The Brontës IV

I'm only up to 1840, when the Brontë children were in their twenties. There is too much information to sum everything up neatly. Charlotte didn't teach for long at the Roe Head School, but Emily and Anne attended briefly while she was there. In 1838, Emily became a teacher in Halifax. Charlotte became a governess in 1839. Anne attended Roe Head when Emily left, but herself left in 1837 following an illness and was briefly a governess. At one point, the three sisters all ended up back at Haworth, a situation that they did not object to. In Branwell's case, he wrote to Wordsworth but was ignored. He later wrote to Coleridge, who did respond and liked the samples of his writing that he had sent. They met. Charlotte also corresponded with Coleridge successfully. 

One of the most interesting aspects of the Brontë family was the way that the children collaborated on writing projects. Branwell and Charlotte wrote about the imaginary world of Angria and Emily and Anne wrote about the imaginary world of Gondal. Branwell liked to think of himself as a heroic, Byronic figure, and Charlotte initially went along with him. Gondal was a less violent and more fantastical world, which Emily and Anne preferred. Eventually Charlotte distanced herself from Branwell's style. The four of them preferred being at home to teaching or working as governesses. The household was like an MFA program for teenagers, with courses in heroic fiction and Gothic fiction. I have noticed that children with a particular talent can become extremely proficient if they are able to pursue it in an unfettered manner.  Over time, it seems that Charlotte and Anne moved closer to realist fiction with elements of social criticism. I've only read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, so my perspective is somewhat limited. While there does not seem to be any clear evidence, it seems likely that Charlotte read A Vindication of the Rights of Women, by Mary Wollstonecraft, and though her novel contains some of the whimsical elements of Angria, it can also be read as the comeuppance of a male chauvinist pig, Edward Rochester. Of the four surviving Brontë children, Charlotte had the most exposure to the outside world and was probably more attuned to the inequities of society. Some of this had to do with wealth. She was acutely aware that her friend, Ellen Nussey, came from a wealthier family and didn't have to work: she was happily traveling about while Charlotte was toiling away in unpleasant jobs. Then it would have been impossible for Charlotte not to notice that Branwell received preferential treatment from their father: she had to work in order to pay for his training as a painter.

Branwell did become a portraitist in Bradford, but judging from the portraits I've seen, they weren't very good, and he soon gave up due to insufficient income. Anne became a governess, and soon after Charlotte became one. Charlotte did eventually have a vacation with Ellen Nussey, during which they traveled to Bridlington, and she saw the North Sea for the first time. Branwell got a job as a tutor in the Lake District, a suitable location for a Romantic poet. However, he was dismissed in a few months, and it is thought that he had impregnated a girl and caused a scandal.

As in most of the biographies that I read, Barker is maintaining a psychologically and sociologically neutral description of the Brontë family. That may be appropriate in this case, because she is consciously attempting to remove the misunderstandings attributed to Mrs. Gaskell. So far, Patrick Brontë does seem like a conscientious and respectable father and citizen, though, consistent with his generation, he had traditional patriarchal ideas. However, when I compare him to my British ancestors, it seems possible that his judgment may not have been optimal. At the beginning of the nineteenth century in Britain, people were streaming away from farming and rural areas and moving to cities. My ancestors from Scotland, Yorkshire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Wiltshire and Hampshire all moved to London. They didn't go to college and learned trades instead. Some were tailors, some were furriers and one was a builder. To me, Patrick Brontë's decision to pursue a low-paying job in a rural area seems out of step with the time, though perhaps it can be justified by his lack of knowledge, having grown up in Ireland. There is also the possibility that Brontë's decision-making process was faith-based, but so far in this book Barker has not explored that angle, and she is being steadfastly neutral on the behavior of the Brontës.

The Brontës III

In 1825, at the time of Maria and Elizabeth's illness at the Cowan Bridge School, besides Charlotte, Emily had just started. Patrick withdrew Charlotte and Emily, and they were homeschooled by Patrick and their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell. In 1831, Charlotte left home at the age of 14 for Roe Head School and completed her formal education in 1832. At Roe Head, Charlotte had been a top student and developed lifelong friendships with Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor. From 1832 to 1835, Charlotte tutored Emily and Anne at home. This was also a continuation of the period during which Branwell and Charlotte wrote about the fictional Glass Town, which eventually became Angria. Emily and Anne had been involved initially, but they started their own imaginary world of Gondal at about this time. The parsonage overlooked the moors, and the children went on walks there. 

When the four children were all at home, their behavior seemed insular. There seems to have been somewhat of a family trauma created by the deaths of the two eldest sisters. At the age of 16, Charlotte already stands out as being more worldly than her siblings. This is probably the result of having spent more time away from home than the others. Charlotte was short, nearsighted and not pretty, but she was quite intelligent and often privately thought that people were stupid. Judging from her behavior, she seems to have been far more ambitious in developing some sort of career plan for herself than her siblings. Not much has been said so far about Emily and Anne, perhaps because they are still quite young.

Branwell, who was a year younger than Charlotte, is a different story. Because he was male, he was educated entirely at home by Patrick in order to receive instruction in Latin and Greek. I am still a little perplexed by how Latin and Greek became core elements of the academic curriculum. I know that Latin is thought to be more precise than English and may be more suitable for certain documents. But Latin hardly seems essential now. My best guess is that this situation exists because of the Roman influence on England. It was part of the Roman Empire from 43 AD to 410 AD, and then the Roman Catholic Church swept in and controlled the religion from 597 AD to 1534 AD. Oxford and Cambridge were founded in 1096 and 1209, so it would appear that there is still a link between the Roman Catholic Church and education in the English-speaking world. Note that Charles Darwin was forced to learn Latin and Greek in order to enter Cambridge. It had little relation to his scientific career. Many scientists, such as E.O. Wilson and Richard Feynman, did perfectly well without it. The Roman Catholic Church made Latin the language of the church, and through much of its time in England services were entirely in Latin, making them unintelligible to those attending church. It was the language of the elite.

As far as I've read, Branwell is only 18, and is already showing signs of future failure. This was a very arts-intensive household. All of the children could write well; they could all draw or paint well; they could all play the piano. Branwell played the organ at the church and also the flute. Charlotte's poor eyesight caused her to give up the piano. Branwell's lack of early exposure to the outside world may possibly have interfered with his attempts to develop a career. Apparently he wanted to be an artist and wrote a letter to the Royal Academy of Arts but didn't send it. He was also considering being a poet and wrote to Blackwood's Magazine, which was very popular in the Brontë household, but that didn't lead anywhere. It may be that the girls were being directed by Patrick to become governesses or teachers, which had inexpensive preparations, whereas Branwell was underfunded for a loftier career. He did have an art teacher for a while, but the teacher wasn't very proficient, and, as a result, neither was Branwell. In 1835, Charlotte returned to Roe Head as a teacher, at least in part to help fund Branwell's art education. Patrick was a Tory, and, in modern terms, a sexist. He encouraged Charlotte to write only for recreation and to enjoy her traditional female duties, which she often didn't.

The Brontës II

As you may have guessed, I'm not in reading mode and am moving through this book at a snail's pace. Actually, I don't want to rush through it, because it is not only interesting to me but also of extremely high quality. There is too much information in the book to provide a detailed summary, but I will make an effort to extract some of what I think are the important facts. The writing isn't entirely in exact chronological order but is still easy to follow.

The chronology skips ahead to the time of Charlotte's death in 1855. Her siblings had already died. Charlotte had published four novels, Emily one and Anne two. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall had all been popular, but they were often considered "coarse" and were criticized accordingly. Charlotte admired reviews written by G.H. Lewes, probably because he was straightforward and unpretentious. She was relieved that his review of Jane Eyre was generally positive. They corresponded and eventually met, but had a falling out when he wrote a negative review of Shirley. Following Charlotte's death, Patrick asked Mrs. Gaskell, the novelist, to write a biography of her. She had been acquainted with Charlotte and had previously visited Haworth. That biography shaped public opinion of the Brontës for many years, and Barker goes to great lengths in this book to correct the errors promulgated by Gaskell. As a novelist, Gaskell was probably not the right person for a biography, and she apparently made several inaccurate descriptions. The one of most concern to Barker is her characterization of Patrick as stern, remote and volatile. To some extent, Barker's book is a corrective, indicating that Patrick was close to his children and sensitive to their needs. 

