I
“OUT OF THE CRADLE ENDLESSLY ROCKING” (then titled “A Child’s Reminiscence”) appeared at Christmastime 1859 in the Saturday Press, an urbane literary weekly entering upon its second year of sparkling but incurably penniless existence. “Our readers may, if they choose,” said the editor’s note, “consider as our Christmas or New Year’s present to them, the curious warble by Walt Whitman . . . on our First Page.” Within days the Cincinnati Daily Commercial rejected the gift out of hand as “unmixed and hopeless drivel” and described it as a disgrace to the Saturday Press, “the prince of literary weeklies, the arbiter elegantiarum of dramatic and poetic taste.” In response the Saturday Press provided Whitman with a forum for an anonymous, distinctly truculent defense of “Out of the Cradle” and other “mystic leaves.” “Walt Whitman’s method in the construction of his songs,” he declared, “is strictly the method of the Italian Opera,” which on first hearing inevitably confounded listeners accustomed to “tunes, piano-noises, and the performances of the negro bands.” He went on to say that Leaves of Grass has “not yet been really published at all” but soon would be—in a new edition “far, very far ahead” of the first and second in “quality, quantity, and in supple lyric exuberance . . . The market needs to-day to be supplied—the Great West especially—with copious thousands of copies.”
The editor of the Saturday Press, Henry Clapp, had “stepped out from the crowd of hooters—was my friend: a much needed ally,” Whitman was to say, “a pioneer, breaking ground before the public was ready to settle.” “My dear Walt,” Clapp wrote in March 1860, when the book was in press, “I can do a great deal for it. I meant to have done more last week.” Apart from paid advertisements, between December 1859 and December 1860 Clapp published at least twenty-five items by or about Whitman, including reviews, commentary, controversy, imitations and parodies; he was party to a literary and domestic skirmish over Leaves of Grass conducted in four successive issues during June 1860. It was occasioned by a review that Clapp had solicited from one of Walt’s fervid admirers, Juliette Hayward Beach of Albion, New York, a writer and copublisher, with her husband Calvin, of the Orleans County Republican. Calvin apparently anticipated or intercepted her article and sent in his own, which declared that Walt was a sexual predator, had the moral sensitivities of “a stock-breeder,” and ought to kill himself. Clapp must have been drunk when this arrived in the mail—he printed it over Juliette’s name on June 2 along with an editorial note congratulating himself for giving houseroom to “every variety of opinion” on a volatile topic. On the ninth, Clapp offered a “Correction”—“the article in our last issue . . . was written, not by her, but by Mr. Beach.” On the sixteenth he published some panegyrics from a Philadelphia paper as a corrective to Beach’s “lump of you know what,” as Whitman called it. Juliette’s own article, this time signed “A Woman,” finally appeared on the twenty-third. She hailed the “deep spiritual significance” of Leaves of Grass and predicted that it would inevitably become “the standard book of poems in the future of America.” “God bless him,” she said. “Walt Whitman on earth is immortal as well as beyond it.” It is not known how the Beaches’ marriage managed to weather this public squabble—“quite a stew,” Whitman said. According to Ellen O’Connor he carried on a romance by mail with Juliette and addressed a tender poem to her, “Out of the Rolling Ocean the Crowd”:
. . . I salute the air, the ocean and the land,
Every day at sundown for your dear sake my love.
“Walt is a genius,” “de facto our poet laureate,” a friendly newspaper editor announced. “Emerson has said so, Clapp says so.” Clapp found in Leaves of Grass the radical boldness, social and artistic, that had been his touchstone since he visited Paris in his thirties and settled in New York to become king of literary bohemia. In the twilight vault of Pfaff’s beer cellar under the Broadway pavement near Bleecker Street Clapp ruled over a court of clever people—his associate editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich (“wittiest man in seven centuries,” Mark Twain was to say); Fitz-James O’Brien, the author of some remarkable short stories thought the equal of Poe’s; George Arnold, poet and popular literary farceur; and the leading humorist of the day, Artemus Ward. “Brandy and soda,” Clapp proposed when Ward showed him a telegraphed inquiry from a lecture agent, “What will you take for forty nights in California?” Whitman remembered the drama critic Edward G. P. Wilkins as “noble, slim, sickish, dressy, Frenchy,” exquisitely attentive to his linen, cravat and gloves, outwardly little more than “a dude,” but still as outspoken an admirer of Leaves of Grass as two less fashionable habitués of Pfaff’s, the Polish patriot Count Adam Gurowski and John Swinton of the New York Times (William’s brother and also Orson Fowler’s son-in-law). “My beloved Walt,” Swinton was to write, recalling his first sight of a copy of Leaves of Grass at a Brooklyn newsstand in 1855. “I got it, looked into it with wonder, and felt that there was something that touched the depths of my humanity. Since then you have grown before me, grown around me, and grown into me.” (That letter had “sugar in it,” Walt said.)
Bohemia’s queen was the famous Charleston beauty Ada Clare, actress and writer, who had borne a child out of wedlock by the composer-piano virtuoso Louis Moreau Gottschalk and now boldly signed hotel and ship registers, “Miss Clare and Son.” She was the New Woman—liberated in sex, expression, and parity with men—that Whitman celebrated in his poems. When she died in 1874 under horrible circumstances—of hydrophobia, from the bite of a lap dog in a theatrical agent’s office—he was “inexpressibly shocked.” “Poor, poor Ada Clare,” he said, contemplating her “gay, easy, sunny, free, loose, but not ungood life.” She was one reason he loved the South. Another was the New Orleans-born Adah Isaacs Menken, also a writer and actress and the heroine of celebrated off-stage adventures. When Walt first knew her at Pfaff’s she was going through a legally inconclusive divorce from the first of her four husbands and a legally inconclusive marriage to the second, the American heavyweight titleholder known in and out of the ring as The Benicia Boy; as soon as their child was born the Boy denied they had ever been married. She found a refuge from misery in her starring role in the Byronic melodrama Mazeppa. Wearing the merest G-string over flesh-tinted tights she rode off into the stage sky lashed to the back of a “fiery steed of Tartary.” Mazeppa made her internationally famous as the “naked lady,” “the most perfectly developed woman in the world.” She was photographed with Alexandre Dumas père in a pose suggesting considerable intimacy and was reputed to be the morganatic bride of King Charles of Württemberg; she attempted a liaison with Swinburne but failed to earn the ten-pound reward that Dante Gabriel Rossetti offered if she got Swinburne into bed. In form and subject matter Infelicia, her volume of verse published shortly after she died in Paris in 1868, showed Whitman’s liberating influence. Writing in the New York Sunday Mirror in 1860, she said he stood “centuries ahead of his contemporaries,” a champion of “liberty and humanity” through whom a “Divine voice” spoke. She predicted that like Poe, another maligned writer “swimming against the current,” Whitman would have “marble statues” erected in his honor.
