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.

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.

Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond, Concord, Massachusetts

I first came across Thoreau when I was 17 - and he's intrigued me ever since. So it was a great pleasure to get round to visiting Concord (pronounced 'Concud', I learned), and even more of a pleasure to visit Walden Pond. I'd noticed on reviews on the internet that it fills up in summer, so May seemed like a saner idea than going in the cold. Even then, at 10am, there was a party of schoolkids on bicycles.

As for my initial impressions of Thoreau, it was the idea of exploring the 'private sea' that impressed me so much. From Walden (1854):

What does Africa - what does the West stand for? Is not our own interior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the coast,
when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the
Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this continent, that we would
find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him?
Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo Park,
the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans;
explore your own higher latitudes - with shiploads of preserved meats to
support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for
a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be
a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new
channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm
beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state,
a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no
self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil
which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may
still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads. What
was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its
parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there
are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an
isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to
sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a
government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it
is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's
being alone.'

The whole of the book Walden is here.

Henry David Thoreau lived in his tiny cabin from 4 July 1845 (the date being a pure coincidence) to 6 September 1847. He didn't live a hermit-like existence, and sometimes walked into Concord just over a mile away. Emerson owned the land, and willingly allowed Thoreau to make his home there. His reasons for staying there are best answered by his own words in Walden:

'I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only
the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to
teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did
not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish
to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to
live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and
Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad
swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its
lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole
and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or
if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true
account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are
in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God,
and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here
to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."'

By the visitor center near the statue, a replica reconstruction of Thoreau's cabin.

Thoreau says in Walden:

'I have [...] a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by
fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large
window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick
fireplace opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying the usual price
for such materials as I used, but not counting the work, all of which
was done by myself, was as follows; and I give the details because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various materials which compose them:-


Boards                                         $8.03½  mostly shanty boards.
Refuse shingles
for roof sides                               4.00
Laths                                            1.25
Two second-hand
windowswith glass                      2.43
One thousand old
brick                                             4.00
Two casks of lime                       2.40      That was high.
Hair                                              0.31      More than I needed.
Mantle-tree iron                         0.15
Nails                                             3.90
Hinges and screws                     0.14
Latch                                           0.10
Chalk                                           0.01
Transportation                           1.40       I carried a good part
                                                                     on my back.
                                                      -----------
                 In all                           $28.12½'

At the back of the structure is the woodshed.

And the interior. I was very fortunate in that a horde of schoolkids had just left it.

Opposite the shop and the parking lot is Walden Pond, here taken from the beach, which mercifully was deserted.

And the crowning glory is the site of Thoreau's cabin, marked out by posts and chains.

'SITE OF

THOREAU'S CABIN

DISCOVERED NOV. 11, 1945

BY ROLAND WELLS ROBBINS'

'Beneath these stones lies the chimney foundation
of Thoreau's cabin 1845-1847
"Go thou my incense upward
from this hearth"'

The above quotation comes from a poem of Thoreau's called 'Smoke':

'Light-winged smoke, Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light blotting out the sun;
Go thou my incense upward from this hearth,
And ask the Gods to pardon this clear flame.'

Obviously this is at the back of the site, as in the reconstruction.

The cairn, where people leave stones in respect. The sign at the side partly reproduces what I reproduced above about Thoreau's reasons for living by Walden Pond.

The symbol of peace in stone.

A few of the stones are from organizations.

Others give the names of people, this young man presumably having expressed a wish after death.

Some are less professionally presented, and are obviously personal to the individual.

No idea!

This creation is distinctly phallic looking, and I'm unclear why. Thoreau and women is an interesting subject, though. Louisa May Alcott was a little young when, as a pupil of his, she became emotionally fascinated by him - something to do with his affinity with nature, being able to recognize beaver dam construction as distinct from just a pile of logs, or identifying a heron's nest, etc, but Thoreau wisely appears not to have responded. He had a brief attaction for the much older Lucy Jackson Brown, and flung a love poem through her bedroom window. On the other hand, the Emersons' tutor Sophia Foord proposed to him and he was horrified.

In a letter, Thoreau proposed to Ellen Sewall from Plymouth, MA, but she turned him down, as she had his brother David (after her father had brought her to her senses). Nevertheless, and despite the handsome Hawthorne calling Thoreau 'as ugly as sin', and Oliver Wendell Holmes detesting his lack of table manners (he ate with his hands), there was no shortage of women who were attracted to him - he just didn't feel the same way about them. So perhaps what he told his sister on his deathbed is true: that he had always loved Ellen.

Thoreauly Antiques on Concord Main Street? I can imagine what the great man would have thought of that.