MATTHEW PEARL:

THE DANTE CLUB

By C.M. McDonald

Matthew Pearl’s first novel, The Dante Club, has emerged as an international best-seller and a book group favorite.

The book is set in post-Civil War Boston and follows a series of murders seemingly spinning out of the efforts of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — assisted by Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell and J.T. Fields — to complete the first American translation of Dante’s Inferno.

As his novel neared publication, Pearl pitched the notion of republishing Longfellow’s long out-of-print version of The Inferno.

Pearl, who graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1997, where he studied English and American Literature, and from Yale Law School in 2000, is now at work on his second historical thriller, also to be set in the 19th-Century.

Interviewer C.M. McDonald caught up with Pearl while on tour for the trade paperback edition of his novel.

McDonald: How did the reissue of the Longfellow translation of the Inferno come about in tandem with your novel? Something you initiated?

Pearl: That was an exciting part of it for me. As is obvious, the Longfellow American translation of the Inferno is somewhat of a character in the novel. Ironically, as the first translation in America, it did such a good job that there were so many translations that followed — now, just floods of translations — that the older ones just got sort of got buried. That happened to Longfellow’s. It had been out of print for between 42 and 80 years, depending on how you look at it, so let’s say 50 years. So, when we were getting ready to finalize the publishing plans for the novel, I had the idea — which I thought was long shot for anyone to listen to — that it would be great to publish a new edition of the translation with the novel. I asked for a meeting with Modern Library, which is an imprint of Random House, which my agent thought would be perfect for that. I explained it to them and, to my surprise, they were very excited about it.

McDonald: How did it sell?

Pearl: They never quite reported to me…or maybe I’m bad at keeping track of asking for numbers, but I know it went into a second printing and the second printing was 2,500. It might have gone into a third printing — I don’t know. But it at least got into a second printing, so whatever it was, it was several thousands. For a 150-year-old translation, that seems pretty great to me.

McDonald: I just generally was wondering if it tracked in any way the success of your own novel, which has become a best-seller.

Pearl: For what it is, I know they are pretty happy with it and they put it on their permanent list which wasn’t necessarily going to happen.

McDonald: You’re listed as the editor of that translation. I’m wondering what your role as "editor" entailed?

Pearl: Some people have asked me that because I guess the obvious question is "what are you editing if Longfellow wrote it?" There were a couple of things. The first thing is that there were many different versions of the translation in Longfellow’s life and different versions of the end notes, which are thicker than the actual translation. At the time, those were extremely important because nobody knew anything about Dante. So the first editorial decision was what text to use. Then, the more tedious part of sort of editing this — but also extremely exciting and unusual — was that I found in the Harvard archives hand-written notes by Longfellow that he wanted to add to the note section of the translation before he died. But he passed away and they were never appropriately incorporated. I went through all of the hand-written material in the Harvard archives and we have incorporated those notes for the first time as Longfellow meant them to be.

McDonald: This is a novel about translation. The book is out in translation, and was recently published in the UK. How is it traveling, so to speak? Are readers in different countries seizing on the same things, or have reactions varied a bit elsewhere?

Pearl: That’s definitely been, hands-down, the strangest part of the publishing process. It never occurred to me because you never see it unless you’re travelling and look through bookstores — it never occurred to me that a book can find these new shapes and forms and languages around the world. It’s funny, because when they first started marketing it to other countries — which I think entails just sending it around to specific publishing companies in other countries — of course our first instinct was, "Oh, Italy! Italy will be really excited about this because it is Dante." And of course Italy was one of the last countries of the countries we’ve sold it to to buy it because they were very skeptical about an American doing something with Dante. Finally, we got a very modest deal with Rizzoli, which is sort of the equivalent of Random House in Italy. We have at least one Rizzoli bookstore here in New York. They put it out and it went to their best-seller list and it got just a huge amount of press and they actually brought me out to Italy. So, it was way beyond their expectations and they’re just thrilled with it. The same thing in England: It was very hard to find a publisher in England. We found one that really believed in it and now it is out there. They just brought me out to London and it’s been doing great there and is also on their best-seller list.

McDonald: Are you fluent in Italian?

Pearl: My speaking Italian is not up to speed because I never use it. When I studied Italian, it was really to read for Dante.

McDonald: I was going to ask you if you had read the Italian translation of your own book?

Pearl: It’s a good question. I really haven’t, but I also never really read the book itself anymore and it’s just that. I’ve read parts of it just to see….You have to sort of be at a point of extreme sensitivity to judge what the sort of quality of the translation is and I don’t think I’m qualified for that. But it is fun to see.

