Books: From Hell to Gout

STATE OF MIND, A BOSTON READER (428 pp.)—Edited by Robert N. Linscott— Farrar, Straus ($4.50).

“This town of Boston is become almost a Hell upon Earth, a City full of Lies and Murders and Blasphemies; a dismal Picture and Emblem of Hell.” It is Cotton Mather, the fanatic 17th Century preacher, talking.

State of Mind traces the parabolic development of the Boston mind—from Puritan bedrock to the brilliant flights of the Emersonian era, and towards the final settling in the dreary marshes of the Mayor Curley epoch. The book ends on “the late George Apley’s” symptomatic, harassed query about “a certain doctor named Sigmund Freud,” who seemed to proper Bostonians a latter-day Emblem of Hell.

By far the best section of the book is its first third, “Bright Morning: 1630-1800.” Editor Linscott reprints the “orders to the town watch” of 1657 which, after charging them “to look at the guns and fortifications,” warns that “if they find young men and maidens, not of known fidelity, walking after ten o’clock, modestly to demand the cause; and if they appear ill-minded, to watch them narrowly . . .” Among the early “Rules and Regulations of Harvard College,” issued at about the same time, was one enjoining students to “be slow to speak, and eschew not only oaths, lies and uncertain rumours, but likewise all idle, foolish, bitter scoffing, frothy, wanton words and offensive gestures.”

Almonds & Yearnings. As Boston grew and prospered, even the Puritans began to relax. The wily, pleasure-liking Judge Samuel Sewall, who had been one of the judges at the Salem witchcraft trials, arrived at a more tolerant vision of life, spent his last widower years wooing likely widows, and married three times. In his vivid diary, one of the best mirrors of the social life of his time, Judge Sewall noted his gifts to the Widow Denison: “K. Georges Effigies in Copper … A pound of Raisins and Proportionate Almonds . . . A pair of Shoe Buckles cost five shillings three pence.” He admitted to himself that “My bowels yern towards Mrs. Denison,” but added, perhaps with an eye to her lack of money, “I think God directs me in his Providence to desist.”

One of the choice items in Editor Linscott’s basket is an account of how mid-19th Century Boston was rocked by scandal: the only known instance in which a Harvard professor committed murder. A Harvard janitor, one Littlefield, achieved immortality of a sort by nabbing the murderer, who had buried his victim in a vault under his chemistry laboratory. As he dug into the wall of the vault, related Littlefield, “the first thing I saw was the pelvis of a man and two parts of a leg.” With appropriate Harvard restraint, the janitor added: “I knew this was no place for such things.”

Vegetarians & Geniuses. In the Boston of the 1840s there could be found every variety of reformer, revolutionist and enthusiast: God-intoxicated Transcendentalists, fire-eating and angular Abolitionists, chest-heaving Fourierists, nutty nudists, and somber lady reformers whose figures Henry James was later aspishly to describe as having “no more outline than a bundle of hay.” But in the midst of all this intellectual mooning there was great and solid achievement; this was the New England of Emerson and Hawthorne, of Thoreau, Lowell and Longfellow—the golden age of American letters.

At the century’s end, what had once been lively and original in Boston’s thought became rigid and eccentric. The cradle of the American revolution gradually became the couch of gouty conservatism. “Its dominant mind,” remarked Van Wyck Brooks, “was a dry seabeach where all the creatures of history had deposited their shells.” And its last great thinker, Henry Adams, sadly noted that “Boston seemed to offer no market for educated labour.”