Longfellow

by Charles C. Calhoun

  Longfellow, as we have seen, did not retain that degree of aggressive literary nationalism, but his thoughts on the Choctaw chief reflect a view he and most of his white contemporaries held throughout the nineteenth century: the “child-like” indigenous people may have been noble, may have been savage, may have been something of both, but their day had passed, and it was time they either accepted assimilation into Euro-American culture or moved on to less settled lands. They were literally a dying race.

  This racial notion had been expressed in a great variety of literary productions during the first half of the century, notably the many theatrical versions of the life and death of the once-feared King Philip, or Metamora, the Native American warrior who had terrorized the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In Longfellow’s own case, the paradigm of rise and decline had been confirmed by his reading of the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, in whose cyclical history of mankind poets played the crucial role of first lawgivers. It was also a truism of the Romantic movement, most powerfully expressed by Herder then taken up by many poets in Germany, Britain, and America, that it was in native languages—Germanic, Scandinavian, even North American Indian—that the uniqueness of cultures is expressed. When Longfellow set out in the mid 1850s to write his “Indian Edda,” he had these notions of the cycles of civilization and the poetic power of aboriginal languages firmly in mind. Familiar with paintings such as Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire of 1836—with its five large canvases depicting the movement of humankind from the savage state, to the pastoral one, and on through consummation, destruction, and desolation—his potential audience was already primed for a world-historical drama of the rise and fall of nations.

  Of all of Longfellow’s works, The Song of Hiawatha is the only one still capable of exciting controversy. A standard reading of it by modern academics is that it is a derivative poem rendered “unreadable” by its failure to understand the true nature of Native American oral literature and its dismissal of the full extent of that people’s tragedy. The notion that it is “racist” has filtered down and makes this once-popular work “unteachable” in the school as well as university classroom. The case for the prosecution is summed up by Helen Carr in her Inventing the American Primitive (1996). “These assumptions of Indian childlike deficiency form the perceptual grid by which Longfellow patterned his sources. Longfellow consistently altered his material so that he infantilised, de-historicized, and, through excessive idealisation, de-humanized the Indians.” Despite the poet’s apparent sympathy for his Indian heroes, Carr goes on to say that his “consoling myth was as essential to the dispossession of the Indians as the raucous racism of the frontiersmen, or the legalistic exclusion of the Indian from natural rights in the government’s bureaucratic language.”

  There have been more sympathetic readers. In Lives of the Poets (1998), Michael Schmidt calls Hiawatha “a literary poem pretending to belong to the oral tradition and guaranteed, when read aloud to small children, to fill them briefly with wonder and then with sleep.” More recently, Alan Trachtenberg describes “Longfellow up to his own civilized magic, as if reading the poem were an encounter with first things, the primordial, the aboriginal.” Longfellow’s own contemporaries tended either to love the poem or to be confused by its meter and its frequent use of only slightly anglicized Native American names. In November of 1855, four months after his famous letter to Walt Whitman praising the “largeness” of Leaves of Grass, Emerson wrote to Longfellow: “I have always one foremost satisfaction in reading your books—that I am safe.” He called Hiawatha a “wholesome” poem, “sweet and wholesome as maize; very proper and pertinent for us to read, and showing a kind of manly duty in the poet to write.” He added: “The dangers of the Indians are, they are really savage, have poor, small, sterile heads,—no thoughts; and you must deal roundly with them, and find in them brains. And I blamed your tenderness now and then, as I read, in accepting a legend or song, when they have so little to give.” Longfellow thought otherwise.

  To understand Hiawatha, it helps to follow Longfellow’s path in writing it. He had long pondered an Indian epic. But it was not until his discovery in early June of 1854 of the “charming” Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, that he figured out a way to do it. By June 22, his concept had taken shape:

  I have at length hit upon a plan for a poem on the Indians, which seems to me the right one, and the only. It is to weave together their beautiful traditions into a whole. I have hit upon a measure, too, which I think the right and only one for such a theme. At present it delights me. Let us see how it will prosper.

