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Overview
Still, as the budding poet learned, books neither sell themselves nor move themselves: without an efficient set of connections to get books to readers, the democratic media-saturated future Whitman imagined would have remained warehoused. Whitman’s works sometimes ran through the “many-cylinder’d steam printing press” and were carried in bulk on “the strong and quick locomotive.” Yet during his career, his publications did not follow a progressive path toward mass production and distribution. Even at the end of his life, in the 1890s as his fame was growing, the poet was selling copies of his latest works by hand to visitors at his small house in Camden, New Jersey. Mass media and centralization were only one part of the rich media world that Whitman embraced.
Whitman’s Drift asks how the many options for distributing books and newspapers shaped the way writers wrote and readers read. Writers like Whitman spoke to the imagination inspired by media transformations by calling attention to connectedness, to how literature not only moves us emotionally, but moves around in the world among people and places. Studying that literature and how it circulated can help us understand not just how to read Whitman’s works and times, but how to understand what is happening to our imaginations now, in the midst of the twenty-first century media explosion.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609384777 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2017 |
| Series: | Iowa Whitman Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 316 |
| File size: | 17 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
TO REACH THE WORKMEN DIRECT
I want you to reach the workmen direct — treat with the craftsman without an intermediary — with the man who sets the type, the man who puts it into form, the man who runs the foundry.
— Walt Whitman, speaking to Horace Traubel in 1888
Walt Whitman's newsboys, unlike Louisa May Alcott's, have names: in June 1888, Horace Traubel, a former newsboy himself, recorded that the poet "gave me a quarter to give Ben Hichens, a newsboy, who stands around the ferry on the Philadelphia side." From his earliest days in journalism, Whitman, born to a hard-working rural artisan family, was attentive to the newsboys, drivers, and other carriers of the written word — distributors all. (Teamsters — also explicitly named, "Pop Rice, Big Frank, Yellow Joe, Pete Callahan" — would become his favored poetic token of the constant motion of the United States, the effecters of flow that made the great drift of the country possible.) "The orange women, the newsboys, and the limping young man with long-lived cakes," Whitman wrote, with an ironic edge, about the very kind of train scene that Alcott described, "look in at the windows with an expression that says very plainly, 'We'll run along-side, and risk all the danger, while you find the change.'" And in an editorial for the New York Aurora in the 1840s, Whitman, lacking material for his column, described a walk he'd taken that day. "Strangely enough," he wrote, self-mockingly, "nobody stared at us with admiration ... no news boys stopped, and trembled, and took off their hats, and cried 'behold the man what uses up the Great Bamboozle!'" Whitman undermines Alcott's stereotype of the gaping newsboy not just by depicting them as self-composed, but by implying that they are readers, savvy enough not to be impressed by newspaper rivalries like that of Whitman with his former employer Park Benjamin — the "Great Bamboozle," founder of the cheap paper The New World.
The relation of Whitman's life and poetry to laboring people has been a preoccupation of his critics since the poet's own time. The image of the rough; his iconoclastic, slangy poetry; and the non-elite circles to which the poet generally confined himself socially serve in part as the provocation for such assessments. "While he is an aggressive champion of democracy and of the working-man," a reviewer in the literary journal the Critic put it in 1881, "in a broad sense of the term working-man, his admirers have been almost exclusively of a class the furthest possibly removed from that which labors for daily bread by manual work." This was an overstatement, as we will see, but it characterized Whitman's most powerful and influential admirers. The critic admitted that the poet's representativeness was not undermined by this fact, but rather was reconfigured in Whitman's address to and as one of the non-elite: "He avoids the cultured few. He wants to represent, and does in his own strange way represent, the lower middle stratum of humanity. But, so far, it is not evident that his chosen constituency cares for, or has even recognized him. Wide readers are beginning to guess his proportions."
Was Whitman read by non-elite, non-middle-class readers? Did he care to be? Whitman is not easy to judge, but we keep finding ways to do so, particularly when considering his late career, his nationalism, his attitude toward capital, or his take on race. In this chapter I tell a new story about Whitman's work and career by attending to his ways of inhabiting the literary life. This chapter reconfigures long-standing questions about the role of literature as a mediator of politics and class through an analysis of some little explored ways in which Whitman imagined, in his terms, reaching "the workmen direct." While Whitman meant the words of this epigraph to evoke a material transaction — the workmen mentioned were bringing one of his books into being — I argue for an additional suggestiveness in his choice of these words. Reaching, surely, through being read — but not only that, as the gestural metaphor implies. Also hinted at is a more intimate contact and exchange. The workmen, that is to say, represent a broader definition of the other-than-elite audiences with which Whitman was trying to connect — or, perhaps, that Whitman imagined his work might be the occasion for interconnecting. Studies of the nineteenth-century U.S. working class have transformed literary criticism, but often focus largely on urban mechanics, which in Whitman's time would still have excluded most of the poor and most laborers in a heavily rural United States. Whitman, who moved from what was then rural Long Island to the giant and growing New York City, was sensitive to this distinction. He was also careful to attend to those who even in urban areas neither fit into nor necessarily identified with the working class: from the petit bourgeois artisans and shopkeepers to the nonworking poor, soldiers, the incarcerated, and those working in the many gray markets of urbanizing America. Thinking about these groups by way of the experiences, stereotypes, preoccupations, and media that connected them, or by a shared imaginary sense of the category of literature, Whitman formulated a sensitive and flexible conceptual framework for his poetic career. He spoke and acted this framework into being, and without implying that we need to replace more recognizably (to us) political kinds of analysis, I follow its infrastructural elements to see what new purchase on the politics of literary aesthetics Whitman's vision of literary interconnectedness might offer. To rephrase the questions with which this paragraph begins: What were the associations and the channels that Whitman hoped to build with his poetry and his way of being in the world? What articulations of literary form to the material transmissions of his words effected that circulatory imagination?
