Eden's Outcasts (44 page)

Yet, strangely, the experience that made a ruin of Louisa's body also bestowed a host of blessings. The first of these was philosophical. In April, when the fever had left her and before the lasting effects of the calomel treatment became evident, Louisa experienced a rebirth of joy and enthusiasm for life. Now strong enough to go for rides and walks around Concord, Louisa greeted the spring feeling “as if born again[;] everything was so beautiful and new.” She hoped that she too had become a new person, and she speculated that the Washington experience might do her lasting good.
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Louisa's ordeal also raised her in her father's estimation. To Bronson and Abba, their daughter's recovery was a kind of miracle. Louisa, it seemed, had walked through the same valley as Lizzie, but Louisa had returned. Because of her vitality, Louisa had been easy to take for granted. As much as Bronson might have fretted over the soul of his dark daughter, he had certainly never lost sleep worrying about the soundness of her body. But now Bronson saw her with new eyes. Louisa's life was transformed from a subject of criticism to a cause for thanksgiving. When Louisa was an infant, Bronson had seen her as a personification of God's glory. During long years, this perception had at times faded. Now, with this second birth, enacted through illness and recovery, that glory again emerged.

There was another reason for Bronson to see Louisa from a new perspective. In late March, when Louisa was out of danger, Bronson wrote a letter to his mother, now in her nineties but still mentally alert. In it, he told of Louisa's service to the army, her resulting illness, and the anxious weeks of her recovery. He wrote, “That was our contribution to the war and one we should not have made willingly had we known the danger and the sacrifices.”
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It is a significant statement. Ever since he had first met Charles Lane, Bronson had valued no human activity more highly than self-sacrifice. Certainly, Louisa had sacrificed before this time, accepting menial jobs and churning out potboiler fiction in an attempt to pay down the family debt. However, these gestures of self-sacrifice had been made for money, and any enterprise connected with cash had a lesser value in Bronson's eyes. Now Louisa had sacrificed nobly and grandly. Bronson had finally come to recognize that some sacrifices are too great to expect from anyone. Louisa's willingness to die for liberty and union, coupled with her very nearly having done so, was heroic in his eyes. At a devastating price, she had earned a place in her father's admiration that she was never to forfeit.

Louisa's nursing experience also transformed her as a writer. Before she had gone off to war, her tales had an aspect of grotesque fantasy that betrayed a lack of experience in the world. Now, her fertile imagination was tempered by a sad but strong knowledge of the way things were. As Julian Hawthorne observed, “Her experiences influenced her writing, manifestly mellowed and deepened it; she could not have touched a million hearts except from the depth of her own.”
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Her time at the hospital also gave her a sudden wealth of writing material. She now had an authentic story to tell, and she did not guess how eager people would be to hear it. At the beginning of May, the Army of the Potomac, now under the inept command of Joseph Hooker, suffered a demoralizing defeat at Chancellorsville, and the fortunes of the Union in the eastern theater declined to their lowest point. Northern readers were ready for patriotic inspiration. Earlier that spring, someone, almost certainly Bronson, had shared Louisa's letters from Georgetown with Frank Sanborn and his friend Moncure Conway, who had joined forces to edit an antislavery journal called the
Boston Commonwealth
. The two men were quite taken with Louisa's descriptions, which they found witty and full of sincere feeling. Partly teasing, but in truth very much in earnest, Sanborn asked Louisa in April if she would like to revise her letters into a collection of short literary sketches, to be serialized in the magazine.

