Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 146: Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram, Apr. 7, 1876,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 412-414 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 412, continued:]

146. Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram. Item 289

My dear friend,

I duly received yours of the 14th Ulto., & on Saturday last a copy of Mr. Horne's Cosmo, of which I will speak hereafter. Many thanks. I have always been an admirer of his “Orion,” & his “New Spirit of the Age,” was, to my thinking, better than Hazlitt's. His correspondence with Mrs. Browning, as published in the Contemporary Review, I read with great interest.

Your “Rejoinder” I handed to two gentlemen who happened to be present when I received it, & who had read with high approval your Civil Service “showing up” of Stoddard's Poetic enterprise. They read, also, with apparent zest your “Rejoinder.” Doubtless it is very pungent & exasperating, damaging not only to Poe's too ambitious champion, but to the testimony, such as it is, presented in his behalf. Doubtless, too, Gill deserved all this, not only for having published documents which I had expressly forbidden him to publish, & for neglecting to [page 413:] submit to me his Lotus Leaf MS., as he had promised to do, but more especially for having put forth his audacious claim to have “kindly permitted you to use material” etc., etc. which had been previously used by himself! That was a felicitous allusion of yours to the embryo lecture, & tells the whole story.

I assumed that your injunction to secrecy about the 1827 edition of the poems would not exclude Mr. Harris from the knowledge of a matter in which he has taken so great an interest. I had an interview with him last evening & he wishes me to ask you if the owner of the copy to which you allude was willing to dispose of it (provided you did not wish to purchase it yourself), to ask you if you would use your influence to obtain it for him. Being a collector of rare books & the owner of the largest collection of American poetry in the country, he will give all & more that the book would be likely to command from any other purchaser. He will be gratified to receive your article on the little vol. He has been aware of the existence of such a copy through a gentleman who has been in correspondence with him on the subject, a Mr. Lee, I think he said, of Baltimore or Richmond, a bookseller.

Was it the Philobiblion in which Stoddard first published his insinuations that no such volume had been printed? Whatever it was, Mr. Harris says that if you wish to see the article he will mail to you the number of the periodical containing it, the numbers still being unbound.

I wonder if you have heard about a scandalous paragraph which is going the rounds of the press? This is the paragraph: “Elizabeth Oakes Smith writes in the Home Journal that the immediate cause of Edgar A. Poe's death was a severe beating which he received from the friend of a woman whom he had deceived & betrayed.”

I have received several letters bitterly denouncing Mrs. Smith for this scandalous story. Now, I do not believe that Mrs. S[mith] ever wrote such a paragraph or would authorise its insertion in any paper.(1)

Some of the tribe of secret slanderers who are forever lying in wait for an occasion to sully his memory & obscure his fame have doubtless seized upon an idle & absurd story told by Mrs. S[mith] in that article which she wrote long ago for one of her own magazines, & which (as I think I told you in my last letter) she has lately republished in the Home Journal.

If you have a copy of that article, you will see that her account of the cause of Poe's death has been misrepresented & misquoted, & doubtless with malign intent, by some of Poe's enemies. If I knew her present address, I would write to her at once to confirm or deny this story, which is being so widely circulated under her name. Cannot you do it? I think that Mrs. S[mith], in getting up an article on Poe, had introduced a garbled & inaccurate account of Griswold's story about [page 414:] the lady who had lent him money and whom, refusing to pay, he had threatened to expose by showing letters that would make her “infamous.” We know on what basis this perfidious & wicked story was constructed. Mrs. S[mith], who, as I told you, is constitutionally inaccurate, probably did not trouble herself to correct or verify the story so long as it was found sensational & acceptable to the lovers of light literature.

She assumes to like & admire Poe, in the somewhat contradictory article lately republished in the Home Journal, & I think must be indignant at this malign perversion of her words. Do ask her about it.

I long to see your article on the suppressed poems.

It is an hour past midnight, and so, goodnight. Forget anything & everything that I may have said to give you pain & believe that I have never faltered in my wish to be to you what you have so often called me, your beneficent “Providence,”

 

1. In the article “Recollections of Poe,” by Mrs. Elizabeth Oakes Smith, New York Home Journal, Mar. 15, 1876, these lines do appear: “He was not a diseased man from his cups at the time of his death, nor did he die from delirium tremens, as has been asserted. The whole sad story will probably never be known, but he had corresponded with a woman whose name I withhold, and they having subsequently quarrelled, he refused to return her letters, nor did she receive them till Dr. Griswold gave them back after Poe's death. This retention not only alarmed but exasperated the woman, and she sent an emissary of her own to force the delivery, and who, failing of success, beat the unhappy man in a most ruffianly manner. A brain fever supervened, and a few friends went with him to Baltimore, his native city, which he barely reached when he died.”