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| Available wherever fine anthologies are sold. (Booze not included.) |
In that book was a reference to Nast’s favorite New York watering hole, Pfaff’s, a coffeehouse/cafe/bar that was popular with a burgeoning class of colorful artists, writers, and theater folks in Greenwich Village in the mid-19th century. Its heyday would have been the 1850s and 1860s.
In its lifetime, Pfaff’s had at least three different incarnations. Two locations—on Broadway near Bleecker Street—were situated in the neighborhood where I had worked for Scholastic back in the day. In my mind’s eye I could picture those old buildings with little effort. But I probably wouldn’t have done much with my newfound knowledge if it weren’t for synchronicity.
You know how you read about some obscure thing and it begins popping up everywhere you look? As months turned to years, whenever a piece about Pfaff’s appeared, I’d tuck that fresh article away on my hard drive.
Pfaff’s worked its magic on me. For a time, it was a rathskeller with vaulted-brick ceilings located under a busy hotel. (See images here and here.) Giant hogshead beer barrels. A gas lamp chandelier. Foreign-language newspapers on every table. It was an epicenter for America’s blooming literary and artistic culture. The round table before there was ever an Algonquin.
It was also New York’s first gay-friendly establishment, where male and female same-sex couples could hang out in a darkened vault in the back without fear of judgment. Patrons declaimed poetry, argued politics, drank heavily, and pleaded with Mr. Pfaff to let them ride the tab till their next payday. He often acquiesced, because thanks to these beautiful loons, Pfaff’s had become famous coast to coast.
Early on, I had the barest ghost of a story idea. Nast hung out here. So did Edwin Booth. But by far the most famous Pfaff’s regular was Walt Whitman, who left behind one unfinished poem about the joint. (One line of that poem inspired the title of this post.)
Cool, I thought, there’s a murder at Pfaff’s, and Whitman and Nast team up to solve it. Easy-peasy.
But I couldn’t possibly start writing based on such a flimsy premise, could I?
I am on the record as a serial over-researcher, knowing that my process often teeters close to obsession. I usually research until everything I read starts to sound repetitive. Then I know it is time to stop. This ritual is propelled by a fear that I will get something wrong, and incur the wrath of those who know better. This grew out of my years in journalism, when there might have been serious repercussions for getting a fact or assertion wrong. An old journalism professor of mine offered this advice on research: “You’ll never become an expert on a new topic. But with enough reporting, you can become a semi-expert.”
Fiction often doesn’t demand that level of research, but old habits die hard. This time around, however, there were signs that I had grown weary of my own shtick. I had just investigated the heck out of Manhattan in the days of the Dutch (1625 to 1660) and New York during the protest era (1960s) for two other fiction projects. I’d written an 1890s New York crime short, and a 1970s Serpico-like crime fantasy short, both of which were pubbed in AHMM. Thanks to that Nast book, I knew a ton about the artist, but I didn’t know if I could spare the time to “become a semi-expert” on Whitman. Indeed, I doubted such a thing was even possible.
Then came a call for submissions. Our editors challenged us to write a short crime story involving…a bar. If this was not fate knocking, I didn’t know what was. Thankfully, I had plenty of time to
I cracked open my Pfaff’s file. To whet my appetite, I read two long scholarly papers, and browsed a Pfaff’s-dedicated website maintained by Lehigh University. (Yes, Pfaff’s is that well known and revered.) I perused articles about an NYU professor who guides people on Whitman tours. It appears that one Pfaff’s location still exists. The current renters of the space sometimes allow Whitman geeks to parade through the basement so long as visitors are careful not to disturb the boxes of merchandise destined for their Korean grocery upstairs.
I had not read Whitman since high school. I bought two modern volumes, The Portable Walt Whitman and The Collected Poems. Digging into those introductions and hearing his voice in my head again gave me one of my story’s conceits. I would presume to write bad poetry in Whitman’s style, only to have my fictional character reject them as they came to his mind. Among other things, I learned that he loved walking the city, as anyone who adores that island does. Like any good flatfoot, he would have known his nabe like the back of his hand.
I supplemented the literary research by reviewing some of his letters and photos at The Walt Whitman Archive, and a couple of decent articles about his relationships. It broke my heart to learn that at the end of his life, knowing that his papers would be scrutinized upon his death, he edited his journals, changing the pronouns of some of his lovers from him to her. I read one piece about the playful cross-dressing that most likely went on at Pfaff’s, which planted the seed for my plot. I found a long, shocking article that claimed that many of the encounters Whitman described in his encoded, private notebook involved males of an age that would greatly concern us today. (Before you judge Walt, consider the relative ages of Mr. and Mrs. Poe; he age 26, she age 13 when wed.)
I was not qualified to assess those claims. I needed just enough details to write a detective story. I shifted to assembling my prosaic details. What sort of food did Charles Ignatius Pfaff offer his patrons? (Slabs of roast beef, German pancakes, Frankfurter wurst, raw clams and oysters, salt herring with black bread, and so on.) What sorts of drinks? (Fancy European tipples, of course, along with the delightful new style of beverage immigrant German brewers had gifted their new American neighbors: lager.) I researched old Hoboken-New York-Brooklyn ferry lines, the old NYPD Tombs building, New York’s horse-drawn transit systems, the first Bellevue Hospital, and the protocols for visiting early city morgues,
I talked to a doctor about how one might successfully stab an obese man in the back. I researched how early physicians diagnosed various forms of cancer. I re-read a book by the historian Harold Holzer on Abraham Lincoln’s famous February 1860 speech at Cooper Union, because that (nonfiction) book was set in the very same neighborhood at about the same time as my proposed story. Holzer’s descriptions of Lower Broadway were incredibly helpful.
At the end of all this, our modern pandemic was still raging, I had 45 pages of copious, pencil-written notes, and had not written a single word of my story.
Instead of freeing me up, my much-vaunted “process” failed me. I was now terrified to write this thing, for all the wrong reasons. I am not a poet. I am not a historian. I am not a literary scholar. I am not gay. I was just a guy who loved beer and old New York bars.
I should have embraced those credentials and run with them. But no. I had just come across a book specifically about Whitman’s place in the bohemian world. Essay after essay written by People In The Know. In other words, academics. Oh cool, I thought. Maybe these experts could teach a wannabe semi-expert what he needed to know.
Skimming even just a few pages of that text convinced me to stop this bullsh*t already and write the damn story. It dawned on me that I had absorbed so much Pfaffian history that I could write the story blind. And I would need to, because that tome made my eyes bleed.
All of which to say, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bled” is now out in Murder, Neat: A SleuthSayers Anthology. Go forth and read it lustily. It pairs well with a cool lager, pork schnitzel, and a robust German mustard. And yes, I probably left too much of my research on its pages, but you know what? Totally cool with it.
Let me assure you that I’ve long since recovered from my dubious labors, and am happily collecting material for two other historical “shorts.” One set during the American Revolutionary War, the other in Renaissance Italy.
Mark my words: I have resolved to never over-research again. In fact, I’m pretty confident that I’ll have both of these pieces wrapped in time for the 2068 SleuthSayers anthology. Go SLEUTHS!
See you next time!
Joe
