Act II

The stage is the same. The time is the same day, into night. The light comes up on Whitman. He is standing, leaning on a cane. His eyes are closed. He has a shawl around his shoulders We hear a voice offstage reciting the lines.

“I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours only

nor left my body mine only,

You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh,

as we pass,

you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return.”

(He opens his eyes and sits in his rocking chair. He turns to the audience.)

WHITMAN

Well, I expected hell when I published my Calamus poems, back before the war. And I got it. But not as I expected. Oh, all the yawpers went scurrying to dictionaries for the meaning of “calamus.” They were speechless when they read it’s a long, stiff reed with a phallic head. But expressions of comradely affection were then widely accepted. Men in public kissing each other was commonplace, you see, and ladies each other. So were letters of affection among each gender. Not like the great stern attention now being paid to it. But back then moralists were chiefly angered by my poems about men’s love of women. They still are. (We hear a voice offstage reciting the lines.)

“It is I, you women, I make my way ...

I pour the stuff to start sons and daughters fit

for these States,

I press with slow rude muscle ...”

I’m asked these days about a new word: “homosexualism.” I answer, What have I to do with “isms”? I’ve been beaten these long decades about my writings of love between man and woman. (He smiles sheepishly. Mockingly, facetiously; clearly a hoax.) And there are those who now call me liar in my claim to have fathered six love children. (He smiles now unabashedly.) But haven’t I written that “the skin is the organ of love”? (Laughs, and then grows serious. Pause.)

“I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy;

To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.”

(Wistfully) The touch of a camerado’s hand. Pete Doyle’s hand. (Projection of the well-known photograph of Whitman and Peter Doyle sitting facing each other.) I’ll tell you about my love for Pete Doyle, and you may tell the world. Let those who mock feed on it. (Lights dim. Sound of a horse-drawn streetcar. Light up on Whitman who is sitting on one of two seats set facing each other, angled downstage, to resemble streetcar seats. He looks straight ahead, and rocks as if to the streetcar’s motion. To the audience.) Right after the war, Pete was a conductor on the Washington and Georgetown Streetcar Line. I was on a car on a cold winter night. My mood was a perfect mate to the storm that battered the windows. And my clothes were fashioned for the night – a black great coat and a wide-brimmed oil-cloth hat. I sat alone, tired and absorbed in melancholy. I had a blanket around me to hold off the night’s offense. Pete came to me. “Sir, are you feeling poorly?” he asked. I looked up and saw him for the first time. (Looking up.) He was a tall young man, with a straight back and a military bearing. He had a manly nose and chin, with a fine long jaw-line. His hair was long, curly, and black, and he had a narrow black mustache. His eyes were dark and close set. But his skin was light. “Black Irish,” they call the appearance back in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan. And, I was to learn, in fact Pete was Catholic Irish, born in the old land, and taken to Virginia as a small lad. There were no other passengers in the car that wild night. I invited him to sit with me. (Lighting change. Peter appears onstage. We see Them sitting next to each other on the streetcar seats.) Pete sat and put his hand on my knee to ease me out of my doldrums. I covered his hand with my own, cold as my fingers were.

PETER

(in a Virginia accent) Captain, are you sure? You don’t look well.

WHITMAN

I’m fine, truly so, except for being too long in the rain. But why do you call me “Captain”?

PETER

You appear to be a ship’s master, or am I mistaken?

WHITMAN

(chuckling) Yes, I suppose I do look like a seaman. But friend, I’m just a clerk third-class at the Department of Justice. (Pointing to Peter’s “CSA” belt buckle.) I see from your belt buckle that you were in the Army of the South.

PETER

Yes, sir, I was. The Virginia Volunteers. Were you in it too, the war?

WHITMAN

Yes I was – in a way, that is. I was a wounddresser in army hospitals. Union Army.

PETER

Federal Army? Well, I too had some experience there. You see, I was a prisoner of war and spent two weeks in a Yankee ward. Not wounded, but sick.

WHITMAN

Why, we could have met!

PETER

No, Mister ...

WHITMAN

Whitman. They call me “Walt.”

PETER

And I’m Pete. Pete Doyle. Well, Walt, I’d of remembered you if our paths had crossed.

WHITMAN

Yes, there were too few volunteers in the wards.

