"American Bloomsbury": Colorful characters

"American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work"
by Susan Cheever
Simon & Schuster, 223 pp., $26

According to novelist and memoirist Susan Cheever, the critic F.O. Matthiessen once declared that all of American literature was written between 1850 and 1855.

"What I hadn't realized is that most of it was written in the same cluster of three houses," Cheever writes in the preface to her swift, gossipy book about the group who lived and worked in those drafty Concord, Mass., houses in the middle decades of the 19th century. The ungainly subtitle pretty much says it all: "Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work."

It's the catchy title "American Bloomsbury" that raises questions. Alcott as an early American cousin of Virginia Woolf? Hawthorne as a forerunner of Lytton Strachey? The most Bloomsbury thing about these vinegary, high-minded Yankees is Cheever's approach — breezy, confiding, sexually curious, mildly feminist.

Undaunted by the poundage of scholarship and biography already heaped on the Concord luminaries, Cheever races through the entire period of their intimacy in just over 200 pages, with plenty of room for rapturous descriptions of gardens in bloom, birds in song, treks through Europe and the convulsion of the Civil War. You have to admire her economy and nerve.

In the manner of a Ken Burns documentary, Cheever thrusts us visually and aurally into the thick of Transcendental Massachusetts. We get the rumble of the stagecoach wheels and the sweep of blond hair as the Alcott family rolls into town one spring afternoon in 1840 — wild-eyed improvident pater familias Bronson, long-suffering wife Abba and their three daughters (a fourth would arrive a few weeks later), the models for the March family in Louisa May's "Little Women." And look, here's Thoreau shambling by the picket fences with "his wild hair, shabby clothes and scuffed boots" while phoebes shrill and jays scream from the venerable elms.

The teenage Louisa May Alcott goes boating with Thoreau and promptly falls in love despite the fact that he was "as ugly as sin," according to Hawthorne, and ate with his fingers. Shortly thereafter, Thoreau and his brother take the "slender, beautiful" Ellen Sewall boating and they both fall in love with her. "One day the glamorous, blond Margaret Fuller, dressed in chic Boston clothes" bursts on the scene — and soon every male within range, notably Emerson and Hawthorne, falls in love with the passionate pioneering feminist writer and editor, Hawthorne falling so hard that he bases all his heroines on Fuller, starting with Hester Prynne in "The Scarlet Letter."

And so it goes in a brisk round robin of tormented love triangles, late-night strolls by the river, petty squabbles, money troubles, hushed confessions, desperate yearnings.

"Was there kissing? Was there sex? ... Was Thoreau gay?" Cheever asks, sounding a bit like her novelist father gazing through the martini mist of the 1950s suburbs. Hawthorne was "obviously very aware of the power of sex ... its joys and its amazing connections," and Emerson had lots of children — so there must have been some sex, though it's questionable whether either of them bedded their "sexy muse" Margaret Fuller. After all, Cheever explains, "the middle of the 19th century was a time when sexual energy was pent up in this country, and all these people were high-minded prudes."

"American Bloomsbury" isn't all peeping through keyholes. Cheever has a sharp eye, a good ear and the novelist's knack for letting individuals hold onto their complexity and contradictions. Though her heart clearly belongs to Louisa May Alcott and Thoreau, she paints a sympathetic portrait of Emerson as a young widower and old man crippled by memory loss. Her description of Alcott's stint as a nurse in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War is harrowing, as is her account of the novelist's subsequent illness and the excruciating mercury poisoning she suffered as a result of her medical treatment (doctors in those days routinely prescribed huge doses of calomel, a mercury compound).

The book is also enlivened by bright flashes of insight — the Transcendentalists were possessed of "an idealism so ardent that it cast a shadow on good sense"; in "Little Women," Alcott "made literature out of the kind of conversations women have while doing the dishes together" — along with Cheever's own amusing personal asides. ("There was nothing to see and everything to buy," she wails after a disastrous summertime jaunt to Concord with three irritable kids and two panting dogs.)

"American Bloomsbury" is a far cry from Carlos Baker's leisurely, learned study of the Concord coterie in "Emerson Among the Eccentrics" and an even further cry from "The Metaphysical Club," in which Louis Menand probes the intellectual legacy of the Transcendentalists' immediate heirs. But what she lacks in depth, Susan Cheever makes up for in charm. She treats these dead white males and females like family, and it's fun to sit beside her as she pages through the dusty old albums and marvels at how strange and wonderful her ancestors were.

David Laskin is the author of "The Children's Blizzard" and "Partisans: Marriage, Politics and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals"