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Though the responses are somewhat predictable, I always enjoy reading these articles, and wonder why no one seems to have commissioned this kind of time travel through literature.
So, let’s try it. To save gas on the time machine, I’ll restrict myself to New England, and a stop in New York City, and see if I can’t whittle down my list to one supreme literary moment it would have been wonderful to witness.
Visiting Thoreau’s cabin at Walden circa 1845 would certainly be special. Small as it was, he occasionally hosted 30 visitors under his roof at one time — “children come a-berrying, railroad men taking a Sunday morning walk, fishermen and hunters, poets and philosophers” — and I’d like to think I’d be welcome under several of these headings.
Special. But the older I get, the more I’m drawn to the angry Thoreau, not the serene one, so I’d choose instead to be there on Oct. 30, 1859, when he delivered his speech at the Concord Town Hall, A Plea for Captain John Brown, two weeks after the doomed raid at Harper’s Ferry. (When the town selectmen refused to ring the bell to convoke the event, Thoreau climbed to the belfry and rang it himself.)
How inspiring it would be to hear those fiery words, as relevant today as they were then. “What shall we think of a government to which all the truly brave and just men in the land are enemies, standing between it and those who it oppresses? A government that pretends to be Christian and crucifies a million Christs each day!”
Or, switching moods, how about going back to attend one of Charles Dickens’s readings on his triumphant American tour of 1842, say an excerpt from Oliver Twist performed in Boston? These were done, a biographer wrote, with “full histrionic brilliance, and stage-managed to a point of high theatricality; the applause when he finished was thunderous and never-ending.”
Even better would be to join him for a quiet moment where we could talk in person, for instance during that same tour when he journeyed via steamboat from Springfield, Mass., to Hartford, Conn.
“The Connecticut River is a fine stream,” he opined, “and the banks in summer are, I have no doubt, beautiful. At all events I was told so by a young lady in the cabin, and she could be a judge of beauty, if the possession of a quality includes the appreciation of it, for a more beautiful creature I never looked upon.”
There’s a famous meeting I would give a lot to have eavesdropped on, if I could be transported to Amherst, Mass., on Aug. 16, 1870. Thomas Wentworth Higginson — the formidable man of letters and even more formidable man of action, who had led a regiment of African-American soldiers in the Civil War — went to meet at her home, after eight years of long-distance correspondence, a poet whose work he would be among the first to champion, Emily Dickinson.
“I heard an extremely faint and pattering footstep,” Higginson remembered, “and in glided, almost noiselessly, a plain, shy little person, the face without a single good feature, but with eyes, as she herself said, ‘like the sherry the guest leaves in the glass.’ And with smooth bands of reddish chestnut hair.”
“Forgive me if I’m frightened,” she said. “I never see strangers and hardly know what to say.”
Another stop on the time tour would be sadder: the death of Nathaniel Hawthorne at the Pemigewassett House in Plymouth, N.H., on May 14, 1864.
He was a broken man at 60, written out, heartbroken, sick. The good thing is that he wasn’t alone at the end; his best friend, the former president Franklin Pierce, was at his bedside.
Pierce was as responsible as any politician for the tragedy of the Civil War, and so the scene (perfect for a play) would have had much poignance — two forgotten men on the wrong side of history, remaining loyal to each other right to the end.
Hawthorne wrote his own epitaph in The Blithedale Romance. “Happy the man who has such a friend beside him when he comes to die.”
In 1842, the young historian Francis Parkman, while still a college student, bushwhacked from the White Mountains all the way deep into Maine, passing through forest almost as wild and unbroken as it was when the Pilgrims landed; it gave him the feel for the unspoiled continent that comes out so forcefully in his masterpiece (and an old favorite of mine) France and England in North America. Having hiked much of that country myself, it would be exhilarating to have seen what it looked like before man made much of an impact.
I’m certainly not the only one who would pay big bucks to go back and attend one of Mark Twain’s lectures — his writing was one thing, but on stage he was the Will Rogers, Jean Shepherd and Garrison Keillor of his day all wrapped into one.
Since it’s not far from home, I’d choose the lecture he delivered at the Brattleboro Opera House on Oct. 30, 1871, and I’d go backstage afterwards and invite him out for a beer.
I can think of several places in the 20th century where I’d like the time machine to stop. Spending some time with the naturalist Henry Beston at his Outmost House on Cape Cod. Picketing at the Sacco and Vanzetti trial with John Dos Passos, Katherine Anne Porter and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Picking up a hitchhiking Jack Kerouac. Befriending Sylvia Plath when her life turned tragic. Exploring tidal pools with Rachel Carson. Attending one of Dylan Thomas’s brilliant readings as he toured New England colleges. Chasing butterflies with Vladimir Nabokov during his years in Massachusetts.
Extraordinary experiences — but they pale in comparison to the one literary event that tops my list, though perhaps “non-event” is the better term. Literary history, after all, is mostly about writing, and writing is such a solitary endeavor there’s hardly anything to watch.
Still, I’d give a lot to have been sitting in the corner of Herman Melville’s study the warm New York City morning in 1850 when he began Moby Dick.
(In this day of computers and Word documents it’s easy to forget that every draft of his massive book was handwritten with a pen, dipped in ink every few words, so even as a feat of fine-motor skills and endurance his achievement is staggering.)
And so he dips that pen in the inkstand, squints down, writes “Call me Ishmael” across the top of the first page. I picture a drumroll in the background, a trumpet fanfare.
But that’s not the moment I would give anything to have witnessed. It’s the very last paragraph of the first chapter, “Loomings,” that I’d like to see him actually write — the passage that gives the broad, unstoppable impetus that launches the greatest imaginative work ever written on this continent.
“By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.”
W.D. Wetherell is a novelist, story writer and essayist who lives in Lyme.