Eden's Outcasts (14 page)

Ironically, one of Alcott's severest critics was the other man of his generation who, though a minor philosopher in his own right, was to be chiefly remembered for the writings of his famous offspring. It was around this time that Emerson introduced Alcott to Henry James Sr., who would father not only the renowned novelist but also the great psychologist William James and the incandescent diarist Alice James. The son of one of the wealthiest men in New York State, James possessed the financial independence that would have been required to render Alcott's disdain for commerce respectable. James was an amputee, having lost a leg in a tragic childhood accident. Whereas Alcott never fully accepted the existence of evil, James maintained that evil was endemic in the world and experiencing it essential to the formation of moral character. They may have differed most profoundly, however, as to the value of educating women. Alcott favored the strongest possible cultivation of the feminine mind. James, to the contrary, utterly dismissed the appropriateness of educating women. He once wrote, “The very virtue of woman…disqualifies her from all didactic dignity. Learning and wisdom do not become her.”
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Given the two men's philosophic differences, it is not surprising that their discussions were often volatile. In one of their early conversations, Alcott casually asserted that, like Jesus, he had never sinned. Astonished, James inquired whether Alcott had ever proclaimed, “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” “Yes, often,” came the calm reply. James fired back, “And has anyone ever believed you?”
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The credibility that Alcott most desired, however, was not as a saint but as a writer. During that first spring in Concord, Alcott, Emerson, Fuller, and fellow transcendentalist George Ripley were deeply absorbed in creating a magazine intended, as Fuller and Emerson were to say in its first issue, “to reprobate that rigor of our conventions of religion and education which is turning us to stone, which renounces hope, which looks only backward, which asks only such a future as the past.”
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The magazine was to stand for an unkempt but noble love of truth and a dedication to the beauties of the unseen. It would propose an antidote to narrowness.

Alcott's first contribution to the proposed journal was its name,
The Dial
. Just as a sundial marked the movement of the sun, Alcott thought, the soul was a dial reflecting the greater movements of the spirit.
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This, too, was to be the work of the new magazine: to offer a visible index of the mightier and more mysterious motions of the heart and mind. Throughout the spring of 1840, Alcott toiled over his contribution to the maiden issue: fifty prophetic, aphoristic observations on topics ranging from prudence to Prometheus. He gave his work the grand title of “Orphic Sayings.” Recognizing that some of his previous work had failed because of its verbosity, Alcott limited each of his observations to a single paragraph, sometimes even to a single sentence. By doing so, he evidently hoped to achieve the energetic concentration that distinguished Emerson's best prose.

Not long after he had settled in Concord, Alcott proudly handed the manuscript of his sayings to Emerson. At a few points, Emerson found incisive, well-crafted observations; at many more places, however, he cringed. With foreboding, he wrote to Fuller, “You will not like Alcott's papers;…I do not like them;…Mr. Ripley will not.” As a whole Alcott's sayings were “open to the same fault as his former papers.” Instead of boiling his thought down to its refined essence, Alcott had strayed into “cold vague generalities.” In contrast to the other contributions to the first issue of
The Dial
, all of which appeared either anonymously or under initials, Emerson thought it essential for “Orphic Sayings” to be printed with the author's name. “Give them his name,” Emerson suggested, “& those who know him will have his voice in their ear whilst they read, & the sayings will have a majestical sound.” Despite his reservations, Emerson recommended publishing Alcott's aphorisms “pretty much as they stand.”
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Abba, at least, was confident. She wrote to her brother Samuel that Bronson had been writing a series of “Delphic letters” that, if people would only read them, would do “more for their souls than Paul or Pliny.”
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Name and sound, however, were not enough to rescue “Orphic Sayings.” At their best, they have a kindly, hortatory quality, encouraging readers to make themselves into better, spiritually larger beings. For instance, Alcott writes, “Engage in nothing that cripples or degrades you. Your first duty is self-culture, self-exaltation: you may not violate this high trust. Your self is sacred, profane it not…. Your influence on others is commensurate with the strength that you have found in yourself.”
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He is also memorable, when, in a saying he later added to the original fifty, he speaks of one of the things he knew best, the liberating nature of the ideal teacher: “The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-trust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciples.”
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Read with patience, Alcott's “Orphic Sayings” speak confidently of the nobility of the soul, the ultimate unreality of death, and the vital, miraculous omnipresence of God.

