The Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  July 1861. The Longfellows should have been at Nahant. There was a cool sea breeze that caressed Nahant, but for reasons nobody remembered the Longfellows had not yet left the fervent sunshine and heat of Cambridge.

  A tormenting scream burrowing into the study from the adjoining library. Two little girls shouting in terror. Fanny Longfellow had been sitting with little Edith, who was then eight, and Alice, eleven, sealing packages of the girls’ freshly cut curls as mementos; little Annie Allegra slept soundly upstairs. Fanny had opened a window in the unlikely hope for a puff of air. The best conjecture in the days that followed—for nobody had seen precisely what happened, nobody could ever truly see something so brief and so arbitrary—was that a flake of hot sealing wax drifted onto her light summer dress. In a single moment, she was burning.

  Longfellow had been at his standing desk in the study, throwing some black sand on a newly inked poem to blot it. Fanny ran in screaming from the adjoining room. Her dress was now all flames, hugging her body like tailored Oriental silk. Longfellow bundled her in a rug and laid her on the floor.

  With the fire out, he carried the trembling body upstairs to the bedroom. Later that night, the doctors put her to rest with ether. In the morning, assuring Longfellow in a bold whisper that she could feel very little pain, she took some coffee and then drifted into a coma. The funeral service in the Craigie House library fell on their eighteenth wedding anniversary. Her head was the only part of her the fire had spared, and on her beautiful hair was laid a wreath of orange blossoms.

  The poet was confined to his bed that day by his own burns, but he could hear the unrestrained weeping of his friends, women and men, down in the parlor, weeping for him, he knew, as well as for Fanny. He found, in his delusional but alert state of mind, that he could make out individuals by their crying. His facial burns would necessitate his growing a full and heavy beard—not only to conceal the scars, but also because he could no longer shave. The orange discoloring on the palms of his limp hands would last painfully long, reminding him of his failure, before whitening away.

  Longfellow, recuperating in his bedchamber, raised his bandaged hands upward. For nearly a week, the children could hear delirious words float into the hall whenever they passed by. Little Annie, thankfully, was too young to understand.

  “Why could I not save her? Why could I not save her?”

  After Fanny’s death had become real to him, after he could look at his little girls again without breaking down, Longfellow unlocked his notepaper drawer where he had once deposited fragments of Dante translations. Most of what he had done as class exercises in lighter times would be of no use. It was food for the fire. It was not the poetry of Dante Alighieri; it was the poetry of Henry Longfellow—the language, the style, the rhythm—the poetry of one content with his own life. As he started again, beginning with Paradiso, he was not chasing after a fitting style to render Dante’s words this time. He was chasing after Dante. Longfellow tucked himself away at his desk, watched over by his three young daughters, the children’s governess, his patient sons—now restless men—his hired help, and Dante. Longfellow found he could barely write a word of his own poetry, yet he could not stop himself from working on Dante. The pen felt like a sledgehammer in his hand. Difficult to wield nimbly, but what volatile power.

  Soon Longfellow found reinforcements around his table: first Lowell, then Holmes, Fields, and Greene. Longfellow often said they had formed the Dante Club to amuse themselves during bleak New England winters. This was the diffident way he expressed its importance to him. The attention to defects and deficiencies was sometimes not the most agreeable interaction for Longfellow, but when critiques were harsh, the supper afterward made amends.

  Resuming his editing of these latest Inferno cantos, Longfellow heard a hollow thud come from outside Craigie House. Trap let out a sharp bark.

  “Master Trap? What is it, old fellow?”

  But Trap, finding no source for the disturbance, yawned and burrowed back into the warm straw lining of his champagne basket. Longfellow peered outside his unlit dining room but saw nothing. Then a pair of eyes jumped out from the darkness, followed by what seemed a blinding flash of light. Longfellow’s heart leapt, not so much at the sight of a face appearing but at the sight of the face, if that is what it was, suddenly vanishing after locking eyes with him, the glass misting under Longfellow’s gasp. Longfellow stumbled backward, knocking into a cabinet and sending headlong onto the floor an entire set of Appleton family dishes (a wedding gift, as was Craigie House itself, from Fanny’s father). The cumulative shattering that followed echoed riotously, causing Longfellow to throw forth an irrational scream of distress.

  Trap pounced and yapped with his entire diminutive might. Longfellow escaped from the dining room to the parlor, and then to the lazy wood fire of the library, where he examined the windows for any further sign of the eyes. He was hoping Jamey Lowell or Wendell Holmes would appear at the door and apologize for the unintended fright and the late hour. But as Longfellow’s writing hand trembled, all he could discern out his window was blackness.

  As Longfellow’s scream rang down Brattle Street, James Russell Lowell’s ears were half submerged in his tub. He was listening to the hollow skip of the water, letting his eyelids droop shut, wondering where life had gone. The small window overhead was propped open and the night was cool. If Fanny came in, she would no doubt command him to the warm bed at once.

  Lowell had risen to fame when most of the celebrated poets were significantly older than he, including Longfellow and Holmes, who were both around ten years his senior. He had grown so content with the title Young Poet that it had seemed at forty-eight he had done something wrong to lose it.

  He puffed indifferently on his fourth cigar of the day, carelessly letting the ashes defile his water. He could recall times only a few years earlier when the tub had seemed much roomier for his body. He wondered at the spare razor blades, now missing, that he had hidden years earlier on the shelf above. Had Fanny or Mab, more perceptive than he allowed himself to believe, surmised the black thoughts that often tingled as he soaked? In his youth, before meeting his first wife, Lowell had carried strychnine in his waistcoat pocket. He said he inherited his drop of black blood from his poor mother. Around the same time, Lowell had put a cocked pistol to his forehead but was too afraid to pull the trigger, a fact of which he was still heartily ashamed. He had only been flattering himself that he could be responsible for so conclusive an act.

  When Maria White Lowell died, her husband of nine years felt old for the first time, felt as if he suddenly had a past, something alien to his present life, from which he was now exiled. Lowell consulted Dr. Holmes in a professional capacity about his dark emotions. Holmes recommended punctual retirement by ten-thirty at night and cold water rather than coffee in the morning. It was for the best, Lowell now thought, that Wendell had turned in the stethoscope for the professor’s lectern; he did not have the patience to see suffering through to the end.

  Fanny Dunlap had been little Mabel’s governess after Maria’s death, and perhaps someone outside his life would have known it was inevitable that she would assume a position as Maria’s substitute in Lowell’s eyes. The transition to a new, plainer wife was not so difficult as Lowell had feared, and for this many friends blamed him. But he would not wear grief on his sleeve. Lowell abhorred sentimentality from the bottom of his soul. Besides, the truth was that Maria no longer felt real to him most of the time. She was a vision, an idea, a faint gleam in the sky like the stars fading out before sunset. “My Beatrice,” Lowell had written in his journal. But even that doctrine demanded all the energy of the soul to believe in, and before long only the most vague specter of Maria occupied his thoughts.

  Besides Mabel, Lowell had fathered three children with Maria, the healthiest of whom lived two years. The death of this last child, Walter, preceded Maria’s by a year. Fanny had a miscarriage soon after their marriage and was left incapable of bearing children.
So James Russell Lowell had one living child, a daughter, raised forthrightly by a barren second wife.

  When she was young, Lowell thought it would be enough to hope Mabel would be a great, strong, vulgar, mud pudding–baking, tree-climbing little wench. He taught her to swim, to skate, and to walk twenty miles a day, as he could.

  But the Lowells from time immemorial had had sons. Jamey Lowell himself had three nephews who had served and died in the Union army. That was destined. Lowell’s grandfather had been the author of the original anti-slavery law in Massachusetts. But J. R. Lowell had borne no sons, no James Lowell Juniors to contribute to the greatest cause of their age. Walt had been such a sturdy boy for a few months; he would have been as tall and brave as Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, certainly.

  Lowell let his hands indulge themselves in pulling at the corners of his walrus-tusk mustache, the wet tips curling like a sultan’s. He thought of The North American Review and how much of his time it swallowed. Organizing manuscripts and submissions was beyond the pale of his talents, and he had formerly left these tasks to his more punctilious co-editor, Charles Eliot Norton, before the latter left for a European journey undertaken for Mrs. Norton to recover her health. Questions of style, grammar, and punctuation in other people’s articles—and the pressure of personal appeals from qualified and unqualified friends alike wanting to be published—all robbed from Lowell his head for writing. And the routine of teaching, too, further dismantled poetic impulses. More than ever, he felt the Harvard Corporation was always looking over his shoulder, racking and sifting and pickaxing and hoeing and shoveling and dredging and scratching (and, he feared, also damning) his brain like so many Californian immigrants. All he needed to recover his imagination was to lie under a tree for a year, with no other industry than to watch the dapples of sunlight on the grass. He had envied Hawthorne on his last visit to his friend in Concord, for the rooftop tower he had built himself could only be entered by a secret trapdoor, upon which the novelist placed a heavy chair.

  Lowell did not hear the light tread up the stairs and did not notice when the door of the bathroom opened wider. Fanny closed it behind her.

  Lowell sat up guiltily. “There’s hardly a breeze in here, dear.”

  Fanny had a troubled spark in her wide-set, nearly Oriental eyes. “Jamey, the yardman’s son is here. I asked him the matter, but he says he wishes to speak with you. I’ve put him in the music room. Poor little thing’s short of breath.”

  Lowell wrapped himself in his dressing gown and took the stairs two at a time. The gawky young man, wide horse’s teeth protruding from under his upper lip, idled at the piano as though nervously preparing for a concert.

  “Sir, beg your pardon for the bother . . . I was coming along Brattle and thought I heard a loud sound from the old Craigie House . . . I thought to call on Professor Longfellow to check if all was right—all the fellas do say he is such a kind one—but I ain’t never met him so . . .”

  Lowell’s heart raced with panic. He grabbed the boy by his shoulders. “What was the sound you heard, lad?”

  “A great impact. A crash of sorts.” The young man tried unsuccessfully to demonstrate the sound with a gesture. “The little mutt—uh, Trap, is it?—barking enough to raise Pluto. And a loud shout, I believe, sir. I have never raised the hue and cry before, sir.”

  Lowell told the boy to wait and rushed to his dressing closet, grabbing his slippers and the plaid trousers to which, under ordinary circumstances, Fanny would state her aesthetic objections.

  “Jamey, you shan’t go out at this hour,” insisted Fanny Lowell. “There have been a rash of garrotings of late!”

  “It’s Longfellow,” he said. “The boy thinks something might be the matter.”

  She grew quiet.

  Lowell promised Fanny to take along his hunting rifle and, with it slung over his shoulder, Lowell and the yardman’s son made their way down to Brattle Street.

  Longfellow was still rather shaken when he came to the door, and shaken further by the sight of Lowell’s gun. He apologized for the commotion and described the incident without embellishment, insisting that his imagination had merely been momentarily agitated.

  “Karl,” Lowell said, and took the yardman’s son by his shoulders again. “You hurry to the police station for a patrolman.”

  “Oh, that won’t be needed,” Longfellow said.

  “There has been a wave of robberies, Longfellow. The police will check the whole neighborhood and make sure it is safe. Now, don’t you be selfish.”

  Lowell waited for Longfellow to put up more of a fight, but he did not. Lowell nodded to Karl, who sped off to the Cambridge station with a boy’s enthusiasm for emergencies. Inside the Craigie House study, Lowell slumped in the chair next to Longfellow and adjusted his dressing gown over his trousers. Longfellow apologized for drawing Lowell out for such a petty matter and insisted he return to Elmwood. But he also insisted on brewing some tea.

  James Russell Lowell sensed there was nothing petty about Longfellow’s fear.

  “Fanny is probably grateful,” he said, laughing. “She calls my habit of opening the bathroom window while in the tub ‘death by bathing.’”

  Even now, Lowell felt uncomfortable saying Fanny’s name to Longfellow and tried unconsciously to alter his inflection. The name robbed Longfellow of something; his wounds were still fresh. He never spoke of his own Fanny. He would not write about her, not even a sonnet or an elegiac poem in her memory. His journal did not contain a single mention of Fanny Longfellow’s death; on the first entry after she died, Longfellow had copied out some lines from a Tennyson poem: “Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace.” Lowell believed he understood quite well the reason Longfellow had written so little original poetry over the last few years in his retreat into Dante. If it were his own words Longfellow was writing, the temptation to write her name would be too strong, and then she would merely be a word.

  “Perhaps it was just a tourist here to see Washington’s house.” Longfellow laughed gently. “Did I tell you that one came by the other week to see ‘General Washington’s headquarters, if you please’? On his way out, planning his next stop I suppose, he asked if Shakespeare did not live in the neighborhood.”

  They both laughed. “Daughter of Eve! What did you tell him?”

  “I said that if Shakespeare has moved nearby I had not met him.”

  Lowell leaned back in the easy chair. “Good answer as any. I think that the moon never sets in Cambridge, which accounts for the number of lunatics here. Working on Dante at this hour?” The proofs Longfellow had taken out were on his green table. “My dear friend. Your pen is wet at all times. You’ll tire yourself out by and by.”

  “I do not grow at all weary. Of course, there are times I feel it drag, like wheels in deep sand. But something urges me on with this work, Lowell, and will not let me rest.”

  Lowell studied the proof sheet.

  “Canto Sixteen,” Longfellow said. “It’s due to go to the printer’s, but I am reluctant to part with it. When Dante meets the three Florentines, he says, ‘S’i’ fossi stato dal foco coperto . . .’”

  “‘Could I have been protected from the fire’”—Lowell read his friend’s translation as Longfellow recited the Italian—“‘I should have thrown myself down among them, and I think my Leader would have suffered it.’ Yes, we should never forget that Dante is no mere observer of Hell; he too is in physical and metaphysical danger along the way.”

  “I cannot quite find the right version in English. Some would say, I suppose, that in translating, the foreign author’s voice should be modified to gain smoothness to the verse. On the contrary, I wish as translator, like a witness on a stand, to hold up my right hand and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

  Trap began barking at Longfellow and scratched his pants leg.

  Longfellow smiled. “Trap has been to the printing office so often he thinks he has translated Dante all along.
”

  But Trap was not barking at the philosophy of Longfellow’s translation. The terrier shot into the front hall. A thundering knock sounded at Longfellow’s door.

  “Ah, the police,” Lowell said, impressed with the speed of their arrival. He wrung out his soggy mustache.

  Longfellow opened his front door. “Well, this is a surprise,” he said in the most hospitable voice he could find at the moment.

  “How so?” J. T. Fields, standing on the wide threshold, angled his eyebrows together and removed his hat. “I received a message in the middle of our whist game—on a hand where I had Bartlett beat, too!” He smiled briefly as he hung his hat. “It said to come here at once. Is everything all right, my dear Longfellow?”

  “I sent no such message, Fields,” Longfellow apologized. “Wasn’t Holmes with you?”

  “No, and we waited a half-hour for him before dealing.”

  A rustle of dried leaves advanced toward them. In a moment, the small figure of Oliver Wendell Holmes, his elevated boots crunching leaves by the half-dozen underfoot, swerved up Longfellow’s brick footpath in a double-quick march. Fields stepped aside and Holmes sprinted past him into the hall, wheezing.

  “Holmes?” Longfellow said.

  The frantic doctor noticed with horror that Longfellow was cradling a sheaf of Dante cantos.

  “Dear God, Longfellow,” Dr. Holmes cried. “Put those away!”

  VI

  After ensuring the door was tightly shut, Holmes explained in rapid-fire speech how it had flashed over him while coming home from the market and how he had rushed back to the medical college, where he found—thank heavens!—that the police had left for the Cambridge station house. Holmes dispatched a message to his brother’s whist table to fetch Fields to Craigie House at once.