Longfellow's neglect

Christopher Irmscher
LONGFELLOW REDUX
304pp. University of Illinois Press. £26.
0 252 03063 X

The bicentenary of the birth of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most revered and reviled of all American poets, falls in 2007. Perhaps the most that can be hoped is that his third century will be kinder to his reputation than his second. Longfellow was the most famous American writer of his age, and the most widely admired, but even before his death in 1882 he was mercilessly parodied and pilloried. Edgar Allan Poe dismissed Longfellow’s work as fit only for “negrophilic old ladies of the north” and repeatedly accused him of plagiarism. Margaret Fuller likened his derivative poetry to “a tastefully arranged Museum” in which there were “flowers of all climes, and wild flowers of none”. Literary nationalists like Emerson and Whitman, while less hostile to the genial Longfellow, thought there was something un-American in his catholic tastes in literature and wine.

During the early years of the twentieth century, every modernist poet and critic seemed to take a ritual swipe at Longfellow, the symbolic corpse of what Santayana called the “genteel tradition”. T. E. Lawrence told Robert Graves that Ezra Pound had “spent his life trying to live down a family scandal: he’s Longfellow’s grand-nephew”. The once generous swatch of pages devoted to Longfellow in anthologies shrank to a poem or two, until, in 1950, F. O. Matthiessen announced in his Oxford Book of American Verse that it was time to “smash the plaster bust” of Longfellow’s “dead reputation”. Meanwhile, his once popular bosky epics, with their Gitche Gumees and Minnehahas, were invoked for laughs around a thousand campfires.

Even when his reputation was at its lowest, however, Longfellow’s poetry maintained a subterranean life, especially among writers who aimed for the “common” or middlebrow reader. Robert Frost, the shape and substance of whose career owed more to Longfellow than to any other American poet, called his own first book of poems A Boy’s Will, a phrase drawn without acknowledgement from Longfellow’s retrospective poem “My Lost Youth”, which was in turn derived from a Lapland lament in Johann Gottfried Herder’s German translation from an earlier Latin version.
Willa Cather, who aspired like Frost to reach the common reader as well as the literary elite, movingly invoked Longfellow in the closing pages of her best novel, The Professor’s House. Alienated from his materialistic family, and sensing the nearness of death, Professor Godfrey St Peter remembers the lines “of a translation from the Norse” (actually, the Anglo-Saxon) that “he used to read long ago in one of his mother’s few books, a little two-volume Ticknor and Fields edition of Longfellow in blue and gold, that used to lie on the parlour table: ‘For thee a house was built / Ere thou wast born; / For thee a mould was made / Ere thou of woman camest’”. Even here, however, the summoning of Longfellow is made to seem slightly embarrassing, requiring the proper old-fashioned setting on the previous generation’s parlour table.

The last serious attempt to take a fresh look at Longfellow’s work was Newton Arvin’s discerning monograph of 1963, which arrived at precisely the wrong moment to salvage Longfellow’s reputation. The dominant New Critics, with their commitment to ambiguity, tension, and the rest of the creed of complexity, were dumbfounded by his straightforward sentiments; a poem of Longfellow’s, read blind by a bright group of Cambridge undergraduates, elicited the most hostile response of all the specimens in I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism. (One student wrote that the poem, “In the Churchyard of Cambridge”, seemed “written in a state of semi-somnolence by a man with St Vitus’s dance”.) The practice of the leading American poets during the early 1960s, committed to free-verse explorations of the tortured psyche, could hardly be farther from Longfellow’s sunny and measured confidence. Poets who maintained an interest in formalist experiments, such as Richard Wilbur and Howard Nemerov, salvaged a few poems from Longfellow’s massive oeuvre – “The Fire of Drift-Wood” and “Snow-Flakes”, exquisite poems that, in their aching gesturing towards unnamed griefs, seem untypical of his main achievement. Longfellow’s harsh fate seemed to be that resuscitation could only follow complete and utter extinction.

There are signs that the time has arrived. During the past twenty years, a quiet Longfellow revival seems to have gained momentum. In his book New England Literary Culture (1986), the Harvard scholar Lawrence Buell offered a fresh assessment of Longfellow’s New England tragedies, and accorded them a central place in his 1988 Penguin Classics selection of Longfellow’s poetry. Two years later, J. D. McClatchy published his superb Library of America volume of the poetry and prose, which includes a deft selection of Longfellow’s translations. Even his children have elicited new interest: Christine Guth’s Longfellow’s Tattoos (2004) is an excellent study of the poet’s wayward, globetrotting eldest son, Charles, who was one of the first significant Western visitors to Japan.

And now we have Longfellow Redux, Christoph Irmscher’s friendly and readable scholarly book about Longfellow, which seeks to introduce a cosmopolitan and democratically multicultural Longfellow for our time. Irmscher considers the writer’s life and work under four headings: his relations with his readers; his views of authorship; travel as theme and practice; and literary translation. All four topics might be subsumed under the notion of Longfellow’s sheer openness to others – other people, other languages, other countries. Irmscher is struck by Longfellow’s “relentless availability” to his readers, both in the relatively undemanding nature of his published work and in his willingness to answer letters from strangers, as many as twenty a day, and receive visitors at his mansion on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Whittier was convinced that his friend Longfellow was “driven to death by these incessant demands”. Whitman, by contrast, said of the letters piling up in Camden, New Jersey, “I practically never answer them”. Irmscher concludes that Longfellow regarded writing as “less a privilege than a civic obligation”.

