Margaret Fuller (50 page)

I prayed too—prayed for the distant, every way distant—for those who seem to have forgotten me, and with me all we had in common—prayed for the dead in spirit, if not in body—prayed for myself, that I might never walk the earth

‘The tomb of my dead self,’

and prayed in general for all unspoiled and loving hearts, no less for all who suffer and find yet no helper.

Then she rose and walked with Giovanni to the top of the Janiculum, where “before me lay Rome,” a broad expanse of tiled roofs and cupolas, stucco walls and glowing domes, with the broad oaks of the Borghese gardens in the distance, “how exquisitely tranquil in the sunset!”

The
Tribune
account contained a coded message for anyone who knew the poems of Shelley as Margaret did. She had quoted from “The Sunset,” a love poem that told of the “night [a] youth and lady mingled lay / In love and sleep”:

. . . None may know

The sweetness of the joy which made his breath

Fail, like the trances of the summer air,

When, with the Lady of his love, who then

First knew the unreserve of mingled being . . .

Like the lovers in Shelley’s lyric, Giovanni and Margaret had wandered a wooded hillside, watched a glorious sunset, and, a knowing reader might infer, spent a night together. In the poem, the lady wakes to find her young lover dead beside her, leaving her to a lifetime of mourning, to walk the earth as “the tomb of thy dead self”—the line Margaret adapted for her
Tribune
column. New to the blissful “unreserve of mingled being,” Margaret had prayed that November afternoon, among kneeling pilgrims communing with their dead, that this would not be her fate—that her “Vita Nuovissima” would last. For the moment, with “unspoiled and loving” Giovanni Ossoli at her side, she “was not afraid.”

But on December 20, three days after posting her
Tribune
column, Margaret guessed she might be pregnant. Could she not have expected this? Her health had never been steady, and at thirty-seven she was “no longer young.” Perhaps she believed herself too frail, too old to conceive a child. Had Giovanni, young and pious, so “truly the gentleman,”
attempted any means to prevent conception? In America, where she had not—probably never would have—found her way into such a crisis, Margaret might have dared to employ an abortionist; the practice was legal there, a last resort elected, increasingly, even by married women who wished to limit family size. But here in Italy, with “none to help me,” as Margaret wrote to Waldo Emerson that awful day, she could only wait to see what the “incubus of the future”
might bring—whether “accident or angel”
might guide her, as she wrote to Cary Sturgis Tappan three weeks later—whether the pregnancy would take hold in the body she again considered weak, though signs of health were unmistakable in her fatigue, nausea: “I am tired of keeping myself up in the water without corks, and without strength to swim.” Just days before, she had rejoiced in her “surprizing” vigor. Now, she wrote Waldo, “nothing less than two or three years, free from care and forced labor, would heal all my hurts, and renew my life-blood at its source”: the length of time it would take to bear, nurse, and wean an infant.
She had longed for a child—she trusted Giovanni as a lover. But what would he say when she told him? Would the young man wish to be a father? And how arrange their lives if he did?

Margaret’s anxious letter must have crossed with Waldo’s of early December. Now she received his ill-timed counsel: “I rejoice in your beatitude . . . but you must not stay alone long.”
How many weeks had it been since she’d written to him of all the ways in which she was contentedly “alone” in Rome? He passed along recent news of “all the good people of that bog of ours”—Sam and Anna, the Channings, Cary. And then Waldo raised his own lament: “Shall we not yet—you, you, also,—as we used to talk, build up a reasonable society in that naked unatmospheric land”—in Concord—“and effectually serve one another?” Was there not still time to form the covenant of hearts and minds? In holding on to this hope, he told her, “I certainly do not grow old . . . All the persons who have been important to my—imagination . . . retain all their importance for me. I am their victim, & ready to be their victim, to the same extent as heretofore.” Still delivering lectures in England, Waldo wished only to return to the company of those “persons who speak my native language, & love what I love. Few—few!” But his proposal, more nostalgic than practical, was no help to Margaret now. Although Waldo would stay in Europe for another six months, she could not suggest a meeting.

