The Village
Page 6
Toward the end he hopefully projects, “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” In this he was sorely disappointed. Very few copies sold, very few reviews appeared. Of those that did, only the ones ghostwritten by Whitman himself were positive; the others denounced it as “a mass of stupid filth,” “stupid and meaningless twaddle,” or a “muck of abomination.” One contemporary poet seemed to appreciate the work: Ralph Waldo Emerson. As a young newspaperman in 1842, Whitman had been terrifically impressed by an Emerson lecture called “Nature and the Powers of the Poet,” in which Emerson declared that “New topics, new powers, a new spirit arise, which threaten to abolish all that was called poetry.” Emerson called for an American poet who would capture “our log-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians, our boasts and our repudiations.” Not outlandishly, Whitman thought he’d done that in Leaves of Grass, and he sent a copy to Emerson, who wrote back, “I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed . . . I give you joy of your free brave thought. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be . . . I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” Emerson came to New York to take Whitman out to dinner. Understandably elated, Whitman had Emerson’s letter printed in the New York Tribune, reproduced it in his expanded 1856 second edition of Leaves, and had the words “I greet you at the beginning of a great career” emblazoned in gold lettering on the book’s spine. Emerson, who hadn’t been asked permission to make his private letter so very public, was taken aback by the brashness, but he got over it. Whitman took Emerson to Pfaff’s, which he found too rough and noisy. Emerson’s friends Henry Thoreau and Bronson Alcott (Louisa May’s father) made their own pilgrimage to New York to meet Whitman; Alcott noted in his journal that Thoreau and Whitman were wary with each other, “like two beasts, each wondering what the other would do, whether to snap or run; and it came to no more than cold compliments between them.”
For all that, the 1856 edition also went unread and unloved. Whitman was furiously writing new poems and planning a third edition when he came to Pfaff’s. He wasn’t much of a drinker. His first published book had been a temperance novel, Franklin Evans; or The Inebriate, published in 1842. At twenty thousand copies, it sold a lot better than Leaves of Grass would. But he liked being around a jolly crowd, and he very much liked the respect and honors afforded him by Clapp and the Saturday Press. He and Clapp were kindred spirits, both lapsed temperance men with Quaker backgrounds and both older than most of the Pfaff’s crowd. In its short existence, Clapp’s weekly printed nearly fifty items about Whitman. Clapp helped broker the 1860 publication of the third edition of Leaves—vastly expanded to more than four hundred and fifty pages—with Whitman’s first commercial publisher, Thayer and Eldridge in Boston. Whitman in turn brokered paid ads by the publisher in the Press. Not surprisingly, when the book was printed, the Press was an enthusiastic if lonely voice of huzzahs and kudos. “We announce a great Philosopher—perhaps a great Poet—in every way an original man,” the review in the Press cheered. Scholars have debated whether it was Clapp or Whitman himself who wrote it. Clapp and Whitman were both believers that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and the Press reprinted some extremely harsh reviews of the new Leaves, including one that pleaded with the poet to commit suicide: “If Walt has left within him any charity, will he not now rid the disgusted world of himself?” Other reviews dismissed his work as “obnubilate, incoherent, overwritten flub-drub” and likened him to a gorilla.
Vanity Fair, begun in 1859 by three Pfaff’s regulars, the brothers William Allen Stephens, Henry Louis Stephens, and Louis Henry Stephens, promoted the 1860 Leaves and its author in its own way—by poking gentle fun at them. Not the direct ancestor of today’s glossy magazine, Vanity Fair was a humor and satire weekly modeled on London’s Punch. All the Pfaffians wrote for it, though the blind items and pseudonyms make it hard to say who wrote what. Along with making sport of revered public figures such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Abraham Lincoln, and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, Vanity Fair ran more than twenty humorous references to Whitman before it folded in 1863, presciently treating the little-known poet—the magazine’s friend—as though he were as large a figure as those others, and as deserving of some satirical jabs.
