Raabe, Wesley, ed., "walter dear": The Letters from Louisa Van Velsor Whitman to Her Son Walt

Abstract

Wesley Raabe, ed. walter dear: Letters from Louisa Van Velsor Whitman to Her Son Walt. Walt Whitman Archive, ed. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price. whitmanarchive.org, 2014.The Walt Whitman Archive now offers the most comprehensive representation of Louisa Van Velsor Whitman's life and thought to date. As if anticipating the question In what ways does Louisa Van Velsor's life merit careful critical attention?, Wesley Raabe, the editor of Louisa's letters to Walt recently published on the Archive, answers in his long and illuminating introductory essay: The full range of her letters exert their own gravity: they the center of orbit in family correspondence from Walt to his mother, they highlight her wide range of social interactions and her verbal inventiveness in spite of the grating burden of financial dependence, they illuminate some familiar phrases in Walt's poetry and correspondence, and they may invite scholars to reconsider the impetus for Walt's first post-Civil War revision of Leaves of Grass. Raabe goes on to propose that another merit of Louisa's letters that they are a rare extended record of the life of a working-class woman during the Civil War and Reconstruction. And Raabe offers a powerful justification for devoting such a substantial section of the Whitman Archive to Louisa: The digital archive that bears the poet's name now encompasses another, his mother Louisa, whose letters may best serve those readers who heed his great poem, and who, upon failing to fetch him at first, should keep encouraged, who missing him in one place should search another.Raabe warns us that, in his notes to the letters, he will repeat brief information on each Whitman family member many who access this part of the Archive do so for one distinct letter. Therefore, he says, is necessary that each reader has the whole as well as the part. True enough, but it is lamentable that some readers are searching for one distinct letter, because the only way a reader can truly hear Louisa's voice-and voice is as important as (and, at times, more important than) content-is by reading her letters one after the other: full immersion. While reading Louisa's 170 letters and Raabe's annotations along with his introductory essay, I finally had but two reservations among the otherwise extreme admiration I felt for his work.Because Louisa's voice is so vital, I believe it is important when writing about her to use as many of her own words as possible. I would have liked to hear more of Louisa's words in Raabe's essay, more lines from Louisa's letters to exemplify points, as when Raabe quotes her of inventive formulas of thanks to Walt. At such moments, I could hear Louisa. And yet, I hesitate to complain because, unlike many previous Whitman scholars, Raabe so consistently honors Louisa. Writing about the gifts for which Louisa is offering her litany of thanks, Raabe says, The small gifts that Walt enclosed helped his mother to maintain a semblance of personal dignity. . . .My second reservation has to do with Raabe's phrase move the center of orbit, quoted earlier. Raabe certainly does not make Louisa a footnote to Walt, and as I applaud that, it may seem wrong for me to want Raabe to put more of Whitman's work in the context of Louisa's letters. Still, I wanted Raabe to examine more closely Whitman's key publishing moments when those moments coincided with Louisa's letters. Though there are only three 1860 letters, I wanted to hear a bit about the third edition of Leaves, which was appearing at the time of the letters. fourth edition of 1867 and the fifth edition of 1870-1871 could also have received more note, especially given that Raabe has indicated that the letters throw light on the post-war editions of Leaves of Grass.The last ten pages of Raabe's essay provide readers with information regarding his editorial practice and how it fits in with the Archive as a whole. …