Luc Sante takes a “headlong plunge” into the lives of nineteenth-century American poets

Our series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry continues today with a contribution by Luc Sante, whose new nonfiction work The Other Paris, just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has already been hailed for its “sneaky genius” by David Ulin in the Los Angeles Times.

Below, Sante testifies to the unique inspiration he derives from the Library of America collections American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume One: Freneau to Whitman and American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume Two: Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals.

The Other Paris
by Luc Sante
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015)

I find myself drawn, again and again, to the capsule biographies in the two volumes of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century. The poets of the nineteenth century were not only poets; not many made their living from academia, let alone literature. They were rich and poor. They were painters, actors, activists, politicians, cranks, investors, lawyers, farmers, hucksters, printers, failures, bureaucrats, physicians, journalists, divines. And many of them wore several of these hats, consecutively or even concurrently; the possibilities for self-invention and re-invention were larger then. John Hollander’s crisply detailed sketches offer a headlong plunge into the air of the nineteenth century that I find irresistible. As a tribute, from these biographical fragments I offer this collective portrait, like an overlay of photographic transparencies.

Lives of the Poets
Born in Head Tide, Maine. Born in Cherokee Nation near Rome, Georgia. Born at family estate The Forest in Amelia County, Virginia. Born into slavery on plantation of William Horton in Northampton County, North Carolina. Father, a German of Huguenot ancestry, was a herbalist and maker of patent medicines; mother, whose parents were German immigrants, was a spiritualist who believed herself endowed with mediumistic gifts. Father, a native of Vermont, served as legal counsel for Dred Scott. Father was a teacher and lecturer whose lack of success led to family’s frequently moving. Raised by his mother, a member of Campbellite sect Disciples of Christ, who discouraged his interest in literature and treated him severely. Family settled eventually in Spunk Point (now Warsaw), Illinois.

By his own account, spoke little English before age 14. After father’s death, apprenticed to a tailor; ran away to Philadelphia, where he learned trade of cigar-making. Worked from early age in father's blacksmith shop; received little schooling. Apprenticed to printer, and in his teens worked for The Huron Reflector in Norwalk, Ohio, and Western Aurora in Mount Vernon, Ohio. Following graduation from local high school, worked for six years as cashier in local pool hall, which was also center for legal off-track betting. Educated at Dayton’s public schools; graduated from Central High School, where he was editor of the school paper, class poet, and only black member of his class. While still in high school founded short-lived newspaper The Dayton Tattler, printed by classmate and future aviator Orville Wright. Left school and worked as lawyer’s assistant and in counting-house, becoming self-supporting by age 15.

Deliberately burned left hand (necessitating amputation) as self-punishment for having beaten another young man in fit of misguided jealousy after he had shown attention to Minna Timmins of Boston. Worked as miner and as a cook in the mining camps; spent time among Indians near Mount Shasta, and had a daughter, Cali-Shasta, with a woman of the band. Enjoyed initial acclaim as actor and was called “the American Roscius.” Wrote financially successful household manual The Frugal Housewife. Was also an inventor; patented a knitting machine, a walking doll, and a rotary engine. Entered world of finance with much success, forming his own brokerage company and eventually holding a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Affiliation with Quakers formally dissolved following his participation in a street brawl.

American Poetry: The
Nineteenth Century, Vol. 1

After husband’s death moved with sons and stepsons to an uncle’s coffee plantation in Matanzas, Cuba, where she built a small house and began Zophiël, or the Bride of Seven, epic poem concerning the love of a fallen angel for a mortal, based on an episode in apocryphal Book of Tobit. While recuperating from illness, reported having vision of fountain of water and angels playing harps. Following brother’s death at 19, experienced troubling visions he attributed to Satan. After being administered nitrous oxide in a dentist’s office, underwent mystical experience; repeated the experience at frequent intervals, expounding philosophical conclusions from it in The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy. Contributed poetry and visionary prose to The Univercoelum, periodical devoted to ideas of mesmerist Andrew Jackson Davis (known as “the Poughkeepsie seer”). Later volumes were poetic collections Eonchs of Ruby, A Gift of Love; Memoralia; or, Phials of Amber Full of the Tears of Love; the long poem Atlanta: or The True Blessed Island of Poesy; and the play The Sons of Usna: a Tragi-Apotheosis. Under tutelage of Sakurai Keitoku Ajari of Homyoin Temple in Kyoto, converted to Tendai sect of Buddhism. Emperor awarded him Fourth and Third Class Orders of the Rising Sun and Third Class Order of the Sacred Mirror.

