And then it happened, this strange, unsettling year’s most decisive event: on November 6, Abraham Lincoln was elected the sixteenth president of the United States of America.
He inherited a perilously divided nation. Throughout 1860, as the political situation slid ever further into dysfunction, America’s traditional two-party approach had utterly broken down. The presidential contest had featured candidates from four different splinter parties: Republican, Northern Democrat, Southern Democrat, and Constitutional Unionist. Each had a decidedly regional bias. Lincoln won 180 electoral votes (28 above the threshold for victory), but received only 39.9 percent of the popular vote. He didn’t carry a single state below the Mason-Dixon line. In fact, ten of those states refused even to place Lincoln on the ballot. In effect, Lincoln was the Northern and Republican president of a United States that was anything but. His victory triggered an immediate secession crisis.
Shortly after the election, Buchanan, the outgoing president, delivered his annual message to Congress. He declared that states had no right to secede from the Union, but he also allowed that the federal government had no constitutional authority to stop them. So deep was the crisis by then that it was unlikely that anybody could have headed it off. But dough-faced Buchanan, with another feeble on-the-one-hand, on-the-other statement, was certainly the wrong man at the wrong time. On December 20, South Carolina’s state legislature convened a special session and resolved to leave the Union by a vote of 169–0. In rapid sequence, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas also announced their intention to leave.
The massive crisis that was brewing had broad fallout, sometimes resulting in very specific and localized consequences. Within weeks of Lincoln’s election victory, the Saturday Press folded. Even in its brightest fiscal moments, the publication had always been a hair’s breadth from ruin. The uncertainty of the national situation, prompting advertisers to be skittish and subscribers to not renew, gave the journal that final, fatal shove. Only a few months earlier, Thayer & Eldridge, Whitman’s publisher, had made a small investment in the SP with plans eventually to buy it. They intended to keep Clapp on as editor. “We can make it pay (we think) in a very short time,” the two young proprietors had announced with characteristic bravado. They had envisioned a smart combination of their publishing house and the influential journal.
Thayer & Eldridge’s small cash infusion wasn’t enough to sustain the SP. The final issues are filled with pleas for money. “All that is wanted, as we said last week, is a little more capital,” wrote Clapp in one. As ever, edgy Clapp became earnest and humorless when begging for money. That he, of all people, couldn’t figure out a way to write a sly money solicitation—it’s a poignant window into his desperation. Still, as the SP wound down, he did manage to publish several appreciations of Booth’s acting, a poem by O’Brien, and a “Thoughts and Things” column by Ada Clare. Fittingly, the very last page of the final issue (December 15, 1860) includes “A Portrait,” a poem by Whitman.
Clapp took the death of his beloved journal very hard. He upped his drinking, drastically, but there wasn’t enough whiskey on earth to drown his pain. This was such a disappointment, such a comedown. His reduced circumstances, as he told Whitman, left him racked by insomnia, caught in “a scrape the horror of which keeps me awake o’ nights.”
Thayer & Eldridge, so recently profitable, also went bankrupt. As a Northern publisher of radical fare, specializing in the works of abolitionists and Bohemians, it faced the same problems as the SP—in extremis. The two partners tried to arrange emergency financing, but credit had seized up and banks weren’t lending. “We go by the board tomorrow or the next day,” wrote Thayer mournfully in a December 5 letter.
The new edition of Leaves of Grass had been on sale for only six months. Momentum had been steadily building. Roughly three thousand copies had sold, and Thayer & Eldridge had gone back to press. But those sales, while highly respectable, weren’t sufficient to keep the publisher alive—not in this environment.
The firm’s meltdown was also costly to Ada Clare. Only a few months earlier, she had traveled to Boston, as Whitman had, to oversee the production of her novel. Now, Asphodel was canceled. The original handwritten manuscript, proofs, plates—every single version of the unpublished book—eventually disappeared. Sadly, the Queen of Bohemia’s first novel has been scrubbed from history.
During the bankruptcy, Thayer & Eldridge were forced to sell the plates for the landmark third edition of Leaves of Grass. They wound up in the hands of Horace Wentworth, a rival publisher, who turned out to be a highly unscrupulous man. Wentworth demanded that Whitman buy the plates from him, threatening that otherwise he planned to distribute a pirated printing of Leaves. Whitman couldn’t meet his fee. Over time, Wentworth would sell thousands of copies, many more than the legitimate version had sold. Of course, Whitman didn’t see a cent in royalties from these sales. (Supposedly, he managed to collect only $250 before Thayer & Eldridge went bankrupt.) In a crucial way, however, Whitman benefited mightily from his shotgun-wedding association with Wentworth. Following the demise of Thayer & Eldridge, at least someone was still printing Leaves of Grass. The pirated version would tend the flame, would help keep the poet’s reputation alive through the sad, chaos-filled years that lay ahead.
During his earlier stay in Boston, in a letter to brother Jeff, Whitman had confided an anxiety as he readied Leaves of Grass for publication. Perhaps the book would not take off “in a rocket way.” This proved true. Leaves would be one of those slow-burn classics, achieving its stature with the passage of many years.
That was of no solace to Whitman in December 1860. Once again, his future looked bleak. He had just been slammed with a one-two combo worthy of Tom Sayers. The publisher of Leaves of Grass was bankrupt. The Saturday Press, tireless champion of his work, was no more.
En route to Washington to assume the presidency, Lincoln made a stopover in New York City. It was then that Whitman got his very first glimpse of the new president. Whitman was riding along Broadway in a stage and got caught in a huge traffic jam. As usual, he was sitting up front, beside the driver and way up high. “I had,” Whitman would recall, “ . . . a capital view of it all, and especially of Mr. Lincoln, his look and gait—his perfect composure and coolness—his unusual and uncouth height, his dress of complete black, stovepipe hat push’d back on the head, dark-brown complexion, seam’d and wrinkled yet canny-looking face, black, busy head of hair, disproportionately long neck.”
Whitman was especially struck by the quietness of the crowd. There must have been forty thousand people lining Broadway, he estimated, yet it was strangely silent. New Yorkers weren’t exactly partial to Lincoln; he had carried only 35 percent of the city’s voters in the election. Manhattan papers mostly cast the president-elect as a rube, a backwoods naïf. There was a great deal of skepticism about whether he was up to the momentous challenges that faced him. Lincoln stepped out of his coach. He briefly surveyed the crowd—no smile, no wave—before stepping into the Astor Hotel.
Whitman felt an instant affinity for this tall, awkward man from the West. The poet was forty-one years old now and still living at home with his mother. Brother Jeff had just had a baby daughter, would soon have another. The Brooklyn basement apartment was more crowded than ever. Whitman scrawled an idea for a “Brochure” in one of his notebooks:
Two characters as
of a Dialogue
between A.
L____n and
W [illeg.]
—as in? a dream
or better?
Lessons for a
President elect
Dialogue between WW.
and “President elect”
It was another of his schemes, like being a wander-speaker, but blurrier. What else could he do? Whitman had come so tantalizingly close to achieving his dream. He’d actually climbed partway to poetic fame and fo
rtune, only to have it come tumbling down.
As 1860 came to a close, perhaps nobody in the Pfaff’s set had fallen further than Menken. The year, which had started for her with such promise, ended in a plunge.
Menken’s baby boy—born in June—lived only a few days before succumbing to Saint Anthony’s fire, a bacterial infection. Meanwhile, Heenan—who had stopped writing from England—simply refused to see her upon his return to America.
Menken faced the indignity of trying to connect with her estranged husband at a public rally held in his honor. The setting was Jones Wood, a stretch of farmland that ran along Manhattan’s East River. The turnout was huge, estimated at fifty thousand by the New York Daily Tribune. Even though the championship bout ended in a disappointing draw, Heenan had emerged a bigger celebrity than ever.
As the boxer arrived in a coach, people chanted, “Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!” Menken was stuck on the crowd’s edge, pressing toward her husband, along with thousands of others. Heenan stepped out and greeted his adoring public, smartly dressed in a silk shirt and flannel breeches. He raised one arm, waving. Clinging to his other arm was a woman. It was his pretty new English girlfriend, Harriet Martin. In that instant, for Menken, the reason for Heenan’s silence became clear—blonde, buxom, and painfully clear.
Menken’s prospects kept spiraling down. Her brief moment as a theatrical sensation had ended, and soon the roles began to dry up. Heenan had moved on and the public along with him. Menken was just another struggling actress. She vacated her home at Third Avenue and 14th Street and took a dingy flat in Jersey City. But she continued visiting Manhattan on a regular basis, pounding the pavement, trying to find work. Spying Menken making the rounds, a gossip columnist for the Charleston Courier wrote unflatteringly, “Adah, as she walks the street with her hair frizzled over her forehead, and her eyes widely wandering, reminds one of Ophelia in the mad scene of Hamlet.”
Late at night, Menken poured her grief into what she called “wild soul poems.” She claimed to write these in a kind of fugue state. Menken was highly influenced by Whitman, and idolized him for being “centuries ahead of his contemporaries.” In stark imitation of Leaves of Grass, many of her works are composed in free verse and contain assorted experimental touches. But while her outpouring of pain and sorrow was genuine, as a poet she lacked that essential something. Menken was no Whitman. “Oh, is this all?” she implores in “Drifts That Bar My Door,” one of her poems from this period. “Is there nothing more of life? See how dark and cold my cell. The pictures on the walls are covered with mould. The earth-floor is slimy with my wasting blood.”
By December 1860, Menken was reduced to working at the Canterbury, one of Manhattan’s notorious concert saloons. “Gives the most varied entertainment in the world,” promises a newspaper advertisement for the Canterbury, before listing sundry other features: “$6,000 expended in Mirrors, Mirrors, Mirrors,” “the novel feature of revolving chairs,” and “crowded nightly with men of real taste and judgment.”
The Canterbury trotted out an endless stream of slightly blue acts such as singers of bawdy songs and lecherous magicians. Menken found work there as a racy actress, performing double-entendre-filled skits. At a concert saloon, such entertainments were merely a diversion, though. The real enticement was the waitresses, who worked the saloon floor in their garish makeup and revealing outfits. As long as a customer kept ordering expensive drinks, he was guaranteed the rapt attention of his waitress. If the pair really hit it off, he might inquire about more intimate services, discreetly available.
At the Canterbury, Menken took the stage at regular intervals throughout the evening to perform her suggestive skits. She was a born entertainer; that was what she did and all she knew, in the best of times and the worst. “I can not sew or work as many women,” she once confessed. But performing at a concert saloon was drastically less than what she’d hoped for and imagined. In the first months of 1860, she’d managed the briefest taste of sweetness and promise. Then, she’d fallen so far so fast. Even so, the Canterbury’s “waitresses” must have been a constant and unsettling reminder that a person can always slide still further. Wherever one is, there are stations below, occupied by countless persons, and below that and that and lower still, endless grisly rungs—terrifying to contemplate.
The evening of December 29, 1860, found Menken sitting alone in her Jersey City flat, regarding her reflection in a cracked vanity mirror. The only light in her small room came from a flickering oil lamp. She stared at herself for a long while. She was wearing her favorite dress, navy satin with white lace cuffs.
Menken was supposed to meet the crowd at Pfaff’s. Instead, she started composing a note in blue ink on a piece of lined paper, addressing it “To the Public.”
Menken lamented the fact that Heenan had abandoned her, writing that the boxer had “absorbed all of good and beauty, and left me alone, desolate.” She asked for forgiveness from God and also asked God to forgive Heenan and everyone else who had wronged her. Then she declared, “Because I am homeless, poor and friendless, and so unloved, I leave this world.”
Menken peeled off her clothing layer by Victorian layer: navy dress, corset, and assorted undergarments. Near at hand was a vial containing a potent tincture, purchased from an apothecary. She lifted the vial to her lips and took a long draw.
Over at Pfaff’s, meanwhile, it seems that a man named Stephen Masset had grown concerned about Menken’s failure to show up. Masset was a singer and sometime guest at Clapp’s table. A small, obsequious person, he curried Menken’s attentions through flattery and endless favors. Masset was aware that Menken had grown extremely depressed of late. So he left Pfaff’s and traveled to Jersey City. On arriving at the flat, he found the door unlocked. He pushed inside, where Menken was lying naked on the floor.
