finding the fanaticsAnother day at Orchard House, but sadly, i forgot my camera. Instead, I tried to jot down some of the exchanges I happened to over hear:
This between two gray-haired dames -- one with a thick german accent and the other a boston one --
Boston: "If you grew up not feeling good about all that gender stuff, then Jo's -- who is of course Louisa -- for you."
Berlin: "Women couldn't just go acting like Jo in my father's house."
Boston: "Is that how Little Women saved your life."
Crap, I thought, I missed the prior conversation on Alcott as life saver. But at least I caught the rejoinder:
Berlin: "She [Jo] was the primal source of my passion"
Kinky, huh?
The talk that I had been looking forward to was disappointing, mostly because it was exclusively biographical -- a real hit with the Alcott fanatics (as were the speaker's joke about Bronson Alcott being no Brad Pitt) -- and also a good reminder about what to avoid. But the audience was enraptured, hearing-aids turned to full volume, and a rather rotund but eager fan kept uttering (audibly, very audibly) "yes" and "Ahh" and "yes" and "oh yes" and "umm." It was cracking me up and I exchanged knowing glances with the octogenarian sitting next to me. It seems we were equally bemused and annoyed.
These last two days have reminded me how extraordinary the fanatic can be. She's read everything any of the Alcotts wrote and she accepts it with an unwavering sense of devotion. There's no real room to trouble her neat narrative, reading, as she does, Alcott as minister, mother, master. She evinces a kind of total commitment to that which we, as academics, are trained to be weary. I've realized that there's part of me -- or that there was part of me -- in the fanatic, and on some level it frustrates me that my work has diminished my love. At the end of her talk this morning, Lisa Stepanski mentioned that she thinks all Alcott scholars are engaged with their subject on a personal level, that they play out their own relationships to their father and mother in their work. As she said this, i wanted to stand up and say, "not me, not me," but I suspect that what I really learned from the fanatics today was that I'm as guilty of that charge as anyone. I do wrestle with the legacy of my family when I write about Bronson and Louisa, but I certainly hope those conjurations don't bleed too heavily into my work.
2 comments:
Sorry I missed yesterday's post, but I think it's fantastic you listened to a talk on your topic, and could sit there and figure out where it challenged your own ideas and emerge with the conviction that there were serious holes in his argument. That is a like a dream come true!
Does the fanatic have to project his whole family onto the Alcotts? I think "personal level" can mean that you feel a connection with a writer, an attraction and respect that does not necessarily mean you juxtapose yourself and your family with them. The former is the love of a writer that keeps us engaged (but we can still argue with our friends, as this blog aptly demonstrates), the latter is when I think you lose critical perspective. Stepanski is probably right about the personal level, but that doesn't seem like such a bad thing.
Anyway, glad you're having a good time up at Orchard House! Sounds like a great week!
AB for a minute there I thought you were writing about the Thomas Wolfe conference...serious flashbacks re: the hearing aids and audible murmurings. And of course that obsession with family. I was always so amazed that the same biographical facts presented from a slightly different perspective were enough to satisfy fully most peeps in the room, year after year.
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