Whitman’s Letters to Peter Doyle*

            One shrewdly suspects that people who thought they understood their Whitman pretty well after an acquaintance with the man during the last decade only of his life will find themselves readjusting their focus on reading the Peter Doyle letters, just edited by Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke.  I have, to a slight extent.  Not that we did not know of his comradely ways with the hand-workers, and that he was one himself for a part of his life (the man who has not been will never know humanity properly); not this,  but that we had not been admitted into the inner shrine of his soul’s friendship for another soul.  We had no such concrete instance of his boundless and passionate love, no expression of it in words to a known and particular person.  It is all in the “Calamus” poems, generalized.    But in the Doyle letters the wistful, yearning Christ-love, passionate as that of mother for child or man for woman, takes us into still deeper and more sacred recesses of the soul.    In the last decade of his life the fire of passion had burned low, and his Dutch-English impassivity united with the calmness of age to give an impression of a more passionless nature than was his in the early Brooklyn and Washington days when, as Doyle says, Whitman was an athlete, full of hot blood and indomitable vigor, and ready for feats of running, walking, lifting, that astonished people. 

As they throw light on the love of a great soul for another soul, these letters are invaluable.  As literature for the general   public, for people who never read Leaves of Grass, they are naught.  Let none such attempt to read them in detail, unless he or she is fond of the pretty nothings that lovers say to each other.  The bard writes to his friend as  one workman to another; he adapts his style and his matter to his lover’s likes and level.     His passionate longing for a constant return of his affection makes him ignore all that would set up estrangement between them.  Love, love, ever ceaseless, quick, tender, is his want; all else he scorns.  A thousand times he lavishes upon his friend such terms as “dear darling son,” “dear son Pete,” “my darling boy.”  He constantly lends him money, lays by little sums for him of Doyle’s earning, counsels him, warns him, treats him as his  own child.  These letters  will strangely quicken  and freshen   your old love for your poet.  They will tighten the heart-fastenings anew, renew the thrill you felt when you  first threw open the door of your soul to the electric pulsations of the New Comradeship and knew that this world henceforth could give you nothing more precious, that you had tasted its costliest attar.

Those who have been, trying to bric-a-brac their poet of democracy, swing him into line, whitewash his grim repellant traits, divinize him, dwelling only on the sweet rhetorical-lyrical parts of his tremendous and vitalizing gospel, will be perhaps shocked by these letters, which show their poet in undress, and in familiar converse with one of the hand-toilers.  I am glad they are likely to be shocked—the dapper little gentry of the eye-glass and critical pen.  They will once more find out what great men value in this world—namely, a deed, a true soul, love, honesty, faith.  And it may occur to them that if they want a loyal friend they will get it always in one of the toilers and not among the cowardly, knavish idlers and dilettante loafers of the frivolous classes.

The Peter Doyle letters are such as Abraham Lincoln might have written to Ann Rutledge or to his partner Herndon.  Their unstudied simplicity of language only adds to their value.  They are letters to be run through at a sitting or two for their atmosphere.  They leave one with warmed and exalted feelings, with ennobled ideals of friendship. And that is enough.

On page 150 there is a passage which makes one suspect that Doyle and others of us who have seen animal pets with Whitman have not got his true attitude toward them after all—that he had more of a quiet appreciation of them than one suspects.

The “Interview with Peter Doyle” by Dr. Bucke and Horace Traubel contains interesting things about the personal relations of Garfield and Whitman in Washington.  President (then Congressman) Garfield, it seems, always jocularly signaled the poet on the street, when approaching him from the rear, with a title of one of Whitman’s productions—“After All Not to Create Only.”  Then they would talk together as they walked on.

The extensive chronological notes prefixed to the volume are accurate and valuable.  The publisher’s part is extremely well done.

   William Sloane Kennedy.