Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [565]
Whatever its evasions, his masterpiece was an astonishing—and ironic—development. Here was the powerful urban voice Young America had long been calling for, yet the survivors of that movement never noticed its coming. They had not expected their literary messiah to be a half-educated carpenter’s son, a political journalist who consorted with b’hoys and coachmen. They’d been expecting the Great American Poem to issue from the parlor. Instead it bubbled up from the streets.
Whitman’s language threw them too. Young America sought a literary democracy but shied away from the country’s ruder idioms. Cornelius Mathews insisted it be American in the “purest, highest, broadest sense. Not such as is declaimed in taverns, ranted off in Congress.” In Pierre, a disillusioned Melville had warned Young Americans they would never produce a native literature because “vulgarity and vigor—two inseparable adjuncts” were denied them. What, then, were they to make of a poet whose work drew sustenance from minstrel shows, blood-and-thunder romances, and the penny press, who boasted that “copulation is no more rank to me than death is” and proclaimed “the scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer”?
Much of polite New York shuddered at Leaves of Grass, reviling Whitman as a disgusting barbarian, but not all the reviews were bad. Whitman the journalist had many friends in the press—Charles A. Dana said nice things in the Tribune, Fanny Fern applauded him in Bonner’s Ledger—and besides, Whitman had taken the precaution of publishing three glowing reviews himself. New Englanders, curiously, were the most supportive, perhaps because, with Charles Eliot Norton, they saw Whitman as fusing “yankee transcendentalism and New York rowdyism.” Emerson sent a splendid salutation and came to pay respects (Whitman took him to a rowdy Mercer Street firehouse for a glass of beer). Bronson Alcott made a pilgrimage to Whitman’s home on Classon Avenue, then came again with Thoreau in tow. Not all Yankee intellectuals were taken with Leaves of Grass, however: James Russell Lowell threw his copy in the fire and warned off a foreign visitor by declaiming, “Whitman is a rowdy, a New York tough, a loafer, a frequenter of low places, a friend of cab drivers!” But cab drivers didn’t buy the book either. Despite the workingman-poet’s strenuous efforts to reach a wider audience, he sold only several hundred copies.
Like Melville, Whitman had failed to get the hearing he wanted. Unlike Melville, Whitman didn’t fade away. Instead he went underground, joining the bohemians, New York’s first self-declared counterculture.
“Bohemians” was the French term for gypsies, based on the erroneous assumption that Bohemia was their original homeland. In the 1840s the name was affixed to the poor artists of Paris’s Latin Quarter—first in derision, then in fascination. Henry Murger’s romantic tales about the left bank’s denizens, serialized between 1845 and 1846, then published as Scenes de la vie de boheme in 1851, presented them as principled people who repudiated middle-class morality, held money in contempt, and adopted alternative work habits and domestic arrangements. The French bourgeoisie, initially scornful, became intrigued by their lifestyle, and some of the affluent adopted or affected their ways.
The apostle who brought the boho gospel to New York City was a Nantucket-born journalist and theatrical critic named Henry Clapp Jr. After several years’ residence in Paris, Clapp moved to Manhattan in the mid-fifties and gathered a like-minded group around him. Its members included Fitz-Hugh Ludlow, who would write The Hashish Eater about his drug experiences, and Ada Clare, the Charleston-born and independently wealthy writer who scandalized respectable New York by publishing torrid love poems and flaunting her illegitimate son.