Masset threw open the window, letting in a blast of icy late-December air. The actress was still breathing, and gradually came to, though groggy and weak.
9: Becoming Artemus Ward
BAD LUCK, ASSORTED PROFESSIONAL SETBACKS, a suicide attempt: it had all been piling up for Clapp’s set. The past year had been painful, as a hopeful mood gave way to a sense of dark foreboding. Who knew what fresh disasters awaited the Pfaffians, ready to be ushered in with the arrival of a new year? Instead, they got Charlie Brown.
On January 1, 1861, at four in the morning, Brown arrived in New York City by train. He checked into the Western Hotel and caught a few hours of sleep. Upon awaking in the afternoon, Brown walked around the city and was perplexed to find the streets fairly quiet and nearly every business closed. It took him a while to figure out why. It was New Year’s Day. But at first opportunity, he made a crucial stop on his itinerary and visited a legendary spot: Pfaff’s.
Clapp and the other Bohemians were intrigued by the new arrival. Proprietor Pfaff waited on him personally. Brown’s reputation very much preceded him, as author of the wildly popular “Artemus Ward” humor columns, and he promised some relief from all the grim events of recent months. He had just moved from Cleveland to take a job with a magazine in New York City.
Charlie Brown was tall and lanky, a gangle of limbs, stretching out of sleeves, extending below pant cuffs. For that first visit to Pfaff’s, one of the Bohemians noticed that he was wearing a broadcloth vest cut way too high. All his clothes were so old-fashioned and provincial. His hair was very straight, very yellow, and very messy, like an untidy pile of hay. But Brown’s most distinguishing feature was his nose: massive, beak-like, and entirely throwing off the composition of his face.
During his first night at Clapp’s table, Brown was disappointingly quiet, wearing a hangdog expression—in a somber mood maybe. But he did perk up long enough to fold his napkin into a puppet and dance it beside his coffee cup. Everyone laughed. It was what the Bohemians would most remember about Brown’s debut evening. While there is nothing remarkable or inherently hilarious about making a napkin puppet,
Brown simply had an instinct for humor.
Brown—twenty-six when he arrived at Pfaff’s—had grown up in Waterford, Maine, before heading West. In his youth, the town had a population of two hundred and consisted of about forty houses, nestled in the foothills of the White Mountains. He’d had a strict Congregationalist upbringing, very similar to Clapp’s. His father, Levi Brown, worked a variety of jobs, including dry goods merchant, farmer, surveyor, and supervisor of a potash plant. But Levi saved his greatest energy for temperance activities. Brown stock had lived in Waterford since the time of the Revolutionary War. He had relatives with names like Abraham, Aram, Moses, Bathsheba, Asaph, and Abijah. Waterford was the kind of New England community Hawthorne had in mind when he wrote about the “gray shadows” of one’s forefathers.
From the time he was a small boy, Brown balked at his town’s solemn piety. He became a skilled prankster. One time, Brown hid a deck of playing cards in a minister’s robe. When the minister performed a baptism in the river, the cards came floating to the surface. Another reliable source of amusement was sending fake letters to local businesses. This was the nineteenth-century equivalent of a prank phone call. He’d write an angry letter, claiming that a harness hadn’t been crafted to specifications, or he’d send the town cooper a note containing an unfulfillably large fictitious order for barrels. In 1846, the year Brown turned twelve, the Smithsonian Institution was founded. Something about its high seriousness triggered Brown’s sense of the absurd. So he wrote a mock scholarly work entitled “Is Cats to Be Trusted?” and mailed it off to the new museum.
The next year, his father died. His mother soon grew strapped financially and could not afford to continue caring for either Brown or his older brother. The two boys were shipped off to serve as apprentices. Brown worked a series of jobs as a printer’s devil at newspapers such as the Norway (ME) Advertiser and the Coos County (NH) Democrat. It was the same kind of work Whitman had done in his younger days. Some of Brown’s employers were borderline Dickensian, treating him as little more than a live-in drudge. He escaped from an unpleasant work situation at the Skowhegan (ME) Democratic Clarion by stringing together bed linens and climbing from a second-story window in the dead of night.
Rebel Souls Page 14