The Fire Next Time Despite The
Tweeter Firestorm-In Honor Of The 150th Anniversary Of The
Publication Of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” (1868)-A Book Review-Of
Sorts
Book Review
By Alden Riley
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott,
Roberts Brothers, 1868
To all those tweeters apparently
with plenty of time on their hands who have raised their hackles over various
statements made in two previous reviews commemorating the 150th
anniversary of Louisa May Alcott’s once influential melodramatic novel Little Women all I can say taking a
slogan from the Red Guards in the Chinese Cultural Revolution back in the 1960s
and 1970s is “fire on the party headquarters.” Fire away all you want to your
hearts content because I have been informed in no uncertain terms by site
manager Greg Green that this is the last review he will authorize payment for.
And he is right to call a halt to what after all was a simple review
commemorating a slice of Americana and is deservedly pissed off that one turned
into three when I have insisted that it was necessary as a professional to
response to the dingbats and wooly-heads who have decided that I needed to hear
their pathetic moaning about a book that even my artistic and literary daughter
refused to read through. The only way I can do justice to what I have been
defending for the three people who have not heard about the “controversy” and
those two people who give a … is to run through what has occurred over the past
weeks that this “furor” has been proceeding on my head. I won’t bore the reader
with the original simple statements made but will refer to them in passing.
Maybe Greg, despite his righteous
desire not to have to foot the bill for my answering every yahoo who has a
Twitter account, is really the cause of this whole uproar (just kidding)
because as part of becoming his own man, part of making himself a legend at
this publication like he was at American
Film Gazette, of distancing himself from the already legendary Allan
Jackson was his decision to let his writers include some internal meanderings
about how reviews are assigned and why. Like I said in the parentheses I was
only kidding but there is grain of truth because Allan never brooked any such
meanderings and the hard fact is that I was not in any way the natural reviewer
for this Little Women book-fest. And
I clearly stated up-front that I had never read the book, and the damn thing
never had any influence over me or anybody I knew except my grandmother who
read the book in about 1950. But Greg insisted on a male view, and on a run
through of how I git stuck with the assignment (and tried to the famous old
editorial runaround by asking me to do the third review by being paid by the
word, an old-fashioned idea that went out with Herbert Hoover but I had the
last laugh and he backed off after seeing how I “padded” this review just to
spite him and his old bourgeois heart).
Although in this third, third can
you believe it over a tired old book, rendition of my review I want to
concentrate on the person of one Bronson Alcott, allegedly Louisa May’s father
although without DNA testing who knows given the wild existence he led, and led
others on, who in the year 2018 has something like a cult following if you can
believe the naïve defenses of this indefensible man let me save my own for
later and speak of how we got to review number three. In the second review I
mention:
“I have to admit I am a bit
exasperated over the “firestorm” from Twitter and other sources over my
original book review honoring the 150th anniversary of the publication
of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women
which I just found out has been made into a yet another film adaptation for a
modern 21st century audience far removed from the semi-nomadic
existent back in the day before cellphones and Facebook. Sometimes you just
can’t win in any quarters that is for sure. I wouldn’t mind if the prairie fire
came from one comment but even side issue stuff raised some ire. Jesus. First,
I mentioned- “I thought things were supposed to change around here with the
changing of the guard, otherwise known at least among the younger writers as
the purge and exile of the previous site manager Allan Jackson and his replacement
by Greg Green after a bitter internal fight with no holds barred and no
prisoners taken in the fall of 2017.”
Frankly I don’t, and I hope nobody
else does either, wants to go through the horrible details of that purge, that
is right, purge and ignoble exile of one Allan Jackson after he went off the
rails back in 2016 and early 2017 attempting to use the publication’s
demographics to give an all-out blitz coverage of every freaking two bit event
that occurred in the 1960s like the following two generations, me and mine,
gave a fuck about almost all of that except maybe the assassination of John F. Kennedy and that only because only a
child would believe that a donk, a loner, a loser like Lee Harvey Oswald acted
alone and you don’t have to be Oliver Stone to know that the CIA and maybe LBJ
hatched the whole thing to put that bastard in power.
