The Gift (31 page)

Once in the summer of 1864 he bought ten gallons of ice cream and, like someone’s grandfather, carried it through all fifteen wards of Carver Hospital, giving a little to everyone (“Quite a number western country boys had never tasted ice cream before”). Always he would sit and take dictation, writing letters home for the men who couldn’t write, adding at the bottom of the page, “The above letter is written by Walt Whitman, a visitor to the hospitals.” He also wrote to the parents of soldiers who died. Sometimes he would read aloud to the men, individually or with the whole ward gathered around—the news, reports from the front, popular novels,
the
Odyssey
, passages from Shakespeare and Scott, and his own poems.

One of Whitman’s letters from the second year of the war describes what by then must have been a typical visit. The day is a Sunday and he arrives at the hospital in the midafternoon. He spends the evening feeding men too wounded to feed themselves. He sits by a man’s bed, peeling a peach, cutting the pieces into a glass, and sprinkling them with sugar. He gives small sums of money to a few—“I provide myself with a lot of bright new 10ct & 5ct bills … to give bright fresh 10ct bills, instead of any other, helps break the dullness of hospital life.” The men retire early, between eight and nine o’clock, and Whitman stays on, sitting in a corner to write his letter. “The scene is a curious one—the ward is perhaps 120 or 30 feet long—the cots each have their white mosquito curtains—all is quite still—an occasional sigh or groan—up in the middle of the ward the lady nurse sits at a little table with a shaded lamp, reading—the walls, roof, &c are all whitewashed—the light up & down the ward from a few gas-burners about half turned down.”

On his very first visit to Washington, strolling near one of the hospital buildings, Whitman had suddenly found himself standing before “a heap of feet, legs, arms, and human fragments, cut, bloody, black and blue, swelling and sickening— in the garden near, a row of graves.” What went on in these hospitals was often literally horrible, and the horror was part of what drew Whitman to the work. The hospitals were so informal and understaffed that Whitman was able to participate in almost all the details of life in the wards. He sat through the night with dying men. He cleaned wounds (the men brought in from the field sometimes arrived with maggots in their wounds), and he attended operations. He stood by as the doctors amputated the leg of Lewis Brown, one of the soldiers he had become fond of.

There is a creepy fascination to such horror—the kind that draws a crowd to an automobile accident—and that must have been part of its impact on Whitman. But beneath fascination, and beneath Whitman’s own obsession with death, lies yet another reason why people are drawn to hospital work: to be in a place where children are born or where men and women are dying or suffering
in extremis
is to be close to the quick of life. Those who do not become inured to the work often find it strangely vitalizing. Death in particular focuses life, and deepens it. In the face of death we can discriminate between the important and the trivial. We sometimes drop our habitual or guardian reticence and speak clearly.

This last, at least, was one of the ways Whitman himself chose to explain why he became so deeply involved with working in the wards. He had stumbled upon a public form for his affections, a way for him to become “undisguised and naked” without retreating to the woods. Of his manner in the hospitals he writes, “I have long discarded all stiff conventions (death and anguish dissipate ceremony here between my lads & me)—I pet them, some of them it does so much good, they are so faint—lonesome—at parting at night sometimes I kiss them right & left—The doctors tell me I supply the patients with a medicine which all their drugs & bottles & powders are helpless to yield.” The presence of death allowed Whitman a wider emotional life than he had ever had (a conjunction to which we shall have to return in a moment).

Whitman was a maternal man—a person, that is, who cares for and protects life—and the hospitals afforded him a chance to live out his maternalism, his “manly tenderness.” Most of the soldiers were under twenty-five, and many were only fifteen or sixteen years old, almost literally “offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,” and now wounded or sick, weak and helpless. He mothered them. He entered into a life of active charity. If you look back at that wonderful catalog of the
treats he dispensed in the wards you will see that its structure is simply “I give… I give… I give.” His nursing offered him a chance to bestow himself in a concrete way, and he describes it in the language of physical-spiritual emanation with which he had earlier described the bestowing phase of the self: the boys need “personal magnetism,” they hunger for “the sustenance of love,” they “respond … electric and without fail to affections,” and so on. “It has saved more than one life.” It is no secret that people die of loneliness, that those who lose their wives or husbands tend to die sooner than those whose spouses live, or that a wounded soldier far from home may fail to find the will to live. Whitman intends his “presence & magnetism” to supply that subtle medicine which no doctor can prescribe. He enters the work on these terms in the very first encounter, of course—no one is attending the true need of the prostrate boy until Whitman speaks to him, writes his letter for him, and gives him a nickel to buy milk. It’s a vivifying gift, literally.

Whitman tells his correspondents that he treats the men “as if they were … my own children or younger brothers.” He gives them the kind of care that a parent would give to a sick child, and they respond to his attentions in kind. Several letters of gratitude have been preserved. The soldiers address him as “dear Father.” They name their children after him. When he himself fell ill in the summer of 1864, a soldier from Illinois wrote: “Oh! I should like to have been with you so I could have nursed you back to health & strength … I shall never be able to recompense you for your kind care … while I was sick in the hospital … No Father could have cared for their own child better than you did me.” Whitman himself understood that his contentment and sense of purpose were in good measure a result of being the object of gratitude. As he wrote to a friend in New York, “I need not tell your womanly soul that such work blesses him that works as much as the object of it. I have never been happier than in some of these hospital ministering hours.”