Haworth in 1820 had problems similar to those in other rural towns at the time, i.e., families were enormous, and people died young from tuberculosis or scarlet fever. In Haworth, the local sanitation was also poor, with untreated sewage accumulating in a ditch by the road. The Brontës apparently had a working privy. In those days, the population of Haworth was growing, but the people were poor. This all added up to a very high death rate. I am often amazed to read descriptions of the daily lives of people hundreds of years ago, and enjoyed the description of a church service in 1833 written by a friend of Charlotte:

The people assembled, but it was apparently to listen, any part beyond that was quite out of their reckoning. All through the Prayers a stolid look of apathy was fixed in the generality of their faces, then they sat or leaned in their pews; (some few perhaps were resting after a long walk over the moors). The children from the school pattered in after service had commenced, and pattered out again before the sermon. <began> The sexton with a long staff continually walked round in the aisles 'knobbing' sleepers when he dare, shaking his head at and threatening unruly children, but when the sermon began there was a change, attitudes took the listening form, eyes were turned on the speaker. It was curious now to note <to note> the expression, a rustic untaught intelligence gleamed in their faces, in some a daring doubting questioning look as if the lips would like to say something defiant.

Patrick had a fairly heavy workload, with baptisms, burials and marriages. In 1821, Maria became ill, and her health gradually declined. Elizabeth Firth, a friend from Thornton, came to help. Later, Maria's sister, Elizabeth Branwell, came from Penzance to help. Maria died on September 15, 1821; the cause was thought at the time to be uterine cancer. Maria's death meant that her inheritance from her parents, which was paid as an annuity, would cease. This put an immediate financial pressure on Patrick, and his subsequent behavior seems to indicate that he was in a panic. In December, Patrick proposed to Elizabeth Firth; she was deeply offended and temporarily broke off contact with the Brontës. Elizabeth Branwell did stay and help for a long period, but in those days it was illegal for a sister of a deceased woman to marry her husband. Barker speculates that Patrick also considered proposing to Isabella Drury, another wealthy local woman, but apparently he didn't. Just to show how desperate Patrick was, he also contacted Mary Burder, his former fiancée from Wethersfield, whom he hadn't seen in nearly fifteen years. She was still unmarried, but his overtures went nowhere.

Barker continues with Brontë family life in Haworth. The Brontë children were quite creative by any standard. Branwell went by his middle name and dropped "Patrick." Apparently he came up with various fictional ideas, and Charlotte, Emily and Anne followed suit. They wrote stories and made tiny books in which the print resembled that of a real book. Maria, Elizabeth and Charlotte attended the Cowan Bridge School, which was fictionalized by Charlotte in Jane Eyre as Lowood School. The conditions were rather bleak there, and both Maria and Elizabeth died from the tuberculosis that they contracted. However, in Barker's account, the school was not particularly substandard for the time. There do seem to be special linguistic and storytelling abilities in the family.

The Brontës I

I've embarked on this extremely long biography by Julie Barker. It is going to take me a lot of time to finish, so I may end up making posts on other topics intermittently. The book is thorough and extremely well-written. It covers more people than the other biographies I've read, and also references historical events such as the Napoleonic Wars, particularly the Battle of Waterloo, because the family patriarch, Patrick Brontë, admired the Duke of Wellington. There is also a fair amount of social history. Brontë was a contemporary of Robert Owen and Jane Austen. In the north of England, the mills were dominating the economy, the Luddites were rebelling, and there was a lot of pollution. In the south of England, there was an epidemic of social climbing, as chronicled by Jane Austen, who lived in Chawton, Hampshire (at the same time as some of my ancestors). The Brontës ended up in Haworth, West Riding, Yorkshire (I also had ancestors in Spofforth, nearby, at about that time). Though I am looking forward to reading the book, I have some trepidations. That is because, although Patrick Brontë lived to the ripe old age of 84, everyone else died young, including five daughters, one son and his wife. The entire Yorkshire branch of the Brontës became extinct then, since he had no grandchildren. Furthermore, he was an Anglican cleric, which may have appealed to George Eliot when she wrote Scenes of Clerical Life, published in 1858, at the beginning of her career. If you've read much of this blog, you will have noticed that I'm not a religious zealot.

Patrick was the first of ten children born to Hugh Brunty in 1777. Hugh was a poor, illiterate Protestant farmhand who had moved from southern Ireland to Northern Ireland. Patrick was mostly self-educated, and decided that he wanted to attend college and become an Evangelical Anglican preacher. He had been a tutor for Reverend Thomas Tighe's children, and Tighe agreed to sponsor him for admission to St. John's College, Cambridge, which he had attended. In those days, a recommendation from Tighe was all that was required for entry. Though he had little money, Patrick left for Cambridge in 1802, when he was 25. He had a sizar scholarship, which was not generous and required him to perform various jobs. He graduated in 1806. It isn't entirely clear to me why he changed the spelling of his name, but I think that he didn't want be identified as Irish. Furthermore, the Irish probably faced a social stigma in England at the time. Patrick had little contact with his family after he left for college.

This book does have the years at the top of each odd-numbered page, but it is still a little difficult to grasp the chronology of events by date, particularly the timing of the sequence of events from Patrick's departure from Cambridge in 1806 to his arrival in Haworth in 1820. During that period he became an ordained preacher and worked in several parishes, seeking his own. The first was in Wethersfield, Essex, in 1806, where he was the curate for two years. While there, he had a whirlwind romance with Mary Burder, and they planned to marry. She came from a wealthier family, and, when they rejected Patrick, he became assistant curate in Wellington, Somerset. In less than a year, he moved to Yorkshire in 1809 and became curate in Dewsbury, West Riding. He subsequently held positions in nearby Hartshead and Thornton, and finally Haworth in 1820, where he was offered the position of perpetual curate.

I suspect that Patrick was sensitive to English snobbery and recognized that there would be less of it in Yorkshire. So far he seems to be fairly extroverted and could read people easily and make friends when he wanted to. I sort of noticed the same thing on my first long trip to Oxford in 1993. After a few days in Oxford, I immediately noticed what I think of as the crudity of the people in York when I visited there. More recently, when reading about Charles Darwin, I was struck by the fact that his brother, Erasmus, who studied medicine in Edinburgh after graduating from Cambridge, disliked Edinburgh to the extent that he didn't socialize at all and returned to England as soon as he could. In his later life, he was sort of a social butterfly in London. In those days, people in Oxford and Cambridge were highly sensitive to accents and judged others accordingly.

Patrick seems to have been fairly busy once he arrived in Yorkshire, but was still interested in a spouse. In early 1812, while living in Hartshead, he visited John Fennell, a friend from Wellington, in nearby Rawdon. There he met Maria Branwell, who was a niece of Fennell's wife and had moved in with them from Penzance after the deaths of her parents:

Maria was twenty-nine years old, petite and elegant though not pretty; pious and something of a bluestocking but also of a bright, cheerful disposition. She was the daughter of a successful, property-owning grocer and tea merchant of Penzance, Thomas Branwell, who had died in 1808; her mother, Anne Carne, the daughter of a silversmith in the town, had died a year after her husband. Maria had grown up in a totally different world from Patrick. The eighth of eleven children, at least three of whom had survived infancy, Maria had enjoyed all the benefits of belonging to a prosperous family in a small town.

After an enthusiastic courtship, Patrick and Maria were married on December 29, 1812 in Guiseley. Patrick had been living in Hightown while working in Thornton, and moved to a different house in Hightown with Maria after the marriage until 1815, when they moved to Thornton. Their first child, Maria, was born in Hightown in 1814, their second child, Elizabeth, was born in Hightown in 1815. The remaining children were born in Thornton: Charlotte in 1816, Patrick in 1817, Emily in 1818, and Anne in 1820. In April of that year, the entire family moved to Haworth Parsonage.

