Мэтью Перл: The Dante Chamber

Knowing I would carry over Oliver Wendell Holmes from the first novel, at a very early stage I decided to recruit Alfred Tennyson (whose poetry is quoted in a pivotal scene of The Dante Club ), the Rossetti siblings, and Robert Browning, all actual devotees of Dante. I originally expected Browning to become the emotional lead of the novel, but the more I thought about Christina Rossetti, she pushed to the center and drove the story. As in The Dante Club , I’ve aspired to remain as authentic to their real voices and lives as possible, including that of Inspector Adolphus “Dolly” Williamson, whose cases ranged from terrorist conspiracies to the first murder on a train in England, and who years later played an elderstatesman role in the pursuit of Jack the Ripper.

Transformations abounded in culture and society when The Dante Chamber takes place. Religions had splintered into so many esoteric groups that many Victorians turned away from organized worship and belief systems. Filling this vacuum were movements such as spiritualism, mesmerism, ceremonial magic, and other quasi-religious approaches to life. The “sanatorium” depicted in my novel is both a product of imagination and of research into examples of utopian, apocalyptic, and cultlike collectives of the nineteenth century (including the Millerites, who prophesied specific dates for the cleansing of the world, and may have inspired suicides, and the utopian Brook Farm, whose “Phalanstery,” or communal living structure, met a fate that mirrored my novel’s Phillip Sanatorium. The spring snowstorms in the novel are based on those recorded in England in 1849, 1876, and 1879). Opiate use, tied to the sanatorium in my story, also became sophisticated and grew into a full-blown trade outside of supervised medical use.

There’s an anecdote Lewis Carroll (a.k.a. Charles Dodgson) told that I liked to think of while working on The Dante Chamber . He visited Tennyson at Farringford on the Isle of Wight. While they smoked, writes Carroll, their “conversation turned upon murders, and Tennyson told us several horrible stories from his own experience.” Tantalizing (Carroll didn’t give more details). Tennyson, of course, wouldn’t have been talking about the violence he and his companions tackle in my novel — part of the fiction of my historical fiction — but I was intrigued by the many ways this group of figures really did face the dark sides of life. Christina Rossetti, as shown in my novel, worked regularly with aiding prostitutes in desperate situations. Browning held his wife Elizabeth in his arms as she died and was absorbed by it for the rest of his life. Tennyson, in addition to dealing with a pattern of depression in his family, paid close attention to crimes and criminal trends.

(In a twist far into the future, in 2005 Tennyson’s great-grandson was found murdered in London, a knife in his neck.)

Then we have the many mysteries of the great and strange and sometimes sinister (to paraphrase Henry James) Dante Gabriel Rossetti. As incorporated into The Dante Chamber , Gabriel’s life included chronic insomnia, opiate addiction, overdoses, suicidal phases, disappearances, and the exhumation of his wife’s body in order to retrieve his poems. At one point, Gabriel, half joking, all macabre, imagines forming “a Mutual Suicide Association, by the regulations whereof any member, being weary of life, may call at any time upon another to cut his throat for him. It is all of course to be done very quietly, without weeping or gnashing of teeth.” Like Christina, Gabriel exacerbated the many gaps in our understanding of his life by destroying many of his personal papers, especially those dealing with Lizzie, and leaving instructions to destroy more letters and papers after his death.

The paranoia of their father, Professor Rossetti, lived on in the eldest son. Later in his life, Gabriel, influenced by his heavy use of opiates, imagined Browning was part of a conspiracy (along with Lewis Carroll and others) to write and plot against him. Gabriel cut off his friendship with Browning, and his friendship with Tennyson likewise frayed beyond the point of recovery. The friendship between Browning and Tennyson (to whom Browning really did offer the story that eventually became The Ring and the Book ) also suffered strains over time, reflected here.

As explored in the novel, Dante Gabriel Rossetti truly was preoccupied with Dante, as were all of the Rossetti siblings in their own ways. For the Rossettis, as for so many Victorian-era poets and artists, Purgatory , with its emphasis on the ideal but elusive woman, Beatrice, held special appeal. One of Gabriel’s paintings of Beatrice, Dante’s Dream , did in fact take approximately fifteen years to complete. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s tomb even contains a bas-relief of Beatrice and Dante. Christina Rossetti never married (after turning down the proposal of Charles Cayley and also an earlier suitor, at the sight of whom she really did faint in the street). When Tennyson died, Christina Rossetti was abashed at the rumor that she might be chosen the new, first female poet laureate. (She was not offered the position, nor was another rumored candidate, rival poet Jean Ingelow.) When she passed away, her brother William ordered inscribed on her tombstone a quote from Dante:

Volsersi a me con salutevol cenno.

Which can be translated as,

They turned to me with an act of salutation.

This epitaph invites us to imagine Christina taking the place of Dante in the afterlife, gratified to be earning respect from its suffering inhabitants.

The dates of the 1870 calendar were the same as that of 1300, the year Dante claimed he made his journey into the afterlife.

I’m grateful to have been guided through this novel by two irreplaceable and gifted people also instrumental in bringing The Dante Club to life: my editor, Ann Godoff, and my agent, Suzanne Gluck. At William Morris, I also thank Andrea Blatt, Raffaella De Angelis, Tracy Fisher, Clio Seraphim, and Elizabeth Sheinkman; at Penguin Press, Casey Denis, Megan Gerrity, Angelina Krahn, Gretchen Achilles, and Claire Vaccaro. The professor who brought me to Dante, Lino Pertile, continues to be patient with my questions and generous in his encouragement. Thanks also for advice from one of my classmates from that original “Purgatory” seminar, Adam Frost, and my go-to expert in forensic science, Mark Benecke. My circle of tireless readers and supporters to thank include Tobey Pearl, Kevin Birmingham, Benjamin Cavell, Gabriella Gage, Joseph Gangemi, and Scott Weinger; Susan, Warren, and Ian Pearl, Marsha and David Helmstadter, and my children, who give me reasons to get out of Purgatory.