I
ALL OVER AMERICA, church bells pealing, the roar of artillery, and rocket bursts welcomed in 1876, a year of centennial mania undampened by Custer’s debacle on the banks of the Little Bighorn and a presidential contest nearly decided at bayonet’s point. During the first minutes of 1876 Camdenites were treated to an especially splendid show of sounds and lights coming across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, site of a great international centennial fair. Halls of glass and iron, one of them reputed to be the largest in the world, were going up on an enclosed tract of 450 acres in Fairmount Park. The fairgrounds were to be served by the Pennsylvania Railroad’s special Centennial depot, designed to handle two trains a minute. President Grant and Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil opened the exhibition on May 10. By November 10, when it closed, eight million visitors, the equivalent of a fifth of the national population, had passed through the turnstiles and marveled at how far the United States had come in just one hundred years toward fulfilling its destiny as the light of the world.
The real and symbolic heart of the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 was a forty-foot-high steam engine that supplied power to 8,000 presses, pumps, gins, mills and lathes in Machinery Hall. “It is in these things of iron and steel,” said William Dean Howells, “that the national genius most freely speaks.” Still, the sponsors of this visionary world of automation did not confine themselves to the materials and technologies of the age of energy. They invited Richard Wagner, then staging the Ring des Nibelungen complete for the first time at his Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, to compose a “Centennial March.” At the opening ceremonies in Philadelphia his composition was received with attention, at any rate, and the reverence due anything so transitory and immaterial that had cost five thousand dollars in gold. The poet Sidney Lanier supplied the text of a cantata, “Centennial Meditation of Columbia,” to Mendelssohnian strains by the Hartford organist Dudley Buck. John Greenleaf Whittier wrote the Centennial hymn after Longfellow, Bryant, Lowell and Holmes declined the honor. Painting and sculpture had a place at the fair as well, although the committee of acceptance looked askance at Thomas Eakins’ masterpiece of naturalism in the tradition of Rembrandt, “Portrait of Professor Gross,” and exiled it to a wall of the first-aid station. (Like Whitman, later his friend and subject, Eakins scorned the exotic, picturesque and overdressed.) As for Whitman, he had not been invited to contribute anything to the fair, even though he had just published a two-volume “Centennial Edition” of his work and in other ways had asserted claims on the role of Centennial Poet. That role was filled by his former admirer Bayard Taylor. “I do not seem to belong to great show events,” Whitman later recalled with a mildness that belied his true feelings in 1876. He came to the fair as an ordinary paying visitor, was wheeled about for two and a half hours in a rolling chair, a popular innovation at Fairmount Park, and after the giantism, din and clutter he encountered in one pavilion after another, was entranced by the simplicities of the Japanese summer house and its garden of dwarf evergreens. He had fallen back on other plans for marking 1876. In January, from his obscure site on the Camden shore of the Delaware, he sent up a starshell of his own, and it burst in the skies of two continents.
The two-volume edition Whitman produced at a Camden print shop comprised a reissue of the 1871 Leaves of Grass and a “Melange” of his other writings, including Democratic Vistas, Passage to India, and a group of “Centennial Songs.” He titled the second volume Two Rivulets (the “rivulets” stood for the dualities of prose and verse, the real and the ideal, politics and immortality) and said in his preface that he had put it together “at the eleventh hour, under grave illness.” Printed from an awkward mix of existing plates and new typesetting, erratically paginated, Two Rivulets had a needy, makeshift, but unmistakably Whitman look. “Forgive me for not writing before. Much of the time I cannot write, from paralysis,” he told an unidentified correspondent at the end of December 1875. “I publish & shall sell the volumes myself, for two good reasons. No established publisher in the country will print my books, & during the last three years of my illness & helplessness every one of the three successive book agents I have had in N. Y. has embezzled the proceeds.”
At fifty-six, after twenty years as a professional author, Whitman was still his own publisher, his own production and sales manager and shipping clerk; now he had neither “book agents” nor Fowler and Wells. Unemployed and likely to remain so, he counted on the Centennial edition to stand between him and dependency on George. He offered his books at ten dollars the set, sent on application to the author in Camden and on receipt of price, post-office money order preferable. He was in effect a subscription publisher, but without door-to-door salesmen to drum up orders. He relied on word of mouth, random publicity, and the usual homemade reviews, one of which Whitelaw Reid ran in the New York Tribune in February 1876. By then Whitman’s new edition and other expenses had left him with about six hundred dollars in savings, not enough to put up a “shanty” for his remaining years. He told an acquaintance, “I have come to the end of my rope, & am in fact ridiculously poor,” and although this sounded like an appeal for charity, it became his official line, not to be gainsaid. Moncure Conway’s well-intentioned denials that Whitman was “in distress or dependent upon his relatives” were denounced as “singularly malapropos” and “hurtful to my case.” With varying degrees of fantasy and exaggeration, but always with a scintilla of fact, in his end-of-the-rope mood he saw himself as a victim of both conspiracy and neglect.
