”Am I wrong to suspect that he lives for ideas, that he builds his whole world of them, and that it is you who are left to deal with the practical
”Am I wrong to suspect that he lives for ideas, that he builds his whole world of them, and that it is you who are left to deal with the practical matters of life?”
I read this book in the grimmest and most distracting of circumstances: the 10 days in which the world began to shut down because of the coronavirus. (Truly it would have been more appropriate to have been reading Brooks’ novel Year of Wonders, the story of a village which voluntarily quarantined itself in at attempt to halt the progress of the bubonic plague.) Like Mr. March - not the month, but the eponymous ‘hero’ of the novel - I drifted in and out of this novel, made distracted and feverish by the news. I begin my review with this sense of reading context in an attempt to be fair, as I’ve certainly not read it under ideal circumstances. I read it listlessly, dutifully (because of my Pulitzer Prize reading group), but not at all intently until the final few chapters.
Another caveat: Little Women, the classic book which inspired this story, is a longtime favourite of mine and a book that I know well. Unlike Geraldine Brooks, who wondered what happened to Mr. March during the year that he was a chaplain in the Civil War - it had never particularly bothered me that Mr. March, the father of the family, was only a shadowy figure in the novel. For various reasons, ranging from commercialism to Victorian ideals and sentiment, Louisa May Alcott used her own family as a model for Little Women but definitely filed down the rougher edges. Mr. and Mrs. March are wholly admirable in the novel, although Mrs. March (known as ‘Marmee’) does confide in Jo that she had laboured for many years to master her own unruly temper. The March family’s poverty, and their high ideals, are modelled on the author’s family, but she manages to make poverty seem more edifying than it ever was in her own insecure upbringing. (For example, the Alcott family moved 22 times before they settled in Orchard House in Concord - the house identified with them.)
My paperback edition of the novel (p. 2006) has an annoying Richard and Judy’s Book Club sticker on the front of it, but it does also contain some interesting supplemental material at the back of the book. The best bits are Geraldine Brooks’ explanations about how Bronson Alcott served as an inspiration for Mr. March in her novel - and how his political beliefs (he was an active abolitionist), his personal habits (he was a vegan from adolescence), his childhood (on a poor Connecticut farm) and his young adulthood (as a peddler in the Southern states) all make up the background of the fictional Mr. March and play a role in this story. I knew a bit about Alcott, mostly from visiting Orchard House, but I had completely forgotten about his years in the South before the Civil War. That background is really the jumping off point for this novel.
The first half of the novel alternates between the past and the present time (approximately 1861, the second year of the war) and we learn about March’s early courtship of Marmee, and also of his brief tenure in the South before the war - and most significantly, of his relationship (and uncomfortably lustful interest in) a woman called Grace. Grace, along with Marmee and March himself, is one of the most important characters in the novel. Raised as a glorified ‘house servant’, she is the biological daughter of a former plantation owner named Mr Clement and his liaison with one of his slaves. Later in the novel, when March ends up in a military hospital in Washington DC, he meets Grace again - this time appearing as the skilled nurse and right-hand woman to a Surgeon Hale.
I suspect that it’s probably better to read this novel if you are NOT a mega-fan of Little Women. I don’t think I am prudish at all, but the first few chapters really were an assault on my sensibilities. Told from March’s first-person point-of-view, the reader is plunged into the real and nasty world of battle and retreat. March - an idealistic abolitionist, but also a committed pacifist - is wholly unsuited to be a soldier. As he quickly learns, not only his political beliefs but his religious ones put him at odds with the soldiers he is meant to be consoling and administering to. Before long, March is moved to a new ‘assignment’ within the Army. He is sent to an estate called Oak Landing, which has been leased by a young Illinois attorney named Ethan Canning. Canning is attempting to bring in the cotton crop, with the not terribly willing help of the former slaves of that plantation. March’s best attributes - chiefly his kindness, and his sincere interest in the not-quite-emancipated slaves under his care - are given a brief and rather heartbreaking chance to shine. Unfortunately, it ends badly; and like many idealists, March is not psychologically well-equipped to deal with his own failings not to mention the collateral damages of war.
There were some aspects of March’s character that really made me squirm, and only in retrospect - having finished the book - could I appreciate how skilfully the author weaves together the fictional Mr. March, the real person of Branson Alcott, and her considerable historical research into the time period. There is one aspect of the novel that seemed slightly anachronistic, but perhaps I’m wrong in that. When Marmee questions Grace about the ‘relationship’ that exists between Grace and her husband, she assumes that March is in love with this elegant and capable former slave. Grace replies: ”He loves, perhaps, an idea of me: Africa, liberated. I represent certain things to him, a past he would reshape if he could, a hope of a future he yearns toward.” Later, Grace castigates March for his egoistic belief that he can still be of any use in the war that is going on.
”We have had enough of white people ordering our existence! There are men of my own race more versed in how to fetch and carry than you will ever be. And there are Negro preachers aplenty who know the true language of our souls. A free people must learn to manage its own destiny. ... If you sincerely want to help us, go back to Concord and work with your own people. Write sermons that will prepare your neighbours to accept a world where black and white may one day stand as equals.”
I’m not sure that a ‘Grace’ in 1861 would have thought or expressed herself in this way, but it certainly does make a strong ending to the novel - and gives it some contemporary resonance, too.
I read this novel as part of the 2020 #mypulitzerstack challenge. 3/12
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