Once Again Despite The Tweeter Firestorm-In
Honor Of The 150th Anniversary Of The Publication Of Louisa May
Alcott’s “Little Women” (1868)-A Book Review-Of Sorts
Book Review
By Alden Riley
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott,
Roberts Brothers, 1868
I have to admit I am a bit
exasperated over the “firestorm” from Twitter and other sources over my
original book review honoring the 150th anniversary of the
publication of Louisa May Alcott’s Little
Women which I just found out has been made into a yet another film
adaptation for a modern 21st century audience far removed from the
semi-nomadic existent back in the day before cellphones and Facebook. Sometimes
you just can’t win in any quarters that is for sure. I wouldn’t mind if the prairie
fire came from one comment but even side issue stuff raised some ire. Jesus.
First, I mentioned- “I thought things were supposed to change around here with
the changing of the guard, otherwise known at least among the younger writers
as the purge and exile of the previous site manager Allan Jackson and his replacement
by Greg Green after a bitter internal fight with no holds barred and no
prisoners taken in the fall of 2017.”
Although as a free-lancer, a
stringer I did not have a decisive vote in the vote of no confidence that
replaced Allan Jackson, in the interest of the seemingly obligatory statement
of transparency an old friend of some of the writers here from high school and anti-war
Vietnam War soldier days, with Greg I do know from various sources, reliable
sources, that among the younger writers their actions were seen as a fight to
the death. That Allan had to go, that Greg had to take over the whole site
manager operation and that a guiding hand Editorial Board had to be established
so one person could not wield an iron hand over the whole operation in the
future. All of this over the to me pretty harmless policy decisions of Allan to
spent plenty of time in 2017 and 2018 commemorating the 50th
anniversaries of the many historically important events of that era beginning
with the Summer of Love, 1967.
At some point, maybe rightly if the
extent of coverage projected by Allan is any indication the younger writers ire,
who like myself at best knew of those events second or third hand rebelled, got
some aid from old-timer Sam Lowell, also an old friend of Allan’s from high
school days who decided it was time to “pass the torch” they were able to
remove Allan from his post. According to Sam Lowell, who after all as “the
father we never knew” of the rebellion should know, the talk around the water
cooler was to fight to the finish, to sent Allan packing, no regrets. So now
readers who have a partisan interest in defending the actions of the younger
writers are up in arms arguing that their “gentile” actions were merely to
force Allan to retire. I am done with the silly issue and Sam has agreed to
reply to anybody who still feels that terms like “purge” and “exile” were exaggerations
of what went on.
Next up in the batting order a
simple statement about Greg’s early stewardship and the pitfalls of following a
legendary figure at this publication like Allan Jackson after his purge and
exile-“Then Greg, I think to show he was his own boss, his own operator came up
with the silly, silly even to Will Bradley who originally presented the idea
before thinking better of it, that to appeal to a younger, eventually
non-existent audience, that the publication would feature film reviews of
Marvel/DC comic book characters gone to screen, serious analysis of rap and current
pop music, and review graphic novels. …”
I came on board shortly before this
change of leadership while Greg was handling the day to day operations and
Allan was making policy decisions, so I had a chance to see what Greg was
trying to do to make his own mark, to become his own legend here just as he had
been for many years over at American Film
Gazette. In the beginning of the Green regime through Senior Film Editor
Sandy Salmon I was getting some very good films, books, and music to review.
Assignments like the Hammer film noir series pitting my take against Seth
Garth’s, commemorating the various anniversaries of books like The Great Gatsby that had heretofore
been staples of the Western literary canon and all kinds CD reviews from
classic rock to world music.
Then the world caved in. Somehow
Greg thought that what was needed to spruce up the publication, to appeal to a
younger audience in the 21st century rather than the hard-core
Generation of ‘68 devotees who have sustained this publication since their own
youths back in hard copy days through the current on-line version was to review
comic book character films, video games and such, and rap and techno-music in
its various mutations. A bad decision which even Greg knew was true as he
retreated back to some more civilized material. The blow-back from readership
was this seemingly orchestrated sycophantic echo about how I was being too hard
on Greg for a momentary mistake, a good faith effort to reach a new audience,
to try something new and that it had been,
and I will quote from one irate tweet “bad taste” to bring up that
serious error of judgment now that Greg has righted the ship. Ho hum.
I certainly have been around long
enough in the publishing business now to know how to weather such storms but
the next “fire storm,” really a tempest in a teapot to quote Sam Lowell on some
internal controversy, a one- man crusade really was too much. Here is what I
“wrongly” said- “Then Allan Jackson whom we all though had perished, gone to
pot, dope pot, was working for Mitt Romney out in Utah Mormon country, running
a whorehouse with an old flame in East Bay or living with an old former hometown
corner boy turned “out” drag queen in San Francisco depending on which rumor
you believed at the moment, showed up to do a series of encore presentations of
material he had produced over the years in order to get back that older
audience which had sustained the publication through good times and bad.”
Of course, the one-man crusade was
one Allan Jackson, now a contributing editor doing encore presentations at this
publication under the good graces of his old friend Sam Lowell and Greg.
Apparently Allan does not have Greg and Sam’s good graces and let the whole
shady rumored past year or so go to ground. No sooner had he seen my comments
that he ripped out a few thousand word “essay” on my “libelous” statements
concerning his whereabout after he got that proverbial boot in 2017. If anybody,
and I worry about what you have been doing with your precious time if you have,
has not seen Allan’s encore presentation introductions which are as
self-serving as anything I have seen of late then a brief summary of his slights
is in order. Under Allan’s tutelage all rumors were allegedly untrue or
half-truths (a nice dodge when you are on the defensive, especially those
unfamiliar with the intentionality rule in libel cases to tar the writer that
scurrilous “half-truth” tag).
Allan didn’t try to weasel out of
what everybody knew was true, that he had been purged and gone into exile like
a beaten cur. Gone far away to try to “rebrand” himself where he was not well
known. What he has argued, unconvincingly, is that he merely went West to seek
work after he had been “blackballed” by some phantom network emanating from
this publication along the East Coast. I have recently been given by our legal
department five affidavits from publishers in New York and Boston who almost
overnight after hearing of Allan’s untimely, their common term, ouster offered
him jobs with increases in salary and less responsibility just to have his name
on the masthead (and not on some other publication and mercifully not on ours).
He allegedly needed money for his various ex-wife alimonies and the onerous
college tuitions for his slew of good kids still in the higher education
pipeline and has declared (at the notoriously accurate office water cooler)
that no East Coast publisher would touch him with a ten- foot pole. In an age
of the casual off-hand lie this is a whooper.
We can dismiss the Mitt Romney press
agent rumor out of hand since I looked at the archives for 2008 and 2012 and
noted that Allan had skewered him and his white underwear fetish, his inability
to keep to one single answer for more than ten minutes before flipping earning
the sobriquet “Mr. Flip-Flop,” and his undying hatred for those who have not
gouged the populace and not emulated his scorched earth policies at Bain
Enterprises. At least I thought I could discount that rumor until I found out
from Sam Lowell, who knows Allan like a book, when he went up to Olde Saco,
Maine to offer Allan that Encore Presentation gravy job, that he told Sam that
when he had landed in Salt Lake City out in the Utahs he approached the editors
of the Salt Lake Tribune for a job to
tide him over for a while. Here is the totally cynical part when you think
about it. He intended to use that position to springboard himself onto Mitt’s
campaign when he announced he was running for the U.S. Senate seat ancient
Orrin Hatch was vacating. That is neither here nor there job-wise but his
“pitch” was that since he had been an expert skewer of Mitt he would be the
perfect guy to deflect any hard-ball stuff that those unruly ruffians might
throw Mitt’s way. Yeah, cynical is right.
A man, any man, any woman for that
matter has the right to have an affair with whoever they want and not have it
published throughout the land. The rumor about Allan running a whorehouse, a
high-end whorehouse for high-end Asian businessmen with a kinky streak, for a
taste for a walk on the wild side, with an old flame, a woman who goes by the
name Madame La Rue whose real name I have known for a while but will stick with
her alias since my beef is with Allan not her was essentially true. From “an
unnamed but reliable source who has asked to remain anonymous since he or she
is not authorized to speak publicly about the matter” I found out that Allan
landed in Half Moon Bay south of Frisco, the site of Madame’s house of
ill-repute as Fritz Taylor put it in his ironic tone with the clothes on his
back and not much else and Madame lend him a bunch of money, so-called lent him
the money. Back in the day and I am not sure if it was before they split or
after Allan (while still married to wife number two) had fronted Madame the
dough to buy an old worn-out mansion on the shoreline, fix it up, grease some
palms and other start-up costs-with no strings attached and no requirement to
pay back. Nice, very nice. So Madame was just paying back that unrequired
pay-back. That is the public story-the real story is that Allan acted as
“master of ceremonies” at the place to earn his keep. I don’t know about you
but that sounds an awful like pimp to me. Frankly I think Madame got the worse
of the bargain for her outlay but I will keep mum about that since I am told
they had started up their old torch while he was there before she booted him out
for some unexplained reason.
