Ralph Disney Emerson

By Melvin Maddocks

THE PASSION OF ROBERT BRONSON by J. M. Alonso. 236 pages. McCall. $5.95.

This is for the last of the New England-novel readers--the people who have stayed the course from The Scarlet Letter to The Late George Apley. These hardy few may recall no more demanding reading along the route; by comparison with Bronson, Henry James' The Bostonians is an act of primer realism. But what a brilliant, erratic goodbye this book is to all those Puritan ghosts who, for two centuries of fiction, have haunted the Concord woods and the cobbled streets of Beacon Hill.

Robert Bronson, "the last great New England transcendentalist," is the ghost that got away. The author of Captain Hook's Gang, Sunday Mornings with Zarathustra and other poems, Bronson is something like a son of Ahab in corduroy pants. So long as he was in and out of psychiatric wards, so long as "his true sense of sight was anger," Bronson remained a darling of the Boston literati. But then--in 1953, to be exact --Bronson transcended: He found the One, the Oversoul, the Truth, the Great Zero that Emerson and all the earlier transcendentalists only dreamed of discovering a century before.

Released by this mystical perception from the ordeal of playing out his role as the last New Englander, Bronson went to Japan, and was killed in a highspeed train crash. Even more devastating, his works and life fall into the hands of a professor-critic--and intellectual mortician--named Muldoon. A pugnacious Boston Irishman, Muldoon does a reckless reconstruct job on Bronson's Yankee soul--a rambling self-parody of scholarship which forms the loose frame of the novel. Understand Bronson, and you will understand America--"our present and our future." This is mad Muldoon's thesis.

But the strongest presence in the novel --wilder than Bronson, more outrageous even than Muldoon--is the author. Born in Buenos Aires, graduated from Harvard, now a professor of Spanish and Latin American literature at Tufts, J.M. Alonso, 34, is one of the most exotic students of American character since that other Hispano-American, George Santayana. Tirelessly inventive in his theories and his jokes, Alonso exuberantly refuses to draw lines between the two. But on at least one or two points, he would seem to be speaking seriously, and for himself. Like Santayana, he knows in his Latin bones something the natives don't--that American Puritanism is an anti-passion so powerful as to disorder the reason it purports to support. Beneath their cool New England exteriors, Alonso hints, Emerson and Thoreau--and Bronson--were as gloriously crazy as his own Don Quixote. He knows how consciences can cramp under strain, how idealism can gnarl the mind. He is not joking when he compares the 19th century Utopian experiment at Brook Farm with a Massachusetts mental hospital of today.

As for America, Alonso would appear to be letting Muldoon speak for him when he sputters: "Even if New England were to contribute more transcendentalists now, they too would be exactly like the produce from the rest of the nation: somehow Californian, hedonistic Pollyannas who betray in their every drug-scented utterance their own fundamentally middleclass, consumer's approach to the Great Questions."

Mad Bronson, mad Muldoon, and mad Alonso may be right--this is the age of Ralph Disney Emerson. But what marvelously alive exceptions they make to the rule of blandness.

Melvin Maddocks

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