My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson III

When Emily returned home from college in 1848, she was given household assignments, such as cooking and dishwashing. She baked bread for the first time. She had some interactions with men, but not many. She hit it off well with Elbridge Gridley Bowdoin, who was her father's junior law partner from 1847 to 1855. He was "a confirmed bachelor" ten years older than her. He lent her his copy of Jane Eyre. A more significant influence was Benjamin Franklin Newton, who was nine years older than her and also worked with her father briefly. He may have introduced her to Wordsworth and is known to have given her a book of Emerson's poems; at the time, these were advanced works of poetry by New England standards. He may have been the first person to recognize her talent. Unfortunately, he moved away to Worcester and died of tuberculosis in 1853. Theirs was not a romantic relationship, and he had married in Worcester, but Newton seems to have formed her prototype for "Master," who later became Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who seems to have had a lesser impact on her. She continued a friendship, though it declined, with Emily Fowler. Fowler's outgoing and confident demeanor seems to have been off-putting to Dickinson. 

In 1853, Edward was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and served for one term. Apparently he was too dogmatic and inflexible to fit into that environment, and he subsequently gave up entirely on politics. Politically, he was not an abolitionist. While he was away in Washington, his wife and Vinnie visited him. During that visit, arrangements were made for Emily's friend, Susan Gilbert, and cousin John Long Graves, an Amherst student, to stay with her.  Apparently, Emily played improvised tunes on the piano alone late at night – annoying the others.

Habegger mostly sticks to old letters in this book, but he occasionally inserts psychological interpretations. He thinks that the Dickinson home environment alternated between warmth and frigidity. The family members weren't always happy, but that didn't stop them from thinking of this as their home, making it, at least in an abstract sense, the secure place where they belonged. Habegger also thinks that Austin was not emotionally sensitive, and compares his relationship with Emily to Tom Tulliver's relationship to Maggie in The Mill on the Floss. 

Of course, these meager statements don't satisfy my interests. I've been thinking about how legal culture is expressed by people who take it upon themselves to become civic leaders. The Dickinsons of Amherst remind me a lot of the Seymours of Middlebury. Horatio Seymour (1778-1833) attended Yale and became a lawyer. While in Middlebury, he practiced law and built an enormous house downtown, which still stands. He served as Middlebury postmaster and state's attorney for Addison County. He also became involved in the management of Middlebury College and served as a U.S. Senator for two terms. Seymour's grandson, Joseph Battell (1839-1915), whom I discussed long ago, also became a civic leader, though he was a little eccentric. Besides supporting the Morgan horse, he was active at Middlebury College, engaged in the construction of the Main Street bridge over Otter Creek, and built the Battell Building nearby. The hotel that he built in Ripton later became the site of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

I also noticed, much later, the flurry of activity that my lawyer father-in-law engaged in in Indiana following World War II. While his contributions to the town were probably not as significant as those of the Dickinsons or the Seymours, I got a very close look at that family's structure. His family was also completely patriarchal. He had a brief political career in Indiana but apparently disliked politics. When they became rich and built a large house, the three daughters were crammed into two small bedrooms on one side of the house, and their lone brother had a gigantic bedroom to himself on the other side of the house. The brother was always praised and attended to by his parents but he had nonexistent relationships with his sisters. None of them were particularly good students, but he eventually got a Ph.D. and became a zoology professor. He married and had children. Later he became a university dean. The three daughters also went to college, married and had children, but only one of them had a good career. There was always discord in that family, and I think that some of it was related to the patriarchal structure – and what might now be called sexism.

I have long noticed that law doesn't necessarily attract the best people. It has been a highly attractive career choice for social climbers. When I think of lawyers, I don't necessarily think of Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln. More likely, I think of Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy or Richard Nixon. And today we have the selfless Rudy Giuliani, Mike Johnson, J.D. Vance and Ron DeSantis.

In Emily Dickinson's case, the sisters also appear to have been treated like second-class citizens. Not much information is provided, and it is unclear to me how Emily felt about her appearance. In the one confirmed image of her, her face is expressionless, and she does not seem to have attempted to make herself attractive. But it is thought that she had been ill for a long time and was only sixteen. Habegger thinks that there is another image of her. In that one, she is older and plumper but still has a vacant expression on her face. Generally, my sense is that her parents' relationship wasn't appealing to her mother, the marriage involved a lot of unpleasant toil, and these factors may have made marriage unappealing to Emily. In this vein, she seems to have made no effort to attract marriageable males. If she had wanted to marry, she could at least have attended church, which was a traditional place to meet potential spouses. She was obviously extremely introverted and private, and these two characteristics may have driven her behavior. But because Lavinia, who seemed to be more outgoing, also never married, the parental example may have been significant.

I'm plodding away through the book but am only halfway to the end.

My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson II

I am ambling along in the book and will spend several more weeks before finishing. Habegger seems to be recording all of the pertinent information – and there is a lot of it. He inserts his interpretations from time to time, and they seem reasonable enough, but it is clear that he is an English professor who was educated in the U.S. Emily's father, Edward, seems to have been interested in restoring his family's reputation in Amherst, but was initially hindered by the Panic of 1837, which was part of a series of recessions and depressions that had originated in the cotton industry. Immediately after his marriage, he had been living in a rental house, but when it became apparent that he could be evicted, he made arrangements to move into one-half of the old Dickinson Homestead. This occurred before Emily was born. In 1839, they all moved to a house on West Street, where Emily spent much of her childhood. Once again, I am finding that money often plays a background role in enabling children to lead successful lives, in the arts or otherwise. Edward got help from his father-in-law, who advanced funds to the family by deducting them from his daughter's future inheritance. Charles Darwin's father did the same thing when Charles wanted to buy a house. Edward also made investments in land in Michigan. Besides his law practice, he was the treasurer of Amherst College. He also served in the Massachusetts government as a state representative and, later, as a state senator.

The Dickinson household followed a completely patriarchal model, but Emily didn't seem to mind. She had so many relatives and there were so many illnesses going around that there was always some activity. When Edward was away in Boston, he always left instructions and sometimes arranged for a substitute male to be present. He acted as if he were an amateur physician and advised his family members on what they should and shouldn't do for their health. Emily herself sometimes had serious coughs.

Some hints of Emily's later interests emerged quite early. Her poetic style may have been influenced by signing as a witness some of her father's legal documents. Her siblings also did this, but it appears that they were often out socializing, while Emily remained at home. I can see how Emily's poems roughly match rather terse legal documents. Her mother loved flowers, and Emily began collecting wildflowers and cultivated flowers at an early age. She dried and pressed them and kept them in a large book, called a herbarium, up to her death. It contains four or five hundred specimens, which are identified by their scientific names. Her poems are also economical in style and were produced slowly over much of her life. They were also carefully preserved up to the time of her death. It appears that Emily spent much of her time alone and gave considerable thought to these two hobbies.

With respect to her siblings, they seem to have had cooperative relationships. Clearly, Austin was destined to be a future patriarch, but Emily seems to have enjoyed communicating with him, both in conversation and letters. Her younger sister, Lavinia, known as "Vinnie," was more socially active than Emily and far less intellectual.

Emily's high school equivalent was Amherst Academy, which was somewhat unstable and in a state of flux while she attended it. As described by Renée Bergland in Natural Magic, it seems almost accidentally to have been rather advanced in the subjects offered to girls. Besides the sciences and mathematics, they were taught Latin, and Emily excelled at the latter. I never studied Latin at all, and I have always been interested in how it became a popular subject. When I was in college, I studied Greek mythology and Homeric Greek, which seem a lot more interesting to me. The answer seems to be that Oxford and Cambridge were originally theological seminaries, and church services were then conducted in Latin. The original graduates, who became the English clergy, had to know Latin for their livelihoods. By the time that the Catholic Church left England, Latin was so much associated with high social status that it took hundreds of years for its importance to diminish within the English universities. Charles Darwin, who was certainly no linguist, had to be tutored in Latin in order to be admitted to Cambridge. On the other hand, Emily Dickinson was supremely talented in language and did well in Latin.

Following Amherst Academy, Emily spent a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, as also described by Renée Bergland. While she did enjoy some of her classes, the environment was unpleasant in several respects. Emily preferred Amherst, which was only ten miles away, but was often unable to go home due to the strict rules. Furthermore, with all of the girls and faculty squeezed into tight quarters, people were often sick. The worst thing, I think, was that the women running it were intense evangelicals, and they harassed the "impenitents" mercilessly. As an independent thinker, Emily can't have found that pleasant. Although she regretted having to leave school early that year due to an illness, in many respects it must not have suited her at all.

My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson I

I've started on this long 2002 biography by Alfred Habegger. Normally I might have saved it for winter, but I don't have any other suitable books at the moment. Natural Magic, which I read in March and April, doesn't focus much on the details of Dickinson's life. As far as I've read, this book is extremely thorough regarding Dickinson's family background and the social atmosphere in Amherst at the time. I am hoping that I will gain some insight into Dickinson's thinking process and, ideally, a better understanding of some of her poems. Even if it turns out that aspects of Dickinson's poems will remain inscrutable, biographies can be an art in themselves if they fully explain the social dynamics in a place and time. I was a little disappointed by the biography that I read of Thoreau, who was thirteen years older than Dickinson and also lived in Massachusetts, because the discussion of his family background and the precise context of his intellectual development seemed somewhat limited. While this book seems better-written, some of that may have to do with the fact that Dickinson's family was firmly in the middle class and Thoreau's was not; if Thoreau hadn't happened to live near Ralph Waldo Emerson, he may never have become a prominent writer, whereas Dickinson's poems probably emanated organically from her background in conjunction with her personality. Furthermore, since Dickinson's family was more involved with civic affairs than Thoreau's, more information is available for her than Thoreau. And the Dickinsons produced vast correspondences.

