The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson is an interesting book set in Chicago near the turn of the nineteenth century.  Its main point of interest is with the World’s Fair of 1893, the people who affected it, and the people who were affected by it.  Most often, the book focuses on Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s chief architect who designed the fair from the ground up with his partner, John Wellborn Root.  After Root’s early death in 1891, it was left to Burnham alone to follow through with the vision they had for the largest, most glorious fair the world had ever seen.  At times, it seemed as though the expectations of Chicago and America alike could not be met, especially under the time constraints and fiscal oversight imposed on Burnham.  Added to his problems were the swampy Chicago landscape chosen for the site, the economic panic spreading through the country, and the personalities and interests of all who were involved.  The book does an amazing job of demonstrating the difficult balance Daniel H. Burnham had to constantly maintain in order to complete the fair without compromising its core values, principle among them to exhibit to the world Chicago in the way he knew it and loved it.

The World’s Fair was planned to coincide with the four hundred year anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America in 1892 and more significantly as an answer to Paris’ World’s Fair held in 1889.  It was at the Paris World’s Fair that Alexandre Gustave Eiffel showcased his now world famous tower.  The United States of America had presented itself poorly at the Paris World’s Fair and its leading citizens looked for an opportunity to demonstrate America’s skill and ingenuity by hosting a fair of their own.  The common rallying cry was to build something that would “out-Eiffel Eiffel.” Through an act of Congress, Chicago was chosen as the site of this new fair, a fitting match between the fair that would be used to show America’s industry and a city that sought to prove the same and still earn a profit.

Chicago was elected as the site of the World’s Fair on February 24, 1890, leaving less than three years until the dedication ceremony scheduled for October 12, 1892.  Although the actual opening of the fair would not be until seven months later, May 1, 1893, political delays prevented the selection of the actual site of the fair until November 1890.  The nine month delay was devastating and the actual site selection was less than ideal.  To tame the landscape, Burnham enlisted the help of the famous landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, who had designed New York’s Central Park, Boston’s Emerald Necklace, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and the grounds of Harvard and Yale.  He also selected the country’s top architects to design the buildings which would comprise Burnham’s vision for a Court of Honor.  Together the team would scramble to put their designs into motion and build the White City as quickly as possible.

Earlier, I explained that although Burnham and the World’s Fair are central topics of the book, they are certainly not the only topics discussed.  Larson sets against the dream of the White City, the cold realities of life in Chicago.  At the time, Chicago was known mainly for its meat packing districts and pig slaughtering houses.  The stench of pig carcasses permeated the air.  As bad, if not worse, was the stench of the garbage-strewn alleys and the raw sewage pumped into Lake Michigan and the Chicago River.  Black sludge could be seen spreading across the lake, eventually reaching the intake pipes for the city’s water supply.  Horses defecated in the streets and when they died their corpses were left rotting where they fell.  Crime was prevalent in Chicago which was home to Mickey Finn, for whom a drug-laced cocktail intended to immobilize a victim in order to rob him is named, and Herman Webster Mudgett, who under the name of Dr. H. H. Holmes earned the distinction of one of the most accomplished serial killers of all time and killed men, women, and children alike.  Mudgett’s murders far exceeded those of Jack the Ripper who preyed on London’s Whitechapel district at the same time Mudgett was constructing his hotel of death, only blocks from the fairgrounds.  Larson also describes in detail William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his Wild West Show, the young engineer George W. G. Ferris whose wheel would rival Paris’ Eiffel Tower and earn a place in American fairs for centuries to come, the outrageous Chicago mayor, Carter Henry Harrison, and his assassin, Patrick Eugene Joseph Prendergast, whose single act of murder signaled the close of the fair and caused the cancellation of its final day of celebration.

Erik Larson’s book, The Devil in the White City, is a fascinating read.  Larson’s attention to detail and painstaking research results in a story that is often times absorbing and at all times factual.  I recommend it highly for anyone interested in reading about what Americans can accomplish through sheer determination and patriotism.  It serves as a sad reminder of what may be missing from citizenry today, particularly considering how strongly these men and women fought to put together a national celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery and yet the 500th anniversary came and passed with little fanfare despite its close proximity to the Millennium, something that also didn’t achieve near the stature of the Fair of 1893.

Ordinarily, I’d try to include a single quote to summarize this posting.  Here, however, I thought I’d choose instead a passage from the book.

"At precisely 12:08 he touched the gold key.  A roar radiated outward as successive strata of the crowd learned that the key had been pressed.  Workmen on rooftops immediately signaled to peers stationed throughout the park and to sailors aboard the warship Michigan anchored in the lake.  The key closed an electric circuit that activated the Electro-Automatic Engine Stop and Starter attached to the giant three-thousand-horsepower Allis steam engine at the Machinery Building.  The start’s silver-plated gong rang, a sprocket turned, a valve opened, and the engine whooshed to life on exquisitely machined shafts and bearings.  Immediately thirty other engines in the building began to thrum.  At the fair’s waterworks three huge Worthington pumps began stretching their shafts and pistons, like praying mantises shaking off the cold.  Millions of gallons of water began surging through the fair’s mains.  Engines everywhere took steam until the ground trembled.  An American flag the size of a mainsail unfurled from the tallest flagpole in the Court of Honor, and immediately two more like-sized flags tumbled from flanking poles, one representing Spain, the other Columbus.  Water pressurized by the Worthington pumps exploded from the MacMonnies Fountain and soared a hundred feet into the sky, casting a sheet rainbow across the sun and driving visitors to raise their umbrellas against the spray.  Banners and flags and gonfalons suddenly bellied from every cornice, a huge red banner unscrolled along the full length of the Machinery Building, and the canvas slipped from Big Mary’s gold-leaf shoulders.  Sunlight clattering from her skin caused men and women to shield their eyes.  Two hundred white doves leaped for the sky.  The guns of the Michigan fired.  Steam whistles shrieked.  Spontaneously the throng began to sing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” which many thought of as the national anthem although no song had yet received that designation.  As the crowd thundered, a man eased up beside a thin, pale woman with a bent neck.  In the next instant Jane Addams realized her purse was gone.

The great fair had begun.”
Erik Larson in The Devil in the White City

I had been so fixated on reading The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl that I hadn’t considered what to read next.  Now that I’ve finished the book, I need something else.  I have a few non-fiction books that I had put off at the beginning of the summer, but I feel like reading something lighter.  I think I’ll stop in at the book store tomorrow and pick up something, maybe an Elmore Leonard novel.  Although I’ve read at least a dozen of his novels, I know there are still some that I missed.

I think I’ll also check out some of the authors from The Dante Club: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and, of course, Dante Alighieri.  That’s one of the interesting things about Pearl’s writings - he details his subject characters so well that I feel like I’ve met, dined, walked, and talked with each so much that I miss them when the book is finished.  Pearl’s web site, http://www.matthewpearl.com, contains some good biographical information and links to other sites, like the National Park Service’s site for Longfellow’s house.  Visiting the house will make for a nice day trip into Cambridge next time we’re looking for something to do.  It’ll also give us an excuse to revisit Fire and Ice, a fun restaurant in Harvard Square, and the nearby pub where I first knew that I’d marry Maggie.

After my last posting about The Poe Shadow, I received a very nice email from Matthew Pearl.  I was a little doubtful at first, because I thought it may have been an automated email from his publishing company, but it turned out to be from the author himself.  So many different thoughts ran through my head from the first second I saw the email’s “from” line and continued for days after.  I was amazed that he had found my little blog and overjoyed that he took the time to write me.  I was also a little self-conscious about whether my comments were good enough or what I would write when I finished The Dante Club.  I also wasn’t sure if I should continue to write him back for fear of being perceived as a stalker as my wife was quick to point out, so I let it go.  However, I think I’ll write him another email after posting this entry anyway to at least let him know that I’ve written about The Dante Club.

