Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Too feeble to rise, [he] groped for the food that always lay within his reach; and in the darkness and solitude of that memorable night ate and drank what was to him the bread and wine of a new communion, a new dedication of heart and life to the duties that were left him when the dreams fled.

  In the early dawn, when that sad wife crept fearfully to see what change had come to the patient face on the pillow, she found it smiling at her, saw a wasted hand outstretched to her, and heard a feeble voice cry bravely, “Hope!”33

  Not long after the end of Fruitlands, Bronson wrote about the difference between success and failure. A man failed, he thought, “when [his] idea ruins him, when he is dwarfed and killed by it.”34 Success, on the other hand, meant using one’s ideas as a means of growing. It also meant staying true to one’s vision, regardless of the world’s opinion. To succeed, therefore, was a matter of choice. Looking back on her father’s recovery, Louisa wanted very much to observe it as a resurrection. She represented it as the death of her quixotic, communalist father and the birth of a new man, redeemed by family, cured of delusion, and tenderly consecrated to the welfare of the blood relations who had called him back from the abyss.

  However, real lives rarely divide so neatly, and neither did Bronson’s. When Alcott emerged from his sickroom, wan and harrowed by his ordeal, no one denied that he was a changed man. But what, precisely, was the nature of his transformation? If the experience left him more dedicated to his own family, this change required more time than the seven months at Fruitlands to complete itself. Indeed, nine months after the fall of his community, Bronson wrote to his brother Junius of his hopes to found another utopian society. Emerson, he said, had offered to give him a few acres and build him a house, and Samuel May had volunteered backing that would free him from the pressures of rents and landlords. Bronson meant to use the space to erect dwellings for several families, of which he imagined he would become the superpatriarch. He wrote, “I cannot consent to live solely for one family. I would stand in neighborly relations to several, and…institute a union and communion of families, instead of drawing aside within the precincts of one’s own acres and kindred by blood.”35 Bronson’s idealism had passed through his trials unaltered. What had changed was the measure of his ambition and energy. There was to be no second communion of families, not because Alcott could no longer dream, but because his will was spent and broken. Despite his protestations, he would eventually consent to live for one family, to till one garden, to strive for the reform and perfection of one spirit—his own. Though his desires remained qualitatively the same, he gradually adjusted their scope to the realm of the possible.

  Tucked away among the Alcott family papers is a copy of a drawing of unstated origin, at the bottom of which can be read the handwritten caption “Removing from Fruitlands Jan. 1844.” In the snow-covered scene, a team of oxen stands before a sled crowded almost to capacity with nine human figures. Either this is an exaggeration, since by the time of this last departure only the Alcott family remained on the premises, or the other figures are friends who have come to help the family vacate. In the background, the farmhouse sits among a grove of bare trees. Curiously, there is still smoke rising from the chimney. In the middle ground, a bearded figure, evidently Joseph Palmer, applies a shovel to the cold earth, still determined to extract something of value from the ruined venture. Just being helped over the stile so she can board the wagon is a grown woman, presumably Abba. All the people in the sled appear drained of energy, but those who wear a visible expression at all appear to be smiling, perhaps with relief. Only two figures appear cross and discontented; the oxen are openly scowling, as if they somehow know that the experiment whose end they are witnessing has been for their benefit and will never be tried again. One would expect Bronson himself to figure prominently in the picture. Strange to say, it is difficult even to guess which of the figures he is meant to be.

  The Alcotts left Fruitlands in early January 1844, never to return. Bronson saved this sketch depicting their departure for the rest of his life.

  (Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  Though the family had found a place for the winter, its future was no more certain than ever. As they made their slow and frigid way to the Lovejoys, the world that lay before them bore no clear features. They had survived a test to their unity. Now unity was all they had.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  FATHER AND DAUGHTER

  “Cultivate poverty like a garden herb.”

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Walden

  “Let not him that putteth his hand to the plough look backwards!”

  —HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW,

  The Courtship of Miles Standish

  AFTER FRUITLANDS, BRONSON REGAINED HIS PHYSICAL health sooner than he recovered his good humor. If Samuel Bower, the erstwhile Fruitlands nudist, was to be believed, Bronson claimed privately that he still saw his marriage as the great impediment to his achievement of perfection. According to Bower, Bronson had declared himself “a Shaker in principle” and had proclaimed that he “had long since been divorced from his wife by the high court of his work and that she was no longer anything to him.” Bower told Elizabeth Palmer Peabody that only Alcott’s consideration for his children had kept him from joining the Shakers.1

  However, other facts suggest that Bronson was no longer quite so willing to leave Abba. In late January and early February, when Bronson had rallied sufficiently to pay visits to the utopian settlements at Northampton and Hopedale, he took Abba with him. Although he was still looking for an alternative to life within society, he was now interested only in situations that would accommodate his family as an undivided unit. The two returned from their trip disappointed. As Abba wrote, they were both persuaded “that there is nothing there for us, no sphere in which we could act without an unwarrantable alienation from our children.”2 Bronson felt that the reformist impulses of the communities he had seen were too modest and that they were at best new phases of the spirit of traditional society.3 Ironically, even if the Alcotts had been able to ride out the winter at Fruitlands, they would not have been able to stave off the encroachment of the machine age for very long; a scant six months after the community dissolved, the Massachusetts legislature authorized construction of a rail line that bisected the Fruitlands property.4

