Miss Fuller (13 page)
I am privately convinced that the Uncles are preventing
Mother from selling the farm — if she did she could move back to Cambridge, which she would prefer. Also the sale of the farm would free my brothers to earn their own money for their studies. The Uncles say that the economic crisis of the country forbids the sale of the farm. Meanwhile they make threats to Mother that they will take her boys away & send them to live with wealthy relatives. I write to her that I will never let this happen.
In August, when I am on vacation from teaching, I spend some days in Concord with the Emersons; on August 31, 1837, I hear his Phi Beta Kappa Address, our “intellectual Declaration of Independence,” in the First Parish Church of Cambridge. I discover that, by virtue of my association with Mr E, Mr Alcott, & others, I along with they have been dubbed “Transcendentalists” in the journals. This term of derogation (suggesting as it does a denial of Christian principles) shocks both enemies & friends sufficiently that my dear companion Caroline, who was to have come to Providence with me for the winter term to study at the school as a special student, is prevented by her parents from so doing.
This is both a personal & an economic blow as I was to have received $28 for her tutelage.
Uncle Abraham releases some funds from the estate to allow schooling only for Arthur & Lloyd in the fall. My sister Ellen comes to me in Providence to study with me privately, & Mother visits me as well. We are only a little crowded in my one room as I spend most of my day at the
school. Meanwhile I embark on teaching weekly evening classes in German. This money is all for Mother.
29 June (or is it 30?)
I have lost the thread these several days. Sea-sickness, mild for me & more pronounced in the cases of Mrs Hasty & my husband. In the last two days the winds righted themselves & all felt better, but by then it had become imperative we address the matter of the lice. Mrs Hasty & I set up a sheep-shearing station & cut the hair of all the men who would allow it, close to the scalp, & then we greased everyone with pork fat. Poor little Nino cried at the smell — it was fierce — & Then Mrs Hasty & Celesta & I combed & greased one another’s long hair & braided the tresses & pinned them up. Two days having passed, with the aid of the cook’s stove we set up our station again, this time to wash away the grease — along with the dead lice & their eggs — from our heads, & the bed-linens, all! Two more days for this chore! & An extra set of sails strung across the decks! It is to be hoped we shall not have to go through this tedious & smelly exercise again this voyage. I am not sure the men would agree to it again in any case.
30 June
No longer scratching, I return to my financial reckoning:
A gift of friendship & a savings of summer expenses! In 1838, the Emersons invite me to spend my three summer
months with them in Concord. I cannot say enough about the recuperation I experience in these blissful months, free from immediate money troubles & solaced at all times by the friendship, instruction, & conversation of Mr E. Since Henry Thoreau is never far from their house himself (working as handy-man for the house-hold & general poetic interlocutor for Mr E) I get to know him well; he has an independent philosophy about Economy that he tested by two years of living in a cabin, scratching beans from the field & pulling fish from the pond.
Come the fall, our family finances are worsening. My brother Eugene has had to leave law school. Only Arthur, enrolled at preparatory school in Waltham, can be educated this year outside the home. Mother at last is able to sell the Groton farm. I sell two Goethe poems in translation. Total income from poems, my own & in translation, thus far: $3.50.
Things are very confusing in these months: I become exhausted by teaching, I leave the school at the end of a year & a half. I go home to Groton (where the farm is sold but the family may stay on for a few months) & work on my Eckmann translation, finally giving it to my publisher, Mr George Ripley, with a long essay on Goethe’s work & life — this is the last I ever see of my “biography,” alas! — as a preface. The book is praised, my essay is lauded, but it never sells well enough to repay the publishing costs & I do not see, as they say, “one thin dime” for all my labors.
April, 1839: Mother & the family are settled into a large but modest house in Jamaica Plain, five miles or so from the center of Cambridge, where Mother plans to take in boarders. The Emersons ask me to live with them through the summer. Relief from the immediate need to earn money is a great balm; my health is again restored in the Concord woods & fields.
& It is this summer that I first try a vegetary diet, hoping at one & the same time to train my body for higher thought & to learn to save income (in the future, when I am not a guest at a sumptuous board) by not eating meat. Henry Thoreau tells me about roasting a wood-chuck & eating the meat half-raw, I think to see if I will scream but instead I solemnly quote from the
Georgics
, where Virgil sings of the gifts of the earth, “Munera verstra cano …” & Henry smiles sweetly as one defeated.