A letter arrived from Richard, describing more of his own romantic reversals and asking her to return and set up housekeeping with him and their mother. “God knows I have not myself been wise in life,” she wrote to him on New Year’s Day, 1848. Although “the first two months of my stay in Rome were the best time I have had abroad,” the past two weeks had “quite destroyed me.” Now she expected “my health will never be good for any thing to sustain me in any work of value.” She was just thirty-seven years old, but her prospects seemed few. She imagined, almost hopefully, the end of her life: “I must content myself with doing very little and by and by comes Death to reorganize perhaps for a fuller freer life.”
In a second letter, Margaret explained that she could make no definite plans until autumn: “There are circumstances and influences now at work in my life, not likely to find their issue till then.” Her child—if it lived, if she lived—would be born in September. For now, quite simply, “I am tired of life and feel unable to face the future.”

Writing to Cary, who had sent news of her wedding, Margaret was even more despairing: “this year, I enter upon a sphere of my destiny so difficult, that I, at present, see no way out, except through the gate of death . . . I have no reason to hope I shall not reap what I have sown, and do not. Yet how I shall endure it I cannot guess; it is all a dark, sad enigma.” She imagined Cary’s days as a new bride: “you have really cast your lot with another person, live in a house I suppose; sleep and wake in unison with humanity; an island flowers in the river of your life.” None of this could be Margaret’s, although she too had “cast her lot” with another. Of “my present self,” Margaret would say nothing, except that “a love, in which there is all fondness, but no help, flatters in vain. I am all alone; nobody around me sees any of this.”

In Rome that January, the winter rains set in—ten days, sixteen, thirty—with no letup. To her sister Ellen, Margaret wrote, “Rome is Rome no more.”

19

“A being born wholly of my being”

E
VEN AT HER MOST DEJECTED, WRITING TO WALDO EMERSON
at her first suspicion of the pregnancy, Margaret had managed to shift moods to express her intention to write for the British press on “my view of the present position of things here” in Italy. She repeated to Waldo what she had written to Cary Sturgis from Paris: “I find how true was the lure that always drew me towards Europe. It was no false instinct that said I might here find an atmosphere to develop me in ways I need.”
Those ways were as much professional as personal.

Although Margaret couldn’t write home about the specifics of her private life—she “made a law to myself to keep this secret as rigidly as possible”—her
Tribune
dispatches were a source of detailed news that her American readers found not just absorbing but indispensable as a wave of revolution swept across Europe in 1848.
“God ’twas delicious,” recalled the poet Walt Whitman of the time when, working as a New York City newspaperman himself, he eagerly followed Margaret’s accounts of “That brief, tight, glorious grip / Upon the throats of kings”—the year when it seemed that all of Europe might fight its way to freedom.
The style of reporting Margaret had developed, first in her travels in the West and then on her forays into the netherworld of the Great Metropolis, personal in tone but visionary in scope, was a perfect match for the tumultuous world events of the next eighteen months. As Margaret would later write, Europe had come to seem “
my
America,” an unsettled territory where liberty was at hand, while the New World she had left behind had grown “stupid with the lust of gain, soiled by crime in its willing perpetuation of slavery, shamed by an unjust war,” the imperialist conflict with Mexico over the annexation of Texas.

Margaret had predicted revolution in a column, composed during her “happiest” days of October, that reached the
Tribune
’s pages on January 1, just as she sank into depression. “Still Europe toils and struggles with her idea,” Margaret had observed of the forces gathering against the old regime, but “all things bode and declare a new outbreak of the fire, to destroy old palaces of crime!”
Austria had sent troops to occupy Ferrara the previous summer in hopes of provoking resistance that would in turn justify an Austrian invasion of central Italy. In response Pius IX had armed the Civic Guards in Bologna and Rome and matched Tuscany in granting press freedoms. Mazzini, watching expectantly from London, exploited the moment by writing an open letter to the pope, widely circulated in Rome and even tossed into the pontiff’s carriage by a conspirator, urging Pio Nono to take charge of all the Italian states under Austrian rule and lead them in a fight for independence and a national democracy. “Our age is one where all things tend to a great crisis,” Margaret had written hopefully, “not merely to revolution but to radical reform.”

