"The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s," Alexander Nemerov - a review

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

“The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s,” Alexander Nemerov

April 13, 2023

 

“The observer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, saw trees as secrets. With the

‘knotty fingers’ of their roots, they held onto the mystery of themselves.”

                                                                                                Alexander Nemerov (1963-)

                                                                                                The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s, 2023

 

The 1830s saw the end of a pastoral age and the start of the Industrial Revolution: The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 made lumber, mining ore, and farm produce from the Middle West available on the East Coast; a factory system brought division of labor and efficiencies to manufacturing; America’s first railroad, the New Jersey Railroad Company, dates to 1832; the daguerreotype process was developed, and the first mechanical sewing machine was patented during the decade, which saw America’s population increase by a third and move west. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 made available 25 million acres to white settlers; the decade concluded with the 1837-1839 “Trail of Tears.” 

 

Fifty-seven essays (and 48 pages of prints and paintings) take us from an axe factory in Collinsville, Connecticut (“The changing country brought a new obscurity of individual actions…”); to the Great Dismal Swamp on the southeastern border of Virginia and North Carolina, where the author imagines a meeting between Nat Turner and Edgar Allen Poe (“Poe also thought of the swamp. Maybe he thought of it enough that – by envisioning it, by calling it into his mind as a true place of the imagination – he succeeded in meeting Turner there…”); to the Swiss-American artist Karl Bodmer and his 1832 painting of the Fox River in New Harmony, Indiana. (“In the picture no one is there, not even the artist himself.”)

 

There are cameo appearances of Araminta Ross, better known as Harriet Tubman; Samuel Morse; Thomas Cole; Alexis de Tocqueville; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Emma Willard; Noah Webster; Ralph Waldo Emerson; John James Audubon; James Fenimore Cooper; Andrew Jackson, and the 54 survivors of the slave ship “Amistad.”

 

In an essay titled “The Gasbag of Louis Anselm Lauriat,” Professor Nemerov wrote words that provide a portrait of the start of the decade: “The trees were so complete that it seemed no human being need ever look anywhere than to them for a view of life.”

 

Professor Nemerov teaches humanities at Stanford. Given his imagination and lyrical prose, it is unsurprising he is the son of Howard Nemerov, twice Poet Laureate of the United States. While he calls his short pieces fables, they struck me as vignettes, with brief appearances of historical figures and ordinary people. His book provides the reader the good and the bad of what life was like in the United States during the 1830s. The stories reveal changing values and social evolution over the past two hundred years. The decade saw the transition from a time when forests dominated man to one when man dominated forests. It would be half a century before the National Park System restored dignity to trees that had covered so much of America. In a postscript, Professor Nemerov wrote: “Reading books, filling in the blanks with my imagination, I sought to restore the figures in the original I had not seen…” Take note, writers of historical fiction.