If I seem venomous now about the
whole internal struggle and am now fully in Greg’s corner (except I disagree
heartily that this review should be a freebie another idea he floated before
the ill-fated by the word joke offer) and of course the Editorial Board that
makes sure he doesn’t go off the rails like Allan it is because one Allan
Jackson, now back in camp here as a contributing editor by the good graces of
Greg and Ed Board head Sam Lowell, an old friend of Allan’s, has challenged me
on a number of hard facts about what he did, or didn’t do, once he was purged
and sent into Utah exile. Not only that but has joined the second wave
firestorm (what beautiful Sam Lowell has called for umpteenth time a tempest in
a teapot) claiming I have libeled him not once but twice. I will deal with his
allegations, his feeble legal theory that I should be put up on a rack and
squeezed hard for those so-called libels which he has yet to refute except some
mumbo-jumbo about “half-truths” always the back-up position of the truly
desperate-and wrong.
Let me finish up with what I had to
say about the internal fight and be done with it:
“Although as a free-lancer, a stringer
I did not have a decisive vote in the vote of no confidence that replaced Allan
Jackson, in the interest of the seemingly obligatory statement of transparency
an old friend of some of the writers here from high school and anti-war Vietnam
War soldier days, with Greg I do know from various sources, reliable sources,
that among the younger writers their actions were seen as a fight to the death.
That Allan had to go, that Greg had to take over the whole site manager
operation and that a guiding hand Editorial Board had to be established so one
person could not wield an iron hand over the whole operation in the future. All
of this over the to me [at the time before I knew how venomous an ex-legend
could be] pretty harmless policy decisions of Allan to spent plenty of time in
2017 and 2018 commemorating the 50th anniversaries of the many
historically important events of that era beginning with the Summer of Love,
1967.
At some point, maybe rightly if the
extent of coverage projected by Allan is any indication the younger writers
ire, who like myself at best knew of those events second or third hand
rebelled, got some aid from old-timer Sam Lowell, also an old friend of Allan’s
from high school days who decided it was time to “pass the torch” they were able
to remove Allan from his post. According to Sam Lowell, who after all as “the
father we never knew” of the rebellion should know, the talk around the water
cooler was to fight to the finish, to send Allan packing, no regrets. So now
readers who have a partisan interest in defending the actions of the younger
writers are up in arms arguing that their “gentile” actions were merely to
force Allan to retire… I am done with the silly issue and Sam has agreed to
reply to anybody who still feels that terms like “purge” and “exile” were
exaggerations of what went on. Done. (And that condition still applies for
those who have that excess time on their hands and need the services of a
cyberspace lonely hearts club to while away their midnight hours previously
spent beside the silent telephone waiting for somebody, anybody, to call.)
Next up in the batting order was a simple
statement about Greg’s early stewardship and the pitfalls of following a
legendary figure at this publication like Allan Jackson after his purge and
exile-“Then Greg, I think to show he was his own boss, his own operator came up
with the silly, silly even to Will Bradley who originally presented the idea
before thinking better of it, that to appeal to a younger, eventually
non-existent audience, that the publication would feature film reviews of
Marvel/DC comic book characters gone to screen, serious analysis of rap and
current pop music, and review graphic novels. …”
I came on board shortly before this
change of leadership while Greg was handling the day to day operations and
Allan was making policy decisions, so I had a chance to see what Greg was
trying to do to make his own mark, to become his own legend here just as he had
been for many years over at American Film
Gazette. In the beginning of the Green regime through Senior Film Editor
Sandy Salmon I was getting some very good films, books, and music to review.
Assignments like the Hammer film noir series pitting my take against Seth
Garth’s, commemorating the various anniversaries of books like The Great Gatsby that had heretofore
been staples of the Western literary canon and all kinds CD reviews from
classic rock to world music.
