Rebel Souls

by Justin Martin

  Often, Whitman simply loafed the day away, before setting out in the late afternoon for Pfaff’s. From Brooklyn and back was a six-mile trip by foot, ferry, and coach, so frequenting this particular saloon was quite a commitment. But as an unemployed poet, facing bleak prospects, Whitman found that Pfaff’s was a place where he could be among other artists. It provided him with a desperately needed identity. The belief that Clapp showed in him must have been extremely heartening.

  Clapp’s deference had a downside, however, at least where the others in the group were concerned. This could be a tough crowd; there was the perpetual jockeying for the favor of the King of Bohemia. Many in the set held themselves above Whitman. As Elihu Vedder, an illustrator and Pfaff’s habitué from this period, recalls, “He had not become famous yet, and I then regarded many of the Boys as his superiors, as they did themselves.” Sure, Whitman had that Emerson endorsement—indeed clung to it—but his few reviews were mostly bad and his sales paltry.

  Sometimes, Whitman found himself the target of the verbal sparring that he worked so hard to avoid. At Pfaff’s, nobody was spared. A caustic comment might issue from somewhere along the table, and Whitman would realize it was directed at him. “I don’t know if you ever realized it—ever realized what it means to be a horror in the sight of the people about you,” Whitman would recall, “but there was a time when I felt it to the full—when the enemy—and nearly all were the enemy then—wanted for nothing better or more simply, without remorse, to crush me, to brush me, without compunction or mercy, out of sight, out of hearing: to do anything, everything, to rid themselves of me.” The comment is hyperbolic, most certainly paranoid, but also captures something of the flavor of being on the receiving end of the Pfaff’s slings and arrows.

  Sometimes Whitman fired back. He couldn’t help himself. While he prided himself on staying above the fray, the rubbing and drubbing sometimes wore him down, managed to find his raw spots. Given his languid style of speech, Whitman didn’t go in for elaborate mind-game put-downs. But he had his ways. “I like your tinkles,” Whitman told a Pfaff’s regular named Thomas Aldrich, referring to the man’s poems. The sting lay in the blasé, utterly dismissive way that he delivered the line. (No, this wasn’t the benevolent, mist-shrouded Whitman.) On the attack, he possessed a “bovine air of omniscience” that could be maddening, according to William Winter. Winter was well acquainted with it, for Whitman once slammed him with “Willy is a young Longfellow.” The jibe was brief, pithy, and a direct hit: where Poe was this crowd’s patron saint, Longfellow was its bête noire. As a sentimental poet, Longfellow was anathema to many in the Pfaff’s set. They snidely referred to him as “Longwindedfellow.” Then again, Longfellow had outsold Whitman and the rest of the Pfaffians put together.

  Whitman grew so frustrated that he began to think about giving up poetry. “It is now time to stir first for Money enough, to live and provide for M.—” (M. being his mother). One option that he considered, though he was shaky on specifics, was delivering lectures on politics. Whitman, far more than many in the Pfaff’s circle, was engaged by the subject, which he approached in his own highly intuitive fashion. Whitman had a poet’s grasp of politics, one might say, and his insight could be almost eerily keen. He’d even once written a pamphlet on the subject. It included a savage attack on the political climate of the 1850s, in which Whitman resorted to outlandish rhetorical flourishes such as his statement that President Franklin Pierce “eats dirt and excrement for his daily meals, likes it, and tries to force it on The States.” The pamphlet was not published in Whitman’s lifetime. But it is notable for one prescient passage, in which Whitman imagines the ideal candidate to lead the country: “I would be much pleased to see some heroic, shrewd, fully-informed, healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American blacksmith or boatman come down from the West across the Alleghanies, and walk into the Presidency.” Incredibly, these words were written in 1856, several years before a beard-faced candidate, in from the West, was even a glimmer in the eyes of America.

  As for Whitman’s plan to be a “wander-speaker,” vague though it was, he actually drew up a circular, entitled Walt Whitman’s Lectures. Never mind that he wasn’t even much of a talker, let alone a gifted public orator. “I desire to go by degrees through all These States,” he announced, “especially West and South.” He came up with what seemed like a proper price for his services. Where Emerson commanded upwards of $50 per lecture, Whitman proposed to charge 10 cents a head. In the circular, Whitman stated that lecturing on political issues would be “henceforth my employment.” But the notion of lecturing was really no more than a lark, a distraction from the real work at hand.

  In the dim light of Pfaff’s, Whitman was discovering that he couldn’t shake poetry so easily. It was inspiring to be among artists, even if they could be irksome, even if he mostly just looked on. “What wit, humor, repartee, word wars, and sometimes bad blood!” Whitman marveled. It goaded him on. Soon he was writing fresh poems. Even after two editions of Leaves of Grass, he had so much more to say. His new work was quite a departure from what he’d done previously. It showed the kind of assurance that comes with maturity and the experience of loss. He was tackling fresh subjects and highly controversial ones, too.

  Sometimes, just sometimes, if the evening’s mix at Clapp’s long table was right, if the roiling sea of egos that surrounded him had achieved momentary calm, then Walt Whitman—this wounded, prideful man—in a voice quiet and slow, would read one of his new poems to the crowd at Pfaff’s.

  4: Hashish and Shakespeare

  “WE WERE ALL VERY MERRY at Pfaff’s,” wrote Thomas Aldrich in his poem “At the Café.” But just a few lines later, he asks: “Did you think . . . that my heart, as I passed the Rhine wine to the boys, was as black as the midnight and bitter as gall?”

  The poem mines that vein of darkness, one of the most distinctive traits of Clapp’s circle. Of course, it’s partly self-conscious posturing. Aldrich—yet another representative of the Pfaff’s youth brigade—was only twenty-three when he wrote it. But he was also tapping into forces in the world around him that were disquieting, pressing, and undeniably real. There was darkness aplenty to draw on at this particular time.

  While the Bohemians gathered in that little vaulted room beneath the Broadway sidewalk, the world above them was fast slipping into disarray. The fact that Clapp was able to launch an American Bohemia during the 1850s is not mere happenstance. Conditions were ripe. Just as revolutionary rumblings had caused Paris’s Left Bank scene to blossom in the 1840s, America was going through paroxysms of its own in the decade that came to be known as the Fiery Fifties.

  This was an agonizing time in US history, as tensions ratcheted up between the North and South. There was a pervading sense of doom; it seemed that at any moment, things might spin out of control. At the same time, America’s glorious founding years remained a fresh memory. Plenty of people were around who had grown up during the presidencies of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. Even a smattering of Revolutionary War veterans were still alive. The contrast made it all that much more painful. Facing a mounting crisis, America was saddled with some of its worst, most uninspiring leadership ever.

  During the latter part of the 1850s, James Buchanan was president. He was an even less capable executive, if that’s possible, than his predecessor, Pierce. Buchanan was a so-called doughface, a Northerner sympathetic to the interests of Southern slaveholders. The term suggests a highly changeable person, capable of molding his features to curry the favor of varied constituencies. Duality ran deep in Buchanan’s nature. Before becoming president, he had been a wealthy lawyer who owned a sprawling estate in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, called Wheatland, modeled after a Southern plantation. Predictably, he pleased no one during his presidency.

  Congress was simply nonfunctional. Throughout the country’s history, Americans have bemoaned the lack of cooperation in Congress, but in the 1850s it reach
ed epic proportions. Sessions degenerated into exchanges of invective and slander, North pitted against South. A particularly deranged episode occurred on February 5, 1858, during a late-night debate in the House of Representatives. Laurence Keitt of South Carolina called Pennsylvania’s Galusha Grow a “Black Republican puppy.” (Representative Grow was white; “Black Republican” was a popular insult of the day, a slap at the party’s avowed sympathy for slaves.) Returning the insult, Grow told his Southern colleague, “No negro-driver shall crack his whip over me.”

  At this point, Keitt rushed at Grow and started to throttle him. A melee erupted on the House floor, and roughly fifty representatives swarmed together, kicking and punching and hollering. Wisconsin’s Cadwallader Washburn took a swing at William Barksdale of Mississippi. The punch grazed Barksdale’s skull, knocking off his wig. Barksdale hastily replaced the hairpiece and continued to scuffle. Duly noted, however, was the fact that the distinguished congressman from Mississippi had put his wig on backward. The floor erupted again, this time with howls of laughter. Keitt unhanded Grow, and the melee ended.

  Outside the halls of Congress, there was violence in abundance. This was an era of widespread rioting; in Boston, Louisville, Baltimore, mobs took to the streets, often driven by a sense of outrage that was vague, inchoate, but killing dozens just the same. Bleeding Kansas was the scene of sectarian tensions that resulted in as many as two hundred deaths; Americans were treated to the spectacle of two competing Kansas territorial legislatures, proslavery in Lecompton and free-soil in Topeka.

  By the late 1850s, there didn’t exist a single official US institution that wasn’t in crisis: Congress, an actual battleground; territorial governments, a farce; the Supreme Court, utterly suspect following the Dred Scott decision. Scott was a slave who sued for freedom on the grounds that his master had moved with him to Wisconsin, a free territory. But the Court ruled that a black person had no right to sue. Further, the Court handed down a ruling so broad as to make it difficult to arrest the spread of slavery into the Northern territories. Buchanan worked secretly behind the scenes, obtaining his desired outcome for the case by pressuring a couple of justices, an egregious violation of the separation of powers. In this way, Buchanan, arguably the worst president in US history, played a role in Dred Scott, often considered the nadir of the US Supreme Court. The ruling led to rampant uncertainty about the nation’s future. That uncertainty, in turn, was a major factor in sparking the Panic of 1857. On top of everything else, the economy was in shambles.

  Among the Pfaff’s set, Whitman was especially caught up in the Fiery Fifties. He filled his private notebooks with comments, lamenting the era’s “hot passions” and “inertia.” In his political pamphlet, he asked, “What historic denouements are these we are approaching? On all sides tyrants tremble, crowns are unsteady, the human race restive, on the watch for some better era, some divine war.” As part of his blurry plan to become a “wander-speaker,” he even contemplated whether the president or perhaps the Supreme Court might require his services, and whether he might be called upon “to dart hither or thither, as some great emergency might demand.” Whitman always held grand—grandiose, his detractors in Clapp’s coterie might say—notions about his capacity to soothe a troubled nation.

  Other Pfaffians tended to be less overtly consumed by the big events of the day. But that doesn’t mean they were unaffected. Being a writer or artist in the 1850s, according to one account, was like being an “overcharged Leyden jar.” (A Leyden jar is an old-fashioned device used to conduct experiments with static electricity.) It’s hard to imagine O’Brien, say, the impoverished writer in an unholy hurry, getting involved in a political discussion. Politics was not a subject he ever showed interest in or explored in his work. But simply as citizens, and further as people of sensitive artistic temperament, the Pfaff’s crowd registered the chaos of the Fiery Fifties just the same.

  A common stance among Clapp’s set was a kind of sly cynicism. Every aspect of American society seemed so eroded, so diminished; drinking, carousing, and trading witty barbs in a subterranean bar—what else even made sense? That’s part of the tension in “We were all very merry at Pfaff’s.” This much was certain: the status quo was a sham. The term didn’t exist in the 1850s, but the Pfaffians were forming what today is called a counterculture.

  It’s only fitting, then, that Fitz Hugh Ludlow found his way to that underground saloon on Broadway. Ludlow first showed up at Pfaff’s in 1858, as the wunderkind author of The Hasheesh Eater. The book—a literary sensation that had been published the previous year—details Ludlow’s drug experiences starting as a teenager and on through college. This was fresh and shocking territory. It was also the perfect book for an era of widespread disillusion, a time when tired old rules and failed authority were being questioned.

  Ludlow, pale and slightly built, looked even younger than his twenty-­one years. But he was also a formidable conversationalist. Well versed in the classics, he was comfortable ranging across a huge variety of subjects, many of them arcane or occult. He possessed an absurdly large vocabulary, enjoyed sprinkling his everyday speech with five-­dollar words such as barathrum (an abyss), omphalopsychite (a navel gazer), sacerdotal (relating to priests), and sesquipedalia (a word for very long words). Due to a surfeit of jittery energy, he spoke with great animation, making wild, staccato gestures with his hands.

  Ludlow’s rare conversational powers quickly earned him a regular place at Clapp’s long table. He brimmed with ambition, like a schoolboy intent on getting the best marks. Having made such an audacious start with The Hasheesh Eater, he was certain that still greater literary heights awaited him.