PETER

That’s not what I meant. (There is an awkward silence between them.)

WHITMAN

Tell me, Pete, what did you do after ...Appomattox?

PETER

I found employment here on the streetcars, as you see. It brought me to Washington. At last. (Chuckles.) We had hoped to come with General Lee. (He grows serious.) I came just before ...well, before Mister Lincoln was killed. As a point of fact, I was in Ford’s Theater the night he was shot.

WHITMAN

You don’t say! Did Mister Lincoln seem carefree that evening, as they say?

PETER

Yes, he truly did!

WHITMAN

What were your feelings when Booth cried out, “Sic Semper Tyrannis”?

PETER

I’ll tell you, Walt. The war ...well, that was one thing. I had nothing against the Yankee soldiers. We were just of different minds. But once it was ...settled, well, I don’t hold with murder, no, sir! (Whitman nods.)

PETER

(troubled) But I don’t believe we’ve had the last of it.

WHITMAN

What do you mean?

PETER

Oh, there’s bitterness and hate all around us. That’s what comes of war. And those out to make hay out of all the mean feelings. You get my drift, Walt?

WHITMAN

I do, Pete. So many feeble, bandaged and bloody. And sets of foxes and wolves after them. And it’s worst of all here in Washington. All the fierce puppet show gods are on the march – greed and malice dressed in blue and gold leading the way.

PETER

That’s on the mark, Walt. Right on target.

WHITMAN

But we can’t drown in despair, my camerado.

PETER

Well, where’s the hope? I don’t see any.

WHITMAN

It’s in the beautiful young, Pete. In the beautiful young we remember, wounded, bleeding, suffering. The beautiful young in wholesale death and agony. We shall never leave them behind, men like you and me.

PETER

I won’t, that’s for sure. I plain can’t! Sometimes wish I could. But where’s the hope in that?

WHITMAN

It’s in the thread that stretches back from the blood and death to the chaos around us now. Like a clear note it rings right to the future. Faith, triumph – a nation of a hundred million superb men and women!

PETER

What thread? I don’t see it. Wish I did.

WHITMAN

It’s the thread of sweet comradeship, Pete. We’re a different race from the Europeans, we Americans. Their houses are built on barren sands. Privilege and spite and every kind of tyranny. Our triumph will be distilled from our freedom and comradeship, immense in passion, pulse and power.

PETER

(brightening) You’re an optimist – you are for sure! To come out of that damned war with hope. Beats all!

WHITMAN

Not the war, Pete. Let me tell you a story. You doubtless can tell many like it. There was a boy in one of the wards, from upstate New York. Name was Oscar F. Wilber. No different from most others. He asked me to read the bible to him, and I did. It pleased him. There were tears in his eyes. Then he asked me if I enjoyed religion. I said, “Perhaps not, my young brother, in the way you mean. And yet, maybe, it’s the same thing in my heart.” Oscar behaved very manly and affectionate. The kiss I gave him before he died he returned fourfold! Magnetic sympathy and friendship, Pete! They do more good than all the medicines in the world. There’s the hope. Don’t you remember it?

PETER

I do now! I surely do, thanks to you. (Laughs.) Your optimism is catching – damned if it ain’t! (He takes Whitman’s hand and presses it tightly against his own heart. He smiles.) And it sure is medicine for a sore heart. (Change of Lighting. Peter disappears.)

WHITMAN

(to the audience) A miserable ride on a most miserable night turned to a great fortune and pleasure for me. In the next years, Pete and I became ...well, how should I explain it? I’ve told you of my love of Italian opera. The Italians make distinctions about friendships. There are friends of self-interest, friends by guts, friends by desire, friends by longing, friends of the heart, friends of the soul, and friends of the spirit. Pete and I were all these. And more. There is more; there’s more. In my writing, I speak as a man, and I speak as a woman. And I speak as both sexes at once. I am the poet of intense and loving comradeship, the personal and passionate attachment of man to woman, of man to man, of woman to woman. He or she who walks into this ocean is with me. He or she need only take the first step. (We hear a voice offstage reciting the lines.)

“Through me forbidden voices,

Voices of sexes and lust, voices veil’d and I remove the veil,

Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.”

Transfiguration! Not from manners. Nor convention, but by love. Not bound in gentility; but breathing free. I destroy not the personal. I destroy nothing. (We hear a voice offstage reciting the lines.)

“I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions,

But really I am neither for nor against institutions, I am the poet of the spiritual sea.”

(He gets up.) Pete and I stepped into that ocean together. (Light shift. He shifts mood, becoming increasingly agitated, and determined to make himself understood.) Would it surprise you to know that the one person who best understood me in all these years was a woman? It’s true. Back when I saw Pete everyday, an Englishwoman named Anne Gilchrist authored an article in a Boston paper about my poems. She said they represented a “new birth of the soul.” She was a widow. Her late husband was famous as a scholar of poetry, and she shared his sensibility. In fact, she finished her late husband’s monumental book about William Blake and his poetry. Until then, Blake had been dismissed as “mad.” With one stroke, Anne Gilchrist established his genius – and her own! Well, we began corresponding. Although she had four children, she was a vigorous, still young woman. Her letters became increasingly passionate. Finally, after six years, in one of her letters she declared her love for me. She proposed marriage! She was sailing to America, she said. I wrote back that she understood my poems better than anyone else. And it was true, it was true. But I wrote to her, “Don’t love me. Love my book!” She came anyway. (Lighting change. Anne Gilchrist appears onstage, a woman about forty years old. They are sitting together.) Dear Anne, I’ve just reread your book on William Blake. A true masterpiece!

ANNE

(brushing aside the praise) The masterpiece is Blake’s, not mine. The glory is his. And one day, Walt, it will be yours. You will one day be known as one of the greatest sons of the earth.

WHITMAN

You embarrass me.

ANNE

No, the reverse is true. Your poems are the most powerful force on me coming from any source. When I first read them, I asked myself, “What is this man’s spell?” And I knew, instantly. In your words, dear Walt, humanity has at last found itself. In your poems, each man and each woman has, for the first time, dared to accept the human spirit without reservation. For the first time our spirit has burst forth triumphantly into song.

WHITMAN

Anne, it’s you who are casting a spell now. Over me.

ANNE

No, Walt. I’m not given to flattery or falseness. Hear me out, and know your true worth. You’ve opened the wilderness of the unopened life. It’s incomprehensible that this is not as obvious to your countrymen as the sun in the sky. And the purity of your vision is cosmic as well as splendid. Like Blake you see

“a World in a Grain of Sand And Heaven in a Wild Flower.”

And in a leaf of grass. But you outdo even Blake in the freshness of your language, the language of every man and every woman. You’ve done what Blake prophesied. You’ve cleansed all our eyes, and let us see that everything is infinite. Our soul not less than the cosmos.

WHITMAN

(genuinely) Anne, please, you overwhelm me ...I’ve lost my voice.

ANNE

My dear Walt, your voice is the voice of my soul! WHITMAN

Anne, dear Anne, you and I are truly soul mates, as no other has ever been to me. But I ...we ...

ANNE

(raising her hand to stop him) Dearest Walt, let me bare myself. Although it’s the instinct of a woman’s nature to be sought, not to seek, I must risk your disapproval by being frank and open in my desire. It isn’t happiness I plead with God for. It’s the very life of my soul. My love is my life. Oh Walt, it’s a sweet and precious thing this love. It yearns with such passion to soothe and comfort and fill thee with tender joy. I’m yet young enough to bear thee children, my darling, if God should so bless me.

WHITMAN

(both moved and uneasy) Dear Anne, I ...I must at least tell you that I’m far from insensible to your love. Please feel no disappointment with me. You’ve understood my poems better and fuller and clearer than anyone else has. They are my best response, my truest explanation of all! Don’t love me, Anne, love my book. Let it be enough that there surely exists so beautiful and delicate a relation, accepted by both of us with joy.

ANNE

Dearest Walt, I can wait. I can grow great and beautiful through sorrow and suffering, working, yearning, loving so, all alone, as I have done these past years. Don’t answer yet. There’s still time. (Lighting change. Anne disappears.)

