Book on Loneliness Is Crowded With Insights

If you could take only one volume to a desert island, Columbia Law School Professor Robert A. Ferguson’s new book might be the one. Ferguson, the George Edward Woodberry Professor in Law, Literature, and Criticism, has written \"Alone in America: The Stories that Matter\" (Harvard University Press), which explores the recurring theme of loneliness in American fiction and the possibility that literature can soothe the pain. “It is a subject lonely people are not willing to admit to, but they’re quite happy to read about it.” said Ferguson “More people live by themselves than at any time in American history.” In 2012, the Census Bureau reported that 27 percent of U.S. households have only one person, up from 17 percent in 1970. Or, as Ferguson also says, one in four Americans have no one to talk to. Ferguson has pondered the affinities between literature and the law for years. He taught English to help put himself through Harvard Law School and saw connections between the two. He later helped pioneer the discipline, using the humanities to inform legal study. Now most top law schools have a scholar in this field. At Columbia Law School, he also teaches courses such as legal advocacy, theories of punishment, legal rhetoric, and legal history, as well as an occasional English course. Ferguson’s interest in law was sparked as a teenager when his family lived in Cuba, where his father was a chemical engineer. “I saw both before and after the [Cuban] revolution that without law, people’s behavior disintegrates very quickly.” Loneliness is not unique to U.S. shores, he says, but it takes on a particular American flavor because of an ingrained ideology of individualism. The culture often tends to “leave you to yourself. It expects you to figure it out on your own. The safety net for people in difficulty or without personal help is smaller and less giving than elsewhere.” The idea for his book originated with an undergraduate English seminar that Ferguson taught at Columbia in the 1990s, \"Growing Up and Growing Old in America,\" which examined how rapid change and technology were driving generations apart and leading to greater isolation. For his book, Ferguson picked novels that people would have read or felt they should have read. The novels, by authors from Washington Irving to Marilynne Robinson, appear roughly in the order in which they were written. They also follow the human life cycle, beginning with Mark Twain’s \"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn\" and Louisa May Alcott’s \"Little Women\" on issues of childhood, and ending with Saul Bellow’s work exploring old age. The chapters also examine crises described by Ralph Waldo Emerson as comeuppances in life that Ferguson translates into “failure, betrayal, change, defeat, breakdown, fear, difference, age and loss.” Nathaniel Hawthorne examines human betrayal. Edith Wharton describes physical breakdown, and Don DeLillo writes of loss after Sept. 11. Ferguson was attracted to the topic because “we all have to learn to handle the attrition of life. It wears us all down.” Yet some might question his expertise on loneliness since he is happily married and works in the same room with his wife. Like everyone, though, he has experienced loneliness, which can happen in many ways, he says: through a failed project, a difficult relationship, the inability to assist someone who needs help. “Literature can teach in intimate ways better than other fields,” Ferguson said. The reason for using novels, he said, is that “people learn through stories. You identify with a protagonist struggling in a certain way.” He has learned through fiction that “while you can only live one life, stories allow you to appreciate many lives.” This is not a book he could have written as a 25-year-old. “You have to be older to appreciate many of the things that bothered Emerson later in life,” he said. Yet Ferguson hopes to impart a sense of optimism. “I’m trying to show that being alone can lead to a positive solitude,” he said. Cicero, who viewed literature as the one comrade who will not let a reader down, makes an appearance at the book’s end. Agreeing with the Roman lawyer and philosopher, Ferguson said, “Literature is the permanent companion. I’m not saying it’s the best companion, but it is the one you can always turn to.” —by Gary Shapiro