In the summer of 1860, though, Howells was just twenty-three and hoping to crack the competitive East Coast literary market. His father was editor of the Ashtabula (OH) Sentinel, a newspaper that had an exchange-list relationship with the SP and frequently reprinted its items. Howells had also managed to get a half dozen of his poems accepted by the SP.
Howells traveled East, hoping to bolster some of his literary connections. His first stop was Boston, where he’d arranged to meet with Lowell, the Atlantic’s editor. They had lunch at Parker House, commencing at two—the hour for bankers and other genteel sorts. To Howells’s amazement, they were joined at the table by both Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Fields, a principal of the publishing house Ticknor & Fields. In the course of lunch, Howells mentioned that he admired Nathaniel Hawthorne. To his further amazement, then and there, Lowell drafted a letter of introduction and suggested that Howells go and meet with the famous author. He did so, and it was the highlight of his whirlwind visit.
Following the Boston adventure, next stop was New York, where Howells went directly to the offices of the SP. The trip East had gotten off to a great start, and now he hoped to firm up his relationship with Clapp. As Howells would recall, “It is not too much to say that it was very nearly as well for one to be accepted by the Press as to be accepted by the Atlantic, and for a time there was no other literary comparison. To be in it was to be in the company of Fitz James O’Brien, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. Stedman, and whoever else was liveliest in prose or loveliest in verse at that day in New York.”
Right from the start, however, Howells’s New York visit took on a very different tenor. Where the Parker House luncheon had been a rarefied affair, there was a distinct looseness to the meeting at the SP’s Spruce Street offices. In fact, the mood was downright unhinged. Clapp paced about, saying the most provocative things he could think of. Howells had the distinct impression that the editor was trying to shock him. Several minions—Howells took them for copyboys or assistant editors—were present, and they goaded Clapp on. That Howells had come to visit the SP by way of Boston and the Atlantic seemed to get Clapp particularly exercised. “The thought of Boston made him ugly as sin,” explained one assistant.
Maybe it was defensiveness, or a desire to set the record straight, but when Howells finally got a chance to speak, he felt compelled to relate some details from his visit there. Clapp listened, his face a rictus of skepticism. Howells told him about the meeting with Hawthorne, adding that he had been shy in the presence of his idol and that—to his great surprise—Hawthorne had also been shy. Clapp pulled his pipe from his mouth, waited the perfect measure, before delivering: “Oh, a couple of shysters.”
Clapp’s minions roared.
The meeting had not gone so well. Nevertheless, that evening, Howells made a second requisite stop, Pfaff’s. “I felt that as a contributor [to the SP] and at least a brevet Bohemian I ought not to go home without visiting the famous place.” Howells took a seat at that long table. He neither drank nor smoked, but he ordered a pfannekuchen, a German pancake. As he dug in, what struck him most was the leadenness of the conversation, nothing like he’d anticipated. Everybody was trying overhard to be clever—at least that was his view. As Howells recalled, “We were joined by some belated Bohemians whom the others made a great clamor over; I was given to understand they were just recovered from a fearful debauch; their locks were still damp from the wet towels used to restore them, and their eyes were very frenzied. I was presented to these types, who neither said, nor did anything worthy of their awful appearance, but dropped into seats at the table, and ate of the supper with an appetite that seemed poor.”
Howells stuck around only until eleven. He was especially disappointed that Ada Clare had failed to make a showing at Pfaff’s that evening. From Ohio, he’d closely followed the Queen of Bohemia, and he’d hoped to meet her in person. The New York leg of his eastern trip had been a real bust—what’s more, he would never again contribute to the SP. As Howells exited Pfaff’s, he was able, at least, to make the acquaintance of a different Bohemian eminence, Walt Whitman:
I did not know he was there till I was on my way out, for he did not sit at the table under the pavement, but at the head of one farther into the room. There, as I passed, some friendly fellow stopped me and named me to him, and I remember how he leaned back in his chair, and reached out his great hand to me, as if he were going to give it to me for good and all. He had a fine head, with a cloud of Jovian hair upon it, and a branching beard and mustache, and gentle eyes that looked most kindly into mine, and seemed to wish the liking which I instantly gave him, though we hardly passed a word, and our acquaintance was summed up in that glance and the grasp of his mighty fist upon my hand.
