I
WHITMAN HAD ALREADY RECEIVED his share of declarations, delicate and otherwise, when Anne Gilchrist began writing love letters to him. In 1860 a total stranger, Susan Garnet Smith of Hartford, informed him that after reading Leaves of Grass she felt “a mysterious delicious thrill!” and decided it was her destiny to bear him “a noble beautiful perfect manchild.”
My womb is clean and pure. It is ready for thy child, my love. Angels guard the vestibule until thou comest to deposit our and the world’s precious treasure. . . . Our boy, my love! Do you not already love him? He must be begotten on a mountain top, in the open air.
He wrote “? insane asylum” on the envelope of her letter, but admitted that if Susan was “insane” so were “Song of Myself” and “Children of Adam.” Like a number of other women (and men) who responded to his poems and had their lives changed as a result, she was in part the victim of an innocent literal understanding. She took him at his word as phallic mystagogue:
I pour the stuff to start sons and daughters fit for these States, I press with slow rude muscle,
I brace myself effectually, I listen to no entreaties,
I dare not withdraw till I deposit what has so long accumulated within me.
During the war he told Charley Eldridge he expected to “range along the high plateau of my life & capacity for a few years now, & then swiftly descend.” By 1870 his hair had mainly gone from gray to white. He had trouble getting about, could no longer write or read without glasses, and, as in 1864, just before his collapse, he suffered increasingly from “heat prostration,” dizziness, faintness, and other symptoms either of severe hypertension (his conspicuously florid complexion was consistent with this) or of a chronic disease of the whole man, mind and body (Victorian physicians called it “hypochondria”). A woman in Washington told him he looked like her idea of the patriarch Abraham; he had aged so fast it was hard to believe he had not been quite forty-six when the war ended and was now fifty-one, only three years older than the pleasure-loving Ulysses Grant. Susan Garnet Smith had faded into the scumbled past along with Juliette Beach of Albion, New York, the mysterious Ellen Eyre, Henry Clapp’s willing beauties, and the young lady who sized up Walt as a good bedfellow. But he continued to exert the same personal magnetism. “I used to get love letters galore, those days,” he recalled, “—perfumed letters.” Nelly O’Connor he would have with him always. A passenger on Peter Doyle’s streetcar gave Walt a rose when she alighted at her stop. A friend of hers visiting Washington rode with him several times in the car, studied his face with affection, but hesitated to speak to him. She finally spoke to Pete, who said that the ancient-looking man who regularly stood beside him on the Georgetown-Navy Yard run was the author of Leaves of Grass. She read it and drew from it “health, freshness, and aroma” along with a sense that life held “grander possibilities” than she had ever suspected. “I need make no apology for this note. You will not misunderstand it,” she wrote. “I go to my home in Harris-burg, Pennsylvania, tomorrow. I may never again chance to see you, but you will believe, nevertheless, that I wish for you—and teach others to do the same—a long earth life of usefulness, and an eternity of appreciation and renown.” “What do you think of that?” he remarked some twenty years later. “It’s better than getting medals from a king or pensions from Congress.”
Anne Gilchrist was different from the others, broader and stronger in her nature, more analytic and intellectual, with a clear scientific bent, but also more passionate, forthright and exigent. Her letters to Walt, whom she did not meet face to face until 1876, were as charged with emotion as the ones he wrote when on home leave in Brooklyn, missing Pete all the time—“My darling son, we will very soon be together again. . . . love to you, baby.” She could not know she was offering what Walt could not accept or give in return, but she was true to her feelings, and her letters have a dignity that survived even the least diplomatic of his evasions. She was “a sort of human miracle to me,” he was to say, “so profoundly considerate, intuitional, knowing.” He respected her for being an archetypal “true, full-grown woman,” self-sustaining, passionate, maternal, cerebral, an intimate of the Rossettis, Tennyson and the Carlyles. When she began her correspondence with Walt she had just recovered from a year-long illness—several times she came near dying and lay unable to move or speak. According to Rossetti, she was “not so capable as she used to be of continuous mental or bodily strain.” And so it was possible that she was also the beguiling invalid of Victorian tradition, suffering from postconvalescent neurasthenia and a baffled premenopausal surge. Whitman knew that he owed her a special degree of considerateness along with a forthrightness equal to her own.