WHITMAN

(to the audience) Well, against all my entreaties, Anne settled here in America, in Philadelphia. (He brightens.) I used to visit her household, and became a father of sorts to her children. It gave me great joy, great joy! Being with her family was sweet to me. The only happy domesticity I’ve enjoyed since my mother’s home. (Pause. Sadly.) Anne went back to England after three years. We corresponded. Dear Anne was a harmony of sensuality, intellect and sensibility. “There’s still time,” she said. If only we ...if only I ...(Sadly.) The darkness, the darkness of our souls’ nights ...(He becomes lost in thought, then recovers.) I met once with Edgar Allan Poe – just once, when I was young. Interviewed him. He was a slender, slight, beautiful man, but of the nervous type. But the most likeable man I’ve ever met. And the most cordial. We talked easily for a long time. Finally, he encouraged me to appraise his writings. I was very reluctant to do so. But he drew me out with great charm. (Lighting change. Poe appears onstage, sitting with Whitman.) Well, Mister Poe, your fantasies are formed of the best writing I’ve ever read. Your are simply the best author alive!

POE

Thank you, Mister Whitman. But I am not seeking kindness, much as it is welcome. Your reviews in your paper are kind. But they’re also very keen in going to the heart of an author. What do you say of the heart of my writing? I require your vision here. You see, to me they are but dreams in dreams.

WHITMAN

(uneasy, feeling on the spot) Well, sir, Mister Poe, pardon my saying so, but your writings are dark.

POE

(nodding and sighing.) You see, from childhood, I’ve not seen as others see. But, tell me, have you been spared these moods?

WHITMAN

No. I wish it had been otherwise. But I couldn’t rest there.

POE

Why?

WHITMAN

Well, for me it’s like a vision of night without day, twilight with no dawn. Forgive me, Mr. Poe, I mean no offense. But to me, well, it’s unnatural. I don’t know how else to put it. Even the six months of night in the arctic yields to six months of sunlight.

POE

(becoming melancholy) Perhaps, then, it will be revealed when your life brings you low ...as it must, as it must. By calamity ...great illness ...old age ...(His voice becomes very sad.) When demon clouds blot the blue of heaven from view.

WHITMAN

Yes, I take your point. I truly do. (Lighting change. Poe disappears. To the audience.) Poe and I parted on the fondest terms, like a father and son, although he was only ten years older than I. But I’msad to say I never saw him again. Many years later, a number of renowned authors were invited to speak at a memorial at his grave in Baltimore. I alone of them attended, although I was not well. (He shakes his head, still finding it hard to believe.) I alone attended. (With new emphasis.) I would be understood ...You see, I would be understood ...unlike poor Mister Poe. “Don’t love me; love my book,” I told Anne Gilchrist. Yes. And I say to others, “Do not bend it to others’ purposes,” as too many have done. I’ve told you all this so that you’ll know that my love for Pete Doyle was not aimed at destroying anything. Although I’ve been branded as such, against my will, I’m not a drum-beater for the free-love movement, or any other schemers that destroy the welfare of our system of marriage, which lies at the root of our society. My intention has been to rescue sexuality, with all its acts and organs, from the keeping of blackguards and debauchers to which it has been abandoned. The free-lovers and bigamists preach humbug. I am the poet of deep, personal love, personal love. (He shifts mood, becoming more personal again.) I must tell you, my love for Pete was hardly flawless. I had doubts about myself. Did I have strength of spirit enough to enter into full love for this great big, hearty, full-blooded everyday divinely generous working man? For the most part the salt of the earth. A hail fellow, but also a little too fond of his beer, now and then, and of women. And he was but nineteen years old, and I forty-seven. I struggled with myself for all the years in which we walked down country lanes, and passed nights in each other’s warmth. I resolved more than once to depress my love for Pete, and to give it up absolutely. “It must come to an end, and it had better come now,” I said to myself. “Let there be no more seeing him!” I was both in and out of the game, watching and wondering at it. Well, Pete at one point fell into a morbid state of mind. He proposed his suicide to me. I was unspeakably shocked and frightened. How to dissuade him? I was scared, and at a loss. Then it came to me. I aimed straight at Pete’s sense of manhood! I told him, “It seems to me that the one I loved, who has always been manly and sensible, seems now gone, and a fool and intentional murderer stands in his place!”

“There was no more talk of suicide.

The truth is we remain to this day camerados. But his youth...

the difference in our ages ...After six years, we

drifted apart.”

In an early edition of my Leaves of Grass, I wrote as in a dream of a woman in New Orleans. (We hear a voice offstage reciting the lines.)

