Now here’s what I get for surfing over at the UK Guardian in the wee hours of a Saturday morning: a story by Alison Flood that 19th century American poet Walt Whitman has been identified as the author of a 13-part guide to "manly health" that he originally published under a pseudonym.
A long-lost book-length guide to “manly health” by Walt Whitman, in which the great American poet tackles everything from virility to “care of the feet” and the attainment of a “nobler physique”, has been rediscovered by a scholar, more than 150 years after it was first published under a pen-name.
Written under the pseudonym Mose Velsor, a known pen-name for Whitman, the 13-part Manly Health and Training series was published in the New York Atlas in 1858 and runs to nearly 50,000 words. Zachary Turpin from the University of Houston stumbled across it when searching digital archives for Whitman’s pseudonyms, and finding a single hit for “Mose Velsor” in the NY Tribune, advertising the fact that his “original articles on manly training” were shortly to appear in the New York Atlas. He sent away for the Atlas microfilm, and was astonished to discover the 13-instalment series.
The entire text, titled Manly Health and Training, With Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions, can be found online for free. And….uh, well…
Manly health! Is there not a kind of charm—a fascinating magic in the words? We fancy we see the look with which the phrase is met by many a young man, strong, alert, vigorous, whose mind has always felt, but never formed in words, the ambition to attain to the perfection of his bodily powers—has realized to himself that all other goods of existence would hardly be goods, in comparison with a perfect body, perfect blood—no morbid humors, no weakness, no impotency or deficiency or bad stuff in him; but all running over with animation and ardor, all marked by herculean strength, suppleness, a clear complexion, and the rich results (which follow such causes) of a laughing voice, a merry song morn and night, a sparkling eye, and an ever-happy soul!
I think that I could have identified Whitman as the writer of this paragraph even if the author was anonymous.
Zachary Turpin, the University of Houston graduate student in English who tracked down Whitman’s serial in old microfilmed copies of New York Atlas, says that there’s more in this text that’s “eyebrow-raising” than simply the erotic and homoerotic content.
In the journal, Turpin says the work can be seen as “an essay on male beauty, a chauvinistic screed, a sports memoir, a eugenics manifesto, a description of New York daily life, an anecdotal history of longevity, or a pseudoscientific tract”, and warns that it can be “eyebrow-raising”. “Readers should prepare to encounter a more-than-typically self-contradictory Whitman; his primary claims tilt from visionary to reactionary, commonsensical to nonsensical, egalitarian to racist, pacific to bloodthirsty – and back again,” he says.
Links:
Walt Whitman Quarterly Review: Volume 33, Number 3 (2016) Special Double Issue: Walt Whitman’s Newly Discovered “Manly Health and Training”
New York Times: Walt Whitman Promoted a Paleo Diet. by Jennifer Schuessler 4/29/16