Your absence from Nahant will leave a gap like that made in the street when a house is pulled down. Longfellow noticed how Dantesque his figures of speech had become.
Charles Eliot Norton and William Dean Howells had returned from Europe in time to assist Longfellow in annotating his complete translation. The halo of their foreign adventures still on them, Howells and Norton promised their friends tales of Ruskin, Carlyle, Tennyson, and Browning: There were certain chronicles better relayed in person than by letter.
Lowell interrupted this sentiment with a hearty laugh.
“But aren’t you interested, James?” asked Charles Eliot Norton.
“Our dear Norton,” Holmes said, glossing Lowell’s gaiety, “our dear Howells, it is we, though we have crossed no ocean, who had a voyage that could be contained in no mortal letter.” Then Lowell swore Norton and Howells to eternal confidence.
When the Dante Club had to end their meetings, when their work was done, Holmes thought Longfellow might become uneasy. So Holmes volunteered Norton’s Shady Hill estate to meet at on Saturday evenings. There they would discuss Norton’s progressing translation of Dante’s La Vita Nuova—“The New Life”—the story of Dante’s love for Beatrice. Some nights their little circle was enlarged by Edward Sheldon, who began compiling a concordance of Dante’s poems and minor writings, on his way, he hoped, to studying for a year or two in Italy.
Lowell had recently agreed to allow his daughter Mabel to travel to Italy as well, for a tour of six months. The Fieldses, who would depart by ship in the New Year to celebrate the passing of daily operations of the publishing firm to J. R. Osgood, would escort her.
In the meantime, Fields began arranging for a banquet at Boston’s famous Union Club even before Houghton started printing Longfellow’s Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, three volumes that reached the booksellers as the literary event of the season.
On the day of the banquet, Oliver Wendell Holmes spent the afternoon at Craigie House. George Washington Greene was in, too, from Rhode Island.
“Yes, yes,” Holmes said to Greene of the great numbers his second novel had sold. “It is the individual readers who matter most, for in their eyes reside the worth of writing. Writing is not survival of the fittest but survival of the survivors. What are the critics? They do their best to cheapen me, to make me of no account—and if I cannot endure it, I deserve it all.”
“You sound like Mr. Lowell these days,” Greene said, laughing.
“I suppose I do.”
With a shaky finger, Greene pulled his white cravat away from his baggy neck. “Just need some air, no doubt,” he said while falling into a burst of coughing.
“If I could make you well, Mr. Greene, I believe I would turn physician again.” Holmes went to see whether Longfellow might be ready.
“No, no, better not,” whispered Greene. “Let us wait outside until he’s finished.”
Halfway down the front path, Holmes remarked, “I supposed I should have had enough, but do you believe, Mr. Greene, that I have begun rereading Dante’s Comedy? I wonder, through all we experienced, you never doubted the value of our work. You never once thought something had been lost along the way?”
Greene’s half-moon eyes closed. “You gentlemen, Dr. Holmes, always thought Dante’s story the greatest fiction ever told. But I, I had always believed Dante made his journey. I had believed God had granted him that, and had granted poetry that.”
“And now,” Holmes said. “You still believe it was all true, don’t you?”
“Oh, more than ever, Dr. Holmes.” He smiled, looking back at the window of Longfellow’s study. “More than ever.”
The lamps turned low in Craigie House, Longfellow climbed the stairs, passing the Giotto portrait of Dante, who looked unfazed by his one useless, damaged eye. Longfellow thought that perhaps this eye was the future, but in the other would remain the beautiful mystery of Beatrice that set his life in motion. Longfellow listened to the prayers of his daughters, then watched Alice Mary tuck in her two younger sisters, Edith and little Annie Allegra, and their dolls, who had been taken with colds.
“But when will you be home, Papa?”
“Quite late, Edith. You’ll all be asleep by then.”
“Will they ask you to speak? Who else will be there?” Annie Allegra asked. “Tell us who else.”
Longfellow brushed his beard with his hand. “Who have I said so far, my dear?”
