Old Books, Rare Friends

by Madeline B. Stern

  “A Modern Mephistopheles” had been rejected, but Alcott was a thrifty Yankee who seldom threw away anything useful. I knew she had re-used the title, A Modern Mephistopheles, for a book requested by the publisher of her later work, when, as America’s beloved author of juveniles, she commanded dazzling prices and an enormous readership. In 1877, long after Little Women had brought her fame and fortune, Thomas Niles of Roberts Brothers asked his illustrious author to contribute a novel to his No Name Series, a series of books published anonymously but written by famous authors. Why not, Niles had suggested, use that old unpublished story and rework it for the No Names?

  Alcott had followed his suggestion, and her Modern Mephistopheles—the story of a Faustian young man who sells his soul for literary fame—appeared in the series in 1877, intriguing readers and setting them to guessing at its authorship. In 1987 I had the pleasure of editing that novel for Praeger, and it was then that Joel Myerson alerted me to the fact that the manuscript of the original “Modern Mephistopheles,” rejected by Elliott, was still extant, in Harvard’s Houghton Library.

  In short order a Xerox copy was on my desk. The story, entitled “A Modern Mephistopheles, or, The Long Fatal Love Chase,” consisted of some 284 pages—indeed “too long” for Elliott’s purpose. In the title, however, I noticed that the words “A Modern Mephistopheles” had been penned out, leaving only “The Long Fatal Love Chase,” whose first paragraph contained the enticing words “I often feel as if I’d gladly sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom.”

  It was an accurate title for the rejected manuscript, which had no relationship at all to the plot of Alcott’s No Name narrative. Had “The Long Fatal Love Chase,” besides being too long, been too sensational? The plot line of each novel is clearly the power struggle between good and evil, but beyond that basic theme they had very little in common. The heroine of the “Chase,” Rosamond, is artlessly frank, unconscious of her power, in love with a sinner but hating the sin. The sinner hero is Phillip Tempest, a man who has tasted every pleasure, obeyed no law but his own will, roamed all over the world, and at thirty-five become “unutterably tired of everything under the sun.” The interaction of hero and heroine triggers an elaborate plot with a number of sensational subplots. Rosamond, to begin with, is won over a card game; a pretended wedding deludes her into thinking she is married to Phillip Tempest; in a chapter entitled “Cholera” Phillip leads a friend to his death; Rosamond’s escape from her sinner husband and his untiring pursuit entail disguises, assumed names, the discovery of a corpse, a stay in a convent, and a stay in a madhouse. Tempest’s chase after his fugitive inamorata is indeed long and fatal, involving sudden reappearances, false reports, and the frequently inaccurate firing of pistols. Midway through the manuscript Father Ignatius is introduced, a priest who falls in love with the heroine. The long chase does end fatally, with Rosamond’s death and Phillip’s suicide. But before he destroys himself, the hero gathers the dead woman in his arms and claims a final macabre victory: “Mine first—mine last—mine even in the grave!”

  In my introduction to the second and much revised Modern Mephistopheles of the No Name Series, I discussed the early rejected version in some detail. And as far as I was concerned, that was the end of “The Long Fatal Love Chase.” I had seen little in it to argue with James R. Elliott’s rejection of the manuscript. In my wildest imaginings—never, to be sure, as wild as Alcott’s—I could not have foreseen that it would, 130 years after it had been conceived, generate a cause célèbre and a reputed fortune.

  Then, some time later, I was sent a copy of Occasional List Number 93, issued by a New York dealer in rare books, Ximenes, Inc. Item 299 in that list offered—under the heading “Six Hundred Pages of Manuscript”—two autograph manuscripts by Louisa May Alcott: Jo’s Boys and A Long Love Chase. The Long Love Chase was described as “the original manuscript of an unpublished novel, a gothic tale about a restless and strong-willed young woman … who is rescued from her dull existence by the demonic Phillip Tempest; the subsequent tale involves bigamy, murder, and suicide.” The two manuscripts were offered as a pair, the price (reputedly over $400,000) available “on request.”

