American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) was not fond of Concord, Massachusetts, the town near Boston that was home to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the other writers at the heart of the Transcendental movement of the 1840s and 1850s. “Never,” he wrote, “was a poor little country village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals, most of whom took themselves to be important agents of the world’s destiny, yet were simply bores of a very intense character.” Emerson nonetheless persuaded Hawthorne to come live there, luring him away from Brook Farm, the utopian community nearby. But Hawthorne never really fitted in with the Transcendentalists. He held the unusual distinction of disliking Emerson and was ambivalent about slavery in this, one of the staunchest strongholds of abolitionism. But Susan Cheever, an admirable writer, the author of Home Before Dark, a haunting memoir of her late father the novelist John Cheever, is careful to include him in American Bloomsbury. She does so, I believe, because Hawthorne was obsessed with, most famously in The Scarlet Letter, the cruel heritage of the New England Puritans and its soul-deadening ism, with which all the persons indicated in her subtitle wrestled.
Some of their struggles were with the grip of Protestant fundamentalism narrowly defined. Others were about old attitudes generally, opposition to which became what they called their newness, a term that suggests a certain abstraction. Still others were concerned with institutions-the idea of institutions if not always individual examples. Emerson (1803-82), the brains of the outfit, was a Unitarian minister until, finding the theologically and socially liberal Unitarians not liberal enough, he quit. (Old joke: “What do you get when you cross a Unitarian with a Seventh Day Adventist? Someone who rings your doorbell for no reason.”) Following a lecture on theology, Harvard, his alma mater as it was that of many of the core Transcendentalists, banned him for 28 years from speaking on the campus. Yet he was as far removed from atheism in the Shelleyean sense as any major writer of the time. He was critical of churches, and indeed of the intentional communities that were such a feature of his generation, simply because they were institutions and thus, by their very nature, artificial: manufactured rather than grown.
The Transcendentalists lavished their worship on Nature rather than on God directly, refusing to cut out the middleman, so to speak. This was radical thinking for its day. Thoreau (1817-62) deserves to be remembered as the prophet of environmental awareness. Sad to say, he also epitomised those bores that Hawthorne, who called him “ugly [and] small”, railed against. Cheever’s enjoyable narrative offers several examples of how he must have driven his listeners to despair as he lectured them to the point of the numbest tedium on individual insects, blades of grass and small lumps of dirt as they tarried along country roads and such. Once while trekking with a young Harvard friend, he made a campfire atop a tree stump. The resulting blaze wiped out 300 acres of valuable timber.
One wants to ask Cheever in what ways the Transcendentalists were the American forerunners of the Bloomsburies. Certainly they were a new presence on the scene, artists and intellectuals of various sorts who held slightly advanced social views that, partly through their example, became the norm eventually. Although she is fully capable of doing so, Cheever doesn’t dwell on ideas, avoiding discussion of Transcendentalism as a philosophy, or of Emerson as a philosopher, though he was perhaps the one read most often by his contemporaries. And she doesn’t make the leap to discuss the politics of the Transcendentalists. She mentions how Thoreau went to jail briefly for refusing to pay his taxes, and the less well known story of how the saintly Emerson intervened to keep Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) from ending up behind bars as well. There is nothing here about the libertarian strain in their thinking as exemplified by their reaction to the U.S. invasion of Mexico in the 1840s.
Cheever came to the subject of her book through her discovery that a novel “I had vaguely loved as a girl reading about girls was actually a rich portrait of American writers at a specific moment in history.” The book is Little Women by Bronson Alcott’s daughter, Louisa May (1833-88). She writes about the group mainly in social terms. This leads her to the real similarity to Bloomsbury: the fact that many of the various players seemed to be sleeping with one another, or wished to be. The collective individualism of the Concordians, she writes, put

“a tremendous strain on all things conventional-and the institution of marriage was no exception. How could men and women of the ‘newness’ reconcile their desires for each other with an old-fashioned way of doing things that had been seemingly invented by the Puritans for their own protection? It wasn’t just Hawthorne who compared marriage to execution.”

