Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Justin Martin
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, Boston, MA 02210.
Cover design by Jonathan Sainsbury
Book design by Brent Wilcox and Cynthia Young
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Martin, Justin.
Rebel Souls : Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians / Justin Martin.
pages cm.—(A Merloyd Lawrence book)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-306-82226-1 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-306-82227-8 (e-book) 1. Whitman, Walt, 1819–1892—Friends and associates. 2. Bohemianism—New York (State)—New York—History—19th century. 3. New York (N.Y.) Intellectual life—19th century. 4. Ward, Artemus, 1834–1867. 5. Booth, Edwin, 1833–1893. 6. Ludlow, Fitz Hugh, 1836–1870. 7. Menken, Adah Isaacs, 1835-1868. 8. Bars (Drinking establishments)—New York (State)—New York—History—19th century. I. Title.
PS3231.M19 2014
811’.3—dc20
[B]
2014008822
Published as a Merloyd Lawrence Book by Da Capo Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
www.dacapopress.com
Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Rex and Donna Martin, my parents, who have always managed to embrace the best of Bohemia
“Bohemia” comes but once in one’s life.
Let’s treasure even its memory.
—WALT WHITMAN
At Pfaff’s! At Pfaff’s! At Pfaff’s!
—Toast the Bohemians would make at their legendary saloon
Contents
Photo Credits
Introduction: A Visit to Pfaff’s
1: Bohemia Crosses the Atlantic
2: A Long Table in a Vaulted Room
3: Whitman at a Crossroads
4: Hashish and Shakespeare
5: Bold Women and Whitman’s Beautiful Boys
6: The Saturday Press
7: Leaves, Third Edition
8: Year of Meteors
9: Becoming Artemus Ward
10: “The Heather Is on Fire”
11: Whitman to the Front
12: Bohemia Goes West
13: The Soldiers’ Missionary
14: Twain They Shall Meet
15: “O heart! heart! heart!”
16: A Brief Revival
17: All Fall Down
18: “Those Times, That Place”
Photographs
Acknowledgments
Notes
Further Exploration
Index
About the Author
Photo Credits
Photographs
Broadway in the 1860s (Courtesy of New-York Historical Society)
Henry Clapp Jr. (Courtesy of special collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University)
Ada Clare (Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)
Whitman, 1854 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Whitman frontispiece from Leaves of Grass 1860 edition (Courtesy of New York Public Library)
Leaves of Grass title page (Courtesy of New York Public Library)
Whitman at Pfaff’s (Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine)
Menken reclining (Courtesy of collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University)
Menken in Mazeppa (Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum)
Fitz Hugh Ludlow (Courtesy of special collections, Schaffer Library, Union College)
Artemus Ward (Courtesy of special collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University)
Abraham Lincoln (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Mark Twain (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Harper’s meteor cover (Courtesy of Texas State University)
Armory Square Hospital (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Whitman and Doyle (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Edwin Booth (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Booth brothers (Courtesy of Brown University archives)
Julius Caesar playbill (Courtesy of New York Public Library for the Performing Arts/Billy Rose Theatre Division)
Whitman as good gray poet (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
All other photos are in the public domain.
Introduction: A Visit to Pfaff’s
TAKE A WALK ALONG Broadway in Manhattan. As you make your way—amid the rushing taxis, pedestrians lost in their smartphones, and other scenes of modern bustle—you might just catch some hints of the distant past. Pause for a moment at 647 Broadway, a few doors north of Bleecker Street. A women’s shoe store is here, assorted boots, sandals, and stiletto heels displayed in the window. It appears to be just another shop along Broadway. But once upon a time, this was the location of the famous Pfaff’s saloon.
To be precise, Pfaff’s (pronounced fafs) was beneath where the shoe store is now. It was an underground saloon in every sense of the word. There’s still a hatchway in the Broadway sidewalk, just as there was in the nineteenth century. It provides entry into the store’s basement, a long, narrow space, lit by electric bulbs and piled high with boxes of shoes. During the 1850s, it was dim, gaslit, and packed with artists. Pfaff’s saloon was the site of an incredibly important cultural movement, the meeting place of America’s first Bohemians.
Their leader, Henry Clapp Jr., was editor of the hugely influential Saturday Press. Clapp deserves credit as the person who brought Bohemianism to America, both the word and the way of life. He was joined by a struggling experimental poet, well into middle age, yet still living at home in Brooklyn with his mother, Walt Whitman.
Around these two figures, a circle formed that included journalists, playwrights, sculptors, and painters. Among the mainstays were Artemus Ward, America’s first stand-up comedian, and the elegant writer Ada Clare (libertine Pfaff’s was the rare saloon that welcomed women in those days). There was also Fitz Hugh Ludlow, psychedelic pioneer and author of The Hasheesh Eater; Fitz-James O’Brien, a talented but dissolute writer; and actress Adah Isaacs Menken, wildly successful, unabashedly notorious, and one of the great sex symbols of the nineteenth century. By turns calculating and vulnerable, she was like a sepia-tone Marilyn Monroe.
