Martin, Justin, Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians

Stephanie Blalock

doi:10.13008/0737-0679.2155

Justin martin. Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians. Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo Press, 2014. xi + 339 pp.In Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians, Justin Martin aims to convey to his readers what he calls the "aliveness" of the "cast of long-lost artists" who formed the first self-proclaimed group of American bohemians in antebellum New York. In this group biography-based on Martin's research and his interpretation of correspondence between and newspaper accounts about the American bohemians, among other primary sources-he reconstructs the lives of some of the most talented and eccentric American bohemians who gathered at Charles Pfaff's restaurant and lager bier saloon, primarily between the years of 1859 and 1862, when the establishment was located at 647 Broadway. Martin devotes considerable time and space to narrating the stories of editor and King of Bohemia Henry Clapp, Jr.; actress and writer Adah Isaacs Menken, whom Martin hails as "one of the great sex symbols of the nineteenth-century"; Fitz Hugh Ludlow, author of The Hasheesh Eater, a pioneering autobiographical account of his experiences with drug use; and, most significantly for Martin's purposes, America's poet Walt Whitman. After all, the overarching goal for the book, as Martin explains in his introduction, is "to provide fresh context for Whitman's life and career" by following this bohemian cast of characters from before they met Whitman at Pfaff 's, to their nightly visits to the cellar, where they drank, talked, and held their own writing workshops with the poet often in attendance, and ultimately beyond their departure from Herr Pfaff's place, as the men and women scattered across the country, entering new professional and social scenes.Martin, the author of previous biographies on Frederick Law Olmstead, Alan Greenspan, and Ralph Nader, presents vivid portraits of the "rebel souls" of the men and women of American bohemia. Through Martin's engaging style and his descriptions of the American bohemians-often delivered with carefully chosen quotes from the primary source material-these characters do, in fact, come alive. This is especially true when Martin is recounting their adventures: Henry Clapp, for example, overcame a Puritan boyhood to become a beer-drinking, pipe-smoking bohemian newspaper editor, while Adah Menken married the boxer John Heenan, who did not acknowledge the actress as his wife. Martin relates what is known about the end of the marriage between Fitz Hugh Ludlow and his wife Rosalie: she left Ludlow for the painter Albert Bierstadt, whom Ludlow had accompanied on a journey across the western United States. Martin goes on to end his chapter on the meeting between the American bohemian and comedian Artemus Ward and a young Mark Twain with the unforgettable image of the pair drinking French wine, climbing on top of the roof of a miner's shack, and "as dawn broke over the Sierra Nevada, the pair just kept leaping. Ward and Twain, roof to roof."In addition to these insights into the sometimes sordid lives of the American bohemians, Martin offers a detailed but very readable account of Pfaff 's beer cellar as the site where these fascinating and disparate nineteenth-century personalities came together, such that the cellar earned a reputation as the "trysting-place of the most careless, witty, and jovial spirits of New York." Martin's research is particularly evident in the information that he includes in his second chapter, "A Long Table in a Vaulted Room," which details the sparse furnishing of the cellar and notes Pfaff 's talents for keeping and serving lager beer. Even more importantly, Martin acknowledges the multiple locations and addresses of Pfaff's, pointing out that before becoming the birthplace of bohemia at 647 Broadway, Pfaff's was likely located elsewhere on the same street, and that later, Pfaff 's would move at least two times-first to 653 Broadway, where Pfaff kept a summer garden and a pet eagle behind the restaurant, and finally, to 9 W. …

Martin, Justin, Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians

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