This week, Page-Turner is publishing a series on Walt Whitman. Yesterday, Jia Tolentino wrote about an unusual use of Whitman’s poetry at a drug court in Alabama. Check back tomorrow to read Jeffrey Yang on Whitman and the sea.
In 1858, Walt Whitman, at the age of thirty-nine, was eking out a living as a journalist at the Brooklyn Daily Times, generating thousands of words a week at an unflagging pace. He’d suffered a vague illness he called “sunstroke,” which dogged him with episodes of dizziness for years to come; and critics had variously shrugged and gawped at the first edition of his “Leaves of Grass,” published three years before. Adrift and demoralized, Whitman cultivated a bohemian image and dreamed of reinventing himself as a travelling orator. Instead, that fall, he attached himself to a more mundane endeavor, as the author of a series of advice columns for the New York Atlas on the topic of men’s health. Given the rubric “Manly Health and Training,” these were published under the pseudonym Mose Velsor, one of Whitman’s many aliases—but the pieces, thirteen in all, were never traced to Whitman until Zachary Turpin, a graduate student at the University of Houston, rediscovered them on microfilm last year. (Turpin also discovered a long lost novel, “Life and Adventures of Jack Engle.”)
The articles, which are collected in a new book, “Manly Health and Training: To Teach the Science of a Sound and Beautiful Body,” brim with piquant digressions and bumptious, often contradictory advice on diet, exercise, and beauty. Whitman implores men to do things briskly: walking, showering, rubbing themselves down with dry cloths and hair gloves. He likes stale bread and fresh air; he foresees the rise of athletic footwear, noting that “the shoe now specially worn by the base-ball players” should be “introduced for general use.” His doctrines adopt the familiar, puritanical posturing of many nineteenth-century self-improvement guides, dispensing bromides about discipline and preparedness that wouldn’t feel out of place in “Franklin Evans; or, the Inebriate,” the novel he’d written more than a decade earlier to warn of “the oblivion-causing cup.” It’s easy to roll your eyes at his dictates, especially when they come under such blustering headers as “THE GREAT AMERICAN EVIL—INDIGESTION” and “COULD THERE BE AN ENTIRE NATION OF VIGOROUS AND BEAUTIFUL MEN?” (Short answer: I don’t see why not!)
But cast all that aside, and you’re left with a fascinating document of male insecurity. “Manly Health” venerates many of the same masculine ideals that Whitman celebrated in his poetic masterwork—one could imagine Mose Velsor exalting, as Whitman does in verse, the body’s “ever-pushed elasticity . . . balanced and florid and full.” But “Manly Health” is brittle where “Leaves of Grass” is supple, nervous where “Leaves of Grass” is unencumbered. Where “Leaves of Grass” celebrates a man sublimely comfortable in his own skin, “Manly Health” is more likely to warn that skin is “one of the great inlets of disease.” Whitman’s column warns against potatoes, prostitutes, overthinking, hot beverages, and between-meal snacking, to name a few of his prohibitions. As for condiments: forget about them. Real men abjure catsup. In one of his more dubious pronouncements, he hymns bare-knuckle boxing, then illegal in the U.S.: it prepares a guy for a volley of blows from that pugilist we call life, “itself a continual fight with some form of adversary or other.” In this hardscrabble world, the embattled man must “form that solid and adamantine fibre which will endure long and serious attacks upon it,” lest he be “wholly emasculated.”
