“’All so juicy ripe…But none of them for me’: Whitman’s Satirists and their Pleasures”
Wendy Katz, Dortmund, Trans-Atlantic Walt Whitman Symposium, May 2018
“’All so juicy ripe…But none of them for me’: Walt Whitman’s Satirists and their Pleasures”
(title slide)
This symposium asks how creative minds have answered Whitman’s call to justify him, and to answer him. Though Whitman envisioned this response among future generations--poets to come--it was his contemporaries who first, and enthusiastically, answered. If their mockery and parodies did not precisely validate him--they were not seriously emulating his style--their work nevertheless recognized, and approved, of how he had set himself apart from the ordinary newspaper poet.
(Universe slide)
In the 1850s, Whitman poems like “Resurgemus” and “Errand Bearer” started appearing in newspapers like the Universe, the Evening Post, the New York Times, and the Saturday Press. His fellow journalists began responding to his distinctive style in these poems, often with satire. In this talk, I am going to try to prove two related points about some newly discovered commentaries in the New York Picayune, New York Herald, and Sunday Atlas. One, these “hits” at Whitman, so typical of this period’s newspaper writing, with its insider jokes, personalities, and abusive language, appeared in papers where he was known, where he had friends among the editors. And two, many of these writers and newspapers supported the Democratic party, in a period when Whitman himself was moving toward free soil Republicanism. The satire from his colleagues emphasizes both Whitman’s newfound poetic distance from the combative and partisan world of newspaper prose, and, at the same time, how his poetry maintained its democratic--democratic with a small d, in the sense of egalitarian--valence.
(slide with Atlas and Leaves)
When Whitman turned from newspaper editing to poetry, his style of writing naturally--obviously--changed. Though Whitman scholars like Jason Stacy and Ruth Bohan have rightly pointed to evidence of the persistence of his journalistic concerns and prose, his style in Leaves of Grass doesn’t employ the popular modes of rhetoric found in contemporary newspapers: satire, billingsgate and other forms of invective, inside jokes and coded personal references. Given that, it is easy to imagine the poet also, at this moment in the mid-1850s, exiting the network of Democratic party editors who had supported his journalistic career, and moving into a new milieu of anti-slavery, or at least free soil, and later Republican authors. This latter group would develop after the Civil war into supporters of art for art’s sake philosophies, and continue as Whitman allies. But that earlier network of Democratic editors responded to his shift away from political newspaper rhetoric, toward a seemingly apolitical poetics of the body, with satire and parodies that, to contemporaries, would have reinforced his old ties to them.
(vault at Pfaff’s)
Ned Watts has brilliantly argued for understanding Whitman’s creations, and those of other writers in New York in the 1850s, in terms of what their networks of contacts legitimated: what those networks understood as art, as poetry, as politics, as bohemianism, established the contours for what could be written, and published. Whitman’s old political network of Democratic newspaper editors similarly established boundaries for him, especially in their reception of his distinctive new style in Leaves of Grass. They often aligned it with their own agendas or what they perceived as shared projects. This affected Whitman’s literary redefinition of himself, if only because he still depended on these newspapers and contacts to secure him publishing opportunities.
(Bennett and model artists)
I’ll start with the New York Herald, because while Whitman’s relationship and publications with the Herald after the Civil War, when it was edited by James Gordon Bennett Junior, is well known, his pre-war history with the controversial paper and its widely despised editor is less familiar. Briefly, the Herald, under the senior James Gordon Bennett, had started publishing in 1833. Bennett had been a staunch Jacksonian Democrat, but when the party refused to subsidize a paper for him, he abandoned them, and set himself up in opposition as a Whig. Despite this, he retained his sympathies for most Democratic policies, particularly for that party’s critique of monopoly, banks, and privilege, and by the 1850s had largely returned to the fold.
(Rally in the Park)
In 1841, the Herald covered what it called “The Great Anti-Bank Meeting in the Park.” This was the Park in front of New York’s city hall, a favorite location for political rallies. This one intended to advance the Democratic party position opposing a national US Bank, and had an audience of eight thousand, who speakers addressed as their “fellow republicans.”
(Great anti Bank rally)
Bennett was one of the first to provide accurate transcripts of public speeches (rather than relying on a manuscript submitted by the speaker), and his account of the rally’s speeches included "Walter Whitman, of L.I., who rose and said: “Each of us my countrymen, can easily call to mind the mighty notes of preparation, the marshalling of forces, the din, and noise of trumpets, that preceded the election last fall. Each party was sanguine of success...” and Whitman’s speech goes on from there for a second column.[1] There were quite a few speakers at these rallies, ranging from state and national politicians to local editors and candidates; that Whitman not only spoke, but was noticed by the Herald, suggests his political ambitions at the time--and that he was well-connected.
By 1841, the Herald was solidly in the John Tyler camp of New York newspapers; Vice-President Tyler, called His Accidency, because he became President only upon the death of President William Harrison, had betrayed the Whigs by vetoing beloved party policies, including veto-ing the US Bank. Whitman too wrote for and edited Tylerite papers, the best known of which is the Aurora. The Herald, in fact, unkindly accused Whitman of killing that paper.
(Herald on the Aurora)
The Herald first sarcastically described Thomas Nichols, the Aurora’s “ineffable” first editor, and a free thinker who had formerly written for the Herald, as hanging his “festoons of fancy and garlands of wit” on the Aurora, until its publishers tossed him out. Nichols, the paper observed, went on to start what the Herald called the “obscene” newspaper the Arena. Despite this seeming condemnation, it’s worth noting that the Herald was itself regularly accused of libel and obscenity, and the Arena and Herald shared engravers (Elton) and printers (Applegate). I mention this because the very fact that the Herald writes about Nichols in this mocking way indicates an ongoing relationship; the paper tended to ignore those they didn’t know.
Mr. Whitman is their next target. The Herald accuses him of an outrageous system of blackguarding--criticizing--the Catholics and the Irish. Again, the Herald itself at this time was involved in a furious war with the Catholic bishop of New York, John Hughes, so it essentially accuses Whitman of doing precisely what the Herald was doing. At this low water mark, the Herald concludes, Brooklyn-based Democrats purchased the Aurora, and Mordecai Noah, an old employer of Bennett, took it over. Finally it was bought out and closed by a Democratic newspaper, the Plebeian. The last Aurora editor in this Herald history of its frenemies, was Thomas Dunn English, who went on to edit the Aristidean, which published Whitman too.[2]
The Herald never covered Whitman extensively; they were most interested in him when he seemingly shared their John Tyler sympathies. But in 1860, the paper reviewed Leaves of Grass.[3]
(Herald review of LOG)
The Herald famously hated abolitionists. In the same book review column, the reviewer praised a travel account of South Carolina plantations by Mrs. Schoolcraft, the slaveowning wife of a famous historian and Democratic official, for refuting the cant of abolition. Her book, the reviewer observed, demonstrated that as long as barbarous people existed, slavery was necessary in order to civilize them. The review of the Thayer & Eldredge edition of the “remarkable” Leaves of Grass was brief. Thayer & Eldredge were known as abolitionist publishers. But Whitman’s book nevertheless displayed “strong ideality, rich imagination and large descriptive power” and the Herald reviewer cited this passage as an example:
In the Mannahatta, streets, piers, shipping, storehouses,
and the countless working men working in the shops,
And I too of the Mannahatta, singing thereof--and no
less in myself than the whole of Mannahatta in
itself,
Singing the song of These, my ever united lands--my
body no more inevitably united, part to part and made
one identity, any more than my lands are inevitably,
united, and made one identity,
Thus, in July of 1860, less than a year before the Civil War, the pro-slavery Democratic Herald not only did not condemn Leaves of Grass, but quoted a section of it that describes the newspaperman’s and printer’s downtown, waterfront Manhattan circuit. It is a passage that also underscores Whitman’s desire to preserve the national Union. The national Union was a Democratic party plank; to them, the Republicans, by attacking slavery, were sectionalists, whose policies would divide the Union.
As the Herald would, most of the Aurora writers, including Mordecai Noah, Thomas Dunn English, and politician Mike Walsh, by the 1850s returned to the Democratic party. English even spoke at a Democratic rally in the city park in 1855. But their familiarity with each other, and Whitman, and most of the Democratic editors in the city, came from their common history with the granddaddy of the cheap Sunday papers, the Atlas.
(Atlas Politician)
The Herald described the Atlas as having an extensive circulation among a certain class, as it was left at the cheap porter-houses to be peddled out by the barkeepers, along with bad brandy. It was published two doors down from Tammany Hall, the headquarters of the Democratic party, and Atlas editor Anson Herrick would run for Congress, and lose, as a Democrat in 1856.
The editors of the Atlas had published the Aurora when it was under Whitman’s hand. The Atlas had also employed William Burns, before he started the cheap weekly Sunday Dispatch, which became another outlet for Whitman’s journalism. The free-soil Atlas regularly published Whitman’s column on Brooklyn, and the editors of both the Atlas and the Dispatch shared Whitman’s opposition to laws that moralistically restricted Sunday travel and entertainment. So not surprisingly, the Atlas also satirized him.
(Toddlejob column)
Or rather Tobias Toddlejob did. In Toddlejob’s column, “Patent Chowder,” which he manufactured expressly for the Atlas, he mocks the editor of Whitman’s old paper the Brooklyn Eagle as an old fogy, and encourages Walt Whitman to splurge, and “beat this,” this being a poem that starts with the author being kissed by a woman:
And the universe seemed to crumble
Into a dream of ecstacy wild, delirious,--
...
Again, and there throbbed to my heart,
A delirium wherein all the past, the present of life[4]
...
The Atlas had called Whitman’s Leaves of Grass dirty and bestial. But this amateur poem to the sensual pleasures of kissing is an insider’s nod to, if not Whitman’s sexuality, then to his much more profound ability to express passion.
(Atlas on Libertad)
The Atlas editors regularly mocked Whitman as rough, shaggy, a shouter of “Libertad” and other incomprehensible screeds, but though they called it egotistic twaddle, they also admired his poetry:
I chant the new empire, grander than any before--As in
A vision, it comes to me;
I chant America, the Mistress--I chant a greater su
premacy[5]
Like the Herald, it was annoying that their old companion proclaimed himself THE American poet, but his chant of the stars and stripes fluttering in the wind had power for them. Like the Herald, they discerned in his poetry a democratic, and so unifying, heart for an American empire.
(Herald’s oyster literati)
Toddlejob, whose real name was John Harrington, an actor turned editor, also wrote for the New York Picayune, the Day Book, and the Dispatch, all papers that took some Democratic turns in the 1850s. The Picayune’s first editor, Joseph Scoville, had been an aide to Southern senator John Calhoun. Scoville had also been employed at the Herald and the Daybook, but whereas the Day Book became proslavery in the 1850s, the comic Picayune, like the Atlas turned toward free soil. By the time the Pic started actively satirizing Whitman, two bohemian editors, the sort who spent time at Pfaff’s beer hall, had taken over the cheap weekly. Whitman knew them; he recorded the address of one, the artist Frank Bellew, in his notebooks.[6]
(Pic: just the thing)
The other Picayune editor, Mortimer Thomson, was the city items editor for Horace Greeley’s Tribune. In an item in the Pic headlined “just the thing for Walt Whitman,” Thomson or a colleague criticizes ladies of so-called good society for adopting street slang, and in so doing revealing their “unsophisticated nature,” that nature presumably being what they shared with Whitman.[7]
(Pic parody)
The Picayune followed this up a week later with a parody of Whitman’s 29th bather, from Song of Myself, another poem about women’s and men’s shared nature.[8] The scholar Ed Whitley points out that the queer yearnings in that poem are made banal in the parody, by rerouting them through the nursery refrain about “four and twenty blackbirds.” As Dr. Whitley says, the resulting poem screams bourgeois heteronormativity--a country picnic with maidens--but then excludes the speaker from the festivities. His interpretation, that Whitman’s friends in what he calls the “republic of wit,” were teasing Whitman about his lack of sexual interest in women, seems dead on. The very conventionality of phrasing, as in Toddlejob’s amateur poem on kissing, is a compliment to Whitman’s greater ideality. At the same time, there are some bacchanalian implications--24 sherry cobblers, followed by 24 brandy smashes, and perhaps 24 more shilling drinks, would do in most fair young maidens, if not the habitues of Pfaff’s.
(clippings on Whitman)
In the late 1850s, an array of Democratic papers would continue to mention Whitman, often mockingly, but that very sarcasm, as I hope I’ve shown, indicates at the least acquaintance, and often a sense of a shared project. This has been demonstrated for papers like the Saturday Press, which were actively promoting Whitman, and it’s not surprising to find steady support for him at papers like poet William Cullen Bryant’s Evening Post, which along with Whitman shifted into the anti-slavery Republican party.
(Sunday Times)
But it is less expected at the conservative Democratic Sunday Times (this is not the New York Daily Times). Yet the Sunday Times, founded by Mordecai Noah, who had briefly edited the Aurora, also took aim at Whitman, in a manner that suggests an insider knowledge akin to the Picayune. The Sunday Times jabs at what they call the hopping, creeping and rolling meter of Whitman’s poem, “A Child’s Reminiscences:”
“But soft!
Sink low-soft!
Soft!”[9]
This half canto, the paper observed, summarized their criticism of the whole poem.
(Leslie’s)
Another example is Frank Leslie’s, which like the Sunday Times was hostile to Republicanism and abolitionism. In 1856 it published a lengthy, nasty review of Leaves of Grass, and its morbid sensuality, though in insider fashion they observed the poem derived from the “bonny-clabber” or sour milk of Brooklyn. But like the Sunday Times, Leslie’s employed writers and artists from Whitman’s Democratic and bohemian circles, and in 1859 mockingly--but with admiration, too--joined the Picayune in calling him a kosmos as well as a loafer.[10]
I’ll conclude by returning to the Herald, which was still an influential paper. In the same issue of Leslie’s that called Whitman a kosmos, that paper’s editors were still comparing their circulation to the Herald’s. Indeed, only the New York Sun among the daily papers really rivaled the Herald’s circulation in the city, which meant that Bennett employed huge numbers of what he sardonically called the loafer literati of New York.
(Herald clipping on writers)
Writers for the Herald aimed for a sharp-witted, vigorous style that would attract the broadest possible readership. Bennett accordingly claimed they were writing the only modern, democratic literature of the day, a literature that would supercede the tedious aristocratic romanticism of his competitors. In one list of New York’s “writers of leaders” and “concocters of squibs” for the newspapers, he lists Whitman, along with the politicians and authors who would over the next two decades regularly hire or publish Whitman: Park Benjamin of the New World, Nathaniel Willis of Brother Jonathan, Mordecai Noah of the Sunday Times, Mike Walsh of the Subterranean, Tom Nichols of the Dispatch, Frederick West of the Atlas, John Inman of the Columbian, and William Bryant of the Evening Post.[11] These writers and others who joined the editorial corps later kept their eye on Whitman.
(Sunday Leader profile)
The Sunday Leader, for example, published a profile of Whitman that summarizes my argument. The Leader was a Democratic paper that backed Stephen Douglas for President, and its profile was written by someone who says he has known Whitman long and thoroughly. This contributor observes that when the journalist Whitman is nasty in print, no modern author has ever been nastier. But in his poetry, the writer points out that despite Whitman’s persevering efforts to render his thoughts laughable or repulsive, he had managed to roll out lines that will endure.
(Sunday Leader masthead)
The character the Leader creates and endorses is a Whitman who scorns both prosody and gentility. And it’s this, his primitive style, his absolute sympathy with nature, that made him for Democrats too, the poet of democracy.
[1] "The Great Anti-Bank Meeting in the Park Last Night," Herald, July 30, 1841, p. 2.
[2] “Journalism in New York,” Herald, January 6, 1845.
[3] “Books received,” Herald, July 15, 1860.
[4] Tobias Toddlejob, “Patent Chowder,” Atlas, September 9, 1860, p.1. John Harrington, an actor turned editor, wrote for the Picayune, the Day Book, the Atlas and the Sunday Dispatch, as Toddlejob, as John Carboy, or without signature as a regular editor. His column for the Atlas, Patent Hash, like Patent Chowder, owed a debt to a Sunday Mercury editor, Elbridge G. Paige, who wrote “Short Patent Sermons” under the pseudonym Dow, Jr. He visited Pfaff’s, and knew habitues like Frank Bellew, Ned Wilkins of the Herald, and Thomas Gunn, and perhaps he encountered Whitman too.
[5] “Walt Whitman,” Atlas, July 1, 1860.
[6] See Pfaff’s. W.H. Levinson, the editor after Scoville, wrote a comic column as an African American, Professor Julius Caesar Hannibal; John Harrington was on the editorial staff with him.
[7] “Just the thing for Walt Whitman,” Picayune, May 23, 1857.
[8] “A Poem of June, by Walt. Whitman,” Picayune, May 30, 1857.
[9] Sunday Times, December 25, 1859.
[10] Frank Leslie’s, December 20, 1856, p. 42, and April 2, 1859, p. 281.
[11] “The Newspaper Writers of New York,” Herald, November 9, 1842, p. 2.