Rebel Souls

by Justin Martin

  Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,

  Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,

  And thought of him I love.

  And then Whitman provides a further poetic complication, this one transcendent: the “him I love” comes to represent not only Lincoln but also every departed son and father and husband and brother—“all the slain soldiers of the war.”

  Whitman’s new collection—featuring a pamphlet sewn into a previously printed volume—was referred to by an awkward title, Drum-Taps and Sequel. That’s when it was referred to at all. It received very few reviews, although one did run in the SP. Written by a critic who used a single initial—F.—it was mostly negative. Clapp was up to his old any-publicity-is-good-publicity tricks. But Whitman was in no position to benefit. He wasn’t able to get the collection into bookstores or, for that matter, even phrenology shops. He sold perhaps a couple hundred copies at best, directly to readers.

  The work was destined to make its mark slowly, over the passage of many years. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” was once described as “the most sweet and sonorous nocturne ever chanted in the church of the world.” “O Captain! My Captain!” would emerge as the most famous poem Whitman ever wrote and, by some accountings, rates among the ten best known in the English language. The Saturday Press had the distinction of being the first place where it ever appeared.

  Only two weeks later, Clapp published a story by Mark Twain. “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” created an instant sensation. To this point, Twain’s reputation was strictly regional, but after appearing first in the Saturday Press, his story was reprinted across the United States. “The papers are copying it far and near,” reported the Alta California. Clapp, champion of Whitman, also gave Twain his first big national break.

  Credit is also due Artemus Ward, of course. Ward had come through, keeping his promise to bring Twain’s work to the attention of editors back East. The sequence of events that rescued Twain from sagebrush obscurity is like a tall tale in its own right and goes as follows: Ward had been working on another quickie book for his publisher, Carleton. To pad it out, he contacted Twain and others he’d met on his recent tour, requesting that they send stories, brief sketches, observations about western life, anything.

  Twain sent Ward the fictional tale of Jim Smiley, a mining camp dweller who enjoys betting on “rat-terriers and chicken cocks, and tom-cats, and all them kind of things.” He is especially proud of Dan’l Webster, a frog that can “out-jump ary frog in Calaveras county.”

  The publisher couldn’t see how Twain’s story, or any of the bric-a-brac Ward had gathered from his western acquaintances, fitted into the book. This was supposed to be Artemus Ward, His Travels. Carleton decided not to use the contributions of the other authors. That meant publishing a slender volume, but no matter—Ward’s previous book, while wafer-thin, had been a runaway hit. At this point, Twain’s discarded story was snatched up by Clapp, who couldn’t believe his good fortune.

  The version that ran in the SP differs slightly from the now familiar tale. For one thing, it has a framing device in which the story is presented as a letter written to Ward. “Mr. A Ward,” it begins, and it closes, “Yours, truly, Mark Twain.” After the story became famous, the author would also change the title to “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

  Twain would always feel a debt of gratitude. “The ‘Jumping Frog’ was the first piece of writing of mine that spread itself through the newspapers and brought me into public notice,” he would recall. “Consequently, the Saturday Press was a cocoon and I the worm in it.”

  Clapp had managed an awesome literary streak for the SP. By January 1866, however, the journal was in a death spiral.

  Clapp remained a brilliant editor. The SP was still a bright and clever journal. But its novelty—the second time around—quickly wore thin. The arrival of Lincoln’s funeral train in Springfield had signaled the dawn of a new era. As was about to become painfully clear to Clapp, people now had a limited appetite for irony and edginess and fanciful conceits. The nation had just emerged from a war that had cost hundreds of thousands of lives. It was entering into a new period, dubbed the Brown Decades by critic Lewis Mumford, characterized by an autumnal mood of seriousness and a clear-eyed realism.

  As readers began to flee the SP, a vicious circle was triggered. Money started to dry up, so Clapp hiked the subscription rate from three to five dollars per year, driving away still more of them. Soon advertisers joined in the exodus—though Pfaff’s saloon remained stalwart—and Clapp was forced to start adjusting his page count downward. Unable to pay contributors even the usual pittance, Clapp took to reprinting old articles from prewar issues of the SP, including a couple of pieces by the long-departed Fitz-James O’Brien.

  “I am getting too old to care much about cultivating new people,” wrote Clapp in one of his editor’s notes. The comment was meant in a different context, but it may as well have referred to the current state of his professional affairs.

  As the SP floundered, the vultures began to circle. Other publications started to take shots at Clapp’s journal. “Of late, however, it has sadly fallen off in interest and brilliancy,” asserted the Trenton Gazette. Many of the attacks took aim not only at the SP but also, more broadly, at Bohemianism. The Wilmington (NC) Herald calculated that Clapp’s circle, “originally composed of about a dozen literary fellows,” had now declined to six. The New York Leader called those remaining acolytes “a peculiar mixture of the seedy, bloated, whiskey-sucking, kid-gloved, airish and pretentious.”

  The SP’s troubles provided occasion for a sort of referendum on Bohemianism. The overwhelming verdict: it had fallen very out of fashion. Such is the way of artistic movements, whether they be romantic poetry, Fauvism, or punk rock; they have their shining cultural moment, sometimes eye-blink brief, and then tail off. It took the Civil War ending, however, for real perspective to emerge. Now, a clear line existed. All at once, Bohemianism seemed a relic, a movement that had enjoyed its ascendancy in an earlier era.

  When Clapp ran an article headlined “Decimal Currency, Weights, and Measures,” the SP’s end was drawing nigh. The opening sentence reads, “By the adoption of a decimal currency, America has brought her financial computations within the four fundamental processes of arithmetic.” Then, the story proceeds to walk through each of the four in excruciating technical detail. Subscribers—their ranks now greatly diminished—must have read this article with puzzlement, waiting for it to become satire or take a bizarre turn, expecting some kind of conceit to reveal itself. None was forthcoming. The story really was about decimal currency, weights, and measures. It appears that Clapp simply lifted it from another publication to use as filler. His editor’s note became a source of equal mirthlessness, as he began increasingly to devote it to panicked requests for subscribers.

  June 2, 1866, is the date of the SP’s last issue. Less than a year after restarting, it re-stopped. The final number is notably austere: thin on stories, thin on ads. Nothing really marked the sad occasion. There was no official announcement to be found anywhere in the issue, no valedictory essay by Clapp about his journal’s invaluable contributions to American culture and letters. The SP was here. And then it was gone.

  17: All Fall Down

  “C. PFAFF AND DIE!”

  Some anonymous wag scrawled this bit of graffiti on the wall at the new saloon, playing with the rotund proprietor’s first name, Charlie, and the old saying “See Paris and die.”

  It may as well have been a prophecy. The years following the Civil War would be pitiless toward many of Clapp’s original circle. They had lived life at full tilt, making art, seeking adventure, pushing limits, and tasting passion. Now, America’s first Bohemians came tumbling down.

  Sometime in the early months of 1865, during the war’s grim final winter, Fitz Hugh Ludlow lost his beautiful wif
e. She left him, fleeing into the waiting arms of none other than the painter Albert Bierstadt.

  As to when their affair began, it’s impossible to pinpoint. Perhaps Bierstadt and Rosalie were already involved even before the transcontinental journey. Or maybe they got together on the first part of that trip, the part that was conducted by rail. Rosalie had gone along all the way to Atchison. It’s also possible that Bierstadt was merely smitten with Ludlow’s wife at the time of the journey, and feelings that he hadn’t yet acted upon account for those dissonant little gestures, such as naming the camp in Yosemite “Camp Rosalie.” Maybe the affair didn’t start until after the painter arrived back in New York City.

  Chances are no one will ever know. Bierstadt and Rosalie would always remain tight-lipped about the circumstances that brought them together; no incriminating letters between the couple—providing dates or details—are extant. The trail of this ancient adulterous affair has gone very cold. But this much is clear. Rosalie walked out on Ludlow. On November 21, 1866, she married Albert Bierstadt.

  The same year, Bierstadt managed a record sale of one of his monumental-­scale paintings, A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie. Ironically, it’s based on his study of the Colorado peak he had named after Ludlow’s wife during the western journey. The work fetched $20,000. This was more than Ludlow had earned from writing over the previous ten years. Bierstadt moved his new bride into a mansion built in her honor. Malkasten, as he dubbed it, sat high on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River with a commanding view that extended all the way to West Point in one direction and to Manhattan in the other. The mansion included a library, billiard room, and butler’s pantry. The painter’s new studio was seventy feet long with thirty-foot-high ceilings, the better to accommodate his huge canvasses. “I am the happiest man living,” gloated Bierstadt, referring to his new wife, new home, bright prospects, everything.

  Ludlow was simply in hell. For years, he had struggled to follow up The Hasheesh Eater. The cross-country journey—what a stroke of good luck it seemed at the time—had provided a worthy subject at last. He’d lined up an enthusiastic publisher, the New York–based Hurd and Houghton. Following Rosalie’s departure, however, Ludlow found it difficult to finish his masterpiece. Increasingly, he lost himself in opium. While it may have helped numb his pain, it also hampered his efforts at writing. As Ludlow’s life grew more troubled, he slid deeper into addiction. He fell completely out of touch with the old crowd from Pfaff’s.

  Relatives were horrified by what had become of the bright-eyed young man they had once known. It’s perhaps a blessing that Ludlow’s minister father died before the lowest ebb was reached. “I pity the strange misguided man & seek not to judge him,” noted a cousin. An uncle observed that “Fitz . . . from his long-continued bad habits, is so radically dilapidated, as to demand all sorts of means & appliances to sustain him in life. It must be folly to expect that the wreck can ever be raised & repaired.”

  Ludlow tried valiantly. During these sad years, he did numerous stints at water-cure facilities. Such places promised treatment of myriad ailments through bathing, constant bathing, in water that was steaming or ice cold, fresh or salty, before meals or at midnight—there were scores of competing philosophies. Because he was battling a drug addiction, these water cures served as the nineteenth-century equivalent of a rehab clinic for Ludlow. But he always relapsed.

  Ludlow’s publisher grew impatient with the constant delays. Post–Civil War, the publishing industry was on the rebound, and travel books were a popular category. Several accounts of cross-continental journeys were published while Ludlow struggled to complete his. One, by noted journalist Samuel Bowles, not only beat Ludlow to market, but also featured the very title he had planned to use: Across the Continent.

  When Ludlow was able to write, he drew on his original travel diary, the one brimming with learned observations, the one that he’d carefully protected with the homemade India rubber sleeve. He was also able to use the travel pieces he had earlier contributed to the New York Post and the Golden Era. Often he took entire sections directly from these accounts. But he always made a point of removing Bierstadt’s name. For places in the account where Ludlow had to mention him, he employed generic terms such as “the other overlander.” Ludlow made other revisions, too. For example, he changed the episode about Camp Rosalie as follows: “Here we pitched our first Yo-Semite camp,—calling it ‘Camp Rattlesnake,’ after a pestilent little beast of that tribe which insinuated itself into my blankets, but was disposed of by my artist comrade before it had inflicted its fatal wound upon me.”

  Ludlow could liken his ex-wife to a venomous snake, disposed of by his unnamed artist comrade. He could pretend this somehow had all been for the best, preventing him from receiving her fatal wound. But what burns through are the bitterness—and the pain.