As much as with those of Bloomsbury, the fluid nature of Transcendentalism’s private relationships requires some parsing. Let us begin. Bronson Alcott, no Harvard man, had once been a pedlar but became, in Cheever’s words, a person whose “ideas grew to their looniest ripeness” in the extremity of what would now be called his veganism, his incessant founding of utopias, and so on. The world remembers him best as the father of the alternative education movement in America, but he was a proponent and practitioner of free love as well. Then there was Margaret Fuller (1810-50), the author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and the editor of Emerson’s journal, The Dial (and later of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune). Although her prose is quite unreadable (even Thoreau was more riveting on the page), she reminds me nonetheless of Rebecca West in that she never allowed her fine mind to impair her emotions. She was perhaps the most glamorous intellectual of her time, a protofeminist attracted to at least a few of the men who were so attracted to her. Only the ever-rancorous Hawthorne felt threatened, whereas Emerson was deeply in love with her.
For his part, Thoreau, sometimes in partnership with his brother, was in love with almost everyone: first with the sister-in-law of Emerson, his patron, elder, and patient friend, and then Mrs. Emerson, with various self-destructive affairs in between. All the while he was oblivious to Louisa May Alcott’s feelings for him, which produced the character of Laurie in Little Women-or was Laurie really Emerson, who lived next door and, having married money, seemed to subsidise everyone generously, but not simply in monetary or even literary terms. “During the twenty-five years of their friendship,” Cheever writes,

“years of real intimacy as Thoreau took over Emerson’s household and fell in love with his wife, years in which Emerson supported Thoreau financially, years of intellectual companionship and growth, Thoreau was always the disciple in a way that may have overshadowed him as much as it helped him. Not until long, long after the publication of his greatest work, Walden, about a house built with a loan from Emerson on land owned by Emerson, did Thoreau escape the gossipy assumption that he was more Emerson’s man than his own.”

Cheever holds Thoreau in the highest regard as is mandatory for survivors of the American school system.

“We revere Thoreau for his contempt for material things,” she writes. “We love him for damning new clothes and cautioning us against possessions. We like his judgment that other men and women are leading lives of quiet desperation [and] we love him because we are swamped with things, because even the simplest of us could not list our possessions in a few lines or even a few pages. In a world where materialism has eclipsed religion, Thoreau’s messages have a different ring than they did in a world where religion was changing and materials were few.”

But was he more of an ascetic than he was a layabout? One wishes not only that he had written more but also that he had written better. As well as being the work of someone with an intellect almost immeasurably far beneath that of Emerson, Walden is also a piece of prose richly comic for its amazing ability to anesthetise the reader through its repetitions and numerous other faults.
Some of the participants in the story came to bad ends. Louisa May Alcott, for example, witnessed terrible suffering as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War and emerged with her health broken, though she carried on admirably with writing. Emerson lived long, but died of what today we recognise as Alzheimer’s. Margaret Fuller left the United States for Italy, where she had a child and became the Marchioness Ossoli. On returning home a few years later, she drowned in a shipwreck off Fire Island in New York, moments after seeing her daughter disappear beneath the waves. The bodies were never found.
George Fetherling (Books in Canada)

This beguiling book is Cheever's exploration of the extraordinary cross-fertilization of creativity in Concord, Mass., during the mid-19th century, when Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and the Alcotts lived as neighbors there. If it won't offer much new information for serious students of American literature, it does provide a lively and insightful introduction to the personalities and achievements of the men and women who were seminal figures in America's literary renaissance, and who, Cheever theorizes, influenced the social activism of succeeding generations. In episodic chapters, Cheever describes their entwined relationships. Margaret Fuller was their brilliant, free-spirited muse and a model for Hester Prynne. Louisa May Alcott, was forced to support her family because her feckless father, Bronson, had no intention of doing so. Herman Melville briefly entered the enchanted circle through his friendship with Hawthorne. Cheever touches on their love affairs and intellectual platonic attractions, their high-minded idealism, their personal losses, their intermittent misunderstandings and jealousies, the years of penury suffered by all except Emerson and their full-fledged tragedies—such as Margaret Fuller's drowning. While Cheever sometimes indulges in high-flown speculation about their personal lives, she keenly analyzes the positive and negative ways they influenced one another's ideas and beliefs and the literature that came out of "this sudden outbreak of genius." 8 pages of photos. (Jan.)
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