Lit and love in Bloomsbury ALL EDITIONS

[Ralph Waldo Emerson] made a mint from lecturing (and he had an inheritance from his first wife), which allowed him to subsidize his chronically hard-up friends. "It is as the sugar daddy of American literature that he really takes his place in the pantheon of Concord writers," [Susan Chee...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNewsday
Main Author MATTHEW PRICE. LOS ANGELES TIMES
Format Newspaper Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Long Island, N.Y Newsday LLC 07.01.2007
EditionCombined editions
Subjects
Alcott, Louisa
Cheever, Susan
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Thoreau, Henry David
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Summary:[Ralph Waldo Emerson] made a mint from lecturing (and he had an inheritance from his first wife), which allowed him to subsidize his chronically hard-up friends. "It is as the sugar daddy of American literature that he really takes his place in the pantheon of Concord writers," [Susan Cheever] writes. Well, that's one way of putting it. Emerson paid the Alcotts' rent (Louisa's father, Bronson, was a daydreaming minor sage who idealized the rural life and was always in need of cash), lured [Nathaniel Hawthorne] and his wife from dreary Salem, Mass., and lent [Henry David Thoreau] - a world-class freeloader - a woodlot on Walden Pond. [Margaret Fuller], intellectual, activist, a feminist "unafraid of her own brilliance," was a frequent guest at the Emerson house, as were many others. Cheever at times seems desperate to make the writing of these American greats relevant to our times, but her overly strenuous advocacy isn't needed. Their work speaks for itself; as long as there is a culture of American letters, Hawthorne, Emerson and Thoreau will be relevant. She reduces the latter to a kind of dippy proto-hippie, and her curious readings of his works diminish him: "We revere Thoreau for his contempt for material things. We love him for damning new clothes and cautioning us against possessions." Uh, "we" do? I can appreciate Thoreau as a naturalist, an American original and a fine writer, but I have nothing against material possessions, and I certainly have nothing against new clothes (when I can afford them).