Rebel Souls

by Justin Martin

  Broadway was an infinity unto itself. Whitman loved the street for its bizarre contrasts and unexpected harmonies. Here, it was possible to attend a play about pirates and also to meet a coach driver named One-Eyed Joe. Owing partly to his own humble roots, Whitman felt a rapport with coach drivers and other workingmen. He would greet the drivers who constantly traversed Broadway with a kind of downward salute, like a chop. They invariably returned his greeting. When Whitman took a coach, he liked to ride up front, sitting beside the driver. He didn’t necessarily talk much on the ride; he was always sparing with spoken words, most content to listen. But in the company of drivers, he felt at ease, while among his fellow artists he would be forever wary.

  Over time, Whitman developed his sartorial style in emulation—pretentious imitation, some of his contemporaries would argue—of such workingmen. He even compiled a dictionary, full of slang such as bender, bummer, spree, and shin-dig, picked up from coach drivers and blacksmiths and stevedores. Though never published, Whitman’s Primer of Words was intended as an update to Noah Webster’s landmark work. A sample entry for so long, then still a slang term, goes as follows: “a delicious American—New York—idiomatic phrase at parting.”

  At times, Whitman would simply stand on Broadway, studying his reflection in a shop window and marveling at how his image blended with the multitudes passing behind him. To Whitman, the result was a highly satisfying optical illusion: Manhattan was coursing through him.

  But perhaps his favorite place to visit was a shop with a supremely Gothic-sounding name: the Phrenological Cabinet of Fowler & Wells. Address: 286 Broadway.

  Phrenology is a pseudoscientific theory that holds that the brain is extremely compartmentalized, consisting of a huge number of different centers. The centers control various attributes, such as destructiveness or the capacity to love. These can be built up through use or can atrophy through neglect, just like a muscle. The center for destructiveness, for example, was thought to be right above the ears. Someone who is destructive could be expected to have a pronounced swelling in that area. By examining the shape of people’s skulls, reading the bumps, it was thought possible to determine their character.

  Thousands of nineteenth-century Americans had their skulls read, including Horace Greeley and Edgar Allan Poe. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael attempts to gain phrenological insight into the great whale. Employers sometimes even asked prospective hires to submit to a phrenological reading. In some ways, phrenology was extremely prescient. Scientists now recognize that the brain truly is divided into discrete regions that govern various functions. But phrenology’s fine-grain divisions (supposedly, there were centers devoted to love, anger, benevolence, and countless other traits), not to mention the notion that a person’s propensity for such traits can be revealed by bumps on the skull, is now viewed as bunkum. At best, phrenology can be seen as the crazy granddad of modern neuropsychology.

  In its day, however, phrenology was taken quite seriously, and the contribution of Fowler & Wells to the field was considerable. Brothers Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, along with their associate Samuel Wells, succeeded in wedding phrenology’s concepts with America’s burgeoning self-help movement. “Know thyself” was the business’s official slogan. Through a phrenological reading, the proprietors promised, not only could one gain self-awareness, but by exercising deficient traits, one could also achieve personal growth.

  Whitman haunted the Phrenological Cabinet of Fowler & Wells. It featured a gallery of plaster casts of the skulls of murderers and thieves—miscreants one did not want to emulate, bump-wise—as well as celebrities and other desirable types. Whitman enjoyed browsing the store’s collection of books such as The Philosophy of Electrical Psychology, a text that held that people’s power to connect with one another was based on harnessing electrical currents that flowed through all the universe’s matter. Fowler & Wells were also big advocates of the idea that sex is a natural function, nothing to be ashamed of. Titles such as Love and Parentage counseled that sex was not only procreative, but also something to be enjoyed.

  On July 16, 1849, Whitman paid three dollars to have his skull read by Lorenzo Fowler. On a scale from 1 to 7, Whitman rated an exemplary 6.5 on such traits as benevolence, self-esteem, and firmness. He received one of his lowest marks for acquisitiveness, the pursuit of money and material gain. The low rating sat fine with Whitman, struck him almost as a veiled compliment. In his report, Lorenzo noted, “Size of head large . . . a certain reckless swing of animal will, too unmindful, probably, of the conviction of others.” He added, “You are yourself at all times.” Overall, Fowler painted a flattering picture of Whitman, casting him as a well-rounded modern man. (The phrase well rounded derives from phrenology and is based on the notion that an actualized person has a nicely shaped head, without any distortive bumps.) The results greatly pleased Whitman.

  Up and down Broadway, in and out of journalism, taken by daguerreotypes, transported by opera, gathering gathering gathering experience—but for what? By the early 1850s, Whitman began to feel what he later described as a “great pressure, pressure from within.” With his thirty-fifth birthday fast approaching, he grew pained by the notion that at the same age Shakespeare was “adjudged already to deserve a place among the great masters,” having by then written such plays as Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, and Richard III.

  Yet Whitman remained unsure where his area of mastery might lie. He’d tried such a variety of endeavors, yet failed to distinguish himself in any single one. By now, Whitman had drifted out of journalism, save for the occasional freelance piece. He was currently involved in building and flipping houses with about the same luck his father had managed. He’d even published a handful of poems, none of them memorable, none of them showing much originality or promise.

  But a fresh pass at poetry yielded very different results. This time the ideas came pouring out of Whitman. He wrote in mad haste, seeking to capture what he called “the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment—to put things down without deliberation.” Before long, he had covered myriad scraps of paper with scrawled fragments and half-formed notions. These he collected in an envelope. And then he set to the task of crafting this raw outflow into finished poems, a process as meticulous as what came before had been spontaneous. As Whitman put it, he “wrote, rewrote, and re-rewrote.”

  By 1855—three years before he first showed up at Pfaff’s—Whitman had a collection ready. “Remember,” he would state many years later, “the book arose out of my life in Brooklyn and New York from 1838 to 1853, absorbing a million people, for fifteen years, with an intimacy, an eagerness, an abandon, probably never equaled.”

  The title he chose, Leaves of Grass, was a treble entendre. On the one hand, leaves simply means “pages.” It was frequently used in 1850s book titles, such as Fanny Fern’s widely read Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio. As a veteran newspaperman, Whitman was also playing on grass as journalistic lingo for filler, articles that could be held for a slow news day. But he also meant his title to work on a more profound level, as an assertion that the whole of something and its parts are indivisible: grass consists of countless individual leaves, yet each is part of the whole.

  Leaves of Grass was like no collection of poetry the world had ever seen. It consisted of twelve untitled poems, flowing inexplicably one into the next, propelled by lengthy, comma-less sequences and bursts of ellipses. Whitman mixed elevated language with slang such as tushes, blab, and foofoos (vain people). And he sprinkled in plenty of the day’s pseudoscience, things like electricity traveling via “instant conductors” from one person’s body to another.

  Much about Leaves of Grass was groundbreaking. Whitman wrote the poems in free verse, a form for which he is acknowledged as the innovator. This was a complete departure from the rigid meter and rhyme of his contemporaries. Many of the poems also featured a kind of universal first person t
hat shape-shifted and swung wildly through time and space. Sometimes I could be taken simply as Whitman, but this was an outlandishly fluid I that switched in an eye blink from male to female and with the greatest of ease assumed various identities: a slave, a witch being burned at the stake, a cholera sufferer, a clock.

  With Leaves of Grass, Whitman laid out for himself an ambitious mandate: “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” The techniques he employed—free verse, fondness for idiom, the universal I—were in service of trying to express the full nature of America. He was out to capture the country’s teeming, democratic vastness:

  Do I contradict myself?

  Very well then. . . . I contradict myself;

  I am large. . . . I contain multitudes.

  Whitman chose to self-publish his collection, not unusual in that era. He hired the Rome brothers (Andrew, James, and Thomas), who ran a print shop in Brooklyn. The brothers’ only experience was with legal forms. Thus, Whitman’s poems were typeset in tiny ten-point letters on extra-large pages. The oversize work was bound and given a green cloth cover; the title, Leaves of Grass, was rendered so that the individual letters flowed together, sprouting roots and tendrils.

  Because Whitman was paying to publish his own work, the first run was limited to 795 copies. He arranged to have his poetry collection sold, of all places, through the Phrenological Cabinet of Fowler & Wells. The books were available in the outfit’s New York, Boston, and Philadelphia locations. Otherwise, the work could be found at only a few other places, such as William Swayne’s bookstore on Fulton Street in Brooklyn.

  Nevertheless, Whitman had massive hopes for Leaves of Grass. He envisioned the initial run selling out quickly. Money would keep flowing in, enough to fund the larger and then larger printings necessary to meet public demand. This was a time when poetry was a proven route to fame and fortune. Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha—published only a few months after Leaves of Grass—got off to a quick start, selling 30,000 copies during its first six months in print. Martin Farquhar Tupper, a wildly popular poet (yes, such a thing once existed), managed to sell 300,000 copies of his work Proverbial Philosophy. But the country wasn’t yet ready to absorb Walt Whitman. No reliable numbers exist for the first edition of Leaves of Grass, but according to the poet’s own bitter accounting, sales were minuscule.

  It’s actually surprising—a tribute to how truly radical the work was—that it still managed to receive a handful of reviews. Most were not sympathetic. Putnam’s described Leaves of Grass as “a curious and lawless collection of poems. . . . The introduction of terms, never before heard or seen, and of slang expressions, often renders an otherwise striking passage altogether laughable.” The Boston Intelligencer said of Whitman: “There is neither wit nor method in his disjointed babbling, and it seems to us he must be some escaped lunatic, raving in pitiable delirium.” Harsher still was a London publication called the Critic: “Walt Whitman is as unacquainted with art, as a hog is with mathematics. His poems—we must call them so for convenience—twelve in number, are innocent of rhythm and resemble nothing so much as the war-cry of the Red Indians.”

  Whitman also sent copies of Leaves of Grass to various literary lions. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier delivered perhaps the most concise verdict. Supposedly, he hurled Whitman’s book into the fireplace.

  A copy also went to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Back in the 1830s, Emerson had emerged as the leading light of transcendentalism, the profoundly influential movement centered in New England and dedicated to such precepts as the infinite potential of humankind and the need for self-reliance. Arguably, Emerson remained the arbiter of literary taste in America. He had a very different response to Whitman’s work than the critics. On July 21, 1855, Emerson wrote Whitman a five-page letter that contained the following: “I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of ‘Leaves of Grass.’ I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. . . . I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be.” And the kicker: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”

  On receiving the letter, Whitman was wonderstruck. For several months, he carried the folded letter around in his pocket, secret confirmation of his singular talent. He felt that he had received the blessing of “an emperor.” Soon, Whitman heard from Emerson again. Emerson planned to travel from his home in Concord, Massachusetts, to New York City and hoped to meet Whitman in person.

  It’s hard to imagine two people more mismatched in terms of physical appearance, temperament, everything. Whitman was earthy and robust; Emerson, fifty-two, sixteen years the poet’s senior, was thin, with a ramrod patrician bearing. Where Whitman’s formal education ended at eleven, Emerson was a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. Whitman placed a high value on physically demanding jobs such as carpentry. Emerson once attempted a manual labor regimen as a kind of spiritual experiment. But it left him exhausted, and he delivered the following maxim: “The writer shall not dig.” Whitman was deeply emotional. Emerson was cerebral to the core, even once describing himself as a “cold, fastidious” person.

  Despite these differences, however, there existed an unexpected affinity, one that prompted the Sage of Concord to seek out an obscure Brooklyn poet. In his essays, Emerson maintained a steady drumbeat about the need for homegrown, nativist art. It was high time, he argued, for America to quell its cultural insecurities and stop the slavish imitation of Old World models. Ignore “the courtly muses of Europe,” he famously urged. Yet Emerson was in no position to heed his own call. As an essayist, he was unrivaled—eloquent, urbane, powerfully persuasive. As a poet, however, Emerson was not nearly as talented or inspired. In Whitman, he believed he’d discovered that vaunted, authentic American voice.

  For Emerson’s visit to New York, Whitman took him to the Fireman’s Hall, a raucous club on Mercer Street. It was a strange choice. Whitman, it seems, was trying to make a calculated impression. “He shouted for a ‘tin mug’ for his beer,” Emerson would recall. Emerson emerged from that first meeting with a sense that Whitman was odd, but sublimely gifted—just as the poet had hoped.

  In 1856, Whitman self-published a second edition of Leaves of Grass. He made numerous changes. The book was now printed in a far more sensible size, one that was portable (roughly seven by three inches). He added twenty new poems. And this time around, Whitman gave the poems titles. What’s more, he added Poem to all thirty-two titles, just to be certain that people knew exactly what they were reading. It made for some awkward verbiage, for along with “Poem of the Road” and “Burial Poem,” there’s the glaringly self-evident “Poem of the Poet.” Whitman also cleaned up his unruly syntax, becoming a bit more sparing with ellipses and more generous in his use of commas. Oddly, Whitman chose to include his own phrenological reading in the appendix. Even in the nineteenth century, it was unusual for a new edition of a book to differ so greatly from the previous one. But then, nothing about Leaves of Grass is typical.

  For the second edition, the most striking change appeared on the book’s spine, where the following was stamped in gold: “I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career R. W. Emerson.” Inside the volume, Whitman reprinted Emerson’s letter in full. Taking matters still further, Whitman crafted a kind of open letter to Emerson. He didn’t mail it to him; rather, the letter was simply published in the book, where it served as a canny device to help position the new volume. Whitman’s open letter begins: “Here are thirty-two Poems, which I send you, dear Friend and Master.” The implication was clear: not only had Emerson endorsed the twelve poems in the first edition, but his blessing extended to the new poems as well.

  Upon receiving a copy of the new edition in the mail, the cold, fastidious Emerson was overcome with hot passion. Friends reported that they had never seen him so angry. Whitman had overstepped his boundaries and succeeded in pushing away his benefactor.

 
It was a moot point, however. Despite Emerson’s unauthorized endorsement, the new volume of Leaves of Grass was another abject failure. In fact, it is said to have sold even more poorly than the first, if that’s possible. Around this time, Whitman scrawled the following in a notebook, under the heading “Depressions”: “Every thing I have done seems to me blank and suspicious.—I doubt whether my greatest thoughts, as I had supposed them, are not shallow—and people will most likely laugh at me.—My pride is impotent, my love gets no response.—The complacency of nature is hateful—I am filled with restlessness.—I am incomplete.—”

  This was the Walt Whitman who first showed up at Pfaff’s. Poetry wasn’t paying the bills, so he had fallen back into journalism and was working for the Brooklyn Daily Times. Then, in June 1859, Whitman lost that job, supposedly due to a pair of controversial editorials, one urging licensing for prostitutes, the other suggesting that women, so as to ensure compatibility with potential marriage partners, should have the option of premarital sex. Unemployed, he started going to Pfaff’s nearly every night.

  By now, Whitman had turned forty. The poet was living at home with his mother in a basement apartment at 106 North Portland Avenue in Brooklyn. (Whitman’s father had died four years earlier.) Crowded into the quarters were Whitman’s youngest brother, Eddy, who was both mentally slow and emotionally disturbed, and eldest brother, Jesse, a disabled former sailor slipping ever deeper into insanity, the result of syphilis caught from a prostitute while on a shore leave in Ireland. Present, too, was George, a carpenter and easily the most practical Whitman sibling, a doer rather than a feeler. Walt and George shared a special bond, rooted in the fact that they were opposites. A fourth brother, Jeff, had just moved into the apartment with his new wife, and they would soon have a child. Fortunately, Walt’s two sisters, Mary and Hannah, had made lives for themselves outside this cramped and impoverished household.