Mr E thinks I am wrong-headed & mightily fulminates against my “Hindoo” practices, but Lidian joins me in the vegetary regimen for nearly a month & claims to feel freer in her mind. We both “lapse” together & laugh at our newly voracious appetite for fowl, ham, &c, but I had mastered a salutary lesson in surviving on beans & corn & greens & fruit should the time come again when it would be expedient or necessary.
July the 1st
Cont: I am quite entertained by this “autobiography in dollars & cents” tho’ I will probably spare you some of these
pages dear Sophia. Soon we will return to the “autobiography of the heart” on which I initially embarked.
Quickly, then: When I left Concord to live with Mother at the end of the summer, I hatched a project with Elizabeth who would sponsor my Conversations — as you well know who were in most faithful attendance. (Had you met your princely Mr Hawthorne yet? I cannot recall.) My Conversations support me for some months in the winter & spring of 1839–1840. My first series earned me $200, & I doubled the price for the second series so was now earning nearly what my Providence salary had paid. The cost to me was an invariable head-ache, enough to fell me for two days afterwards; but I kept the work going for five years & had over 200 students during that time.
Meanwhile Mr E had offered me the editor’s post at
The
Dial
, where I began work in 1840. Subscriptions sold at $3. Contributors were paid so little that I ended up writing most of the copy myself for some issues. I was paid nothing & I never labored harder at anything, before or since. (& Some money, & my as yet only dimly seen future, arrived through this as well: I wrote “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women,” that Mr Greeley of the
Tribune
offered to publish as a book,
Woman
in the
Nineteenth
Century
— & which, when it came out at last in 1846, went into editions world-wide with seven translations, became my calling-card everywhere I went in Europe … & from which I earned the only money I ever made from a book thus far — $85!)
The summer of 1843 I took a long trip to the Great Lakes with friends & wrote the book
Summer
on
the
Lakes
, which eventually was published but from which, again, I earned no dividends.
By the end of 1844 I was finished with the Conversations & done with the
Dial
, which struggled along for a year after I left it & then collapsed in obedience to the market-place tho’ Mr E swore he did not lose more money by it than he could afford. Mr Greeley pressed me to come to New York & write for his
Tribune
with an offer so tempting — as it seemed to me — to write essays on literature, the theatre, the conditions of women & the poor, reporting or thoughtful, as I liked — to write 250 articles, at $5 each, in a year — & to save much that I earned by living as a guest in his home, a “country” farm in Turtle Bay only a few miles north of the city. $1, 250 for a year’s work! A princely sum!
Oh what a year ensued. To earn my salary & write an article nearly every day, in a house-hold where I was chastised for my personal habits, including & most importantly, drinking tea! The Greeleys had long since given up eating meat — & I was glad of my ability to be abstemious in this regard — but they also, on the grounds of both health & spirit, forbade themselves a host of other foodstuffs, including fish, tea, coffee, sherry, honey, white sugar, eggs, cucumbers, & pepper & nutmeg. I rebelled to the extent of insisting on my tea & also kept a private stock of honey & eggs in my room. I was more sociable than I might otherwise
have been in that year, angling by the rushing stream of society for any invitation to dine that might come my way, sometimes at James Nathan’s hotel, & was able thereby to get a substantial meal perhaps one day a week. It was during this year that Mother told me she no longer needed my reg’lar remittances, as the older boys were able to pitch in & with Ellen’s help she was able to keep boarders in the Jamaica Plain house.
One more financial note from this time: When Mr Nathan departed for Europe, he entrusted to my keeping his enormous Newfoundland dog, Josy. She promptly killed two chickens belonging to the Greeleys’ neighbor (thereby interrupting my egg-supply & requiring my out-of-pocket replacement of the fowl), so I employed their boy to feed the dog. Her enormous appetite required such a quantity of horse-meat & grain-mast that the whole cost me nearly $2 a week! When at last my urgent query when Mr Nathan would return to reclaim his Josy was answered by him with the suggestion that I turn her loose because animals can fend for themselves, you may imagine that what little regard I had left for Mr Nathan’s heart was crumbled into dust.
Happily Josy was soon placed with a prosperous family which boasted three romping little girls, at a country estate up the river.
Another thing I learned at this time: Discretion can be expensive tho’ candor costs more. Discretion costs at most such trifles as the hire of a hansom & a slight sense of shame;
candor costs the earth. The Greeleys knew nearly nothing of my friendship with Mr Nathan & moreover I felt it wise not to speak of my frequent dining with any friends, as the first such occasion resulted in a quizzing such as you cannot imagine, as to what exactly I had eaten — with such a hand-wringing about the duck, & the berry-sauce & the joint & the peppered turnips, the cakes & creams, & the claret —!
My obligation of writing copy for the
Tribune
cost me some friendships in that time. Caroline, & Mr E, & a dozen or more of my dearest correspondents could not understand that I no longer had the leisure to pour forth my thoughts privately on the page, as all such thoughts were now claimed by the public sphere. Well I felt from Up North the cold mutterings that I had become a frivolous city scribbler & had succumbed to the vulgar blandishments of the market-place.
Perhaps because I never felt any diminution of your regard, dear Sophie — perhaps because so much of what we felt for one another was wordless — & was simply, as the poet Herbert has written of an even deeper connexion, “something understood” — that I cherish our friendship through all that has happened in these years. I see your dear face, silently listening as Elizabeth & I talked into the early morning. I feel your hand in mine as I guided you along the river path when you were with child. & I remember how often, in those first months of your marriage, when Nathaniel would take me on one arm & you on the other, &
we three would sally forth into the Concord evening — how I loved you both, & loved your love for one another!
I must not be distracted by sentimental tears; my tale of dollars is nearly done. I had told everyone I knew that I wished to go to Europe. Mr Greeley, tho’ unable he said to pay my expenses, would be interested in commissioning me to write regularly for the
Tribune
. Marcus & Rebecca Spring proposed themselves as my saviors & companions, as they had a plan to bring their young son to be educated in England for a year while they visited the Continent. They would pay my passage to England if I would consent to tutor their boy on the voyage to prepare him for the rigors of an English school. With what I had saved & sums from a range of friends & a small advance from Mr Greeley with a promise to pay twice the rate he had paid me before — $10 a column! — I was able to amass my supply of $2,000 & so we embarked.
Alas there has not been a moment in the last four years in which money was far from my mind. Mr Greeley paid me but not always quickly & once the Springs had left me on my own in Italy I was bereft of my accountant Marcus & his habit of advancing me funds until money from New York arrived. For the first time I needed to apply to Mother for help, & from time to time as well my brothers, Mr E, & other old friends sent a “donation” to the “cause” of my bed & board. For many weeks in Rome I kept an “economies” note-book in which I entered every purchase, as dear Henry Thoreau taught me once — & by eating only bread & fruit,
& allowing friends to buy me coffee, I was able to live on less than one dollar a day, including rent. Fortunately I was often taken into the homes of people we met for dinner & during the siege itself most everyone shared what little was to be had. (Twice I used my payments from Mr Greeley just to buy hospital supplies.)
My husband’s family had land & property once upon a time & while Giovanni’s father was still alive he had some small income. The Ossoli family are of the “Papal Aristocracy,” so his two elder brothers, following the family tradition of Vatican service, were soldiers of the Papal Guard. Giovanni, with his much older sister (more like a mama to him since his own mother’s early death), had stayed at home to care for their long-ill & lingering father. The anger in the family when Giovanni joined the Civil Guard & spoke with revolutionary fervor! I met him when he had just done so, & his father had for a time forbidden him his presence.
Unlike many others in the Democratic, Unitary, Associationist, & Revolutionary movements (& these are only 4 of the many shades of the causes of the people & not always in accord amongst themselves), Giovanni was never fooled by the Pope’s words — he believed, as was shown to be right by later events, that the Pope would turn against our Revolution at last. But it is curious. He who has in his quiet way raged most persuasively against the betrayals of Pius IX cannot bear for others, such as Protestant Americans like myself, to criticize the Holy Father even now. I am grateful
that he cannot read English because he would be angry at what I have written in my book.