I thought it would be somewhere between cute and cool to write in our Pride Issue about the newly discovered Walt Whitman articles that address, head-on, manliness. I thought that with my reverence for the poet I could walk the line between his time-bound and timeless rants. I thought I could be wry about the doctoral dissertations that, god forbid, now lie in the offing, connecting the dots between Whitman's grunt journalism of 1858 and the vast expanses of poetry to come. But in a day when a masculine ideal is most likely to be articulated in a Grindr profile or an Instagram feed, I was unprepared for the degree to which Uncle Walt would, one more time, knock me out.
Not literally, of course, though Whitman does write in his 13-part series in The New York Atlas about the value of bare-knuckle boxing in fostering a masculine culture. Days ago I might have been horrified by Whitman's advocacy of sport brain-bashing - yet while I've been reading this newly discovered material, along have come the passionate paeans to Muhammad Ali, who likely would have fallen dead-center in the poet's masculine ideal.
Some facts. As alert scholars sometimes do, Zachary Turpin, a doctoral candidate at the University of Houston, poring over microfilm, discovered "Manly Health and Training, with Off-hand Hints Toward Their Conditions," that 13-part series published in the autumn of 1858. Spotting the name in its byline, Mose Velsor, one of Walt Whitman's known pseudonyms, Turpin immediately knew what he had found. The 47,000 words increase the cache of known Whitman journalism by half again. It's all been republished in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, with an informed and immensely readable Introduction by Turpin, which can be accessed free of charge at ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2206&context=wwqr
The popular press has, so far, honked its greeting. Commentators have stumbled over one another noting that Whitman's advocacy of all lean meat (with a crust of bread) as the ideal diet for a man in training is his anticipation of the paleo diet (hold the bread). And there's been the even more predictable nudge-nudge wink-wink about Walt's caution about spending too much time with women - when he's explicitly talking about the syphilis epidemic tearing through New York at the time. But, in fact, Whitman seems eminently sane in his open discussion of sexuality, counseling only against dissipation. By the time he actually writes, "We are no moralist," it's already clear. And to talk about sexuality and virility in a Sunday paper in 1858 is, well, something, particularly given the unmistakable homoerotic (but not leering) tone of the writing.
It may have been part of the reason for Whitman's resort to pseudonym, but it's just as likely it was New York journalism politics. Not only does the Manly Health series add significantly to our trove of Whitmania, it helps fill in one of the least well-known periods of the poet's life. Probably Whitman pitched the series because he needed the money. There's also evidence that he was severely depressed, and he writes about "the horrors" of depression with a sane, self-tested recommendation for increased exercise. There were family problems and the breakup of an intense romantic relationship with a man (or men). His own "perfect health" (the holy grail of his enterprise) was on the wane, and he was suffering from high blood pressure. He's not writing as the men's auxiliary of the WCTU when he recommends temperate drinking (of everything, including water), and it was at this time that he himself returned to the blandishments of booze at Pfaff's, Manhattan's legendary Bohemian saloon.
Yes, his style is incantatory, but it's altogether readable when it is remembered that it is by a man through whose hand and pen the blood and ink of the Greeks and the Hebrews, the orators and prophets and preachers, flowed in ecstatic torrents. And then, he means what he says. Predictably, he's sometimes self-contradictory, and his views of dancing vacillate (though he sees its value for developing flexibility of the all-important foot). Turpin is right to call "Manly Health" "an invaluable, revealing, and even frustrating document," one that sometimes rambles and argues with itself.
Such as Whitman is railing, it's against New York's increasingly sedentary (and dissolute) office culture, which he see as weak and nothing short of a threat to American democracy. Such as it's mad, there's method in it. There are echoes of the "beauty, handsomeness, goodness" of Melville's Billy Budd. Whitman is not, tongue hanging out, calling for a race of handsome supermen (though you'll find language resembling that) but for a revitalized generation of American men who are hot because they're happy.
I've not seen citations of Whitman's theory of "magnetic attraction" as a harbinger of New Age attraction theory. But in these writings we have his vision: "This singular but sure magnetic condition, the result mainly of animal robustness (through which the moral nature of course effuses), is, we cannot too often repeat, the result of the health of the whole being, from top to toe - all must be sound, without exception - and then the stronger the tone of health, the mightier will be the stream of magnetic influence involved."
This is a step beyond gym cruising. But today's gay gym culture will find little unorthodox in Whitman's trenchant advocacy of exercise and training. His alarm about viruses entering the collective male bloodstream adumbrates the refining fire of AIDS. And his advocacy of beards will appeal to today's fashion-minded.
I would wager than anyone willing to dismiss this new material as "wacky" - the prevailing sentiment in its popular journalistic reception so far - hasn't looked at the poetry recently enough. "I Sing the Body Electric" (has any poem ever had a happier title?) is only a year off. I don't recall seeing the word "love" in this new Whitman find, but as the overriding tone, it suffuses it all. At the end of "Body Electric"'s first stanza, we read: "And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul? The love of the body of a man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account, That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect."