“He affects me like a specter. His looks, tones, words, are all sepulchral,” said Bronson Alcott of the Transcendentalist poet Jones Very, the subject of a new biography by Clark Davis. Ralph Waldo Emerson found Very remarkable in his clarity of purpose—“a brave saint”—when they first met (239). But on Very's second visit, Emerson found it was like having “a corpse in the apartment,” making the natural flow of activity and conversation feel awkward. These were the effects of Very's serious endeavors to eradicate his self-will and invite the presence of God in its stead. So intent was Very on this project that Alcott reports he barely had enough left to operate his own legs: “While walking by my side,” Very seemed “somehow using my feet instead of his own, keeping as near me as he could, and jostling me frequently.” Even “his voice has a certain hollowness, as if echoing mine” (225).Davis' biography presents a detailed and nuanced portrait of this strange figure from the inside out, delving deep into Very's youth and family circumstances, focusing closely on Very's published and unpublished (but never revelatory) writing, and situating Very's thought in Transcendentalist culture and beyond, with fascinating results. It is difficult to get close to the inner workings of Very's mind given his project of self-erasure. With considerable skill, Davis manages to give a portrait of the man that is a fresh angle on Transcendentalist culture. Indeed, Very was a polarizing figure whose ideas tested the boundaries of Transcendentalist thought. Nathaniel Hawthorne's “Hall of Fantasy” places Very “in the same part of the hall” as other “disciples of the Newness,” the Transcendentalists. Yet there “Jones Very stood alone, within a circle of which no other of mortal race could enter, nor himself escape from” (237).Hawthorne captures Very's mortal predicament; his messianism shocked and alienated others while his renunciation of worldly living bound him to a lonely existence. Very's form of withdrawal was radical and unique, even in an age rife with religious and utopian experimentation. His desire was to eradicate his personal will, to empty his self, so that he might only be filled with God's light. Echoes of Emerson's description of his ecstatic experience in Nature (1836), his feeling of becoming a “transparent eyeball” that was part and particle of God, are not coincidental. Davis places Very in the sweep of Emerson's heady coming out in Cambridge, first with the publication of Nature in 1836, and then with the incendiary Divinity School Address two years later. Very, a Greek tutor at Harvard, was in the audience—and like Walt Whitman after him, was already simmering when Emerson brought him to a boil. Davis details the meeting at Emerson's home of these two young men on the brink of becoming the figures we know today. Very's iconoclasm took a different form from Emerson's, though their heresies became entwined in the eyes of their detractors. Within months, Very's eradication of self and openness to spirit was so complete that he declared himself to be not only a prophet, but God's son.A person dedicating their life to the eradication of their own will does not make for an easy biographical subject. Davis' resourcefulness in marshaling an archive and his skill in gleaning readings in unlikely places yields riches. It is equally rewarding to watch what Davis does with the scant personal trail left by Very as it is to learn more about who Very was. Chapters are short narratives that spring open from a seemingly insignificant touchstone—a letter (rarely from Very), a poem, a school essay, a book borrowed from the library. A cultural reading of Very's mother's needlework tableau leads into an account of the models of motherhood available to Lydia Very. A set of four undergraduate notebooks filled with quotes copied from reading yields a wide-ranging discussion of Very's development as a literary critic and his evolving ideas about the role of the poet. These strands and others are threaded expertly through wider Transcendentalist discourse on the topic. God's Scrivener, as its allusion to Herman Melville suggests, is truly a literary biography.The protagonist of the early chapters is frequently not Very himself, but his mother. Davis builds a fascinating portrait of a young widow determined to eke out a dignified existence for her small family despite the vague opprobrium cast by husband Jones Sr.’s relatives, who sued for his assets and for the children. Davis shoots down problematic 20th-century psychoanalytic accounts of the outsized effect of Lydia Very's free-thinking. Despite Davis' careful reconstruction, Lydia stands as the source of the will and passion against which Very strives. The biography rehearses that theory, reifying the iconoclastic mother as a problem for her son.Ranging into Very's time at Harvard, the first section treats readers to an intimate view of the generational ferment there. Davis' effort to take Very's early poetry and spiritual trials seriously lends to the palpable sense of Transcendentalism as a kind of youth movement in its opening stages. One wonders how Very's mysticism might look contextualized in a broader ring of Transcendentalists that included those on the outskirts of a Harvard education. Very's spiritual asceticism and devotion, as well as the crises it brings on, also features in Margaret Fuller's works. She wrote several mystical sketches in which female figures consecrate themselves to divinity, ultimately finding their way into her Woman in the Nineteenth Century. The protagonist of Julia Ward Howe's The Hermaphrodite undergoes periods of self-imposed asceticism and mystical vision, presented as a wraith-like poet choosing to cut off intimate relations. Howe's brother, Sam Ward, was Very's classmate. The poet's outsider status there as a poorer, older student also suggests other locations at which Transcendentalist frequencies can be registered.Davis situates Very's messianism in the contexts of literary study and religious doctrine. Davis combs Very's commonplace books, where he recorded numerous extracts and commentaries. This approach offers a glimpse into the interests of 19th-century literary criticism, especially the construction of authors as representative figures who, in Very's hands, can be read within a progressive Christian teleology. From within these coordinates, Davis develops a reading in which Very cultivates his own authorial persona as a prophet-poet, in which his poems (like his person) are vessels for the Holy Spirit.It is nonetheless startling to learn that Very's poems were an important accoutrement to his messianic presentation. During a visit with Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Davis reports, Very unfolded a “monstrous folio” filled neatly on every square with handwritten poems, announcing to her that these were God's word. The midsections of the biography, covering Very's first revelations of his holy rebirth to his Greek classes at Harvard and the subsequent fallout, tell a remarkable story about the poetry and the paradox of the tightly controlled form elaborating the poetry's charged, ecstatic message. Very has been regarded as one of the best sonnet writers of his age. Davis' incisive readings, reconstruction of literary methods and aims, and cultural contextualization are literary recovery at its best, allowing for fresh views of Very's poetry. What is perhaps more exciting is the concrete role that literary study and poetic practice is shown to play in the formation of Very's religious personhood, rather than the other way around, where literature is generally broadly reflective of, rather than productive of, biography. This is literary biography with the credentials to critically read the literature as well as the life.Davis closes the biography with Very's life after he retreated from public assertions of his messianism, even as he remained true to his beliefs in his poetry and sermons. He discusses the meaning of Very's madness within a broad swath of American literary and intellectual currents, including Edgar Allan Poe's gothicism, Melville's alienated protagonists, and even the American captivity narrative, to grand effect. Davis' extended exploration of connections between Garrisonian pacificism and Very's ideologies yields particularly rich insight into both subjects. Though Very may have preferred not to cultivate any identity or life script, Clark Davis is able to coax a richly layered literary biography from the elusive poet. Despite the willed nullification of the biographical subject, God's Scrivener has much to say about Jones Very, his spiritual project, and the contexts from which he both sprung and stood apart.
Dorri Beam (Mon,) studied this question.