As the two men strolled beneath the elms, they discussed the planned edition of Leaves. Emerson broached the subject that maybe Whitman should consider toning down—maybe even cutting—some of the racier content. Whitman offered a few mumbled protestations. Then Emerson launched into a discussion of all the reasons this made sense. He was nothing if not thorough. “It was an argument-statement, reconnoitering, review, attack, and pressing home,” Whitman would recall, likening Emerson’s discursive style to “an army corps.”
Yet it troubled Whitman that Emerson seemed most concerned that the inclusion of certain poems might hurt the work’s financial prospects. Could sales truly be Emerson’s chief concern? Whitman asked if the book would be as good minus certain portions. Emerson frowned; the question appeared to throw him slightly. But then he continued, allowing that it would certainly still be a good book, if not as good a book.
Around and around the Common they walked, for two full hours, on a cold March Saturday. Emerson talked and talked; Whitman mostly listened.
A short time afterward, Whitman received a letter from Clapp. “I need not say, we are all anxious to see you back at Pfaff’s,—and are eagerly looking for your proposed letter to the crowd.” It’s unlikely that Clapp was aware of the recent stroll with Emerson. Still, Clapp seems almost to be checking on Whitman, maybe trying to ensure that Boston wasn’t exerting too much pull on the poet. (Whitman’s letter to the Pfaff’s crowd, if he wrote one, has sadly been lost.)
Clapp also promised Whitman that he’d enlist the Saturday Press in the promotion of Leaves: “What I can do for it, in the way of bringing it before the public, over and over again, I shall do, and do thoroughly—if the S.P. is kept alive another month. We have more literary influence than any other paper in the land.”
A battle for Whitman’s soul was taking shape. On one shoulder was Emerson, counseling prudence. On the other perched devil Clapp. Whitman chose Clapp. He decided to press ahead with Leaves, refusing to make a single change. Whitman would later say, “Emerson’s face always seemed to me so clean—as if God had just washed it off.” For his part, Emerson would state that he had “great hopes of Whitman until he became Bohemian.”
Whitman continued to oversee the production of Leaves, in unexpurgated form. Typically, he spent at least a few hours each day in the stereotype foundry. But that left ample time to explore Boston. Sometimes, he simply walked up and down Washington Street, the city’s equivalent of Broadway. He wore his wideawake and heavy boots, a getup that often drew stares, much to Whitman’s amusement. In Boston, he stood out in a way that he didn’t in anonymous New York. He was surprised, too, by the city’s high prices. In a letter home, he complained, “7 cents for a cup of coffee, and 19 cts for a beefsteak—and me so fond of coffee and beefsteak.”
One of Whitman’s favorite spots to visit was the Seamen’s Bethel, a chapel near the harbor featuring a congregation that consisted mostly of sailors. Here, Whitman got to listen to Father Edward Taylor, a legendary sermonizer and the model for Father Mapple in Moby-Dick. For Whitman, a good sermon was one of life’s great pleasures, right up there with opera. It was never about religious instruction for him; matters of belief and doctrine were strictly secondary. Rather, Whitman thrilled at the flow of words, the rhythm, the transformative magic of language. “For when Father Taylor preach’d or pray’d,” Whitman wrote many years later, “the rhetoric and art, the mere words, (which usually play such a big part) seem’d altogether to disappear, and the live feeling advanced upon you and seiz’d you with a power before unknown.”
Whitman visited the Seamen’s Bethel repeatedly. Besides Father Taylor’s sermons, there were other draws. He liked to sit by himself in a pew appreciating the “physiognomies, forms, dress, gait” of the sailor parishioners. Never averse to mixing the sacred and profane, he found that this little chapel offered a prime opportunity for man watching.
One other notable event from Whitman’s Boston stay was attending an extradition hearing for Frank Sanborn. Sanborn, a local teacher and fervent abolitionist, had provided financial and moral support to John Brown as he planned the Harpers Ferry raid. Whitman attended the hearing at the invitation of Thayer and Eldridge. Redpath, their best-selling author and Brown’s biographer, was also present.
