Walt Whitman's Secret Read Online Free

dashed about on our printing and publishing errands, preparing his works in prose as well as verse and overseeing manufacture of the books themselves.
    Along with money gifts from admirers and friends, W lived, modestly but never in want, by the sales of his books and his contributions to the newspapers and magazines. He took delight in filling orders for single copies that arrived in the morning mail, wrapping and addressing them for me to take to the post office. “I am like the smith at his forge,” he said. At other times he used the metaphor of the mechanic, the house builder (which he once had been, briefly and long ago) or the small freeholder.
    When I went on with my own life’s work, I fancied that I knew more about W than anyone else living except the man himself, but some of the most important pieces of understanding came to me only when he was on the very verge of death. If I could, I would make adjustments to the first three published volumes, but of course I do not have the privilege that W enjoyed of tinkering with and refining books once they had appeared, so great was the difficulty of getting them published in the first place. Even if I could do so, I no longer have the life-energy for such a task. It is all I can do to set down these reminiscences for you to read once I am gone.
    Some of the notes and documents I collected and recollections I pried out of others increased my understanding only after I had reflected upon them more deeply. I had sorted through them to make the works you have there on your bookshelf. For example, when I saw W at his little nephew’s funeral, I failed to comprehend that this was only the latest blow of many, what the French call a
coup.
It was as though it epitomized his relations with his family, which were all about love and loss. To be sure, it helped to show me, as I cogitated on the subject over time, how he must have felt to be living in Camden. To me, it is home and always has been. I have traveled the world in Camden, and have been happy to do so. W was of Mannahatta, as he called it, believing this to have been the usage favored by the original Red Indians there. From the farmland of Long Island as ayouth and from the unceasing commerce of Brooklyn when he was a young man, he looked westward to Mannahatta, finally sojourning there with the unspoken intention to remain forever, until the war took him to Washington, with its government offices full of stifled air and its improvised hospitals reeking of horror and the aftermath of horror. He suggested to me many times that the lights of the capital were extinguished forever when President Lincoln was killed. His own began to dim thereafter. And when, later, the man who tended to the needs of the sick became one of the sick himself, he was initially drawn to Philadelphia, a stuffy place as he first believed and later knew it to be, and then just across the river to the family he was reluctant to let know him thoroughly but perhaps felt that he should do so now, given the circumstances— yet could not, not quite.
    So the shrinking of his world is what brought him to Camden, a trick of fate for which I am so grateful, as I do not know what purpose I would have discovered in life unassisted by his ready example— that is, other than the cause of Socialist Revolution. Just as once, back in Brooklyn, his great heart had ached for Mannahatta to the west, visible on even the wettest, foulest day and attainable by the simplest ride on the ferry, so it was once more, down here. Philadelphia, on the western bank, is in similar relation to Camden on the eastern, two hemispheres, you might say, linked by ferries waddling back and forth like ducks both day and night. The difference was that Philadelphia was no Mannahatta. The view did not inspire his imagination; it merely reminded him of youth and health, both gone. Sometimes he spoke of the period immediately before Mickle Street as his Indian Summer, and I am