Several leading magazines—conspicuously the Galaxy and Harper’s—had bought his work, but he preferred to believe that all of them were in the hands of either “fops,” like Howells, or “old fogies,” like Dr. Josiah Gilbert Holland of Scribner’s Monthly. Holland called him a “wretched old fraud,” “a pest and an abomination,” and sent insulting rejection letters that rankled for years. When Bayard Taylor joined the Tribune editorial staff in March 1876 the paper ceased to be a reliable ally. Whitman had learned to expect little or nothing in the way of support from the great men of New England—Lowell, for example, “the chief of staff in that army of the devil,” or Longfellow, even though he paid Whitman “a sort of one-horse visit,” polite but meaningless, when he was on his way to the Philadelphia Exposition. (Privately, Longfellow admired Drum-Taps but felt that whatever “true poetical power” Whitman had was “obscured by a total want of education and of delicacy of feelings.”) Emerson was a category all to himself.
The Concord sage had never followed up his first letter of recognition with anything comparable. Whether he had “recanted,” and, if he had, whether capriciously or under the influence of Whitman’s “deadly haters in and around Boston,” was an issue debated among the faithful with the same sectarian passion as the divinity of Christ or the doctrine of predestination. “Its importance is immensely overrated,” Anne Gilchrist protested. “No man, however eminent, can make or mar another man’s fame.” Looking back to the way Whitman had used Emerson’s 1855 letter as a passport and charter for Leaves of Grass, one could argue with her about short-term effects, at any rate. But the fact remained that if Emerson had not formally “recanted” he had certainly drawn away. His 1860 debate with Whitman under the elms in Boston Common crystallized his objections to Leaves of Grass. Ten years later the English intellectual James Bryce noted that Emerson had ceased to expect much from Whitman,
whom he describes very amusingly. . . . Walt, by his account, must be not only a conceited but a rather affected creature, valuing himself on his roughness and shewing a contempt for the ordinary usages of good breeding. He has an immense estimate of his own performances, and does not desire criticism. He has had some sort of education, and read a good deal of poetry, so he is not quite so much a child of nature as might be expected.
From time to time Emerson’s gibes were meant for Whitman to hear. “Tell Walt I am not satisfied, not satisfied,” he said in 1871. “I expect—him—to make—the songs of the—nation—but he seems contented to—make the inventories.” The following January Whitman and Burroughs heard him lecture on “Imagination and Poetry” and were disappointed. “He maintains the same attitude—draws on the same themes—as twenty-five years ago,” Whitman complained about his former “Master,” once the arch-rebel of American thought. “It all seems to me quite attenuated,” like tea made from brewed-out leaves. When they talked after the lecture, Burroughs was aware of a certain coolness to Whitman on Emerson’s part. A few days later, seeing Emerson off at the depot in Washington, he found out what the trouble was. “He thought Walt’s friends ought to quarrel a little more with him and insist on his being a little more tame and orderly—more mindful of the requirements of beauty, of art, of culture, etc.—all of which was very pitiful to me, and I wanted to tell him so. But the train started just then and I got off.” Burroughs decided that Walt could get along nicely without such timid counsel, and Walt agreed. “I know what I am about better than Emerson does,” he said, but he tempered this with some of his old admiration and gratitude—“I love to hear what the gods have to say.” Emerson’s enervated lecture (which Burroughs found remote from “the needs of the American people today”) was a sign of the mental vacancy that had been coming on him for some time. By the time Anne Gilchrist paid him a visit in 1878 he could not remember the name of his best friend, Henry Thoreau, and asked her if the Walt Whitman whose photograph she showed him was an Englishman.
From Whitman’s point of view Emerson had already been guilty of more reprehensible sins of omission. In 1874 he had finished putting together a poetry anthology, Parnassus, that was supposed to compete with Francis Turner Palgrave’s enormously popular Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language. Among the living Americans represented in Emerson’s five hundred two-columned pages of selections were Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier and Bryant. This was as it should have been. He showed favor also to E. C. Stedman and a Wisconsin poet, long since forgotten, named Forceythe Willson, whose “genius” was “akin to Dante’s.” Perhaps predictably, there was nothing by Poe, whom Emerson had once dismissed as “the jingle man,” or Melville, who was generally forgotten, or Emily Dickinson, who published only five poems before she died in 1886. But there was not so much as a single line in Parnassus from the book Emerson had called “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed.” Maybe there was a glimmer of consolation in the report that while editing the anthology Emerson had been under the thumb of his daughter Edith, who hated Whitman. Still, it was humiliating beyond all account to be denied houseroom on this Parnassus, even by a doddering god.
In a Boston journal at the beginning of January 1876 Whitman read an attack calling his work nauseating drivel about armpit odors—the writer charged Rossetti and other English partisans with perpetrating a “really cruel hoax” on the reading public. On the eighteenth the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican, a friendly paper, printed a well-intentioned denial of “loose talk” to the effect that Whitman was “a neglected martyr” now living “in want.” His despair and loneliness fused at that moment with a shrewdly manipulative sense of occasion, a genius for publicity, that had never yet failed him. “Walt Whitman’s Actual American Position,” an unsigned article he wrote and placed in a Camden paper, the West Jersey Press, on January 26, was at the same time a cry out of the depths and a superb piece of advertising copy. He immediately sent clippings to Rossetti, Dowden and other supporters, with instructions to circulate them to magazines and newspapers. Given such impellence, a 1,300-word white paper issued from the provinces turned out to be the most widely circulated and commented-on of all Whitman’s anonymous works.
“Whitman’s poems in their public reception have fallen stillborn in this country,” the article declared. “They have been met, and are met today, with the determined denial, disgust and scorn of orthodox American authors, publishers and editors, and, in a pecuniary and worldly sense, have certainly wrecked the life of their author.” He reviewed the past twenty years: the “bowl of criticism and the charge of obscenity” that first greeted Leaves of Grass, his steadfast indifference to popularity and profits, the long war service that planted “the seeds of the disease that now cripples him,” his treatment at the hands of Secretary Harlan, and finally his “half-sick, half-well” subsistence in Camden. “Whitman has grown gray in battle. Little or no impression, (at least ostensibly,) seems to have been made. Still he stands alone.” His life was composed of “deep shadows, streaked with just enough light to relieve them.” He returned to his charges of persecution and neglect, including his omission from Emerson’s anthology, and concluded with a pitch for the Centennial edition:
We have now said enough to suggest the bleakness of the actual situation. But the poet himself is more resolute and persevering than ever. “Old, poor, and paralyzed,” he has, for a twelvemonth past been occupying himself by preparing, largely with his own handiwork, here in Camden, a small edition of his complete works in two volumes, which he himself now sells, partly “to keep the wolf from the door” in old age—and partly to give before he dies, as absolute expression as may be to his ideas.
Two weeks later the Tribune, as yet free of Bayard Taylor’s eventually dominating influence, ran a summary and concluded that Whitman’s situation was “black and desolate.” A relative silence ensued. Then on March 11, in London, Rossetti printed excerpts in the Athenaeum along with a statement from Whitman that the West Jersey Press article, printed “with my consent,” may even have understated “the plain truth.” In the Daily News two days later the Scottish poet and critic, Robert Buchanan, a Whitmanite since 1868, invoked parallels with Christ and Socrates and denounced America’s mistreatment of its greatest poet, a “Golden Eagle . . . pursued by a crowd of prosperous rooks and crows” and condemned to “literary outlawry and official persecution.” He proposed the formation of an English committee to come to Whitman’s rescue by recruiting subscribers to the Centennial edition.
Buchanan’s vividly intemperate outburst in the Daily News was duly flashed by cable to newspapers in the States, and it soon became evident that by defining his “actual position” Whitman had started a two-continent literary war. At issue was not only his alleged neglect and persecution but whether Centennial America had advanced sufficiently since its founding to be able to recognize and live with originality. According to one English line of argument, perhaps the chickenheartedness shown by the American literary establishment in its dealings with Whitman was just a sign of colonial culture. In rebuttal, Bayard Taylor, for one, argued that it was precisely Whitman’s barbarism and formlessness that were likely to excite the “blasé,” “decorous,” and “overcloyed palates of a large class of English authors and readers.” “We have enough, and more than enough, of unresolved elements in our American life,” Taylor said, and we crave “the lost blessing of repose.”
During the spring the domestic and transatlantic debate generated at least twenty-five articles, including further defenses of “the great Poet and Martyr” by Buchanan, counterattacks by Taylor, and an editorial in the (London) Saturday Review that dismissed Leaves of Grass as “garbage” and Buchanan’s “Golden Eagle” simile as grotesquely misleading—Whitman was instead “a dirty bird . . . shunned on account of its unclean habits.” Whitman’s spirits rose along with the fierceness of the battle. He crowed to Rossetti, “There is a small fury & much eructive spitting & sputtering already among the ‘literary coteries’ here from Robt. Buchanan’s lance-slash at them anent of me.” Friends rallied to the cause, just as they had done ten years earlier after the Harlan firing. “It seems to me that [his] countrymen should not allow him to suffer from penury in his old age,” John Swinton wrote in a letter to the New York Herald. “His closing days should be cheered by those kindly memories, which, I hope, are not to reach him wholly from Great Britain.” By the time Burroughs committed his forces in April with a long public letter, Buchanan’s “lance-slash” had become “an artillery and bayonet charge combined,” Whitman said, like Pickett’s gallant charge at Gettysburg, only more successful. O’Connor, though still estranged from both his wife and his old friend, put personal grievances aside and joined the battle with more than three thousand words of polemic in the Tribune, “Walt Whitman: Is He Persecuted?” The answer to O’Connor’s question was evident in the first paragraph, which described Bayard Taylor’s editorials as “a new kind of dragon’s teeth” breeding “the foul and copious abuse and insults journals of every description in this country are not ashamed to offer to a great genius, even when age, poverty, and illness have drawn around him their sad sanctuary.” O’Connor asked for Whitman nothing more than “the candid effort at a fair interpretation of his writings, which his admitted genius deserves.”
Eventually there came what the Atlantic called “a lull in the Walt Whitman controversy, which lately raged so fiercely in both hemispheres.” When the smoke lifted, Whitman found that his position in the United States as well as in England was far stronger than it had been when 1876 opened, even though the issues of poverty and neglect continued to be debated during the last sixteen years of his life. E. C. Stedman’s evenhanded appreciation in the November 1880 Scribner’s Monthly, formerly enemy territory, was one of several signs that a time had come when Leaves of Grass could be discussed on its own merits and without reference to whether Whitman had abused Emerson’s confidence or worn red flannel shirts in polite company or frequented dives and whorehouses or any of a hundred other circumstances either immaterial or imagined.