Though there has so far in the book not been much discussion of writing, I should mention that in 1815 Patrick published The Cottage in the Wood, or the Art of Becoming Rich and Happy. He also anonymously published the novella The Maid of Killarney: or, Albion and Flora: a Modern Tale in Which Are Interwoven Some Cursory Remarks on Religion and Politics in 1818. In addition there were two books of poems: Cottage Poems (1811) and The Rural Minstrel (1813).

Éric Rohmer: A Biography V

I did finish the book, though it does not quite live up to my biographical ideals. There is a great deal of information provided about Rohmer, but nearly all of it is in the strict context of filmography. He made a large number of films, and I've only seen a fraction of them. Toward the end of his life he worked on The Lady and the Duke, a historical drama set during the French Revolution. Unlike most of his films, it had a significant budget and a large crew, and, while it received positive reviews, it seems forgotten today. Of the films that I've seen recently, I'll just mention my favorites. I'd say that A Summer's Tale is my favorite, because it draws excellent performances from the actors, and the subject matter is one that Rohmer obsessed over for his entire career: the relationship between the sexes (before LGTBQ came along). For me, Rohmer is one of the few filmmakers who portrays women whom I find interesting. This is displayed in their perceptiveness and complexity, and is something that you don't generally see in films, particularly in American films: for that matter, those characteristics often seems nonexistent in American women. My second favorite is probably Claire's Knee, which, besides the beautiful scenery, includes interesting young and older women and good dialogue. The Jerome character and Claire's boyfriend, Gilles, seem self-centered to me, as do many of Rohmer's male characters. I guess My Night at Maud's is my third favorite. It suffers from being in black-and-white, and I don't really identify with the male protagonist, Jean-Louis, who is a devout Catholic. Maud is really the only interesting character, though she doesn't get much screen time. Jean-Louis ends up marrying Françoise, a Catholic who had been having an affair with a married man. There is an interesting twist at the end if you watch carefully. Five years later, Jean-Louis and Françoise go to the beach with their young son and run into Maud. Apparently Françoise and Maud know each other and are not on particularly good terms. After briefly talking to Maud and Françoise separately, Jean-Louis realizes that Françoise had been having an affair with Maud's husband just before she met him. Another film that I like, perhaps not as much, is A Tale of Autumn. This features Béatrice Romand and Marie Rivière, two solid Rohmer long-timers. It is a little unnerving because the subject is middle-aged dating, an unsettling subject for me, but it has a happy ending. It also features a new young actress, Alexia Portal, who is rather strong-willed and brushes off her philosophy professor, who is pursuing her. In the other Rohmer films that I've seen, there were things that I disliked that were not offset by other features. In many of his films, Rohmer recorded the background sounds himself, and there are often very loud roosters in the morning. There can also be very loud insects on summer days.

The major deficiency of this book is that Rohmer's private life is practically invisible. You don't really find out about how well he got along with his wife and children or whether he maintained a good rapport with his brother. In a practical sense, he seems to have been a workaholic who spent very little time at home. This may simply be a manifestation of Rohmer's personality, but it could also be an intentional effort by Rohmer to prevent his family from knowing about his work life. Over the years, he became extremely close to Marie Rivière and Françoise Etchegaray, and Françoise never met his family until 2009, when he had a stroke. While Rohmer may not have been involved in any extramarital affairs, I think that the absence of information about his family life disqualifies the book from being categorized as a biography. It might also have been interesting to know more about his brother, René Schérer, who wrote about Charles Fourier, the utopian theorist who had been popular with George Ripley, Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalist friend.  

Éric Rohmer: A Biography IV

Rohmer's filmmaking career was extremely long, with his first major film releasing in 1967 and his last in 2007. It is confusing to follow his development, but, to some extent, he followed a pattern in which his early theme in the late 1960's was relationships between men and women, his middle theme in the late 1970's was more complex dramas set in Napoleonic and medieval times, and in the 1980's he returned to his 1960's themes. Part of the confusion has to do with the fact that none of his films were made in an industrial environment like Hollywood, and Rohmer's development as a filmmaker at his own pace reflects a transition from amateurism to professionalism without much external assistance. During most of his career, his films were made under extremely spartan conditions that would not be tolerated by most actors or cinematographers. He did all of the writing and casting himself and was generally incapable of raising the funds necessary for larger productions. I think that this was largely related to his introverted personality and penny-pinching habits. He seemed to prefer to do everything on a modest scale. Toward the end of his career, he had name recognition and a large assortment of supporters who had worked with him over the years, and, to some extent, his late films may be construed as better-made representations of his earlier films, though, because he was much older then, there are more middle-aged characters.

Far into the book, the authors are beginning to make more interesting comments about Rohmer. In the making of The Green Ray (1986), Rohmer hired Françoise Etchegaray as a supervisor. Under a tenuous agreement, his frugal tendencies precipitated a reaction:

These temporary conditions did not fail to create certain tensions. Especially when Rohmer, at the end of a lunch with volunteers playing secondary roles, quibbled about paying for their meals and ended up leaving the restaurant after furiously throwing the bill on the table. The next day, Françoise threatened to abandon everything if he persisted in acting like an ill-tempered miser.

She was the first to dare stand up to him, and that did not necessarily displease him. She was the first, especially since Barbet Schroeder with a willingness more complete than Marie Bouteloup's, to go to great lengths to realize the great Rohmerian dream: working from day to day, with the means at hand, without worrying about the constraints of traditional production (assistant, scriptwriter, work schedule) and freely adapting to circumstances.

There is also discussion as to whether Rohmer was politically incorrect. On the surface, he appears to have been: minorities are not featured in his films, women may seem to behave subserviently, and all of the characters belong to the bourgeoisie. The only thing that he seemed to have going for him was an interest in environmentalism. From my perspective, he had a right to explore in his films life as it was while he was growing up. As someone who grew up far from Paris and was born in 1920, I think that he is allowed to have some 19th century characteristics. For the most part he was apolitical, and his brother, René, described him as "a ferociously independent anarchist." To this I would add that, although some of the men in his films might be described as male chauvinist pigs, the women stand up to them quite well. Rohmer's women are often more thoughtful, observant and articulate than the men, who sometimes seem a little out of touch with reality, especially in his early films. I particularly like A Summer's Tale (1996) in which three young women and one young man have encounters in which they are all on equal footing. If you watch many Rohmer films, it becomes obvious that he absolutely adored women, and they are the centerpieces of his films. He is never attempting to transform them into dutiful housewives.

I am nearing the end of the book and will make one more post.

Éric Rohmer: A Biography III

I am finding that, although the French New Wave was a movement, it was not coherent compared to, say, Impressionism. The Impressionists exhibited together during the Belle Époque, and their paintings are now exhibited in museums all over the world, whereas the French New Wave occurred briefly during a less-affluent period. It was built from an existing medium and merely added slightly different styles, whereas Impressionism represented a permanent replacement of formalism in painting and a transition to modernism. Moreover, film is a more transient form of art than painting and doesn't lend itself to exhibitions in museums or purchases by art aficionados. Since the early 20th century, film has been an industry, and "art films" such as those made by Éric Rohmer constitute only a tiny segment.

As I read, I am slowly forming a more complete picture of Rohmer. In 1974 he said in an interview:

I have in reality three activities: (1) the cinema; (2) teaching cinema, which is a kind of theoretical reflection; (3) a more open pedagogy, teaching through cinema. I did that for educational television, and now I am doing it on the service of research. I am very happy with this triple vocation, because I don't want to confine myself in a personal universe that is pure fiction. I seek to retain, in every possible way, contact with the world.

This doesn't explain his choices of subject matter, which I think can be understood with a look at the available biographical information. There is evidence that he would have preferred a university position and felt that, to some extent, he was a failure for not obtaining one. That is what his mother would have preferred, and he let her believe that he was still a schoolteacher right up to her death in 1970. He also gave his sons no encouragement to enter the film industry. On some level, he always seemed to think of it as a disreputable field.  

As the authors of this book suggest, Rohmer's second full-length film (1969), My Night at Maud's, was in fact highly autobiographical. He was a conservative Catholic who wanted a Catholic wife. In the film, this is slightly intellectualized by a discussion between the characters regarding Pascal's Wager, but it is one example of his hidebound religious and social views. In his first full-length film (1967), La Collectionneuse, the protagonist, Adrien, engages in a lot of self-deception regarding the sexually promiscuous Haydée until he finally gives up on her at the end. In his fourth full-length film (1972), Love in the Afternoon, Frédéric avoids pressure to begin an affair with Chloé and decides to remain faithful to his wife. In his third full-length film (1970), Claire's Knee, Jérôme gets to know the young Laura but isn't attracted to her. When he meets Claire, also quite young, he is attracted to her. Since he is about to leave and get married, he elects to sublimate his attraction by focusing only on her knee to resolve the tension. It is probably fair to say that there is a little of Rohmer in each of these four male characters.

As far as Rohmer's film career is concerned, his popularity gradually increased among critics after Claire's Knee and My Night at Maud's. In 1976 he shared the Jury's Special Prize in Cannes for The Marquise of O, awarded by Tennessee Williams, but was not present that day. Taxi Driver won the Palme d'Or. In 1986, he won the Golden Lion in Venice for The Green Ray. Even so, he never had high box office sales by industry standards.

One topic that isn't mentioned at all in this book is Rohmer's influence on Woody Allen. Allen was an early admirer of Rohmer and to some extent copied his style. He liked the emphasis on conversation and the interactions between men and women. However, it isn't necessarily easy to see Rohmerian characters in short, talkative, neurotic Jewish New York men and their Waspy girlfriends. 

I should finish this book within a couple of weeks and will make some additional comments on the Rohmer films that I've seen and what I like and dislike about them.

Éric Rohmer: A Biography II

At the time of his marriage, Rohmer was editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma, one of the leading film magazines in Paris, and this provided most of his income. His own experimentation with filming was done on the side with what became his production company, Les Films du Losange, co-founded with Barbet Schroeder in 1962. His preferred cinematographer became Nestor Almendros. Everything changed in 1963 when, due to financial losses at Cahiers du cinéma he was fired and replaced by Jacques Rivette. He does not seem to have been prepared for that and briefly considered returning to school teaching. However, by then he had two sons, and his wife didn't work, and he preferred to keep the family in Paris. As far as I've read, in November, 1963, he began to make short episodes for educational television. 

If you have been reading this blog much, you may have noticed that I make an effort to keep the dates straight in order to get a good picture of the sequence of events. In some biographies that information may be listed at the end of the book and makes this a little easier. However, when you are looking at a "movement" – particularly in the arts – the sequence of events can be quite murky, and this book does little to remedy that. Rohmer produced short films in 1962 and 1963, but his full-length films didn't begin to release until 1967. In the context of the French New Wave, Louis Malle and Claude Chabrol had released full-length films in 1958, François Truffaut and Alain Resnais in 1959 and Jean-Luc Godard in 1960. So, technically, Rohmer's films fall at the tail end of the French New Wave. He was primarily a journalist during the first few years. This isn't necessarily crucial knowledge, but in order to understand how the aesthetic aspects of a movement evolve, it would be useful to at least have detailed descriptions of the motifs and styles of the directors over time and the extent to which they influenced each other. I am not finding this book very helpful in that respect.

Ironically, I first learned of the importance of dates while studying Impressionism in Paris in 1995. The instructor, Jean Lancri, University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, always stated the birth and death years whenever he mentioned an artist. This may be a little tedious, but it is a good way to avoid mistakes, such as considering people to be contemporaries when that was not possible.

Other than this criticism, the book is quite readable, and I am hoping that greater detail will be provided when I get to Rohmer's major films.

Éric Rohmer: A Biography I

This book, by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, is my current reading project. I like most of the Rohmer films that I've seen and wanted to understand him better. What I've found is that all human activities, including the arts, exist in ecosystems. It isn't always easy to recognize this, particularly when you live in a dominant ecosystem whose participants presume that it is the best of its type in the world. When it comes to the arts, Americans tend to think, or are trained to think, that box office sales, value at auction, copies sold, crowd size, number of followers, etc., are indications of success. However, that is just a current sociological phenomenon here and is unlikely to hold up over time. What I find is that various motifs and styles surface and disappear all over the world all of the time, and to understand them properly requires a lot of work. In the arts as in the biological world, the ecosystems are ultimately what determine the success of individuals. Often, when evaluating a work of art, it is best to start with the ecosystem. I think of classical music as an example. First there was Bach in Germany, then a musical cult developed in Vienna and was led successively by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. I think that if Vienna hadn't developed as it did as a musical center, you may never have heard of Beethoven. In the case of Éric Rohmer, I find that his particular ecosystem is not entirely familiar to me, as I have not paid much attention to the French New Wave. However, it does appear to be a distinct artistic and cultural movement, and I will attempt to discuss Rohmer in that context.

Éric Rohmer was born Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer in Tulle, in south central France, on March 21, 1920. His grandfather had moved to Tulle from Alsace-Lorraine, where he had worked as a gunsmith, following its annexation by Germany in 1870.  He married a Tulle woman, and they had one son, who was Rohmer's father. His father worked as a notary's clerk, and the family belonged to the middle class and were conservative Catholics. Rohmer had a brother, René, who was two years younger. They were close, and René grew up to be gay. They were both good students and enjoyed the arts. Rohmer had little exposure to film but staged theatrical productions at home while he was growing up. He studied in Paris for entry to the École normale supérieure in Paris and passed the written exam but failed the oral exam in 1939. He tried again in 1940 but failed. At that point he was drafted into the French army for physical work. He was discharged from military duty on January 31, 1941 and wasn't sure what to do next. He eventually decided to move to Paris, where his brother, René, was studying for the École normale supérieure. When the Germans retreated from France in 1944, there were severe reprisals against Nazi collaborators, and this seems to have traumatized Rohmer. Simone de Beauvoir describes this period in The Mandarins. She was twelve years older than Rohmer, but they had similar postwar experiences.

Rohmer never succeeded at gaining entry to the École normale supérieure. Instead, he earned a license-ès-lettres and was only qualified to teach Latin and Greek in a secondary school. René, on the other hand, entered the École normale supérieure at the age of twenty-one, which led to a brilliant career in philosophical research. René entered the same "mandarin" class as Sartre and de Beauvoir, but was not a close friend of them. This all had a psychological effect on Rohmer but didn't damage his relationship with René. However, within the Schérer family, René was considered the brains. In the greater scheme of things, it's probably just as well, because Rohmer's career was more interesting. One of the factors that interfered with his academic success was probably his shyness, because in those days aggressive students like Sartre and de Beauvoir were the model. I'm probably a little prejudiced on this because I've never had any desire to study French philosophy. In any case, René went on to have a successful career, despite once being charged with "inciting minors to debauchery." For that matter, Sartre and de Beauvoir were always a little depraved.

The relevant details in this book are a little slim, but Rohmer did work as a teacher for a few years and had a job near Paris. In the early 1950's, the film craze that led to the French New Wave gained momentum. All of a sudden there were countless film clubs and film journals. Rohmer wrote articles and was exposed to the new directors, such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol. I'm not sure exactly why Rohmer chose to use a pseudonym, but it may be that he didn't want to upset his mother, who was extremely conservative and had a low opinion of films. The actual films didn't appear until the late 1950's. Most of them were markedly low-budget. Rohmer seems to have been completely inept when attempting to make his first film, and I enjoyed this anecdote from Claude Chabrol:

Intending to make a film of Les Petites Fille modèles, he thought it would be a good idea to seek his actress in the parc Monceau. Imagine the scene: this tall, skinny, dark-haired silhouette wearing a cape, slithering silently down the garden paths with a package of candy in his hand. When he liked a little girl, he beckoned to her, saying: "Come here, little girl, I'm going to tell you a lovely story." After using this ploy for three or four hours, naturally he got himself arrested by the park guard. In his absolute innocence and entirely cinematic passion, he didn't understand why the cops hauled him off to the police station.

