The Poet among the Bohemians: The Garden of History.

            Before the counterculture, before hippies, before Beatniks, the social rebels who turned their back on conventional society -- regular hours, regular jobs, family life, the rules and respectability of the middle class -- were known as Bohemians. The word was coined in Europe to describe the denizens of quarters given over to students and non-students, from various lands who gathered in university cities. They drank, caroused, witticized, rioted occasionally, had love affairs, and some produced 'works' of various sorts. Some would no doubt give up the wild-life to return to families or conventional occupations. Beginning in the latter Middle Ages, collections of such folk gathered in university towns like Bologne, then moved on to Paris. Some portion of the poor students who flocked to take classes from famous lecturers hailed from the land of Bohemia (now the Czech republic), somehow providing a name to the entire population. 
            Hence we get "La Boehme," a romantic tale of artsy types who spent the occasional piece of good fortune at the cafe, fell in love (Act I), parted through misunderstandings or jealousy (Act II), and perished romantically from tuberculosis and poverty in Act III.

            Published last year, Justin Martin's "Rebel Souls," subtitled "Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians," traces the earliest seeds of an urban counterculture in the self-consciously "unconventional" gathering of artsy types, hard drinkers, publicity seekers, and other aspiring escapees from the provinces at a special table in the  basement cafe-restaurant-nightclub called "Pfaff's" on Broadway in the mid-1850s.

            Bohemianism was brought to American, and to Pfaffs, by Henry Clapp, scion of a Puritan New England family who goes to Paris a teetotaler and returns to America an onephile who has learned how to live from the French and wants absolutely nothing to do any more with the strictures of strait-laced Boston. Fast-growing, melting-pot Manhattan proves more his style. He discovers the Broadway cafe run by an easygoing, lager-loving Charlie Pfaff, one of the German immigrants who in this period introduced lager beer, which in combination with refrigeration, weaned Americans away from the room-temperature brews, ales and stouts favored by their English ancestors.

            Members of Clapp's "Bohemian Club" sat at his table, told stories, delivered complex toasts, tossed out hidden and not so hidden insults to one another, grew witty, or high-spirited, or morose and sometimes offered critiques of others' productions.

            A Clapp bon mot: Author William Dean Howells finally meets his idol, Nathaniel Hawthorne, but each is too shy to say much. "Oh," says Clapp, "a couple of shysters."

            Broadway, as we learn from "Rebel Souls," was America's first urban playground boulevard. Its hotels boasted indoor plumbing. It had scores of theaters in the era when live entertainment was everything, from 'legitimate' theater to minstrel shows in black-face. It had 'concert saloons' with scantily clad waitresses. It had the department stores that coaxed Mary Todd Lincoln into spending wildly beyond her $20,000 budget for a facelift at the White House. Located near Bleeker Street, the city's newspaper row, Pfaff's lured a late-night newsie clientele along with the struggling artists and denizens of the Bleeker Street's cheap love nests employed by bourgeoisie sinners. 

            The Bohemian maintstays of Clapp's Bohemian Club illustrate some enduring types of the American demi-monde. Fitz-James O'Brien: the talented writer who burns up his gift in alcoholic fume. Thomas Nast,the pioneering newspaper cartoonist and satirist of political boss-ism and corruption. The experimental drug explorer of inner worlds Fitz Hugh Ludlow, who at age 21 published the scandalous best-seller "The Hasheesh Eater," but never managed a second act. The brooding stage actor Edwin Booth, son of a legendary American actor in the Booth family, "crazy" Junius Brutus Booth (who pioneered the 'blood and thunder' school of acting) and brother to the infamous Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth.

            The women in the circle (in contrast to most establishments of the time women were welcome at Pfaff's), included two 'celebrities,' actress-writer Ada Clare, and one of the first of America's international celebrities, "the wildest, most brazen and most colorful" of Bohemians, Adah Isaacs Menken. Born of mixed race parentage she was teen chorus girl and circus rider who reached stardom when a stage vehicle was created for her, a bizarre theater piece set in an exotic setting in which Menken was tied to a horse lying on her back in a sheer, flesh-colored body stocking
as he animal raced around a 'special effect' stage sets. In the dim lighting, Martin suggests, audiences could convince themselves she was naked. "Menken's fearlessness was a plus," he writes. Famous for being the notorious "naked lady," her star burned bright and expired soon -- like the James Deans, Jim Morrisons and Marilyn Monroes whose fame followed a similar trajectory.
            The other superstar in the crowd was Artemus Ward (Charlie Brown), who toured internationally with a humorous lecture called "The Babes in the Wood."  Dressed in old man's clothes with a mournful expression. He blended verbal faux pas,
stricken silence, pregnant pauses and blurted nonsequitors while never getting around to the hypothetical "babes." Mark Twain close observed this act and concluded "it was all in the pauses." The audience would laugh and Ward would look flustered, as if he didn't understand why.A look of reproach: why is everyone laughing? He practiced eveyr 'um' and 'ah,' timed his pauses, for a show that depended on an intense rapport with the audience and his magnetic voice, clear as a bell throughout the auditorium.

