Pearl: The Poe Shadow

I loved The Dante Club (reviewed in July).  It was intelligent, and pure geeky fun, and I had a lovely time picking my way among the corpses in 19th century Boston.  So I jumped at the chance to take The Poe Shadow on paperbackswap.com.

I should preface this by admitting I haven’t read much Poe.  I have a couple of collections; I’ve just … never gotten around to it.  But I’m familiar with his most famous poems, I knew who C. Auguste Dupin was, and I knew a little about Poe’s life and reputation – about the fact that though he was often condemned for being a drunkard he was not, and in fact had a very low tolerance for alcohol.  And about his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin, and his despair at her early death.  But the only work I’ve read about him before this was some dreadful thing I can’t recall the name of and won’t look up which cast him and P.T. Barnum as detectives… This had to be light years better. 

And it was.  Especially in the beginning I had as much fun as I did with The Dante Club.  The story is told in the first person by Quentin Clark, an attorney in Baltimore in 1849 who has long enjoyed reading Poe.  “Enjoyed” is actually an understatement; Clark’s interest in the poet and his work begins to sound like obsession, and that becomes full-blown as the book proceeds – but it begins with his defiance of his family’s opinion that Poe is a dangerous influence.  He reads every scrap that he can find, and enters into a correspondence with Poe, even offering his legal services pro bono if they are needed to defend the magazine Poe dreams of starting. 

Upon Poe’s death, Clark is distressed by the tone of newspaper articles and essays.  Most of them paint him, obliquely or outright, as a drunk, and most take the tone that he didn’t contribute much to the universe and won’t much be missed.  Outraged, Clark begins a campaign to try to gain retractions and corrections, to try to rehabilitate Poe’s reputation, which leads by various paths to his quest to find the real man who was Poe’s inspiration for Dupin, the genius of detection.  Surely the real Dupin can discover the truth about Poe’s death and clear his name. 

The quest leads Clark to Paris, which is in an upheaval of government; it has not been so long since the French Revolution, and now the republic is beginning to give way to a new empire under the Bonapartes.  It’s dangerous, but the obsession is strong, and Clark soon has two possible Dupins on his hands: the attorney Baron Dupin, whom Clark had written earlier, and Duponte, who is the new lead contender.  Baron Dupin is a charlatan and showman, and Clark decides he can’t be the one – especially as he learns more about Duponte, an investigator who fits the descriptions in Poe’s stories perfectly.  He works to bring the latter back to Baltimore, and to complicate matters the former comes too, along with his wife (a beautiful assassin) and a matched set of men who appear to be hunting him for reasons unknown. 

It’s not a spoiler to state that Clark winds up accused of a murder; that’s given on the first page of the book.  And I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that that’s about when the book started to lose me.  Halfway through the book, not the first page.  Clark’s need to exonerate Poe grows to a state in which he can do nothing else; he loses his practice, and, through her family, his fiancee, and shortly is in danger of losing the home he inherited from his parents as his aunt brings a case against him stating he has lost his sanity.  Between simply being a little fed up with a man who would sacrifice everything without even a thought – and not even so much the fact of the sacrifice as the pain it caused his family and beloved Hattie – and behaving in a thoroughly unreasonable manner in pursuit of a noble goal; and being more than a little fed up with the prospects of an International Conspiracy (I hate International Conspiracy as Tolkien despised allegory: “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence”) – the book started to lose me, and never really got me back.  I finished it – but it was a long slog.  I read a review that referred to Clark as an unreliable narrator: quite right.  While he doesn’t necessarily intentionally lie to the reader, he makes wild assumptions, changes his mind, and becomes somewhat unhinged.  That reviewer had a time of it with the mid-19th century language; I didn’t find that nearly as difficult as I often do (it’s usually harder to read pseudo-19th-century than the real thing, I find).  That was the least of my problems with the book. 

On the whole, I’m glad I read it.  I learned a good deal – for one thing, I’m going to try very hard to avoid referring to Poe as “Edgar Allan Poe”, as he hated it, with good reason.  For another, it took the taste of that other Poe/Barnum book out of my mouth; there’s a certain irony in this book rehabilitating the name of Poe for me as Clark fought to do in Baltimore.  And I’m going to read Poe, soon.  But I don’t think this will come up for a reread very soon.  It felt disjointed in places, and as though Pearl lost the reins for a while and was a passenger in a runaway carriage: as if Pearl’s research into Poe and his death created in him much the same condition as he describes in Clark.  Method writing?  Maybe.  The Poe Shadow both explained and created allure about Poe, and raised Poe in my estimation while, sadly, lowering Pearl a notch or two.  But this didn’t kill my respect; on the contrary.  I did love Dante; I do respect the tremendous amount of work that went into making The Poe Shadow - and his third, latest book is The Last Dickens.  I look forward to it.

 

Matthew Pearl: The Dante Club

Over the weekend, unable to put my hands on Dear Theo or To Kill a Mockingbird (there must be a box of books somewhere) and not quite up to committing to Song for Arbonne or Lions of Al-Rassan, I picked up something I received a while back through paperbackswap.com … Why on earth I was yelled at once for sending a book that had a little yellowing of the pages, but it’s perfectly fine for people to send out ex-library books with pages falling out (it’s happened a few times), I don’t get.  Still, the book sounded intriguing, and it fit my requirements.

