One can only imagine how her father’s letter made Louisa think or feel. Not surprisingly, though, it effected no miraculous transformation. She was not, of course, willingly any of the bad things that her father suggested. Rather, she was of an age when children, reminded of their faults, tend to cry, apologize, and vow to be better. But then they forget, and their parents wonder why. Bronson was an exceptional man. Louisa was to become an extraordinary woman. As a middle-aged father and a growing daughter, however, they shared most of their traits with the rest of the world—both earnestly willing the best, both wanting to communicate all that they had to tell each other, but each failing to receive the messages that the other was sending them. This is how fathers and daughters could be in the nineteenth century. The species has not changed.
Abba and Louisa came back to Concord after New Year’s Day, ready for another try at domestic peace. Bronson, too, wanted nothing more than a serene and contented home. In his mind, his upcoming venture into communal living was largely motivated by his concern for his children and how best to teach them of celestial things in a fallen world. He had concluded his birthday letter to Louisa with the hope that the Alcotts would “become a family more closely united in loves that can never sunder us from each other.” Two months later, he addressed to all four of his daughters a rhapsodic letter in which he promised to show them “what is…more lovely and more to be desired than every thing on which the eye can rest,” the thing “for which the world and all its glories was [sic] made.” He was referring to a kind and loving family and a house “from which sounds of content, and voices of confiding love alone ascend.” Such a family was, he said, “the Jewel—the Pearl of priceless cost.” He told his daughters that he wanted to prepare for them an “imperishable mansion”—a home as heaven. His dream seemed so near his grasp that he signed his letter, “Your Ascended Father.”88 The community he was readying himself to found would be the ultimate test of his ability to ascend.
As spring came to Concord in 1843, Alcott and Lane began to feel more urgently the need to find the land where they could build their paradise. The earlier in the growing season they could begin their work, the better the colony’s chances for success. Emerson had by this time emphatically declined to take part in the enterprise, and he had spent the winter trying to talk Bronson out of the idea.89 Two years earlier, Emerson had politely declined an invitation to join George Ripley’s commune at Brook Farm. Now he made a similar refusal. He doubted that he would find improvement by retreating from the world of bustle and conflict; running away, he implied, was not instructive. Rather, he argued, “He will instruct & strengthen me, who…where he is…in the midst of poverty, toil, & traffic, extricates himself from the corruptions of the same.”90 The man who had once advised his readers “Build therefore your own world,” wanted them to build on the spot where they already found themselves.
Alcott, who had gotten used to having Emerson underwrite his projects, was no doubt surprised when Emerson withheld not only his participation but also his financial backing from the utopian plan. Certainly Emerson was too well mannered to tell Bronson to his face what he had written about him in his journal: “For a founder of a family or institution, I would as soon exert myself to collect money for a madman.”91 The only money available for the venture was Lane’s, and so he provided it: his life’s savings of approximately $2,000, a portion of which went to free Alcott of his remaining debts in Concord, which amounted to $175. Lane also located a piece of land that might serve for the commune. Reluctant to settle on a place too close to Concord and, therefore, the interfering influence of Emerson, Lane declared his preference for a ninety-acre tract of fields, orchards, and woodlands near the hamlet of Harvard, Massachusetts, a town that shared only its name with the great university. Lane liked the remoteness of the spot. It was well to the west of Concord, and there was no road leading to the house. Lane and Alcott visited the property and inspected the weather-beaten farmhouse and barn, neither in the best condition but acceptable. “The capabilities are manifold,” Lane wrote, “but the actualities humble.”92 He bargained down the owner, Maverick Wyman, to an affordable price: $1,800 for the land and rentfree use of the house for the first year. Without much ceremony, the deed was signed, and the land’s legal ownership passed from one Maverick to two others. Alcott and Lane, however, refused to call themselves the owners of the property; rather, they had liberated the acreage from the bonds of commerce. Nevertheless, Lane congratulated himself on the handsomeness of the deal. To his friend William Oldham, back in England, Lane boasted, “this, I think you will admit…will entitle transcendentalism to some respect for its practicality.”93 The farm was given a new name: Fruitlands.
Bronson knew that Fruitlands would be the Rubicon of his life. In his view, the inspiration for the colony had been an expression of divine guidance, a holy directive that he must fulfill or lose all in the attempt. More realistically, it was the ultimate gambit of a man whose other choices had evaporated. Incalculable stakes lay in the balance. If the utopian farm succeeded, it would prove that human beings could thrive by adopting kinder, simpler relations with one another. Its example might light the way to a better way of living, and it would prove at last that Bronson Alcott was neither a failure nor a fool. But if the experiment did fail, it would be a byword of folly, a failure not only for Alcott but for all who dreamed of higher things. At the end of the road to Harvard, either ruin or redemption waited.
