Customer Reviews

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

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2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

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.

-----------------------------------------

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.

Having just completed a course on the literature of the Transcendentalists, I was looking forward to learning more about their lives in American Bloomsbury. I shouldn't have. It was apparent from the beginning that this is not a sophisticated academic work--the writing is sloppy (the cliches are painful), the facts are wrong (some things are purely made up), and the tone is offensively casual for such a brilliant group of writers and thinkers. First, in her introduction, Cheever explains her attempt to present each thinker's individual perspective. She explains that some events will appear multiple times as she attempts to convey Thoreau's, Hawthorne's, Alcott's, or Emerson's interpretation of incidents they experienced together. However, Cheever never succeeds in telling more than the same 3-sentence stories over and over again in the third person. She offers little more than a tangled mess of events hopelessly lacking any sense of organization, chronology, or significance. Second, Cheever fails to acknowledge the main reason the Transcendentalists are known today: their elegant writing and intricate ideas. In her effort to describe Hawthorne's, Thoreau's, Alcott's, and Emerson's lives, she haphazardly separates the author's from their work, the people from their thoughts. She does little to connect the characters to their words or actions beyond her own whimsical conjectures about their lives. Finally, every once in awhile, Cheever lets her voice surface through her narrative. Yanking the reader from the world of Transcendentalism, she veers onto irrelevant tangents about sweltering summer roadtrips with 3 kids and a golden retriever and her reasons for visiting Plymouth Hospital 3 times (remind me again what a scratched cornea, a stomach ache, and a skinned knee has to do with Louisa May Alcott). The only reason I finished this book was to move on and get on with my life. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

I've never written a review before, but I'm compelled in this case. I expected better, and not just because the name of Cheever sets a high standard. Two big problems: 1) Susan hasn't done her homework. 2) The quality of the writing is poor. I've actually only gotten to page 48 in two weeks because I'm so disspirited - and the whole Concord scene is one of my favorite topics. I live in Massachusetts, and have taken the standard tours of the Old Manse and Alcott's house, and Emerson's house a number of times. The docents on the tours have different information than Susan does. Here's an example. Emerson's favorite excuse for being late to church was that he had mislaid his gloves. It was for that reason that Thoreau built a special glove drawer for him. It was not for Lidian, as Susan stated on page 39. Did Susan not visit Emerson's house? Susan also mentions several times that Emerson changed his second wife's name from Lydia to Lidian. It seems odd that, since she thinks it important enough to mention several times, she doesn't say why he did that. Again, the tour docents, as part of their normal spiel, say that it's because the two vowels coming together (end of Lydia, beginning of Emerson) was awkward to pronounce. Simple. Why hold that back? Also, Plymouth is not on Cape Cod (page 23). It's on the mainland. It IS on the shore of Cape Cod BAY, however, but that's different. Check out MapQuest, Susan. To my second point above: I'm having to read many sentences over and over again to figure out what Susan means. There are many characters to keep straight, so there's a need for the author to be very clear whenever she uses "he" and "she." And Susan doesn't. It's just infuriating. She'll refer to both Emerson and Thoreau in a sentence, for instance, and then start the next sentence with "He." Arghhhh. Here's an example of confusion (page 21).
"There had been many boarders at the Thoreaus' house over the years, but Lucy Brown's aloneness in the world with her son and daughter had captivated him (whom? What preceeds this is a poem.). She (Lucy, I presume) was a literary woman of a certain age on a protracted visit to her sister Lidian, who had married the local sage, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and moved (who moved - Lucy or Lidian?) into a big square white house (shouldn't there be commas somewhere in there? ) with him (whom? Thoreau? Emerson?) on the other side of town." What a mess.
I'm also puzzled by the organization of the book. In the introductory note to the reader, she explains the structure, but I find it just a mish-mash. Sorry I can't be more positive. Susan needs to go back to writing school. Or to start going.

