Eden's Outcasts (34 page)

Louisa May Alcott: a face “full of contradictions,—youthful, maidenly, and intelligent, yet touched with the unconscious melancholy that is born of disappointment and desire”

(Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

The intensity of his daughter's stare may have made Bronson fear that Louisa was pressing herself too hard, for he proposed that she soon return to Walpole. All the bills had been paid for the time being, he told her, and he intimated that the pleasure of her company and the knowledge that she was getting some rest from her writing mattered more to him than the dollars she could send home. It seemed to him that Louisa was “bent on making as long a stay from good bread and fine air and early hours as you can with any grace about you.”
⁷⁹
He missed her, and he wanted her back home again.

It was clear that Bronson thought of Walpole as a place of good health and wholesome living. Yet Walpole was to ruin the health of the gentlest Alcott. In June 1856, Abba, still dedicated to good works, found herself ministering to the needs of the Halls, one of the town's poorest families. The family inhabited a space above a cellar where swine had recently been kept. The landlord—a deacon of the church, as Louisa bitterly noted in her journal—had not troubled himself to have the cellar cleaned, and he did so only after Abba threatened legal action. Two small children in the flat had come down with scarlet fever, and Abba came to their aid. At her side stood two Alcott daughters still living at home, Lizzie and May. What followed was almost a reenactment of the Alcotts' exposure to smallpox in 1850, which had also resulted from contact with one of Abba's charity cases. This time, however, the consequences were more devastating. Both Lizzie and May caught the disease. May recovered quickly and completely. Lizzie, however, did not, and by the time Louisa was able to return home from Boston, her sister was seriously ill. For a time she lay near death. The fever did not kill Lizzie, but it left her perilously weak. Understating the case considerably, Louisa called the months that followed an “anxious time.” She nursed Lizzie, took over her housework, and, amid the bustle and worry, managed to write a story a month during that careworn summer.

The Alcotts chose not to call in traditional doctors to treat Lizzie's illness. They were much taken at the time with the theories of Samuel Christian Hahnemann, the German physician credited with founding homeopathic medicine. Anticipating that Lizzie would soon throw off her illness, Bronson put much faith in the fact that she had never tasted animal food. By August 5, Lizzie's condition had improved enough that Bronson was able to write to his mother, “We are all well.”
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There remained little reason for the entire family to hover near Lizzie's bedside. With nothing to keep her in Walpole, Louisa laid plans for another winter in Boston. Bronson, now driven stir-crazy by the want of intellectual friendship in Walpole, planned a conversational tour of Boston, New Haven, New York, and Philadelphia.

Once on the road, he kept to a strict budget; eating only two meals a day and bravely resisting the temptations of the New York bookstores, he managed on a dollar a day.
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Bronson avidly read his wife's letters for reports on Louisa's literary progress and confessed that her prospects gave him good hopes. He was developing confidence in her energy and creative powers. He declared, “I hope to be a Spectator of her triumphs fairly soon.”
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For her part, Louisa watched the newspapers for accounts of her father's conversations and took great pleasure in discovering that New York was receiving him well. On their birthday, she wrote to him that she loved “to see your name first among the lecturers, to hear it kindly spoken of in the papers and inquired about by good people here—to say nothing of the delight and pride I take in seeing you at last filling the place you are so fitted for.” She thought it would be wise and creditable for the Gothamites to erect a statue to her modern Plato.
⁸³

The praise Louisa gave in one paragraph, however, she all but took back in the ensuing ones. Dryly writing about May's latest achievements in music, French, and drawing, she ventured to say that her youngest sister might become “what none of us can be, ‘an accomplished Alcott.'” As to her own strivings, she claimed that her goal was to “prove that though an
Alcott
I can support myself.”
⁸⁴
Bronson's family history was a matter of deep pride to him. In 1852, he had spent months tracing the lines of his father's and mother's ancestry as far as the American records would allow him to go.
⁸⁵
For Louisa to suggest that an Alcott was by definition a ne'er-do-well was to aim her joke at an especially sensitive spot.