Anne had been twice reborn, once in the summer of 1869, when she discovered his poems and learned for the first time “what love meant . . . what life meant,” and again during her illness, when she “looked death very close in the face.” Walt’s gift of a copy of Leaves of Grass, sent to her via Rossetti in appreciation of her “Englishwoman’s Estimate,” arrived with “no word for me alone,” and she was so disappointed that for weeks she could not open it. “I was so sure you would speak, would send me some sign: that I was to wait—wait. So I fed my heart with sweet hopes: strengthened it with looking into the eyes of thy picture. O surely in the ineffable tenderness of thy look speaks the yearning of thy man-soul toward my woman-soul?” At last she decided that time had become too precious to be sacrificed to propriety. Early in September 1871, more than two years after her first rebirth, she went out into a field in Surrey, openly declared her love in a long letter, and felt “relieved, joyful, buoyant once more.” “It is not happiness I plead with God for,” she wrote, “—it is the very life of my Soul, my love is its life. Dear Walt. It is a sweet & precious thing this love—it clings so close, so close to the Soul and Body, all so tenderly dear, so beautiful, so sacred; it yearns with such passion to soothe and comfort & fill thee with sweet tender joy; it aspires as grandly, as gloriously as thy own soul, soft & tender to nestle and caress. If God were to say to me—see—‘he that you love you shall not be given to in this life—he is going to set sail on the unknown sea—will you go with him?’—never yet has bride sprung into her husbands arms with the joy I would take thy hand & spring from the shore.” Seven weeks later, still waiting for an answer, she declared herself again. “Love thee day & night:—last thoughts, first thoughts. . . . My Soul has staked all upon it.”
Walt’s first letter to her was guarded and deliberate:
Washington City, U. S. : November 3, 1871.
DEAR FRIEND,
I have been waiting quite a long while for time & the right mood to answer your letter in a spirit as serious as its own, & in the same unmitigated trust & affection. But more daily work than ever has fallen upon me to do the current season, & though I am well & contented, my best moods seem to shun me. I wished to give to it a day, a sort of Sabbath or holy day apart to itself, under serene & propitious influences—confident that I could then write you a letter which would do you good, & me too. But I must at least show, without further delay, that I am not insensible to your love. I too send you my love. And do you feel no disappointment because I now write but briefly. My book is my best letter, my response, my truest explanation of all. In it I have put my body & spirit. You understand this better & fuller & clearer than any one else. And I too fully & clearly understand the loving & womanly letter it has evoked. Enough that there surely exists between us so beautiful & delicate a relation, accepted by both of us with joy.
WALT WHITMAN
She told him the word “enough” in his last sentence had been “like a blow on the breast to me.” Still, she believed she had not been rejected, only deferred. “You might not be able to give me your great love yet,” she answered. “But I can wait.” She entered a “long long novitiate,” as she called it, that ended with her death fourteen years later.
At the beginning of 1872 she sent him two pictures of herself, one taken in her early twenties and the other just before her breakdown—she was a large woman with a remarkably expressive face and dark, full, intense eyes. She had begun to hope that he would visit England and was “restless, anxious, impatient . . . above all, longing, longing so for you to come—to come & see if you feel happy beside me.” Without fully knowing what he was doing, he allowed his hunger for recognition to trap him into teasing her hopes. “Did I tell you that I had received letters from Tennyson, & that he cordially invites me to visit him? Sometimes I dream of journeying to Old England, on such a visit—& then of seeing you & your children—but it is a dream only.” The Poet Laureate’s flattering hospitality was part of a grand ovation some of Whitman’s friends told him to expect in England, and he was tempted to go, but he said he heard an inner voice warning him, “Stay where you are, Walt Whitman.” (Indirectly, through Burroughs, he also heard a voice of warning from Rossetti, who said he was not well enough known in England for a reading tour, something even Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne had not attempted.) Given all the circumstances, Anne Gilchrist included, it would have been a rash trip to make, and besides, as between England and America, Leaves of Grass was a “this side book,” he was to say, and had to be guarded “against all counter-inspirations.”
It was only after exchanging letters for half a year that Whitman finally brought himself to address the crux of Anne Gilchrist’s misapprehensions. “Dear friend,” he wrote in the postscript to an otherwise circumstantial account of family affairs and travel plans, “let me warn you somewhat about myself—and yourself also. You must not construct such an unauthorized and imaginary ideal Figure and call it W. W. and so devotedly invest your loving nature in it. The actual W. W. is a very plain personage, and entirely unworthy such devotion.” This was a shrewd but overdelayed retreat from his first statement to her about Leaves of Grass, “In it I have put my body & spirit.” But she was reluctant to accept his warning, firmly as he had put it, and continued to believe what she wanted to believe. Even at the end of her life, when she had finally given up all hope of marrying him, she still felt that his poems were “his actual presence” and caused “each reader to feel that he himself or herself has an actual relationship to him.” Like Peter Doyle, “the actual W. W.” remained the pursued and unrequiting party, and by the same rough symmetry he and Anne lived passional lives in abeyance. She yearned for the child she would never have by him, but, following his own open road to generativity, he was delivered of “triplets,” he said: the fifth edition of Leaves of Grass (“my eldest daughter”) and two further candidates for the future, “Passage to India,” new poems celebrating voyages of “the unseen Soul,” and Democratic Vistas, the work of an extraordinarily penetrating and original social philosopher and a major contribution to American prose literature. “All goes ‘as well as could be expected’ with me,” he told O’Connor. “That’s the phrase you know in parturition cases.”
II
After the Northern and Southern guns had been silent for a few years, thoughtful Americans began to wonder if as much had not been lost as gained. Something precious had surely vanished from the shared life—simplicity, humane scale and tempo, mutuality, trust. Perhaps these critics were emotionally exhausted and saw mirages of Eden in a past that had not been edenic at all. Still, it seemed that each day of the postwar era brought fresh news of “public scandal, private fraud” in “the Land of Broken Promise,” said James Russell Lowell. Swindlers, boodlers, speculators, suborners, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Tweed Ring were in the saddle and riding democracy down. There was a question about whether constitutional principles or merely party politics were at issue, but nonetheless a President of the United States, Andrew Johnson, stood charged in impeachment proceedings before the Senate with “high crimes and misdemeanors.” His successor, Ulysses Grant—Whitman described him in 1868 as “good, worthy, non-demonstrative, average-representing”—inaugurated eight years of historic neglect and corruption in government. The great warrior’s campaign slogan, “Let us have peace,” turned out to mean, “Let us look the other way.” “The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant,” said Henry Adams, “was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.” “The present era of incredible rottenness is not Democratic, it is not Republican, it is national,” Mark Twain said. “The Gilded Age,” as he dubbed that era, worshiped “Gold and Greenbacks and Stock—father, son, and the ghost of same.”
Stifled, O days! O lands! in every public and private corruption,
Whitman wrote,
Smothered in thievery, impotence, shamelessness, mountain-high;
Brazen effrontery, scheming, rolling like the ocean’s waves around and upon you, O my days! my lands!
Of the moralists and critics and artists who lashed the times Whitman, in Democratic Vistas, was perhaps the most savagely and unflinchingly thoroughgoing because he was the most profoundly engaged. His psychic wholeness and the validity of his life work were at stake, just as they had been during the darkest days of the war, when not one European government wished the Union to survive. Now, in addition to the daily tidings of public and private corruption, Whitman again listened to voices from across the ocean arguing that democracy was the low politics and low culture of Philistines and the mindless mass. Carlyle’s word was Schwärmerei, which he rendered freely as “‘the Gathering of Men in Swarms,’ and what prodigies they are in the habit of doing and believing, when thrown into that miraculous condition.” Matthew Arnold, author of Culture and Anarchy, was another croaker. He “was not in the abstract sense a damned fool,” Whitman was to say, “but with respect to the modern—to America—he was the damndest of damned fools—a total ignoramus—knew nothing at all.” Arnold’s brand of “culture” was almost as hard to take as his “anarchy.”
But if Arnold was just “one of the dudes of literature,” Carlyle could not be dismissed so easily. No one could beat him for pure “cussedness,” Whitman said—Carlyle was “kinky.” No one since Isaiah had voiced so much unrelieved bitterness with the secular world. “Never was there less of a flunkey or temporizer. Never had political progressivism a foe it could more heartily respect.” Carlyle’s most recent polemic, “Shooting Niagara,” published in Horace Greeley’s Tribune during August 1867, was a finger in the eye of just about every American of liberal inclinations. Carlyle said that extending the vote to the English working class, as mandated by Disraeli’s Reform Bill, merely assured a fresh supply of “blockheadism, gullibility, bribeability, amenability to beer and balderdash, by way of amending the woes we have had from our previous supplies of that bad article.” By allowing an electoral head count to become “the Divine Court of Appeal on every question and interest of mankind” (a principle Americans were about to reaffirm in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution), England was headed over Niagara Falls in a barrel, in emulation of its former colony. In what Carlyle regarded as an apocalyptic demonstration of Schwärmerei, half a million Northerners and Southerners lost their lives fighting a civil war for the empty purpose of emancipating “three million absurd Blacks.” Carlyle had managed to reduce Union, progress, freedom—“the good old cause,” Whitman called it—to “Settlement of the Nigger Question.”
“Such a comic-painful hullabaloo and vituperative cat-squalling as this . . . I never yet encountered,” Whitman said about “Shooting Niagara.” But he set to work right away on “a counterblast or rejoinder” that he titled “Democracy” when it appeared in the Galaxy for December 1867. It was the first of three linked essays that made up Democratic Vistas, the 84-page pamphlet that he published privately with the title-page dateline, “Washington D. C. 1871.” “I will not gloss over the appalling dangers of universal suffrage in the United States,” Whitman wrote. “In fact, it is to admit and face these dangers I am writing.” Nearly forty years earlier Carlyle had described the ills of English society as “foul elephantine leprosy,” “gangrene,” and a “fatal paralysis” spreading inward from the extremities, “as if towards the heart itself.” Now Whitman claimed that American society was “canker’d, crude, superstitious, and rotten” and employing the same rhetoric of pathology, developed his own bleak and savage analysis.
