Sheila Heti's George Ticknor grabs a tie from under the bed and escapes his dusty, untidy apartment. Through an unsympathetic nineteenth-century Boston of departed streetcars and soggy sidewalks, the self-pitying, mildly neurotic bachelor makes his way to his childhood friend Prescott's house. Ticknor is late to the dinner and, as it's also late in the two men's lives, the walk across town transforms into a review of their long friendship, in which his dull existence was the foil for Prescott 's brilliant career. While the narrator despondently lay around his home, never marrying and producing but a smattering of articles on topics which did not interest even him very much, his friend, despite his partial blindness since childhood, blossomed into a renowned literary historian. Prescott created a lovely household on Beacon Street, host to the best of Boston literary society. As the rain gradually ruins the pie Ticknor carries, and he contemplates not even showing up at Prescott's door, where he knows he will feel unwelcome, the least fashionable and least learned of the guests, a lifetime of hurt pride and unflattering comparisons reveals itself.

Ticknor and Prescott were, of course, real men, influential literati in early nineteenth-century Boston. Upon Prescott 's death, his friend penned a celebratory memoir, The Life of William Hickling Prescott, as was frequently done in the day. The divergence between the historical reality and Heti's characters begs a question about the goal of this short novel. Historical fiction it is not. While tweaking facts for the sake of narrative logic is the norm, Heti's protagonist bears no resemblance to his historical namesake. Ticknor was a bookish but also socially accomplished star of the Boston scene, protagonist of a four-year European tour during which he not only was trained by the best scholars in the continent but also frequented everyone from Byron and Sir Walter Scott to Goethe, Madame de Staël and Humboldt (in the novel, Ticknor's European tour is only mentioned in passing, and as a "failure"). Upon his return, Ticknor was made the first professor of modern literatures at Harvard, soon marrying into the wealthy Eliot family and setting up house on Park Street, where he would write his History of Spanish Literature. Much like his friend and colleague Prescott, who worked on South American histories, Ticknor was one of America 's first scholars of international caliber. His published and unpublished writings betray the self-assuredness of such a bright mind in the relatively unchallenging intellectual environment that was contemporary New England.

There is something particularly significant in producing, as Heti has done, a literary account of a life such as Ticknor's. For Ticknor and Prescott, biography, more than a scientific enterprise, resembled the development of a narrative, and had to yield meaningful moral teaching. In re-writing Ticknor's account of Prescott 's life, Heti inserts herself within a certain tradition of writing lives. Yet her novel is also strangely uncoupled from the history it recovers: Heti has not just eliminated any reference to the historical Ticknor, but also made only a very circumscribed attempt to imagine Unitarian Boston. The streets her Ticknor roams have a disappointingly twentieth century feel. In Ticknor and Prescott 's exchanges is no sign of the wealth of Unitarian theological reflection, nor of the urgency the Bostonians felt in defining American national culture, even if perhaps an optimistic combination of politics and religion is what most distinguished these Bostonians as avid reformers and public moralists in the Federalist moment and thereafter.

Yet at other moments Heti lets what must have been the excitement of participating in the early American literary republic shine through. Her Prescott studies the life of prolific Italian dramatist Vittorio Alfieri to motivate himself to work, then pulls long shifts at his desk, forcing himself back again and again. Ticknor worries about his letters getting lost and preserves all correspondence carefully, his concern with memorializing evident. (In the day, "coterie publishing" of copied-out letters and carefully-written diaries was common practice.) The novel's climax, the moment in which Prescott discovers his calling as a historian-narrator, gives deserved prominence to a crucial feature of these Bostonians' lives: their scholarly practice, which united literary interests and moral beliefs. Through study and criticism, this generation of Bostonian academics aimed to influence American society and manners—an attempt striking both for its naïveté and as a nostalgic reminder of what it was like before our day of academic overspecialization and of the failure of most humanities critics to connect with society at large.

While the methodological discovery catapults Prescott to greatness, in Heti's novel it indicates the failure of his friendship with Ticknor: the brilliant inspirer of the method was not our hero, but another, brighter friend, Gardiner. The event confirms Ticknor's marginality in Prescott 's life. Heti portrays in Prescott a genial man pursuing his studies perhaps selfishly, with the complicity of a committed wife à la Mrs. Ramsay, at a time when studying literature meant contributing significantly to the development of the American nation. The frequent literary dinners in the novel are also a warm and accurate representation of the Unitarian era: Bostonian scholars were not just men of letters, but gentlemen of letters who believed that serious discussion could coexist with dinners of pheasant and claret.

Not historical fiction, Ticknor nonetheless disturbs the memory of these genteel American scholars to tell its story. Without its historical reference, it might just seem a neatly-told tale of subdued jealousy and lifelong lack of understanding. With it, it grows into something more, though certainly not a story about Ticknor. A better key to reading can be found in the tradition of writing biography to render lives exemplary and to moralize. By revisiting this practice with attention to the intimate knowledge one lifelong friend can have of another, including the tiniest regrets and reproaches that can be revisited in the mind for a lifetime, Heti is perhaps suggesting the impossibility of drawing balances and identifying morals. A friendship, a life—these are perhaps phenomena at the same time too complex and too close to us for reduction into a few clever narrative strokes, or a couple of insightful paragraphs. In this line of reading, Ticknor is a minute but well-pondered response to the once significant biographical immortalizations of the American nineteenth century.

 

Alexander Bevilacqua is a History concentrator in Leverett House.