“Supper at Pfaff’s cellar, Broadway, 1860,” noted one of Whitman’s partisans, E. C. Stedman. Among the fourteen present were Whitman, Clapp, Arnold, O’Brien, Wilkins, Ada Clare, Aldrich and Artemus Ward. By 1877, Stedman counted, nine of the fourteen were dead—“No other list of names that I remember could show such a death roll.” Clapp died in poverty, an alcoholic, after making an attempt to revive the Saturday Press in 1865. “This paper was stopped in 1860 for want of means,” he announced. “It is now started again for the same reason.” Within a period of two weeks before it went under for good, the Saturday Press published Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” and a dazzling story soon to become world famous as “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Not even one complete file of Clapp’s brilliant paper survives. Sardonic to the end he datelined his occasional correspondence from the municipal drying-out ward on Blackwell’s Island “My Cottage by the sea.” Artemus Ward, George Arnold, and Ned Wilkins were in their early thirties when they died—they had been victims, eventually, of what Whitman called “a restless craving for mental excitement,” of the desperate expenditures of energy and the unrelenting anxiety about subsistence that were among the harsher aspects of literary bohemia and made the inhabitants “bad husbands” and strangely ineffectual. “They won’t hurt you,” Ward told a newcomer at Pfaff’s. “These are Bohemians. A Bohemian is an educated hoss-thief!”
It had been a doubtful proposition from the start whether bohemia as a way of life and art, an alternative to philistinism on the one side and an emerging genteel tradition on the other, could ever be naturalized in New York after being transplanted from Paris. So thought William Dean Howells, then a young literary postulant from Ohio (with a deliberate scorn for transappalachian niceties Clapp identified him as a “Hoosier”). When Howells recounted his recent pilgrimage to Concord and described himself and the revered Hawthorne as shy, Clapp said, “Oh, a couple of shysters.” Clapp described Horace Greeley as “a self-made man that worships his creator,” and a certain clergyman as awaiting “a vacancy in the Trinity.” Clapp may have been mulling over his mistrust of middle-class society in general when he advised, “Never tell secrets to your relatives. Blood will tell.” Howells was repelled by Clapp’s flippancy and cynicism, his malign glitter and his contempt for New England culture. Uncomfortable in his presence, Howells was proud nonetheless to be one of his writers. “It was very nearly as well for one to be accepted by the Press as to be accepted by the Atlantic, and for the time there was no other literary comparison.”
The night in August 1860 that Howells overcame his dread of Gomorrah and visited Pfaffs fragrant temple of tobacco smoke, lager beer, Rhine wine, wurst and sauerkraut, the main fact that lodged itself in his mind was the presence of Walt Whitman, in a rough flannel coat with baggy trousers, seated at his ease a little apart from the main table but clearly the object of a cult. For almost three years after he left the Brooklyn Times Whitman was one of the regulars at Pfaffs. “Don’t you miss Walt,” he asked his mother when this period in his life was over, “loafing around & carting himself off to New York, toward the latter part of every afternoon?” A friendly editor described him on his way to Pfaffs crossing over on the Fulton Ferry, gazing at the harbor traffic and the forests of masts, exchanging small talk with the deckhands. Perched on the box alongside the driver he rode the Broadway stage uptown to Bleecker Street, and helped collect the fares. He was so much a feature on the Broadway line that a Boston paper reported he was earning his living as a driver, just as Robert Burns had done as a ploughman.
The Pfaff’s style of steady drinking and late suppers was not naturally Whitman’s. Neither was the social and conversational style there, “cutting” and barbed, although he could not help being infected by it and later had to swear off smart talk along with hot rum ptinches. “Yes, Tom, I like your tinkles: I like them very well,” he said, referring to Aldrich’s book of poems, The Bells, published the same year as Leaves of Grass. Aldrich, in turn, thought of him as a charlatan; so did the drama critic William Winter—“little Willie Winter, miserable cuss!” as Whitman remembered him, “a dried up cadaverous schoolmaster”—who described Leaves of Grass as “odoriferous.” “My own greatest pleasure at Pfaff’s,” Whitman recalled, “was to look on—to see, talk little, absorb. I never was a great discusser, anyway.” He was comfortable not in center ring with Clapp but at one of the less conspicuous tables with a group of young men about town—easy in their manners, fairly well educated, middle or upper class—whom he banteringly named the Fred Gray Association. A doctor’s son, Frederick Schiller Gray served as a general’s aide-de-camp during the War and later became a doctor, as did Charles Russell; another member of the “Association,” Hugo Fritsch, was the son of the Austrian consul; others were merchants, brokers, sportsmen. In 1863, when they had all been scattered by the War, Walt envisioned a time when they would all meet again, “allowing no interloper, & have our drinks & things, & resume the chain & consolidate & achieve a night better & mellower than ever.”
Despite some qualifications, Whitman had found in that gloomy vault beneath the sidewalk a more gemütlich and inspiriting social base than Abby Price’s Brooklyn parlor. His dealings with editors reflected a new self-regard and assertiveness. “The price is $40. Cash down on acceptance,” he said when he submitted a poem to Harper’s in January 1860. “Should my name be printed in the programme of contributors at any time it must not be lower down than third in the list. . . . I reserve the use of the piece in any collection of my poems I may publish in the future.” Since the summer he had been working with his friends Thomas and Andrew Rome, who set new poems in type for him and pulled proof copies, and he was still planning to reissue Leaves of Grass himself when he received a letter, again addressed to him in care of Fowler and Wells, from a new publishing firm in Boston. Crusaders of a transcendentalist bent, the partners were at that moment riding the crest of their first and only success, James Redpath’s rushed-into-print tribute to the abolitionist martyr, Captain John Brown:
Boston Feb 10/60
Walt Whitman
Dr Sir. We want to be the publishers of Walt. Whitman’s poems—Leaves of Grass.—When the book was first issued we were clerks in the establishment we now own. We read the book with profit and pleasure. It is a true poem and writ by a true man.
When a man dares to speak his thought in this day of refinement—so called—it is difficult to find his mates to act amen to it. Now we want to be known as the publishers of Walt. Whitman’s books, and put our name as such under his, on title-pages.—If you will allow it we can and will put your books into good form, and style attractive to the eye; we can and will sell a large number of copies; we have great facilities by and through numberless Agents in selling. We can dispose of more books than most publishing houses (we do not “puff” here but speak truth).
We are young men. We “celebrate” ourselves by acts. Try us. You can do us good. We can do you good—pecuniarily.
Now Sir, if you wish to make acquaintance with us, and accept us as your publishers, we will offer to either buy the stereo type plates of Leaves of Grass, or pay you for the use of them, in addition to regular copy right.
Are you writing other poems? Are they ready for the press? Will you let us read them? Will you write us? Please give us your residence.
Yours Fraternally
Thayer & Eldridge
“It is quite curious, all this should spring up so suddenly, aint it[?]” Walt remarked to Jeff about this “first proposition” and the publishing agreement that it led to. By Thursday March 15 he was in Boston to begin seeing the Thayer and Eldridge edition of his work through the press. On Saturday Emerson called at Whitman’s rented room downtown, greeted him with great courtesy, and among the other hospitalities offered that day registered him for guest reading privileges at the Boston Athenaeum. Before their late midday dinner they walked for two hours crossing and recrossing the Common under the bare elms along the Beacon Street slope.
Willingly or unwillingly Emerson had stood godfather to Leaves of Grass and had a certain stake in its growth; as they walked along the Common he urged Whitman to reconsider some of his new poems. It was not “Calamus” that troubled him. A long time back Emerson had had a crush on a fellow undergraduate at Harvard, Martin Gay, nicknamed “Cool” by their classmates, and wrote ardent poetry about him as well as a fantasy laced with sexual symbolism. But that episode had since become layered-over, and Emerson apparently found Whitman’s celebrations of the love of comrades as unexceptionable as a later generation found Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. (Whitman too possessed something that appeared on no phrenologist’s chart, a “very large” bump of denial.) Instead of “Calamus,” Emerson cited such provocations to public complacency as the poem “To a Common Prostitute”—
Be composed—be at ease with me—I am Walt Whitman, liberal and lusty as Nature,
Not till the sun excludes you, do I exclude you,
—and numerous passages in “Children of Adam.” The times and the taste of the times were not ready, he argued, talking “the finest talk that was ever talked,” as Whitman recalled, and marshaling his points as if they were an army corps advancing. The mere mention of nakedness and the limbs of the body was taboo. Sexuality, especially the sexuality of women, was an unholy secret, to be kept, not flaunted, as Whitman insisted upon doing. Just to hint at masturbation was unthinkable, and yet here was Whitman’s
. . . young man that wakes, deep at night, his hot hand seeking to repress what would master him—the strange half-welcome pangs, visions, sweats,
The pulse pounding through palms and trembling encircling fingers—the young man all colored, red, ashamed, angry.
A daring metonymy, that last clause, and yet by any standards these lines were intolerable, provided that anyone was willing to admit to knowing what they were about in the first place. How would an educated reader, man or woman, already put off by Whitman’s lawless meters and elastic morals, respond to “stalwart loins,” “love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching,” “limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous,” “phallic thumb of love,” “bellies pressed and glued together with love”?
“Emerson was not a man to be scared or shocked . . . by the small-fry moralities, the miniature vices,” Whitman said. The objections Emerson raised were in the end neither moral nor aesthetic; they were purely prudential. In practical, commercial terms, meaning the sales and unimpeded circulation of the new book, there was a limit to how far Whitman could exercise the “free and brave thought” and “the courage of treatment” Emerson had saluted in his famous letter. That limit was set by the public, or at any rate by their watchdogs, and for the sake of Leaves of Grass in 1860 and the predictable future, Emerson concluded, the objectionable passages must be excised, a small enough concession, considering the larger work that was at stake. “But would there be as good a book left?” Whitman asked. Emerson thought this over briefly. “I did not say as good a book,” he answered. “I said a good book.”
“If I had cut sex out,” Whitman reflected years later, “I might just as well have cut everything out”—sex was the root of roots, the life beneath the life, and without “Children of Adam” the entire structure of Leaves of Grass would come down about his ears. Whitman’s heterosexual poems often ranted and postured, and they had their share of camp, but in the aggregate they strove for the candor, simplicity and joy unashamed of Adam in the Garden. “The dirtiest book in all the world is the expurgated book,” Whitman told Traubel. “Expurgation is apology—yes, surrender—yes, an admission that something or other was wrong. Emerson said expurgate—I said no, no. . . . I have not lived to regret my Emerson no.” As they finished walking the unpaved paths below the State House, Whitman felt “down in my soul the clear and unmistakeable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way.” He told Emerson that Leaves of Grass would have to stand or fall as it was, and with this settled, they went to the American House in Hanover Square and had “a bully dinner.”
Even the bohemian Henry Clapp favored the side of prudence. “I think you would have done well to follow Mr. Emerson’s advice,” he told Walt, and in the Saturday Press he conceded that Leaves of Grass “does not lack passages which should never have been published at all.” W. W. Thayer and Charles W. Eldridge, the young Boston publishers, had no such hesitations, “have not asked me at all what I was going to put into the book,” Walt told Abby Price after he had been away for two weeks, “just took me to the stereotype foundry, and [gave] orders to follow my directions.” He spent about three hours a day correcting proof and also exercising much of the authority of a publisher in matters of typography, decorations, paper, presswork, and binding. “Thayer & Eldridge . . . think every thing I do is the right thing.”
“It is quite ‘odd,’ of course,” Walt said about the physical appearance of the new Leaves of Grass, a thick octavo volume of 456 pages bound in orange cloth blind-stamped with symbolic devices repeated in the text as tailpieces: the western hemisphere of the globe—Whitman’s “New World”—surmounting a swash of clouds; a rising sun with nine spokes of light; a pointing hand with a butterfly—symbol of the soul, resurrection, metamorphosis, and eternal life—perched on the index finger.* As before and in subsequent editions, the title page omits the author’s name; in Whitman’s distinctive manner it gives the date of publication as “Year 85 of The States (1860–61).” The uncaptioned frontispiece portrait, by a New York friend, Charles Hine, has little of the casualness and arrogance of 1855. The poet wears a Byronic collar with a flowing tie and looks like Victor Hugo, Garibaldi, or an opera singer, and although the face has been softened and bloated by the engraver the picture still gives an impression of buffalo strength. Perhaps “the best of all,” Whitman said about Hine’s original. “I was in full bloom then: weighed two hundred and ten pounds. . . . I was in the best of health: not a thing was amiss: I was like Carlyle’s man, who, asked the state of his system, exclaimed: ‘System? system? what have I to do with systems?’”