I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness of heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ’d in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings,) nor is humanity itself believ’d in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. . . . The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. . . . The best class we show, is but a mob of fashionably dress’d speculators and vulgarians. . . . I say that our New World democracy, however great a success in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic development, products, and in a certain highly-deceptive superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and esthetic results. In vain do we march with unprecedented strides to empire so colossal, outvying the antique, beyond Alexander’s, beyond the proudest sway of Rome. In vain have we annex’d Texas, California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for Cuba. It is as if we were somehow being endow’d with a vast and more and more thoroughly-appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.
“I had no idea he was so conservative,” one of Whitman’s admirers said after reading these and further reflections on material progress, “infidelism,” and a secular culture of “the mean flat average . . . the common calibre.” Whitman’s first patriotic reaction against “Shooting Niagara” had yielded to his recognition that “I had more than once been in the like mood,” and he sent Carlyle a copy of Democratic Vistas with “true respects & love.” They agreed on the diseases of modern society—their differences had to do with whether these diseases were terminal. In Whitman’s view, America was as yet unformed, unrealized: its failures were transitional, growing pains; even its blunders were discoveries. When he looked ahead to the second centennial of the republic and beyond he parted company not only with Carlyle but with Mark Twain, Henry James, Adams, Howells, writers whose dominant spirit was nostalgic, elegiac or detached.
Whitman’s indictment of the present was his baseline for the future. He believed that America, for all its troubles, alone possessed the prerequisites for a great moral and religious civilization. By assuring “freedom to the free,” as Lincoln had said, America remained “the last, best hope of earth.” “We have frequently printed the word Democracy,” Whitman wrote. “Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps. . . . It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.” Democracy was both a psychological and a political absolute. Its history was to be enacted through “Personalism,” Whitman’s term for the complex, fertile interplay of individual identity and the social aggregate, and through “Literature,” democracy’s “Soul” and “sole reliance.” The priests had departed, their function absorbed by “races of orbic bards”—“sweet democratic despots of the west”—making icons for a new trinity: political freedom, science and natural religion.
Coming out of Whitman’s darkest nights and deepest imperatives, Democratic Vistas was at once the least personal but the most powerful of his prose exercises in self-justification. Its resolutions fostered a remarkable radiance and openness of spirit, despite griefs and illnesses. “What is life but an experiment? and mortality but an exercise? with reference to results beyond. And so shall my poems be,” he wrote on his fifty-third birthday. “I ventured from the beginning, my own way, taking chances—and would keep on venturing.”
“Passage to India,” another of the “triplets” of 1870–71, was the verse counterpart of Democratic Vistas; it was also the last of Whitman’s major poems on the grand scale and, as he described it, the culminating statement of all his lurking religious meanings, of his faith in “the unfolding of cosmic purposes” through evolution. But it was also intended to be the beginning of an entirely new and separate book of poems. “After chanting in Leaves of Grass the songs of the Body and Existence,” he now planned “a further, equally needed volume exhibiting the problem and paradox of the same ardent and fully appointed Personality entering the sphere of the resistless gravitation of spiritual law.” In his notebook he identified “the spinal Idea” of “Passage to India”: “That the divine efforts of heroes, and their ideas, faithfully lived up to [,] will finally prevail, and be accomplished however long deferred.” He compared his poem to the final scene of some ancient saga: “A farewell gathering on ship’s deck and on shore . . . a starting out on unknown seas.” His starting place was the world of materials and “the great achievements of the present”: the Suez Canal, the Atlantic Cable, the American transcontinental railroad, and other recent engineering triumphs that promised to unite the peoples of the earth into a nation of nations. Like Columbus, like Tennyson’s Ulysses sailing “beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars,” the hero-poet of “Passage to India” steers
. . . for the deep waters only,
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.
“Every great problem,” Whitman noted, “is The Passage to India.” The material civilization of the nineteenth century, its deep diseases cured, was to evolve into a grand spiritual civilization in which “Nature and Man shall be disjoin’d and diffused no more.” Again, as in Democratic Vistas, the mission of literature was to be altogether fulfilled:
Finally shall come the poet worthy that name,
The true son of God shall come singing his songs.
The perturbations that made his love for Peter Doyle a torment yielded to a vision of universal brotherhood. “Urge” became the explorations and arrivals of a “brave soul” sailing “the seas of God.”
All these hearts as of fretted children shall be sooth’d,
All affection shall be fully responded to, the secret shall be told,
All these separations and gaps shall be taken up and hook’d and linked together,
The whole earth, this cold, impassive, voiceless earth, shall be completely justified.
