The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [122]
Whitman’s friend was forced to report that not only had he failed to find the poet a job but he’d lost the letter to boot. Whitman was bemused. “He is right,” he said, “in preserving his saints from contamination by a man like me!”
Whitman himself had scant desire to become any but an idle owner. He didn’t own a home until he moved to Camden, New Jersey, when he was sixty-five. Until then he had always lived with family, with friends, or in rented rooms. It wasn’t that he was naïve about money. He knew how to get a construction contract, build a house, and sell it. He was always able to find work as a journalist or editor when he wanted it. In the 1840s and again in the late 1860s he held down steady jobs. He was direct and frank when selling a poem (“the price is 4 pounds—$20—in gold and four copies of the number in which it is printed” reads a typical cover letter). He was both frugal and generous. His solicitation of letters from Emerson reveals some craft in the job market. But as the fate of those letters shows, he wasn’t really interested. His aspirations were plain. His fantasy of a house was “a regular Irish shanty …, two rooms, and an end shed.” His letters show he didn’t think of his accommodations in Washington as bare and desolate: “I have a little room, & live a sort of German or Parisian student life—always get my breakfast in my room, (have a little spirit lamp) … walk quite a good deal … go down the river, or off into Virginia …” Whitman spent his days in Washington browsing through the newly built capital buildings, listening to speeches in the Congress, walking the banks of the Potomac, writing poems, and—the main thing—nursing the wounded in the hospitals. “With my office-hunting, no special results yet,” he wrote to a friend. “I cannot give up my Hospitals … I never before had my feelings so thoroughly and … permanently absorbed.” When the war was over and the hospitals were empty, Whitman finally settled into a steady job. It bored him. “A clerk’s life … is not very interesting.”
III • Saplings
Whitman had traveled to Washington in December of 1862 to look for his brother George, who the family feared had been wounded during the second battle of Bull Run. While he was in the city he went to Campbell Hospital to visit “a couple of Brooklyn boys” from his brother’s regiment. About a hundred wounded men lay in a long shed with whitewashed walls. Whitman stopped to try to comfort a boy who was groaning with pain. “I talked to him some time,” Whitman wrote to his sister. “He seemed to have entirely give up, and lost heart—he had not a cent of money—not a friend or acquaintance.” Discovering that no one had examined the boy since he was brought in, Whitman went and found a doctor. He sat on the bedside and wrote out a letter that the young man dictated to his family. The boy said he would like to buy some milk from a woman who came through the ward each afternoon, and Whitman gave him the change in his pocket. “Trifling as this was, he was overcome and began to cry.”
This serendipitous encounter drew on so many elements of Whitman’s personality that he soon abandoned his plans to return to New York. It not only touched his sympathy and generosity but gave him a chance to “emanate”—to heal through attention and affection—and to fulfill one of his roles as a poet, committing to paper the speech of the illiterate boy. He began to visit the hospitals daily. He wrote to friends in Boston and New York soliciting contributions so he could buy things for the soldiers, and soon he had settled into the routine that was to last all through the war—living in a rented room, working three or four hours a day at odd jobs, and visiting the hospitals.
He would arrive in the late afternoon and stay late into the night. Sometimes he would appear just before supper carrying a pot of food and go through a ward with a spoon, “distributing a little here and there.” He discovered a store where he could buy homemade biscuits and cookies. He acquired a haversack and walked his rounds dispensing crackers,