Margaret Fuller (31 page)

But Cary held Waldo at arm’s length and was as stricken as Margaret when they both learned at summer’s end that Ellery Channing and Ellen Fuller, Margaret’s pretty twenty-one-year-old sister, had fallen in love out west and were engaged to be married. Ellery had drifted from farming in Illinois to newspaper journalism in Cincinnati and now into a romantic entanglement that, for the first time, he had no immediate wish to escape.

This was not the propitious match that Margaret had envisioned for her little sister, and Ellen’s readiness to throw caution to the winds and accept the marriage proposal of a man with no steady means of support seemed to make a mockery of Margaret’s own sacrifices to sponsor Ellen’s education and entrance into society. Yet Margaret knew the impulse that drove Ellen. In the Conversations of the previous spring, speaking of the marriage of Venus to the lusty warrior god Mars, Margaret had compared the more serene Olympian deities, who had been shocked by Venus’s impulsive marital choice, to “modern men” who expected beautiful women to fall in love with “their softness and delicacy,” only to find that “the girl elopes with a red coat.”

In the earnest, high-minded Transcendentalist “Coterie,”
the roguish Ellery Channing was the red coat. The only man who could hold a candle to him—in fact outshone him considerably—was the coolly handsome Nathaniel Hawthorne, who’d left the Custom House post procured for him by Elizabeth Peabody to make a go of it selling stories to magazines. Byronic in his looks if not in his shy manner, Nathaniel Hawthorne had won Sophia Peabody’s heart, and after he’d tired of a season of manual labor at Brook Farm, the couple had made plans to set up housekeeping in Concord, where Waldo had secured them the Old Manse at a low rent. When news of the Hawthornes’ long-delayed nuptials reached Margaret, she had written to Sophia in congratulation, “If ever I saw a man who combined delicate tenderness to understand the heart of a woman, with quiet depths and manliness enough to satisfy her, it is Mr. Hawthorne.”

The installation of the newlyweds at the hulking gray Manse on the Concord River, vacant since the recent death of Waldo’s step-grandfather, the Reverend Ezra Ripley, was part of Waldo’s grand scheme to build up “Community” in Concord—or at least “a good neighborhood” providing “a solid social satisfaction.”
He’d first tried expanding his own household, inviting the entire Alcott family—Bronson, Abba, and their four little girls—to board. A summertime visit to Brook Farm had persuaded Waldo that only “living in the house with them for years . . . permits the association of friends without any compromise.”
Then he’d requested his cook and housekeeper to join the family in the dining room at mealtimes to promote an egalitarian spirit. Both offers were refused. In the end only Henry Thoreau, now twenty-three and “an earnest thinker” with “a great deal of practical sense,”
in Margaret’s estimation, came to live with the Emerson family and eat at their table. He would earn his keep as a handyman and gardener, and Margaret approved—“
that
seems feasible.”
Now when she stayed in Concord—sometimes with Waldo, sometimes with the Hawthornes—Margaret could look forward to evening rides on the river or nearby ponds, propelled by Thoreau in the
Musketaquid,
the small rowboat he had built himself and given the Indian name for the town’s languid waterway.

Waldo’s project to muster his comrades in his own Concord neighborhood had achieved new seriousness in the wake of domestic tragedy. Early in 1842, his five-year-old son and namesake fell ill with scarlet fever and died in a matter of days—“fled out of my arms like a dream,”
Waldo wrote. “Nature . . . has crushed her sweetest creation.”
Lidian, nursing the infant Edith, born two months earlier in November, and tending to three-year-old Ellen, who was suffering a milder case of the disease, joined Waldo in the sharp apprehension of just “how bad is the worst.”
From his study, where “our fair boy”
had played happily on the carpet, Waldo wrote despairing letters to Margaret and Cary, recalling that the child had been a part of “every cherished friendship of my life.”
“Margaret Fuller & Caroline Sturgis,” he recorded in a journal passage commemorating Little Waldo, had “caressed & conversed with him whenever they were here.”
Now he asked Margaret, “Shall I ever dare to love any thing again?”
And Cary: “Must every experience—those that promised to be dearest & most penetrative,—only kiss my cheek like the wind & pass away?”