Its prose prefaces discarded, Leaves of Grass at last stood on its own “with no other matter but poems,” as Whitman had promised Sarah Tyndale in 1857, “no letters to or from Emerson—no notices, or any thing of that sort.” For the first time it had organic unity and canonical finality as a theory of art and a sort of whole duty of man for the nineteenth century and after. Some of the earlier poems had been revised. “Song of Myself,” untitled in 1855 and “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American” in 1856, was now simply “Walt Whitman.” The “Sun-Down Poem” of 1856 takes on its final and memorable title, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” There are 124 new poems, including “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (now “A Word Out of the Sea”) and three major clusters, “Chants Democratic,” “Enfansd’Adam,” and “Calamus.” The book opens with an important new poem, “Proto-Leaf” (later, “Starting from Paumanok”) in which Whitman celebrates his birth and antecedents, his program, and his themes—democracy, love, comradeship, natural religion, personality. He is the chanter of “the Many in One”:
Take my leaves America!
Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own offspring . . .
O now I triumph—and you shall also . . .
In “So Long!”, the closing poem of 1860 and of every subsequent edition, Whitman, like Osiris, announces the end of one life cycle and the beginning of a posthumous one:
It appears to me I am dying,
he says.
My songs cease—I abandon them,
From behind the screen where I hid, I advance personally.
Who touches this, touches a man,
(Is it night? Are we here alone?)
It is I you hold, and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms—decease calls me forth.
O how your fingers drowse me!
Your breath falls around me like dew—your pulse lulls the tympans of my ears,
I feel immerged from head to foot,
Delicious—enough.
And so Leaves of Grass was being “really published” for the first time. “Altogether, Jeff,” Walt wrote in May, shortly before the first finished copies were ready at the bindery, “I am very, very much satisfied that the thing, in the permanent form it now is, looks as well and reads as well (to my own notion) as I anticipated—because a good deal, after all, was an experiment—and now I am satisfied.” His slough was well behind him. “I feel as if things had taken a turn with me, at last.”
He was planning to come home to Brooklyn for a while after the book was produced and then go off on a tour of New England—“partly business and partly for edification”—and a visit to his sister Hannah in Burlington. Meanwhile, he lived in a lodginghouse for two dollars a week and took his meals at a restaurant—“7 cents for a cup of coffee, and 19 cts for a beefsteak,” he complained to Jeff, “and me so fond of coffee and beefsteak.” He liked Boston far more than he had anticipated and found the Yankees friendly, generous, and intelligent.
The city was a center of abolitionism and high principles, but it was also conformist in culture, manners and dress, cramped by “respectability,” “squeezed into the stereotype mould.” “Everybody here is so like everybody else,” he told Abby Price, “and I am Walt Whitman!—Yankee curiosity and cuteness, for once, is thoroughly stumped, confounded, petrified, made desperate.” He enjoyed the “immense sensation” that he created when, with his lounging gait and rough clothes, he walked the Common, or Washington Street, the city’s Broadway, where Thayer and Eldridge had their offices, or solemn State Street, where he admired the Doric United States Custom House—“one of the noblest pieces of Com[mercial] architecture in the world.” He must have been the most unaccountable visitor that ever entered the solemn premises of the Boston Athenaeum.
Several Sundays Whitman went to morning services at the Seamen’s Bethel, a Methodist chapel down by the harbor, to hear the celebrated sailor-preacher Father Taylor. Emerson had compared Taylor with Demosthenes, Shakespeare and Burns—“He shows us what a man can do.” In American Notes Dickens wrote at length about Taylor, who had served ten years and more before the mast, and whose “imagery was all drawn from the sea, and from the incidents of a seaman’s life.” Taylor is Father Mapple in Moby-Dick. For Whitman, the sixty-seven-year-old chaplain was the only “essentially perfect orator” he had ever heard, Elias Hicks, Daniel Webster and Henry Clay not excepted. With a Bible under his arm Taylor paced his quarterdeck of a pulpit exhorting his crew to bend their shoulders to the capstan and weigh anchor for heaven. “When Father Taylor preach’d or pray’d,” Whitman said, thinking of his own ambitions as a poet speaking the language of daily life, “the rhetoric and art, the mere words, (which usually play such a big part) seem’d altogether to disappear, and the livefeeling advanced upon you and seiz’d you with a power before unknown.” Like Elias Hicks, Taylor had tenderness and passion along with “a curious remorseless firmness, as of some surgeon operating on a belov’d patient.”
Walt was much missed at Pfaff’s that spring, as he heard from Clapp and the others. They awaited an open letter from him reporting on his progress in Boston. He could have told them he had found another phalanx of partisans there. Thayer and Eldridge, his first “real” publishers, idolized him and counted themselves among those “men and women who love thee and hold thy spirit close by their own.” Walt told Jeff that his publishers were sure that Leaves of Grass would prove “a valuable investment, increasing by months and years, not going off in a rocket way, (like ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’),” a quixotic comparison on Eldridge’s part that had the effect of both calming and overexciting his author. In addition to an elegantly turned-out book, which they advertised as “a specimen of beautiful and honest workmanship, beyond anything of its price ever yet printed . . . in the world,” they distributed, gratis, a 64-page promotional brochure of reviews and criticisms of Leaves of Grass, including Whitman’s unsigned panegyrics. At times even this author felt that Thayer and Eldridge were going too far. He read one specimen of hypomanic advertising copy, offered to revise it, took it back to his room, and put in in the fire. By mid-June the first printing of one thousand copies was nearly gone, a second was at the binder’s, and Thayer and Eldridge were shaping new marketing plans despite what they described as “considerable opposition among the trade . . . partly born of prejudice and partly of cowardice.” Disregarding these and other storm warnings in the conduct of their business, they continued to believe that they could create for Leaves of Grass “an overwhelming demand among the mass public.” Toward the end of the year, with their business only a few months away from bankruptcy, they announced a new volume of Whitman’s poems “in preparation,” Banner at Day-Break.
In 1855–56 the poet and abolitionist novelist John Townsend Trowbridge had discovered Leaves of Grass. It was as bold as “nature itself,” he decided, the work of “a sort of Emerson run wild,” but he had his doubts, too: why did this poetry have to be so formless and obscure, and at times so coarse? When he heard from a mutual friend on Washington Street that its author was reading proof in the stereotype foundry around the corner, he expected to meet a mid-century Socrates or King Solomon, and he was disappointed. He found Whitman in a dingy office in the company of a sickly-looking boy from his lodginghouse—“I am trying to cheer him up and strengthen him with my magnetism.” About rereading his own work in proof he said, “I am astonished to find myself capable of feeling so much.” But for the most part Whitman was “the quietest of men,” scarcely forthcoming or interested in making an impression. He agreed to spend Sunday at Trowbridge’s house on Prospect Hill in Somerville, and this time he opened up, talking freely about himself and his early life, his friendships with “the common people” and the aspirations that smoldered within him for so long.
