Free Walt Whitman's Secret by George Fetherling

afternoons before darkness gives the place a different character, a different complexion. Men and near boys— soldiers, deserters without papers, farmhands feeling lonely in the unfamiliar city, all the various types drawn to the capital by the opportunity the war affords them— take their nocturnal exercise there and oftentimes fall into conversation. Pete wanders slowly up and down the footpaths, his boots in need of blacking, his hat level with his brow. There on a bench is a nobby-looking gent in a full cloak of some fine dark material. He looks up to see if he recognizes Pete or, more to the point, whether Pete recognizes him. At close quarters, one can see that his eyes are every bit as dark as his moustache. He has an aristocratic face and a sensitive mouth. One can tell at a glance that he is lithe and athletic under all those clothes. The inevitability is startling.

    FOUR    
    A S YOU SEE , I have many imperfections as an author. Believe me, I too am piercingly aware of them, though only now have I gained the knowledge that eluded me for so long without my being conscious of its absence. I refer to how it has been only in the past few years that I have come to accept that my gift was never for making even minor literature but only for reading and appreciating the literature of others. Would that I had comprehended this before publishing those collections of my verse and prose. All of them were failed attempts to work in the manner of W— under the spell of W, one might as well say it— while lacking his invention and authority. The wise student is the one who absorbs the lessons his teacher has to give with no wish to become his instructor’s
Doppelgäenger.
I have learned this too late in life.
    Only partly by his design, W’s instruction gave my existence much of its purpose and more of its tone, but his passive example provoked an itch for literary expression that I’ve never been able to scratch and so have abandoned— except for these pages I am writing in as much haste as my failing heart permits me, without resort to any research beyond a few diaries and an uncertain memory. I have waited too long to begin the ending of the story and still I prattle on at too great a length. Like you I am sure, I much admire Bernard Shaw for hisdramas and comedies that are in essence both Socialist and, to use Charles Fournier’s original term,
féministes.
I am given to understand that Shaw is known to offer apologies to his correspondents for writing such lengthy letters, explaining that he doesn’t have the time to compose a postal. I am in much the same situation here.
    What I am getting at is that I have no reputation, no credible one at least, for writing or any other art. At this point I am not concerned with this lack, despite the way some of W’s old enemies, or sons of his enemies, try to calumniate against me injuriously by charging me with being overly confident to the point of arrogance, vanity and narcissism, or at the very least braggadocio. Perhaps their criticism was partly true in times past, when I seemed to be the primary bearer, often without much assistance, of W’s banner. It is hardly so now, when I am a vessel that is so nearly empty.
    The point I am trying to make in my rushed yet long-winded way is that I don’t know why exactly I am writing all this for you rather than for a wider readership, even one as small in the world’s eyes as the Whitman Fellowship. The only plausible reasons are that you are one of the last few people I am likely to meet on Earth and are a woman of advanced progressive views. As you have gathered if you’ve read this far, I wish to pass along, to someone who will truly understand, the fact that the skeleton in W’s closet was not the one outsiders suspected, for the meaning of his Uranianist and adhesive propensities was obvious to anyone, anywhere, familiar with such terms or to those