Marriage strained because of husband’s objection to many of her public activities. Imprisoned for debt in Fleet Prison; moved to Paris upon release and continued to dodge his many creditors. Traveled to California, where he was briefly jailed for horse theft; escaped with cell-mate and again lived with Indians. Wife Fanny died when her dress caught on fire; he was badly burned putting the flames out. Marriage troubled by his neglect of family responsibilities. Lived increasingly separately from wife and children. Notorious for affair with elderly novelist Alexandre Dumas; photographs of the two of them circulated widely. He and wife, Caddie, had three daughters, Essie, Mable, and Alberta, who later became vaudeville team The Whitman Sisters.

Postmistress of Auburndale, Massachusetts; endured opposition and boycotts from residents opposed to Roman Catholicism. Developed deep interest in American Indians and published A Century of Dishonor, influential account of U.S. government mistreatment and deception; sent a copy to every member of Congress at her own expense. Interested in economic ideas of Henry George; defended anarchists sentenced to death following Haymarket Riot. Lobbied in Washington against the admission of Texas to the Union. Involved in diplomatic maneuvering relating to Spanish-American War and annexation of Philippines, which he enthusiastically supported. Prepared paper for Cleveland convention urging black settlement on borders of California; active thereafter in plans for black emigration and colonization; believed to have traveled to Central America to investigate possibility of purchasing land there for colonization.

American Poetry: The
Nineteenth Century, Vol. 2

Became world-famous for her ride across stage strapped to the back of a horse in the dramatic version of Byron’s “Mazeppa.” Traveled to Great Britain, where privately printed Pacific Poems and manners and costume (sombrero, boots, spurs, and buckskin) gained him fame as “frontier poet.” Returned to U.S. to find that his popularity did not extend there. Local response to his editorial protest in Northern Californian against “indiscriminate massacre” of 60 Wiyot Indians on Guyot’s Island forced him to leave Aracata. Family estate Woodlands was destroyed by stragglers from Sherman’s army; fled to Columbia, South Carolina, and witnessed its burning. Lost home and possessions when Sherman’s army burned Columbia; reduced to extreme poverty.

Left Vilna for Warsaw and was caught up in Napoleon’s retreat during his journey. Contracted lung inflammation; died a few days after leaving Warsaw for Zanowiec, a village near Cracow. Died when caught in a blizzard while walking home. Died during yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans. Drowned while trying to cross the North Canadian River, Oklahoma, in a small boat. During bout of influenza, died in Venice in fall from balcony. Received serious injuries in fall from tree, which led to his death two years later. Died at home; his last intelligible words were “moose” and “Indian.” After settling his affairs, he disappeared into Mexico, writing to a friend: “If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think it is a pretty good way to depart this life.” Poems published posthumously, although most of the poems were written when he was in his teens.

Sources, in order by paragraph (some items are more than one sentence long):
Edward Arlington Robinson, John Rollin Ridge, John Banister Tabb, George Moses Horton, Madison Cawein, Eugene Field, Bret Harte, Edwin Markham, John Hay.

Alexander L. Posey, Thomas Buchanan Read, Daniel Decatur Emmett, Madison Cawein, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Bret Harte.

John Jay Chapman, Joaquin Miller, John Howard Payne, Lydia Maria Child, Henry Clay Work, Edmund Clarence Stedman, John Neal.

Maria Gowen Brooks, Thomas Holley Chivers, Manoah Bodman, Benjamin Paul Blood, Thomas Holley Chivers, Ernest Fenollosa.

Julia Ward Howe, John Howard Payne, Joaquin Miller, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Ellery Channing, Bret Harte, Adah Isaacs Menken, Albery Allson Whitman.

Louise Imogen Guiney, Helen Hunt Jackson, Stuart Merrill, John Greenleaf Whittier, John Hay, James Monroe Whitfield.

