Whitman and war -- a poet among the soldiers

Nestled amid the six volumes of “The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (1861-65),” a grisly scientific chronicle devoted to the Civil War’s 625,000 casualties, there appears, if anyone cares to look, the appalling case of one John M. Although this unfortunate 19-year-old private in the 101st New York might warrant special attention due to the bizarre nature of his injury (a Minie ball passed through his bladder and exited his right buttock at Second Bull Run on Aug. 29, 1862, leaving him to languish, in excruciating pain and in his own urine, for 14 months before dying), he remains nameless and faceless, a case study with diagrams in clinical black and white.

The account of Private M.’s travail is full of terms such as “ramus” and “symphysis.” It neglects to mention that he was an orphan boy from the Catskills; that his foster father beat him, leaving scars on his body; that he bravely bore his fate at the Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C., where the staff and fellow patients adored him; that an interloping, self-described “soldier’s missionary” from Brooklyn, N.Y., gave him horehound candy to soothe his throat and sat with him over the course of his long unraveling; and that when poor John Mahay finally died on Oct. 24, 1863, he was given a memorable send-off.

We know these things about Mahay because the aforementioned horehound dispenser -- a tall, bearded fellow in a purple suit who bounded from hospital to hospital “like a great wild buffalo” in the grim days between 1862 and 1865 -- was Walt Whitman, the then-obscure 40-ish author of an eccentric collection of poems called “Leaves of Grass,” who scribbled his “few stray glimpses” of these forgotten men into blood-spattered notebooks during his daily rounds.

These “impromptu jottings” -- descriptions of soldiers’ last breaths; their recoveries; their requests for toothbrushes, pickles, rice pudding, fresh underwear, a good book, a pen, an ice cream treat, a letter to be sent home -- later became “Memoranda During the War,” a slim volume that Whitman published in a private edition in 1876 and later folded into the diary-like “Specimen Days.” It now resurfaces -- to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the first edition of “Leaves of Grass,” also reissued by Oxford University Press -- in an authoritative version, thoughtfully annotated and introduced by Peter Coviello, a professor of literature at Bowdoin College in Maine.

“Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors ... of the Secession War,” Whitman confides in the book’s opening essay. It’s a theme repeated throughout these wartime memos -- naturally enough for the poet of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” whose commuter-narrator is so achingly conscious of future New Yorkers. Whitman famously argued that “the real war will never get in the books.” As it turns out, he was only partly right. In “Memoranda During the War,” Whitman, one assumes, does give us a taste of the real war, recording the kind of fleeting episodes -- of suffering and kindness -- that never make it into the official histories: the wounded cavalryman with “profuse beautiful shining hair,” a soldier’s terse account of the Peninsular Campaign, monotony-breaking games of 20 Questions, the way cattle look when they’re wandering the avenues of Washington, the refreshing taste of ice water laced with blackberry syrup on a hot Fourth of July in 1863, the “tinge of wierd [sic] melancholy” in President Lincoln’s face or a diary entry from Pvt. Stewart C. Glover, Company E, 5th Wisconsin: “To-day, the doctor says I must die -- all is over with me -- ah, so young to die.”

Whitman’s stint in Washington’s teeming army hospitals (including the Patent Office Hospital, now the National Portrait Gallery) was prompted by his brother George’s wounding at Fredericksburg, the Dec. 13, 1862, debacle that stands as a symbol of needless bloodletting. (The 12,700 Union casualties were more than double what American forces would suffer at D-day.) Arriving near the Virginia battlefield, the first thing Whitman came upon was “a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c.;, a full load for a one-horse cart.” Throughout “Memoranda During the War,” we find Whitman preoccupied with wholeness, yearning to reunite a severed country, to restore a Pennsylvania or Tennessee boy to health, hearth and home.

By his own reckoning, Whitman, who wasn’t technically a nurse or wound dresser, managed to succeed here and there. “I can testify that friendship has literally cured a fever,” Whitman reported to an associate. Although Whitman had his skeptics (an uppity Harriet Hawley of the United States Sanitary Commission found his presence in the wards “odious”), the gratitude of veterans who wrote Whitman letters for the rest of their lives -- addressed “dear uncle” or “Dear Father” and one even announcing a newborn son named after him -- suggest Whitman’s comforting, if not outright curative, powers. As Whitman wrote of his curious bedside role, in the poem “To One Shortly to Die,” “I am more than nurse, more than parent or neighbor.”

“I only gave myself,” Whitman later remarked. “I got the boys.” In “Memoranda During the War,” Whitman’s response to these “fine built” young men crackles with electricity, a playing out of Eros and Thanatos before a ghastly backdrop of bedridden dysentery cases, ether-soaked amputees and morphine overdoses. As he writes in “Memoranda” of a dying rebel, “I loved him much, always kiss’d him, and he did me.” (Coviello, in his illuminating introductory essay, refers to “Whitman’s unabashed amorous commerce with the nearly dead.”)

But what “the boys” really did for Whitman (the idea of actual sex in a Civil War hospital is, as Whitman chronicler Roy Morris Jr. has pointed out, absurd) was to forever solidify his reputation as the “Good Gray Poet,” the one we know from “Drum-Taps,” the cycle of war poems -- quieter and tougher than the roving, headlong verses of, say, “Song of Myself” -- that became the centerpiece of Whitman’s ever-shifting, ever-growing lifelong project, “Leaves of Grass.”

IN the years leading up to the war, Whitman, that old “Bowery B’hoy,” was a Grub Street journo and frequenter of Pfaff’s saloon, headquarters of New York’s free-loving bohemian set. He was known as a “rough,” a “rowdy” who fraternized with cabdrivers and longshoremen. The erotically tinged “Calamus” poems, written about 1860, suggest Whitman as something of a cruiser. In modern parlance, this street-level versifier was akin to a gay, hirsute Eminem.

But at the Armory Square and Patent Office hospitals, in the Union camps of northern Virginia and on the ambulance- and deserter-clogged streets of Washington, Whitman witnessed (or heard about) scenes that would transform him -- or, at least, his image -- and which he would dutifully transform into “Drum-Taps”: dead infantrymen under blankets, brigades on the march along unknown roads, a Midwestern family receiving from a stranger (Whitman, presumably) a letter relating the fate of their boy soldier. (“While they stand at home at the door he is dead already, / The only son is dead.”)

Whitman would eventually encounter more than 80,000 sick and wounded soldiers, both Yankee and “Secesh.” No wonder, then, that the Civil War became the very soul of “Leaves of Grass,” supplying its shape and scope, its gem-like core, its heft. Thanks to “Memoranda During the War,” we can savor “Leaves of Grass” for what it is: the saga of an American self, molded by the testy run-up to the Civil War, galvanized by its apocalyptic events and forever looking back in grizzled age upon it, that “Verteber of Poetry and Art ... for all future America.” When Whitman told a friend that “the war saved me,” he meant it. And all this from a four-year cataclysm that, when glimpsed from the hospital wards, added up, as Whitman put it late in life, to “about nine hundred and ninety-nine parts diarrhea to one part glory.”

John Mahay, who lies in Washington’s Congressional Cemetery, would be an eternal orphan but for the soldier’s missionary from Brooklyn who happened to create in “Leaves of Grass” perhaps the Civil War’s sole literary masterpiece and, in “Memoranda During the War,” some of the war’s best reportage. It was precisely those grassed-over graves like Mahay’s that Whitman had in mind when he jotted, in these resurrected pages, “They make indeed the true Memoranda of the War.” *