The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [124]
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