Then the world caved in. Somehow
Greg thought that what was needed to spruce up the publication, to appeal to a
younger audience in the 21st century rather than the hard-core
Generation of ‘68 devotees who have sustained this publication since their own
youths back in hard copy days through the current on-line version was to review
comic book character films, video games and such, and rap and techno-music in
its various mutations. A bad decision which even Greg knew was true as he
retreated back to some more civilized material. The blow-back from readership
was this seemingly orchestrated sycophantic echo about how I was being too hard
on Greg for a momentary mistake, a good faith effort to reach a new audience,
to try something new and that it had been,
and I will quote from one irate tweet “bad taste” to bring up that
serious error of judgment now that Greg has righted the ship. Ho hum.
I certainly have been around long
enough in the publishing business now to know how to weather such storms but
the next “fire storm,” really a tempest in a teapot to quote Sam Lowell on some
internal controversy, a one- man crusade really was too much. Here is what I
“wrongly” said- “Then Allan Jackson whom we all though had perished, gone to
pot, dope pot, was working for Mitt Romney out in Utah Mormon country, running
a whorehouse with an old flame in East Bay or living with an old former
hometown corner boy turned “out” drag queen in San Francisco depending on which
rumor you believed at the moment, showed up to do a series of encore
presentations of material he had produced over the years in order to get back
that older audience which had sustained the publication through good times and
bad.”
I noted at the time the following
which under normal circumstances I would not continue to argue about except
once again on Allan Jackson, the previously purged and self-exiled site manager
at this publication has joined forces with the dingbats who have decided to
bombard me with lame defenses of Allan’s 1960s nostalgia trips and Greg
ill-fated and ill-advised leap into the depths of social media-driven youth
culture and come up empty-handed. Moreover Allan has continued despite our
working currently for the same publication me with a steady by-line and he
living on literary hand-outs and special pleadings to accuse me of libeling him
on where he went when he got the axe, when he was run out of town like a cur.
Just to let him know that I know what is what Allan as a well-known publisher,
in short in the public square, should know that he would face a high threshold
as such under Sullivan vs. New York Times
and its progeny if I had actually legally libeled him. Yes, so stop whining and
answer with something better than that weak-kneed “half-truths” noise. For that reason alone I will, once again,
detail my information about what happened to Allan after he was booted from
civil society.
“Of course, the one-man crusade was
one Allan Jackson, now a contributing editor doing encore presentations at this
publication under the good graces of his old friend Sam Lowell and Greg.
Apparently Allan does not have Greg and Sam’s good graces and let the whole
shady rumored past year or so go to ground. No sooner had he seen my comments
that he ripped out a few thousand word “essay” on my “libelous” statements
concerning his whereabout after he got that proverbial boot in 2017. If
anybody, and I worry about what you have been doing with your precious time if
you have, has not seen Allan’s encore presentation introductions which are as
self-serving as anything I have seen of late then a brief summary of his
slights is in order. Under Allan’s tutelage all rumors were allegedly untrue or
half-truths (a nice dodge when you are on the defensive, especially those
unfamiliar with the intentionality rule in libel cases to tar the writer that
scurrilous “half-truth” tag).”
Allan, to his credit and I think to
avoid his own heightened legal liability if you think about it although I have
no intention, none, of taking any kind of action against him except as a foil
here, didn’t try to weasel out of what everybody knew was true, that he had
been purged and gone into exile like a beaten cur. Gone far away to try to
“rebrand” himself where he was not well known. What he has argued,
unconvincingly, is that he merely went West to seek work after he had been
“blackballed” by some phantom network emanating from this publication along the
East Coast. I have recently been given by our legal department five affidavits
from publishers in New York and Boston who almost overnight after hearing of
Allan’s untimely, their common term, ouster offered him jobs with increases in
salary and less responsibility just to have his name on the masthead (and not
on some other publication and mercifully not on ours). He allegedly needed
money for his various ex-wife alimonies and the onerous college tuitions for
his slew of good kids still in the higher education pipeline and has declared
(at the notoriously accurate office water cooler) that no East Coast publisher
would touch him with a ten- foot pole. In an age of the casual off-hand lie
this is a whooper.
