Walt Whitman's Secret by George Fetherling Page B

writing a poem about us in his mind.
    Anne had read his poetry in the newspapers and wherever else she could find it. Buying a copy of the most recent edition of
Leaves
, complete with the pleasure of knowing that the parcel had been wrapped in butcher paper by the author himself—“The hand that holds the pen,” I told her, “also knots the twine”—was out of the question. “Father would never allow it, and you can imagine how angry that makes me.” The anger existed only because she said it did; there was no trace of it in her voice (which is not made for anger) or her face (ditto).
    There was no mystery about how knowledge of the book’s unspeakable salaciousness and debauchery might have seeped (but did not) into the Montgomerie household. In such situations it is customary to terminally suspect the servants, always the simplest course of action when there is blame to be apportioned. Then as now and forever, Anne was a capable and ingenious woman. Our meals together became frequent, and at one of them she told me how she had gone to one of the rare-book dealers’ shops off Chestnut Street and placed an order for a copy that she could then pick up there in person to deliver secretly to herself. The proprietor had grown prosperousand pompous selling long sets of books to matrons who wished bindings that matched their draperies: the Waverly novels, the Life and Letters of this or that famous personage, the more pretentious and generously gilded the better. The bookseller pretended he was unacquainted with the work, and gently, gingerly, questioned her about its contents, in order to discover the— how might he have expressed it to himself?—
sophistication
of the young lady’s taste in literature, for however much he might look askance at the request, he did not look down his nose at a paying customer, not one of such filigreed manners and obvious pluck.
    â€œThe compromise,” she told me, “was this, which he was able to have sent by a colleague in London.”
    Out of her bag came a rather well-used not to say unhygienic copy of
Poems of Walt Whitman
, the harmless selection that W.M. Rossetti had edited back in Sixty-eight for English consumption. W of course never cared for it, and indeed tried to suppress his memory of it as ardently as others suppressed the book itself, or would have done if Rossetti, knowing the strictness of British law in this respect compared to the American, had not sidestepped the contentious poems in the “Calamus” sequence and some other “indecent” writings entirely, leaving not a bowdlerized pastiche exactly but one suitable for the hardier sort of female reader or the curious male one with a wife at home.
    â€œThis is actually quite difficult to find,” I told her.
    She laughed. “And was accordingly expensive. But my book-smuggling friend and I had entered into a criminal pact.”
    A few months later, when we were alone together, I took down my own copy of one of the American editions and began to read her the entire
Leaves
over the course of many nearly consecutive evenings. I betrayed no change of inflection when we came to the disputed verses. I remember reading to her such lines as:
    Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you
,
With the comrade’s long-dwelling kiss, or the new husband’s kiss
,
For I am the new husband, and I am the comrade.
    Or if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing
,
Where I may feel the throbs of your heart, or rest upon your hip
,
Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;

For thus, merely touching you, is enough, is best
,
And thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.
    I made bold enough to say that I didn’t know what person W was addressing when he wrote this but that I for my own part now thought only of her when I read it, showing the power of poetry to provoke such individual responses and thereby prove its own