Washington, D.C.
May 16, 1888
Dear Walt:
I have hoped daily to write in reply to your letters of April 8th and 23d, and the
postal card of May 7th, but between office business and illness I have been
prevented. Last night I got another of May 14th, covering the one from Herbert
Gilrchrist,1 which I send today to Doctor Bucke,2 as you desire. I am grieved to learn by these last advices
that you are ill lately. Your trouble all through seems twin to
mine—semi-paralysis, indigestion, constipation, etc. But who can be well, or
who being sick can help being sicker, in such weather as we have had this spring?
The last five days have been simply horrible—cold, wet, raw, diabolical, and
we are all the worse for it. I think we will have to do like the
Greenlanders—when the weather is bad, they boil the thermometer!
I saw your little piece in the Herald of the 14th.3 No fear of your distempers getting
into your compositions! Your temperament is indomitable. One would think you had the
sun for a solar plexus. I basked in the mellowness of your last letters as in the
gold and azure October weather of which I am so fond. I often feel deep regret that
you should have become ill. It simply proves the existence of the devil, whom Starr
King4 called the fourth person of the Trinity! (Certainly he's powerful enough to be
so styled.) But for him, or what he stands for, you might have reached a hundred,
hale, sturdy, impregnable, and like the best druid of the grove. So may it be
yet!
I read with a jovial heart of your trencher work at the planked shad and champagne up
at the old tavern on the Delaware,5 and, later, with your friends, where champagne
and oysters ruled the board. Didn't I wish to be along! Didn't my lower stomach
shout to my upper stomach with loud halloos! O there's fun in this sad world yet! I hope you'll have lots of it.
Apropos of the Devil, I once had a conception of him, which I worked out in an
unpublished romance thirty years ago, as a type of intellectual ignorance—that
is, of word-knowledge as against the knowledge of things. Lately, I had another and
more grotesque conception of such a being, supernatural and immortal, but, simply
having all the diseases! Wouldn't be a bad idea, would it? How very diabolic such
a devil would naturally be, wouldn't he?
Herbert Gilchrist's letter was very interesting. His reference to your bust would
have been very enigmatical, but for a card I had from Kennedy6
which helped me to infer that it was Morse's7 bust that was
alluded to.
In a couple of days the weather will change for the better, and you will feel
revived. I hope you will ride out all you can in the Spring air.
You speak of Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton8 having been to see you. It is many years
since I saw her. She used to be very pretty: I hope she is yet. Her fault was in
being too Araminta-Seraphina-Matilda, and this, life has made her outgrow.
I had a letter from Ben Tucker9 about you and your Herald threnody on the Emperor10
(which I have never seen). He seemed much troubled and cast down. Undoubtedly, he
has a great regard and veneration for you, and feels hurt.
I am delighted at your returns from the Herald, and hope they will continue. Bennett11
is certainly the most generous of all the blackguards.
You speak of having the bust of Elias Hicks,12 which must be a grateful possession.13 I
hope your article on him is growing.14 You ought to make it good, and as elaborate as
possible.
Miserable Cosmopolitan!—to refuse the Lilt of Songs,15 which has a real and deep
thought! Such are these demons.
I had your Critic Thought on Shakespeare,16 and read it many times lately again. It is
certainly very satisfactory, though I could wish it had certain explanations and
expansions.
Donnelly's17 book is out, and I have gone through it, though
hurriedly and in illness. He has done something I don't like—withheld a part
of the explanation of the cipher, and moreover expounded it so bewilderingly as to
leave the matter still in debate. Still, the effect is rather tremendous, and
although the chief journals denounce and lampoon it with all their armory of lying,
misrepresentation and persiflage, I don't think any fair mind can doubt the validity
of the cryptograph. The general abuse and ridicule are consoled, so far, by
Professor Colbert of Chicago vouching for the reality of the figures, and by Mr.
Bidder, one of the best mathematicians in England, declaring that the cipher is
surely in the test. But that my illness makes me unfit for composition, I would like
to review Donnelly's reviewers so far, and would engage to make them skip. Such
ignorance and such impudence I have rarely seen. The fragments of the cipher story
in the book are quite amazing and have wonderful vraisemblance. He has a notice of
me, with other Baconians, and briefly pays good tribute to you.
You speak truly of the beautiful hue of the young wheat. I have sometimes thought
that "wheat-color" would be a justified and telling epithet. The tint is so
peculiar, so living.
By the way, in looking over Stedman's18 book (the Poets of
America) I saw how thoroughly and even radically he had modified the article on you.
It is by no means what it was in the magazine. My talk with him must have sunk
in.
Goodbye. Nelly19 sends you her love. So do I. Always
affectionately
W.D. O'Connor20
Correspondent:
William Douglas O'Connor
(1832–1889) was the author of the grand and grandiloquent Whitman pamphlet
The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication, published in 1866.
For more on Whitman's relationship with O'Connor, see Deshae E. Lott, "O'Connor, William Douglas (1832–1889)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).
Notes
- 1. Herbert Harlakenden Gilchrist
(1857–1914), son of Alexander and Anne Gilchrist, was an English painter
and editor of Anne Gilchrist: Her Life and Writings
(London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1887). For more information, see Marion Walker Alcaro,
"Gilchrist, Herbert Harlakenden (1857–1914)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D.
Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
- 2. Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1902) was a
Canadian physician and psychiatrist who grew close to Whitman after reading Leaves of Grass in 1867 (and later memorizing it) and
meeting the poet in Camden a decade later. Even before meeting Whitman, Bucke
claimed in 1872 that a reading of Leaves of Grass led him
to experience "cosmic consciousness" and an overwhelming sense of epiphany.