However, far too many of Alcott's pronouncements are turgid and obscure, heavy and ponderous. His musings on “Aspiration” read like a vocabulary bee gone mad: “The insatiableness of her desires is an augury of the soul's eternity…. Intact, aspirant, she feels the appulses of both spiritual and material things; she would appropriate the realm she inherits by virtue of her incarnation: infinite appetencies direct all her members.”
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Still more baffling was his one-sentence statement on “Calculus”:

The contemporary critics chose to bypass the uplifting message of “Orphic Sayings” and to concentrate on their pompous hilarities. The
Boston Transcript
published a parody titled “Gastric Sayings.” The
Boston Post
printed a letter that likened Alcott's work to “a train of fifteen railroad cars with one passenger.” Emerson's own brother William complained that the magazine had been marred by “Alcott's unintelligibles.”
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The Dial
as a whole was off to a shaky beginning; Emerson wrote to Carlyle that the first issue, a “poor little thing,” had been “honoured by attacks from almost every newspaper & magazine.”
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But Alcott suffered most of all. The inclusion of his full name, far from improving the reception given his “Sayings,” made him the most identifiable target of ridicule. Undaunted, Alcott continued to turn out Orphic Sayings for inclusion in
The Dial
, and Emerson and Fuller bravely printed them. Numbering one hundred altogether, they stand as an incarnation of transcendentalism at its most ebullient and its most fatuous. They so severely damaged Alcott's reputation as a writer that no editor went near another important piece of his writing for a quarter century. In 1842, the publisher of
Conversations with Children on the Gospels
sold 750 copies of that book, at five cents a pound, for trunk lining.
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Despite such setbacks, Alcott had the comfort of knowing that country life was bringing health and happiness to his children. Fresh air and open space seemed to enliven the high-spirited Louisa more than ever. At the age of seven, she was, in her father's view, a “noisy little girl” who made “house and garden, barn and field, ring with her footsteps.” Bronson sometimes had to ask Louisa to “step lightly, and speak soft, about the house” and to remind her that her “sober Father, and other grown people,” cherished quiet. Still, he marveled at the way the little girl and her landscape appeared to harmonize. The “Garden, Flowers, Fields, Woods, and Brooks” all seemed able “to see and answer the voice and footsteps, the eye and hand” of the child who wandered past them. While she was in Boston visiting Abba's father, even the hens and chicks seemed to miss her. Bronson wrote, “[W]e find how much we love now we are separated.”
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On July 26, the same month that the first
Dial
saw daylight, a fourth daughter joined the family. The “quiet little lady,” whom her parents named Abigail May Alcott, was born at dawn on a Sunday morning. In her childhood, people called this youngest daughter Abby. When she was old enough to choose for herself, she preferred to be known by her middle name. Bronson may have felt a twinge of disappointment as he faced the likelihood that he was destined never to have a son. Nevertheless, he wrote to Sam May that he would “joyfully acquiesce” in the Providence that had given him “daughters of Love instead of sons of Light.” Fully aware that responsibility for the fate of reform in America would fall on both genders, he welcomed the chance to “rear Women for the new order of things.”
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Despite this revolutionary sentiment, Bronson decided not to keep a journal chronicling the new baby's development. Unlike her three older sisters, Abby did not live her early childhood as the subject of an experiment. Louisa later called her “the flower of the family” and maintained that her youngest sister had been born under a lucky star.