Adah Isaacs Menken, Joaquin Miller, Bret Harte, William Gilmore Simms, Henry Timrod.

Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau, Richard Henry Wilde, Alexander L. Posey, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Edward Hamilton Sears, Henry David Thoreau, Ambrose Bierce, John Rollin Ridge.

Luc Sante is the author of the nonfiction books Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, and Kill All Your Darlings. A contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1981, he is the visiting professor of writing and the history of photography at Bard College and lives in upstate New York.

Related posts:

• John Hollander (1929–2013)
• The poem for a winter storm: Snow-Bound by John Greenleaf Whittier

Recent “Influences” posts:
Kirk Lynn • Sara Jaffe • Alexandra Kleeman • Amitava Kumar

Shelley Fisher Fishkin on the enduring infamy of two fire starters: Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau

Guest blog post by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, Professor of English, and Director of American Studies at Stanford University, editor of The Mark Twain Anthology, and author of the forthcoming book, Reading America: A Companion to Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee (University of California Press, 2013)

Sam Clemens first visited Lake Tahoe in 1861. From that moment on, he was tough on all other bodies of water.

His comment, in Innocents Abroad (1869), on Lake Como? “I thought Lake Tahoe was much finer.” Lake Como, he continued, “is clearer than a great many lakes, but how dull its waters are compared with the wonderful transparence of Lake Tahoe!”

He was similarly unimpressed by the Sea of Galilee, commenting in that same volume, that

The celebrated Sea of Galilee is not so large a sea as Lake Tahoe by a good deal—it is just about two-thirds as large. And when we come to speak of beauty, this sea is no more to be compared to Tahoe than a meridian of longitude is to a rainbow. The dim waters of this pool cannot suggest the limpid brilliancy of Tahoe; these low, shaven, yellow hillocks of rocks and sand, so devoid of perspective, can not suggest the grand peaks that compass Tahoe like a wall, and whose ribbed and chasmed fronts are clad with stately pines that seem to grow small and smaller as they climb, till one might fancy them reduced to weeds and shrubs far upward, where they join the everlasting snows.

Two years after Innocents Abroad came out, Twain averred in a lecture, “Now if you would see the noblest, loveliest inland lake in the world, you should go to Lake Tahoe. . . . I have seen some of the world’s celebrated lakes and they bear no comparison with Tahoe. There it is, a sheet of perfectly pure, limpid water, lifted up 6,300 feet above the sea—a vast oval mirror framed in a wall of snow-clad mountain peaks above the common world. . . . It is the home of rest and tranquility and gives emancipation and relief from the griefs and plodding cares of life.”

The next year in Roughing It (1872), he described Lake Tahoe as “the fairest picture the whole earth affords.” “Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe,” he wrote, “would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator. I do not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones.”

Mark Twain celebrated the beauty of Lake Tahoe every chance he got. His comments are still invoked by realtors in advertisements for property near the lake and feature prominently in magazines designed to promote tourism there. So why, a little over a year ago, did the U.S. Board on Geographic Names deny the request from the Nevada State Board on Geographic Names to designate a lakeside beach “Sam Clemens Cove?”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, and the martyrdom of John Brown

Margaret Kimberley, on her Freedom Rider blog, muses, “if anyone ever won by losing, it is John Brown”; her sentiment echoes the complex mix of feelings that contemporaries felt on the day of Brown’s execution, December 2, 1859.

“This will be a great day in our history,” wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in that day’s diary entry, “the date of a new Revolution,—quite as much needed as the old one.” Longfellow believed that by hanging Brown, the Virginians were “sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon.”

Brown envisioned arming an insurrection of Southern slaves by capturing the arsenal at Harpers Ferry. His assault and occupation on October 16 lasted less than thirty-six hours and cost the lives of three townspeople, one marine, and ten of Brown’s eighteen men, including two of his sons. Beyond his initial recruits, no slaves answered his call.

Three weeks before, Brown had hoped to enlist Frederick Douglass by outlining the plan for the raid to him. Douglass thought it suicidal, as he details in Life and Times:

I at once opposed the measure with all the arguments at my command. To me such a measure would be fatal to all running off slaves . . . and fatal to all engaged in doing so. All his arguments, and all his descriptions of the place, convinced me that he was going into a perfect steel-trap, and that once in he would never get out alive . . . I looked at him with some astonishment . . . and felt that he was about to rivet the fetters more firmly than ever on the limbs of the enslaved.

