Miss Fuller

by April Bernard

  She made everybody angry. Such a terrible talent.

  Flanked closely by two ushers to the door, as if she were a horse that might rear in traffic, Anne stepped out into a misty evening. As she had been reading, the world had been transformed into softness and muddle, and the eye was drawn to small patches of clarity where the gas-lamps lit the paths. How could one reclaim the private person one had known, even if only a little, in the midst of the clamor and eloquence of public opinion and reminiscence? She concentrated very hard on her own few memories; she summoned up her own words. Under the lamp-light at the Yard gate, she wrote in her note-book: More alive than anyone else. And then: She frightens me.

  The day following her Harvard visit Anne drove her pony-cart to the public library in Concord, to borrow The Blithedale Romance, the novel of Hawthorne’s she had learned was supposed to be about Miss Fuller. Not much of a novel reader as a rule, she struggled at first to understand what was fantasy, what was allegory — since clearly the narrator was meant to be a figure for Hawthorne himself, and Blithedale was like Brook Farm, in Roxbury, where Hawthorne had briefly joined his many friends in the early 1840s to run a communal farm on noble principles. (She remembered Henry’s muted horror at the scheme — or perhaps just at the very idea of living with that particular company — and remembered also that Miss Fuller had not joined them either, as she was too busy elsewhere.) The very disclaimer from the author at the start of the book was, Anne surmised, a kind of code: I’ll say this is not Brook Farm, that these characters are not based on figures from real life, and by my so saying you will understand the reverse. Anne could not make out who the powerful, sinister Westervelt and Hollingsworth were meant to be exactly — the Reverend George Ripley, who founded Brook Farm? Mr. E? Alcott? — but she was pretty sure that the feeble and pretty Priscilla was a sort of Sophia Peabody (loved by the narrator) and that Zenobia, despite her “dark” hair, was Miss Fuller.

  Named for that powerful queen of ancient history, Zenobia of Palmyra, who murdered her husband and son, this Zenobia of Hawthorne’s imagination was beautiful and mesmeric, rich and richly dressed, preaching a doctrine of female emancipation although she herself longed only for a man’s love, hiding an illicit marriage, enchanting the narrator and Priscilla and everyone around her — and then bringing destruction, mostly upon herself. She committed suicide by drowning at the end of the novel.

  Anne pondered these things, and returned to her notes to write:

  Mr. H. wrote the novel soon after MF died; and it is filled with love and hate. He is unjust in his portrayal of her as idly rich, as she surely was not. He also believed his wife, “Priscilla,” was in her power. Did he suspect Sapphic tendencies? (Good heavens.) Do novelists do this often, kill a person a second time? Would he have been happier if Miss F had committed suicide? Did he somehow imagine she had? But how can a ship-wreck be suicide? Does he suggest by giving her the name “Zenobia” that she murdered her husband and son? Did he confuse her power with the power of the weather itself? The goddess of hurricanes.

  In any case, thought Anne, Miss Fuller had certainly occupied Hawthorne’s imagination.

  At last, not sure if she should, less sure of everything than she had been even before her researches began, the next morning, at dawn, almost as if she were ceremoniously opening a tomb of the Pharaohs, she took a file and broke open the desk lock. The interior still smelled, sharply, of the sea. She touched a button, a drawing-pin, three tiny buds dried on a knobbly stem — she recognized the plant, Amaranthus graecizans, or was it virids? — a clam shell no bigger than her smallest fingernail, some fine sand. She smiled and thought, Amaranthus fulleris.

  As she lifted out the pile of Miss Fuller’s pages, she dislodged something: One of Henry’s small travelling notebooks had been wedged there, between the pages. The pebbly leather had been smoothed to shiny patches where her brother’s left hand had held it open as he wrote with his right. As she put her own hand where her brother’s had been a moan came from somewhere, from her own throat, as if she had just that moment lost him.

  On the first page were her own joking words about the train from that hot day in 1850; then the following in Henry’s hand:

  25 Jul.

  • Sad bcs. not sad

  • Not Tragedy. Tr. large & human; this nature & not human, tho’ large

  • Sailors liked her, praised her, loved her

  • Sailors shaved almost bald. A mourning ritual of the salty fraternity?

  • Bolton, a sailor, has circled the world 2X. Orig. fr. Kentucky; likes Marseilles best bcs. cheap wine & wife there

  • Study rip currents and undertow. Visible sometimes even w/out gales — gales far out can cause a rip, or an undertow? Are they same?

