Rebel Souls

by Justin Martin

  Ostensibly, he was delivering a lecture called The Babes in the Wood. The posters and notices that went up in advance of his performances simply offered, “Artemus Ward will speak a piece.” His act was bizarre, like nothing audiences had ever before witnessed.

  To begin each performance, Ward would stand there in silence, allowing the audience to look him over. Many attendees had expected they’d be seeing the “Old Showman” character from the popular “Artemus Ward” letters in the Plain Dealer and Vanity Fair. Others weren’t sure what to expect. But one thing was now clear: the man on stage was so young. Yet he was dressed like a man twice his age: silk cravat, suit and tails, shiny cuff links, a pocket watch on a chain. He had a shockingly large nose and a truly ridiculous coiffed mane of jet-black curls. His expression was mournful.

  Ward would maintain his silence for many minutes, providing the audience a long—an uncomfortably long—opportunity to study him. Invariably, people would start to snicker. At this, Ward would dart his eyes nervously, maybe shift from one foot to another. More snickering. Finally, he would announce in a halting voice, “Ladies and gentlemen: When you have finished this . . . unseemly interruption . . . I guess I’ll begin my discourse.”

  The crowd would erupt. This was a tour-de-force opener; it never failed to break the tension. As an attendee at one of his shows recalled, “And the audience, as if feeling that it could not come to the relief of the unhappy man too quickly, and assure him of its entire neighborliness and sympathy, broke out spontaneously with hand-clapping that said plainly enough, ‘Welcome, welcome! Be not cast down! We shall laugh at anything you say.’”

  Ward would then launch into his act, rarely smiling, never breaking character. He’d begin an anecdote, only to drift off on to some other topic. He’d sputter and weave, unable to quite find his conversational balance, forever trying to recover. Many of his jokes depended on non sequiturs. For example, “I met a man in Oregon who hadn’t any teeth—not a tooth in his head.” He’d pause for a moment, letting the audience absorb that. Then he’d add, “Yet that man could play on the bass drum better than any man I ever met.”

  When the audience laughed, Ward would often look flustered. It was as if he wasn’t sure what he’d said, or why it was funny. Sometimes, the laughter would appear to cause him to lose his train of thought. A look of reproach might cross his face, as if to say, I’m struggling here, valiantly trying to make a serious point. Why is everyone laughing? This only added to the crowd’s enjoyment.

  Like all the finest humorists, Ward had a gift. Also, like Menken with Mazeppa, he benefited from the fact that his work resonated with the times. To wit: his act consisted of a man in a dark suit, who, in a tone of complete seriousness, speaks utter nonsense. At some level, it certainly reminded audiences of all the oratories and lectures and sermons they’d been forced to endure, delivered by assorted pompous moralists. Perhaps, some even caught a hint of the politician in Ward. Politicians—with their distinguished bearings and stentorian voices—could talk a good game. But they’d pitched the nation into war just the same.

  Ward was a meticulous artist. While Menken didn’t bother to learn her lines, he practiced every “um” and “ah,” timed every pause. The impression that his performances were rambling and spontaneous was just that, an impression: he was in complete control. As he moved deeper into a show, audiences grew accustomed to his quirky rhythm. It became possible to trot out highly precise comic bits, dependent on subtleties of timing and delivery.

  An example is Ward’s penitentiary joke. He would begin by struggling to describe the claustrophobic feeling of traveling inside a very small stagecoach. “Those of you who have been in the penitentiary . . . ,” he offered. But then his voice trailed off, and his eyes filled with panic. He realized his error. He’d just suggested that members of his audience had been to jail.

  As Ward tried to extricate himself from this awkwardness, the audience could almost see the wheels turning in his mind. He spoke slowly, trying to buy himself time to recover: “and stayed there . . . any length . . . of time . . . ” Suddenly, his expression brightened. He added hopefully, “ . . . as visitors.” He stood up straight, pleased with himself. But then Ward’s trademark crestfallen look returned. He recognized his error. Even suggesting that members of his audience had merely visited the penitentiary didn’t do the trick. That only meant they had friends and loved ones in jail.

