Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  That was all he said. But they hurrahed as though it were another Emancipation Proclamation. Then there was cherry cobbler and ice cream, and cognac with flaming cubes of sugar, and unwrapped cigars lit on the candles at the center of the table.

  Before the night came to an end, Longfellow was persuaded by Fields to tell the table of the cigars’ history. In coaxing Longfellow to speak of himself in any capacity, one was required to cloak interest in a neutral topic, such as cigars.

  “I had called on the Corner on business,” Longfellow began, while Fields laughed in advance, “when Mr. Fields persuaded me to accompany him to a nearby tobacconist’s to procure some gifts. The tobacconist brought over a box of a certain brand of cigars I swear I had never before heard of. And he said, with all the earnestness in the world, ‘These, sir, are the kind Longfellow prefers to smoke.’”

  “What was your reply?” Greene asked over the gleeful din.

  “I glanced at the man, looked down at the cigars, and said, ‘Well then, I must try them.’ And paid him to send a box over.”

  “So what do you think now, my dear Longfellow?” Lowell’s dessert caught in his throat from laughing.

  Longfellow exhaled. “Oh, I believe the man was quite right. I do find them good.”

  “‘Therefore it is good that I should arm myself with foresight, so, if I am driven from the place most dear to me, I will . . .’” the student hummed with frustration, rubbing his finger back and forth under the Italian.

  For several years now, Lowell’s study in Elmwood had doubled as a classroom for his course on Dante. In his first term as Smith Professor, he had requested a room and received a bleak space in the basement of University Hall, with long wooden boards instead of desks and a pulpit for the professor that had to have descended from the Puritans. The course was not sufficiently well attended, Lowell was told, to merit one of the more desirable classrooms. It was just as well. Holding court at Elmwood provided him the comfort of a pipe and the warmth of a wood fire, and was another reason not to have to leave home.

  The class met twice a week on days of Lowell’s choosing—sometimes on a Sunday, for Lowell liked the idea of meeting on the same day of the week that Boccaccio, centuries before him, had held the first Dante lectures in Florence. Mabel Lowell often sat and listened to her father’s lessons from the adjoining room, which was connected by two open archways.

  “Remember, Mead,” said Professor Lowell when the student stopped in frustration. “Remember, in this fifth sphere of Heaven, the sphere of Martyrs, Cacciaguida has prophesied to Dante that the Poet will be exiled from Florence soon after he returns to the living world, under the sentence of death by fire if he reenters the city gates. Now, Mead, translate his next phrase—‘io non perdessi li altri per i miei carmi’—with that in mind.”

  Lowell’s Italian was fluent and always technically correct. But Mead, a Harvard junior, liked to think that Lowell’s Americanness came out in the scrupulous pronunciation of each syllable, as if each had no connection to the next.

  “‘I will not lose other places for reason of my poems.’”

  “Stay with the text, Mead! Carmi are songs—not just his poems, but the very music of his voice. In the days of minstrels, you would pay your money and have a choice whether he would give you his stories as song or sermon. A sermon which sings and a song which preaches—that is Dante’s Comedy. ‘So that through my songs I shall not lose the other places.’ A fair reading, Mead,” Lowell said with a gesture resembling a stretch, which communicated his general approval.

  “Dante repeats himself,” Pliny Mead said flatly. Edward Sheldon, the student beside him, squirmed at this. “As you say,” Mead continued, “a divine prophet has already foreseen that Dante will find sanctuary and protection under Can Grande. So what ‘other’ places would Dante need? Nonsense for the sake of poetry.”

  Lowell said, “When Dante speaks of a new home in the future by virtue of his work, when he speaks of the other places he seeks, he speaks not of his life in 1302—the date of his exile—but of his second life, his life as he will live on through the poem for hundreds of years.”

  Mead persisted. “But the ‘dearest place’ is never truly taken from Dante; he takes himself away from it. Florence offered him a chance to return home, to his wife and family, yet he refused!”