“The book he knew best was the Bible,” Trowbridge noted, “the prophetical parts of which stirred in him a vague desire to be the bard or prophet of his own time and country.” Finally Emerson brought him to “a boil.” Trowbridge came away from this spellbinding narrative, one of Whitman’s variant versions of history, with a picture that stayed with him: the thirty-five-year-old carpenter holding a sandwich in one hand and in the other a volume of Emerson that revealed to him “his greatness and his destiny.” Never a Whitman idolator, however, Trowbridge had no hesitation about teasing him. Preparing a salad for their dinner, Trowbridge was doing what the critics would soon be doing, “Cutting up Leaves of Grass.” In the waning afternoon, when Whitman said it was time for him to be getting back to Boston, someone tried to cover the face of the clock. “Put Leaves of Grass there,” Trowbridge said. “Nobody can see through that.” He noticed that his visitor enjoyed any allusion to his poems, serious or jocular.
Trowbridge was to be Whitman’s lifelong friend and admirer, like Charley Eldridge and like Eldridge’s most dependable author, James Redpath, who in addition to his John Brown biography published two other “anti-slavery works” with the firm during 1860. “I love you, Walt!” Redpath wrote in June, after Walt returned to Brooklyn. “A Conquering Brigade will ere long march to the music of your barbaric yawp.” The eventual leader of the brigade, and the most important figure in Whitman’s later public career, was yet another house author, the twenty-eight-year-old William Douglas O’Connor. “My dear, dear friend,” Whitman was to write of him, “and staunch (probably my staunchest) literary believer and champion from the first.” A poet turned short-story writer, O’Connor had just been dismissed from his editorial job on the Saturday Evening Post in Philadelphia; like Whitman, he had been enticed back to his native Boston by Charley Eldridge, who offered him twenty dollars a week for six months to write a polemical novel about the fugitiveslave laws (with the exception of one literary book on their list, Leaves of Grass, Thayer and Eldridge were movement publishers). With Harriet Beecher Stowe always at the back of his mind, Eldridge held out the characteristic promise that O’Connor’s novel, Harrington: A Story of True Love, published in November, would sell at least 25,000 copies and earn a great deal of money all around.
“As I saw and knew him then,” Whitman wrote about their first meetings in Boston during the spring of 1860, O’Connor “was a gallant, handsome, gay-hearted, fine-voiced, glowing-eyed man; lithe-moving on his feet, of healthy and magnetic atmosphere and presence, and the most welcome company in the world. He was a thorough-going anti-slavery believer, speaker, and writer, (doctrinaire,) and though I took a fancy to him from the first, I remember I fear’d his ardent abolitionism—was afraid it would probably keep us apart.” They came to the issues of race and slavery with such opposed understandings that it was difficult at times to believe they were dealing with the same social realities.
Walt noted that although there were fewer blacks in Boston than in New York or Philadelphia, they were treated with what seemed to him great liberality. They worked side by side with whites at their jobs, he said, mentioning in his notebook a black compositor in a printing office, a black clerk employed at the State House, and a black lawyer from Chelsea named Anderson, “quite smart and just as big as the best of them.” Blacks were served at public eating places in Boston and “Nobody minds it,” he said, adding, “I am too much a citizen of the world to have the least compunction.” As depicted in O’Connor’s novel, the black people of Boston were “shut out of the mechanic occupations; shut out of commerce; shut out of the professions,” excluded from omnibuses, theaters, schools, churches, “decent dwellings” and “decent graveyards”—in short, from everything except “the gallows and the jail.” O’Connor believed with Emerson that the execution of John Brown made “the gallows glorious like the Cross.” Whitman, too, acknowledged a martyrdom but did not allow it “to spoil my supper,” as he remarked to Traubel. “I see martyrdoms wherever I go . . . Why should I go off emotionally half-cocked only about the ostentatious cases?” Northern abolitionists and Southern fire-eaters had more in common than they thought: they were all “quite insane.”
In 1860 O’Connor did not share Whitman’s forebodings about these and other issues that were to stand between them. The Christmas before he came to Boston he read “Out of the Cradle” in the Saturday Press and exclaimed, “What astonishing beauty, what reach of spiritual sight—what depth of feeling.” Now he found “health and happiness” merely in being near “the great Walt.” “He is so large & strong—so pure, proud, & tender, with such an ineffable bon-hommie & wholesome sweetness of presence: all the young men & women are in love with him.”
III
Fire, smoke, and thunder from cannon in New York harbor saluted the arrival on June 16 of an American warship bringing diplomat princes of Japan. Bareheaded, impassive as bronze statues, they rode in open barouches in a Broadway pageant and submitted to the stares of “million footed Manhattan unpent,” Whitman wrote. In one of his new poems, he had described the bard of Leaves of Grass looking westward toward Asia and mankind’s ancient home:
Inquiring, tireless, seeking that yet unfound,
I, a child, very old, over waves toward the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar,
Look off the shores of my Western sea—having arrived at last where I am—the circle almost circled.
Now he merged himself in seas of bystanders and celebrated these exotic visitors as more than envoys come to exchange ratifications of a commercial treaty opening imperial ports to traders from the young republic half a world away. The Japanese diplomats were “lesson-giving princes,” and their eastward passage was as symbolic as Columbus’ westward passage. The harbor salutes, the cheering crowds, the Broadway buildings festooned with pennants and bunting marked the completion of a spiritual rondure.
. . . the orb is enclosed,
The ring is circled, the journey is done,
Whitman wrote in “The Errand-Bearers,” printed in the New York Times on June 27.
On the twenty-eighth another “wonder,” Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s mammoth steamship, Great Eastern, “swam up my bay.” Half a million people watched the floating city—five times larger than any vessel yet launched, a triumph of seagoing luxury and engineering hubris—arrive on its maiden voyage from Southampton and tie up at its North River pier at Bank Street; berthed, it stretched for nearly three city blocks. On October 11 the Prince of Wales, first royalty to visit New York, the future King Edward VII, rode up Broadway from Bowling Green in an open carriage drawn by six champing horses. Whitman addressed him in a poem.
There in the crowds stood I, and singled you out with attachment.
The ball in the Prince’s honor at the Academy of Music was the nobbiest social event in the city’s history, and for a while, like the manias for the Japanese envoys and the Great Eastern, Prince-mania reigned until the inevitable reaction set in. George Templeton Strong was positive that “by Monday next, the remotest allusion to His Royal Highness will act like ipecac.”
