In Rough Country Read Online Free

I America of which Benfey writes bears a significant relationship to fin de siècle English culture, and that the individuals whom Benfrey discusses—Emily Dickinson, for one, of whom it’s said by her sister-in-law neighbor Susan Dickinson that the reclusive Amherst poetess had not “any idea of morality”—are aesthetic epicureans of a sort, finding profound meaning in “routes of evanescence” unexpectedly akin to the Pateresque ideal of burning with a hard gem-like flame.
    Christopher Benfey, poet, critic, and professor of literature at Mount Holyoke, whose previous critical works include Emily Dickinson and the Problem of Others (1984), Emily Dickinson: Lives of a Poet (1986), The Double Life of Stephen Crane (1994), The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan (2004), and most recently American Audacity: Literary Essays North and South (2007), has constructed an intricately woven bird’s nest of a book arguing that the “seismic upheaval” of the Civil War and its protracted aftermath precipitated a psychic crisis in the national consciousness as Americans tried to retain traditional beliefs, values, and conventions in the face of ever-shiftingnew social, political, and racial realities. Both during and after the war, Benfey speculates, Americans “gradually left behind a static view of existence, a trust in fixed arrangements and hierarchies”:
    In science and in art, in religion and in love, they came to see a new dynamism and movement in their lives, a brave new world of instability and evanescence…(A) dynamism…(that) found perfect expression in the hummingbird.
    And the hummingbird as a creature of mysterious otherworldly beauty is most brilliantly evoked by the watercolors of Martin Johnson Heade—see Heade’s masterpiece “Cattleya Orchid and Three Brazilian Hummingbirds,” 1871, which Benfey discusses in detail—and the poetry of Emily Dickinson—see the riddlesome poem indexed as #1463, which Benfey calls the poet’s “signature poem” since Dickinson frequently sent it to correspondents and sometimes signed it “Humming-Bird”—“as though she herself were its evanescent subject.”
    A Route of Evanescence
    With a revolving Wheel—
    A Resonance of Emerald—
    A Rush of Cochineal—
    And every Blossom on the Bush
    Adjusts its tumbled Head—
    The mail from Tunis, probably,
    An easy Morning’s Ride—
    (c. 1879)
    A Summer of Hummingbirds is richly populated by eccentric personalities in addition to Dickinson and Higginson: the itinerant and obsessive Martin Heade, one of the greatest of nineteenth-century nature painters, who yearned to evoke a kind of New World Eden in his highly stylized, symbolic paintings; the beautiful and uninhibited Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd, whom Heade loved at a distance, and who conducted a scandalous love affair virtually in public, in staid Amherst, Massachusetts, with the older brother of Emily Dickinson; the flamboyant hedonist preacher Henry Ward Beecher of whom Benfey says admiringly that he was “drawn to things that flickered and flashed…He liked to tell people that he was intoxicated by art” and Beecher’s Christian-messianic sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, famous as the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin but the author as well of a curious book-length polemic titled Lady Byron Vindicated (1869). More a skeptical observer than a participant of the genteel cultural scene, Mark Twain emerges intermittently in Benfey’s narrative as a kind of measuring-rod for the author: the most famous writer of his time and yet harshly judged by such envious New Englanders as Higginson, who claimed to have found Twain “something of a buffoon,” and an anonymous critic for a local Amherst newspaper who, after Twain lectured in Amherst to a large audience, reported: “As a lecturer we are of the