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Boston
Saturday Evn'g Aug: 27
Dear Sister Lou
All goes satisfactory here—I keep as well as usual—have a very good room
& board in a kind of half hotel half boarding house, the hotel Waterston—the landlady Mrs Moffit,1 has a hundred
guests when full, mostly families, very nice—capital table, (most too good for
me, tempts me too much)—
My book is getting on swimmingly—I have got it (after considerable worrying
& doing & undoing) into a shape that suits me first-rate, and this
printing office is putting it into typographical shape too that satisfies me
well—nearly 100 pages already set up & cast—so you see that's
working all right—I am mostly
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here at the printing office, five or six hours
every day, reading proof & seeing to things2—Mr
Osgood the publisher & Rand & Avery the printers are very friendly indeed, I
couldn't have better ones to deal with. I suppose you get the papers I
send—the Boston Globe of four or five days ago3—& others—I get my letters very well
here, sent on from Camden—Lou I send a small package directed to you by mail,
please put it up on my table—Shall send occasionally same way, to be put
up there & kept for me—I go out riding now & then, am to go for a
couple of hours this evening—havn't got anything from you since (I believe)
Monday last.
—Address me either here (see outside of this
envelope)—or care Osgood & Co: 211 Tremont Street—Of course the
greatest anxiety about the President4—thought here
to-day there is no hope—it is terrible—
Brother Walt
Notes
- 1. Whitman paid $8 a
week for his board to Eva E. Moffit. On September 30 Whitman paid Mrs. Moffit
$41.44 "for six weeks, up to date" and $21 on October 19 (Whitman's
Commonplace Book, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman,
1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). [back]
- 2. On August 22 Whitman
spent the morning at the printing office: "the superintendent Mr [Henry H.]
Clark very kind & thoughtful—appears as though I was going to have
things all my own way—I have a table & nook, in part [of] a little
room, all to myself, to read proof, write, &c." In an inclusive entry, "Aug
20 to 30," Whitman noted: "the book well under way—I am at the printing
office some hours every day." On September 1 Whitman sent Dr. Richard Maurice
Bucke "proofs up to page 143" and on September 4 "proofs to p 176" (Whitman's Commonplace Book). See also Clifton Joseph Furness,
Walt Whitman's Workshop (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1928), 263–265. [back]
- 3. A lengthy interview with
Whitman, entitled "The Good Gray Poet," appeared in the Boston Globe on August 24, in which the poet discussed the architectural
structure of Leaves of Grass; averred that "the large
magazines are still shy of me," citing a recent rejection by Harper's Monthly ("A Summer's Invocation"; see the letter from Whitman
to Harry Stafford of January 2, 1881); praised
Emerson as the most important American poet and termed Tennyson "in every
respect the poet of our times." [back]
- 4. President Garfield
lingered in a critical condition until September 19. [back]