[Around the water cooler when he is
not around and I am fellow real writers and not hand-me-down rewrite men like
Allan have speculated that he brought up that whole black-ball business just to
get back in Greg’s good graces although it makes more sense that he would suck
up to Sam, knowing that Sam also had three ex-wives feeding at the trough and
that obligatory slew of kids with college eyes. All I know is that if I had
been kicked out of a job in an organization that I helped found I would not
have come back hat in hand to do what is essentially second-level rewrite work
on stuff I am not so sure after the rock and roll series is worth a second
run.]
I also noted in that second review
the following which I will comment on anew afterward since Allan has challenged
me on my facts:
“We can dismiss the Mitt Romney
press agent rumor out of hand since I looked at the archives for 2008 and 2012
and noted that Allan had skewered him and his white underwear fetish, his
inability to keep to one single answer for more than ten minutes before
flipping earning the sobriquet “Mr. Flip-Flop,” and his undying hatred for
those who have not gouged the populace and not emulated his scorched earth
policies at Bain Enterprises. At least I thought I could discount that rumor
until I found out from Sam Lowell, who knows Allan like a book, when he went up
to Olde Saco, Maine to offer Allan that Encore Presentation gravy job, that he
told Sam that when he had landed in Salt Lake City out in the Utahs he
approached the editors of the Salt Lake
Tribune for a job to tide him over for a while. Here is the totally cynical
part when you think about it. He intended to use that position to springboard
himself onto Mitt’s campaign when he announced he was running for the U.S.
Senate seat ancient Orrin Hatch was vacating. That is neither here nor there
job-wise but his “pitch” was that since he had been an expert skewer of Mitt he
would be the perfect guy to deflect any hard-ball stuff that those unruly
ruffians might throw Mitt’s way. Yeah, cynical is right.”
[Once again truth-teller Sam Lowell
knows his man, and incidentally although I do not know him well has aided my
side in this tempest in a teapot dispute Allan has waged against me. Sam showed
me the letter Allan sent directly to Mitt out in Utah asking if he wanted to
play golf so they could discuss future plans. It seems that after 2012 Allan
and Mitt had been paired together at a charity event at Belmont Country Club
outside of Boston when that was one of Mitt’s ten thousand residences and had
kind of buried the hatchet once neither man thought Mitt would run for any
office again. I stand by my “Yeah, cynical is right” and it is rather
noticeable that while Allan hammered me on other stuff he left this one down in
the human sink.]
I also stand by my remarks about
romance and love below except I have found out why Allan really hammered me on
his then current affair with Madame La Rue. It had nothing to do with that
really but that I had mentioned that he had funded, had loaned Madame La Rue
the money to buy and refurbish that mansion turned high-end whorehouse. See
Allan had been married to wife number two back in those 1970s days while he was
diddling with the Madame and he today is afraid that said wife number two will
do something crazy if she finds out he lent Madame a couple of hundred thousand
then and she didn’t have enough dough to payteh bills. Oh, well.
“A man, any man, any woman for that
matter has the right to have an affair with whoever they want and not have it
published throughout the land. The rumor about Allan running a whorehouse, a
high-end whorehouse for high-end Asian businessmen with a kinky streak, for a
taste for a walk on the wild side, with an old flame, a woman who goes by the
name Madame La Rue whose real name I have known for a while but will stick with
her alias since my beef is with Allan not her was essentially true. From “an
unnamed but reliable source who has asked to remain anonymous since he or she
is not authorized to speak publicly about the matter” I found out that Allan
landed in Half Moon Bay south of Frisco, the site of Madame’s house of
ill-repute as Fritz Taylor put it in his ironic tone with the clothes on his
back and not much else and Madame lend him a bunch of money, so-called lent him
the money. Back in the day and I am not sure if it was before they split or
after Allan (while still married to wife number two) had fronted Madame the
dough to buy an old worn-out mansion on the shoreline, fix it up, grease some
palms and other start-up costs-with no strings attached and no requirement to
pay back. Nice, very nice. So Madame was just paying back that unrequired
pay-back. That is the public story-the real story is that Allan acted as
“master of ceremonies” at the place to earn his keep. I don’t know about you
but that sounds an awful like pimp to me. Frankly I think Madame got the worse
of the bargain for her out-lay but I will keep mum about that since I am told
they had started up their old torch while he was there before she booted him
out for some unexplained reason.”