McDonald: It’s an interesting phenomenon, because, obviously, a hundred years ago or more, you tended to have writers who were writers themselves performing translations, now you get the sense that it is such a commerce driven activity that you’re getting hired guns. You’re not necessarily finding translators who are sensitive to the text.

Pearl: You hope that they are, but you don’t have the control of it and I think that’s why you try to choose the best publishers, because they — you hope — will actually care about that. It is a little strange and it is sort of poetic justice to the subject matter of the novel which is about translation and even more so, about the possibility of translation being unstable or even violent... turning into something that sort of gets back at you, or gets back at the writer. It’s exciting to have the translation, and at the same time you realize what a shame it is that we have so little translated here. In other words, our books sort of circulate pretty smoothly to other countries, but it doesn’t really work in reverse.

McDonald: There are a number of small instances and asides which I sense you may have lifted from diaries and letters. Did you incorporate any such materials?

Pearl: I actually tried very hard to incorporate as much of the real voices. Of course, we don’t have their real voices, but we have their letters, we have their journals, we have a lot of wonderful records of their conversations that were kept in diaries. One’s diary might say, "I attended supper at Longfellow’s house and James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes started to have an argument and here’s what they said." And they’ll actually write out the dialogue. Different historical writers feel differently about this, but I was very happy at the idea of having those windows into their actual phraseology and style of talking and writing and thinking.

McDonald: You’ve noted the writers you researched all left diaries, letters, journals, memoirs. In an age of computers and electronic mail — essentially, digital ephemera — I’m wondering whether in a hundred years the materials will exist for someone who might be inclined to write a thriller about, say, David Liss and Matthew Pearl?

Pearl: (Laughing) Well, me and David Liss are probably boring because we’re both vegetarians and pretty quiet. But it’s true: The style of writing e-mail which has become so much a primary way of communicating is so sparse and a little, just, thin. And, back to the process of what I was doing for the novel, you have to sort of go in the reverse direction: you can’t read a letter written by Oliver Wendell Holmes and think that’s necessarily how he spoke. You have to actually pare that down a little. You’d have to "pare up" our e-mails very radically to try and approximate voice. But, we do have live interviews and radio and TV — and Reality TV to whatever extent that is reality — so we have more of a record of how people speak than probably we can find for other eras.

McDonald: Were you reading other 19th-Century novels in order to capture that narrative voice? Did you avoid reading anything contemporary why you were really deep into the writing of the book?

Pearl: It’s hard. It’s still something I go through — to find the right dynamic while writing with reading. It’s very difficult for it to not feel like work. If it is work, if you are doing it for the purposes of work or for studying how another writer is writing, that can feel awkward, too. It’s very easy to get distracted and say, "Oh, why don’t I write like this? Why isn’t my style more like this?" I did avoid 19th-Century works by good writers. Does that make sense? It was more helpful for me to read memoirs and travelogues of just people who weren’t aspiring…

McDonald: To write for posterity?

Pearl: Exactly. Exactly. You get much more of the raw data. David Liss is a good example. He’s someone I did read while I was writing and felt very inspired and very sort of fired up by his approach even though it differs in some ways from mine. I do think it’s great to find the communication for yourself with other writers, but it is difficult.

McDonald: You offer readers the opportunity to host book club meetings in which you will participate by speaker phone. Have you done many of these?

Pearl: Yeah, I’ve done a real bunch. I was thinking the other day I should have kept a list of the clubs and their names.

McDonald: Any insights that startled you coming out of these sessions?

Pearl: Whether you’re there physically, in person, or whether you’re over the phone, you’re changing the thing….

McDonald: The Heisenberg principle….

Pearl: Exactly. I will say it’s interesting to see how much they talk about things other than the contents of the books. A lot of book club discussion is sort of a springboard into talking about our own lives, or our own culture or what is going on today. Some current event or politics. A lot of the discussion in book clubs is really about something other than the book — that’s something I learned.

McDonald: Did you supply many of the topics for discussion offered for book club groups via your Web site and the trade paperback edition?

Pearl: I did. That’s the kind of thing before you have a book published you would never think you would have to do. The truth is, they — and I don’t even know who that means, but someone at the publishing company other than the writer — usually won’t come up with such things until the paperback version. I wanted a Web presence for book clubs because I think book clubs are a terrific thing to interact with so that’s why I wrote them for the Web site. I guess the publisher just decided to pick them up for the trade paperback. I do think it’s nice for the paperback to incorporate that because most book clubs do seem to prefer paperbacks because they are cheaper.

McDonald: I take it that you take a very active hand in conceptualizing the Web site?

Pearl: The publishing houses normally won’t do a lot for you in terms of a Web site. They’ll put up a basic page on their site because they have hundreds and hundreds of books. The Web site was all me. I didn’t design the site myself, but I hired my own designer. But all of the content I oversee.

