Cross of Snow by Nicholas Basbanes

Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
By Nicholas A. Basbanes
Knopf, 2020

Any biography of the great American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow hinges on two tragedies, one sadly common for its era and the other so baroque it still retains the power to freeze the reader’s blood. In 1835, Longfellow’s first wife Mary died after a miscarriage, and in 1861 his second wife Fanny died when her dress caught on fire in the family home. 

Nicholas Basbanes, in his new biography of Longfellow, necessarily spends time on these tragedies, including sifting the scanty information we have on what exactly caused the fire that claimed Fanny’s life. The narrative of Longfellow’s life moves along through his birth in 1807, his schooling, his slow blossoming as a poet in publishing circles, his time teaching at Harvard, and so on - but it inevitably tightens to the almost incomprehensible horror of that afternoon in 1861 when a napping Longfellow was awakened by the sight of his wife rushing into the room wreathed in flame:

Whatever the cause, Fanny’s dress was in an instant consumed in flames and she ran toward the study, where Henry was taking an afternoon nap. Jolted to his feet by the commotion, he did what he could, hugging his wife with his arms in a futile attempt to suffocate the flames, losing hold when she broke away in a panic, managing, finally, to snuff out the fire with a small throw run that proved woefully inadequate to the task.

“I suppose you don’t remember Longfellow,” Dickens wrote years later to his son. “He is now white-haired and white-bearded, but remarkably handsome. He still lives in his old house, where his beautiful wife was burnt to death. I dined with him the other day, and could not get the terrific scene out of my imagination. She was in a blaze in an instant, rushed into his arms with a wild cry, and never spoke afterwards.” 

Basbanes is a seasoned writer on bookish subjects, a compassionate investigator, and Cross of Snow is a quietly superb Longfellow biography, fit to stand alongside its scandalously few predecessors. More than half a century ago, Edward Wagenknecht’s publishers were already able to call his Longfellow biography “rather badly needed,” and in the years since there have been excellent treatments by Newton Arvin and Christoph Irmscher (whose 2002 book Longfellow Redux really shouldn’t be missed), but there remains an unavoidably noticeable gap between the towering renown of the man during his lifetime and the breadth of his critical reception in the last century. 

He’s had his critics, of course, most famously Edgar Allan Poe but also Margaret Fuller and even that erstwhile grandee of the literary tastemakers, Van Wyck Brooks, but Basbanes sees a deeper, more intentional program perpetrated by the various minions of modernism and the New Criticism:

Fashion and renown are slippery slopes in the best of times, and all writers have their ups and downs. Longfellow stands apart in that he did not meet his critical demise as the result of natural causes. Put another way, his fall from favor did not come about through general apathy or the purported transience of what he wrote, as the continued use in daily discourse of phrases and images he introduced makes abundantly clear. Instead, he was the victim of an orchestrated dismissal that may well be unique in American literary history - widely revered in one century, methodically excommunicated from the ranks of the worthy in the next. 

Basbanes actually has to start his book with this kind of disclaimer, which is, when you think about it, intensely depressing. Cross of Snow is a fast-paced and eloquent account of a man whose beautiful, knowing poetry has been made to seem as outdated as crinoline or starched collars. Poetry itself enjoys barely a fraction of the popularity today that it had when Longfellow was an international celebrity, and that tiny readership largely ignores him. It’s doubtful that any book, even one by an author as beloved as Basbanes, will be able to change that - the tenacious strength of snobbery being what it is - but bless him for trying.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.