Susan Cheever: American Bloomsbury (2006)

Susan Cheever's American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work (New York: Simon & Schuster (2006)) gives the impression of a designed-for-Googling title, cramming in the important members of the writing set in Concord, Massachusetts. This book is not a critical analysis of the authors' works — that would be a whistlestop tour in just 200 pages — but it does manage to bring the main characters of a literary phenomenon to life very well.

The Concord phenomenon would not have been possible without the financial support of Emerson, who — thanks to the money he inherited from his first wife Ellen Tucker — provided assistance to the writers, as one of the many blunt chapter titles, 'Emerson Pays for Everything', makes quite clear.

This book is essentially a popular representation of a highly talented literary community concentrated in a very small area. It isn't a work of original research and relies, apart from some speculation, entirely on secondary sources. As the chapter title already mentioned suggests, this is also slightly sensationalized. And he words 'American Bloomsbury' of course suggest not just a concentration of great talent in a small area, but also bed-hopping, sex triangles, homosexuality, free thinking, etc.

How does that square with the reality of Concord? Was it a 19th century Bloomsbury, or is the title just a publisher's exaggeration? Apart from the concentration of talent, are there any other similarities to Bloomsbury? Yes and no. In both communities, we have the freshness of new ideas, the spirit of adventure, the break with the past, etc. But to suggest that Concord was a hotbed of wild sex — and not only the word 'Bloomsbury' does that, but also Cheever's titillating chapter titles 'Sex' and 'Margaret Fuller, the Sexy Muse' — is going way too far. The first sentence of 'Sex' points out that the 'more liberal ways' of the previous century were giving way to the 'uptight views' of the mid-nineteenth century, and the chapter itself — scarcely more than two pages in length — only speaks of one of the five writers in relation to sex outside marriage, and that's to speak of Hawthorne's fictional Hester Prynne!

Desire is abundant though: Lousia May Alcott falls first for natural man Thoreau, then philosopher Emerson; Thoreau falls for, well, several women; and Cheever's 'Sexy Muse' Fuller (incidentally the only one of the five not to be buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, but Mount Auburn) gets both Hawthorne and Emerson's lusting after her. But through all this, there's not a scrap of proof any of the five heros spent any of their 'Transcendental Wild Oats', as Louisa humorously puts it, on any of their objects of desire.

If Margaret Fuller was a tantalizer, so is Susan Cheever. This is still well worth a read though — just don't be conned by the title.

Louisa May Alcott: A Long Fatal Love Chase (1995)

In 1865 Louisa May Alcott went to Europe, traveling as a paid companion to Anna Weld, who was sickly and from a monied Boston family. Louisa tired of Anna's constant demands and left her employment to travel alone, although toward the end she spent two weeks with Ladislas Wisniewski, later basing the character Laurie in Little Women on him.

On her return to the USA, Alcott was not surprised to find the family's financial situation in its usual poor state, so tried to get pulp publisher James R. Elliott to accept this novel that she wrote, in two months, to Elliott's structural design. However, Elliott said he thought it too long and too sensational, so Alcott shelved it. It was not published until over a century later.

In A Long Fatal Love Chase the main character Rosamund Vivian, in the beginning living with her abusive grandfather, is very soon enticed away by the exciting Philip Tempest, who turns out to be even worse than her grandfather, and soon after her marriage to him she discovers that this frightening man is already married. No matter where she runs — and her escape takes in several different countries — Tempest, or his servant Baptiste, finds her. The book has Elliott's recommended number of twenty-four similar length chapters, there is the usual 'cliffhanger' effect at the end of most of them enticing the reader to continue, the book does betray the fact that it was swiftly written, but this is not just what we might call writing by numbers. There is a feminist strength in it: there is criticism of men's abuse of power, a female protagonist who controls most of the action, and although there's another male who's in love with her and gets her out of a few tricky spots, he's also effectively neutered by his unswerving devotion to a monastic order.

It's a very quick read, but it's not at all as trashy as it might sound on the surface. Plus, it's of obvious historical interest in Alcott's oeuvre.

Beacon Hill, Boston, Massachusetts

Beacon Hill is a neighborhood in Boston north of the Public Garden and Boston Common, with the boundaries Storrow Drive to the west, Cambridge Street to the north, Beacon Street to the south, and Somerset Street to the east. Many notable literary figures have lived here, but unfortunately the dense foliage and the parked vehicles make it very difficult to take a decent photo. However, I managed a few.

This quotation on a mural in Charles Street, Beacon Hill, is from Robert Lowell's 'The Ruins of Time', which consists of two sonnets, and the tercet here is from the end of the second sonnet:

'O Rome! From all your palms, dominion, bronze
and beauty, what was firm has fled. What once
was fugitive maintains its permanence.'

This second sonnet is a version of 'A Roma sepultada en ruinas' by Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas (1580–1645), of which the second tercet is:

'¡Oh Roma!, en tu grandeza, en tu hermosura
huyó lo que era firme, y solamente
lo fugitivo permanece y dura.'

And this in turn is a Spanish translation of the fourth sonnet  of the 'Les Antiquités de Rome' sequence (1556) by Joachim du Bellay (c. 1522-60), of which the second tercet is:

'Reste de Rome. Ô mondaine inconstance !
Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps détruit,
Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait résistance.'

'From 1865 to 1893

THE HOME OF

FRANCIS PARKMAN

American Historian' 

As I've already mentioned Parkman in the Mount Auburn Cemetery post, I shall say nothing here. Except that it was impossible to photograph the house because the foliage rendered it almost invisible.

Henry David Thoreau once lived in an apartment at 4 Pinckney Street.

Irish-American Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920) was a poet and essayist born in Roxbury, MA, and was a friend of Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett. Her most noted publications are A Roadside Harp (1893) and Patrins (1897). She died in Chipping Camden, England.

'20 Pinckney Street

As a litle girl Louisa May Alcott lived in rented rooms at 20 Pinckney Street. The Alcott home was part of the Boston literary scene during the decades before the Civil War.  Louisa's father, Bronson Alcott, was an innovative educator whose friends included Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Ellery Channing, and William Lloyd Garrison.

In the 1880s, her reputation and fortune secure, Miss Alcott returned to Beacon Hill. She lived at 10 Louisberg Square until her death.'

'ROBERT LEE FROST

1874-1963

AMERICA'S "POET LAUREATE

AND FOUR-TIME PULITZER PRIZE WINNER

LIVED AT 88 MT. VERNON STREET

FROM 1938-1941

WHILE TEACHING POETRY

AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY

"THE FIGURE A POEM MAKES,

IT BEGINS IN DELIGHT AND ENDS IN WISDOM."'

Authors' Houses: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Alcotts in Concord, Massachusetts

The Old Manse on Monument Street, Concord, was built by Ralph Waldo Emerson's grandfather, Rev. William Emerson, in 1770. William's widow married Rev. Ezra Ripley, and Emerson stayed with his ageing step-grandfather at the Old Manse in 1834, where he wrote a draft of Nature, (1836), which set the foundations for transcendentalism.

In 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody and moved to the Old Manse, which was not in fact named 'The Old Manse' until Hawthorne  came along, and was where Thoreau had prepared the garden for the pair to move in.

Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse (1846).

Originally named 'Coolidge Castle' after the family that owned it from its construction in 1828, Ralph Waldo Emerson bought this house, at the junction of the Cambridge Turnpike and Lexington Road, in 1835: the tragic death of his wife Ellen at the age of twenty had left him wealthy, and after a period of turmoil (in which he left both the church and academia), he visited Europe and returned to New England with many new ideas, and to Concord in particular with a new wife - Lydia (he preferred 'Lidian'), née Jackson.

A number of notable people visited Emerson in this house, and a few stayed here for a short time - significantly Henry Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller.

The utopian Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), the founder of the unfortunate Temple School in Boston and the father of Louisa May Alcott, moved to Concord. Aided by the ever-generous Emerson, the Alcotts purchased 'Hillside' in 1845, although Bronson's wife Abigail (usually called Abby) was unhappy with the move, and the family rented the home out and moved on in 1848.

In 1852, the Hawthornes moved back to Concord and purchased the house, renaming it 'The Wayside'. 

Harriett Mulford Stone Lothrop - mentioned in my Sleepy Hollow Cemetery post as the writer of the Five Little Peppers children's stories as 'Margaret Sidney' - and her daughter Margaret preserved The Wayside.

The Alcotts returned to Concord and bought Orchard House, next door to 'Wayside' (or 'Hillside' as Bronson still insisted in calling it) in 1857.  Louisa wrote Little Women here.

The Concord School of Philosophy is at the side of the house and was run by Bronson from 1880 until a short while before his death.

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts

Most of the noted Concord writers are buried on Authors' Ridge, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, MA, which is about a half mile north out of downtown Concord on the west side of Bedford Road, and no doubt the highest area of the cemetery. Very unusual it must be to find such of cluster of famous people all in one spot. 

The Thoreau plot contains - along with Henry David Thoreau - the remains of Henry David Thoreau's pencil maker father John Thoreau (1787-1858), his wife Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau (1787-1872), his brother John Thoreau Jr (1816-42), and his younger sister Sophia E. Thoreau (1819-76).

It's not difficult to spot the grave of the most noted Thoreau.

And right opposite is the grave of Nathaniel Hawthorne in the Hawthorne plot.

'SOPHIA

WIFE OF

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

BORN IN SALEM MASSACHUSETTS

DIED IN LONDON

JANUARY TWENTY-FIRST 1871

BURIED IN KENSAL GREEN

REINTERRED HERE JUNE 2006'

Emerson's huge slab of granite.

'RALPH WALDO

EMERSON

BORN IN BOSTON MAY 1803

DIED IN CONCORD APRIL 27 1882

THE PASSIVE MASTER LENT HIS HAND

TO THE VAST SOUL THAT O'ER HIM PLANNED'

The above two-line quotation is from Emerson's poem 'The Problem'.

'LIDIAN

Wife of Ralph Waldo Emerson,

Wife of Charles & Lucy (Cotton) Jackson.

Born on 20th September 1802, close by

Plymouth Rock, as she loved to remember.

Died November 30th 1892 in Concord.'

Emerson's second wife (see post above).

'HARRIETT MILFORD STONE LOTHROP

MARGARET SIDNEY

THE CREATOR OF THE FIVE LITTLE PEPPERS

ALWAYS A LOVER OF AND WORKER FOR CHILDREN'

Lothrop (1844-1924) - as 'Margaret Sidney' (see the post above) - wrote children's stories.

As this marker states, Lothrop was the founder of the Children of the American Revolution. Had the marker not been there, it would have been difficult to find the grave.

The Alcott family plot.

Louisa May Alcott.

Edmund Hosmer (1798-1881) was a Concord farmer who was a friend of Emerson and Thoreau who was associated with the Transcendentalists and had helped Thoreau in the construction of his cabin.

'EPHRIAM WALES BULL

THE ORIGINATOR OF THE CONCORD GRAPE

BORN IN BOSTON MAR 4 1806

DIED IN CONCORD SEPT 26 1806

HE SOWED OTHERS REAPED'

Presumably the final line refers to the fact that Bull, a neighbor of Bronson Alcott's - thanks to Thomas Jefferson -  was unable to patent his invention, so lost out big time. The story of this is in an essay in Paul Collins's Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck (London: Picador, 2001).

'ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

1804-1894

A TEACHER OF THREE GENERATIONS OF CHILDREN,

AND THE FOUNDER OF KINDERGARTEN IN AMERICA.

EVERY HUMAN CAUSE HAD HER SYMPATHY.

AND MANY HER ACTIVE AID.'

Sophia Hawthorne's sister is buried far from Authors' Ridge.