  • Current running a pale green almost white w/lavender lights, sideways, parallel to shore

  • Candle in tide, swirl’d by waves like whelk-shell, or barber pole

  • 2 buttons fr. Ossoli’s coat, jet, real but not actual

  • Ellery & Arthur arrivd

  26 Jul.

  • Argument about the boy’s corpse: Arthur will dig up & take coffin home tho’ Ellery & I see a greater poetry in leaving it here where his parents died

  • All frantic for book ms

  28 Jul.

  • Women cant have the Wild within

  • Found & buried in sand a woman’s arm & hand. M’s? 7 Crow Brothers: The sister’s finger bone whittled to open the door

  • M told me she did have Wild — so why Europe?

  Old World not The Wild, The Wild is interior & wards westly. M did not have Wild

  • Sorry I never liked M

  • Crab shells, bird skeletons, this stuff, not actual. Goat when alive: Actual. Smells hwvr both alive & dead. Not Real when Dead? The Wild can also contain Death

  The rest were his notes on weather, tides, birds, kelp, shells, grasses, the formation of dunes (with tiny drawings and arrows), and a local story about a beached whale. Nothing more about Miss Fuller.

  Tenderly, she placed Henry’s note-book beside the wasps’ nest on the mahogany side-board where the Bratcher plate and service had once shone.

  Then she sat for many minutes, with the stack of pages in her lap, still not sure whether or not to read the words of this long-dead, alarming, annoying, still-alive woman. And she went for a walk with the dog to think some more.

  “Complete,” she said aloud, and the dripping wet dog turned to look at her. “What is that?” He cocked his head at the question, or more likely at the stick she raised to throw again. She threw the stick, and turned back, now in a hurry. The dog swerved from his play and followed her.

  Not pausing to take off her boots and hat, she returned to her work-room. The dog, sensing her mood as one that meant he must be quiet, found his usual place on the worn Turkey carpet next to the wood-stove and put his nose upon his paws.

  She pulled the stack of pages out and began to read words formed in a large, looping hand: “… How extraordinary to be on board and coming home! Here I must compose my thoughts.… Yet still I hesitate. Not from shame, but from something else — a fear of offending, a fear of disturbing the peace of so dear a friend.…”

  Anne read all the pages, more than forty sheets scrawled across two sides. At some point, quite unconsciously, she removed her hat and boots. She curled up in an arm-chair, the pages piled in her lap, and read that way for an hour or so; then, stiffening in that posture, returned to the chair at the table. When Mattie put her head round the door in the early afternoon she knew by the set of Anne’s back not to disturb her. Anne did not eat or drink, and she felt weak and sick when she at last stopped. It was dusk. She stretched, and still in her stocking-feet stepped out on the back doorstep with the collie-dog, just in time to see the last pink and orange smears over a black horizon-cloud in the west.

  A little later, carrying a pot of tea and a plate of cold pork, pickles, and green beans, Anne returned to her work-room. She re-read the pages by lamp-l
ight, while the expected storm crashed around the house, briefly. At last she went to bed.

  Some days later, on a rainy morning in mid-October, a letter arrived from Anne’s difficult daughter in the Wyoming territories declaring that, as women there had the vote, she was campaigning for a district council seat. She added that one day, when Wyoming became a state, she hoped to be governor. Chewing over this preposterous news, Anne bound Miss Fuller’s pages up in butcher’s paper and tied them with strong twine. On the top she wrote: PRIVATE PAPERS OF MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI.

  She had heard of an organization recently founded, The New England Society for the Progress of Women. With her other daughter — the clever, handsome one — she braved the rain that afternoon, to attend a tea at the Society’s modest house in Cambridge, and while the speaker droned about conditions in the New South, she slipped into the library-office of the director. She took the bundle from her carpetbag and placed it in a low cupboard, on a shelf underneath other papers. It did not look as though these shelves were dusted often, but one never knew. Evening was coming on already, and the rain blew against the window of the office. She shivered.

  As soon as next month, perhaps, the Society might move to a new building, or rearrange its offices, and the ladies would sort and pack these shelves. Someone would find the bundle and send it to a local scholar, a historian. Possibly that historian would be interested; possibly he would read it. Possibly he would give it to a woman of his acquaintance, herself educated and a believer in the rights of women, and she would know what to do with it.

  Or perhaps one day the Society’s maids would be told to clear out all those old papers. One of the maids, educated even if only slightly, would notice the label and call the bundle to the attention of the house-keeper, who would authoritatively drop it in the dustbin.

  Or the Society’s house would go up in flames on some cold night five years hence.

  Or the shelves would never be sorted, and the Society’s building would return to private hands. It would be home to a large and boisterous family. One wintry day, the children would need extra paper for snow-flakes and paper dolls, and would cut page after page into delicate shreds.

  Miss Fuller did not inhabit Anne’s night-time dreams. (Those were populated almost exclusively by members of her family and by a boy she had loved when she was fifteen, a glorious laughing boy visiting relatives in Concord, who had climbed into a pear-tree and thrown fruit at her and then pulled her under a wagon to kiss her.) But once she was fully awake, her first thought was often of that woman.

  It was Anne’s morning habit to make a pot of tea and take it into her work-room. She drew the curtains back on the clear north light, tied her duster into place, and set up the paints — daubing oil into cyan blue and Indian yellow powders, shaving off curls of Japanese lacquer for the red tints, thinning out the white with pine spirits, to make the misty white-into-grey gruel of sea foam.

  If you could have visited, you would have seen the stacks of worked and half-worked canvases, dried and set aside, and if you had leafed through them — but can one be said to leaf through those heavy things, so much heavier than leaves? — you would have seen how her theme had seized her. For again and again, as long as she was able to paint, in the years until rheumatism froze her fingers, she worked on the same image.

  We are in a shallow but wild sea. The vantage point of the viewer is slightly behind and to one side of the central figure, a woman — so it is as if the viewer, standing in deeper water, is following her lead. The woman is partly bent and stepping through ocean waves; sometimes with her entire face visible, turned to us with a beckoning expression; in some versions one can make out the images of figures on the beach (that one looks like Henry in his old suit!); sometimes with the beach bare; sometimes with a bell-buoy or a life-boat visible; sometimes with the light of a sunrise rouging the tips of the waves, but always:

  A woman, her hair streaming in the wind and water, her red dress half torn away and soaked nearly to black, clasping a book under one bare arm and a small child in the other — a woman, thus encumbered, yet striding through the boiling waves, and making it to shore.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Though grounded in fact, this is a work of fiction. To readers interested in history I recommend Margaret Fuller’s writings and the biographies of her written by Charles Capper and by Paula Blanchard; Alexander Herzen’s memoirs; Megan Marshall’s biography of the Peabody sisters; Brenda Wineapple’s biography of Hawthorne; and the biographical and critical writings on Thoreau and Emerson by Stanley Cavell, Walter Harding, Jonathan Levin, Joel Porte, and many other scholars.

  I wish to thank: Patricia Willis at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, Pamela Matz at the Widener Library at Harvard University, and the librarians at the Houghton Library at Harvard, for invaluable assistance; and The Corporation of Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony, for time and peace in which to work.

  Many thanks to my agent, Jin Auh, and to the wonderful Steerforth Press team of Roland Pease and Chip Fleischer.

  Douglas Bauer, Christopher Benfey, Catherine Ciepiela, Annabel Davis-Goff, Richard Q. Ford, Lyndall Gordon, Elana Greenfield, Alice Mattison, Marc Robinson, Elizabeth Sacre, and Mark Wunderlich provided help of various and essential kinds, and I am profoundly grateful.

  It was Joel Porte’s inspired writing and teaching that “shocked my soul awake” to the lives and work of nineteenth-century American writers when I was an undergraduate; to him I owe my longest-standing debt and offer my deepest thanks.

  All errors and fancies are my own.

  OTHER BOOKS BY APRIL BERNARD

  Fiction

  Pirate Jenny

  Poetry

  Blackbird Bye Bye

  Psalms

  Swan Electric

  Romanticism

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  April Bernard is a novelist, poet, and essayist. Her first novel, Pirate Jenny, was published in 1990 and her poetry collections include Romanticism, Blackbird Bye Bye, Psalms, and Swan Electric. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation, and Slate. Her honors include a Guggenheim award, the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Whitney Humanities Fellowship at Yale University, a Sidney Harman Fellowship, and the Stover Prize. She is Director of Creative Writing at Skidmore College and is on the faculty of the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars.