In “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman described himself memorably as “a kosmos, of Manhattan the son.” He bragged that through him “many long dumb voices” would speak, not only those of “prisoners and slaves,” but the “voices of the diseas’d and despairing.” But in some ways his cosmos was as circumscribed as the island he claimed as home. He sympathized with idiots and suicides, with criminals and outcasts. And yet, for all his cosmic inclusiveness, he drew the line at drunkards. The poet who claimed to be “turbulent, fleshy, sensual” was not only a teetotaler but a fierce spokesman for the flourishing Temperance Movement in 19thcentury America. His first and only novel, written when he was 23, was a tract on the evils of drink. Whitman earned $125 for the book — a tidy sum in 1842 — and his onslaught on “the dominion of the liquor fiend” became a best-seller and outsold all his later works, including “Leaves of Grass.”

“Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times” (Duke University Press, 205 pages, $21.95), edited by Christopher Castiglia and Glenn Hendler, may be one of the worst novels ever written. Melodramatic, populated by stick figures in lurid postures of well-oiled dissolution, and written in a drab and sanctimonious prose, the book poses the unanswerable question: How did a poet of genius emerge, a mere 13 years later, from such unpromising beginnings? The first edition of “Leaves of Grass” appeared in 1855 but in that brief interval, the self-righteous prig and pamphleteer had blossomed into a cosmos.

The editors don’t tackle this question, but they do supply a fine and detailed introduction, a scrupulously annotated text, and several fascinating illustrations, including a facsimile of the front page of “The New World,” the tabloid where “Franklin Evans” first appeared on November 24, 1842. They also include a reproduction of a splendid 1848 daguerreotype in which Whitman bears a striking resemblance to Ralph Waldo Emerson, his mentor and first supporter. Despite the studied elegance of his pose, with his glossy curls propped on one hand and his neatly trimmed black beard, Whitman appears less the sophisticated man of letters than the very embodiment of a particularly American kind of wholesomeness. He’s a Boy Scout trying to pass as a rake.

The novel confirms this fauxnaif illusion. Franklin Evans is the country mouse who comes to ruin in the wicked city. Led astray by evil companions, he takes one swig of wine in a tavern and sets himself on the downward path. As wine bibbing leads to harder stuff, the hapless Evans becomes a puppet of the demon rum. His forays into low dives and dance halls cost him his job, wreck his marriage, contribute to his saintly wife’s death, and quickly bring him to a life of petty crime.

Evans is a maddening protagonist, utterly lacking in will or initiative; he’s a sort of moral polyp afloat in a bottle. Even so, the course of his downfall isn’t completely predictable. As if to show how low drink can bring a man, Whitman has Evans move to Virginia where he falls in love with Margaret, a “creole” slave whom he marries but comes to hate. In her “swarthiness,” Margaret embodies sheer animal appetite; she personifies Evans’s own thirst for drink. Interestingly, she’s the only character who pulses with a semblance of life. Maddened by jealousy, “the wretched Creole” poisons the genteel Mrs. Conway, a luscious widow whom Evans wants to take as his mistress. These are the ugliest chapters in the novel, made more distasteful by Whitman’s shameless attempts to play on race for sensational effect. But this is, of course, a tale of redemption. Evans takes the temperance pledge. He ends up inheriting a fortune from a benefactor. Whitman’s moral is clear: Sobriety isn’t just virtuous, it can be lucrative too.

Although worthless as a novel, “Franklin Evans” is a precious document that tells us much about theyoungWhitman. Inlateryears, the poet claimed he wrote it for money but this doesn’t ring quite true. ForWhitman, whoembraced all the contradictions within himself , alcohol stood for an alien evil, an invasive poison. There was something ascetic in his exuberance. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman praises perfumes but says tellingly of them, “The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.” And in a later poem, when he ecstatically lists all human occupations, he extols “the brewery, brewing, the malt, the vats, everything that is done by brewers, wine-makers, vinegarmakers.” It is the act of making which he praises, not the consumption. Whitman wouldn’t have subscribed to “the systematic derangement of the senses” that Rimbaud, his younger contemporary, recommended; he wanted the amplification of the senses to the utmost. A decade later, he would write that “logic and sermons never convince,” but the preachiness of his youth hadn’t left him. It had simply been transformed into something far more encompassing.

Emily Dickinson, his hidden contemporary, had read “Leaves of Grass” and thought it “disgraceful,” but she and Whitman shared an ecstasy of temperance. In an early poem, she wrote a stanza that Walt Whitman could have taken as his motto, had he known of it:

Inebriate of Air am I
And Debauchee of Dew
Reeling through endless summer days
From inns of Molten Blue.

eormsby@nysun.com