Louisa's playful but piercing raillery notwithstanding, Bronson's reputation was beginning to revive. While in New York, he had the honor of being elected as a vice president of a women's rights convention, and the doors of illustrious men and women were open to him. Thoreau, visiting New York, joined with Alcott to seek out Horace Greeley and ride with the latter to his farm. The poet Alice Cary was also present for this visit, but Alcott was more interested in telling Thoreau about another poet he had met a month earlier: Walt Whitman.

Whitman had received Bronson while reclining on a couch, pillowing his head on a bended arm. He immediately impressed Alcott as an extraordinary person. No sooner had Alcott told his journal that Whitman was not easily described, than he launched into a vivid description: Whitman was “broad-shouldered, rouge-fleshed, Bacchus-browed, bearded like a satyr.” Bronson marveled at the poet's brute power, genius, and audacity and noted Whitman's calico jacket, coarse overalls, and cowhide boots with an admiration approaching envy. Whitman's voice, too, was enchanting—deep, sharp, sometimes tender, and almost melting in its intonation. He was, Bronson thought, an Adamic figure, claiming never to have sinned and “quite innocent of repentance and man's fall.”
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Alcott could not wait for Thoreau to meet this singular man.

On November 9, the two Concordians heard Henry Ward Beecher preach at Brooklyn's Plymouth Church. Alcott was entirely taken with Beecher's keen intelligence, broad humor, and lively human sympathies. Thoreau was less impressed, finding Beecher's performance “pagan.”
⁸⁷
They disagreed again the next day when Alcott introduced Thoreau to Whitman. The poet and the naturalist eyed each other, Alcott noted, “like two beasts, each wondering what the other would do, whether to snap or run; and it came to no more than cold compliments between them.”
⁸⁸
Whitman was surprised at Thoreau's indifference to current political events. Thoreau was taken aback by the sensuality of Whitman's conversation; he felt as if he were interviewing an animal.
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Alcott reached the conclusion that both his friends were “hard to tame.” He remained on excellent terms with both of them.

In February, on a return trip to New York, Bronson attended a production of Euripides'
Medea
, which affected him profoundly. The play tells of how Jason, the husband of Medea and the father of her children, forsakes her in order to marry a Corinthian princess. Jason deceives himself into believing that his new match will benefit all concerned; it will give his children a royal name, win a place in the palace for Medea, and in time, garner a crown for Jason himself. He persuades himself that his adulterous marriage is an act of duty. Jason ignores the chorus, who warn that he is betraying his wife, and he blames his domestic discord on the feminine—and therefore flawed—thinking of Medea. He declares, “The human race should produce children from some other source and a female sex should not exist. Then mankind would be free from every evil.”
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Medea responds in jealous fury. She not only poisons the princess and her father, but murders Jason's children with her own hands. In the final scene, Medea departs in a chariot pulled by dragons, carrying the children's corpses with her.

The play, “with all its appalling accompanyments [
sic
],” struck personally at Bronson's guilty memories, suggesting “events too vividly, perhaps, of home experiences, and the Courage of Principle.” Euripides had taken Bronson back thirteen years, to a time when he, like Jason, had confused his selfish pursuits with altruism and when, along with Charles Lane, he had dreamed of building a little world made solely of men. Medea's chariot seemed to him like the ox-drawn sled moving slowly away from the ruin of his fond Utopia. He wrote to Abba, “I had ‘Fruitlands' before me, and Ideas there celebrated and played oft to the applauding snows—the tragedy of ox-team and drifting Family wailing their woes to the wintry winds.” Alluding to the period of madness that had followed, he added, “You shall imagine the Sequel, and the rest.”
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Alcott's personal farce had been replayed for him as Grand Guignol.

Coming home from New York, he stopped in New Haven to give a series of six conversations at Yale. He was pleased to find there a number of “bright boys…professing an unexpected interest.”
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One of these was William Torrey Harris, a Connecticut-born graduate of Andover who was so eager to make Alcott's acquaintance that he met him at the New Haven train station. Like Frank Sanborn, Harris almost instantaneously became Alcott's devotee. Later that year, Harris left the college without a degree, accepting a teaching position in St. Louis, where he dedicated himself to the study of Hegel and other German philosophers. In future years, when Alcott traveled west to St. Louis, he did so at Harris's standing invitation.

