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Posts Tagged ‘hawthorne’

170 Years Ago in Concord

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on October 15, 2012| 3 Comments »

We had to cut down a sick sugar maple near our house. The arborist counted the rings: 170.

170 years ago Thoreau walked around this neighborhood. Maybe he walked under the tree’s branches. Maybe at this time of year, he kicked up its fallen leaves. The abolitionist John Brown visited a house on this street, too.

Come to think of it, 170 years ago was roughly the period that Concord’s “genius cluster” hung out together, as author Susan Cheever describes the Concord writers in her book American Bloomsbury.

Somehow looking at the rings on a tree that you more or less took for granted makes you think about historical characters that always seemed in the distant past. You imagine that you might have had a nodding acquaintance with Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, and various Alcotts if they hadn’t unfortunately died a few years before you came to town.

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Margaret Fuller

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on February 4, 2012| 2 Comments »

Even people who think they know all about Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, Alcott and other Concord worthies often seem not to know Margaret Fuller. She was a key member of the “genius cluster” that author Susan Cheever has called the “American Bloomsbury.”

Although Fuller has passed from public awareness, in Concord it is different. Which is why a reading at the Concord Bookshop on January 29 was standing room only. Fuller’s latest biographer, John Matteson, was there to read about her “many lives” and engage in discussion about such abstruse topics as what Fuller thought of Emerson’s second wife. (Answer: Not much.)

It’s always amusing to attend a reading of a book about one of the Concord greats, as participants have such passionate feelings. Especially the Bronson Alcott fan base, who cannot bear to hear a word said against Louisa May
Alcott’s innovative but impractical father. I have been to a couple readings of books in which Louisa appears, and you can see Bronson’s partisans stiffening their spines, baring their fangs, and rising to the bait.

But who was Margaret Fuller? She was a first in many realms, including first female editor of the highly regarded 19th century literary magazine The Dial and the first overseas war correspondent. Matteson bemoaned the fact that she was probably best known, however, for the way she died, having perished in 1850 at age 40 in a shipwreck off Point o’ Woods, Fire Island.

That fact touches a nerve in me, I admit, since I spent all my childhood summers on Fire Island, and it is still a mystery why many of the ship’s passengers were saved while Margaret Fuller, her husband, and her baby drowned. Fortunately, interest in her life has been renewed, with Matteson’s book only one of several in which she plays a significant role.

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Spontaneous Poetic Outbursts

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on July 4, 2011| 2 Comments »

James is an Irish poet, widely considered part leprechaun. Every few years he comes to stay with his cousins for a couple weeks, across the street from my house. James is on the left in this photo, which I took at the Fourth of July parade.

James has two main modes of conversation: storytelling and poetry recitation. It is a pure delight to chat with him. As we waited for the parade, he narrated pages of Irish history, including dates, and recited from W.B. Yeats and our own Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others.

Earlier, he was sitting on his cousins’ front porch and saw a young woman he knows coming across the street. He was moved by the way she walks, as he told me, and with a kind of poetic spontaneous combustion, intoned on the spot:

Meran, fairest maid art thou,

Lovely is thy stride.

My heart goes out to thee

As ebbs the great sea tide.

But, ah, my kind Meran, I’ll not forget thee.

Nor the kind words you said unto me.

James has self-published a couple books of lore in his unique style. He and his brother, both lifelong bachelors, sell peat. On certain Sundays, James bikes 18 miles to the ruins of an old monastery, where he narrates the history for visitors. Then he bikes 18 miles home. In any kind of weather. James is 73.

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