  Ludlow had grown up in Poughkeepsie, New York, the son of a Presbyterian minister. At age three, he taught himself to read. He was a sickly youth, a dreamer; rather than playing outside, he was content to remain indoors with a book. By seven, he was studying Latin and Greek with his father: “the smartest and most learned boy I ever saw,” recalled a cousin. Ludlow was so nearsighted that, while still a child, he was fitted with spectacles, very unusual for the time. The other kids taunted him with what would become the classic insult aimed at glasses wearers: “four eyes.”

  After his mother died, everything took a turn. Ludlow became rebellious, developing a fondness for what he’d later call “childhood’s sweetest flavor—the taste of disobedience.” He bounced from school to school. Often his father was forced to interrupt his sermons, pointing up at the church’s gallery and saying, “Fitz Hugh, I mean you.”

  At age sixteen, Ludlow started frequenting an apothecary shop in Poughkeepsie. Ludlow sampled the various drugs available “until I had run through the whole gamut of queer agents within my reach.” The concept of illegal drugs didn’t exist yet. Young Ludlow appears to have viewed these dabblings as scientific inquiry, or at least that’s how he would play it in The Hasheesh Eater. As for the apothecary, maybe he was simply charmed by Ludlow’s enthusiasm and willing to share samples of his potions and patent medicines with a teenager. Ludlow tried ether and chloroform, various opiates and stimulants. “When the circuit of all the accessible tests was completed,” Ludlow recalled, “I ceased experimenting, and sat down like a pharmaceutical Alexander, with no more drug-worlds to conquer.”

  Then, one afternoon, Ludlow happened to visit the shop when the apothecary was unpacking an enticing new arrival. It was a box from Tilden & Company of New Lebanon, New York, filled with little vials of Cannabis indica extract. This plant (common name: Indian hemp) can be cultivated for marijuana, or a sticky resin can be collected from its leaves and concentrated, producing hashish. While recreational use goes back centuries in places such as China and India, hashish was viewed strictly as a medicinal agent in nineteenth-century America. It was prescribed in small doses and taken orally as a remedy for a variety of ailments. “A most pleasurable and harmless stimulant,” promises an old advertisement in Harper’s Weekly. “Cures Nervousness,
Weakness, Melancholy, &c.”

  For his first foray, Ludlow took a massive dose. He rolled the tar-like green resin into a fat pellet, what he called a “bolus,” and then chewed it up. At first nothing happened. But then Ludlow noticed that time seemed to have ground to a halt. He checked his watch, allowed his mind to meander a bit, and then checked again. A mere thirty seconds had passed. Ludlow went home and hid in his bedroom, safe from his preacher father. Later that evening, still very much under the influence, he sneaked out of his room and stood at the top of the stairway. The stairs appeared to stretch endlessly downward. “My God!” Ludlow thought. “I am in eternity.”

  Ludlow continued to experiment with hashish. When he enrolled at Union College in Schenectady, New York, one of the first things he did was arrange to buy Tilden’s extract directly from the company. He introduced several of his friends and dorm mates to hashish in this form. None of them were as taken with the drug as Ludlow. Already, he was a veteran sensation seeker. Back in grammar school, he had once been punished for chewing cloves to stay awake in class, and his sister would recall that as a two-year-old he liked to eat cayenne pepper directly from the shaker. At Union, Ludlow took heroic doses of hashish, eating as much as four grams at once, the equivalent of smoking six joints at an impossibly fast clip.

  Ludlow had many of the classic experiences of cannabis users, such as giggle fits, ravenous hunger, and extreme receptivity to music. While high, Ludlow went to see an orchestra and was enthralled when the music began to separate into its component parts and he was actually able to pick out the sound issuing from each individual violin. Because he was taking such massive doses—and also due to his delicate nature and unbridled imagination—Ludlow had vivid hallucinations more closely akin to those experienced on mushrooms or LSD, a drug that would not be synthesized until nearly a century later. Solid walls melted and reconstituted in front of Ludlow’s eyes, squat little buildings sprouted into fantastical Moorish castles, the physical features of his classmates mutated (a whist enthusiast’s face fanned out like a hand of cards) in ways that seemed to reveal their underlying characters. During one hash-blissed perambulation, Ludlow came upon a little brook that trickles through the Union campus. In his altered state, the brook looked like a mighty river. Filled with awe, he began shouting, “The Nile! The Nile!”