Walt Whitman - Manly Health and Training: To Teach the Science of a Sound and Beautiful Body

65 Bleecker Street

New York, NY 10012

Introduction Copyright 2016 by Zachary Turpin

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Regan Arts Subsidiary Rights Department, 65 Bleecker Street, New York, NY 10012.

First Regan Arts hardcover edition, February 2017

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955001

ISBN 978-1-68245-075-8

ISBN 978-1-68245-076-5 (ebook)

Interior design by Nancy Singer

Cover design by Richard Ljoenes

Image credits, which constitute an extension of this copyright page, appear on .

By Zachary Turpin

Microfilm is full of surprises, the discovery of Walt Whitmans Manly Health and Training series being only one of them. The first time I held a spool of it, I was surprised to find that microfilm is heavy, a bit like a hockey puckif it were made of one hundred feet of wound-up polyester. Those hundred feet are surprisingly durable; their primary purpose, after all, is to last. The pages of old books and newspapers may be more of a treat for the senses, brittle and musty and delicious, but microfilm, properly stored, will last half a millennium. And thank goodness for that, because squirreled away on microfilm are uncountably more surprises. Surprise just barely describes the feeling of finding Manly Health and Training. For me, looking for the lost writings of Walt Whitman had begun almost as a joke. Id already uncovered work by the poet Emma Lazarus, the novelist Rebecca Harding Davis, and the fantasy writer L. Frank Baum, each of whom had been very, very prolific. (Davis and Baum wrote at least a book a year.) As I looked, it slowly occurred to me that every great American writer might have written something that is now lost. But Walt Whitman? The man whose Leaves of Grass might be the most important book of poetry ever written in America? Whose face is, second to Abraham Lincolns, maybe the most recognizable of the nineteenth century? Whose poemsSong of Myself, I Sing the Body Electric, O Captain! My Captain!have so saturated our literature, songs, movies, and culture that they help define what it means to be American? No. Absolutely not. It was impossible.

I couldnt resist.

Literary research is about pursuit first, pay dirt last (if at all). The pleasure of being a researcher is in every little thing that turns up along the way, a principle that scholar Stephen Ramsay calls the hermeneutics of screwing around. Indeed, the best treasures are always found in reading and writing. Walt Disney once said that there is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island, and, while I agree, when the adventure began I dont think I honestly expected to find anything in particular. Adventures often reveal themselves as such after the fact; until then, we insult them with the word work.

The months went by slowly. As it usually happens, nothing turned up. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. And then something , with no warning whatever. I doubt that most true discoveries are glamorous momentsthis one wasnt: a hot July morning, a library basement, a cup of coffee, a loaded microfilm reader. Inside, though, I was vibrating with anticipation. These are the moments a researcher lives for. Based on a clue found in a newspaper clipping, I knew that the film I was looking at had something by Walt Whitman hidden in it, but as I scrolled, my best guess was that it would be a couple of short articles at most, a pleasant curiosity or two. Then, after a minute or so, the words I was looking for whirred into view: Manly Health and Training. This was itand it was, indeed, an article. (I kept scrolling.) Actually, two articles! (I kept scrolling.) No, three articles! Id officially been wrong. (I kept scrolling.) Four articles! Long ones, at that. (More scrolling.) Five articles! Six! Seven! Eight! By the time I came to the thirteenth and final article in the series, I was in what Im sure was a state of shock. Here was the largest cache of Whitmans work to come to light in half a century. To be the only person alive to know it existed, what amounted to a book by Walt Whitman, lost since 1858: this was more than a surprise. It was a thunderclap. Disney is right: there are untold riches in the written wordand best of all, he adds, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life. The book you are holding is proof that there are many more treasures out there, waiting to be found, shared, enjoyed. They may have disappeared, but as Whitman reminds us, Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost.

About his own disappearance, the otherwise self-confident Whitman could be surprisingly anxious, despite nearly everything he ever said in poetry. Some day Ill die, he reminded his friend Horace Traubel, maybe surprise you all by a sudden disappearance: then wherell my book be? Thats the one thing that excites me: most authors have the same dreadthe dread that something or other essential that they have written may somehow become side-tracked, lostlost forever. And indeed, it turned out that quite a bit of his writing was lost, despite the efforts of generations of scholars to find it. He simply wrote too much. Some of his works were bound to sink from sightwith Whitman occasionally trying to scuttle them himself, anxieties be damned. His early short stories, for example, embarrassed him dreadfully: My serious wish, he confessed in Specimen Days and Collect (1882), were to have all those crude and boyish pieces quietly droppd in oblivion. In the end, Whitman only collected them to avoid the annoyance of their surreptitious issue. Other early writings were less persistently annoying, and so less fortunate. Whitmans freelance journalism was particularly unfortunate in this regard. Published during the early years of Leaves of Grass (1855 to 1860), often anonymously or under pen names, much of it fell into near-total obscurity after the poets death. Its taken more than a century and a half of work to recover, with plenty left to be found. Whitman himself encourages us: Missing me one place, he writes in Leaves of Grass , search another. The most recent result of the search is the book you hold in your hands, Walt Whitmans lost guide to living healthily in America.

If you havent already skipped ahead to it, you may be wondering: what is Manly Health and Training, anyway? Its a good question, and theres more than one good answer. Manly Health is part guest editorial, part self-help column, first published as a weekly serial in the New York Atlas newspaper. It begins as a fairly straightforward diet-and-exercise guide for men, but, as you will see, it gradually becomes much more: an essay on male beauty, a chauvinistic screed, a sports almanac, a eugenics manifesto, a description of New York daily life, an anecdotal history of longevity, a pseudoscientific tract, and a fitness manual for the nation. Apparently, few topics were out of bounds for Whitman: he writes about not only diet and exercise but also physical beauty, manly comradeship, sex and reproduction, socialization, race, eugenics, war, climate, longevity, bathing, prizefighting, gymnastics, baseball, footwear, facial hair, depression, alcohol, and prostitution. At times, this book is an eyebrow raiser, not least because it sheds more light on a period (186061) in which Whitman was also writing dozens of new poems for the third edition of Leaves of Grass . Manly Health and Training also helps us understand Whitmans transition from a career journalist to one of the premier poets of America. And it provides some much-needed information about Whitmans life at that time.