WALT WHITMAN AND THE PHRENOLOGY OF MURDER
CHAPTER ONE
He was forever following him, searching for nuggets of connection to the forsaker, finding in the echoes of others he who had abandoned him. He had read the forsaker’s portrait and knew which aspects he must seek out.
I went to Pfaff’s that sticky July evening a few years before our most uncivil of wars, choosing a night of hops and gentle, perhaps remarkable, conversation instead of one of hashish and heightened imagination. Some two years before, in 1855, Charlie Pfaff, a fat, genial, Swiss German—some said a refugee from the European Revolutions of 1848—had opened his basement beer hall on Broadway, a few doors south of the Winter Garden, in the midst of the theater district. I descended into the dimly lit Rathskeller, a smoke-filled, underground cave. Pfaff’s boasted good coffee and decent sausages, and was well-stocked with adequate European wines, but was most famous for its German style lager. I ordered the lager.
The evening performances at the Winter Garden, Burton’s, Niblo’s, Laura Keene’s, and the Academy of Music had ended, so the bar was full of equal proportions of swells and roughs. The swells, dressed to distinction in their plumage of reds and greens, be-ringed and be-spangled, ever the big-bugs, kept to the right side. The roughs, their faux-worker garb of studied simplicity advertising their allegiance to the populace, congregated to the left. The more artistic—or was it simply the more opinionated?— patrons sat at a long table in a low-ceilinged, inner vault. Pfaff cultivated all truly creative patrons, including the gentlemen of the press, thus my ready acceptance.
I spotted many familiar countenances in the dense crowd.
Walter Whitman, our budding poet, a reformed swell, lately given to roughness, stood on the left at the bar. Whitman sported a blue carpenter’s jacket and baggy trousers. Six feet tall, of impressive proportions, his open blouse advertised a manly chest of hair. He wore a large, low-crowned hat, a wide-awake, though his lazy eyes, gray-blue, half-clouded, belied the effect. Bronzed by excessive exposure to the sun and the sea, he was rough-skinned with a forehead seared with wrinkles. His beard and his hair were flecked with gray, prematurely aged beyond his thirty-eight years. Whitman was deep in conversation with a friend, William Mount, a thin, tall, full-bearded, threadbare clad painter.
Mike Walsh, champion of the Irish roughs, with his typically reddened nose, held firmly to the far left side of the bar, holding an Irish Wake to his failed political career. He was already half seas over to full groggery.
Ned Buntline, the tsar of the dime novel, a rabble-rouser of a Know Nothing, formed the center of a small group on the right, swell side of the bar.
Max Maretzek, the impresario and conductor that night at the Academy of Music, featured an elegant opera tuxedo. He sat alone at the center of the artistic, long table, feasting on a cheese plate, a frankfurter, and a lager.
There was an opening to the left near Walter, our reformed swell, and Mount. I joined them to sample their conversation.
“Mr. Mount, a pleasure to see you.”
“Lannon.” Mount was not one for social pleasantries. I was surprised he even remembered my name.
“Walter, how goes our budding poet?”
“Walt,” Whitman corrected me. I had forgotten that his costume change dictated a blunter, more masculine, public name. “I am well. Frantically scribbling ‘pomes’ for the next edition of my Leaves. It will be much different. It will grow like I grow.” Scribbling was a most appropriate word. I thought his ‘pomes’ (Whitman had an odd way of saying the word, as if to distance himself from the high-falutin’ poetry of Longfellow and Bryant) hurried and unpolished—more lists than poetry. At their publication, I held my tongue due to our friendship. Others had not been so kind; after Whitman self-published his Leaves, New York swell-dom had howled in derision. Who did he think he was—this unrefined, coarse man in masquerade as a poet?
“I recognize your breathless prose style in a couple of the reviews,” I quipped only half in jest. “You certainly are not above boosting yourself.”
“Emerson liked my work. That speaks volumes.” Walt, voice markedly raised, let the Boston sage’s pronouncement spread through Pfaff’s like a benediction. At the mention of Emerson, one young man turned to observe us closely. He started to move towards us but was delayed by an ever-thickening crowd of boisterous roughs.
