Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  “Am I the right sort of man to guide ingenuous youth? Not a bit of it!” Lowell heard himself speak these words a third of the way through a lecture on Don Quixote. “And then, on the other hand,” he speculated, “my being a professor isn’t good for me—dampens my gunpowder, as it were, so my mind, when it takes fire at all, crawls off in an unwilling fuse instead of leaping to meet the first spark.”

  Two concerned students tried to take him by the arm when he almost fell over. Lowell wobbled to the window and extended his head outside, eyes closed. Instead of feeling the cool brush of air he hoped for, there was an unexpected stroke of heat, as though Hell were tickling his nose and cheeks. He rubbed his mustache tusks, and they felt warm and moist too. Opening his eyes, he saw a triangle of flames down below. Lowell scrambled out of the classroom and down the stone stairs of University Hall. Down in Harvard Yard, a bonfire crackled voraciously.

  Surrounding it, a semicircle of august men stared down at the flames with great attention. They were feeding books from a large pile to the fire. There were local Unitarian and Congregationalist ministers, fellows from the Harvard Corporation, and a few representatives of the Harvard Board of Overseers. One picked up a pamphlet, crushed it, and flung it like a ball. Everyone cheered as it hit the flames. Rushing forward, Lowell got down on one knee and pulled it out. The cover was too charred to read, so he opened the seared title page: In Defense of Charles Darwin and His Evolutionary Theory.

  Lowell couldn’t hold it any longer. Professor Louis Agassiz stood across from him on the other side of the fire, his face blurred and bent by fumes. The scientist waved amiably with both hands. “How fares your leg, Mr. Lowell? Ah, this—this is a must, Mr. Lowell, though a peety to waste good paper.”

  From a steam-filled window of the grotesquely Gothic granite Gore Hall, the College library, Dr. Augustus Manning, treasurer of the Corporation, looked down over the scene. Lowell rushed toward the massive entrance and through the nave, thankful for the composure and reason that came with each giant tread. No candles or gaslights were permitted in Gore Hall because of the danger of fire, so the library alcoves and the books were dim as the winter.

  “Manning!” Lowell bellowed, educing a reprimand from the librarian.

  Manning lurked on the platform above the reading room, gathering several books. “You have a lecture now, Professor Lowell. Leaving the students unsupervised shan’t be deemed acceptable conduct by the Harvard Corporation.”

  Lowell had to wipe his face with a handkerchief before climbing to the platform. “You dare burn books in an institution of learning!” The copper tubes of Gore Hall’s pioneering heating system always leaked steam, filling the library with billowing vapor that condensed into hot droplets on the windows, the books, and the students.

  “The religious world owes us, and owes especially your friend Professor Agassiz, a debt of gratitude for triumphantly combating the monstrous teaching that we are descended from monkeys, Professor. Your father certainly would have agreed.”

  “Agassiz is too smart,” Lowell said as he reached the top of the platform, breaking through the vapor. “He shall abandon you yet—count on it! Nothing that keeps thought out will ever be safe from thought!”

  Manning smiled, and his smile seemed to cut inward into his head. “Do you know, I raised a hundred thousand dollars for Agassiz’s museum through the Corporation. I daresay Agassiz will go exactly where I tell him.”

  “What is it, Manning? What makes you hate other men’s ideas?”

  Manning looked at Lowell sideways. As he answered, he lost the tight control of his voice. “We have been a noble country, with a simplicity of morals and justice, the last orphan child of the great Roman republic. Our world is strangled and demolished by infiltrators, newfangled notions of immorality coming in with every foreigner and every new idea against all the principles America was built upon. You see it yourself, Professor. Do you think we could have warred against ourselves twenty years ago? We have been poisoned. The war, our war, is far from over. It is just beginning. We have released demons into the very air we breathe. Revolutions, murders, thievery begin in our souls and move into the streets and our houses.” This was the closest to being emotional that Lowell had ever seen Manning. “Chief Justice Healey was in my graduating class, Lowell—he was one of our finest overseers—and now he has been done in by some mere beast whose only knowledge is the knowledge of death! The minds in Boston are under constant assault. Harvard is the last fortress for the protection of our sublimity. And that is under my charge!”

  Manning capped his sentiment: “You, Professor, have the luxury of rebellion only in absence of responsibility. You are truly a poet.”

  Lowell felt himself standing erect for the first time since Phineas Jennison’s death. This gave him a rush of new strength. “We put a race of men in chains a hundred years ago, and there began the war. America will continue to grow no matter how many minds you chain up now, Manning. I know you threatened Oscar Houghton that if he published Longfellow’s Dante translation there would be consequences.”

  Manning returned to the window and watched the orange fire. “And so there shall be, Professor Lowell. Italy is a world of the worst passions and loosest morals. And I welcome you to donate some copies of their Dante to Gore Hall, as some foolcap scientist did those Darwin books. That fire is where it will be swallowed up—an example to all who try to turn our institution into a shelter for ideas of filthy violence.”

  “Never shall I allow you,” Lowell responded. “Dante is the first Christian poet, the first one whose whole system of thought is colored by a purely Christian theology. But the poem comes nearer to us than this. It is the real history of a brother man, of a tempted, purified, and at last triumphant human soul; it teaches the benign ministry of sorrow. His is the first keel that ever ventured into the silent sea of human consciousness to find a new world of poetry. He held heartbreak at bay for twenty years, and would not let himself die until he had done his task. Neither shall Longfellow. Neither shall I.”

  Lowell turned and started to descend.

  “Three cheers, Professor.” From the platform, Manning glared impassively. “But perhaps not everyone shares the same views. I received a peculiar visit from a policeman, a Patrolman Rey. He inquired after your work on Dante. Did not explain why, and he left abruptly. Can you tell me why your work attracts the police to our revered ‘institution of learning’?”

  Lowell stopped and looked back toward Manning.

  Manning steepled his long fingers above his breastbone. “Some sensible men will rise up from your circle to betray you, Lowell—I promise that. No congregation of insurgents can stand together for long. If Mr. Houghton shall not cooperate to stop you, someone else will. Dr. Holmes, for instance.”

  Lowell wanted to leave, but he waited for more.

  “I warned him many months ago to disassociate himself from your translation project or suffer severe damage to his reputation. What do you think he did?”

  Lowell shook his head.

  “He called on me at home and confided in me that he agreed with my assessment.”

  “You lie, Manning!”

  “Oh, so Dr. Holmes has remained dedicated to the cause?” he asked as though he knew much more than Lowell could imagine.

  Lowell bit his quivering lip.

  Manning shook his head and smiled. “The miserable little manikin is your Benedict Arnold awaiting instructions, Professor Lowell.”

  “Believe that when I am once a man’s friend I am always so—nor is it so very hard to bring me to it. And though a man may enjoy himself in being my enemy, he cannot make me his for longer than I wish. Good afternoon.” Lowell had a way of leaving a conversation with the other person needing more from him.

  Manning shadowed Lowell down to the reading room and caught him by the arm. “I do not understand how you can put your good name, everything you’ve worked for your whole life, on the line for something like this, Professor.”


  Lowell jerked away. “But don’t you wish to heaven you could, Manning?”

  He returned to his class in time to dismiss his students.

  If the murderer had somehow been monitoring Longfellow’s translation and was racing them to completion, the Dante Club had little choice but to complete the thirteen remaining Inferno cantos with the utmost speed. They agreed to divide into two smaller camps: a company of investigators and a company of translators.

  Lowell and Fields would labor in reviewing their evidence while Longfellow and George Washington Greene toiled over the translation in the study. Fields had informed Greene, to the old minister’s great delight, that the translation had been placed on a strict schedule, in view of its immediate completion: There were nine previously unreviewed cantos, one partially translated, and two with which Longfellow was not fully satisfied. Longfellow’s servant, Peter, would deliver the proofs to Riverside as Longfellow finished and take Trap for his constitutionals while doing so.

  “It makes no sense!”

  “Then move on from it, Lowell,” said Fields from his place in the library’s deep armchair, which had once belonged to Longfellow’s grandfather, a great Revolutionary War general. He watched Lowell carefully. “Sit down. Your face is bright red. Have you slept at all lately?”

  Lowell ignored him. “What would qualify Jennison as a Schismatic? Particularly in that pouch of Hell, each of the shades Dante chooses to single out is unequivocally emblematic of the sin.”

  “Until we find out why Lucifer would have chosen Jennison, we must cull what we can from the details of the murder,” said Fields.

  “Well, it confirms Lucifer’s strength. Jennison had climbed with the Adirondack Club. He was a sportsman and a hunter, yet our Lucifer grabs him and chops him up with ease.”

  “No doubt he took him at the point of a weapon,” said Fields. “The strongest man alive may fall to fear of a gun, Lowell. We know also that our killer is elusive. Patrolmen were stationed on every street in the area, at all hours, since the night Talbot was killed. And Lucifer’s great attention to the details of Dante’s canto—this too is certain.”

  “Any moment as we speak,” said Lowell absently, “any moment as Longfellow translates a new verse in the next room, there could be another murder and we will have been powerless to stop it.”

  “Three murders and not a single witness. Precisely timed with our translations. What shall we do, roam the streets and wait? If I were a less educated man, I might begin to think it’s a genuine evil spirit thrust upon us.”

  “We must narrow our focus to the murders’ relationship with our club,” Lowell said. “Let us concentrate on tracking all those who might somehow know of the translation schedule.” As Lowell flipped through their investigative notebook, he absently stroked one of the library’s collectibles, a cannonball fired by the British onto Boston against General Washington’s troops.

  They heard another knock at the front door but ignored it.

  “I have sent a note to Houghton asking that he ensure that no proofs from Longfellow’s translation have been removed from Riverside,” Fields told Lowell. “We know all the killings were taken from cantos that at the time were not yet translated by our club. Longfellow must continue to hand in the proofs to the presses as if all were normal. In the meantime, what of young Sheldon?”

  Lowell frowned. “He has not yet replied and has been seen nowhere on campus. He is the only one who can tell us about that phantom I saw him talking with, with Bachi gone.”

  Fields stood up and leaned down next to Lowell. “You are very certain you saw this ‘phantom’ yesterday, Jamey?” he asked.

  Lowell was surprised. “What do you mean, Fields? I told you already—I saw him watching me in Harvard Yard, and then another time waiting for Bachi. And then again in a heated exchange with Edward Sheldon.”

  Fields couldn’t help but cringe. “It is only that we are all under much apprehension, much anxiety of the mind, my dear Lowell. My nights are passed in uneasy snatches of sleep as well.”

  Lowell slammed down the notebook he was reviewing. “Are you saying I’ve imagined him?”

  “You told me yourself that you thought you saw Jennison today, and Bachi, and your first wife, and then your dead son. For Heaven’s sake!” Fields shouted.

  Lowell’s lips quivered. “Now look here, Fields. That is the last turn of the thumbscrew—”

  “Pray calm yourself, Lowell. I didn’t mean to raise my voice. I didn’t mean that.”

  “I suppose you should know better than us what we should be doing. We are merely poets after all! I suppose you should know precisely how someone has traced our translation schedule!”

  “Now what could that imply, Mr. Lowell?”

  “Simply this: Who besides us is intimately aware of the activities of our Dante Club? The printer’s devils, the plate makers, the binders—all of them aligned with Ticknor and Fields?”

  “I say!” Fields was flabbergasted. “Don’t turn the tables on me!”

  The door connecting the library to the study opened.

  “Gentlemen, I’m afraid I must interrupt,” Longfellow said as he brought in Nicholas Rey.

  A look of horror ran across the faces of Lowell and Fields. Lowell blurted out a litany of reasons why Rey could not turn them in.

  Longfellow merely smiled.

  “Professor Lowell,” Rey said. “Please, I’m here to ask you gentlemen for leave to assist you now.”

  Immediately, Lowell and Fields forgot their argument and greeted Rey excitedly.

  “Now, understand, I am doing this to stop the killing,” Rey made clear. “Nothing else.”

  “That is not our only goal,” said Lowell after a long pause. “But we cannot complete this without some assistance, and neither can you. This scoundrel has left the sign of Dante on everything he touches, and it is downright deadly for you to take a step in his direction without a translator by your side.”

  Leaving them in the library, Longfellow returned to the study. He and Greene were on their third canto of the day, having started at six in the morning and worked through the high hump of noontime. Longfellow had written Holmes a note asking that he aid in the translating, but received no response from 21 Charles. Longfellow had asked Fields whether Lowell could be convinced to reconcile with Holmes, but Fields recommended giving both time to calm themselves.

  Throughout the day, Longfellow had to turn away an inordinate number of odd requests from the usual assortment of people who came to call. A Westerner brought an “order” for a poem that he wished Longfellow to write about birds, for which he would pay roundly. One woman, a regular caller, brought baggage to the door, explaining that she was Longfellow’s wife, who had returned home. A purportedly wounded soldier came to beg money; Longfellow felt sorry and gave him a small amount.

  “Why, Longfellow, that man’s ‘stump’ was merely his arm tucked into his shirt!” Greene said after Longfellow had closed the door.

  “Yes, I know,” Longfellow replied as he returned to his chair. “But, my dear Greene, who will be kind to him if I am not?”

  Longfellow reopened his materials to Inferno, Canto Five, of which he had postponed completion for many months. This was the circle of the Lustful. There, unceasing winds toss the sinners aimlessly, just as their unrestrained wantonness tossed them about aimlessly in life. The pilgrim asks to speak with Francesca, a beautiful young woman who had been killed when her husband found her embracing his brother, Paolo. She, with the silent spirit of her illicit lover beside her, floats to Dante’s side.

  “Francesca is not content to suggest that she and Paolo simply yielded themselves to their passions as she tells her story weeping to Dante,” Greene remarked.

  “Right,” Longfellow said. “She tells Dante that they were reading of Guinevere and Lancelot’s kiss when their eyes met over the book, and she says coyly, ‘That day we read no further.’ Paolo takes her in his arms and kisses her, yet Francesca places the blame f
or their transgression not on him but on the book that drew them together. The writer of the romance is their betrayer.”

  Greene closed his eyes, but not because he was asleep, as he so often was during their meetings. Greene believed a translator should forget himself in the author, and this is what he did in trying to help Longfellow. “And so they receive their perfect punishment—to be together forever but never to kiss again or to feel the excitement of courtship, only to feel torment side by side.”

  As they talked, Longfellow saw the golden locks and serious face of Edith leaning into the study. After her father’s glance, the girl stole into the hall.

  Longfellow suggested to Greene that they pause. The men in the library had also stopped their discussions so that Rey could examine the investigative journal Longfellow had been keeping. Greene stretched his legs in the garden.

  As Longfellow put some books away, his thoughts traveled to other times in the house, times before his own. In this study, General Nathanael Greene, grandfather of their own Greene, had discussed strategy with General George Washington when news came of the British arrival, sending all the generals in the room rushing to find their wigs. In this study, too, according to one of Greene’s histories, Benedict Arnold had lowered himself to one knee and sworn his allegiance. Putting this last episode of the history of his house out of his mind, Longfellow went into the parlor, where he found his daughter Edith curled up in a Louis XVI armchair. Her chair was pulled close to the marble bust of her mother, Fanny’s creamy countenance always there when the girl needed her. Longfellow could never look at a likeness of his wife without the thrill of pleasure that had come over him from the earliest days of their awkward courtship. Fanny had never left a room without leaving him with the feeling that something of the light went with her.