I will let the following stand as is
since Allan has relented on brow-beating me about his friendship with Miss Judy
Garland his old friend Timmy Riley after he came out of that very deep closet
he was in once he got out of his boyhood growing up town. Maybe the fact that
Sam Lowell and Seth Garth have photos, cellphone selfies, of Allan acting as
“master of ceremonies” at a drag queen revue has something to do with it as
well.
“Seth, Jack Callahan (who had done
yeoman’s service funding this publication in the dark red ink days), Si Lannon,
Sam, all Allan’s friend, his corner boys from the old Acre neighborhood in
North Adamsville had the usual pre-Stonewall “fag” “light on his feet,” ‘fairy”
vocabulary and social distain before they got enlightened about LGBTQI matters.
The one person who I have not put in that mix but who was in the thick of the
gay-baiting of certain people (and of each other as well accepted ritual in
those hard macho days) is Timmy Riley. Timmy Riley who maybe as a defense
mechanism of his own preferences suppressed himself as long as he was in the
Acre, and before Stonewall at what cost we will never know. Timmy though turned
into Miss Judy Garland, a drag queen, who subsequently has run the famous drag
queen club in Frisco for many years. What people did not know was that Allan at
some point when Timmy was down in the streets lend him the money to buy the Kit
Kat Club in North Beach and from there he zoomed along to fame and fortune. So
the story-the public story is that after Madame threw Allan out he went to
Timmy with some sad tale and Timmy lend him some money. (All of this money
supposedly to pay that damn alimony and those blood-sucker colleges, Allan’s
expressions). The real story is that Allan, while living above the club in one
of Timmy’s spare rooms declared himself “master of ceremonies” downstairs at
the club. Yeah, right we can read between the lines.”
Jesus now to the real deal, or what
I thought was the real deal from those Twitter fanatics abetted now by Allan
who has taken up their defense of one Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s besotted
father who was something like the Jim Morrison of the Doors in his day and has
claimed that I have libeled that bastard-bearing man. I will address the whole
explosive issue below but the thoughtful reader should have a little background
as to why supposedly rational Tweeters are raising a hue and cry about Papa
Bronson.
“Remember boys and girls all these
critics of my review have said not word one about the impact, or lack of
impact, of the Ms. Alcott’s book on me, or the world of literature. And before
I mention what they have said, or not said there is yet another firestorm they
had been more than happy to enflame. This is the offending section-“The only
thing I knew about Louisa May Alcott, and this second-hand through Sandy Salmon
when he was Senior Film Editor and I was his associate editor was that her
father, Bronson Alcott, was a wild man, had run amok at Brook Farm, the holy of
holies in the pre-Civil War Transcendentalist movement, you know Emerson,
Thoreau and other Buddha-like figures who ran around Cambridge, mainly Brattle
Street telling naked truths naked. Bronson has run through whatever dough he
had from his inheritance and had fathered, some say illegimately, a bunch of
children by various female denizens of that isolated farm including Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s wife and had had an affair with Herman Melville’s brother. Such
things are hard to pin down but all I know for sure is that he claimed Louisa
May and three other young women as his children. Lacking DNA testing who knows.
