and we lowered him onto his back. (Whitman gets a stool, sets it next to the chaise/cot and sits.)

WHITMAN

(to George) Let me see your wound.

GEORGE

(lifting his bandage to reveal a wound on the side of his face) Here. Hardly took some skin off.

WHITMAN

(leaning forward to inspect George’s wound) Not so bad then? (Pause. He breathes a sigh of relief.) Good!

GEORGE

How’s Mama?

WHITMAN

Fine. Except for the fright about you.

GEORGE

Good of you to come, Walt. (Whitman brushes the thanks aside.)

GEORGE

What are you up to these days?

WHITMAN

Still writing.

GEORGE

More Leaves of Grass? (Whitman nods.)

GEORGE

Is it selling?

WHITMAN

It’s sold well enough. (Pause. In sadness.) I wish you and Mama and everybody back home had some tolerance for it.

GEORGE

Let’s not go down that road again.

WHITMAN

Well, you might read it, and make up your minds. I’m a Whitman, and not one of the Whitmans’ve read it, except Jeff, bless him.

GEORGE

I perused a few pages – just enough to prove the critics are right.

WHITMAN

Damnation, it is not obscene!

GEORGE

Did you come here to argue?

WHITMAN

(sighs heavily) No, let’s not argue.

GEORGE

That was churlish of me, Walt. I apologize. Thank you for coming. It’s good to see you.

WHITMAN

(becoming gentle, holding and stroking his brother’s hand) No need to thank me, brother. We’ll talk of spring, and you’ll get well. (Change of lighting. George disappears. Whitman gets up and moves as if around the ward. To the audience.) Well, I brought George food and candy. And the other soldiers. Rebs too. And Bibles – so many wanted Bibles. George was on his feet soon. One day, I found him dressed to ride, boots, hat and all. He returned to the fighting. George survived the war. He was a hero. Enlisted as a private and came out a colonel. (Anguished.) But never read one of my poems in all his life. (Almost tearfully.) Neither did my dear Mama. (Light change. More projections of Civil War wounded, and sounds of a crowded hospital ward, including men screaming.) I stayed on in Washington. I couldn’t get the hospitals out of my mind, or my nose. I went round them all day and night. I’d nap a few hours at a time on an empty cot, sometimes still warm from a body who just died. On these first visits I was of little use to the men. So I wrote letters for some of them to their mothers, and wives and kin. Then I carried water and a sponge in a barn bucket and washed them as best I could. They were all lying there in their uniforms, covered with field dirt and blood and vomit and urine and ...(he shakes his head.) Forgive me, I’ve never spoken of these things. I need to. I fed those too weak to hold a soup spoon, or whose hands the surgeons had taken. They called these doctors “sawbones.” With good reason. As soon as man’s arm or leg began to gangrene, and it usually did, they’d hack it off. Over in Europe, they were already using ether and chloroform. But not here. Most Army doctors had no interest in them. A swig of brandy was all a soldier got, if it was available. And then ...The screaming went on all day and night. The men would just nod when they heard an arm or leg had to come off. Afterward, there was no complaining. About anything. Not the pain. Not the cold. Not the salt pork and hard tack. When it came time for a man to die, he’d just turn his face down and do it. When the fighting started, I beat the drum for relentless war. But now I sat by the wounded, comforted them, wrote letters for them, brought them food and writing paper, dressed their wounds. (Whitman sits on the chaise/bed, as if cradling a hurt soldier in his arms, rocking gently. His eyes are lost in memory. We hear a voice offstage reciting the lines.)

“I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young,

Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad,

(Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested,

Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)”

(Whitman rises to his feet, and stands as if among the Army cots.) Emerson had written letters on my behalf to members of President Lincoln’s cabinet. They got me a job as a clerk at the Department of the Interior. Part of the Department’s building was being used as an army hospital. My clerk’s duties were light, so I spent much of the time nursing the wounded there. I spent most of my money on food and sundries for them. (Whitman becomes very animated.) In the summer, every day President Lincoln would ride close by the Interior Building. All the men who could stand crowded the windows to see him. I called out his passing to those on the cots. Even the rebel boys lay still to hear me. (He pretends to look out a window. In a loud voice, so that all the wounded may hear him.) Well, boys, there he goes. He’s riding a good-sized, easy going grey horse. He’s dressed in plain black, and he looks somewhat rusty and dusty. He’s wearing a tall, stiff black hat. Don’t know how he keeps it on his head, with the horse’s trotting and all. (Short pause.) His face? Well, his face’s dark brown. From riding in the summer sun, I guess. (Short pause.) No, he’s not alone. His boy’s next to him, riding a pony. ’Bout ten or twelve years old, I’d say. And there’s about thirty cavalrymen too. Real troopers, not parade dandies. They have drawn sabers ready at their shoulders. (To the audience) Some days he’d come by with Mrs. Lincoln. (In a loud voice again, looking out a window, to the wounded men on the cots.) They’re riding in an open carriage, a very simple one. Two horses pulling it. Mr. Lincoln and his lady are sitting facing each other. (Short pause.) She’s a plain woman, but pleasant looking. She’s wearing an honest dress. Mr. Lincoln’s wearing a long black cape. Off on a pleasure ride, I’d say. (To the audience.) Sometimes, when I was out walking, Mr. Lincoln would pass right near me. The people on the street would hardly pay him attention. But I’d always stop. We got so we’d exchange nods, very cordial. His face was cut deep with lines. (He is summoning up his memory.) There was something else there. In his eyes. Sadness, yes, but something else. Hard to describe. None of the artists or pictures got it right. As if he were looking at the wounded, always staring at the wounded. (He walks to his desk and sits behind it. Light down on chaise/bed.) One day, Mr. James Harlan, the Secretary of the Interior, came to my desk. (He rises to his feet. Light up on Harlan, who appears onstage.) Good day, Mister Secretary!

HARLAN

(holding a book in his hand.) I examined this last night, Mister Whitman.

WHITMAN

Leaves of Grass. My own copy! How did you get it?

HARLAN

I went into your desk. (He opens the book to a mark and reads a passage of a poem loudly.)

“The female form approaching, I pensive, love-flesh tremulous aching...

The face, the limbs, the index from head to foot,

and what it arouses,

The mystic deliria, the madness amorous, the utter abandonment ...”

HARLAN

(slamming the book shut) This is nothing more than indecent, sir!

WHITMAN

(growing angry) Indecent? No, Mr. Secretary. It’s a work of a great spirit!

HARLAN

Your spirit, such as it is!

WHITMAN

Not my spirit alone, our spirits, our spirit!

HARLAN

It is base and vulgar!

WHITMAN

The loving act is vulgar only to those who are barbaric in their love. To the great loving spirit, when we are loving, sex is exalted and divine. Spiritual!

HARLAN

“Sex? Sex!”

WHITMAN

Yes, Mr. Secretary, I said “sex.”

“Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his sex, Without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers.”

HARLAN

Mister Whitman, empty your desk of your personal belongings. As of this moment, your services here are no longer needed! (Whitman walks downstage. Light fades. Harlan disappears. Light up on Whitman.)

WHITMAN

(to the audience) Well, the war ended. But not the dying. The slow dying, and the slow healing. I stayed in the hospitals. Then came the terrible news from Ford’s Theater. The news was more bitter to us in the hospitals than all the amputated limbs staining all the grass outside all the wards. (He closes his eyes in pain, then opens them. In an anguished voice.)

“O Captain! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim

and daring;

But O heart! heart! heart!

O the bleeding drops of red,

Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.”

(He crumples in painful anguish.)