This chapter explores a range of non-print-based factors in Whitman's circulation, including performance, the oral transmission of stories about the poet, his physical presence and his image, his continued connection with his rural hometown, and the material aspects of his books. Whitman appears to have imagined these elements in the drift of his work as key not just to shaping his relationship with the common people of his day, or to the possibility of his poetry reaching them, but to his distribution over time. Readers in the long future, his circulation among people of all "places" (one of his preferred terms, blending space and status), would be an authenticating factor in his poetic program of representing America. This series of scenes opens the larger engagements of this book for consideration: What kinds of evidence might we use to study distribution? How might structuring literary historical interrogations by the light of the means and strategies of circulation used by writers and publishers of the past get us out of some of our critical deadlocks? From strategizing with Horace Traubel about bookmaking and labor politics, to the publicity tactics of his poem "After All, Not to Create Only," to his long relationship with the Long-Islander, Whitman cultivated multiple circulatory modes simultaneously. This palette of possibility is one dimension of a larger picture of Whitman's imagination of the articulation between literary circulation and the transformation of sensibility: an imagination that was aesthetic, political, and practical, offering insight into the potentialities of nineteenth-century literary worlds. If working-class literary studies have often been concerned to demonstrate and criticize the aestheticization of politics by an increasingly hegemonic capitalist media order, in Whitman's texts and distribution strategies we have a chance to see the very process of aestheticization put into commotion.
"VOICES VEILED, AND I REMOVE THE VEIL"
The study of non-elite, non-middle-class reading has been one of the most methodologically productive, if controversial, areas of book history. From the opening movement of E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, with its discussion of popular emblems, to the work of Q. D. Leavis and Richard Altick on British popular readerships, to the landmark studies of dime novels by Michael Denning and romance novels by Janice Radway, a picture has emerged not just of a rich engagement with print by everyday folks, but of that readership's role in transforming the very print and literary industries themselves. The disagreements among scholars in this area have to do, by and large, with the effects and values of such reading and such transformations. Was the spread of literacy and reading an opiate for troubled masses — and literature, one of the agents of capitalist submission? Or did these phenomena enable new conceptions of "the people" or "the working class," and new forms of agency, communication, and organization? Or does it all come out the same in the end: print, only one of many forces in the regimes of industrialization, militarization, and incarceration, offered a give-and-take that is difficult either to indict or to laud? These debates often hinge on definitions of class, on disagreements about the agency of the common people in relation to intellectual or party leadership, and on the problem of reception — of knowing just how the dispossessed read, given the scarcity or untrustworthiness of the records remaining to us.
"Our knowledge of reading practices is limited, particularly for the period after the Civil War," Barbara Sicherman reminds us. "We do not know whether more people read books or the same people read more books, let alone understand the meaning of reading in people's lives." We do not know with any depth whether with increasing population, education, and library building, more people of certain classes read more, or differently, than they traditionally had, or how ethnicity and immigration affected overall patterns of reading. We know that literacy was important, and increasingly axial to the middle-class imagination of itself and others. "Let every man, if possible," William Ellery Channing advised, "gather some good books under his roof, and obtain access for himself and family to some social library. Almost any luxury should be sacrificed to this." And what of every woman? Sicherman points out that "an older tradition of Bible literacy linked to America's dissenting Protestant origins joined with the ideology of republican motherhood that required a certain level of female learning to produce virtuous male citizens." But what about book reading, or poetry reading in particular? Did these activities become broader or deeper with the undeniable growth and spread of the U.S. population, or with the increase in the numbers of books or magazines printed? How many readers remained unreached? How many books sat unread? How many were heard, or overheard? We may never know the answers to these questions, of course, though they seem foundational to assertions about the power of literature in the shaping of national feeling, or the penetration of a functionalist capitalist mentality, or secularization.
Whitman offers both fascinating, suggestive evidence and interpretive challenges to the investigation of working-class reading. Literature, Richard Brodhead observes, "has been differentially available throughout its history: available on some terms at some periods to some figures and groups of figures, but available on other terms — including not at all — to others." Brodhead emphasizes the social worlds of literature, both those generating it and those it helped generate, transform, or maintain. The transmission of literature inits material embodiments, on paper or orally, complicates the boundaries of the "literary social worlds" that are Brodhead's focus. Whitman is an author whose works transgressed these worlds, even if he did not.
On one hand, our knowledge of Whitman's reading habits is deep, our archives enormous: thousands of pages of printed text with Whitman's marginal notes remain, and hundreds of pages of free-standing annotations. Whitman's close friendships and romantic relationships were mostly with wage-earning men like Peter Doyle, Harry Stafford, and Horace Traubel. Whitman gave common folks, including, for example, wounded soldiers and Peter Doyle, copies of his books, samples of poetry published in newspapers and periodicals, and photographs of himself. Not only did he circulate his own work among them, he maintained relationships through distribution scenes governed by intimate, embodied protocols of information circulation. An 1868 letter to a young friend offers a window onto this habit:
Dear friend Harry Hurt — I thought I would just drop you a line for yourself — but no doubt you keep fully posted about me by my letters to Pete, as I am willing you or any of my particular friends who wish to, should read them (he knows who I would be willing should read them — I leave it to him). ... Harry, I wish when you see Ben. Thompson, conductor, you would say I sent him my love and have not forgot him. Let him read this letter. I send him a Newspaper, the N.Y. Clipper. I have marked the piece about the Five Points. ... I wish you to tell John Towers, conductor, I send him my love, and we will see each other again one of these days. I send him a Clipper also with an account of the Five Points — Harry, you let one of them lend you the paper, and read the account.
In this exchange, printed stories, manuscript letters, and face-to-face transmission of greetings functioned together as a bonding system among these men.
On the other hand, in this vignette of newspaper circulation and workingmen's intimacy, and in others like it, Whitman doesn't mention any politically marked class identifiers, nor does he figure the nation as the framework or cause for bonding. And certainly in his reading habits, Whitman was unusual even (as we know from his correspondence) in his own family: the intense absorption of news and literary gossip he acquired as a habit in the newspaper industry was still with him in his final years in Camden. Whitman's own experience of work was varied, from stretches of unemployment, to wage-laboring, to petit-bourgeois real estate investment and construction, to the quasi-middle-class life of an editor and the uncertain one of a salaried government employee. In general, as M. Wynn Thomas points out, Whitman's "use of poetry to call into existence a western society that will be simultaneously individualistic and cooperative" shows his "early education in what Eric Foner has called 'the central ideas and values of artisanal radicalism.'" He worked with or was friends with labor radicals for much of his life — and yet he praised the wealthy capitalist Andrew Carnegie, one of his supporters, despite his notorious record of labor exploitation. And when it came to race, and the role of African Americans in the polity and the workforce, Whitman was — it is hard to put it any other way — a bit of a mess. Eric Lott writes of Whitman's depictions of blackface minstrelsy and the politics of race that "Whitman is a salutary reminder that there is no simple correspondence between individual racial feeling, cultural predisposition, and political ideology." Whitman in this demonstrates "both the potential and the real limits of class egalitarianism as a wellspring for antiracism," and, one might add, for any other clear political reform. In Whitman, a commoner brought to the pantheon, we have an inspiring example of how a writer need not have comfortable origins to rise to literary-canonical status. In his writing and conversation, however, we also find no clear platform for workers' rights or any easy-to-label social transformation, but a vigorous attempt to transform the very language of class, status, value, or appreciation that one might use to organize a political vision.
Even if we dare not generalize overmuch from Whitman's reading and writing habits, there are some certainties. We know that there was a vibrant reading and writing life beyond the parlors and halls of elite and middling America, and one often oriented toward a program of social change. There was the Lowell Offering, written by female mill workers; the sensational work of Philadelphia labor organizer and fiction writer George Lippard; and the radical periodical publishing of labor organizers, African American activists, and a range of reformers. How did literary texts get to and among the working men and women of America, or rural farmers, or the nonworking poor? The routes were many, and as scholars have increasingly come to appreciate, often involved surprising uses of print — or no print at all.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Whitman's Drift"
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Table of Contents
Contents Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction. The Drift of It Every Thing One. To Reach the Workmen Direct Two. The Good Gray Market Three. Transmitting the Untranslatable Four. Whitman in Unexpected Places Five. Over the Roofs of the World Notes IndexWhat People are Saying About This
“Whitman’s Drift is a theoretically sophisticated, practically adept work that revitalizes Whitman as a critical subject no less fit for the multicultural digital age than for the age of print. This is the most powerful, original new book on Whitman I have seen in a long time.”
“Showing real mastery over the fields of Whitman studies, book history, and media studies, Cohen goes looking for Whitman in places that we may not think to find him, and along the way he develops a fascinating methodological framework (the drift of distribution and reception) for helping us to understand how he charted his journey.”