The Ice Harp, page 9
“I’d despise you if you tried to curry favor, but the courtesy due your host would not be taken amiss.”
“Mr. Emerson, suh, I do begs your pardon.”
Without another word, I leave the room, closing the door behind me.
Ah, well, Emerson. It was the same with Samuel Long when he first arrived in Concord. Their consciousness has been shaped by quite different circumstances than any you have known.
Downstairs, I sit at the table and try to make headway on a poem begun in February.
Outside is winter.
Except for a Calvary
Of masts on the river
And the useless spires,
The town is vanishing
In snow as am I.
I haven’t managed to extend the piece by so much as a word. I sigh and put the scrap of paper back into the drawer. If a poem could grow in the dark, as eyes do on potatoes! If I could see with the clarity I once possessed! What might the scientific instruments of the future reveal to our astonished eyes? Belial lording it over the animalcules in a drop of stagnant water or “the proud seat of Lucifer” erected beyond the rings of Saturn? Not now, not yet. As Keats said, “But here there is no light.”
“Too much light spoils the daguerreotype.”
“As does too little.”
I turn and see Walt Whitman coming down the stairs. In his gait, I detect evidence of the stroke that stopped him in his tracks, if only for a time. Like an oak half killed by lightning, he’ll stand awhile longer in the dooryard singing his peculiar songs. He makes himself comfortable in the overstuffed chair. He takes off his soft hat.
“Walt, what in God’s name are you doing?”
“I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame, / I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done …”
“Always the poseur!”
He shakes a fist at me.
“I’d knock you on your bony ass, Emerson, but the exertion would kill us both.”
I try to muster sufficient moisture to spit; lacking juice, however, I manage only dribble, which hangs on my chin.
“I hope you didn’t wake Stokes with your yawping?”
He scratches his shaggy beard.
“He sleeps like the dead.”
“You should know, you old cuss.”
“I’m not dead; I’m in Camden—or I was before I sent my spirit out to beard you in your den, old man.”
“You seem more than usually hostile tonight, Walt.”
“I’m one hostile who can’t be persuaded, bribed, or forced onto the reservation. During a lecture of yours, you said of me that ‘ he belongs yet to the fire clubs, and has not got into the parlors.’”
“Who told you that?”
“John Trowbridge. I suppose he’s another of your young geniuses.”
“Since when have you cared a hangnail for parlors? Isn’t Pfaff’s beer cellar more to your taste?”
“I resent your disparagements, Emerson. I deserve a seat at the high table of literature. I’ve earned it! I’m too old to be a writer of promise, perched on a barstool.”
Weary, I sit in this chair, which is as straight-backed as a young man’s principles. I am, however, no longer young and have grown tired of all the fret and fritter.
“Walter, I’ve no time to spare for ancient grudges.”
He returns his hat to his head, and with a thumb, he insolently cocks it.
“The right man comes—the right hour; the leaf is lifted.”
He opens his wallet and removes a piece of yellowed paper nearly worn to pieces from being unfolded and folded so often since I sent it to him nearly a quarter century ago. And now the old blusterer begins to read it back to me!
“‘I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our Western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment, which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start.’
“Et cetera, et cetera.”
Walt carefully folds the letter, and, as he gives me a mischievous wink, he kisses the paper and returns it to his wallet.
“Well, Waldo, what do you have to say for yourself ? Respondez! Respondez!”
“That I’ve lived to regret my initial enthusiasm. It has worn thin—as thin as that piece of writing paper.”
“Without enthusiasm, what is a man?”
“Your work strikes me as that of a poet not yet fully grown, albeit ‘The Wound Dresser’ and ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ are very fine. They show a man annealed by immense sorrow—a genuine pity that has saved you from being seen merely as a chronicler of facts.”
“What would you have me do, Emerson? Poke among the veils with a eunuch’s sapless wand?”
“Your verses can seem like an exordium of declarations and assertions that awaken in me sentiments better suited to needlepointed mottoes for a parlor wall.”
Walt stands and rolls up a sleeve.
“Whitman, we’re too old for fisticuffs!”
“But not too old for a contest of strength—you and I being about equally feeble.”
He sits beside me and plants an elbow on the table.
“I mean to arm-wrestle you, you lily-livered school-marm. See if I don’t make you cry, ‘Uncle’!”
“You’ve already had two strokes, you ‘mere white curd of ass’s milk,’ to quote Alexander Pope.”
“You mealymouthed pedant!”
“A third will carry you off.”
“You can roll me up in your Turkey carpet and carry me out death’s door, so long as you take back your insults!”
“Damn you, Whitman!”
“Emerson, take them back!”
“I will do no such thing! I sent Carlyle a copy of your 1856 edition and invited him to light his pipe with it.”
“Fight me.”
“No!”
“Coward.”
I sigh, already defeated. His eyes are hectic, his lips curled in a sneer. Even at sixty, he appears formidable, a type of Jeremiah or Ezekiel. I feel about as hearty as Ichabod Crane.
I roll up my sleeve and grip his hand in mine. The veins in our arms push through the skin; the old blood moves according to the tired heart’s impulse. The muscles in Walt’s arm are stringy; mine seem to have preceded me into the grave.
“On the count of ten, professor … One little Indian, two little Indians, three little Indian boys.”
He pulls my arm down onto the table with sufficient force to startle the unfinished poem.
“Ho ho!”
“You jumped the gun, Walt!”
“Don’t be such a namby-pamby puritan!”
He slaps the tabletop and offers me a second chance.
I struggle awhile, and then, struck by the lunacy of this engagement of old men, I let him have his way. My knuckles thump. Walt beams in triumph, scratches his beard with all his nails, throws back his massive head, and laughs as boys do who have been caught acting foolishly and hope to brave it out.
“We’re too old for this horseshit, Waldo!”
“Walter, would you care for a drink?”
I lay my hand lightly on his sleeve as I did at Boston Common nearly twenty years ago, when I tried to convince him to take the sex out of “Children of Adam.”
“I never say no to a stiff one.”
I get the bottle of Kentucky whiskey that I stock for Ellery Channing. On second thought, the cheap rye I keep to warm the man who shovels snow is good enough for nature’s roughneck sitting at my table, as “Exalté, rapt, extatic” as he was in his brawling days.
He fills our glasses, lifts his, and in the voice he raised at Paumanok against the Atlantic’s imperial roar, he salutes democracy. We go on to toast the States, the territories, Lincoln, Grant, our mothers, and the martyr John Brown, whose body and truth lie a-mouldering in the ground.
The bottle, like the miraculous jug at Cana, is apparently inexhaustible.
I’m waiting for my head to split, eyes to blur, tongue to thicken, and words to stagger, but Providence appears to have delivered us from drunken-ness—a further miracle to ponder, in a day whose strangeness tomorrow I will be happy to forget.
Walt puffs out his chest and declaims:
“O Libertad—turn your undying face,
To where the future, greater than all the past,
Is swiftly, surely preparing for you.”
We listen to its echo fade away to a sigh, which is always a prelude to silence.
“O past! O happy life! O songs of joy!” He wipes a string of drool from his lip. “When a man arrives at his life’s summit, he longs for a comfortable chair and a glass of something to fortify himself against the …”
“Against what, Walt?”
“What is missing from Leaves of Grass.”
“I thought it contained every last atom and morsel of creation.”
“That’s the great boast, my dear Emerson, and the great cheat.”
He musters himself; he assumes his former swagger. I suppose that he has embarrassed himself in front of his old teacher.
“Poor bastard, I heard your mind is unraveling.”
“Who told you that?”
“Bronson Alcott.
Ingrate!
“I wouldn’t care overmuch about becoming infirm if only my mind were not so. Can you imagine anything more pathetic than a philosopher who can no longer think?”
“A poet who can no longer write because his hands shake and his bleary eyes are filled with rheum.”
To cheer him, I try my hand at bravado. “There are enough knots left at the end of our ropes for us to hold on awhile longer!”
His grizzled countenance opens in a smile. It warms me, and I return it from my own pallid, closely shaved one. Together, we share a moment of goodwill stripped of pretense and ambition.
“Waldo, have you written anything new?”
“An order for groceries in Whitmanesque fashion, though not with the bard’s ‘courage of treatment, which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.’”
“The muse is only sleeping, my friend; she hasn’t yet deserted you.”
“Walt, somehow it doesn’t seem important any longer.”
“You might as well say that the sea is of no importance, or the firmament of stars. Poetry is the Radiance that remains after creation’s first day. The faint echo of that awful roar.”
“I think that what’s asleep upstairs is beyond all poetry and philosophy.”
“You mean the colored fugitive.”
“I mean a man who happens to be a negro and a fugitive.”
I blush to hear myself. Why must we be embarrassed by our better nature?
“I’m not sure I know what to do with him. Henry would know, but he’s gone back to the hollow.”
Walt goes to the window and gazes at the night. He speaks of a self buried underneath all his boasts of perfect equanimity: “I love to lie abed on a winter’s night when the house is quiet, and there’s not a beetle in the wall or a cricket in the closet to disturb the felted stillness. At times, the blab of the pavement, the shouts in the street, my ceaseless yawping make me wish I’d been born deaf and mute and could attend to nothing except the silent progress of souls.”
“Sometimes I swear I can hear the yeast in Lidian’s bread dough shriek!”
“The sourdough eaten with a bitter herb—this, too, is the bread of life.”
“A jackass of an editor at the Bloomington Pantagraph called me ‘Ralph Cold-Dough Simmerson.’”
“To think of the ink and breath we two have spent!”
“My purse and I wheeze.”
“Emerson, you wrote too damned much!”
He sits. We face each other across the table, two old men at the end of their powers.
