Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America

Parry cites Whitman's remark "Yes, Tom, I like your tinkles: I like them very well" and the enemy he made in Aldrich as an example of Whitman's tendency to be rude when others "shone" at Pfaff's (41).

Parry writes that "In the 'Seventies and 'Eighties, prosperity, which began its deadly work among the Pfaffians even before the war, raged untrammeled. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, associate editor of the Saturday Press, who at times kept ledgers on the water-front of New York and composed his 'Baby Bell' on the backs and margins of bills of lading, was destined to become the editor of the Atlantic Monthly and a leader among the despised Philistines" (61).

According to Parry, Aldrich and Howells became members of John Boyle O'Reilly's Papyrus Club in Boston, the "headquarters of Bohemia" in that city in the early 1870s. Parry is certain that when these two men were elected to the group they did not know that the club's aim was to support the Bohemian lifestyle

Decades after his death, Briggs and Thomas English were named by Stoddard as Poe's "Bohemian friends."

Burroughs worked with Clapp at the Saturday Press. Clapp also introduced Burroughs to Whitman, as he knew both men through the Saturday Press, which is also how Burroughs took notice of Whitman's work.

Her professional stage debut was in 1858 at Wallack's Lyceum.

Parry mentions Clemenceau as one of the visitors to Pfaff's in the late 1860s and 1870s, when the "saloon prospered commercially but not intellectually." Parry writes, "At the end of the late 'Sixties, just before he began to hate everything German, a poor, struggling French teacher, doctor, and journalist, Georges Clemenceau by name, frequented the saloon, and later the protrait of the Tiger-to-be hung in a yellow frame on the wall" (61).

English was mentioned by Stoddard as one of Poe's Bohemian friends.

Parry reprints the illustration "An Artists' Boarding-House" from Gunn's book, The Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses on p.23.

Parry mentions that Herbert's (Frank Forester) suicide followed North's on May 16, 1858. Like North, Herbert was "another roving Englishman." Parry writes, "This prolific writer on game, the first in America to introduce hunting and fishing into ficiotn on an extensive scale , still read by hordes of rural American sportsman of today, was an aristocrat among the Bohemians of New York. He appeared among them rarely, and as seldom he included them among his guests at his New Jersey estate of the Cedars. An older man than most of the mansarders, he treated them with a certain touch of lordly superiority (he was, indeed, related to the Earl of Carnarvon), but he insisted that he was part of New York's Bohemia. The Pfaffians gladly accepted him as their own man. His literary temper tantrums and his stormy love affairs were among the most favorite topics in Clapp's circle. When his last young wife left him, Herbert-Forester arranged a grand dinner at the Stevens House on Broadway, near Bowling Green. There he invited his friends to eat, drink, and see him shoot himself dead before a large mirror" (49-50).

In discussing Poe's use of drugs, Parry writes "There was no idle interest and no empty pretension in Poe's sporadic use of drugs. He did not start it out of bravado as Fitz Hugh Ludlow and many other imitators did years later" (6).

According to Parry, after Arnold's death, Ludlow was the next to go in September, 1870. Ludlow was a native New Yorker, unlike many of the Pfaffians. According to Parry, "He was also the first Amernica art-zany to die abroad, but it was in Geneva and not on the Left Bank of the Seine that he finished his days." According to Parry, the "respectable Harpers had published his confessions of a hasheesh easter in the belief that he had cured himself of the terrible habit, but if he really did so it was only to continue with opium." Parry also writes that "His activity was the more picturesque since, like Arnold, he was the son of a clergyman, and himself once planned to take the orders. He wrote some of the best American student songs, was interested in the children's theaters, wrote many stories and verses for the young, and made a trip to the Mormon land, of which he wrote interestingly. But above all he tried to be the American De Quincey" (55).

Parry mentions that the second run of the Saturday Press ended by "introducing Mark Twain and his 'Jumping Frog' to the Atlantic coast and actually starting the snowball of his nation-wide fame" (25). Twain is also mentioned as a contributor to the Golden Era (29). Twain and Bret Harte would be made honorary members of the California Bohemian Club in 1873 (219).