After being jailed, Brown refused to plead insanity or to be rescued. As he told his brother, “I am worth inconceivably more to hang, than for any other purpose.” Brown’s dignified demeanor during his briskly paced trial and the publication of his moving letters to his wife began a swell of sympathy in the North. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his Journal, “if Brown is hung, the gallows will be as sacred as the cross.”

Brown had met with Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in 1857—most of Brown’s funding came from northern abolitionists. Following the raid Thoreau sprang to his defense, eager to correct what he believed to be inaccurate press accounts. “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” which he delivered in Concord on October 30 and again on November 3, was reprinted and discussed in all the Boston papers. It will surprise anyone who thinks of Thoreau as the apostle of nonviolence:

It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others. . . I speak for the slave when I say, that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me.

Two more essays on Brown would follow: “Martyrdom of John Brown” and “The Last Days of John Brown,” the latter for a memorial service on July 4, 1860. Three days after Brown’s hanging Thoreau wrote in his Journal:

Of all the men who are said to be my contemporaries—it seems to be that John Brown is the only one who has not died. I meet him at every turn. He is more alive than ever he was. . . He is no longer working in secret. John Brown has earned immortality.

Also of Interest: Biographer and scholar Louis A. DeCaro, Jr. devotes his blog to the life and times of John Brown: Abolitionist.

Related LOA works: Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies; Henry David Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems

Henry David Thoreau: August 9, 1854: “ ‘Walden’ published.”

Henry David Thoreau published only two books during his lifetime: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (James Munroe and Company, 1849) and Walden, or, A Life in the Woods (Ticknor and Fields, 1854). Thoreau began A Week when he went to live at Walden Pond in 1845. Intended to be a memorial to his older brother John, who had died of lockjaw three years earlier, the book was based on a boat trip they had made together in 1839. On the website dedicated to the writings of Thoreau at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Elizabeth Witherell and Elizabeth Dubrulle describe how the creation of A Week ended up overlapping with Walden:

At Walden, Thoreau worked diligently on A Week, but he also explored Walden Woods and recorded his observations on nature in his Journal. He entertained visitors and made regular trips to town; friends and neighbors began to inquire about his life at the pond. What did he do all day? How did he make a living? Did he get lonely? What if he got sick? He began collecting material to write lectures for his curious townsmen, and he delivered two at the Concord Lyceum, on February 10 and 17, 1847. By the time he left the pond on September 6, 1847, he had combined his lectures on life at Walden with more notes from his journal to produce the first draft of a book which he hoped to publish shortly after A Week.

Unfortunately, A Week sold only two hundred copies during the first years after publication. In a Journal entry of October 28, 1853 (PDF) Thoreau describes receiving from the publisher “in a wagon” 706 copies of its printing of 1,000.

They are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. . . I now have a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which I wrote myself. . . . Nevertheless, in spite of this result, sitting beside the inert mass of my works, I take up my pen to-night to record what thought or experience I may have had, with as much satisfaction as ever.

Thoreau would revise Walden seven times before it was published on August 9, 1854. His Journal entry for the historic day (PDF) is brief:

Aug. 9. Wednesday. —To Boston.
“Walden” published. Elder-berries. Waxwork yellowing.

His friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson captures a less Stoic post-publication Thoreau in a letter to a friend: “He is walking up & down Concord, firm-looking, but in a tremble of great expectations.” Walden fared much better than A Week. By the end of the year 1,744 copies of the 2,000-copy first printing were sold and reviews were mostly favorable, even as far away as England. Reviewing Walden for The Westminster Review, George Eliot wrote “. . . we have a bit of pure American life (not the ‘go-ahead’ species, but its opposite pole), animated by that energetic, yet calm spirit of innovation, that practical as well as theoretic independence of formulae, which is peculiar to some of the finer American minds. . . . There is plenty of sturdy sense mingled with his unworldliness.”

Related LOA works: Henry David Thoreau: A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod; Henry David Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems