One day, early in 1874, Clare dropped by the offices of the second-rate theatrical agency that handled her bookings. The previous autumn, a financial panic had gripped the United States, and the theater business had yet to recover. Roles had become all the harder to come by. While Clare was at the offices, a little black-and-tan terrier, belonging to her agent, hopped into her lap. Clare petted the dog. Unexpectedly, it lunged up and bit her face. Despite this unpleasant encounter, Clare succeeded in firming up a series of engagements with Lucille Western’s traveling theater company.
Clare departed for a tour of cities in upstate New York such as Auburn, Buffalo, and Syracuse. At a performance in Rochester, however, she created a shocking onstage spectacle. Midway through the play East Lynne, she utterly abandoned her role and began raving like a lunatic. She had to be forcibly removed from the stage by police officers and was confined to a jail cell for the night. The following day, Clare was placed on a train with an escort, a fellow actor from her company, and she traveled back to New York City. She seemed calmer during the ride. Her husband was there to meet her at the station. As Clare emerged from the train, however, as the cold winter air hit her face, she began to scream in agony.
A hyperamplified sense of touch is a symptom of one of history’s most dreaded afflictions, then known as hydrophobia, now as rabies. As it turns out, the little terrier had died the day after it bit Clare.
Clare was taken back to her boardinghouse. Doctors were consulted, but there was nothing to be done, save for administering opiates to numb her addled consciousness. Mercifully, she slipped into a coma and died on March 4, 1874. She was thirty-nine years old.
That such an elegant woman came to such a brutal end was hard to fathom. On learning the news, Whitman said, “Poor, poor Ada Clare—I have been inexpressibly shocked by the horrible & sudden close of her gay, easy, sunny free, loose, but not ungood life.” Unlike so many of the departed Pfaffians, Clare didn’t die without significant attachments. She left behind a spouse and a child. Aubrey would grow up to be an actor.
The Queen of Bohemia was dead. But what about the king? What became of Henry Clapp?
When the Saturday Press folded for the second time, it broke the old cynic’s heart. For a while, Clapp managed to pick up assignments from newspapers such as the New York Leader and the Daily Graphic. As the work dried up, he turned increasingly to drink.
The final years of Clapp’s life are visible only in brief flashes, like a man falling down a mine shaft. In the flickering half-light, it’s possible to get intermittent glimpses as he tumbles and flails and vainly reaches out his hands. He remained in New York City, living in a series of squalid rooms. But he also did an untold number of stints in asylums, where he was thrown into a general population that included schizophrenics, victims of serious head injuries, and prostitutes suffering the last ravages of syphilis. For an alcoholic without means, that was the only treatment option available in the nineteenth century.
During one bender, police officers picked him up and took him to an asylum, where he was admitted as “Henry Clark.” No one even bothered to get his name right; it didn’t really matter. Clapp had outlived his fame and had outlasted many of the main figures of his circle who would have recognized him as well.
Still, as Clapp made his shambling rounds, he was sometimes spotted by one member or another from the old Pfaff’s set. These little glimpses are terribly sad. He was seen on the Bowery selling some of his clothes for liquor money. Another person saw him walking along Broadway, looking “shriveled and shabby and wretchedly forlorn” and “unknown and unnoticed in the hurrying crowd.” Still another described encountering Clapp and being stunned to realize that the old man was in “actual want.” Actual want: those two little words speak volumes. This wasn’t the salad days’ pennilessness that some of his young acolytes tried on for style. Unable to find work, bedeviled by alcoholism, Clapp had slipped into genuine, crushing poverty.
The asylum stays became more frequent and longer. Over time, Clapp got in the habit of writing to old friends, seeking money for incidentals that could be bought at the institutions’ commissaries. A letter to Edmund Stedman, a journalist and onetime Pfaffian, concludes, “And now, my dear fellow, if you can send me a few dollars to buy tobacco, pipes, newspapers . . . etc, you will make me a happier man than I have been for years, though I am in a Lunatic Asylum.” Stedman sent him five dollars. Desperate for money, Clapp even wrote to Frederick Douglass, someone he’d last known decades earlier when they had both lived in Lynn, Massachusetts. Douglass also sent Clapp a few dollars and would later recall: “He was a witty and pungent writer and speaker and for a time did good service to the antislavery cause.”
