Plum Pudding by Christopher Morley

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[Illustration]

FULTON STREET, AND WALT WHITMAN

At the suggestion of Mr. Christopher Clarke, the Three Hours for
Lunch Club made pilgrimage to the old seafaring tavern at No. 2
Fulton Street, and found it to be a heavenly place, with listing
brass-shod black walnut stairs and the equally black and delightful
waiter called Oliver, who (said Mr. Clarke) has been there since
1878.

But the club reports that the swordfish steak, of which it partook
as per Mr. Clarke's suggestion, did not appeal so strongly to its
taste. Swordfish steak, we feel, is probably a taste acquired by
long and diligent application. At the first trial it seemed to the
club a bit too reptilian in flavour. The club will go there again,
and will hope to arrive in time to grab one of those tables by the
windows, looking out over the docks and the United Fruit Company
steamer which is so appropriately named the _Banan_; but it is the
sense of the meeting that swordfish steak is not in its line.

The club retorts to Mr. Clarke by asking him if he knows the
downtown chophouse where one may climb sawdusted stairs and sit in a
corner beside a framed copy of the _New-York Daily Gazette_ of May
1, 1789, at a little table incised with the initials of former
habitues, and hold up toward the light a glass of the clearest and
most golden and amberlucent cider known to mankind, and before
attacking a platter of cold ham and Boston beans, may feel that
smiling sensation of a man about to make gradual and decent advances
toward a ripe and ruddy appetite.

Fulton Street has always been renowned for its taverns. The Old
Shakespeare Tavern used to be there, as is shown by the tablet at
No. 136 commemorating the foundation of the Seventh Regiment. The
club has always intended to make more careful exploration of Dutch
Street, the little alley that runs off Fulton Street on the south
side, not far from Broadway. There is an eating place on this byway,
and the organization plans to patronize it, in order to have an
excuse for giving itself the sub-title of the Dutch Street Club. The
more famous eating houses along Fulton Street are known to all: the
name of at least one of them has a genial Queen Anne sound. And
only lately a very seemly coffee house was established not far
from Fulton and Nassau. We must confess our pleasure in the
fact that this place uses as its motto a footnote from The
_Spectator_--"Whoever wished to find a gentleman commonly asked not
where he resided, but which coffee house he frequented."

Among the many things to admire along Fulton Street (not the least
of which are Dewey's puzzling perpetually fluent grape-juice bottle,
and the shop where the trained ferrets are kept, for chasing out
rats, mice, and cockroaches from your house, the sign says) we vote
for that view of the old houses along the south side of the street,
where it widens out toward the East River. This vista of tall,
leaning chimneys seems to us one of the most agreeable things in New
York, and we wonder whether any artist has ever drawn it. As our
colleague Endymion suggested, it would make a fine subject for
Walter Jack Duncan. In the eastern end of this strip of fine old
masonry resides the seafaring tavern we spoke of above; formerly
known as Sweet's, and a great place of resort (we are told) for
Brooklynites in the palmy days before the Bridge was opened, when
they used to stop there for supper before taking the Fulton Ferry
across the perilous tideway.

The Fulton Ferry--dingy and deserted now--is full of fine memories.
The old waiting room, with its ornate carved ceiling and fine,
massive gas brackets, peoples itself, in one's imagination, with the
lively and busy throngs of fifty and sixty years ago. "My life then
(1850-60) was curiously identified with Fulton Ferry, already
becoming the greatest in the world for general importance, volume,
variety, rapidity, and picturesqueness." So said Walt Whitman. It is
a curious experience to step aboard one of the boats in the drowsy
heat of a summer afternoon and take the short voyage over to the
Brooklyn slip, underneath one of the huge piers of the Bridge. A few
heavy wagons and heat-oppressed horses are almost the only other
passengers. Not far away from the ferry, on the Brooklyn side, are
the three charmingly named streets--Cranberry, Orange, and
Pineapple--which are also so lastingly associated with Walt
Whitman's life. It strikes us as odd, incidentally, that Walt, who
loved Brooklyn so much, should have written a phrase so capable of
humorous interpretation as the following: "Human appearances and
manners--endless humanity in all its phases--Brooklyn also." This
you will find in Walt's Prose Works, which is (we suppose) one of
the most neglected of American classics.

[Illustration: Drawing of "Lightning" statue]

But Fulton Street, Manhattan--in spite of its two greatest triumphs:
Evelyn Longman Batchelder's glorious figure of "Lightning," and the
strictly legal "three grains of pepsin" which have been a comfort to
so many stricken invalids--is a mere byway compared to Fulton
Street, Brooklyn, whose long bustling channel may be followed right
out into the Long Island pampas. At the corner of Fulton and
Cranberry streets "Leaves of Grass" was set up and printed, Walt
Whitman himself setting a good deal of the type. Ninety-eight
Cranberry Street, we have always been told, was the address of
Andrew and James Rome, the printers. The house at that corner is
still numbered 98. The ground floor is occupied by a clothing store,
a fruit stand, and a barber shop. The building looks as though it is
probably the same one that Walt knew. Opposite it is a sign where
the comparatively innocent legend BEN'S PURE LAGER has been
deleted.

The pilgrim on Fulton Street will also want to have a look at the
office of the Brooklyn _Eagle_, that famous paper which has numbered
among its employees two such different journalists as Walt Whitman
and Edward Bok. There are many interesting considerations to be
drawn from the two volumes of Walt's writings for the _Eagle_, which
were collected (under the odd title "The Gathering of the Forces")
by Cleveland Rodgers and John Black. We have always been struck by
the complacent naivete of Walt's judgments on literature (written,
perhaps, when he was in a hurry to go swimming down at the foot of
Fulton Street). Such remarks as the following make us ponder a
little sadly. Walt wrote:

We are no admirer of such characters as Doctor Johnson. He was
a sour, malicious, egotistical man. He was a sycophant of power
and rank, withal; his biographer narrates that he "always spoke
with rough contempt of popular liberty." His head was educated
to the point of _plus_, but for his heart, might still more
unquestionably stand the sign _minus_. He insulted his equals
... and tyrannized over his inferiors. He fawned upon his
superiors, and, of course, loved to be fawned upon himself....
Nor were the freaks of this man the mere "eccentricities of
genius"; they were probably the faults of a vile, low nature.
His soul was a bad one.

The only possible comment on all this is that it is absurd, and that
evidently Walt knew very little about the great Doctor. One of the
curious things about Walt--and there is no man living who admires
him more than we do--is that he requires to be forgiven more
generously than any other great writer. There is no one who has ever
done more grotesquely unpardonable things than he--and yet, such is
the virtue of his great, saline simplicity, one always pardons them.
As a book reviewer, to judge from the specimens rescued from the
_Eagle_ files by his latest editors, he was uniquely childish.

Noting the date of Walt's blast on Doctor Johnson (December 7,
1846), it is doubtful whether we can attribute the irresponsibility
of his remarks to a desire to go swimming.

The editors of this collection venture the suggestion that the
lighter pieces included show Walt as "not devoid of humour." We fear
that Walt's waggishness was rather heavily shod. Here is a sample of
his light-hearted paragraphing (the italics are his):--

Carelessly knocking a man's eye out with a broken axe, may be
termed a _bad axe-i-dent_.

It was in Leon Bazalgette's "Walt Whitman" that we learned of Walt's
only really humorous achievement; and even then the humour was
unconscious. It seems that during the first days of his life as a
journalist in New York, Walt essayed to compromise with Mannahatta
by wearing a frock coat, a high hat, and a flower in his lapel. We
regret greatly that no photo of Walt in this rig has been preserved,
for we would like to have seen the gentle misery of his bearing.

[Illustration]

McSORLEY'S

This afternoon we have been thinking how pleasant it would be to sit
at one of those cool tables up at McSorley's and write our copy
there. We have always been greatly allured by Dick Steele's habit of
writing his Tatler at his favourite tavern. You remember his
announcement, dated April 12, 1709:

All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment, shall
be under the article of White's Chocolate-house; poetry, under
that of Will's Coffee-house; learning, under the title of The
Grecian; foreign and domestic news, you will have from Saint
James's Coffee-house; and what else I have to offer on any
other subject shall be dated from my own apartment.

Sir Dick--would one speak of him as the first colyumist?--continued
by making what is, we suppose, one of the earliest references in
literature to the newspaper man's "expense account." But the
expenses of the reporter two centuries ago seem rather modest.
Steele said:

I once more desire my reader to consider that as I cannot keep
an ingenious man to go daily to Will's under twopence each day,
merely for his charges; to White's under sixpence; nor to The
Grecian, without allowing him some plain Spanish, to be as able
as others at the learned table; and that a good observer cannot
speak with even Kidney[*] at Saint James's without clean linen:
I say, these considerations will, I hope, make all persons
willing to comply with my humble request of a penny-a-piece.

[* Evidently the bus boy.]

But what we started to say was that if, like Dick Steele, we were in
the habit of dating our stuff from various inns around the town, our
choice for a quiet place in which to compose items of "gallantry,
pleasure, and entertainment" would be McSorley's--"The Old House at
Home"--up on Seventh Street. We had feared that this famous old
cabin of cheer might have gone west in the recent evaporation; but
rambling round in the neighbourhood of the Cooper Union we saw its
familiar doorway with a shock of glad surprise. After all, there is
no reason why the old-established houses should not go on doing a
good business on a Volstead basis. It has never been so much a
question of what a man drinks as the atmosphere in which he drinks
it. Atrocious cleanliness and glitter and raw naked marble make the
soda fountains a disheartening place to the average male. He likes
a dark, low-ceilinged, and not too obtrusively sanitary place to
take his ease. At McSorley's is everything that the innocent
fugitive from the world requires. The great amiable cats that purr
in the back room. The old pictures and playbills on the walls. The
ancient clocks that hoarsely twang the hours. We cannot imagine a
happier place to sit down with a pad of paper and a well-sharpened
pencil than at that table in the corner by the window. Or the table
just under that really lovely little portrait of Robert Burns--would
there be any more propitious place in New York at which to fashion
verses? There would be no interruptions, such as make versifying
almost impossible in a newspaper office. The friendly bartenders in
their lilac-coloured shirts are wise and gracious men. They would
not break in upon one's broodings. Every now and then, while the hot
sun smote the awnings outside, there would be another china mug of
that one-half-of-1-per-cent. ale, which seems to us very good. We
repeat: we don't care so much what we drink as the surroundings
among which we drink it. We are not, if you will permit the phrase,
sot in our ways. We like the spirit of McSorley's, which is decent,
dignified, and refined. No club has an etiquette more properly
self-respecting.

One does not go to McSorley's without a glimpse at that curious old
red pile Bible House. It happened this way: Our friend Endymion was
back from his vacation and we were trying to celebrate it in modest
fashion. We were telling him all the things that had happened since
he went away--that Bob Holliday had had a fortieth birthday, and
Frank Shay had published his bibliography of Walt Whitman, and all
that sort of thing; and in our mutual excitement Endymion whisked
too swiftly round a corner and caught his jacket on a sharp
door-latch and tore it. Inquiring at Astor Place's biggest
department store as to where we could get it mended, they told us to
go to "Mr. Wright the weaver" on the sixth floor of Bible House, and
we did so. On our way back, avoiding the ancient wire rope elevator
(we know only one other lift so delightfully mid-Victorian, viz.,
one in Boston, that takes you upstairs to see Edwin Edgett, the
gentle-hearted literary editor of the Boston _Transcript_), we
walked down the stairs, peeping into doorways in great curiosity.
The whole building breathed a dusky and serene quaintness that
pricks the imagination. It is a bit like the shop in Edinburgh (on
the corner of the Leith Walk and Antigua Street, if we remember)
that R.L.S. described in "A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured"--"it
was dark and smelt of Bibles." We looked in at the entrance to the
offices of the _Christian Herald_. The Bowling Green thought that
what he saw was two young ladies in close and animated converse; but
Endymion insisted that it was one young lady doing her hair in front
of a large mirror. "Quite a pretty little picture," said Endymion.
We argued about this as we went down the stairs. Finally we went
back to make sure. Endymion was right. Even in the darkness of Bible
House, we agreed, romance holds sway. And then we found a book shop
on the ground floor of Bible House. One of our discoveries there was
"Little Mr. Bouncer," by Cuthbert Bede--a companion volume to "Mr.
Verdant Green."

But Dick Steele's idea of writing his column from different taverns
round the city is rather gaining ground in our affections. There
would be no more exciting way of spending a fortnight or so than in
taking a walking tour through the forests of New York, camping
for the night wherever we happened to find ourself at dark,
Adam-and-Evesdropping as we went, and giving the nearest small boy
fifty cents to take our copy down to the managing editor. Some of
our enterprising clients, who are not habitual commuters and who
live in a state of single cussedness, might try it some time.

The only thing we missed at McSorley's, we might add, was the
old-time plate of onions. But then we were not there at lunch time,
and the pungent fruit may have been hidden away in the famous tall
ice box. Hutchins Hapgood once said, in an article about McSorley's
in _Harper's Weekly_: "The wives of the men who frequent McSorley's
always know where their husbands have been. There is no mistaking a
McSorley onion." He was right. The McSorley onion--"rose among
roots"--was _sui generis_. It had a reach and authenticity all its
own.

We have said a good deal, now and then, about some of the taverns
and chophouses we enjoy; but the one that tingles most strongly in
our bosom is one that doesn't exist. That is the chophouse that
might be put in the cellar of that glorious old round-towered
building at 59 Ann Street.

As you go along Ann Street, you will come, between numbers 57 and
61, to an old passage-way running down to a curious courtyard, which
is tenanted mostly by carpenters and iron-workers, and by a crowded
store which seems to be a second-hand ship-chandlery, for old
sea-boots, life preservers, fenders, ship's lanterns, and flags hang
on the wall over the high stairway. In the cellars are smithies
where you will see the bright glare of a forge and men with faces
gleaming in tawny light pulling shining irons out of the fire. The
whole place is too fascinating to be easily described. That
round-tower house is just our idea of the right place for a quiet
tavern or club, where one would go in at lunch time, walk over a
sawdusted floor to a table bleached by many litres of slopovers,
light a yard of clay, and call for a platter of beefsteak pie. The
downtown region is greatly in need of the kind of place we have in
mind, and if any one cares to start a chophouse in that heavenly
courtyard, the Three Hours for Lunch Club pledges itself to attend
regularly.

[Illustration]

A PORTRAIT

"My idea of life," said my friend S----, "would be to have a nice
lawn running down to the water, several deck-chairs, plenty of
tobacco, and three or four of us to sit there all day long and
listen to B---- talk."

I suppose that B----,--I wish I could name him, but it would be an
indecency to do so, for part of his charm is his complete
unconsciousness of the affection, and even adoration, of the little
group of younger men who call themselves his "fans"--I suppose that
B----'s talk is as nearly Johnsonian in virtue and pungency as any
spoken wisdom now hearable in this country. To know him is, in the
absolute truth of that enduring phrase, a liberal education. To his
simplicity, his valorous militancy for truth, he joins the mind of
a great scholar, the placable spirit of an eager child.

I said "Johnsonian"--yet even in the great Doctor as we have him
recorded there were a certain truculence and vehemence that are a
little foreign to B----'s habit. Fearless champion as he is, there
is always a gentleness about him. Even when his voice deepens and he
is well launched on a long argument, he is never brutally dogmatic,
never cruelly discourteous.

The beauty of B----'s talk, the quality that would make it a
delight to listen to him all a summer afternoon, is that he gives,
unconsciously, a perfect exhibition of a perfect process, a great mind
in motion. His mind is too full, too crowded, too ratiocinative, for
easy and frugal utterance. Sometimes, unless one is an acute listener,
he is almost incoherent in his zeal to express all the phases and
facets of the thought that flashes upon him. And yet, if one could
(unknown to him) have a stenographer behind the arras to take it all
down, so that his argument could be analyzed at leisure, it would show
its anatomical knitting and structure. Do you remember how Burke's
speech on Conciliation was parsed and sub-headed in the preface to the
school-texts? Just so, in I and II and III, A. B. and C, ([alpha]),
([beta]), and ([gamma]), i, ii, and iii, we could articulate the
strict and bony logic that vertebrates B----'s talk. Reservations,
exceptions, qualifications, parentheses, sub-clauses, and humorous
paraphrases swim upon him as he goes, and he deals with each as it
comes. Sometimes, one thinks, he has lost the spine of the discourse,
is mazed in a ganglion of nerves and sinews. But no! give him time and
back he comes to the marrow of his theme!

What a happiness this is to listen to--he (bless his heart) now and
then apologizing for his copiousness, little dreaming that we are
all better men for hearing him; that his great gray head and clear
kindly eye ("His mild and magnificent eye": whose is that phrase?)
are to us a symbol of Socratic virtue and power; that there is not
one of us who, after an hour or so with him, does not depart with
private resolutions of honour and fidelity to wisdom. How he
irrigates his subject, whatever it is.

I'll tell you who Time gallops withal! It is when B---- sits down at
a corner table of some chophouse, and (the rest of us seeing to it
that the meal gets ordered, and now and then saying something about
the food so that he will remember to eat) we marvel to watch the
glow and business of a mind so great paired with a heart so simple.

"My idea is this," he says, "subject to an exception which I will
state in a moment." Taking up his exception, he makes it so lucid,
so pregnant, so comprehensive, so irresistible, that it seems to us
the whole and satisfying dogma; and then, suddenly turning it
inside-outward, he reveals the seams, and we remember that it was
only a trifling nexus in the rational series. He returns to his main
thesis, and other counterpoising arguments occur to him. He outlines
them, with delicious AEsopian sagacity. "Of course this analysis is
only quantitative, not qualitative," he says. "But I will now
restate my position with all the necessary reservations, and we'll
see if it will hold water."

We smile, and look at each other slyly, in the sheer happiness of
enjoying a perfect work of art. He must be a mere quintain, a poor
lifeless block, who does not revel in such an exhibition, where
those two rare qualities of mind--honesty and agility--are locked in
one.

Of course--it is hardly necessary to say--we do not always agree
with everything he says. But we could not disagree with _him_; for
we see that his broad, shrewd, troubled spirit could take no other
view, arising out of the very multitude and swarm and pressure of
his thought. Those who plod diligently and narrowly along a country
lane may sometimes reach the destination less fatigued than the more
conscientious and passionate traveller who quarters the fields and
beats the bounds, intent to leave no covert unscrutinized. But in
him we see and love and revere something rare and precious, not
often found in our present way of life; in matters concerning the
happiness of others, a devoted spirit of unrivalled wisdom; in those
pertaining to himself, a child's unblemished innocence. The
perplexities of others are his daily study; his own pleasures, a
constant surprise.

[Illustration]

GOING TO PHILADELPHIA

I

Every intelligent New Yorker should be compelled, once in so often,
to run over to Philadelphia and spend a few days quietly and
observantly prowling.

Any lover of America is poor indeed unless he has savoured and
meditated the delicious contrast of these two cities, separated by
so few miles and yet by a whole world of philosophy and metaphysics.
But he is a mere tyro of the two who has only made the voyage by the
P.R.R. The correct way to go is by the Reading, which makes none of
those annoying intermediate stops at Newark, Trenton, and so on,
none of that long detour through West Philadelphia, starts you off
with a ferry ride and a background of imperial campaniles and
lilac-hazed cliffs and summits in the superb morning light. And the
Reading route, also, takes you through a green Shakespearean land of
beauty, oddly different from the flat scrubby plains traversed by
the Pennsy. Consider, if you will, the hills of the idyllic
Huntington Valley as you near Philadelphia; or the little white town
of Hopewell, N.J., with its pointing church spire. We have often
been struck by the fact that the foreign traveller between New York
and Washington on the P.R.R. must think America the most flat,
dreary, and uninteresting countryside in the world. Whereas if he
would go from Jersey City by the joint Reading-Central New
Jersey-B.&O. route, how different he would find it. No, we are not
a Reading stockholder.

We went over to Philly, after having been unfaithful to her for too
many months. Now we have had from time to time, most menacing
letters from indignant clients, protesting that we have been
unfaithful to all the tenets and duties of a Manhattan journalist
because we have with indecent candour confessed an affection for
both Brooklyn and Philadelphia. We lay our cards on the table. We
can't help it. Philadelphia was the first large city we ever knew,
and how she speaks to us! And there's a queer thing about
Philadelphia, hardly believable to the New Yorker who has never
conned her with an understanding eye. You emerge from the Reading
Terminal (or, if you will, from Broad Street Station) with just a
little superbness of mood, just a tinge of worldly disdain, as
feeling yourself fresh from the grandeur of Manhattan and showing
perhaps (you fondly dream) some pride of metropolitan bearing. Very
well. Within half an hour you will be apologizing for New York. In
their quiet, serene, contented way those happy Philadelphians will
be making you a little shame-faced of the bustling madness of our
heaven-touching Babel. Of course, your secret adoration of
Manhattan, the greatest wild poem ever begotten by the heart of man,
is not readily transmissible. You will stammer something of what it
means to climb upward from the subway on a spring morning and see
that golden figure over Fulton Street spreading its shining wings
above the new day. And they will smile gently, that knowing, amiable
Philadelphia smile.

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