Zachary Turpin ’07 (M.A.) is kind of a big deal. You may not know his name or even his discovery, but in the literary world, Turpin has done something incredible. Actually, he has done something incredible twice.
In case you didn’t realize it, Zachary Turpin ’07 (M.A.) is kind of a big deal. You may not know his name or even his discovery, but in the literary world, Turpin has done something incredible. Actually, he has done something incredible twice.
To casual observers, Turpin’s findings of lost Walt Whitman texts may seem insignificant. But they’d be wrong. The two previously unknown works that Turpin found, stashed away in archival microfilm and forgotten newspapers, represent something akin to discovering a secret 1960s-era Beatles side project or an unidentified Shakespearean novel.
The very fact that Turpin was even looking for potential lost works speaks to a changing mindset in literary study – a flat-world mentality giving way to something much more complicated and well-rounded.
“Early in my academic studies,” Turpin explains, “I believed literature from the past was something definite, something set in stone. I had been operating on the assumption that literature was squared, that a body of work is monolithic, complete and not expanding further.”
And no one is more iconic, chiseled into stone, so to speak, than Walt Whitman – certainly one of the faces on a literary Mount Rushmore of 19th-century American writing, sharing space with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Mark Twain.
“Like many of us, who meet these great writers in high school and ENGL 101, I had the mistaken belief that 19th-century writing was cut and dried,” Turpin continues, “and that an author’s work is essentially known. Fortunately, there is still much more out there. American literature – especially as it stands in the 1800s – is something to be thought of as still under construction.”
And so, the “statues” we have erected remain incomplete – in very exciting ways.
Both Whitman writings that Turpin unearthed – penned under pseudonyms – had been serialized in New York newspapers in the 1850s, and these two long-form pieces – Manly Health and Training (1858) and Life and Adventures of Jack Engle (1852) – represent two very different works from a writer who at the same time was crafting his magnum opus, Leaves of Grass (first published in 1855). These two “new” pieces add to the Whitmanian oeuvre, revealing different and exciting aspects of an author and poet that has been widely studied and more widely admired for more than a century.
And all because Turpin had the right eye and the right mind to see it.
BARBARIC YAWP
Turpin will be the first to admit that the act of discovery is actually not that exciting – at least from outside appearances. His “aha” moments lacked any outright, cinematic climax: for Manly Health, he was alone in a library basement in Houston; for Jack Engle, he was in his bedroom checking emails at midnight. Both moments, however, provided Turpin an adrenaline-induced head rush, a heart-pounding thunderclap of the eye and brain on par with the most audacious Fast and Furious car chase and accompanying gratuitous pyrotechnic explosion.
“Research, in real time, is agonizingly boring to an outside observer,” Turpin admits. “However, for the person doing it, it is endlessly interesting – it is an internal adventure.”
And, in both cases, during these internal quests to find lost Whitman writings, Turpin felt as if he were stepping into a Whitman poem and physically embracing the Bard of America: From behind the screen where I hid I advance personally, solely to you / Camerado! This is no book; / Who touches this, touches a man.
Having pored over Whitman’s many diaries and notes (a literary feat unto itself) as a doctoral student at the University of Houston, Turpin was able to track down clues of possible Whitman ties in the digitized pages of 19th-century newspapers from archives across the country. True to form, Turpin was his own best Google search, his mind containing a mental algorithm of key words and phrases tied to Whitman’s vast inventory of false starts and character names (for potential short stories and novels), his draft advertising copy (Whitman was also a master at self-promotion) and his favorite pen names.
In the case of Manly Health, Turpin recognized from Whitman’s journal a nom de plume – “Mose Velsor of Brooklyn” – and tracked down the New York Atlas, a weekly newspaper kept alive only in the American Antiquarian Society, and on film held by the Penn State Library.
“I thought what I would find might make for an interesting little article in an academic journal,” Turpin says. “But as I sifted through the microfilm, I found a full, book-length wellness treatise. I was in total shock, and it took a day or two for it to really hit me. It was indescribable: to be privy to something that no living eyes had seen in over 150 years. I had here a manifesto on living healthfully, being an American male in the 19th century. It was social and philosophical grist, revealing sides of Whitman that are less emphasized in his work.”