The most famous Vanity Fair jape at Whitman’s expense was a twenty-five-line parody of “Song of Myself,” published in the paper two months before the 1860 Leaves appeared, and thus serving as left-handed advance publicity. It was titled “Counter-Jumps” and subtitled “A Poemattina.—After Walt Whitman.” The Pfaff’s house jester Fitz-James O’Brien is a good candidate for its authorship. Besides being a brilliant parody of Whitman’s style, it makes winking mockery of his homosexuality, which was well known to his comrades at the saloon. It was his other reason for frequenting Pfaff’s: it was a hangout for “tall, strapping, comely young men” who were not averse to what he called “manly love,” “adhesiveness,” and “comradeship.” In the 1840s and ’50s—his twenties and thirties—Whitman cruised (he used the word) the streets of Manhattan and the Brooklyn waterfront to meet young workingmen, or “trade,” with a special fondness for stage drivers, omnibus drivers, and ferryboat crews, once referring, in what must have been an unintended pun, to “all my ferry friends.” His notebooks from these years are filled with entries like “Peter—large, strong-boned young fellow, driver . . . I liked his refreshing wickedness, as it would be called by the orthodox,” and “David Wilson—night of Oct. 11 ’62, walking up from Middagh [a street in Brooklyn Heights]—slept with me.” At Pfaff’s he met a group of young men who called themselves the Fred Gray Association for one of their members. He wrote of the Fred Gray group’s “animation, hilarity and ‘sparkle,’ ” and of joining them on their rounds of the “lager beer saloons” on the Bowery. It’s believed that it was at Pfaff’s that Whitman met Fred Vaughan, an Irish-Canadian stage driver who may have been the inspiration for a large new section of poems in the 1860 edition of Leaves known as the “Calamus” poems. Calamus is a figure in Greek mythology whose grief transforms him into a reed after his young lover Karpos dies; it’s also the name of a plant with a distinctly phallic shape. The Calamus poems contain passages such as the following:
Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,
With the comrade’s long-dwelling kiss, or the new husband’s kiss,
For I am the new husband, and I am the comrade.
Or if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,
Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip,
Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;
For thus merely touching you is enough, is best,
And thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.
To Whitman’s despair, Vaughan married and fathered four children. In cities like New York with huge populations of single working-class men constituting a “bachelor subculture,” it wasn’t uncommon for a young man to take his sex and romance any way he could find it and later settle down in a traditional marriage.
The Calamus poems were as close as Whitman came to outing himself. But his friends at Vanity Fair had beaten him to the punch. “Counter-Jumpers” was their joking term for “the well-dressed male clerks who worked in the fashionable stores catering to women,” and “one way of speaking about the emergence of an urban homosexual culture.” An accompanying illustration depicted the bearded poet looming over a smaller male. Associating Whitman with counter-jumpers was a clever way to tweak him on two counts, both for being gay and for being so unbohemian in his lust for commercial success. It begins:
I am the Counter-Jumper, weak and effeminate.
I love to loaf and lie about dry-goods.
I loaf and invite the Buyer.
I am the essence of retail. The sum and result of small profits and quick returns.
It ends:
&nb
sp; For I am the creature of weak depravities;
I am the Counter-jumper;
I sound my feeble yelp over the woofs of the World.
Whitman’s sexuality was known not only to his friends but to at least one of his enemies. Five years before the Calamus poems, one of the reviewers of the 1855 Leaves attacked him openly for it. After expressing his “disgust and detestation” of the poetry in Leaves, the critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold, who had previously written a rather nasty obituary for Poe, dropped straight to his main point, resorting to Latin to expose the “vileness” of the poet: “Peccatum illud horrible, inter Christianos non nominamdum.” That is, “the horrible sin not to be named among Christians,” later in the century known as the love that dare not speak its name.
IN 1861 THE ONSET OF THE CIVIL WAR BEGAN TO BREAK UP THE Pfaff’s crowd. Some of them joined the army, while Whitman dallied at Pfaff’s for a while, then went to Washington to volunteer as an army nurse. In the decades after the Civil War he finally achieved some of the respect he’d hoped for, developing a following as America’s “good gray poet,” acquiring fans including Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker. To protect his reputation he dissembled and denied his homosexuality until his death in 1892, once angrily claiming to have sired six children.