The novel takes place in Boston in 1865 when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is the premier poet of his time.  In this time before cinema, television, and radio, authors of the written word are the popular celebrities and Boston was brimming with them.  Longfellow had formed a translation group of his friends and peers, simply called The Dante Club.  Each week, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, and George Washington Greene met to produce an American translation of Dante’s seminal novel, The Divine Comedy, originally named Commedia.  As the authors make their way through the first canticle, The Inferno, two gruesome murders shock the citizens of Boston.  When it is discovered that both murders were committed according to punishments described within The Inferno, the authors fear for the worst.  Their translation could be doomed before it is ever published, they themselves could be accused of the murders, and the murderer may continue his spree under the noses of the dumbfounded police.  Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes (Greene is excepted due to his age and poor health) enlist the aid of their publisher, J. T. Fields, and set out to solve the mystery and catch the murderer.

An interesting character in the story is that of the fictional Nicholas Rey, the first black (actually mulatto) police officer in Boston.  Rey is an amalgam of real nineteenth century black police officers Pearl researched during his writing of the book.  What differentiaties Rey from the other characters in the book is that we are constantly reminded that he is an outsider.  He’s part black, so he’s not accepted by the white community, and part white, so not accepted by the black community either.  He’s a police officer, yet he doesn’t have the powers of his fellow officers.  He can’t arrest a white person, he can’t wear a uniform, and he can’t carry a gun.  Although the authors are more open-minded than many and certainly don’t discriminate against Rey for the color of his skin, they do recognize him as a police officer and fear that he will connect the murders to Dante and therefore, to them.  We learn that Rey was born a slave and emancipated as a boy and placed in the care of a Boston blacksmith and his family, but there are no other mentions of Rey’s family, his friends, or even where he lives.  From all appearances, Rey is alone in this world.  It’s a painful reminder of the struggles Africans have made to fit into American society.

I should warn that the accounts of the murders in this book are frightful and gruesome.  The depictions reminded me a bit of the movie Seven, aka SE7EN, starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman.  I don’t think Pearl is glorifying the violence, only that he is accurately rendering what Dante had envisioned.  Dante described a punishment befitting the crime for each soul he encountered during his journey through hell and Pearl describes these for us in the deaths of the victims in his novel.  Interestingly, in the Reader’s Guide at the back of my book, Pearl is asked about these depictions is comparison with a Stephen King novel.  The author remarks that he’d like someone to give King a copy of the novel and see what he thinks.  I’d like to know if someone took him up on that offer or if that other New England writer had responded.  Maybe after my day trip to The Longfellow House, I’ll have to make a second trip to Bangor, Maine to seek out King and then catch rocker Howie Day doing a show at a local pub.  Ok, maybe my wife was right to be concerned about me being perceived as a stalker.

"The apprehension of approaching evil has hurried many into the utmost danger.”
James Russell Lowell

P.S. I once attended a wedding at the rose garden in Lynch Park in Beverly, MA.  I remember reading an engraving at the entrance to the garden and I feel certain that it contained lines from Longfellow’s translation starting with “All hope abandon, ye who enter in!” It stood out at the time because of how inappropriate it seemed for a site where weddings were held.  Does anybody know what the enscription at the park reads?

Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow may well be the best new novel I’ve read in a very long time.  It’s led me to purchase his prior novel, The Dante Club, which I’m enjoying presently.  I’m not entirely sure what caused me to pick up The Poe Shadow when I saw it on the new releases table at Barnes and Noble.  The cover was unassuming, and I hadn’t read any reviews or received any recommendations.  However, I am glad I did.  From the first page to the last, I loved this book.

Often times I breeze through a good fiction quickly, but I found my approach to this novel different from others.  Although I was certainly enraptured by its story, I found myself savoring each word and often rereading sentences and paragraphs.  Instead of stealing time to read a page here and there, I set aside time and waited to enjoy it much in the way I might a fine cigar or nice bottle of pinot noir.

The Poe Shadow takes place in Baltimore in 1849 and being written in the first person, contains the quaint dialogue of the time.  In this manner, it reminded me a lot of a Dickens novel or one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries, except with an American bent.  It’d be more accurate to say that it’s written in the manner of one of the titular Edgar Allen Poe mysteries which were written some forty years before the Holmes novels, but being ignorant of Poe’s work outside of The Raven and some short stories, I could only think of Sherlock Holmes.  However, Matthew Pearl has convinced me to pursue some Poe novels which I expect to be reading soon.

Since I’ve already claimed ignorance, I may as well continue with my Sherlock Holmes comparison.  Like the Holmes novels, excepting one, this story isn’t told through the voice of the astute detective.  While the Holmes novels are told by the venerable doctor, Dr. John H. Watson, The Poe Shadow is told by an esteemed attorney named Quentin Hobson Clark who decides he must defend the honor of Edgar Poe after his unfortunate death and subsequent vilification in the press.

Clark is dismayed to learn that the author he so admired and with whom had begun a correspondence isn’t receiving his due respect in the public.  He is even more dismayed to learn the police haven’t begun any kind of investigation into the matter of Poe’s death despite the unusual and unexplained circumstances.  Thus, Clark sets out to solve the mystery of Poe’s demise and entrench the author firmly in the minds and hearts of an American audience.

To add depth to the story, Pearl nicely weaves in an alternate and possibly more significant motive for Clark’s sense of urgency when he reveals that the young attorney’s parents recently perished in a carriage accident.  The closeness of this tragic turn and Clark’s expected nuptials to a childhood sweetheart that would set to define his future both send the narrator scrambling for anything different and exciting.  When he witnesses, albeit unknowingly at first, Poe’s sparse funeral service and reads the newspapers’ accounts of the author’s last days, he discovers an outlet for all these pent up emotions and leaps into the matter without ever looking back.  He abandons his law practice, risks his neck, and ultimately everything he owns in pursuit of a mystery that many doubt even exists.

Clark convinces himself that the media’s account, the police department’s lack of interest, and Poe’s relatives’ reluctance to discuss the matter are all signs of a sinister plot.  When he struggles to untangle the mess for himself, he decides to enlist the one man he feels can solve the enigma: the real-life model for Poe’s fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin.  Unfortunately, with Poe deceased and little information available, Clark has a difficult time identifying the nonpareil detective.  He eventually narrows his selection between two prominent citizens of Paris: a fellow attorney named Baron Claude Dupin who has never lost in court, and a freelance agent to the police named Auguste Duponte who helped solve several difficult, publicized cases.

Clark decides that Duponte is the more likely candidate for Poe’s inspiration and sets off for Paris in anticipation of luring the detective back to America with promises of fame, fortune, and an interesting puzzle.  From the moment he arrives in Paris, things don’t go quite as he had expected.  First, he discovers that his presence in Paris isn’t exactly appreciated by the police commissioner who has held a simmering jealousy from Duponte’s previous feats.  Then even after he finally tracks down Duponte, the detective is completely unwilling to even consider the matter, spending days in a pensive state, barely uttering but a few words to the American gentleman.  To make matters worse, one day during a tour of the palace of Versailles, Clark is abducted by the Baron Dupin who boasts that he is the role-model for the fictional detective.  Despite Clark’s protests that the real Dupin would never have employed a gang of ruffians or acted in such a manner, the Baron declares that he will set off for America to claim his fame and fortune, without need of Clark’s assistance.  This chain of events sets the clock ticking for Clark who must now persuade the detective to join the adventure, solve the mystery, and restore Poe’s good name before the faux Dupin muddies the waters and claims victory for himself.

Throughout the story, Matthew Pearl introduces many interesting characters and sub-plots that include a French female assassin, the American family of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, the heated political climate of nineteen century Baltimore, the declining Atlantic slave trade, and of course the continued pressures in Clark’s life that had originally set him off on his pursuit.  It is to Pearl’s credit that he accomplishes all this without ever confusing the reader or clouding the mystery that is at the heart of The Poe Shadow.  Further, it is interesting to note how many of the details of the case are true to their original and the interesting, previously unknown factoids Pearl discovered during his research into the novel; he outlines these in his afterword to the book.  I also found it interesting that although completely different in context, I was reminded of Dan Brown’s work in that both authors exhaustively research a subject and then build a mystery around the actual or perceived facts of the setting; Dan Brown gave a recommendation on the jacket for both The Poe Shadow and The Dante Club.  So far, I’m really enjoying The Dante Club and will write about it when I finish.

"To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.”
Edgar Allen Poe