April 26, 2008
Winslow on Benfey
Today's Chicago Tribune contains the first review I've seen of Christopher Benfey's A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade, a book I've been looking forward to for months (despite its off-putting, laborious subtitle). The reviewer, Art Winslow, states:
Setting his stage, Benfey notes that Todd and Heade, Dickinson and Higginson, Beecher and his novelist sister Stowe, "were fanatical about hummingbirds." They wrote poems and stories, and drew and painted hummingbirds, tamed live ones and collected stuffed ones—in short, represented an "informal cult of hummingbirds" with origins that hewed back to the Civil War. Why the obsession? Here is the branch on which Benfey's book balances:
"Americans during and after the Civil War 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. This dynamism, in all aspects of life, found perfect expression in the hummingbird."
This is a handy unifying image-theme for a writer offering up cultural interpretation, and for the most part it proves utilitarian in linking the otherwise somewhat disparate parts of Benfey's story.