328 Mickle Street
Camden1
April 12 p m
Dear friend
Rec'd yours last week & was glad as always to get letter from you2—Dr Bucke has been here—left this morning for
N Y—sails Wednesday next for England—to stay two months—was with
me Friday, Saturday & Sunday—we rode out every day—
He is pretty well—I am ab't the same as when I last wrote—am to read the
"Death of Lincoln" lecture Thurs: afternoon next in the Phila: Chestnut St Opera
House—the actors & journalists have tendered me a sort of
benefit—Thomas Donaldson and Talcott Williams are the instigators of it
all—(I am receiving great & opportune Kindnesses in my old
days—& this is one of them)3—
The printed slip on the other side I just cut out of my Phila: Press of this
morning4—I am looking for your little book5—Good weather here—
Walt Whitman
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. This letter is endorsed:
Answ'd May 25/86. It is addressed: Wm D O'Connor | Life Saving Service |
Washington | D C. It is postmarked: Philadelphia, Pa. | Apr | 12 | 1886 | 7 PM |
Transit; Washington, Rec'd | Apr | 12(?) | 12 PM | 1886 | 1. [back]
- 2. O'Connor, according to
his notations on Whitman's letters, did not write to the poet between March 23
and May 25. Either O'Connor was in error or Whitman had a lapse of
memory. [back]
- 3. On April 15 Whitman received $370 from Donaldson
and $304 from Williams. In his Commonplace Book Whitman noted receiving an
additional $13 at an unspecified date (Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the
Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.).
The total, according to Whitman, was $687, but in Donaldson's book the
amount is given as $692. The discrepancy apparently stems from the amount of
Donaldson's share: he gave it as $375, Whitman as $370. Williams
forwarded an additional $8 on June 11. Whitman read his lecture for the
fourth time this year in Haddonfield, N.J., on May 18, "without pay, for the
benefit of a new Church, building fund, at Collingswood" (Whitman's Commonplace
Book). For an account of the sparsely attended lecture, see Walt Whitman Review, 9 (1963), 65–66. [back]
- 4. The item, pasted on the
first page of the letter, includes the following: "'William D. O'Connor,' says
the New York Commercial-Advertiser of a former
Philadelphian, 'is one of the very few clever writers who do not write enough.
The reason may be that, having a Government position in Washington, the salary
of which supports him, he has not the need, and without the need the desire for
composition is perhaps absent.' The same paper, saying that 'Carpenter' is the
best of Mr. O'Connor's stories, adds: 'It is a story of which Walt Whitman is
visibly the idealized hero, and it is singularly interesting and
rememberable.'" [back]
- 5. O'Connor's Hamlet's Note-book. On January
21 O'Connor reported to Whitman that "the New York publishers have
uniformly refused to publish my Baconian reply to R. G. White, even at my
expense." On March 23 he said that the book was to
be published by Houghton, Mifflin & Company. [back]