Rebel Souls

by Justin Martin

  During the mid-nineteenth century, Cincinnati was the center for Reform Judaism in the United States. This was due to Queen City resident Rabbi Isaac Wise, leader of the movement in America. Wise was also the editor of a highly influential newspaper called the Israelite. It helped connect American Jews, many of them living in small groups that were greatly isolated geographically one from the next. Rabbi Wise’s newspaper kept them informed on matters of doctrine and faith. The paper also featured notices in which Jewish communities in various cities advertised for people to play vital religious roles. Memphis’s Congregation B’nai Israel, for example, placed a notice searching for a rabbi and also for a kosher butcher.

  Upon settling in Cincinnati, Menken—master of reinvention—embraced Judaism with a rare fervor. (She would often maintain that she was born Jewish, as opposed to having adopted her second husband’s faith.) She started to contribute poems to the Israelite. Her poems tend to have rather obvious, basic titles such as “Sinai” and “Moses.” And the versifying is far from inspired.

  Will He never come? Will the Jew,

  In exile eternally pine?

  By the idolaters scorned, pitied only by few,

  Will he never his vows to JEHOVAH renew,

  Beneath his own olive and vine?

  “She is a sensitive poet who, unfortunately, cannot write,” Charles Dickens would one day remark. (Menken was destined to travel in some rarefied circles.) But though her poetry was rather prosaic, some of her work did at least manage to address vital concerns of the time such as the discrimination faced by Jews in the Ottoman Empire. As an added touch, she assigned many of her poems dates from the Hebrew calendar such as 11. Tishri 5618 (September 29, 1857).

  Menken longed to return to the stage. Apparently, this became the source of considerable marital tension. Alexander Menken liked the idea of a steadfast wife, who regularly contributed verse to an esteemed religious publication. Eventually, she wore him down. She began to perform at theaters around Ohio in cities such Cincinnati and Dayton. However, the more she acted, the harder he drank. He seems to have realized she was going to be difficult to hang on to. Acting—with its odd hours and opportunities to meet strange men—promised to hasten the process. Ultimately, the couple would get divorced. She walked away with only one thing: a stage name. By tacking on an h, Ada became Adah. And by adding an s to Isaac (her ex’s middle name), her new full name had a more harmonious flow. Now, and through three subsequent marriages, she would forever and always be known as Adah Isaacs Menken.

  As an actress, Menken lacked the traditional skills of the trade. She wasn’t collaborative, didn’t really care to play off her fellow thespians. She certainly lacked the subtlety of acting’s new, naturalistic school. Menken was already a character. She had devoted her considerable talent and intelligence to creating herself—in real life. Exploring other characters, well, that held less interest. But Menken possessed a couple of formidable theatrical attributes that entirely compensated for whatever she lacked. She was absolutely fearless. And she had a drop-dead sexiness that projected deep into the cheap seats. By modern standards, Menken might be described as zaftig. To a nineteenth-century eye, she was alluringly, almost excruciatingly, curvaceous. “Adah was a symbol of Desire Awakened to every man who set eyes on her,” according to one of her husbands. “All who saw her wanted her immediately.”

  James Murdoch, one of the era’s finest actors, offers the following description of Menken’s approach to stagecraft, such as it was: “A woman of personal attractions, she made herself a great favorite. . . . She dashed at everything in tragedy and comedy with a reckless disregard of consequences, until at length, with some degree of trepidation, she paused before the character of Lady Macbeth!”

  Through steely ambition worthy of Lady M herself, Menken managed to land that plum role in an 1858 production staged in Nashville. She starred opposite the great Murdoch. This was a fast-and-loose era in American theater; skilled actors were expected simply to know certain popular roles, such as teenage Edwin Booth stepping in as King Richard III. Often productions were mounted on short notice with few or even no rehearsals. That’s one reason Shakespeare was so popular. It was part of a shared repertoire.

  Only a few hours before the play was set to open, Menken approached Murdoch, sheepishly revealing that she didn’t know her lines. She begged him to teach her, and he did his best to prepare his co-star.

  When the curtain rose, however, Menken’s mind went blank. So she simply shadowed Murdoch, standing very close to him throughout the play. He fed Menken her lines in a whisper. For Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies, once Menken got rolling, she simply improvised. According to Murdoch, “She poured out such an apostrophe to guilt, demons, and her own dark purposes that it would have puzzled any one acquainted with the text to guess from what unlimited ‘variorum’ she could have studied the part.” A Nashville paper described Menken’s Lady Macbeth as “full of southern passion,” but “devoid of Shakespeare or, for that matter, any known playwright.” The audience, however, met her performance with clamorous applause.

  Menken was wise enough to quit while she was ahead. She would never again attempt Shakespeare. Upon moving to New York, she concentrated instead on so-called protean comedies. These were better suited to her particular skills. Protean comedies were a type of drama, popular at this time, where actors demonstrated versatility by playing a large number of different roles. The plots fell somewhere between broad and nonexistent; for audiences, the pleasure lay in watching rapid-­fire character changes. An actor might play a dandy, then a lady, then a doctor, and so on. Menken starred in such protean standbys as The Little Corporal and Satan in Paris. Sometimes, she was called upon to do as many as nine costume changes in a single play. It helped that Menken looked fetching, whether dressed as a nurse or as a filthy street urchin.

  At Pfaff’s, Menken and Clare became close friends. Both hailed from the South, and they were close in age. Menken’s supposed birth date made her one year younger. They formed a kind of mutual-­admiration duo. Menken aspired to be like Clare, an effervescent wit, taken seriously as a writer. Clare could only dream of having Menken’s magic onstage. While the men puffed their pipes, in obeisance to King Clapp, Menken and Clare enjoyed smoking cigarettes together at Pfaff’s, a verboten activity for proper women. Menken, following Clare’s lead, even cut her black hair short and parted it like a man. Given Menken’s figure, however, the effect was very different.

  Of course, the two women also shared the same first name, though Menken had added an h to the end of hers. (Ada was a fairly popular name in the mid-1800s; Ada Clifton, also an actress, was an occasional visitor to Pfaff’s.)

  Whitman became very partial to Menken and Clare. Clapp would remain his primary ally in the circle, but he also valued Ada and Adah, once saying of them, “The girls have been my sturdiest defenders, upholders.” Pure Whitman: he was forever sizing up fellow artists by the measure of whether they held him in sufficient esteem. But he also felt genuine affection for Menken and Clare—they weren’t merely two women who had his back. And he truly enjoyed talking with Clare—quite a tribute. Despite his efforts to remain above the conversational fray at Pfaff’s, he was drawn in by Clare’s easy, graceful manner. He made a point of sitting by Queen Clare at the table and once described her as having “no inconsiderable share of intellect and cultivation.”

  Still, there was only so long he could keep up the banter. Soon enough, he was guaranteed to lapse back into silence. Whitman was a hard man to fathom. His manner was laconic, often he was nearly mute, yet he managed to emanate a sense of vastness—a vastness of experience. One of the things the Pfaff’s set noticed was that he kept the pieces of his life (people too) in separate compartments.

  During the late 1850s, he could be found at the saloon nearly every night. When he sat down to Clapp’s table, he was guaranteed to be the honored guest, or, as one account aptly put it, Wh
itman was “the shrine to which Clapp led the faithful.” But here’s the thing: Whitman may have been a regular at Pfaff’s, but he was not always at Clapp’s table. That vaunted vaulted room, crackling with intellectual tension, was tight-packed, almost claustrophobic. Beyond it lay an ample subterranean space, dim lit and expansive, with other reaches to explore. “There was no formality—‘Bohemia’ sat around in groups,” Whitman once observed of Pfaff’s. “ . . . In fact, a portion of that ‘Bohemia’ did not recognize another portion of visitors as ‘Bohemians.’ It took hard work and merit to have full membership.”

  Whitman sought full membership. As it happened, Pfaff’s main room was a gathering place for other types and stripes of Bohemian. Though these patrons were not members of Clapp’s official and vigorously curated Bohemian circle, they had been drawn to Herr Pfaff’s establishment for the same reason: the wild and welcoming atmosphere. Among the denizens of the saloon’s larger room were assorted rebels and societal outliers, including plenty of gay men. Pfaff’s was a place where gay men could meet, in an era when such matters were not so clearly defined and delineated.

  Café Lafitte in Exile, a fixture in the New Orleans French Quarter since 1953, touts itself as “America’s Oldest Gay Bar.” There are other claimants to the title, such as Seattle’s Double Header, which opened in 1933. Perhaps the honor rightly belongs to Pfaff’s, an establishment from a whole other century. Given its two separate rooms and diverse clientele, however, Pfaff’s is actually a semigay bar. What’s more, gay meant “lighthearted” in the 1850s. Even the term homosexual wouldn’t come into wide usage for another thirty years.

  During its time, then, Pfaff’s might best be described as a “semiadhesive bar,” though that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. In the quirky language of phrenology, “adhesiveness” was the capacity for intense and meaningful same-sex friendship. Its symbol was two women embracing. By contrast, “amativeness” referred to romantic love between a man and a woman. Whitman, who took great pride in his phrenological reading, received one of his highest scores for adhesiveness. (He rated a 6.) Whitman loved to twist words and phrases, appropriating them, lending them new meaning. In his poetry, he employed a number of coded terms for passionate attachments among men such as “comrades” and “adhesiveness.”

  When Whitman first started going to Pfaff’s, he was in a serious relationship with a man named Fred Vaughan. Often, he and Vaughan would sit together at a table in Pfaff’s other, larger, room. Vaughan was in his early twenties, nearly two decades younger than Whitman. He was of Irish descent and worked as a stage driver. It appears the two men even lived together for a time on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn. During that giddy stretch when Whitman walked around with Emerson’s letter burning a hole in his pocket, one of the people he showed it to was Vaughan.

  Not long after the couple began going to Pfaff’s, however, their relationship started to sour for reasons that are unclear. It’s possible their problems stemmed from the fact that Vaughan had reached an age when he was expected to find a proper mate, that is, a woman. Vaughan ended up getting married and settled into a rather conventional life. He worked a series of jobs such as insurance salesman and elevator operator and with his wife raised four sons. He also became a terrible alcoholic. In the early 1870s, after roughly a decade of silence, Vaughan reconnected with Whitman, writing him several letters, one of which includes the following heart-rending passage: “I never stole, robbed, cheated, nor defrauded any person out of anything, and yet I feel that I have not been honest to myself—my family nor my friends.” In the letters, Vaughan never spells out the source of his anguish. Perhaps it was the result of living in a state that felt unnatural to him. One letter includes, “My love my Walt is with you always.”

  Even as his relationship with Vaughan faltered, Whitman continued to visit the larger room at Pfaff’s. Here, Whitman spent time in the company of a group of young men that included Fred Gray, son of a prominent New York doctor; Hugo Fritsch, son of the Austrian consul; and Nathaniel Bloom, a cart driver. Whitman described them as “beautiful” and credited this circle with providing the “quiet lambent electricity of real friendship.” He addressed them as “my darlings and gossips” and “my darling, dearest boys.”

  It’s striking how different Whitman’s manner was with this group of men. One can scarcely imagine him using words such as darling or gossip at the long table in that vaulted room. As everyone does, Whitman revealed different sides of himself to different kinds of people. The two sections of Pfaff’s appear to have served separate social needs for Whitman—as a poet and as a gay man. Where Clapp’s circle offered artistic fellowship, albeit met by Whitman with much standoffishness, the poet showed a warmer, more playful side to his beautiful boys.

  Even the act of traveling to and from Pfaff’s provided an opportunity for Whitman to meet men. It was, after all, a six-mile round-trip from his Brooklyn home, requiring a variety of different conveyances. All along the way—while walking, riding in coaches, and aboard ­ferries—Whitman encountered men, all different kinds. But he was especially drawn to workingmen such as stage drivers. Edward Carpenter, a friend of Whitman’s during his later years, once described the poet’s tastes, saying “the unconscious, uncultured, natural types pleased him best, and he would make an effort to approach them.”

  Whitman’s notebooks are filled with brief descriptions of the men he encountered, often during his ambles to and from Pfaff’s:

  Tom Egbert, conductor Myrtle av. open neck, sailor looking

  Mark Graynor, young, 5 ft. 7 in, black mustache, plumber

  Saturday night Mike Ellis—wandering at the cor of Lexington av. & 32d st.—took him home to 150 37th street,—4th story back room—bitter cold night—works in Stevenson’s Carriage factory.

  Dan’l Spencer . . . somewhat feminine—5th av (44) (May 29)—told me he had never been in a fight and did not drink at all . . . slept with me Sept 3d.

  A failed romance. A restless sense of longing. As it’s always been, these are raw ingredients that get mulled, weighed, processed—and ultimately transformed into art.

  6: The Saturday Press

  POETS, JOURNALISTS, ACTRESSES, and a gifted hashish eater: Clapp had assembled quite a collection of talented eccentrics. But he wasn’t content merely to preside over an artists’ circle. As it happened, Clapp had a ready means for extending his reach. He was founder and editor of a journal called the Saturday Press. During its brief, impecunious existence, it would become one of the most influential publications in America.

  The SP was a weekly journal devoted to culture and the arts. It was also a showcase for work by members of the Pfaff’s set. American Bohemianism had been born in a basement saloon. But Clapp’s journal brought the movement out into the light, revealing it to a curious world. Thanks to the SP, the Pfaff’s Bohemians even achieved a moment of cultural zeitgeist. Most significant, perhaps, the Saturday Press played a major role in rescuing Walt Whitman from anonymity, helping establish him as a poet for the ages. (Clapp—an editor with brilliant instincts—would revive his journal in 1865 for a handful of issues, once again achieving an impressive, outsize impact.)

  The debut issue of the SP is dated October 23, 1858. To start up the venture, Edward Howland, a friend of Clapp’s, sold his personal collection of rare books, netting $1,000. It wasn’t much, but it qualified Howland as the SP’s initial “investor.” Thomas Aldrich, the poet who crafted the line “We were all very merry at Pfaff’s,” served as Clapp’s deputy editor. The journal occupied a small, dingy office in a nondescript building at 9 Spruce Street in Manhattan, directly behind the headquarters of the New York Tribune. Clapp referred to Horace Greeley’s Tribune as being “next door to the Saturday Press building.”

  While the SP’s offices were humble, Clapp was not. On returning to America from Paris, he had abandoned New England for New York, certain that the latter would provide more fertile soil for growi
ng a Bohemian movement. Clapp held an enduring grudge against New England, blaming the region for an upbringing that he considered too earnest, too reverent, too narrow. Upon creating his journal, he was eager not only to poke fun at the region, but also to challenge the cultural primacy of Boston.

  By the late 1850s, New York’s population had just topped a million, making it five times the size of Boston. Teeming and hectic, New York was America’s commerce center, yet to a great degree Boston remained the nation’s cultural capital, often referred to in those days as the “American Athens.” The city looked the part; during the 1850s, Boston went on a neoclassical jag, raising a series of stately Doric-columned buildings. But its eminence went much deeper than appearance. Boston was home to Harvard, the country’s first university. The Boston Public Library, opened in 1854, was the world’s first free municipal public library. The city’s Handel and Haydn Society scored coup after coup, presenting the US premieres of everything from the Messiah to works by Bach and Mozart.

  When it came to so-called high culture, Boston reigned supreme. New York had its share of book publishers, but Boston was the seat of such high-tone houses as J. P. Jewett, which issued the abolitionist masterwork Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Ticknor & Fields, official American publishers (they paid foreign authors, rather than pirating their work) of Dickens and Tennyson. New York had its share of writers, but most of the real forces in American letters lived within a day’s carriage ride of the Massachusetts State House. While simply walking around Boston, San Francisco writer Bret Harte once quipped, “It was impossible to fire a revolver without bringing down the author of a two-volume work.”

  Boston also had the Atlantic Monthly. The magazine debuted in 1857, only one year—no coincidence here—before Clapp launched the Saturday Press. The Atlantic was “born mature,” in the words of cultural historian Van Wyck Brooks. The inaugural issue alone contained work by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emerson, and Longfellow. James Russell Lowell, the Atlantic’s editor, contributed a short poem, a sonnet, and an essay to that first number. An article about the Panic of ’57, by New York–based writer Parke Godwin, was the sole contribution by a non–New Englander. This would prove an enduring pattern: over its first fifteen years of existence, according to one count, two-thirds of its pieces were the work of New England writers.