Belying their title, the “Manly Health” articles reveal Whitman as an intimate of malady. For “Mose Velsor,” health and infirmity are locked in Manichaean conflict; even if you’re healthy, your fitness is often defined by an absence of symptoms. One piece devotes a long, astutely observed passage to “loathed melancholy,” which “shows itself in the lines of the face, cut and seamed by harrassing [sic] thoughts, and many an hour of discontent and nausea of life.” Even a section called “THE SURE REWARD,” beginning with a jaunty portrait of vitality, soon devolves into a slough of despond where manliness becomes defined by what it manages to fend off:
Whitman, who would go on, during the Civil War, to volunteer at an Army hospital, vacillates between empathy and disgust for such infirmities. He doesn’t so much sing the body electric as linger on the sad sack whose “joints move like those of some rusty machine,” whose “bowels are clogged with accumulations of fearful impurity, like sewers that have been stopped.” Such a benighted man finds that “wherever he moves, he is without vigor, without attraction, without pleasure, without force, without love, without independence, buoyancy, spirit or pride.” One of the more striking aspects of “Manly Health” is that it seems to exist in an erotic vacuum. Compare the pansexual promiscuity that helped earn “Leaves of Grass” censure (“Loveflesh swelling and deliciously aching / Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous”) to the health columnist’s diagnosis of young men as oversexed, their inflamed passions merely a vehicle for syphilis. There’s a low voltage, to be sure, coursing through Mose Velsor’s rhapsodic descriptions of “the spread of [a] manly chest, on which also are flakes of muscle which rival those of the ox or horse”—but the body, in his conception, is mainly “a machine calculated to produce force . . . in moving among his fellow men.”
Yet if “Manly Health” often reads as the soggy, fermenting mulch beneath “Leaves of Grass,” one can occasionally make out the blurry figure of the life-affirming, democratic Everyman who wanders through Whitman’s poetry. You can see him in Mose Velsor’s ideal man, from whom “a blithe carol bursts . . . to greet the opening morn.” Or in the young fellow “loudly reciting and declaiming in the open air . . . rambling over the hills.” Whitman even manages to turn his all-time favorite activity, loafing, into a form of exercise, suggesting that a healthful man would do well “to toss a stone in the air from one hand and catch it in the other” as he walks along. And Velsor shares his creator’s gift for exclamation; who else but the author of “O Captain! My Captain!” would command the “clerk, literary man, sedentary person”: “Up! . . . Out in the morning!” Or: “Eat enough, and when you eat that, stop!”
As in many contributions to the genre that Samuel Smiles, only a year after “Manly Health” first appeared, would christen “Self-Help,” there’s something provisional and hucksterish about Whitman’s proscriptions, an eagerness for validation. The first edition of “Leaves of Grass,” from 1855, featured a frontispiece engraved with Whitman’s portrait: hands in pockets, work shirt unbuttoned at the neck, hat at a rakish angle. (“I cock my hat as I please indoors or out,” he writes in the poem.) A few years ago, the writer Ted Genoways discovered an alternate version of the image, differing only in one detail: a conspicuous bulge had been added to Whitman’s crotch. It’s the spectre of this “goodshaped and wellhung” specimen, as Whitman describes him in “Leaves,” who looms throughout “Manly Health.” Behind the abstracted talk of the “brute animal in the man” is some kind of priapic fixation, a yen for the eternal boner. “With perfect health,” Whitman writes, “a man realizes the old myth of the poets; he is a god walking the earth.” As with any chest-thumping paean to manhood, impotence is the unspoken nemesis here, the ultimate fear. Hence Whitman’s reference to a man’s “virile power . . . without which, indeed, he is not a man.”
With his casuistry, Whitman seems intent on convincing himself, more than anyone, that this health regimen will work. You can imagine him grabbing himself by the lapels, asking, Are you man enough for this cruel world? Reading “Manly Health,” with its nested anxieties, I kept hearing the final lines of Mike Nichols’s movie “Carnal Knowledge,” in which an impotent divorcé, played by Jack Nicholson, hires a prostitute to recite a pep talk he’s written. A true man, she incants, has “an inner power so strong that every act, no matter what, is more proof of that power . . . he has himself, and who is better, more beautiful, more powerful, more perfect . . . you’re getting hard . . . more strong, more masculine, more extraordinary . . . it’s rising, it’s rising . . . more virile, domineering. More irresistible . . . it’s in the air.” This is arguably the objective of “Manly Health,” and every tract like it—to get it in the air. Whitman knew. He had it down to a single exclamation: “Up!”