So old Bronson was a certified wild man no doubt…”
I need not stand on the silly
defense that the information I got about the old wild man Bronson Alcott,
Louisa’s beloved if looney father, was gathered from Sandy Salmon, my boss. I
refer the reader, and especially those readers who have decided out of some
serious naivete to defend this lout, Sol Sandburg’s classic and some say
definitive book on Bronson Alcott and the whole Brook Farm ménage In The Time Before Hippie Times; The Brook
Farm Commune. Reading the book made even my jaded ears ring. Sure there
were serious things going on in the ante bellum period in America, up in cold
New England where the least of it was that they stopped believing in the
eternal Father, Son, Holy Ghost trifecta, stopped believing in God if you
really delve into the Universalist doctrine without flinching. Started a whole
movement called if you can believe this the Transcendentalist movement which
let’s face it would draw as many wooly-headed minds as intellectual giants like
Thoreau and Emerson. The streets of Cambridge were filled with cranks con-men
and drifters of no repute who were ready to listen to anybody except maybe
Martin Van Buren about how to break out of the nine to five rat-trap circa the
1840s.
This mayhem was a perfect foil for a
flake like Bronson Alcott (who also had several aliases to cover his various
bigamous marriages both before Brook Farm and after so when I pose the question
of who were actually Bronson’s prodigy I wasn’t blowing smoke although the four
Alcott sisters, including literary Louisa May, seen to have been his legitimate
daughters-all others including the bastard raised by Nathaniel Hawthorne are
different stories). No money, no standing, no anything yet he was able in those
odd times to ingratiate himself with a ton of intellectual heavyweights and
eventually have a soft landing at Brook Farm where he literally went amok, went
crazy with laudanum, morphine, hemp (what we call marijuana), opium anything
coming off the China sea Yankee clippers that could be ingested. Had those two
billion affairs and whatever number of children and walked away with not so
much as a by your leave when the place folded due to corruption, malfeasance
and general hubris. Some say he was later kept by a woman who ran a whorehouse
next to the Parker House in Boston since he was so dope-addled that he was
unemployable and needed ut a whatever alms would provide for the children he
would claim as his own. A shabby, shabby man and Sol Sandburg nailed the
bugger, put him in the deadbeat hall of fame. This is the guy all those irate
tweeters have been defending unto death for the sake of Louisa May’s
reputation. But enough.”
It is hard to know where to begin
when you are dealing with the young who have no real background to go by and
have taken to the defense of Bronson Alcott merely because he was some famous
writer’s father and the daughter had written about the plight of energetic but
suppressed young women in the middle of the 19th century. The latest
“defense” of one Bronson Alcott is to say I am mistaken, that Bronson Alcott
never had any association with Brook Farm over in what is now West Roxbury but
an admittedly failed experiment called Fruitland out in what is now Harvard the
other side of Concord, all Massachusetts towns.
Are they kidding. Yes, Bronson
Alcott ran amok out in Harvard, drove the women crazy there with his
drunkenness, debauchery, and frankly weird rules of behavior like not eating
meat or wearing meat products, and other stuff that can be checked on. But this
guy really was a beast, a deadbeat of the worse sort. All true. But what they
fail to get, consciously fail to get is that a guy like Bronson had many
aliases. According to Sol Sandburg he had several Amos Bronson, Alcott Brown,
Amos May, Amos Alcott, Willard Saint Orge, Maxwell Amos and so on. A very quick
look at who inhabited Brook Farm will find those names readily available on
member rosters. So if you can believe this these tweeters are not only
defending a stumblebum at Brook Farm but have dragged in Fruitland atrocities
as well. What these naïve folk fail to realize is that the good Constables of
Boston had his number, had his arrest record. Apparently thinking that without
DNA testing, without the Internet and computers our forebears could not be
traced to their vile deeds. Read Hawthorne about Brother Bronson who not only
violated his wife but his brother, more importantly read Sol Sandburg for the
real deal. The worse part of all this is that Allan Jackson who once was
something of a legend in the business is the one who tried to muddy the waters
with that Fruitland stuff when he knew better. Check his review of Sol’s book in
the 1982 archives for American Film
Gazette in his sunnier days (which in those days also did book and music
reviews before it went on-line to survive) in his sunnier days.
I admit I am still at wit’s end as
to why the tsunami of tweets has fallen on my head on side matters and almost
nothing has been mentioned about my contention that nobody reads the damn book
anymore much less that it serves as any kind of model for young women today. I
will end this third unfortunately necessary review with my original thoughts
about the place of Little Women in
the literary pantheon.