            One of the most original figures in "Rebel Souls," he invented stand-up comedy.

            Looking for local star power, Clapp recruited Walt Whitman, who at age 39 had published his great work "Leaves of Grass" three years before, the masterpiece that would change the course of poetry, though it was little read at the time. While it sold few copies, "Leaves" drew praise from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Clapp, a talented editor, also founded a weekly journal that promoted Whitman's work relentlessly.

            Though he sometimes read a poem at the Bohemian Club, Whitman did not hold court or exchange witticisms with the kind of people he called "the talkers." Whitman wrote much, but spoke little -- "never a great discusser" is his own self-characterization." My greatest pleasure at Pfaff's was to look on -- to see, talk little, absorb," he wrote later. Whitman's type (like Ward's) is the one of a kind genius. 
           Whitman wrote, and largely invented, the style of free verse that still dominates Western poetry almost two hundred years later. His verse follows the voice rhythms of natural speech. It's the music of ordinary speech spoken extraordinarily well. He uses syntax, instead of rhyme, for closure and repetition. The verse swings, relying on breath, parallelism, and the full range of vernacular expression. The content of poetic discourse -- what Harold Bloom has lately termed 'the American sublime' -- was expanded by "Leaves of Grass" in a single step to the full range of human of activity and sensation in lived experience.

            Poems are written from the point of view of an 'I' who is both the poet, and some assumed persona, and then some-floating observer who switches character, and even gender as needs be.

            His book is the "most democratic" work in the world, wrote Thoreau, who tellingly objected to the frank sensuality of parts of it. Most 19th century Americans did. Emerson recognized "Leaves" as the voice of an America that could not be contained by the point of view of Concord and Boston or any single perspective. "I am large...[as Whitman wrote in 'Leaves'] I contain multitudes."

            And he wanted to be loved as the poet who kept Americans together at a time when the United States was flying apart. That didn't happen; none of it. His big book of wholly new poems didn't sell. He was working once more as a newspaperman (the Brooklyn Daily Times) when he began going to Pfaff's.

          And he spent time in Pfaff's because its open, tolerant, atmosphere proved inviting to another class people Whitman was attracted, beyond the intellectuals who liked the sound of their own voices -- young, working class men who enjoyed the company of other men.

              "Rebel Souls" centers on a period, and on a few major figures of that period, when rapid urban development began to change the character of the country. Urban expansion created a space for life styles that are common today, but were new back then. Gatherings of artsy types, often with unconventional personal lives, some seeking fame or attention, some merely seeking like-minded companionship, are too routine today to believe that they ever needed to be invented, pioneered anywhere. But they were, as "Rebel Souls" tells us -- at a basement beer hall on Broadway in Lower Manhattan. Where else?

Time Flies in the Garden: Siberian Iris Runs Through Our Lives.

             Wish I knew more about these plants. They practice "group mind" more thoroughly than any other perennial I know of. What's their secret?

            According to the expert testimony of online references, Siberian iris will cause your garden to burst  "with early season color and intricate, frilly flowers." (http://www.gardeningknowhow.com/ornamental/flowers/iris/growing-siberian-iris.htm)
            Ah, but not for very long. When I see them blooming, I reach for the camera. If we get a rainy spell or the light is bad, or we go away for a few days, my chances of giving them a good looking over have markedly declined.

            We ran into a cool spell in late May, which they seemed to like, so I think we have had close two weeks of those "intricate, frilly flowers" this year.

            According to the source cited above, planting Siberian iris "in mass adds an elegant charm to the spring garden." Well, the plants got the mass part down for us. A few years ago, I dug up a weedy patch, moved these irises from an earlier home where they weren't providing many blossoms, and got out of their way. They filled the available space quickly.

            Not much else could compete with them. They've mapped this spot from border to border. I stuck some September-blooming asters between a couple of clumps of the transplanted irises. They lasted a year or two, but they're not there any more.

            A couple of clover stems, the tall weedy kind, stick a blossom head up in mid-summer and are endured for their success in parting this sea of green blades after the iris blossoms are gone

           While they seemed to last longer that other years, our Siberian iris have come and gone within the time frame when the larger, better known "bearded" irises began to bloom and ended. Some of those irises just came into their own this week. The Siberian irises are completely finished. When one or two flowers start to fade, I know they're all gone the next or the day after. They are the clearest example of group-think I know of.

            We have a second smaller colony of Siberian irises growing, and expanding, in a spot too shady for the production of many blooms,  but they love packing the place with their sharp looking vertical green blades. This year, following some tree-trimming to let in more light, they threw up about a dozen blossoms, a bracingly good show. But they must have got the memo from the bigger group in the back garden. Their blooms all faded in the same day or two as the others.

            I look through the online references on this stunning, quick-moving flower for some hint on how to prolong the blooming period, a subject on which I find they are all unanimously silent.

            I am told they are "low-maintenance," that their "easy care" involves regular watering on the first year, limited fertilization (I've been going with none) and "division of the clumps" every three to five years. I just know I have to mark my long-distance calendar now with this info, because the chances of my remembering this mandate range from exceedingly slim to absolutely none.
            I prefer the point of view of a different authority that sums up Siberian iris as "among the easiest of all types of iris to raise and bloom in the temperate" climates. I'm attracted to easy. If you'll be easy on me, I'll be easy on you.  
            Yet another authority, hinting at the shortness of the Siberians' blooming period, remarks that "their graceful foliage and sturdy stems are naturally attractive even when not in bloom." Maybe, but sometimes the spot in the garden which snags the eye for the two weeks in late May (or shorter) when Siberian iris turns the green world blue, just goes back to looking like "a place without any flowers" when they're gone.
            On the other hand, when they are drawing the eye to that intricate, charming, graceful, slenderized variation on the theme of 'iris,' they're simply aces.  

The State of Nature on Long Island: the Garden of 'Cultural' History

            I'm having one of my periodic rediscoveries of Walt Whitman, American's world class poet. Reading about Whitman's time (his dates are 1819-92) has given me a new perspective on the 19th century, and a local one. For somebody who grew up on Long Island, it tickles some unexpected need to see in imagination at least what Long Island and the surrounds -- Brooklyn, then its own municipality, and Manhattan, then beginning to swarm with industry and people -- looked like.

            The book these word pictures come from is revealingly titled "Walt Whitman's American: A Cultural Biography" by David S. Reynolds.

            The book is a biography of the poet, but also of the times. Literary history, it turns out, is everybody's history. Is anything more interesting, to some part of our mind at least -- then looking back at where we came from? So many Americans find an interest in genealogy, tracing their ancestors. America's cultural history is all our genealogy. It's how we became who we are.

            Whitman, who actually did most of his growing up in Brooklyn, was born on a family farm near the geographic center of Long Island, an area then called West Hills (near the border today of Huntington and Smithtown), which served as a traveler's hub in the early 19th century. The Whitman family roots on Long Island went back to 1640. His father moved the family back and forth from Brooklyn to farms in what we now call 'Long Island' -- Nassau and Suffolk counties. Walt developed a strong affection for both places.

            Whitman was born, as Reynolds puts it, "at the very heart of Long Island," halfway down the 125-mile length from Manhattan to Montauk Point. The island is fish-shaped -- the two east-end forks resembling the fish's tail fin.

            In his poetry, and his mindset, Reynolds tells us, Long Island stands for nature: "...rambling in lanes and country fields, Paumanok's fields," Whitman writes, using an Indian name for Long Island. His birthplace was close to Jayne's Hill, the highest spot on the island, from which you could see the Atlantic on a clear day.

            While Long Island stood for nature, farm life, and family history for the poet, Manhattan represented business, money, and the cultural opportunities of urban life. Whitman loved the city too. For years his daily routine included walking up and down Broadway -- America's first cosmopolitan avenue -- when the city's development stopped at 34th Street (mere "lower Manhattan" today). Farther north were fields, farms, and estates.

            In between, Brooklyn represented something more like village life. Brooklyn was known as the city of churches; nothing taller broke the skyline than church spires. The city's dramatic 19th century development is a forgotten American epic. In 1810, Reynolds' book tells us, the population numbered 4,000. By 1855 when Whitman was writing his great poems there, Brooklyn was the country's fourth largest city with a population over 200,000. But life there was brutally "primitive" in the early decades of the 19th century. No municipal water or sewage, no central heating. Water was drawn from street pumps, the way Moses got it in Egypt. Refuse was thrown into the gutter.

