One time O’Brien showed up at the Harper’s office, demanding a $25 advance for a story the magazine had commissioned. This was unheard of; magazines paid on publication—and often not even then. The editors flatly refused. So O’Brien burst into the bindery department, grabbed a board, and scrawled a message on it. He marched back and forth in front of the magazine’s office with a makeshift sign: “One of Harper’s Authors. I Am Starving.” He was mollified with a $5 advance.
Another trait that defined Clapp’s artists’ circle, even in its earliest days, was a fixation on all things bleak and morbid. For some, this was simply posturing. The artists recruited by Clapp tended to be very young. Exploring morbid themes was a way to signal that one had privileged insight into some cold truths about the human condition: I’m no stranger to darkness, and to prove it I’ve chosen a skull as the subject of my poem/painting/sculpture. Stephen Fiske, an aspiring playwright and a teenager when he first showed up at Pfaff’s, nicely sums up this attitude: “Just at that period death was very dear to all of us.”
For some members of Clapp’s circle, however, the morbid fixation would prove more than a pose. Living the life of an artist carried genuine risks, including alcoholism, drug abuse, tuberculosis, madness, and suicide. Among the Pfaff’s set, some of those who grew most committed to Bohemianism would suffer those very fates, the same as their Parisian counterparts—or Edgar Allan Poe.
Clapp and his coterie held Poe in special veneration. In fact, O’Brien’s story in progress, about viewing a tiny world through a microscope, had a decidedly macabre tone—a debt to Poe. Many in the crowd drew charcoal sketches on the walls of their decrepit flats, something that Poe had reputedly done. By now, Poe was long gone; he had died back in 1849. In his day, he wasn’t referred to as a “Bohemian.” But he certainly lived the life (drunken, dissolute, aflame with creativity) and died the death (penniless, insane, only forty years old). Poe would serve as a kind of patron saint for the Pfaff’s Bohemians.
Clapp was creating something truly radical. Convening his group in a dingy, underground lager house was a striking departure from the drawing rooms and salons where artists of the day tended to congregate. More typical for the times was the Calliopean Society, an august collection of New York City writers that included Peter and William Irving, Washington Irving’s brothers. One of its bylaws spelled out that absolutely, under no circumstances, were “controversial subjects” to be discussed. Or consider the Saturday Club. Founded in Boston in 1855—the year before Clapp started his group—it took its name from a dinner held on the fourth Saturday of every month at the tony Parker House hotel. Even the names of the members sound formal and stuffy: John Lothrop Motley, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
The notion of the rebel artist hadn’t really taken hold yet in America. If one hoped to be successful—rather than some wild-eyed Bleecker Street debauchee—it was necessary to be presentable. As Joseph Wood Krutch, one of Poe’s earliest biographers, noted: “He might have had the good fortune to be born, like Baudelaire, in a world a little more tolerant of outcasts than that of literary America in the early nineteenth century.”
In the years ahead, Clapp and his circle would do a great deal to change the standing of the outsider artist and to romanticize the role as well. They gathered in a saloon, not a salon.
As it grew, Clapp’s group did at least become more organized (though organized Bohemia is certainly an oxymoron). Proprietor Pfaff set aside a dedicated area in his lager house, reserved for Clapp and his group. This quirky space, at the front of the establishment, extended out underneath the Broadway sidewalk. Casks of wine lined one wall. Here, the ceiling was even lower and vaulted. Small glass bull’s-eyes, placed in the pavement, let in the faintest gloaming and also made it possible to pick up a kind of shadow tally of the foot traffic on the pavement above. It was a rather smelly spot—right near a privy. But this curious little vaulted space also had the advantage of being set apart. Where before the Bohemians had met in the saloon’s main room, now they had their own private area.
Pfaff furnished Clapp with a long table, capable of seating a large group of people. A little niche in the wall became the dedicated spot for Clapp’s collection of clay pipes, an affectation from his Paris days. Once again, Herr Pfaff proved a canny saloon keeper. He recognized that catering to a group of regulars was simply good business. Clapp’s crowd were his favorites, and he made a point of waiting on them personally. Rotund, radiating good cheer and discretion, Pfaff would take orders all around.
Clapp took up a position at the head of the long table. He was now in his early forties, making him at least twice the age of many of his newfound acolytes. They treated him with due deference, referring to him as the “King of Bohemia.” Clapp pretended not to like the title, though it was exactly what he’d wanted. His wit was sharper than ever, honed now by whiskey, which remained his drink of choice. He referred to Wall Street as “Cater-wall Street” and punned that its bankers had outsized “lie-abilities.” He dismissed a writer of middling talent by saying the man “aimed at nothing and always hit the mark precisely.”
Clapp reserved some of his sharpest jibes for newcomers. There were roughly thirty spots at his long table; the vaulted room was a cramped, little space. While some people made only sporadic appearances, others were becoming regulars. Clapp was forced to become selective. Toying with the mix, trying to get just the right collection of people at his table, seems to have given Clapp a special, even sadistic, thrill.
When someone showed up for the first time, Clapp would engage the person in a verbal battle, a kind of hazing ritual. An old article in the American magazine describes how Clapp “spied the intruder” and “shot a remark at him over the shoulder of another.” Sometimes Clapp would even toss out a comment in French. Newcomers who responded faced the considerable challenge of trying to parry with Clapp in a language he’d mastered while in Paris. Any prospective member, according to that article, was “treated with scant courtesy until he had won a position by an intellectual tilt.” Plenty of failed aspirants to Clapp’s group beat a hasty retreat from the vaulted room.
Those who remained couldn’t exactly rest easy. In the ferocious little ecosystem that Clapp had set in motion, he had his favorites, such as O’Brien and the poet Arnold. Naturally, this left others feeling insecure. Many felt they had to constantly work to curry the King of Bohemia’s favor. They also had to contend with one another. This was an artists’ circle, after all, brimming with competition, raw ambition, and egos as large as they were delicate.
Still, this uneasy atmosphere had its upside. Being an artist can be a solitary pursuit; at the very least, the saloon offered fellowship. Pass muster with Clapp, hold one’s fellow artists at bay, and there was pride in belonging to an exclusive group, albeit an impoverished one—the Pfaff’s Bohemians. There were professional advantages, potentially: a writer might meet an editor who was seeking to publish new voices; a sculptor might learn about art dealers looking for fresh talent. There was even the opportunity to share works in progress. Members of the circle brought in novels, plays, even paintings for critique. William Winter—a young, aspiring writer in these earliest days—would recall that during a critique, his fellow Bohemians “never spared each other from the barb of ridicule.” But he would also remember it as “a salutary experience” for artists, “because it habituated them to the custom not only of speaking the truth, as they understood it . . . but of hearing the truth, as others understood it, about their own productions.”
Underneath everything, a terrible tension always hummed in that little vaulted room. Here, it was necessary to live by one’s wits—or, rather, wit. But with the right mix of people (the proper level of inebriation also helped), Clapp frequently achieved a kind of social alchemy. “Those were merry and famous nights,” recalls an 1868 account, looking back wistfully on those first shining moments. There were clever puns and bawdy jokes
; people told rambling stories and delivered toasts that went all rococo in their sentiment and complexity. As the evening drew on, the bon mots fairly flew. The long table was the site “of quip, and quirk, and queer conceit, of melancholy mirth and laughing madness,” according to another old account.
Clapp had found a home at Pfaff’s. He was quickly assembling his circle of Bohemian artists. He was their king, no less. But Clapp longed to pull a singular talent into his orbit, someone who could deliver the glory he craved.
3: Whitman at a Crossroads
WHEN WHITMAN FIRST wandered into Pfaff’s cellar, likely sometime in 1858, he’d already published two editions of Leaves of Grass, a collection of experimental poems. But the work had generally been ignored. Between the two editions, he’d sold only a handful of copies. Whitman was lost and in considerable torment.
Part of him was so certain that fame was his rightful station. Not merely fame: Whitman’s ambitions were boundless, and on a good day, becoming the “greatest poet” of his age, America’s representative bard, an immortal artist—all seemed inevitable. He could even marshal a tantalizing piece of evidence, an endorsement he’d received from Ralph Waldo Emerson, then one of America’s leading artistic tastemakers. But his work had received only a small number of reviews, typically filled with puzzlement and derision. Mostly, he’d been met with the worst thing for an artist: terrible, soul-deflating silence. So Whitman also had all the proof he needed that failure and anonymity would be his destiny. He wasn’t altogether sure that he shouldn’t abandon poetry and move off in some radical new direction.
When he started frequenting the saloon, Whitman was thirty-nine years old. He stood roughly six feet, tall for the era, but weighed less than two hundred pounds. He wasn’t yet the beefy, shaggy poet of legend. His hair was cut short, a salt-and-pepper mix of brown and gray. His beard was trimmed. Only later would he put on weight, the wages of stress and illness and advancing age. Only later would he grow his hair long and let his beard go thick and bushy.
But he was already an eccentric dresser. Whitman favored workingmen’s garb, such as his wideawake, a type of broad-brimmed felt sombrero. He liked to wear it well back on his head, tilted at a rakish angle. His trousers were always tucked into cowhide boots. He wore rough-hewn shirts of unbleached linen, open at the collar, revealing a shock of chest hair. Whitman had a rosy complexion, almost baby-like, and quite incongruous for a big man. Because he was meticulous about hygiene, he always smelled of soap and cologne. His manner of dress often struck people as more like a costume. Or maybe it was a kind of armor, protecting the vulnerable man underneath.
Whitman wasn’t much of a drinker. In fact, no one at Pfaff’s would ever recall seeing him so much as tipsy. He would sit hour upon hour, nursing a single lager, intrigued by the spirited banter. “I think there was as good talk around the table as took place anywhere in the world,” he would say.
He appears to have viewed the proceedings as a kind of conversational white-water rapid that he either was afraid to enter or perhaps didn’t care to. As a poet, Whitman is celebrated for language that moves—soaring, swooping, singing—but his manner of speaking offered such a contrast: slow . . . deliberate . . . earthbound. He pronounced “poems” as “pomes,” drawling it out, his eyelids drooping. That was another of his characteristics—those drooping eyelids, which lent a kind of impassivity to many of his facial expressions.
It wasn’t as if his mind were slow; clearly, it was quite the opposite, but maybe all the connections and contradictions lighting up his synapses were best worked out on the page. At any rate, he steered clear of the “rubbing and drubbing,” as he called those infamous verbal battles. “My own greatest pleasure at Pfaff’s was to look on—to see, talk little, absorb,” he would recall. “I never was a great discusser, anyway—never.”
Once, at a birthday dinner, Clapp sat at the head of the table, collecting lavish toasts all around from his acolytes. When it came Whitman’s turn, the poet raised his stein and managed only to offer: “That’s the feller!” The other Pfaffians couldn’t believe it. “The ravishing charm of Walt Whitman’s colossal eloquence,” sneered William Winter. But what was it really: Was it shyness or sadness? Was it hauteur, or a willful and affected show of inarticulateness?
Regardless, Clapp—for so many reasons—was thrilled to have Whitman, even a reticent Whitman, at his table. The poet was five years his junior, while so many in the circle were decades younger. He’d achieved a measure of acclaim, outstripping most of the other Bohemians. Clapp sensed that Whitman could act as a kind of calling card, conferring legitimacy, drawing other more established artists into his ambit.
At the same time—and this is crucial—Whitman had thus far fallen short of fame. Clapp considered himself an unerring judge of talent. He was certain he could detect the poet’s genius where others had mostly failed. The fact that what little acclaim Whitman had received was typically more like notoriety made the situation very nearly perfect. Here was a chance to provoke people; there’s nothing the King of Bohemia liked better. Clapp would emerge as Whitman’s great champion. In due time, thanks to a publication Clapp founded called the Saturday Press, he would publish, promote, and defend Whitman’s work. Whitman would later state, “I have often said to you that my own history could not be written with Henry left out: I mean it—that is not an extravagant statement.” It’s worth noting that this comment was uttered years in the future, to a biographer, by an entirely transformed Walt Whitman. It was a Whitman who still recognized his debt to Clapp’s ceaseless evangelism.
People tend to think of Whitman as the Good Gray Poet, up in a pantheon somewhere, holding celestial court with Dante and Homer. But in 1858, none of this was assured. Upon first arriving at Pfaff’s, grand ambitions notwithstanding, Whitman was decidedly mortal. So far, he’d led a bewilderingly varied life, soaking up experience. The catholic nature of his formative years is a key to understanding the Whitman that first showed up at the saloon and the towering figure that he was to become.
Born in 1819, Whitman grew up living mostly in Brooklyn. His father was a speculative home builder with abysmal business instincts, and the family was forever skating on the brink of ruin. By age eleven, Whitman was done with formal schooling and went to work to help his large family, which included seven other siblings. Whitman worked as an office boy for a law firm, then for a doctor. He found intermittent work out on Long Island as a country schoolteacher. This was one of many places in those days that had no official certification—and required only the most minimal qualifications—for teachers. He tended to classrooms as large as eighty kids, some older than he, for a rock-bottom salary. He also tried his hand selling pencils and inkstands out of a small Brooklyn storefront.
But his primary occupation was journalism. At age twelve, he got his first newspaper job as an apprentice at the Long Island Patriot. Over the next quarter century, in an era when the profession was remarkably unstable and unremunerative, he worked for a wild array of publications in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Long Island: the Daily Plebian, Evening Tattler, Statesman, New World, and New York Mirror, to name just a few. He did every possible job, from operating a bed-and-platen hand press to writing articles. At age twenty-two, he landed his first editorship with a big-city daily, taking charge of the Aurora, a Manhattan paper that competed—not very effectively—with about twenty others. He even founded a couple of newspapers, including the Long Islander. For this paper, he wrote most of the articles and sold all the advertisements, often trading ad space for potatoes or firewood. He delivered the paper himself, traveling the thirty-mile route once a week on a horse named Nina.
Whitman wrote about everything. He covered a baseball game between New York and Brooklyn, separate cities in those days; he reviewed Omoo, an early novel by Herman Melville, an exact contemporary, though the two never met; he tried his hand at medical advice: “To cure a tooth ache, plunge your feet in cold water.”
At one paper, he wrote a regular column on murders in New York City. At another, he produced profiles of city characters like coopers and butchers. He wrote editorials against capital punishment, in favor of stricter rules on ferryboats, and against dueling, which he denounced as “honorable nonsense.”
The papers where he worked often received complimentary passes to various entertainments. Even as a young apprentice, Whitman got to use those tickets. On rare occasions, he was able to get someone else to join him, often one of his brothers. There was a set-apartness to Whitman from early on; for all the people he met, he would always lack for intimates. But viewing performances alone had its advantages. It allowed him complete focus. He gained a thorough knowledge of Shakespeare, developed a particular passion for opera. When Whitman went to see contralto Marietta Alboni, he was utterly transfixed, even though he didn’t speak a word of Italian. She did something like forty performances during her New York stand; Whitman caught them all.
Over the years, Whitman spent time enough in Manhattan to become the ultimate Broadway rambler—small wonder that he eventually found his way to Pfaff’s. He grew to know the two-mile stretch from city hall to Union Square probably better than anyone ever. He had his own peculiar collection of spots he enjoyed visiting. There was Dr. Abbott’s Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, where he passed untold hours looking at mummies and artifacts. There were several daguerreotype studios on Broadway, including one run by the celebrated Mathew Brady. Creating daguerreotypes was a new process, and getting one’s picture taken was a novelty, sweeping the nation. Whitman regularly made the rounds, studying the portraits. At the Broadway Temple, meanwhile, Whitman attended learned lectures on a huge array of subjects. He was exposed to the latest thinking on geology and astronomy, which held that the earth was very old and space unfathomably large.
Rebel Souls Page 4