III
In September 1871, at the invitation of the American Institute of New York, Whitman read in public a long poem he had composed for the opening of their annual industrial arts fair. He received a one-hundred-dollar honorarium, his expenses, and a great deal of attention. The following June he delivered the commencement poem at Dartmouth. Measured against even his average, both poems were too “orbic,” too “bardic” in rhetoric, for their emotional and intellectual freight. But their quality was of less consequence to him than their occasions, invigorating journeys of the ego into the world of external event. In other ways as well his life was becoming freer, more ample, and suggested the coming of a second spring. There had been a love feast on the Potomac in May 1872, one of the last happy gatherings of Whitman’s Washington circle before it broke up for good. William and Nelly O’Connor, John Burroughs, Whitman, and a few others were the guests of Dr. Frank Baker, the Smithsonian’s medical historian, on a canal boat that took them to High Island for a picnic. Baker’s invitation bore the lines from Leaves of Grass,
Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons
Is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth.
During 1872 Whitman took four months of leave from his job to tend to literary business, travel, and spend time with his mother. She was nearly eighty, arthritic, and barely able to keep house for herself and Eddy. George had married and moved to Camden. Jeff was chief engineer of the water system in St. Louis. Jesse had died in 1870 at the Kings County Lunatic Asylum. “O Walt,” she wrote when she heard he was dead, “aint it sad to think the poor soul hadent a friend near him in his last moments and to think he had a paupers grave. . . . if he has ever done so wrong he was my first born.” Lonely and failing, she made a pet of Walt, her second born, whenever he came home. She cooked breakfast for him every morning—“grand” feasts of buckwheat cakes or broiled salmon with potatoes, homemade bread, and sweet butter. “My mammy makes the best coffee in the world,” he told Pete. As if he were a child again at his mother’s apron strings in West Hills he kept her company while she did her household chores, cooked and read the newspapers.
When he ran into the transatlantic celebrity Joaquin Miller on Fifth Avenue in July, they had enough in common for three hours of conversation. Like Whitman, the bard of the Sierras (who changed his first name from Cincinnatus to the more dashing Joaquin) had been taken up by Rossetti and his circle, but Miller had actually gone to London and made a great success there. More of a showman than a poet, he thrilled the drawing rooms with his frontiersman outfit of boots, chaps, red shirt and sombrero. “It helps sell the poems, you know, and it tickles the duchesses.” Miller was “a natural prince,” Whitman said admiringly, although something of a “California Hamlet, unhappy every where.” His own press-agentry, like the plain gray suits he favored, was less theatrical than Miller’s but wore better. Friendly editors printed the personal items and other unattributed copy that he sent them. Unfriendly editors at least recognized his controversy value. How else could it have been known so quickly and so generally that Tennyson had invited him to visit, that Swinburne ranked him with Victor Hugo, and that “it would astonish Longfellow and Lowell to travel in England and learn how highly Walt Whitman is regarded”? His caricature appeared in a series of “Men of the Times,” and he puffed it for the Washington Evening Star. “It represents W. W. at full length, with characteristic easy attitude, immense beard, hand in pants pocket, enormous and open shirt collar, exaggerating all the points till they are funny, while the likeness is admirably preserved.” (The “W. W.” in itself was presumptive of fame.) The report of his death in a railroad accident in upstate New York became a publicity bonanza. He returned from his supposed grave, one paper said, looking “as well as could be expected for a man who has suffered from two columns of obituary notice.” A number of other rectifications were published, but for a while, as Walt told Nelly O’Connor, he could not appear in public without giving at least a few people a start. Among his other anonymous and pseudonymous published writings was his “Walt Whitman in Europe,” a long article that he sent in manuscript to the journalist Colonel Richard Hinton with instructions to “Sign this with your name at the conclusion, and send it at once to the Kansas Magazine with a note proposing it for their ensuing January [1873] number.” Hinton, an old Leaves of Grass and Good Gray Poet partisan who was well remembered in Kansas as one of John Brown’s Free Soil guerrillas, obliged, and so did the editors, who had already published two of Whitman’s poems. Celebrity, as Whitman demonstrated in and by the article (which he also placed in at least two eastern papers), was reflexive, self-renewing:
As certain as that the bodily presence of the subject of this sketch remains altogether in the United States, well known by appearance to the vision of thousand and tens of thousands, it is just as certain that the subtle shadow of him, his fame, has established himself in Europe, and is branching and radiating there in all directions in the most amazing manner. . . . This is Walt Whitman, author of certain books of poems and some prose also, about all of which there is a singularly wide difference of opinion.