Whitman’s nursing also gave him a chance to give and to receive physical affection. He complains that the other nurses are too restrained with the men, “so cold & ceremonious, afraid to touch them.” How can the healing be transmitted without the body? Whitman pets the boys, he hugs and caresses them. Over and over in the letters he tells of exchanging kisses with the soldiers: “some so wind themselves around one’s heart, & will be kissed at parting at night just like children—though veterans of two years of battles & camp life.” Sometimes his kiss is not a parent’s kiss but a lover’s. Writing to a mutual friend about a visit with Lewis Brown, Whitman says, “[He] is so good, so affectionate—when I came away, he reached up his face, I put my arm around him, and we gave each other a long kiss, half a minute long.”

Late in the war, when Whitman was forty-five, he fell ill for the first time in his life, troubled with headaches and fainting spells. It was never clear what ailed him; by his own account, one doctor told him he had been “saturated with the virus of the hospitals,” another that he had “too deeply imbibed poison into [his] system,” and another that he had “been penetrated by the malaria.”
*
Whitman had been bold and incautious in his nursing, going among smallpox victims and deliberately tending the worst fevers and wounds (“I go—nobody else goes”). When he himself began to weaken, he considered leaving the work, but soon realized that it was too important to him. As he wrote to his mother, “It is now beginning to tell a little upon me, so many bad wounds, many putrified … but as it is I shall certainly remain here… it is impossible for me to abstain from going to see & minister to certain cases, & that draws me into others, & so on …”

There is no reason to doubt that Whitman was physically sick, but I think we may take his illness as a fact of the psyche as well. It seems clear that the emotional weight of Whitman’s years of nursing lay in the contact with the soldiers. He chanced upon a form for the dedication of his manly tenderness and, having found it, allowed it to absorb him completely, giving himself away and receiving affection in return. But then: sickness. To generalize his dilemma and put it boldly we might say: affection decays identity. The ego-of-one is willingly wounded in love, broken so as to receive the beloved. In the soldier’s wounds, and in their putrefaction, the ego sees itself, and its fear, reflected. Once the self has abandoned its protective armor, will the lover come to fill the empty place, or will the wound just fester? Whitman’s claims to healing the sick with his personal magnetism belong alongside his talismanic sentence “I know my body shall decay”; for, confined inside the knowledge of that decay, the poet of “Song of Myself” had chosen the decay of giving himself away, the Osiris-decay in which with mingled fear and attraction he allowed himself to be drawn into a dismemberment that bears new life as its first fruit.

A prewar poem, “This Compost” (the poem I earlier associated with the Osiris etching), rehearses the drama of Whitman’s hospital work in every detail except, perhaps, the last. The poem opens with a man who hesitates to give himself to love:

He senses the threat of disease. How, he asks, can he press his flesh to the earth, “Are they not continually putting
distemper’d corpses within [it]? / Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?” Whitman resolves the fear in his usual manner, through an invocation of “the resurrection of the wheat.” Nature transforms the putrid:

New love is cautious because it is vulnerable. There is a dark side to nature; the green Osiris has a brother, Set, who rules the desert. If we open ourselves to love, will love come in return, or poison? Will new identity appear, or the dead-end death that leaves a restless soul? In the poem, at least, Whitman resolves his hesitancy by fixing his eye on the give-and-take of vegetable life in which the earth “grows such sweet
things out of such corruptions.” In apparent decay the man of faith recognizes the compost of new life.

This, at any rate, is how Whitman resolves the association between love and decay in the poetry. His central metaphor begins with the sympathetic self receiving the outer world (the world of objects or the lover) with both fear and delight, and then suffering a kind of death, the “chemistry of nature” that leads to the spring wheat, the new shoots, the grass over graves. But in life things are a little more complicated. For Whitman “in the game” the sequence begins with a sympathetic man admitting the soldiers to his heart, and feeling again the simultaneous attraction and risk: a “virus” saturates his system as he kisses them good-night. But here the plot may have to change, for is there a “chemistry of man” like the “chemistry of nature” which will assure the life of a lover who has allowed a foreign thing to penetrate his blood?

A curious anecdote will answer the question in the terms Whitman himself might have used. Whitman’s comrade after the war, Peter Doyle, suffered at one time from a skin eruption called “barber’s itch.” Whitman took him to a doctor for treatment. Writing soon thereafter, Whitman tells Doyle: “The extreme cases of that malady … are persons that have very deeply diseased blood, probably with syphilis in it, inherited from parentage, & confirmed by themselves—so they have no foundation to build on.” Both Whitman and Doyle had apparently worried that his rash might be a sign of syphilis. (The association between love and disease needed even less imagination in the days before penicillin. Whitman’s brother Jesse had contracted syphilis from a prostitute and was later to die in an asylum.) There was no obvious “diseased blood” in Whitman’s own parentage, but he felt it close by. And as vegetable life has the chemistry of compost, so, for Whitman, we humans may clean our animal blood through the chemistry of love: “My darling,” he wrote to Doyle, “if
you are not well when I come back … we will live together, & devote ourselves altogether to the job of curing you …”

Here, however, as in
Calamus
, we come to a gap between desire and accomplishment. Whitman was not able to cleanse the blood—either his or Peter’s—in the fullness of a human love. He could not live out his affections in the form his fancy offered, and his illness dragged on—not, perhaps, the actual ailment that first broke his health but the more figurative “virus of the hospitals … which eludes ordinary treatment.” It became Whitman’s habit for the rest of his life to attribute frailty and disease to the “hospital poison absorbed in the system years ago.” His own imagination, that is, sensed he was not cured. During the war he had allowed himself to cease being the “superb calm character” imagined in his journal, “indifferent of whether his love and friendship are returned.” Instead, he took the risk and opened himself up. And the soldiers returned his love, but not on the terms he wanted. He was always “Dear Father” to them, never “My darling.” His illness, “tenacious, peculiar and somewhat baffling,” lingered on. Had he been born in a different land or a different era he might have found the way. But in the capital of the New World in the middle of the nineteenth century,