On the eve of the Civil War, this motley group made the Broadway saloon its headquarters. The Pfaff’s Bohemians, as they were known, met here every night to drink, joke, argue, and drink some more. Along the way, they also managed to create startling and original works. Although much of their output is long forgotten, its animating spirit lives on, continuing to have resonance today. The Pfaff’s Bohemians were part of the transition from art as a genteel profession to art as a soul-deep calling, centered on risk taking, honesty, and provocation. Everyone from Lady Gaga to George Carlin to Dave Eggers owes a debt to these originals. They were also the forerunners of such alternative artist groups as the Beats, Andy Warhol’s Factory, and t
he abstract expressionist painters who hung out during the 1950s at New York’s Cedar Tavern.
If you’ve never heard of Pfaff’s saloon, or its coterie of Bohemian artists, that’s not surprising. More than 150 years have elapsed since this scene’s heyday, and time moves in mysterious—sometimes heedless—ways. History is not a meritocracy. To reconstruct the lives of Clapp, Ludlow, Menken, and the members of the circle, I did a vast amount of original research, consulting correspondence, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, and old books. Many of these materials were yellowed and musty, yet what began to strike me most was the aliveness of my subjects. It shone through. The more I pursued this cast of long-lost artists, in libraries and archives, the more their time seemed to resonate with our own. I felt an obligation to revive them by telling their stories.
Of course, Whitman has not been forgotten. But the importance of his participation in a circle of Bohemian artists has. Despite the sheer volume of Whitman scholarship, conducted over more than a century’s time, this has remained one of the least understood periods of the poet’s life. Pick up any book on Whitman, and invariably only a few pages are devoted to Pfaff’s and its circle, often less. This was no casual association. Between roughly 1858 and 1862, Whitman was at the saloon virtually every night.
Time spent among the Bohemians was crucial to the evolution of his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass. In 1860 he published a vastly expanded edition of the work, featuring more than one hundred new poems, many drawn from the experience of being part of this artists’ circle. The new edition even included an entire section devoted to romance between men. Pfaff’s—permissive place that it was—gave Whitman the opportunity to explore his sexuality in both art and life.
Whitman’s barfly years were a vital stretch for him, filled with triumph and torment and intense creativity. It was that critical time before—before fame, before myth, before he had been forever fixed as the Good Gray Poet. By focusing on this period, my goal is to provide fresh context for Whitman’s life and career. Whitman himself recognized its importance. As an old man, he told Thomas Donaldson, one of his first biographers, “Pfaff’s ‘Bohemia’ was never reported, and more the sorrow.”
The outbreak of the Civil War scattered the Bohemians. Pfaff’s saloon opened up, loosing its colorful denizens into the world. Famously, Whitman went to Washington, DC, where he tended to wounded soldiers. Others saw battlefield action or traveled across the troubled nation performing theatrical pieces. A couple of the Bohemians even headed out to raucous silver-rush Nevada, where they met up with a promising young writer who only months earlier had adopted the pen name Mark Twain.
Thus, it seems natural to carry on with this tale through the years of the Civil War, to follow the main figures as they fan out across the land, yet keep crossing paths, sometimes in dramatic new settings. In fact, the story continues right on through the assassination of Lincoln in 1865. For the Pfaff’s set, this was more than simply a tragic news event. The group had unexpected, even shocking, connections to that fateful evening at Ford’s Theatre.
And then everything came crashing down. It’s almost as if the darkness surrounding Lincoln’s death couldn’t be contained, spread out, and infected the Pfaff’s set as well. These artists were intimately bound up with their times. Just like that, their times were at an end. Nearly everyone in the circle died young, often under grim circumstances. America’s first Bohemians burned brightly, but briefly, then flamed out in spectacular fashion. Whitman was among the few to live on, past that tempestuous era.
By the late 1860s, the group was fast receding into history. But memories of them remained vivid. For many years, it was a given that the famous Bohemian scene would be properly memorialized. “Pfaff’s, as it was, has passed away; but the history of it would make one of the most unique and startling books in American literature,” states an article in the Cincinnati Commercial from March 14, 1874. But the years kept slipping past, then decades . . . then entire centuries. One can easily walk along Broadway and go right past the shoe store, with no idea that Walt Whitman and a group of artists used to meet below in that basement saloon.
But it’s not as if the passage of time somehow erased the very existence of the Pfaff’s Bohemians. They’ve been here all along. They’re like restless ghosts—elusive, flickering, unsettled. And this is their tale, at last.
1: Bohemia Crosses the Atlantic
THE STORY BEGINS on November 11, 1814, with the birth of Henry Clapp Jr., on Nantucket Island, off the Massachusetts coast. He would come to be known as the King of Bohemia, but his childhood was spent in a devout family during a highly conservative era.
