Walt Whitman and Harry Stafford, ca. 1878. Photograph by John Moran. Courtesy of the Walt Whitman Archive.

Harry Stafford

In the same letter Binns reports finding a Whitman diary entry dated November 25-28, 1876: “At White Horse [Timber Creek] Memorable talk with H.S. settles the matter [?] for life.”

Binns reports other Whitman diary entries: “December 19. Evening sitting in room [? Camden] had serious inward revelation and conviction about H's course in the matter. Saw clearly what it really meant. Very profound meditation on all— more happy and satisfied at last about it—singularly so.”

Another diary entry: “April 29 1877 Scene with H. in front room.”

And yet another Whitman diary entry: “July 20 1877 Scene in the room at White Horse ‘Goodbye.’”[2]

Binns Speculates

Binns first speculates to Carpenter that “H.S.” could be Harry Stafford, the young farmhand that Whitman scholars now agree was “H.S.” and one of Whitman's beloved younger men.

Binns then goes on to suggest that the above diary entries “may refer to the closing up of some relationship which had previously existed with some woman.”[3]

Binns is blind to the possibility that Whitman refers to the end of a sexual and romantic relationship with Harry Stafford.[4]

This private letter is first publicly quoted in November 1941 by Edward Naumburg (see below), a “collector” of Whitman books and papers, in The Princeton University Library Chronicle (see below).

Binns's letter to Edward Carpenter indicates that Whitman's followers are privately discussing among themselves the evidence of Whitman's supposed girlfriend and his sexual desires and acts.

Binns: 1905

In Henry Bryan Binns's biography, A Life of Walt Whitman, published in 1905, an appendix publicly discusses Whitman's claim, in a letter to John Addington Symonds, that he had fathered six children, including one living southern grandchild. Which of course raises the question: who was the mother or mothers?

Binns had been informed in Camden, New Jersey, where Whitman had resided, that there were “two Southern (?) ladies.” Binns then says: “There is a love-letter extant, signed with a pseudonym, dated from New York in 1862, evidently written by a cultivated woman.”[5] That's the Ellen Eyre letter.

The biographer next discusses a supposed southern grandchild; Whitman once told his friend Horace Traubel that the grandchild had visited him.

That leads Binns to discuss the poet's “tearing out of several leaves after the entry of his starting for New Orleans”[6] where Whitman followers (called Whitmanites and sometimes Whitmaniacs) talked about possible Whitman romances with a woman.

Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle, Washington, D.C., 1865. Photograph by Moses P. Rice. Library of Congress.

So the Ellen Eyre scandal becomes one episode in scholarly discussions of the larger issue of Whitman's supposed procreations, his sexual desires, and his sexual activities.

Naumburg 1941

In November 1941, a “collector” of Whitman books and papers, Edward Naumburg, in The Princeton University Library Chronicle, first publicly prints H.B. Binns's letter to Edward Carpenter of September 28, 1904 (quoted above).

Naumburg sums up Binns by saying that he deals with Whitman's supposed romance with a woman in New Orleans “with too much imagination.”[7]

Naumburg directly takes on the subject of Whitman's “homosexuality”:

“No biography of Whitman has yet given us satisfactory answers as to that problem which one early monograph euphemistically called ‘the questionable side of Whitman.’ It takes no professional psychologist to point out passages in his poems which can be construed as definitely homosexual. The ‘Calamus’ section of the Leaves and the letters to Peter Doyle will furnish controversial battlegrounds for years to come, and I leave that to the experts. But the Whitman collector can do much which may help to clarify the picture. To search for new source material is his hobby—and lucky is the one who finds something to fill in some puzzling hiatus in Whitman's life.”[8]

Naumburg stresses: “We have no exact knowledge of any romantic entanglements with women in Whitman's life: only hints and innuendos such as those which refer to possible affairs in New Orleans and Washington.”[9] Naumburg does not mention the Ellen Eyre letter.

“That Whitman rejected the matrimonial advances of Mrs. Gilchrist is known,” says Naumburg.[10]

That Whitman “childishly evaded the direct question as to why he never married is told in Sloane Kennedy's Reminiscences of Walt Whitman.”[11]

Naumburg adds: “I have seen a scrap of manuscript in Whitman's hand which seemed to be a close paraphrase of a passage from a letter of Charles Dickens. To me it is a pathetic and regretful allusion to Whitman's bachelorhood: ‘Why is it that a sense comes always crushing on me, as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made?’”[12]

Naumburg relates: “Peter Doyle is quoted by Dr. Bucke as having said, ‘I never knew a case of Walt's being bothered up by a woman. In fact, he had nothing special to do with any woman except Mrs. O'Connor and Mrs. Burroughs. His disposition was different. Women in that sense never came into his head.’”[13]

Naumburg discusses Whitman's claim in a letter responding to the probing question of John Addington Symonds that he had six children and a grandchild.

Naumburg concludes: “Whitman's assertions, along the years, are full of inconsistencies.”[14]

Naumburg asks, “Repeatedly confronted with the direct question of the true meaning of the ‘Calamus’ poems, did he become frightened in the caution of his senility, and hit on this story [of six children] as a device to throw persistent questioners like Symonds and Träubel off the track?’”[15]

“Or did the kindly and faithful Träubel,” Naumburg asks, “over-solicitous in his inquisitiveness, irritate Walt a bit now and then, so that the aged poet took sardonic pleasure in torturing his Boswell with mysterious references to children and even grand-children?”[16]