The child’s death did not, as sometimes happens, ruin the parents’ marriage. Waldo and Lidian’s attachment was already tenuous, as Waldo’s efforts at “covenant” and “new partnership” betrayed. He had remarried too soon after his beloved Ellen’s death, choosing an older woman who was his first wife’s opposite—decorous, erudite, more conventionally pious, and, as years went on, with Waldo’s heart inclining elsewhere, prone to illness and depression. To Margaret, Lidian was “saintly,” her “holiness . . . very fragrant,” a not entirely favorable judgment.
Margaret would never carry “a bible in my hand,” as she once wrote to Waldo, contrasting her own personality to Lidian’s, and she considered herself “no saint, no anything, but a great soul born to know all, before it can return to the creative fount.”
Nothing made her feel “so anti-Christian, & so anti-marriage” as talking to Lidian, whose company she avoided almost to the point of rudeness on visits to the Emerson household, often leaving the house just before dinner in order to miss the family meal.

In the months Waldo spent working out his philosophy of friendship—in person and on the page—he had puzzled over the marriage bond as well, propounding a more eccentric and self-serving theory. “Marriage should be a temporary relation,” he wrote in his journal during the summer of his chaste tryst with Cary. “When each of two souls ha[ve] exhausted the other of that good which each held for the other, they should part in the same peace in which they met, not parting from each other, but drawn to new society. The new love is the balm to prevent a wound from forming where the old love was detached.”
It was an apt description of his own marriage at the time, at least on his side. Cary had become Waldo’s “new love,” yet he debated the subject of marriage more often with Margaret, his spiritual brother. She took a darker view, remarking to him on one occasion that “all the marriages she knew were a mutual degradation.”

As an outsider to the institution of marriage, Margaret had little reason to defend it. She had argued with Elizabeth Peabody during the first series of Conversations that for unmarried women there came a time when “every one
must give up
” and plan for a single life.
Now in her early thirties, Margaret half believed she had reached that point. Sometimes she reasoned that her “ruined health,”
brought on by the shock of her father’s death and the years of overwork that followed, resulting in a “lack of vital energy,”
would have prevented her from marrying anyway, even as she “mourned that I never should have a thorough experience of life, never know the full riches of my being”—never experience a sexual union.
From opposite vantage points and for different reasons, both Margaret and Waldo yearned for a “supersensuous” connection with “perfect” friends, above and beyond the physical realm, that would provide relief from the strictures of their particular domestic lives.

On behalf of the married women in her classes, Margaret held out the hope of reforming the flawed institution from the inside, whereas Waldo, for all his theorizing, believed nothing could be changed: “We cannot rectify marriage because it would introduce such carnage into our social relations.” The “boundless liberty” he dreamed of, the freedom to move from one love to the next, could not be trusted to “even saints & sages.”
Waldo would not knowingly hurt Lidian, yet he wounded her grievously anyway when he restlessly wandered the outermost shores of the marriage, falling in love with the sea.

The “saintly” Lidian issued her own complaint, not against marriage but against the philosophy that to her seemed to have robbed her husband of his humanity. In a handful of manuscript pages she called her “Transcendental Bible,” Lidian inscribed a list of ironic commandments, which Waldo claimed to find amusing when he read them and which almost certainly would have aroused Margaret’s sympathy for Lidian, had she known of the document’s existence. Although phrased in the language of an embittered catechist, Lidian’s lament was also Margaret’s:

Never confess a fault. You should not have committed it and who cares whether you are sorry? . . .

Loathe and shun the sick. They are in bad taste, and may untune us for writing the poem floating through our mind . . .

It is mean and weak to seek for sympathy; it is mean and weak to give it . . .

Never wish to be loved. Who are you to expect that? Besides, the great never value being loved . . .

Let us all aspire after this Perfection! So be it.

Waldo now lured the newlywed Channings, Ellen and Ellery, to Concord, promising to find them inexpensive lodging after the Hawthornes refused Margaret’s suggestion that the two couples share the rambling former rectory. “Let there be society again,”
Waldo declared, eager for distraction from his sorrows: “we shall have poets & the friends of poets & see the golden bees of Pindus swarming on our plain cottages and apple trees.”
Ellery would join the Emerson household in September for house hunting while Ellen packed up their belongings in Cincinnati for the move east.