On November 15 a meteor was sighted in the day sky over New York. “Omens, Auguries and Portents Dire,” said the Times headline, playing on traditional associations with wars and disasters. Whitman was to commemorate 1859–60 as “Year of Meteors,” “year all mottled with evil and good—year of forebodings.”
What am I myself but one of your meteors?
After the brilliant promise of the spring his affairs had taken a steep downward turn along with those of his allies. “Just now I am in a state of disrepair even in respect to getting out another issue of the S.P.,” Henry Clapp told him, “and all for want of a paltry two or three hundred dollars.” On Walt’s advice, Thayer and Eldridge advanced Clapp enough to tide him over, and in the belief they could make the Saturday Press “pay,” even in a time of “literary flunkeyism,” they offered to assume financial control. Before the year was out Clapp’s valiant journal suspended publication, and Thayer and Eldridge themselves went bankrupt. They were forced to turn over their stock (including the plates of Leaves of Grass) to Horace Wentworth, a Boston publisher Thayer considered “an illiterate man” and a “bitter and relentless enemy.” Although the partners had promised to sell Leaves of Grass to “the mass public” and do its author some good, “pecuniarily,” it remained a rogue book that the critics attacked and that earned for Whitman only about $250 in royalties. Banner at Day-Break, the bravely titled new book that Thayer and Eldridge had announced in June, entered a limbo from which it emerged, as Drum-Taps, after five years of war.
By Whitman’s reckoning, “Year of Meteors,” the last peacetime year, was set in its course in December 1859, when John Brown, “an old man, tall, with white hair,” mounted the scaffold in Virginia. It ended in November 1860, when Abraham Lincoln won the presidency.
The American poet-hero of the 1855 Leaves of Grass preface prefigured the archangel that Lincoln was to become in Whitman’s imagination. Like Lincoln, this bard spoke for the common people and for his country as a union, “a teeming nation of nations.” He was “the equable man,” “the equalizer of his age and land.” His spirit was marked by largeness, simplicity, candor and generosity. In time of peace he spoke “the spirit of peace. . . . In war he is the most deadly force of the war.” (When the war came Whitman served as if he had already heard Lincoln’s call “to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle.”) The “I” of “Song of Myself” has the sad and brooding quality that Whitman associated with the martyr-president:
I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there . . .
Agonies are one of my changes of garments . . .
Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,
When I give I give myself
But the same “I” also displays Lincoln’s shrewd, homely humor:
Walt you contain enough, why don’t you let it out then?
I do not say these things for a dollar or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat . . .
In his 1856 political tract, “The Eighteenth Presidency!” Whitman said that he would be “much pleased to see some heroic, shrewd, fully-informed, healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American blacksmith or boatman come down from the West across the Alleghanies, and walk into the Presidency, dressed in a clean suit of working attire, and with the tan all over his face, breast, and arms.” Whitman stopped short of mentioning “honest Abe” and “the rail-splitter,” but he called for his Lincolnesque candidate, “the Redeemer President of These States,” to come from “the real West, the log hut, the clearing, the woods, the prairie, the hillside.” Two years before he first mentioned Lincoln by name—in a brief newspaper item about the debates with Stephen Douglas—Whitman had begun to shape a legend.*
With Lincoln soon to take the oath of office, Whitman made notes for a “Brochure” that was apparently intended for the same purpose as “The Eighteenth Presidency!”—
Two characters as
of a Dialogue
between A.
L___n and
W. Whitman
—as in ? a dream
? or better
Lessons for a
President elect
—Dialogues between W. W.
and “President elect”
The “dream” yielded in February 1861 to Whitman’s first sight of Abraham Lincoln. General Scott and Senator Seward were warning of assassination plots and a rebel takeover of Washington; despite the whistle-stop speeches, the bands and banners and cheering crowds along the way, Lincoln’s twelve-day journey from Springfield to the inaugural platform at the Capitol was cautious, even furtive. Opposition papers in New York City, a nest of Copperheads, called him a baboon and a yokel. Whitman was certain “many an assassin’s knife and pistol lurk’d in hip or breast-pocket there, ready, as soon as break and riot came.” On the afternoon of the nineteenth Lincoln arrived by train from Albany and drove with his party to the Astor House in a line of shabby hacks. From the top of a Broadway omnibus that had been stopped with all other traffic, Whitman watched him step out on the sidewalk, stretch his arms and legs, and scan the vast crowd of thirty or forty thousand people who, by some tacit agreement to avoid provocations of any sort, preserved “a sulky, unbroken silence.”
“I had, I say, a capital view of it all, and especially of Mr. Lincoln, his look and gait—his perfect composure and coolness—his unusual and uncouth height, his dress of complete black, stovepipe hat push’d back on the head, dark-brown complexion, seam’d and wrinkled yet canny-looking face, black, bushy head of hair, disproportionately long neck, and his hands held behind him as he stood observing the people. He look’d with curiosity upon that immense sea of faces, and the sea of faces return’d the look with similar curiosity.” After another relieving stretch or two, Lincoln turned and disappeared through the broad entrance of the Astor House, “and the dumb-show ended.” “As I sat on the top of my omnibus, and had a good view of him, the thought, dim and inchoate then, has since come out clear enough, that four sorts of genius, four mighty and primal hands, will be needed to the complete limning of this man’s future portrait—the eyes and brains and finger-touch of Plutarch and Eschylus and Michel Angelo, assisted by Rabelais.”
George Templeton Strong heard the first news of the bombardment of Fort Sumter late in the evening of April 12—“I can hardly hope that the rebels have been so foolish and thoughtless as to take the initiative in civil war and bring matters to a crisis.” Toward midnight Whitman was walking down Broadway after attending a performance of Verdi’s A Masked Ball at the Academy of Music when he heard the newsboys crying their extras. He bought a paper and read it under the blaze of gaslights outside the Metropolitan Hotel. Years later, probably with Verdi’s opera in mind, he was to say that the war had not been “a quadrille in a ball-room.” It had turned the entire country, North and South, into “one vast central hospital.” But in April 1861, like Strong and most Unionists, he looked on the upstart rebellion in South Carolina with disbelief and scorn. One government official went on record as predicting the whole thing would blow over in sixty days. Whitman noticed that volunteers being mustered in at the Brooklyn armory “were all provided with pieces of rope, conspicuously tied to their musket-barrels, with which to bring back each man a prisoner from the audacious South, to be led in a noose, on our men’s early and triumphant return!” The quadrille ended, the “soft opera-music changed” for good, “the real war” began, on July 21, when Beauregard, Johnston, and Stonewall Jackson routed the Union army at Bull Run.