The Nantucket of Clapp’s youth had two beacons: whaling and faith. Though only a small island—a mere forty-eight square miles—it was then a maritime power unto itself, the whaling capital of the world. Its fleet of roughly seventy ships stalked the Atlantic, even rounded Cape Horn and fanned out across the Pacific, relentlessly pursuing their quarry. Local lore held that the first word a baby learned would likely relate to whales. The islanders possessed a vast whaling terminology. For example, townor referred to a particular whale spotted for the second time.
Nantucket was also a stronghold of Congregationalism, one of the primary religious denominations of the region’s original Puritan settlers. H. L. Mencken famously described the Puritans as “desperately afraid that somebody, somewhere might be having a good time.” Both of Clapp’s parents came from long, distinguished lines. His father could date his New England ancestry to 1630, when his forebears arrived aboard the Mary and John, only ten years after the Mayflower. Clapp’s mother could trace her lineage six generations straight back to Tristram and Dionis Coffin, the original white settlers of Nantucket. Clapp, as one of eight children who lived to maturity, was part of a household that was crowded, strict, and God-fearing. Clapp would remember this upbringing as the “Spare-the-Rod-spoil-the-Child Academy of my boyhood.”
Growing up, Clapp attended the Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin Lancasterian School, a unique institution. The school featured America’s very first training ship, used to give the older students hands-on experience, preparing them for a life at sea. In 1830 fifteen-year-old Clapp took two voyages on this training ship, the Clio, first to the coast of Quebec, then all the way to Rio. He hated the experience. Mostly, he spent the voyages seasick and in misery.
Following graduation, Clapp moved to nearby Boston. He found work that, fittingly, was on dry land yet also tied to the economy of his native Nantucket. He sold whale oil wholesale. But this didn’t strike him exactly as a promising career. When a friend of Clapp’s landlady died, she asked him to draw up a death notice that could be submitted to the newspaper. For Clapp, the simple act of composing a few brief paragraphs suggested a new career direction. He decided he wanted to try journalism.
During the next few years, he bounced from paper to paper, taking jobs with the Nantucket Inquirer and the New Bedford Intelligencer. After such a dour upbringing, working for newspapers awakened something in Clapp. He found the world of words to be refreshingly alive, even though, as a young reporter, he was mostly called upon to write short notices about public events or the weather. Sometimes he got to craft a nice turn of phrase, though. In reporting on a parade of Odd Fellows (a fraternal society akin to the Freemasons), he couldn’t help but comment on their preposterously colorful uniforms: “I venture the assertion, that the dolls in the royal nursery of Queen Victoria do not have more gaudy pinafores than this body of grown up men.” He described Nantucket as peaceful, punning that its citizens were involved in “pacific business, viz:—fitting whale-ships for the Pacific ocean.”
Clapp worked his way up as a newspaperman, eventually becoming editor of the Lynn Pioneer. Where Nantucket was a whaling powerhouse, Lynn, Massachusetts, was an industrial center during the 1840s, the shoe-making capital of America. The Pioneer was owned and financed by a shoe-factory owner, who held radical political views.
His paper regularly covered topics such as abolition, temperance, labor reform, and pacifism.
For Clapp, opposing the status quo proved thrilling. He delighted in a newfound freedom to take on powerful people. He “liked to say startling things,” a newspaper colleague from these years would recall, “and did not always exhibit the best taste.”
One time, Clapp took aim at a local judge named Aaron Lummus, accusing the man of doling out biased justice. According to Clapp’s account in the Pioneer, the judge gave preferential treatment in his court to rich people over poor people. For good measure, Clapp referred to Judge Lummus as a “lummox.” Clapp was convicted for libeling a justice of the peace and sentenced to sixty days in jail. He continued to edit the Pioneer from behind bars.
Clapp was short and homely. By his early thirties, he was balding fast, leaving him with a fringe of reddish hair and a too prominent, jutting forehead. His shrill voice was once described as sounding “like snapping glass under your heel.” Yet he discovered that he had rare oratorical powers. The Pioneer had steeped him in the causes of the day. He began to travel around New England, building quite a reputation and becoming a much-sought-after lecturer.
Involvement in radical causes further opened up the world to Clapp. At the same time, he discovered that many of his fellow reformers were as rigid and dogmatic as anyone he’d encountered growing up. Disagree with them by an inch, he found, and you invited the same wrath as if you were miles apart. There was a kind of absolutism at work here. It reminded him of his Congregationalist upbringing, in which something was either pure or wicked. Clapp even managed to run afoul of William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist firebrand. Clapp was all for ending slavery, yet he differed from Garrison over some fine points on how to achieve this aim. Garrison denounced Clapp just the same, calling him “a wily creature, with considerable talent, but not to be trusted or encouraged.”
Rebel Souls Page 1