Some of the inspiration for the French New Wave came from Alfred Hitchcock. Rohmer enjoyed It Happened One Night, by Frank Capra. There was also an interest in Paris of American authors such as William Faulkner and John Dos Passos. Rohmer enjoyed the works of Balzac.

Rohmer's shyness may have impeded his romantic life. This was resolved as follows:

One Saturday evening in December 1956, at a dance at École des Mines, this very shy man had the nerve to approach a young brunette who was herself very reserved, and whom he had "spotted" (one might think we are already in My Night at Maud's). In doing so, Rohmer, who had never been very bold with girls, suddenly made good on a wager he had made with his friend Jean Parvulesco: "This evening," he had told him, "I will meet my wife." Her first name was Thérèse. She came from a good family in the north, having been born in Cambrai. She had been carefully brought up, was a practicing Catholic, and was twenty-seven years old. They began seeing each other. On July 13, 1957, Maurice Schérer married Thérèse Barbet at the church in Paramé, near Saint-Malo, where the young woman's family owned a vacation home. Rohmer, established in his profession, married, and aged thirty-seven, looked for an apartment for himself and his wife: his bachelor life was definitely over and he left, after fifteen years of Bohemian renting, his furnished room in the little Hôtel de Lutèce on rue Victor-Cousin.

Emerson: The Mind on Fire VI

In 1855, Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass and sent a copy to Emerson. Emerson read it immediately and liked it. He wrote back to Whitman approvingly. Without permission, Whitman had the letter printed in the New York Tribune.  Thereafter, Whitman became the poetic model for Emerson, and Whitman built his reputation on that. If I were Emerson, I would have disliked Whitman's shameless opportunism, but Emerson was also opportunistic, and in Whitman he had found a poet who seemed to fit his literary ideals. Since this is my last post on the biography, I'll say that I don't find Emerson, Thoreau or Whitman to be particularly good poets. By this time, Emerson was having a hard time living up to his "great man" ideal.

During Emerson's later life, there were growing abolitionism and women's rights movements, and he participated in them. To his credit, he publicly opposed materialism. In a commencement address at Williams College in 1854, he said "It is the vulgarity of this country—it came to us with commerce, out of England—to believe that naked wealth, unrelieved by any use or design, is merit." When Darwin's Origin of Species became available in 1860, he read it with interest. In Richardson's description, it doesn't sound as if Emerson or Thoreau had a good understanding of speciation, though they were sympathetic toward the general concept of evolution. Thoreau died from tuberculosis in 1862.

By the 1870's, Emerson was quite famous and was still accepting engagements. In 1871 he took a trip out west, during which he met Brigham Young in Salt Lake City and John Muir at Yosemite. In 1872 there was a fire at his house, but the damage was repaired. Following the fire, he took a trip to England, France, Italy and Egypt with his daughter, Ellen. They returned in May, 1873. His memory gradually deteriorated, with Alzheimer's symptoms, and he died from pneumonia on April 27, 1882, at the age of 78. Lidian lived to the age of 90, dying in 1892.

At this stage, I have a fairly mixed view of Emerson. On the positive side, there are his humanistic qualities: he valued equality and disliked material excess. He emphasized the importance of natural environments, but so did many others at the time. For me, his most important impact was on Emily Dickinson. Many of her poems directly embody some of Emerson's ideas. Though they never met, she read his works and attended one of his lectures. I think that what distinguishes Dickinson from the proclaimed transcendentalists is that she had exactly the right feelings and exactly the right words. To me, she is a far more skilled writer than Emerson. In Emerson's case, you can imagine him saying to himself "By God, I'm having a spiritual experience!" I don't agree with his endorsement of Whitman.

I think that there is more to criticize about Emerson in his postures as an intellectual. He was sort of a Romantic social climber, but his timing was all off. When he first arrived in England in 1833, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Goethe were already dead, and Coleridge and Wordsworth were old. The best ally he could come up with was Thomas Carlyle, who was not a particularly good fit for him. More significant, I think, was his compulsively wide reading in conjunction with his dilettantish summation of it. Also, I think that he set the bar for himself quite low by relying primarily on public lectures, often to uneducated audiences. Though I do make allowance for the fact that the fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology and archaeology barely existed in those days, he liked to quote people who lived all over the world in different cultures over thousands of years as if he just ran into them in Concord. I doubt that he fully understood the cultural contexts of what he read. This would have made it difficult for him to apply those models to nineteenth century Massachusetts. My greatest irritation with Emerson has to do with his adoption of the "great man" theory, which he probably applied to himself. To be sure, that has long been a theory among men and is still present in global and national politics. However, the idea had been suspect for quite some time, such as when Beethoven changed the name of his Third Symphony from Bonaparte to Sinfonia Eroica (Heroic Symphony) in 1804.

Summing up, I would say that Emerson was a nice guy who had an interesting life. It would have been fun to visit Emerson and Thoreau in Concord. But I think that an appropriate way to memorialize him would be with an excellent portrait – by Norman Rockwell.

Emerson: The Mind on Fire V

I'm finally approaching the end of the book, and am looking forward to that, since I haven't become a convert to transcendentalism. For me, this is light historical reading, which is useful for understanding earlier periods and the contexts in which people lived, but, in this case, with Emerson as a popular figure of his time, it stands out to me that very little of this has filtered down to the present. Rather than discussing that now, I'll wait until my next post.

Richardson provides a good account of Emerson's life, and the point that Emerson was primarily a lecturer is significant:

Over his active career of four decades, Emerson gave some 1,500 public lectures. Lecturing was a major part of his life and a major source of income. For twenty-five years he was out and away from home lecturing for four, five, or even six months out of each year, every year. He traveled as far west as St. Louis, Des Moines, Minneapolis, and eventually California; he gave 17 lectures in Canada but almost none south of the Ohio River. He delivered the great majority of his lectures in Massachusetts. He gave 157 lectures in New York State. He gave more lectures in Maine than in New Hampshire (35 to 27) and many more in Illinois (49), Ohio (56), Pennsylvania (42), and Wisconsin (29) than in Connecticut, the land of steady habits, where he spoke only 18 times in his entire career.

Throughout his life, Emerson also went on reading binges, sometimes in exotic areas. In 1846 he became obsessed with the Persian poet Hafez, who was a Sufi. This inspired him to write Hafez-like poems and translate Hafez into English. Of what I've seen so far, I'm not inclined to read Emerson's poems. Also that year, the Emersons decided to convert their house into a boardinghouse. This may have been because Lidian's health had declined, and she had difficulty doing all of the housework. They hired a woman to run the boardinghouse and continued to live in part of the house. He took up horticulture and planted many fruit trees, as was popular at the time. By then he had also published four books. But he became restless at home and planned another trip to Europe.

The trip lasted from October, 1847 until July, 1848, and he did a series of lectures at the Mechanics' Institute in different locations. While he was away, Thoreau moved in with Lidian and the children. This is the trip in which he met George Eliot. She was 27 at the time and hadn't started her literary career. Later, Emerson told Carlyle "That young lady has a calm, clear spirit." George Eliot wrote a letter to her friend, Sara Hennell, saying "I have seen Emerson – the first man I have ever seen." He also met previous acquaintances, Wordsworth and Harriet Martineau. New acquaintances included Thackeray, Tennyson, Disraeli, Dickens and Leigh Hunt. He spent time with Carlyle again, but they had some strong disagreements. Apparently, in his later years, Carlyle became reactionary and supported slavery. They both liked the "great man" theory, but Emerson disliked authoritarianism and Carlyle didn't. Even so, they remained cordial, in that they had each assisted the career of the other on their respective continents. During this trip, he briefly visited France and witnessed the revolution in which King Louis-Phillipe was deposed.

When he returned home, Emerson seemed a little disoriented and depressed. His driving idea had been to show the English how competent the Americans are, but he was concluding that the English were in fact superior to the Americans. He wanted to be a "great man," but how could he if he were hanging out with a bunch of losers? A conflict emerged with Thoreau. Thoreau had enjoyed the children and Lidian, and he may have preferred it if Emerson hadn't returned. Thoreau was also in a bad mood because he was unable to find a publisher for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which was later printed at his expense but never sold well. Thoreau was in fact stubborn, churlish and lacking in social graces, but their friendship survived.

Emerson gradually readjusted to life in Concord. He went on long walks with Ellery Channing, the "ne'er-do-well" poet. The equanimity in his relationship with Lidian was restored. He began writing again and took up Hegel and Swedenborg. On July 19, 1850, Margaret Fuller died in the shipwreck off Fire Island while returning from Italy, and Emerson was shocked and saddened.

Emerson: The Mind on Fire IV

I'm up to 1844, when Emerson reached the age of 41. His first child, Waldo, was born in 1836 but died in 1842. This had a devastating effect on the family that lasted for some time. He also had a daughter, Ellen (1839-1909), named after his first wife, another daughter, Edith (1841- 1929), and another son, Edward (1844-1930). He seemed to have a good relationship with his wife, Lidian, and she dutifully cared for the children and household and the stream of visitors invited by Emerson, which must have been a strain, because they often stayed for four or five days. Some of them were eccentric, such as the poet Jones Very. Two new women, Anna Barker and Caroline Sturgis, entered the circle, and Emerson seems to have been attracted to both of them physically and emotionally, though nothing came of it. He fretted about this for some time, as Richardson describes:

In August of 1841 Emerson was still protesting that "it is not in the plan or prospect of the soul, this fast union of one to one." In September of 1841 he repeated that "plainly marriage should be a temporary relation, it should have a natural birth, climax and decay, without violence of any kind,—violence to bind or violence to rend." The same year, he made a note, "I marry you for better, not for worse." In 1843 he was still upset by what he called "the vitriolic acid of marriage," and in 1852, after his trip to England, he was still thinking (as he wrote) that "everything is free but marriage." 

There was a similar tension with Margaret Fuller, though he seems to have been less attracted to her. She became the editor and a contributor to their new publication, The Dial, in 1840. This was a transcendentalist publication, and other contributors included Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and W.E. Channing, a preacher. The Dial was never popular and it ceased publication in 1844.

In 1840, his friend, George Ripley, invited the Emersons to live at his newly-formed commune called Brook Farm, which opened in 1841. The commune had been carefully planned and was organized on principles from Charles Fourier. After mulling this over for some time, he declined, because it had an intricate collectivist social structure that would conflict with his independence. Nathaniel Hawthorne lived there briefly. In any case, Brook Farm was never financially viable, and it closed in 1847.

In 1841, Emerson took an interest in Plotinus:

Emerson was particularly struck by two Neoplatonic teachings: the idea of the world as emanation and the idea of the ecstatic union with the One. For Plotinus everything emanates, or flows out, from the One, the ultimate power and unity of things. The first emanation is thought or mind, meaning the whole range of ideas from which in turn the whole range of tangible things and beings emanate. In a piece of visionary writing of this year Emerson says:

As the river flows, and the plant flows (or emits odors), and the sun flows (or radiates), and the mind is a stream of thoughts, so was the universe an emanation of God. Everything is an emanation, and from every emanation is a new emanation, and that from which it emanates is an emanation also. If anything could stand still, it would be instantly crushed and dissipated by the torrent which it resisted.

When I see language like this, I begin to think "Where's Waldo?" To me, this is not serious writing, though I can accept the ideas obliquely in poetic form, such as in the poems of Emily Dickinson. 

In 1843, Emerson's friend, Bronson Alcott, started a transcendentalist-themed commune called Fruitlands. That lasted for less than a year. In 1844, Emerson became an active opponent of slavery. In modern terms, he seemed to have a hodgepodge of ideas that would not cohere well today. For example, he supported capitalism though that is usually seen as inconsistent with most religious sentiments. So, I'm not exactly in awe of Emerson as a thinker at this point but will save my conclusions until after I've finished the last two hundred pages.

Emerson: The Mind on Fire III

I'm at the middle of the book, and it seems to be getting more interesting at this point. The five surviving Emerson brothers are starting to die off. Edward died in 1834 at the age of twenty-nine. More significantly, Charles died in 1836 at the age of twenty-seven. Charles was close to Waldo and had planned to marry later that year. Waldo had added two rooms to his house so that the couple could move in with him. An organization that came to be known as the Transcendental Club began to meet in the Boston area, and although Emerson wasn't particularly fond of it, it indicated that Emerson was forming a sort of movement that came to be centered around his house in Concord. At this point, Emerson's primary source of income seems to have been his lectures.

A heterogeneous group of people began to meet with Emerson at his house. One was Bronson Alcott, who was a rather eccentric educator and a utopian thinker. He was not thought to be an effective writer. His ventures were usually unrealistic, and he was often unable to support his family. Nevertheless, his daughter, Louisa May Alcott managed to become a successful novelist. Another was Margaret Fuller, a prominent journalist and feminist. Fuller added a dimension to Emerson's group, but she was also not a good writer. She died in a shipwreck in 1850 at the age of forty, which I mentioned in my discussion of the Thoreau biography. Thoreau himself probably met Emerson when he attended a lecture by him in 1835 when he was a student at Harvard. After graduating in 1837, he met Emerson at his house and began to become Emerson's disciple, though I think that that is a rather strong word to use, given Thoreau's independence. Richardson's book emphasizes how close Emerson and Thoreau were for a time. I think that, in Emerson's quest to start a movement, Thoreau may have been the only person who was of much help.

Emerson published Nature in 1836, and it became the centerpiece of the transcendentalism movement. At first the essay was a little controversial, but that died down. I have been reluctant to read Emerson because I know how he developed his ideas, I don't agree with all of them, and Thoreau was probably a better writer. Thoreau was a perfectionist in both reading and writing. He preferred to read everything in the original text, including Latin and Greek, and his writing was straightforward, based on his own experiences, and did not contain many abstract ideas. Emerson, on the other hand, was a frenetic reader, and was actively trying to piece together some sort of gospel, which did not occur to him spontaneously. He wanted to identify a spiritual essence in nature, whereas I consider that a waste of time, because it doesn't exist. This tendency, I think, places Emerson within a now-dead cultural environment that was still active during his lifetime. Up until the late nineteenth century, spiritualism was quite popular, and you could find it in Alfred Russel Wallace, Robert Owen and George Eliot. I think it is ironic that the system that Emerson was trying to replace, Unitarianism, is more rationalistic, and that survived while transcendentalism vanished. Another area in which I think he was incorrect was in his emphasis on individualism. He seemed to think that people could be trained to become more individualistic, and, though I suppose that might occur occasionally, for the most part it is an inborn trait. It is a commonplace statement now that individualistic people were more attracted to the U.S. from other countries than collectivists. Moreover, I noticed from an early age that I was individualistic, and I know that I was born that way, and that no essay would ever have affected me in that respect. Despite the above criticisms, transcendentalism probably did have some positive effects. It can be seen as a precursor to a respect for nature and environmentalism. Furthermore, it is well establish now that exposure to nature can be quite therapeutic.

So, I am looking at this as a story about cultural evolution that has little to do with science or theoretical considerations. Indirectly, Emerson was attempting to differentiate American culture from European culture in order to reduce the appearance of vassalage. But Emerson was hardly exposed to psychology, anthropology, sociology or evolution, so it would have been difficult for him to say anything that I would find interesting. Even so, I have to admire him for living at a time when people were open to new ideas and enjoyed discussing them with others – sooooo nineteenth century!

Emerson: The Mind on Fire II

At the time of their marriage, Ellen was already showing signs of tuberculosis, and she died on February 8, 1831, at the age of nineteen. They had been happily married, and this occurring after less than two years was a blow to Emerson. On Christmas Day, 1832, he left on a long trip to Europe, from which he returned on October 8. He was not at all wealthy at that point, and lived very frugally. Later, he received an inheritance from the estate of Ellen's father, but it wasn't large. On the trip, he spent time in several countries and met people. In Rome, he met John Stuart Mill, and, in Paris, he was struck by the Jardin des Plantes, which stimulated his interest in botany. But he really hit the jackpot in England and Scotland, where he met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle was the closest to his age, and they maintained a long friendship. When he returned to Massachusetts, he switched to becoming a lecturer and a writer. At a lecture in Plymouth, he met Lydia Jackson, who was about a year older than he was. They married on September 14, 1835. Eventually they moved to Concord, which was the ancestral home of the Emersons. He disliked her name, and they changed it to "Lidian." Besides being nearly a year older than Emerson, she was more conservative than Ellen, but she also seems to have been somewhat more intellectual. In any case, the marriage lasted up until Emerson's death in 1882. While all this is going on, there are various illnesses and deaths in Emerson's family, which have consequences with respect to living arrangements and financial support. I am trying to avoid writing about that, because it is not central to the narrative.   

