ATTORNEY GENERAL'S OFFICE, Washington,
Oct. 30, 1866.
1
Dearest Mother,
I am well as usual, & having good times—There is nothing new to tell you—I hope you are well, mother dear—& Mat & the little girls & Jeff & Georgy—I begin to want to see you all again—I hear there is a long & favorable piece about me & Leaves of Grass in an English magazine called the Fortnightly Review
2—one of the highest rank, too—Well, I am now going to leave off, & drink a cup of tea—near us there is a room where the Treasury ladies work—about noon they have tea—one of our own clerks has a sort of sweetheart in there who sends him every day a cup of splendid green tea—which as he dont drink the article—he always makes over to me—
Well, mother dear, good bye for this time—
Walt.
Notes
- 1. The envelope for this
letter bears the address: Mrs. Louisa Whitman | p. o. Box 218 | Brooklyn, New
York. It is postmarked: Washington, D. C. | Oct | 30. [back]
- 2. Moncure Conway's article;
see the letter of September (?) 1866. John
Burroughs called it "an eloquent article . . . but it told untruths about him.
Walt said it did" (Clara Barrus, Whitman and
Burroughs—Comrades [Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1931], 39).
William O'Connor wrote to Conway on December 5, 1866: "A great deal of it I
liked very much, and I think the general effect of it was very good. In part of
it, there was a tone I regretted. Pardon me. I think the time is past when this
august man should be written of as a curiosity, or his poem mentioned as
something monstrous. You do not do this, it is true, but there are, here and
there, lines and touches in your article, which suggest such a treatment and
leave me unsatisfied" (Yale). However, to John Townsend Trowbridge, O'Connor
labeled it "a frightful mess of misstatement and fiction" (Barrus, Whitman and Burroughs (1931), 40). Whitman, and therefore
his friends, objected to two of Conway's anecdotes in particular: Whitman's
lying on his back at Coney Island with the temperature at 100 degrees, and the
description of his room in 1855. In 1888 Whitman observed: "I can't help feeling
still a little suspicion of Conway's lack of historic veracity: he romances: he
has romanced about me: William says lied: but romanced will do" (Horace Traubel,
With Walt Whitman in Camden [Boston: Small, Maynard
& Company, 1906–1996], 3:16). William Michael Rossetti repeated the
Coney Island tale in Poems by Walt Whitman (London: John
Camden Hotten, 1868), 15–16.. [back]