August - September 2008

Books

by Nancy Stone

Our beloved president, Richard May, is out of town, and he asked me to fill the space allotted to the president this month. Because he did not specify what I should say, or even what topic I should choose to write about, I decided to stick to a subject that interests me: Books.

Since I wrote a review of Miss Alcott’s e-mail last year, a book about Louisa May Alcott, I have read three others about this fascinating woman and her circle. Although she never declared herself a Unitarian or a Universalist, UUs have always claimed her as “one of our own” because of her stated beliefs, the actions of her life and her associations with the religious liberals of her time.

Her most important association with a religious liberal, of course, was with her father, Bronson Alcott, that interesting, maddening, vital, optimistic genius. Eden’s Outcasts by John Matteson, published in 2007 by W.W. Norton, examines this association in fascinating detail. The experience at Fruitlands, the Alcotts’ Eden and their failure to live the purest possible lives, there, which had been the object of the settlement, was a turning point for Bronson. At that point he decided that he must not desert his family, his wife who had thrown herself into his [interests] and embraced his beliefs without hesitation, and the four little daughters whose souls he was trying to perfect. The family’s desertion of Fruitlands and its dreams was a blow which shook Bronson to his depths. Louisa observed him during his breakdown at that time, though she was still a child, and it was clear to her that family was what mattered most in attaining an ideal of any kind. She literally spent the rest of her life assuming the care of each of her family members, her mother, her sister Elizabeth, the sons of her sister Anna, the daughter of her sister May, and her father himself when he needed it.

Matteson has also included captivating details from the lives of those who inhabit his book. For instance, he speculates on such interesting topics as the identity of the Laurie figure in Little Women and Louisa’s relationship with Thoreau, both of which had been matters of interest to Louisa’s fans for sometime.

As an interim book I offer The Concord Quartet by Samuel A. Schreiner Jr. published in 2006 by John Wiley and Sons. This is a history of the relationships among Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The story of each of these men is fascinating in itself, but it is a kind of miracle that the four of them were together in the same place and were friends as well at a time which Schreiner says, was the day of “America’s intellectual independence.” These four, in fact, were the declarers of that independence and the ignition of America’s renaissance. You can come to this book for a look at the details of the lives of these four, what they meant to each other and how they each issued a spark that blazed into an unforgettable American epoch.

Move along to a different look at this collection of remarkable thinkers in American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever published in 2006 by Simons and Schuster. This book you can read just for its own literary qualities. Cheever is a remarkable writer! And I was enchanted by a statement in her preface. Reading Little Women because she had been asked to write an introduction to a new edition of the book, Cheever sure she would know what it was like. “The book amazed me. Far from being the string of bromides I dimly recalled, it was an elegantly written family story of great poignance and skill.” Louisa May Alcott is one of the engrossing characters in Cheever’s book about the gathering of the giants of the American renaissance in New England in the 19th century. The more familiar names are there: both Alcotts, Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne but also Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Longfellow, Holmes, Beecher and others as well. How these people lived, conversed, wrote to each other, loved each other, quarreled with each other, impressed their countrymen and women is detailed by Cheever. Whether she ever “proved” the association implied in the title, I can’t say. My feeling is that the American version was much more important in its intellectual impact on America than was that of Virginia and Leonard Woolf on the literary climate in early 20th century London. But look for yourself. The book is full of the lively, passionate, energetic people whom Cheever calls The American Bloomsbury.

All of these books, appearing now so close together in time, suggest to me that our liberal religion is still vitally a part of American thought.

Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Venice

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