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The Draw of 19th Century America, by The Technologists Author, Matthew Pearl
The Technologists is a thriller revolving around the very first class at M.I.T. It is my fourth novel and my third set in Boston of the nineteenth century. I'm sometimes asked what it is about that time and place that appeals to me. I might need some psychoanalysis to answer. Like many other things in the creative process, I was drawn to the setting as much by accident and instinct as by a deliberate process. The first story I conceived as a novel, which would become The Dante Club, brought me to 1865 through historical fact - that was the year that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow gathered some friends together to help him finish his groundbreaking translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, and that was the subject matter I wanted to pair with a mysterious story.
Though I came to it by chance, I found I enjoyed writing and researching about the nineteenth century. The more I immersed myself in it, the more I wrote in it, leading into more novels.
Though I had not planned to become such a long-running tourist to the nineteenth century, I recognize some specific elements that keep me there. I've always been fascinated by origins. What it was like to be the first at something. In The Technologists, the first students at M.I.T. were pioneers striving against suspicion and ridicule for this experimental new college. I even thought of calling the novel The First Class (until those X-Men stole the idea for the prequel movie about a very different school). In general, much of our modern culture and society took recognizable form in the nineteenth century, and Boston was often at the forefront. With all of those origins swirling around, there's an endless amount of material.
The origin could be in the form of a person - in The Poe Shadow, I follow the first mega-fan of Edgar Allan Poe. In The Last Dickens, my third novel, I included a climactic scene involving the first passenger elevator in Boston. I envisioned this as the slowest chase scene in literature! The elevator in 1870 was more of a parlor, with a chandelier and benches to sit on while taking the very slow ride. The controls were very complicated and operated by a trained employee, usually a boy.
The other natural connection I feel to the nineteenth century is how conscious some people were becoming then of ushering in our future. This is what was so interesting to me about The Technologists. The characters are very aware that the scientific innovations that they seek will change the world, which is why they are feared by others. That tension animated much of the plot.
Despite my interest, I wouldn't want to live in the nineteenth century - that's a question I'm also asked. Still, it would be nice to visit.
Interview reproduced from www.everydayebook.com, with permission
Matthew Pearl Discusses His First Novel, The Dante Club
Matthew Pearl's been busy. He graduated from Harvard in 1997, won the
prestigious Dante Prize from the Dante
Society of America in 1998, and graduated from Yale law school in 2000. He
is currently teaching at Harvard and has just published his first novel, The
Dante Club. He also generously took the time to answer our questions. Thanks
Matthew!
When did you first become interested in Dante Alighieri?
I became intrigued by Dante in a backward fashion: I was studying
the "modernists" (e.g., T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound) and was deeply impressed
by the influence from Dante that they not only displayed but flaunted. I wanted
to find out for myself what had motivated them so intensely and interestingly.
Who comprised the original Dante Club?
The original Dante Club was a group of poets and scholars who
helped Henry Wadsworth Longfellow complete his groundbreaking translation of
Dante's Divine Comedy. The core members were James Russell Lowell, a
renowned poet and professor, and Charles Eliot Norton, an editor and later a
famous art critic. Other members included Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a professor
at the Harvard Medical College and a poet, James T. Fields, Longfellow's
publisher, and George Washington Greene, a Revolutionary War historian. Often
other guests, prominent in fields of science, art and literature, would join
them for the evening, and the mixture of disciplines surely helped Longfellow in
the daunting task. They would meet every Wednesday around 7:00 p.m. at
Longfellow's house in Cambridge and would follow their translation discussion
with an elaborate supper, often not concluding until after 1:00 a.m.
Why's the study of Dante important in the twenty-first
century?
Great question, and an important one. One answer from a cultural
perspective is that Dante, despite writing a poem seemingly steeped in doctrine,
finds a way to bring out the humanity in the most savage and hopeless persons,
without denying their wrongs, and at the same time forces us to confront the
always startling reality of goodness that never reaches apparently deserved
rewards. From a literary perspective, we might also think how important it is to
remember that literature is not separate from life, and Dante makes himself out
of the poem and the poem out of himself, unapologetically and powerfully.