  What the Kalevala provided him was not a fund of stories to adapt (the approach he had taken to other European sources), but the suggestion of a meter that sounded “primitive” and the organizing principle of a central hero around whom any number of more or less disparate tales could be linked. Although he had a smattering of Finnish, he had to read the epic in a German translation, removing him one more length from the raciness and occasional grotesqueness of the original.

  “Original” is perhaps not quite the right word for the Kalevala, which is in fact an early-nineteenth-century assemblage of traditional, pre-Christian ballads, lyrics, and folk tales from the far northern region of what became Finland. The folklorist Elias Lönnrot had traveled as a doctor in the Karelian countryside in the early 1830s, collecting material that he published under the title of Kalevala, or Poems of the Kaleva District starting in 1835. Lönnrot’s work as a folklorist and lexicographer is a case study par excellence in how literature can create national identity: the sense of a distinct Finnish identity (and eventual Finnish political independence) is a direct outgrowth of his work, as it was taken up by Finnish nationalists later in the century. The Kalevala can be said to have “invented” Finland.

  But whatever clues Lönnrot’s epic may have provided to writing an “Indian Edda”—the endings of the two poems, as pagan spiritualism gives way to Christianity, do have vague similarities—Longfellow needed local material. This he found from a variety of books in the Harvard library and elsewhere, notably the protoethnographical accounts of the Indians of the Great Lakes region collected and published by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. An Indian agent and geologist who had married a Chippewa, Schoolcraft was unscientific but earnest in his methods, and at least appreciated the fact that the tribal legends and chants that he was recording were in danger of disappearing. He was unusual among white Americans of his day in believing this material had any value. As he remarked, the study of Indian languages had been left to “the business of a class of men who were generally uneducated, and who, imbued strongly with the feelings and prejudices of their employers, sought no higher excellence in their profession than to express the common ideas connected with transactions of trade.” As a result, the white population remained ignorant of Indian cultures, assuming such people were savages living as brutishly and as unselfconsciously as the animals of the forests. Schoolcraft began compiling an Ojibwa vocabulary—the source of all the names in Longfellow’s poem except for “Hiawatha” (an Iroquois hero the poet confused with Schoolcraft’s Manabozho)—and in 1839 published his Algic Researches (the name is derived from Allegheny and Atlantic, a reference to his tribes’ reputed place of origin before being driven westward).

  FIGURE 9: Hiawatha struggles with the giant pike, in Canto VIII of The Song of Hiawatha (1855), as illustrated by George H. Thomas in an 1861 British edition.

  Longfellow rummaged through a number of other texts—for example, John G. Heckewelder’s History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations (1818)—and sought visual inspiration in the works of the painter and student of Native American life, George Catlin, whose writings, paintings, and staged performances by actual Indians, here and in Europe, had sparked some interest in their “unspoiled” culture. As a result, Longfellow’s Indians dress and behave more like the Plains Indians among whom Catlin had lived than like actual Ojibwas. But Catlin had portrayed these tribesmen as pow
erful, noble, physically imposing characters, and this heroic idealization is carried over into the poem. And Longfellow remembered the Indians—mostly Fox and Sioux—he had seen visiting Boston in October of 1837. As he had written then in a letter:

  There are Indians here: savage fellows;—one Black-Hawk and his friends, with naked shoulders and red blankets wrapped around their bodies:—the rest all grease and spanish brown and vermillion. One carries a great war-club, and wears horns on his head; another has his face painted like a grid-iron, all in bars:—another is all red, like a lobster; and another black and blue, in great daubs of paint, laid on not sparingly. Queer fellows! One great champion of the Fox nation had a short pipe in his mouth, smoking with great self-complacency as he marched out of the City Hall; and another was smoking a cigar! Withal, they looked very formidable. Hard customers.

  On June 25, he began what he tentatively called “Monabozho”: “His adventures will form the theme at all events.” The next day, he looked over Schoolcraft’s three volumes—“ill-digested, ill-arranged, and without any index” and tried writing a few lines. On the 27th, he wrote Monabozho’s first adventure and lamentation for his brother. On the 28th, he changed his hero’s name to the mellifluous Hiawatha—which he said ought to be pronounced “Hee-a-wa-tha”—in the mistaken belief that both figures were “the same Manito.” Work was interrupted by his annual visit to Portland and the disruption of moving the family to Nahant, where the sea air always made it difficult to concentrate. Yet by July 25 he noted in his journal that the poem “goes on rapidly, and takes shape more and more.” Three days later, he added, “If I had a hundred hands, I could keep all busy with ‘Hiawatha.’ Nothing ever absorbed me more.” At month’s end he exalted: “It is purely in the realm of Fancy.”

  Adding to his cantos—there would in the final version be twenty-two of them—as his family swam, rowed, picnicked, and read at Nahant (with a new work called Walden among the readings) became such a part of his daily routine, he mentioned Hiawatha in his journal only to complain of social interruptions. Upon the Longfellows’ return to Cambridge, the news that the Harvard Corporation had accepted his long-delayed resignation brought both sadness and relief (“This separating one’s self from one’s former life! This breaking away from one’s Past!”). In mid September he was “working away with Tanner, Heckewelder and sundry books about Indians” in search of further source material, while trying to disentangle a great mass of legends. The time once filled up with college duties, he found, was too often consumed with “other, little nameless things.” By early October, however, he was polishing the first canto. Later that month he recorded: “‘ Hiawatha’ occupies and delights me. Have I no misgivings about it?—Yes—sometimes. Then the theme seizes me, and hurries me away, and they vanish.” He found that a native idiom came naturally to him: Indian Summer he declared “a charming tradition in the Mythology of the Indians, that this soft hazy weather is made by the passionate sighs of Shawondasse or the South!”

  In mid November he read some passages to his friend Scherb. “He likes the plan, and the execution; but fears the poem will want human interest. So does Fanny. So does the author. I must put a living beating heart into it.” In December the mood left him, and the poem was set aside for almost two months. On January 11, 1855, he tried to take it up again. “But alas! I am out of the harness. How I regret it! The ‘Day without a line’ is a sad day to me.” On the 18th, after having heard the great soprano Carlotta Grisi in I Puritani and Lucrezia Borgia in Boston, he took refuge from the snow to work at his poem. “It will get itself sung—to speak in Carlylese—one of these days.” On the 22nd: “Morning ‘Hiawatha.’ Evening ‘Norma’.” He complained three days later: “We are so dissipated with all this Opera-going, that I can hardly bring myself to a working mood.” He turned to Prescott on Peru to clear his head. But he could not resist Don Giovanni a few nights later. By late February he had completed eighteen cantos. On March 19 he began the last one.

  March 21. Read Sumner some Cantos of Hiawatha, which he likes; “Hiawatha’s Sailing,” and “Hiawatha’s Wooing.”

  After he goes finish the last Canto at twelve o’clock. Write to Fields.

  He added another intermediate canto on “Picture-Writing” (“rather curious than poetical,” perhaps in response to his friends’ comments), and began the slow chore of revision. (In a burst of poetical enthusiasm amid an attack of influenza, he also wrote his Portland ode, “My Lost Youth,” which came to him as he lay sleepless in bed. He was pleased to work into it two lines he remembered from an old Finnish song: “A boy’s will is the wind’s will/And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”)

  On May 11 he complained: “This re-writing a Poem, so long as ‘Hiawatha,’ is very wearisome, but very profitable; as one can better see it as a whole, and fill up gaps. The work is nearly half over.” Early June brought proof sheets—“I am growing idiotic about the Song; and no longer know whether it is good or bad”—and more opera (Rigoletto, Masaniello, the last act of Lucia). The annual Portland visit was followed by a family holiday in Newport, where he continued to correct proofs.

  Longfellow himself had given the press a preview of his work, which Fields followed up upon with an advance notice on July 24:

  A PROMISED LITERARY TREAT. Among the list of new works in press, we notice Ticknor & Fields announce a new poem by Longfellow. It is, we understand, a lengthy production, and the subject is an American one. We could not chronicle a pleasanter bit of news.

  “‘Lengthy!’ a vile word!” added Longfellow to the clipping he pasted in his journal.

  Newport meant further social interruptions and unaccustomed routines. He continued “vigorously” at the poem in their Perry Street hotel. “But it is hard to write poetry in a closet, on a wash-stand, with glare at the window and flies inside.” In early August he saw some excerpts from Tennyson’s new collection—“Very rich and dreamy”—and some sheets sent by Fields from Maud, which he first found “delicious” but about which he had second thoughts upon hearing Curtis read it aloud. For all its beauty he found parts where Tennyson had exhibited “a spirit of ferocity I do not like.” Meanwhile negotiations for British publication of his own poem continued: “Ticknor says Bogue offers one hundred pounds for advance sheets of ‘Hiawatha.’ Tell him to accept.” The question of “ferocity” arose in a different context.

  On September 20 he noted:

  In great doubt about a Canto of Hiawatha, whether to retain it or suppress it. It is odd how confused one’s mind becomes about such matters, from long looking at the same subject.

  At issue was how far Longfellow—and presumably Fields—thought a poet selling to a broad popular audience could go in depicting the violence of the Indian legends. Caution won out. The owners of Ticknor & Fields were optimistic. On October 2, Ticknor presented Longfellow a check for a thousand dollars for the first edition of The Song of Hiawatha, already scheduled for a press run of five thousand. Sumner, at his habitual Sunday dinner at the Craigie House, tried to add to the celebration by reading aloud the last half of the poem. But his head cold made him hoarse, and the poem “very lugubrious.”

  November 10, 1855, was publication day, by which time more than four of the five thousand copies printed had been sold, and a new edition of three thousand ordered. This was an extraordinary success for a book of American poetry, and reports of British sales soon proved just as heartening. “Some of the newspapers are fierce and furious about ‘Hiawatha,’ which reminds me of the days when ‘Hyperion’ first appeared.” Longfellow’s excitement was dulled by weeks of severe headaches—“I have been a martyr to neuralgia,” he wrote on November 30—and throbbing mouth pain that made him “a gloomy guest” at Thanksgiving. He noted that the reviewers were in “the greatest pother” about his epic: “It is violently assailed; and warmly defended,” with a gratifying number of British papers coming out in his favor. Fields was gleeful, and by year’s end some eleven thousand copies were in print
. While the literati debated its trochaic meter and Longfellow’s more hostile critics accused him of borrowing too freely from the Kalevala, the general public took instantly to the poem. It was eminently memorizable (Longfellow would be subjected to recitations from it for the rest of his life), and a skillful declaimer could subtly vary its otherwise insistent tom-tom beat. Above all—though this may seem a curious virtue—it lent itself immediately to parody. There were hundreds, possibly thousands, of parodies playing on its long native names and distinctive rhythm (the best of them in print being Lewis Carroll’s “Hiawatha’s Photographing”; Alice’s White Rabbit comes from Canto II of Hiawatha.) Longfellow was bothered by these distortions of his work but took them as a vote of popular confidence. They did not hurt sales. His “Indian Edda” proved the most commercially successful of all his work.

  Modern students of the poem—and their number has not been great—have tended to focus on what seems its most distinctive canto, “XIV. Picture-Writing,” in which Hiawatha, realizing how fugitive is his people’s culture, teaches a method of preserving it. As Angus Fletcher writes, “Hiawatha can be read as an implicit treatise on the nature of language. . . . the poem is all about language.” Longfellow had succeeded in transliterating Native American words into pronounceable “English” to a degree, and over a span of verse, unequaled by his predecessors. (More typical was the early contemporary of his who rhymed Androscoggin with “noggin.”) By avoiding rhyme altogether and relying instead on alliteration, repetition, and his four-beat measure, he created an aural environment that is neither “Indian” nor “Anglo.” As several commentators have noted, Longfellow himself assumes Hiawatha’s mantle as teacher, adding a glossary of Ojibwa vocabulary at the end of the poem for the benefit of his readers, and frequently translating names as they are given in the work—Minnehaha, “laughing water,” being the most famous of them.