Customer Reviews

A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade

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Hummingbirds! I would have never thought of them as some kind of ambiguous stand-in for a number of concerns of the period (marital infidelity or bliss, abolitionist arguments of freedom, a hint of tea totaling or the pleasures of a sumptuous life) but I'm sure I'll see them everywhere now.

Benfey provides you with a paragraph or so of Twain, a few stanzas of Dickinson, a painting of Heade and then composes fascinating readings, sensitive of them by combining close analysis and historical detail. His pleasure and enjoyment of these authors and artists is palpable and contagious.

I really appreciate the way this book resists the common urge to treat Dickinson's biography as freakish (the white dresses, the recklessness, etc.). Benfey calls her a "stay-at-home visionary" and points out that "by April 1882, Dickinson could have published a volume of her poems had she wished to do so."

One of my favorite aspects of this book is the way it makes moments of the nineteenth century seem so close to our own experience. Benfey ends a description of the "hotel-world" that Henry Flagler creates: "Guests arrived at the resort in luxury railroad cars designed by Flagler, bearing the same yellow trim--`Flagler Yellow'--as the arches and windows of the hotel. The transition between railroad and hotel was seamless..." Doesn't that just sound like the branded, constructed trip one would get from, say Disney?

The overall symbol of the hummingbird to describe how America was changing from a staid worldview to a more transient, evanescent one in the Civil and post Civil War period is probably insightful. The author also gives us some biographical details not well known about well known luminaries (and people who would become luminaries) of that period. HOWEVER, his writing is pedestrian and I found the book quite a slog. I'm a huge fan of Emily Dickinson(who knew?) and an admirer of Mark Twain, et al. So, I persevered; but I kept thinking about how dull this English professor's classes must be, despite the interesting subject matter.

I don't think this book would capture/retain the interest of the general reader.

It is a little difficult to pin down what "A Summer of Hummingbirds" is. Like the little bird that serves as the central metaphor, the narrative flits about, darting among its "flowers," the artistic and cultural lights of 19th century America, creating a kaleidoscope of their intersecting relationships, influences, work and zeitgeist. The experience of reading it is very much like viewing a large collage comprised of many recognizable individual images and materials, that taken in its entirety is at once abstract yet pleasingly aesthetic.

There are no surprises among the cast of characters Benfey traces through their swirling circles, except the 20th century artist Joseph Cornell who serves as a coda absorbing and releasing the energy of the muses before him. Artist Martin Johnson Heade seems to touch all of the 19th century line-up, including Thomas Higginson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Ward Beecher, Emily Dickinson, Austin Dickinson, Mabel Loomis Todd and Mark Twain. Early in their lives, Lord Byron, slavery and the Civil War inspire meditations on freedom, and Darwin alternately stirs up curiosity about natural phenomenon and challenges to religious belief in the creation story. Hummingbirds turn up everywhere, as images of freedom, images of restless lives, images caught in poetry and on canvas, and as pets and taxidermy specimens. Benfey's subjects are intellects on fire. It is only time before their passions boil over to more physical alliances that seem to coalesce around the summer of 1882, also the year of the transit of the planet Venus. The hermetic Emily Dickinson is engaged, her married brother becomes involved with the also married Mabel Loomis Todd, charismatic preacher Henry Ward Beecher is undone by an extramarrital affair, and the aging Heade who also lusts after Todd finally takes a wife. Meanwhile, America is gradually transformed from a place of ruins and frontier to a developing world stitched together by trains and sporting new luxuries like resorts in Florida.

Benfey stakes a lot on the leitmotif of the hummingbird to impose a narrative structure on what are essentially many concurrent lives on a continuum. For much of the book I was thinking, now which summer is the summer of the title? Much of the action takes place before or overshoots 1882, and it seems that at that point, the arbutus or mayflower has become the symbol of a re-ordering sensuality among this group. Mark Twain is more of a tangential figure, more influenced by the group than a player, and little is made of friendship with Harriet Beecher Stowe in their Hartford days. All that said, it is a pleasant trip following the author around trying to catch his human hummingbirds in a world of slipping paradigms.

"A Summer of Hummingbirds" is an historical, non-fiction book that is both fascinating and informative.

I LOVE this book to the extent that I am now reading it for the third time!
Christopher Benfey describes the private lives of well-known people: Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Martin Johnson Heade (hummingbird artist) and others, whose lives are also connected to these writers and artists.

Benfey focuses on the 1860s (the Civil War Years) and the 1880s to bring to life the people who created great poetry, literary works that reflect those decades, and their shared love of hummingbirds.

I recommend highly "A Summer of Hummingbirds".

No one channels the Zeitgeist as engagingly as Christopher Benfey. In "The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan" he wrote about the late 19th infatuation with all things Japanese. In his most recent book, "A Summer of Hummingbirds," he looks at dislocations in the post-Civil War period: among them changing sexual mores, changing tastes in literature and art, and religious doubt. The book's subtitle speaks of the "intersecting worlds" of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade, but there is an entertaining supporting cast, including Henry Ward Beecher (principal in one of the century's great sex scandals), Mabel Loomis Todd (principal in another less public, but no less scandalous, one), and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (an early proponent of Emily Dickinson).

Benfey is a master at connecting all of these people through their relatives, their marriages, their literary and artistic interests, their jobs, their social engagements---and their infatuation with hummingbirds. The latter set of intersections is occasionally pushed a bit far, but it's a nice motif, for the most part. Some of Benfey's chatty, impressionistic chapters are a delight; it's like reading a highbrow 19th century version of People Magazine, where the Beecher/Tilton adultery scandal would be right at home. As in his book about Japan, Benfey writes well about artists, too, and his sketch of the artist Martin Johnson Heade is affectionate and compelling.

The only person whom Benfey does not write well about is Emily Dickinson. He conveys her milieu very well, but the poems themselves really seem to elude him. He has an unfortunate tendency to insert them as props to make his point, without reading them closely. The harder he tries to make us see her as a part of her circle of Amherst relatives and acquaintances, the more she seems to slip away. At times he seems as frustrated as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who encouraged Dickinson but was never really comfortable with her poetry---or with her, for that matter, in their few encounters.

Enjoy Benfey's "Summer of `82" for its interesting observations, wonderful literary chitchat, and sympathetic portrayal of a generation for whom the early 19th century seemed as distant as the early 20th does to us.

M. Feldman

What a fascinating review of the "Victorian Period" of American art and letters!
The reader bounces from one "relationship" to another, finding it was a very intimate society. Most of the authors/artists that Benfey writes about are household words, for instance Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, but he includes others who are not quite so familiar, but equally interesting.
Extremely readable and informative.