In the summer of 1857, the Alcotts reassembled in Walpole. Louisa and Anna had fine times together, and Lizzie, who had never fully regained her strength following the previous summer's fever, was cheered by all the activity and seemed to rally for a while. However, the long, cold winter had taken a toll, and her lingering frailty was now a cause of continual worry. To Louisa, it seemed that Lizzie's emotional attachment to the world was diffident and weak. “She never seemed to care for this world beyond home,” Louisa wrote.
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She was starting to wonder whether home was a sufficient reason for Lizzie to live.

That summer, Louisa came to understand and appreciate her father more than she had previously done. The change in her attitude was precipitated by the arrival of a welcome visitor. Bronson's mother, still hardy and sharp-minded at the age of eighty-four, made the journey to Walpole from her home in Oriskany Falls, New York, to spend time with her eldest son. She did not leave until November. For Louisa, who had spent little time with her grandmother, the visit was a minor revelation. It was not merely that she found the elder Mrs. Alcott “a sweet old lady…very smart, industrious and wise.”
⁹⁴
More importantly, both in her character and in the stories she told of the past, she helped Louisa to understand her father in the context of his youth.

Louisa had come to regard her father as a somewhat pitiable figure, a man who, though admirable for his ideals, was a hapless, fumbling personage, unable to boast of any concrete achievements. The presence of Bronson's mother changed all that. At last, Louisa could “see where Father got his nature.”
⁹⁵
She had observed her father through mature eyes only after his youthful enthusiasm had been spent and his most precious visions had been crushed by circumstance. She had, of course, not seen him as a bright and energetic youth, eager to recast the world in the contours of his dreams. But now her grandmother brought forth her recollections of the young Bronson, and Louisa was astonished to learn what an active and self-reliant person her father had formerly been. To her surprise, she learned that her father, like Louisa herself, had been formed by adversity, ambition, hard work, and struggle. She conceived the idea for a novel to be based on Bronson's life, with chapters based on his experiences on Spindle Hill, at the Temple School, Fruitlands, Concord, and Boston. She only hoped that she would live to write this great memoir of “the trials and triumphs of the Pathetic Family.”
⁹⁶

In the fall of 1857, Abba took Lizzie to the seashore at Swampscott, hoping that a change of air and the influence of “the salutary Sea,” as Bronson put it, might restore her health. Meanwhile, Bronson considered the possibility of moving back to Concord.
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He decided to spend some time in the old town in September, exploring available properties and consulting with Emerson about the feasibility of his return. On the way there, he stopped at the seaside resort where Abba and Lizzie were staying. Although he generally thought Lizzie none the worse, she was slightly thinner and her features paler and more elongated than when he had last seen her three weeks earlier. The salt air had performed no miracle. The doctor whom the Alcotts had at last chosen to consult was hopeful, and Abba shared his view. However, Bronson thought the case “
a critical one
” and fretted that Lizzie had “neither flesh nor strength to spare, and the Eye falling upon her wasted form scarcely dares to hope for her continuance long.” As always, however, Alcott tried to discern the soul as well as the body. Lizzie remained gentle, confiding, and pleasant, and her face seemed so full of hope that Bronson wondered why he should venture to fear or doubt.
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And yet his doubts persisted.

On September 7, Bronson left Abba and Lizzie in Boston and traveled to Concord, where he began looking at the available real estate. He quickly fastened his attention on a house belonging to a John Moore, adjacent to the Alcotts' former home at Hillside. Shaded by elms and butternut trees, it was the first that one passed when walking westward from Hillside toward town. The property included an orchard of at least forty apple trees, ten acres of woodland, and an excellent well for drinking water. In an enthusiastic letter he sent to Anna, Louisa, and May, Bronson acknowledged that the house was old, but he added that nothing like it could be found near the center of town for a comparable price. He promised that as the family weighed the decision to buy the house, he would not press his position. However, his heart was obviously set on the property; he declared, “'Tis the home for me.” Like a child promising to be good in exchange for some much-desired treat, Bronson averred that he was “minded to take the reins a little more firmly in hand, and think you may rely on me for supports of labour and money in the years to come,” adding that he could “do more for you, and for myself, from the Concord position, than any known to me.”
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In the face of such eagerness, it would have been difficult to raise objections. On September 22, Bronson purchased Moore's estate, as surveyed by Henry David Thoreau, for $945.