In this capacity I decided to embark on a girthy
assignment: verifying the 141-year-old dong, photographed by Thomas Eakins,
which may or may not have belonged to Walt Whitman.
If you only read Whitman in The Norton Anthology of Modern &
Contemporary Poetry in high school,
you probably missed out on how Brooklyn's foremost poet was a total perv. His
epic, Leaves of Grass, is one of
the most erotic books of poetry ever written. He loved nudity, sex, and all the
desires of the body. Or as he put it in the "Song of Myself" from Leaves of Grass:
I believe in the flesh and the
appetites,
Divine am I inside and out, and
I make holy whatever I touch or am touch'd from,
If I worship one thing more than
another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of
it...
The verse may be the most lyrical list of turn-ons ever
written. Whitman was an apostle of nudity even in non-sexual situations, and
in Specimen Days, a collection
of thoughts and journal entries he published late in life, he wrote about how he
was proud of his body.
It was unlikely that he would have opposed posing nude
for photos, especially by an artist as renowned as Thomas Eakins. The mysterious
dick pic in question is actually a group of seven black-and-white photos, which
show a Gandalf-esque man turning like a rotisserie chicken: full-on, in profile,
and from behind. It is but one of many nude physiognomic studies that Eakins did
in his life time, and contains the oldest model, by far, in his entire oeuvre.
The model projects neither modesty nor bravado; he simply allows the camera to
dispassionately catalog his body. In general outline, he ticks all the Whitman
boxes: two arms, two legs, long white beard, and a cute little
wang.
But is it Whitman? Eakins didn't label it so ("old
man," he simply noted), and under close examination, the face appears
inconclusive. Whitman-ish, sure. But actually Whitman?
To make that call, I consulted some experts, starting
with Karen Karbiener, a Whitman scholar and professor at NYU who also leads walking tours
of "Walt's Brooklyn" when the weather is nice. In between spring classes, she
picked apart Whitman's willie in her office.
"The first page of Song of Myself he's like 'I will be undisguised and naked,'
and here he is!" she said through giggles as she pulled up the photo on her
computer monitor. "The size fits," she murmured. "He was six feet tall, never
had a gut, was always in reasonably good shape even when he was older… I haven't
seen a lot of 80-year-old men naked, but presumably this is good shape for an
80-year-old man!"
Not only does the photo fit with what we know of
Whitman physically, Karbiener said, it also fits energetically. Whitman was one
of the most photographed men of the 19th century, and he embraced new
technology in general.(Indeed, a similar mystery in the canon of Whitman ephemera concerns an
early Edison recording of someone (probably Walt) reading a stanza from
Whitman's "America."
"I don't think Walt would have any shame about posing
for these," Karbeiner noted after perusing the photos. "Especially for Eakins.
There was a mutual affection and respect there."
Eakins and Whitman met around 1887, according to the
books kept by Whitman's amanuensis, Horace Traubel. Both were artists of the
first caliber and lovers of virile young men; critics think the "28 Young Men
Bathe by the Shore" passage in Song of Myself inspired Eakins' painting The Swimming Hole.
Shortly after their first meeting, Eakins commenced on a portrait
of Whitman, and it's possible that these nude images were photographic studies
for that painting.
Ed Folsom, a Whitman scholar and co-director of
the Walt Whitman Archive
online, noted that this timing would make
sense for Whitman, writing in a paper for the Walt
Whitman Quarterly Review that "in 1887 Whitman was in relatively good health
(following his recovery from an earlier stroke) and was busy posing for several
artists, including Eakins, Gilchrist, Sidney Morse, and J. W.
Alexander."
Folsom hedged his bets, however, never quite coming out
and saying the model is Whitman. In 1997 Folsom brought the photos to a
neurologist, hoping to discover whether they contained any evidence of the
strokes and other ailments that plagued Whitman towards the end of his life.
Neurological results were, again, inconclusive. Although the Walt Whitman
Archive's digital gallery includes the image, they list it with a note that
suggests it may or may not be him.
Whoever it is, the photo shows the thing that Whitman was
writing about: the absolute adoration of the body.
"People don't want to stick their necks out," Karbiener
said as we discussed the inconclusive scholarly consensus. There's almost no way
to know, unless an undiscovered trove of Whitman's writing resurfaces (a not
implausible possibility, given the
recent discovery of one of his lost manuscripts.) But maybe the actual provenance
of the photo doesn't matter.
"This is the approach I take when I teach it,"
Karbiener stated towards the end of our discussion. "Whoever it is, the photo
shows the thing that Whitman was writing about: the absolute adoration of the
body."
Whitman would have been 198 years old today; were he
still alive, perhaps that photo would grace his Grindr profile. Some might
consider it indecorous to commemorate one of America's literary treasures with
an investigation into his penis, but it's oddly fitting for Whitman. This was a
man who loved puzzles, new technology, and—yes—penises. He reveled in the body,
and in thumbing his nose at Victorian morality. Sharing this photo, whether or
not it is actually of Whitman himself, is perhaps the most Whitman-ic way we
could celebrate his birthday.
# # #
Thomas Eakins, "The Swimming Hole"
1 comment:
What a great article. Very thorough research. I tend to agree with you that this sort of photo would not be something that Whitman would have been ashamed of or would have avoided. This is such a great blog site.
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