Bucke became the poet's first biographer with Walt
Whitman (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1883), and he later served as one
of his medical advisors and literary executors. For more on the relationship of
Bucke and Whitman, see Howard Nelson, "Bucke, Richard Maurice," Walt Whitman: An
Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
- 3. Whitman's short poem "As I Sit Writing Here" appeared in the New York Herald on April 14, 1888. [back]
- 4. Thomas Starr King (1824–1864)
was an American Unitarian minister, Freemason, and orator based in California.
During the Civil War, he advocated fervently for the Union and Abraham Lincoln.
For more on King, see Charles W. Wendte, Thomas Starr King:
Patriot and Preacher (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1921). [back]
- 5. William J. "Billy" Thompson
(1848–1911), known as "The Duke of Gloucester" and "The Statesman," was a
friend of Whitman's who operated a hotel, race track, and amusement park on the
beach overlooking the Delaware River at Gloucester, New Jersey. His shad and
champagne dinners for Whitman were something of a tradition. See William Sloane
Kennedy, Reminiscences of Walt Whitman (1896),
15–16. [back]
- 6. William Sloane Kennedy
(1850–1929) was on the staff of the Philadelphia American and the Boston Transcript; he also
published biographies of Longfellow, Holmes, and Whittier (Dictionary of American Biography [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933], 336–337). Apparently Kennedy called on
the poet for the first time on November 21, 1880 (William Sloane Kennedy, Reminiscences of Walt Whitman [London: Alexander
Gardener, 1896], 1). Though Kennedy was to become a fierce defender of Whitman,
in his first published article he admitted reservations about the "coarse
indecencies of language" and protested that Whitman's ideal of democracy was
"too coarse and crude"; see The Californian, 3 (February
1881), 149–158. For more about Kennedy, see Katherine Reagan, "Kennedy, William Sloane (1850–1929)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
- 7. Sidney H. Morse (1832–1903)
was a self-taught sculptor as well as a Unitarian minister and, from 1866 to
1872, editor of The Radical. He visited Whitman in Camden
many times and made various busts of him. Whitman had commented on an earlier
bust by Morse that it was "wretchedly bad." For more on this, see Ruth L. Bohan,
Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art,
1850–1920 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2006), 105–109. [back]
- 8. Ellen Louise Chandler Moulton
(1835–1908) was an American poet and critic who published several
collections of verse and prose, as well as regular contributions to the New York Tribune and Boston
Herald. [back]
- 9. Benjamin Ricketson Tucker
(1854–1939) was an American activist and editor of the anarchist
periodical Liberty, which ran from 1881 to 1908. [back]
- 10. O'Connor is referring to
Whitman's poem "The Dead Emperor," which was published in the New
York Herald on March 10, 1888. [back]
- 11. James Gordon Bennett
(1841–1918) was the editor and publisher of the New York
Herald, founded by his father. For more on the paper and the many poems
by Whitman that were published in it, see "The New York Herald." [back]
- 12. Elias Hicks (1748–1830) was a
traveling Quaker preacher and anti-slavery activist from Long Island, New York.
Whitman's essay on Hicks, "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks,"
appeared in November Boughs (1888). For more on Hicks,
see Henry Watson Wilbur, The Life and Labors of Elias
Hicks (Philadelphia: Friends' General Conference Advancement Committee,
1910). [back]
- 13. The bust of Hicks was
sculpted by Sidney Morse. [back]
- 14. Whitman was writing an
essay, "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks," which he would publish
in November Boughs(1888). [back]
- 15. This poem was published as
"The Final Lilt of Songs" in the New York
Herald on April 16, 1888, after being rejected by the Cosmopolitan. [back]
- 16. Whitman's "Thought on
Shakespeare" was published in The Critic on August 14,
1886. [back]
- 17. Ignatius Loyola Donnelly
(1831–1901) was a politician and writer, well known for his notions of
Atlantis as an antediluvian civilization and for his belief that Shakespeare's
plays had been written by Francis Bacon, an idea he argued in his book The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in Shakespeare's
Plays, published in 1888. [back]
- 18. Edmund Clarence Stedman
(1833–1908) was a man of diverse talents. He edited for a year the Mountain County Herald at Winsted, Connecticut, wrote
"Honest Abe of the West," presumably Lincoln's first campaign song, and served
as correspondent of the New York World from 1860 to 1862.
In 1862 and 1863 he was a private secretary in the Attorney General's office
until he entered the firm of Samuel Hallett and Company in September, 1863. The
next year he opened his own brokerage office. He published many volumes of poems
and was an indefatigable compiler of anthologies, among which were Poets of America, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1885) and A Library of American Literature from the Earliest
Settlement to the Present Time, 11 vols. (New York: C. L. Webster,
1889–90). For more, see Donald Yannella, "Stedman, Edmund Clarence (1833–1908)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
- 19. Ellen M. "Nelly" O'Connor was the
wife of William D. O'Connor. Walt may have mentioned a potential visit by Nelly
and her daughter during his May visit to Brooklyn, though whether a visit came
near this time is not known from his or Louisa Van Velsor Whitman's letters.
Walt Whitman dined with the O'Connors frequently during his Washington years,
and he spoke often in his letters of their daughter Jean (called "Jenny" or
"Jeannie"). Though Whitman and William O'Connor would temporarily break off
their friendship in late 1872 over a disagreement about Reconstruction policies
and the role of emancipated slaves, Nelly would remain friendly with
Whitman. [back]
- 20. For Whitman's spirited
response to this letter, see Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman
in Camden, Friday, March 1, 1889. [back]