By Whitman’s count, “After All, Not to Create Only,” his American Institute poem, was published in twelve of the seventeen New York and Brooklyn dailies. Roberts Brothers, a bona fide Boston publishing house then enjoying the success of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and its sequels, issued it as a pamphlet, somewhat to his surprise. “My percentage &c. I leave to you to fix,” he said gratefully. “That the papers have freely printed & criticized the piece will much help, as it awakes interest & curiosity, &many will want to have it in good form to keep.” There was no reason for him to point out that, with the exception of the editorial material that he himself had either cued or supplied, most of the criticisms had been derisive.
Workmen were still sawing and hammering away and bolting down the exhibits when Whitman, wearing a gray suit with white vest and open-necked shirt, began his recital in a low, unemphatic voice; what was audible in the reading did not prove to be altogether intelligible.
After all, not to create only, or found only,
But to bring, perhaps from afar, what is already founded,
To give it our own identity, average, limitless, free.
This delphic prospect opened, at times, on badlands of bathos and incongruity, although the ensemble, as Whitman might say, was absolutely distinctive. The muse of poetry was bidden to migrate from the Old World and take her place in Grant’s America among the fixtures of the age of energy:
By thud of machinery and shrill steam-whistle undismay’d,
Bluff’d not a bit by drain-pipe, gasometers, artificial fertilizers,
Smiling and pleas’d with palpable intent to stay,
She’s here, install’d amid the kitchen ware!
In the Tribune, Bayard Taylor, once a member of the friendly circle at Pfaff’s, lampooned this latest effusion of “the Kosmos, yawping abroad.” The Boston Journal called it a “dementation,” the Atlantic Monthly a curious “catalogue” of American “emotions, inventions, and geographical sub-divisions.” Congressman James Garfield, whom Walt frequently ran into along Pennsylvania Avenue, saluted him by raising his right arm and saying with a smile, “After all, not to create only.” Still, when the Centennial came around in 1876 Whitman dusted off his dementation, gave it a timely title, “Song of the Exposition,” and, without much success, tried to sell it to newspapers in New York, Chicago and London.
“I am to be on exhibition,” he told John Burroughs about his commencement reading at Darmouth in June 1872, a “great occasion.” Flattered and excited by the prospect of appearing for the first time before a college audience, he sent out his customary publicity and advance texts. The graduating seniors who had invited him hoped that he would read or do something scandalous to discomfort the faculty. If they were disappointed, he was not. The trip north was a pleasure outing that took him again through the large unconscious American landscape he internalized so lovingly. He spent two leisurely days traveling through the farmlands of the Connecticut Valley to Hanover, where he read his poem in the college church on the afternoon of June 26. He was preceded on the commencement literary program by the Reverend Edward Everett Hale of Boston, who sixteen years earlier had praised the power and reality of Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s offering, “As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free,” the title poem of a small collection he brought out at the end of the summer, recapitulated familiar themes—democracy, the modern, the voyages and destinies of the soul—in a familiar manner. His press release described his verse as a series of “ejaculations” with the exhilarating effect of oxygen, but his performance at Dartmouth, although he told Pete that “all went off very well,” was apparently lulling. His audience, polite if unimpressed by what they managed to hear, knew for sure the reading was over only when they saw the program chairman rise and shake hands with the poet. He enjoyed himself at the commencement concert that evening, waving his arms in applause and shouting, bravo!
After a night in the college pastor’s house on the Hanover green, he rode the Vermont Central up the White River valley to Burlington to stay with his sister Hannah in her brick house on the edge of Lake Champlain. His visit either coincided with or brought on a brief truce in her life of warfare with Charley Heyde, the “skunk” and “leech” Walt believed to be the direct cause of all her miseries. Charley had no more desire to be with Walt than Walt with him; he virtually moved out of the house and into his studio downtown, where he went on painting unsellable pictures of Mount Mansfield and Camel’s Hump and also, if Hannah’s accusations had any basis, trying to seduce young women who came to him for art lessons. Hannah appeared to be better off than Walt had expected—“every thing much better,” he said pointedly—and she told her mother that his “comeing done me a great deal of good, he has promised to come again and I think he will, and he must stay longer.” (They exchanged affectionate letters to the end of Walt’s life but never saw each other again.) He spent a week with her, took the lake steamer to Ticonderoga, stayed over in Albany, and sailed home down the Hudson on July 4 “through a succession of splendid & magnificent thunderstorms (10 or 12 of them) alternated by spells of clearest sunlight.”
