Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians by Justin Martin (review)

Clubs, organizations, and specific geographical landmarks have always held a certain allure for those of a literary bent. From the famous Scriblerus Club that linked together Swift, Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot, to the Lakeside Poets of the Romantic Era, to the fictional Pickwick Club of Dickens’s imagination, artists and writers have often joined together to discuss their common woes and become inspired to write their greatest works. Justin Martin’s Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians is an attempt to uncover just such a world. In this work, Martin brings to center-stage Pfaff’s Saloon, a small restaurant and bar in New York City wherein some of the strangest American artistic talents gathered in the years before the Civil War. Examining the lives of Walt Whitman, Charles Farrar Browne (Artemus Ward), Henry Clapp, Adah Isaacs Menken, and Fitz Hugh Ludlow, to name a few, Martin shows how these individuals gathered at Pfaff’s and there shared drinks, jokes, and ultimately inspiration. Martin provides a well-written account of the adventures of these intriguing individuals, but he relies heavily upon previously published studies of American Bohemianism and adds little to the existing historical scholarship. Rebel Souls is thus recommended for those looking for a breezy overview of how the Bohemian movement influenced a small group of Americans, which happened to include Walt Whitman. Those looking for a scholarly or highly original account of how Bohemianism shaped antebellum life and literature should look elsewhere.

Throughout the work, Martin uses Pfaff’s as the central location wherein the lives of his main characters intersect. The work begins with the story of Henry Clapp, a peripatetic American who moved to Paris in the 1840s and returned to the United States in the 1850s thoroughly imbued with European ideals, eccentric taste, and a disdain for the bourgeois. By 1856, Clapp began to frequent Pfaff’s Restaurant and Lager Bier Saloon, which was located on Broadway near Bleecker Street. Within a short space of time, he met a host of fellow eccentrics who also dabbled in literary, artistic, and theatrical ventures. These included the poet Walt Whitman, who had published Leaves of Grass in 1855 and who enjoyed the convivial environment; Fitz Hugh Ludlow, who wrote a book about his time experimenting with drugs; and Adah Isaacs Menken, who shortly achieved world-wide fame as an actress and celebrity. In a disarmingly oblique way, Martin tries to draw a parallel between the gathering of these talents at Pfaff’s and the later gathering of wits at the Algonquin Hotel (86). Although the former did not influence the latter, Pfaff’s served the same purpose as it allowed individuals to gather, talk, and critique the society in which they found themselves.

Martin’s goal is not to regale his reader with a host of trivial anecdotes but rather to posit that these individuals created an early artistic and cultural movement now known as Bohemianism. These artists and actresses shared a somewhat vaguely defined disdain for the rising bourgeois culture in America. They smoked, often drank, dressed in unorthodox fashions, and wanted to create works of art that appealed to the common people and not merely to refined Bostonians or the Knickerbockers of New York. A central argument of this work, therefore, is that the milieu of American Bohemianism ultimately pushed Whitman away from the Transcendentalism of Emerson and into the writing of poetry that captured the lives of ordinary Americans. As Martin notes, “a battle for Whitman’s soul was taking shape. On one shoulder was Emerson, counseling prudence. On the other perched devil Clapp. Whitman chose Clapp” (101). As can be deduced from the title of the book, Martin’s most straightforward argument is that Walt Whitman lived a Bohemian lifestyle and that the group that gathered at Pfaff’s helped inspire him to write the later versions of Leaves of Grass that resonated deeply with ordinary Americans.

The problem with this...