Whitman had gained pretty nearly everything he might have asked for—a way to exorcise depression and discharge despair; inner equilibrium; public demonstrations of love and loyalty; international prominence; a more benign climate of appreciation; sales for his Centennial edition. Among the English subscribers were Ruskin, Lord Houghton, Edmund Gosse, Justin McCarthy, George Saints-bury, and G. H. Lewes, George Eliot’s husband. Tennyson had heard that Whitman was “in great straits, almost starving” and sent five pounds as an outright gift. Dowden ordered six sets. In the States the sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward, one of the many prospects John Swinton lined up, ordered five sets. Whitman’s book sales for 1876 came to $1552.83, not a great sum, considering that he bore all the costs of composition, printing and binding. But it was larger then he expected when he first announced the new edition, and in June he ordered a second printing. Ten years later, when the wolf was at the door again, substantially the same group of English subscribers sent “offerings” of almost two thousand dollars in cash gifts. Their money was welcome then, but not so welcome as it had been in 1876 when, Whitman said, “blessed gales from the British Islands . . . plucked me like a brand from the burning, and gave me life again. . . . I do not forget it, and shall not; and if I ever have a biographer I charge him to put it in the narrative.”
As spring approached, the old physical complaints were still with him—gastric and liver troubles, dizziness, lameness—but there was a distinct upward trend in his spirits. The West Jersey Press affair had yielded what he called “deep medicines.” The day after the article first appeared he felt well enough to give a public reading in aid of the other poor of Camden. He played by the hour with his infant nephew Walt, George and Louisa Whitman’s only child, and he accepted with serenity the boy’s death in the July heat wave. He sat by the coffin surrounded by the neighborhood children, fondling them and trying to explain that no one, not even grownups, understood what death was. He became sociable again and went over to Philadelphia often to take dinner and drink wine with friends. “I get out nearly every day,” he wrote to Dowden, “but not far, & cannot walk from lameness—make much of the river here, the broad Delaware, crossing a great deal on the ferry, full of life & fun to me.”
When he revised his will in 1873 Walt left his silver watch to Peter Doyle, “with my love.” Since then, Pete, who had lost his streetcar job and was doing hazardous work as a brakeman on the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad, had been able to manage only an occasional visit to Camden. Their old intimacy waned. “I ought to have written you before,” Walt said after several months of silence passed between them. “But I often, often think of you, boy, & let that make it up.” There was no need for him to say so, but a new protégé, Harry Stafford, had taken Pete’s place and would in time receive Walt’s silver watch. Walt was as exigent with him as he had been with Pete. “How I wish you could come in now, even if but for an hour & take off your coat, & sit down on my lap . . . I want to see you, my darling son, & I can’t wait any longer.” They wrestled, and Walt, the semi-invalid, drew enough strength from the younger man to pin him to the floor, just as he had been able to outwalk Pete in the Washington days. When he traveled with Harry he introduced him as “my (adopted) son,” “my nephew,” “my young man,” and explained that they were in the habit of sharing a room and a bed. Burroughs was annoyed to see them roughhousing together and cutting up “like two boys.” “Great tribulation in the kitchen in the morning,” he wrote in his journal after they had spent a few days with him at Esopus in the Catskills. “Can’t get them up to breakfast in time. Walt takes Harry with him as a kind of foil or refuge from the intellectual bores.”
When they met, Harry Stafford was eighteen and working as errand boy at the Camden print shop where Whitman saw Two Rivulets through the press. Harry responded gratefully to the attention and affection of a man nearly forty years his senior who was reputed to be a famous writer and was treated with deference by the printers and pressmen. Like other young men to whom Walt was drawn he was barely literate, still unformed in identity and direction. He was subject to “blue spells,” fits of temper, impulsive acts, flights into fantasy, all of which were exacerbated by a relationship he was not able to understand and had to accept on faith—it made demands and awakened responses that were profoundly confusing as he made his passage into full manhood. In his more assuring role of mentor rather than lover Walt tried to moderate these mood swings in line with the spirit of Leaves of Grass, as he interpreted that spirit for Harry. “It makes (tries to make) every fellow see himself, & see that he has got to work out his salvation himself—has got to pull the oars & hold the plow, or swing the axe himself—& that the real blessings of life are not the fictions generally supposed, but are real, & are mostly within reach of all—you chew on this.”
After they had known each other for a month or two, Harry took him home to meet his parents. George and Susan Stafford were tenant farmers at Laurel Springs (or “White Horse”), a crossroads settlement twelve miles from Camden. Soon Walt was staying there for days and even weeks at a time. He was a paying guest, as he was at his brother’s place at Camden. He was also an adopted member of the Stafford family and companion to Harry’s six brothers and sisters. “I think he is the best man I ever knew,” Susan Stafford told Whitman’s English admirer, Edward Carpenter. Carpenter was moved by the ease and intimacy with which they dealt with one another. “Am with folks I love, & that love me,” Whitman said. “Have had a real good old-fashion’d time, first-rate for me—It is a farm, every thing plain & plenty, & blazing wood fires—in the eating line, lots of chickens, eggs, fresh pork &c: (they kill a hog every two weeks).” Living with the Staffords, in a farmhouse surrounded by meadows, woods, a pond, and a little creek, was like going back to old times on Long Island. When he went on rambling drives to the fields or the marl pit or farm auctions in George Stafford’s roomy old wagon he remembered rides with his grandfather Van Velsor at Cold Spring. Coming in to supper as grace was about to be said, he rested his hands affectionately on George’s head before passing to his place at the table. “If I had not known you—if it hadn’t been for you & our friendship & my going down there summers to the creek with you,” he was to tell Harry, “I believe I should not be a living man to-day—I think & remember these things & they comfort me—& you, my darling boy, are the central figure of them all.”