Clapp doesn’t appear to have written to Whitman. Perhaps the two had drifted apart again, or maybe this represented a last morsel of pride, Clapp not wanting the poet who had brought him glory to see him in such an abject state of need. Whitman, for his part, would always remember Clapp fondly: “Henry Clapp stepped out from the crowd of hooters—was my friend: a much needed ally.” On another occasion, the poet would say, “He did honorable with me every time.”
Clapp did keep up with Charlie Pfaff, though. For years, the cheerful old proprietor fed him meals gratis. It was the least Pfaff could do; Clapp had done so much to promote his reputation as a saloon keep. Pfaff refused to serve Clapp alcohol at his establishment—or tried to anyway. But it was hopeless; whenever he had any funds, Clapp went on a fresh bender and always wound up institutionalized once more.
A last flickering glimpse finds Clapp at the asylum on Ward’s Island in Manhattan’s East River. It was a regular drying-out spot for him. The asylum had a small library, an amenity of which Clapp took thorough advantage. One of the books he checked out was Thackeray’s last novel, The Adventures of Philip on His Way Through the World: Shewing Who Robbed Him, Who Helped Him, and Who Passed Him By. Clapp was also thrilled to discover a cache of yellowed back issues of magazines in the library. “I have been feasting, this last few days, on old and odd no’s of the Galaxy and Harper,” he wrote to Stedman. Even in this grimmest of places, Clapp held fast to his passion for the arts, remained curious about the world, and he must have had plans, and on his best days hopes, and—
Clapp died on April 10, 1875. He was sixty years old.
There was a brief flutter of obituaries, a last taste of the attention that had so eluded him in the last years of his life. “With the death of Henry Clapp,” reads one in the Boston Globe, “fades the memory of one of the most peculiar cliques of roystering literary characters ever known,” adding, “The rest of the Colony that once met at Pfaff’s beer saloon on Broadway, to enliven the midnight hour with songs and jokes and reckless repartee, are either dead or dispersed or turned respectable.”
For a while, Clapp’s body lay in a pauper’s grave before it was removed to Nantucket and placed in a little cemetery overlooking the sea.
Born a Puritan, Clapp died a Bohemian.
18: “Those Times, That Place”
WHITMAN CONTINUED ON, through the presidencies of Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, and Harrison. He was still around for the last bare-knuckle prizefight and the first five-and-dime, for the advent of electric bulbs and Coca-Cola, standardized time zones and the Brooklyn Bridge. He even managed to make one final visit to Pfaff’s. Fellow Bohemians such as Ludlow, Menken, and Ward never even saw forty. It’s quite likely that they didn’t manage a single gray hair. Whitman watched his hair turn gray to white, and his blue eyes became highly changeable, now filled with sadness and, in the next moment, flooded with joy. There had been so much—time and people and change—just so much.
For many years, Whitman remained in Washington, DC. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, following Lincoln’s assassination and the Civil War, he had built a life there for himself. He had moved into a new attic room, at 472 M Street, though it wasn’t much different from hi
s previous garrets. He settled into a new government clerkship, working in another undemanding job for the US attorney general’s office, not such a departure from his earlier posts. Whitman enjoyed frequent month-long leaves. He was even allowed to draw on the departmental stationery supply for use in his own writing.
What distinguished this job, however, was the length of his tenure. Whitman spent seven years in the attorney general’s office. It’s hard to imagine him as a civil servant, yet this job was among his life’s constants for a very long time. One of his primary duties was making copies of official correspondence. (In the days before mimeographs and photocopiers, this was a necessary though thankless task.) Whitman dutifully copied thousands of letters related to the department’s busy docket of legal cases, filled with terminology such as “binding stipulation,” “writ of error,” and “nolle prosequi.” A typical letter ends with a little flourish: “I am Sir, with great respect, your obedient serv’t, Henry Stanbery, Attorney General.” But even the attorney general’s signature was in Whitman’s distinctive hand. (It’s merely a copy, after all, for the department’s records.) The poet of the body and the soul was also a government clerk, third class, making $1,600 per year.
Whitman also kept up with his hospital visits. That was one of the reasons he held fast to a job that left him ample free time. After the war ended, though, the sense of frantic mission lifted. A handful of badly wounded soldiers remained in the hospitals, but eventually they either died or recovered, returning to civilian life as farmers and bakers and factory workers. Only a few chronic cases lingered on. Gradually, Whitman reduced the frequency of his visits until he was going only on Sunday afternoons, just a remnant from a sad time fast receding. So much from those days was receding.
But Whitman and Peter Doyle remained steadfast. Each day, after finishing work, Whitman would stand in front of his building on Pennsylvania Avenue, waiting for Doyle’s omnibus. He’d climb aboard and ride back and forth until the shift was over. Often Whitman would help out, ringing the bell or assisting passengers as they got on and off. He’d salute the drivers of the other omnibuses as they rolled past.
Whitman and Doyle continued their habit of long walks, only now it was as if the world had opened up. The war was over, and they could go anywhere, walk as far as they wished. Sometimes, they crossed the Anacostia River via the Navy Yard Bridge, then ambled along its banks to a ferry point where they would set off for Virginia, then more ambling, this time along the Potomac banks, before crossing back into the district by way of the Long Bridge. That’s a roughly eight-mile circuit. “Often we would go on for some time without a word, then talk—Pete a rod ahead or I a rod ahead,” Whitman would recall. “Oh! the long, long walks, way into the nights!—in the after hours—sometimes lasting till two or three in the morning! The air, the stars, the moon, the water—what a fulness of inspiration they imparted!—what exhilaration! And there were the detours, too—wanderings off into the country out of the beaten path.”
In Doyle’s recollection: “We took great walks together—off towards or to Alexandria, often. . . . We would talk of ordinary matters. . . . He never seemed to tire.” Whitman would point out the stars to Doyle. He knew all the constellations, Canis Major, Cassiopeia, and the hunter, Orion. “My love for you is indestructible,” he promised Doyle.
For Whitman, these years in Washington right after the Civil War were a sweet time, full of calm. This wasn’t one of his most productive periods, at least when measured against the whirlwind pace he’d sometimes achieved. No matter. For Whitman, perhaps, the lack of fever—in his personal life, in the life of the nation—simply didn’t lend itself to the act of creation.
Ironically, it’s during this time that Whitman’s reputation as a poet began to grow. In 1867, he brought out a new volume of Leaves of Grass. This was the first one since 1860, when Thayer & Eldridge had published the third edition. During the intervening years, pirated versions, such as Horace Wentworth’s, had helped keep interest alive. Whitman took his old familiar route, self-publishing the latest Leaves. It was the first to contain his Civil War poetry, such as “O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Otherwise, there were only six new poems. Leaves, fourth edition, was a commercial flop that garnered very few reviews—an all too common outcome for Whitman’s work.
Yet somehow, he was finding his way to readers. The sense of opposition that his poetry always managed to spark created a potent interplay between those who thought he merited obscurity and those who felt he’d been dealt a grave artistic injustice. The very fact that Leaves of Grass was dismissed in some quarters served as the proof for others that it was a masterpiece.
In 1874, Emerson published an exhaustive 534-page collection meant to settle for all time the question, What are the greatest poems ever written? It was titled Parnassus after the mountain that symbolized poetry in ancient Greece. Virgil, Dante, and Chaucer were well represented in the collection, as were such homegrown talents as Whittier and Longfellow. There was even a selection from Forceythe Willson, a contemporary American poet deemed “remarkable” by Emerson. But no Whitman: Emerson, it seems, had never forgiven him for becoming a Bohemian, and the collection didn’t include a single poem from the man he’d once greeted at the beginning of a great career.
