Your kind letter (Eva's) came this afternoon & it gave me real comfort both to hear from you & have such loving remembrance & friendly invitation—Harry, dear boy, I hardly think I shall be able to come down & be with you this Thanksgiving2—but I will come one of these times—Since I have got into this shanty, although I go out every day, I don't go any distance—havn't been away this past summer, only one short trip to Cape May3—My lameness increases on me—it probably won't be long before I shall be unable to get around at all——General health otherwise about the same as usual—Eva, my dear friend it would be a true comfort for me if it was so I could come in every few days, and you and Harry and I loc_vm.00214_large.jpg could be together—I am sure it would be good for me——Nothing very new in my affairs—not much sale for my books at present, or for the last fifteen months—Harry your Mother call'd here last Monday, but I was not in, was over to Germantown—I was sorry to be away—I am writing this up in my room—am alone most of the time—write a little most every day—sell a piece once in a while—Maintain good spirits and a first-rate appetite—My dear friends, indeed I appreciate your loving wishes & feelings, & send you mine the same, for both of you—
Walt WhitmanEva would you like to have me send you some papers now & then? Write me whenever you can. Harry I am sorry about the neck—I think it will get right & heal in time
loc_vm.00211_large.jpg loc_vm.00212_large.jpgCorrespondents:
Walt Whitman met the 18-year-old Harry Lamb Stafford
(1858–1918) in 1876, beginning a relationship which was almost entirely
overlooked by early Whitman scholarship, in part because Stafford's name appears
nowhere in the first six volumes of Horace Traubel's With Walt
Whitman in Camden—though it does appear frequently in the last
three volumes, which were published only in the 1990s. Whitman occasionally
referred to Stafford as "My (adopted) son" (as in a December 13, 1876, letter to John H. Johnston), but the relationship
between the two also had a romantic, erotic charge to it. In 1883, Harry married
Eva Westcott. For further discussion of Stafford, see Arnie Kantrowitz, "Stafford, Harry L. (b.1858)," Walt Whitman: An
Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998).
Eva Westcott married Harry Stafford in 1884.