Garrets and Pretenders: Bohemian Life in America from Poe to Kerouac

1850

CHAPTER I

THE LONE ONE

AMERICAN Bohemianism, so gay and mellow and, in its later stages, respectable, began with a tragedy. It began with Edgar Allan Poe.

In his own time Poe was seldom, if ever, referred to as a Bohemian. The sentimental term applied to a man of art and of unconventional or wandering disposition was brought to America from France at the time Poe was drinking himself to death. In 1849, the term was already widely used in France but comparatively unknown in America or England. An obituary notice of that time read as a stab: A dissolute, fantastic writer died at Baltimore in consequence of fits of intoxication. Soft tears and mild sighs befitting the death of a François Villon or a Murger hero were absent. It was much later that Poe was identified with the freakish mood of a Latin Quarter, and even then it was because Baudelaire was remembered by Americans as a fascinating madman, Baudelaire who carried Poe’s name to new horizons and was regarded as his spiritual twin.

Decades later, R. H. Stoddard placed Briggs and English as Poe’s Bohemian friends. It was one of the first references, however indirect, to Poe as a Bohemian by any of his contemporaries. In 1885, E. C. Stedman wrote of the period between Poe’s first departure from Mr. Allan’s mansion and his marriage to Virginia Clemm, referring to it as the profligate phase in the poet’s life. The time had come when Poe, with his sense of the fitness of things, could see that Bohemianism, the charm of youth, is a frame that poorly suits the portrait of a mature and able-handed man.

Poe beheld Greenwich Village after he married Virginia. Stedman lived and wrote before Greenwich Village had become the Montmartre of America. Some writers of the two last decades view Poe as a Bohemian because he starved near Washington Square. They pick him up as a literary gypsy just where Stedman ceases to worry about Poe’s looseness. They magnify the accident of Poe’s residence on Carmine Street and Waverly Place and Greenwich Avenue into a fact of great symbolic import. The old Square has no stranger nor sadder shade to haunt it than that of the brilliant and melancholy genius who in life loved it so well, wrote a recorder of Greenwich Village. The restless Poe, moving in search of cheaper quarters all over the city, was bound to strike Greenwich Village time and again, but the recorder sees in this much more than a law of mathematical averages. Poor Poe lived always somewhere near the Square. Once in a while he moved away for a time, but he invariably gravitated back to it and to his old friends there.

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, it was not Baudelaire’s shade nor was it the Greenwich Village addresses that made Poe a Bohemian. Neither were certain periods of his life decorous and certain other periods indecorous. He was born and he died a Bohemian, his whole life the truest picture of that phenomenon at its rarest and best.

Poe was not a self-conscious protestant. His despair of the world was not a pose. It was natural in all of its manifestations. His whole make-up as man and poet led to it as inevitably as a mighty river leads to a tumultuous sea. Both heredity and environment moulded Poe into the torn, mad, unconventional being that he was. Joseph Wood Krutch remarks, He was, it is always necessary to bear in mind if one is to understand his complicated bitterness, a Bohemian from necessity and by no means from choice.

He was born the son of an itinerant actress and a shiftless, adventurous father. For almost the three earliest years of his life, little Edgar was in the proximity of the stage and its people, who then still lived as semi-outcasts of the post-Puritan era. When the Allans adopted him, the memory of his outcast ancestry was not allowed to fade but was persistently brought back, ostensibly to remind him of his everlasting debt of gratitude to his adopters but really to drive home the fact that he was among ladies and gentlemen on sufferance only, that he did not belong among them and never could.

Up to December, 1811, the month of adoption, Edgar knew no other home but taverns and inns, in which his parents and their actor friends stopped and rested. Partly out of deliberate bravado to confirm the idea of the contemporary society that they were indeed unduly jolly and almost wicked, partly out of the true exigencies of their artistic temperaments, the traveling actors of America of the early nineteenth century made their lives irregular and their sojourns in inns and taverns quite noisy. While Poe’s mother lay dying in Richmond, the rest of her troupe gathered next door at the jolly Indian Queen Tavern. If little Edgar did not remember the scene of his mother’s death in the shadow of the tavern, if he did not remember her earlier part in those convivial gatherings when she was well, all this was brought back to him in the house of his adoption and in the school. He learned to defend with a fierce heat the memory and profession of his mother and to feel a morbid interest in taverns.

The desire to escape from the painful reality of an uncertain social position has been, in all lands and times, one of the chief distinguishing reasons for Bohemianism. Poe was the first American refugee of this sort. He began to dream of fame early in his life, because as a returning hero with laurels on his brow he could build a base for the doubtful respect shown him by Southern society, and so strengthen it beyond any taint of his real origin and any taunt of his enemy. Thus began his wanderings, real and imaginary; his soldiering in the American army and his court martial in West Point; his mythical adventures in Greece and Russia; his pretensions at scholarship; his effort to picture himself as an unusual man cut off from the rest of humanity by mystical and deep knowledge, by violent and uncommon passions, and by an evil fate. He believed in the portrait he painted of himself. He was sincere in hoaxing the reader and in plagiarizing and criticizing scientific works. He almost believed in the tales of his adventures in far-off lands which he never visited.* He was a supreme and true Bohemian, refusing to come down to the dull and painful reality and adjust himself to it. There was no cheapness about his frauds, and no merry putting of the tongue to the cheek, but there was a magic carpet of self-delusion of a genius that, indeed, lifted him high above every hill and hamlet … every town and city on this earth. The Satanic note that was attempted by so many garret-dwellers in the years to follow never rang as true as in the case of Poe, its originator in America and its most earnest exponent in the world.

As wanderings and wild attacks at the elusive ghost of fame and money continued to fail him, Poe tried to find an escape and forgetfulness in drink and at times in drugs. He drank not as the French artistic sans-culottes of his time, in jovial camaraderie and overabundance of good mood, but as a man who tries to drown a pain, the origin of which he himself only vaguely or not at all knows. He drank savagely, sullenly, with little, if any, affection for his bottle-companions. A hereditary inclination to drink acted as the spark to a load of oil. Once starting on his path of morose drinking, Poe could not stop, and finally burned himself with a flame of drink to his death. This heritage was coupled with a certain proclivity to insanity; this was the pain which Poe tried to drown, the origin of which he did not know; his sister Rosalie lived and died a harmless imbecile. Indeed, there is but one step from insanity to genius and back.

There was no idle interest and no empty pretension in Poe’s sporadic use of drugs. He did not start it out of bravado as Fitz Hugh Ludlow and many other imitators did years later. His was a genuine and urgent need for hushing the pain in his soul and obliterating the tragedy of his existence. The drug, even better than drink, sent him soaring to those heights of the bizarre and the sublime to which constantly he aspired. The drug, like the drink, helped him to feel a genius without appearing mad to himself.

There were no kindred souls to understand his pain and his desire to soar above it. His companions were temporary because they were common and petty, and there were no higher minds in sight. Like most of the geniuses, Poe was born out of the bounds of his proper time and country. He was either too late or too early in coming to earth; he was either born too far to the West or too far to the East. He might have had, wrote Joseph Wood Krutch, the good fortune to be born, like Baudelaire, in a world a little more tolerant of outcasts than that of literary America in the early nineteenth century; in an older and richer civilization he might have found habitable circles outside respectability where he would not have been compelled constantly to measure himself by the standards of a bourgeois society; he might, in a word, have finally adapted himself to a Bohemia had one existed; but under any imaginable circumstances he would have been outcast and miserable. There would have been less pain and solitude of spirit for Poe had a Bohemia of high and sympathetic souls existed in his time, a group not too large and not too widely advertised and exploited.

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though surrounded by no Montmartre to soothe his ruffled soul and to proclaim his greatness, Poe laid, with his life and work, the foundation for American Bohemianism.

Poe started in America the tradition of literary hoaxes, of vitriolic criticism with a frankly personal tinge and twist, of making taverns into rendezvous of arts, and of dying drunk and delirious in a gutter, an attic, and the backroom of a saloon. Before Poe, literature might have been the profession of the starved, but the starved never ceased to be genteel. Before Poe, American literati, artists, and actors drew the blinds when they sinned or when they thought they sinned. Poe made his dissolution a public affair, even though, surrounded by drinkers, he managed to remain tragically alone.

But if there was any genuine Bohemianism in the make-up and pastime of Poe and some of his friends or contemporaries, it was a vague phenomenon, undefined by any glamorous name. If there were carefree behavior, disregard for conventions, and dissolute living among them, they were half-ashamed of it, and they, the outcasts, compelled Poe to be an outcast even from their circle, for he dared to attach too much importance to this way of life. Bohemianism, before the term itself was brought from France, was nothing to be proud of. In Poe’s time, it was not as organized and publicized as it became a few years after his death. There was no king and no queen of literary roamers in his time; there was no prime-minister dispensing drinks from behind his idealized and yet profitable counter. Nobody wrote long articles on American Murgeria, attacking it, defending it, magnifying and glorifying it. In Poe’s time no one made any cult or money out of it.