  Alcott manuscripts on deposit at the Houghton Library were for the most part still owned by the Alcott family. In the case of the “Love Chase,” which had never appeared in print, the right to publish was also vested in the family. When I read the Ximenes offer, I of course informed Dean Larsen of Brigham Young, who would have been delighted to add the manuscript of Jo’s Boys to the library had the price been less astronomical. Jo’s Boys, the final volume of the Little Women trilogy, had been written during Alcott’s last years and had rung the curtain down upon the March—and Alcott—family. By contrast, “The Long Love Chase” seemed a minor acquisition. I took the liberty of suggesting to my colleague of the Ximenes firm that, since the two works had nothing in common beyond their authorship, it might be wise to offer the two manuscripts separately.

  At this point yet another character walked on stage to participate in the ensuing drama. Kent Bicknell, in his mid-forties, was principal of a private school in New Hampshire and, not unlike the Transcendentalists, had long been under the influence of East Indian philosophy and mysticism. A former collector of Nathaniel Hawthorne, he had recently switched his collecting interests to Louisa May Alcott, and in this connection he paid occasional visits to the firm of Rostenberg and Stern. We talked Alcott; he made a few purchases; and, in exchange for a number of my articles on various phases of Alcott’s career and Leona’s groundbreaking article on the Alcott pseudonym, he presented us with a large quantity of local maple syrup.

  During this seminal period, another cast of characters walked on stage with a revised film version of Little Women. I found the new rendition too free with its reading of the original text, and the whole far too saccharine. Remembering only Katharine Hepburn as Jo March, I thought Winona Ryder too beautiful and too unruffled. But the majority of viewers loved the new Little Women, and the movie would do much to heighten interest in the Concord spinner of tales.

  While the film was in preparation, Kent Bicknell purchased the manuscript of “A Long Fatal Love Chase” and paid the family for the right to publish it. It was not long before he engaged the services of an agent, who had no trouble stirring up interest in a previously unpublished sensational Alcott novel, and Random House acquired the prize for a reputed seven figures. History, once again, repeated itself, and the publishing world savored the idea of a new discovery. Of course, Louisa May Alcott had been “hot” for a long time.

  By January of 1995, earlier publishers of Alcott’s sensation stories were hoisting themselves on the bandwagon. The blood-and-thunder style apparently filled a twentieth-century need, too. A Long Fatal Love Chase was published, without introduction but with considerable hype, by Random House in 1995. Along with it came the reissues of my earlier collections and the proposals for new ones. Vindication loomed for the women ignored—for Leona, known to many as “the Little Grandmother of the Alcott Revolution,” for me, and most of all for Alcott herself.

  As it turned out, the new generation of readers was captivated by the reprinted Behind a Mask. In October 1995, in an article entitled “Dead White Females,” Michele Slung wrote for the Washington Post:

  Collector Kent Bicknell, the man who’d bought and [peddled] the manuscript of Love Chase, was really only riding on the distinguished coattails of book dealer/scholar Madeleine Stern, who’d begun staking out the territory of Alcott rediscovery as long ago as the early 1940s.

  Thirty years after she’d gotten on the case, in an era when the cobwebby shelves of out-of-print fiction by women writers were finally starting to be scrutinized … William Morrow … took a chance and … brought out her edition of Alcott’s mesmerizing and lurid Behind a Mask, to the delight of anyone who happened to come across it.

  Stephen King, reviewing the Chase in the Times, concluded that it was “not the best of Alcott’s sensation stories; t
hat is probably ‘Behind a Mask.’ ” General critical opinion concurred. Maureen Corrigan, in her joint review of Mask and Chase for the Washington Post, wrote that “Behind a Mask is by far the better way to become acquainted with Alcott’s racier side.” Corrigan ended her critique with a delicious suggestion: “If they ever make a movie of ‘Behind a Mask,’ forget Winona Ryder; this Alcott heroine calls for the likes of Leona Helmsley.”

  Meanwhile, I had received a phone call from Random House. Would I supply them with an Alcott volume for their Modern Library division? The request was irresistible to me. I selected for the volume five shockers whose themes would appeal to twentieth-century readers: “A Pair of Eyes,” based on mind control; “The Fate of the Forrests,” with its ethnic barbarism and violence; “Behind a Mask: or, A Woman’s Power”; “Perilous Play,” on hashish experimentation; and “My Mysterious Mademoiselle,” with its suggested transvestitism. In my introduction I wrote that “Louisa May Alcott would have found herself at home in the twentieth century … In her stories of … mind control, Eastern violence and woman’s power, drug experimentation and transvestitism, she transcends her own time … The enchantments she has conjured up are as modern as they are magical.”

  The new compilation, Modern Magic, was joined some time later by yet another, requested by Northeastern University Press, a house that had already issued my omnibus volume, Louisa May Alcott Unmasked: Collected Thrillers. Now I provided them with The Feminist Alcott: Stories of a Woman’s Power, including “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” “V.V.: or, Plots and Counterplots,” “Behind a Mask: or, A Woman’s Power,” and “Taming a Tartar”—four stories selected “because in them the sexual power struggle is … the fiber that knits the narrative together” and “in each of the four … the canny author has offered fascinating variations on the theme.”

  The climax of my Alcott renaissance was reached when Random House elected to reprint my biography of Louisa May Alcott, first published in 1950, as a paperback. Needless to say, its bibliography of Alcott writings was expanded to 314 numbered items, including of course all the traced sensation stories.

  In the 1950s, after that biography was issued, I sold the majority of the Alcott books I had collected to make room for books related to my next biography. In the 1970s, when I began tracking down the Alcott thrillers, I assembled another Alcott library. Now, in the 1990s, I am doing the same thing. If there has been a persistent ghost in my literary life, it is certainly that of Louisa May Alcott. Early on, identifying, as so many adolescents have done, with Jo March, I gloried in that heroine’s forthright independence and daring. Surely she was, as I was, a feminist in the making. Later I would realize that she was a role model for all women who said what they thought and did what they believed in, regardless of world opinion.

  Thanks to Leona’s discovery, we had learned that, like Jo March, Louisa May Alcott had written sensation stories that were published anonymously and pseudonymously. The forthright Louisa Alcott had led in secret a tumultuous double literary life. Later on, tracing those stories to their original printed sources, we became aware of Alcott’s familiarity with—and delight in—“forbidden” subjects: violence and revenge, hashish and opium, the lust for power, the struggle of the sexes, and, long before the twentieth century, feminism articulated. Alcott had written not only of hearth and home, but of the strange and exotic. She inspired discovery and—as with A Long Fatal Love Chase and the recently published juvenile novel The Inheritance—rediscovery. Alcott was a woman for all seasons, a writer for all ages, complex and fascinating, capable of shocking, still capable of surprising.

  To disclose the fascinations we had uncovered in Alcott, I spent much of my own creativity pursuing her, revealing her secrets to the world. Leona started all this with her discovery of A. M. Barnard. Together, we rejoiced as unacknowledged Alcott narratives were traced and read and assembled. The ghost of Louisa Alcott further cemented our relationship with each other.

  By the 1990s it almost appeared as if my own productivity was attempting to rival Alcott’s. In an article, “The Sensational Miss Alcott,” in The New Criterion, James W. Tuttleton commented that “Madeleine Stern, Miss Alcott’s first scholarly biographer, has long made a cottage industry out of editing and anthologizing” Alcott’s potboilers. That “cottage industry” soon generated several interesting interviews with Leona and me. Our opinions were elicited by the BBC for a production on women’s literature and women’s lives, captioned “Behind a Mask.” Then, early in 1995, Michael Warner consulted us on the “recent” Louisa May Alcott revival and produced a provocative article for the Village Voice Literary Supplement, entitled “The Secret Behind the Secret Writings of Louisa May Alcott.” He ended his lengthy exploration of the roles of Rostenberg, Stern, and Alcott with a tantalizing query:

  Will the thrillers and the feminist writing ever have the same foothold in the popular imagination that Little Women has? Will we learn to see Jo March and Jean Muir as sharing more than their initials? Or will Jo remain the figure portrayed by Winona Ryder, drained of all internal conflict and comfortingly normal? At 750 pages, [Louisa May Alcott] Unmasked may be just enough ballast to outweigh that image. And who knows; it may not even be the end of Alcott’s secret ventings. After all, there’s always Madeleine Stern “Mady will find more,” says Leona Rostenberg. “She’s a sleuth.”

  EPILOGUE

  THE SENSATIONS—THE BLOOD-AND-THUNDER—IN our own lives have all been derivatives of our detection and scholarly sleuthing. These have been our lifelong passion. They still are.

  Even now, as octogenarians, we rise to the excitement of the hunt, the thrill of the find. And yet all too frequently we are made aware of our age. At book fairs, where we have a booth every year, we hear from browsing visitors, “We can’t believe you two are doing the fair again. We never thought to see you here.” The implication is obvious.

  Glancing around us at those book fairs, we find ourselves looking for what is absent. There are but few booths operated by our contemporaries, so many of whom have died. The ghosts of retired librarians visit our stand, along with collectors who have given up collecting. Thanks to all this, as well as to health scares over the years, we recognize the intimations of mortality. We no longer fly overseas semiannually or annually to buy from our European colleagues, whose ranks are diminished. Yet we still hanker for the musty whiff of a Left Bank librairie or the calf and vellum vistas of a bookshop in Cecil Court. When we visit dealers closer to home, we no longer climb ladders to explore the topmost shelves. Serendipity has not disappeared, however, and so we find treasures on the lower shelves of bookcases. There is no doubt that we still search for them. When we open a book and make a discovery, our hearts palpitate wildly—not from angina, but from excitement.

  Young people—people, say, under sixty or seventy—see us as old and frail. We recall Walter Savage Landor, who, having “warmed both hands before the fire of life,” wrote that he was “ready to depart.” The point is that he wrote those lines at age seventy-five, but he lived to be almost ninety. One of us has diminished sight and the other diminished hearing. We have become each other’s eyes and ears and so survive. We do more than survive—we experience the passion that has dominated our lives; we continue our hunt for books, practice our Sherlockian exploits, and, living our double lives, write and co-write our books. It is true we may be stepping back. We are not stepping out.

  We have become keen observers of the generations who have succeeded us. Every age is critical of the next, and we are no exceptions. Although we admire and befriend many young dealers who do not confuse value with price, we deplore the all too popular conception entertained by many dealers that books are to be regarded primarily as investments. Such booksellers go in for dollarship, not scholarship. We deplore too the concentration upon books that require next to no research, the modern first editions in English whose interest lies less in their content than in their mint dust jackets. Then we retreat happily to our Renaiss
ance octavos and quartos published by Aldus Manutius and Johann Froben, by the Estiennes and Colines, bound in vellum that has become stained or calf that has become scuffed, and as we turn their pages we still find unexpected, unknown riches. We still reach avidly for the small pile of seventeenth-century French pamphlets that may refer in passing to a brave new world. Our reference library is filled with books that after half a century of use have become—like us?—worn and tattered. But they yield us clues and insights that we would never be able to glean from intimidating computers.

  Our untraditional lives have given us few regrets. We would certainly have delighted in children. At the same time we realize that growing offspring would have given us, for all the joy, a continuing awareness of our own aging process. Not having had children, we have often been blissfully unaware of the passage of time. Somehow our beloved dachshunds have been able to give us joy without reminding us of the Grim Reaper.

  One deep disappointment of the 1930s—Mr. Thorndike’s rejection of the doctoral dissertation on the printer’s role in humanism—has turned into a blessing. Had that dissertation been accepted then, one of us would have been stranded in some small Midwestern college teaching names of kings and dates of battles; the other would have continued unhappily explaining Ivanhoe and Silas Marner to uninterested high school students. There is no doubt that we both owe a debt of gratitude to that saturnine, green-suited necromancer who sidled into the lecture room, mumbled on about magic, and unwittingly—magically—changed our lives forever.

  Instead of abiding in academe, we have sought and discovered, independently and together. We have introduced the past to the present. One of our greatest thrills was our discovery of the double literary life of America’s best-loved writer of juvenile fiction. The revelation that the author of Little Women was also the author of clandestine sensational shockers was our blood-and-thunder story.