On the Dickinson side of the family, Emily's grandfather was Samuel Fowler Dickinson (1775-1838). He was a Dartmouth graduate and a lawyer who was instrumental in the founding of Amherst College. However, as noted in Natural Magic, his civic zeal led to his financial ruin, and he moved to Ohio permanently, apparently with some bitterness regarding events in Amherst. Emily's mother was a Norcross, from Monson, Massachusetts. Her father, Joel Norcross (1777-1829), was a civically active businessman and seems to have been better-off than Samuel Fowler Dickinson. Habegger, I think, does a good job describing how life in these families was quite different than it is in most families today. The Norcrosses had nine children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. The Dickinsons had nine children, all of whom survived to adulthood. In those days, I think that the stresses were quite high in non-farming families where it was presumed that the sons would attend college. Emily's father, Edward, had to transfer to Amherst from Yale once, apparently because his father couldn't afford the Yale tuition. And housekeeping must have been a nightmare, with no electricity, no modern appliances, no public water and no public sewage systems. Furthermore, even for wealthy families, there was a shortage of qualified domestic servants. It sounds as if Emily's mother, also named Emily, was rather anxious, and it is easy to see why, even though in her case she had only three children.

I'm up to the year 1836, when Emily was just five. Her older brother was Austin and her younger sister was Lavinia. Her mother's sister, also named Lavinia, took a liking to Emily. Not much has happened yet in Emily's life, and her father, Edward, is still under some financial duress due to his father's bankruptcy. He has moved once, between marriage and Emily's birth, and will move again twice during Emily's life. It is already apparent that Austin might become a lawyer, but the fates of Emily and Lavinia seem unclear. It is possible that the stress evident in their mother discouraged them from wanting children, and they don't seem to be under any pressure to follow that path.

Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science VI

I finally finished the book. Darwin died in 1882 at the age of 73 and Dickinson died in 1886 at the age of 55. I think that Bergland succeeds in evoking the period, which, as she points out, was quite different from the present. I was often reminded of A.S. Byatt's novella Morpho Eugenia and her novel Possession, though this book doesn't take such liberties with history.

While I enjoy Bergland's style of writing, her focus seems to be mainly on literary history, so she doesn't devote much space to the psychological makeups of the people discussed. Dickinson's sister, Lavinia, also never married, though, apparently, she was more sociable than Emily. Did their mother tell them that sex was awful and childbirth even worse? Bergland is also a complete blank on economic history, which, in my experience, played a significant role the evolution of the arts in England. In Darwin's case, his family married into the Wedgwood family, which had become wealthy from the manufacture and sale of china and other products. If Darwin had been from a poor family, you would never have heard of him. I think that Janet Browne makes that clear in her biography. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's family on both sides became wealthy from slave labor in Jamaica. William Morris's father was a wealthy English financier. I was also surprised to learn recently that Percy Bysshe Shelley's grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, was born in Newark, New Jersey and became rich partly from marrying wealthy women. As I've written, money and the arts often go hand in hand.

Dickinson had a portrait of George Eliot by her desk, which almost automatically makes me a member of the Emily Dickinson fan club. I'm not as enthusiastic about Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose portrait was also there. I am still feeling sorry for Dickinson, because she didn't get the kind of recognition that she deserved during her life. She was self-conscious about her appearance and had only one know daguerreotype made (from school?). She actually had red hair. For many years it seemed that she was seeking a "Master" who would help guide her through her work and publication. Apparently, the best that she could come up with was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who may have aided her in some ways, but does not seem to have had any sophistication in poetry. To me, he sounds like an active person with many interests, including abolitionism and women's rights. Somehow he took an interest in Darwin and visited him at his house, though I'm not clear what the purpose of that was. Higginson may have been significant to Dickinson, because they began corresponding in the same year that she wrote "I died for Beauty." Bergland parses that poem, which is one of my favorites. I think that Dickinson identifies with Beauty, and her fellow corpse, possibly Higginson, identifies with Truth. Truth says that Truth and Beauty are "Brethren," but Beauty neither agrees nor disagrees. My impression is that Dickinson was less interested in science than Bergland suggests. The enjoyment of flowers seems to be intoxicating to women, and I think that those feelings underlie her reaction to nature. Darwin may have had similar feelings, but, if he did, he was more interested in figuring out how organisms work. That pragmatic quality seems to be absent in Dickinson.

On the whole, my take on Dickinson and Darwin is slightly different from Bergland's. She seems to make Dickinson out to be interested in magic, but I don't see any clear evidence of that. To me, Dickinson is interested in the harmony of nature and the relatedness of organisms, which, for me, can evoke a sense of awe and mystery that does not normally intrude on ordinary life. It is possible that Dickinson did think in terms of "magic," but that isn't exactly how I interpret her poems. I am in closer agreement with Bergland on Darwin, though in that case I find her a little tendentious. Possibly she's been reading too much A.S. Byatt. My impression of Darwin is that he wasn't very literary at all but, from years of living with his wife, Emma, decided that he ought to be more literary. While, at times, he must have felt in awe of nature, it would be inaccurate to describe him as remotely interested in magic. As Bergland herself points out, Darwin was a total skeptic regarding the séance that he attended. He probably felt socially obliged to attend, and that was the only reason why he went.

Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science V

I am gradually approaching the end of this book and should finish it by my next post. It is literally putting me to sleep on some days. Though I think that the main thesis is flawed, it is still an academic exercise that can be amusing and informative at times. Dickinson seems to me to have been quite lonely and in search of literary friends. In 1862, when she was 31, she began a correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who published articles in Atlantic Monthly. He didn't consider her poems publishable initially. The Civil War was under way then, and, later that year, Higginson enlisted. Her brother, Austin, paid someone else to serve for him. In any case, the war disrupted many people's lives.

When I finish the book, I'll make some final comments. For now, I'll just make some general criticisms. My greatest annoyance is probably that Bergland assumes, without providing any evidence, that Dickinson read On the Origin of Species, absorbed its content, and incorporated those ideas into her poems. I read her poems more psychologically: as a lonely person who spent a lot of time outdoors, she tended to anthropomorphize animals. Frogs are courting her like men. A snake is a "fellow." I like to compare her to my other favorite poet, Denise Levertov. In her poem, "Living," Levertov uses a description of a red salamander to evoke a rather mystical feeling about life: Charles Darwin is nowhere in sight. 

More broadly, I think that, to some extent, Dickinson can be viewed in terms of religious history. In England, Henry VIII kicked out the Roman Catholic Church in the mid-sixteenth century. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Calvinists fled the Roman Catholic Church in France and moved to England and America (Henry David Thoreau's family were Huguenots). As I've said, much of New England resembled a Congregational theocracy up until the late nineteenth century. Emily Dickinson herself rebelled against that church. Though I don't think that Bergland is wrong about the intellectual climate in Massachusetts during Dickinson's life, she seems to be placing more weight on Darwin's influence than seems appropriate. She is probably more accurate with respect to how a scientific education may generally have supported Dickinson's theological rebellion.

Another area where I think that Bergland could have done a better job would be in showing how marginalized Dickinson was by her family and how the scope of her life experience was limited from cradle to grave. She had so little to do for much of her life that she went outdoors and identified with blades of grass. If you compare her to Denise Levertov, she barely lived. Levertov was a nurse during World War II, had an abortion, moved to America, established a career as a poet, had a son, protested the Vietnam War, supported her family, and even supported her ex-husband and his second wife after their divorce. I don't think that poor Emily ever even went on a date! It is possible that Dickinson had some psychological conditions that inhibited the progress of her life, but I don't know of any other than shyness, and Bergland has nothing to say on that front.

Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science IV

When Dickinson returned to Amherst in 1848 at the age of seventeen, she gradually settled into what was to become her adult life. In 1851, there was a spectacular display of the aurora borealis that awed the entire town. At the time, Emily and her friends speculated on mysterious natural forces. They thought that telepathy, as described in Jane Eyre, could be some sort of electrical phenomenon. By 1855, the fortunes of her father, Edward, had improved. He was able to buy back the Dickinson Homestead, and the family returned to it. At that time, her older brother, Austin, was away from home. He eventually became a lawyer and worked at his father's law firm in Amherst. Thereafter, Emily, her mother, father and younger sister, Lavinia, lived at the Homestead. Austin later moved to a house next door. Her mother became ill after the move, and Emily disliked doing the housework.

One of Dickinson's poetic inspirations was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, particularly Aurora Leigh. She also subscribed to Atlantic Monthly, where in 1860 she would have read Asa Gray's review of On the Origin of Species, which was the first in the U.S. So far in the book, Bergland is emphasizing the theory of evolution as a confirmation of the relatedness of organisms, which accords with Dickinson's view in her poems. However, Bergland seems to be downplaying the actual process of natural selection, which can be quite grim. On the other hand, Bergland does a good job explaining how neither Darwin nor Dickinson were anthropocentric in their views of nature. Neither of them seem to have adopted the rigid, ideological tree that I mentioned before, which presents a developmental hierarchy with Homo sapiens at the top.

Even so, I think that Bergland is stretching things a little by emphasizing the similarities between Dickinson and Darwin. Dickinson's poems tend to interweave elements of the personal with elements of the natural world and the mystical. Darwin's work is specifically scientific and attempts to develop biological theories from the observations that he made. Bergland dutifully reports that it was Darwin who first discovered carnivorous plants, and that he spent years studying them. For all of her enjoyment of plants and natural phenomena, Dickinson's projects had little to do with scientific knowledge. Darwin's projects involved more than scientific discovery in the sense that he carefully calculated how to present his ideas in an environment in which he knew that some of his colleagues would be hostile because of their religious implications – he did in fact lose several friends. However, Darwin had a soft side, and at times he seems to have been almost paralyzed by the enormity of his findings. To this day, I don't think that many people can face them straight on.

It may not be Bergland's fault, because there doesn't seem to be much information available, but so far in the book I haven't developed much of a sense of how people who knew Dickinson perceived her. Her family life seems to have been satisfactory, though it was clearly patriarchal. Obviously, Emily was extremely introverted, and her mother and Lavinia may also have been. Emily developed a close friendship with Susan Gilbert, who read some of her poems and offered advice. But, after, Susan married her brother and lived next door, the relationship seemed to decline. Austin and Susan had large parties, which Emily avoided. There is also speculation in this book and elsewhere about Emily's sexuality. There don't seem to be clear answers, though several of her poems seem to be of a sexual nature.

I should finish this book within two more posts. Although it is entertaining to see Dickinson within the context of scientific progress during the nineteenth century, I prefer to see her as a talented artist who developed her craft in privacy and to very high standards. To some extent, this makes her immediate social environment, which seems a little insipid, of somewhat lesser importance than Bergland suggests. Dickinson seems to me a lot more like Vivian Maier, who developed very high proficiency as a street photographer completely in private, than Charles Darwin, who had few discernible artistic tendencies.

Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science III

I've reached the halfway point in the book and am enjoying it, but am mainly reading it in bed at night for a few minutes at a time. Not much space is devoted to Darwin's voyage on HMS Beagle, which was a major transformative experience in his life. Through the captain, Robert FitzRoy, and his reading of Charles Lyell on the voyage, he changed his focus from biology to geology. When he returned to England, Darwin became a close friend of Lyell, who helped him launch his career – as a geologist. Bergland does describe Charles's brother, Erasmus, a little and suggests that he may have been gay. Erasmus was a close friend of Harriet Martineau, the most prominent female intellectual in England at the time, and Bergland notes that Charles also knew her and spoke to her. Darwin himself hardly ever mentioned Martineau, and I think the same occurred with George Eliot. It is a little difficult to sort out Darwin's attitude toward women: on the one hand, one might say that he was a complete sexist who thought that the ideas of women had no scientific importance, but, on the other hand, especially for an introvert, he was extremely socially aware and didn't want to make public statements that linked him to specific women who were not members of his family.

Following the voyage, Darwin married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, after a completely lackluster courtship, during which she didn't think that he was interested in her. Bergland doesn't mention that he had a potential love interest before the voyage that had evaporated. While Janet Browne isn't particularly sanguine about the marriage, Bergland thinks that it worked very well. As a couple, they had identical social backgrounds, so they were operating on the same model. They each knew their predefined roles and stuck to them. I found this interesting, because it may be an example of a pre-feminism marriage that worked well for both the husband and the wife. Their personality differences seemed to complement each other. While he was highly introverted and disliked most social events and public speaking, she was highly extroverted and socialized a lot. With frequent visits from family members and several children of her own, Emma's social needs seem to have been satisfied. Of course, it helped that they were rich and had several servants. I should also note that, in those days, before radio, films, TV, computers, smartphones and social media, married couples often read books out loud together for entertainment, and this probably added a stability to their relationships. Darwin may have been slightly dismissive of women as thinkers, and Emma thought that he was a hypochondriac – though he may have picked up some very unhealthy microbes on his voyage. They both enjoyed their children a lot, and Darwin liked to compare them to orangutans. I doubt that Emma would ever have wanted to be a business executive or a professional athlete. Bergland makes a strained attempt to show a connection between Darwin and Amherst by saying that Harriet Martineau met the geologist, Edward Hitchcock, in Amherst, and Charles Lyell and Darwin corresponded with him.

The details of Dickinson's development are sparse compared to those of Darwin. Like her mother, also named Emily, she was a very good student across all subjects. However, as an adult, her mother spent more time on housework than on reading. Her father, Edward, tried to control which novels his children read, and the household doesn't seem to have been particularly open to new ideas or perspectives. After finishing at Amherst Academy, Emily studied for a year at Mount Holyoke, which was then called Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, about ten miles from Amherst. Though the word "seminary" at the time did not imply any religious training, the students were ranked according to their religious standing. The highest rank consisted of members of the orthodox Congregationalist Church. The next rank consisted of those who aspired to become members, and the bottom rank consisted of those who had "no hope" of joining the church: they were called "impenitents." Dickinson became an "impenitent," it seems, based on whatever she said, after careful consideration of her religious views at the time. She stayed at Mount Holyoke for only a year. It isn't entirely clear to me why she left. Her academic performance had been good. Apparently, besides disliking the religious pressure, she felt herself to be on par with the faculty, which, in those days, consisted of people with no college training. She gradually stopped going to church, though the rest of her family continued to go. This is not to say that she wasn't religious: it is evident in many of her poems that she had strong religious sentiments, but that she didn't want to submit to religious orthodoxy simply to conform with those around her. You might say that she wanted to divine the divine on her own.

Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science II

Because I had such a hard time finding good reading material over the winter, I got out of the habit of reading regularly, and now, with spring, I am, as usual, distracted by new projects. Nevertheless, I do find this book useful and will continue reading it, but at a very slow pace. Since starting this blog, I have found that learning about the cultural and scientific developments of certain periods can be quite interesting. This period is especially interesting to me compared to others, because it includes both the U.S. and England from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century, and I've already read a lot about it. Another period that I covered, less thoroughly, the French Enlightenment, was also interesting, but it seems to have ended by the late 18th century, before science really took off. This particular book is somewhat adventurous, because it links subjects that aren't usually associated with each other: poetry and science.

The chapters alternate between Darwin and Dickinson. So far, Bergland seems to be more neutral on Darwin than Janet Browne was in the earlier biography that I discussed. She draws a lot from Darwin's version of events, whereas Browne has a slightly more sociological take on Darwin. Overall, the impression I have is that Erasmus Darwin was thought of as somewhat of a crank by his son, Robert, and Robert attempted to raise his children a little more conservatively. Browne provides more of a sense that Robert considered his older son, Erasmus, smarter than Charles, because he breezed through school and became a doctor, like Robert and his father, whereas Charles wasn't very academic and liked to collect things in the outdoors. However, they were all quite shrewd about money. Robert married into the wealthy Wedgwood family and grew wealthier from his investments, and Charles married his first cousin from the Wedgwood side and never worried about money much. I haven't got very far in Bergland's book, but Browne portrays the younger Erasmus as somewhat of a dandy: though he did well academically, he did not practice medicine and socialized a lot in London, never marrying: there is some evidence that he was gay. I am watching to see how Bergland's account will play out later, but so far she hasn't conveyed the sense that Charles had a slight inferiority complex while he was growing up and psychologically was geared to be very careful about his work as an adult in order not to appear like a failure.

One area where Bergland does a good job is in conveying how the sciences were not widely part of the academic curriculum in the early-to-mid nineteenth century. The Darwin family traveled to Edinburgh and elsewhere for three generations for medical educations, because there was nothing available in England at the time. In this respect, though Dickinson's family wasn't at all scientific, the academic environment in Amherst was far more science-friendly at the time than it was at Cambridge and Oxford, or even Harvard and Yale. Amherst College was founded in 1821, and it may have had a better science faculty than the older colleges. Dickinson attended Amherst Academy for high school, and the curriculum there was atypical for females: it included math and science. While Dickinson's family wasn't poor, it wasn't rich: her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, went bankrupt and moved away to Ohio. The original Dickinson Homestead, where Emily lived initially, had to be sold, and she moved to a lesser property for several years.

Although I've got a long way to go in this book, I am trying to piece together a history of British empiricism and how it intersected with American empiricism. Empiricism in Britain has an extremely solid footing dating from the eighteenth century, from David Hume to Thomas Malthus to Charles Darwin. Though various forms of spiritualism became popular periodically, affecting Robert Owen and Alfred Russel Wallace, and perhaps even George Eliot, Darwin was a complete skeptic and knew from the start that it was all nonsense. With the religious history in New England, Emily Dickinson was also predictably affected. That is something that will interest me in the remainder of the book. For me, it ties in with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Emerson reminds me a little of a cult leader: who, today, discusses Transcendentalism as a serious movement? Though Emerson came from a good family, he was poor while growing up. However, his first wife was quite wealthy, and when she died from tuberculosis after just two years, he inherited that wealth. He decided not to work and to form his own intellectual movement. I have never studied it in any detail, but it seems like a mishmash of Romanticism, the enjoyment of nature, and an undefined form of spiritualism. Emerson was not himself a true naturalist and didn't enjoy slogging through the wilderness in search of specimens. I think that he actively recruited people for his movement, and he specifically wanted to develop Thoreau as the naturalist spokesperson for Transcendentalism. It seems that he was often at odds with Thoreau, who was simply too independent and stubborn to follow Emerson's instructions. I suspect that, at heart, Emerson wanted to be seen as an informed evangelist. He actually favored literature and poetry over science, and, though he was twenty-seven years older than Dickinson, she may have made an excellent recruit for Transcendentalism – if he had ever heard of her.

Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science I

Just as winter abruptly ended, I came across this new book by Renée Bergland, and it suits me perfectly. I'm not sure how quickly I'll work through it, but it discusses topics that interest me and is very well-written. Enormous cultural changes occurred in the mid-to-late nineteenth century in England and the U.S., and this book delves into how Dickinson and Darwin were affected in complementary ways. As a matter of preference, I like the days when poetry was open to science and science was less specialized than it is now. Bergland differentiates natural magic from supernatural magic and discusses how participating in the exploration of natural magic can have a therapeutic effect on people – it definitely does on me – and how it became popular during the period discussed. I already knew a lot about Charles Darwin, but only a little about Emily Dickinson. Darwin's time period (1809-1882) doesn't exactly match Dickinson's (1830-1886) but overlaps for nearly all of Dickinson's life, and they also lived on different continents. Darwin never visited North America and Dickinson never traveled beyond the East Coast. This raises the question of how they could have similarities. The answer is probably that they both came from well-educated families, probably read some of the same things and were both upper-middle-class.

If anything, Darwin's family was considerably more intellectual and wealthier than Dickinson's. Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus (1731-1802) was a key figure in the English Enlightenment. Besides being a doctor, he wrote poetry, invented things, studied flowers and had discussions with members of the Lunar Society, where he befriended Benjamin Franklin, among others. He was also quite politically-minded, and I like this poem of his:

When Avarice, shrouded in Religion's robe,

Sail'd to the West, and slaughtered half the globe:

While Superstition, stalking by his side,

Mock'd the loud groan, and lap'd the bloody tide;

For sacred truths announced her frenzied dreams,

And turn'd to night the sun's meridian beams.

Later, when he met Wordsworth and Coleridge, they thought of him as a "meddling intellect." After Mary Shelley heard Byron and Shelley discussing Erasmus, he may have come to represent to her a type of callous rationalism, which she expressed in the character of Victor Frankenstein. Needless to say, Erasmus Darwin does not fit within the Romantic tradition.

I'm not in a hurry to finish this book, as spring has already arrived, and may linger on it for some time.

Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers

I've been reading a biography of Tennessee Williams, mainly to find out more about his relationship with Carson McCullers. Tennessee is one of the best-known American playwrights, and one of the first plays that I read in high school was The Glass Menagerie. At the time, it seemed all right to me, though I wasn't especially impressed. It mirrored some of the dysfunction in his family, and, because there was also dysfunction in my family then, I didn't find it particularly interesting. Later on, I came to prefer the film versions of two of his other plays: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire. It helped that some of the best actors of the time appeared in these films: Elizabeth Taylor, Burl Ives, Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando. The biography I'm reading is a little too chatty for me, and plays have never been a central interest of mine, so I decided to read only the parts that pertain to Carson McCullers. This book repeats some of the same information found in Mary V. Dearborn's biography of McCullers, which I think is better-written, but it adds more context with respect to Tennessee.

Tennessee was six years older than McCullers, and he was impressed by her The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding. This resulted in his sending her a fan letter in 1946 and subsequently inviting her to his summer house in Nantucket, as I mentioned earlier. When they met, they bonded, rather intensely it seems. It would appear that, because they were both Southerners, both gay, and had similar artistic sensibilities, they rejoiced as kindred spirits. Tennessee later told James Laughlin "The minute I met her she seemed like one of my oldest and best friends!" Also, "We are planning to collaborate on a dramatization of her last book soon as I get my present play finished." On the other hand, Gore Vidal said "She was a crashing bore, but Tennessee found her sort of tragic and interesting." At that time, Tennessee's live-in boyfriend, Mexican Pancho Rodriguez, had a rather volatile personality, and he came to resent Tennessee's affection for McCullers. Before long, McCullers thought of Pancho as a gold digger. He also was an inappropriate person to mingle within Tennessee's artistic circles: no one liked him, and their relationship eventually failed. I don't know what Tennessee saw in him.

Tennessee later described 1946 as "the last good year before her stroke" (though she probably had an earlier stroke). In 1970, after she had died, he said "To have known a person of Carson's spiritual purity and magnitude has been one of the great graces of my life." 

So, this isn't adding that much to my knowledge of McCullers. I have found it interesting that these two people were able develop such a close relationship. As a practical matter, it helped McCullers when Tennessee encouraged her to make stage adaptations of her fiction. It isn't clear that Tennessee got much benefit from the relationship, though, at the time, it may have enhanced his professional reputation to be associated with her. I was touched when reading the Dearborn biography that Tennessee encouraged McCullers to get psychiatric help and even recommended a therapist. 

I think that the fiction and stage scenes in New York City were a lot more dynamic in the '40s and '50s than they are today. It was all really quite messy for those who participated in it, but people like Tennessee and McCullers seem to have had more fun than the current participants, who are likely to be operating under the constraints of boring corporate overlords now.

Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman

Having read some of de Beauvoir's fiction and memoirs, I had a few questions about her life, and this biography, by Toril Moi, was the best that I could find. There is also a biography by Deirdre Bair that reveals many new facts about de Beauvoir, but I decided to skip it, because some readers find Bair a little presumptuous. I also had trepidations about Moi's book, because it is primarily about de Beauvoir's ideas as a feminist, and I thought that she might write in the manner of Elizabeth Povinelli, who sounds absurd to me. Both are academics, but Moi is a little older. On the whole, I liked Moi's book, though it focuses more on ideas than biographical facts, because it does answer the questions I had and provides a clearer picture of de Beauvoir than she did about herself.

One of the areas that I was interested in was the role, if any, of existentialism in de Beauvoir's life. I had thought for a long time that existentialism could be a lot of bunk, and I now think that it is. Having read quite a bit on human evolution, the emerging theory is now that all organisms, including humans, are subject to biological determinism over which they have no control. This makes Jean-Paul Sartre's central idea, that we are "condemned to be free," a falsehood, and I think collapses his entire model. Robert Sapolsky even makes fun of Sartre in Determined. I don't think that existentialism played much of a role in de Beauvoir's life. She paid lip service to it for Sartre's benefit, but it doesn't conspicuously appear in her works. She is best known for The Second Sex, which is primarily a takedown of the patriarchy, and when it was published in 1949 it influenced some of the American women who led the feminist movement in the U.S. in the 1960's and 1970's, such as Betty Friedan and Kate Millett.

I think that in her memoirs and more so in The Mandarins de Beauvoir provided a distorted picture of her life and omitted some of the key factors that influenced her. She was the eldest of two daughters, and was initially very close to her father, who was a conservative, patriarchal bourgeoisie. After her sister, Hélène, was born, her father lost interest in her. Hélène was prettier than Simone and fit her father's model better. He had no interest in an intellectual daughter, and Hélène matched his bourgeois preferences by growing up to become an artist. In Simone's case, until she completed her education and moved out, her parents imposed strict rules on her, and she may have developed an abandonment complex, though she never says this herself. A case could be made that when Sartre became de Beauvoir's ideal partner, he accommodated her because she was his first intellectual fan, and he planned to have a major intellectual career. However, he hedged his bets by setting up the relationship such that they would not marry or live together, and this paved the way for many affairs. In fact, they stopped having sex early in the relationship. But he did live up to their initial agreement, and they continued to confide in each other.

As I said earlier, I don't think that Sartre was of much significance as an intellectual, and Tony Judt, the historian, thought that he missed the boat on Stalin's abuse of power. Angela Carter, the writer, wrote "Why is a nice girl like Simone wasting her time sucking up to a boring old fart like J.-P.?" It was de Beauvoir's minimization of Sartre's sexual escapades that first drew my attention to her omissions. One of the earliest ones was with Olga Kosakiewicz, who was a student of de Beauvoir when she was seventeen and had an affair with Sartre when she was twenty. Olga's younger sister, Wanda, also had an affair with him. Olga later said that she felt psychologically damaged by Sartre. Sartre's behavior toward women sounds as if it perfectly fit de Beauvoir's definition of patriarchal abuse. In many respects, de Beauvoir seems to have adjusted her lifestyle in order to match Sartre's. While she claimed to dislike lesbian sex, she engaged in it often for several years and passed on her lovers to Sartre. Occasionally it almost seems as if they maintained some sort of rivalry in their sex lives. In 1945, Sartre began an affair with Dolorès Vanetti, whom he met while traveling alone in the U.S. In 1947, de Beauvoir also went on a solo trip to the U.S. and immediately started an affair with Nelson Algren. This sort of behavior seemed to become a tit-for-tat pattern in which they both behaved badly but made a private joke of it later.

One of the main things that I noticed from reading de Beauvoir is that she rarely criticizes male behavior but freely offers slightly condescending advice to unhappy women. In The Mandarins, Anne, the de Beauvoir character, pities Paula, who cracks up when Henri, the Camus character, abruptly dumps her, but she isn't at all sympathetic and presumably thinks that Paula should just grow up. In "The Woman Destroyed," Monique also has a breakdown when her husband, Maurice, has an affair, and de Beauvoir once again shows little sympathy. Another thing about her fiction that I dislike is that she portrays young adults within a rigid ideological framework that seems unrealistic to me. Nadine in The Mandarins is portrayed as far more sophisticated for her age than seems possible, and so is Lucienne in "The Woman Destroyed." In "The Age of Discretion," I think that de Beauvoir is too heavy-handed with Phillipe, since he violates Sartre's dogmatic preference for the intellectual life. In these three instances, I think that she missed a lot by never having children and probably didn't understand them well. To me it seems that she may have been unconsciously inserting Sartre's self-serving ideas into her fiction, perhaps as a rationale for her own behavior.

Near the end of the book, Toril Moi does a good job discussing de Beauvoir's psychological weaknesses. This is generally concealed in the de Beauvoir works that I've read. From reading them, you would never know that she had anxiety attacks and suffered from depression, along with the abandonment fears that I mentioned above. In reality, she was nothing like the Anne character in The Mandarins. Moi writes:

For me, the most striking aspect of Beauvoir's choices is the fact that she consistently refused to examine her own emotional strategies with anything like the discernment she mobilized to analyze those of other women. What would have happened to Simone de Beauvoir had she taken psychoanalysis seriously from the start? But this, clearly, is an anachronistic question. Beauvoir was born into a pre-analytical age: in France in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s there was little incentive for her or any other intellectuals to consider psychoanalysis as a major influence on their thought or personal lives.

I would say that de Beauvoir's emotional investment in Sartre was a very bad idea, but that she can't be blamed for that, given her available resources at the time. 

The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life

This 2023 biography of George Eliot, by Clare Carlisle, was recommended to me by a reader. Reading it was like a walk down memory lane, because I had already covered most of the same material, but in the last century. Even so, I never stopped being a George Eliot admirer, and Carlisle, who is a philosophy professor, does offer some useful insights at the end.

I tend to evolve intellectually, and I have always found George Eliot to be an interesting case study. I came across her when I was about forty, and I was gradually working my way through various fields at the time. By that point, I had already decided that philosophy, particularly as an academic discipline, is mainly a waste of time, and I was taking a shot at literature while also becoming interested in evolutionary biology. Since starting this blog in 2014, I have gradually given up on literature, but I think that Middlemarch may be the one novel that is worth reading. I find it interesting because it successfully represents a local culture at a particular place and time and accurately depicts a variety of its inhabitants, including unvarnished descriptions of human behavior. When it was written, Darwinism was being discussed in London, and Eliot would have been exposed to it through G.H. Lewes and Herbert Spencer. Lewes himself had transitioned from the arts to the sciences and was personally acquainted with Charles Darwin. In addition, though modern psychology didn't exist then, Eliot understood people well. After reading Middlemarch, I eventually came to think of it as an insightful book, unlike most novels, because it provided more than the usual fictional entertainment. While it does contain predictable romantic intrigues and relationship failures, it is of much greater substance than a Jane Austen novel. Unlike some of Eliot's other stories, religion, mysticism and the occult are not at the forefront. At this point in my life, I prefer to view the world through the lens of evolutionary biology, because, if nothing else, it provides you with a way of understanding why things are the way they are now.

Where I think Carlisle does a good job is in showing how difficult it is to know how George Eliot made some of her decisions and whether she regretted any of them. The "double" in the title refers to how and why she paired up with G.H. Lewes and, later, after Lewes had died, with John Cross. I had thought about this before and have some thoughts now. First, I should say that it was largely an accident that she became a writer. Her father happened to retire near Coventry, Eliot happened to still be living at home, and their new neighbors happened to be the Brays. Charles Bray was a progressive ribbon manufacturer, and his home became a salon for progressive intellectuals. He was a follower of Robert Owen, who visited there, along with various London intellectuals. Unlike modern manufacturers, Bray and Owen cared about their workers. Eliot befriended Bray's wife, Cara, and her sister, Sara Hennell. In any case, it seems that Eliot may never have established any connections with London intellectuals if she hadn't lived there, and her life could easily have taken a different course.

In London, though she was recognized as a talented writer, editor and translator, she was not physically attractive and came from an ordinary rural family, so she did not have many suitors. She "dated" Herbert Spencer, but was crushed when he dumped her. That is just as well, because Spencer was cold and would have been unacceptable to her, since she was emotionally needy. The only other prospect to turn up was G.H. Lewes, who, though warm, had several shortcomings. He was short and pockmarked, and was an illegitimate son of a man who had abandoned his mother. Furthermore, his wife had cuckoled him by having four children with his best friend in addition to his three, and he couldn't divorce her under existing law without an embarrassing trial. He was struggling to support his wife and children, and, having generally failed as a playwright and a novelist, he eventually became a science writer – with little formal education. On top of this, he was an avowed atheist, while Eliot had a devout childhood. Nevertheless, the relationship met Eliot's needs, and, after he encouraged her to write fiction, they became extremely wealthy. Lewes was an extroverted man-about-town and did an excellent job as her manager.

The question that comes up is whether he was the sort of man who suited Eliot. From her point of view, I would say no. He was a slightly disrespectable bohemian who drew disparaging comments from his social superiors – to be expected in England. She preferred people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom she had met through Charles Bray. Emerson was a tall, handsome, elegant and religious college graduate, and she was instantly attracted to him. Part of the point of Carlisle's book is that the choice of a partner can be somewhat inscrutable. Because Eliot tended to be conservative and religious, I would say that there was a certain amount of expediency in her pairing up with Lewes. I think that she was quite aware that, from a social standpoint, Lewes was an inappropriate partner for her.

Following this line of reasoning, it makes sense that she married John Cross after Lewes died. She had taken a lot of flak for living with Lewes out of wedlock. Cross was tall and came from a good family. In person, I think that he must have been boring to an intellectual woman like Eliot. My guess is that she had the same social-climbing instinct as many women. There is some evidence of a problem in that he inexplicably dove into the Grand Canal in Venice on their honeymoon, apparently because he was having some sort of breakdown. This was all swept under the rug, and Eliot died a few months later.

I might add that the biography that Cross assembled after Eliot died was so bad that her literary reputation declined for several years. I've read it myself and can see why. On balance, I would have to say that Lewes was a better choice than Cross. If she had been a little more adventurous, she may have found a less burdened partner than Lewes and a more interesting partner than Cross.

Robert Owen

I seem to be past the point when I was interested in finding a better place to live. After I graduated from college in 1972, I stayed temporarily with my family in Connecticut but wasn't sure what I wanted to do or where I might go. For a time, I considered moving to New Zealand, but then I ended up moving in with my girlfriend, who was living in Columbus, Ohio, not exactly a utopia. I unenthusiastically got married, and, after an exploratory trip to parts of the U.S. and Canada, moved to Eugene, Oregon for a year, during which I lost enthusiasm for that part of the country. After moving to Indiana, having children and getting divorced, I moved to Louisville, Kentucky for a couple of years and then, with job changes, lived in northern Illinois for about twenty-four years until after I retired. Then I decided on Vermont and moved here in 2011. While I don't usually get very socially engaged with the locals wherever I live, I find west-central Vermont appealing for a number of reasons. Besides the low population and pleasant scenery, there are still hints of utopianism here. The U.S. became a testing ground for a wide swath of utopian ideas early in its history, but nearly all of them had some level of religious motivation. The more interesting ones to me are less religious and are related to optimal social structures, and those didn't become popular until the early 19th century. 

Robert Owen (1771-1858) was a Welsh textile manufacturer of humble origins who operated a highly successful plant in New Lanark, Scotland. He had worked in Manchester and hated the miserable living conditions created there by the Industrial Revolution and used New Lanark as a testing ground for some of his theories. His main goals at the time were to improve working conditions for his employees and provide them with better educations. 

When I lived in Indiana, I was not far from New Harmony, which I mentioned in an earlier post. At that time it was a tourist attraction, and I visited it. It was a town built by a religious German group called the Rappites, who were productive and successful, but they eventually ceased to exist because they didn't believe in sex or reproduction. It may be that they had expected Armageddon to occur, and when it didn't, they had no Plan B. They had purchased the Indiana land, which was wilderness at the time, in 1814, developed it considerably, and then moved away to Pennsylvania in 1824. Robert Owen purchased the town and surrounding acreage in 1825 with the goal of setting up an experimental utopian community. Owen became a notable social reformer and later influenced Marx and Engels. To some extent I agree with his main ideas, because he opposed religion, private property and marriage. However, his idea of integrating those ideas into a workable society in the early 19th century was unrealistic, to put it mildly. After he bought the property, he arrived in the East Coast to much fanfare and met John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. He also gave a three-hour speech to the three branches of government, telling them that he hoped to eradicate every social evil.

Obviously, Owen was completely unrealistic, but it would have been less apparent at the time, since human nature was not well understood then. While he objected to religion, he seems to have been unaware that religion serves a social function – it was religion that supplied the cohesion that allowed America's early settlers to survive collectively. As it was, he recruited a wide range of people to live in New Harmony without paying much attention to how compatible they would be. He seems to have attracted a few scientific people, along with more general intellectuals and artists, and a slew of farmers and tradespeople. They came from different backgrounds and geographic locations. From what I've read, it does not appear that Owen gave much thought to how they would be organized. With his faith in reason, he thought that they would follow a democratic process and figure it out on their own. They couldn't, and the community hemorrhaged money until Owen and his financial partner, William Maclure, abandoned the project in 1827. Some of the residents remained there and did productive work, but Owen's original plan completely failed. Unfortunately, I don't think that any social models much better than Owen's have emerged since then. A good start would be recognizing that people are not fundamentally rational.

Vermont, as I wrote earlier, was once a Congregational theocracy to some extent. That did provide cohesion originally, but has little to do with why I find the state appealing now. Because it never industrialized much and the population remained low, the groups that have lived here haven't been at each other's throats as much as in some other states. There are wealthy outsiders who have moved here and locals with reduced economic conditions that don't see eye to eye with them, but the wealth contrasts are less conspicuous here than elsewhere. And some of the liberals who moved here are similar to Bernie Sanders and emphasize equality as more than a talking point. Under these conditions, people tend to be more cooperative. The local newspapers also have a positive impact by covering all aspects involving the local population, which is more conducive to creating a cohesive environment than national news outlets or the internet in general. So, in my case, even though there are aspects of European culture that I prefer, which are absent here, I am resigned to remaining in Vermont, because I am better adapted to living here than anywhere else.

Carson McCullers: A Life: IV

I've finished this book, and did actually find it quite interesting. Ordinarily, I have difficulty relating to the thinking process of those who engage in the arts and am more comfortable with "serious" thinkers, however you define that. Possibly, because McCullers was not that distant from me in time and spent much of her life in Nyack, New York, not that far from where I lived, during the last ten years of her life, I have more socio-cultural connection with her than I do with most writers. I'll just sum up the remainder of the book and make a few comments. 

Bébé had recovered and moved back to Nyack, but died in June, 1955, when McCullers was thirty-eight. At that time, McCullers was working on a stage adaptation of The Square Root of Wonderful with Arnold Saint-Subber, who was gay. They developed a very close relationship, but he eventually moved off the project. That story is autobiographical and contains elements of both McCullers and Reeves, but is was a flop as a play on Broadway in 1957. McCullers' health was poor, and she came under the psychiatric care of Mary Mercer, who lived in Nyack, in 1958, when she was working on the novel Clock Without Hands. By this time, McCullers was becoming a regular at hospitals, and she finally received a medical explanation of her condition. It was thought that a strep throat infection during her childhood had led to rheumatic heart fever, which in turn had caused her strokes. There was no evidence that the strokes had caused brain damage. However, she was partially paralyzed on her left side and received corrective surgery. 

Mary Mercer initially did a Freudian analysis of McCullers, but it doesn't seem to have produced any insights. Nevertheless, McCullers chose to keep records of her psychotherapy sessions for possible future use. Mercer became a very close friend and, as an M.D., gradually took charge of her other medical needs. Since McCullers was becoming more physically disabled, she also became more dependent on her African-American housekeeper, Ida Reeder, who had earlier worked for her mother.

In 1959, Isak Dinesen, the author of Out of Africa, one of McCullers' favorite books, visited the U.S. McCullers had an opportunity to meet her and discovered that Dinesen had specifically wanted to meet her, E.E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe. She had already met Cummings and McCullers, and Hemingway wasn't available at the time. Since McCullers was acquainted with Monroe, she arranged a lunch at the Nyack house with Dinesen and Monroe, which went well.

In 1961, McCullers finished her first novel since 1946, Clock Without Hands, which became a bestseller and generally received positive reviews. In 1962 and 1963, she worked with Edward Albee on a stage adaptation of The Ballad of the Sad Café. In 1962, she resumed contact with Mary Tucker, her childhood piano teacher. She was invited to the Cheltenham Literature Festival in the U.K. to speak at a symposium on "Sex in Literature" and flew there in September. In 1966, she met John Huston, who was working on the film adaptation of Reflections in a Golden Eye. They hit it off very well, and he invited her to his estate in Ireland. She flew there, on a stretcher, in April, 1967, with Ida to assist her.

At this stage, McCullers was almost a complete invalid. She had undergone several surgeries, including a radical mastectomy, and was scheduled for a leg amputation. After she returned home, she had a massive stroke on her right side on August 15 and died on September 29 at the age of fifty. 

On the surface, this doesn't seem like a happy story, but, actually, McCullers was very happy most of the time. She was quite strong-willed and often got what she wanted. While she could become a major drain on people, she was able to develop a few of the close, intense relationships that she craved. There were elements of selfishness in this, but this particular biography doesn't emphasize that fact. Possibly, her early dynamics with Bébé set the stage for the rest of her life. She was a first child who remained in the limelight, and her siblings could never compete with her. Furthermore, Bébé may have projected her own aspirations onto her, influencing her decision to pursue a life in the arts. She never developed close relationships with her siblings, and there were elements of manipulation throughout her adult life. One of her closest friends, Tennessee Williams, went to great lengths assisting her but remained cautious, because he knew that she could be a bottomless pit of neediness. It seems that her primary desire as an adult may have been to develop a close relationship with an older female – like Bébé – and be bathed in uncritical love. Ironically, men seem to have been more cooperative than women. Reeves and Tennessee supported her more than all of the women except Mary Mercer, who helped her partly in her role as a doctor when she was an invalid. McCullers usually made a good first impression, but many seem to have been able to sense her intense neediness. Truman Capote and Gore Vidal made catty jokes about her behind her back. 

Some of the negatives about McCullers' life don't seem to be her fault. If strep throat as a child led to her illnesses as an adult, she can't be blamed for that. However, a case could be made that she took little responsibility for her health as an adult. The effects of smoking and drinking were not well understood in those days, but generally she seems to have done whatever she preferred regardless. It probably would have been difficult for her to break out of that lifestyle, because her family had a long history of alcoholism. She also would have been better off if she had never developed a relationship with Reeves. Despite his charm, he seems to have been psychologically problematic. He was confused about his sexuality, drank too much and took drugs. He was never able to make viable career decisions and stick with them. Possibly he suffered from PTSD. Not much information is provided about his family background, but it is probably not a coincidence that both of his brothers and his sister also committed suicide. I feel some sympathy for Reeves, because, in certain respects, he was McCullers' principal psychological support during much of her life, and she does not obviously seem to have reciprocated or felt any responsibility for his early demise.

Overall, I found McCullers to be intelligent and creative, and that her life was quite dramatic. Given her background, I think that she was relatively knowledgeable about literature and classical music. She also had fairly good taste, with some qualifications. Where I find her disappointing is that she didn't seem to have much interest in increasing her understanding of the world. For example, when she traveled to Europe she didn't explore the local cultures. Often she would just stay in a hotel room or with literary acquaintances. I don't know if she ever went to a museum. She seemed to focus almost exclusively on vocational activities and making new friends. So I'm ending up with a slightly disappointed, Sapolskyesque feeling: stuff happens.

Carson McCullers: A Life: III

After her 1947 strokes, McCullers increasingly required assistance from others to go about her daily life. She was partially paralyzed on her left side and needed a cane to walk. Thereafter, she was unable to do much physical work and needed someone to help her bathe. She, Reeves and her sister, Rita, all recognized that they had an alcohol problem, and Reeves and Rita joined AA. McCullers didn't join and pretended to decrease her alcohol intake but actually didn't. When in Nyack, her mother generally took care of her. Reeves got another job and an apartment in Greenwich Village, with a walk-up that was too demanding for her. She continued to develop crushes on women and became interested in Jane Bowles, the wife of Paul Bowles, the better-known of the two.

In 1949, McCullers, with encouragement from Tennessee, participated in a stage adaptation of The Member of the Wedding, which became a Broadway hit in 1950. She also became pregnant in 1949 and had a medical abortion. The success of her play and the publication of The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories boosted her literary reputation and income. She became attracted to Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish writer, who was a few years older than her. Their writings had nothing in common, but she knew that Bowen had affairs with women. When she visited Bowen in Ireland later in 1950, nothing came of it, and she left for Paris, where she met Reeves. Bowen did have affairs with women but apparently was not attracted to McCullers. I was surprised to learn that later she probably had an affair with Eudora Welty, who was not generally known to engage in such things.

In Paris, McCullers and Reeves drank too much and decided to get more involved with AA. Later in 1950, McCullers met Marty Mann, who had been instrumental in the formation of AA. She was also a lesbian and had a brief affair with McCullers. McCullers at this point was circulating in the highest literary circles and met the English poet, Edith Sitwell, at a party at Tennessee's apartment on East 58th Street in New York City.

In 1951, though Reeves was still drinking too much, he and McCullers traveled to London. Tennessee thought that McCullers needed psychiatric help and found her a psychoanalyst, Kathryn Cohen. Just to show the kind of people that McCullers associated with, here is Dearborn's description of Cohen:

Kathryn was an elegant woman with an interesting past, just the sort who drew Carson. Born in New York City in 1905, before the age of forty she was a successful actress and a performer with the Ziegfeld Follies. She married Dennis Cohen in the late 1930's, and when war broke out, she enrolled at Cambridge to study medicine, graduating with a degree in genetics. Regardless, she became a psychoanalyst with St. George's Hospital, an eminent teaching hospital then located in Hyde Park. She often had affairs with women. The writer Patricia Highsmith was most recently her lover, and Cresset Press [operated by her husband] went on to become the British publisher of Highsmith's psychological thrillers.

Cohen and McCullers did bond. McCullers became a patient at St. George's Hospital, and later was moved to a home in Sussex. But by the end of October, 1951, McCullers abandoned her treatment and moved to the Ritz Hotel in London. Her treatment was a failure according to Cohen. McCullers returned to Nyack.

In January, 1952, McCullers and Reeves sailed to Italy. In May, they drove to Paris. They ended up buying a house in Bachivillers, a small town an hour away. They liked the house, and McCullers loved gardening – especially growing tomatoes. However, she returned briefly to the U.S. because Bébé had had an accident. At that point, McCullers owned the Nyack house and Bébé moved back to Georgia. Shortly after this, McCullers was offered the job of working on a screenplay for a film directed by Vittorio De Sica and produced by David O. Selznick in Rome. She returned to Rome and worked on the screenplay, but Selznick didn't like it and she was fired.

The Diary of Anne Frank was published in the U.S. in 1950, and in 1952 McCullers was approached with an opportunity to write a stage adaptation. She met Anne's father, Otto Frank, in France, and they hit it off well. However, because of her slow work and other factors beyond her control, the play was eventually given to someone else. At her house in Bachivillers, her relationship with Reeves grew worse. He spent most of the time away in Paris. One day early in 1953, he took her out to a cherry tree in their orchard and proposed that they hang themselves together with the ropes that he had provided. She wasn't interested. In July, he proposed a double suicide again, and she immediately flew back to the U.S. by herself, without packing. On November 18, Reeves committed suicide in Paris, with an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol. At that time, McCullers was living in Nyack, and she expressed little reaction to Reeves's death. She spent time with friends in Charleston, South Carolina and then resumed her Yaddo routine.

On my next post I'll wrap up my commentary on this book. It is not pleasant to read, but I do think that it is quite informative. Besides the tragic aspects of McCullers' life, I am finding the discussion of the sexuality of McCullers and her friends surprising. It seems that within the literary milieu of the time, homosexuality was quite common. In the past, I had heard about the men – Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, etc. – but little or nothing about the women. Even today, if you look up Eudora Welty, who has been dead for years, on Wikipedia, there is no reference to that aspect of her relationship with Elizabeth Bowen. Possibly this difference between men and women was that the women felt that they had to hide their behavior in order to avoid damaging their careers. This is why I prefer reading biographies to Wikipedia entries. Many of the descriptions of people that you read in Wikipedia articles are not much better than cleaned-up résumés written by the person discussed. Another question that arises for me is the nature of female sexuality. Obviously McCullers and many of the women in her life had a fluid sense of their sexuality. Terms such as "LGBTQ" may address some of the ambiguity, but, judging from the past, many people were able to get along fine without them. To use McCullers as an example, she may have been "LBQ." How useful is that information?

Carson McCullers: A Life II

McCullers had a poor health history while growing up, and this continued for the remainder of her life. Generally, she had lung problems, and it seems that she had rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease. In 1941, while visiting her family in Columbus, she apparently had a stroke. At that time, Reflections in a Golden Eye was published, and reviewers generally didn't like it much. She recovered and returned to New York, where she met David Diamond, a composer, and took to him immediately. However, Diamond was gay and was actually attracted to Reeves; apparently Diamond and Reeves slept together one night. Shortly after this, McCullers began to attend the Yaddo artists' retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York. Reeves was working elsewhere and began cashing checks addressed to McCullers without telling her. This went on for quite a while and eventually caused her to divorce him. At Yaddo, McCullers socialized wildly and decided that she loved Katherine Anne Porter. Unfortunately, Porter was homophobic and completely rejected her, preferring to spend her time with Eudora Welty, who was also there. After this, she traveled to Columbus to write. In 1942 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and decided to return to Yaddo. In December, she learned that Annemarie Schwarzenbach had died in Switzerland following a bicycle accident, and, predictably, this was extremely upsetting to her. In January, 1943, she moved back to the Brooklyn house. In June, she returned to Yaddo. The Ballad of the Sad Café was published in Harper's Bazaar in August. Reeves joined the Army again and became a lieutenant, serving in Europe; via letters, he attempted to win her back.

On August 1, McCullers' father, Lamar, Sr., who had been in poor health – probably due to alcoholism – died, presumably by suicide. He was fifty-five. At this point, Bébé decided to move closer to McCullers and her other daughter, Rita, who had become an editor at Mademoiselle. In time, she bought a Victorian house in Nyack, New York, north of New York City on the west bank of the Hudson River. Nyack was a slightly trendy location for various people in the arts then. In 1945, at the end of World War II, Reeves returned, injured, from Europe. He attempted to start a new career, and he and McCullers decided to remarry. They lived part-time in the Nyack house. In January, 1946, The Member of the Wedding was published in Harper's Bazaar. It received poor reviews, most notable from Edmund Wilson, the leading literary critic at the time, in the New Yorker. This was devastating to McCullers, and she didn't publish another novel for fifteen years. She made friends with fellow Southerners Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams and vacationed with Tennessee and his boyfriend on Nantucket. In November, 1946, McCullers and Reeves went on an extended trip to France.

In France, they lived luxuriously, and they also traveled to Rome. They had many connections, and McCullers' books were already popular in France. Their social conduct was appalling on some occasions. Besides both of them drinking excessively, Reeves had sex with a daughter of one of their friends. He was also thought to be taking drugs. McCullers had her second stroke in the summer of 1947. Later, she had a kidney infection and a third stroke. They flew back to the U.S. on November 30, and McCullers received medical treatment.

To a reader of this book, McCullers' life following the publication of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter seems to be a disaster-in-progress. In just seven years, she became dissolute, and Reeves was even worse. At this point, I'm not sure how much of this is the result of their psychiatric conditions, how much of it is the result of their inexperience and lack of preparation, and how much of it is the result of a complex literary environment during and after World War II. I think that this was a difficult period for people in the arts to navigate, though others, such as Tennessee Williams, seem to have managed well. It all goes downhill from here for McCullers, but I still like the Southern elements of her fiction, because, even with their limitations, there is a genuine interpersonal warmth between characters that doesn't generally occur elsewhere in American fiction. That was a long time ago, and warmth between characters now seems to be a thing of the past.

I should have two more posts on this book.

Carson McCullers: A Life I

I've started this new biography by Mary V. Dearborn. On the whole, Carson McCullers is not an ideal subject for me, because I'm not terribly excited to read more of her works. However, I do think that she was one of the best American writers of fiction, and if her health had been better and she had lived more than just fifty years, she may have produced more good fiction. For me, this book is turning out to be a further study in the history of American literary fiction. Her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, was published in 1940, when she was twenty-three. That year, she moved to Greenwich Village, and, therefore, McCullers' life intersects with other people I've discussed. Around that time, Carl and Alice Zuckmayer were fleeing Europe with the commencement of World War II, and then, after the war, people like Anatole Broyard and Denise Levertov moved to Greenwich Village. As of 1940, several European literary people were already in New York City. McCullers' life is also an early example of young people descending on New York City in order to become writers, and some of the same patterns are still in place. So far, I am finding Dearborn's writing to be quite good, because she specifically addresses the psychological questions that occur to me, unlike most of the biographers I've been reading.

McCullers, née Lula Carson Smith, was born into a middle-class family in Columbus, Georgia in 1917. Her father was a jeweler, and she had a younger brother and sister. Her mother, who went by the name Bébé, had an interest in the arts, and although their income was modest, her house in some ways resembled a salon. The family also habitually engaged in drinking, which later became one of McCullers' habits. Bébé identified artistic talent in McCullers, who dropped her first name at an early age, and encouraged her to play music. While she was growing up, McCullers generally dressed like a male, though, as far as I've read, she does not seem to have had transgender feelings and was more likely a lesbian. Her behavior during her youth seems to have been primarily asexual. She did turn out to be quite musically talented and considered becoming a composer or a concert pianist. For four years, she received high-quality lessons from Mary Tucker, an extremely proficient teacher who was the wife of an officer at nearby Fort Benning. They attended a Rachmaninoff concert while he was touring in Georgia, and there was talk of McCullers going to the Julliard School on a full scholarship. Then, suddenly, Tucker's husband was transferred to Maryland. McCullers, who had been extremely close to Mary, felt betrayed and began saying that she wanted to be a writer, not a pianist. There is some speculation about the nature of McCullers and Mary's relationship.

While she was growing up, McCullers was an average student and took no interest in the local schools. After she finished high school at the age of seventeen in 1934, she made several solo trips to New York City, and she enrolled in creating writing classes at Columbia, and, later, at New York University. On one of her returns home, she met, through a mutual friend, James Reeves McCullers, Jr., called "Reeves," who was four years older than her and a soldier stationed at Fort Benning. He was a charming and intelligent person who was also interested in the arts, and they developed a strong relationship based on their discussions, though physical attraction did not occur immediately. They married in 1937, when she was twenty and he had been discharged from the army. They moved a few times with Reeves's jobs, and when The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published, they moved to Greenwich Village.

The novel was an instant hit, and McCullers immediately drew the attention of the American literary community. George Davis, the editor of Harper's Bazaar took an interest in her and soon put her in touch with Erika and Klaus Mann, the children of Thomas Mann. W.H. Auden and Erika Mann were gay, and they had married in order to permit her to escape Germany. Through Erika, McCullers met Annemarie Schwarzenbach, the daughter of a wealthy Swiss businessman, who was a lesbian and dressed like a man. McCullers was instantly smitten with her. That year, both McCullers and Eudora Welty were invited to Bread Loaf, at Middlebury College, and Welty disliked McCullers, perhaps because of her drinking habits. They were also in competition with each other as Southern writers. McCullers met W.H. Auden there. After Bread Loaf, Davis organized a project in which several writers would live together in a rental house in Brooklyn. Before long, McCullers was living there with Davis, Auden, Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten and Richard Wright. They lived in separate rooms but ate communally and paid rent. The idea was that they could do their work there, and Reeves was generally left out, staying in the Greenwich Village apartment.

As far as I've read, McCullers has had an unsatisfactory sexual encounter with Schwarzenbach, who then attempts suicide; the latter has psychiatric issues, along with a morphine addiction, and she is hospitalized. As Schwarzenbach points out to McCullers, she is not sophisticated enough to be part of her group. She is nearly ten years older than McCullers, and their backgrounds are completely different. I agree with this assessment, and so does Dearborn. I am not looking forward to the remainder of the book, because it already reminds me of Katherine Mansfield, who was about twenty-nine years older than McCullers and went through a similar experience when she moved to London and attempted to become a writer. For all of Bébé's motherly intentions, she could not have known what McCullers would get into with her artistic encouragement.

Scientist: E. O. Wilson: A Life in Nature

This biography of Edward O. Wilson, by Richard Rhodes, was published in 2021, just before Wilson died at the age of ninety-two. I was reluctant to read it initially, because it is short and was probably timed to coincide with Wilson's death. The book itself does supply an adequate account of Wilson's life and sums up his work reasonably well. However, since I have already read seven of Wilson's books, this one didn't add much to my knowledge. Because Wilson was one of the most significant biologists to follow Charles Darwin, I think that a more complete biography may appear within the next few decades.

Wilson was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1929. Neither of his parents attended college, but his father had reasonably good jobs as an auditor of rural electrification programs and as an accountant. His assignments required periodic moves. One of the major shortcomings of this book is that Wilson grew up in what I think was a highly dysfunctional household, and this fact isn't specifically examined. His father was an alcoholic, and his parents divorced when he was seven. That year, he had an accident in which his fishing bait struck his right eye and damaged it. The wound wasn't treated properly at the time, and he later became blind in that eye. This was significant, because he was already spending time outdoors observing small objects such as ants.

From an early age, Wilson was exceptionally industrious. After his parents divorced, he stayed with his father, who remarried. His mother moved away and also remarried. He became an Eagle Scout. Because of his father's moves, he attended several different schools, and he skipped a year. His birth parents supplied financial support for college, though they were not wealthy. At the University of Alabama, he completed both bachelor's and master's degrees in four years and then went to graduate school. Eventually he transferred to Harvard, where he completed his Ph.D. At Harvard, the atmosphere was highly competitive, but he received a teaching position there and stayed for the remainder of his career. One of his colleagues was James Watson, author of The Double Helix and co-discoverer of DNA, who was dismissive of field biologists like Wilson. Wilson was initially somewhat dismissive of genetics, which he called "reductionist." However, he became more interested in genetics when William Hamilton published his theory of kin selection. 

Wilson's research interests changed over time, which you can see in the titles of his main books: The Theory of Island Biogeography; The Insect Societies; Sociobiology: The New Synthesis; On Human Nature; The Ants; The Diversity of Life; Concilience: The Unity of Knowledge; The Social Conquest of Earth; and Half-Earth. 

Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, became extremely controversial in 1975, when it was published. It was reviewed in the New York Review of Books, which prompted a group called the Sociobiology Study Group to submit a letter of protest titled "Against Sociobiology." That group included two of Wilson's colleagues at Harvard, Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould. They were ideologically Marxists and became a model for later politically-correct groups that automatically reject theories that present deterministic models for human behavior, which they immediately link to racism and eugenics. In 1978, at a symposium, when Wilson was about to speak, protesters interrupted, and one of them dumped a pitcher of ice water on his head. Wilson was not psychologically prepared to be the victim of protests such as this, and he disliked this period in his career. I think that Wilson did tend to favor deterministic models, which, after all, is what scientists generally do, and, coming from the South, may have internalized some racial stereotypes, but the protest against him was unfair, because he certainly had no racist agenda and was shocked by this treatment. This was probably a cautionary lesson to later biologists who chose to adopt deterministic models – Robert Sapolsky, for instance – and may explain some of the obliqueness of their writings. In my view, the New York Review of Books permanently tarnished its intellectual reputation by publishing a purely ideological criticism of Wilson that made life difficult for him for several years, even when his ideas were clearly more tenable than those presented by his critics.

Wilson later had run-ins with Richard Dawkins, after Dawkins published The Selfish Gene in 1976. Dawkins, following the arguments of William Hamilton, advocated a position in which evolution is driven by the multiplication of genes rather than organisms or species. From his work on ants and his observations of humans, Wilson advocated eusociality as a driving force in evolution. It is not entirely clear who won this argument – they may both be wrong – but eusociality is not currently seen as a suitable explanation for evolution in general. First of all, there are very few eusocial species, and one would expect far more of them if that were a driving force. However, it is clear that the eusocial characteristics of ants permitted them to become dominant species. Similarly, it is clear that human cooperation permitted humans to survive when all of the other Homo species perished. Also, humans are the only primates that are flourishing now. I think that the "grand theory" model in science has become obsolete. To a certain extent, it is the result of pointless competition among scientists: everyone wants to be the next Darwin or the next Einstein. I think that recent scientific findings indicate that, while the physical world may behave according to a set of rules, those rules, if they exist, are probably too complex for human understanding. Every language that we use, including mathematics, exists as a product of human evolution, and is ultimately not suited to answering fundamental questions about the nature of reality. Language is best suited to activities such as exchanging information, finding food, escaping enemies, building bridges and engaging in cooperation. In order to survive as a species, you don't have to understand the universe. Furthermore, even if we wanted to, recent findings indicate that humans are not fundamentally rational.

The main thing that I think is missing from this book is a meaningful discussion of Wilson's personal life. His father served in World War I, became an alcoholic, with ulcers, and committed suicide by shooting himself in the head when he was forty-eight. This sounded familiar to me, because my father served in World War II, became an alcoholic, with ulcers, and committed suicide by shooting himself in the head when he was fifty. This behavior is now routinely referred to as PTSD, yet Rhodes has nothing to say about it. Near the end of the book, he recounts interviews that Wilson had with the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Wilson said that he enjoyed being alone very much, and, more tellingly I think, said:

I want to feel that I'm in control, that I cannot be driven out of it, that I cannot be stopped, that I will be well regarded for being in it, and that entails control, and control means ambition. It means constantly extending one's reach, renewing, extending, innovating.

I don't have enough information to say this with much certainty, but it seems possible that Wilson's unstable childhood caused him to compulsively seek control for the rest of his life.  Rhodes says almost nothing about Wilson's adult personal life. It sounds as if Wilson did not pursue women at all until he arrived at Harvard. Once there, he seems to have dated only one woman, Irene Kelley, who did not have a college degree and worked in the Harvard admissions office. They married in 1955. She did not have any children, and they adopted a daughter, Catherine, about whom Rhodes says almost nothing. Irene died shortly before Wilson in 2021. So, to a certain extent, this book is opaque regarding Wilson's inner life.

Henry David Thoreau: A Life V

Thoreau's desire to meet and become well-acquainted with a Native American was fulfilled when he hired Joseph Polis as a guide for an 1857 trip in Maine. He was mainly impressed by Polis's ability to travel effortlessly in the wilds, and he subsequently wrote a portrait of him. That year also included the beginning of an economic depression, referred to as the Panic of 1857, which lasted for several years, and the Dred Scott ruling by the Supreme Court, which denied citizenship to all blacks. Thoreau also met John Brown and later became highly politicized at the time of Brown's execution following Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, which was then part of Virginia. In 1859, Thoreau's father died, and he became the head of the family. The same year, Thoreau was appointed to the Harvard Committee for Examination in Natural History, which was led by Asa Gray, a prominent botanist; this was perhaps Thoreau's only scientific position; they conducted examinations of Harvard botany students.

Because of Asa Gray's friendship with Charles Darwin, he received an early copy of On the Origin of Species in 1860. He shared it with his friends, and Thoreau became one of the first Americans to read it. They had animated discussions about it at Harvard, and, of course, Louis Agassiz completely rejected it, because he thought that "all natural species were separately created by God, unchanged through eternity." That year, Thoreau also delivered a lecture titled "The Succession of Forest Trees." This was published in newspapers by Horace Greeley and became the most popular publication by Thoreau in his lifetime. In May, 1861, Thoreau went on a trip to Minnesota and returned via Canada. In Minnesota he met Native Americans. After he arrived back in Concord in July, his tuberculosis worsened, and he died on May 6, 1862 at the age of forty-four.

My lack of enthusiasm for this book continued right up to the end. One aspect of this, as I mentioned, is Walls's writing style. Although she has the appropriate academic credentials, she projects a Thoreau-fan-club aura that tends to result in an absence of critical appraisal. That can work to a certain extent, because Thoreau doesn't really fit the model of a major thinker, and, describing him the way that she does, it becomes clear that he was informed by the environment in which he lived, which can alternatively be seen as the subject of the book. So, even if Thoreau wasn't that great, you get a highly detailed picture of the culture in Concord during the mid-1800's. Unfortunately, I'm not a cultural historian.

As for Thoreau himself, I don't currently find him particularly interesting. That is because I am not impressed by his ideas. I think that is partly his fault, because he spread himself too thin. He delved haphazardly into so many subjects that failure was almost guaranteed. His interest in Native Americans could theoretically have been developed into an early anthropological study, but it wasn't. His interest in the regional effects of farming on local ecosystems could have been developed into land management science, but it wasn't. I also think that his political writings tend to be naïve and uninformed. Then, although he delved into Buddhism and Hinduism, he did not seem to make a real departure from New England Puritanism, because Transcendentalism seems merely to be a variant of that. I think that Thoreau's scattershot way of choosing subjects was the result of his family background and the time and place in which he lived. He had no model in his household for choosing a career and pursuing it with a college education. Furthermore, Harvard at the time was nothing like a modern research university and was similar to Oxford and Cambridge, which were also still functioning like theological seminaries. Charles Darwin himself could easily have ended up as a clergyman, because he did not distinguish himself academically at Cambridge. So, although Thoreau seems to have been talented, he lacked a career plan and ended up spreading himself too thin. As a writer, he didn't have a practical strategy for developing a wide readership. In other respects, he held many of the prejudices of his time; for example, he thought that women were stupid: technically, he was a sexist. Then, as a writer, I don't particularly like his style, which seems archaic to me. Overall, I think that Thoreau fits best within the context of later developments such as the civil disobedience protest strategy and the interest in nature-friendly lifestyles, but I don't think that he provided any definitive writings on those or other subjects. It is possible that, had he remained in good health for another twenty years, he may have produced something more closely resembling a magnum opus than Walden.