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From T. B. Gunn’s The Physiology of New York

Boarding-Houses, 1857

Poe became the prophet of organized Bohemianism after his death. It is doubtful whether Poe would have enjoyed this rôle of prophet and founder that the carousing pretenders at Weltschmerz foisted upon him post factum. The first organized American Bohemia that followed the unearthy specter of Poe spoke of him in tones of robust enthusiasm or hushed awe. The imbibers at Pfaff’s of the ’Fifties took up Poe’s fight against the smugness and prosperity of Boston, making an exception, from among all the New England butts of Poe’s hatred, of Emerson only.

Essentially gay and life-loving, this group tried to emulate Poe’s distrust of mankind and his despair of the world. Fitz-James O’Brien tried to borrow the mystery and horrors of Poe’s imagination for his own stories. Henry Clapp endeavored to be as sexless and as sublimely morose as Poe, but since Henry was essentially a cynic and a wit he failed, and turned out to be caustically sullen instead—yet quite sexless. Ada Clare and George Arnold attempted mild melancholy, and the whole group talked of suicide as an ideal exit from life. All of them hung on the words of those who had the privilege of meeting and talking with their departed idol. R. H. Stoddard, a sedate and staunch enemy of noisy freedom, used his recollection of an encounter with Poe as a sermon to his young friends on the evils of their mode of life.

Yet they persisted in drinking, in pretending at melancholy and restless travels, and in drawing charcoal sketches on the walls of their garrets, as they heard Poe did on his Rowdy Row walls. Long after they had disappeared, the artistic souls of Greenwich Village continued this tradition of free and desperate expression in print, talk, and on the walls of their rooms. Perhaps, thus was born the multi-colored and curiously shaped furniture of the Village studios, for when walls are decorated with men and events of many and brilliant shades, furniture along these walls cannot remain staid and prim in color and shape.

The first organized Bohemia of America, the Pfaffians, gladly and freely acknowledged their debt to Poe. Perhaps it would be too far-fetched to say that the best of the dreamers of Greenwich Village, or their most immediate predecessors such as Lafcadio Hearn or Ambrose Bierce, were indebted for their tragedy and their restless wanderings of body and spirit to Poe alone. It would nevertheless be safe to maintain that, having arrived at their fevers independently of any older influences, they were grateful to the memory of Poe, for in it they certainly found justification for their conduct and writings. At any rate, they were proud when likened to Poe, the writer, and Poe, the Bohemian. Of all the major roving figures in American letters, Ambrose Bierce alone resented this comparison and denied it fiercely—to no avail, for in his case, more so than in any other, is evident the indebtedness to Poe for the supernatural satanic note, and for his very form of writing.

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influence was even more pronounced in the European Latin Quarters of the subsequent decades. It was so, because in part, consciously or unconsciously, Poe’s eccentricity was borrowed from Europe, and then elevated to heights of seriousness and elaborated upon painstakingly.

American Bohemianism has always been, even in its earliest stages, the product as much of the European mode as of the American social, economic, and literary scene. Poe, in his young years, was under the influence of the wild dreams and adventures of Byron. In his Rowdy Row room, at the University of Virginia, Poe decorated the ceiling with a copy of an illustration to Byron’s poems; later he fashioned his mythical adventures in Greece and Russia after the Englishman’s tragic exploits.

The angry denials of Poe could not wholly dispel the idea, first advanced by his contemporary critics, that he had borrowed his horrors from the writings of Hoffmann and other Germans. Very likely, he had borrowed these heavy German terrors through their French interpreters and imitators. Indeed, the influence of the contemporary French upon Poe was never as thoroughly and deservedly traced as his own influence upon Baudelaire and succeeding generations.

Laying the plot of some of his best short stories in France, Poe came close to the understanding of these phenomena that made for the French eccentricity of his time. Romanticism and exoticism marked the poetry and the tales of Poe and the reckless writers of Paris of the ’Thirties and ’Forties. Théophile Gautier and his friends of the Bohême Galante knelt before Woman and drank punch from human skulls in complete darkness. The Bohemians of the Young France group wrote short stories full of epileptic nightmares and revolting tortures, murders, and suicides, including, for instance, that of a man who killed himself by swallowing the artificial glass eye of his mistress.

But Poe lacked that frank strain of eroticism which streamed through the writings of his French contemporaries; his Ulalume or Ligeia were too anemic, fleshless, and pure in comparison with the odalisques of the Parisian writers. Poe also was far more serious about the exotic nightmares than the French who wrote them for fun rather than for a mad and earnest escape from reality. Poe and the French writers of his time traveled in vehicles of about the same type, but along roads that led far away from each other. The passionate, mad Baudelaire came across Poe’s road and saw his fresh tracks when it was almost too late for him to hail the American poet as his living brother. So it remained for Baudelaire to pray to Poe as to a saint and to give to Europe, a hundredfold, that which Poe had once upon a time borrowed from Europe and her mood.