The two young editors were in a state of high dudgeon for the hearing. They even sneaked pistols into the courthouse. Were the judge to rule against Sanborn, they had hatched a plan to spring to his aid, escorting him to a waiting carriage that would carry him to safety. Thayer and Eldridge took seats at the front of the packed courtroom and sat there, armed and fidgeting. They were much relieved when the judge ruled that Sanborn should not be handed over to the authorities.
Whitman watched the proceedings from the rear of the courtroom, showing his usual detachment. Defendant Sanborn would recall spotting the poet, “wearing his loose jacket and open shirt collar.” The hearing and the frenzy surrounding it were, to Whitman’s view, just more of the era’s “hot passions.” He was no slavery sympathizer, but neither was he enamored of John Brown’s violent methods. He was a pacifist. A Quaker meetinghouse was one of the places he’d worshipped during his varied upbringing.
Late in the spring, Whitman departed Boston by boat, returning to his Brooklyn home and his Manhattan home-away-from-home: Pfaff’s.
The official publication date of Leaves of Grass, third edition, was May 19, 1860. Originally, Thayer & Eldridge had planned to pair this literary title with a political title, the biography of Seward. But on May 18, the final day of the Republican convention held in Chicago, there was a surprise turn of events, as Lincoln pulled ahead of Seward to become his party’s presidential nominee. (In those days, parties chose the nominee at the convention, not before.) Thayer & Eldridge immediately pulled the Seward biography, which had instantly been rendered irrelevant. They undertook a rush-job book on Lincoln instead. Thayer & Eldridge would become the first house in America to produce a bio of the nominee. But for now, Whitman’s title would have to stand on its own in the marketplace.
The latest Leaves was a vast, sprawling work. It clocked in at 456 pages and contained 146 poems, 114 more than the previous iteration. Where the first Leaves had been a tall, thin volume, Whitman had specified that the new edition be small and thick, giving it roughly the dimensions and the heft of a Bible. For Whitman, this was a highly significant choice: he was going for grandeur, heeding his friend’s advice to construct the literary equivalent of a cathedral. The book was supposed to be so much more than a mere poetry collection. Perhaps it could even serve as a spiritual guide, spelling out a “new American religion” or maybe “no religion,” as he had scrawled in a notation to himself several years earlier. How better to convey these outsize aims than with a suitably holy-looking tome?
But if Whitman’s new work was a Bible, it was a decidedly bawdy one. On the title page, the words Leaves of Grass are rendered with little spermatozoa swimming among the letters. Plenty of risqué content can be found in the poems, some of which were carried over from the earlier two editions. There’s “love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching” and a “slow rude muscle” and “delirious juice” and “limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous” and “bellies pressed and glued together with love.” Because some of the most libidinous passages appear in the “Enfans d’Adam” cluster, it has often been speculated that these were the poems that Emerson suggested cutting. There’s something strident about this group, featuring men and women proudly copulating, glorying in their bodily fluids and functions.
By contrast, the “Calamus” cluster—dedicated to attachments between men, romantic and otherwise—is less frenzied, more nuanced. While “Enfans d’Adam” consists of what might be termed “message poems,” celebrating the sanctity of the human form, both male and female, “Calamus” is where Whitman appears to be exploring his deepest feelings. This section contains some of the most beautiful poems he woul
d ever write. Some are deeply erotic, but the sequence explores a range of feelings, love and pain and desire and loss. One of the finest is the brief but lovely “Calamus, number 29”:
One flitting glimpse, caught through an interstice,
Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room,
around the stove, late of a winter night—And
I unremarked, seated in a corner;
Of a youth who loves me, and whom I love, silently
approaching, and seating himself near, that he
may hold me by the hand;
A long while, amid the noises of coming and going
—of drinking and oath and smutty jest,
There we two, content, happy in being together,
speaking little, perhaps not a word.
It is quite possible that the “youth” in this poem is Fred Vaughan, the man with whom Whitman once lived, the serious romance that went painfully awry. And maybe the barroom setting is Pfaff’s.
Taken in total, Leaves, edition three, feels as epic as Whitman intended—almost elemental. It’s gorgeous and obscene, earthy and transcendent. Many of the poems feature Whitman’s signature first-person universal, shape-shifting, careening through time and space. Once again, Whitman demonstrates his fondness for slang, weakness for bizarre syntax, and fascination with phrenology and other pseudosciences. Terms like electric, adhesive, and magnetic appear throughout. Moments of supernatural clarity follow muddied stretches of utter artistic chaos.
Yet somehow, thanks to Whitman’s genius, an overarching theme shines through, the theme of union. There is union of past and present, good and evil, life and death. (The poem from the Saturday Press—in which the sea repeatedly whispers “death”—was prominently featured in the new collection, positioned by itself, outside of the various clusters.) The theme of union, of course, extends to sexual union: between men and women, men and men. And perhaps most significant, there’s political union—between the states.
In the first edition of Leaves, Whitman had deemed the United States “essentially the greatest poem.” Now, he called on this body politic to remain whole. “And a shrill song of curses on him who would dissever the Union,” goes a line in one of the poems. And in another the poet chides, “States! Were you looking to be held together by the lawyers? By an agreement on a paper? Or by arms? Away!” He even makes the connection—pure Whitman here—between the states and paramours: “Inextricable lands! the clutched together! the passionate lovers!” The third edition was published in May 1860. Given what was about to befall America, Whitman, who always approached politics with a poet’s intuition, demonstrates a deep prescience.
On the title page, Whitman even went so far as to list the publication date of Leaves of Grass as “Year 85 of the States.” He was dating his new Bible, it seems, using a new Whitmanian calendar. Accordingly, if 1860 was year 85, then year 1, the moment of origin, began on July 4, 1776, with the birth of the United States of America. This highly idiosyncratic dating system, one of the book’s many striking features, grew directly out of Whitman’s near-mystical fixation on union.
The third edition of Leaves was both a demanding and a provocative work. Predictably, critics tended to focus on the controversial passages. The headlines speak volumes. “‘Leaves of Grass’—Smut in Them.”—Springfield (MA) Daily Republican. “Walt. Whitman’s Dirty Book”—Cincinnati Daily Commercial. “Mr. Whitman sees nothing vulgar in that which is commonly regarded as the grossest obscenity,” wrote a New York Times critic, adding that the poet “rejects the laws of conventionality so completely as to become repulsive; gloats over coarse images with the gusto of a Rabelais.” In the Boston Wide World, a reviewer wrote, “Why, these ‘poems’ (prose run crazy) are the veriest trash ever written, and vulgar and disgusting to the last degree. There never was more unblushing obscenity presented to the public eye than is to be found in these prurient pages and how any respectable House could publish the volume is beyond my powers to comprehend.”
In an unusual turn, the Westminster Review placed the onus on Pfaff’s, holding the saloon responsible for the deficiencies of Whitman’s latest effort. For several years now, the critic stated, the poet had spent his time drunk in a “cellar,” and it had blunted his skills.
Many of the bad reviews were tempered, with the critics allowing that Whitman had promise and talent. There were plenty of good reviews, too. In fact, Whitman garnered more notices than for his previous two editions combined. But it still wasn’t enough. Even in the nineteenth century—when far fewer choices vied for people’s entertainment time—to get a book to take flight commercially required publicity, a steady, relentless drumbeat of publicity.
“What I can do for it,” Clapp had promised, “. . . I shall do, and do thoroughly.” In the weeks following its publication, the Saturday Press ran dozens of items on Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass. Clapp enlisted the Pfaff’s circle to write essays, appreciations of the poet, bits of gossip; his journal even reviewed the book on three separate occasions. Every issue also carried an advertisement for the title from Thayer & Eldridge. “Clapp seemed almost to have founded the Saturday Press for the purpose of forcing Whitman upon the balking public,” writes Frances Winwar in a 1941 biography of the poet.
Clapp also ran a number of Leaves parodies. Given the jealousy and ill feeling harbored by some in the Pfaff’s circle toward Whitman (he was so clearly Clapp’s favorite), writing a parody must have been a more palatable assignment. Certainly, there was no love lost between Whitman and Winter. Whitman once called him “little Willie, weakest of the New York lot.” Winter would refer to Leaves as “that odoriferous classic.” Writing a parody for the Saturday Press must have come quite naturally to Winter. And his is spot-on:
I celebrate the Fourth of July!
