Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [45]
The atmosphere of the Club was mock-solemn. Members discussed the “evolvement of sardonic iced gas,” the propriety of “discumgarigamfrigation.” Finley fully entered the farcical fun. The club minutes record that he at one time or another made a motion that “whereas this is moving day, the Secretary be removed”; exhibited a new portrait from life of Oliver Cromwell; and offered a hanky to a leaking fellow club member, “which on examination turns out to be a modification of a mixture of purple and pea green—no go.” The host of each meeting selected an object or phrase for the members to illustrate in a poem or drawing. Revealingly perhaps, when the host suggested “The Emotions,” Finley chose to depict “Indignation.”
Finley had done some writing since his undergraduate days—poems, essays, scriptural exegeses, a few newspaper articles, a farce. Friendly now with the Knickerbocker literary lights, he became a part-time literary man himself. Writing anonymously in his brothers’ Observer, he assailed the Bowery Theater for presenting Madame Hutin, a scantily clad danseuse whose performances amounted to smut, “the public exposure of a naked female.” The articles made such a stir that he was invited to write the prospectus for a new daily newspaper that would not, as he said, “pander to the appetites of the depraved by enticing them to scenes of licentiousness”—a journal dedicated to the moral reform of New York City. He named the paper the Journal of Commerce and may even have managed it awhile before finding a permanent editor. He wrote poetry, too: a sonnet to Lafayette, who “freely brav’d our storms”; an insipid “Serenade,” about “magic notes/In visions heard.”
Finley also found time to edit the literary remains of a precocious Plattsburgh girl named Lucretia Davidson. She had died at the age of seventeen, leaving over three hundred poems in manuscript. He published the collection as Amir Khan, sending copies to Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey. Lucretia Davidson’s name was of course resonant for him. The memories it stirred register in his description of her as an example of “exquisite beauty … perishing in its bloom.”
Finley thought often and tearfully of Lucrece. People he knew urged him to remarry and make a new home for his children, but he lacked the “shopping disposition,” he said; “I cannot look for a wife as I would for a pair of gloves.” In his most dejected moments he believed he had no prospect of ever marrying again, or having his family around him; other times it seemed at least not impossible.
Such a moment arrived in the fall of 1828, a few months after his newspaper squabble with John Trumbull. Traveling upstate to paint some commissioned portraits, he met a young woman named Catherine Pattison (or Patterson), the daughter of a Troy, New York, businessman. She seemed a “lovely, noble minded girl,” having the qualities of mind and heart that he sought. After much prayer he proposed to her. Not much more can be said about how their close relationship developed; relevant passages in his surviving correspondence have been deleted and entire letters lost or removed. What is known is that Catherine agreed to marry him, although apparently half his age—a schoolgirl in her teens and ill at ease in the world, “so different from other people,” she told him, “that I almost despair of ever being like the rest of the human family.”
But Catherine’s father strongly disapproved the match and forbade Finley to visit or communicate with her—“Nor would her father see me, or explain to me, or suffer me to personally explain to him.” He considered Finley unsuitable