Under the influence of Poe, Baudelaire began a new school in French mansardes, a school of no cheer, but of morbid attitude toward the world. It was a sharp and unusual note in that light-hearted fiesta or attempt at fiesta which the French Murgerism generally was. Until Baudelaire came, his compatriots in the attics mocked the bourgeois with a smile. A bitter snarl was a rare occasion, and nightmare stories were told and written to amuse rather than to frighten the world. Drugs were taken almost as lightly as drinks, and perhaps with the same toasts. But Baudelaire elevated the bitter snarl into a holy system of evil. To die of dissolution was with him a virtue, for Poe made just such an exit from life.

The French artistic gentry, on the whole, continued as light-heartedly after Baudelaire had come and gone as they did before he declared himself Poe’s apostle in Europe. But the pose of morbidity was now much more frequent in the mansardes and the cafés. Schools of symbolists and decadents flourished, but the fact that the roll-calls of their masters and disciples were so fluctuating showed that when this morbid Bohemianism was not a pose it was merely an infatuation, perhaps sincere but often temporary. Young sons and sometimes daughters of the good bourgeois were having their fling at freedom of thought and life allegedly in the manner of Poe and Baudelaire. The infatuation over, they would safely return to the ways of their class, to careers of merchants, deputies, and staid writers, while the new crop of young people would take their places in the realm of despair and daring. Only a few remained to age in the morbid pose, and still fewer elected to die in a sordid way that would resemble the end of Poe or Baudelaire. Certainly, none rose to the heights of the mastership of the satanic tone that the mad pair achieved.

Poe’s influence was also felt in that phase of European Bohemianism which was, in fact, the American pose transplanted. James Laver wrote: Whistler, like Poe, was an American with a touch of diabolism. Some French, among them Mallarmé, were attracted to Whistler because he was a compatriot of Poe. Mallarmé translated Whistler’s Ten O’Clock, thanks to Poe and Baudelaire; it was Baudelaire who interested him in Poe, and it was his thoughts on Poe that made him look closer at the diabolism of Whistler. Of course, Whistler was proud to be so associated with the memory of Poe. Now, perhaps unconsciously, he injected a still stronger dose of Poesque diabolism into his bad-boy complex, generated by the reading of Murger’s book.

In decades to come, thanks to Baudelaire’s apostleship, artistic bad boys of many lands swore by the name of Poe. To them his life and work were the ideal of a despairing sneer at society, of dark and soul-rending mystery. Even those rebels who hissed at the rot of symbolism were under Poe’s influence, whether they admitted it or not. The life and suicide of Mayakovsky, the poet of Red Russia, shows him to be a Bohemian of the Poe type. A Russian critic noted this influence upon Mayakovsky of such masters of nightmare and horror literature as Edgar Poe and Baudelaire, citing as proof the cast of one of Mayakovsky’s tragedies: a man without an ear, a man without a head, a man with a stretched face, an old man with black, lean cats. David Burliuk, the teacher of Mayakovsky, and the leader of the Russian Futurists, has been always proud to acknowledge their debt to Poe and his awesome motives.

Poe-Baudelairism was accepted much more seriously and widely in Russia than in any other country, as might be expected. It appealed to the soulful Slavs, nurtured amid bleak steppes and taigas and crushed by autocratic oppression. Even the bold revolutionaries in the Czar’s land were not above an admiration for the decadent works and lives of Poe and Baudelaire. In fact, they at times turned to Poe-Baudelairism completely, disappointed in their own revolutionary work. Some Russian critics called Poe a predecessor of Dostoyevsky, and not without reason. Poe had exerted his evident influence upon Andreyev’s gropings in symbolism. Konstantin Balmont spoke for the many Russian Symbolist-Bohemians of the beginning of this century and anticipated the feelings of David Burliuk and his Futurist-Bohemians when he exclaimed: Edgar Poe is our elder brother, the beloved Solitary One, and we sorely grieve that we are not able to sail up the river of years and join him, all of us, a faithful band, now so numerous, him, our king, who at that time was deserted, in the dreadful moment of his great struggle. Balmont, in fact, spoke in behalf of all the literary and artistic protestants of the world, morbid and gay, genuine and pretending, a band indeed numerous if not always faithful to Poe’s genius.

* Poe’s legendary trip to Russia and his arrest in St. Petersburg have been disproved by many authorities, yet the Russian poet and historian of literature, V. Piast, generally known for the veracity of his statements, wrote in his book, Vstrechi (Meetings, published in Moscow, in 1929), that during the March, 1917, revolution, the policemen of the Kazanskaya precinct station in St. Petersburg burned their archive, including among other documents, as I succeeded in learning later, a thing of fabulous value to the history of world literature—a document confirming the truth of that which has been, since the beginning of the twentieth century, considered a legend—the protocol of the arrest on the street, in the beginning of the 1830s, of an American citizen, Edgar Allan Poe. Last February I wrote to Piast for further particulars of this protocol, but my letter crossed with the news of Piast’s suicide. So, once more, the legend of Poe in St. Petersburg remains no more than a legend.

CHAPTER II

THE RISE OF THE QUEEN

OF BOHEMIA

AS organized group Bohemias go, the pioneer Bohemia of New York had a record in the best of traditions. From 1854 to 1875 it saw eight spectacular deaths, namely, two suicides, one death by pneumonia in a leaky garret, one of lockjaw as a result of a battle wound, one of paralysis ascribed to dissipation, one of lungs and nerves shattered by hasheesh and opium, one of rabies caused by a performing dog’s bite, and one by alcoholism. And as behooves real Bohemians, six of the eight died young.

There were also violent love affairs and at least one child born out of wedlock. There were several fistic encounters of historic significance. At least one real genius hobnobbed with the Bohemians, and was claimed noisily as of their own making, or denounced as noisily by a minority as a fake and intruder. There was also a Queen of Bohemia, and she was the center of the entire picture.

Walt Whitman admired Ada Clare because of her great charm, but also because he saw in her a New Woman born too soon. He was grateful to her and to the few other women who came to Pfaff’s saloon in the ’Fifties or frequented the literary gatherings at Ada’s rooms. He called them his sturdiest defenders and upholders, and added: Some would say that they were girls little to my credit, but I disagree with them.

The other girls did not come to Pfaff’s until after Ada had opened woman’s way into the first Bohemia of New York. Moreover, they lingered but a short time, whereas Ada remained to rule. Her title originated in the very beginning of her career and persisted through the years, long after her followers were dispersed and she had become a prosaic and devoted wife. In 1874, after her tragic end, the newspapers saw good copy, not only in the tragedy itself, but also in her old exalted title. A few friends protested that her last years had been quite respectable, but their indignant letters to the editors of the day were disregarded by the subsequent authors of reminiscences. Not as a dutiful wife, but as Queen of Bohemia was Ada destined to go down in the history of American letters.

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Though her fame in her early years was nation-wide, not many records of her survive. One finds a paragraph here, a hint there, a vague memory or a sentimental verse in one book or another. Her biography was not regarded as important, even to the authors of her obituaries. She was a brilliant woman to them, but with a past not exactly savory. Detailed biographies were due only to the upright dead. Even the garrulous William Winter, of the New York Tribune, published nothing about her save a short obituary and a poem, though he wrote endlessly of all the other members of Pfaff’s clique, and knew Ada well, and was on the coroner’s jury which investigated her death.

She departed from life at the unfortunate time of the Temperance Crusades. The press of America was busy paying reverence to the good ladies warring against the saloon. Could it print detailed and respectful memories of one who once was the queen of a saloon? The country in general could only gasp at the unusual spectacle of a cultured and genteel female visiting a beerhouse, not to pray and exhort, but to drink and smoke. The few Americans who had heard of Murger’s Scènes de la vie Bohême were wont to associate Ada’s type with the frivolous Musettes and Mimis of Paris. She was more than the queen of American Bohemians; she was the first woman among them. While the first men of American Bohemia were met by the public with reserved awe, she was treated with unreserved suspicion. The heroines of Theodore Dreiser and Floyd Dell had not yet come to life.

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real name was Jane McElheney, and she was born at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1836. Her parents died when she was a child, and she was taken North by her grandfather. She left behind a cousin, Paul Hamilton Hayne, also an orphan, who grew up to be one of the glorious poets of the South. The literary strain was probably a heritage from their granduncle, Robert Hayne, whose orations against Daniel Webster are still remembered. Of Ada’s initial years in the North scarcely anything is known, except the fact that she early left her guardian-grandfather’s home, and as a girl of nineteen won her first literary renown.

In January, 1855, she sent to the editors of the Atlas, a New York weekly, the short poem entitled Lines to…, signing it Clare. Its first stanza read:

Oh sleep my darling, sweetly sleep,

No sound shall break thy deepest rest;

Oh! let thy dreamings faintly rise

From the sweet dreamland of my breast;

Oh! sleep, my darling, sleep!