            At age four, when Whitman's father brought his family to Brooklyn to go into business as a house builder, you could stand on Brooklyn Heights and see across Manhattan to the Jersey Shore. Pigs and chickens owned the roads, rooting for garbage thrown into unpaved streets that turned to mud in the winter. The first gas lighting came in 1828. Until then you could step outside your door and look at the stars, but if you had to go anywhere after dark you needed a lantern. The population suffered cholera epidemics. With no water supply system, fires burned out of control. Big trees shaded streets that turned into country lanes. Some of the farmers spoke Dutch.

            Reynolds quotes Whitman on the differences between these three cultural zones essential to his upbringing: Long Island was "fertile, beautiful, well-watered" and boasted plenty of timber. Manhattan was "rocks, bare, bleak without anything to recommend it except situation for commercial purposes without rival in the world." Brooklyn, in between, had both beauty and location close to the action of commerce.

            In those days you got to Manhattan, where Whitman spent much of his young manhood working as a printer, then a writer and editor of newspapers, by a 15-minute ferry. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," his iconic poem of 19th American urban life, takes off from the original commute (the most universal of urban experiences)

            The poem has seen revived attention since it gave the title to the new, recently produced opera about Whitman's life, "Crossing," by Matthew Aucoin. The opera is set during Whitman's life as a devoted hospital visitor in Washington, D.C. during the Civil War, but relies on the poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" for its evocation of the world Whitman came from.

            We all come from somewhere. These three places essential to Walt Whitman's 19th century America, Long Island, Manhattan and Brooklyn, had changed beyond recognition by the time many of us were born and grew up in this region in the middle of the twentieth century. And they have gone on changing since then.

            But a region's genealogy tells us something -- about ourselves and about the world. These places, fertile Long Island, Brooklyn with its many neighborhoods, Manhattan the commercial engine of an endlessly reinvented metropolis, remain vibrant settings for the American drama. Which is also -- Whitman's genius recognized this essential point -- the universal drama of life on earth. In lines from "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" that are incorporated into the opera "Crossing," he writes:

            Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!

            On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,

            And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

Showing the Flag Irises: the Garden in High Spring

                 The iris is the colored part of your eye. In Greek mythology Iris is one of those many 'other' gods and goddesses not included on the 'A' list of Olympian celebrities. Also described as the personification of the rainbow -- maybe there's a clue for an answer -- she is  goddess of the sea and sky who serves as a messenger of the gods. Thereby, learned sources tell us, linking the gods to us little people here below. The question is how did this divine character name come to be applied to the showy perennial that flourishes in late May and early June? Maybe it's the plant's ability to produce flowers in all the colors of the rainbow? Maybe Iris flowers are thought, in some way, to channel the beauty of the immortals -- creatures who tend to lie around in flower gardens (no ants at their picnic) -- to mortal nature.

            One thing everybody who grows irises knows about these blossoms is they're not immortal. You have to catch them while you can, because they don't last long.

            The other interesting term is "flag iris," which a little research tells me is apparently the common gardener's term for the species Iris Versicolor ("changeable in color"). Varieties include the Blue Flag, Harlequin Blueflag, Larger Blue Flag, Northern Blue Flag, and Poison Flag. In the UK and Ireland it's called Purple Iris.

            I don't which kinds of flags we're flying here in the back garden, but I am happy to report that this spring the flower is really flying. Anne said the blossoms look like prom dresses. I can't think of a better comparison.

            I transplanted these irises a couple of years ago to their current situation in the hope of giving them more sun, or even just a change of scene, from a place where most of them were failing to bloom. It took them a couple of years to settle in. This year they're dressing up a whole ballroom in fancy dress 'flag' blossoms.

            The photos here come from a week ago.

            I've thought of irises as June bloomers. We haven't had any June yet this year, because the first few days of the month were given over to after-effects from the last day of May wallopaloozer

downpour that delivered an average month-of-May rainfall in a single day, after a month-long drought.

            Happily our irises appear oblivious to the changes in weather. We have another big sweet flag iris bombshell on the way that I haven't tried to get a photo yet because they're still emerging.

            Another high-spring merry month of May bloomer that sparkled this year is speedwell, (fourth photo) which I have come to learn is technically veronica, or veronica officinalis. The word "speedwell" means thrive, and it's a good name for such hardy fellows. Veronica comes from Saint Veronica, and the connection of the flower to the death of Jesus is another one of those grim legends I'm going to omit repeating here.

            I've planted speedwell in various places in our garden, both in front of the house and in the back garden, because it's hardy and reliable, and the flowers come in a charming variety of blue, or blue and white shades. And because they are just so "May."

            I'm sorry to see the high tide of May flow away from us so quickly. The only compensation is we're smack into the high-sun, high-octane bloom season of June.