  This was bravura material, requiring an intense rapport with an audience. Along with timing and delivery, Ward benefited from some physical attributes, unique to him. He had a highly expressive face, making it possible to communicate emotions to people sitting at quite a distance. He was also easy to hear, blessed with a voice that one attendee called “clear as a bell and peculiarly magnetic; it seemed to grip you.” In the days before electronic amplification, the value of a strong speaking voice cannot be overstated. Stage careers—Ada Clare’s is an example—could be dashed by a weak one. Even in a packed auditorium, audiences were able to pick up every nuance of Ward’s act. There’s even speculation that he achieved sonic advantage thanks to his huge nose—perhaps it acted as some kind of amplification device. (While one can endlessly dissect Ward’s skills and formula, his magic will always be elusive. Whatever made him so uproariously funny is simply unknowable.)

  Ward’s show clocked in at exactly one hour. Just as it opened on a high note, it closed on one, too. As the hour mark drew nigh, Ward would reach into his pocket and retrieve his watch. He’d stare at it, an expression of alarm spreading across his face. He had been rambling for many minutes, traveling countless conversational tangents, yet he’d failed to address the subject at hand, “The Babes in the Wood.” But what could he say now? What pithy comment about the topic could he offer that might tie things up? There simply wasn’t enough time left. After a few more stumbles and false starts, Ward would apologize, promising to give the subject a full airing during his next lecture. Then he’d bid a good night to his delighted audience. The next morning, the critics’ columns would be full of praise.

  Ward’s show was so fresh that no one was even sure what to call it. Newspapers often referred to his act as a “humorous lecture.” But it’s fair to describe Artemus Ward as America’s first stand-up comedian.

  Throughout those first months of the Civil War, Ward kept up a relentless schedule. By day, he would travel to his next engagement, often aboard trains packed with soldiers headed for destinations of their own. In the evenings—save for Sundays—he played a succession of towns: Brooklyn; Newark; New Haven; Hornellsville, New York; Paterson, New Jersey; South Danvers, Massachusetts. But even after he’d completed a show, his day wasn’t done. It was his practice to make late-night visits to the offices of the local newspaper in whatever town he happened to be playing.

  Over the years, Ward had worked for dozens of papers as everything from a printer’s devil to a columnist. Though he was a comedian now, he retained a kind of homing instinct. Every town—no matter how small—usually had at least one newspaper. For a man as itinerant as Ward, it seems, this provided a sense of consistency. Journalists tended to work late, too. There was comfort in being surrounded by the presses and type boxes. Sometimes, after a show, Ward was known to drop by a newspaper unannounced, roll up his sleeves, and help set type.

  For a while, the frenetic Ward also continued his association with Vanity Fair, contributing an occasional piece from the road. Thanks to his celebrity, he was even promoted to editor. But he’d prove an absurdly absentee editor. The magazine died soon enough, anyway. “Comic copy is what they wanted for Vanity Fair,” he quipped. “I wrote some and it killed it.”

  While traveling the Union North, Ward and Menken often crossed paths. They began to develop an uneasy friendship. It appears that Ward wanted more out of the relationship. But Menken didn’t reciprocate the feelings. She and Ward had already had their fling, and her eye was now on other playthings.


  While in Racine, Wisconsin, touring for Mazeppa, Menken wrote a long letter to Hattie Tyng, a twenty-one-year-old poet who would later publish a popular volume, Apple-Blossoms. Menken asked Tyng:

  Do you believe in the deepest and tenderest love between women? Do you believe that women often love each other with as much fervor and excitement as they do men? . . . We find the rarest and most perfect beauty in the affections of one woman for another. . . . The electricity of the one flashes and gleams through the other, to be returned not only in degree as between man and women, but in kind as between precisely similar organizations. And these passions are of the more frequent ocurrence [sic] than the world is aware of—generally they are unknown to all but the hearts concerned . . . I have had my passionate attachments among women, which swept like whirlwinds over me, sometimes, alas! scorching me with a ­furnace-blast, but generally only changing and renewing my capacities for love.

  Menken was intense, all right. When she wanted something—or someone—she could really come on strong. Even so, Hattie Tyng looks to have resisted her advances. But this much is certain: for a traveling Bohemian, life on the road offered ample opportunity for adventure.