The editors went into ecstasies over this piece. They called it, in an editorial note, one of the most beautiful poems in the language. The young poet, encouraged, sent in more of her work, and the next week the subscribers to the Atlas were reading this:

It is not fear that binds my heart,

Nor do my tears from sorrow flow;

’Tis not because I love you not;

Ah! ’tis because I love you so!

Everyone wondered who this passionate and mysterious Ada Clare was (for, with her second effort, the full pseudonym appeared for the first time), and many agreed with the editors of the journal when they exclaimed:

Ada Clare will always find a warm welcome to our columns. She is warm, ardent, and eloquent as young Catullus, who, when asked by his Lesbia how many kisses would satisfy him, replied, as many as there are sand in the deserts of Lybia and stars in the high heavens. To one so passionate, so ardent, and so intellectual, we could—but it were idle to offer her a Lybian compliment.

One wonders whether Ada was indeed quite a stranger to the editors. Such a stranger writing verses of fiery love, might one day appear in the editorial offices as a shriveled old maid, and where then would the editors be with their enthusiastic forewords?

One conjectures that they had at least met Ada in one of the literary salons that flourished in New York at the time, before anything of hers was ever printed, and that, in fact, the discovery of her genius in the columns of the Atlas was carefully and skilfully prearranged.

Whatever the way of her entry into the world of belles lettres, she was now a celebrity. The second poem, To Thee Alone, was followed by a third, To Thee! which the editors pronounced a gem of intellect. Verses dedicated to her soon began to appear in the same columns. An unknown poet queried:

Why dost thou wander waywardly

From kindred orbs afar,

And stray through dread infinity

A lone, and peerless star?

Other magazines clamored for her work, and she began to write sketches and short stories in addition to poetry, mostly on love and its pangs. She drank in her new fame excitedly, and contemplated her future immortality. She wrote: Who knows whether I may not go down to posterity as the Love-Philosopher?

Soon she began to appear at first nights in the New York theaters, and, though her manner of dress was found by the connoisseurs to be a bit too showy and even loud, her beauty was admired. Men about town lauded her physical charms as much as her intellect, and the reputation of a ravisher was hers till her death.

The two portraits of Ada which I have succeeded in finding do not show anything save a tired, albeit sympathetic face. Yet young poets raved about her and old beaux grew fond again when her fair locks fell over her fairer forehead. Another anonymous admirer wrote: I certainly thought her one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, the very incarnation of beauty and grace. John Burroughs exclaimed in 1862: She is really beautiful, not a characterless beauty, but a singular, unique beauty!

Ada had wavy and very light hair, of a peculiar flaxen hue, unusually short for the period, and parted on the side in a boyish manner. Like a boy she would toss her forelock back when it fell too low. Her eyes, set wide apart, and with almost level brows above them, were pansy blue and with a strange gleam of sadness. Some, indeed, said that her face drew men because of its pathos rather than because it showed any real beauty. Her skin, to some, seemed to be of dazzling fairness; to others it revealed an ivory pallor. Charles Warren Stoddard described her nose as tip-tilted but pretty and delicate—just the right nose for a trim little person with a past.

Ada’s past was acquired in the middle ’Fifties. Perhaps her Paris trip had something to do with it. If it was not an illicit honeymoon trip, then it was undertaken to find a safe place for bringing her son, Aubrey, into the world. The exact dates of the boy’s birth and death are uncertain, but it is known that he was with her on her trips to California and Hawaii in the ’Sixties, and that he died, somewhere in the East, still a boy.

When outsiders pressed too insistently with their queries, the Pfaffians answered that Ada’s son was the result of an immaculate conception. They also said that their Queen was entirely virtuous; but the outsiders sneered that it was virtue in the French fashion: no more than one lover at a time! There was, in her circle, Henry Clapp, reluctantly answering to the name of the King of Bohemia. But he and Ada were consorts in name only. Ada had many admirers, but Clapp was surely the least active of the lot. Clapp, in spite of his volubility, kept much to himself; he liked to talk of everything except himself; no one knew whom or when he loved.

It was more or less generally known that Ada’s despoiler was Louis Moreau Gottschalk, a celebrated pianist and composer of the time. Females the country over were crazy about Louis, the poor dears, and chased after his curly mustache and hypnotic eyes with their billets doux imploring for dates. Once Louis made a bet with a friend, also a conqueror of ladies’ hearts, that any girl would be glad to meet him any place, no matter how unconventional, for a sweet rendezvous. Gottschalk appointed a ferryboat, and the lovelorn maiden came there. Gottschalk won the bet.

Ada was as silly about Gottschalk as the maiden of the ferry-boat. She was madly in love with him and invited her public to share her joys and sorrows. She mentioned his name in her articles upon the slightest provocation, and in January, 1857, in a treatise On Suicide, she spoke of him as a quite sufficient cause for dispensing with life. However, for herself she decided to live, even without his love. She wrote:

I say to myself, my poor Ada, this is a short play and you may as well see the end of it. Through the whole eternity of the past you have waited for the curtain to rise, and now will you escape from the theater ere the play is halfway played? No, my poor child; you did not request to be brought to this play, you did not engage a seat in advance, you are not responsible for its heart-sickening and tragic effects, but you cannot know what its closing up may bring forth!

At this stage of the affair she evidently still hoped for Gottschalk’s return. Two months later, she published in the Atlas, her short story, What Sequel? again frankly autobiographical, wherein, through a heroine speaking to her lover, she vainly implored Louis:

All that the merest friends demand, I resign; I will not ask for one kind word or look, and I will never stand between you and any object you may seek. Only let me go with you!

As the years went by, and Gottschalk refused to cover his sin, Ada became bitter, and wrote:

Alas! in the way of hardened consciences, there is none so utterly seared as that of the man who pursues the conquest of the other sex simply for vanity and amusement. The still small voice may reach, somehow, the conscience of the murderer, the bigot, the miser; but the fascinator sweeps it away with a sigh, hushes it with a bound of the ardent pulse, drowns it with a surge of the warm and eager blood.

III

A

DA’S

writing did not bring her any money to speak of—it was not the custom of the day to pay authors living wages—but she had property in Charleston, and her income from it was sufficient for her to maintain a comfortable home in New York and to make occasional trips about the country and abroad. Whenever she and her little son happened to be in a town where Louis Gottschalk was giving a concert the pianist would send the boy tickets and toys. Thus he acknowledged his paternity, though in his memoirs he was to remain silent about it. But perhaps his sister Clara edited the mention out of his Notes of a Pianist.

Early in 1857, the New Yorkers were astonished to read in their press sparkling and worldly letters written from Paris by a girl of twenty-one, who proudly boasted of her youth without guidance.

Ada found Paris somewhat mirth-inclined and never-too-lugubrious. She wrote of its theaters and concerts, and she complained about the money-grabbing proclivities of the French, but she enjoyed the finest seasons, and under skies the brightest which the gods can give us. She described pathetically the case of a starving young violinist, arrested for stealing bread from a bakery. She made the acquaintance of the French Bohemians of the period, not far withdrawn from Murger’s time. She admired greatly a rich Frenchwoman who joined the Bohemians, but, thanks to her considerable means, managed to partake of the beauty and artistry of their existence without sharing its poverty and squalor. Years later, Ada said that this woman, leading a life unconventional yet moral, free yet unselfish, artistic yet comfortable, seemed to her the incarnation and the highest type of a Bohémienne. Ada Clare fell in love with the Latin Quarter but felt that it might show more order and cleanliness. She returned to America with the idea of establishing and ruling over a better and smaller Quarter in New York.

But this idea had been anticipated, though perhaps by no more than a few months. Henry Clapp, a struggling journalist and theatrical critic, arrived in Paris before Ada. On returning to New York he boldly called himself a Bohemian, named his articles feuilletons, and for lack of sidewalk cafés cultivated Pfaff’s beer cellar under the Broadway pavement. Immediately, several scores of writers, actors, artists, and even students of law and medicine joined him, or tried to imitate him in other saloons. They too called themselves Bohemians; they kept late hours; they pretended to flout conventions, and they clothed their poverty with the poetical cloak of Murger’s philosophy. The time was propitious, for by the beginning of the second half of the century America had produced a sizable class of professional men of arts, but was not as yet ready to pay them more than a gingery and dubious admiration.

When Ada came back to New York she found the Pfaff’s circle eagerly waiting for her. The Bohemians had to have their women. Perhaps most of them did not expect these women to be equal to them in brilliance, but once they realized the full range of Ada’s interests and intellect they hailed her enthusiastically and proclaimed her their queen.

Herr Pfaff accepted Ada and other women in his establishment with a bland smile, paying no attention to the shocked gossip on the street. He was a respectable man of business, but as one of the customers remarked about Pfaff and his helpers: The Germans are not shocked when a woman enters a restaurant.

IV

T

HE

exact location of Pfaff’s can be defined as 653 Broadway, a few doors above Bleecker Street. The section then was one of the important parts of New York. Trade was lively; the hotels and restaurants entertained endless crowds; a great promenade took place on Broadway from Spring Street, where the fashionable St. Nicholas Hotel stood, to Bleecker Street. The promenade was not limited to the rich and fashionable but took in all classes of New Yorkers. A contemporary columnist advised his townsmen concerning Broadway, between Spring and Bleecker, at 4

P.M.

: The greatest variety of the human physiognomy may then and there be studied to the best advantage.

The parade passed directly over the heads of the exalted, for in a niche with a vaulted ceiling under the Broadway sidewalk Herr Pfaff had installed a long table especially for his literary and artistic friends. The main room of the saloon was filled with small tables. Here sat other customers, the uninitiated, but here Walt Whitman often took his place, slightly withdrawn from the exalted, the better to watch them, or to have an intimate talk with one or another of them, unhampered. Pfaff presided over the bar, keeping a watchful eye on the few uneven stairs which led to the crowded sidewalk, ready to greet a distinguished visitor.

Bayard Taylor liked the dim, smoky, confidential atmosphere of Pfaff’s, mainly because it reminded him of Auerbach’s cellar in Leipzig. To him, mild potations of beer and the dreamy breath of cigars delayed the nervous, fidgety, clattering-footed American Hours. Though solid silver and good china were used in Charlie’s establishment and sanitary appearances were generally maintained, certain finicky visitors described the chairs as uncomfortable, and the whole basement as dingy. John Swinton was wont to remark that it smelled atrociously, but he praised Pfaff’s coffee and sweet-breads.

It was Charlie’s coffee that attracted Clapp, his discoverer and first booster. The cheese Charlie served was quite famous, the cakes most renowned, and the fried breakfast fish wonderfully crisp. A certain poet for years came to Pfaff’s expressly for his breakfast eggs which he found unsurpassed. W. D. Howells, on his sole visit to the place, found the German pancakes rather toothsome, though he charged the saloon with the poor appetite shown by Clapp’s men at supper. A historian of arts wrote that Pfaff’s suppers were bad, particularly when eaten late at night. But Charlie’s liquids were praised alike by the friends and foes of Bohemia. His excellent beer was the pride of the establishment, but he also offered sound ales, red clarets, and cool champagnes. By some contemporaries he was called the best judge of champagne in America. His barrels and bottles held white and red burgundies, Graves and Haut-Graves, Clos Regent and Bonnes Sauternes, Beaune and Volnay, Bonnes-Mares and Romanée, sherries and madeiras, Malvoisie Royal and Cama de Lobos de Joa Vicente de Silva.

Buxom Saxon girls served the guests. There were also a few men-waiters. Herr Pfaff himself was a German from Switzerland. He was rotund of form though devoid of excessive fat. His big head was crowned with short and bristling hair and lit up by a silent yet jovial smile. Like most proprietors of cafés chosen by literati for their headquarters he was not learned but he knew how to behave. He took pride in his beers and wines and still more in his bookish and eccentric clientele. Shrewdly, he was aware of the profitable growth of his reputation as a patron of American belles lettres. He fostered his fame unobtrusively and skilfully. He drank to the toasts of his guests at their invitation. He listened to their tales and verse with a sweet and quiet dignity. He kept his cellar open into the dawn for the sake of a handful of Bohemians engaged in a verse-making contest. He helped in various ways those of his guests whose finances temporarily ebbed. So grew his fame. In New York, by the end of the ’Fifties, his cellar was a landmark vieing with Castle Garden, Tammany Hall, and P. T. Barnum’s Museum.

A

N

A

RTISTS’

B

OARDING

-H

OUSE

From T. B. Gunn’s The Physiology of New York

Boarding-Houses

Charlie’s name was immortalized in much of the sweeping verse and cryptic prose published in the Saturday Press. Whitman wrote poetry about Pfaff’s. George Arnold versified on how We were all very merry at Pfaff’s.

The Saturday Press was the first Bohemian weekly of America, founded by Clapp in October, 1858, and jestingly referred to as the house organ of Pfaff’s. Everybody worth while in contemporary letters seemed to be among its contributors, even though the pay was irregular, small, and at times practically nil. The public gasped at the editorial paragraphs of Henry Clapp. For the first time in the memory of the living, the whiskers of American gods were pulled by a weekly with such nonchalant energy and air of authority.

Often, Clapp and his paper appeared to be naive and hitting at small fry, but on the whole it did valuable spading of American life and spanking of the native arts. For a time, the Saturday Press enjoyed as much prestige as the Atlantic Monthly; they were born only a year apart. Four decades later, Howells admitted that "the young writers throughout the country were ambitious to be seen in it … for it was very nearly as well for one to be accepted by the Press as to be accepted by the Atlantic."

Fancy titles and pen-names added to the novel appeal of the sheet. John Burroughs signed his Fragments from the Table of an Intellectual Epicure with a pseudonym of All Souls. Ned Wilkins appeared under the name of Personne, while Henry Clapp chose Figaro as his