“Day by day and night by night we were together – all else has been forgotten by me,

I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung to me ...”

But now, now I remember only Pete.

“I remember only the man who wandered with me ...for love of me,

Day by day, and night by night, we were together.”

(He is lost for a moment in reverie. He regains himself. He gets up and walks a few feet. Tight light on him – black elsewhere. He softly comes back to the present.) Oh yes. I remained in Washington twelve years after I rushed to my wounded brother, George. (Light up on Peter Doyle as he appears on stage, extreme stage right, from Whitman’s thoughts.)

PETER

I remember then, Walt. You never liked it much in Washington. Why’d you stay? We could’ve left. Lord knows, I wanted to see New York.

WHITMAN

Well, Pete, I had a thought that the war would cleanse these States. I thought that so much blood-letting would finally render America healthy of spirit. I wanted to see that! But I was wrong. Today, as we face a new century, Americans are besotted with false goddesses. (Light up on Anne Gilchrist as she appears on stage, extreme stage left, from Whitman’s thoughts.)

ANNE

Ah yes, Walt. We spied the sham goddesses early on, back then, you and I. The “prevailing delusion,” you called it. The notion that free political institutions, plentiful smartness, and prosperity were proof of democracy’s success. (Pause.) But you saw a society cankered with materialism. The element of moral conscience seemed either entirely lacking, or seriously enfeebled, or ungrown. You said, “We had best look our times searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease!” But that was a long time ago. How goes it now, my dear Walt?

WHITMAN

Now? Well, Anne, as we approach a new century, the spectacle is appalling! The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. And worse, in literature – our precious literature, Anne – a scornful superciliousness rules. The aim of authors is to find something to destroy. The depravity of the business and celebrated classes is not less than supposed, but infinitely greater. And everywhere we have flippancy, tepid love, weak infidelities, small aims, or no aims at all. Only the killing of time.

PETER

(still standing at extreme stage right) Well, now, Walt, I told you, didn’t I? Said men would never change. But you were all bound up in politics then. Look at the recent presidential campaign. Mr. Cleveland’s supporters shouted (We hear a voice offstage shouting.) “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of Maine.” And Blaine’s men? Mr. Cleveland admitted fathering an illegitimate child, so his enemies shouted at him (We hear a voice offstage shouting.) “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!”

WHITMAN

(He makes a face of disgust. To the audience) Our democracy has spawned a certain vulgar, superficial popular culture. But where are the crops of fine youth? We see shallow notions of beauty, sex, and a lack of manners probably the meanest in the world. Where are the majestic old persons? We see dispirited phantoms, many playing at meaningless distractions. Where is a great, pulsing moral and religious civilization – the only justification of a great material one. It’s as if we have been endowed with a more and more thoroughly appointed body, and then left with little or no soul. Does it surprise you that Walt Whitman is a moralist? The “indecent” poet “rooting about in garbage?”

PETER

(still from extreme stage right) There – you’re still at it! You know I could never grab hold onto all that moralizing. And your friends – well, they looked down their noses at me for it. It was a helluva sore point between us, Walt, a helluva sore point!

WHITMAN

Forgive me, camerado, I didn’t mean to preach.

ANNE

(still from extreme stage left) Walt, Walt! Don’t turn your back on yourself, not now at this late time! Ever since your youth, you’ve had one purpose. The foundation of a moral America, in the never-ending infinitude of each man and each woman. You said, for each of us to commence the experiment whose end may be the forming of a full-grown man or fullgrown woman – that would be something. Yes, Walt, it would be! It shall be! Heed your own call, Walt:

“Away O soul! hoist instantly the anchor! Cut the hawsers – haul out – shake every sail! Sail forth – steer for the deep waters only.”

WHITMAN

Yes, Anne, yes! Love and will and courage. These are the deep waters. They are in me, in the actual me. They are in each actual soul. We are not measured between the hat and shoes of our little selves. Love and will and courage, Anne. Oceans! Measured by love and will and courage, our little selves are foam on great waves. Our social institutions are bobbing corks. (To the audience.)

“Prescriptions? Examples? I have none.

Let others dispose of questions, I dispose of nothing, I arouse unanswerable questions.”