  Understandably, Bronson was frustrated after the loss of his colony, and in a flash of anger, he might well have spoken bitterly of his family obligations. In a more tranquil moment, though, Bronson wrote a poem that gave a very different view of what his family had done for him. It reads, in part:

  I drank the dregs of every cup

  All institutions I drank up,

  Athirst I quaffed Life’s flowing bowls

  And smacked the liquor of all Souls

  One sparkling cup remained for me:

  The ever-brimming fount of family.5

  When he was thinking carefully instead of railing impulsively at his discomforts, Bronson realized that family was the living water that had saved him. Charles Lane, who had had a better chance than most to observe how things really stood with the couple, did not report any estrangement. To the contrary, he continued to maintain that “constancy to his wife and inconstancy to the Spirit” had besmirched Alcott’s life for all time.6

  In the early months of 1844, Bronson still required saving in many respects. The financial situation of the family had grown desperate. The Fruitlands disaster had left Bronson with only thirty-two dollars to his name.7 The Alcotts thanked heaven that the Lovejoys had taken them in, but the means of regaining their independence were unclear. No plans could be made until Bronson had regained his emotional balance, and he was not yet his old self. Still unwilling to relinquish the dream that had unraveled before his eyes, he continued to practice an austere regimen, maintaining a spartan diet and wearing the linen leggings and tunics from his experiment. To his credit, he no longer insisted that his family observe the same strict purity; he allowed hi
s daughters to put on the warmer clothing that they received from friends and relatives. Eventually, he also stopped insisting that the family abstain from meat and dairy products, although he himself continued as a vegetarian.

  Bronson’s later recollections of this period reveal a mind in distress, not firmly fixed within the boundaries of reality. His social thinking reached its most iconoclastic point; he seemed determined “to lay the axe at the root of every existing institution.”8 As soon as he was able, he flung himself into his manuscripts with almost self-destructive energy. His two projects of the moment were an account of Fruitlands and a more abstruse work he called “The Prometheus of Creation.” He stayed indoors and worked from sunrise until midnight, sometimes laboring on toward dawn. Fed only on fruit, biscuits, water, and his unfathomable visions, he wrote with complete abandon. He also continued his dedication to cold baths, plunging himself into frigid water twice a day. This routine worked a strange effect on his enervated body and overburdened spirit. His delirious recounting of his sensations during one such bath reveals a state of hallucination, in which the perceptions of all five senses seemed engrossed:

  In the coldest mornings there was a crackling and lambent flash following the passage of my hand over the pile of the skin, and I shook flames from my finger ends, which seemed erect and blazing with the phosphoric light. The eyes, too, were lustrous, and shot sparkles whenever I closed them. On raising my head from the flood there was heard a melody in the ear, as of a sound of many waters; and rubbing the eyes gave out an iris of the primitive colors, beautiful to behold, but as evanescent as a twinkling…. I tasted mannas, and all the aromas of field and orchard scented the fountains, and the brain was haunted with many voiced melodies. I enjoyed this state for a couple months or more, but was left somewhat debilitated when spring came, and unfit for common concerns.9

  By his own admission, it was difficult for him to write during such moods of elevation, yet he drove his pen forward, convinced that he had reached a lofty pinnacle of inspiration. It probably seemed more likely to the people around him that he was out of his mind.

  Despite her husband’s alarming behavior, Abba was more concerned by his continuing refusal to seek employment in the marketplace economy that he found so distasteful and bewildering. Although she still respected his faith in Divine Providence, she would have dearly loved to discover “a little more activity and industry” on his part—enough, at least, to put an end to their dependency on others.10 Their friends still gave, but no longer without grumbling.

  In his idleness, Bronson was infuriating. In his otherworldly visions, he was bizarre. Looking back on this period, he himself used the word “possessed” to describe his frame of mind.11 It has been suggested, though never precisely proved, that in the aftermath of Fruitlands Bronson Alcott became temporarily insane. Yet such labels can obscure more than they elucidate. In “The Artist of the Beautiful,” a story coincidentally published during the same year Bronson heard his many-voiced melodies, Hawthorne observed that madness is the easy method by which the world accounts for whatever lies beyond its most ordinary scope. But was there any other way to explain Bronson’s strange elations and his desperate pursuit of ideal phantoms? Some lines from Hawthorne’s story are appropriate to Bronson’s mental state:

  Perhaps he was mad. The lack of sympathy—that contrast between himself and his neighbors, which took away the restraint of example—was enough to make him so. Or, possibly, he had caught just so much of ethereal radiance as served to bewilder him, in an earthly sense, by its intermixture with the common daylight.12

  The world had no good yardstick for measuring Bronson Alcott. His inspirations seemed saintly to some and deluded to others. During that winter with the Lovejoys, there was probably not a person in the world who understood him. Only in the self-confirming workings of his own mind did his contemplations make sense, and it was within his own mind that Bronson did much of his living for the next decade or more.

  Communal life had also had its effect on the Alcott daughters. Bronson privately conceded that, whereas he had hoped that Fruitlands would “provide the means of an improved culture in which my children might participate…to the extent of an enthusiast’s dream,” the results had been much to the contrary. When he looked back on his experiment in 1851, it seemed to him that his plans for the molding of his daughters’ souls had been “frustrated, and at the greatest personal hazard and domestic cost.” He reflected ruefully that years of toil and anxiety had been inadequate to repair the damage that his folly had inflicted. He took consolation, however, in the thought that his “dear intent [was] all the dearer for its hurts and delays” and in the hope that his dream might “ripen and fructify in some distant generation.”13

  Not everyone felt the same. The failure of Fruitlands seems to have prompted Hawthorne to revise his estimate of Alcott. A few months before the commune began, Hawthorne’s story “The Hall of Fantasy” had hailed Bronson as “a prophet” and “a great mystic innovator…calm and gentle…holy in aspect.”14 These words of praise were intact when the story first appeared in the periodical Pioneer in February 1843. In 1846, however, when he revised the story for inclusion in Mosses from an Old Manse, Hawthorne deleted all references to Alcott. A few years later, in the sketch that introduces The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne cast an additional slur in the direction of his mystical acquaintance. He wrote that even a corpulent eighty-year-old customs inspector with “no power of thought, no depth of feeling” was a welcome change of company “to a man who had known Alcott.”15

  Meanwhile, the catastrophe of Fruitlands had left its impression on the rest of the Concord literary community. Emerson sympathized deeply with this friend’s distress. After Bronson paid him a visit soon after Fruitlands collapsed, Emerson wrote, “Very sad it was to see this half-god driven to the wall, reproaching men, & hesitating whether he should not reproach the gods.”16 Publicly, however, Emerson kept his distance. Less than two months after the end of Fruitlands, Emerson gave his lecture on “New England Reformers,” the one in which he likened contemporary reformers to “a congress of kings.” Kindly refraining from mentioning Fruitlands by name, he argued that society gained nothing “whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him: he has become tediously good in some particular, but negligent or narrow in the rest.” Emerson feared that any community that retreated from the world would likely become “an asylum to those who have tried and failed, rather than a field to the strong.”17

  When in 1845 Thoreau set off for his famous sojourn at Walden Pond, he may have wanted to show that, Fruitlands notwithstanding, a world-shunning community could make itself viable and self-sufficient, even if it were just a community of one. Walden begins with a lengthy chapter titled “Economy,” in which the author reckons the costs and profits of his experiment to the last half-penny. Anyone curious to know why Thoreau took such pains to show the fiscal practicability of his paradise may find at least a partial explanation in Thoreau’s desire to refute the evident lessons of Alcott’s failure. In the subtle pas de deux between idealism and practicality that gives Walden much of its brilliance, the ghost of Fruitlands repeatedly figures.18

  Despite his winter of furious scribbling, the Concord litterateur who had the least to say in print about Fruitlands was Alcott himself. However, his silence was due more to accident than intention. In July 1844, Alcott set out with Anna on a trip to visit three visionary communities in upstate New York, including John Humphrey Noyes’s colony at Oneida. He brought with him the journals he had compiled at Alcott House and Fruitlands, probably to have a record on hand as he compared notes with fellow utopians. He also took along an assortment of letters and the “Prometheus of Creation” manuscript. On their way home, Bronson and Anna spent a night in Albany, New York. The next day, they loaded their luggage atop the hotel’s stagecoach and rode to the Hudson River to board a boat. Bronson left the coach for a few moments to help Anna board the vessel. When he returned
to get their trunk, he found to his horror that the stage had driven away with it. Inside the trunk were Bronson’s papers. Bronson sent frantic, pleading letters to the hotel, and six years later, on a subsequent trip to Albany, he was still looking for the lost trunk.19 However, neither the trunk nor its contents were ever recovered, and with his journals went the possibility of his ever writing the history of the Consociate Family. At the moment that the omnibus had pulled out of sight, the catastrophe of Fruitlands was complete.

  As critics picked over the wreckage of Fruitlands and Bronson mourned the loss of his irreplaceable manuscripts, the Alcott family was regaining its equilibrium. In the family’s comfortable winter quarters with the Lovejoys, Abba had recovered her strength. She sold a few small belongings to bring in some extra cash, and her brother Samuel sent a few dollars. Later in the year, to economize as much as possible, the family moved to another location in Still River, where they rented four rooms and a garden for twenty-five dollars a year. Abba was buoyed by the hope that the worst of the family’s straits lay behind them. She did her best to keep her dissatisfactions from her daughters. After all, she wrote, her children “are in no wise participators of my anxiety, neither can they alleviate my suffering by their sympathy.”20 That spring, the Alcotts celebrated their fourteenth wedding anniversary. Abba marked the occasion by writing in her journal, “Whom confidence and love have wedded, let not doubt or distrust put asunder.”21