Longfellow Read online

  For Michael Horvath

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  The Craigie House, January 30, 1882

  Chapter One: The City by the Sea

  Chapter Two: A Small College in Maine

  Chapter Three: The Passionate Pilgrim

  Chapter Four: Bungonuck Days

  Chapter Five: The Journey North

  An Alpine Interlude

  Chapter Six: Castle Craigie

  Chapter Seven: The Water Cure

  A Wedding in Beacon Street

  Chapter Eight: A Seaside Idyll

  Chapter Nine: Evangeline

  Chapter Ten: “Sail On, O Union”

  Chapter Eleven: Hiawatha

  A Lock of Hair

  Chapter Twelve: Charley Goes to War

  Chapter Thirteen: Morituri Salutamus

  Chapter Fourteen: Aftermath

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  IN SEPTEMBER OF 2002, the National Park Service rededicated the Longfellow National Historic Site, the house at 105 Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow lived from 1837 until his death in 1882. The event marked not only the thirtieth anniversary of public ownership of the property, but the completion of four years of badly needed restoration made possible by the Save America’s Treasures Act of 1997. Under a large tent on the lawn where Longfellow’s children had often played, some three hundred guests heard writers, politicians, federal officials, musicians, and schoolchildren pay tribute to a man whose name most Americans still recognize, but whose work scarcely anybody reads.

  For a moment that afternoon, something else seemed restored: the Longfellow house’s centrality in our culture—that intermingling of poetry and politics, of architecture and music, of cultural power and sense of public duty that the Craigie House had represented for about forty years in the middle of the nineteenth century.

  The senior senator from Massachusetts recalled how his mother encouraged all the Kennedy children to learn “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” by heart. The junior senator from New York, Hilary Clinton, said that lines from “A Psalm of Life”—“but to act, that each tomorrow/Find us farther than to-day . . .”—had sustained her in her legislative career. Senator Clinton confirmed that Edward Kennedy had indeed recited “Paul Revere” from memory before Senator Robert Byrd, chair of the Appropriations Committee—who had recited it back to him, during the hearings on the funding bill.

  Historian David McCullough evoked the ghosts of an earlier period—the dark winter of 1775–76 when General Washington lived in the house and pondered the fate of American independence. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky said that Longfellow’s poetic project had been to “make it new”—“it” being the sense of national identity that Americans of his day were still struggling, violently in 1861–65, to define. Members of the Boston Pops played the Largo from Dvorák’s Ninth (with its echoes of Hiawatha), and a soprano sang Charles Ives’s haunting setting of “The Children’s Hour.”

  And then it was over. Like the Arabs in “The Day Is Done,” someone eventually folded the tent and silently stole away.

  Was this celebration an anomaly, or does Longfellow still live, even on the margins of our culture? If he does survive, whether as a diffuse poetical influence or as some broader cultural force, why do most people (literary historians included) know so little about him? There has long been a need for a comprehensive account of his life and career, written for the general public but drawing on a generation of new scholarship in history, literature, and the study of national identity.

  The problem, of course, is that Longfellow was so very nice a man. He did not sleep with his sister, grow addicted to opium, have to flee college because of his gambling debts, cruise the waterfront, sire an illegitimate child abroad, or drink himself into dementia. He did not, in other words, behave the way the public has come to hope great poets will behave. While his life had an uncommon share of personal triumph and personal tragedy, his days in general were so placid, his livelihood so secure, his contemporary fame so universal, that in time he came to be seen as a symbol of everything that a writer should not be.