Except … My strong recommendation is: read this, but do not eat rice at any point directly before, during, or after reading it.  And especially don’t do as I did, which was to put rice on to cook, open the book and start to read the first chapter – about the discovery of a body covered and filled with thousands of blowflies and their maggots – and then sit down to a dinner of said rice and scallops.  Really.  Don’t.  Did I mention the maggots?

(Spoilers follow regarding deaths, but not the killer…)

The book takes place in 1865 Boston.  The Civil War is only months over – Abraham Lincoln is only months dead; the city is filled with returning soldiers in all conditions.  And in the heart of the city, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is translating Dante.  There never has been an American edition of The Divine Comedy, and any British ones have been (for kind of obvious reasons) unavailable.  The translation was something Longfellow worked on periodically – until his wife, Fanny, died in a terrible accident, and it became almost a therapy for him; he has worked on the translations solely for years.  One of his friends speculates that if he were to return to his own poetry, he would not be able to not write about Fanny, and she would become just a word.

- – Pictures taken, with gratitude, from Matthew Pearl’s site. No pictures of Greene are immediately to be found.

As the translation has progressed, Longfellow has formed a Dante Club, along with George Washington Greene, Oliver Wendell Holmes,  James Russell Lowell, and their publisher, James Thomas Fields (also a poet).  At meetings each Wednesday a canto of the piece is discussed, and the translation is perfected, and then dinner.

Holmes, as a professor of medicine at Harvard, is tangentially involved when the body of a murdered man is brought in.  It is that of a chief justice, who was supposed to be away and therefore had not been missed for several days, and was at the last found naked under a blank white flag by a servant out in the house’s grounds – still, if her testimony was to be believed, alive, though barely.  No, say all of the pathologists – impossible, for he was the one who was horrifyingly infested with flies and maggots and wasps – these only eat dead flesh, so therefore he must not have been alive.

Except he was.

The lives of the men of the Dante Club incorporate and move past this murder of a man of their set, but with whom none of them were particularly close.  And then there comes word of a second death – this one of a minister, who was found in the crypt of his church, buried naked upside-down up to his waist … with his feet on fire.

Again Holmes is one of the first to see the body – and it strikes him in a horrible blow that this death, and in fact that first one, bear a very strong resemblance to punishments meted out in Dante’s Inferno.  He flies back to his Dante Club to discuss this, and the first impulse is to take it to the police – but they are stopped by the fact that Longfellow’s translation is already meeting with opposition.  It’s too Catholic a poem, it’s too graphic, it’s not fitting for a Protestant country or state or – most importantly – city or college.  There are those who feel it their duty to fight Dante – along with other heretics like Darwin – tooth and nail.  And any adverse publicity – such as “Dante inspired horrid murders” – would be the end of the project.  This isn’t, to their credit, important because of the potential lost investment (though that’s never so far from Fields’s mind), but for Dante’s sake: they want him to be known.  Shakespeare lets men know themselves; Dante lets men know each other.

At that point it becomes a four-way race – among the Dante Club; the police, who are a new body and not exactly Boston’s Finest at this point; Nicholas Rey, a mulatto police patrolman, the first black cop in Boston (at least), who is not exactly having an easy time of it among much the rest of the police force or the criminal element; and, of course, the killer, whose timeline seems to be connected to the Dante Club’s: the murders seem to be taking place just days before the cantos to which they pay tribute.

I knew little about any of the poets involved; Longfellow’s work, of course, is an old friend, but I knew nothing about the poet.  I  don’t think I knew Oliver Wendell Holmes was a poet; I have his Autocrat of the Breakfast Table on hand (though I have not yet read it), and honestly I think I thought he was a lawyer – which is a little ironic.  I wasn’t at all familiar with Lowell, or with Fields, their publisher – and this was a fascinating look at poetry and publishing in 19th century Boston.  I’ve said before that real persons’ appearances in fiction make me a little uneasy, but in truly well done historical fiction – when the people themselves are gone and hopefully their heirs are on board – isn’t objectionable.  (Although there was one centering on Poe – oh, and P.T. Barnum, I believe? – which I did not enjoy at all … Can’t remember title or author.)  In fact, I enjoyed this a great deal.  I believed the author’s depictions of the characters, both real and fictional, and believed the weaving together of real and fictional.  And the mystery was lurid and intriguing: I guessed the killer, but only by using the old “which named character in the cast could be the one” method; there was no way for the reader to deduce the killer’s identity logically, nor his motivation, not all of it, but this is never a great priority with me.  Also, of course, the chapter which takes us inside his head was powerful – all else is forgiven after that.

This was a rich book, deeply enjoyable on many levels – biography, history – of Boston, of Harvard, of publishing; mystery, thriller, literary pastiche … It was dark chocolate: a bit decadent, but – anti-oxidants!  Good for you!

The end result of a book like this, blending fact and imagination, is always that I want more – I want to know more about the real people involved, and I want to (in this case) read their poetry.  I never knew Longfellow translated Dante, and I want it.  (Also, I find, he translated Michelangelo – I want that too.)  And does it need saying I want the rest of Matthew Pearl’s books – and that I hope he writes many more?

Along with everything else, I love the jacket of the book: an etching of Harvard University, dotted with droplets of blood …