At first I was impressed with Susan Cheever's apt writing, and excited at the prospect of reading about some of my favorite writers. But reading this book is a little like listening to a friend who enjoys malicious gossip -- embarassing, distasteful, and finally just boring. I get the feeling that some parts are whomped up; she's trying to raise questions that the facts don't justify raising. But mostly there's an edge of bitter glee here -- as if she's enjoying anything negative she can dig up. This isn't the kind of writer with whom I enjoy spending time.

This book has a lot to recommend it as an introduction to several brilliant individuals whose lives crossed paths in Concord, Massachusetts between about 1840 and 1870. It is an enjoyable, easy read -- with very short chapters that are organized around themes and encounters rather than strict chronology. The book brings these characters to life, reading between the lines of letters, books and journals to capture their unspoken thoughts and feelings for each other. It shows how the lives and thoughts of these thinkers, who rarely mention one another or acknowledge their debts to each other in their published works, are deeply intertwined. It also makes a serious effort to take them out of "ancient" history and show how their concerns and conceptions are not so far away from our own.

It is this concern, however, to show the relevance of the lives of people like Thoreau, Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, Bronson and Louisa Alcott, that also accounts for several of the major weaknesses of the book. Ms. Cheever tries so hard to show that these individuals are just like us that the book reads almost like tabloid journalism -- especially in the first several chapters. I was reminded several times as I read the book of Goethe's maxim that "no one is a hero to his valet" -- that from a certain perspective even the most distinctive individuals look like ordinary folk who have passions and drives and needs and just happen to be in the right place at the right time. Only rarely does the book give a hint at what makes these individuals remarkable -- although the author is obviously fascinated by them, her descriptions of them make them seem just like peculiar and idiosyncratic folk with a sense of grandeur and peculiar ideas that made them stand out against the norm but not much more. I never got a clear sense from the book of how the ideas of these thinkers connect with their lives, and the book never gives a clear sense of what their ideas were beyond very superficial descriptions. The account of Emerson suggests again and again that apart from being charismatic and a clever writer, his most important contribution was to have inherited enough money from his first marriage to enable him to be generous with the others and create a community around him. I never saw any indication that Cheever had any idea how powerful and radical Emerson's thought really was. (Her suggestion that Thoreau and the rest of the transcendentalists were leeches on Emerson is one of many examples where Cheever chooses which of the many existing rumors to believe and report as if it were fact rather than making sure it is -- at least in the case of Thoreau, this rumor is clearly false -- as Walter Harding has shown in his excellent biography, Thoreau was very careful not to owe anything and worked hard in his father's pencil factory or later in life at surveying or even manual labor to take care of his needs, and even made sure to pay rent when he was living in his parents' house as a boarder, and had agreed with Emerson to do work around the house in exchange for room and board when he lived with him).

Part of the problem is that Ms. Cheever can't seem to decide whether she wants to write a tabloid style expose of the love lives of the Concord geniuses, or a popular history, or a personal account of her own fascination with that history. In the last half of the book Ms. Cheever figures more and more prominently in the book -- her personal feelings and responses to the history begin to overwhelm that history. For example, she can have no sympathy whatsoever for (and no clear understanding of) the Concord thinkers' admiration for John Brown -- because she cannot understand why they would have seen him as anything else than what she sees him to be: a cold-hearted murderer, whose passionate ideals led to outrageous and insane actions. In the end, I think that the best way to describe this book is not as a genuine history, but as an imaginative attempt to tell the story of these characters that Ms. Cheever had come to love in a way that made sense of them to her. While there is value in such an approach, it should not be mistaken for an accurate history. As other reviewers note, she invents a great deal and reads a great deal into things that may not be there (e.g. Alcott's admiration for Thoreau and Emerson is read as her having fallen in love with her teacher and her father's friend). The book is also in need of some serious editing -- there are several parenthetical points or asides or statements of fact irrelevant to the paragraphs or chapters in which they are included. Several words are misused consistently throughout ("insure" is used when she means "ensure," for example).

