Walt Whitman: a life by Justin Kaplan: book review

Walt Whitman (1980), the biography, begins, not at birth, but when the American poet bought his first house on Mickle Street in New Jersey in 1884 at the age of 65. He bought the home after living inharmoniously with his brother George for 11 years, and 29 years after the publication of his book of poems Leaves of Grass (due to a sudden surge in sales).

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was described by his mother as ‘a very good, but very strange boy’ and by 17 he was ‘big and muscular, but he moved slowly with a curious indolence.’ He left Long Island to seek work in the newspaper industry in New York in the 1840s. It was in New York where he was introduced to new trends and experiences, such as hydrotherapy and phrenology, Egyptology, the Great Exposition of 1853 at Crystal Palace, and the 1876 Centennial Exhibition with Richard Wagner performing ‘The Ring.’

Leaves of Grass was first published in 1855 as 12 poems and grew to 293 poems by 1892 after ten editions. It was called nauseating drivel,  disgraceful, humbug, superficial, and morally offensive. He called it ‘worse than a failure’ – it led to public humiliation and dismissal from his job, acknowledging that ‘only one here and there, oftenest women’ understood what he was writing. Even his siblings were unimpressed. Whitman said he doubted ‘if even ten were sold’ of the first edition. Friend and biographer Richard Bucke (1837-1902) said the first edition had ‘no sale’ and the second edition had ‘little or no sale.’

But he had admirers, such as Oscar Wilde and Samuel Longfellow, and many visitors to his home, although he was a loner. In fact he said Leaves of Grass ‘was to celebrate the conquest of loneliness through the language of common modern speech.’ He described it as ‘the book of going forth in the day’ – embracing the new and modern.

He wrote notes to himself on what to write and how to write, such as ‘be simple and clear.’ Whitman said the ‘test of a poem’ was ‘how far it can elevate, enlarge, purify, deepen and make happy the attributes of the body and soul.’

The format of the biography is not conventional. It is really about the development of the poetry collection Leaves of Grass throughout its expansion over 37 years, rather than comprehensively about Walt Whitman. Instead, the book follows the publication of 10 editions of Leaves of Grass from the first edition in 1855 to his ‘death-bed’ edition in 1892.

In between there are: the 2^nd edition in 1856, the 3^rd edition in 1860 (containing the Calamus poems), the 4^th in 1867 (with the well-known poem, O Captain! My Caption! about the death of Abraham Lincoln in 1865), the 5^th in 1871, the 6^th in 1881, the 7^th in 1881, the 8^th in 1884, and the 9^th in 1889. He  revised the editions with ‘punctuation and single-word corrections to wholesale deletions and additions’ and ‘reshaped, tightened and clarified individual poems, rearranged them in sequence and by group, rejected forty, shortened others, and eliminated some.’

For Walt Whitman enthusiasts, there is an extensive coverage of his poetry, attempting to extract perceptions of his life from it. However, there are no quotations from O Captain! My Caption! (only a photograph of it in Whitman’s handwriting). I found the development of his poetry, his inspirations, and the context of the times in New York interesting and worthy of reading. But the publication Leaves of Grass is the glue that holds the biography together: without it, the text would be disjointed and disappointing.

I was inspired to read the biography after the International New York Times published an article entitled ‘Walt Whitman Promoted a Paleo Diet. Who Knew?’ (29 April 2016). In 1858 Whitman wrote a 47,000-word manifesto on healthy living called ‘Manly Health and Training’ under the pseudonym Mose Velsor (after his mother’s maiden name). For men, he recommended a meat diet, comfortable shoes (‘specially worn by base-ball players’), good climate, bathing, gymnastics, getting up early, fresh air, a non-sedentary life, not too much brain action, and not too much fretting (worrying). While there are non-politically-correct assertions, there is an emphasis on moderation and a holistic vision of the relationship between mental and physical health.

The series was lost for 157 years and unearthed in 2015 – and now published in 2016 in the online journal Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (described as ‘the biggest new Whitman discovery in decades’). Graduate student Zachary Turpin, in the English department of the University of Houston, discovered the document when he searched one of the pseudonyms that Whitman used. ‘Manly Health and Training’ was originally published in weekly installments starting in September 1858, when Whitman was 39 years of age.

This Kaplan biography, dated 1980, has 10 pages that refers to ‘the pursuit of health in the Victorian era’ but does not mention the manifesto, the ‘Manly Health and Training.’ Whitman wrote it after the bad sales of the first editions of Leaves of Grass.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/30/books/walt-whitman-promoted-a-paleo-diet-who-knew.html?_r=0

MARTINA NICOLLS is the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).