And what I celebrate you shall celebrate,
And all together we’ll go in strong for a celebration. . . .
Then is the Fourth of July, and I, rising, behold it.
I descend to the pavement. I merge with the
crowd, I roar exultant, I am an American citizen.
I feel that every man I meet owes me
twenty-five cents.
Another parody that ran in the Saturday Press was entitled “I Happify Myself,” by journalist Richard Grant White:
O my soul!
O your soul, which is no better than my soul,
and no worse, but just the same!
O soul in general! Loafe! Proceed through
space with a hole in your trousers!
O pendent shirt-flap! O dingy, unwashed, flut-
tering linen! . . .
By golly, there is nothing in this world so unut-
terably magnificent as the inexplicable com-
prehensibility of inexplicableness. . . .
O triangles, O hypotheneuses, O centres, circumferences,
diameters, radiuses, arcs, sines,
cosines, tangents, parallelograms, and paral-
lelopipedons.
O myself! O yourself.
O my eye!
Clapp even took the extraordinary step of reprinting in the Saturday Press bad reviews from other publications. He recognized the value of creating a forum on the pages of his journal, filled with discussion of Whitman, both positive and negative. This created the impression that the controversial poet was being widely and passionately discussed. The greatest danger is to be ignored—modern-minded Clapp knew this lesson oh so well. Whitman would later say, “Henry was right: better to have people stirred against you if they can’t be stirred for you—better that than not to stir them at all.”
It didn’t take long for Clapp’s publicity blitz to show results. Sales started to pick up. Whitman’s collection was gaining momentum. In July 1860, Thayer & Eldridge went back to press, issuing a second printing of this latest edition of Lea
ves of Grass.
8: Year of Meteors
THE YEAR 1860 BROUGHT great promise for the Bohemians: Whitman published the monumental third edition of Leaves of Grass. Clapp’s Saturday Press was at the height of its power and influence. Ada Clare’s first novel, Asphodel, was slated to appear in the fall.
In equal measure, the mood in 1860 felt ominous. The year contained the last gasps of peace as America continued to slide toward a drawn-out and horrific bloodletting. The nation’s collective anxiety kept building, growing progressively more urgent. As the sense of impending crisis grew, the Bohemians would be affected, some deeply and painfully.
For Adah Menken, 1860 certainly began on a high. It was less than a year since she’d moved from Cincinnati to New York, and already her acting career was starting to take off. Things always happened quickly for Menken. She was also having some luck getting her new poetry, on topics other than Judaism, published in places other than the Israelite. To top it off, following a whirlwind romance, she had gotten married for the third time. Her new husband, John Heenan, age twenty-four, was a boxer.
Heenan was scheduled to fight a match in England in the spring of 1860. His opponent was Tom Sayers, the pride of London’s Camden Town. It was billed as the first-ever world championship bout. The exact location was yet to be revealed. Caution had to be taken with arrangements for the big match, as boxing was against the law in both the United States and England. The sport was especially punishing in this era; opponents fought gloveless after first treating their hands with elixirs such as walnut brine, the better to harden their bare fists. A round ended when a boxer fell. A match ended when someone couldn’t get back up.
Menken’s new husband was a big man and knock-down handsome. Given boxing’s illegality, he occupied a strange place in society as a kind of netherworld celebrity, a folk hero whose activities were followed avidly by the public at large and the sporting crowd in particular. Between bouts, Heenan made his living as an enforcer for New York’s corrupt Tammany political machine. His job was to menace undecided voters, intimidating them into casting their ballots for Tammany-backed ward chiefs and the like. Menken and Heenan had married on a whim, following a night of passion at the Rock Cottage, a kind of no-tell lodge on Bloomingdale Road in upper Manhattan. The lodge’s sleazy proprietor had summoned a priest to perform a quickie ceremony. Menken and Heenan had agreed to keep their marriage secret, even from most of their closest friends. Heenan worried that his reputation would suffer if the public learned of his marriage, especially with the championship bout looming. It might make him look soft. At least, that’s what he told his new wife.
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