It took another week for the Alcotts to make ready for the move. Two of the converts whom Alcott and Lane had succeeded in winning for the cause, Wood Abram and Samuel Larned, went ahead of them along with Lane’s son in order to prepare the farmhouse for occupation. Abba and her daughters packed up their belongings, contending with all the mixed emotions that arise when one leaves one home for another. Abba could not help looking back on all that had transpired during her three fleeting years in Concord. Her father had died, and her youngest daughter had been born. On the first of June, the day of the departure, nostalgia and hope crowded together in her mind. Early that morning, the family’s belongings were loaded onto a large wagon. Abba and the girls said their farewells to Hosmer Cottage and took their places in the wagon. Lane settled in beside them. It remained only for Bronson to climb into the driver’s seat, take the reins, and urge the horses forward.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE SOWING OF THE SEEDS
“I know not why we may not live the true life.”
—Journal of ABIGAIL MAY ALCOTT,
June 1, 1843
THE FARMHOUSE AT FRUITLANDS, WHICH STILL STANDS, does not offer a commanding view of the surrounding country. However, a short walk up the hillside is rewarded with a sweeping view of the Nashua Valley and the bluish slopes of Mount Monadnock in the far distance. Black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace grow profusely in the meadow. Mockingbirds trill fantastic arias, damselflies ruffle the stillness of the air, and chipmunks dash boldly past the front door of the house. The look of the land today is far different from what it was when the Alcotts took possession. Most of the once-open, cultivated land has been overgrown by forest, so that even the rocky and rutted path that led to the house is visible only to those with a keen eye or an experienced guide. Where Lane and Alcott sowed their first and only crop, there now grow thick stands of ash, white pine, and wild cherry trees. They are not quite so thick, however, as the squadrons of mosquitoes and deer flies that rudely remind one that this, like any other place on earth, is not paradise.
Although Fruitlands was to be a highly literary commune, the best writer who lived there was only ten years old at the time. The closest Louisa May Alcott came to writing a memoir at Fruitlands was a short story called “Transcendental Wild Oats.” The story has long tantalized those eager to know the truth about Fruitlands; it presents facts and fabrications side by side, offering no dependable guide as to which is which. In the story, Louisa recollects the day she first saw Fruitlands as being attended by “the pleasan
t accompaniments of wind, rain, and hail.”1 Charles Lane, however, wrote that the trip took place on a sharp, clear day, colder than normal for that time of year. In either case, it was not the best of days for traveling. But there was no time to waste. In Massachusetts, the first of June falls perilously late in the planting season. Spring wheat is in the ground by the end of April; potatoes should be planted no later than the last of May. Although the planting seasons for beans, barley, and sweet corn were not over by the time the Alcotts arrived at the Fruitlands farmhouse, these too would ideally have been planted earlier. Recalling his childhood, Bronson Alcott must surely have understood the prospects that await the farmer who spends the spring months discussing philosophy in fashionable people’s parlors. Yet Lane had purchased the Fruitlands property only on May 25. Before they had even begun, Lane and Alcott had placed themselves in an almost unwinnable race against the calendar.
If Alcott and Lane had been patient, they could have used the summer and autumn of 1843 as a time of preparation, making the necessary repairs to the house and barn and raising the organic materials with which they might have fertilized the land during the following spring. But a cluster of worries had pressed Alcott and Lane to move forward without delay. First was the concern that their financial position would worsen in the next ten months. To Alcott, every month spent in Concord was likely to mean a deeper plunge into red ink. In America, Lane had no business contacts that might lead to employment. Moreover, there was the matter of principle to be addressed. Lane’s journeys from London to Alcott House to Concord had followed a trajectory of renunciation, a path on which he was determined to continue. It would not do for the steps toward establishing Fruitlands to partake, any more than necessary, in the foul habits of getting and spending.
From Concord to Harvard, Massachusetts, is a distance of fourteen miles. For the seven travelers who made the journey, four of them children not yet in their teens, the trip took almost the entire day. In “Transcendental Wild Oats,” Louisa recalled that the wagon borrowed for the journey was a large one, spacious enough to contain Bronson, who drove, Abba, their four daughters, and “a motley load” of possessions. Bronson’s attention was perhaps more focused on his dreams and visions than his driving; in Louisa’s narrative, the small horse that draws the wagon is left to follow the road “all his own way.”2 The mother holds an infant while another girl snuggles close to her father. The remaining two pass the early part of the journey chatting happily together and, as the afternoon extends toward evening, sing soft, murmuring lullabies to their dolls. “Timon Lion” the character in Louisa’s story who stands for Charles Lane, strides alongside the wagon on foot; whether Lane’s decision to walk was dictated by a lack of space or his stalwart disdain for luxury is unclear. Although Louisa also places a young, brown-faced boy in the scene, this detail is fictitious; the only boy who lived at Fruitlands, William Lane, was already at the homestead, awaiting his father’s arrival.