January brought “the fortieth day of rain, and damp, and abominable reeking odors” to Rome, Margaret mustered the energy to write for the
Tribune.
“As to eating, that is a bygone thing; wine, coffee, meat, I have resigned; vegetables are few.”
The only food she could stomach was rice. But there was “authentic news”
to report: “full insurrection”
in Palermo and threatened uprisings in Apulia, Basilicata, Calabria, and Naples—where, she added in a last-minute postscript, “revolution has now broken out”
—had forced the Sicilian king Ferdinand to grant a popular constitution to his lands in the south, more than half the Italian peninsula. By March, Margaret wrote to William Channing, “war is everywhere,” but she was thrilled, not dismayed: “I have been engrossed, stunned almost, by the public events that have succeeded one another with such rapidity and grandeur.” The ferment and frustration Margaret had witnessed firsthand in both Europe’s workers and the intelligentsia could no longer be contained. Uprisings across the Continent brought a new French republic, the resignation of Austria’s Prince Metternich in Vienna, the separation of Hungary from Austrian rule. There had been popular insurrections in all the states of Germany. Margaret was optimistic that democracy in Italy, where Milan was now “in the hands of my friends”—the young radicals she had met the previous summer—would be achieved without “need to spill much blood.”

The turmoil meant “I cannot leave Rome”;
it was simply too dangerous to travel, Margaret reported to William, with regiments forming and leaving the city to join the fight against Austria. To an acquaintance in Paris, from whom she hoped to gather a firsthand account of King Louis Philippe’s “dethronement,”
she explained simply, “I am nailed here by want of money.”
But her physical safety, her straitened finances, even her pregnancy were surpassed by a more compelling reason for staying in Rome. “It is a time such as I always dreamed of, and for long secretly hoped to see,” she wrote to William; she expected to “return possessed of a great history.”
The book for which she had been gathering material now seemed both urgent and epochal, destined to become the saga of “a great past and a
living
present.”

Mickiewicz arrived in March with a small “squadron”
of Polish exiles on their way home to make revolution, planning to recruit any of his countrymen living in Rome. He quartered his regiment on the Via della Pozzetto, not far from Margaret’s rooms, but he may have stayed with her. “Mickiewicz is with me here, and will remain some time,”
Margaret wrote in a letter to Waldo explaining why she would not meet him in Paris, where he planned a respite from his lectures in May, “if bullets have ceased to sing on the Boulevards.”
She didn’t hide from Waldo the fact that Mickiewicz had been her main object in considering a return trip to Paris, and “I have him much better here.”

But there was no long-delayed tryst. Margaret was nearly three months pregnant. She had not been surprised to find that Giovanni proved himself “unswerving and most tender. I have never suffered a pain that he could relieve,” she would later write.
But her health was still poor. “At present, I am not able to leave the fire, or exert myself at all,” she wrote to Waldo. A doctor she consulted gave the opinion that her health would “of itself revive,” and she mentioned vaguely to Waldo a plan of “moving for the summer,” making her recovery, as the doctor advised, “the first object.”
Perhaps as encouraging as the doctor’s assurances, which she did not tell Waldo concerned a pregnancy, and Giovanni’s steady attendance, was Mickiewicz’s acceptance of her situation. Her mentor in “full and healthy” living saw nothing wrong in her unlooked-for pregnancy, and Margaret began to welcome, cautiously, the prospect of motherhood. Years ago she had given up hope of becoming “a bestower of life,” but she had never given up longing for a child, “a being born wholly of my being.”
To Waldo, who had sent news of his second son, three-year-old Edward, she wrote, “Children, with all their faults, seem to me the best thing we have.”

After confiding in Mickiewicz and finding relief, it was hard to keep her vow of silence. In a letter to Jane Tuckerman, a favorite pupil from Greene Street School days, Margaret came close to revealing her secret. “The Gods themselves walk on earth, here in the Italian Spring,” she wrote as the weather improved and the wave of revolution swept onward. “But ah dearest, the drama of my fate is very deep, and the ship plunges deeper as it rises.” Margaret expected that “my present phase of life” would “amaze” Jane, if only she could “know how different” it was, how her former teacher had “enlarg[ed] the circle of my experiences.” All Margaret would say now was “I love Rome more every hour; but I do not like to write details, or really to let any one know any thing about it. I pretend to, perhaps, but in reality, I do not betray the secrets of my love.” It had been a decade since Margaret taught a teenage Jane Tuckerman the myths of Aspasia, Daphne, and Atalanta, “who wished to live in the enjoyment of ‘single blessedness.’” Now Margaret informed her one-time pupil, provocatively, “I have done, and may still do, things that may invoke censure.” Yet “in the foundation of character, in my aims, I am always the same:—and I believe you will always have confidence that I act as I ought and must.”
Would Margaret marry Giovanni Ossoli now? Or wait to see if their child lived? Or, even then, retain her “single blessedness”?