But around the same time that Whitman was denied the rare air of Parnassus, he received a flattering accolade. He was asked to read a poem at Dartmouth’s 1872 commencement ceremony. He composed one just for the occasion, entitled “As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free.” It was the first invitation Whitman had ever received to read at a university. It came courtesy of a student committee that was hoping to rile some of the more conservative members of the faculty. That didn’t happen. Whitman read his poem without Dartmouth descending into contention or chaos. But it was the student committee’s gesture that mattered.
Increasingly, Whitman was becoming a divisive cultural symbol, one that separated the broad-minded from the stodgy—and very often the young from the old. The fustiest critics, the most doddering professors, could be reliably counted on to pronounce his poetry obscene. That left the younger generation all the more enticed. The fact that Leaves of Grass was difficult to find added to the mystique; only a handful of copies—in a quirky array of printings—were in circulation. Dog-eared editions moved across university campuses, passed from one student to another.
Whitman’s poetry also created an international split, the United States versus Europe. Or, more precisely: Europe versus the United States. Across the Atlantic, there was a growing movement to give Whitman the recognition denied in his native land. Those Americans, went a common conceit, they aren’t even aware that a great poet is in their midst. While Whitman labored as a government clerk, poems from Leaves of Grass were translated into Russian and German. English poet Algernon Swinburne wrote an encomium, “To Walt Whitman in America.”
Back and forth it went. Overlook Whitman, seek out Whitman; disregard him, give him his due; there was no single event, no sudden breakthrough, but it was this process, this tension, that by slow degrees began to push forward his fame.
One of the most impassioned Whitman defenders was William O’Connor, host of the Sunday-night get-togethers Whitman frequented during the Civil War. Though O’Connor had held a milquetoast salon, as a polemicist he proved nothing short of ferocious. He wrote a forty-six-page pamphlet in which he took on the doubters, what he referred to as “the bigots, the dilettanti, the prudes and the fools.” By contrast, he cast Whitman in near-saintly terms:
He has been a visitor of prisons; a protector of fugitive slaves; a constant voluntary nurse, night and day, at the hospitals, from the beginning of the war to the present time; a brother and friend through life to the neglected and the forgotten, the poor, the degraded, the criminal, the outcast; turning away from no man for his guilt, nor woman for her vileness. His is the strongest and truest compassion I have ever known
.
Time was, Henry Clapp had been Whitman’s champion, publishing and promoting his work. O’Connor was something altogether different. Unquestionably, Whitman’s service in the hospitals was noble, and his compassion for the wounded soldiers was truly remarkable. But visitor of prisons? Protector of fugitive slaves? O’Connor was Whitman’s mythologizer, the most capable of several who would assume that role, and the title he gave his pamphlet, The Good Gray Poet, would become an enduring image.
On January 23, 1873, sometime around three in the morning, Whitman awoke in his attic room to find that he couldn’t move his left arm and leg. There wasn’t any pain, though, so he didn’t give it further thought and soon drifted back to sleep. Come morning, he was horrified to discover that the entire left side of his body was paralyzed. He was stranded in his bed and grew increasingly panicked. “After several hours, some friends came in,” he recalled, “and they immediately sent for a doctor.”
Whitman had suffered a stroke. He was only fifty-three years old, though his health had been in decline for many years, had never really been the same since the war. To his mind, the cause of his stroke would always be the “hospital poison” that he’d absorbed at the time. In a way, this may even have been true. The stress of that experience certainly could have exacerbated what appears to be serious and undiagnosed hypertension.
Doyle and various friends took turns nursing Whitman. The paralysis began to lift, and in a matter of days he was able to get around, though slowly and with help. After only a few months, he even returned to his job. The stroke—or “whack,” as Whitman called it—didn’t affect his speech and doesn’t appear to have diminished his mental acuity. But it had lasting physical effects. His left leg would remain pretty much useless. For the rest of his life, he would walk with a cane, dragging his left foot.
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