{"id":100571,"date":"2016-07-21T08:54:37","date_gmt":"2016-07-21T12:54:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=100571"},"modified":"2016-07-22T09:18:05","modified_gmt":"2016-07-22T13:18:05","slug":"troubler-of-the-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/07\/21\/troubler-of-the-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Troubler of the House"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>

McLean Asylum for the Insane.<\/p><\/div>\n

On September 14, 1838, the precociously gifted twenty-three-year-old poet Jones Very was removed under mysterious circumstances from his post as a Greek tutor at Harvard. The previous day, he had visited the Unitarian minister Henry Ware Jr., a prominent opponent of the radical new school of religious thought associated with Very\u2019s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and his Concord-based intellectual circle. Unprompted, Very started reciting a heated, controversial commentary on the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew. \u201cTo Mr. Ware\u2019s objections,\u201d his fellow divinity student George Moore would later relate,\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

he said he was willing to yield, but that the spirit would not let him\u2014that this revelation had been made to him, and that what he said was eternal truth\u2014that he had fully given up his own will, and now only did the will of the Father\u2014that it was the father who was speaking thro\u2019 him. He thinks himself divinely inspired, and says that Christ\u2019s second coming is in him.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Having been asked to leave Harvard, Very had nowhere to go but back to the Salem house in which he\u2019d been raised by his mother, an outspoken atheist who the progressive educator Elizabeth Peabody\u2014one of Very\u2019s close correspondents\u2014described to Emerson as a \u201ctiger of a woman.\u201d (Very\u2019s parents were first cousins who lived together in a kind of common-law union, Lydia Very not believing in marriage as a legal arrangement. His father, a shipmaster, died at sea before Very was in his teens.)<\/p>\n

On\u00a0September 16,\u00a0Very knocked on Peabody\u2019s door, laid his hand on her head, announced his intention to \u201cbaptize\u201d her \u201cwith the Holy Ghost and with fire,\u201d recited much of Christ\u2019s Olivet discourse from memory, and, in the words of his biographer Edwin Gittleman, \u201cthereupon began to speak with her in the most matter-of-fact way \u2026 without once mentioning what had just taken place between them.\u201d After a few minutes, he left.<\/p>\n

Troubled, Peabody appealed to Very\u2019s mother. She found this lifelong \u201ccoarse materialist\u201d (as Peabody had once called her) markedly changed, asserting that Jones \u201cwas an\u00a0angel<\/em>\u00a0whom God inspired, and\u00a0proof<\/em>\u00a0that there\u00a0was<\/em>\u00a0a God above us, who was Infinite Love.\u201d Very himself, meanwhile, was calling on the town\u2019s conservative religious officials, who had less tolerance for his ministrations than had Peabody. That evening, he paid Peabody a second visit to entrust her with what she called \u201ca monstrous folio sheet of paper, on which were four double columns of Sonnets\u2014which he said the Spirit had enabled him to write.\u201d Several hours later, the Utilitarian minister\u00a0Charles Wentworth Upham had\u00a0Very removed\u00a0from Lydia\u2019s house and committed to the nearby McLean Asylum for the Insane, where Very spent the next month reciting scripture to his fellow patients, strolling good-naturedly around the hospital grounds, and writing an essay on\u00a0Hamlet<\/em>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"Jones<\/a>

Jones Very.<\/p><\/div>\n

The one widely distributed photograph of Very as a young man shows a gaunt, mummy-like figure with high cheekbones, deep-set eyes, arched eyebrows and a thin mouth oddly half open. His early years at Harvard\u2014where he arrived at twenty after spending several years working in a Salem auction house\u2014were marked by long periods of solitude, frequent spiritual upheavals, and oscillating intellectual obsessions, first with his teacher Edward Tyrrel Channing, then with the Calvinist epic poet Robert Pollok, then, more fruitfully, with Byron and Coleridge. In his senior year he underwent what he called a sudden \u201cchange of heart,\u201d after which he was convinced that \u201call we have belongs to God and that we have no will of our own.\u201d What stage his sexual life had reached by 1835 isn\u2019t clear, but he was concerned enough about restraining his carnal urges that he gave himself a law \u201cnot to speak (or look at) women.\u201d<\/p>\n

