GOOD READING
by Barbara Klaw
The Alcotts
by Madelon Bedell
Clarkson N. Potter
20 illustrations
384 pages, $15.95
It is doubtful that any family has ever chronicled itself as abundantly as the Alcotts. Bronson’s diaries alone fill sixty-one fat volumes, earnestly recording his every thought. His wife, Abba May, and the four Alcott daughters also kept journals. Madelon Bedell has used this torrent of material to build a portrait of this intense, eccentric family.
Bronson, “the most transcendental of the transcendentalists,” was a passionate husband and father, and a miserable provider. It was not that he despised money, but that “he scorned the necessity to debase oneself … in the earning of it.” He was an educator/philosopher, and his first pupils were his own children. He felt that a teacher’s role was to release a child’s potential, to nourish the soul. For punishment he substituted the building of moral conscience—or what we now call, less loftily, guilt. He started school after school, each of which flourished briefly, then faded as nervous parents grew alarmed by his strange methods of teaching.
New England in the pre-Civil War period was seething with moral uplift, often expressed in terms of Utopian living experiments. Bronson started one of the most rigorously pure of the Utopian communities—Fruitlands. Its “Consociate Family” managed to hang together for only a few months.
With Bronson for a husband, it was fortunate that Abba May was practical. She was also loving and loyal, but there were times when she had to rebel. When Bronson’s partner at Fruitlands tried to impose celibacy on the community, Abba announced that she and the children were leaving—with the furniture. Bronson struggled with his soul, but love (and marital comforts) triumphed. “Mr. Alcott’s constancy to his wife and family,” the disgusted partner wrote, “and his inconstancy to the Spirit have blurred his life forever.”
Many years later, the second daughter, Louisa May, celebrated her chaotic family life in Little Women, in which Abba May was transformed into the saccharine Marmee. The four fictional sisters are pretty close to the originals. And Bronson, the confusing father figure, is disposed of by sending him off to the Civil War where he safely can be adored in absentia.
Bedell centers this absorbing biography on Bronson and Abba May. She plans a second volume on the adult lives of the four Alcott daughters—definitely a book to look forward to.
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The Fall of Fortresses
by Elmer Bendiner
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
8 pages of photographs
258 pages, $11.95
It was a tidy plan that the beat-Germany-with-air-power contingent had in World War II: Send heavy bombers deep into enemy territory to wipe out the enemy’s war-making ability. But “we aircrews would not match their vision of neat and precise destruction,” Elmer Bendiner, who navigated a B-17, writes. “We missed too often, and too many of us died. We were inept and perishable.”
Two of Bendiner’s twenty-five missions were directed at the ball-bearing factories of Schweinfurt. These strikes might have hurt the Germans had the B-17 losses not been so massive that the planners dared not inflame public opinion by immediately repeating the raids. Survival in the heavy bombers was a matter of time and luck, as Bendiner makes clear. Once his flying fortress plunged into the English Channel, and the crew was rescued; and once eleven shells penetrated the gas tank but inexplicably failed to blow up the plane. When the shells were examined back in England, they were found to be empty, except for one which held a rolled slip of paper, on which was written in Czech, “This is all we can do for you now.”
This small, wise book, written with elegant simplicity, makes the reader see, smell, and feel the airman’s war.
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Rufus Porter, Rediscovered
by Jean Lipman
Clarkson N. Potter
124 illustrations, 22 in color
198 pages, $16.95
If a Renaissance man could be crossed with a Yankee egalitarian, Rufus Porter would be the result. And if he hadn’t been such a washout as a businessman, his name would be familiar to us all. Porter could do anything—play music, dance, draw, paint, teach, write, or invent anything that the raw, new 19th-century society he lived in seemed to need. The repeating rifle that made Samuel Colt rich was his design (the company bought his patent for one hundred dollars); and he drew up sophisticated plans for a dirigible but could never raise the money to build it. He also was the founder of, among other less durable magazines, Scientific American.
That we know as much about him as we do is due to Jean Lipman’s persistence. Primarily interested in his painting—strong, fresh portraits and graceful, usually unsigned wall murals—she has spent forty years tracing his life and work. In 1968, Lipman published a biography of Porter, and she now has revised and added to it. This handsome book acquaints us with both the life and the art of an astonishing and delightful American.
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