"Anything honest to sell books": Walt Whitman and the Autograph Monster

Abstract

Walt Whitman claimEd to have rigid rule for dealing with requests, but towards end of his life he had become well known among contemporaries for his cautious approach to swarming signature seekers.1 During mid-nineteenth centur y, persistence of what Whitman called autograph monster-a growing number of men and women who begged and often lied their way to signatures from nation's leading poets and novelists-signaled America's rapidly increasing appetite for collecting and consuming celebrity personalities (WWWC, 3:496). For Whitman, this monster was simply a fact of life. Not a day but hunter is on my trail-chases me, dogs me! . . . Their subterfuges, deceptions, hypocrisies, are curious, nasty, yes damnable, W hitman complained to Horace Traubel. No request was to be met naively; even a letter from a young girl could bear the grin of deceiver, old subterfuge poet often met with a laugh (WWWC, 2:82-83; 3:410-411).2 Monsters were everywhere.Whitman's life would become punctuated by encounters with these persistent collectors. have no mail today except Whitman tells Traubel in 1888: an mail, yes, and that I get every day. They all write me-hundreds write-strangers-they all beg autographs-tell funny tales about it, give funny reasons (some of them are pitiful-some of them are almost piteous)-I practically never answer them anymore. It takes about all strength I have nowadays to keep flies off (WWWC, 1:366). Though would never become as revered by contemporary collectors as those of signers of Declaration of Independence-signatures that inspired their own cult following-the poet's canny management of his signature would earn him a unique place among literary professionals. relationship with monster was markedly ambivalent, and, as I will argue, that ambivalence had a tremendous impact on design and marketing of his final books. Like so many brands before and after him, Whitman would place a signature-his signature, written by hand or reproduced mechanically-at center of his commercial identity. Spanning from 1868 British edition of Poems by Walt Whitman, first Whitman-book to include a facsimile of poet's autograph, to 1892 deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass, signature-produced in and on his books and requested every day through mail-became increasingly prominent marker of his personality and literary work.This essay traces W hitman's relationship to culture of collecting during nineteenth century. I begin by examining emergence of hunter in America, focusing especially on cultural significance of celebrity signature after Civil War and relationships collectors developed with well-known writers like Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Howells, and Holmes. Whitman was far more protective of his than his poetic peers; that guarded stance came to influence way Whitman circulated his signature within covers of Leaves of Grass, where he included it several times as part of a preconceived promotional scheme. signature would become a central emblem of his literary brand-it appears in and/or on nearly every volume poet published from 1881 until his death in 1892-the perfect symbol of what David Haven Blake identifies as Whitman's remarkable merger of poetry and publicity.3 efforts to join his with his poetry tapped into emergence of what Tamara Plakins Thornton calls romantics-autograph collectors and handwriting analysts-subcultures with a taste for tokens of celebrity that some believed could reveal character of their inscriber.4 For Whitman, was not only a new and foolproof way to drum up business; it was yet another strategy to emphasize author's place within Leaves of Grass through signature's transcendental form of presentness. …