Alcotts

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT -- Katharine Anthony--Knopf ($3).

When Van Wyck Brooks called the period of Hawthorne, Emerson and Bronson Alcott the flowering of New England, he did not use the phrase for its warm, poetic savor. Not only in Brooks's book but in lesser works like Odell Shepard's Pedlar's Progress: The Life of Branson Alcott, readers can catch whiffs of a morning freshness in the cultural air, when poets and novelists no less than practical citizens took on themselves lifetime projects, came back to work unshaken after personal tragedy or public disgrace.

In some ways the buoyant, penniless, unbreakable Bronson Alcott--who bounced up and down as good-naturedly as if the path from success to failure was the most pleasant and natural one in the world--symbolized this spirit better than anyone else.

New England's culture had begun to go to seed before the Civil War, but the war acted as an almost killing frost. Where Bronson Alcott's first experiences were peaceful peddling trips to the South, his sensitive daughter Louisa got her initiation into the great world in a Civil War hospital, where, in her first hour on duty, her patient died, and where she tried to lessen a soldier's agony by reciting Dickens to him while his arm was being amputated without an anesthetic. Bronson Alcott returned from his trips across the U. S. in times of peace, usually broke but refreshed and inspired; his daughter came home from her glimpse of the wartime U. S. sick, neurotic, her health permanently affected.

A careful, sympathetic biography, Katharine Anthony's Louisa May Alcott points the contrast between father and daughter, draws a subtle picture of the relationship within the strange Alcott family, but is principally memorable for the light it throws on U. S. culture before and after the Civil War. Viewing Louisa Alcott as a writer of great native powers, and Little Women as a work of genuine social and literary influence, Miss Anthony with gentle strokes traces Louisa Alcott's progress from a high-spirited tomboy to a hardworking old maid. The impression of a frustrated and unhappy life is communicated almost in spite of her efforts. In Louisa's revolt against her father's unpracticality, she set herself to make money. She got her money and her popular success but none of the intellectual following she deserved and needed. At 56 her nerves and health collapsed. Shut away in a darkened house in Roxbury, her acute illness unknown to the world, she died two days after her father, who wanted none of the things she broke her heart trying to get.

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