Transcendentalist

PEDLAR'S PROGRESS : THE LIFE OF BRONSON ALCOTT -- Odell Shepard -- Little, Brown ($3.75).

Who was Bronson Alcott? Few U. S. memories are long enough to answer. Fifty years ago a name to conjure with, he is known now, if at all. as the father of Louisa May Alcott, best-selling author (Little Women, Little Men). It is Biographer Shepard's well-presented thesis that Bronson Alcott is one of America's almost-forgotten great men. An ably-written, authoritative book, Pedlar's Progress deserves every penny of its $5,000 prize (Little, Brown Centenary), will fit snugly on the same shelf with Van Wyck Brooks's The Flowering of New England (TIME, Aug. 24).

Bronson Alcott's given name was Amos Bronson Alcox. He changed it not for euphony but to scotch smirks. Born (1799) a Connecticut farmer's son, Alcott had a good old-fashioned pastoral upbringing but little school. His immortal longings were not bounded by the farm's horizon: he was determined to better not only himself but the world. At 19 he left home to find himself and make his fortune, went as a pedlar of Yankee notions into the South. The hospitable Southerners took him in, taught him manners, lent him books. Commercially, his trips were a signal failure: when he stopped peddling to take up schoolteaching he owed his hard-pressed father $600. But he had learned more than any college could have taught him.

As a schoolteacher Alcott was a heretic from the start. His innovations--all aimed at drawing out rather than cramming the pupil--drew wide and often unfavorable attention. By the time he had married and started his famed Temple School in Boston he was known as an educational revolutionary. The Ph. D.'s of the day considered him a rank incompetent. "He turned over and tumbled up and down at least a thousand of the most influential books in the world . . . yet the total result never amounted to anything in the least like erudition. His faculty for ignoring and forgetting the innumerable things that he considered unimportant approached the phenomenal." He had practically no sense of humor, he was a vegetarian, and never understood Shakespeare. His theory of education: that a child knows all the right answers already, has only to be asked the right questions. On the rare occasions when a pupil needed severe punishment, instead of striking the child Alcott had the child strike him.

Founded in boom days, the Temple School prospered only briefly. When Alcott published the Record of Conversations on the Gospels Held in Mr. Alcott's School, its theological and pedagogical heresies shocked Boston; the pupils dropped from 40 to 25, to ten, to three. Alcott shut up shop. He tried to open another school, had to close that in short order when he admitted a Negro child among the Brahmins. By this time he was $6,000 in debt.

With education in his blood, too, Alcott set out on the road once more. This time he peddled not notions but what he called Conversations-- informal but high-souled colloquies of 20 or 30 people. These Conversations never degenerated into arguments; if they did, "Alcott simply took refuge in the uppermost silences."

When Alcott was 43 his good friend Ralph Waldo Emerson treated him to a trip to England, wrote cautiously commending him to Carlyle. That friendship did not come off. Alcott did not like England; he did not like Carlyle. The two sages met several times. When Carlyle as a special favor gave him strawberries for breakfast, Alcott mixed them with his potatoes, a sight that sent his host storming up & down the room. But Alcott brought two disciples back from England. One soon fell by the wayside; the other, Charles Lane, nearly wrecked his household.

Charles Lane shared Alcott's unworldly views to an alarming extent, easily persuaded him to try living the ideal life. Lane bought a farm, settled there with the Alcotts to revive Paradise. Much more ascetic than its contemporary experiment, Brook Farm, Fruitlands had an even briefer existence. They did without butter, cheese, milk and wool because those products involved the slavery of animals; cotton because of Negro slavery. Lane regarded Alcott's family as an only temporarily necessary evil, did what he could to win Alcott to single sainthood. At that last hurdle Alcott rebelled and they parted company.

The failure of this experiment sent Alcott back to Concord, Mass, to join its individualistic colony of notables: Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Channing. Their intercourse was friendly but a little stiff. "Every one of them knew that every one was keeping a private Journal and was making his daily observations upon all the rest." To navigate the family straits Alcott took to the road again with his Conversations, this time went West. His first trip netted exactly $1 profit. Mrs. Alcott hid her disappointment, kissed him, said: "I call that doing very well." When family straits got too much for him Alcott retired to his room, plunged into the Rig-Veda or the Confucian Analects or Hermes Trismegistus. Occasionally he dined with Emerson, who was less of an ascetic than he. Once his host was dilating on the horrors of cannibalism while carving a roast. Alcott set the table agrin by saying: ''But Mr. Emerson, if we are to eat meat at all why should we not eat the best?"

As age closed in, something almost like success came to Alcott. He was made Superintendent of Schools in Concord, at $100 a year. He went on more western tours, came back from the last of them with $1,200. He never got himself altogether out of debt; like Mr. Micawber, "it was a miracle that he was always expecting, but what he usually got was the law." But money meant less than nothing to Bronson Alcott. Long laughed at as an eccentric, Alcott attracted such lasting admiration from such admired men that at last even his own New England was proud of him. Said Emerson: "As pure intellect, I have never seen his equal." Thoreau called him "the sanest man ... I chance to know." When the Concord School of Philosophy was founded, nine years before his death, it seemed only fitting to make Alcott dean, though the great Emerson was still there. And when he died, at 88, two days before his famed daughter Louisa, the Concord School disbanded.

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