The Forest
A Fable of America in the 1830s
by Alexander Nemerov
2023
The Forest is a rather unusual work of creative nonfiction. Nemerov is a professional historian, and everything he's written is supported by primary documents, very often diaries. At the same time, rather than the usual register of academic writing, Nemerov narrates in the close third person, creating an intimate sense of understanding each person's interiority in a way that's usually reserved for literature. The Forest also lacks any explicit central thesis or obvious connection between its parts. What Nemerov has written are a series of factually true vignettes that read like short stories.
There are themes here though, even if they don't coalesce into a clear argument about what life was like in America in the 1830s. Essentially all the vignettes are set in the forest, where people work or visit for leisure or travel through on the way to somewhere else or depict in art. Most of the vignettes include someone who is an artist or a craftsperson. Another theme is a growing sense of loss and disconnection from 'the wilderness' and 'the frontier,' from the founding ideas and myths of America in a country that is increasingly populated and settled, and especially, increasingly industrialized. You get a real sense of how wood was harvested and used at this time, a view of pretty much every stage of the process. A final theme are precursors to the Civil War, incidents that reveal a populace uncomfortable with the compromises and contradictions of allowing slavery in half the states in a country that is supposedly an embodiment of freedom. In the afterward, Nemerov explains his writing philosophy, though predictable, he does so by relating a parable.
Many of the vignettes are about people who are anonymous (though Nemerov may know their names and simply choose not to use them), others are about people who were famous or infamous at the time, whose names might also appear in other histories, but were unknown to me. A few of the vignettes are about incidents involving people who are still famous today - Alexis de Tocqueville, James Audubon, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Andrew Jackson. Several also include thorough descriptions of specific works of art. There's a section of color plates where all the illustrations are gathered. They're well marked, though I wished for some indication in the text that you ought to go look at the next one.
In most vignettes, Nemerov combines at least two, sometimes more perspectives, from people who were in about the same place at around the same time, even if they might not've known or even encountered each other. These chapters, 'fables,' as he calls them, are mostly between 3 and 10 pages long, and I think mostly on the shorter side. The chapter the includes Harriet Tubman, for example, finds her still a child, sneaking out at night to visit her mother on a different plantation, awed by the sight of the thousands of meteors in a uniquely bright Leonid shower. On the same night, nearby, a slave-owning doctor traveled to a friend's plantation to treat his friend's sick daughter and, when she died, to comfort the grieving family.
If I have one complaint about the book, it's that I frequently felt like Nemerov's writing was overwrought. Everything is epic, everything portends something else, every little detail and incident reveals the essential nature of humanity, etc. Axe chops echo forward through the years, the current of a river propels events forward, conversations make a cathedral of words. The latter half, at least, of every single vignette is written like the concluding sentences of The Great Gatsby. It's just too much. It's probably fine in small doses, but it's overwhelming if you read more than one or two chapters in a row with no break.This is clearly a stylistic choice Nemerov is making, but I did wonder how much it was solely his own voice coming through, and how much, perhaps, people at this time might've written their diaries full of metaphor and apocalyptic intensity about every little thing. It's possible that what, to me, seems like Nemerov overdoing it is in fact an accurate representation of how high-minded people often sounded at that time when recording their experiences.
There are themes here though, even if they don't coalesce into a clear argument about what life was like in America in the 1830s. Essentially all the vignettes are set in the forest, where people work or visit for leisure or travel through on the way to somewhere else or depict in art. Most of the vignettes include someone who is an artist or a craftsperson. Another theme is a growing sense of loss and disconnection from 'the wilderness' and 'the frontier,' from the founding ideas and myths of America in a country that is increasingly populated and settled, and especially, increasingly industrialized. You get a real sense of how wood was harvested and used at this time, a view of pretty much every stage of the process. A final theme are precursors to the Civil War, incidents that reveal a populace uncomfortable with the compromises and contradictions of allowing slavery in half the states in a country that is supposedly an embodiment of freedom. In the afterward, Nemerov explains his writing philosophy, though predictable, he does so by relating a parable.
Many of the vignettes are about people who are anonymous (though Nemerov may know their names and simply choose not to use them), others are about people who were famous or infamous at the time, whose names might also appear in other histories, but were unknown to me. A few of the vignettes are about incidents involving people who are still famous today - Alexis de Tocqueville, James Audubon, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Andrew Jackson. Several also include thorough descriptions of specific works of art. There's a section of color plates where all the illustrations are gathered. They're well marked, though I wished for some indication in the text that you ought to go look at the next one.
In most vignettes, Nemerov combines at least two, sometimes more perspectives, from people who were in about the same place at around the same time, even if they might not've known or even encountered each other. These chapters, 'fables,' as he calls them, are mostly between 3 and 10 pages long, and I think mostly on the shorter side. The chapter the includes Harriet Tubman, for example, finds her still a child, sneaking out at night to visit her mother on a different plantation, awed by the sight of the thousands of meteors in a uniquely bright Leonid shower. On the same night, nearby, a slave-owning doctor traveled to a friend's plantation to treat his friend's sick daughter and, when she died, to comfort the grieving family.
If I have one complaint about the book, it's that I frequently felt like Nemerov's writing was overwrought. Everything is epic, everything portends something else, every little detail and incident reveals the essential nature of humanity, etc. Axe chops echo forward through the years, the current of a river propels events forward, conversations make a cathedral of words. The latter half, at least, of every single vignette is written like the concluding sentences of The Great Gatsby. It's just too much. It's probably fine in small doses, but it's overwhelming if you read more than one or two chapters in a row with no break.This is clearly a stylistic choice Nemerov is making, but I did wonder how much it was solely his own voice coming through, and how much, perhaps, people at this time might've written their diaries full of metaphor and apocalyptic intensity about every little thing. It's possible that what, to me, seems like Nemerov overdoing it is in fact an accurate representation of how high-minded people often sounded at that time when recording their experiences.
Thanks to my friend Scott for alerting me that these started as a series of lectures at the National Galleries: https://www.nga.gov/stories/videos/forest-america-1830s
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