Introduction to Walt Whitman's "Life and Adventures of Jack Engle"

Abstract

Nothing is ever really lost, or be lost.-Continuities (1888)In autumn of 1850, newspaper called The New-Yorker was set to debut in Manhattan.1 For six and one-fourth cents per week subscribers were offered latest news, plus a series of Nouvelettes or Stories, of highest merit, in advance of any other publication. Perhaps prematurely, it was promoted as the best Family Paper in Union.2 As literary daily, The New-Yorker was going to need steady stream of good fiction to maintain readership-and indeed, its editor, Carlos D. Stuart, received plenty of mail from writers offering stirring tales at modest prices. One author, novelist and short-story writer from Brooklyn, sent letter on October 10 volunteering particularly wide range of services. Did Stuart, he asks,have any sort of opening in your new enterprise, for services that I could render? I am out of regular employment, and fond of press-and, if you would be disposed to try it on, I should like to have an interview with you, for purposing of seeing whether we could agree to something. My ideas of salary are very moderate.Would you like Story, of some length for your paper?3After requesting reply through post office, fiction writer signs off: Yours, &c Walter Whitman.Though he rarely identified as an author of fiction, fact remains that by age of thirty, Whitman published popular novel and more than twenty well-received-and in some cases, widely republished-short stories and novellas.4 In their time, his tales appeared alongside Hawthorne's, Poe's, Cooper's, and Child's, in some of premier literary magazines in United States, including Democratic Review, Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, American Review, and Union Magazine. Counting reprints, Whitman's tales saw publication in more than two hundred periodicals across country. Even his temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842), an early effort he would later detest, sold 20,000 copies-making it bestselling literary creation of his lifetime.5 Whitman's years of engagement with fiction, and his popular and commercial successes as writer of stories, are enough to make one wonder, as Stephanie M. Blalock does, why and how Whitman left fiction writing to pursue poetry.6It is deceptively simple question. There is instinct to point to Leaves of Grass as full and final answer, to see it as creative work that could only have come from pencil of committed poet. By this logic, Whitman put away fiction because he had to. It is tempting to think so. Indeed, Whitman is now so deeply dyed in wool of American culture that it is difficult not to think so. How else to explain his shift from rather conventional newspaper poetry in 1840s, to revolutionary new prose-poetics, with free-verse effusions like Blood-Money (1850), Resurgemus (1850), and, eventually, Leaves of Grass (1855)? Surely something must have gotten left in dust, and critics from Edgar Lee Masters to Paul Zweig have long assumed that that something was Whitman's fiction. According to them, Whitman was no good at fiction-writing-or, at very least, it was insufficient for his expressive needs. After all, even poetry, Whitman writes, can merely hint, or remind, often very indirectly, or at distant removes. Aught of real perfection, or solution of any deep problem, or any completed statement of moral, true, beautiful, eludes greatest, deftest poet-flies away like an always uncaught bird.7 The fiction-writer, presumably, is left even more birdless.While tidy, such reasoning is prey to what Henri Bergson calls illusions of retrospective determinism, fallacy that because something happened, under circumstances it to happen.8 Further, it is simply too easy to underestimate breadth of Whitman's literary experimentation in fiction, and to downplay extent to which his fictions inform his poetic development. …