Louisa May Alcott, a long fatal love chase, Random House
Fresh from her portrayal of Winona Ryder
in Little Women, Louisa May Alcott now bursts on the literary scene with
the recently uncovered A Long Fatal Love Chase (Random House, $21). And
it is terrific. Young Rosamond Vivian has led a cloistered girlhood in
the care of her surly grandfather on an unnamed island off the coast of
England. She is easily led astray by the aptly-named Philip Tempest, a
rich, handsome, masterful man whose spectacular scar and vaguely homoerotic
retinue of Continental henchmen portend no good. Rosamond’s idyll
with the older man proves brief-lived, after which, discovering the depths
of his dastardly betrayal, she escapes, precipitating the exciting chase
of the title. There are glimpses of fashionable spa-life, country convents,
a steamer ride down the Rhine, the cholera-ridden expatriate scene at
Nice, and, back in England, a mano a mano confrontation on the misty moors.
This is one of the hack jobs Alcott churned out before stumbling onto
her true talent as a sentimental memoirist for young girls. Deemed too
sensational, it was rejected by her publisher, even after she tried toning
it down in some unspecified ways (perhaps by excising the passionate priest,
Father Ignatius, who tosses his cassock aside at the least provocation
to reveal “manly strength and skill” at such diverse activities
as swimming, rowing, and wrestling, as well as toying with thoughts of
renouncing his vows, becoming a Lutheran, and marrying the fair Rosamond
himself). At the time, Alcott was trying to support her parents and siblings
through her writing, and this seems (I can’t pretend to know) a naked
grab at what the overwhelmingly female novel-reading public of the 1860’s
wanted. But it is too blatant, too contemptuously right in listing the
basic elements of melodrama and romance in their then-contemporary garb,
which is exactly what makes it so interesting to read today. Much better
written than its modern-day descendants, there is a clean, faceted shape
to the prose, with no oozing inner monologues or numbingly “realistic”
conversations. The historical glimpse into the powerlessness of women
is well done too:
“Mr. Tempest,” [young Rosamond asks] “you know a great
deal of the world and you take a little interest in me...so I will venture
to ask you what I can do to earn my bread in peace and freedom when I
can bear this dreadful life no longer?”
“Turn governess and drudge your youth away,” was the brief reply.
“I don’t know enough and am too young, I think.”
“Be an actress, that’s a free life enough.”
“I’ve no talent and no money to start with if I had.”
“You can stitch your health and spirits into ‘bands and gussets
and seams’ as a needlewoman. How does that suit?”
“Not at all. I hate sewing and know very little about it.”
“Bewitch a young man and let him make an idol of you—for a time,”
he added under his breath.
We look down on this kind of story, call it “genre fiction”
or “historical romance,” but we shouldn’t. Much of what
passes for straight literature in today’s Waldenbooks will, 50 years
from now, be read exactly the same way, and found wanting. Shorn of their
specious topicality, left only with the same four or five plots, most
modern novels will reveal a glaring lack of craft and an almost laughable
self-indulgence, aesthetic sins of which Alcott is rarely guilty. It is
a pity this was not published, that it did not cause a scandal, render
the author infamous, and drive her from her sponging family in Concord,
so that she would have been forced to delve even deeper into the twisted
lusts of the post-Civil War America reading public. Instead, her “natural
love of labor, her wide-reaching generosity, her quick perception, and
her fondness for sharing with her many readers that cheery humor which
radiated from her personality and her books, led her to produce stories
of a diminishing value, and at last she succumbed to overwork, dying in
Boston” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed.). A Long Fatal Love Chase
is miles from that future fate. It marks a turning, not taken.
Tom Rayfiel
Brooklyn, New York
1995