IV
“The city seems to have gone suddenly wild and crazy,” Strong wrote on April 20. A quarter of a million New Yorkers turned out for a rally in Union Square honoring Major Robert Anderson, the hero of Fort Sumter. George Whitman, not usually given to impulsive acts, put his cabinetmaker’s tools in the safekeeping of his employer and signed up for one hundred days service as a militia private. “The Women and children make a regular practice of saying as we pass them hurrah for Jeff Davis,” he was soon writing from camp near Baltimore. “Mother you need not wory about me at all as I am not in want of anything and I dont believe we shal see any fighting at all.” His one-hundred–day hitch became four years. By the time he was mustered out he had fought in twenty-one engagements or sieges, spent five months in Confederate military prisons, and seen most of his comrades killed. “His preservation and return alive seem a miracle,” said his brother Walt, a superheated Union patriot from the start. He once got into a scuffle at Pfaff’s with George Arnold who had proposed the toast, “Success to Southern Arms!” (This was apparently meant in the spirit of the burlesque war correspondence Arnold was writing under the pseudonym “McArone.”) But Walt at forty-two, over-age for the ranks and without any discernible qualifications to be an officer, had little desire to go for a soldier.* “I had my temptations,” he recalled, “but they were not strong enough to tempt. I could never think of myself as firing a gun or drawing a sword on another man.”
When enlistment fever swept New York after Sumter, Walt vowed to put himself on a new footing.
Thursday April 18, ’61.
I have this hour, this day, resolved to inaugurate for myself a pure, perfect, sweet, cleanblooded robust body by ignoring all drinks but water and pure milk—and all fat meats, late suppers—a great body —a purged, cleansed, spiritualized, invigorated body.
But this hydropathic discipline was at least as literary as it was patriotic. “So far, so well,” he wrote when he turned forty-two, “but the most and the best of the Poem I perceive remains unwritten, and is the work of my life yet to be done. The paths to the house are made—but where is the house itself?” The summer of Bull Run he took his customary vacation trip to Greenport. He baited his line with fiddler crabs and hauled in blackfish from the dock; he sailed to Montauk, ran along the beach, feasted on sea-bass chowder and stewed pullet, and slept in a furled sail. He once told Kennedy that he had stopped going to Pfaff’s after his scuffle with George Arnold, but he remained a fixture there during the first twenty months of the war, even though the temple of wurst and lager now had a darker symbolism:
—The vault at Pfaff’s where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse
While on the walk immediately overhead pass the myriad feet of Broadway
As the dead in their graves are underfoot hidden
And the living pass over them . . .
“Walt Whitman is at Pfaff’s almost every night,” John Burroughs noted in October 1862. “He lives in Brooklyn, is unmarried, and ‘manages,’ Clapp says, to earn 6 or 7 dollars per week writing for the papers. He wrote a number of articles for the ‘Leader’ some time ago, on the Hospitals. . . . I do not like to believe that he can write in any other style than that of ‘Leaves of Grass.’”
At Pfaff’s during the first September of the war Walt read aloud from the manuscript of a new poem that was about to be published, almost simultaneously, in the Boston Evening Transcript, the New York Leader, and Harper’s Weekly.
Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
Into the school where the scholar is studying;
Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride,
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,
So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow. . . .
But his other poems on similar or related timely themes met with less success at the hands of the editors. James Russell Lowell at the Atlantic turned down three for a reason that, as stated, struck Whitman as “a bit odd.” “We could not possibly use [them],” Lowell said less than six months after Sumter, “before their interest,—which is of the present,—would have passed.” “Years that whirl I know not whither,” reads one verse fragment dealing with 1861 and 1862, a time when his granite foothold in purpose gave way to quicksand.
Schemes, politics fail—all is shaken—all gives way
Nothing is sure.
The affirmation that follows this had a melodramatic ring:
Only the theme I sing, the great Soul,
One’s-self, that must never be shaken—that out of all is sure,
Out of failures, wars, deaths—what at last but One’s self is sure?
With the Soul I defy you quicksand years, slipping from under my feet.
The irrepressible Poet of America who never had to put his name on his title pages was now to be found listed in the Brooklyn directory as “copyist,” soon to be his formal occupation in wartime Washington. He earned his six or seven dollars a week as the anonymous or pseudonymous author of potboiling articles, including a twentyfive–part history of Brooklyn, much of it filler.
The Leader articles that Burroughs mentioned show Whitman in the role of loafer-observer recording images of the city (the series title is “City Photographs”). He describes the Bowery’s mix of Germans and Jews, circus people, sports and rowdies; the auction halls, carpet shops, restaurants and beer halls; the cheap hotels where the prudent guest sleeps with his wallet under the pillow. The shooting galleries now offer prospective soldiers free instruction by “an accomplished professor.” The Bowery was more pungent and idiomatic than the fashionable avenues. “Things are in their working-day clothes, more democratic, with a broader, jauntier swing, and in a more direct contact with vulgar life.” But it was in the wards of New-York Hospital, then off Broadway at Pearl Street, that Whitman found vulgar life reduced to its barest terms of survival. He also found there his wartime vocation—hospital visitor, nurse, “wound-dresser.”
Arous’d and angry, I’d thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war,
But soon my fingers fail’d me, my face droop’d and I resign’d myself,
To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead.
The novelist Anthony Trollope, one of several distinguished visitors to New-York Hospital around this time, fainted during his tour; this happened frequently. “Amputations are going on—the attendants are dressing wounds,” Whitman was to write from the Washington hospitals. “As you pass by, you must be on your guard where you look.” What sustained him, along with the surgeon’s “remorseless firmness” of will that he admired in Father Taylor’s preaching, was a curious dreamlike remoteness, a fractured consciousness that separated the “impassive hand” holding bandages, water and sponges from the “burning flame” in his heart. Once again, as in “The Sleepers,” he seemed to be wandering all night in his vision, dreaming in his dream all the dreams of the other dreamers. Now, “in silence, in dreams’ projections,” he wrote in “The Wound-Dresser,” he saw himself threading his way through suffering:
From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand,
I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood,
Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv’d neck and side-falling head,
His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the bloody stump,
And has not yet looked on it.
The New-York Hospital staff gave him the freedom of the wards, the offices and examining rooms, the pathological museum with its appalling specimens of tumors and hypertrophied limbs. He was present, he said with professional aplomb, at “several very fine operations”—a cystotomy for a bladder stone bigger than the end joint of his thumb, an amputation, routine procedure then for limb wounds and injuries.
What is removed drops horribly in a pail.
