Walt Whitman's Secret by George Fetherling

thought something very interesting, valuable and suggestive might be written about the influence, good or bad, of disease in literature. I mean ‘disease’ more than ‘sickness.’ The influence of drink in literature might also be written about. It has so many sides, noble and devilish both, that it would need to be rightly interpreted, not by a puritan or a toper (the puritan is only another kind of toper).”
    Toper
, you may not know, is obsolete American slang for a drunkard.
    â€œI have almost made up my mind to make some use of the themes myself, though I don’t know as I’ll ever get to them. So many physical obstacles have dropped onto my pathway in recent years.”
    Now he was doing just what he ought not to do, pushing himself in the direction of despondency. He saw the danger and backed away.
    â€œTake my love to your mother,” he said as I prepared to leave after doing my best to lure him away from despair. “And how about Anne Montgomerie? She has not been here for ten days. When she washere last, she brought me a bunch of roses. They were very beautiful, though not so beautiful as she herself. She has cheeks like the prettiest peach in the orchard.”
    How had fate permitted me to find this woman who had both the power to keep me enthralled and the power to make America’s greatest poet sound like a schoolboy in the first flush of desire?

    FIVE    
    W HAD BEEN HAVING considerable success getting his poems printed in the newspapers, weeklies and monthlies, including all or most of the best places. He was always skilled at that. Yet since
Drum-Taps
, published the month following Lincoln’s murder (as he always called the assassination), his heart had been inclined more in the direction of prose. It seemed to me that around 1865 something important had taken place to change him profoundly— in addition to the end of the war or the murder, I mean, something unconnected to public events. I wasn’t certain what or just how. Such was my feeling at the time I enthusiastically accepted Anne’s suggestion, resolving to commence a record of my Mickle Street visits. Practically every day, usually after dinner but sometimes in the morning as well, I found him in either the front parlor or the bedroom.
    The downstairs room was furnished with a davenport and chairs and decorated with two busts, one of Elias Hicks, the other of W himself. Hicks was the Quaker divine who farmed on Long Island and whose common-sense democratic theology led to a great schism amongst Quakers. When W was a young boy, he heard Hicks, who must have been about eighty years old, preach a lesson, an event that had gained some powerful hold on W’s imagination and philosophy.“Hicksite-ism may be found on every page of the New American Bible,” he said. This was the name he sometimes gave to the immortal
Leaves
in candid conversation, whether in jest or not I can’t say. The other conspicuous object in the front parlor was a model of a sailing ship, which I believe had belonged to Missus Davis’s late husband.
    Although I did not mention that I was now resolved to keep a daily memorandum of his conversations, I was aware soon enough that our relationship had changed on that Wednesday when I jotted my first such entry, trying to find a style that would capture the cadence of his speech, for W’s bump of intuitiveness was one of the most remarkable of all his gifts. If he was his own critic, using his experience as a newspaperman to write anonymous praises of
Leaves
and see them published in the press, then his friends were his biographers: his wartime associate O’Connor, whom he hailed for his “Keltic” qualities, and of course Doctor Bucke. Now, knowing that he was in steep though not unchecked decline, he instructed me what to do after he was gone. “When you write about me one day, tell the whole truth,” he would say,