Louisa thought Sanborn and Conway rated her work too highly, but as always, she needed money. Perhaps just as importantly, her long, unavoidable hiatus from writing may have been starting to wear on her. Drafting the sketches probably seemed like a good way to convince herself that life was returning to normal. And if she required any more incentive to start writing again, that same April brought an envelope from Frank Leslie, containing a check for one hundred dollars. Her anonymous thriller, “Pauline's Passion and Punishment,” had won the contest she had entered the previous autumn. Louisa speedily finished reworking her hospital letters and recollections, and on May 22 the first of four “Hospital Sketches” graced the pages of the
Boston Commonwealth
. The date marked a water-shed in her literary career. The sketches were popular beyond Louisa's highest expectations, and by her own account, people bought the issues of the
Commonwealth
faster than the printer could supply them. In the 1860s, the word “hit” was already being used to connote a popular success. To Louisa's bemused wonder, she had one on her hands. “I find,” she wrote, “I've done a good thing without knowing it.”
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Henry James Sr., wrote to applaud her “charming pictures of hospital service.”
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To reward her efforts, he sent along a copy of his own book,
Shadow and Substance
. Far more wonderfully, however, not one but two publishers approached her with offers to release her sketches in book form. The two competitors for her work were the firm of Roberts Brothers and a fiery Scottish abolitionist named James Redpath. A raw novice in the domain of book publishing in the summer of 1863, Louisa had little sense of the comparative practical merits of the two printers. She eventually leaned toward the Scotsman. Redpath, a friend of Sanborn's, had had at least some connection with Bronson for several years. Shortly after Lincoln's election, Redpath had written to Bronson, asking him to attend an antislavery convention that Redpath had organized.
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Now, as he angled for the rights to
Hospital Sketches
, Redpath courted not only Louisa's favor but Bronson's as well, sending the latter a complimentary copy of his company's edition of the abolitionist Wendell Phillips's speeches, lectures, and letters. Bronson praised the book, as well as Redpath's personal service to the cause of freedom in publishing such a “solid and superb” volume.
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There can be little doubt that Bronson wanted Redpath as Louisa's publisher. For her part, Louisa liked Redpath's politics, and her Alcott sensibilities may also have been swayed by the Scotsman's promise to donate at least five cents from each copy sold to orphans made homeless or fatherless by the war. Louisa had gone into nursing to advance the cause of union and freedom; she thought it only right that her book should also promote that cause.

Bronson was undoubtedly pleased when Louisa signed her contract with Redpath, though Louisa herself came to regret the decision. Despite Redpath's honorable convictions, Louisa gradually recognized that he was unskilled as a publisher and was more interested in allocating her profits virtuously than in maximizing them. When Redpath became more insistent and sanctimonious as to the percentage to be donated to orphans, Louisa reminded him that her family, too, knew what it was to receive alms, and that so long as the Alcott fortunes remained precarious, her charity must begin at home. She wrote to him, “I…am sure that ‘he who giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord' & on that principle devote time and earnings to the care of my father and mother…. On this account I often have to deny myself the little I could do for other charities, & seem ungenerous that I may be just.”
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Like her parents, Louisa was deeply generous. Unlike them, she was learning to temper her giving impulse with prudence.

In later years, Louisa always claimed that a more astute publisher could have made more money with
Hospital Sketches
. She was probably correct. Nevertheless, she acknowledged, writing the book “showed me
my style
, & taking the hint I went where glory waited me.”
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Moreover, it was thrilling for her to go around Concord toward the end of summer and see her neighbors laughing and crying over the book. She could not quite contain her mirth upon learning that one rash youth had bought eight copies at once. From Venice the American consul—the future literary lion William Dean Howells—sent his compliments to Nurse Periwinkle.