In Washington that August he and O’Connor had what proved to be the last of their noisy debates. This time, as Nelly had been fearing for almost a decade, they went too far—nothing that was said could have been imaginable earlier or unsaid now. As on other occasions over the dinner table and in the parlor the ostensible topic was the black man and the vote. On this issue Whitman was as conservative as ever. The enfranchisement of voters without regard to race, color or previous condition of servitude, as the Fifteenth Amendment required, was another demonstration of the “appalling dangers” of universal suffrage. During the summer of 1872 the practical wisdom of the Amendment was about to be put to the test for the first time in a presidential election, with Grant’s chief opponent, Horace Greeley, openly bidding for the black vote. Whitman may have been inflamed by newspaper reports and editorials about Greeley’s candidacy. He charged into the argument with O’Connor more vigorously than usual (his well-publicized “Quaker mildness” was official, not organic) and, as Burroughs later understood, was “rather brutal and insulting.” Nelly, who openly adored him, compromised herself by taking his side in the argument, and he may have been encouraged to make some rash reference to O’Connor’s failings as a husband. (The precise progress of this terrible fracas can only be inferred—the three contestants were reluctant to discuss it later except in the most general way.) O’Connor apparently felt that he had been betrayed by both his wife and his best friend, and he responded with the same hot spirit that informed the pages of The Good Gray Poet. He left Nelly after that evening and did not move back under the same roof with her until about 1888, when he was dying of locomotor ataxia.
The day after the argument Walt put out his hand when he met O’Connor in the street. O’Connor merely bowed and walked on coldly. He continued to resist attempts at a reconciliation on Walt’s part and that of friendly intermediaries like John Burroughs—he did not call even during Walt’s grave illness that winter. “His heart and his home had been broken,” a niece said, “and he was in no mood to forgive.”
Perhaps the explosion was inevitable, given the tensions and personalities involved. All the same, in the space of an hour or less, Whitman lost his most ardent and effectual champion, and with the breakup of the O’Connor menage he lost his oldest domestic and psychological shelter in Washington. By the time winter came he lost two other such shelters, one when Burroughs went back to New York State and put the Capitol Hill house up for sale, and the other when Louisa Whitman broke up housekeeping in Brooklyn and moved in with George in Camden. Whitman’s last ties to the Long Island of his birth, young manhood and literary vision were cut for good. In October he drew up a hasty will leaving everything he had in trust for Eddy (he amplified it the next year and listed printing plates, books out on consignment, accounts receivable, and a total of fifteen hundred dollars in savings-bank accounts). “Don’t be alarmed—& don’t laugh either,” Walt said when he drew up the first will and sent it to George for safekeeping. “I just took a notion to-day that I would like to fix it so.” He celebrated the open road and a life of experiment, but ever since the forced moves of his childhood, from one house to a shabbier, he had known loss to be another face of change. He was seeking to console himself as well when, shortly after she left Brooklyn, he said, “Mother, it is always disagreeable to make a great change, & especially for old folks.” Until she died he held out the hope that she and Eddy would come to live with him in a house he planned to buy or build in Washington.
On January 18, 1873, the Atlantic Cable carried news of the death, in Torquay, England, of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of the popular catastrophe novel, The Last Days of Pompeii. The news reminded Whitman that Lytton, for all his addiction to “tinsel sentimentality” and upper-class snobberies, had been a gifted, satisfying storyteller some of whose many novels deserved to be remembered. (Whitman undoubtedly did not know that Lytton had dismissed Leaves of Grass as the work of “an impudent, blatant impostor.”) On the twenty-third, a miserable day of rain and sleet in Washington, Whitman stayed late at his office in the Treasury building lying on a sofa by the fire and lazily reading Lytton’s novel about ambition and success, What Will He Do with It? He felt faint after a while and put the book down; more than a year was to pass before he took it up again. At the Treasury door a concerned guard offered to escort him to his lodging around the corner on Fifteenth Street, but he went by himself, climbed the stairs to his fourth-floor room, and fell asleep. He woke in the middle of the night without sensation or movement on his left side. He was no better in the morning, becoming dizzy and nauseated when he tried to sit up. Dr. William Drinkard, a neighboring physician who was summoned, told him he had suffered a paralytic stroke.* “Had been simmering inside for six or seven years,” Whitman noted, “—broke out during those times temporarily—and then went over. But now a serious attack beyond all cure.”
Peter Doyle, Charley Eldridge, Nelly O’Connor, and John Burroughs, back in Washington briefly on a business visit, spelled each other as nurses. “Pete, do you remember . . . how you used to come to my solitary garret-room and make up my bed, and enliven me, and chat for an hour or so—or perhaps go out and get the medicines Dr. Drinkard had order’d for me—before you went on duty?” By the middle of February he was able to go out on the street for the first time since his stroke, but he needed someone on each side to hold him up. His faltering recovery was slowed and then reversed as he followed the terminal illness and death of “my dear, dear sister Martha,” Jeffs wife. He was barely able to move ten steps without feeling sick, and in his depressed state he preferred to be alone most of the time, propped up in a rocking chair and looking out the window. By early May he again felt strong enough to work at the Treasury building a few hours at a time and to walk a few blocks, but this was the peak of his recovery.
