Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  In 1806, Bronson’s school day was interrupted by a total solar eclipse. Not knowing what else to do, Bronson and a group of boys gathered stones and threw them upward toward the bewildering phenomenon. In his excitement, Bronson stepped awkwardly and fell, dislocating his shoulder blade. More than sixty years later, Bronson reflected that this boyhood misfortune had been a prophecy of his life to come—“tilting at the sun and always catching the fall.” Nevertheless, Bronson relished the memory of throwing the stones more than he rued the pain of the accident, and this too was true of his life. He wrote, “I suppose I am to toy with the sunbeams as long as I am dazzled by them.”6

  That same year, following the community’s usual practice of wasting nothing and making do with whatever the Lord made handy, Bronson’s father cobbled together two old buildings near the top of the hill to make a new house for the growing family. It was the first home that Bronson would remember. The widemouthed chimney kept the ground floor comfortably warm in wintertime, but upstairs, where Bronson slept, he gave thanks for the thick coverlets that his mother quilted. Well into old age, he was to recall the downstairs room for its deep-seated armchairs, its uncarpeted but scrupulously scoured floor, and the pipe and almanac that sat on the mantelpiece.7 In an autobiographical poem, he remembered his home as a picture of domestic industry: his father weaving a basket, his mother spinning thread, and his sisters minding their sewing while his brothers peeled apples. Significantly, the only person in the scene not engaged in gainful work was Bronson himself. Instead, he sat to one side, finding “his Elysium” in his books.8

  Bronson’s seeming idleness was a puzzle to his father, Joseph Alcox. A grave, quiet man, Joseph was a skilled farmer whose frugality and preference for his own handiwork prompted him to make his own tools.9 In bad weather, he could be found in his shop, crafting farm implements that he sold to neighboring farmers for extra money. During Bronson’s boyhood, his father could lay claim to the best-tilled, best-fenced farm in the district. Of him, Bronson wrote, “He gave himself to life with the earnestness & simplicity of a child. He was the most diffident person I have ever known.”10 A man of few ambitions, either for himself or his family, Joseph took little part in public affairs and paid his bills. He was a man of virtues that, in later life, his eldest son found it easier to admire than imitate. Joseph could teach his son how to make farming implements and how to plow a straight furrow. But he was illiterate, and he could take no greater hand in his son’s education.

  It is tempting to look for parallels between the early life of Bronson Alcott and that of a boy born to another struggling family in rural isolation a little more than nine years later. Like Abraham Lincoln, Bronson grew up working the soil alongside a father who could barely read and write. The two boys were also similar in their innate thirsts for knowledge, in the shallowness of the intellectual springs from which they were first compelled to drink, and in the fact that whatever culture came to them was supplied by the maternal side of the family. Bronson learned his ABCs by copying letters with chalk on the floor of his mother’s parlor. On winter days, if no chalk was available, he continued his practice by tracing letters with his finger in the snow. Anna Alcox, née Bronson, came from a family of some stature, and it was said that her arrival on Spindle Hill brought with it “a refinement of disposition and a grace of deportment” that had a good effect on the local minds and manners.11 Her eldest son considered her “a woman of great good sense, sweetness of disposition, industry, and engaging manners.”12 The mild expression of her eyes always remained in Bronson’s memory. She was a kindhearted, gentle mother who saw that her children never suffered from a lack of affection.

  Looking backward, Bronson drew a picture of himself as “a comely child, his aspect sage, benign, / His carriage full of innocence and grace; / Complexion blond, blue eyes, locks brown and fine, / And frank expression in his rosy face.”13 He had not been perfect, he knew; he remembered himself as a willful boy, more interested in his idle fantasies than doing the work that the world and his parents foisted on him. Although he was permitted both in the morning and in the evening to write in his journal and devour his books, the time allotted never seemed enough for him.

  Bronson never regretted having grown up on Spindle Hill. “It kept me pure,” he wrote. “It soothed and refined my disposition. It was discipline and culture to me. I dwelt amidst the hills. I looked out upon rural images. I was enshrined in Nature. God spoke to me while I walked the fields.” To his mother’s gentle teachings, the hill added its own mute messages. “Nature was my parent,” Bronson observed, “and from her, in the still communings of my solitudes, I learned divine wisdom, even when a child.”14

  Learning more conventional lessons, however, posed a problem. He was, he remembered, “confined to the narrow range of thought which…a small, isolated town could furnish…removed from the means of moral and intellectual improvement.”15 The available schooling was meager, and Bronson’s progress was further impaired when he had to miss sessions to help with the planting, harvesting, and other exigencies of the Alcox farm. On those days when Bronson could attend, he received his lessons in a frame building that he later described as “disconsolate,” unsheltered from the piercing sun in the summer and frozen by bleak winds in the winter. The children shivered through their lessons as they sat on stiff benches hacked from pine boards.16 The schoolmaster was usually some favorite or relative of the district committee members, and the students were instructed in a mechanical fashion that called on no faculty other than memory. The parish library, the only ready source of printed material, contained fewer than a hundred volumes and was essentially defunct by the time Bronson was in his teens.