Tell me about Longfellow's translation of Inferno.
Longfellow's translation, published in 1867, was the first
translation of Inferno by an American, and because of his wide fame it
opened Dante to the American readership for the first time. There are 34 cantos
(or subdivisions) of Inferno and Longfellow completed the first draft of
his Inferno translation in 34 days, doing one canto each day, starting
the day he learned his son Charley had joined the army to fight in the Civil
War. Longfellow's translation is remarkable for its accuracy and faithfulness
to Dante's text. Though the translation has been out of print for over forty
years, there is now a new authoritative edition published by Modern Library,
released simultaneously with The Dante Club novel.
Which mystery writers do you like the most? Who do you think
has influenced your work?
The writer who influenced this project most was probably Umberto
Eco, who is not a mystery writer by trade, but whose novel The Name of the
Rose redefined historical fiction and the profound intersection of history
and mystery. Iain Pears, author of the remarkable historical mystery An
Instance of the Fingerpost, also provides an amazing model for this type of
writing and storytelling. As a child, I couldn't get enough of Arthur Conan
Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. Doyle, interestingly, is said to have named
his character after Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, an author he admired and one of
the main characters in my novel, The Dante Club. In my original draft, a
young Conan Doyle visits America and meets Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes while
Holmes and the Dante Club are seeking out the murderer.
In an article for Legal Affairs you write about
Dante's concept of contrapasso in that "...punishments must arise
from the crime itself, not from the damage it has caused. The Hypocrites, for
example, wear cloaks of gold encased with lead. The false representations they
made while on earth elicit a punishment embodying the sin itself -its deceitful
contrast between the external and the internal - rather than an attempt to
revisit the effect their sin had on their victims." Are there elements of contrapasso
in The Dante Club?
Definitely. Contrapassos appear throughout the novel. In The
Dante Club murder victims are discovered that have been killed through the
use of the contrapassos designed by Dante as eternal punishments. Only
the members of the Dante Club, as the first American Dante scholars, realize
this connection, and once they discover the contrapasso they must figure
out why that particular contrapasso or punishment was chosen for that
victim, since Dante creates a highly differenciated range of punishment. Dante
makes similar investigations by interviewing the sinners he meets in Hell to
find out what brought them to their fate, and then speaking with the penitents
he comes upon later in Purgatory.
How did you envision the cover of The Dante Club? Are
you pleased with the cover design?
I had many ideas for the cover, none of which my publisher listened
to! The truth is I love how it came out, thanks to the talented Allison Saltzman,
who oversaw the design. There was a process and evolution. The original version
of this design pictured an illustration from Dante's Inferno in the backdrop
rather than a street scene of Boston. I voiced my opinion that since Dante was
in the title it was overkill to have the image Dante-related and that the
balance between the book's subject matters - the literature of Dante and the
19th century world of Boston - would be better served aesthetically with a
Boston image looming behind the prominent Dante titling. They did take my
advice on that! The title is really the anchor for the cover design and what's
nice, for bookstore purposes, is you can read it pretty easily from far away. If
the book is on a shelf, on the other hand, I think the spine is distinctive and
exciting enough to draw your eye.
Funny
enough, the cover designer chose an image of the Park Street church in Boston
that would have roughly been the view from the window of the offices of Ticknor
& Fields, the publisher of Longfellow's translation, where many scenes in
the book take place. I don't think the choice was deliberate but it shows the
stars were aligned!
Has anyone compared you with other lawyers-turned-novelists
like Scott Turow and John Grisham?
I don't think anyone has drawn comparisons to Grisham or Turow,
but I wouldn't complain!
What will you be working on next?
Well, I'm very busy right now with activity related to The
Dante Club. I have book signings planned for February in Boston, New York,
New Haven, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Pasadena. I
looking forward to hearing from readers and sharing time with them. When I have
more time to write, it's on to the next project, another 19th century thriller
set in a literary environment, though will all different characters and focal
points.
Interview first published at ospreydesign.com
and reproduced with their permission
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