UH student’s electric find opens new window into Whitman’s life
Discovery of lost 1858 work on ‘manly health’ excites scholars
For more than 150 years, a book-length essay by Walt Whitman has been hidden away in the pages of a long-defunct newspaper. Under the pen name Mose Velsor, the 19th-century poet wrote nearly 50,000 words for a series on fitness and healthy living — a rambling, revealing piece of prose — and no one alive knew it existed.
Until Zachary Turpin found it.
Turpin, a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Houston, unearthed this stash of Whitman’s writing last summer. His discovery was published online Friday by the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, giving everyone free access to the complete text.
And what a text it is. The series, titled “Manly Health and Training,” was published in the New York Atlas in 13 weekly installments during the
fall of 1858. In long, sometimes self-indulgent passages, Whitman offers his thoughts on diet and exercise, bathing, male beauty, prize fighting, alcohol, aging, sex, footwear and the importance of spending time outdoors.
Turpin describes the series as “part guest editorial, part self-help column.” Like Whitman’s poetry, it sprawls across the page in a winding style that feels decadent and voluptuous, even as Whitman prescribes “plain food” and a spartan lifestyle.
“Manly health!” Whitman writes. “Is there not a kind of charm — a fascinating magic in the words?” He outlines the ideal healthy breakfast (rare lean meat, a chunk of bread, tepid tea), the importance of a beard (“a great sanitary protection to the throat”), and a cure for “melancholy of mind” (a full-body scrub-down and a brisk walk in fresh air)
Whitman, who died in 1892 at age 72, ranks among the best-known and most beloved of American poets. His worldview is inclusive and his poetry expansive, a celebration of how it feels to be human in a rich and complicated universe.
No one is Whitman’s equal when it comes to exploring the American identity, said Douglas Brinkley, an author and historian who teaches at Rice University. “He defines the American canon.”
Finding such a large cache of Whitman’s writing, more than a century after his death, is “a momentous occasion for celebration,” Brinkley said.
Spooky feeling
Turpin, 32, didn’t set out to uncover a treasure trove. One day last summer, he typed some of Whitman’s known pseudonyms into online databases, just to see what popped up. He tried “Mose Velsor,” one of Whitman’s favorite pen names, and a single result appeared: an ad for a newspaper series on good health.
Turpin didn’t get too excited. He found the New York Atlas on microfilm, requested it through interlibrary loan, and pretty much forgot about it.
“As a literary researcher, it’s important to keep your expectations very low,” he said. “It’s an unrewarding game.”
There might be a single new article, he hoped.
“No one, I think, expects to find what is essentially an entire book by a major 19th-century literary figure. That would be insane.”
A couple of weeks later, Turpin trekked down to the University of Houston library basement and threaded the delicate microfilm into the reader. Old newspaper pages started whirring by, one after the other, becoming a blur as he searched for September 1858. He found the article. Then he kept scrolling. In the next issue, he found another article by Mose Velsor. Then he found a third. By the time the series was finished, Turpin was almost certain he was onto something big.
“Scrolling through and seeing another, and another, and another, puts a real pressure in your soul,” he said. “It’s a spooky feeling to be the only person alive who knows about something. You want to get that feeling off of you.”
He contacted Ed Folsom, a University of Iowa English professor and editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and another Whitman scholar to find out if, indeed, he had just uncovered something new.
“I was trying to restrain myself,” Turpin said. “I don’t think I did a very good job of it.”
The scholars confirmed that this was a real find. Whitman’s papers contain some notes about the series, but it was assumed that “Manly Health” was never written. Turpin knows that scholars will be poring over the essay — which he transcribed himself from the micro- film — searching for hints of Whitman’s future poems. But he doesn’t know whether he’ll be one of them.
It’s “time for other people to take up the discussion,” Turpin said. “It’s too big and interesting for it to be the ‘me’ show.”
Likely a side project
Whitman made his living as a journalist and bits of his writing have turned up in scads of old newspapers and journals. But this is the first time anyone has uncovered such a large chunk of previously unknown material, and it fills some gaps in our knowledge of Whitman’s life and work, Folsom said.
“What got my attention was the date,” Folsom said. Scholars know little about Whitman’s life in 1858. They know that it was a rough time for the poet; the first two editions of “Leaves of Grass” hadn’t sold well, and Whitman, 39 at the time, was struggling to make ends meet and considering a new career as a public lecturer. The poet had a full-time job at another newspaper, so writing “Manly Health” was likely a side project he picked up to supplement his income.
The series provides a window into what Whitman was thinking and writing about at this time.
“I see it as kind of a hymn to the male body — a love song to the male body,” Folsom said.
And that’s not surprising. At the time he published “Manly Health,” Whitman was writing what are now called the “Calamus” poems, which describe a relationship between the narrator and a male lover. The poems explore not just homosexual love, but male affection. Just before the Civil War, Folsom said, Whitman’s poems ponder “what the country would be like if males interacted with each other not through competition, but primarily through affection.” In 1860, Whitman would add this group of poems to the third edition of “Leaves of Grass.”
The body itself was important to Whitman. In “Leaves,” his signature poetry collection, his freewheeling lines are full of visceral, sexual images. He presents a world in which the physical — a tumble of flesh and muscle, earth.and appetite — is no less worthy than the spiritual. In the 1856 edition, Whitman amended his poem “I Sing the Body Electric” to end with a long list of body parts, a catalog of terms he made up and collected from medical texts and street slang. “The limbs, the genitals, the lungs, the heart — everything is included,” Folsom said. “‘Manly Health’ I think of as a kind of prose ‘Body Electric.’ ”
Over the next couple of years, it will be fascinating to see what scholars and other readers will find in the series to make us rethink Whitman’s life and poetry at this time, Folsom said.
And there’s undoubtedly more of Whitman’s journalism to discover.
“Working with Whitman all the years I’ve worked with him, I stand in awe of how many words the guy could write,” Folsom said. “He was so prolific.”
Whitman describes himself, in one of his late poems, as “garrulous to the very last,” Folsom added.
“I’m always struck by that. It’s like: Oh yeah, he’s still garrulous. We suddenly have 50,000 words we didn’t have before, coming out in 2016.”