Ada Clare traveled and continued to pursue both her writing and her acting careers. In 1866 her novel Only a Woman’s Heart, based on her affair with Gottschalk, was published to harsh reviews, some from writers she’d previously panned. In February 1874, a small item in the Times reported that Clare “was some days ago nursing a pet dog which was ill, and while holding the animal in her lap the treacherous little beast, for some trivial cause or other, sprang at her, and, catching her nose between its teeth, wrenched and tore the unfortunate woman’s face so severely that her countenance will undoubtedly be sadly disfigured for life.”
It was worse than that: the dog was rabid. The following month she collapsed on a stage in Rochester, was carried off delirious, and died. In a letter to a friend, Whitman wrote that he was “inexpressibly shocked by the horrible and sudden close of her gay, easy, sunny, free, loose, but not ungood life.”
Pfaff and Clapp tried to resuscitate the scene when the war ended in 1865, but its moment had passed. “The old Bohemian clique is smashed, and Pfaff’s has become a respectable and well-conducted lager beer saloon,” an observer wrote. Clapp declined into drunken decay and died in 1875.
Pfaff closed the saloon and went into retirement for a while, then opened a new one farther uptown, on Twenty-fourth Street near Broadway. In the mid-1870s Whitman visited with him there, then wrote that the two old survivors sat and reminisced.
Ah, the friends and names and frequenters, those times, that place. Most are dead . . . And there Pfaff and I, sitting opposite each other at the little table, gave remembrance to them in a style they would have themselves fully confirm’d, namely, big, brimming, fill’d-up champagne-glasses, drain’d in abstracted silence, very leisurely, to the last drop.
Pfaff closed the new place in 1887 and died a few years later.
4
The Restless Nineties
SO, TO QUAINT OLD GREENWICH VILLAGE THE ART PEOPLE SOON CAME PROWLING, HUNTING FOR NORTH WINDOWS AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GABLES AND DUTCH ATTICS AND LOW RENTS.
—O. Henry
THE UNION VICTORY IN THE CIVIL WAR ENDED THE ARMED conflict that had almost destroyed the nation, but war had left many rifts and fissures: between North and South, East and West, between the unimaginably wealthy and the unspeakably poor, between native-born and immigrant, rural and rapidly growing urban. In the following decades America surged into a period of dynamic growth and expansion. It completed its march across the continent, adding new states at a heady clip. Its victory in the Spanish-American War in 1898 gave it Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines—the start of a global empire. It urbanized and industrialized with breathtaking speed. Cities grew in prodigious leaps, fed by millions of immigrants from abroad, as well as by a large-scale domestic migration in from the farms and plantations. They flocked to work in the new steel mills, textile mills, and factories, in shipping and logging and railroading, in offices and shops. The rise of industry and the birth of giant corporations made a tiny elite—railroad men, steel barons, the Morgans, Rockefellers, Carnegies—stupendously wealthy, while reducing most everyone else to either droning wage slavery or hideous poverty. Middle- and working-class Americans learned how to punch the clock, pass the exam, and meet the quota, while the new mass marketing and merchandising encouraged them to devolve from active customers into passive consumers. As early as 1873 Mark Twain (an off and on Village resident) dubbed the era the Gilded Age—gilded as in shiny on the surface, darker underneath. He also called it “the great barbecue.” At the other end of the era, the economist Thorstein Veblen, who would help found the Village’s New School for Social Research, coined the term “conspicuous consumption.” A vast social chasm opened between the very wealthy and the hideously poor. The average American family lived on less than four hundred dollars a year, while the richest capitalists and industrialists bought their dogs diamond-encrusted collars. In New York City, the rich competed with one another in building palaces on Fifth Avenue, while in the Lower East Side the poor were crowded beyond overcapacity into disease- and crime-ridden ghetto tenements.