Seth, Jack Callahan (who has done
yeoman’s service funding this publication in the dark red ink days), Si Lannon,
Sam, all Allan’s friend, his corner boys from the old Acre neighborhood in
North Adamsville had the usual pre-Stonewall “fag” “light on his feet,” ‘fairy”
vocabulary and social distain before they got enlightened about LGBTQI matters.
The one person who I have not put in that mix but who was in the thick of the
gay-baiting of certain people (and of each other as well accepted ritual in
those hard macho days) is Timmy Riley. Timmy Riley who maybe as a defense
mechanism of his own preferences suppressed himself as long as he was in the
Acre, and before Stonewall at what cost we will never know. Timmy though turned
into Miss Judy Garland, a drag queen, who subsequently has run the famous drag
queen club in Frisco for many years. What people did not know was that Allan at
some point when Timmy was down in the streets lend him the money to buy the Kit
Kat Club in North Beach and from there he zoomed along to fame and fortune. So
the story-the public story is that after Madame threw Allan out he went to
Timmy with some sad tale and Timmy lend him some money. (All of this money
supposedly to pay that damn alimony and those blood-sucker colleges, Allan’s
expressions). The real story is that Allan, while living above the club in one
of Timmy’s spare rooms declared himself “master of ceremonies” downstairs at
the club. Yeah, right we can read between the lines.
Remember boys and girls all these
critics of my review have said not word one about the impact, or lack of
impact, of the Ms. Alcott’s book on me, or the world of literature. And before
I mention what they have said, or not said there is yet another firestorm they
had been more than happy to enflame. This is the offending section-“The only
thing I knew about Louisa May Alcott, and this second-hand through Sandy Salmon
when he was Senior Film Editor and I was his associate editor was that her
father, Bronson Alcott, was a wild man, had run amok at Brooks Farm, the holy
of holies in the pre-Civil War Transcendentalist movement, you know Emerson, Thoreau
and other Buddha-like figures who ran around Cambridge, mainly Brattle Street
telling naked truths naked. Bronson has run through whatever dough he had from
his inheritance and had fathered, some say illegimately, a bunch of children by
various female denizens of that isolated farm including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
wife and had had an affair with Herman Melville’s brother. Such things are hard
to pin down but all I know for sure is that he claimed Louisa May and three
other young women as his children. Lacking DNA testing who knows. So old
Bronson was a certified wild man no doubt…”
I need not stand on the silly
defense that the information I got about the old wild man Bronson Alcott,
Louisa’s beloved if looney father, was gathered from Sandy Salmon, my boss. I
refer the reader, and especially those readers who have decided out of some
serious naivete to defend this lout, Sol Sandburg’s classic and some say
definitive book on Bronson Alcott and the whole Brook Farm ménage In The Time Before Hippie Times; The Brook
Farm Commune. Reading the book made even my jaded ears ring. Sure there
were serious things going on in the ante bellum period in America, up in cold
New England where the least of it was that they stopped believing in the
eternal Father, Son, Holy Ghost trifecta, stopped believing in God if you
really delve into the Universalist doctrine without flinching. Started a whole
movement called if you can believe this the Transcendentalist movement which
let’s face it would draw as many wooly-headed minds as intellectual giants like
Thoreau and Emerson. The streets of Cambridge were filled with cranks con-men
and drifters of no repute who were ready to listen to anybody except maybe
Martin Van Buren about how to break out of the nine to five rat-trap circa the
1840s.
This mayhem was a perfect foil for a
flake like Bronson Alcott (who also had several aliases to cover his various
bigamous marriages both before Brook Farm and after so when I pose the question
of who were actually Bronson’s prodigy I wasn’t blowing smoke although the four
Alcott sisters, including literary Louisa May, seen to have been his legitimate
daughters-all others including the bastard raised by Nathaniel Hawthorne are
different stories). No money, no standing, no anything yet he was able in those
odd times to ingratiate himself with a ton of intellectual heavyweights and
eventually have a soft landing at Brook Farm where he literally went amok, went
crazy with laudanum, morphine, hemp (what we call marijuana), opium anything
coming off the China sea Yankee clippers that could be ingested. Had those two
billion affairs and whatever number of children and walked away with not so
much as a by your leave when the place folded due to corruption, malfeasance
and general hubris. Some say he was later kept by a woman who ran a whorehouse
next to the Parker House in Boston since he was so dope-addled that he was
unemployable and needed whatever alms would provide for the children he would
claim as his own. A shabby, shabby man and Sol Sandburg nailed the bugger, put
him in the deadbeat hall of fame. This is the guy all those irate tweeters have
been defending unto death for the sake of Louisa May’s reputation. But enough.
Like I said a minute ago nothing
about the fucking book, not word one about what to their young impressible
lives and I can only conclude, male or female, these tweeters have had nothing
better to do with their time that throw cyberspace bombs my way to cover the
very hard fact that except for an occasional Seven Sisters Lit major nobody has
read the book since about 1960, maybe 1950. That said, that truth uttered why
did nobody bother to froth-mouthed respond to my take on the book’s place, or
non-place, in the expanded Western canon. In the interest of completeness I
will retail what I have written previously in the forlorn hope somebody might
pick a real literary fight in L.M. ‘s defense:
“Here is where things get weird
though Sandy who knew Allan Jackson when they both were much younger and had
worked the free-lance stringer racket we all go through before getting our so-called
cushy by-lines at American Film Gazette
asked him what sources I should go to for a look at the lingering influence of
the book on modern girls and young women. Told Sandy to tell me to ask my
sister, Ellen, when she had read the book and what she had thought of it. Here
is the honest truth Ellen had never heard of the book, didn’t know who or what
I was talking about and when I told her the outline of the story she laughed,
smirked and laughed again saying “are you kidding” who had time to read such
old-time melodramas. Failing that avenue I figured that I would work my way
back so I mentioned the book I was reviewing to my mother who told me that my
grandmother had read her the book at night before bed but she didn’t remember
much except there were four sisters who grew up and got married or something
like that and were good wives except one who died young of some strange
disease. She said ask my grandmother. Bingo. Grandma quoted me chapter and
verse without hesitation until I asked how the book influenced her. She told me
those were different times, more restrictive times even against her growing up
times in the 1930s so she would have to pass on the influence question. She was
only a little shocked that my sister knew nada about the book and my mother
only a little more. So I am going to take a stab and say as a 150th
anniversary honor-women you have come a long way since those homebody marriage
child-rearing times.
I had to think awhile, had to ask
Seth Garth who is good at this kind of question and his old flame Leslie
Dumont, both fellow writers here what was it about the novel that would have
appealed to young girls and women up at least until my grandmother’s growing up
times. And why when I later asked some other female contemporaries they came up
as blank as my sister on even having heard of the book. Leslie said it best, or
at least better. Those were male dominated times and so even the least amount
of spunk, independence by say Jo, who is the character in the book who pretty
much represents Louisa May’s profile was like a breath of fresh air even to
young girls and women who knew the score, knew they would be driven back into
the cave if they got too brave. Seth, who was more than willing to defer to
Leslie’s judgment took a more historical approach saying there was nothing in
the plotline that dealt with eternal truths so that such a novel would have a
limited life-span except in the groves of academia where a couple of
generations of Ph.ds could get worked up about the social meaning of it
all.
That is about it except to briefly
trace the story line, or lines since there are actually two main threads, the
almost universal family-centered expectations for women and Louisa May’s
struggle to get somebody to survive into strong independence co-managership of
the family along with a thoughtful husband. Oldest sister Meg is pretty
conventional, beautiful and domestic preaching to the younger sisters’ choir
about the need to be civilized and good God-fearing wives. Jo, Louisa May’s
character is strong-willed and thoughtful and will make the marriage that
Alcott thought should be appropriate for her times and class (and the unspoken truth
was to end the shameful lusts and lechery of one Bronson Alcott). Beth is something
of a cipher, musical but early on sickly who died young from the after effects
of horrible scarlet fever so no real lesson can be drawn from her life. (Funny
how these Victorian novelists, male and female, have to have some frail sickly
female character hovering in the background.) Amy, the youngest, is the closest
to the character that let’s say my daughter could relate to if she ever finished
reading the book which she adamantly refused to finish after reading about a
third of it and declaring the thing
utterly boring even the Amy character who struggle for artistic
self-expression is very similar to her own feelings about what she wants out of
life. As Sam Lowell has stated on many occasions-a slice of life circa the
1860s-that is the “hook.”
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