  And that is where we find him today. To the extent that nineteenth-century poetry survives only in the classroom, Longfellow has dropped off the charts. He has never recovered from the battering he received at the hands of the Modernists, and he rarely caught the attention of the new, politically engaged scholarly communities of the 1980s and ’90s (when he did, it was usually as a reminder of the complacencies, moral and aesthetic, of the successful white male Eurocentric poet-craftsman). Not that he ever really disappeared. He still has the respect of some practicing poets—read, for example, the enthusiastic essay by Dana Gioia in the Columbia History of American Poetry (1993) or Pinsky’s tributes to him as a Dante translator—and his words are ineradicably lodged in the mind of every American of a certain age who had to memorize “The Wreck of the Hesperus” or “The Village Blacksmith” in school. Others, innocent of Victorian poetry, nonetheless say they have “shot an arrow into the air” or passed “like ships in the night” or seen “footprints on the sands of time” or unwittingly echo the dozen or so other Longfellow quotes that have become part of the language. In a more general cultural sense, anyone outside of southern Louisiana who bites into some pan-blackened Cajun catfish or listens to zydeco is paying tribute, at only a slight remove, to Longfellow’s role in rescuing the Acadians from historical oblivion.

  Longfellow is not only a more admirable poet than his twentieth-century detractors would have admitted; his most enduring cultural achievement is to have created and disseminated much of what we think of as Victorian American culture. That we still have conflicted feelings about this culture seems evident, especially in the field of sexual and religious politics. Yet we need to recognize over how large a field Longfellow operated. He played a central role in establishing New England’s cultural hegemony—in the sense that Americans were persuaded that “America” was New England writ large. He served as a major conduit into this country for European culture, from the radical German romanticism of the 1830s through his Dante studies in the 1860s and ’70s. In turn, he represented the best of the new American culture to sympathetic Europeans. He did much to inspire Colonial Revivalism in architecture and the decorative arts in the 1870s, just as he had helped to popularize Medieval Revivalism in the 1830s and 1840s. He virtually invented the Evangeline story, the foundational myth of modern Acadian culture in Canada, Maine, and Louisiana. He supplied his fellow citizens with such emblematic literary characters as Hiawatha, Paul Revere, Priscilla Alden, and Miles Standish. He expressed in his work, and represented in his life, a style of masculinity in bold contrast to the Social Darwinists and muscular Christians of the next generation. However genteel and unthreatening his verse seems to us, he did produce over a long career an alternative vision to the America of the relentless market economy.

  My interest in writing this book goes back to the time, ten years ago, when I was researching a history of Bowdoin College. In trying to determine to what extent the college could be said to have “produced” some of its most famous graduates, I was surprised to find that, while Hawthorne’s life had been minutely examined, there was no competent modern biography of his classmate Longfellow. I had not realized quite how precipitously so famous a man had fallen out of academic regard. Newton Arvin’s Longfellow: His Life and Work had appeared in 1962 and been reprinted in 1977, but it was more a critical study (the best to date) of the poetry than a biography drawing on primary sources. It showed the strain of Arvin’s own struggle to balance his genuine affection for the poet with his intelle
ctual allegiance to the New Criticism and its virtues of irony, ambiguity, and the stiff upper lip. Edward Wagenknecht’s 1955 biography was old-fashioned, stately, and short. Earlier twentieth-century biographies—with the exception of Lawrance Thompson’s somewhat overwrought Young Longfellow in 1938—were rewritings of the Reverend Samuel Longfellow’s three-volume memorial (1886), which had served to embalm his brother as the “good gray poet” of the Craigie House fireside. The absence of a reliable biography, asking the questions a modern biographer is expected to ask, seemed an astonishing empty spot in the otherwise busy field of nineteenth-century American literary scholarship. The closest thing to it was the excellent information provided in the notes in Andrew Hilen’s six-volume edition of Longfellow’s letters, published between 1967 and 1982, but only a specialist would have read such a work in whole, and only about a third of Longfellow’s vast correspondence had survived.

  The notion that such a biography was worth writing found many small encouragements—not least, the number of visitors I saw each summer lining up to visit the poet’s boyhood home in downtown Portland, Maine. In visiting other historic houses, while working on a cultural guide to Maine, I was struck by the frequency with which busts of Dante appeared in these otherwise solidly Anglo-American interiors. This image began jumping out at me everywhere—antiques shops, country auctions, small-town libraries. Why, among these Protestants, these often nativist Yankees, all the beak-nosed, hooded Dantes, brooding in plaster or marble or bronze? Meanwhile, I had begun reading about the Dante Club that met in Longfellow’s study in the 1860s and the immense cultural authority of his translation of the Divine Comedy, and it became clearer how cultural influences could survive even the decline of the reputation that had set them in motion. Late-nineteenth-century Boston’s identification of itself with that other mercantile republic, Florence, was no coincidence. A line of descent could be traced from Longfellow’s Dante studies through Charles Eliot Norton’s lectures on Florentine art, to Isabella Stewart Gardner, to Bernard Berenson, to the great American museums of the early twentieth century.

  Nor were the cultural reverberations all that antiquarian. In 1996, for example, I attended the Maine Humanities Council’s “premiere” of the newly restored print of the 1929 silent film Evangeline, starring Dolores Del Rio. The music was spirited (improvised for the occasion), even if the acting seemed stiff and mawkish. Then, suddenly, we saw the British soldiers on the beach (many of them, in historical reality, New Englanders) forcing the frightened Acadian women and children into the boats that would carry them into exile and poverty. There was a brief but palpable moment of tension in the room. A vintage film had become a real movie. The papers and television screens that week had been filled with images from Bosnia—of refugees torn from their homes, of families with all their surviving goods on a cart, of soldiers terrorizing women and children.

  In the intervening years, many other small discoveries have confirmed those two experiences—namely, that Longfellow, almost two hundred years after his birth, exerts a cultural force that goes far beyond his poetry and that he was a master storyteller whose narratives can still resonate for a modern audience. His poetic oeuvre itself will most likely survive, at least in fragments—for example, the short lyrics such as “Aftermath” and “The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls” that find their way into anthologies. But his real legacy—his claim to our attention—is surely extraliterary.

  Let me give two examples of this. In 1994, Harvard University established its Longfellow Institute, named in tribute not to Longfellow’s poetry but to his pioneering role in teaching comparative literature in this country. The institute is devoted to the study and republication of historically, aesthetically, and culturally significant works written in what is now the United States but published in languages other than English. It turns out that there is an astonishing variety of such work, in more than forty languages; a fifty-volume series is contemplated over the next decade. Longfellow himself would have been astonished that Americans can graduate from college and think themselves educated without being able to read one or more foreign languages. (He was fluent in French, Spanish, German, and Italian and could read at least half a dozen other modern languages and two ancient ones.) The linkage of his name and this ambitious modern project suggests a new way of looking at the poet—as a pioneer multiculturalist championing the “civil rights of language” of this country’s neglected non-English writers and thinkers.

  The other side of this twenty-first-century Longfellow is our new appreciation of his role as a nation builder. Benedict Anderson, among others, has helped us understand how important a role “invented” memory and mythopoetics play in those sometimes shaky constructs we call nations. Recently, the Maine Historical Society held the first major exhibition ever dedicated to the poet’s career, titled “Longfellow: The Man Who Invented America”—a bit of a stretch, perhaps, but a useful corrective. In this light, it is significant that one of the major thrusts of activity today at the Longfellow National Historic Site (the Craigie House, named for its post–Revolutionary War era owner, but Longfellow’s home for almost half a century) is the scholarly study of the poet’s role in inspiring the Colonial Revival movement in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America. An amazing variety of cultural artifacts—from the much-reproduced image of Priscilla at her Pilgrim Century spinning wheel to the replicas of the Craigie House itself that were built all over the country—attest to the Longfellow influence on the ways in which Americans continue to construct their national identity. Henry and Fanny Longfellow’s determination in the 1840s to maintain the house as a shrine to George Washington—who had lived there for nine months during the Siege of Boston and who had perfected his own notion of a separate American republic in the very rooms in which the poet slept and worked—was itself a powerful stimulant to the historic preservation movement. Historians once wrote off such efforts as the backward-looking defense mechanisms of a threatened elite. Today, there is a more nuanced appreciation of how importantly historic preservation is linked with environmentalism, urban civility, and a Ruskinian sense of the moral implications of the visual.

