American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work [Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged] [MP3 CD]

What a peculiar book! American Bloomsbury is easy to dislike for all
the reasons given in a number of the editorial and customer reviews:
the factual errors riddling the book beginning right on page 1 (little
Waldo Emerson was 5 when he died, not 9; Emily Dickinson and other
"neighbors" were not neighbors to the Concordians; the Emersons were
not married in 1838; and on and on and on), the jarring colloquialisms
(Emerson as sugar daddy, Thoreau as moocher, Hawthorne as rat), the
sweeping and totally unfounded assertions, and the sporadic
real-clunker sentences.

Such factors as these contribute to making a bad book, but what makes
this book peculiar is that the author shows herself capable, on a
number of pages, of producing compelling, factual, graceful prose, but
just as you are lulled into the story and willing to forgive and
forget the clunkers and errors just passed, she pulls you up short
with some sensationalistic or speculative doozy that utterly breaks
the spell. In the worst cases, these sojourns into fantasy make one
angry because they are so clearly untrue -- and purposeless except as
means to stoke the potboiler theme of the book: unconsummated lust,
cerebral adultery (and maybe more!), jealousy, seething
resentment.

The best example of this is her depiction of Hawthorne,
whose complex moral and intellectual flaws receive no attention at all
because Cheever chooses instead to focus one glaring spotlight on him
as "a rat with women." She quotes him out of context referring to his
wedding as an "execution," says by marrying Sophia he traded "passion
for stability," and has him panting after Margaret Fuller to the
extent that poor equally misrepresented and maligned Sophia is
depicted as almost "gloating" over the horrific death by drowning of
Margaret Fuller, her husband, and their baby. Cheever's depiction is a
colossal miscarriage of historical justice because in truth we admire
Hawthorne the man (as opposed to Hawthorne the author) perhaps most
for his gloriously happy and, yes, very passionate marriage and his
faithfulness and devotion year after year to Sophia. Cheever's version
is ridiculous, especially given that her bibliography is peppered with
biographies and other critical works that provide no foundation for
her story and in fact, if read, reveal just the opposite.

And yet, there are thoughtful pages on Thoreau and dozens of pages
that cleave to the truth and show a faithful grasp of events and
influences. There are lovely paragraphs describing nature. There are
passages that show sensitivity to the new thinking of that time, the
rebellious ferment,the originality and energy of this complicated
group of convention-busting freethinkers. But each time you begin to
float happily along, basking in the rich glow of a glorious American
renaissance, you strike an iceberg like the following paragraph:

"But the middle of the nineteenth century was a time when sexual
energy was pent up in this country, and all these people were
high-minded prudes, usually too wrapped up in Goethe to be thinking
about the carnal aspects of love. Even Walt Whitman had joined the
popular antimasturbation movement. None of them drank. Perhaps the
absence of actual physical intercourse, with its groping with the
endless skirts of the time, made the affairs of Emerson and Hawthorne
with Fuller even more intense than they might have been otherwise. The
only thing more powerful than lust is lust denied."

This paragraph's problems go beyond its numerous factual errors. But
even those factual errors are inexcusable. Emerson loved wine,
Nathaniel and Sophia loved their bed, and Nathaniel perhaps drank too
much. And that "popular antimasturbation movement?" Who knows. The
dozens of books I've read on this period have never mentioned it.

So, who actually wrote this book? A split personality? A committee? A
bunch of Bennington grad students with occasional oversight by the
author? A ghostwriter? A dabbler who spread her keyboard sessions too
far apart? It's almost hard to believe it to be the work of one
coherent person. But perhaps this is no harder to believe than that
the virtual army of "inestimable" and "brilliant" literary lights,
musicians, photographers, editors, agents, and educational
institutions acknowledged at the back of the book were unable to help
Cheever with the countless boo-boos, fibs, hyperbolic fits, and verbal
infelicities that fatally mar this book.

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Postscript: Does the truth matter anymore?

I've just read all of the currently posted reviews, which shoot from one end of the spectrum ("fabulous" & "a treasure") to the other ("shoddy" & "shameful"). The positive reviews appear to be written largely by people with little knowledge of the book's subject matter before reading, who were entertained by its content. The negative reviews appear to be written primarily by people knowledgeable about the American Renaissance and upset by the book's many errors, conjectures, and untruths, which, for them, precluded any entertainment value.

So I guess potential readers have to ask themselves: Do I place a higher value on entertainment or truth? Our current political situation and the best-seller status of fabricated works like James Frey's A Million Little Pieces would certainly indicate that as a culture we're not very concerned with the truth anymore.

My recommendation then boils down to this: if you are a person who loves and values truth, do not buy this book. If you are seeking entertainment and are indifferent as to the truthfulness of what you read, you may enjoy it.

I did not expect a great book on this subject by Susan Cheever, but I expected a fun and readable book. This is neither fun nor interesting nor particularly readable. Not only is _American Bloomsbury_ rife with factual errors -- an inexcusable breach considering the subject matter, upon which so much ink has been spilled that there is no excuse for shoddy research -- it is written in a bizarrely disjointed, juvenile tone and is the most poorly edited book I've seen in years. The interpretation of personalities and events are embarrassingly shallow, and the author can't decide if this is a personal reflection or a historical literary overview. Why, for instance, should we care about Cheever's revelation on p. 43 that "my ancestor Ezekiel Cheever was part of the [Salem witch] trials"? Ah, nepotism! Ms. Cheever must assume that her great literary name will interest readers of this book. Is there any other reason to skip into first person in the eleventh chapter of a book about the Transcendentalists?

I'm such a huge fan of the Transcendentalists that I'll read *anything* on them, but slogging through the rest of this stilted mess is going to take a LOT of commitment.

If you haven't purchased it yet, do yourself a favor and get the eminently superior _Emerson Among the Eccentrics_ by Carlos Baker. Read anything by David Robinson. Read _Daughter of Boston: The Extraordinary Diary of A Nineteenth-Century Woman Caroline Healey Dall_ by Helen Deese. Read Megan Marshall's marvelous contribution, _The Peabody Sisters_, read Phyllis Cole's absolutely brilliant _Mary Moody Emerson And the Origins of Transcendentalism_.

There is such a wealth of wonderful books out there on this subject, there's no reason to support this shoddy effort.

The premise seems interesting enough: use a light-hearted approach to detail the lives of the major Concord authors (Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau) and their sometimes steamy interpersonal relationships. To that end, Ms. Cheever does a decent job here. The nearly endless combinations indeed weave a transcendental web: Louisa-Henry, Louisa-Waldo, Henry-Lidian, Waldo-Margaret, Nathaniel-Margaret. And that's not even mentioning Ellen, Sophia or Count Ossoli. Thus does "American Bloomsbury" provide an overview of the lives of the originators of truly American literature.

And yet, nonfiction readers deserve accuracy. And the Concord writers deserve to be remembered honestly. This book is fraught with factual errors. And we're not talking about infinitesimal, esoteric, or subjective ones. We're not even talking about interpretations. These are mistakes that could have, nay, SHOULD have been corrected by consulting the very books listed in the bibliography on pages 211-214.

To Ms. Cheever's credit: she at least knew that the North Bridge wasn't standing in the mid-1800s. That's the most common mistake that writers make about this time period. But what about something as basic as the natural environment? Thoreau wouldn't have pointed out deer tracks or beaver dams to his students because both animals were rare in New England back then. He didn't see cardinals either, for they were "Dixie invaders" that didn't come north until decades later. OK, you might say. Those don't sound like big deals. We could overlook those assumptions. Fine.

Concord devotees will find here more than a dozen inaccuracies regarding Thoreau alone. Some of the most egregious ones appear on page 168, where the author states that Henry died in "the family house he helped build on Texas Street -- now named Thoreau Street." Well, that statement has multiple problems. First of all, the Thoreau family did indeed once inhabit a house built by Henry and his father. It was located on what was then Texas Street but is now Belknap Street in Concord. That house no longer exists. Secondly, there is a Thoreau Street, but the Thoreaus never lived along it. Third, Henry died in "The Yellow House," now referred to as the Thoreau-Alcott House, which sits on Main Street. He lived there for the last 12 years of his life and died in its living room in 1862. Members of the Alcott family lived in this same house after the Thoreaus were gone. Given that the author deliberately looked for path-crossings of the Concordians, it's a wonder she didn't mention that coincidence or even that house, for that matter. And the ultimate irony is that an old photograph of the Thoreau-Alcott house graces the cover of Cheever's book! But casual readers won't know that because the photo isn't identified anywhere on the jacket or otherwise in the text.

Though Cheever did a nice job with the end notes and bibliography, I'm shocked to see no credits given for the eight pages of photos. (I'll bet the suppliers of those photos are shocked as well.) That's certainly a research no-no. And even the brief photo captions are not without a glitch. The image of Thoreau is identified as having been taken "ten years after the publication of _Walden_." What a ghoulish trick that would have been, since the book was released in 1854, and he died in 1862. No, that daguerreotype dates from 1856. Perhaps we can give the author the benefit of the doubt. Maybe her original notes read "two years" instead of "ten years," and the printer got it wrong.

Ms. Cheever is obviously passionate about her subject matter, and her research isn't all bad. But when even basic facts are misrepresented, a shadow is cast over the entire work. Remember the movie "Runaway Bride"? The USA TODAY editor told columnist Ike Graham, "Journalism Lesson Number One: If you fabricate your facts, you get fired." I continue to be mystified by (a) how this inaccurate book got published, (b) why it continues to sell to members of an unsuspecting public, and (c) why descendants of Emerson and Hawthorne aren't lining up to file libel lawsuits. Readers of "American Bloomsbury," beware.

AFTERWORD: This review was written about the FIRST edition of this book. As of April 2007, I hear that a new edition is available which corrects the errors. I have not yet seen it to compare for myself. But readers and purchasers should be aware that multiple versions are out on the market.

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