McDonald: It’s strange the demands we place on writers today and I’m hearing you say a bit of that — touring, readings and signings…book groups. Could you envision a Longfellow or Holmes engaging in these sorts of self-promotions?

Pearl: Lectures were done. In fact that’s how they made a lot of their money. Not Longfellow, because he hated to lecture. But Emerson and Holmes were both constant lecturers and they hated it. There are very funny letters of them complaining about it. But there are a lot of demands that are unique to the fact that we can travel and interact long distance so easily now. It’s also a choice. I don’t know if you can say "no" to touring, although very established authors can say no. But certainly a lot of authors don’t have Web sites or don’t have Web presence. There’s no access to them over e-mail. I get e-mails pretty much every day. That’s a choice.

McDonald: Do you respond personally?

Pearl: I respond. I try to respond to every e-mail I get, as long as it’s not insane or inappropriate. Sometimes, even those I’ll respond to as long as they don’t seem dangerous. I do respond, but it takes a while, sometimes.

McDonald: You offer "lost chapters" from the novel on your Web site. Presumably these are materials cut in the editing process. You’re obviously comfortable putting them out there. It’s kind of an interesting phenomenon.

Pearl: We originally offered a "lost chapter of the month" when the hardcover was first published. Recently, we just put up an archive of all of those. I guess it’s sort of like DVDs. You see the movie in the theatre, then you get the DVD — and I don’t even have a DVD player so I’m saying all of this with uncertainty — and often there are these extra scenes. There’s something fun about peeking into the writing process. I get a lot of comments from readers who ask questions about why they were cut. One person was very interested in them who kept e-mailing questions asking "Can I put out an edition of the novel with the lost chapters put back in?"

McDonald: Yes, is it possible we might one day see an expanded The Dante Club, ala John Fowles’ The Magus or Stephen King’s The Stand?

Pearl: No, no! I’m happy they were cut out, but I think it’s also interesting to think about why something was cut out or to give a different insight into a plot device or a character.

McDonald: It’s been noted that descendants of the historical figures — we’ll call them "characters" — in the novel have contacted you. Any quibbles they expressed with characterizations?

Pearl: No. I’ve only had positive feedback from the descendants. There aren’t that many descendants of certain of these historical people and a lot of them maybe don’t keep that much in touch with their ancestors.

McDonald: I was going to say, you may actually be more familiar with their forebearers than they are.

Pearl: I think so, probably.

McDonald: Any hints you’re prepared to share about your next book?

Pearl: It’s still a little bit early in terms of talking about details. It’s another 19th-century historical novel. Also, another combination of literary history sort of linked in with a thriller story. There’s something about that energy now, although I’m not planning on doing ten of them, or even a third one. But, right now, I’m finding that combination very stimulating.

McDonald: It is conceivable you might tackle a historical novel with a slightly more contemporary setting?

Pearl: For some, reason the 19th-Century appeals to me. The early 20th-Century doesn’t appeal to me at all. It’s strange. I have story ideas that aren’t historical at all, that are just contemporary settings. After the one I’m working on now I might go that way. I’m also planning on doing not a sequel, but just a novel with Nicholas Rey, the black policeman in The Dante Club. It would be a novel just about him taking place a couple of years after The Dante Club. It would be interesting to have something with him that doesn’t require as much research because I now know that period.

McDonald: You wrote a piece on Dante and the death penalty for Legal Affairs Magazine.

Pearl: Right.

McDonald: I guess this isn’t necessarily a question, but I read it and I never got a sense of your own stand on the death penalty.

Pearl: It’s funny. I’ve had people interpret the article differently. I guess my point wasn’t at all what my stance was, but rather how Dante would frame the discussion. My stance is probably a combination of what’s in there — sort of against the death penalty, even if it is nothing more than it doesn’t effectively accomplish what it’s meant to.

McDonald: Did your opinions shift as a result of your legal training, or were they affirmed?

Pearl: I think they shifted a little. I think you see the wiggle room in law and it’s a little frightening. It’s also frightening when you don’t know much about law to think there is no wiggle room. It’s frightening to think of the conclusiveness of any legal conclusion and, of course, there is nothing more conclusive than the death penalty. Oddly enough, the article I wrote was cited in a death penalty case. The Massachusetts Supreme Court was upholding the sentence of a convicted murderer in Boston and ordering him to be executed. They cited my article in relation to being able to broadcast the execution on closed-circuit TV for the victims’ families. It was a horrible crime in which a guy walked up to three people in a park and just killed them. It was kooky to me that they cited my article.

McDonald: And in Boston, of all places.

Pearl: Exactly.

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