“Like I said a minute ago nothing
about the fucking book, not word one about what to their young impressible
lives and I can only conclude, male or female, these tweeters have had nothing
better to do with their time that throw cyberspace bombs my way to cover the
very hard fact that except for an occasional Seven Sisters Lit major nobody has
read the book since about 1960, maybe 1950. That said, that truth uttered why
did nobody bother to froth-mouthed respond to my take on the book’s place, or
non-place, in the expanded Western canon. In the interest of complete-ness I
will retail what I have written previously in the forlorn hope somebody might
pick a real literary fight in L.M. ‘s defense:
“Here is where things get weird
though Sandy who knew Allan Jackson when they both were much younger and had
worked the free-lance stringer racket we all go through before getting our
so-called cushy by-lines at American Film
Gazette asked him what sources I should go to for a look at the lingering
influence of the book on modern girls and young women. Told Sandy to tell me to
ask my sister, Ellen, when she had read the book and what she had thought of
it. Here is the honest truth Ellen had never heard of the book, didn’t know who
or what I was talking about and when I told her the outline of the story she
laughed, smirked and laughed again saying “are you kidding” who had time to
read such old-time melodramas. Failing that avenue I figured that I would work
my way back so I mentioned the book I was reviewing to my mother who told me
that my grandmother had read her the book at night before bed but she didn’t
remember much except there were four sisters who grew up and got married or
something like that and were good wives except one who died young of some
strange disease. She said ask my grandmother. Bingo. Grandma quoted me chapter
and verse without hesitation until I asked how the book influenced her. She
told me those were different times, more restrictive times even against her
growing up times in the 1930s so she would have to pass on the influence
question. She was only a little shocked that my sister knew nada about the book
and my mother only a little more. So I am going to take a stab and say as a 150th
anniversary honor-women you have come a long way since those homebody marriage
child-rearing times.
I had to think awhile, had to ask
Seth Garth who is good at this kind of question and his old flame Leslie
Dumont, both fellow writers here what it was about the novel that would have
appealed to young girls and women up at least until my grandmother’s growing up
times. And why when I later asked some other female contemporaries they came up
as blank as my sister on even having heard of the book. Leslie said it best, or
at least better. Those were male dominated times and so even the least amount
of spunk, independence by say Jo, who is the character in the book who pretty
much represents Louisa May’s profile was like a breath of fresh air even to
young girls and women who knew the score, knew they would be driven back into
the cave if they got too brave. Seth, who was more than willing to defer to
Leslie’s judgment took a more historical approach saying there was nothing in
the plotline that dealt with eternal truths so that such a novel would have a
limited life-span except in the groves of academia where a couple of generations
of Ph.ds could get worked up about the social meaning of it all.
That is about it except to briefly
trace the story line, or lines since there are actually two main threads, the
almost universal family-centered expectations for women and Louisa May’s
struggle to get somebody to survive into strong independence co-managership of
the family along with a thoughtful husband. Oldest sister Meg is pretty
conventional, beautiful and domestic preaching to the younger sisters’ choir
about the need to be civilized and good God-fearing wives. Jo, Louisa May’s
character is strong-willed and thoughtful and will make the marriage that
Alcott thought should be appropriate for her times and class (and the unspoken
truth was to end the shameful lusts and lechery of one Bronson Alcott). Beth is
something of a cipher, musical but early on sickly who died young from the
after effects of horrible scarlet fever so no real lesson can be drawn from her
life. (Funny how these Victorian novelists, male and female, have to have some
frail sickly female character hovering in the background.) Amy, the youngest,
is the closest to the character that let’s say my daughter could relate to if
she ever finished reading the book which she adamantly refused to finish after
reading about a third of it and declaring the thing utterly boring even the Amy
character who struggle for artistic self-expression is very similar to her own
feelings about what she wants out of life. As Sam Lowell has stated on many
occasions-a slice of life circa the 1860s-that is the “hook.”
