The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [123]
I try to give a word or a trifle to every one without exception, making regular rounds among them all. I give all kinds of sustenance, blackberries, peaches, lemons & sugar, wines, all kinds of preserves, pickles, brandy, milk, shirts & all articles of underclothing, tobacco, tea, handkerchiefs, &c &c &c. I always give paper, envelopes, stamps, &c … To many I give (when I have it) small sums of money—half of the soldiers in hospital have not a cent.
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