6. Cassius Hueffer

“They have chiseled on my stone…”

Cassius Hueffer,  who “made warfare on life”, has finally been tamed by those who never managed to impose their idea of control over him while he lived. They have claimed him in death who, in life, went unswayed by their words, for he “could not cope with slanderous tongues”. Only now he is dead are they able to make him submit to their words, in the form of the epitaph “[g]raven by a fool!”

Whatever kind of man Cassius Hueffer was, his importance to the community of Spoon River was such that they could not let him simply die and be rid of him. Even as they laid him in his grave, they did not give up on the need to reclaim him as one of their own. This man in whom the “elements were so mixed”, who could never succumb to a gentle life for fear that in so doing he would relinquish the freedom of the fight, had to be rebranded rather than merely discarded because a community in which he lived his life could never be the bastion of small town Midwestern values it might wish itself to be if his memory was allowed to besmirch the sheen. 

They who chiseled on Hueffer’s stone are the very ones the Anthology seeks to reveal for what they really are. The words they had chiseled on the stone are meant to keep hidden a truth they couldn’t allow to be heard. If Hueffer’s epitaph had been as he thought it should then the Anthology would not have had the impact that it did for there would be no sordid secret to be revealed by the occupants of The Hill. The power of the Anthology to scandalise rests in its revealing the good people of Spoon River in all their abject, avaricious and base humanity. It is to avoid this very revelation that they chiselled a distortion of a man’s life onto his stone.

There is something Kafkaesque about this sixth epitaph of the Anthology. However much Cassius Hueffer railed against those “slanderous tongues” or bemoaned a life not gentle, he is ultimately, as was Josef K. in The Trial, slain by forces insuperable. That Cassius Hueffer didn’t learn from the fate of his Roman namesake the futility of standing opposed to the legions of Caesar might make his gesture little more than suicide and, certainly his death, as the use of the word ‘slain’ makes explicit, was no going gentle into that good night. Yet, for all his huffing and puffing, he appears to have achieved nothing. However ungently, it is into that good night that he has gone and the house of Spoon River remains standing. 

Yet, Hueffer’s efforts are not as futile as they might appear for here he is, from below that offending stone, through the medium of the Anthology, finally gaining some kind of victory over those who would have had him silenced. If his purpose was always to show the truth of Spoon River to the world, here at last his goal is so spectacularly achieved.