Whitman, as described by Howells, is almost godlike, what with his “mighty fist” and “cloud of Jovian hair.” But here’s the thing: he wasn’t yet perceived that way at the time of their meeting. Howells’s account is a recollection, published in an 1895 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine article, so everything is filtered through the haze of three and a half decades gone by. Thanks to the vagaries of memory, Howells’s description mixes the Whitman of Pfaff’s with another Whitman—the celebrated poet of the people, the lofty figure that he slowly became over time.
The SP played a crucial, early role in this transformation. It started with the publication of Whitman’s sensational new poem “A Child’s Reminiscence,” in the journal’s December 24, 1859, issue. (He would later rechristen the poem with the name by which it’s now known, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”) Clapp had heard him read it out loud and had hungrily seized it. For Whitman, this represented a return to public life after a lengthy silence. It was his first piece of published poetry in several years, since the second edition of Leaves of Grass in 1856. An editor’s note announced the poem: “Our readers may, if they choose, consider as our Christmas or New Year’s present to them, the curious warble, by Walt Whitman.”
What’s striking about the poem are a newfound maturity and sense of loss. The poem relates a boy’s pleasure at encountering a pair of mockingbirds while walking on the beach. During a storm, one of the birds disappears, never to return. Its mate remains, sending terrible anguished cries out to the vast, empty sea. And then, time collapses, as the adult version of the boy looks back, blurring the pain of his own life with that of the lone mockingbird. But he recognizes that there’s recompense to being a “solitary singer,” for from pain comes beauty—the creative spark.
The poem is notably darker than Whitman’s earlier work. In creating it, he seems to have drawn on the blackness that moved through those gatherings in Pfaff’s basement:
Answering, the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whispered me through the night, and very plainly be-
fore daybreak,
Lisped to me constantly the low and delicious word
Death,
And again Death—ever Death, Death, Death,
Hissing melodius, neither like the bird, nor like my
aroused child’s heart,
But edging near, as privately for me, rustling at my
feet,
And creeping thence steadily up to my ears,
Death, Death, Death, Death, Death.
After appearing first in the Saturday Press, “A Child’s Reminiscence” was reprinted in numerous papers. It reached thousands of readers—for many, it served as their introduction to the poet. Through the agency of Clapp’s penniless yet mighty journal, Whitman’s darkly beautiful new poem was broadcast across the land.
7: Leaves, Third Edition
Dr Sir. We want to be the publishers of Walt. Whitman’s poems—Leaves of Grass.—When the book was first issued we were clerks in the establishment we now own. We read the book with profit and pleasure. It is a true poem and writ by a true man. . . .
Now we want to be known as
the publishers of Walt. Whitman’s books, and put our name as such under his on title pages.—If you will allow it we can and will put your books into good form, and style attractive to the eye; we can and will sell a large number of copies; we have great facilities by and through numberless Agents in selling. We can dispose of more books than most publishing houses (we do not “puff” here but speak truth).
We are young men. We “celebrate” ourselves by acts. Try us. You can do us good. We can do you good—pecuniarily. . . .
Are you writing other poems? Are they ready for the press? Will you let us read them? . . .
Yours fraternally, Thayer & Eldridge
THIS LETTER IS DATED FEBRUARY 10, 1860, shortly after Whitman’s poem ran in the Saturday Press. It appears that the principals of a book publishing company had seen his new effort and were eager to work with him.
The firm Thayer & Eldridge was a partnership of William Thayer, age twenty-nine, and Charles Eldridge, age twenty-one, both former clerks at a Boston-based publisher. Following the bankruptcy of their employer (a casualty of the Panic of 1857), they had bought up its stock, plates, and other assets. As is fitting for a publisher run by “young men,” the new company was committed to producing books on progressive—even radical—subject matter. Thayer & Eldridge had recently scored its first big hit with James Redpath’s The Public Life of Capt. John Brown, a biography—or, more precisely, a hagiography—of the man who had attempted to spark an armed slave insurrection. Redpath’s book casts Brown in near-saintly terms. As North-South tensions continued to ratchet up, the title would be increasingly in demand, eventually selling a remarkable seventy-five thousand copies.
Flush with cash, Thayer & Eldridge was busily making other acquisitions. Among its planned titles was a rush-job biography of William Seward, due out in May 1860. It was an election year, and, as of February, Seward was a favorite to be the Republican candidate (Lincoln still faced long odds) and very possibly the next president. To leaven its book list, to mix in some experimental literature with the progressive political fare, Thayer & Eldridge was also seeking some Bohemian authors. After all, Bohemians were the current rage. Around the time the publishers contacted Whitman, they also approached Ada Clare. They signed her right up, agreeing to bring out her forthcoming novel.
“Are you writing other poems,” Thayer and Eldridge had asked Whitman in their letter. “Are they ready for the press?” The answers: yes and yes. Being unemployed left him with ample time to write, to rewrite, and to get his efforts into publish-ready form. Since 1856, the date of his last published collection, Whitman had written more than one hundred poems.
He was aiming to create a monumental work. Whitman once requested that a friend, Hector Tyndale, provide a brutally candid critique of the second edition of Leaves of Grass. Tyndale, who had recently visited England, told the poet that Leaves needed to be more like York Minster cathedral. One of the major shortcomings of the collection, his friend suggested, was that it lacked a sense of scale, of grandness. That criticism stuck with Whitman. From then on, he came to think of the first two versions as “inchoates,” as he put it, or “little pittance editions.” Leaves—as Whitman conceived it—was anarchic and organic; it subscribed to no particular rules. He had followed the first edition with a second, and nothing said there couldn’t be further editions—so he’d thrown himself into the task of revising, reordering, and, most of all, enlarging the work.
Many of the one hundred new poems show the influence of spending time at Pfaff’s. For example, Whitman had recently written a set of poems portraying love between men. He intended these as a kind of sonnet cycle, though not in any formal way (the poems didn’t hew to the classic fourteen-line, ten-syllable-per-line scheme). Rather, Whitman was seeking the spirit of an Elizabethan sonnet sequence, a celebration of male-male romance.
Whitman had even taken the step of having many of his poems professionally set. The typewriter hadn’t yet been invented. This was a way to have polished, non-handwritten versions of one’s work. Whitman enjoyed looking over the new poems in printed form. It pleased him to think that this was how they would look to readers. Then again, he hadn’t been certain that his new work would find readers.
Even as Whitman amassed a huge amount of fresh poetry, he had continued to seesaw between moments of grandiosity and moments of grave self-doubt. He jotted the following notation to himself: “Founding a new American Religion (?No Religion).” At other times, though, he was filled with worry:
Shall I make the idiomatic book of my land?
Shall I yet finish the divine volume [?]
I know not whether I am to finish the divine volume . . .
Thayer and Eldridge’s letter carried the weight of prophecy for Whitman. To someone who had self-published a couple of poetry collections, the idea of a genuine publisher was thrilling. To a poet who had so far earned scarcely a penny, the assurance that “we can do you good—pecuniarily” must have been like a dream. From Whitman’s standpoint, the fact that Thayer & Eldridge was based in Boston was an unalloyed positive. He shared none of Clapp’s antipathy for the city. A real publisher in the nation’s cultural hub had sought him out. That this was a newish Boston outfit run by a pair of progressive-minded young men, as opposed to an old-line firm—which might take a more conservative approach to publishing—made the prospect all the more appealing to Whitman.
