Rebel Souls

by Justin Martin

  It’s hard to imagine two publications more opposite in temperament than the Atlantic and the SP. The Atlantic’s editorial meetings were often held at the elegant Revere House. For one such meeting, Stowe, a temperance advocate, requested that no alcohol be served. According to T. W. Higginson, a frequent contributor, “conversation set in, but there was a visible awkwardness. . . . The thawing influence of wine was wanting.” By contrast, the SP’s raucous editorial meetings were often held at Pfaff’s, the journal’s spiritual home. For meetings at the Spruce Street office, Clapp often lugged a bucket of beer from Pfaff’s. He published a manuscript submissions guideline in the SP, stating that he was “firm but courteous in accepting drinks and declining articles.”

  The Atlantic’s first issue included a kind of mission statement, asserting, among other things, that the magazine “will not rank itself with any sect of anties.” In other words, it aimed to be sober, balanced, above the fray. By contrast, Clapp was all about anties. Here’s a description of Clapp, courtesy of William Winter, who served for a time as a subeditor at the SP: “He was brilliant and buoyant in mind; impatient of the commonplace; intolerant of smug, ponderous, empty, obstructive respectability; prone to sarcasm; and he had for so long a time lived in a continuous, bitter conflict with conventionality that he had become reckless of public opinion. His delight was to shock the commonplace mind and to sting the hide of the Pharisee with the barb of satire.”

  When the opportunity came to start a journal, Clapp formed it in his image. According to Junius Henri Browne, a contemporary New York writer who did not contribute to the SP, the journal “often sparkled with wit, and always shocked the orthodox with its irreverence and ‘dangerous’ opinions.”

  The SP sold for five cents an issue (two dollars for a year’s subscription) and featured essays and arts criticism as well as poetry and the occasional work of fiction. Heavily represented in the editorial mix were pieces written by the Pfaffians, prompting the Philadelphia Express to dub the journal “the organ of Bohemia.” O’Brien, for example, acted as the SP’s first drama critic, a gig that—like most of his gigs—held his focus for only a few issues before he failed to turn in a column that was due and then quit altogether. But first, he managed to review his own 1854 play, A Gentleman from Ireland, then in revival at Wallack’s Theatre. “I had not seen it played for a couple of years,” he explained, “and I think viewed it from as impartial a point of view as any dramatic critic in the city.” O’Brien then proceeded to pan his own work: “I discovered that it is not a comedy, although announced to be such. It is simply a sort of farce in two acts. The dialogue is sometimes smart, but never witty, while occasionally it rises into the realms of fustian. The ending of the first act is weak and nonsensical. There is no characterization in it from beginning to end, and everybody talks like everybody else.”

  During his brief SP tenure, O’Brien also reviewed a production of Hamlet—from a distinctly Pfaffian perspective. Had Hamlet not been a nobleman, had he not been wealthy and privileged, O’Brien contends that the “prince would most undoubtedly have been a Bohemian.” O’Brien then proceeds to catalog the Dane’s supposed Bohemian attributes, such as “Hamlet was at times a roysterer,” and “he is familiar with the carousal and the wassail . . . the wild revel, the midnight debauch,” adding that he “has a stupendous contempt for all kinds of sham and humbug.”

  Indeed, the SP devoted ample space in every issue to Bohemianism itself: defining, defending, celebrating, and mythologizing the movement. This was necessary. The word Bohemian hadn’t yet appeared in Webster’s or other dictionaries. As of the late 1850s, an American was most likely to encounter this still exotic term, say, when reading Balzac in translation. Clapp worked tirelessly, pushing Bohemian into popular usage in American English, scattering its tenets far and wide.

  The SP was the vehicle. Sometimes, the journal acted almost like a primer, covering the subject in simple, easily digestible ways. It offered a poem by James Hammond, “Ode to a Tobacco Pipe,” which extols the pleasures of one of Clapp’s favorite indulgences. It published George Arnold’s poem “Beer,” quickly knocked off at Pfaff’s during a drunken reverie. An essay signed only with the initials D. D. and entitled “Bohemia” simply wends its way among various historical figures, designating them as either worthy or unworthy of the designation. Chaucer, Sophocles, and Sappho—Bohemians. Henry Knox, Alexander the Great, and John Winston Spencer-Churchill, Seventh Duke of Marlborough—decidedly not. The essayist even makes the following assertion: “All of Washington’s greatness came from his Bohemianism.” Nothing further is offered to substantiate this bold claim about the Revolutionary War hero and father of the United States. Then again, creating a galling sense of insiderism (some are worthy of the club; others aren’t) seems to be the essay’s primary purpose anyhow. Ada Clare provides a more straightforward take on Bohemianism in the February 11, 1860, issue:

  The Bohemian was by nature, if not by habit, a Cosmopolite, with a general sympathy for the fine arts, and for all things above and beyond convention. The Bohemian is not, like the creature of society, a victim of rules and customs; he steps over them all with an easy, graceful, joyous unconsciousness, guided by the principles of good taste and feeling. Above all others, essentially, the Bohemian must not be narrow-minded; if he be, he is degraded back to the position of a mere worldling.

  Clare was also an SP regular, with a column called “Thoughts and Things.” Clare ranged widely, attending to numerous subjects. As a defiant single mother, one of her most frequent concerns was feminism, though the term didn’t yet exist. She railed against the prevailing styles in women’s clothing, asserting that bonnets, hoop skirts, and heels were male-sanctioned fashions, designed to slow women down and keep them servile. “The number of things she is obliged to put on and take off,” writes Clare, “involves a sacrifice of time and patience to which the martyrs were utterly strangers.”

  In one column, Clare mulled over a puzzling double standard. Why are brave men deemed virtuous, she asked? Why is the word chaste invariably applied to maidens? Doesn’t virtue imply an active personal discipline, while chastity suggests a mere passive condition? In other words, a virginal woman gets no credit for her actions—or rather, lack of actions. The clear implication, Clare concluded, was that women weren’t believed to have any control over their sexuality. They needed to be reined in by society’s mores. “As it is,” writes Clare, “the great body of men persist in believing, against all record and the witness of their own eyes, that the woman who can accept one man can accept all men.”

  As with so many of the Pfaffians, there’s something startlingly modern about Clare. In one “Thoughts and Things” column, she even addressed the issue of the way the media—the nineteenth-century media, that is, of novels as opposed to glossy fashion spreads—pressured women about their weight. Clare was on intimate terms with this topic, given her own southern belle upbringing, complete with a morning glass of appetite-stymieing vinegar. Clare writes, “There is a horribly pernicious sentiment prevailing among novel-writers, which always represents the interesting heroine as being fragile, delicate, and unhealthy. This sentiment has found its way into boarding-schools, so that the fat and healthy girls are regarded with an insulting pity, by their dyspeptic companions.”

  Clapp was also a frequent contributor to his own journal, mostly as a critic, a role for which he was spectacularly well suited. He expended buckets of ink on Edwin Booth, following his career in exhaustive, worrying detail: Was Booth’s latest Hamlet an improvement on earlier Hamlets? Was he fulfilling his potential as an actor? But with the exception of his own Bohemian circle—most especially Whitman, as will become clear—Clapp wasn’t what could be called a constructive critic. Destructive criticism was more his style. In one issue of the SP, for example, he reprinted “War,” a new poem by Tennyson, explaining that had the work been originally submitted to his journal, it would have been summarily reje
cted. The reason, Clapp explained, that the poem was appearing at all (no doubt without remuneration for Tennyson) was simply as “a specimen of what the most gifted poets can do when they are not in earnest.”

  Clapp wrote as he spoke, lashing his subjects with cruel invective. He thrilled at coming up with novel conceits for lambasting his targets. Once, Clapp gave a wretched review to a book while withholding the name of the author and the title. Clapp explained that he’d already “wasted two hours and fifty minutes reading it.” To identify the work, he explained, would provide publicity, wholly unmerited publicity, to the author.

  But Clapp reserved his greatest critical animus for . . . Boston. The pages of the SP fairly swim with insults meant for the city he had once called home, where he had sold whale oil as a young man. “New York is such a big city,” goes a typical jibe, “and that it excites so much envy and uncharitableness on the part of its sister cities—and especially Boston, which is such a quiet little place, that it always reminds us of an inscription we once saw on the Canal de l’Ourcq, near Paris—‘Here may be found tranquility and fish in abundance.’”

  Characteristically savage is Clapp’s review of the collected papers of Boston eminence Edward Everett. “A most frightful mass of weak and wearisome platitude” is Clapp’s verdict on the entire lifetime literary output of this author, statesman, and onetime Harvard president. “All is prim, precise, regular, respectable, austere, reverend,” Clapp continues, adding, “Had this book been written by a person less stately and pretentious than Mr. Edward Everett, had it proceeded from one of the disciples rather than from the lord and master of respectable twaddle, we suppose it would have received little attention from the public.” Clapp was only getting warmed up. He called Everett an “inflated bladder” and suggested that he possessed “well-cultivated but quite ordinary mental faculties,” before working up to his gravest insult. He accused Everett of “conventionality” (the cardinal sin in Clapp’s canon). For good measure, Clapp added that “most of the literary men congregated in and about Boston are of this kind.”

  Predictably, one of Clapp’s favorite targets was the Atlantic. “The December [1858] number of the Atlantic was very heavy, and conferred on us, at best, the somewhat doubtful benefit of a few hours sound and unexpected sleep.” Of the next issue, he had this to say: “The leading article—on ‘Olympus and Angard’—is very learned, doubtless, but it is so full of the mythic, the eddaic, the cosmogonic, the telluric, the cryptogalmic, the eupeptic, and, especially, the ethnic and the chronic, that it makes us almost dyspeptic to think of it.”

  Born mature, the Atlantic elected simply to ignore Clapp.

  In a way, the Saturday Press can be seen as the New Yorker with a malevolent streak. There are marked similarities between Clapp’s journal and Harold Ross’s magazine, launched in a subsequent century. Both publications make a cult of Manhattan. Both strike a studied pose of urbanity, esteem the arts above all, and share a fondness for the second-person regal, as in “us” and “we.” There are echoes of Clapp’s long table, too, in the Algonquin Round Table, a salon legendary for its high-wire quip bandying among New Yorker writers such as Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Alexander Woollcott. Even so, the connection between the Pfaff’s Bohemians and the Algonquin wits is not as close as it might appear. Call it an ethereal influence as opposed to a direct one. Clapp was certainly one of the originators of that maddening Manhattan hauteur. But by the 1920s, his set was mostly forgotten.

  If the SP was a kind of proto–New Yorker, it was one with decidedly shallow pockets. Clapp quickly burned through the proceeds from Howland’s rare book collection. So he brought in a series of other investors, what he called “fresh blood,” but their contributions were also quickly exhausted. Running a journal is expensive. Advertising revenue was never enough, though there were plenty of advertisers.

  Among the businesses that regularly placed ads in the SP were A. W. Faber pencils, Delano’s Improved Life-Preserving Vest, and Mathew Brady’s ambrotype and daguerreotype studio, with three locations, one on Broadway. Nearly every issue of the SP also carried the following advertisement for Pfaff’s:

  Go to Pfaff’s! At Pfaff’s Restaurant and Lager Bier Saloon, No. 647 Broadway, New York, You Will Find: The Best Viands. The Best Lager Bier. The Best Coffee and Tea. The Best Wines and Liquors. The Best Havana Cigars. The Best of Everything at Moderate Prices N.B.—You will also find at Pfaff’s the best German, French, Italian, English, and American papers.

  Most issues also included a plea from Clapp for subscribers. He managed countless variations on the theme: If you enjoy this publication, please, please subscribe. This regular feature showed none of Clapp’s characteristic wit. In fact, these pleas for money were quite earnest, with a whiff of desperation thrown in.