Cities became sinkholes of corruption as political machines exploited the voting power of the new urban masses. In New York, that machine was Tammany Hall. Opposition to all the bald-faced corruption and exploitation that characterized the Gilded Age ran from reformist to revolutionary. It was the birth time of Marxism, socialism, and anarchism in America, which would be pursued as viable alternatives to corporate capitalism by many American workers and intellectuals well into the twentieth century.
For much of the white Protestant middle class, meanwhile, this was the Victorian era of prosperity, a time of stiff collars and tight corsets and stuffy parlors where they obsessed over minutiae of etiquette and propriety while repressing and sublimating most desires. Some rebelled. Young, college-educated reformers went into big cities’ poorer neighborhoods, including Greenwich Village, to document, as Jacob Riis put it, “how the other half lives,” and to found settlement houses, offering various social services. The Progressive movement and a new species of journalist, the muckraker (an antiquated term revived by President Theodore Roosevelt, who was irked by what he felt was scandal-seeking journalists’ meddling in government affairs), sought to expose the corruption in government and dismantle the big-city machines. Progressives pushed for the federal government to take a much more active role in curbing the seemingly limitless powers of the corporations and banks. Opponents mocked this Good Government movement as “goo-goo.”
Another largely middle-class reform movement, feminism and women’s liberation, grew as a force of change in this period. It comprised a range of issues, including prohibition and women’s suffrage, which would culminate in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the Constitution in 1919 and 1920. Feminism would play a huge role in energizing the busy Greenwich Village scene of the mid-1910s.
The great barbecue came to an end with the Panic of 1893, a cascade of bank failures and Wall Street crash followed by a severe depression. Widespread unemployment and homelessness, as well as wage freezes for those who kept their jobs, sparked renewed labor unrest. Anarchism and socialism gained strength among workers despite all attempts to suppress them. Growing discontent and dissatisfaction characterized large sections of the working and middle classes in what is misremembered as the Gay Nineties. The Restless Nineties would be more apt. Into this milieu George du Maurier, a writer and illustrator for London’s Punch, launched his 1894 novel Trilby, essentially an update of Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème, which was wildly successful in America as middle-class readers young and old, crammed into their high collars and tight corsets, bored with their office jobs and conventional marriages, responded to the call of the wild bohemian
.
Curiosity seekers and wannabes looking for bohemia in Manhattan got no end of advice from the guidebooks and magazines of the period. Any restaurant or tavern ever patronized by a writer or an artist, anywhere on the island, might be identified as a bohemian hot spot, especially if the cuisine and ambience were French, German, Italian, or otherwise exotic. Not all of the advice was bogus. There were enclaves of artists, writers, actors, and assorted bohemian types on the multiculturally bustling Lower East Side and up around the Art Students League near Columbus Circle.
Greenwich Village was the largest and most established of the city’s bohemian zones. Although Pfaff’s time as the first hot spot of New York bohemia was brief, it helped plant a seed that sprouted in the neighborhood in the years after the Civil War. South of Washington Square, once fashionable streets slid downmarket, with fine homes subdivided into rooming houses and bawdy houses. The cheap rents drew writers, painters, theater folk, and other potential bohemians. Before the Civil War the fine homes on Bleecker Street had rivaled those on the north side of Washington Square for elegance. They included Depau Row, a set of six handsome, upper-middle-class row houses on the south side of the street between Sullivan and Thompson, featuring airy front parlors that, with the connecting doors open, formed a block-long ballroom. As the city marched uptown the wealthy home owners left the street and it went into decline. An 1872 guidebook describes it as “a passably good-looking street going to decay . . . It was once the abode of wealth and fashion, as its fine old time mansions testify . . . Now a profusion of signs announce that hospitality is to be had at a stated price, and the old mansions are put to the viler uses of third-rate boarding houses and restaurants.”
The author goes on to say that “In many respects Bleecker Street is more characteristic of Paris than of New York. It reminds one strongly of the Latin Quarter, and one instinctively turns to look for the Closerie des Lilas. It is the headquarters of Bohemianism.” He portrays the denizens of a single house on the street.