If you were picking a bookstore section for this work, Manly Health falls easily in the self-help/self-improvement aisle. It is full of advice and counsel on how men can live what Whitman calls the “stirring life,” ensuring vigor and peak mental and physical conditions until at least a man’s mid-50s. Whitman’s celebration of the American male physique is clearly recognizable as he advises men to sleep well, get up early, take in fresh air, eat in moderation, take cold baths and avoid alcohol.
For Whitman, a sound body equated to a sound mind: “No amount of cultivation, intellect, or wealth, will ever make up to a community for the lack of manly muscle, ability and pluck.”
And Whitman lays out a far-ranging regimen to guide the American male (who he considered “undoubtedly the handsomest men, as a race, now upon the earth”), covering training, diet, a focus on strength in the legs and feet, swimming and bathing, voice exercises, a school curriculum for physical education, night eating (or the lack thereof) and avoidance of condiments, prostitutes and too much interior air, overexertion of the brain and an over-reliance on medicines.
The literary world, especially Whitmaniacs, as they lovingly call themselves, rejoiced in the new discovery when Manly Health and Training was published in 2016. But Turpin wasn’t done: “When it happens once, you pursue it again.”
MISSING ME ONE PLACE, SEARCH ANOTHER
Surprisingly, Turpin is a late-blooming Whitmaniac.
While he certainly knew of the poet and his impact on the American canon, Turpin had navigated his literary voyage on different waters. Growing up in Dripping Springs, a small, bedroom community of Austin, Texas, Turpin had worked his way during high school through a good portion of the Harvard-Radcliffe Top 100 Novels list and was especially drawn to James Joyce’s writings. As an undergraduate English major at New York University and then a graduate student in the College’s English master’s program, Turpin focused on American literature, but not Whitman.
However, at the University of Houston, where Turpin would go on to complete his doctorate, he was assigned to read a first edition of Leaves of Grass.
BEWARE OF HOT DRINKS
Then of hot drinks – if you are disposed, indeed, to place your physique in perfect condition, it is probable that you must give these up entirely. In almost all cases, they are enervating, injure the action of the stomach upon the food, and produce bad effects upon the general tone of the system.
— From Walt Whitman’s Manly Health and Training: To Teach the Science of a Sound and Beautiful Body
RIDDING DEPRESSION
The observance of the laws of manly training, duly followed, can utterly rout and do away with the curse of a depressed mind, melancholy, “ennui,” which now, in more than half the men of America, blights a large portion of the days of their existence.
— From Walt Whitman’s Manly Health and Training: To Teach the Science of a Sound and Beautiful Body
“It is a common experience to read Leaves of Grass and get hit in the gut. Its style and its form have a power – even after 160- plus years. Whitman’s mature poetry can still make you blush, confuse you, move you and motivate you,” Turpin says. “Leaves of Grass is one of the most important English-language documents in the world. It is political, social, individual and cosmic. It was a revelation. It hit me like a literary bomb. It was, to say the least, transformative.”
Turpin, who identified with Whitman’s effusive and elated style, dug deep to better understand the poet.
“Whitman didn’t just appear out of nowhere,” Turpin explains. “While he wanted people to believe he was just some guy stepping off of New York’s Broadway, a common man with this immaculately conceived poetic touchstone, in reality, Whitman was a protean writer, adept at adapting to different audiences, writing with different sounds. Most people may not know that he was a journalist for more than 20 years before Leaves of Grass and had written short stories and even a temperance novel.”
But what did appear out of nowhere was an advertisement in the New York Daily Times, which Turpin found late one night, his wife and new baby asleep next to him, as he was scanning through search results in ProQuest Historical Newspapers. In the ad, he found mention of a serialized story to be published in another paper – The Sunday Dispatch, to which Whitman was known to have been an anonymous contributor. The ad mentions “Jack Engle” as the title character, and the neurons in Turpin’s brain started firing and rushing to make connections. This name, a seemingly throw-away detail, appears somewhere else, too: in one of Whitman’s early notebooks, a handmade thing full of ideas for short stories and novellas. None were known to have ever been published.
For a month, Turpin corresponded with an image librarian from the Library of Congress in order to track down a copy of The Sunday Dispatch. Then, one Friday afternoon, as he was settling in for the weekend, he opened his email to find a message with an attachment: a digital image of the newspaper in question. As his eyes ratcheted down the page, he realized that lightning had struck twice.
It was a novel, titled Life and Adventures of Jack Engle.
In early 2017, Jack Engle, once serialized in obscurity, was republished by the University of Iowa Press, and it immediately found a new audience. It was even made into an audio book, narrated by actor Jon Hamm (famous for his work in Mad Men and a voice that could launch a thousand products).
Turpin is quick to point out that Jack Engle “doesn’t hold up on its own. The next great American novel is not something you just trip over. Rather, this work expands and complicates what we know about the great poet.”
The literary world agrees. The book is important – in context.
“This makes us reconsider everything we thought we knew about Whitman’s early writing career,” says Ed Folsom, one of the leading authorities on Whitman, co-director of the Walt Whitman Archive and editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, based at the University of Iowa. “For the first time, we have fiction written and published by Whitman after he had started writing the poems that would be included in his first edition of Leaves of Grass. Scholars and critics will be working on the implications of this for many years to come. We can now see that Whitman in the early 1850s was still unsure about what form his life’s work would take.”
NOT A BIT TAMED
This notion of path and career aspirations is an interesting one. Clearly, Walt Whitman struggled to find his identity and his voice in the 1850s. Was he going to be an American Charles Dickens (Jack Engle certainly echoes a Dickensian tone, style and plot framework), or perhaps he would be a 19th-century health and wellbeing guru or, maybe, he could be the first great American poet? In many ways, Turpin, like Whitman, faced the same uncertainty trying to determine the form that his life’s work would take.
From a distance, Turpin appears like your typical academic: Boy loves books. Boy goes to college to study books. Boy gets Ph.D. in books. Boy becomes a professor teaching books. It seems like a pretty predictable come-full-circle story.
But rarely does life follow such natural, sequential steps. And Turpin’s life is no exception. Like many of us, Turpin had many starts and stops in his career as he tried to figure out which path to take. While he had an inkling, even as early as high school, that he wanted to teach, he dipped his toe in many different careers: teaching middle school math and English in Austin (“I was not cut from the proper cloth to teach at the middle school level”); volunteering in New Zealand and trapping invasive species, such as rats, weasels, stoats and skinks; being a staff writer for the Book of Odds website, a statistical almanac for probability; and serving as a health and medical writer doing SEO work for Brafton, a content marketing agency in Boston.
“Let’s just say,” Turpin laughs, “I had a lot of gap years.”
Translate “gap years” to “interests,” and you have a better understanding of Turpin, who is now an assistant professor of American literature at the University of Idaho. His professors in the College’s master’s program in English recognized his wide-ranging interests and saw them as unique strengths.
“Turpin was the smartest person in the room – in a room full of very smart people,” says Mike Duvall, today’s director of the M.A. in English program and then one of Turpin’s American literature professors in fall 2006. “And like Whitman, Zach is exuberantly interested in everything. His interests are catholic – nothing is off limits to him and he does well with a lot of things.”
Chris Warnick, associate professor of English, agrees: “Zach was interested in not following the traditional path. His interests were all over the place. In fact, he did a teaching internship with me for ENGL 102, a course about composition and literature. We studied the play M. Butterfly and he brought in Weezer’s 1996 album, Pinkerton, and talked about how it was riffing off of Madame Butterfly. The students loved it. Zach also established ‘office hours’ – something fairly unusual for graduate assistants. He hung out in the Addlestone Library, where he picked a table near the computers on the first floor, in order to be available to students on their schedules. Not many people are as motivated as he is.”
In the eyes of Trish Horn Ward ’78, professor of English and then director of the master’s program, “Zach is very quiet, sort of self-deprecating, but smart as a whip. He just stood out.”
While pursuing my meditations, the noon had passed, and the after-half of the day crept onward; and it was time for me to close my ramble, and move homeward. I put my pencil and the slip of paper on which I had been copying, in my pocket, and took one slow and last look around, ere I went forth again into the city, and to resume my interest in affairs that lately so crowded upon me.
Out there in the fashionable thoroughfare, how bustling was life, and how jauntily it wandered close along the side of those warnings of its inevitable end. How gay that throng along the walk! Light laughs come from them, and jolly talk – those groups of well-dressed young men – those merry boys returning from school – clerks going home from their labors – and many a form, too, of female grace and elegance.
Could it be that coffins, six feet below where I stood, enclosed in the ashes of like young men, whose vestments, during life, had engrossed the same anxious care – and schoolboys and beautiful women; for they too were buried here, as well as the aged and infirm.
But onward rolled the broad, bright current, and troubled themselves not yet with gloomy thoughts; and that showed more philosophy in them perhaps than such sentimental meditations as any the reader has been perusing.
— From Walt Whitman’s Life and Adventures of Jack Engle
Standing out has never really been an issue for Turpin. Maybe it’s the tattoos on his arms, bearing the Latin phrase: “cras amet qui numquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet” (loosely translated, “Let those love now who have never loved; let those who have loved, love yet again”). The optimistic phrase appears in John Fowles’ classic novel The Magus and is taken from a third-century poem, “The Vigil of Venus.” Not exactly your typical body ink.
Or, maybe it’s just how he approaches things that makes him stand out. For example, when applying for doctorate programs, Turpin wanted his application to be memorable, to say something about himself.
“I was under the impression that a personal statement in an application is supposed to differentiate you in some personal way, as opposed to what really matters: one’s academic and professional plans,” Turpin observes. “I wanted to bowl people over with my ‘originality.’”
In literature, Ernest Vincent Wright had received international notoriety in 1939 for publishing Gadsby, a novel that did not use the letter E. Along those same lines, Turpin had seen an episode of Gilmore Girls in which, at a swanky party, no one uses the letter E in their conversations. Thus inspired, Turpin made his personal statement a lipogram, omitting the letter E.
“Rejection is very educational,” laughs Turpin, who would later ditch the lipogram approach, tweaking his personal statement to describe his academic interests, and then gaining acceptance into the University of Houston’s doctoral program, where his manifold interests converged and led to his Whitman discoveries.
I CONTAIN MULTITUDES
For the past two years, Turpin has garnered a lot of attention for these two found Whitman texts. He’s graced the pages of The New Yorker, The New York Times and Parade Magazine, among countless other news outlets. His personal highlight, to date: an interview with Ari Shapiro from NPR’s All Things Considered. And all that has certainly been nice, but Turpin is more excited with what literary treasures still lie undiscovered, waiting to be found.
“I feel like a 49er,” he says. “When something like this happens, you want to telegraph to the world – ‘there’s gold in these hills!’ And there is a lot more that people can do. I consider my role in the American literary community to be a Johnny Appleseed for digital detective work and to help democratize the research process.”
As Turpin points out, there are millions upon millions of digitized pages in archives around the world that have yet to be reviewed – and these pages can be read from the comforts of a home computer. New pages are being added and digitized by archives every day as people discover once-forgotten diaries, journals and newspapers hidden away in archives, as well as boxes and trunks in their attics and basements.
In these electronic pages, Turpin knows there is more gold to be found. For his part, he is searching for two more unknown novels that Whitman mentions in his notebooks – The Sleeptalker and Proud Antoinette. And he also has a white whale, of sorts – a rumored lost work of Herman Melville’s called the Isle of the Cross – that he would love to find.
“Judging by the last few years,” Turpin says, “anything is possible. As Whitman pointed out in his own poetry, ‘nothing is ever lost, or can be lost.’”
