EMERSON AMONG THE ECCENTRICS: A Group Portrait

by Carlos Baker ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1996

In his final, unfinished work, literary scholar Baker (Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, 1969, etc.) views an eclectic collection of individuals through the lens of conventional scholarship. Working from the early 1970s until 1986, the year before he died, Baker set out to show how Emerson's views ""were reflected, contradicted, partly diverged from, or zealously misrepresented"" by his acquaintances. Although the work falls short of this ambitious goal, it offers a glimpse of a set of fascinating people and the points at which their lives touched Emerson's. There are, most notably, Emerson's second wife, Lidian, hovering in the background, chronically ill; Aunt Mary (Mary Moody Emerson), the eccentric par excellence, who considered tact ""only another name for lying""; Bronson Alcott, whose wealth of ideas could not keep his family out of poverty; Henry Thoreau, who spent more time camping in Emerson's house than at Walden Pond; Margaret Fuller, who was intellectually brilliant and emotionally demanding; and Jones Very, a poet who was briefly convinced that he was ""the Second Coming."" The focus of the narrative shifts from person to person with each chapter, portraying Emerson as the genial and stable center of a tornado of friends, but the image occasionally cracks: Surely a man capable of peering into his son's coffin 15 years after the boy's death is at least a candidate for the title of eccentric. And while Baker presents some of the circle as ""self-appointed disciples"" whom Emerson saw simply as friends, a complaint from Thoreau suggests otherwise: ""He would not meet me on equal terms, but only be to some extent my patron. He would not come to see me, but was hurt if I did not visit him."" Although this group biography is less than the sum of its parts, the parts themselves remain deeply intriguing.

Pub Date: April 1, 1996

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 640

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996

Categories: NONFICTION