Walt Whitman novel lost for 165 years holds clues to 'Leaves of Grass'

Readers who picked up the New York Times on March 13, 1852, might have seen a small advertisement on Page 3 for a serial tale set to begin the next day in a rival newspaper.

"A RICH REVELATION," the ad began, teasing a rollicking tale touching on "the Manners and Morals of Boarding Houses, some Scenes from Church History, Operations in Wall-st.," and "graphic Sketches of Men and Women" (presented, fear not, with "explanations necessary to properly understand what it is all about").

It was a less than tantalizing brew, perhaps. The story, which was never reviewed or reprinted, appears to have sunk like a stone. But now comes another rich revelation: The anonymously published tale was nothing less than a complete novel by Walt Whitman.

The 36,000-word "Life and Adventures of Jack Engle," which was discovered last summer by a graduate student, was republished online Monday by the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and in book form by the University of Iowa Press. A quasi-Dickensian tale of an orphan's adventures, it features a villainous lawyer, virtuous Quakers, glad-handing politicians, a sultry Spanish dancer and more than a few unlikely plot twists and jarring narrative shifts.

"This is Whitman's take on the city mystery novel, a popular genre of the day that pitted the 'upper 10 thousand' — what we would call the 1 percent — against the lower million," said David Reynolds, a Whitman expert at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

But it also, Reynolds and other scholars say, offers clues to another mystery: how a workaday journalist and mostly conventional poet transformed himself into the author of the sensuous, philosophical, wildly experimental and altogether unclassifiable free verse of "Leaves of Grass."

"It's like seeing the workshop of a great writer," said Ed Folsom, the editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. "We're discovering the process of Whitman's own discovery."

That doesn't faze Zachary Turpin, the graduate student at the University of Houston who found "Jack Engle." In fact, this is the second time archival lightning has struck Turpin. Last year, he announced the discovery of "Manly Health and Training," a previously unknown 47,000-word self-help treatise that Whitman published in the New York Atlas in 1858.

"Jack Engle," published in six typo-ridden installments, may not belong in the American literary canon.

"It's not a great novel, though it's not a bad read either," said Reynolds, the author of "Walt Whitman's America."

Turpin called it "rollicking, interesting, beautiful, beautiful and bizarre," with antic twists, goofy names and suddenly revealed conspiracies that recall "a pre-modern Thomas Pynchon" or even, he ventured, "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World."

This may sound a long way from "Leaves of Grass." But Jack Engle and the other raffish young male characters, Reynolds said, are reminiscent of the man-of-the-streets persona Whitman created with "Leaves of Grass."

"Long, rank grass covered my face," says Jack, the first-person narrator. "Over me was the verdure, touched with brown, of trees nourished from the decay of the bodies of men."

Jack wanders among those bodies of men, copying out the inscriptions of the tombstones of Alexander Hamilton, the War of 1812 hero Capt. James Lawrence and other lost lives. Then he exits onto the streets and quickly and rather indifferently wraps up his own story.

"Throughout the novel, you constantly see Whitman wandering off the plot, looking for life in all the nooks and crannies of the city," Folsom said. "With the visit to the cemetery, where all plots end, it's as if he's suddenly lost interest in all plots — or at least this plot."

Today, we think of the radically expansive free verse of "Leaves of Grass," with its wandering "I" who "contains multitudes," as one of the fixed signposts in American literary history. But in his notebooks from the early 1850s, Turpin noted, Whitman was toying with other forms for his great work.

"You see him asking, Should it be a novel? Or a play, with thousands of people onstage, chanting in unison?" he said. "It's amazing to think that 'Leaves of Grass' could have taken a different form entirely."

But when asked how it felt to be the first in many generations to read Whitman's now-resurrected novel, Turpin reached for another near-mystical line.