  Pliny Mead was never one to impress instructors or peers with geniality, but since the morning he had received his marks on last term’s papers—and had been sorely disappointed—he had eyed Lowell with sourness. Mead attributed his low mark—and his resulting drop in the class of 1867 rank book from twelfth to fifteenth scholar—to the fact that he had disagreed with Lowell on several occasions during discussions of French literature and that the professor could not stand being thought wrong. Mead would have dropped his course work in the living languages altogether but for the Corporation’s rule that once enrolled in a language course, the student had to remain three more terms in the department—one of the contrivances meant to dissuade the boys from even dipping a toe. So Mead was stuck with that great bag of wind James Russell Lowell. And with Dante Alighieri.

  “What an offer they made!” Lowell laughed. “Full clemency for Dante and restoration of his rightful place in Florence: in return for the poet’s request for absolution and a hefty payment of money! We marched Johnny Reb back into the Union with less degradation. Far be it for a man who cries aloud for justice to accept such a rotten compromise with his persecutors.”

  “Well, Dante is still a Florentine, no matter what we say!” Mead asserted, trying to recruit Sheldon’s support with a collusive glance. “Sheldon, can’t you see it? Dante writes incessantly of Florence, and of the Florentines he meets and speaks with in his visit to the afterlife, and he writes all this while in exile! Clear enough to me, friends, he longs only for return. The man’s death in exile and poverty is his great final failure.”

  With irritation, Edward Sheldon noticed that Mead was grinning at having silenced Lowell, who had risen and thrust his hands into his rather shabby smoking jacket. But Sheldon could see in Lowell, could see in the puffing of his pipe, a heightened frame of mind. He seemed to be treading on another plane of mental cognizance, far above the Elmwood study, as he paced the rug with his heavy-laced boots. Lowell typically wouldn’t allow a freshman admission to an advanced literature class, but young Sheldon had been persistent and Lowell had told him they would see whether he could manage. Sheldon remained grateful for the opportunity, and hoped for the chance to defend Lowell and Dante against Mead, the sort who had no doubt put coppers on the railroad track as a younger boy. Sheldon opened his mouth, but Mead shot him a look that made Sheldon stuff his thoughts back inside.

  Lowell betrayed a look of disappointment at Sheldon, then turned to Mead. “Where is the Jew in you, my boy?” he asked.

  “What?” Mead cried, offended.

  “No, never mind, I didn’t think so. Mead, Dante’s theme is man—not a man,” Lowell said finally with a mild patience that he reserved only for students. “The Italians forever twitch at Dante’s sleeves trying to make him say he is of their politics and their way of thinking. Their way indeed! To confine it to Florence or Italy is to banish it from the sympathies of mankind. We read Paradise Lost as a poem but Dante’s Comedy as a chronicle of our inner lives. Do you boys know of Isaiah 38:10?”

  Sheldon thought hard; Mead sat with iron-faced stubbornness, purposefully not thinking about whether he did know it.

  “‘Ego dixi: In dimidio dierum meorum vadam ad portas inferi’!” Lowell crowed, then rushed to his crowded bookshelves, where somehow he instantly found the cited chapter and verse in a Latin Bible. “You see?” he asked, placing it open on the rug at the foot of his students, most delighted to show that he had remembered the quote exactly.

  “Shall I translate?” Lowell asked. “‘I say: In the midst of my days I shall go to the gates of hell.’ Is there anything our old Scripture writers didn’t think of? Sometime in the mid
dle of our lives, we all, each one of us, journey to face a Hell of our own. What is the very first line of Dante’s poem?”

  “‘Midway through the journey of our life,’” Edward Sheldon volunteered happily, having read that opening salvo of Inferno again and again in his room at Stoughton Hall, never having been so ambushed by any verse of poetry, so emboldened by another’s cry. “‘I found myself in a dark wood, for the correct path had been lost.’”

  “‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. Midway through the journey of our life,’” Lowell repeated with such a wide glare in the direction of his fireplace that Sheldon glanced over his shoulder, thinking pretty Mabel Lowell must have entered behind him, but her shadow showed her still sitting in the adjoining room. “‘Our life.’ From the very first line of Dante’s poem, we are involved in the journey, we are taking the pilgrimage as much as he is, and we must face our Hell as squarely as Dante faces his. You see that the poem’s great and lasting value is as the autobiography of a human soul. Yours and mine, it may be, just as much as Dante’s.”

  Lowell thought to himself as he heard Sheldon read the next fifteen lines of Italian how good it felt to teach something real. How foolish was Socrates to think of banishing the poets from Athens! How thoroughly Lowell would enjoy watching Augustus Manning’s defeat when Longfellow’s translation proved itself an immense success.

  The next day, Lowell was departing from University Hall after delivering a lecture on Goethe. He was not a little taken aback when he found himself facing a short Italian man rushing past, dressed in a withered but desperately pressed sackcoat.

  “Bachi?” said Lowell.

  Pietro Bachi had been hired as an Italian instructor by Longfellow years before. The Corporation had never liked the idea of employing foreigners, particularly an Italian papist—the fact that Bachi had been banished by the Vatican did not change their minds. By the time Lowell had assumed control of the department, the Corporation had stumbled upon very reasonable grounds to eliminate Pietro Bachi: his intemperance and insolvency. On the day he was fired, the Italian had grumbled to Professor Lowell, “I shan’t be caught here again, not even dead.” Lowell had, on whatever fancy, taken Bachi at his word.

  “My dear professor.” Bachi now offered his hand to his former department head, who pumped vigorously in his usual way.

  “Well,” Lowell started, not sure whether to ask how Bachi, plainly alive and breathing, came to be in Harvard Yard.

  “Out for a stroll, professor,” Bachi explained. Yet he seemed to be looking anxiously past Lowell, so the professor kept the pleasantries short. But Lowell noticed, as he turned back briefly in increasing wonder at Bachi’s appearance, that Bachi was heading for a vaguely familiar figure. It was the fellow in the black bowler hat and checkered waistcoat, the poetry admirer whom Lowell had seen idling against an American elm some weeks before. Now, what business would he have with Bachi? Lowell planted himself to see whether Bachi would greet the unknown character, who certainly seemed to be waiting for someone. But then a sea of students, grateful to have been released from Greek recitations, swarmed around them, and the curious pair—if the two men were indeed to be spoken of together—were lost to Lowell’s sight.

  Lowell, forgetting the scene entirely, started toward the law school, where Oliver Wendell Junior stood surrounded by classmates, explaining to them their mistake on some point of law. The general appearance was not dissimiliar to Dr. Holmes—but it was as though someone had taken the little doctor and stretched him to twice his stature on a rack.

  Dr. Holmes idled at the foot of the servants’ stairs of his house. He stopped at a low-hung mirror and flung his thick shock of brown hair to one side with a comb. He thought his face not a very flattering likeness of himself. “More a convenience than an ornament,” he liked to say to people. A complexion one shade darker, the nose shapelier on the incline, the neck more pronounced, he could have been looking at the reflection of Wendell Junior. Neddie, Holmes’s youngest, had been unfortunate enough to align his looks with Dr. Holmes’s, inheriting too his breathing problems. Dr. Holmes and Neddie were Wendells, the Reverend Holmes would have said; Wendell Junior, a pure Holmes. With that blood, Junior would no doubt rise above his father’s name, not only Holmes Esq. but His Excellency Holmes or President Holmes. Dr. Holmes perked up at the sound of heavy boots and swiftly backed into an adjoining room. Then he started for the staircase again with a casual stride, his gaze pointed down in an old book. Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior burst into the house and seemed to make one great leap for the second floor.

  “Why, Wendy,” Holmes called out with a quick smile. “That you?”

  Junior slowed down midway up the stairs. “Hello, Father.”

  “Your mother was just asking had I seen you today, and I realized I had not. Where are you coming from so late in the day, my boy?”

  “A walk.”

  “That so? Just you?”

  Junior paused grudgingly at the landing. Under his dark eyebrows, Junior glared at his father, kneading the wooden baluster at the bottom of the stairs. “I was out talking with James Lowell, as a matter of fact.”

  Holmes put on a show of surprise. “Lowell? Have you been spending time together of late? You and Professor Lowell?”

  A broad shoulder lifted slightly.

  “Well, what is it you talk about with our dear mutual friend, might I ask?” Dr. Holmes went on with an amiable smile.

  “Politics, my time in the war, my law classes. We get on quite well, I’d say.”

  “Well, you’re spending far too much time in common leisure these days. I order that you cease these trifling excursions with Mr. Lowell!” No reply. “It robs your time for studying, you know. We can’t have that, can we?”

  Junior laughed. “Every morning it’s, ‘What’s the point, Wendy? A lawyer can never be a great man, Wendy.’” This was said with a light, husky voice. “Now you wish me to study the law harder?”

  “Right, Junior. It costs sweat, it costs nerve-fat, it costs phosphorus to do anything worth doing. And I shall have a word with Mr. Lowell about your habits at our next Dante Club session. I’m sure he shall agree with me. He himself was a lawyer once, and knows what it requires.” Holmes started for the hall, rather satisfied in his firm position.

  Junior grunted.

  Dr. Holmes turned back. “Something more, my boy?”

  “I only wonder,” Junior said. “I’d like to hear further about your Dante Club, Father.”

  Wendell Junior had never shown any interest in his literary or professional activities. He had never read the doctor’s poems or his first novel, nor had he attended his lyceum lectures on medical advances or the history of poetry. This had been the case more pointedly after Holmes published “My Hunt After the Captain” in The Atlantic Monthly, retelling his journey through the South after receiving a telegram mistakenly reporting Junior’s death on the battlefield.

  Junior had in fact skimmed through the proof sheets, feeling his wounds throb as he took it in. He could not believe how his father could think to roll up the war into a few thousand words, which mostly told anecdotes of dying Rebels in hospital beds and hotel clerks in small towns asking if he was not the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.

  “I mean,” Junior continued with a cocked grin, “do you really bother calling yourself a member?”

  “I beg your pardon, Wendy? What’s the meaning of that? What do you know of it?”

  “Only that Mr. Lowell says that your voice is heard mostly at the supper table, not in the study. For Mr. Longfellow, that work is life itself; for Lowell, his calling. You see, he acts on his beliefs, doesn’t just talk of them, just as he did when he defended slaves as a lawyer. For you, it’s just another place to chime glasses.”

  “Did Lowell say . . .” Dr. Holmes began. “Now see here, Junior!”

  Junior reached the top floor, where he shut himself in his room.

  “How could you know the first thing about our Dante Club!” Dr. Ho
lmes cried.

  Holmes wandered the house helplessly before retiring into his study. His voice heard mostly at table? The more he repeated the allegation to himself, the more stinging it was: Lowell was trying to preserve his place at the right hand of Longfellow by showing himself superior at the expense of Holmes.

  With Junior’s words in Lowell’s loud baritone hanging on him, he wrote doggedly over the next weeks, with a sustained progress that did not come to him naturally. The time at which any new thought struck Holmes was his Sibylline moment, but the act of composition usually was attended with a dull, disagreeable sensation about the forehead—interrupted only from time to time by the simultaneous descent of some group of words or unexpected image, which produced a burst of the most insane enthusiasm and self-gratulation and during which he sometimes committed puerile excesses of language and action.

  He could not work many hours consecutively, in any case, without deranging his whole system. His feet were apt to get cold, his head hot, his muscles restless, and he would feel as if he must get up. In the evening, he would stop all hard work before eleven o’clock and take a book of light reading to clear his mind of its previous contents. Too much brain work gave him a sense of disgust, like overeating. He attributed this in part to the depleting, nerve-straining qualities of the climate. Brown-Séquard, a fellow medical man from Paris, had said that animals do not bleed so much in America as they did in Europe. Was that not startling to think? Despite this biological shortcoming, Holmes now felt himself writing like a madman.

  “You know I should be the one to speak with Professor Ticknor about helping our Dante cause,” Holmes said to Fields. He had stopped by Fields’s office at the Corner.

  “What’s that?” Fields was reading three things at once: a manuscript, a contract, and a letter. “Where are those royalty agreements?”

  J. R. Osgood handed him another pile of papers.

  “Your time is much occupied, Fields, and you have the next number of the Atlantic to think about—you need to rest your tired brain, in any case,” argued Holmes. “Professor Ticknor was my teacher, after all. I may well have the most influence over the old fellow, for Longfellow’s sake.”