The Search for Genius

Last week I finished Eden’s Outcasts, Matteson’s wonderful biography of Bronson and Louisa May Alcott. I have read biographies of Louisa May Alcott before, but never one that also focuses on her father. What I have learned is that my father and Bronson Alcott are soul brothers. Perhaps Bronson was reincarnated as penniless mid-west philosopher to make up for his 19^th century god-complex. If so, he has still not learned his lesson.

Bronson Alcott was an ambitious dreamer who dragged his family from city to city looking for a population that would acknowledge his greatness. He could not stand dissention, and willfulness of any type in his family was construed as a personal insult. His wife and daughters would labor at lackluster, soul sucking jobs to keep the family fed and clothed while he read and visited his great friends, refusing to descend to labor that he thought was beneath him. If it sounds like I’m being hard on both Bronson and my own father, I am. They both had a wonderful, loving side and tended to error more from blindness than inclination. But the parallels between my family and the Alcott family were startling, though I realize they should not be. Bronson Alcott was no harder on this family than Percy Shelley or Edger Allan Poe was on theirs; people of genius are not easy to live with. That said, people searching for genius, but never finding it, are just as hard to live with, and there are a lot more failed than ascending genius in the world.

I also started reading Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian. Written by Scott Douglas, who I have adored as a McSweeney’s correspondent for years, I was quite looking forward to this book. Sadly, it has been a bit of a disappointment. Flashes of Douglas’s sardonic yet affectionate humor are still present, but it is mostly hidden behind a clumsy and heavy- handed apparatus that make it impossible to get into the story. Douglas’s personal narrative is constantly interrupted by surprisingly uninteresting sidebars and needless footnotes. I am all for footnotes in the style of David Foster Wallace, but I don’t need to be told what a class visit to a library is. The whole narrative is also very episodic, which works well for a blog or the McSweeney dispatches, but it oddly unsatisfying in a book. I hope Douglas keeps up his contributions to McSweeney’s and perhaps branches out into other magazines/newspaper. His style is perfect for that venue.