The Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  “Why, that’s thousands of dollars in value—tens more over the next years!” Osgood said with alarm.

  Fields nodded patiently. “Hmm. Do you know, Osgood, why we did not publish Whitman when he brought us his Leaves of Grass?” He did not wait for a reply. “Because Bill Ticknor did not want to call down trouble on the house over the carnal passages.”

  “May I ask whether you regret that, Mr. Fields?”

  He was pleased with the question. His tone modulated from employer’s to mentor’s. “No I don’t, my dear Osgood. Whitman belongs to New York, as did Poe.” That name he said more bitterly, for reasons that still smoldered. “And I’ll let them keep what few they have. But from true literature we mustn’t ever cower, not in Boston. And we shall not now.”

  He meant “now that Ticknor was gone.” It was not that the late William D. Ticknor had no sense of literature. In fact, it might be said the Ticknors had literature running in their blood, or at least in some primary organ, as their cousin George Ticknor had once been Boston’s literary authority, preceding Longfellow and Lowell as the first Smith Professor at Harvard. But William D. Ticknor had started in Boston in the field of complex financing, and he brought to publishing, which at the time was little more than bookselling, the mind of a fine banker. It was Fields who had recognized genius in half-finished manuscripts and monographs, Fields who had nurtured friendships with the great New England authors as other publishers closed their doors for lack of profits or spent too much time retailing.

  Fields, while a young clerk, was even said to exhibit preternatural (or “very queer,” as the other clerks put it) abilities; he could predict by the demeanor and appearance of a customer what book would be desired. At first he kept this to himself, but when the other clerks discovered his gift, it became a source of frequent wagers, and those who bet against Fields always ended the day unhappily. Fields would soon after transform the industry by convincing William Ticknor to reward authors rather than cheat them, and by realizing that publicity could turn poets into personalities. As a partner, Fields bought out The Atlantic Monthly and The North American Review as venues for his authors.

  Osgood would never be a man of letters like Fields, a litterateur, and so hesitated to compare ideas of True Literature. “Why would Augustus Manning threaten such a measure? It’s extortion, that’s what,” he said indignantly.

  At this Fields smiled to himself, thinking of how much there still was to teach Osgood. “We extort everyone we know, Osgood, or nothing should get done. Dante’s poetry is foreign and unknown. The Corporation lords over Harvard’s reputation by controlling every word allowed past the College gates, Osgood—anything unknown, anything unknowable, stands to frighten them beyond measure.” Fields picked up the pocket edition of Dante’s Divina Commedia he had found in Rome. “Here is revolt enough between two covers to unravel it all. The mind of our country is moving with the speed of a telegraph, Osgood, and our great institutions are stagecoaching behind it.”

  “But why would their good name be affected in this instance? They have never sanctioned Longfellow’s translation.”

  The publisher mocked indignation. “I rather think not. But they still have association, most fearful, for it is something that can scarce be erased.”

  Fields’s connection to Harvard was as the university’s publisher. The other scholars had stronger ties: Longfellow had been its most famous professor until retiring about ten years earlier to devote himself fully to his poetry; Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and George Washington Greene were alumni; and Holmes and Lowell were celebrated professors—Holmes holding the Parkman anatomy chair at the Medical College and Lowell being the head of modern languages and literature at Harvard College, which had been Longfellow’s former post.

  “This will be seen as a masterwork springing from the heart of Boston and from the soul of Harvard, my dear Osgood. Even Augustus Manning is not so blind as to miss that.”

  Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, medical professor and poet, hurried through the cropped paths of the Boston Common in the direction of his publisher’s office as though he were being chased (stopping twice, however, to sign his autograph). If you passed close enough to Dr. Holmes or were one of those amblers who wielded your pen on behalf of your autograph book, you could hear him humming with purpose. In his moiré silk waistcoat pocket burned the folded rectangle of paper that drove the little doctor on toward the Corner (that is, the office of his publisher) and drove him to fear.

  When encountered by admirers, he sparkled to hear them name their favorites. “Oh, that. They say President Lincoln recited that poem by memory. Well, truly, he told me himself . . .” The shape of Holmes’s boyish face, the small mouth pushing against the loose jaw, made it appear an effort for him to keep his mouth closed for any noticeable period of time.

  After the autograph hounds, he came to a stop only once, haltingly, at the Dutton & Company Bookstore, where he counted out three novels and four volumes of poetry from entirely new and (in all probability) young New York authors. Every week the literary notices announced that the most extraordinary book of the age had just been published. “Profound originality” had become so plentiful that, not knowing better, one could take it for the most common national product. Just a few years before the war, it seemed the only book in the world was his Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, the serialized essay with which Holmes had surpassed all expectations by inventing a new attitude for literature, one of personal observation.

  Holmes burst into the vast front showroom of Ticknor & Fields. Like the Jews of old at the Second Temple remembering the glories it replaced, Dr. Holmes could not help resisting the oiled and polished glare and smuggling in his sensory recall of the musty quarters of the Old Corner Bookstore, on Washington and School streets, into which the publishing house and its authors had squeezed for decades. Fields’s authors called the new palace, at the corner of Tremont Street and Hamilton Place, the Corner or New Corner—in part from habit, but also as pointed nostalgia for their beginnings.

  “Good evening, Dr. Holmes. Here for Mr. Fields?”

  Miss Cecilia Emory, the pleasing blue-bonneted girl at the front desk, received Dr. Holmes in a cloud of perfume and a warming smile. Fields had taken on several women as secretaries when the Corner opened a month earlier, despite a chorus of critics, who condemned the practice for a building otherwise crowded with men. The idea almost certainly originated with Fields’s wife, Annie, willful and beautiful (qualities usually allied).

  “Yes, my dear.” Holmes bowed. “Is he in?”

  “Ah, is that the great Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table descended before us?”

  Samuel Ticknor, one of the clerks, was passing an overlong good-bye with Cecilia Emory as he slipped on his gloves. Not the average publishing-house clerk, Ticknor would be welcomed home by wife and servants on one of the most desirable corners of Back Bay.

  Holmes took his hand. “Grand little place the New Corner is, isn’t it, my dear Mr. Ticknor?” He laughed. “I’m half surprised our Mr. Fields hasn’t gotten lost in here yet.”

  “Hasn’t he,” Samuel Ticknor muttered back seriously, followed by a light snigger or grunt.

  J. R. Osgood came to usher Holmes upstairs. “Pay him no mind, Dr. Holmes,” Osgood sniffed, watching the him in question saunter onto Tremont Street and toss money at the peanut vendor on the corner as he would at a beggar. “I daresay young Ticknor believes he should command the same view of the Common as his father would have were he alive, on the basis of name alone. And wants everyone to know it, too.”

  Dr. Holmes had no time for gossip—not today, at least.

  Osgood noted that Fields was in meetings, so Holmes was purgatoried in the Authors’ Room, a plush chamber for the comfort and pleasure of the house’s writers. On an ordinary day, Holmes might well spend his time here admiring the literary mementos and autographs hanging on the wall that included his name. Instead, his attention turned to the check that he drew flinch
ingly out of his pocket. In the taunting number written out in careless hand Holmes saw his failures. He saw in the stray ink spots his life as a poet, battered by the events of the last years, incapable of rising to past achievements. He sat in silence and rubbed the check roughly between his forefinger and thumb as Aladdin might his old lamp. Holmes imagined all the fearless, fresher authors Fields was courting, convincing, shaping.

  He wandered from the Authors’ Room twice, twice finding Fields’s office shut. But before he could turn back this second time, the voice of James Russell Lowell, poet and editor, found its way out. Lowell was speaking forcefully (as always), even dramatically, and Dr. Holmes, instead of knocking or turning away, tried to decipher the conversation, for he believed it would almost certainly have something to do with him.

  Narrowing his eyes as though he could transfer their share of power to his ears, Holmes was just making out an intriguing word when he hit something and tumbled.

  The young man who had come to a sudden halt in front of the eavesdropper flailed his hands in stupid repentance.

  “My fault entirely, dear lad,” the poet said, laughing. “Dr. Holmes, and it’s . . .”

  “Teal, Doctor, sir,” the trembler, a shop boy, managed to introduce himself before turning yellow and scurrying away.

  “I see you’ve met Daniel Teal.” Osgood, the senior clerk, appeared from the hall. “Couldn’t keep a hotel, but as hard a worker as we have.” Holmes chuckled with Osgood: poor lad, still green around the ears at the firm and nearly knocking heads with Oliver Wendell Holmes! This renewed self-importance made the poet smile.

  “Would you like me to check on Mr. Fields?” Osgood asked.

  Then the door opened from inside. James Russell Lowell, majestically untidy, his penetrating gray eyes taking one’s attention from the woolliness of his hair and the beard that he smoothed with two fingers, looked out from the threshold. He was in Fields’s office alone with today’s newspaper.

  Holmes imagined what Lowell would say if he attempted to share his anxiety: This is a time to concentrate all energies on Longfellow, on Dante, Holmes, not our petty vanities . . . “Come, come, Wendell!” Lowell started to make him a drink.

  Holmes said, “Why, Lowell, I did believe I heard voices in here just now. Ghosts?”

  “When Coleridge was asked whether he believed in ghosts, he replied in the negative, explaining he had seen far too many of them.” He laughed gleefully and twisted out the glowing end of his cigar. “Oh, the Dante Club shall celebrate tonight. I was just reading this aloud to see how it sounded, you see.” Lowell pointed to the newspaper on the side table. Fields, he explained, had stepped down to the cafeteria.

  “Tell me, Lowell, do you know whether the Atlantic has changed its payment policies? I mean, I haven’t heard whether you gave in any verses for the last number. Certainly, you’re busy enough with the Review.” Holmes’s fingers tangled with the check in his pocket.

  Lowell wasn’t listening. “Holmes, you must have a good eyeful of this! Fields has outdone himself. There, go on. Have a look.” He nodded conspiratorially and watched carefully. The newspaper was folded back to the literary page and smelled of Lowell’s cigar.

  “But what I mean to ask, my dear Lowell,” Holmes said insistently, putting the paper out of the way, “is whether recently—oh, many thanks.” He accepted a brandy and water.

  Fields returned with a broad smile, stretching his rolling beard. He was as inexplicably cheery and complacent as Lowell. “Holmes! Wasn’t expecting the pleasure today. I was just about to send for you at the Medical College to see Mr. Clark. There was a blasted mistake in some of the checks for the last number of the Atlantic. You might receive one for seventy-five rather than a hundred for your poem.” Since the rapid inflation due to the war, top poets received a hundred dollars per poem with the exception of Longfellow, who got $150. Lesser names were paid between twenty-five and fifty.

  “Truly?” Holmes asked with a gasp of relief that instantly felt embarrassing. “Well, I’m always happy for more.”

  “This new batch of clerks, such creatures as you’ve never seen.” Fields shook his head. “I find myself at the helm of an enormous ship, my friends, that will drive upon the rocks if I do not watch it all times.”

  Holmes sat back contentedly and finally glanced down at the New York Tribune in his hands. In stunned silence, he slipped deeply into the armchair, allowing its thick leather folds to swallow him.

  James Russell Lowell had come to the Corner from Cambridge to fulfill long-neglected obligations at The North American Review. Lowell left the bulk of his work at the Review, one of Fields’s two top magazines, to a team of assistant editors, whose names he confused, until his presence was required for final proofing. Fields knew Lowell would appreciate the advance publicity more than anybody, more than Longfellow himself.

  “Exquisite! You have a bit of the Jew in you yet, my dear Fields!” Lowell said, swiping the newspaper back from Holmes. His friends did not particularly notice Lowell’s strange gloss, for they were accustomed to his tendency toward theorizing that everyone of ability, including himself, was in some unknown way Jewish, or at least of Jewish descent.

  “My booksellers will chomp at the bit,” Fields boasted. “We’ll build a shiny coach from the Boston profits alone!”

  “My dear Fields,” Lowell said, laughing briskly. He patted the newspaper as if it held a secret prize. “If you had been Dante’s publisher, I daresay he would have been welcomed back to Florence with a street festival!”

  Oliver Wendell Holmes laughed, but there was a little pleading too as he said, “If Fields had been Dante’s publisher, Lowell, he could have never been exiled.”

  When Dr. Holmes excused himself to find Mr. Clark, the financial clerk, before they started for Longfellow’s house, Fields could see that Lowell was troubled. The poet was not one to hide displeasure, in any event.

  “Don’t you think Holmes should seem more committed?” Lowell demanded. “He might have been reading an obituary,” he sniped, knowing Fields’s sensitivity about the reception of his puffs. “His own.”

  But Fields laughed this off. “He is preoccupied with his novel, that’s all, and whether the critics will treat him fairly this time. Well, and he always has a hundred things on his mind. You know that, Lowell.”

  “That is just the thing! If Harvard tries to daunt us further—” Lowell began, then started again. “I don’t want anyone to come to a notion that we’re not behind this to the end, Fields. Do you not ever wonder that this might be just another club for Wendell?”

  Lowell and Holmes liked to sharpen their wits against each other, Fields doing what he could to discourage them. They competed mostly for attention. After a recent banquet, Mrs. Fields reported having heard Lowell demonstrating to Harriet Beecher Stowe why Tom Jones was the best novel ever written, while Holmes was proving to Stowe’s husband, the divinity professor, that religion was responsible for all the swearing in the world. The publisher was worried about more than the return of serious tension between two of his best poets; he was worried Lowell would stubbornly try to prove that his doubts about Holmes were correct. Fields could not afford that any more than he could afford Holmes’s trepidation.

  Fields made a show of his pride in Holmes, standing beside a framed daguerreotype of the little doctor that hung on the wall. He put a hand on Lowell’s strong shoulder and spoke with sincerity. “Our Dante Club would be a lost spirit without him, my dear Lowell. Certainly he has his distractions, but that’s what keeps his brilliance. Why, he’s what Dr. Johnson would have proclaimed a clubbable man. But he’s been there for us all along, hasn’t he. And for Longfellow.”

  Dr. Augustus Manning, treasurer of the Harvard Corporation, remained at University Hall later into the evenings than the other Harvard fellows. He often turned his head from his desk to the darkening window that glared back with indistinct light from his lamp, and he thought of the perils that daily rose up to shake the founda
tions of the College. Just that afternoon, he had been out for his ten-minute constitutional and recorded the names of several offenders. Three students were talking to one another near Grays Hall. By the time they saw him approach, it was too late; phantomlike, he made no noise, even when walking over crisp leaves. They would be admonished by the faculty board for “congregating”—that is, standing stationary in the Yard in groups of two or more.

  That morning, at the College’s required six o’clock chapel, Manning also had called the attention of Tutor Bradlee to a student who was reading a book under his Bible. The offender, a sophomore, would be privately admonished for reading during chapel, as well as for the agitating tendency of the author—a French philosopher of immoral politics. At the next meeting of the College faculty, judgment would be entered under the young man’s name, there would be a fine of several dollars imposed, and points would be removed from his class standing.

  Manning now thought about how to address the Dante problem. A staunch loyalist to classical studies and languages, Manning, it was said, had once spent an entire year conducting all his personal and business affairs in Latin; some doubted this, noting that his wife did not know the language, while other acquaintances remarked that this fact confirmed the story’s veracity. The living languages, as they were called by the Harvard fellows, were little more than cheap imitations, low distortions. Italian, like Spanish and German, particularly represented the loose political passions, bodily appetites, and absent morals of decadent Europe. Dr. Manning had no intention of allowing foreign poisons to be spread under the disguise of literature.

  As he sat, Manning heard a surprising clicking sound from his anteroom. Any noise would be unexpected at this hour, as Manning’s secretary had gone home. Manning walked to the door and pushed on the handle. But it was stuck. He looked up and saw a metal point pushing into the doorframe, then another one several inches to the right. Manning yanked the door hard, again and again, harder and harder until his arm hurt and the door cracked open unwillingly. On the other side a student, armed with a wooden board and some screws, balanced on a stool, laughing as he tried to seal Manning’s door.