Rebel Souls

by Justin Martin

  Departing troops marched directly past Pfaff’s. Whitman was often on hand, watching as they filed by in brightly colored formations. Early in the war, he wrote the following in a notebook: “I have this hour, this day resolved to inaugurate a sweet, clean-blooded body by ignoring all drinks but water and pure milk—and all fat meats, late suppers—a great body—a purged, cleansed, spiritualized invigorated body.” There was a loftiness to this statement, coupled with a vagueness, reminiscent of his earlier desire to become a professional “wander-speaker.” But he didn’t keep to his resolve for long. He continued going to Pfaff’s, kept drinking lager and enjoying late suppers of his favorite beefsteak. He was becoming shaggier, too, letting his hair and beard grow out. More than anything, it seems, Whitman’s “resolution” was a search for a way to get caught up in the sweep of events.

  Enlisting was out of the question. Now forty-one, he was too old and certainly lacked a soldier’s temperament. “Could there be anything more shocking and incongruous than Whitman killing people?” a friend once asked. It perfectly sums up the matter.

  Most of Whitman’s fellow Pfaffians proved similarly unsuited for military duty. Clapp wasn’t exactly a joiner. In any case, at age forty-­six, he was too old. Ludlow, Winter, the poet Arnold, and others didn’t feel compelled to volunteer for assorted reasons, including age, lack of physical hardiness, or a generally unmartial disposition.

  O’Brien was an exception, and he enlisted immediately. He’d never shied from a good fight. He was also handy with guns, or at least was more comfortable using one than his fellow Bohemians. One time, he had gotten into a heated discussion in a Manhattan restaurant about whether the story of William Tell shooting an apple off his son’s head was truth or myth. Truth, insisted a drunken O’Brien. To prove it, he drew a gun and proceeded to point out as targets—then shoot—­various portions of the chandelier.

  O’Brien volunteered for the 7th Regiment of the New York Militia, an outfit with a reputation for being filled with dandies. One newspaper called it a “Regiment of Beaux.” For O’Brien, it was a perfect fit. He was especially drawn to the pomp of soldiering: “Why, when I am marching down Broadway I do not know whether I am a part of the universe, or whether the universe is a part of me.”

  Among Clapp’s circle, one of the few others who sought military service was Thomas Aldrich, the poet and onetime Saturday Press deputy. In fact, Aldrich and O’Brien would ultimately compete for the same position, as an aid to General Frederick Lander. O’Brien would win the post.

  While Pfaff’s saloon wasn’t exactly a wellspring of soldiers, it did produce some war correspondents. As a consequence, Bohemian—a term that had proved so versatile for the French—took on an additional meaning in English. At the beginning of the Civil War, Bohemian became synonymous with journalist, a meaning that would hold for years to come, before fading out of usage. This made sense: war correspondents tended to be scruffy, hard-drinking sorts, the type of people who were associated with Bohemianism in the popular imagination. Only a portion of these so-called Bohemians had actually spent any time at Clapp’s table. Poet Edmund Stedman; Edward House, a drama critic for the New York Tribune; and Charles Webb, a regular contributor to Vanity Fair, along with a handful of others, successfully made the transition from Pfaff’s habitué to war correspondent.

  Public tastes were changing fast. Now in demand was a steady stream of war news. The New York Tribune debuted an evening edition. The Herald answered by introducing three separate afternoon editions at 1:30, 3:00, and 5:00. The appetite had greatly diminished for the types of writing favored by Clapp’s coterie, such as satire, scathing cultural criticism, and experimental poetry. The Saturday Press was no more, and Vanity Fair was barely alive. Many of Pfaff’s wordsmiths found themselves quickly out of step.

  Whitman tried to adapt. During those heady first days, he roughed out a brief poem called “Broadway, 1861.” It was—for lack of a better term—a recruiting poem, not in any official capacity, but simply in subject and style. Other poets, also trying to adjust to the new realities, wrote “recruiting poems” at around this time. William Cullen Bryant, for example, offered “Our Country’s Call.”

