Walt Whitman's Secret by George Fetherling Page A

unaware— no, I mean “with no proof”—that of course I was writing about him already, every night, as prelude to my reading in Socialism and other subjects, sometimes until the dawn announced itself. He began handing me newspaper cuttings to read and discuss. He extracted letters from the bottomless midden of paper. One was a letter from England more than a decade old concerning some small Whitman controversy of that place and moment between two of his many admirers there.
    As he received letters from abroad, so too did he receive visitors from all over, visitors high and low. One pilgrim from the British Isles declared that his two ambitions in America were to meet W and see Niagara Falls, both sites being conspicuous wonders of Nature. Others of the first rank among writers and artists, such as William Michael Rossetti, brother of the more famous Dante Gabriel R.,took W to be a man of high literary standing, but of course they were not American. In any case, W once spoke of them as “the tribe of the Oxford-Cambridge Israel who have felt that, despite their great scholarship, layers on layers of erudition,” they had something in common with him or at least with the immortal
Leaves
, as though the two could be viewed separately.
    Soon he was giving me such letters to take away, knowing, without the subject being raised, that I would transcribe them into the nocturnal journal of our conferences. He always claimed that he’d come upon a certain letter by chance while “mousing” in the hillocks of paper. “I clean house from time to time,” he said, sitting in the bedroom, which in fact showed few signs of such activity. The best Missus Davis could do was to work around the considerably smaller stacks of newspapers and letters in the parlor. At least this way she prevented it from resembling too closely the room above, whose door was always closed and often locked, even when W was inside, a habit that would prove worrisome later on, as his periods of comparative health gave way alarmingly to ones quite different. He went on: “Give you bits— hunt them— that I think might be of service to you. Service or interest. The rest— most of the things— go into the fire.” His gaze floated toward the little round stove. “I know you are jealous of that fire. Well, that stuff is trash, notwithstanding your appetite for it. Trash, trash, trash.” This was mousing in a rather different sense. We were playing a cat-and-mouse game, and I was not the one that purred.
    He would speak a brief preface to each piece as he passed it to me. “I want you to have this letter of William’s for your archives,” he said one day, giving me one of the letters from O’Connor that he cherished. “It would be valuable enough if it was only William’s, but it happens to be more than that. You see the date—1865.” The letter dealt with the defense of W that O’Connor was writing following hisfriend’s dismissal from the Interior Department, the manuscript that became
The Good Gray Poet.
    For the most part W seemed perfectly at ease giving me his treasures. The exception was the famous Emerson letter of 1855. I kept asking if I could take another look at it. He would then claim that he would lay it aside to show me the next time it turned up, which it never seemed to do. This was a further illustration of how he found it necessary to be wily in certain matters. And then there was one instance in which he was only provisionally generous. “Take this away,” he said, thrusting a letter from Tennyson at me. “But take good care of it. The curio hunters would call it quite a gem.” Several times later on he asked for the temporary loan of it. He even sent visitors to my place with requests that they be allowed to read it on the premises.

    Four years earlier, shortly after W moved into Mickle Street, thirty of his admirers had