Margaret was spending a month in Concord herself at the end of the summer, having reached the difficult decision to relinquish editorship of
The
Dial.
After two years of publication to the same mixed reviews—satirical responses in the press, enthusiastic letters from a handful of dedicated readers—the magazine was never to be a fiscal success. As with her teaching for Bronson Alcott, Margaret could not afford to continue without pay. Unwilling to let “our poor Dial . . . perish without an effort,”
Waldo stepped into the breach, admitting the need for a “rotation in martyrdom.”
The chaotic business of editing the journal enlivened his too quiet study, but now it was Waldo’s turn to press Margaret for copy. He summoned her to Concord, where he promised to supply “desk & inkhorn” for her use in composing an essay on European folk ballads to open the October 1842 issue.

“I began at once to write for him,” Margaret recorded in her journal after settling into the “red room,” the guest room across the hall from Waldo’s first-floor study, in mid-August. For Margaret it was an inwardly satisfying reprise of the early days of her writing career, when her father had bidden her to compose an essay in defense of Brutus and she had readily obliged. Late-afternoon rambles with Waldo to Walden Pond to watch the sunset, and even “long word walk[s]”
in the parlor, were peaceful now that their “questioning season” was past.
Although “we go but little way on our topics, just touch & taste and leave the cup not visibly shallower,” Margaret felt “more at home,” noting, however, with a tinge of regret that “my expectations” of Waldo “are moderate now,” and “we do not act powerfully on one another.”

If this was so, the change was lost on Lidian. Suffering from a low-grade fever and looking ahead to the sad inevitability of Little Waldo’s birthday in October, she could no longer maintain her composure in the face of her husband’s obvious engagement with a female houseguest. She retreated to the bedroom. When Margaret knocked on the door after two days to inquire about her health, Lidian “burst into tears, at sight of me.” Through her tears, Lidian apologized, blaming the outburst on her nerves and the stimulant medication—opium—she was taking for the fever. But, Margaret wrote in her journal afterward, “a painful feeling flashed across me,” a sudden perception that Lidian was jealous of the time she spent with Waldo, though, in Margaret’s view, “I never keep him from any such duties”—to his wife and family—“any more than a book would.” Margaret had learned from her own painful disappointments that “he lives in his own way.” Waldo would never “soothe the illness, or morbid feelings of a friend, because he would not wish any one to do it
for him.
It is useless to expect it.” She might have been quoting from Lidian’s Transcendental Bible. In the end, Margaret rationalized, “what does it signify whether he is with me or at his writing”? She “dismissed” the eruption as “a mere sick moment of L’s.”

Yet the next day, when Lidian appeared for the noon meal and proposed that Margaret take a walk with
her
afterward, and Margaret answered that she’d already made plans to walk with Waldo, Lidian was in tears again. The assembled family fell silent and “looked at their plates.” Margaret offered to change her plans, but Lidian, saint and martyr, answered, “No! . . . I do not want you to make any sacrifice,” even as she admitted to feeling “perfectly desolate, and forlorn,” and to having hoped that Margaret might take her outdoors, where “fresh air would do me good.” Still, Lidian bravely insisted, “Go with Mr E. I will not go.” Waldo maintained his silence, smiling through the commotion, remaining “true to himself”—as Margaret saw it. In the end, Margaret walked twice, first with Lidian, next with Waldo.

Now she heard from Lidian—not a philosophy of marriage, but the simple “lurking hope” that Waldo’s “character will alter, and that he will be capable of an intimate union,” the reciprocal exchange of affection and sympathy she’d expected from marriage. Lidian’s confession only served to convince Margaret that “it will never be more perfect”; no improvement was likely in relations between the two. There was so much Margaret had schooled herself to accept—and by now had forgiven—in Waldo, but Lidian, as his partner in daily life, evidently could not excuse. Margaret advised Lidian to “take him for what he is,” at the same time congratulating herself that she was not in Lidian’s place. Margaret did not “have fortitude” to live in “a more intimate relation” with Waldo, yet “nothing could be nobler, nor more consoling than to be his wife, if one’s mind were only thoroughly made up to the truth” of his limited capacity for emotional give-and-take.
It seemed inevitable to Margaret, in fact, that
she
would be “more his companion” than Lidian, for “his life is in the intellect not the affections.” Waldo “has affection for me,” Margaret believed, but only “because I quicken his intellect.”