  The SP didn’t have a bookkeeper—Clapp couldn’t afford to hire one. He didn’t even bother keeping books. Instead, Clapp and deputy Aldrich worked out an informal system for handling finances. Whoever showed up first at the office on any given day appropriated whatever money came via mail such as subscription payments and advertising revenues. Clapp was in his forties and a confirmed insomniac, so he often arrived at the crack of dawn, while Aldrich—in his twenties—might roll in hours later. This meant Clapp got to attend to his list of priorities: paying the printer, making rent on the SP’s offices, and using whatever pittance remained for his own needs—usually buying drinks at Pfaff’s. Paying contributors was considered optional, an afterthought.

  One time, William Winter was sitting in the SP office with Clapp. The editor was complaining bitterly about money, or the lack thereof—it was a lean time, even by SP standards. In fact, Clapp had taken the precaution of locking the front door to stave off creditors. Suddenly, they heard footsteps in the hallway. Someone began banging on the door. Clapp motioned to Winter to remain silent. The pounding continued for a few minutes, accompanied by a series of muttered oaths. Then they heard retreating footsteps. Clapp sat still for several more minutes, ear tilted toward the door, puffing on his pipe. “’Twas the voice of the Stoddard,” Clapp finally announced to Winter (Richard Stoddard was a regular contributor).

  Despite the SP’s shaky finances, Clapp built a small but intensely loyal readership. A letter from the October 29, 1859, issue provides some flavor: “You may not know it, dear Editor, but in Oswego, the Saturday Press is an institution—indeed, I may say a peculiar institution.”

  The SP’s circulation was maybe five thousand, tops, yet it managed a reach that’s simply amazing. This was thanks to a kind of magnifier effect. Items that ran first in the journal were sometimes reprinted in as many as two hundred publications around the country. The SP benefited from a US Postal Service policy, allowing editors to mail their publications free of charge to other editors. The policy was a holdover from the early days of America, when it was recognized as prudent for editors—many of them living in great isolation—to be able to trade information. During the 1850s, publications continued to build so-called exchange lists; the SP was on hundreds of them. While a publication virtually never paid to reprint an item from another, the convention was to properly credit the source of a piece. And so it was that across the nation—in Houston, Cincinnati, and San Francisco—even nonsubscribers to the SP were treated to the journal’s articles, in the process learning about Clapp’s vicious opinions and O’Brien’s latest fistfight or getting a glimpse at the life of the lovely Ada Clare.

  Thanks to the SP’s ubiquity, Bohemianism became a full-blown cultural phenomenon. While some publications were content to reprint SP articles, others wished to do their own original explorations of the subject. Many of these pieces also have a decidedly introductory quality. The public was hungry for the basics: What exactly was a Bohemian? Did they bathe? Did they bite? “Men of an indomitable irregularity and indolence, who live by their wits and for self-indulgence, are Bohemians,” explained Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, adding, “
They are shaggy as to the head, with abounding hair.” According to the New York Times, “The true Bohemian has either written an unsuccessful play, or painted an unsalable picture, or published an unreadable book, or composed an unsung opera.” The piece ended with a warning: “Still, the Bohemian cannot be called a useful member of society.” Predictably, these cautions only made Bohemianism all the more seductive.

  Some publications even dispatched intrepid reporters to Pfaff’s to provide firsthand accounts. After entering the inner sanctum, a writer for the Boston Saturday Express provided the following breathless, mixed-metaphor-laden account: “This is the capital of Bohemia; this little room is the rallying-place of the subjects of King Devilmaycare; this is the anvil from which fly the brightest scintillations of the hour; this is the womb of the best things that society has heard for many-a-day; this is the trysting-place of the most careless, witty, and jovial spirits of New York,—journalists, artists, and poets.”

  William Dean Howells was one of those people out in the hinterlands versed in Bohemia and all things Pfaffian. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, he would emerge as one of America’s most celebrated novelists, the foremost practitioner of the realist school of fiction. His most famous work is The Rise of Silas Lapham. He would also serve as editor of the Atlantic for a decade, from 1871 to 1881.