Walt and I gossiped about journalists we both knew. Our friendship went back a few years to when he had edited and I had written for the Brooklyn Eagle. He had been summarily dismissed from that job for political reasons—Walt too much a Free Soiler, fighting the extension of slavery to the West, for the Hunker of an owner who favored any economic activity, including slavery, that spelled profits. I remembered fondly how Walt would assign a topic in city politics and I would write a scathing indictment of some politician. Then he would forget he had charged me with the story and write something himself. Whitman’s off-topic commentary and my more pithy prose would both appear, often in the same issue, usually in direct contradiction. Whitman loved being a newspaper editor because he was essentially a teacher. His editorial detractors described him as a failed countryman schoolmaster.
I had gone on to other papers and now worked for Bennett’s penny dreadful, the Herald. Bennett’s politics were not of the Hunker variety; but like the Eagle owner, he leaned towards whatever sold the most papers.
Walt had not always dressed in his present carpenter-poet guise. When I first knew him, he was a rather dapper swell, and it was only lately that he had assumed this rugged man of the people pose. Though he affected the workingman, his outfits were made to order of the finest materials. I pondered how this lazy, facile, often glib swell of an editor had become this self-absorbed rough of a poet.
Walt turned to include Mount in the conversation. “Mount and I have been talking about the beauties of Long Island. Such a grand place to loaf around in.”
“I stick to Long Island,” Mount added. “That’s where I find my art.”
Mount switched topics. “I’m inventin’ again. A special violin, the Cradle of Harmony. A hollow back makes it louder. Goin’ to be demonstrating it at the Crystal Palace. I play at barn dances. Hard it is to hear when the folks get a dancin’. So I invented this loud violin. I wrote me a song, The Musings of an Old Bachelor. It’s a song about me and Walt too.” Mount gestured to Whitman who nodded.
“I thought you just painted barn dances,” I observed. “I didn’t know that you played at them too.”
“I paint. I play. I play, I paint. Always travel with a paint kit, ’cuz you never know when you’ll happen upon a subject…”
“Just like me with my poet’s notebook,” Walt interrupted. “Finding lines.”
Mount paused to take a sip of water. No grog touched his lips. “Art is just there. Painters, poets, wandering. Spring, summer, fall, learning from nature, the most perfect of artists. Finding, sketching with the exactness of a phrenologist’s measurements. Winters are for finishing paintings trapped in a studio, adding, figuring, re-living what I first saw.”
Whitman added, “Art comes from drifting.”
Both Whitman and Mount were drifters searching for subject and finding art in the homely detail: be it bargaining for a horse, spearing an eel, or ringing a pig. Walt’s pomes positioned each element in an ever-shifting whole. In comparison, I found Mount’s subjects merely mundane recordings of insipid aspects.
Walt scratched his scraggly beard. “The North Shore, Long Island. There a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars.” Walt was caught again in the rapture of self-quotation.
Walt’s phrase was in the air as the young man, who had attempted to approach us earlier, finally broke free from the clasp of noisy roughs and made it to our corner of the cellar. He was hardly older than a student and wore an anxious expression, focused on Whitman. He hovered close to Whitman and finally spoke. “David Franklin, Mr. Whitman. I have read your poems. Emerson loaned me the copy you sent him. And I don’t plan on ever returning it. Your poems are marvelous.” Another reader: but, alas for Walt, not another sale.
Walt seemed nervous, his tension engendered by the handsome young man’s praise. “How is the Sage of Concord faring?” Walt finally asked.
“Well,” Franklin answered, “he is in town to give a lecture at the Cooper Union. I came along to view the Crystal Palace exposition one last time. You must come to hear Emerson speak and join us at the Palace.”
“Emerson, of course. Just talking about a display of Mount’s paintings at the Palace.” Walt turned and introduced Franklin to the craggy painter.
Without encouragement, the short, comely, obviously excitable Franklin launched into a supplication. “I heard you talking about the beauty of Long Island. Nature, poetry. Walt, I love the way you capture nature in your poetry. I read your poetry as I wander free on long walks. I ramble amongst the hayfield mowers and the apple pickers reading each a poem.”
What transcendental nonsense these New Englanders talk. And how quickly they presume a first-name basis. “What do you do when you are not reading poetry or wandering?” I asked.
“I teach school in Boston but am currently on leave raising funds for a Free Kansas. Who can quietly teach while such threats to freedom gather?”
Mount tried to evade the abrupt turn of the conversation to politics by announcing loudly, “Walt used to teach school—didn’t you Walt?” Mount spoke loudly as if daring Whitman to be a part of the conversation. “I’ve even painted one of the humble schoolhouses where Walt taught, in a town called Southold. My South painting is part of my hangings in the Crystal Palace.”
Franklin was not to be turned from politics. “Slavery is wrong. If the United States Constitution allowed for slavery, then it would have to be revised—or revoked.” There he had done it. We had gone ten minutes without slavery entering the conversation; but here it flashed, the topic behind much of what passed for politics in this troubled time.
Mount interjected crankily, “Slavery ought be decided by each state. I say to all you abolitionist types: mind your own business.” The debate was joined.
“The Kansas-Nebraska perfidy,” Franklin snorted. “You want to leave the question of slavery to be decided by the settlers. Popular sovereignty! Squatter sovereignty! As if that makes slavery right. Those who voted for it should be hung. Free Kansas, not Slave Kansas.”
“I reckon you’d hang me, youngin.” Mike Walsh rose from his cups. He shook his head violently, inclined forwards, and steadied his large, piercing, reddened eyes as if ready to pounce. “I voted for that perfidy.” He paused, taking a deep gulp of lager for dramatic effect. “Ah, for the clarity of youth.”
I introduced ex-Congressman Walsh to Franklin.
Franklin attacked Walsh with a youthful passion. “A New York City congressman with a Southern paymaster. The Kansas-Nebraska Act switches the rationale of slavery’s expansion from geography to the whim of a rigged, popular sovereignty. It leaves the people of Kansas to fight it out whether they adopt slavery or not. I aim to support the free people of Kansas in this battle against the slavers.”
Walsh, famed as a fiery debater, was not tempered by drink. “So great to be young. Everything is pristine and clear. Energy to battle on many fronts. As I age I pick my fights. I spar for the Irish workingman. Get him a decent job, food, shelter. Get him a place at this most bountiful table.” Walsh gestured at his cup still half-full of lager. “If you trust the wisdom of your views, youngin, why not trust the settlers to choose the noblest course. I go for peace with the South, even if it means a few more slave…”
The vigorous Franklin broke in on Walsh, “Free all slaves. Anything else is the work of the Devil.”
Walsh spoke much louder, his ruddy nose blazing in anger, “Free the slaves for what? To sentence them to wage slavery? The Black has a master without asking for him while the Irishman has to beg for the privilege of becoming a slave. The one is the slavery of an individual; the other is the slavery of a class. If we free the slaves, free Blacks will overwhelm the Irish workers and degrade their wages.”
“You would have the Blacks serve at that table just to advance you Irish,” Franklin individualized the argument. “You’d expand slavery to Kansas and beyond just to get a few more jobs for your drunken countrymen. You are a Hunker who has voted as a Southerner and been turned out by the Northerners.”
Whitman, as his want, moved his chair back from the debate. He was embarrassed by the emotional extremity of the discussion. He remained silent, absorbing much, either timid or sagely listening.
Ned Buntline shouted from the opposite side of the bar, “The Irish are only good at one thing, drinking. No more fit to be true Americans than the snowballs.” Snowball was a common, if now outdated, appellation for a Negro. Buntline, besides being a poor excuse for an author, was an equal opportunity bigot.
Congressman Walsh and author Buntline were frequent adversaries who went at it hammer and tongs. “Ned, aren’t you looking particularly squirt-ish this evening!” Buntline wore his emblematic frock coat ornamented with a fresh boutonniere. A spiffy, small cane lay on the nearby table. His dandified garb went well, or so he thought, with his aristocratic, America for Americans notions. Walsh continued, “Keep your nativist blather to yourself.”
“I try to dress up for an occasion rather than looking as though I just arrived from the swill of some Irish oyster bar. What are you and your Irish friends planning? Pipe-laying for Mayor Wood? You couldn’t drag enough foreign paupers to the polls to get yourself reelected. Who are these voters? Just off the boat, homeless.”
Mayor Wood would need Walsh’s aid in the upcoming election. Walsh was a formidable politician for a drunkard. He was quite good at laying more than a bit of pipe downtown in his infamous Sixth Ward.
Walsh dismissed Buntline with a wave. “Wood at least defends us Irish from the nativists and the Republicans. We Irish are true Americans in the making. You are just afraid of our successes.”
“Success,” Buntline shouted. “You’re just a raving drunk, Walsh.”
Walsh paused to load up with lager. He raised his voice to orate. “Anti-slavery Barnburners, unprincipled knaves trying to bring our democracy into war. Hollow-hearted renegades and ingrate Free Kansas traitors like that murderer, John Brown. Rampant abolitionist cavorting with long-heeled Negroes. His heart is blacker than the sooty faces of the poor benighted dupes he deludes.”
Franklin disputed, “I know no greater patriot than John Brown. I raise funds for his Emigrant Aid Company. We must pack free-holding Kansas with anti-slavery colonizers and arm them with Sharpe rifles to fight the slaveholders.”
Walt roused from his withdrawal, but spoke softly, “I disagree, David.” How quickly Walt echoed his first-name basis. “I am afraid of agitators, though I believe in agitation. Be radical—be radical—be not too damned radical. I feel and think as a Southerner and as a Northerner. What we need is an honest blacksmith to run this country. First he would bottle slavery up. Then he can abolish it.”
David Franklin, no longer catering to the poet, turned his anger towards Walt. “Diverting attention from slavery’s abolition is evil.”
Walt buckled and retreated from Franklin’s fresh-voiced ire into the safe resides of poetry:
“I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters
And I will stand between the masters and the slaves,
Entering into both so that both will understand me alike.”
I was unconvinced by Walt’s predictable retreat into the benedictory of un-scannable verse. But blessedly, it did seem to end the topic for now.
Mike Walsh gazed longingly at the tier of grog above the bar in Pfaff’s spirit room. “Let’s walk up to the bar and enter a plea, boys. My tin cup is empty.”
I looked up to see a welcome addition, Henry Clapp, my bright-eyed, wiry housemate, a fellow boarder at Victoria Castle’s, as he entered Pfaff’s. Henry was yet another member of the journalist crew that frequented Pfaff’s to eat, to drink, and to criticize dull city dwellers. He gestured to Pfaff and ordered some coffee and scotch whiskey.
Henry acknowledged me, “Eugene, my boy. Didn’t Miss Victoria Castle need you for a social or medicinal function this evening?”
I smiled. “A Mr. John Goodhue was calling later after the opera. I was expendable.” Goodhue, Victoria’s supporter and investment advisor, would often call in the late evening after having finished ushering his wan, Washington Square wife to the Academy of Music. I introduced Henry to Mount and to Franklin. He knew the balance of the taproom Bohemian Brigade.
Walt, happy that the talk had moved from politics, spied a swarthy, Black Irish rough at the bar. He waved him over and introduced him as Stephen Ireland, a ferryman that Walt claimed to have met on one of the poet’s numerous trips between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Whitman lived on the Brooklyn side but could not long resist the nightly temptations of Manhattan. Walt hailed all of the laboring class that he met, declaring his allegiance as a rude child of the people. Whitman would often take an off-duty ferryman or stage driver to Pfaff’s for a beer, a smoke, sometimes a sausage. But usually he took care to keep them separate from his writer friends.
“Where is Fred Gray tonight?” Stephen asked of Walt.
“He isn’t here. Perhaps we’ll run into him on our way home to the ferry.” It appeared that Walt and Stephen shared a common friend they might meet in their nocturnal wanderings.
Buntline, ever-searching for the knifed edge of a conversation, addressed Whitman, “Fred Gray? Some snipper-snapper who cavorts with you roughs?” A snipper-snapper was an effeminate young man, a trifler. How this matched with the roughness of Stephen or Walt I could only imagine.
“Buntline, stop bawling. Go back to your swell side of the bar.” That was pretty contentious for excessively sensitive Walt. Buntline retired to the safer swell side with a mocking raise of his glass to Walt in salute.
I turned to see that Max Maretzek had finished his post-opera repast. The gray-haired Max, Walt, and I chatted a bit about Madame Alboni, a singer that both Walt and I adored. We all arranged to meet up backstage during her Norma two evenings hence. I was reviewing the opera for the Herald. I was to accompany Victoria that night to sit in a swell-dom box supplied by John Goodhue. Franklin repeated his invitation that Walt join Emerson and him at the Crystal Palace.
The roughs and the swells began to leave Pfaff’s. Walt, Walsh, and Stephen left at the same time, with Walt and Stephen offering to help the grogged Walsh head downtown. Buntline and some fellow swells slick as grease left in their turn. I shared one last lager with Max and Henry, mellowing in the hops. After Max had left, Henry and I strolled home to Grove Street. It was always well to air after Pfaff’s to dispel the smoke.
He had watched in the safety of numbers as the argument among the rummy, the forsaker, and the others heated up and died down. He picked up the trail of the unholy trinity as they emerged from that hellish hole, Pfaff’s. In the lead was the forsaking father, his rakish beard set ablaze by the gaslights. Next came the second person of the trinity, Black Ireland’s winsome son. Each to a side they propped up the Irish bogtrotter, the un-holiest of ghosts. Why was the forsaker favoring with attention this contentious sot? The trio of ill-matched heights bumped up and down as they headed south on Broadway. The ghosted middleman, passed out, needed full support. With the harsh gas lamps showing the way, they reached Houston. The trio’s father spied an opening in the dense chain of hansom cabs, and the three crossed the thoroughfare, followed shortly by their pursuer. They took a right going west on Houston, then a left south onto Greene Street. He followed them, waiting for the trio to part company.
In the blocks nearest Houston, Greene Street became a familiar cathouse of exposed women. The lower stories of the houses catered to drinking as the bars, their doors flung wide open to balmy weather, sent forth a poisonous steam. The upper stories were dedicated to a more lucrative, intimate, and lustful fare. The idle inmates of each house, many gathered on the front porches, were dressed in the most shocking immodesty. Bareheaded, bare-armed, and bare-bosomed, these illicit women stood on the porches, in the doorway, or on the sidewalk, inviting passers-by, indiscriminately, to enter. The women exchanged oaths and obscenities with inmates of neighboring houses. Besides the trio, the walkers in these haunts were mostly out-of-towners from the nearby hotels. Most of the first floor bars had its fiddler, tuning up his vile squeaking, adding a false song of gaiety. Some houses, the finer ones, had a pianist. The pursuer ignored the sights and sounds of the street, concentrating on his prey.
The trinity moved down Greene Street, lurching oddly with the weight of the ghosted middleman.
The father and the son left the unholy ghost at a prosperous, quieter house, its porch empty with bar doors shut, silent, fiddler-less, piano-less. Having done their Christian duty, they abandoned the Irishman on the front stoop and headed south.
The pursuer approached this quiescent dove of a ghost, picking him up most gently. He carried him to an adjoining abandoned lot where he placed him on the pedestal of a wall. His chosen threatened to awake, but he quieted him with the caress of his gentle hand. He anointed him about the neck with a balm of oil taken from his right pocket and retrieved the sacrificial ligature from his tiny bag. His goal was not to bind him but to deliver him from the source of evil. He wrapped the neck with the rope tenderly. His prey did not stir. Then, with a force focused on the compassion of liberation, he released him from earthly care.
The ghost was no more a part of the trinity but became a dank and odor-filled man of corruption. He quickly removed his boots, pants, and undergarments. He focused on the fount of all vice, the body’s now engorged appendage. He removed his ever-sharp cutter from his bag, opened it, and sheared the immoral infection at its base. He purified the putrescence, absolving the now empty, bloodied crotch with oil. He took on the sin of the tallywhacker, wrapping it and placing it in his bag.
He was almost ready now to part. He found the letter he would leave as a mark, located his spot, and hammered the letter into the skull of this corruption. He had begun his portrait by murdering an argumentative sot.