(Lighting change. Peter Doyle disappears. Anne remains on stage, still at extreme stage left. Whitman picks up his cane, goes to a wheelchair, and taps the wheelchair contemptuously with the lower part of his cane. To Anne.) Now, Anne, I spend too much of my days in that. (He sits reluctantly in the wheelchair. His demeanor becomes that of a physically impaired, old man.) I’m under the test set me by Mr. Poe. I’m much like some hard-cased, dilapidated, grim, ancient, shellfish – no legs, cast up high and dry on the sand! I’ve been under Mr. Poe’s test for some time. You recall I told you that when I was thirty-nine years old, I suffered a blow inside my head? You remember, Anne, four years after the war, these afflictions suddenly worsened after another blow? Well, when I was fifty-four years old, there came the worst whack of the series of whacks. I was left paralyzed, save for my brain and my right arm. I felt the strong and delicious seductiveness of death. The touch of beautiful Death would end all suffering, end all yearning. But these depressions – they were not Me myself, the actual Me. Any more than my exultations were. From deep within me, I determined to live. (We hear a voice offstage reciting the lines.)

“Strong is your hold O mortal flesh, Strong is your hold O love.”

The more the darkness of death entered me and filled me, the more it was lighted. I came to live here in Camden, not in this cottage, but in my brother George’s house. I sat under an oak by a stream in the sunshine, in every season. And under stars in clear blue-black nights. I was conscious of a definite presence. Nature, silently near. Not chemistry nor reasoning nor esthetics will ever give the least explanation of it. (Projections of trees, woods. He speaks ardently.) In nature, my spirit, sick or sane, is as near at peace and at home as it can be. Never am I less alone than when I am alone with nature. Nature – open, voiceless, mystic, far removed, yet palpable and eloquent. (To Anne, who remains at extreme stage left.) Two years, Anne, daily in the open air. As my body returned, I hobbled into the woods. In summers, I shed my clothes, and walked on the grass. Sweet, free, exhilarating nakedness in nature! Some people may think me half-cracked or feeble, but I owe my partial rehabilitation to this. (He gets up and acts out some of the following to show Anne, growing stronger as he does so.) In all four seasons, Anne, I exercised my body by bending hickory saplings to and fro. For hours, I strained my legs with my shoulders against tree trunks, and pulled my arms against the limber boughs of hickory and beech, holly and maple. In this natural gymnasium, I felt elasticity and strength growing in my fibers. From time to time, I collapsed, the softness of my naked body falling against a smooth birch trunk, my sweat moistening its unyielding bark. (He stops. He’s breathless from the exertions.) In the loving wrestling with the innocent stalwartness of trees, my arms, chest, trunk and legs – and my soul – were greatly rehabilitated. Maybe the trees were more aware of it all than I ever thought. I remember each of them, and the streams and banks and grass and stars. Even the weeds.

ANNE

Good for you, Walt! You were never faint of heart. Oh, how I longed to share the wisdom of nature with you! After I returned to England. And the wisdom of age – to the day I died.

WHITMAN

(anguished) Oh, Anne!

ANNE

What have you learned, Walt? (Pause. He has regained his breath.)

WHITMAN

After years of paralysis, Anne, I realized a venerable myth: A man, a woman, is God walking the earth. Merely to move is a happiness, a pleasure – to breathe, to see, is also. A man finds new beauties and powers everywhere. (Light change to indicate scene change. Projections of the places he talks about.) After six years, I was strong enough to travel. I went to Colorado, and the Rockies, stayed with my brother, Jeff, and his family, in Saint Louis. I visited old friends, former work mates, in Washington. You see, my poem about President Lincoln had finally become famous, and I read it to packed houses everywhere. The New York Times said, and still does, I’m the reverse of the poet. (He and Anne laugh.) But the good paper could not ignore me, Anne, not any longer! After thirty years and eight editions, Leaves of Grass was suddenly in demand, despite the critics. Still is. And the ninth edition of Leaves of Grass – hundreds of pages! More poems than ever. And most reworked. You would love them, Anne. You more than anyone! (Light down, then up. Different light. He walks nearer to the wheelchair, picks up his cane and leans heavily on it.) Three years ago, Anne, I had another series of strokes. They left me the half-paralytic I am today. I came back to live here in Camden. The success of my readings brought me enough money to buy this small house. Some friends come to visit. Old friends, and new. Pete Doyle too came to visit me.

ANNE

And how did it go, Walt?

WHITMAN

(pause) Oh, we talked, ever as camerados. (We hear a voice offstage reciting the lines.)

“After supper and talk – after the day is done, Good-by and Good-bye with emotional lips

repeating...

Soon to be lost ...in the darkness ...”

Anne, you know I had my fill of doctors long ago. But one came to see me recently. A good man, drawn to me by my writings – as you were. (Lighting change. The Doctor appears. Whitman is sitting in the wheelchair and converses with the Doctor, as the doctor examines him.) Well, yes, Doctor, my kidneys hurt too. Particularly when I pass water. But then, I’ve pains almost everywhere. I’ve taken to resting on a water bed. Like a big duck! And my throat is forever sore. What’s the cause, do you think?

DOCTOR

Hospital malaria.

WHITMAN

(puzzled) What is “hospital malaria?”

DOCTOR

Poison absorbed in the system in the army hospitals.

WHITMAN

(unsatisfied) I see.

DOCTOR

From the very atmosphere there.

WHITMAN

(ironically) Well, that’s most enlightening. Tell me, Doctor, is that the cause too of my constant coughing?

DOCTOR

(quite serious) Tuberculosis. And more. Tuberculosis sometimes circuits the body. And it fixes itself in all the organs and joints.

WHITMAN

I didn’t know that.

DOCTOR

And I’m afraid you have pneumonia, too.

WHITMAN

(with gallows humor) Well, well, well. Doctor, it seems I am a veritable pathological museum!

(Pause. Light change. The doctor disappears. Whitman still sits in the wheelchair. Anne is still at extreme stage left. To Anne.) Anne, we used to talk about growing old together ...

ANNE

(interrupting. Matter of factly) I talked of it, Walt, not you.

WHITMAN

Yes. I’m so sorry, dear Anne!

ANNE

(with a loving, dismissive gesture) Have no regrets, Walt. I carried your spirit with me all my days in England, to the end, and I had no regrets. You were about to say?

WHITMAN

It’s about a discovery I’ve made in old age, Anne. Each day, each meal, each cup of water is fresh. I would not give a straw for that person who is not more grateful at the second day of the week, the third day, and at each meal. The hundredth time at a tree or steam, or with a friend. I discover the best after years of familiarity. What is humanity in its faith, love, heroism, poetry, even morals ...?

ANNE

...Emotion, my dear Walt! Passion!

WHITMAN

Yes, passion! Always new, if we’ re awake.

“The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her

who remains jagged and broken.”

ANNE

(amused) What’s “the trick” as they say?

WHITMAN

Anne, you and I know the trick. Enter life fully. Know that which is greater than you. Our personality is most important with reference to the immortal, the unknown, the spiritual. The soul is the only permanently real.

“No reasoning, no proof has establish’d it, Undeniable growth has established it.”

My critics yawp that my vision is but a dream. No, the life of the small self, that’s a dream. (Anne disappears. Change of light to indicate passage of time. It is nighttime. Whitman is sitting in the wheelchair. He looks square at the audience. He reaches under a blanket covering his lap, holds up a thick book, and smiles triumphantly to the audience. To the audience.) The Ninth Edition of Leaves of Grass! Straight from the press in Philadelphia. I’ll trust and rest in it! Beware.

“Camerado! This is no book;

Who touches this, touches a man.”

(Through an act of great will, He gets up from the wheelchair. He walks with difficulty, leaning heavily on his cane, all the way down stage. With effort, he stands upright, tall. He lifts the cane’s bottom off the floor. He extends his other hand to the audience in invitation. His voice grows stronger as he speaks.)

“Camerado, I give you my hand!

...will you come travel with me?...

Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

I know I am restless and make others so,

I know my words are weapons full of danger, full of death,

For I confront peace, security, and all the settled laws,

to unsettle them,

I heed not and have never heeded either experience,

cautions, majorities, nor ridicule,

And the threat of what is call’d hell is little or nothing to me,

And the lure of what is call’d heaven is little or nothing to me;

Dear camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me,

and still urge you, without the least idea what is our destination,

Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell’d and defeated.”

(Pause. He reaches his hand out to the audience.)

Come.

(Light fades to black.)

END