Before the chloroform sponge did its work more than one patient saw a bulky man with an iron-gray beard standing a little to one side of the operating table.*
By the spring of 1862 one wing of New-York Hospital had already been taken over by the military. But for a year or so before then Walt had been coming to the wards to see sick and injured stage-driver friends, members of that “strange, quick-eyed, and wondrous race” whose nicknames he recited like Homer’s catalogue of captains and contingents—Broadway Jack, Dressmaker, Balky Bill, Old Elephant, Tippy, Pop Rice, Yellow Joe. One of the house officers, Dr. D. B. St. John Roosa, said that he and the other doctors “always wondered” why Walt was interested in “the class of men whom he visited.” They questioned him over off-duty beers at Pfaff’s. He told the doctors little more than that his heart went out to poor devils who had to work outside in all weathers, and besides there was much he had learned from them. He was more willing to talk about his poems, and he gave Roosa a copy of Leaves of Grass. “I must confess that I did not understand them then,” Roosa recalled many years later, “any more than I understand the character of the man who wrote them.”
“There is a lady come from time to time,” Walt reported from the hospital. “She brings illustrated and other papers, books of stories, little comforts in the way of eating and drinking, shirts, gowns, handkerchiefs, &c. I dare not mention her name, but she is beautiful. . . . She is clearly averse to the eclat of good works, and sometimes, to avoid show, sends her gifts by a servant.” It may have been this dark lady of the wards who, two weeks earlier, had her servant deliver a letter to Walt “At Pfaff’s Restaurant, BroadWay, New York.” Beyond her letter, signed “Ellen Eyre,” she remains unidentified. She cited a “fancy I had long nourished for you” and represented herself as a Dumas heroine in a world of assignations and disguises.
My social position enjoins precaution & mystery, and perhaps the enjoyment of my friends society is heightened while in yielding to its fascination I preserve my incognito, yet mystery lends an ineffable charm to love and when a woman is bent upon the gratification of her inclinations—She is pardonable if she still spreads the veil of decorum over her actions. . . . I trust you will think well enough of me soon to renew the pleasure you afforded me last P.M. and I therefore write to remind you that there is a sensible head as well as a sympathetic heart, both of which would gladly evolve wit & warmth for your direction & comfort—You have already my whereabouts & my home—It shall only depend upon you to make them yours and me the happiest of women.
I am always
Yours Sincerely
Ellen Eyre.
According to one conflation of things known and things conjectured, Walt first met Ellen Eyre, now married, when she was Miss Ellen Grey of Brooklyn, an actress he saw onstage at the Bowery Theatre in 1857 and whose photograph—identified as that of “a young N. Y. actress,” and “an old sweetheart of mine”—hung over the mantelpiece at Mickle Street. But in his written record, at any rate, Ellen Eyre makes her first appearance by name in her letter of March 25, 1862, and her last three and a half months later in a notebook entry, memorandum of an encounter with a Fifth Avenue stage driver, another probable link between her and the hospital wards:
Frank Sweeney (July 8 ’62) 5th Ave. Brown face, large features, black moustache (is the one I told the whole story to about Ellen Eyre)—talks very little.
The barest facts about Ellen Eyre, not to mention “the whole story,” tail off into nothingness.
At the end of September, Walt spent an evening at Pfaff’s with Fred Gray, home on a two-day furlough after fighting at Antietam. “He gave me a fearful account of the battlefield,” he noted. For a few hours on September 17, with George’s 51st New York Regiment leading the attack, McClellan had had Lee on the run but then drew back, the worst blunder of the war to date. By the time the cannon finished their red business at Antietam the Shenandoah Valley echoed with the screams of twenty thousand Union and Confederate wounded; a long, bloody stalemate lay ahead. On December 13, another blunderer, General Ambrose Burnside, led the Army of the Potomac in a suicidal charge on the Confederate entrenchments at Fredericksburg. George’s regiment advanced in formation over a narrow plain so completely enfiladed, said an enemy gunner, that “a chicken could not live in that field when we open on it.” Walt said that the Union disaster at Fredericksburg was “the most complete piece of mismanagement perhaps ever yet known in the earth’s wars.”
George’s name, garbled as “First Lieutenant G. W. Whitmore,” appeared in the Tribune list of regimental casualties on the sixteenth. Walt set out immediately for the front, had his money stolen while changing trains at Philadelphia, arrived in Washington without a dime for food or carfare. For a time of “the greatest suffering I ever experienced in my life,” he hunted through the hospitals for George, “walking all day and night, unable to ride, trying to get information, trying to get access to big people, &c—I could not get the least clue to anything.” Two men he had met in Boston in the spring of 1860 came to his aid. O’Connor, now clerk of the Light-House Board in Washington, and Charles Eldridge, assistant to the Army Paymaster, lent him money and got him a military pass to travel to Falmouth, Virginia, where George’s regiment had regrouped. One of the first sights that greeted him outside the improvised field hospital there was a heap, large enough to fill a horse cart, of amputated limbs, “cut, bloody, black and blue, swelled and sickening.” But he finally caught up with George, who was not only alive but well, probably the luckiest of the ten thousand Union soldiers wounded at Fredericksburg; he had been cut in the cheek by a shell fragment. “[R]emember your galliant Son is a Capting,” George wrote to his mother after Walt found him (he had been promoted on the eve of the battle). “You cant imagine how sorry I was to hear how worried you have been about me, and all the while I was as well as ever, so you see how foolish it is to frett.” But she and Jeff remained so hysterically fearful that Walt, normally realistic about the chances of George’s surviving the war (they were at best 75 per cent), went out of his way to assure them that “to be in the army is a mixture of danger and security in this war which few realize—they think exclusively of the danger.”
Walt shared his brother’s tent and mess for more than a week. Living so close to the front, to the dressing stations and the hospital tents pitched on the frozen ground, the fresh barrel-stave markers in the burial field, the vexed Rappahannock, and the ruins of Fredericksburg, he saw “what well men and sick men and mangled men endure.” At Falmouth he wrote the prose draft of a Drum-Taps poem.
Sight at daybreak—in camp in front of the hospital tent on a stretcher, (three dead men lying,) each with a blanket spread over him—I lift up one and look at the young man’s face, calm and yellow,—’tis strange!
(Young man: I think this face of yours the face of my dead Christ!)
The living suffered but also shared an astonishingly tender communion without pledge or demand, a loving intimacy of the sort he wanted to celebrate in “Calamus.” Being among the men seemed to promise him a radical way of simplifying his own existence, a degree of remission. “I can be satisfied and happy henceforward if I can get one meal a day, and know that mother and all are in good health.” On December 28 he said goodbye to George and went back to Washington, planning to stay there for a few weeks at least. He told Emerson the next day his “New York stagnation” had ended “for good.”