  It was not long before the curious boy started looking for ways to distance himself intellectually from his environment. Using his father’s tools, he made his own violin from a maple tree. In less active moods, he sat on the hillside, musing about the future. Apart from his mother, Bronson’s only ally in this search for broader horizons was his cousin William, about sixteen months his senior. As teenagers, they exchanged stories and hand-delivered weekly letters to each other, discoursing as best they could on the books they read and their newfound ideas. They read each other’s journals and discussed their dreams. They both thought that teaching might make a good profession, and they even aspired to authorship.17 Bronson eventually sought leave from his father to cease working on Saturday afternoons, so that he might scour the area for more books. Families from miles around received visits from Bronson, inquiring whether they had any to lend him. Eventually, with the help of his cousin, Bronson began to accumulate a personal library from the castoffs of local parlors. A Bible was an early acquisition. Another find that influenced Bronson profoundly was James Burgh’s The Dignity of Human Nature.18 Also available on many a farmer’s shelf was The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan’s venerable allegory of salvation, which had lost little of its popularity among the God-fearing since it first appeared in 1678. Unable to acquire his own copy, Bronson repeatedly borrowed the book from his cousin Riley, committing favorite portions to memory. He carried The Pilgrim’s Progress into his father’s fields, stealing moments while resting the family’s oxen to thumb its pages.19 After a long day’s labor, he would sit in the chimney niche, with a candle in his hand, poring over the book’s “enchanted pages” until late at night. When he was seventy-three, the very same copy of the book at last became his, placed in his hands by Ruth Frisbie Alcott, Riley’s widow. Bronson seems never to have received a gift with heartier thanks.20

  Far more than any other book, The Pilgrim’s Progress captivated Bronson. He called it his “dear, delightful book” and later claimed that it was his most efficient teacher and the dictionary by which he learned the English tongue.21 Looking back over a span of decades, he felt that it had done more than give a contour to his education and his thinking about spiritual matters:

  My early childhood was revived in my memory with a freshness and reality that no ordi
nary mind [sic] could have caused. This book is one of the few that gave me to myself. It is associated with reality. It unites me with my childhood, and seems to chronicle my Identity. How I was rapt in it!22

  If The Pilgrim’s Progress teaches anything, it teaches one not to take the world’s judgments at face value. It firmly proclaims the narrowness of the way that leads to salvation. One either serves the false gods of wealth and the good opinion of one’s neighbors, or one serves the true God of Heaven. There is no third option. According to Bunyan, the person who lives in the service of temporal legality and civility has chosen a path to destruction; to heed the advice of the Worldly Wiseman, who praises earthly comforts and counsels only so much morality as would make one’s way easiest in the current life, is to submit ultimately to spiritual bondage. Bunyan’s stern warnings against temptation and self-gratification found an avid listener in young Bronson. Paradise Lost, it seemed to him, was a book to be read. The Pilgrim’s Progress was a book to be lived. The allegorical trials of Bunyan’s Christian seemed perpetually to reflect Bronson’s own struggles toward a kind of earthly perfection.23

  The Pilgrim’s Progress not only held out to Bronson a way of living but, just as importantly, a way of reading every aspect of his experience. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, a fact is never merely a fact. Every phenomenon is presented to the reader for its metaphorical relevance. Bunyan encourages the reader to regard the world as a divinely created symbol, to be observed for its spiritual, not its literal, significance. It seems beyond question that one of the shared traits that later attracted Emerson and Alcott to each other was their habit of thinking about the visible world, not as a sufficient truth in itself, but as pointing the way toward a greater, more satisfying truth that could be approached only through metaphor. Not long after their friendship began in earnest, during the period in which Alcott’s influence on him was strongest, Emerson wrote, “Every natural fact is the symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of mind.”24 Through the observation of metaphor in nature, Emerson reassured himself of the presence of divinity in the world.

  But whereas the vision of the world as a physical bodying forth of a Platonic ideal was liberating for Emerson, this way of seeing was to become a disability for Bronson. Emerson had the flexibility to balance his understanding of the world between two seemingly contradictory models. He could accept a world in which every fact had two sides, one related to sensation and the other to morals. “Life,” he wrote in Representative Men, “is a pitching of this penny,—heads or tails. We never tire of this game.”25 Bronson saw no attraction in the moral coin toss that Emerson found so fascinating. Solidity, he argued, “is an illusion of the senses. There is nothing solid. The nature of the Soul renders such a fact impossible.”26 Thanks in part to his reverence for The Pilgrim’s Progress, Alcott’s penny had only one side. He seems to have decided early on that it was only the spirit that truly mattered.

  Curiously, however, although Bunyan’s allegory was pivotally responsible for shaping Bronson’s ideas of right conduct, it failed to impress on him the point that its author undoubtedly considered the most fundamental of all: the necessity of embracing the doctrines of Christianity. Bronson was essentially immune to the arguments of orthodoxy. He was confirmed in the Episcopal faith when he was sixteen, and he long remembered how worshippers filled the pews and galleries of the plain, two-storied meetinghouse of his youth. He had enjoyed church, and he always felt that Sundays had been great days in those times.27 Nevertheless, Alcott’s experience of organized religion failed to bind him to its forms and dogmas. He never accepted the idea of Jesus as the Son of God. While he found himself “disposed to consider the author of the Christian system as a great and good and original man,” Alcott could not convince himself to think of Jesus as anything other than a superb specimen of humanity.28 He thought the writings of Confucius, the Bhagavad Gita, and other Eastern texts should be combined with the New Testament to create an ecumenical “Bible for Mankind.”29 He did not pray, and he taught his children to follow his example, explaining to them that their “thoughts, feelings, and resolutions” mattered more than private communication with God.30

  One of the most enduring lessons that the boy appears to have absorbed on those long, pious Sundays was one he would have done well to unlearn. The preaching of those times generally reflects an infatuation with sonorous, convoluted, periodic sentences. In such discursive sentences, a point may be elegantly and elaborately made, but the reader bears the task of reducing the idea to its hard, crystalline form. Robert Richardson has observed that the well-padded, ornate sentence was a mainstay of Emerson’s when he was trying to find his way as a minister.31 Indeed, the transformation of Emerson the florid preacher into Emerson the compactly aphoristic, quotable essayist is one of the great marvels of American literature. It was a feat that Alcott found impossible to duplicate. Reading Alcott’s journals, one frequently has the sense of a mind that worked through ideas with great deliberation and thoroughness. However, one searches in vain for the quick, decisive stroke. He writes as if assuming that his readers will have much time in which to enfold themselves in the densities of his prose.

  Even an invisible, personal faith, however, must express itself in some physical, identifiable way. If Bronson Alcott could not comfortably find that expression through prayer or church membership, then he had to seek some other way. Like most people, he found it natural to evince belief by giving things up. Having no church to prescribe the forms of his self-denial, Alcott arrived at his own conclusions as to what earthly appetites were wrong and impious. He eventually came up with a very long list. He lived much of his life by the creed that one must prefer one’s soul to one’s body, and the needs of others to the wants of oneself. At its most rampant, his urge toward asceticism seemed to command him almost to relinquish life altogether.

  Bronson’s one chance at pursuing a formal education came when he was thirteen. His mother’s brother, Dr. Tillotson Bronson, a tall, personable man of priestly cast, was then the head of the Episcopal Academy in Cheshire, Connecticut, a school that, as Alcott later recalled, “was a college in everything but the name.”32 Seeing promise in his nephew, Dr. Bronson offered to take the boy under his roof and enroll him in his school. The family agreed, and Bronson rode off with his uncle to see what might be made of him. Bronson’s time at the Cheshire Academy was a turning point in his early life. Success at the academy might have meant an eventual matriculation at Yale and a future in the church. It would also have given him something less tangible but perhaps more important. To be a thinker in the truest sense requires being open to the enriching possibilities of a mental tug-of-war. Bronson Alcott did not have this flexibility when he arrived in Cheshire, and if he were ever to absorb it, this would have been an opportune time.

  As it happened, his experiences at the academy seem to have had the contrary effect. Children grow up assuming that their own experiences are normal. The discovery of a larger world in which people speak differently and cleave to other assumptions can come as an overwhelming surprise. So it was with Bronson Alcott, abruptly placed in the midst of boys who did not say “nimshi” when they meant “fool” or “ollers” instead of “always.” Cheshire made Bronson feel bumptious and strange. As an old man, he still remembered the sting of being called on to read in front of the other boys and promptly learning that his performance was not up to the mark. If Bronson’s private studies had taught him some things his new classmates did not know, they were knowledgeable in matters never dreamed of in his philosophy. He could not fit in. His sojourn among the learned lasted only a month; he could not bear to stay any longer.

  In the face of the suggestion that his instinctive methods of approaching knowledge might be inadequate, Bronson clenched himself still tighter against outward criticisms and clung ever more devotedly to his private god: a belief in his own genius, begotten within him by a wise and all-sustaining Nature. Throughout his life, hi
s criterion for an idea was neither whether it was practical or provable, but whether it resonated with his spirit. Over time, the faith that he was both right and righteous became essential to Bronson; to renounce it would have been to lose all bearings in a bewildering world.

  After his abortive attendance at the Cheshire Academy, Bronson’s formal education was essentially at an end. He embarked on a series of small ventures, none of which led him anywhere in particular. He thought for a while that he might follow in his father’s footsteps as a farmer. He worked awhile as a clockmaker and sold religious tracts from door to door. More than five years passed, and still he found nothing new to engage his soul.

  He found out something important about that soul when he was sixteen. Hearing that there was to be a public hanging, he walked sixteen miles with William in order to see it. When the condemned man was thrown down and his neck snapped, Bronson fainted dead away. Another time, he was horrified to see a group of prisoners being marched up from their subterranean cells and driven to work at bayonet-point. He did not get over the effect of these sights for some time.33 These experiences deepened his aversion to cruelty, which in later years became virtually absolute.