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Camden1
Monday Evn'g Aug 1
We have had three hot days right in a string but I am getting along with it all,
& there is a great let up evenings & nights—Nobody here to day—I
think of you & George2 & all—H3 yesterday told me he was much better—good—I will be
down one of these days—
Walt Whitman
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Correspondent:
Susan M. Lamb Stafford
(1833–1910) was the mother of Harry Stafford (1858–1918), who, in
1876, became a close friend of Whitman while working at the printing office of
the Camden New Republic. Whitman regularly visited the
Staffords at their family farm near Kirkwood, New Jersey. Whitman enjoyed the
atmosphere and tranquility that the farm provided and would often stay for weeks
at a time (see David G. Miller, "Stafford, George and Susan M.," Walt Whitman: An
Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings [New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998], 685).
Notes
- 1. This letter is addressed:
Mrs: Susan Stafford | Kirkwood | (Glendale) | New Jersey. It is postmarked:
Camden, N.J. | [illegible] | 8 PM |
87. [back]
- 2. According to a notation
in the Commonplace Book on July 24 George was ill with "lung hemorhages"
(Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919,
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). On August 4, when Whitman drove to
Glendale, he found George "better." [back]
- 3. 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). [back]