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J
USTIN
M
ARTIN
, the author of
Rebel
Souls: Walt Whitman and America’s
First Bohemians
, is clearly a man of
eclectic interests, having previously
written biographies of Frederick Law Olm-
sted, Ralph Nader, andAlan Greenspan. He
has now turned his attention to the biogra-
phy of an entire group.
The group consisted of a number of
writers and performers of varying talents
who gathered in mid-19th century Manhattan at Pfaff’s, a base-
ment saloon on Broadway between Houston and Bleecker
Streets. The Diaghilev of this motley crew was the journalist
Henry Clapp, a New Englander whose radical politics and
avant-garde æsthetics had taken him to Paris in 1849, where he
became so enamored with “la vie bohème” that he stayed for
three years, returning to New York determined to create an
American version of the cultural life he’d found so thrilling in
Paris. He also launched a monthly journal, the
Saturday Press
,
which despite having fewer than 5,000 subscribers became the
most important organ of advanced writing in the U.S. (Among
other coups, it published Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle End-
lessly Rocking” and a short story called “The Celebrated Jump-
ing Frog of Calaveras County” by an unknown writer who
called himself Mark Twain.)
Whitman was the foremost member of the group, which also
included Artemus Ward, America’s leading humorist; the actor
Edwin Booth (brother of Lincoln’s assassin); Hugh Ludlow, au-
thor of the scandalous and wildly popular “The Hasheesh
Eater”; Charles Warren Stoddard, an early proponent of homo-
sexual rights; and Adah Menken, whose body stocking per-
formances in potboiler dramas made her a trans-Atlantic sex
symbol. Nightly gatherings at Pfaff’s were free-wheeling, free-
thinking affairs that also functioned as a mutual help and admi-
ration society. It seems clear that Whitman benefitted most from
the group, joining at a low point in his career just after the sec-
ond edition of
Leaves of Grass
had appeared to little fanfare and
much opprobrium. Clapp was so convinced of Whitman’s ge-
nius that he used the
Saturday Press
to promote
Leaves
at every
opportunity, publishing 25 items by or about Whitman in a sin-
gle year.
Whitman was also drawn to Pfaff’s because it was one of
the few commercial places in New York that welcomed homo-
sexuals. The Clapp group met in a private alcove, but Whitman
also spent time in the larger room, which accommodated what
he called his “beautiful boys” and “my darling, dearest boys.”
“We all loved each other more than we supposed,” he wrote to
a friend, expressing the sad hindsight of the closeted homosex-
ual. In fact, Pfaff’s was as close to a gay bar as anything mid-
19th century Manhattan had to offer, and it provided the setting
for some of the poems in the homoerotic
“Calamus” sequence that first appeared in
the 1860 edition of
Leaves of Grass
.
Although a worthwhile book,
Rebel
Souls
has several problems. Errors of gram-
mar and diction abound, and tenses shift
from past to present and back for no good
reason. Criminals are “hung,” not hanged;
a Maryland battlefield is “blood-sotted”;
and Martin succumbs to the inelegant prac-
tice of creating nouns by adding “ness” to adjectives (“indis-
criminateness” being one of many ugly results). He’s also guilty
of the biographer’s sin of attributing to his subjects things he
can’t possibly know. When Adah Menken attempts suicide by
swallowing poison, we’re told that “She lifted the vial to her
lips and took a long draw.” Maybe it was a long draw, maybe it
was a quick gulp, but whatever it was, this sort of thing is an-
noying and unnecessary. Sometimes Martin forgets that his
reader isn’t as familiar with his material as he is: “No American
Song of a Social Butterfly
A
LAN
H
ELMS
Rebel Souls:
Walt Whitman and America’s
First Bohemians
by Justin Martin
Da Capo Press. 339 pages, $27.99
Alan Helms is professor emeritus of English at UMass-Boston and the
University of Paris. His dance reviews can be found at DanceTabs.com.
38
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