Book Alert / A Summer of Hummingbirds

A Summer of Hummingbirds -- Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Martin Johnson Heade by Christopher Benfey, Penguin Press '08, $25.95, 287 pages, ISBN #1594201609. Index, source notes, no bibliography, b&w images sprinkled through text.

If such a horrific thing as war can have a consolation prize, it may be the grist it provides for literary types to re-examine the human condition. If we didn't have World War I, would we have ever have read All Quiet on the Western Front, for example? As Christopher Benfey sees it, the Civil War was no different, inspiring the likes of Dickinson, Twain, Stowe and Heade:

"These gifted men and women saw the rigid Calvinist world of their youth replaced by an opening of possibility -- a new romantic, unconventional world based on self-transformation and love, in which nature prevails and freedom is all." Benfey unveils "how, through the art of these great thinkers, the hummingbird became the symbol of an era, an image through which they could explore their controversial ideas of nature, religion, sexuality, family, time, exoticism and beauty."

Debbie Applegate, whose biography of Henry Ward Beecher, one of Benfey's subjects, won the Pulitzer Prize last year, writes of his book: "This is not a conventional cultural history, nor is it a linear history of literary influences. Instead, to borrow from a description of Dickinson's hummingbird poems, it presents 'a fusion of realistic detail and vaporous suggestion'....A meditation on a moment in history, in which the reading experience itself recreates those feelings of evanescence."