LONGFELLOW, MAN FOR ALL SEASONS

By Sean Hadley

Why write another biography on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow? Some authors—Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle—are universally recognized, even if the reader has never picked up one of their works. Today a name like Stephen King likewise generates ire or admiration at a mere mention, though there are enough folks on both sides who have never read him. Go back a few decades, and you will get the same kinds of reactions to names like Washington Irving and Longfellow. Longfellow’s is perhaps the most recognizable name of the nineteenth-century American authors whose works continue to find their ways into student hands every year. Everyone knows the name Longfellow, but “the best-known American author no one has read” is a dubious honor indeed. Do we really need another biography of one more old, dead, white, male poet? In fact, we could use it now more than ever.

Consider how many Americans encounter Longfellow at some point in their life. It is true that only a narrow portion of his complete oeuvre is read, with “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” probably topping the list, alongside his shorter poem “The Cross of Snow,” or the poem turned Christmas carol, “Christmas Bells.” But Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha are some of our best candidates for a national epic and, along with shorter works like “The Psalm of Life,” are so ingrained in our cultural fabric that the titles and characters find their way into pop songs and children’s cartoons with ease. Often, Longfellow is just one more name stood up vertically on a bookshelf, with a handful of pages leafed through and many more begging for attention, but many homes, classrooms and libraries contain at least one book with a Longfellow poem within its pages. And all of this in spite of the efforts, detailed in Cross of Snow, to purge Longfellow from the literary canon. Longfellow’s poetry may not always please modern sensibilities for formlessness and void, but his poems endure all the same.

Longfellow is the kind of author with whom familiarity is easy to come by but seldom runs very deep. Longfellow wrote lyric and epic poetry, but he also penned dramas (including one, in verse, about the life of Michelangelo), translated Michelangelo’s sonnets and Dante’s Divine Comedy, and was the founding president of the Dante Society of America (one of the first scholarly societies in America to admit women). The author of some of America’s greatest poetry deserves a bit more than the casual passing glance that he receives in the average classroom.

Like the breadth of poetry, prose, and translations that he produced over his fifty years of writing, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s own life serves as a poignant reminder of the tragic, the blessed, and the ordinary aspects of human existence. And while biographies of the poet abound in an unbroken series from just after his death to today, most view him from a respectful distance. It can be difficult to get your hands on the exceptions—the extensive biography written by his brother, Samuel, or the brief and witty life penned by literary critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Thankfully, Nicholas Basbanes’ recent contribution, Cross of Snow, closes this gap for the reading public and reintroduces this extraordinarily ordinary man to a new generation of everymen and everywomen.

The twenty-first century has averaged one decent Longfellow biography per decade. Longfellow Redux (2004) by Christoph Irmscher and Longfellow: A Life Rediscovered (2016) by Charles Calhoun are worthy reads in their own right, but Cross of Snow stands out for its highly relational approach to telling the story of Longfellow’s life. It is not only that Basbanes details Longfellow’s friends and relations, for other biographers do that as well; Basbanes draws the reader into Longfellow’s joys and sufferings by treating the poet as a friend. Modern biographies tend to be either academic treatises or lionizing tales; Bas banes manages to avoid both. We sympathize with “young Henry,” as Basbanes refers to him throughout the book, as he tries to balance the duties of a son and student while studying in Eu rope with his desire to grieve the early loss of his first wife. We want to celebrate with Henry when he meets Frances a few years later, knowing the joy that lays before them. And we feel his heart break when Basbanes recounts her death and Henry’s failed attempts to rescue his wife from the burning dress which took her life. Basbanes accomplishes this through two key elements: the relational focus already mentioned and the interweaving of Longfellow’s writings—both personal and private. In addition to providing the book’s title, Longfellow’s own words run through the whole volume; almost every page contains a line or two of Longfellow’s own writings, often from his previously unpublished letters. In this way, Basbanes creates in the reader a sense that we are truly getting to know Longfellow, rather than an idealized American icon or a caricatured object of derision. Longfellow is merely a man.

But we know as well that Longfellow is more than that. Basbanes opens his biography by describing Longfellow as “a man for all seasons, discreet, loyal, and principled to a fault.” Every man and woman could use such a friend, which makes the accessibility of Cross of Snow all the more inviting. When Longfellow died in 1882, a national day of mourning was declared and from coast to coast it was observed with genuine feeling. Has the country seen a more unifying figure since? And as we move away from the struggles of 2020, a year of separation and division, Longfellow’s final printed word, coming just before his death, seems a welcome call into new friendship and new readings: “It is daybreak everywhere.”

Sean Hadley is a graduate of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and a doctoral student in Faulkner University’s Great Books program. He currently teaches humanities and research at Trinitas Christian School in Pensacola, FL.

Misunderstanding

Homer

By Christian Leithart

The Iliad is not a book a man would need if he were stranded on a desert island. He would not need it because the Iliad would be there already, in his bones and breath. The story of the Trojan War is as much a part of Western heritage as reading from left to right. From it, a man could rebuild all our tales.

Theodor Kallifatides admits as much in the afterword of his 2019 novel The Siege of Troy, a retelling of the Iliad set alongside the occupation of Greece by German soldiers during the Second World War. The book is slim, and its author humbly states that in writing it he had no intention of trying to replace Homer. How could he? Instead, he says, “I just wanted more people to get to know him” (203). With so many recent attempts to “reframe” ancient tales for enlightened modern minds, this is a refreshing attitude. But who is the Homer Kallifatides wants to introduce us to?

The novel’s frame tale takes place in April of 1945, in a small Greek town where a new teacher has just arrived from Athens. The story’s fifteenyear-old narrator is immediately smitten by the young woman, whose pupils address her as “Miss

Marina” or, more often, “Miss.” When British bombers scatter bombs over the countryside, attempting to dislodge the Germans, Miss takes her class to a nearby cave and distracts them with a story. A besieged city . . . ragged warriors camped on a beach . . . the most beautiful woman in the world. . . . The skeptical high schoolers are soon enrapt.

The Iliad that appears in the novel is clearly told from Miss’s point of view. For one thing, the language falls far, far short of Homer’s original. Here is how the opening line communicates the rage of Achilles: “The sun was shining bright on the camps of the Achaeans, but their mood was far from sunny” (6). Far from sunny indeed.

For another, Miss does not hide her disdain for the war, and in particular for the men who started it. In this telling, Helen is not kidnapped by Paris, but leaves willingly, having fallen for his sensitive nature. Menelaus does not fight to regain his honor but to soothe his jealousy. Achilles is cruel, Agamemnon stupid, and Odysseus conniving. Hector alone is honorable, but it is clear from the moment he appears that he is doomed. Kallifatides considers the Iliad “the strongest anti-war poem ever written” (203) and, in Miss’s voice, paints the Trojan War as futile and senseless, more about muscles and cruelty than reason and honor. The Achaeans are fools to think they are fighting for anything other than their own masculine vanity.

By contrast, the female characters are innocent (Iphigenia), self-aware (Helen), courageous (Andromache), and resourceful (Briseis). None of this makes any difference, of course, in a world controlled by men. The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. When Miss says to Dimitra, her one female student, “A woman’s body is the field of conflict where men crush one another’s pride and honor” (30), Dimitra refuses to accept the statement, but as the novel progresses, the atrocities of war prove Miss right.

Strangest of all is the omission of the gods. They are absent from Miss’s story, except for a character’s occasional prayer or curse. Zeus does not deign to appear. Athena participates in no battles. Achilles’ armor is fashioned by Iphis, a female slave, not Hephaestus. Their absence is all the stranger considering the fact that Miss is herself religious. She comments that her seven students make a “good number . . . God created the world in seven days” (4). Her story implies that men’s fates are not under their control, but as to who or what does control them, she is silent. Her students, however, speculate. When Dimitra asks if he believes in anything, the fifteenyear-old protagonist says, “In people, to put it simply. Some are stupid, some are evil, but there’s nothing else to believe in” (85).

By the end of the novel, the teenage protagonist has dropped his puppy love and accepted the fact that he will marry Dimitra and quietly raise a family in the village. Despite cruel men, despite bullets and bombs, despite random executions in the village square, life goes on. Love outlasts hate because it needs to. Even women, who are treated more savagely by war than men, have a place in the world. The last line of the book, as the protagonist and Dimitra walk toward the lights of the village, is: “Our mothers were waiting for us” (202).

For those who have never read or perhaps never even heard the story of the Trojan War, The Siege of Troy would make a fine introduction. Its aims and execution are equally humble. But its Homer is not the one I know. Kallifatides does not capture the vitality of the Iliad partly because he does not seem to recognize the heroism on display, the “prodigality of life,” as William Hazlitt said. Kallifatides’ Greeks and Trojans are barbarians full of nothing but despair. By contrast, in Homer, the characters, Trojan and Achaean, man and woman, know that life is cruel and painful, but also rich and wonderful. Yes, war is hell, but facing hell with courage is what life is for an ancient hero. You do not need to read between the lines to find life in Homer’s epic. Its splendor, force, and variety are laid bare on every page.

As for the man on the desert island, the only book he would need is a practical guide to shipbuilding, of course.

Christian Leithart writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He likes old books and staring out the window.