His days were spent on the Fulton Ferry, for two cents a ride; on the driver’s seat of a horsecar, where he rode for free up and down Broadway; and in the wards and house doctor’s office of the old New York Hospital. The dark stone building with its Gothic cupola lay beyond a green lawn a hundred yards back from Broadway, facing Pearl Street. Whitman would stroll the serpentine pavement of Pearl Street, pass through the iron gates, cross the yard, and enter the hospital.
He had come to visit the stage drivers, injured in the line of duty. Driving an omnibus was dangerous. If you drove one long enough the odds were that sooner or later you would crash, turn over the coach, or fall off and be trampled by horses’ hooves, if you were not blackjacked by thieves.
Dr. John Roosa, who knew him there, recalled: “We were interested in the man, and hardly any one could fail to be. Whatever might be the truth about the literary merit and good taste of his poems, his personality was extremely pleasing. Why this was so it would be hard to say. It must have been from the gentle and refined cast of his features, which were rather rude, but noble.” He remembered Whitman dressed in a woolen shirt with a white collar open at the neck, blue flannel coat and vest, and baggy gray trousers. “His face and neck were bronzed by exposure to the sun and air . . . He was scrupulously careful of his simple attire, and his hands were soft and hairy.” A large man, Whitman gave the impression of great vigor, though he moved slowly.
“No one could see him sitting by the bedside of a suffering stage driver without soon learning that he had a sincere and profound sympathy for this order of man,” Roosa wrote. “Close observation of their lives would convince one that they had endured hardship, which naturally invited the sympathy of a great nature.”
Whitman went to check on his stage drivers, men with names like Broadway Jack and Yellow Joe, drivers beaten senseless by bandits, knifed by other drivers in rage, or breathless with consumption. He stayed to comfort total strangers with pneumonia, palsy, typhoid fever, or gunshot wounds, and men whose gangrened limbs were about to be amputated. Whitman was fascinated by all the diseases he saw: malnutrition, “wolverine paralysis,” and especially the cases of delirium tremens: “Robust, brown sailor seven days ashore—monkeys after him dogs biting him—men & women beat him.” The poet admired “the romance of surgery and medicine.”
The house staff let him come and go as he pleased. He was even welcome in the house doctor’s office, the little room over the hospital entrance that served as “wicket of the house,” where all visitors had to pass—policemen with injured felons, wives and mothers fretting over their menfolk, journalists, the novelist Anthony Trollope, even President Franklin Pierce. This was “the hiding place of many a secret,” though few were kept from Whitman, who always found out what he wanted to know. The doctor recalled that Whitman was “always very glad, when our time and his permitted, to stop and have a chat, in which he managed to get pretty complete details of the case of his friend, the stage driver . . .
“He seemed to live above the ordinary affairs of life. I do not remember—and I saw him at least fifty times—ever having heard him laugh aloud, although he smiled with benignancy. He did not make jokes or tell funny stories . . .” When the time came for laughter Whitman would laugh out loud until he cried, but the hospital was no place for levity. The sick ward was an outpost he visited to bring comfort and peace, and to learn.
That winter, by day, he was a student of life: of human nature and illness and suffering. By night he was an idler, a peripatetic philosopher, a boulevardier. What money he had to spend came from his occasional journalism and $250 in royalties that trickled in from his book. But every night, at the end of his omnibus route, or his self-appointed rounds at the hospital, Whitman would retire to the subterranean warmth and bohemian camaraderie of Pfaff ’s, across from the little St. Charles Hotel and the immense corner tabernacle of the Manhattan Savings Bank.
Charley Pfaff had opened his restaurant-saloon just months after Whitman first published Leaves of Grass. The place soon became the prime watering hole for “bohemians,” where Whitman served as unofficial poet-in-residence. (Actually, he shared that honor with the late but still scandalous Edgar Allan Poe, Pfaff ’s guardian spirit.)
From the west side of Broadway just above Bleecker, a stair-well descended to the small, dingy rathskeller—Whitman once compared the place in size to his bedroom on Portland Avenue. Pfaff ’s had fewer than a dozen little round tables, with rush-bottomed wooden armchairs clustered around, three or four to a table. A few triple-branched gas chandeliers lighted the white-painted walls, the bar at the far end, the bartender, and the drinkers. From novelist William Dean Howells to naturalist John Burroughs, editor Horace Greeley, and the actresses Adah Isaacs Mencken and Ada Clare, anybody in town who wanted to see Walt Whitman in 1861 knew he could be found nightly at Pfaff ’s.
Whitman was the dangerous literary lion of New York’s bohemia. The beautiful actress and novelist Ada Clare, known as “the Queen of Bohemia,” had borne a child out of wedlock to the pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk, without notable embarrassment. She was rumored to be Whitman’s mistress. This is unlikely, although they were intimate friends and she championed his poetry in reviews published in the Saturday Press. The company of Ada Clare and other women at Pfaff ’s, in the days when ladies were not usually welcome in taverns, was one of the reasons folks considered the atmosphere bohemian. Another was the presence of the one-eyed Polish Count Adam Gurowski, who wore a cape, and blue-tinted glasses to protect his good eye. The brilliant, explosive exile wrote for Greeley’s Tribune, and he brought with him an air of romance and intellectual arrogance.
The saloon lasted hardly a decade, but during that period it provided Walt Whitman with a home away from home and the society of writers, actors, painters, and patrons and amateurs of the arts, many of whom admired him. Howells said that the poet was practically the object of a cult. Gurowski idolized Whitman, and praised him aloud in Pfaff ’s. It was there, in the smoky light of the saloon, that Whitman would often meet Fred Vaughan, and there that Whitman enjoyed the bonhomie of the group of anonymous young men he called the “Fred Gray Association.”
“The King of Bohemia,” by common consent, was the reckless editor of the Saturday Press, the diminutive Henry Clapp—witty, daring, and hard-drinking. He called rival editor Greeley “a self-made man, who worshipped his creator.” He also counseled, in his piping voice: “Never tell secrets to your relatives. Blood will tell.”
Nowadays Pfaff ’s is remembered, if at all, because Whitman drank there. In its day the saloon was famous for hosting a crowded roundtable of now forgotten literati, the Pfaffians—Ada Clare, Fitz-James O’Brien, Artemus Ward, Frank Wood, Charles Shanley, George Arnold. The powerful, arch, and often caustic Clapp presided over this colorful crew. The editor was way ahead of his time, grasping the potential of marketing in democratizing commerce—even in literature and the arts. “Everything succeeds if money enough is spent on it,” he said. An abolitionist and free-love advocate, five years older than his poet, Clapp may once have been Whitman’s lover. Be that as it may, Whitman recalled, “Henry was my friend . . . Henry Clapp stepped out of the crowd of hooters.” Clapp became Walt Whitman’s most skillful and devoted publicist.
Henry Clapp and his marketing theory bolstered Whitman’s constant self-promotion, paid advertising, and stirring of controversy. Clapp would make hay out of scandal. “Better to have people stirred against you if they can’t be stirred for you.”
The editor was happy to publish almost any review or notice of Whitman in the Saturday Press, from adoring Pfaffian tributes to the most scathing indictments. He ran columns that hailed Whitman as a prophet alongside invitations for the poet to hang himself and charges that he was a “sexual predator.” One wrote: “Walt Whitman on earth is immortal as well as beyond it”; another said his morals were best fit “for a stock breeder.” In the 1859 Christmas issue Clapp printed the first version of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly
Rocking.” Then, during 1860, when the third edition of Leaves was issued, Saturday Press ran more than twenty-five items by and about the poet—reviews, advertisements, and parodies of Whitman’s style.
William Dean Howells recalled that, of all the magazines then published, only the Atlantic was seen by young writers as a more desirable showcase than the Saturday Press, “and for the time there was no other literary comparison.” He admired the magazine so much that he came down from Boston to pay his respects to the editor. Clapp twitted Howells for being respectable and from Boston. In search of bohemia, Howells ended up in Pfaff ’s Cellar, but not until he was leaving did he realize that Whitman was there in the gloom. Someone took the novelist by the arm and led him to Whitman’s table. “He leaned back in his chair, and reached out his great hand to me, as if he were going to give it to me for good and all. He had a fine head, with a cloud of Jovian hair upon it . . .”
Whitman looked into the young man’s eyes “most kindly,” and although the writers exchanged only a few words, Howells would remember: “our acquaintance was summed up in that glance and the grasp of his mighty fist upon my hand.” Howells said that meeting Whitman was “the chief fact of my experience” of New York literary culture.
Whitman was in his element at Pfaff ’s, and more than that: he was Jovian, mighty, sipping the ambrosia of his hard-earned fame, surrounded by poets, novelists, editors, one-eyed counts, actresses, and adoring young men.
The vault at Pfaffs where the drinkers meet to eat and drink and carouse
While on the walk immediately overhead pass the myriad feet of Broadway
As the dead in their graves, are underfoot hidden
And the living pass over them, recking not of them,
Laugh on laughers! Drink on drinkers!
Beam up—Brighten up bright eyes of beautiful young men!
Politics, the gross tides of popular consensus and low intrigues in quest of power that shaped parties and statesmen in a democracy, had not always interested Whitman. But these were times when no man who loved his country dared ignore politics. In two years the conflict between Democrats and Republicans over slavery, as expressed by Lincoln and Douglas in their debates, had escalated to the verge of civil war. Though Whitman was not an abolitionist like Henry Clapp and other bohemians, he loathed slavery. He believed, as did Abraham Lincoln, that as long as slavery was not allowed to grow it would inevitably perish in the South. It would sink under its own dire weight because such bondage involved too many human contradictions to survive. But like Lincoln, Whitman opposed the radical abolitionists whose policies would scare the South into secession.
Whitman admired the antislavery senator from New York, William Henry Seward, and once wrote to him, “I too have at heart Freedom, and the amelioration of the people.” He hoped Seward might become president. But a slip of the tongue, the phrase “irrepressible conflict,” made in a speech similar in content to Lincoln’s “House Divided” message, had imperiled Seward’s status as front-runner. The party was longing for a standard-bearer.
Then in February 1860, a tall, gaunt “stump-orator” arrived from Illinois, in a new frock coat of black alpaca, a bit long in the sleeves. He had just bought new boots and they hurt him. He usually walked with a swift flat-footed stride and bounded up steps two or three at a time. But now he limped up the staircase of the Astor House on Broadway to his lonely room, where he would put the finishing touches on a speech he had been invited to give in New York. Five blocks from Pfaff ’s, where Whitman had come in out of a snowstorm to drink beer, Abraham Lincoln stood before a crowd of fifteen hundred elite New Yorkers, some Pfaffians among them, at the Cooper Union.
The crowd of well-dressed men and women had purchased seats to see “this Lincoln person” who had held his own against Stephen A. Douglas, long considered the nation’s greatest orator, in the seven debates everyone had read in the Times and Tribune. Poet William Cullen Bryant, editor of the Evening Post, introduced him. As the crowd applauded, Lincoln put his left hand in the lapel of his coat and smiled broadly, gratefully, and with winning good humor, showing two rows of large white teeth.
Lincoln’s craggy features are well known. Their animation is not. He froze in front of the camera, so photographs convey only the intelligence and kindness, qualities so salient in Lincoln that even his adversaries did not dispute them. Fortunately we have many descriptions of his expressions for a variety of moods and emotions dating back to his days on the Illinois court circuit. As a boy, the homely Lincoln had mastered the art of mimicry of voices, mannerisms, and physical defects. Herndon remembered “whole crowds lifted off their seats by his unequaled powers of mimicry . . . It was only on rare occasions that he resorted to this method of killing off . . . an enemy.”
