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

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost.-"Continuities" (1888)In the autumn of 1850, a newspaper called The New-Yorker was set to debut in Manhattan.1 For "six and one-fourth cents per week" subscribers were offered the latest news, plus "a series of Nouvelettes or Stories, of the highest merit, in advance of any other publication." Perhaps prematurely, it was promoted as "the best Family Paper in the Union."2 As a literary daily, The New-Yorker was going to need a steady stream of good fiction to maintain a readership-and indeed, its editor, Carlos D. Stuart, received plenty of mail from writers offering stirring tales at modest prices. One author, a novelist and short-story writer from Brooklyn, sent a letter on October 10 volunteering a 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 the press-and, if you would be disposed to "try it on," I should like to have an interview with you, for the purposing of seeing whether we could agree to something. My ideas of salary are very moderate.Would you like a Story, of some length for your paper?3After requesting a reply through the post office, the fiction writer signs off: "Yours, &c Walter Whitman."Though he rarely identified as an author of fiction, the fact remains that by the age of thirty, Whitman had published a 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 the premier literary magazines in the United States, including the Democratic Review, the Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, the American Review, and the Union Magazine. Counting reprints, Whitman's tales saw publication in more than two hundred periodicals across the country. Even his temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842), an early effort he would later detest, sold 20,000 copies-making it the bestselling literary creation of his lifetime.5 Whitman's years of engagement with fiction, and his popular and commercial successes as a 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 a deceptively simple question. There is the instinct to point to Leaves of Grass as the full and final answer, to see it as a creative work that could only have come from the pencil of a 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 the wool of American culture that it is difficult not to think so. How else to explain his shift from rather conventional newspaper poetry in the 1840s, to a 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 the 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 the 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 the solution of any deep problem, or any completed statement of the moral, the true, the beautiful, eludes the 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," the fallacy that because something happened, under the circumstances it had to happen.8 Further, it is simply too easy to underestimate the breadth of Whitman's literary experimentation in fiction, and to downplay the extent to which his fictions inform his poetic development. …