Similarly, Longfellow regarded the author as a humble craftsman, creating possibly perishable objects for a ready market. “The Village Blacksmith”, memorably parodied by Buster Keaton, relishes the daily rhythms of production: “Each morning sees some task begin, / Each evening sees it close; / Something attempted, something done, / Has earned a night’s repose”. A more sustained expression is Longfellow’s excellent long poem about pottery, “Kéramos” (1877), which Irmscher calls Longfellow’s “last great poetic apotheosis of the values of craftsmanship”. He circles the globe in the poem – from his native town of Portland, Maine, to Delft and Italy, and on to Japan – with vignettes for each pottery-making locale. In his stress on pottery as something handmade and handled, Longfellow, Irmscher argues, rejects the separate aesthetic realm of Keats’s Grecian urn, or the landscape-dominating jar on Wallace Stevens’s Tennessee hill. Longfellow’s real subject is “the strange kinship between people and the things they make and use”. When pots are broken, they are discarded – “Behind us in our path we cast / The broken potsherds of the past, / And all are ground to dust at last” – an unsentimental view of the function of art that Longfellow accorded to poetry as well.

I wish that Irmscher had not tried to align this unsentimental view of literary production with Longfellow’s family life in Cambridge. Irmscher wishes to persuade us that “for Longfellow, being an author meant being a father”, and that “the walls of the poet’s study” were “as permeable as the borders of the text” – permeable to intrusions by his five children, that is. It is good to learn that he made himself available to his children, most movingly after the horrible death of his second wife, Fanny, in 1861, when her dress had caught fire and Longfellow had sought, unsuccessfully, to douse the flames. It is even possible that, ahead of his time, he “imagined the family not as the playground of patriarchal power . . . but as a potentially egalitarian and dehierarchized space”. But Irmscher’s attempts to apply this vision to what he calls “literary paternity” are strained at best.

More interesting is his discussion of Longfellow’s best-known poem about fatherhood, “The Children’s Hour”, so influential in its time that Henry James thought it should be retitled “The Children’s Century”. While conceding that the poem, in its evocation of a father in his study besieged by his three daughters, “drips” with sentimentality, Irmscher thinks “the little text is less easy than it looks”. (Charles Ives’s haunting musical setting is further evidence of unsuspected depths.) Irmscher puts particular pressure on the seventh quatrain: “They almost devour me with kisses, / Their arms about me entwine, / Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen / In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!”. The allusion is to Archbishop Hatto of Mainz, whose solution to a famine was to torch the barn in which he had assembled the poor townspeople. They get their revenge when an army of mice scales the walls of the tower on the Rhine where the Bishop has taken refuge and devour him, and not with kisses. Irmscher plausibly suggests that Longfellow transforms the Mäuseturm of Bingen, besieged by “the patter of little feet”, into a “Bluebeard-like fortress” in which the possessive father wishes to imprison his daughters. In discerning a violent subtext to the poem, Irmscher stops short of aligning it with “the tradition behind Goya’s gruesome painting Saturn Devouring His Child”. Nevertheless, he is surely right to discern a darker strain in a poem in which we least expect to find it.

No one has gone more deeply and sympathetically into Longfellow’s work as a translator. Irmscher concedes Margaret Fuller’s assessment of the poet’s lack of originality, and tries to convert it into a virtue. “I contend that Longfellow was fully aware of the mediated, irrepressibly allusive nature of his literary work.” He reminds us that Longfellow was the first Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard, a field that barely existed, and the first to teach a class on Faust. Longfellow assembled and published his own foreign dictionaries and anthologies of world poetry; no one was more of a bridge, as Irmscher writes, “between the past and the present, Europe and America, the world of poetry and the man or woman on the street”.

After Fanny’s death, Longfellow assumed the task of translating the entire Divine Comedy, meeting regularly with his “Dante Club” to try out individual cantos. The time was ripe for translation, as Van Wyck Brooks noted long ago, with Bayard Taylor working on his version of Goethe’s Faust and T. W. Higginson translating Epictetus. Irmscher, carefully comparing the original Italian of Dante’s text with Longfellow’s successive drafts, makes a spirited defence of his archaisms and involutions. Longfellow didn’t subscribe to the modern aim of literary translators to create a plausible English poem. Instead, he anticipated Walter Benjamin’s conviction that a translation should reflect the imprint and irreducible strangeness of the original. The results, especially where Longfellow sought to preserve the sound of the original, can seem daunting to a modern reader:

Upon this journey, whence thou givest him vaunt,
Things did he hear, which the occasion were
Both of his victor and the papal mantle.

Irmscher has fun with The Song of Hiawatha, Longfellow’s “experiment in literary bilingualism” of 1855, noting that the poem sometimes “reads like a draft of a translation abandoned halfway through”. The poem was almost immediately parodied, of course, most memorably perhaps in Lewis Carroll’s “Hiawatha Photographing”:

From his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing . . . .

There is more to say about Longfellow and photography. Julia Margaret Cameron’s great photograph of Longfellow, taken in England in 1868, captures our lasting image of him as a long-haired and bearded Victorian sage, his hand and profile, as Irmscher notes, pointing in opposite directions. Longfellow’s face, burnt in the fire that killed his wife, couldn’t tolerate a razor. Another photograph, shot in the Rockies, inspired his beautiful sonnet commemorating her death:

There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast,
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes,
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.

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Christopher Benfey's books include The Great Wave: Gilded age misfits, Japanese eccentrics, and the opening of old Japan, 2003, and Degas in New Orleans, 1997.