Free American Philosophy by John Kaag Page A

When Emerson died, in 1882, Whitman sought other champions, and O’Reilly, who was quickly becoming a cultural icon in Boston, fit the bill.
    In the Hocking attic, someone had tucked news clippings between the Whitman volumes, and they documented, with surprising clarity, the relationship between their acclaimed relative and his still more famous friend. O’Reilly had made daily visits to the poet’s Boston study as Whitman finished his final edits. Whitman welcomed his guest and admired—nay, envied—the Irishman’s brave escape and flight to the New World. To Whitman, it sounded romantic.
    I picked up a book from a pile next to the O’Reilly shelf—a volume from Horace Traubel’s With Walt Whitman in Camden. Traubel had been Whitman’s literary executor, a professional role that was equal parts respectful and parasitic. After Whitman died, Traubel documented in excruciating detail the conversations they’d had in the poet’s final years. This had immortalized Whitman and earned Traubel a modicum of notoriety. I flipped to his account of a conversation he had with Whitman in the late 1880s. Traubel explained that “something or other induced me to mention John Boyle O’Reilly. This started W. [Whitman] right off”:
    â€œOh! He is not the typical Irishman: rather Spanish: poetic, ardent … You know his life in outline: he has given me glimpses into it: short, sharp, pathetic look-ins … They were like this: it was in his prison days: the prisoners suffered from bad food or too little food or something: O’Reilly is deputed to present a complaint: he does it: the overseer does not answer—pays no attention whatever: raises his hand, this way”—W. indicates it—“hits Boyle—slaps him in the mouth—violently—staggers him or knocks him over … What must that have meant to O’Reilly? he was a mere boy … O’Reilly has had a memorable life: this is but a sample item: he is full of similar dramatic introspections.”
    Dramatic introspections? The American poet made oppression and incarceration sound like a campfire story. Whitman, along with Emerson and Thoreau, is often praised for his simple, even harsh language, for the way he entreats his readers to return to the hard core of human experience, for his insistence, in the words of Thoreau, on “sucking the very marrow out of life.” But maybe Whitman couldn’t stomach O’Reilly’s story without sugarcoating it, without making it more uplifting than it actually must have been. It is possible that O’Reilly liked being idealized in this way—maybe it was easier than recalling his previous life’s reality—but maybe he secretly hated it. I hadn’t read much of O’Reilly’s poetry, but something of “The Dreamer” had stuck with me. I searched through the shelf to find it:
    I am sick of the showy seeming
    Of a life that is half a lie;
    Of the faces lined with scheming
    In the throng that hurries by.
    From the sleepless thought’s endeavour
    I would go where the children play;
    For a dreamer lives forever
    And a thinker dies in a day.
    I had no real idea when he wrote this, but I now imagined it was right after recounting one of his “dramatic introspections.” O’Reilly had given Whitman a theatrical story that the poet could embellish to his heart’s content, but the Irishman alone was left with the memory of its brutality.
    The distance from Boston to Bunbury, Australia, was 11,566 miles. In 1867, after his sentencing by the British courts, a young O’Reilly had boarded the Hougoumont , an English prison ship bound for Western Australia, and slowly made his way to Bunbury. When he escaped two years later, it was largely under his own power—from Bunbury to a little town called Dardanup, to Java, to Mauritius, to the British colony of Saint Helena, to Liverpool, to