God’s Scrivener: The Madness and Meaning of Jones Very
by Clark Davis.
University of Chicago Press, 363 pp., $35.00
Ralph Waldo Emerson was endlessly seeking his ideal writer, who was “part and particle of God,” as he wrote in Nature (1836). So it comes as no surprise that in the spring of 1838 he embraced the poet Jones Very, a twenty-four-year-old Greek tutor studying at the Harvard Divinity School, and soon hailed him as “our brave saint.” “Wherever that young enthusiast goes,” Emerson confided to his journal, “he will astonish and disconcert.”
Very did astonish, and he did disconcert. He astonished and disconcerted his fellow students, not to mention Harvard officials, when, that September, he claimed that the Holy Spirit communicated directly through him and that he, Jones Very, was the “second coming.” Very also barged into the study of Professor Henry Ware Jr., declaring that he’d “fully given up his own will, and now only did the will of the Father—that it was the Father who was speaking thro’ him,” as Clark Davis recounts in God’s Scrivener, his new biography of Very. Even more apocalyptically, he commanded the students in his Greek class to “flee to the mountains, for the end of all things is at hand!”
“It is almost fearful to look upon him,” one divinity student remarked. “I hardly know what to think of the man.” Harvard’s president promptly sent Very packing.
Things didn’t fare any better for him back home in Salem, Massachusetts. Deadly serious and fairly aggressive, Very informed his neighbors that they were wicked and that he was the first good man to exist since the time of the apostles. When he visited and tried to “baptize” local ministers, at least one of them threw him out of the house. A few days later, Very was shipped off for a month to the McLean Asylum for the Insane.
The Reverend Charles Wentworth Upham blamed none other than Emerson for Very’s bizarre behavior. After all, the conservative clergy and the Boston
