Matthew Pearl - The Dante Club

When he was released to Boston, Benjamin Galvin was mustered out with the rest of his regiment in a big ceremony on the State House steps. Their tattered company flag was folded and given to the governor. Only two hundred of the original one thousand were alive. Galvin could not understand how the war could be considered done. They had not come close to meeting their cause. Slaves were freed, but the enemy had not changed its ways—had not been punished. Galvin was not political, but he knew that the blacks would have no peace in the South, slavery or no slavery, and he knew also what those who had not fought the war did not know: that the enemy was all around them at all times and had not surrendered at all. And never, never for a moment had the enemy been only the Southerners.

Galvin felt he now spoke in a different language that civilians could not understand. They could not even hear. Only fellow soldiers, who had been blasted by cannon and shell, had that capacity. In Boston, Galvin began to travel in bands with them. They looked haggard and exhausted, like the groups of stragglers they had seen in the woods. But these veterans, many of whom had lost jobs and families and talked about how they should have died in the war—at least their wives would get a pension—were on the prowl for money or pretty girls, and to get drunk and to raise Pluto. They no longer remembered to watch for the enemy and were blind just like the rest.

While Galvin was walking through the streets, he would often begin to feel that someone was following him closely. He would stop suddenly and spin around with a frightful look in his wide eyes, but the enemy would vanish into a corner or a crowd. The Devil’s mad and I am glad …

He slept with an ax under his pillow most nights. During a thunderstorm, he woke up and threatened Harriet with a rifle, accusing her of being a Rebel spy. That same night, he stood in the yard in the rain in his full uniform, patrolling for hours. At other times, he would lock Harriet in a room and guard her, explaining that someone was trying to get her. She had to work for a launderer to pay their debts, and pressed him to see doctors. The doctor said he had “soldier’s heart”—fast palpitations caused by battle exposure. She managed to convince him to go to a soldiers’-aid home, which, she understood from other wives, helped tend to troubled soldiers. When Benjamin Galvin heard George Washington Greene give a sermon at the soldiers’-aid home, he felt the first ray of light he could remember in a long time.

Greene spoke about a man far away, a man who understood, a man named Dante Alighieri. He was a former soldier, too, who had fallen victim to a great divide between the parties of his sullied city and had been commanded to journey through the afterlife so that he might put all mankind right. What an incredible ordering to life and death was witnessed there! No bloodshed in Hell was incidental, each person was divinely deserving of a precise punishment created by the love of God. What perfection came with each contrapasso , as the Reverend Greene called the punishments, matched with every sin of every man and woman on earth evermore until final judgment day!

Galvin understood how angry Dante became that the men of his city, friend and foe alike, knew only the material and physical, pleasure and money, and did not see the judgments that were rapidly at their heels. Benjamin Galvin could not pay close enough attention to Reverend Greene’s weekly sermons and could not hear them half enough; could not get them out of his head. He felt two feet taller every time he walked out of that chapel.

The other soldiers seemed to enjoy the sermons as well, though he sensed they did not understand them the way he could. Galvin, lingering one afternoon after the sermon and staring at Reverend Greene, overheard a conversation between him and one of the soldiers.

“Mr. Greene, may I remark that I greatly liked your sermon today,” said Captain Dexter Blight, who had a hay-tinted handlebar mustache and a strong limp. “Might I ask, sir—would I be able to read more about Dante’s travels? Many of my nights are sleepless, and I have much time.”

The old minister inquired whether the soldier could read Italian. “Well,” said George Washington Greene after being answered in the negative, “you will find Dante’s journey in English, in all the detail you wish, quite soon enough, my dear lad! You see, Mr. Longfellow of Cambridge is completing a translation—no, a transformation –into English by meeting each week with something of a cabinet council, a Dante Club he has formed, of which I humbly count myself a member. Look for the book next year at your bookseller, my good man, from the incomparable presses of Ticknor and Fields!”

Longfellow. Longfellow was involved with Dante. How right that seemed to Galvin, who had heard all his poems from Harriet’s lips. Galvin said to a policeman in town, “Ticknor and Fields,” and was directed to an enormous mansion on Tremont Street and Hamilton Place. The showroom was eighty feet long and thirty feet wide, with gleaming woodwork and carved columns and counters of western fir that shone under giant chandeliers. An elaborate archway at the far end of the showroom encased the finest samples of Ticknor & Fields editions, with spines of blue and gold and chocolate brown, and behind the arch a compartment displayed the latest numbers of the publishing house’s periodicals. Galvin entered the showroom with a vague hope that Dante himself could be waiting for him. He stepped in reverentially, his hat doffed and his eyes closed.

The publishing house’s new offices had opened only a few days before Benjamin Galvin walked in.

“Here answering the ad?” No response. “Excellent, excellent. Please fill this out. Nobody better in the business to work for than J. T. Fields. The man’s a genius, a guardian angel of all authors, he is.” This man identified himself as Spencer Clark, financial clerk of the firm.

Galvin accepted the paper and pen and stared widely, relocating the bit of paper he always carried in his mouth from one cheek to the other.

“You must give us a name for us to call you, son,” said Clark. “Come on, then. Give us a name or I shall have to send you on your way.”

Clark pointed to a line on the employment form, so Galvin put his pen there and wrote: “D-A-N-T-E-A-L.” He paused. How was Alighieri spelled out? Ala?-Ali? Galvin sat wondering until the ink on his pen had dried. Clark, having been interrupted by someone across the room, cleared his throat loudly and snatched the paper.

“Ah, don’t be shy, what have we got?” Clark squinted. “Dan Teal. Good boy.” Clark sighed disappointedly. He knew the chap couldn’t be a clerk with writing like that, but the house needed every hand it could find during this transition to the massive New Corner mansion. “Now, Daniel my lad, pray just tell us where you live and we can start you tonight as a shop boy, four nights a week. Mr. Osgood, he’s the senior clerk, he’ll show you the ropes before he leaves tonight. Oh, and congratulations, Teal. You’ve just begun your new life at Ticknor and Fields!”

“Dan Teal,” the new employee said, repeating his new name over and over.

Teal thrilled to hear Dante discussed when passing the Authors’ Room on the second floor as he rolled his cart of papers to be delivered from one room to another for the clerks to have when they arrived in the morning. The fragments of discussions he overheard were not like Reverend Greene’s sermons, which spoke of the wonders of Dante’s journey. He didn’t hear many specifics about Dante at the Corner, and most nights Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Fields, and their Dante troop did not meet at all. Still, here at Ticknor & Fields were men somehow allied with Dante’s survival—speaking of how they might go about protecting him.