“Not at all enough, Papa!” She removed her notebook from under the covers. “Mr. Lowell, Mr. Fields, Dr. Holmes, Mr. Norton, Mr. Howells . . .” Annie Allegra was preparing a book she called A Little Person’s Memories of Great People, which she planned to publish with Ticknor & Fields, and had decided to start with a report on the Dante banquet.
“Ah, yes,” Longfellow interrupted. “You may add to that Mr. Greene, your good friend Mr. Sheldon, and certainly Mr. Edwin Whipple, Fields’s fine magazine critic.”
Annie Allegra wrote as much as she could spell.
“I love you, my dear little girls,” Longfellow said as he kissed each soft forehead. “I love you because you are my daughters. And Mama’s daughters, and because she loved you. And loves you still.”
The bright patches of the daughters’ quilts expanded and dropped symphonically, and there he left them, secure in the infinite hush of the night. He looked out the window to the carriage house, where Fields’s new carriage—it seemed he always had a new one—waited, the old bay horse, a veteran of the Union cavalry newly adopted by Fields, helping himself to water that had collected in a shallow ditch.
It was raining now, a night rain; a gentle, Christian rain. It must have been very inconvenient for J. T. Fields, driving from Boston to Cambridge only to go back to Boston again, but he had insisted.
Holmes and Greene had left a good space for Longfellow between them, on the seats across from Fields and Lowell. Longfellow, as he climbed up, hoped he would not be asked to speak in front of all the guests during the banquet, but if he were, he would thank his friends for bringing him along.
Historical Note
In 1865, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the first American poet to achieve true international acclaim, began a Dante translation club in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home. The poets James Russell Lowell and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the historian George Washington Greene, and the publisher James T. Fields collaborated with Longfellow to complete the country’s first full-length translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The scholars withstood both literary conservatism, which protected the dominant position of Greek and Latin in academia, and cultural nativism, which sought to limit American literature to homegrown works, a movement stimulated but not always spearheaded by Ralph Waldo Emerson, a friend to Longfellow’s circle. By 1881, Longfellow’s original “Dante Club” had been formalized as the Dante Society of America, with Longfellow, Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton as the organization’s first three presidents.
Although prior to this movement some American intellectuals showed familiarity with Dante, gained mostly from British translations of the Comedy, the general public had remained more or less unexposed to Dante’s poetry. The fact that an Italian text of the Comedy does not appear to have been printed in America until 1867, the same year Longfellow’s translation was published, provides one reflection of the expansion of interest. In its portrayed interpretations of Dante, this novel attempts to remain historically faithful to its featured figures and their contemporaries rather than to our own accustomed readings.
The Dante Club, in some of its language and dialogue, incorporates and adapts portions of the poems, essays, novels, journals, and letters of the Dante Club members and those closest to them. My own visits to the Danteans’ estates and their environs, as well as various city histories, maps, memoirs, and documents further assembled 1865 Boston, Cambridge, and Harvard University. Contemporary accounts, especially the literary memoirs of Annie Fields and William Dean Howells, imparted an indispensable direct window onto the daily
lives of the group and find a voice in the narrative texture of the novel, where even passing characters are drawn, whenever possible, from historical personages that could have been present in the events narrated. The character of Pietro Bachi, Harvard’s disgraced Italian instructor, actually represents a composite of Bachi and Antonio Gallenga, another early teacher of Italian in Boston. Two members of the Dante Club, Howells and Norton, greatly informed my perspective through their accounts of the group, although they find only brief occasion to appear in the present story.
The Dante-derived murders themselves have no counterpart in history, but police biographies and city records document a sharp rise in New England’s murder rate immediately following the Civil War, as well as widespread corruption and underhanded partnerships between detectives and professional criminals. Nicholas Rey is a fictional character, but he faces the very real challenges of the first African-American policemen in the nineteenth century, many of whom were veterans of the Civil War and were of mixed racial backgrounds; an overview of their circumstances can be found in W. Marvin Dulaney’s Black Police in America. Benjamin Galvin’s war experience derives from the histories of the 10th and 13th Massachusetts regiments as well as firsthand accounts from other soldiers and from reporters. My exploration of Galvin’s psychological state was especially guided by Eric Dean’s recent study, Shook over Hell, which emphatically demonstrates the presence of post-traumatic stress disorder in Civil War veterans.
