Dear Pete

Washington, 1865. Whitman was in his forties, a former army-hospital visitor still wearing the war in his body. Peter Doyle was a young Irish-born Confederate veteran who drove a horsecar. They met on a stormy night, Doyle would later say, when Whitman was the only passenger. Familiar at once. A hand. A looking. The city was full of men who had learned how to sit close in wartime and had not all gone home.

The letters that survive are not a closet drama. They are weather, money, health, jobs, the wish to share a room if one of them is ill. Dear Pete, dear son, my darling boy. Whitman's endearments run through kinship words because those were the words he had for keeping. Doyle writes back from the car-barn world: shifts, coughs, the ordinary. This is a working-class companionship. It is also queer. Those facts do not take turns.

In August 1869 Whitman wrote from Brooklyn after a bad night between them, a night by a fountain, a talk that had frightened him. The letter repairs. It sends money. It says the love is indestructible. We need not make a spectacle of the fright to believe the repair. The point is that they had a life in which a quarrel could be written down and survived.

Leaves of Grass had already invented a public language for adhesiveness. Doyle is not an illustration of the poems. He is a particular man with a conductor's hands who outlived Whitman and kept a coat.