  This drift into art history suggests another way of revivifying Longfellow. Recently, exhibitions of the work of the painters Eastman Johnson (a Maine-born painter whose early career Longfellow supported) and Martin Johnson Heade (a painter whose love of the New England salt marshes Longfellow shared) drew both critical attention and good-sized crowds in Brooklyn and Boston, respectively. The achievements of these two nineteenth-century American painters will never rival those of Eakins and Homer, any more than we can read Longfellow today with the sense of self-recognition that we bring to Whitman and Dickinson. Yet at the same time we cannot ignore any of this work if we want to understand the American nineteenth century. Art historians (encouraged, admittedly, by the art market) seem to have grasped this fact more readily than their colleagues in the English departments.

  There is a note of apology, even of defensiveness, that still attaches itself to any serious look at Longfellow’s life and career. Let’s try to abandon it for the moment. His contemporaries saw him not just as a world-famous poet and an admirable man but as a vitalizing force at the very center of their culture. We cannot put him back there. But we can seek to rediscover the sources of this enormous cultural power and the ways in which he stamped his imprint on three generations of Americans.

  The Craigie House, January 30, 1882

  IN THE HALF-LIGHT OF A MORNING BLIZZARD, Cambridge would have been easy to miss. Its ice-filled tidal river scraped against the backside of gardens and houses, stables and stores, erasing any clear definition of what might be water, what might be land. For an Oxford man, its collegiate buildings were of no special distinction. Passing through Harvard Square and turning into Brattle Street, he could make out a row of frame dwellings that had survived from colonial times. And then there it was: pale yellow, set well back from the road, bracketed by bare elms, the grand
est house of them all. Amid the flying snow, it might have seemed, in its ample but provincial way, something far northern and neoclassical—Gustavian, even tsarist—a frost-castle conjured up in a fairy tale.

  It was in fact Castle Craigie, as its intimates liked to call it, a subtle reminder that the house had been there longer than the United States had been a republic. The young man was Oscar Wilde, come to burnish his reputation in the New World. His cab pulled into the circular drive to the west of the house, and passing through the Blue Entry he soon faced the pleasure of a hot breakfast on a cold day. His host was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most widely read poet in the English-speaking world.

  The old house had been the scene of many odd and interesting encounters, but this was perhaps the most singular. One age was brushing shoulders with another, as in a Max Beerbohm cartoon. It was a generous move on Longfellow’s part, for he was seriously ill—would be dead before spring—and had extended the invitation simply because of the insistence of his old New York friend (and now enthusiastic Wildolator) Sam Ward. Longfellow had trouble saying no to anyone, but particularly to a dear friend he had met on his own first voyage across the Atlantic, half a century earlier. Wilde’s immediate task was to publicize Gilbert and Sullivan’s American tour of Patience—an operetta that satirized the Aesthetic Movement of which he was so decorative a part—but he also wanted to try out Oscar Wilde, as it were, on a new and untested audience. In a few days he was to lecture at the Boston Music Hall—a notorious event, it was to prove, in the annals of Harvard philistinism, for the sixty undergraduates who paraded into the hall dressed as Oscar Wilde (velvet breeches, floppy hats, a sunflower in a limp hand) were chagrined to find their target dressed in the most elegant of evening clothes. (He had been warned of the prank in advance.)

  Had Wilde had time to poke about a bit, he would have been surprised to discover that aestheticism had reached the Craigie House about ten years before him. Longfellow’s otherwise conventional elder son, Charley, had decorated every surface of his rooms upstairs—ceiling included—with Japanese silks, woodcuts, porcelains, swords, screens, and bric-a-brac, possibly as a reminder of his Japanese mistress of a decade earlier. But the downstairs was in earnest: souvenirs of General Washington, society portraits of the previous generation, High Victorian clutter. Not a kimono in sight. Yet it was Longfellow himself—this American answer to Tennyson—whom Wilde had come to see. The poet was as much a local landmark as the Old North Church or Bunker Hill, a survival, a man who had known Dickens and Carlyle and Thackeray and Fanny Kemble.