“You, as well, with your thickening mulch. What is a book if not a heap of nouns and verbs enclosing an intuition or two?”
“‘ The rest is silence.’ Shakespeare.”
“‘Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule.’ Carlyle.”
“‘Silence is what follows the last thump of earth on the coffin lid and the great feed at the funeral lunch.’ John Doe.”
In such an atmosphere as we two have produced, cakes and kingdoms fall.
Walt looks into my pale blue eyes and apprehends me with his sad gray ones. They have seen much of the world and, through the lens of ecstatic vision, may have descried places where the questing spirit roves unhindered, such as the Mountains of the Moon and the red mountains of Madagascar, the beautiful bay of Nagasaki, the pharaohs’ Egypt, and the Pleiades. I almost reach out my hand to touch his, but something prevents me—fear, I suppose, that he will take hold of mine. I sigh, regretting the distance I have kept from others of my kind and from this man, the poet whose coming I foretold. Whitman is our Rabelais, whose Gargantua supped on Christian pilgrims mixed in salads, and also our Pantagruel strutting brazenly in his codpiece.
Walt, you are the full belly of democracy, rank and ruddy in your fireman’s red flannel undershirt, your trousers tucked into your boots. You are gross and coarsely vernacular—and tender withal. You are, as you wrote of yourself at the beginning of your great career, “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, / Disorderly fleshy and sensual … eating drinking and breeding.”
He slaps the table with a fleshy palm, scrapes back his chair with an insolent disregard for Lidian’s floor, and heaves up his great bulk, insisting that we visit Nathaniel Hawthorne’s grave.
“As long as I’m here, I should pay my respects. I won’t be coming back to Concord.”
“I didn’t think you cared much for his books.”
“I don’t; they have an unwholesome odor of corruption and disease, like Edgar Poe’s tales. Their morbidity subverts the democratic optimism I promulge.”
I wince at the pompous word.
“I’d have thought the late war had taught you otherwise.”
“I have witness’d the true lightning, I have witness’d my cities electric, / I have lived to behold man burst forth, and warlike America rise …”
“‘For by stroking of him I have found out electricity,’” I say, thinking of our cat Jeoffry, whose literary antecedent was conceived in a London asylum by the mad poet Christopher Smart.
“Will you go with me, Emerson, old chuck?”
I glance at the mantel clock. “It’s gone nine, and the night air will do neither of us any good.”
“Don’t be a fuddy-duddy!”
Again, I look at the clock.
“You were always too cautious by half, Waldo.”
Vain septuagenarian! I’ve no wish to seem a pygmy beside this ruined colossus. I put on my coat and hat and wrap my throat in a muffler. I open the front door and nod toward Whitman. Wearing his old hat, baggy pants, and flannel coat, he stands in the doorway, relishing the night beyond and the tonic air.
I’m about to offer him something warmer to put on, when I check myself, realizing that he is only a projection of my need to be again in his company. A magic lantern slide. How perverse human wishes often are!
“After you, old ruffian.”
Do I imagine that he pauses to consider the matter of the lintel? It is too low to allow a man of his height to pass without taking off his hat. But Whitman will not doff his hat, bow, or bend a knee to anyone or anything. He leans his big head forward a little, pretends to scratch the back of his neck, and walks out the door, his hat on his head, his pride and purpose intact.
Once again it is proved: A man can walk upright if he but lean a little toward the common center.
I shut the door behind us. We start up Cambridge Pike, which leads to Concord and, just beyond it on Bedford Street, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
I feel a cold sufficient to freeze the ink in Concord inkwells and turn my pages to snow.
II
We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged
battle of fate, where strength is born.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson,
“Self-Reliance,” 1841
WALT AND I PASS THROUGH a pair of wrought-iron gates. Were the cold night a summer’s day, and the rimy grass green and living, and the dead lilies drooping in bronze urns blooming asphodels, I might persuade myself that we have arrived at the Elysium Fields instead of a burying place, the end of all human dreams and philosophies. But it is grocer Bierce’s brother-in-law, George Hammond, who tends the graves here and not the titan Kronos.
Crouching behind a willow tree, we watch Hammond wending amid the monuments. He carries a lamp against the darkness, which has fallen over Middlesex County, and an ear trumpet. He stops by each marble and granite remembrance and, getting to his knees, as if to do reverence to the ranks of the Concord dead, he cocks his head and strains to hear, perchance, a subterranean noise through the instrument’s embouchure.
“Waldo, what’s he doing?”
“He’s listening.”
“To what?”
“The maggots that thin the animal, so that it can pass through Pilgrim’s wicket-gate.”
“What sound do you suppose a maggot makes?”
“One too faint for an ear trumpet, although I expect that if it were amplified a thousandfold, it would remind us of a fire ravenously gnawing wood or a star roaring like a Bessemer.”
“In other words, the sound of uncontrollable appetite.”
“Yes, Walt, the noise and clamor of it.”
“The rude song at the end of the world.”
“The song of the States and territories.”