Rolling slowly along the road, the family may have struck passersby as a picture of togetherness. On this togetherness, the success of Fruitlands was largely to depend. However, Louisa and her older sister, Anna, were becoming ever more capable of forming independent judgments about their parents. As a teacher, Bronson had always most loved working with younger children, in part, perhaps, because they were most willing to accept his ideas and authority uncritically. For Anna and Louisa, the time when their father could do no wrong was drawing to an end. This fact suggests an unspoken reason why Bronson became attracted to the idea of an insular community with himself at its head. Alcott was enchanted by fatherhood. He loved, as most men do, the adoring regard that prepubescent children lavish on their fathers. And like many fathers, he probably dreaded the almost inevitable withdrawal of affection that comes with adolescence. By removing his children from a world that judged him harshly, Alcott might have hoped to preserve his preeminent place in his daughters’ hearts for a while longer. Indeed, had Fruitlands succeeded, Alcott would have remained perpetually a father in a symbolic sense, since the “consociate family,” both young and old, would have owed him its filial love even after his daughters had moved on to more mature affections. It is unclear whether Alcott paused to consider that one often loses most quickly the thing one tries to maintain beyond its time. In June 1843, Anna and Louisa were very much “in the wagon” insofar as they still lived for their father’s approval and believed that what he thought best must finally be right. For Louisa, at least, a change was coming.
Abba and the girls first saw the Fruitlands farmhouse in the late afternoon light. They could hardly have been in a mood to appreciate its rustic beauty. The house is a two-story structure, painted so vividly red that its color was the only detail of living there that three-year-old May remembered as an adult. If, on approaching the house, Louisa or one of her sisters asked her father where she would be sleeping, Bronson would have gestured toward the low-pitched roof of the house. The only area in the house spacious enough to accommodate Anna, Louisa, and Lizzie was the attic.
Originally intended to serve only until “suitable and tasteful buildings in harmony with the natural scene” could be erected, the Fruitlands farmhouse was the home of the Alcotts throughout their experiment in communal living.
(Courtesy of the Fruitlands Museum)
In their desire to renounce the world, Alcott and Lane had been attracted to the Fruitlands property because the house was well removed from the main road. For this reason, and because the house lay at the end of an incline just steep enough to be treacherous, the last few hundred yards of the day’s journey presented the greatest challenges to beast and traveler alike. No horse could have negotiated the rutted, uneven cart path without stumbling. Happily, though, catastrophe was avoided, and wearily triumphant, the Alcotts soon stepped over the threshold. Abba’s first task in her new home was to assemble a hasty dinner of bread and potatoes. Tonight, however, was not the time to begin the task of putting the house in order. The travelers were so worn out by their journey that they lacked the will to set up the beds; they spent their first night at Fruitlands amid blankets and sheets spread on the floor.
At some point that day, Abba found time to scribble a paragraph into her journal. She did not write about the sights and sounds of the day, but rather of the high purpose of the commune and the sobering challenges that lay ahead. She wrote: “[T]here is much to strengthen our hearts and hands in the reflexion that our pursuits are innocent and true—that no selfish purpose actuates us—that we are living for the good of others.” But Abba realized that the Alcotts and Lanes, acting alone, were too small a force to make the venture a success. Her tentative assessment was that, “if we can collect about us the true men and women; putting away the evil customs of society, I know not why we may not live the true life, putting away the evil customs of society and leading quiet exemplary lives.” Yet Abba seemed already to be bracing herself for disappointment when she wrote, “tho we may fail it will be some consolation that we have ventured what none others have dared.”3
The experiment had attracted a handful of recruits. They were not precisely “the true men and women” Abba had hoped for in her journal. In particular, “true women” seemed to be in short supply. Apart from Abba and her daughters, Fruitlands attracted only one woman during its entire existence, an Anna Page from Providence, Rhode Island, who did not arrive until August. In a concession to the world of commerce, Lane and Alcott hired a local farmhand, whom they paid by the week. As for the regular male adherents of the commune, they were a cast of characters well worthy of satirical fiction. Twenty-year-old Samuel Larned was a self-styled ascetic whose various programs of self-denial included once subsisting an entire year on nothing but crackers. Another, Abraham Everett, was later remembered by Anna Alcott as “the hermit,” an interesting mark of distinction in a community that was not famously sociable. Everett, however, had a persuasive reason for feeling bitter about life within society and for renouncing the world of money and p
roperty; his relatives had once conspired to commit him to a madhouse as part of a scheme to cheat him out of an inheritance. In writing of him, Lane attested that Everett was quite sane, even if he was not “a spiritual being—at least not consciously and wishfully so.”4
Surely the most visually arresting of the band of eccentrics was, to use Louisa’s description, a “bland, bearded Englishman” by the name of Samuel Bower “who expected to be saved by eating uncooked food.”5 Mr. Bower had another interesting proclivity. Whereas Alcott saw enemies in cotton and wool, Bower took the doctrine of abstention a step further and espoused naturism, claiming that clothes themselves were an obstacle to spiritual growth. Some uncertainty exists as to how freely Bower was permitted to indulge his disdain for clothing at Fruitlands. By some accounts, he bared all only during strolls after sundown; it has also been suggested that he was pressured into the compromise of draping himself in a sheet. In any event, the mental image of Bower, sheeted or sheetless, in daily contact with the real-life counterparts of Marmee and the March sisters, beggars the imagination.
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