by Alexander Nemerov
Princeton University Press, 2023
Unsurprisingly, The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s is about trees – the 100-foot white pines destined to be felled for construction materials, the bent limbs of trees that “make a scattered alphabet” along the Trail of Tears, the trees “of great Bigness” that grow from the murky waters of the Great Dismal Swamp, the locust trees whose leaves “sprouted in fractal patterns…a kind of trilobite design.” Told through thematically and spatially tied groupings of vignettes, Alexander Nemerov’s unique work is neither a conventional history text nor conventional fiction. It connects America’s natural spaces to its past without any overarching narrative, although the reader may follow numerous small plots as the author introduces compelling characters from early America. Some are famous, including Nat Turner, Alexis De Tocqueville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, while others are imagined or relatively unknown (but nevertheless fascinating), such as the jealous arachnologist or the poetry-writing aeronaut.
Footnotes accompanying each vignette point to academic articles and the primary sources that inspired these imaginative reconstructions of the past. Occasionally, a character will wander through multiple narratives, reminding us that these stories share a time and geographical place. All work together to show the vast interconnected ecosystem of America in the 1830s, a time when territorial expansion, Indigenous removal, abolitionism, and industry reshaped the continent’s political and natural landscapes.
Nemerov’s depictions of the various forms of American nature are fascinating and ethereal. Describing the eerie quality of a vast forest, he writes, “the woods seemed pre-stocked with ghosts, ambitious ghouls who had no need to live and die before haunting a place but seemed drawn to the woods’ silence as a climate welcoming to their non-entity. The strange visual clarity – the way you could see a deer a half mile off because of the absent underbrush – was itself a version of this ominous peace, a kind of visual silence.” The supernatural inhabits these spaces alongside wildlife, with witches just as likely as woodpeckers to dwell in the woods.
Artistry runs as a theme throughout the book, and the author (also a professor of art history) often takes time to explore particular works of art that give a concreteness to the text and place it within the creative life of the 1830s. Several of these works appear in color toward the back of the book.
Not everyone will enjoy a book so rooted in place and time rather than plot; those who skipped the whale description sections in Moby Dick are not the right readers for this book. Nor will it please those who don’t like history to be philosophical or poetic, as the author’s work clearly bears the influence of the great early American writers who so often editorialized in their work. In some instances, Nemerov reaches for profundity and falls somewhat short, but other final flourishes are transcendent and sonorous. Nat Turner sees “hieroglyphic characters on the leaves. Written in blood” that mirror the signs he saw in the sky – the trees themselves call him to the axe. When the text tends transcendental, the writing becomes even stronger, as in Nemerov’s descriptions of Rafinesque’s encounter with Pan, a classical forest deity. Rafinesque attempts to draw the moment he sees the divine, but “Quivering in nervous graphite lines, Rafinesque’s trees show the transfiguration in the draftsman, not in what he drew…in that drawing…he created as true a picture of what could not be seen as was ever made.”
Themes and images branch through the book, revealing a pattern and vitality to a historical period that might otherwise seem dry. Each vignette grows on its own, but its roots are entwined with the others in its stand, and The Forest is more than its trees.