Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  The members of the Harvard Corporation, the president and six pious men of affairs chosen from outside the College faculty, were firm in their commitment to the long-standing curriculum that had served them well—Greek, Latin, Hebrew, ancient history, mathematics, and science—and their corollary assertion that the inferior modern languages and literature would remain a novelty, something to fatten their catalogs. Longfellow had made some headway after Professor Ticknor’s departure, including initiating a Dante seminar and hiring a brilliant Italian exile named Pietro Bachi as an Italian instructor. His Dante seminar, from a lack of interest in the subject and the language, was consistently his least popular. Still, the poet enjoyed the zeal of a few minds passing through that course. One of the zealous was James Russell Lowell.

  Now, after ten years of his own tussles with the administration, Lowell faced an event for which he had waited, for which the time was ripe as destiny: the discovery of Dante by America. But not only was Harvard swift and thorough in its discouragement, the Dante Club also faced an obstacle from inside: Holmes and his straddling.

  Lowell sometimes took walks in Cambridge with Holmes’s oldest son, Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior. Twice a week, the law student would emerge from the Dane Law School building just when Lowell had finished his teaching at University Hall. Holmes could not appreciate his good fortune at having Junior, because he had made his son hate him—if only Holmes would listen, instead of making Junior talk. Lowell had asked the young man once whether Dr. Holmes ever spoke at home about the Dante Club. “Oh, certainly, Mr. Lowell,” Junior, handsome and tall, said, smirking, “and the Atlantic Club and the Union Club and the Saturday Club and the Scientific Club and the Historical Association and the Medical Society . . .”

  Phineas Jennison, one of Boston’s wealthiest new businessmen, was sitting next to Lowell at a recent Saturday Club supper at the Parker House when all this darkened Lowell’s mind. “Harvard is harassing you again,” Jennison said. Lowell was stunned that his face could be read as easily as a sign board. “Do not jump so, my dear friend,” Jennison said, laughing, the deep dimple in his chin jiggling. Jennison’s near relations said that his gold-flaxen hair and his regal dimple had betokened his vast fortune even from the time he was a boy, though, accurately speaking, it was perhaps a regicidal dimple, inherited as it was supposed to be from an ancestor who had beheaded Charles I. “It is only that I chanced to speak with some of the Corporation fellows the other day. You know nothing happens in Boston or Cambridge without coming under my nose.”

  “Building another library for us, are you?” Lowell asked.

  “The fellows seemed to be heated up speaking amongst themselves of your department anyway. They seemed downright determined. I do not mean to pry into your affairs, of course, only—”

  “Between us, my dear Jennison, they mean to rid me of my Dante class,” Lowell interrupted. “I sometimes fear they’ve become as set against Dante as I am for him. They even offered to increase enrollment for students in my classes if I allow them approval over my seminar topics.” Jennison’s expression conveyed his concern.

  “I refused, of course,” Lowell said.

  Jennison flashed his wide smile. “Did you?”

  They were interrupted by a few toasts, including the night’s most cheered improvisational rhyme, which had been demanded by the revelers from Dr. Holmes. Holmes, quick as always, even managed to draw attention to the raw style of the format.

  “A verse too polished will not stick at all:

  The worst back-scratcher is a billiard ball.”

  “These after-dinner verses could kill any poet but Holmes,” Lowell said with an admiring grin. He had a hazy look in his eyes. “Sometimes I feel I am not the stuff that professors are made of, Jennison. Better in some ways, worse in others. Too sensitive and not conceited enough—physically conceited, I should call it. I know it is all wearing me out.” He paused. “And why shouldn’t sitting in the professor’s chair all these years benumb me to the world? What must someone like you, prince of industry, think of such a paltry existence?”

  “Child’s talk, my dear Lowell!” Jennison seemed tired with the topic but after a moment’s thought was newly interested. “You have a larger duty to the world and to yourself than any mere spectator! I shan’t hear a bit of your hesitancy! I wouldn’t know what Dante is to save my soul. But a genius the likes of you, my dear friend, assumes a divine responsibility to fight for all those exiled from the world.”

  Lowell mumbled something inaudible but no doubt self-effacing.

  “Now, now, Lowell,” Jennison said. “Were you not the one to convince the Saturday Club that a mere merchant was good enough to dine with such immortals as your friends?”

  “Could they have refused you after you offered to buy the Parker House?” Lowell laughed.

  “They could have refused me if I had given up my fight to belong among great men. May I quote from my favorite poet: ‘And what they dare to dream of, dare to do.’ Oh, how good that is!”

  Lowell fell into more laughter at the idea of being inspired by his own poetry, but in truth, he was. Why shouldn’t he be? The proof of poetry was, in Lowell’s mind, that it reduced to the essence of a single line the vague philosophy that floated in all men’s minds, so as to render it portable and useful, ready to the hand.

  Now, on his way to another lecture, the very thought of entering a room full of students, who still thought it was possible to learn all about something, made him yawn.

  Lowell hitched his horse to the old water pump outside Hollis Hall. “Kick them like hell if they come, old boy,” he said, lighting a cigar. Horses and cigars were among the catalog of prohibited items on Harvard Yard.

  A man was leaning idly against an elm. He wore a bright yellow-checkered waistcoat and had a gaunt, or rather wasted, set of features. The man, who towered over the poet even at his slanting angle, too old for a student and too worn for a faculty member, stared at him with the familiar, insatiable gleam of the literary admirer.

  Fame did not mean much to Lowell, who liked only to think that his friends found some good in what he wrote and that Mabel Lowell would be proud of being his daughter after he was gone. Otherwise he thought himself teres atque rotundus: a microcosm in himself, his own author, public, critic, and posterity. Still, the praise of men and women on the streets could not fail to warm him. Sometimes he would go for a stroll in Cambridge with his heart so full of yearning that an indifferent look, even from an entire stranger, would bring tears into his eyes. But there was something equally painful in encountering the opaque, dazed glare of recognition. That made him feel wholly transparent and separate: Poet Lowell, apparition.

  This yellow-vested watcher leaning on the tree touched the brim of his black bowler as Lowell passed. The poet bowed his head confusedly, his cheeks tingling. As he rushed through the College campus to vanquish his day’s obligations, Lowell did not notice how strangely intent the observer remained.

  Dr. Holmes bounded into the steep amphitheater. A round of boot stomping, employed by those whose pencils and notebooks made the use of hands inconvenient, rumbled forth upon his entrance. This was followed by rapid hurrahs from the rowdies (Holmes called them his young barbarians) collected in that upper region of the classroom known as the Mountain (as though this were the assembly of the French Revolution). Here Holmes constructed the human body inside out each term. Here, four times a week, were fifty adoring sons waiting on his every word. Standing before his class in the belly of the amphitheater, he felt twelve feet tall rather than his actual five-five (and that in particularly substantial boots, made by the best shoemaker in Boston).

  Oliver Wendell Holmes was the only member of the faculty ever able to manage the one o’clock assignment, when hunger and exhaustion combined with the narcotized air of the two-story brick box on North Grove. Some envious colleagues said his literary fame won over the students. In fact, most of the boys who chose medicine over law and theology were rustics, an
d if they had encountered any real literature before arriving in Boston, it would have been some poem of Longfellow’s. Still, word of Holmes’s literary reputation would spread like sensational gossip, someone securing a copy of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table and circulating it, remarking with an incredulous stare to a fellow, “You haven’t yet read the Autocrat?” But his literary reputation among the students was more a reputation of a reputation.

  “Today,” said Holmes, “we shall begin with a topic with which I trust you boys are not at all familiar.” He yanked at a clean white sheet that covered a female cadaver, then held up his palms at the foot stomping and hollering that followed.

  “Respect, gentlemen! Respect for humanity and God’s divinest work!”

  Dr. Holmes was too lost in the ocean of attention to notice the intruder among his students.

  “Yes, the female body shall begin today’s subject,” Holmes continued.

  A timid young man, Alvah Smith, one of the half-dozen bright faces in any class to which the professor naturally directs his lecture to intermediate for the rest, blushed vibrantly in the front row, where his neighbors were happy to taunt his embarrassment.

  Holmes saw this. “And here, on Smith, we find exhibited the inhibitory action of the vasomotor nerves on the arterioles suddenly relaxing and filling the surface capillaries with blood—that same pleasing phenomenon which some of you may witness on the cheek of that young person whom you expect to visit this evening.”

  Smith laughed along with the rest. But Holmes also heard an involuntary guffaw that cracked with the slowness of age. He squinted up the aisle at the Reverend Dr. Putnam, one of the lesser powers of the Harvard Corporation. The fellows of the Corporation, though they comprised the highest level of supervision, never actually attended classes in their university; tramping from Cambridge to the medical building, which was located across the river in Boston for proximity to the hospitals, would have been an unacceptable notion to most administrators.

  “Now,” Holmes said to his class distractedly, setting his tools to the cadavers, where his two demonstrators gathered. “Let us plunge into the depths of our subject.”

  After class ended and the barbarians elbowed their way through the aisles, Holmes led the Reverend Dr. Putnam to his office.

  “You, my dearest Dr. Holmes, represent the gold standard for men of American letters. None have worked so hard to rise in so many fields. Your name has become a symbol of scholarship and authorship. Why, just yesterday I was speaking with a gentleman from England who was saying how you are revered in the mother country.”

  Holmes smiled, oblivious. “What did he say? What did he say, Reverend Putnam? You know I like to have it laid on thick.”

  Putnam frowned at the interruption. “Despite this, Augustus Manning has developed concern about certain of your literary activities, Dr. Holmes.”

  Holmes was surprised. “You mean about Mr. Longfellow’s Dante work? Longfellow is the translator. I am but one of his aides-de-camp, so to speak. I suggest you wait and read the work; surely you will enjoy it.”

  “James Russell Lowell. J. T. Fields. George Greene. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Quite a selection of ‘aides,’ now, isn’t it?”

  Holmes was annoyed. He had not thought their club a matter of general interest and did not like speaking of it with an outsider. The Dante Club was one of his few activities not belonging to the public world. “Oh, throw a stone in Cambridge and you’re bound to hit a two-volumer, my dear Putnam.”

  Putnam folded his arms and waited.

  Holmes waved a hand in an arbitrary direction. “Mr. Fields deals with such matters.”

  “Pray remove yourself from this precarious association,” Putnam said with dead seriousness. “Talk some sense into your friends. Professor Lowell, for instance, has only compounded—”

  “If you’re in search of someone to whom Lowell listens, my dear reverend,” Holmes interrupted with a laugh, “you’ve made a wrong turn into the Medical College.”

  “Holmes,” Putnam said kindly. “I’ve come chiefly to warn you, because I count you a friend. If Dr. Manning knew I was speaking with you like this, he would . . .” Putnam paused and lowered his tone eulogistically, “Dear Holmes, your future will be hitched to Dante. I fear what shall happen to your poetry, your name, by the time Manning is through, in your current situation.”

  “Manning has no call to assault me personally even if he objects to our little club’s chosen interests.”

  Putnam replied, “We’re talking of Augustus Manning. Consider this.”

  When Dr. Holmes turned away, he looked like he was swallowing a globe. Putnam often wondered why all men did not wear beards. He was cheerful, even on the bumpy ride back into Cambridge, for he knew that Dr. Manning would be highly pleased with his report.

  Artemus Prescott Healey, b. 1804, d. 1865, was placed into a large family plot, one of the first purchased on the main hillside of Mount Auburn Cemetery years earlier.

  There were still many among the Brahmins who begrudged Healey his cowardly decisions before the war. But it was agreed by all that only the most extreme former radical would offend the memory of their state’s chief justice by spurning his final ceremonies.

  Dr. Holmes leaned over to his wife. “Only four years’ difference, ’Melia.”

  She requested elaboration with a brief purr.

  “Justice Healey’s sixty,” Holmes continued in his whisper. “Or would be. Only four years older than I am, dear, almost to the day!” Really almost to the month; nonetheless, Dr. Holmes genuinely appreciated the proximity of dead persons to his own age. Amelia Holmes, by a shift in her eyes, told him to stay silent during the eulogies. Holmes settled his mouth and looked ahead over the quiet acres.

  Holmes could not claim to have been an intimate of the deceased; few men could, even among the Brahmins. Chief Justice Healey had served on the Harvard Board of Overseers, so Dr. Holmes had enjoyed some routine interaction with the judge in Healey’s capacity as administrator. Holmes also had known Healey through the doctor’s membership in Phi Beta Kappa, for Healey had presided for a time over that proud society. Dr. Holmes kept his ΦBK key on his watch chain, an item with which his fingers now wrestled as Healey’s body settled into its new bed. At least, Holmes thought with a doctor’s special sympathy for dying, poor Healey never suffered.

  Dr. Holmes’s most prolonged contact with the judge had come at the courthouse, at a time that shook Holmes, that made him want to retreat fully into a world of poetry. The defense in the Webster trial, presided over, as all capital crimes, by a three-judge panel chaired by the chief justice, had requested Dr. Holmes’s testimony as a character witness for John W. Webster. It was during the heat of the trial so many years before that Wendell Holmes witnessed the ponderous, grueling style of speech by which Artemus Healey surrendered his legal opinions.

  “Harvard professors do not commit murder.” That was what the then-president of Harvard, taking the stand shortly before Dr. Holmes, testified on behalf of Webster.

  The murder of Dr. Parkman had transpired in the laboratory below Holmes’s lecture room, while Holmes was lecturing. It was hard enough that Holmes had been friends with both murderer and victim—not knowing whom to lament more. At least the customary rolling laughter of Holmes’s students had drowned out Professor Webster’s hacking of the body into pieces.

  “A devout man, and one that feared God with all his house . . .”

  The preacher’s shrill promises of Heaven, with his chief-mourner expression, did not sit well with Holmes. As a matter of principle, few ornaments of religious ceremony ever had sat well with Dr. Holmes, son of one of those stalwart ministers whose Calvinism had remained hard and fast in the face of the Unitarian upheaval. Oliver Wendell Holmes and his shy younger brother, John, had been reared with that awful bosh that still buzzed in the doctor’s ears: “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.” Fortunately, they were sheltered by the quick wit of their mother, who whispered witty asid
es while the Reverend Holmes and his guest ministers preached advance damnation and inborn sin. She would promise them that new ideas would come, particularly to Wendell when he was shaken by some story of the devil’s control over their souls. And so did the new ideas arrive, for Boston and for Oliver Wendell Holmes. Only Unitarians could have built Mount Auburn Cemetery, a burial place that was also a garden.

  While Holmes took stock of the many notables in attendance to occupy himself, many others were tilting their heads in Dr. Holmes’s direction, for he was part of a pocket of celebrities known by various names—the New England Saints or the Fireside Poets. Whatever their name, they were the top literary contingent of the country. Near the Holmeses stood James Russell Lowell, poet, professor, and editor, idly twisting the long tusk of his mustache until Fanny Lowell would pull at his sleeve; to the other side, J. T. Fields, publisher of New England’s greatest poets, his head and beard pointed downward in a perfect triangle of serious contemplation, a striking figure to be juxtaposed with the angelic pink cheeks and perfect poise of his young wife. Lowell and Fields were no more intimate with Chief Justice Healey than was Holmes, but they had attended the service out of respect for Healey’s position and family (to whom the Lowells, in addition, happened to be cousins in some fashion or another).

  Those attendees viewing this trio of litterateurs looked in vain for the most illustrious of their company. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had, as a matter of fact, prepared to accompany his friends to Mount Auburn, which was no more than a stroll from his house, but as usual had kept to his fireside instead. There was little in the world outside Craigie House that would presume to draw out Longfellow. After so many years dedicated to this project, the reality of pending publication brought full concentration. Besides, Longfellow feared (and rightly so) that had he come to Mount Auburn, his fame would have drawn the mourners’ attention away from the Healey family. Whenever Longfellow walked through the streets of Cambridge, people whispered, children threw themselves into his arms, hats were lifted in such great numbers that it seemed all of Middlesex County had simultaneously entered a chapel.