GLR May June

Song of a Social Butterfly

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

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-

A LAN H ELMS

Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians by Justin Martin Da Capo Press. 339 pages, $27.99

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

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

Alan Helms is professor emeritus of English at UMass-Boston and the University of Paris. His dance reviews can be found at DanceTabs.com.

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