THE search for the Great American Novel is an amusing if aimless literary parlour game. Some maintain that it has already been written, and that it is called The Great Gatsby (1925). Others claim it is older - older even than Twain's subversive classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885): after all, Moby-Dick was published in 1851 Melville's surreal Puritan epic owes much to the European novel tradition in which ideas overshadow story. Flash forward a century, and perhaps the novel which best captures the real America at its loudest, most energetic and most irrefutably American is Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March (1953), his third novel.
But where did this literature begin? America is often accused of having neither a real history nor an authentic sense of the past, and of being condemned therefore to concentrate exclusively on the future, all the while keeping an envious eye fixed on Europe with its tantalising store of culture and ancient rituals. However, even in its earliest stages the American literary tradition managed to combine the classical cast of mind with a New World vision of reality in which virtually everything has possibilities.
If ever a single individual personified this combination of regard for tradition with an optimistic belief in practicality, it is Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) the father of American philosophy. He stands at the centre - no, he is the centre of the American literary Renaissance and its enduring intellectual tradition. His influence far exceeds his genius but the best of Emerson's essays - "Nature", "Self Reliance", "Experience",
"Fate" as well as his seminal address, "The American Scholar", delivered at Harvard in 1837 - display singular eloquence, integrity and common sense. Aware of his own limitations, Emerson somehow managed to inspire those around him. "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands draws to a close," he announced to his Harvard audience. His work thereafter is the chronicle of a nation discovering its national identity.
It was Emerson, writes Carlos Baker in this engaging, old-fashioned study, who drew a generation of original thinkers and writers including Amos Bronson Aleott, Margaret Fuller, Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, the often reluctant Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emerson's special disciple, Henry David Thoreau, to Concord, near Boston. By the mid-19th century it appeared Emerson would achieve his objective of establishing a community of essayists, poets and novelists. The town became the capital of American Transcendentalism. Between 1850 and 1855, a unique group of pioneering masterpieces, including Representive Men, The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables, Moby-Dick, Pierre, Walden and Leaves of Grass were all published.
Far from attempting to shape a literature based on the English tradition, these writers were engaged in creating rock-solid foundations for a national literature as diverse as America itself. The years of the American Renaissance mark a period of exciting intellectual growth which began with Emerson as a young man in 1833 dutifully following the footsteps of so many others by making his pilgrimage to Europe. It would later witness Emerson's reign when Europeans in turn came to hear and heed him. Emerson called for an American bard, "a liberating god", and he came in the form of Walt Whitman.
This American arcadia, well populated with reformers and improvers, was not allowed to develop without interference. There was no place for complacent elitism. The slave-owning South was seen as a replusive foreign country by Easterners living in New England, and while Emerson perfected his philosophy of anti-materialism, the American West came to represent a place of mythic romance, as it does to this day. Somehow myth managed to obscure the materialist greed directing the westward expansion, while the rise of the West helped counter the European influence of the East.
There were those who disapproved of Emerson, the one-time Second Church (Unitarian) pastor - and his deceptively awkward attitudes towards religious doctrine. In time Hawthorne and Melville would become exasperated by Emerson's rigid optimism, while the Civil War was harshly dividing the country.
Baker's friendly, anecdotal narrative is not a standard biography, nor is it an academic analysis. By focusing on the personal and social as much as, if not more than, the philosophical, political and literary, it comes far closer to evoking a real sense of the world Emerson and his friends lived in than a conventional biography could do. "Life consists in what a man is thinking all day," said Emerson, and Baker certainly allows this statement to direct the narrative.
Interestingly, he begins the book when Emerson is 27, although he fills in the family history, including the death of his father when Emerson was only eight. Emerson was one of a family of five sons, two of whom were to spend their lives in a mental asylum while ill-health tracked the entire clan with grotesque insistence. At Harvard, young Emerson was an average student. His first wife died after only 16 months of marriage. Throughout the book, however, Emerson strikes one as an engagingly detached optimist, likeable, but a bit distant.
Not surprisingly, he preferred the written to the spoken word, and despite his fame as a lecturer he rarely shone in conversation. The account of his second marriage to the ever-ill Lydia Jackson, whom he called Lidian, who appears to have spent her days in her bedroom while he walked in the woods and undertook lengthy lecture tours, is a study in how to succeed at marriage. There was also the tragedy of the death of their five-year-old son. For the last decade of his own life Emerson, working to the end, battled with a failing memory.
Like a novel developing through a series oil self-contained chapters, this book shifts focus back and forth between Emerson and the other central players. Best known for the biography Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969), Baker, a Princeton academic and critic, was a good writer as well as a shrewd reader. Because Emerson Among the Eccentrics is a group biography, with a cast of lively characters, the conversational tone is at times a bit too chatty and irritatingly cosy. In fairness to Baker, it should be pointed out that he died before the book was finished. It is repetitive, often wanders, and was clearly written at speed in the shadow of death. At times the text reads like the transcript of an oft-delivered lecture.
The stylistic limitations do not detract from the fact that Baker by sheer volume of information captures the sense of lives running parallel and interacting. With births, marriages, deaths, friendships flourishing and faltering, the narrative has the feel of a Victorian novel, but there is method behind the apparent randomness. The joys and sorrows of a small community dominate a book which could have been monumental but instead is on a human scale, wry and touchingly celebratory. Emerson's story is part of American history and Carlos Baker's labour of love offers a personalised companion volume to F.O. Matthiessen's classic American Renaissance (1941), remains the finest account of an exciting assertion of national intellectual independence.
