Poet's Lady

MRS. LONGFELLOW (255 pp.)--Edited by Edward Wagenknecht--Longmans, Green ($5).

As a poet, young Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had an eye for beauty. As a man. he had a hankering for beauties. He had married one (Mary Storer Potter) in 1831, but she died four years later while they were traveling in Holland. Only months had passed when, in Switzerland, he met statuesque Fanny Appleton. a proper Bostonian of 19 whose wealth and social position matched her looks and charm. His grief notwithstanding, the young (29) widower wasted little time. They talked and walked by the Rhine, Longfellow reading poetry aloud as he plodded along behind her. He was not yet the gentle greybeard whom every U.S. child would associate with Hiawatha and spreading chestnut trees, but Harvard had given him a chair of languages and literature and even by exacting standards he might have been called a catch. But it was seven years before Fanny could bring herself to say yes to the man she bitingly called "the Prof."

Mrs. Longfellow, a selection from her letters and journals, gives a few clues to Fanny's dim view of Longfellow's suit. For one thing, she already had a more interesting mind than his. She was well read and neither life nor people fooled her. At 19 she could look back uneasily on "childhood, innocence and ignorance, before the down is rubbed off and the skeleton in all things revealed, and that fiend Doubt become our fireside companion." A bit morbid, perhaps, but still more acute than anything young Henry had yet written. She could also be cattily tart. After seeing Victoria before she became Queen. Fanny set down: "A short, thick, commonplace, stupid-looking girl . . . without even a good complexion."

Critic Into Wife. The fact is that Fanny did not rate Henry very highly as a poet. "The Prof has collected all his vagrant poems into a neat little volume christened mournfully Voices of the Night. He does not look like a nightbird and is more of a mocking-bird than a nightingale . . ." And when he published his next volume: "The Professor has a creamy new volume of verses out . . . the cream of thought being somewhat thinner than that of the binding." But when, in 1843, Fanny finally said yes. she loyally ended her role as one of Henry's sharpest critics. Her letters show that their happiness was nearly total, for whatever Longfellow was as a poet, he was a dedicated husband.

Mrs. Longfellow is pre-eminently a woman's book, and the picture that slowly emerges of a thoroughly charming and civilized lady is one that most contemporary women might well envy. Life with Henry was not exciting, but it had its compensations. ''The Prof read and wrote and taught, and as his fame grew the Longfellows entertained most of the famous writers in flowering New England--Hawthorne, Lowell, Emerson. Fanny always saw them plain, just as she had once seen Henry. Emerson's fame could not keep her from writing: "Where has his humanity gone, I wonder . . . He is like a ghost to me. I never feel he cares, from his heart, for any human being." As for James Russell Lowell, she noted that shaving off his beard "takes half the poetry from his face."

Martyrdom of Fire. In 1858 John Long, a young schoolteacher who was later to be a three-time governor of Massachusetts, wrote in his journal: "I judge that Longfellow has not suffered enough to be a great poet." Less than three years later, if he remembered it, the entry must have made him uneasy. On July 9, 1861 Fanny was sealing a package that contained a lock of one of her children's hair. Her sleeve caught fire, and in a moment her light summer dress became a sheath of flame. Trying to save her, Longfellow was himself seriously burned. The next day Fanny Longfellow was dead, and from then on Henry's quota of suffering was enough for any poet. It never made him a great one, but 18 years after the event he wrote:

In the long, sleepless watches of the night A gentle face -- the face of one dead Looks at me from the wall, where round its head The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light. Here in this room she died; and soul more white Never through martyrdom of fire was led To its repose . . .

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