Perhaps the crowning tribute to
Hospital Sketches
came that September. A company of Concord soldiers, recently under fire at Gettysburg, came home to a town bedecked with flags and patriotic wreathes. Louisa wrote of seeing Welcome Home banners stuck “in every stickable place.”
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The town drum corps, consisting of eight little boys trying to cope with eight large drums, strove doggedly to stay in rhythm. Julian Hawthorne, recently accepted to Harvard College, helped to produce enough lemonade “to flavor Walden Pond.” A score of Concord's fairest young ladies, May Alcott among them, donned white frocks to serve the refreshments. Louisa brought out her nurse's uniform for the occasion and supervised preparations, unaware that a small ceremony was being planned for her as well. The company of sixty young veterans marched up to Orchard House. There, the captain called the column to a halt, the company wheeled to face the home, and the men raised their caps in salute to Louisa. After briefly mingling with the crowd that had come to watch the parade, the men fell back into ranks, gave a hearty cheer for the proud ex-nurse, and marched on.
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Louisa could claim another noteworthy product of her weeks at Union Hotel Hospital: her poem “Thoreau's Flute,” which Sophia Hawthorne admired enough to send to James T. Fields at
The Atlantic
. Louisa was highly gratified to have the poem appear there, but her response was tinged with a worldly consciousness that was now sadly characteristic. She wrote, “being a mercenary creature I liked the $10 [received for the poem] nearly as well as the honor of being…‘a literary celebrity.'”
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In January, Louisa had been near death. Only seven months later, she was one of the most celebrated women in Massachusetts. In his journal, Bronson noted the favorable reviews of her book and expressed his own judgment that it was “handsomely printed, and likely to be popular,” especially among army personnel. He wrote, “I see nothing in the way of a good appreciation of Louisa's merits as a woman and a writer. Nothing could be more surprising to her or agreeable to us.”
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Bronson was continuing to garner praise for his supervision of the schools, even if Concord's real political power resided in more conservative hands than he would have liked. Like many grandparents, he was evidently more at ease with his grandchild than he had been with his own offspring. When, in his journal, he noted Freddy's infantile accomplishments, it was no longer with the clinical eye of an eager pseudoscientist but with the simple pleasure of a proud patriarch. In October, Bronson looked forward to the day, not far off, when little Freddy would be able to take solid food. He promised Anna that when the baby was ready for fruit, he would have all he wanted from Grandpa's garden.

It seems that Anna's success as a new mother, as well as Louisa's emerging stature as an author, was inspiring Bronson to imagine what he himself might now achieve. He sent a copy of “The Rhapsodist,” his essay on Emerson, to James Fields, who commented on it favorably. Bronson was working on an idea for a book of characters, in which he would sketch the personalities and ideas of the many luminaries he had known, including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Carlyle, the elder Henry James, and Margaret Fuller. His sketch of Thoreau, called “The Forester,” had already been published in
The Atlantic Monthly
in April 1862. If he had failed to keep pace with the great minds around him, there still might be a place for him as their biographer.

In the autumn of 1863, as Bronson worked on his sketches of famous friends, Louisa was writing at high speed, trying to keep up with the suddenly enthusiastic demand for her work. Redpath wanted another book. James T. Fields, the same editor who had once told Louisa to stick to teaching, also inquired about a book. For the time being, Louisa satisfied him with a story for
The Atlantic
—a tale of race and revenge that she titled “My Contraband.” Narrated by Miss Dane, a Civil War nurse, the story tells of Robert, a freed slave who works as an orderly in Dane's hospital. Among the critically wounded patients, Robert discovers a Confederate captain, Ned Fairfax, the son of Robert's deceased former master, who, by way of an illicit union with a slave woman, was also Robert's father. Robert prepares to murder the captain, for, as he further reveals to Miss Dane, the younger Fairfax had once sold Robert to another plantation so that he might force himself on Robert's young wife, Lucy. Nurse Dane talks Robert out of killing the captain, persuading him to go to Massachusetts and start life as a free man while Dane searches for Lucy. In gratitude, Robert takes the nurse's last name as his own. On learning that Lucy committed suicide after being disgraced by the captain, Robert joins the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, the famous African-American regiment led in real life by Robert Gould Shaw. Coincidence again intervenes. Robert and Captain Fairfax, fully recovered, meet in battle. After mortally wounding Robert, Fairfax is killed. Before he dies, Robert finds himself under the care of Nurse Dane, who looks on as he leaves “the shadow of the life that was [for] the sunshine of the life to be.”
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