Free Walt Whitman's Secret by George Fetherling Page A

less knowing who probably couldn’t define the words but recognized in their own being the things his words described. Meaning that the supposed revelation W was at such pains to hide from the public while being compelled to reveal it in his work was actually not a secret in the least, but a commonplace truth for limited circulation.
    This manuscript is composed in such haste because the hour grows late. I implore you to receive it kindly even when it contradicts(never deliberately) your own vision of W’s work and thought. I have no wish to come back as a ghost and haunt you (a gentle joke, dear Flora, and not a threat, especially since, as you know, I am not like yourself a follower of spiritualism and never was, though I try to avoid prejudging others’ beliefs— or are they only hopes?). No, I am seeking your patient reading of this because you have worked so hard and long for the rights of women, are an acknowledged leader of the movement in your own country through writings, speeches and most of all actions, and will understand me, supporting yourself with the tools of the seamstress as I have done with those of the writer and printer. Specifically, I pray that you will understand and not be offended by, or be careless with, the story of my marriage to Anne, who would be well within her liberties not to forgive me for saying what comes next: the fact I have finally located the courage to admit what I’ve known in my heart all along— that I am and always have been far more in love with her than she is with me. Can such a union truly be one of equals? Until this moment, all of your male coreligionists, so to call us, have considered ourselves to be your partners in striving for change. We have assumed as your own gender does that all inequality in marriage flows in only one direction,
ex
the dominant husband and
pro
the subordinate wife. While of course this is so in virtually all instances, it is not the case in every last one. I cannot illustrate the point for your knowledgeable consideration without being somewhat indiscreet.
    How long now have all of us been reading in the papers and periodicals about the phenomenon of the New Woman, so labeled, who speaks her mind, bobs her hair and strides with utter confidence through the business world and all other such domains to which her mother was denied entry— in fact, was magisterially assumed to have had no interest in being part of? My single contribution to the pool of insight into this matter is to point out that Anne Montgomeriewas a precursor of to-day’s New Woman and remains, though the field is crowded now, a genuine original and a marvel besides. I have loved her so dearly for such a long time that I have enriched my merry soul even while abusing my mere body. I silently challenge you, when you again observe Anne and me together in a few weeks’ time, to look into these dilapidated green eyes of mine and say that this is not the case.
    I first espied her in the Spring of Eighty-five, and what a sight she was. W was well settled into Mickle Street, after spending a few years in accommodations he rented farther along on Stevens Street once he had quit, amicably enough, his brother’s house a few blocks away. Our acquaintanceship, mine with him and his with me, was growing steadily, and I guess I was slowly coming to the realization that I should make its furtherance my principal activity. This is when I sought a job that would afford me food and cover but consume fewer hours and less energy than the invariably hectic and often unpredictable life of a printer. I accepted the offer of a
very
part-time position as an assistant bookkeeper at a small factory, a place of such little importance as to be unworthy even of description except to observe that one Anne Montgomerie was a supervisor there and a most proficient one. She was twenty-two, five years my junior, born in 1863, the year of the virtually simultaneous victories at