“I take an interest in the boy in the office, Harry Stafford—I know his father & mother,” Walt had written to one of the Camden printers in April 1876. He could have been describing his own family at West Hills, his refusal to do farm work, his apprentice years.
There is a large family, very respectable American people—farmers, but only a hired farm—Mr. Stafford is in weak health—
I am anxious Harry should learn the printer’s trade thoroughly—I want him to learn to set type as fast as possible—want you to give him a chance (less of the mere errands &c)—There is a good deal really in the boy, if he has a chance.
Don’t say any thing about this note to him—or in fact to any one—just tear it up, & keep the matter to yourself private.
Less than a month later Harry quit his job, apparently hoping to find more exciting work at the Exposition grounds in Philadelphia. “I fear he is to much trouble to you all ready,” Harry’s mother apologized to Walt. “I hope Harry will ever be Greatfull to you fore all your kindness to him.” Harry tried his restless hand after that at a series of positions, many of which Walt helped him find. He worked for the West Jersey Press and other papers, was a telegraph operator for the Camden and Atlantic Railroad, tried for appointments to the lighthouse and lifesaving services, and drifted to Canada, where he served as an attendant in Dr. Bucke’s lunatic asylum until the “unearthly noises” of the inmates got him down. “H S and Eva Westcott married,” Whitman wrote in his diary for June 25, 1884. The last of his sustained love affairs had modulated into friendship, like the others. He could not spend Thanksgiving with them, he wrote to Harry’s wife that November, but “it would be a true comfort for me if it was so I could come in every few days, and you and Harry and I could be together—I am sure it would be good for me. . . . I appreciate your loving wishes & feelings, & send you mine the same, for both of you.” And so he was alone again, without the “ridiculous little storms & squalls” that had given him pain. Harry too remembered that they had had “many rough times together.” “Can you forgive me and take me back and love me the same,” he once wrote. “I will try by the grace of God to do better. I cannot give you up, and it make me feel so bad to think how we have spent the last day or two; and all for my temper. I will have to controol it or it will send me to the states prison or some other bad place. Cant you take me back and love me the same.”
Other men figured in these storms of jealousy and recrimination. Walt had again taken to writing down the names of drivers, conductors, ferrymen, delivery boys, and the like in whom he took an interest.
John Williamson, tall, young . . .
John McLaughlin, black eyed . . .
Wm Stillé, young man formerly at Coley’s grocery . . .
Rob’t McKelvey, Market st driver—young, blackeyed, affectionate
At Laurel Springs he met a twenty-five-year-old farmhand, Edward Cattell, whose name appears in a number of notebook and diary entries.
the hour (night, June 19, ’76, Ed & I,) at the front gate by the road
saw E. C.
Sept meetings with Ed C by the pond moonlit nights
Ed Cattell with me
After they had known each other for about eight months Walt sent Ed an urgent letter from Camden.
Do not call to see me any more at the Stafford family, & do not call there at all any more—Dont ask me why—I will explain to you when we meet. . . . There is nothing in it that I think I do wrong, nor am ashamed of, but I wish it kept entirely between you and me—&—I shall feel very much hurt & displeased if you don’t keep the whole thing & the present letter entirely to yourself. Mr and Mrs Stafford are very near & kind to me, & have been & are like brother & sister to me—& as to Harry you know how I love him. Ed, you too have my unalterable love, & always shall have. I want you to come up here & see me.
He and Ed exchanged letters from time to time and continued to see each other, but not so frequently as before. “It seems an age Since i last met With you down at the pond and a lovely time We had of it to old man,” Ed wrote. “I love you walt and Know that my love is returned to.”
Meanwhile, Walt had been pressing Harry to accept a ring from him. In the conventions of the time it signified friendship, but in the evolving intensity of their relationship it signified a marriage as well, and Harry apparently drew back.
talk with H S & gave him r[ing] Sept 26 ’76—(took r back) Nov 1—Talk with H S in front room S[tevens] street [in Camden]—gave him r again
Nov 25, 26, 27, 28—Down at White Horse—Memorable talk with H S—settles the matter
A few weeks later, reconsidering the matter, Walt arrived at a crisis point, just as he had done with Peter Doyle, and he used the same characteristic word, “perturbation,” to describe it. With Pete he had made a vow impossible to keep, to avoid “any talk or explanation—or any meeting, whatever, from this hour forth, for life.” This time he seems to have found a calmer remedy. “Had serious inward rev’n & conv’n,” he said in a fragmentary daybook entry for December 19, 1876. “Saw clearly what it really meant—very profound meditation on all—happy & satisfied at last about it—singularly so. . . . (that this may last now without any more perturbation).” Still, the memorable talks, the crises and brief resolutions, continued to occur during 1877, when Walt was seeing something of Ed Cattell.
the scene in the front room Ap. 29, with H
July 20th ’77, in the room at White Horse “good bye”
Harry became dependent and forlorn. “You may say that I dont care for you,” he wrote after spending a sleepless night waiting for Walt to come back to Camden, “but I do, I think of you all the time. . . . I want you to look over the past and I will do my best to-ward you in the future. You are all the true friend I have, and when I cannot have you I will go away some ware, I don’t know where.” During the fall, although they were seeing each other in Camden and at the farm, Harry continued to write agitated letters. “I wish you would put the ring on my finger again, it seems to me there is something that is wanting to compleete our friendship when I am with you. I have tride to studdy it out but cannot find out what it is. You know when you put it on ther was but one thing to part it from me and that was death.”
Feb 11 [1878]—Monday—Harry here—put r on his hand again
And yet, as Harry had said, something remained wanting. Walt told him a few years later that there were still “many things, confidences, questions, candid says you would like to have with me, you have never yet broached—me the same.”
Anne Gilchrist—“Your own loving Annie”—had also promised to wear Walt’s ring so long as she drew breath. The year 1876 found her freed of the ties that had been holding her in England. Her mother was dead, her oldest son started in his career, her three younger children ready and eager for a new life. She believed her long wait, her novitiate, was finally ended.
Do not think me too wilful or headstrong, but I have taken our tickets & we shall sail Aug 30 for Philadelphia [she wrote]. O I passionately believe there are years in store for us, years of tranquil, tender happiness—me making your outward life serene & sweet—you making my inward life so rich—me learning, growing, loving—we shedding benign influences round us out of our happiness and fulfilled life—hold on but a little longer for me, my Walt—I am straining every nerve to hasten the day. I have enough for us all (with the simple unpretending ways we both love best).
He did his tactful best to hide his alarm, thanked her for her “good & comforting letter,” and made casual reference to their mutual friend Rossetti, the progress of the Centennial edition, and, of course, his health, which was now sufficiently improved—“perhaps a shade better”—to permit him at least to think about coming over to England to visit her and other friends. He was not able to sustain this easygoing tone for long. “I do not approve your American trans-settlement,” he said, getting to the point at last, but then he veered away, warning her not about his positive disinclination to “get hitched” but about the crudeness and meagerness of the social existence she was likely to find in his country. “Don’t do any thing toward such a move, nor resolve on it, nor indeed make any move at all in it, without further advice from me. If I should get well enough to voyage, we will talk about it yet in London.” But he could not turn her. Coming to America, she countered, “has been my settled, steady purpose (resting on a deep, strong faith) ever since 1869. . . . I cannot wait any longer”—Walt had used these words with Harry Stafford. She had developed a touch of Centennial frenzy herself. She imagined the grand sights and sounds of the Exposition and worried—needlessly, as it turned out—that because of the millions of visitors to Philadelphia she might not be able to find a suitable place in which to live. She planned a long, perhaps permanent stay and was bringing over furniture, pictures, and books. On September 10 her intended husband made a brief entry in his daybook, “Mrs G & family arrived.” In his private records she remained “Mrs G” for the nearly two years she spent in Philadelphia.
He began seeing her nearly every day, riding the red cars of the Market Street line from the ferry station out to her rented row house on North 22nd Street. By the fall he was a part-time resident there and occupied a bedroom (“a kind of prophet’s chamber,” Edward Carpenter noted) that was always kept ready for him. He entertained guests—George Whitman and Lou, Burroughs, Carpenter—as if in his own house. He had a little stove installed in his room, and he put in a supply of wood for the winter. In warm weather his bamboo rocking-chair was carried to the pavement, and he introduced the Gilchrists to the American custom of socializing out by the front stoop while the neighbors did the same. Anne’s children thought of him as a sort of eminent uncle.* He took Herbert, her twenty-one-year-old son, with him when he went to Laurel Springs, although there were collisions with Harry, who claimed the boy insulted him. (“If I had been near enough to smacked him in the ‘Jaw’ I would have done it,” Harry said after a scene at the supper table. “He will find out sometime [t]hat he is fooling with the wrong one.”) All in all, Walt occupied much the same position in the Gilchrist and Stafford households, except that with Anne and her children he recited poetry, Tennyson’s more often than his own, and he talked about literary matters, the poetry of Victor Hugo and Heine, the novels of Scott, George Eliot, Bulwer Lytton, and George Sand, the social style of the Boston writers and their circle—“They are supercilious to everybody. Emerson is the only sweet one among them and he has been spoilt by them. Yes, it is a stifling atmosphere for him.” As for Thoreau: “I do not think it was so much a love of woods, streams, and hills that made him live in the country, as a morbid dislike of humanity.” He recalled his pleasure in hearing Italian operas and the voice of Marietta Alboni. George Sand’s Consuelo, the heroine as opera singer, he preferred to any of Shakespeare’s women, and he acted out the scene in which she was singled out for the beauty and earnestness of her music. “How often have I dwelt upon that passage,” he said, thinking back to an early time in the foreground of Leaves of Grass when, in his solitary way, he had singled himself out to be the poet he became.
When Anne heard him singing in his room before breakfast she understood it to be “an outburst of pure emotional and physical abandon to the delight of living,” and surely it was not his health that remained the barrier between them. “Never saw Walt look so handsome,” Burroughs said after spending the night with him at the Gilchrists’, “so new and fresh.” Carpenter said he looked like a god. Anne’s daughter Grace was struck by his “majestic presence” and compared him to a mountain in the noonday sun. But it soon became clear to Anne that this enormous vitality, casually shared with others, came from a source that would always remain closed to her and that in her lifetime she could never be more than his “dear friend.” “I saw that Anne Gilchrist was suffering,” Carpenter recalled. “I saw that Whitman was all kindness—kindness itself toward her; but at the same time that his relation to her did not go farther than that word would indicate.” She may not have been able to point to the precise moment when she realized that her coming to America had been a mistake. “I do not feel as if I ought to stay,” she told a friend in December 1877—she was recovering then from what she described as “a somewhat severe operation (under ether) to cure an injury received at the birth of one of my children which has always troubled me.” As soon as the worst of her discomfort was over Walt came back to the house:
Oct 5 after three weeks absence visited Mrs G’s—
Mrs G temporarily sitting up
Dec 10-to-30—fine spell of weather—out every day—evenings at
Dec 25—Christmas—dinner at north 22 st
They exchanged affectionate letters and saw each other several times after the spring of 1878 when she moved out of her house—“It stands empty and forlorn now,” she said—to spend a year moving from place to place in the Northeast.
June 9 [1879] the Gilchrists sail’d from N Y for Glasgow
Before she embarked they talked in private at a friend’s apartment on Fifth Avenue; and whatever degree of desolation she felt she kept to herself. Perhaps she never understood Walt’s meanings, never understood “Calamus” as passionately as she understood “Children of Adam,” for she still believed it was all a matter of waiting. “I think of you continually,” she wrote when she was again settled in England, “& know that somewhere & some-how we are to meet again, & that there is a tie of love between us that time & change & death itself cannot touch.” Her faith was romantic and traditional, but in her characteristic way, as a Victorian intellectual she also derived it from evolutionary science. The world, the race, each single soul, she told Whitman—all were “surely going somewhere.”
III
A grassy farm lane that narrowed to a footpath led from the Stafford house to a stream, a secluded pond, and high woods. Calamus and cattails grew at the water’s edge beneath banks of brush and tree roots. Like Adam, in this wild garden that he called Timber Creek, Whitman, gaining back strength and spirit, looked at nature as if for the first time—“I never really saw the skies before”—and marveled at the timeless cycle of renewal he celebrated in Leaves of Grass. The brown earth quickened in early spring and ripened into the sensual stillness of summer:
The fervent heat, but so much more endurable in this pure air—the white and pink pond-blossoms, with great heart-shaped leaves; the glassy waters of the creek, the banks, with dense bushery, and the picturesque beeches and shade and turf; the tremulous, reedy call of some bird from recesses, breaking the warm, indolent, half-voluptuous silence; an occasional wasp, hornet, honey-bee or bumble (they hover near my hands or face, yet annoy me not, nor I them, as they appear to examine, find nothing, and away they go)—the vast space of the sky overhead so clear, and the buzzard up there sailing his slow whirl in majestic spirals and discs; just over the surface of the pond, two large slate-color’d dragon-flies, with wings of lace, circling and darting and occasionally balancing themselves quite still, their wings quivering all the time . . .
In wayward, spontaneous notes, set down on the spot, just as he had done in the hospitals, Whitman rendered the continuum of his perceptions and sensations, made loving roll calls of the names of trees, birds, flowers, and insects, distinguished Timber Creek’s thousand small and separate sounds: the distant rustle of dry cornstalks and the wings of migrating birds, the hum of wild bees, “the flup of a pike leaping out, and rippling the water,” “the quawk of some pond duck—(the crickets and grasshoppers are mute in the noon heat, but I hear the song of the first cicadas).” He wrote seated on stumps and logs or in an old chair the boys hauled out to the creek for him. Once in a while he met them there when they came to dive and splash in the pond. A quarter of a century earlier a diary note of June 1876—“The swim of the boys, Ed., Ed. C. & Harry”—might have been the germ of a surpassingly delicate and daring poem:
The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair,
Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.
An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.
At Timber Creek he also remembered the deaths of young men. “Who is there to whom the theme does not come home?” He found “nothing gloomy or depressing in such cases—on the contrary, as reminiscences, I find them soothing, bracing, tonic.”
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them.
Timber Creek was the imagined landscape of his poetry. He found there other transparent summer mornings on the grass. He revisited the budding grove of sexual identity that had been the setting of “Calamus.”
In paths untrodden,
In the growth by margins of pond-waters,
Escaped from the life that exhibits itself.
“Away from the clank of the world,” like Virgil’s passionate shepherd finding words for his love in the deep shade of beech trees, he was free
To tell the secret of my nights and days,
To celebrate the need of comrades.
“The token of comrades” was, as it always had been for him, calamus with its aromatic spears and thrusting spadix.
. . . what I draw from the water by the pond-side, that
I reserve, I will give of it, but only to them that love as I myself am capable of loving.
“There come moods,” he wrote by the pond, “when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent.” For several summers he performed a solitary “Adamic” ritual in his garden. Off to one side of the creek was an abandoned marlpit with a little spring running through the middle of it under some willows. He stripped himself naked, dug his feet into the black mud and rolled in it, rinsed away the mud, rasped his body with a stiff brush until his skin turned scarlet, rinsed again in the spring. After his mud and water bath he bathed in the sun and air, making slow promenades on the turf and declaiming and singing—“vocalism”—at the top of his voice. “I make the echoes ring, I tell you!” He toned his muscles, borrowed “elastic fibre and clear sap,” wrestling with oak and hickory saplings, just as he wrestled with Harry Stafford and drew strength from him. As he hauled and pushed he took great draughts of fragrant air into his lungs. “After I wrestle with the tree awhile, I can feel its young sap and virtue welling up out of the ground and tingling through me from crown to toe, like health’s wine. . . . I hold on boughs or slender trees caressingly there in the sun and shade, wrestle with their innocent stalwartness.” In the changing light he drank in with his eyes their rugged trunks, their shadowed deltas, unexpected bulges and gnarls, as if trees were the bodies of strong lovers; he remembered that ancient peoples worshiped trees and believed them to be the progenitors of the human race. “One does not wonder at the old story fables, (indeed, why fables?) of people falling into love-sickness with trees, seiz’d extatic with the mystic realism of the resistless silent strength in them—strength, which after all is perhaps the last, completest, highest beauty.” In the instinctual and healing forest he spent hours at a time alone and happy, away from restraints, artifice, “perfumes”:
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
“Somehow I seem’d to get identity with each and every thing around me, in its condition,” he said at Timber Creek. “Nature was naked, and I was also.” Earth, rocks, trees, and small living things were lessons in imperturbability, concreteness and strength. “Being” was superior to “the human trait of mere seeming,” the human habit of “persistent strayings and sickly abstractions.” Literature yielded to “Nature.” Wherever he looked he found eloquent dumb miracles, each “enclosing the suggestion of everything else”: a yellow poplar swarming with wild bees; mulleins by the chestnut fence, the knobs on their erect stalks bursting into clear yellow flower; a balloon of white butterflies floating and rolling in the air above a field of cabbages, malachite-green; a dark-winged hawk circling the pond—“Once he came quite close over my head; I saw plainly his hook’d bill and hard restless eyes.”
“Pete, if you came to see me to-day,” Whitman wrote in 1877, after his second summer at Timber Creek, “you would almost think you saw your old Walt of six years ago—I am all fat & red & tanned . . . thankful to God to be as well & jolly as I am.” He dragged his left foot and leaned heavily on his stick, but he went out into the world. In 1879, the year he turned sixty, he made a three-month visit to New York, gave the first of what became his annual Lincoln lectures, and traveled west to the Rockies. He found “wonders, revelations I wouldn’t have miss’d for my life, the great central area 2000 miles square, the Prairie States, the real America,” he wrote to Anne Gilchrist, and he sent her a map of his travels, past and present. He spent the next summer in Canada, on the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence. In 1881 he came to Boston to lecture and read proof on the seventh edition of Leaves of Grass; he revisited the Whitman and Van Velsor homesteads around West Hills.
Meanwhile, he had found a theme for a new book, the pond at Timber Creek. The notes he made there are his Walden. As a chronicler of solitude the poet of million-footed Manhattan and the Broadway pavements stands with Thoreau and John Burroughs, but his pond notes are also the record of a return from the void of breakdown to a new stage of integration, generative, hospitable to change and experiment. At first he planned to publish this material—“prose, free gossip mostly”—in a book of a hundred pages or so to be called Idle Days & Nights of a Half-Paralytic or, among the three dozen “suggested and rejected names for this volume,” Away from Books—Away from Art, Only Mulleins and Bumble-Bees, Echoes of a Life in the 19th Century in the New World, and Ducks and Drakes, the last a reference to the democratic, inexhaustibly diverting pastime of skipping flat stones along the surface of quiet waters. “Down in the Woods, July 2d, 1882,” obeying “a happy hour’s command, which seems curiously imperative,” he decided to combine the pond notes with his book about wound-dressing and the hospitals, Memoranda During the War. He undid his bundles of manuscripts and clippings and drew out material on his ancestors and his early years, travel notes, descriptions of New York and Philadelphia, a lecture he had given in 1877 on the 140th anniversary of Thomas Paine’s birth, reconsiderations of Emerson, Carlyle and Poe, other writings seemingly too miscellaneous to belong together but reflecting in some decisive way the interiors of his life and century, “a strange, unloosen’d, wondrous time.” All of this he put together, intending to “send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed.” This “melange” and “incongruous huddle” had the appearance of something that had happened instead of being made. He gave it the title Specimen Days, and yet, to his mind, the pond remained the central image of his new book. “Do you know what ducks and drakes are?” he asked O’Connor, once again his friend and confidant. “Well, S. D. is a rapid skimming over the pond-surface of my life, thoughts, experiences, that way—the real area altogether untouch’d, but the flat pebble making a few dips as it flies & flits along—enough at least to give some living touches and contact points—I was quite willing to make an immensely negative book.”
But for all that it deliberately does not tell—about the birth of Leaves of Grass, for example—Specimen Days is a profoundly intimate book, written in a lean, unassuming prose that is in direct contrast with his earlier manner. By indirections, random links, discriminated occasions invoking “the costless average, divine, original concrete,” Whitman suggests how immense creativity, perturbations, loneliness, the bustle of the cities and the suffering of the war had their own enclosing significance and were also paths to the stillness and health of Timber Creek. Almost alone among the major American writers, he achieved in his last years radiance, serenity and generosity of spirit. “A Discovery of Old Age.—Perhaps the best is always cumulative,” he said in the final pages of Specimen Days. “I cannot divest my appetite of literature, yet I find myself eventually trying it all by Nature—first premises many call it, but really the crowning result of all.” Having for the moment, at any rate, settled to his satisfaction the relative claims of his life and his art, Whitman was ready to take up residence at Mickle Street. From there he looked back to the cities of his youth—New York, Brooklyn, New Orleans, Washington. “They are my cities of romance. They are the cities of things begun—this is the city of things finished.” An old man who never married and had no heart’s companion now except his books, he rode contentedly at anchor on the waters of the past.