The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s

337 Pages·2023·10.513 MB·English

by  Alexander Nemerov

forest
the

Alexander Nemerov
forest
the
A Fable of America in the 1830s
princeton university press
Princeton and Oxford
the a. w. mellon lectures in the fine arts
national gallery of art, washington
Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
Bollingen Series xxxv: 66
For Jeremi Szaniawski
Shakespeare’s plays are not in the rigorous and critical
sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions
of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary
nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and
sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion
and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing
the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the
gain of another; in which, at the same time, the revel-
ler is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his
friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes
defeated by the frolick of another; and many mischiefs
and many benefits are done and hindered without design.
—samuel johnson, Preface to Shakespeare, 1765
Contents
Author’s Note ix
Part One: Herodotus among the Trees 1
A Lone Pine in Maine
The Town the Axes Made
Hat and Tornado
rush, rush, RUSH
History without a Sound
The Sacred Woods of Francis Parkman
A Shallow Pool of Amber
Grand Central
Part Two: The Tavern to the Traveler 24
The Sleep of John Quidor
The Dancing Figures of the Mountain Pass
The Dutchman’s Diorama
Menagerie
The Man with the Amputated Arm
A Land of One’s Own
Down the Well
The Song of Cold Spring
The Branches Played the Man
An Oak Bent Sideways
Part Three: Come, Thick Night 47
Smoke and Burnt Pine
Sculpting Thomas Jefferson’s Face
Reading the Leaves
A Meeting in the Great Dismal Swamp
Part Four: Panic 60
Ere You Drive Me to Madness
Lifesaver
Sayings of the Piasa Bird
The Death of David Douglas
Part Five: Animals Are Where They Are 82
Lord of the Sod
Night Vision
The Cup of Life
Calamity at New Garden
Spiders at the Altar
Moose and Stencil
Encounter in a Black Locust Grove
Part Six: The Clocks of Forestville 109
The Time the Peddler Fell
Daybreak on Monks Mound
The Clocks of Forestville
Longleaf Pine and a Length of Time
Shades of Noon
A Trip to Bloomingdale Asylum
The Lost Child
Part Seven: Supernatural 145
The Actress at the Waterfall
Harriet of the Stars
The Glitter of the Argand Lamps
A Sight Unseen at New Harmony
A Statue in the Woods
The Secret Bias of the Soul
Deities of the Boardinghouse
Triptych of the Snuff Takers
The Drug of Distance
Painter and Oak
Part Eight: Four Greens 207
The Gasbag of Louis Anselm Lauriat
Ship of Elms
Pray with Me
Backflip and Sky
Part Nine: Three Levitations 225
The Architect’s Escape
The Many Skulls of Robert Montgomery Bird
Two Sisters at the Mountain House

Postscript: The Shield 242

Acknowledgments 249

Notes 250

Credits 269
Author’s Note
This book tells the story of many people. Sometimes they
know one another, sometimes they do not. Often they go
their separate ways, this person striving for one thing, that
one for something else. Together they make a pattern of life
at a given time in the history of the United States.
The forest is a backdrop— if not always an actual setting—
for what follows. Trees play an important role, but this is not
a book of ecology. It portrays the dense and discontinuous
woods of nation, a forest of people destroying and saving the
woods and, in some way, themselves.
These people are all artists in one way or another. Some
are painters and poets. Others have no artistic intention. But
all are creators of private and grand designs, makers of worlds
in the way that this book, in telling their stories, makes the
world they lived in. My artists—m y characters—a re mystics
traveling paths of realization, lost in thought.
The action unfolds in brief stories. Each is an episode, an
impression, not an argument or claim. The reader searching
for conclusive meanings will be disappointed. The book is a
fable, not a history. For authoritative histories of the period,
I recommend, among other books, Sean Wilentz’s The Rise of
American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, Daniel Walker Howe’s
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1 848,
and Charles Sellers’s The Market Revolution, 1815– 1846. Much of
what follows is based on the historical record, though only
some of it is true. Yet I hope that something real is revealed: a
lost world of intricate relation, of human beings going about
their ways, living the dream of themselves in shade and sun.
—a lexander nemerov