Walt Whitman's Secret by George Fetherling Page B

banded together and surprised him with the gift of a buggy. The donors included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Twain, John Greenleaf Whittier and Edwin Booth. Holmes, the famous physician and writer, was one of the doctors who always appeared to take to W, perhaps because he was such a good case for study. As for actors such as Booth, W counted himself an omnivorous watcher of plays, both comedies and drama, though this was most true in his New York days before the war, for in Washington he was far too preoccupied with tragedies, the kind performed in the hospitals, and in Camden too limited by the encroachments of age and illness.
    But the soothing effects of his many friendships could not make up for the cumulative effects of all the public abuse he had endured, which marked him for the rest of his life. The critics, he told me that Spring of Eighty-eight, had given him a devil of a time, andhe was “even to-day not accepted by the great bogums,” though it could be easily shown that the statement was less true,
far
less so, than in the past. The disapproval he had accumulated over the years naturally disposed him well toward some writers but not others, and membership in the one category or the other was not determined by literary criteria.
    He presented me with the correspondence that passed between Booth and himself in which he sent Booth a likeness and asked if in return he might have one of Booth’s father, Junius Brutus Booth, the great Shakespearean whom he had often seen on stage. A long time passed before I ever heard him speak of the patriarch’s middle son, John Wilkes, except in connection with the public lecture on the Lincoln murder, which he was asked to give at various times.
    Regarding John Greenleaf Whittier, well, some poets adhere to one another and others mutually repel. It is in the nature of poets to be this way. Whittier was one of the New Englanders everyone read in school. No one would ever think to look there for W, whom you might expect to feel no sympathy for Whittier; but because Whittier supported him, though apart from the buggy fund more passively than actively, W responded warmly. But writers who were safely dead had the strongest claim on him. He read and reread the novels of Sir Walter Scott, who had been born almost two decades before W’s father (who died in Fifty-five, the same year that
Leaves
first appeared). Not only was Scott safely in his grave, a figure from benign antiquity unable to slander anyone even if he wished, but the grave was on the other side of the Atlantic. Writers closer to W in both chronology and geography, usually ones much younger than himself, could rile him by their existence, most especially if they were more literary. Henry James was “only feathers to me,” he said. But then, whereas Scott was a Scot, James was an American who pretended to be English. When Matthew Arnold, slightly W’s junior, died that Spring, W saidto me, “He will not be missed.” Later, when the subject of Arnold came up, he put it this way: “There is no gap as with the going of men like Carlyle, Emerson, Tennyson.” Of Arnold’s work he said, “As poetry it is fragile. It lacks substance.”
    Emerson of course was the one author he admired with almost no qualification, Emerson who had given
Leaves
such a hand-up so long ago and who, while he never repeated the tribute, never revoked it either. W thought him “in ways rather of thin blood,” this man who brought the mind to Nature, but I know how important to W their few meetings were. W thought the great New Englander “was born to be but never quite succeeded in being a democrat.” He was, however, an American through and through, the greatest of American idea-men and philosophers, and this was no unimportant thing to W; essential, in fact. He urged Emerson on Anne as a vital subject for study. He was forever advising her and doing little kindnesses for her.
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