  Whitman’s poem was inspired in part by his brother George. As the most practical Whitman sibling, George was the only one of the six brothers to enlist. Less than a week after Sumter, he signed up for the army. When George’s ninety-day service was up, he would reenlist, joining the 51st New York.

  Whitman, however, would abandon “Broadway, 1861.” He didn’t polish it further, didn’t try to get it ready for publication. He must have recognized that it was not one of his finest efforts:

  The sights now there

  The splendid flags flying over all the stores

  (The wind sets from the west—the flags are out stiff and broad—you

  can count every star of the thirty-four—you can count the thirteen

  stripes.)

  The regiments arriving and departing,

  The Barracks—the soldiers lounging around,

  The recruiting band, preceded by the fifer—

  The ceaseless din

  In the future, Whitman would write very different types of war poems, often infusing the subject with an air of ambivalence, even dread. Finding his own distinctive voice for capturing a war would prove difficult. It would require authentic experience, and even then Whitman would forever question whether art—limited, imprecise art—offered an adequate window into something as vast and chaotic as war. Ultimately, he would require something larger than poetry to find his place.

  While some writers and artists foundered with the outbreak of the Civil War, others prospered. As quickly became clear, people on the home front had two distinct and utterly contradictory needs. They wanted a constant flow of hard news about the war, with maybe the occasional martial-themed poem thrown into the mix. Otherwise, they desired pure escapism. This created an unexpected division among Clapp’s set of Bohemians.

  While the scribes mostly struggled at the outset, the actors were quick to thrive. Asia Booth described the Civil War as “the harvest time for theaters.” As the sister of Edwin and John Wilkes, she was in a position to know. Looking back on this time, one New Yorker would say, “I remember well, in the first year of our war, when we were profoundly miserable and frightened, what a relief it was to go and see [Edwin] Booth in ‘Hamlet.’”

  Demand for dramatic fare was so great that in 1861, impresario John Ford opened a theater in an abandoned church in Washington, DC. It burned down the following year. Not wanting to miss the boom, he would race to build a new Ford’s Theatre.

  For the most part, actors were identified with a particular region, either the North or the South. After war broke out, Edwin began his successful run of Hamlet in New York. Brother John was a frequent performer in the Confederate states. But there was a looseness to the North-South rule, at least where actors were concerned. They certainly weren’t soldiers; neither were they pillars of the community, such as merchants, doctors, or preachers. On matters other than stagecraft, society didn’t tend to take actors very seriously. Their political views were considered inconsequential. This served as a kind of passport. Actors could move more easily between the North and South than most people during the Civil War. Thus, John also performed extensively in the North. In fact, Whitman attended an 1861 performance of Richard III in New York City with John playing the lead. Whitman never met Edwin’s brother. But the poet later said, “He was a queer fellow: had strange ways: it would take some effort to get used, adjusted, to him: but now and then he would have flashes, passages, I thought, of real genius.”

  An unanticipated result of this theater bounty was the sudden and spectacular reemergence of a fallen Pfaffian. Less than a year earlier, Adah Isaacs Menken, reduced to performing at the tawdry Canterbury concert saloon, had fallen into near-fatal despair. But one of Menken’s defining traits
was a capacity for startlingly rapid transformation. With the outbreak of the war, her fortunes revived. In fact, her career took off like one of the 23rd New York Light Artillery’s rockets.

  The mastermind of Menken’s unlikely comeback was Captain John Smith, manager of the Green Street Theatre in Albany. The dramatic vehicle that transported her to glory was Mazeppa; or, The Wild Horse of Tartary, a shopworn historical play and repertory staple for decades. Captain Smith, a man with considerable Barnum flair, hoped to breathe new life into this tired tale. Menken was key to his vision.

  The play was loosely—very loosely—based on the story of Ivan Mazeppa, a Ukrainian Cossack born in the 1600s. The real Mazeppa led an eventful life, filled with byzantine political intrigue involving such figures as Russia’s Peter the Great and Charles XII of Sweden. But it was a single episode, almost certainly apocryphal, that managed to capture the imagination of people beyond the northern latitudes. Supposedly, Ivan Mazeppa and a Polish count were rivals for the affections of the same beautiful woman. To dispense with his adversary, the count arranged for Mazeppa to be stripped naked, lashed to the back of a horse, and sent off into the wilderness to die. Somehow, Mazeppa survived and became a Cossack chieftain.

  In 1819, Lord Byron published a lengthy poem, “Mazeppa.” He transformed his subject from a Cossack into a Tartar—why worry the details? The poem’s central conceit, a bound and bare Mazeppa, strapped to a stallion, hurtling across frigid and punishing terrain, proved an irresistible image for Byron. In his rendering, against all odds, Mazeppa survives his equine ordeal to lead an uprising against the Poles, vanquishing his people’s evil oppressors. Mazeppa is a man ruled by overwhelming passions. He’s a fighter—a freedom fighter—and a lover, who in the end wins back his lady true.

  And so it was that the blurry outlines of the life of an obscure Balkan political figure became fodder for art. Inspired by Byron, Victor Hugo wrote an epic poem of his own about Mazeppa. Both Géricault and Delacroix painted the “Tartar” hero. Franz Liszt composed an especially challenging piano étude devoted to the subject.

  In 1831, English playwright Henry Milner did a treatment of Ma­zeppa. Milner was no Shakespeare; his work is distinguished by slovenly plotlines, cardboard characters, and overwrought dialogue. Nevertheless, he possessed a keen instinct about popular tastes. He was among the first to adapt Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for the stage. The immortal line “It’s alive!” is actually from Milner’s play, not Shelley’s novel. With Mazeppa, he managed to create an enduring work. The winning formula was spectacle, what today would be called special effects. His Mazeppa calls for lush costuming, elaborate set pieces, and epic battle scenes. Many productions even featured a live horse onstage. By 1861, an entire generation of theatergoers had been treated to Mazeppa. Over time, it had become safe, reliable fare. The play was—in the truest sense—a warhorse.

  Captain Smith, the Albany impresario, planned to change that. Rather than have a man play the lead, he wanted a woman. And why not bind her to a real horse? Traditionally, for the play’s climactic scene, the actor playing Mazeppa was replaced by a dummy, which was strapped to a docile dray horse. The horse would trot in circles for a spell, moving against a backdrop painted to look like a wilderness scene. In some productions, the horse even went up a small ramp, suggesting a climb through a treacherous mountain pass. This furnished audiences with a serviceable, but not exactly pulse-quickening, simulation of that wild ride. None of that for Captain Smith; he wanted a gorgeous woman atop a horse.

  Menken was the ideal choice—for so many reasons. For starters, there was a robustness to her sensuality; she was no dainty, delicate beauty like her friend Ada Clare. This quality apparently suggested Menken might be convincing in drag, as a Tartar warrior. Once she was stripped down—to a sheer, flesh-colored body stocking—she was certain to command an audience’s attention. Menken’s fearlessness was also a plus. To play the role would require that she be bound to a horse while lying on her back, spread-eagled, yet somehow manage to hang on. An ingenious rig had been fashioned, making it possible for her to tighten her precarious purchase on the horse’s back by tugging on the lashings. This was like a circus trick. Once again, Menken filled the bill, as she could draw on equestrian experience gained while touring Texas with Victor Franconi’s Imperial Hippodrome. She was almost uniquely qualified to play the role. As for the whiff of scandal that surrounded Menken—well, that was simply a bonus in the eyes of Captain Smith.

  Mazeppa opened on June 7, 1861. To drum up advance publicity, the captain had paraded the production’s thoroughbred lead, Belle Beauty, up and down Albany’s Main Street. He plastered posters on every available surface. As a result, the Green Street Theatre was “crowded from pit to dome,” recalled Smith.

  During the opening scenes, Menken comported herself adequately. She engaged in a rousing sword fight, even managed to remember some of her dialogue. Captain Smith was prepared for this: he had placed himself in the production, playing a character that tails Mazeppa. That way, he was able to feed whispered lines to his star. Then came the big scene. At the urging of the Polish count, soldiers ripped off Mazeppa’s tunic, revealing the buxom Menken underneath. The audience gasped. In the weak glow of the theater’s calcium lights, it was impossible to tell whether or not she was naked. She was lashed to Belle Beauty. Then the horse started up a specially built ramp that wound around and around, rising to a height four stories above the stage. It featured canvas panels with images of rocks and trees and a waterfall—at last, a prop that could proximate a mountain. Up and up climbed Belle Beauty. At the very top, horse and rider exited through an archway.

  Following the wild ride, unfortunately, plenty of play remains. Mazeppa is a badly paced drama, like everything in the Milner oeuvre. The remaining action includes battles, a wedding, and some kind of Tartar tribal hootenanny; there are mistaken identities, reunited lovers, and endless soliloquies. When the curtain fell opening night, however, the Albany audience remembered only one thing. “It had to be seen to be believed,” said one attendee. “Parts of the body of this actress were exposed that God never intended to be seen by any eye other than her mother’s.”

  Captain Smith had a hit. Mazeppa enjoyed a six-week sold-out engagement at the Green Street Theatre. Then, beginning in July 1861—right after Bull Run, the Civil War’s first major battle—the show went on the road, traveling from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati to Milwaukee. The timing for a successful revival of Mazeppa was perfect. The play’s battle scenes had a degree of resonance with the new reality of an America at war. But only a degree: the combatants were Tartars and Poles, so there was no risk of audiences being too closely reminded of current events. Mazeppa also promised cultural enrichment. In the prudish Victorian era, this provided convenient cover for many playgoers. To attend Mazeppa was an edifying experience, a chance to gain useful information about history, pageantry, and the customs of faraway lands. All that, plus you got to see a naked lady.

  As Mazeppa traveled from town to town, Menken, predictably, never succeeded in fully memorizing her lines. Audiences were treated to a different version every single night. “I was not impressed by her acting though her form spoke loudly,” recalled one theatergoer.

  Nevertheless, Menken took herself very seriously as an artist. While she offered neither consistency nor much dramatic ability, she brought a rare intensity to the role. No doubt, that helped sell the production. Menken wrote an account of playing Mazeppa where she described “resting on the bare back of the leaping, dashing steed, and whirled up the mimic mountains of peril and danger.” She added, “I am as wild and as earnest in my dressing-room, and woe to the unlucky creature who displeases me, or opposes me in look or deed! . . . They think I am crazy at night. My attention can never be turned to any subject but the stage as long as the piece lasts. I see and hear nothing else. I feel nothing but the character I represent. To be so intense requires soul.”

  During a ru
n at Boston’s Howard Athenaeum, Menken managed to summon that passion both on- and offstage. “My business here is wonderful, and enthusiasm is on the increase,” she wrote to her freshly hired advance man in New York. Yes, Mazeppa had become so popular so quickly that already she needed an advance man. She added, “Last night I had to go before the curtain four times!”

  During her Howard Athenaeum stand, it seems, Menken also had a sexual fling with none other than Artemus Ward, her fellow Pfaffian, née Charlie Brown. The pair “‘went it’ pretty rapid for a few days here,” as she put it. Apparently, they were also spotted together in public. Worried that she and Ward would become grist for the gossip columns, Menken instructed her advance man to deny any reports that they were an item, and certainly any claims that they were altar bound. “It won’t do to be married,” Menken wrote. That was something she’d already done, thrice. Only recently had she obtained a divorce from Heenan, her absentee boxer husband. What had happened with Ward, she assured her advance man, was only a brief dalliance, nothing more.

  But what about Artemus Ward? What was he doing in Boston besides going it rapid with Menken? Turns out that Ward was in the midst of a wildly successful tour of his own. His timing had been exquisite. Not relying solely on writing, diversifying with a stage act, had proved a brilliant move. He’d practiced his material at Clapp’s table. He’d refined it based on the frank feedback of the Bohemians. When the Civil War broke out, he was ready. Ward, it’s safe to say, was the only member of the Pfaff’s set currently creating even more of a sensation than Menken.