The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  JUST AS THE FIRST PARIS BOHEMIANS HAD EMERGED AT A TIME OF huge social and economic changes, New York’s first bohemians announced their presence when the young nation, not yet a century old, was facing great internal crises. America had entered the decade of the 1850s with a booming economy, vigorously expanding across the continent, yet it had begun pulling itself apart along regional and factional fault lines that pitted the industrializing Northeast against the plantation South, the farmers of the Midwest, and the vast new territories farther west. North, South, East, and West disagreed over much—over slavery, over tariffs and taxes, over the rights of individual states versus the rule of the union, even over the path of a proposed transcontinental railroad and the need for coast-to-coast telegraph lines. Slavery was the touchstone issue around which much of the conflict coalesced.

  The country’s economic boom ended in 1857 when a wave of bank failures rolled out from New York, followed by panic on Wall Street. Much of the country plunged into a brief but steep depression, with the highest unemployment in the North. In New York City the jobless ranks swelled to as high as a hundred thousand in a city of eight hundred thousand. Workers in factories and mines throughout the North, battered by wage cuts and layoffs, organized strikes. The trouble spread to the Midwest, where the value of farmers’ crops plummeted. The plantation South, still able to export cotton and tobacco, weathered the turmoil best. The fissures deepened and the nation continued its slide toward civil war.

  The Pfaff’s scene appeared in the midst of all this turmoil, providing some welcome distraction and a little comic relief. The restaurant saloon was in the cellar of the Coleman House, a small hotel on Broadway. The building still stands, showing its age. Broadway itself was in a state of great flux. From the 1820s through the 1840s, great homes and cultural institutions had spread up Broadway from the Washington Square area. Stuyvesants, Roosevelts, Lorillards, Astors all built mansions on or near Broadway above Houston Street. The wealthy importer Allan Melville built a grand house there when Herman was nine years old. The beautiful Grace Episcopal Church, the Gothic Revival masterpiece at Broadway and East Tenth Street, was consecrated in 1846.

  Next door to Coleman House stood the grand Stuyvesant Institute, a Greek Revival palace of culture built in the 1830s that at various times was home to the New-York Historical Society, the Lyceum of Natural History, NYU’s Medical College, and the National Academy of Design, the first professional association created by and for artists in this country. Young artists including the portrait painter Samuel Finley Breese Morse had started the academy in 1825 as a revolt against the older, hide-bottomed American Academy of the Arts (originally the New-York Academy of the Fine Arts). Morse was its first president, and he also taught painting and sculpture at NYU. In 1825 the city of New York sent Morse to Washington, D.C., to paint a portrait of Lafayette. While he was there news reached him that his wife, Lucretia, had taken ill in New Haven. By the time he got there she was in her grave. Already a sometime inventor, Morse started to think about faster ways to send messages over long distances. Through the 1830s he worked on what became the telegraph. It’s an exaggeration to call him the telegraph’s sole inventor—several others were working on the same principles, leapfrogging one another, and often disputing one another’s claims—but he did invent Morse Code.

  As the city surged up toward Fourteenth Street in the 1840s and ’50s, Broadway developed into its chief shopping area, entertainment zone, and “sporting” (red-light) district. Putnam’s Monthly declared the Broadway stem “the most showy, the most crowded, and the richest thoroughfare in America” during the day, and a “promiscuous channel of activity and dissipation” by night. Riding the pre-1857 boom times, shopping was a popular new recreational activity in the city. Department stores like Lord & Taylor and A. T. Stewart, the jeweler Tiffany, dress shops, hat shops, and huge restaurants such as Taylor’s, at Broadway and Franklin Street below Canal—where the stupefyingly opulent decor made up for the rude service and mediocre food—drew hordes of shoppers in the daytime. Not all that wide despite its name, Broadway was choked with the traffic of horse-drawn wagons, carts, carriages, and omnibuses, raising a terrible clatter. Shoppers darted from one side of the street to the other at some peril to their lives, not to mention their shoes and hems, since it was muddy in the rain, slushy in winter, and dusty when dry and the inadequate private garbage removal usually left the gutters choked. It was visually loud as well, with gaudy painted signs and advertisements festooning every spare surface of the buildings.

  After dark, Broadway turned into the central nervous system of what the patrician George Templeton Strong called the city’s “whorearchy.” In the evenings Broadway was “always crowded,” he complained in his diary in 1840, “and whores and blackguards make up about two-thirds of the throng.” Upwards of a hundred brothels operated on and around Broadway in the 1850s; they were included in all the guidebooks. Whitman observed that “any man passing along Broadway, between Houston and Fulton streets, finds the western sidewalks full of prostitutes, jaunting up and down there.” Broadway was lined with theaters, hotels, and saloons that also served as de facto whorehouses. The whorearchy worked generally unmolested in a city that was wide open and vice ridden. Prostitution was a huge industry—the second largest in the city, according to an 1855 census. Sex workers included both “she-harlots and he-harlots,” as Whitman writes in his mad jeremiad “Respondez!” One guidebook remarked that New York out-Sodomed Sodom.

  So it seems that Pfaff’s was in the right spot at the right time to become a hangout for artists, writers, and newfangled bohemians. It had the vaulted, subterranean atmosphere of a rathskeller and was known for its beer selection, but it also maintained an excellent wine list and real silver and china service. Regular customers sat at small tables in the front, while a long table in the rear was reserved for the bohemian crowd. Charles Pfaff was a German Swiss who, like all the best publicans, was a good-natured host to his colorful, eccentric clientele and shrewd enough to exploit their presence as a draw to student wannabes and gawkers. In its 1890 obituary for Pfaff, the New York Times recalled that in the late 1850s his establishment had been “the favorite resort of all the prominent actors, authors, artists, musicians, newspapermen, and men-about-town of the time. It was not an attractive-looking place, for it was on the floor below street level, and was fitted up in a plain, quaint fashion . . . but the service was clean and the cooking excellent.” Pfaff’s beefsteak and pfannkuchen were renowned, but most folks had come, the Times said, to “get a look at the lions of bohemia.”

  The core group at Pfaff’s conformed closely to Cowley’s notion that bohemia was Grub Street with an added layer of self-conscious ostentation. “Far from a pack of free-and-easy artistic vagabonds, the Pfaff’s crowd consisted primarily of hard-working writers who made penurious livings from the penny press and magazines,” the historian Christine Stansell notes. It was boom times for New York newspapers and magazines, and several founded in this era went on to great and long success, including the New York Times (founded in 1851), Harper’s Monthly (1850), Harper’s Weekly (1857), the Atlantic Monthly (1857), the New York World (1860), the Nation (1865), and Harper’s Bazaar (1867). Most of them still paid their writers and illustrators abysmally, however, so Pfaff, who allowed them to loiter over their beers and run up tabs, was a godsend. Like media folks in any age, they wrote a lot about themselves, and Pfaff reaped the benefits of the free publicity. There were a couple of other venues where a nascent bohemian crowd hung out, including the saloon down at Taylor’s restaurant, but Pfaff’s was preeminent.

  By January 1858 the New York Times felt moved to print a rebuke of the bohemian fad, observing that the term “is now heard almost as frequently as the once unknown term of loafer. But a Bohemian is not quite a loafer, though he is not far removed from one. The true Bohemian has either written an unsuccessful play, or painted an unsalable picture, or published an unreadable book, or composed an unsung opera.” Boh
emians “hold the finest sentiments, and have a distinctive aversion of anything that is low or mean, or common or inelegant. Still, the Bohemian cannot be called a useful member of society.” Disparaging bohemians as loafers or at best not-quite-loafers—loafing being a newly minted term when the Times and Whitman used it (“I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass”)—became a standard put-down in work-ethic America still in use a century later.

  Unhappy with writing for, and being written about in, stodgy papers like the Times, the “Pfaffians” created two short-lived papers of their own, the Saturday Press and Vanity Fair, which were in effect house organs for the scene. The founder and editor of the Press was a slight, perpetually pipe-smoking New Englander named Henry Clapp Jr. According to legend Clapp—a Sunday school teacher who by the 1850s had fallen off the temperance wagon and become a prodigious drinker—discovered one afternoon that the beers in Pfaff’s were excellent and told all his writer friends, who made the place a boisterous scene and declared Clapp the king of Bohemia. The Saturday Press was a weekly broadsheet that sold for a nickel. It scratched out a chronically cash-strapped subsistence only from October 1858 into December 1860, later revived by Clapp for less than a year in 1865. The Press is best remembered in literary history for its relentless championing of Whitman’s 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, at a time when most critical responses were extremely negative, and for helping to kick off Mark Twain’s career by first publishing “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” in the 1865 reincarnation. Clapp set the irreverent, sarcastic tone of the Press. He was known for his pointed bon mots. When the Nation appeared in 1865, he gave it the nickname Stag-Nation for its lack of female writers. He called Wall Street Caterwaul Street and branded the Tribune’s Horace Greeley “a self-made man who worshipped his creator.”

  One of the most remarkable figures in Clapp’s crowd was Ada Clare, born Jane McElhenney into a well-off Charleston family in 1836. She borrowed her nom de plume from Dickens’s Bleak House, serially published in 1852–53, but she might also have been thinking of the southern belle’s common exclamation “Ah declare!” Like Mabel Dodge Luhan in the following century, Clare spent much of her life in headlong flight from her dull, respectable origins. By 1855 she was in New York and her first poems were appearing in the New York Atlas. She met and fell in love with the celebrated pianist and composer Louis Gottschalk, a notorious philanderer and ruiner of young women’s reputations. (When he died in Rio de Janeiro in 1869, it was rumored that he’d been killed by a jealous husband. The cause of death was in fact malaria, of which he collapsed on stage in the midst of a recital.) Clare had a son by Gottschalk. Rather than quietly suffer the ruin of her reputation, as most young women of her time would have done, she boldly trumpeted it. She had calling cards printed up with the shocking announcement “Miss Ada Clare and Son,” and the two of them traveled that way through Europe, out West, and as far as Hawaii.

  In 1858 she returned to New York from Paris where, like Clapp a few months earlier, she’d enjoyed the bohemian milieu. The Pfaffians, already declaring Clapp their king, welcomed her back as their queen. The boys at Pfaff’s were quite taken with her. Whitman called her “a perfect beauty” with “no inconsiderable share of intellect and cultivation.” Stansell points out that the mere presence of Clare, an unrepentantly unwed mother, along with a handful of other single, unchaperoned women, was enough to give the scene at Pfaff’s a risqué allure. In the mid-1800s, any woman seen alone in public—and certainly in a saloon—was presumed to be a prostitute.

  Clare struggled with something of an acting career for much of her life (the Times described her performances as “erratic but gifted”), but her true forte was writing. She contributed funny, sharp-tongued theater and literary criticism to the Saturday Press and other publications. “I have finished reading ‘Beulah,’ ” she wrote once in the Press. “Let the fact be recorded as a proof of my extreme pertinacity of purpose. ‘Beulah’ is another inane copy of ‘Jane Eyre.’ But it is a waxen, corky, wooden-jointed, leather-and-findings imitation of it.” She used her Press column “Thoughts and Things” to comment on issues of the day, once lampooning the various causes then roiling the city and the nation (“Temperance, anti-asylumism, anti-slavery, anti-capital punishments”) by declaring her own campaign—against pie.

  Clare did not live in the city but out in what were effectively the suburbs at 86 West Forty-second Street (Whitman jotted it down in one of his notebooks), where developers had been building rows of modest town houses, brownstones, and tenements for about a decade at this point. Horse-drawn “street railroads” connected the new and still rather isolated developments to the city. According to another actress friend, Rose Eytinge, Clare held soirees on Sunday evenings for “men and women, all of whom had distinguished themselves in various avenues—in literature, art, music, drama, war, philanthropy. The women were beautiful and brilliant, the men clever and distinguished . . . This was Bohemia, and our fairy-like, beautiful young hostess was its queen.”

  Another regular at Pfaff’s, the Irish writer Fitz-James O’Brien (1828–1862), came to America in 1852 from England, where he’d first tasted the bohemian life while squandering a modest inheritance on immodest and intemperate pleasures. He earned the nickname Fist-Gammon O’Bouncer for his tendency to escalate literary arguments into fistfights, which often saw him remanded to the Jefferson Market jail. He was also known for borrowing cash to throw dinners for his friends at Pfaff’s or Delmonico’s, then not inviting the lender, on the presumption that anyone holding that much cash to lend must be a bourgeois pig. O’Brien wrote Gothic horror tales inspired by Poe for which he’s best known now, a column of theater criticism called “Dramatic Feuilleton” for the Saturday Press, a “Man About Town” column for Harper’s, and other journalism. He wrote his best work when giving free rein to his raffish sense of humor. His short story “The Bohemian” is a satire of the already well-established stereotypes. A young, struggling lawyer and would-be writer—he’s working on an article for Harper’s—looks up from his desk one night to find a “seedy” man in his doorway, who proclaims himself a bohemian. He explains:

  “When I say that I am a Bohemian, I do not wish you to understand that I am a Zingaro [Gypsy]. I don’t steal chickens, tell fortunes, or live in a camp. I am a social bohemian, and fly at higher game . . . Have you read Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then, you can comprehend my life. I am clever, learned, witty, and tolerably good looking. I can write brilliant magazine articles . . . I can paint pictures, and, what is more, sell the pictures I paint. I can compose songs, make comedies, and captivate women.”

  “On my word, Sir, you have a choice of professions,” I said, sarcastically . . .

  “That’s it,” he answered; “I don’t want a profession. I could make plenty of money if I chose to work, but I don’t choose to work. I will never work. I have a contempt for labor.”

  “Probably you despise money equally,” I replied, with a sneer.

  “No, I don’t. To acquire money without trouble is the great object of my life.”

  Walt Whitman began frequenting Pfaff’s in 1859, “sitting out the long period of critical silence that followed the second edition of Leaves of Grass,” Stansell writes. “Pfaff’s became, in these years, his chief source of social intercourse.” A little older than most of the bohemians, he sat to one side and was amused by their high spirits. He was born near Huntington, Long Island, in 1819 and raised there and in Brooklyn, where he dropped out of school at twelve and became a printer and typesetter, a newspaperman, and a (largely self-taught) schoolteacher. He lived in Manhattan for several years in the 1840s, but was back in Brooklyn by the 1850s, though frequently crossing the river into the city for both work and play. He was attracted to Pfaff’s—and to the attention its crowd was getting—at a time when he was avidly seeking attention for himself and for Leaves of Grass
.

  Four years earlier, he had self-published just under eight hundred copies of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, setting the type for some pages himself in a Brooklyn Heights print shop. In every respect it was unusual. The author was unnamed but presumably portrayed in a frontispiece engraving, looking more like a slightly dandyish workingman than an aesthete. It opened with a prose prologue, a ten-page statement of purpose that seemed to gush from the author in such a torrent he could barely pause for punctuation: “The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into any thing that was before thought small it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe. He is a seer . . . he is individual . . . he is complete in himself . . . the others are as good as he, only he sees it and they do not.” The twelve poems that followed were untitled, without rhyme or meter or normal line breaks. The first one, later titled “Song of Myself,” flowed an astounding 1,336 lines, fifty-six pages of “barbaric yawp.” Later readers would recognize it as startlingly modern free verse, exploding like an impatient supernova half a century before its time. “I am the poet of the body, / And I am the poet of the soul,” Whitman announces. He declares his unity with everything and everyone in the “kosmos.” Nothing is too small or too large for him to embrace (“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars”), and no human act is off-limits.

  Through me forbidden voices,

  Voices of sexes and lusts . . . voices veiled, and I remove the veil,

  Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured.

  I do not press my finger across my mouth,

  I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,

  Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.

  I believe in the flesh and the appetites,

  Seeing hearing and feeling are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.