Intense, hungry, chronically dissatisfied with religious affectation and cant, Very was well suited to his time and place. He was enrolled in Harvard Divinity School when Emerson gave his incendiary address to that institution\u2019s 1838 graduating class, and in his rant to \u201cMr. Ware\u201d the following fall it was as if he was taking Emerson\u2019s speech startlingly literally, as a plan to be faithfully acted out. Emerson had called it a \u201cdefect of Historical Christianity\u201d to place undue importance on \u201cthe\u00a0person<\/em>\u00a0of Jesus,\u201d when in fact \u201cthe soul knows no persons\u201d and \u201cinvites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe.\u201d Emerson was relocating the authority to define good Christian behavior from the Unitarian religious establishment to the individual believers in whose interests that establishment purported to act. \u201cThat is always best,\u201d he insisted in one of the speech\u2019s densest, most famous passages, \u201cwhich gives me to myself \u2026 That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen \u2026 Already the long shadows of untimely oblivion creep over me, and I shall decease forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Divinity School address was an incitement. (The young pastor Theodore Parker, who would give an almost equally controversial sermon in Boston in 1841, wrote in his journal after hearing Emerson\u2019s speech that \u201cmy soul is roused.\u201d) For Very, it was a confirmation of two ideas to which he was already drawn:\u00a0that spiritual health required acknowledging, \u201cthat which shows God\u201d in oneself, and that to insist on loving God only (in Emerson\u2019s words) through \u201cmediator and veil\u201d was a kind of spiritual death. The sonnets he wrote between 1838 and 1839 abound in images of the walking dead, of figures whose \u201chearts the living God have ceased to know\u201d and who therefore \u201cin their show of life more dead \u2026 live \/ than those that to the earth with many tears they give.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time of the address, Emerson and Very were already friendly. They were introduced in April 1838 by Elizabeth Peabody, whom Emerson wrote the following day with thanks for acquainting him with \u201csuch wise men as Mr. Very.\u201d When Very seemed to go mad, Emerson found himself in a difficult position. His intellectual enemies, including Ware, could take Very\u2019s behavior as a sign of the disruptive excesses to which Emerson\u2019s thinking would lead, and which Emerson himself\u2014a settled family man\u2014had never pursued to the end.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After Very\u2019s confinement, Peabody encouraged Emerson to distance himself from the younger poet, who had just sent Emerson a long essay on Shakespeare. But Very lingered in Emerson\u2019s thoughts. Later that month, Emerson wrote Margaret Fuller wondering if she had \u201cheard of the calamity of poor Very,\u201d whose essay was \u201cso deep and true and illustrated so happily and even grandly, that I account it an addition to our really scanty stock of adequate criticism on Shakespeare. Such a mind cannot be lost.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead of feeling continually that the life is more than the food,\u201d Very was writing in McLean around the time of Emerson\u2019s letter to Fuller, \u201cand the body [more] than the raiment, we live as if it were directly the other way, and by that very state of mind are incapacitated almost from conceiving of one who stood in a truer relation to things.\u201d Shakespeare, for Very, was \u201cthe childlike embodiment of this sense of existence,\u201d to which Very believed modern men could only come by submitting to the will of God. In a startling passage in \u201cShakespeare,\u201d he had associated the playwright\u2019s point of view with the \u201cprimeval state of innocence from which we have fallen,\u201d reflected that \u201cwe are no longer carried out of ourselves\u201d as Shakespeare was,\u00a0and insisted that, \u201cwould we to attain to\u201d such a state, \u201cit can only be by being born again.\u201d Now, in his new essay, Very wanted to prove that Hamlet\u2019s madness, morbidity, and indecision were something like the pangs preceding this new birth.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Shakespeare\u2019s \u201ccontinual satisfaction with the simple pleasure of existence,\u201d Very wrote, \u201cmust have made him more commonly liable to the fear of death.\u201d Hamlet acts out, in Very\u2019s reading, because he refuses to \u201cfeed on that which is not bread, on which to live is death\u201d\u2014because he refuses to value the things of this world and attends instead to the things of the next. When Very describes Hamlet\u2019s mental state, it\u2019s in a passages that seem like transparent self-portraiture:<\/p>\n

\n

He does not set this life at a pin\u2019s fee. He is contending in thought with the great realities beyond it; the dark clouds that hang over the valley of the shadow of death, and float but dimly and indistinct before\u00a0our<\/em>\u00a0vision, have, like his father\u2019s ghost, become fixed and definite \u201cin\u00a0his<\/em>\u00a0mind\u2019s eye\u201d; he has looked them into shape, and they stand before him wherever he turns, with a presence that will not be put by.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In this way, \u201cunder the influence of those spiritual realities which should qualify\u00a0our<\/em>\u00a0thoughts, he describes objects in a manner which from our position appears very strange and distorting.\u201d Very\u2019s use of phrases such as \u201cour position,\u201d like his allegation that \u201cwe\u201d prioritize superficialities like food or clothing over the essential conditions for life and bodily health, was a coy device. The Shakespeare essays had become his way of justifying the extent to which he\u2019d distanced himself from such common delusions and aligned himself instead with the \u201cspiritual realities\u201d Hamlet saw. Shakespeare, for Very, was on his side; it was clear that he \u201cthought more of [Hamlet\u2019s] madness than he did of the wisdom of the rest of the play.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

After a month, Very was discharged from McLean.\u00a0His condition had not improved, as Gittleman claims his doctor decided, but \u201che was not violent; he was not depressed,\u201d and \u201che was anxious to have his freedom of movement restored.\u201d No more than a week later, he came to Concord to stay a week with Emerson. It was the first of several encounters and exchanges during which their relationship came under intense strain. Emerson confided deeply in Very; in a striking journal entry from\u00a0November 3, four years before the death of Emerson\u2019s young son prompted him to express a similar thought in his great essay \u201cExperience,\u201d he admitted having told Very \u201cthat if my wife, my child, my mother, should be taken from me, I should remain whole \u2026 I should not grieve enough, although I love them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Very, for his part, despaired over what he considered Emerson\u2019s refusal to give himself over fully to God. \u201cHe is sensible in me,\u201d Emerson wrote, \u201cof a little colder air than he breathes.\u201d One morning, five days into his visit, Very announced that this would be his \u201cday of hate.\u201d He\u00a0spoke violently, shrank from handshakes, and excoriated one of Emerson\u2019s guests loudly during a\u00a0Sunday\u00a0school teachers\u2019 meeting that night. The following month, from back in Salem, Very was writing Emerson that \u201cyou must pass out of that world in which you are, naked (that is, willness) as you came.\u201d It was around this time that Very began assigning his closest friends \u201csacrifices\u201d he hoped they would make to correct their particular spiritual deficiencies. Peabody\u2019s was \u201cthe love of truth,\u201d Emerson\u2019s \u201cthe love of thought.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cOriental,\u201d \u201cHebraic\u201d: the words Emerson, Peabody, and their close associate Amos Bronson Alcott\u00a0used to describe Very suggest how exotic and foreign the Concord circle\u00a0found him. Their ability\u00a0to approve of or tolerate Very\u2019s behavior\u00a0became a kind of\u00a0test of the limits of their intellectual\u00a0radicalism. Compared with him\u00a0they seemed moderate, cautious; he was one of the few figures capable of bringing out their affinities with reactionary Unitarians like Upham and Ware. For Emerson in particular he was the kind of convert that John Bunyan, in his book\u00a0The\u00a0Acceptable\u00a0Sacrifice,<\/em>\u00a0had\u00a0called a \u201ctroubler of the house.\u201d The author of the Divinity School address once wrote Peabody\u00a0worriedly when Very announced a vague intention\u00a0to drop by Emerson\u2019s home unannounced; what if he had company?\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 1839, Emerson edited a book of Very\u2019s essays and poems\u2014an effort to prove\u00a0Very\u2019s legitimacy as a thinker and writer to a skeptical public. It was a daring show of support on Emerson\u2019s part; but it\u00a0also, as the project progressed, sharpened the contrast between the two men\u2019s sensibilities. Just as he would later tell Walt Whitman that (in Whitman\u2019s words) he did not \u201csee the significance of the sex element\u201d in\u00a0Leaves of Grass<\/em>, so here Emerson\u00a0resisted including more than a few of the sonnets in which Very showed his tendency toward\u00a0doomsday prophecy, violent denunciation, and\u00a0morbid treatment of bodily decay. He also requested the right to\u00a0edit\u00a0the text of the poems themselves, to which Very strongly objected, insisting to Emerson that their\u00a0shape and form and sometimes unorthodox spelling\u00a0came\u00a0directly from the Holy Spirit. In a letter from\u00a0September 1840 to his friend Elisabeth Hoar, Emerson asked exasperatedly: \u201cIs the poetic imagination amber to embalm & enhance flies & spiders? As it fell in the case of Jones Very, cannot the spirit parse and spell?\u201d<\/p>\n

Essays and Poems<\/em>\u00a0was\u00a0Very\u2019s only book. It was as if the spiritual work he\u2019d described in his essay on\u00a0Hamlet\u2014\u201c<\/em>contending in thought with the great realities beyond it\u201d\u2014was too draining to maintain. After 1840, he drifted apart from most of his former\u00a0Concord friends and supporters and settled into a\u00a0quiet domestic life he would maintain in Salem for the next forty years. He spent his time, to cite part of\u00a0Gittleman\u2019s perhaps exaggeratedly tepid account, \u201creading pious tracts and sentimental stories; writing more than a hundred tedious sermons \u2026 muttering about the large Catholic church erected on the lot adjoining his house \u2026 examining ancient\u00a0tombstones in out-of-the-way cemeteries and studying old documents for traces of his ancestors.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

He had accused Emerson of spiritual coolness, but it was the less volatile\u00a0Emerson who kept up\u00a0decades of more or less undimmed literary and intellectual effort. Emerson continued to worry over Very, of whom he included an admiring, almost awed sketch in his 1841 essay \u201cFriendship.\u201d To him Very was troublingly immoderate, unforgiving, and rigid in his thoughts. But he had also gone very far in \u201cgiving\u201d\u00a0himself \u201cto himself,\u201d\u00a0in\u00a0seeing\u00a0the movements of the\u00a0godlike spirit Emerson had argued\u00a0every individual\u00a0conducted. Emerson might have wondered, once Very had left public life, what moderating reservation or qualifying point\u00a0in the Divinity School address the younger man had\u00a0missed.<\/p>\n

Max Nelson\u2019s\u00a0writings\u00a0on film and literature\u00a0have appeared in <\/em><\/em>The Threepenny Review,\u00a0<\/em><\/em>n+1, <\/em><\/em>Film Comment, and<\/em><\/em>\u00a0Boston Review, among other publications.\u00a0He lives in New York.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Previous entries in Prison Lit<\/a>:<\/em><\/p>\n