  11: Whitman to the Front

  FOR THOSE BOHEMIANS left behind at Pfaff’s, a feeling of stagnation began to seep into that vaulted room beneath the Broadway pavement. The old crowd was thinning, its prospects dimming, the champagne banter growing stale and flat. Once a refuge, the saloon was becoming a trap instead. Whitman would later describe this period in his life as a “quicksand” year.

  Already, the Civil War was moving into a terrible new phase. Whatever sense of giddiness once existed had dissipated. Northerners had brimmed with confidence at the outset, certain that the sheer righteousness of their cause guaranteed quick victory. Yanks talk a good game about preserving the Union and ending slavery, went the Southern refrain, but let them get a taste of Confederate gunfire and they’ll turn and flee. Below Mason-Dixon, a popular saying held, “A lady’s thimble will hold all the blood that will be shed.”

  By early 1862, way more than a thimble’s worth had been spilled. The death toll had already climbed into the thousands. Bull Run—the war’s first big battle—had been a victory for the South, leaving the North shocked and shaken. But the wages of Bull Run were terrible for both sides: 460 Union soldiers and 387 Confederates killed. It was followed by such major early battles as Wilson Creek, which resulted in 535 dead for the two sides combined, and Fort Donelson, with a total death count of 834. Still ahead lay the Civil War’s most horrendous battles, which would produce thousands of deaths, tens of thousands wounded or taken prisoner.

  Americans were witnessing carnage on a level that dwarfed anything they’d experienced previously. For the War of 1812, the entire tally of US combat deaths was 2,260. During the American Revolution, even major battles such as Yorktown and the two at Saratoga routinely resulted in fewer than 100 deaths among the Colonial forces.

  But the Civil War was a novel conflict, waged with efficient new weapons. The soldiers of previous generations had relied on smooth-bore muskets, spraying chunky iron balls with comic inaccuracy. Now, a different kind of gun, featuring a rifled barrel, fired a new type of projectile, the familiar pointed bullet, that rotated in flight like a tiny football—giving it tremendous aerodynamic stability—and could strike a distant target with cruel precision. Even so, many generals from both the North and the South failed to adjust their strategies accordingly. They clung stubbornly to the Napoleonic tactics they’d learned at West Point and other military academies, marching orderly rows of soldiers right into the teeth of enemy fire.

  No doubt, all this mayhem seemed particularly deranged to Clapp’s set, composed as it was of writers and artists. When Whitman spotted a ragged old woman lurching along Broadway near Pfaff’s (just a small urban episode), it was oddly freighted with meaning. In a brief notebook entry, dated January 9, 1862, he described the woman as “either insane or drunk, wretchedly drest, affectedly promenading the sidewalk.” This was a poetic scrap, something to tuck away and maybe use later. But it also appears to have struck Whitman as a fitting metaphor: here was this shambling old woman alone on Broadway, the same boulevard where cheering crowds had seen off regiment after regiment of soldiers. Everything had changed, seemingly in an instant. War was revealing its true self: ugly and messy and crazy.

  Early in 1862, the crowd at Pfaff’s received word from the front concerning one of their own. On February 16, O’Brien had taken part in a military maneuver, a late-night foraging expedition, where he’d joined thirty-five cavalrymen charged with rounding up one hundred head of secessionist cattle. This would provide much-needed food for his hungry regiment. At four in the morning, near Bloomery Gap in what is today West Virginia, O’Brien’s detail encountered a much larger force of Confederates. O’Brien broke into a horseback charge, riding directly at the enemy. A Confederate officer yelled, “Halt! Who are you?” O’Brien shouted, “Union soldiers!”

  Simultaneously, O’Brien and the officer opened fire. The officer’s second shot passed through O’Brien’s left shoulder, shattering his scapula bone. The officer then wheeled around on his horse and led his troops in a hasty retreat. O’Brien’s charge had been so reckless, it seems, that the Confederates naturally assumed he was part of a large Union force in the area, not simply a band numbering a few dozen cavalrymen. Losing blood fast, O’Brien rode the roughly twenty-five miles to Cumberland, Maryland. There, he was placed in a field hospital under the care of a surgeon. In letters to Pfaff’s friends, O’Brien cheerfully described his condition, noting that the injury had rendered his left hand useless, fit for “no higher occupation than to clutch pennies.”

  On learning the news, Clapp quipped, “Aldrich, I see, has been shot in O’Brien’s shoulder.” This was a reference to the fact that O’Brien and Aldrich had competed for the same military post.

  At least Clapp still retained his razor wit. More than ever, he was left to derive pleasure from cracks delivered at Pfaff’s long table—had to make them count—because he didn’t have many other outlets. Clapp had been forced to take a straight job, as theater critic for the New York Leader. He still got to write the occasional barb, but he no longer enjoyed anything like the latitude he’d had with his own Saturday Press. There was certainly no opportunity to rant about Boston or devote an entire column to savaging some esteemed public figure he considered a ponderous windbag.

  The Leader was turning out to be a kind of island for lost Bohemians. Ada Clare, William Winter, and George Arnold also became frequent contributors. While none of them was granted anything like the freedom of the SP, at least the paper paid a few dollars. Whitman also wrote a series of articles for the Leader. Struggling as a poet, he turned to journalism once more. He used the pseudonym Velsor Brush. This was a combination of his mother’s maiden name (Louisa Van Velsor) and that of his paternal grandmother (Hannah Brush). Such efforts earned him a measly five dollars per week.

  Soon there was more news of O’Brien. Following an operation to his shattered shoulder, complications had set in. He developed lockjaw. O’Brien wasted away, dropping from 163 pounds down to 120. On the morning of April 6, he looked to be rallying a bit. He was sitting up on his hospital cot, sipping a glass of sherry. Suddenly, he turned ashen and fell backward, dead. O’Brien, the charter Bohemian, Clapp’s very first recruit, was thirty-three.

  As further details trickled in, however, a more complicated picture began to emerge. A few days before that late-night cattle-wrangling expedition, an old friend had visited O’Brien in camp. During their entire time together, O’Brien kept singing a line from a song: “Then let me like a soldier die.” O’Brien explained that he liked the line, found it oddly comforting. Further, O’Brien told his friend, he had a presentiment that he would be shot before long. The friend emerged from the visit with an uneasy feeling.

  Then there was the matter of the letter O’Bri
en had written from the front, asking Frank Wood to act as his literary executor. Wood was a journalist, playwright, agent—a kind of jack-of-all-trades—and a frequenter of Pfaff’s. (He briefly served as Artemus Ward’s agent, before Ward outgrew him.) In the letter, O’Brien confided—and Wood now shared this with others in Clapp’s circle—“After I’m dead I may turn out a bigger man than when living.”

  The Bohemian life was draining, filled as it was with constant debauchery, drafty attic rooms, artistic rejection, romantic rejection, and money woes, always money woes. O’Brien may have been more worn down than anyone knew. Perhaps he decided it was easiest to slip out of life and place his trust in the wisdom of the future, hoping posterity would render a generous verdict on his merits as a writer.

  O’Brien left behind a mountain of hackwork, but also a few masterful pieces that show just what he could achieve when he gave his best. There’s “The Diamond Lens,” the fantastical story started shortly after he began frequenting Pfaff’s, the one about a man who peers through a microscope lens and spies a tiny, beautiful woman inside a droplet of water. He also wrote a couple of other memorable macabre tales, such as “What Was It?” about an invisible supernatural creature that can be detected only through its interaction with the physical world. There’s a particularly chilling scene, where someone throws a blanket over the creature and manages to glean some details about its otherworldly appearance as it kicks and struggles.

  In death, O’Brien would indeed cut a larger figure than most writers. Following the Civil War, for decades, his best stories would be reprinted in magazines and included in numerous anthologies. A Gentleman from Ireland, the play O’Brien humorously self-reviewed in the Saturday Press, would continue to be staged until 1893. As recently as 1923, the noted critic Fred Pattee wrote, “No more electric and versatile genius had ever appeared among American authors.” But time itself proved ruthless. With the passage of the years, O’Brien’s literary reputation would waste away, growing ever smaller and smaller, until, at last, he was largely forgotten.