I recd your letter over two weeks ago—Am glad you have a good place at
Marlton—such a spot is so much pleasanter than Phila. or Camden or any close
city—Hank I am sorry you have that trouble with your throat but I have no
doubt it will go over in time—your mother was up here yesterday—bro't me
a nice chicken—said every thing was all right with your folks home—I am
pretty much as usual again after quite a long siege—I am here in a little old
house I have bought—my room is a big loc_vm.00240_large.jpg one in the 2d story—get along
well enough (nothing to brag of)—there is a couple of elderly folks,
acquaintances of mine, Mr and Mrs Lay, they live in the house, & I take my meals
with them. Any how I like it all ever so much better than the Stevens Street
business—Am not doing any thing lately, & the sale of my books has been very slim for some
time1—Met a lady on the ferry last week, she
came up to very pleasant & said, "Your friend Jo Allen is in Laredo, Texas,
keeping store doing well, & has a family"—
—So long, Harry dear boy—write soon, & I will the same—I send you some papers2—
W WCorrespondent:
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).