THE FOREST

Beguiling study of American intellectual and cultural life two centuries ago at the places where forests and civilization met.

“Reading books, filling in the blanks with my imagination, I sought to restore the stories of the figures in the original I had not seen, which itself was a record of what the chronicler-carver perhaps only dreamed when he invented the life of his times.” So writes Stanford humanities professor Nemerov of a mysterious carved box that, long ago, poked its way out of a streambank. It’s not the only mystery in the pages of this luminous book. Another is the odd vision of a figure painted in the crook of a tree high above a Virginia forest floor, both startling and delighting its discoverer, who took the opportunity to “ponder the fact that his imagination gave rise to such phantoms.” Nemerov is a collector of such forest-born visions. Some are exalted, as when, early in this episodic, anecdotal narrative, Nathaniel Hawthorne finds in the New England woods a metaphor for his work. “For him,” writes Nemerov, “trees were brains, arbors of thought, much like his own.” Some are economic: Groves of hemlock are felled in order to cure livestock hides, with a noxious load of acids and blood dumped into a pristine Hudson River. Some are ominous: Nat Turner retreats to “a self-secluded place in the woods” to plan his uprising of enslaved people. Nemerov delights in turning up surprises that inform his pointed tales. His discovery of the story of David Douglas, who lent the Douglas fir his name and whose life ended tragically in a trap meant to protect gardens from rampaging cattle, is a feat of scholarly detection. So is his restoration to history of an Irish immigrant who, sadly, fell from an elm he was trimming, a narrative frame within which the author discusses anti-immigrant sentiment.

A lively history of the early republic, its branches coming together to form a sturdy whole.