Though the intrigue that consumes the characters of the novel is entirely fictitious, one might note an undocumented anecdote from an early biography of the poet James Russell Lowell: On a certain Wednesday evening, it is said, a disquieted Fanny Lowell refused to allow her husband to walk down the street to Longfellow’s Dante Club session until the poet had agreed to bring his hunting rifle along to the meeting, citing as her concern an unspecified crime wave that had reached Cambridge.
Acknowledgments
This project has its origins in academic research providentially guided by Lino Pertile, Nick Lolordo, and Harvard’s Department of English and American Literature. Tom Teicholz first challenged me to explore this unique moment in literary history further by constructing a fictional narrative.
The Dante Club’s evolution from manuscript to novel depended most of all on two talented and inspirational professionals: my agent, Suzanne Gluck, whose extraordinary commitment, vision, and friendship quickly became as integral to the book as its characters; and my editor, Jon Karp, who immersed himself wholly in shaping and guiding the novel with patience, generosity, and respect.
In between origin and completion, there are many who contributed and are owed thanks. For their faith and ingenuity as readers and advisers: Julia Green, beside me without fail for every new idea and obstacle; Scott Weinger; my parents, Susan and Warren Pearl, and brother, Ian, for finding time and energy to help with all dimensions. Further thanks to readers Toby Ast, Peter Hawkins, Richard Hurowitz, Gene Koo, Julie Park, Cynthia Posillico, Lino, and Tom; and to counselors on various issues Lincoln Caplan, Leslie Falk, Micah Green, David Korzenik, and Keith Poliakoff. Thanks to Ann Godoff for staunch support; also at Random House, my appreciation to Janet Cooke, Todd Doughty, Janelle Duryea, Jake Greenberg, Ivan Held, Carole Lowenstein, Maria Massey, Libby McGuire, Tom Perry, Allison Saltzman, Carol Schneider, Evan Stone, and Veronica Windholz; David Ebershoff at Modern Library; Richard Abate, Ron Bernstein, Margaret Halton, Karen Kenyon, Betsy Robbins, and Caroline Sparrow at ICM; Karen Gerwin and Emily Nurkin at William Morris; and to Courtney Hodell, who fortified the project with zeal and her inventive perspective.
My research was bolstered by the Harvard and Yale libraries, Joan Nordell, J. Chesley Mathews, Jim Shea, and Neil and Angelica Rudenstine, who allowed me to study their home (formerly Elmwood) with Kim Tseko as guide. For outstanding help with forensic entomology, I extend thanks to Rob Hall, Neal Haskell, Boris Kondratieff, Daniel Maiello, Morten Starkeby, Jeffrey Wells, Ralph Williams, and to Mark Benecke in particular for his tutoring and creativity.
Special appreciation to the keepers of history at the Longfellow House, where we step into the rooms that once hosted the Dante Club, and to the Dante Society of America, the direct descendant of the Dante Club by virtue of legacy and spirit.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MATTHEW PEARL graduated from Harvard University summa cum laude in English and American literature in 1997, and in 2000 from Yale Law School. In 1998, he won the prestigious Dante Prize from the Dante Society of America for his scholarly work. He grew up in Fort Lauderdale and currently lives in Cambridge. He can be reached via his website, www.thedanteclub.com.
The Dante Club is a work of fiction. Many of the characters are inspired by historical figures; others are entirely imaginary creations of the author. Apart from the historical figures any resemblance between these fictional characters and actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2003 by Matthew Pearl
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Random House and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pearl, Matthew.
The Dante Club : a novel / Matthew Pearl.
p. cm.
1. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321—Appreciation—Fiction. 2. Holmes, Oliver Wendell,
1809–1894—Fiction. 3. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803–1882—Fiction. 4. Boston
(Mass.)—Fiction. 5. Authors—Fiction. 6. Insects—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3616.E25 D36 2003
813'.6—dc21 2002017886
eISBN: 978-1-58836-310-7
v3.0
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