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Back in the mid-to-late 19th century, the period that these two widely praised volumes explore, books sported modest titles. At mid-century, Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter and gave it the subtitle, A Romance, which referred not to its protagonists' passions but to its fictional form. In like manner, the words Great Expectations stand alone atop the cover of Charles Dickens' masterpiece, while George Eliot's greatest novel, Middlemarch, has a discreet, understated subtitle, A Study in Provincial Life. And at the century's end, Thomas Hardy finished his novel-writing career with the bleak and blunt Jude the Obscure.
Yet times and tastes have changed on the title front. Simplicity is out, obscurity is in, and the unapologetic earnestness of then has given way to the allusive irony of now. Today, titles tease and subtitles reveal. Without their subtitles, for example, what would we make of Christopher Benfey's A Summer of Hummingbirds and Brenda Wineapple's White Heat? Is Benfey writing about the migratory patterns of this smallest of birds, or is this perhaps a memoir about a poignant season in his life? And what is Wineapple offering us? A biography of Jimmy Cagney, or perhaps a primer on one of his greatest films?
From their titles alone, we could never surmise that Christopher Benfey's interests are in Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade. Nor could we imagine that in White Heat, Brenda Wineapple is setting out to plumb the depths of The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.The titles tease us with an image but leave it to their subtitles to reveal the connections that bind together each book.
For both Benfey and Wineapple, the binding ties are of the kind that literary modernism has long prized. Indeed, one of the central premises underlying these two books was put forward a little less than a century ago by E. M. Forster in Howards End."Only connect!" the narrator in that novel cries out. "Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die." Through a series of "quiet indications," Forster assures us, the bridge may thus at last be built that can "span [our] lives with beauty" and reconnect us one to another.
Christopher Benfey and Brenda Wineapple have written bridge-building books in the Forster line. As he did, they take it as a given that Christian belief no longer provides a span adequate to handle the traffic of our lives. Almost all of the artists these two treat in their works—from Higginson to Dickinson, from Heade to Twain—lived through a dramatic cultural eclipse of Christianity in the final decades of the 19th century. Within a matter of years, a broadly based communal experience of belief, grounded in ritual and steeped in the language of the King James Bible, gave way to the isolating particularities of personal perception and private memory. According to Benfey and Wineapple, it fell to the artists of America to overcome this isolating solitude and forge what connections they could in the desolate decades after the Civil War.
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