A Human Emerson
Allen, Gay Wilson
A Human Emerson WALDO EMERSON by Gay Wilson Allen The Viking Press. 751 pp. $25. If today's high school graduates carry away from their alma maters any vestige of what some educators used to call...
...Books Briefly Coastal Damage COAST ALERT: SCIENTISTS SPEAK OUT edited by Thomas G. Jackson and Diana Reische Coast Alliance/Friends of the Earth...
...He wrote and lectured almost constantly to free his family from debt...
...Most of his contemporaries found themselves incapable of marrying the life of the mind to the world of action, but not Emerson...
...Consider his early backing of Whitman, a move he knew would cost him readers among the staid, or his attempts over a decade to help the unfortunate Bronson Alcott...
...Once past the age of required reading, however, few claim the much anthologized Emerson for their own...
...Readers of Waldo Emerson may find themselves pulling for Emerson and wishing Allen would drop the persona of neutrality...
...Even though Allen seems to have made uneven use of much of the material, Waldo Emerson is generally a useful, readable biography...
...To be great is to be misunderstood, remember, and a fine new biography, Gay Wilson Allen's Waldo Emerson, proves it...
...181 pp...
...The result, placing Emerson's thought in the context of his life, does much to mitigate some of the harshest criticism of the man, such as criticism that he had no notion of human evil and wrote from a facile optimism or that he was emotionally aloof as a man and a thinker...
...If Emerson pioneered in psychology, he was blind to his own inner workings on at least one important matter, the issue of work...
...The biographer does succeed in a most difficult mission: He makes the reader see Emerson as a human being, not just a foun-tainhead of apothegms...
...He admits that in using his shortened title, Waldo Emerson, he wants to remove his subject from the moribund company of "trinomial New England contemporaries" like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell...
...7.95...
...However, Allen reveals that Emerson worried about his isolation from his fellows and lamented "the porcupine impossibility of contact with men...
...Surely Emerson had strengths which make such "relevantizing" unnecessary...
...How," Emerson asked, "can they have a day's leisure for anything but the work of the river...
...By giving Emerson the name he privately preferred, Allen hopes to smuggle his client into the ranks of more durable binomials like Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson...
...The religious radical could never wholly expunge his family's Puritan heritage...
...He guides us through Emerson's works and days dispassionately, letting Emerson flay himself without correction...
...Allen invites the conclusion that Emerson's salvation was through work, that the constant struggle for solvency forced an otherwise retiring personality into the world...
...Chris Tucker (Chris Tucker teaches literature at Brookhaven College in Texas and is a frequent reviewer for the Dallas Morning News...
...Time and again we are told that Emerson pioneered in psychology, anticipated the spiritual concepts of such thinkers as Teilhard de Chardin, shaped Nietzsche's thinking (much more space should have been given to support this claim), or grasped the Big Bang theory long before its time...
...Emerson was a harsh judge of himself on the matter of his alleged "emotional frigidity...
...Allen seems aware that reclamation of Emerson is not an easy task...
...It was an interesting idea to publish a collection of scientists' essays on the damage hu...
...The author's research covered the most complete Emerson material ever assembled, including more than 3,000 Emerson letters in Ralph Rusk's Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, published in 1949...
...Perhaps a biography of Emerson may be evaluated somewhat more subjectively than most books...
...If today's high school graduates carry away from their alma maters any vestige of what some educators used to call "culture," it is probably the remembrance of a play or two by Shakespeare and a handful of epigrams by Ralph Waldo Emerson...
...Caught up, the reader wants to reach back through the decades and say something like, The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude...
...Emerson's generosity may have been exceeded only by his self-flagellation...
...Yet Waldo Emerson shows him almost buried in work once he left the ministry for the lecture circuit...
...At Allen's hands Emerson emerges as a husband, father, and friend as well as a New England oracle...
...In practice Emerson was unfailingly helpful to his friends...
...On a lecture swing through the West, Emerson confessed he was appalled at the lives of Illinois settlers, who were arguably more representative of their time than the visiting New England Brahmin...
...Yet Emerson was not just a tepid tran-scendentalist vending capsule wisdom...
...After two world wars, after Auschwitz and Jonestown, much of Emerson's eloquence about the self-reliant, God-directed, inconquerable human spirit seems like talk and little more...
...Allen's integration of Emerson the man with Emerson the philosopher may be crucial if readers are again to hang on his words as did his lyceum audiences more than a century ago...
...Allen tends to overinflate Emerson's prescience...
...Emerson repeatedly castigated himself for "sloth" and resolved to purify himself and produce more...
...He did, and you can quote him on that...
...If a biography can reclaim for modern readers the Sage of Concord, in danger of disappearing under his own hallowed anthology dust, this book might...
...Everyone has the mud up to his knees, and the coal of the country on his shirt collar...
...Allen points out that Emerson's "theory of friendship" made him set almost unreachable standards...
...How can he be literary or grammatical...
Vol. 46 • April 1982 • No. 4