Within a month of receiving Thayer and Eldridge’s letter, Whitman had temporarily relocated to Boston to oversee the printing of an expanded third edition of Leaves of Grass. He rented a room in a shabby lodging house for two dollars a week. Each day, he headed over to the Boston Stereotype Foundry on Spring Lane. This was the finest such facility in Boston; eight years earlier, it had created the plates used for Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Whitman was given a temporary office on the top floor. It was stiflingly hot, and the air hung thick with a metallic stench. Six floors below, furnaces blasted and trays sloshed with molten lead as stereotypes were created for printing books.
Because Whitman was an old hand at the process—he’d done every job from compositor onward—young Thayer and Eldridge gave him a remarkable degree of control. The typefaces for the volume were handpicked by Whitman, who suggested an array of fonts: Saxon ornate shaded for this poem, pica ornamented No. 7 for that one. He provided meticulous instructions about the spacing between words, line breaks, and where to use italics.
He also opted to arrange his poems in groups (what he called “clusters”) representing common subject matter, although with Whitman, it can never be quite that boiled down. A poem might be placed in a particular cluster because of its mood, or the way it harmonized with another poem, or just because. Among the clusters Whitman specified were “Chants Democratic and Native American” (broadly, poems about the commonweal), “Enfans d’Adam” (poems about a desired Edenic state that was innocent and natural), and “Calamus” (the sonnet sequence). Calamus is a plant native to the United States that features a long, phallic bloom.
In a curious way, Whitman’s clusters mirror the rigorous segregation he maintained between parts of his own life. He liked to keep people in separate compartments. At Pfaff’s, he sometimes joined Clapp’s crowd at the long table in that exclusive vaulted room, where he mostly listened, absorbing the chatter. Other times, he could be found in the saloon’s main room, conversing with his “beautiful boys.”
Whitman worried over every detail in his book’s production. He even grew fixated on the blank spaces. Often, when a poem ended on the early part of a page, it was followed by a stretch where there was nothing. In such a busy book, achurn with wildly varying fonts and packed with dashes and exclamation points—favorite Whitman devices—the blank stretches looked glaring. So Whitman decided to fill them with illustrations. Three different ones pop up at intervals throughout the book: a butterfly lighting on an extended finger; the earth, viewed from the vantage of space, and partially obscured by
clouds; and the sun over the sea, ambiguously either rising or setting.
Leaves quickly grew to be the most costly book project that Thayer & Eldridge had ever undertaken. “The printers and foremen thought I was crazy,” Whitman reported in a letter to his brother Jeff, “and there were all sorts of supercilious squints (about the typography I ordered, I mean).” But when pages started to come off the press, Whitman continued, the skepticism evaporated. The foreman had pronounced Leaves “in plain terms, the freshest and handsomest piece of typography that had ever passed through his mill.” In another letter, Walt expressed to Jeff his amazement that the new edition was truly under way. A book was so permanent. The publication of Leaves, he wrote, “seems to me, like relieving me of a great weight—or removing a great obstacle that has been in my way for the last three years. . . . It is quite curious, all this should spring up so suddenly, aint it.”
Jeff wrote back, assuring Walt that he couldn’t wait to see the finished book: “I quite long for it to make its appearance.”
Emerson soon learned through the grapevine that Whitman was in his midst. He had never forgiven the younger man for taking liberties with his letter, for splashing “I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career” across the spine of the second edition of Leaves. At the same time, Emerson felt an intellectual obligation to Whitman and held out hope that the poet could yet emerge as that pure and true American voice.
While down from Concord to deliver a lecture in Boston titled “Moral Sentiment,” Emerson decided to pay a visit. First, Emerson stopped by the lodging house, but was informed that Whitman was out. So Emerson went to the offices of Thayer & Eldridge. Charles Eldridge walked him to the nearby stereotype foundry and conducted him to the sixth floor, where Whitman was busily reading proofs. Whitman’s cramped temporary office was stiflingly hot as always. So he and Emerson decided to go for a walk on the Boston Common.
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