Matthew Pearl - The Dante Club

“He asked me if I did wish to stay here, Mrs. Healey, before he wrote his orders. He said that we would always be safe in Boston but that it had to be my choice to be a Boston man, a man who stood for himself and for his city at the same time, or I would always be an outsider. He told me that when a Boston man reaches the pearly gates, an angel comes out to warn him: ‘You won’t like it here, for it is not Boston.’ “

He heard the whisper as he listened to Widow Healey fall asleep; he heard it in the bareness of his shivering rooming house. He awoke each morning with the words on his tongue. He could taste them, could smell the potent odor that coated them, could brush against the crusted whiskers that recited them, but when he tried to speak the whisper himself, sometimes while driving, sometimes before a looking glass, it was nonsense. He sat with his pen at all hours, using up inkwells, writing it out, and the nonsense looked worse than it sounded. He could see the whisperer, reeking of rot, shocked eyes glaring at him before the body carried itself through the glass. The nameless man had been dropped from the sky from a faraway place, Rey couldn’t help thinking, into Rey’s arms, from where he had dropped him again. He trained himself to put it out of his mind. But how clearly he could see the plummet onto the courtyard, where the man became all blood and leaves, over and over again, as smooth and constant as pictures passed through the slide of a magic lantern. He had to stop the fall, Chief Kurtz’s command be damned. He had to find some meaning for the words left hanging on the dead air.

“I wouldn’t let him go with anybody else,” said Amelia Holmes, her small face pleated, pulling her husband’s coat collar to cover his neck cloth. “Mr. Fields, he ought not to go out tonight. I am worried what will come of it. Hear how he wheezes with the asthma. Now, Wendell, when will you get home?”

J. T. Fields’s well-appointed carriage had driven up to 21 Charles Street. Though it was only two blocks down from his house, Fields never made Holmes walk. The doctor was breathing with difficulty on the front step, accusing the cooling weather, as he often did the heat.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Dr. Holmes said, slightly annoyed. “I put myself into Mr. Fields’s hands.”

She said somberly, “Well, Mr. Fields, how early will you get him back?”

Fields considered this with the utmost gravity. A wife’s comfort was as important to him as an author’s, and Amelia Holmes had been apprehensive lately.

“I wish Wendell would not publish anything more, Mr. Fields,” Amelia had said at a breakfast at the Fieldses’ earlier in the month, in their pretty room looking out through leaves and flowers at the well-tempered river. “He’ll only call down newspaper criticism, and where is the use?”

Fields had opened his mouth to set her mind at rest, but Holmes was too quick—when he was agitated or panicked, no one could talk as fast, especially about himself. “How do you mean, ‘Melia? I have written something new which the critics won’t complain of. This is the American Story’ Mr. Fields has long been pressing me to make. You’ll see, dear, it’ll be better than anything I have ever done.”

“Oh, that’s what you always say, Wendell.” She shook her head sadly. “But I wish you’d let it alone.”

Fields knew Amelia had endured Holmes’s disappointment when his sequel serial to The Autocrat – The Professor at the Breakfast-Table –was dismissed as repetitive, despite Fields’s promises of success. Still, Holmes planned a third in the series, which he would call The Poet at the Breakfast-Table . There had also been his devastation over the critical attacks and only modest success wrought by Elsie Veneer , his first novel, which he had written breathlessly and published shortly before the war.

The new set of Bohemian critics in New York liked to attack the Boston establishment, and Holmes represented his proud city more than anybody– he, after all, had dubbed Boston the Hub of the Universe and had named his own class the Boston Brahmins, after those in more exotic lands. Now the ruffians who called themselves Young America and dwelt in subterranean Manhattan taverns along Broadway had declared Fields’s long dominant Fireside Poets irrelevant to the next age. What had the Longfellow coterie’s quaint rhymes and village settings done to prevent the catastrophe of a civil war? they demanded to know. Holmes, for his part, years before the war, had spoken out for compromise and had even signed, along with Artemus Healey, a resolution to support the Fugitive Slave Act, which would send escaped slaves back to their masters, as a hopeful measure to avoid conflict.

“But don’t you see, Amelia,” Holmes had continued at the breakfast table. “I shall make money by it, and that won’t come amiss.” Suddenly he looked up at Fields. “If anything should happen to me before I get the story done, you wouldn’t come down upon the widow for the money, would you now?” They’d all laughed.

Now, standing next to his carriage, Fields glanced at the checkered sky as if it could tell him the answer Amelia waited on. “About twelve,” he said. “How does twelve sound, my dear Mrs. Holmes?” He looked at her with his kind brown eyes, though he knew it would be closer to two in the morning.

The poet took his publisher’s arm. “That’s pretty well for a Dante night. ‘Melia, Mr. Fields will take care of me. Why, it’s one of the greatest compliments one man ever paid another, my going out to Longfellow’s tonight with all I’ve been doing lately, between my lectures and my novel and the fine dinners. Why, I ought not to go out at all tonight.”

Fields decided not to hear this last comment, lighthearted though it was.

It was popular Cambridge legend by 1865 that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would divine precisely when to appear outside his sun-yellow Colonial mansion to greet arrivals, whether long anticipated guests or entirely unforeseen callers. Of course, legends often disappoint, and commonly one of the poet’s servants would answer the massive door to Craigie House, so named for its previous owners; in recent years there had been times when Henry Longfellow had simply been of the mind to receive no one at all.

But this afternoon, faithful enough to village lore, Longfellow was on his doorstep when Fields’s horses towed their cargo up the Craigie House carriageway. Holmes, leaning on the carriage window, made out the erect figure from up the street before the white-dusted hedges parted and bowed. His pleasant view of Longfellow standing serenely under the lamplight in the downy snow, weighted by his flowing leonine beard and impeccably fitted frock coat, matched the representation of the poet embossed in the public mind. This image had crystallized in the wake of the unfathomable loss of Fanny Longfellow, when the world seemed intent on memorializing the poet (as if he, rather than his wife, had been the one who died) as some divine apparition sent to answer for the human race, when his admirers sought to sculpt his persona into a permanent allegory of genius and suffering.

The three Longfellow girls rushed in from playing in the unexpected snow, pausing just long enough at the entrance hall to kick off their overshoes before scrambling over the sharply angled stairs.

Holmes had just passed that broad stair and now stood with Longfellow in that study, where the lamplight illumined the poet’s writing desk. All the while, the three girls tumbled from sight. Still he walks through a living poem .