March and Midnight Rising - fictional and non-fictional Civil War Reading

It just so happened that I read March, by Geraldine Brooks, and Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz back to back in September.  The coincidence is not so much that they are both books about the Civil War--I am on a CW reading binge--but Brooks and Horwitz are married, and in her Afterword Brooks mentions traveling with her husband countless times to Civil War sites. 

March is a novel in which the main character is Mr. March, the father of Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth March and husband of Marmee, literature's archetypal mother, in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.  In LW, Mr. March is a shadowy character, off stage during half the book and in his study or in the far background during the second half.  He rarely speaks, and while the girls adore him, he withers as a character in the face of the force which is Marmee.

As with A Year of Wonders, the other novel by Brooks that I've read, I had mixed feelings about this book, which is why it's taken me so long to blog about it.  It is well-written and the characters and storyline are interesting, just not believeable.  I'm not sure what it is about Brooks' stories, but she always seems to go a step too far in her plotting, rendering me a disbeliever. 

I also came to this book having recently read Eden's Outcasts, which is about Louisa May Alcott and her father, Bronson Alcott.  Brooks' portrait of Mr. March draws heavily on Bronson Alcott, just as LMA drew heavily on her own life for the stories and characters of Little Women.  While I am not a fan of Bronson Alcott, I'm even less of a fan of Mr. March.  Brooks took all his worst qualities and magnified them...and yet, the writing is good.

I really think I would've enjoyed March much more if Brooks hadn't leveraged Little Women.  Her main character still could've hailed from Concord, MA, still could've rubbed shoulders with Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, still could've been an abolotionist, but needn't have been saddled to Marmee and the girls from Little Women.  There's just too much baggage and it weighs the story down with doubt and assumptions and inevitable dissappointment.

On the other hand, I thoroughly enjoyed Midnight Rising, a bio of John Brown, he whose "body llies a-mouldering in the grave" while "his soul's marching on."  I have known of Harper's Ferry for years, but never really had a good grounding in what led Brown and his family and followers to attack Harper's Ferry, what they hoped to accomplish, or even really what they did accomplish.

I learned a tremendous amount from this book, and really loved how Horwitz was able to link so many of the major players in the Civil War together via Brown's story.  Absolutely first rate history and one that will bear rereading down the road.

Here's a great interview with Tony Horwitz about Midnight Rising on NPR's Talk of the Nation.

Eden's Outcasts - a companion book to Little Women

Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, by John Matteson, was every bit as good as I hoped and expected. Coming into the book, I knew enough about A. Bronson Alcott to know that I thought he was a selfish crackpot who endangered his family's health and well-being to pursue his experiments in communal living. However, I had no idea what an innocent, well-meaning selfish crackpot he was until I read this book. Like his daughter, Louisa, I ended up forgiving him because his heart was so clearly in the right place, even if his ideas and capabilities fell fall short of the mark.

The most fascinating fact about Louisa and Bronson that I learned from the book was how coincidental their lives and achievements were. Not only were they born on the same day of the same month, November 29, but their greatest literary milestones were passed in the same year (Little Women for LMA and Tablets for her father), and they died within two days of each other. While LMA's literary success and fame far outstripped her father's, their arcs were remarkably parallel.

I found the book a delight to read--well-written, well-annotated and researched, and just the right amount of quotation from letters, journals (both father and daughter were lifelong diarists), and other primary sources. While I enjoyed reading about Bronson's quixotic youth and early struggles to find his place in Transcendental society, I most enjoyed reading about LMA's growth and development as a writer.

Having finally read Little Women last year, I can honestly say that reading this bio of LMA and her father, who was such a strong force in her life, has greatly enriched LW for me. Just today when I was listening to an audio recording of P.D. James' book, Talking About Detective Fiction, she says that "most fiction is autobiographical and some autobiography partly fiction." With the possible exception of the Little House series, I can't think of a better example of what James is saying than LMA and Little Women, which is an unabashed fictionalized account of her life.

Other notable highlights of Eden's Outcasts include a fascinating look at the years leading up to the Civil War and the abolition movement (John Brown's widow and daughters visited the Alcotts after his death) and the part the whole family played in this monumental struggle, not to mention LMA's relationships to the Concord greats, Emerson and Thoreau (who were mentors and teachers) and Hawthorne, who was a somewhat cranky and reclusive neighbor. I am now eager to get to Concord to visit Orchard House, Hillside Chapel, and Sleepy Hollow cemetary.

Having recently finished The Pilgrim's Progress, which was such a primary influence in Bronson's life, and hence his daughter's, I feel like I've completed a mini-course on LMA. Reading Pilgrim's Progess helped me see how Bronson could justify his single-minded passion of pursuing his Eden, just as Christian in Pilgrim's Progress throws off his family responsibilities in order to journey to the Celestial City, leaving his wife and children to journey on their own, just as Bronson's wife and daughters do. I can't say I ever come to admire Bronson Alcott, but I certainly admire his daughter and what she was able to acheive.

I'm not sure I'm such a fan of LMA's writing that I want to tackle her other works, but I found Eden's Outcasts to be an essential companion book to Little Women, which I read because of its popularity over the past 144 years (as in, "what's all the fuss?"), and reading both have enabled me to appreciate and understand the contribution of Little Women to American literature.