All my life I've been asked if I'm related to the sewing-machine Pfaffs (no such luck). And about once a year someone tells me that there's a beer bar called Pfaff's in the poetry of Walt Whitman (I know; connection there plausible, but alas). The latter cropped up with far greater frequency late last summer, which I took as an indication that people were reading Justin Martin's recently published Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians (Da Capo Press). But again, no. So let me �" no connection, no royalties, no conflict of interest �" tell you about Rebel Souls .
First impressions to the contrary, it's not an entire book about Pfaff's Restaurant and Lager Bier Saloon, a mid-19th-century Manhattan establishment that became the sawdust-floored host to a colorful coterie of artists and hangers-on. But it is an informed narrative of the ever-looping connections among the artistic denizens assembled in antebellum New York and, following the cataclysm of the Civil War, scattered across America, Whitman, viewed from our historical perspective, pre-eminent among them. It's a book that bears its considerable scholarship lightly, taking a cue from the "Bohemians" themselves about how to entertain.
Briefly, the literally underground bar (down a flight of stairs off Broadway, and extended in a vaulted room back under the street) was established in 1855 by Charles Ignatius Pfaff, a German immigrant with celebrated taste in both champagne and lager who wanted to start a restaurant of the Rathskeller type. The following year, journalist Henry Clapp, Jr., an American in Paris who had seen the flowering of the artistic enclave at Cafe Momus memorialized in the Henry Murger play La vie de Boheme , and most famously of all now, Puccini's opera La Boheme, saw Pfaff's as America's Cafe Momus-to-be. There the publicity hound Clapp became "King of Bohemia."
In one of the book's more delectable passages, Martin concludes that, while it would be a misrepresentation to call Pfaff's America's first gay bar, "Among the denizens of the saloon's lager room were assorted rebels and social outliers, including plenty of gay men. Pfaff's was a place where gay men could meet, in an era where such matters were not so clearly defined and delineated."
In a paragraph you wouldn't find in a more formal biography of Whitman, Martin goes on: "Pfaff's might best be described as a 'semi-adhesive bar.' In the quirky language of phrenology, 'adhesiveness' was the capacity for intense and meaningful same-sex friendship." Whitman, who had a deep interest in phrenology, "loved to twist words and phrases, appropriating them, lending them new meaning. In his poetry, he employed a number of coded terms for passionate attachments among men such as 'comrades' and 'adhesiveness.'"
The Whitman who strides Martin's pages, an indefatigable walker until a stroke and other illnesses decked him, is viewed up-close and personal. We read of his serious relationships with Fred Vaughan and Peter Doyle ("the love of his life"), his trials as a poet with a voice America had not previously heard, his loving, even maternal tending to the victims of the Civil War, and his idolization of Abraham Lincoln. Doyle's singular gift to Whitman was, we learn, his account of the assassination of President Lincoln, since Doyle was, remarkably in retrospect, in the audience of Our American Cousin on that fateful night, and had heard the fatal shot.
In more scholarship of the you-read-it-here-first variety, Martin informs us that in the third, 1860 edition of Whitman's magnum opus, "On the title page, the words Leaves of Grass were rendered with little spermatozoa swimming among the letters. Plenty of risque content can be found in the poems. There's 'love flesh swelling and deliciously aching' and a 'slow rude muscle' and 'delirious juice' and 'limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous,' and 'bellies pressed and glued together with love.'"
Although the Whitman story is, rightly, the ongoing, recurring and binding narrative of Rebel Souls, Martin is equally effective in chronicling and characterizing the likes of actor Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes; Artemus Ward, "America's first stand-up comedian"; Fitz Hugh Ludlow, "psychedelic pioneer and author of The Hashish Eater"; actress Adah Isaacs Menden, "the 19th century's sepia-toned Marilyn Monroe"; and many others, with a dash of Mark Twain �" who mentions Pfaff's in his overlooked Autobiography, though he does not seem actually to have been there �" thrown in for good measure. Their stories interweave in a way that brings a unique sense of coherence to Martin's essentially "wild" (a word he seems to love) narrative.
On an artistic "tour" of the American West, Ludlow and photographer Albert Bierstadt based themselves in San Francisco, which they found the most commodious, Pfaff's-like environment west of Manhattan. Martin doesn't waste the opportunity to remark, "In San Francisco, everything was possible and available."