Whitman Among the Bohemians ed. by Joanna Levin and Edward Whitley (review)

The twelve essays in Whitman Among the Bohemians provide much-needed contextual background of the period in Walt Whitman’s life that has intrigued Whitman scholars: after the publication of the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass but before Whitman’s departure for Washington, DC, in December 1862. The essays that comprise this collection will also interest readers who want to know more about the print culture of antebellum America. Many of the essays provide enriching readings of Whitman’s Manhattan milieu – deepening our understanding of such figures as “The Queen of Bohemia,” Ada Clare; Edward (Ned) Mullen, close friend of Whitman’s and illustrator for Vanity Fair; Fred Vaughan and the role of a group of young bachelors known as the Fred Gray Association; and the “protean” performer Adah Isaacs Menken.

The essays are arranged in a roughly thematic and chronological order, beginning with Karen Karbiener’s “Bridging Brooklyn and Bohemia: How the Brooklyn Daily Times Brought Whitman Closer to Pfaff ’s.” Karbiener connects Whitman’s experience at Pfaff ’s Cellar Saloon to his employment at the Daily Times, both geographically and politically. It is possible, Karbiener speculates, that the “simmering Republican inclinations” of the Daily Times were more appealing to Whitman, and may have found expression in his jeremiad, “The Eighteenth Presidency.” Moreover, Karbiener argues, the proximity of Pfaff ’s to the editorial offices of the Brooklyn Daily Times may have encouraged Whitman to become more of a “Manhattanese.” In her essay, “Walt Whitman and the King of Bohemia: The Poet in the Saturday Press,” Amanda Gailey examines more closely Whitman’s relationship with Henry Clapp Jr., newspaper editor and founder of the Saturday Press. Clapp, a staunch supporter of Whitman, generally took the approach that any publicity was good publicity. He helped to boost Whitman’s visibility in the late 1850s through canny marketing tactics, orchestrating the media response to Whitman’s work that helped to create a wider readership for Leaves of Grass—through exposure and controversy. Ingrid Satelmeyer’s essay, “Publishing Pfaff ’s: Henry Clapp and Poetry in the Saturday Press,” provides an illuminating examination of the ways in which Clapp’s “philosophy of literary production” represented an extension of his earlier “abolitionist and protemperance” work. In the Saturday Press, Satelmeyer argues, the poems chosen for publication were aligned with “a social environment that valued collaborative entertainment,” creating literary networks that encouraged improvisation. It is easy to see why Whitman would have been attracted to such a social setting, and how his own poetic vision may have continued to be shaped and formed by the “communication networks” that Clapp fostered, both in Pfaff ’s and on the pages of the Saturday Press. Even though Clapp claimed that he followed a “no puffing” policy, Leif Eckstrom reveals the implicit contradiction in “On Puffing: The Saturday Press and the Circulation of Symbolic Capital.” Clapp was ingenious in the ways in which he “puffed” Whitman’s work—and Eckstrom’s essay examines the ways that Clapp both created, and curated, literary taste.

Joanna Levin’s “‘Freedom for Women from Conventional Lies’: The ‘Queen of Bohemia’ and the Feminist Feuilleton” sheds further light on Ada Clare, the female bohemian whose weekly column “Thoughts and Things” appeared in the Saturday Press. Clare’s witty, parodic columns called for greater honesty in the relationship between the sexes, celebrated female sensuality, and questioned the ideology of separate spheres. Decades later, in conversation with Horace Traubel, Whitman recalled a gathering in 1856 at her “brownstone” on Forty-Second Street, identifying her as one of his staunchest defenders. Clare’s biography and the significance of her “Bohemienne” writing—as liminal social space, as transnational countercultural realm—are carefully traced by Levin. In “Whitman, the Antebellum Theater, and the Cultural Authority of the Bohemian Critic,” Edward Whitley points to the ways in which Pfaff’s combined the German beer cellar with the Parisian café, providing a space where “theater people” could...