“My head feels bad . . . i have such trembling spels,” Louisa Whitman wrote to him around May 12. A few days later she added, “dont come till you can walk good and without injury to your getting fully recovered.” He managed to get to Camden three days before her death on May 23, four months to the day since he had his stroke. He kept among his papers to the end a stained envelope which he had marked “Mother’s last lines.” Inside was a scrap of paper inscribed in a faltering hand, “dont mourn for me my beloved sons and daughters, farewell my dear beloved waiter.” To the end she singled him out as her favorite. He sat up by her coffin all night before the funeral and in the morning he was still sitting there, his head down, both hands clasped on his cane. Over and over again in a keening rhythm he lifted and brought it down on the floor with a thud. Mourners in the next room felt the floor shake. This death was “the great dark cloud of my life,” he told his mother’s old friend Abby Price, “the only stagggering, staying blow & trouble I have had—but unspeakable—my physical sickness, bad as it is, is nothing to it.”
He returned to Washington briefly in June, arranged for a leave of absence, and left for Camden “in a very depressed condition,” Charley Eldridge reported to Burroughs, “complaining more in regard to himself than I have ever heard him do since he got sick. . . . I begin to wonder whether Walt is going to recover, and I am very apprehensive of another attack. . . . He is a mere physical wreck to what he was” and in danger of turning “hypochondriacal,” by which Burroughs meant chronically depressed and misanthropic. In the mental disordering of his grief, Whitman had lost himself as well as his mother. He regressed to a time far in the past and, apart from inevitable idealizations of the dead, he wiped his memory clean of the fact that Louisa was an old woman and that by his own choice he had lived away from her for the past ten years.
In reparation for the lost time he moved into her rooms in George’s house and kept everything just as it had been before her death, even to the gray dress, his favorite, that hung in the wardrobe. He lived day and night “in her memory & atmosphere”—“Every object of furniture, &c. is familiar & has an emotional history.” He slept in her bed, lay against the pillow she made for him and used herself at the end, read at her table, sat in the mahogany armchair he gave her a few years before Leaves of Grass first came out. He wrote Nelly O’Connor “a perturbed sort of letter” that he thought should be torn up, but he sent it anyway—“I look long & long at my mother’s miniature, & at my sister Mat’s—I have very good one’s of each—& O the wish if I could only be with them—.” In August, when he took the ring from his finger and sent it to Anne Gilchrist as a friendship offering, he was feeling too empty, too recklessly absorbed in the thought of a “termination” other than recovery, to think of the effect upon her. “I feel the pressure of the ring that pressed your flesh & now will press mine so long as I draw breath,” she answered. “Perhaps if my hand were in yours, dear Walt, you would get along faster.”
By the end of the summer he started going over to Philadelphia on the ferry, but when he got back from these outings he felt depressed all over again and had spells of dizziness, mental confusion, and deadly weakness in his limbs. He complained that there was no one he cared to see in Camden and sat by himself for hours at a stretch, doing nothing. “I think it is best to face my situation—it is pretty serious,” he told Peter Doyle. “I want you to be prepared, if anything should happen to me.” He revised his will again and on at least two occasions destroyed in haste masses of letters and papers. He contributed his share and more to the smoking pyres that in his century marked trail’s end for other authors who dreaded what the biographers might find after they were dead and gone.
By the end of 1873 his health and spirits had picked up a little and he was able to sell some prose and poetry to the magazines. “Prayer of Columbus,” published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in March 1874, returned to the themes of “Passage to India,” but now the brave soul that had set out to sail the seas of God was “a battered, wreck’d old man . . . venting a heavy heart.” “As I see it now,” Whitman told Nelly O’Connor about the new poem, “I shouldn’t wonder if I have unconsciously put a sort of autobiographical dash in it.” Anne Gilchrist, signing herself “Your loving Annie,” recognized the autobiographical parallels immediately—“You too have sailed over stormy seas to your goal—surrounded with mocking disbelievers—you too have paid the great price of health—our Columbus.” A visit from Pete at the end of May came at a time “when I was feeling almost at my worst.” In June, almost a year and a half since his stroke, he was too feeble still to travel to Tufts College, where—a reminder of his better days at Dartmouth—he had been invited to deliver a commencement poem. In July, despite appeals to President Grant, he was discharged from his government clerkship and out of necessity began to face up to the prospect of being stranded for good in Camden, “a receiving vault.” He spent $450 on a building lot on Royden Street and made arrangements to have his boxes sent on from Washington, but, as he told Burroughs, “All questions of what I shall do are to me so subordinate to the question of whether I shall soon or ever get well, (or partially well,) that I hardly entertain them seriously.” In February 1875 he had another paralytic stroke, on his right side. “I was down, down, down that year,” he later said. “I came out of it—God knows how.”