  The Heart of the Continent was finally published in the summer of 1870. Originally, it was supposed to include some of Bierstadt’s studies. Instead, the book now featured a handful of amateurish sketches of stagecoaches and waterfalls and prairie dogs. They’re the work of an uncredited artist. This change defeated an important part of the book’s original purpose: to combine Bierstadt’s sketches and Ludlow’s prose in a glorious symbiosis that would benefit both their careers. There was also an issue of unfortunate timing to contend with. One of the signature events of the previous year, 1869, was the completion of the transcontinental railroad, capped by the driving of that famous golden spike joining the eastern and western portions. Traveling across the country soon became an unremarkable achievement.

  Ludlow’s long-delayed book received very few reviews. One did appear in the Atlantic, however, and it was brutal: “Since Mr. Ludlow made his explorations . . . the Heart of the Continent has been visited by such numbers of travellers that it is wellnigh as stale and battered as the heart of a coquette entering upon her fifth or six season of flirtations.” The reviewer added that the book was full of “superannuated raptures about buffaloes, and sage-brush, and alkali, and antelopes, and parks, and the giant pines and domes of the Yosemite, and Brigham Young’s capacity for self-government, and all the rest.” And then one final twist of the knife: “It is rather late for Mr. Ludlow, we must confess, and we think that five hundred and six pages are a good many.”

  Yes, it was late. Very late. On September 12, 1870, Ludlow died in a little cottage on the shore of Lake Geneva, his sister Helen by his side. The official cause of death was tuberculosis. He’d traveled to Switzerland, hoping to find a suitable place to convalesce. By this time, though, his body was racked by years of opium abuse. Ludlow was thirty-four years old.

  The final year of the Civil War found Adah Isaacs Menken in London. She had pretty well blanketed the states and territories of the Union, even dipped into Confederate-leaning Baltimore, so Great Britain was her natural next stop. Menken was becoming an international superstar at a time when the very concept—let alone that phrase—was difficult to comprehend. Then again, she had always been like a celebrity from a future era, closer in temperament to a scheming Hollywood leading lady or a jaded rock star. “I have everything I could wish for,” she lamented, “but I am very miserable.” The comment may as well have been her mantra.

  For her London run, Menken performed Mazeppa at Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre. An advertisement claimed that her shapely legs “would have made St. Anthony lift his eyes from his prayer book.” The ante was upped once again: everything was bigger, faster, newer. For her infamous ride, she was now pursued by mechanical wolves that snapped at the horse’s hooves. As she climbed a truly imposing prop mountain, more Caucasus-like than ever, she traveled past an artificial cataract that gushed real water.

  Charles Dickens attended several performances of Mazeppa. He went backstage to meet the star; the two also crossed paths at some fancy London dinners. By now, works such as Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, and Oliver Twist had sec
ured his lasting fame. Menken courted Dickens assiduously, hoping to enlist his aid in publishing a collection of her poetry. “I have the advice and patronage of the greatest literary man of England, who will revise my poems for me,” she crowed in a letter to one of her handlers back in New York. She demanded that the man gather up her poems and mail them to her at once.

  While in Great Britain, Menken took Mazeppa on the road, traveling to Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, and Liverpool. In Scotland, she caused such a sensation that it remained forever imprinted on the mind of a young Arthur Conan Doyle. Many years later, as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, he’d write a story called “A Scandal in Bohemia,” featuring a character named Irene Adler, based on Menken. Adler is a femme fatale, described as having “the face of the most beautiful of women, and the mind of the most resolute of men.” Adler is distinguished as one of the few characters capable of rattling the famous detective.

  Somehow, in the midst of ceaseless touring, Menken also managed to get married yet again. During a trip back to New York, she was wed to James Paul Barkley, a rich but shadowy mining-stock speculator, whom she had met on her trip out West. (She had earlier been granted a divorce from the mousy Robert Newell.) Menken’s fifth marriage lasted only three days. She fled New York, returning to Europe, carrying her ex-husband’s child. The boy, born prematurely and named Louis Dudevant Victor Emmanuel Barkley, lived for only a few months.