A poet's family confronts the Civil War
In December 1862, when he was 43 years old, the American poet Walt Whitman learned that his younger brother George had been wounded in the Battle of Fredericksburg. Then, as Robert Roper says in Now the Drums of War, his deeply researched and powerfully told account of Whitman and his brothers during the Civil War, the poet "threw some clothes and probably some writing materials into a carpetbag and was out of the house within two hours."
Walt Whitman and His Brothers
in the Civil War
By Robert Roper
Walker & Co.
432 pp. $28 nolead ends nolead begins
Reviewed by Floyd Skloot
In December 1862, when he was 43 years old, the American poet Walt Whitman learned that his younger brother George had been wounded in the Battle of Fredericksburg. Then, as Robert Roper says in
Now the Drums of War
, his deeply researched and powerfully told account of Whitman and his brothers during the Civil War, the poet "threw some clothes and probably some writing materials into a carpetbag and was out of the house within two hours."
Stopping only to withdraw money from the family's Brooklyn bank account, Whitman "set out for Washington and the unknown" and did not stop until he had found his injured brother in a camp near the front lines. So began Whitman's long, intense time as visitor and consoler of wounded soldiers.
For four years, Whitman distinguished himself as a volunteer attendant, a compassionate quasi-nurse and caregiver who "brought soothing invigoration to the sick and wounded." He made "more than six hundred visits to hospitals," serving as a "sustainer of spirit and body." At the same time, George Whitman distinguished himself as a warrior and leader on the battlefield, rising steadily in rank. He was a leader of "the most veteran of veteran units," the 51st New York, which fought in many of the war's major battles, including Antietam, Vicksburg, the Wilderness, and Second Manassas.
Both wrote letters galore - letters to each other, letters to their mother back in Brooklyn, and letters to their younger brother, Jeff. They kept diaries, and, of course, Walt wrote poems and books of prose about his experiences.
At its heart, despite so much suffering and death, Roper's book is a moving, vivid exploration of love in many forms. Walt's response to the news of George's wounding, "his immediate and emotional concern for his brother" and the dramatic action it triggered, "suggests something about the nature of their bond." It was a war that often pitted brother against brother or family against family, a war in which our country was turned against itself in the bloodiest conflict it had ever known. Now the Drums of War tells of brotherly love and family bonds, of caring for maimed and dying strangers, of coming together, healing. Walt's "vocation as a healer to the wounded men had deep roots in his character," and Roper shows us a Whitman easy to overlook in the myths of his poetic self-focus as the author of such works as "Song of Myself," or the by-now-familiar image of him as a gay libertine.
As Roper notes, "when he visited thousands of young soldiers in the Washington hospitals, he did so in the guise of a fatherly man already gone gray of head (although he was only in his early forties), and the beauty and vulnerability of the suffering soldiers both excited him and broke his heart. His tender faithfulness as Civil War nurse thus expressed, emerged from, and consummated a long-lived erotic impulse." But this "need not diminish one of the most profoundly empathic gestures ever undertaken by an American."
One of the great strengths of Now the Drum of War, whose title is taken from a line in Whitman's poem "City of Ships," is that it extends its reach to the whole Whitman family. Roper shows readers not only Walt's actions and writings; it also recounts George's war experience and their mother's solid, caring, intelligent response to what her sons endured. He lets us appreciate the passion with which each brother - including Jeff, still living at home - yearned for letters from the others, and how their imaginations kept home clearly in mind.
One of the first letters we encounter is from George to his mother, complaining that Jeff has not written for a while, and fantasizing about her making pies while one of the sisters sews shirts, another helps make the dough, and Walt sits upstairs, writing.
Roper comes to narrative nonfiction (his previous book, Fatal Mountaineer, was about the American mountain climber Willi Unsoeld) as an experienced, widely praised master. His craft shows in the way he takes care to evoke settings and scenes, giving us much more than a mere compilation of quotes from the Whitman family's writings. The result is a book that makes readers feel the force of what these people endured, and how their mutual love found expression in acts of bold, brave, honorable service.