A friend noted that when animated, Lincoln’s face brightened like a lantern. “His dull eyes would fairly sparkle with fun, or express as kindly a look as I ever saw, when moved by some matter of human interest.”
Great stage actors are not always classic beauties, but their faces have one thing in common: their features are prominent and generously spaced. Large eyes, set well apart, high cheekbones, and long nose and chin are typical. Without such equipment one cannot carry emotions beyond the footlights. Lincoln was not handsome. But he had the features of a professional actor, and they responded with maximum mobility to inner and outer stimuli, delight, sorrow, or subtle wit. He could raise and lower his bushy eyebrows in mock surprise or deadly menace, or lift one eyebrow in doubt or before delivering the punch line of a joke. The mouth was beautifully shaped, the full underlip conveying his compassion, the firm upper lip his strength of purpose. His smile was famous, incandescent, a Frans Hals smile that lit up the gray eyes and drew up the cheeks, drawing back the deep-cut lines that flared from his nose to the corners of his mouth and bracketed his chin. And this grin seemed all the more brilliant when it suddenly broke from behind the clouds of gloom for which the man was equally known.
“Mr. President and fellow-citizens of New York,” he began, smiling, “the facts with which I shall deal this evening are mainly old and familiar.” Standing square on his feet, his arms at his sides, he proceeded to demonstrate how the framers of the Constitution meant for the federal government to control slavery in its territories. However, “wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to necessity arising from its actual presence . . .”
Herndon recalled, “He used his head a great deal in speaking, throwing or jerking or moving it now here and now there . . . to drive the idea home.” Lincoln was cool, calm, self-possessed, very natural, and pleasing. He did not gesticulate much, but sometimes he would raise his right hand, “shooting out that long boney forefinger of his to dot an idea or to enforce a thought, resting his thumb on his middle finger.”
“His face lights with an inward fire,” wrote Noah Brooks of the New-York Tribune, while a New York World reporter noted: “His voice was soft and sympathetic as a girl’s . . . not lifted above a tone of average conversation . . . a peculiar naïveté in his manner and voice produced a strange effect on his audience . . . hushed for a moment to a silence like that of the dead.” Now and then the audience, spread in a broad semicircle before the speaker, burst forth with applause or laughter or ringing cheers. And after the thunder of the final ovation, as hats and handkerchiefs flew into the air, Brooks would remark: “The tones, the gestures, the kindling eye, and the mirth-provoking look defy the reporter’s skill. No man ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience.”
Brooks’s editor, Horace Greeley, was present. He would soon report to his fellow Pfaffians that Lincoln’s was “the ablest, the greatest, the wisest speech that had yet been made; it would reassure the conservative Northerner; it was just what was wanted to conciliate the excited Southerner; it was conclusive in its argument, and would assure the overthrow of Douglas.”
Greeley, editor of the most influential p
apers in America, eventually threw his support to Lincoln, doing everything in his considerable power to see that Lincoln won the Republican nomination for president.
A year later, on February 19, 1861, a mild, clear afternoon, Whitman was perched on his seat next to a young, brawny omnibus driver on a Knickerbocker trundling down Broadway toward City Hall. The traffic thickened and the horsecars slowed for the gathering crowd. People hurried from every direction: carpenters, mechanics, mothers with children, clerks in their frock coats and top hats, lawyers and merchants leaving their offices, “untold and perhaps thousands of idle and starving workmen,” according to the Times. They had come to try and catch a glimpse of President-elect Lincoln on his way to the Astor House. A suite of adjoining rooms, second-floor front, was awaiting him in the city’s finest hotel.
Mounted police were curbing all buses, drays, and buckboards up and down Broadway, Barclay Street, and Vesey Street to clear the way for the carriages of the presidential party. The cortege would be coming down from the new depot of the Hudson River Railroad on Thirtieth Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. Whitman’s omnibus fetched up against the curbstone on Broadway somewhere between Barnum’s Museum and the City Hall Park. The passengers got off. There was nothing to do but hold the horses and wait for Lincoln to show up.
Lincoln and Whitman Page 6