Far more than his infant daughter, Bronson was in need of such a star. His efforts as a day laborer could not meet the needs of a family of six. Yet he was far from idle. Chopping wood for others and tending his own vegetables occupied him more than ten hours each day. Remarkably, he also managed a handful of speaking engagements. What stood between Bronson Alcott and solvency was not a want of effort but the utter strictness of his conscience. He was more firmly committed than ever to refusing any work that offended his moral principles. Abba observed her husband's rigidity with mounting concern. She wrote to her brother Samuel:

In February 1841, Abba's father passed away, leaving her a little more than two thousand dollars, which he had stipulated could not be used by Bronson or taken to satisfy his debts. Nevertheless, Bronson's creditors challenged the restriction, and the modest bequest was placed in escrow, beyond the family's reach for another four years.
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As it became apparent that Alcott could not meet his obligations, Emerson made a generous but rash proposal. He offered to dismiss his servants and take the Alcott family into his own house. Abba and Emerson's wife Lidian would manage the house together, and Bronson would work Emerson's land in lieu of rent. Abba, however, vetoed the proposal. She knew that such an arrangement would soon subordinate her family to the Emersons. She also knew how unsuited she was for getting along with another man's wife in such close quarters. Sounding rather ungrateful, she exclaimed, “I cannot gee and haw in another person's yoke, and I know that every body [
sic
] burns their fingers when they touch my fire.”
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Thoreau, not the Alcotts, moved in with the Emersons. Samuel May also offered lodging nearer him in a fine house, but Bronson, wishing to remain free, was not prepared to accept.

In 1841, on the first day of spring, Emerson published his towering
Essays, First Series
. He wrote and lectured brilliantly on “Self-Reliance,” “The Method of Nature,” and “The Poet.” By contrast, it was a hard, slow year for the Alcotts. The previous summer, Bronson had talked with Emerson about a college that the two of them might found along with Fuller, George Ripley, Theodore Parker, and some of the other new thinkers of Massachusetts. For a while, Emerson had thought well of this “University which Mr. A. & I built out of straws,” but nothing concrete issued from the scheme.
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After such flights of dreamy creativity subsided, threadbare reality always rushed back in on Alcott. He was beginning to wear down both physically and mentally. In December, Abba's aunt Hannah Robie came from Boston to visit the cottage and was surprised to find the family living on nothing but “coarse brown sugar, bread, potatoes, apples, squash, and simple puddings.”
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Abba confided to her aunt that she was anxious about Bronson's health. She feared that the lack of sympathy and encouragement the world had shown her husband might finally depress him more than he could bear.
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January 1842 was a time of personal loss for the philosophers of Concord. On New Year's Day, Thoreau's brother John cut himself on a razor. He contracted tetanus. Racked with pain, he died ten days later in Henry's arms. On Monday the twenty-fourth, Emerson's beloved five-year-old son Waldo contracted scarlet fever. Three days later, he was dead. The next morning, Louisa innocently bounded up to Emerson's door to ask if her friend was feeling better. The gaunt man came out to meet her, so worn with watching and changed by sorrow that his appearance startled her. She could only stammer her query. “Child, he is dead,” came the reply. Louisa remembered the moment always as her first glimpse of a great grief.
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That same morning, Emerson announced the news to Margaret Fuller. “All his wonderful beauty could not save him,” he lamented. The man who had published an essay called “Love” the year before now wondered whether he would ever dare to love anything again.
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At Hosmer Cottage, there were no acute outward tragedies. However, Abba sensed a dark drama unfolding in her husband's mind. She wrote ominously to Samuel, “If his body dont fail his mind will—he experiences at times the most dreadful nervous excitation—his mind distorting every act however simple into the most complicated and adverse form—I am terror-stricken at this.”
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Yet even in this winter, with little food on his own table, Bronson chopped wood free of charge to fuel the fireplace of a woman with four children whose drunken husband had disappeared.
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