Richardson is doing a good job showing the development of Emerson's ideas. It is apparent that he didn't really want to be a minister and wasn't a particularly good preacher. He seems to have taken it upon himself to distill a new conceptual model that would be suitable in the mid-1800's. He drew ideas from his readings and travels in order to, in effect, transform Unitarianism into transcendentalism. It is apparent that he was quite ambitious and energetic in this pursuit.

I am already starting to see Emerson mainly as a participant in the history of ideas who only makes sense if you look at him in the context of the intellectual currents in the U.S. and U.K. at the time. Unfortunately, he came along just as the Romantic poets were dying off, and before Darwin came along. Thus, like Thomas Carlyle, it is hard for me to see him as a force whose ideas have much significance today. Carlyle seems to have led a pro-Germany movement that encouraged intellectuals to adopt German cultural attitudes from the time of Goethe, but that all collapsed in the twentieth century. I now like to use G.H. Lewes as a barometer of intellectual trends in England during the nineteenth century. First he was a Romantic and a friend of Leigh Hunt; as the century progressed, he switched his focus to Goethe and Germany, like Thomas Carlyle. Finally, before he died in 1878, he was essentially a Darwinian devoted to the scientific method. Generally, it appears to me that Emerson was too old to be a Romantic and too young to be a Darwinian. It is also relevant that he had studied little science.

With this in mind, I'm not terribly excited to read much Emerson myself, but I will follow Richardson's examples and analysis in this book. One of Emerson's weaknesses, I think, is his belief in the "great man" theory:

Every great man does in his nature point out and imply the existence and well being of all the institutions and orders of a state.

I think that it would be fair to say that Emerson considered himself a "great man." Not a good sign. I've also been thinking about Emerson's famous statement from Self-Reliance:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

When I first read this some time ago I found it interesting and tended to agree with it. Given what I know now, it can also be seen as self-aggrandizement by Emerson. And, based on my readings on neurology by Vinod Goel and Robert Sapolsky, it is normal for aging human brains to follow methods that they learned earlier in life. Understandably, Emerson could not have known this.

Emerson: The Mind on Fire I

I've started on this biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Robert D. Richardson Jr. So far it seems to be well-written, but, because I'm reading it more for the historical context of writers in nineteenth century Massachusetts than for a specific interest in Emerson, I'm not finding it particularly exciting. Emerson and his family sound fairly extroverted, and, over the years, I have gradually come to dislike extroverts compared to introverts. The writers, artists and scientists whom I like best tend to be introverts: George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, László Krasznahorkai, Emily Dickinson, Vivian Maier, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and E.O. Wilson, for example. Part of this may be that in order to grasp aspects of life or the world well, one must be capable of observing them and meditating on them for long periods of time. The need to socialize reduces the time available for extroverts to excel in many fields. Rather, I think that extroverts tend to serve the specific function of fostering social unity in various groups. There are probably exceptions to this model, because most people aren't purely introverted or purely extroverted, but it reflects my observations of people over the course of my life. In any case, Emerson seems to me to have been an extrovert, which means that I am unlikely to find his ideas interesting. Nevertheless, it should be informative to learn more about how he interfaced with Henry David Thoreau and other American and British intellectuals of his time.

Emerson was born on May 25, 1803 in Boston. This made him about fourteen years older than Thoreau and twenty-seven years older than Emily Dickinson. In 1803, Boston was a town of only about 25,000 residents, but it was at the beginning of a population explosion. Emerson's father was a poorly-paid minister, and, like other families at the time, his was large, with illnesses and early deaths. The first two children, a girl and a boy, didn't survive to adulthood, then there were five boys who did and one girl who didn't. Emerson's father died 1811, when he was eight, so did not have much direct impact on him. The household, however, was highly literate, and Mary Moody Emerson, his aunt, was extremely well-read. He attended Boston Latin School and entered Harvard in 1817, when he was fourteen. This wasn't because he was precocious, and his family's church connections generally allowed the boys to attend Harvard. Harvard at the time was part boys' school and part college, and there were only sixty students in his class. He did not excel academically and seemed to prefer literature to science. He fancied himself a poet.

After graduating from Harvard in 1821, Emerson didn't have a career plan, and he taught at a school for young women until 1825, when he entered Harvard Divinity School, which he did not complete after withdrawing because of an eye infection. Recovering from the eye infection, he traveled by ship to Charleston, South Carolina and Saint Petersburg, Florida in 1826. In 1827 he returned home, visiting friends and relatives in Baltimore, Alexandria, Philadelphia and New York. He became a preacher and met 16-year-old Ellen Louisa Tucker in Concord, New Hampshire. She was a daughter of a deceased Boston rope manufacturer. They fell in love and married on September 30, 1829.

Besides the above, the book dutifully recounts Emerson's readings throughout and his efforts to clarify his religious beliefs. Of course, his religious struggles are of little interest to me, but I realize that they may be important to others. For me, the ideas discussed by intellectuals didn't become particularly interesting until about 1859, when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species; by then, Emerson was already fifty-six. I do find Richardson's book helpful for understanding the historical and sociological context of Emerson's life, but am doubtful that I would share Emerson's concerns. Hopefully this will not stop me from finishing the book. Because of Richardson's writing style, I may end up speed reading sections of it that don't interest me. In a worst case scenario I'll read only the sections that pertain to Thoreau and Emerson's trips to Europe. 

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

I've finally reached the end of this long biography, and here is the wrap-up.  

Her 1862-to-1865 period, when she first corresponded with Higginson, was probably her most productive. However, she remained reclusive and did not meet Higginson until 1870, when he visited Amherst. Fortunately, he wrote a detailed account of this visit. So much of this book is a recording of her interactions with family members and routine acquaintances that I found Higginson's impressions far more useful: he was a worldly outsider and far better positioned to make an objective evaluation. He found the household strikingly individualistic.

In the entry hall he heard a "step like a pattering child's & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair...in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & a blue net worsted shawl."...Twice he used the word "childlike." His hostess presented him with two day lilies as her "introduction," then asking him to "[f]orgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what I say," she began talking. She talked "continuously" but "deferentially–sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead of her"–and then resuming....he judged her to be "thoroughly ingenuous & simple." Although he doubted his wife would care for her, he considered much of what she said "wise."

"Her father was not severe I should think but remote."

"I was never with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her." Decades later, in a final attempt to sum up his impression, he availed himself of a newer psychological vocabulary: "The impression undoubtedly made on me was that of an excess of tension, and something abnormal." 

As Habegger notes, this is probably the best existing description of Dickinson and her household. Emily became increasingly reclusive as she aged, and she was only thirty-nine at the time of this visit. Higginson saw her only one other time, in 1873, and that appears to have been uneventful.

Edward, her father, died in 1874, at the age of seventy-one. In true patriarchal fashion, he left no will, and it was simply assumed that Austin would thereafter take control of the household, with the three women having no rights or inheritances. From here on, the book is mainly a sequence of deaths. In 1882, her probable "Master," the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, died. Emily came to know the popular judge, Otis Phillips Lord. He was about eighteen years older than her. His wife had died in 1877, and, after Emily's mother died in 1882, he apparently proposed to Emily. She did not accept. It's probably just as well, because he died in 1884. Emily herself died in 1886, at the age of fifty-five. At the time, the stated medical cause of death was basically mumbo jumbo. A more recent analysis suggests that she died from hypertension, which would certainly make sense.

Austin was having an affair with Mabel Loomis Todd (1856-1932) then. She was the wife of an astronomy professor at Amherst. She was a spirited person, liked sex, and had an open marriage – nothing like any of the Dickinsons. Todd worked with Higginson to produce the first book of Emily's poems. There has been criticism of their editing, but the book sold exceptionally well, and Emily's reputation as a poet was immediately established.

Habegger reproduces the entire title poem, which is about death:

My Wars are laid away in Books—

I have one Battle more—

A Foe whom I have never seen

But oft has scanned me o'er–

And hesitated me between

And others at my side,

But chose the best—Neglecting me—till

All the rest have died—

How sweet if I am not forgot

By Chums that passed away—

Since Playmates at threescore and ten

Are such a scarcity—

I've been thinking about the main influences on Emily Dickinson. Although she apparently admired Elizabeth Barrett Browning, her style is probably much closer to that of Emily Brontë. She also admired George Eliot, but George Eliot was vastly more knowledgeable than Emily – and a bad poet. While Emily seems to have been well-read – apparently she did like Henry David Thoreau – as a practical matter she was challenged by direct interactions with people, which excluded her from the kind of knowledge that makes good novelists. Still, I find some of Dickinson's poems to be remarkable little gems.

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

Emily Dickinson left behind three unsent drafts to a person who was addressed as "Master." This has caused a great deal of scholarly speculation, which, according to Habegger, isn't really all that important. One possible candidate was the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, who had visited her at least once. They appear to have been written in the late 1850's and early 1860's. At a later date, in April, 1862, she read the article in Atlantic Monthly, written by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, which I discussed earlier here in connection with Renée Bergland's book, and Higginson thereafter became her de facto "Master," though probably not at an exalted level. The intellectual men who attracted Dickinson's attention tended to have religious training, and that even included Higginson.

Habegger's book is full of minutiae regarding boring bourgeois life in the last days of Puritan New England. He is dutifully reporting it, given that he is a scholar of the subject, but, understandably, this is not a particularly exciting topic, to me at least. Even so, it is still of some value to know that the people in Dickinson's life faced problems different from the ones we have now. Besides the Civil War, with a lack of effective contraception and a primitive state in medicine, people tended to have enormous families, and they were often ill, dying or going bankrupt. Dickinson herself had eye problems and spent a lot of time in Cambridge getting treatments.

As I am reaching the end of the book, I am tending to think about Dickinson in the context of the history of poetry. Since the only other poet I know much about is Denise Levertov, I am often making comparisons. They had a few things in common and a few major differences. They both had hard times establishing their footings as poets. Both wrestled with their religious backgrounds. Levertov's father was a fringe Jewish theologian who came to recognize Christ, and she grew up admiring Rilke. Dickinson's family consisted of rather bourgeois lawyers. Her brother, Austin, lived next door in a showy house; he became an art aficionado, making special trips to New York City to purchase art objects, and this perfectly fits my model of a social climber. Levertov had greater political proclivities than Dickinson; her sister had traveled to Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and Denise actively opposed the Vietnam War. Both Dickinson and Levertov had very strong religious interests, and in this area, Dickinson seems to have been more sophisticated because of her awareness of science, as discussed in Natural Magic. Levertov, on the other hand, was scientifically illiterate, and she seemed to go off into a haphazard religious exploration at the end of her life. 

I was intrigued that both Dickinson and Levertov used the word "Master" to designate people who could guide them in their poetic development. In Dickinson's case, there was no existing blueprint for female poets in the U.S. at the time. She really wanted guidance, and I don't think that she ever found it. By 1862, she had settled into the idea of writing for posterity, and there does not seem to be any evidence that she wanted a public life. She was bound by her family culture and the artistic environment of Massachusetts at the time. Thus, for her, Walt Whitman was not an acceptable or even a readable model, and even Emerson and Thoreau may have been too risqué for her. In Levertov's case, she knew from an early age that she wanted to be a poet and unselfconsciously engaged in networking until she became established. Her transition to the poetry ecosystem within the U.S. after World War II was challenging, and she at one point designated Robert Duncan as her "Master." Because she had worked in Massachusetts for several years, she may have picked up the term from Dickinson. 

Dickinson and Levertov are two of my favorite poets, and they both occasionally seem like mystical visionaries. At the time and place of Dickinson's life, it was impossible for her to have experiences similar to those of Levertov. Thus, what we see is a restricted artistic expression, which I think demonstrates a restrained challenge to religious dogma, along with a remarkable linguistic inventiveness. Levertov lived during a far more propitious time for female poets, and her poems cover a wider range of human experience than Dickinson was capable. However, because Dickinson's work was essentially private during her lifetime, she never had to make compromises for commercial considerations or the prevailing views of the arts crowd.

I expect to finish the book soon and will make a final post. 

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

I'm up to the year 1860, when Emily turned thirty, and will finish the book within a couple of weeks. During the 1850's, her life took more shape, and her writing skills continued to improve. Most of her childhood friends drifted away, and she became close to Susan Gilbert, who came from a wealthy family but was orphaned at a young age and had grown up with relatives in Geneva, New York. Subsequently, she moved to Amherst and lived with a sister and her brother-in-law. Apparently, Susan and Emily didn't meet until late in 1850. They were the same age and seemed to hit it off immediately. Susan had a sharp mind, and they had productive discussions and correspondences. However, Susan occasionally gave Emily the brush-off, so she must have had other priorities. The most obvious one was her involvement with Emily's brother, Austin, with whom she became engaged in 1853. 

In 1855, the former Dickinson Homestead came on the market, and Edward decided to buy it back. Initially, Emily wasn't excited about moving there, because she liked her home on West Street, and the Homestead was becoming decrepit. But Edward devised a plan, not only to refurbish the Homestead, but to build another home, later called "The Evergreens," an "Italianate villa," next door for Austin and Susan. By then, Austin had graduated from Amherst and Harvard Law School. Austin and Susan had planned to move west, and apparently this was an incentive for them to remain in Amherst, with Austin working at his father's firm. "The Evergreens" thereafter became the site of much of Emily's social life.

Habegger, I think, effectively captures the emotional dynamics and the poetic results created by this living arrangement:

What made Sue's distant nearness so powerful a stimulant was that it fit a basic rule of life for Dickinson: always seeking intimacy and finding it withheld. The pattern shows up not only in her friendships but in her orientation to nature and religion. The naive fixation on heaven that was so central in Protestant America, and which she had recklessly taken to heart without experiencing a conversion, had generated a pressing quest for the absolute within the mundane. This perennially expected rush is one of the things that gives her poems on bees, sunsets, and the seasons their Dickinsonian cachet:

A something in a summer's Day

As slow her flambeaux burn away

Which solemnizes me.

A something in a summer's noon—

A depth—an Azure—a perfume—

Transcending extasy.

The last line was not hyperbole. Ecstasy comes with fulfillment, but what moved Dickinson was expectation: not rowing in Eden, but the thought of rowing in Eden. A later stanza of this poem describes the action of nature's fingers on the responsive heart:

The wizard fingers never rest—

The purple brook within the breast

Still chafes its narrow bed—

Sexual, yes, but so much more than sexual, this constant chafing that results in a poetry of increasing power, daring, mastery. The poetry of arousal, it is the product of the single heart lying in its narrow bed and dreaming of a final escape from itself.

I'm not sure whether Emily Dickinson herself would agree with this analysis, but it's the best one I've seen on the dynamics within her poems.

Besides this important artistic tension, social events at "The Evergreens" provided Emily with interesting discussions occasionally. She got to know Samuel Bowles (1826-1878), the editor and owner of the Springfield Republican, quite well. He was far more progressive than her family members and an advocate of women's rights. Although Sue and Austin did not operate what would be called a literary salon, Sue may have intentionally invited guests who would suit Emily. One such guest was Ralph Waldo Emerson, though Emily apparently never met him. It isn't clear whether this was Emily's choice or an accident. In any case, Emily seemed to find ample intellectual stimulation from English authors, particularly the female poets and novelists of the time.

It would seem that, by the age of thirty, Emily had settled into a life that would intentionally not entail marriage, employment or fame.

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.