I did enjoy reading this book quite a bit -- I'd read Emerson and Thoreau and read biographies of both, but had never read an account of all the remarkable people whose lives connected in Concord. It is a quick and easy read -- and gives a valuable shorthand version of the period that I will definitely want to flesh out by reading some of the other biographies and history that she relied upon and mentions in her notes at the end. Ms. Cheever obviously cares about the people she writes about -- and it would be hard to walk away from this volume without likewise caring.

As I read "American Bloomsbury," I found I lost confidence in it. For those with an interest in the Concord of the period Ms. Cheever is discussing, "Alcott in Her Own Time," edited by Daniel Shealy Alcott in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates (Writers in Their Own Time), might be a more useful choice. In addition to the many contemporary views of Louisa May and her family, there are vignettes of the Emersons, Thoreaus, and Hawthornes; reminisences of Julian Hawthorne and Edward Emerson are included. There is an excellent general introduction, as well as introductions to each of the individual pieces--all very informative.

I was really looking forward to reading this book after hearing the author on NPR, but I am thoroughly disappointed. The writing reminds me of student essays shoddily constructed out of poor Internet research. Beyond the factual errors other reviewers have mentioned, the narrative is sloppy and needs a good edit. At times she leaves out critical information, referring to characters she has yet to introduce. She must not have thought anyone would read it to leave it in such a state.

It is true that the authors lived and loved, bled and cried, but some of the 'facts' presented in this book are skewed or downright wrong.

She says that Thoreau was the model for Laurie from Little Women. Louisa clearly states in a letter to Alfred Whitman, a young man from Concord who helped the Alcott girls with their plays, on January 6, 1869, "'Laurie' is you & my Polish boy 'jintly'[jointly]." The "Polish boy" she is refering to is a boy she met while in Switzerland five years earlier, Ladislas Wisniewski.

Anyone who has ever toured the Old Manse, where Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne lived in the three years following their marriage, knows that Emerson didn't own the house his grandfather built. It was owned by his step-cousin, Samuel Ripley, and the reason the Hawthornes were asked to leave was not because Emerson was jealous of Hawthorne's (in reality, purely friendly) relationship with Margaret Fuller, but because of a combination of Hawthorne's inability to pay the rent he owed, and Ripley's desire to retire to his family home.

Reading the letters Nathaniel wrote to Sophia and the few that remain of the letters she wrote back, particularly right after their marriage, one finds it impossible to believe this idea that he had any romantic feelings towards another woman.

Ralph Waldo Emerson also had just married his (second) wife, Lidian when Emerson is supposed to have had this romantic infatuation with Fuller. And for those of you who have read Mr. Emerson's Wife, no, she did not have an afair with Thoreau. Nathaniel, Sophia, Waldo, and Lidian all respected Margaret's genius at conversation and welcomed her as a friend, but there was no cause for jealousy in the group.

I have spent the past 7 years working in and around Concord at the museums in the area and researching the families and their interactions with eachother. I have grown to love the authors through the records they and thier children have left behind and am sadened to see how modern authors mistreat and distort the facts to create a supposedly more interesting story than what already exsists.

Concord was an attractive place for these families because of the history already there. It was the spot of the first battle of the American Revolution. Emerson was drawn to the place where his grandfather had made a home and where he spent several happy years as a boy. Intellectuals of the time were drawn to Emerson's new ideas which he published in his book, Nature, after his dissatisfaction as a minister. Hawthorne moved back to Concord in 1852 to a house he called the Wayside which he purchaced from the Alcotts (a house which now is in dire need of repair because of the Park Service's tragic lack of respect for the first literary home it ever aquired)and enjoyed many years of conversation with Emerson and Alcott and Thoreau.

There is a lot more that I could say about this book and the real history of Concord, but time runs short. If you want to know about Concord, read the letters and journals of the authors who lived there and visit the museums, like the Wayside, that still (for the time being) are open to the public for its edification.