Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  The vigil was exhausting and occasionally terrifying. Abba told Samuel, “Her mind wanders and she lies whole hours muttering incoherent things, then going off into long slumbers, or [arising] in a panic of terror, flying off the bed in terrible confusion.”6 When Louisa tossed about on her bed, Abba would try to calm her by saying, “Lie still, my dear.” On hearing this, however, Louisa would look at her with frightened, unrecognizing eyes. Once, Louisa rose from her bed and made an impassioned speech that sounded strangely like Latin. Only later was she able to explain that, in her delusional state, she had decided that her mother was “a stout, handsome Spaniard, dressed in black velvet with very soft hands,” whom Louisa believed she had married. From the lips of this dreaded spouse, the gentle command to lie still was far from comforting. He seemed always to be coming at her through windows and out of closets. When she had made her pseudo-Latin plea, she thought she was making an appeal before the Pope.7

  Louisa’s other fever dreams were no less vivid. She imagined she was in Baltimore and a mob was breaking down a door to get her. In other fancies she was “being hung for a witch, burned, stoned, and otherwise maltreated.” Two of the nurses and a doctor from the Union Hotel Hospital tempted her to join them in worshipping the Devil. One night, hearing a crash coming from Louisa’s room, May rushed in to find her sister on the floor. Louisa sharply upbraided May, asking her how she could have left her alone with so many men. Louisa thought she was still at the hospital, surrounded by wounded soldiers who refused either to die or get better.8 It is something of a relief to realize that Louisa herself did not regard her visions seriously and recorded them only because she found them entertaining. Having never been gravely ill before, she found the experience “all new & very interesting.”9 Although Bronson wrote that Louisa dreaded the return of the fever fits that came upon her “twice in the twenty four hours,” she herself wrote later that she had enjoyed her fever “very much, at least the crazy part.”10 Undoubtedly she was the only one who found her hallucinations amusing.

  Abba, all but exhausted from watching and worrying, could not contain her rage in response to the misfortunes that continued to beset her family. Their sufferings, it seemed to her, defied any earthly understanding of proportion or justice. Although Dr. Bartlett assured her that the signs were favorable, Abba no longer had any faith in medicine, and she seemed about to lose a profounder faith as well. Haunted by her experience with Lizzie, she confessed, “I hate Drs. and all their nonsense.” However, she added, “the efficacy of good nursing I do know and appreciate and believe if she is to be saved from violent death or the stern ravages of chronic ailments, it will be by faithful vigilant care.” This, Abba vowed, her beloved Louisa would have “if all the rest of the world goes to the dogs.” Indeed, she had had enough of the world and the way it had repaid her efforts, as well as those of her husband and children, to be charitable, generous, and kind. On the subject of the thankless earth, she wrote:

  [W]e have been cruelly dealt by, in it, and owe it no more sacrifices of flesh and blood. If we have sinned greatly against the Lord and these are the compensations he takes, he is welcome and I am sure will be satisfied if the amount of personal suffering and misery caused is the true test of the penalty.11

  But the sacrifice of Louisa was not demanded. The changes were imperceptible at first, but gradually, as Julian Hawthorne put it, Louisa was climbing painfully out of the grave toward life.12 On February 2, Anna’s father-in-law came to take Bronson’s place by the sickbed so that the latter could give a series of conversations in Boston. Two days later, Bronson returned to discover that the fever had finally broken. Louisa was now sleeping more soundly and, when awake, impatiently asked for food. Two weeks after Louisa’s return, the worst was apparently over. As snow fell on Concord, Bronson sat with her parts of the night, reading and conversing. By the middle of the month, Louisa was holding up her end of these conversations. She remembered very little of her ordeal. The face she saw in the mirror was so large-eyed and emaciated that she did not recognize herself. Her first attempts at walking brought only frustration; she cried because her legs “wouldn’t go.”13 Though she was improving, the nights seemed horribly long, and the days were idle and fretful. For such a naturally active woman, the waiting for strength to return was almost intolerable.

  She felt a great indignity, too, on discovering that her doctors had shaved her head. She lamented the loss of her fine hair, a yard and a half in length and, in her view, her “one beauty.” Five years later, in Little Women, Louisa was to use another illness during wartime as the reason for a similar sacrifice. As Mr. March lies dangerously ill in a Washington hospital, Jo raises twenty-five dollars to contribute toward his comfort and safe return by selling her hair. Echoing Louisa’s journal, Jo’s sacrificed hair is mourned as her only beautifying feature. Nevertheless, as Louisa conceded in her journal, “a wig outside is better than a loss of wits inside.”14

  With Louisa on the mend, Bronson was able to resume his conversations with a clear conscience. His first efforts were unsteady, owing to his lingering exhaustion from his long vigils at his daughter’s bedside. Louisa observed, “He was tired out with taking care of me, poor old gentleman, & typhus was not inspiring.”15 However, his conversational tactic of linking general concepts and qualities to individuals was starting to work well. His talks on Hawthorne the Novelist, Thoreau the Naturalist, and Emerson the Rhapsodist received favorable notices in the papers. One observer wrote, “Mr. Alcott is one of a class of thinkers who have done more for our literature and politics and religion than any that America has yet seen.”16 Although listeners sometimes complained that his characterizations lacked sufficient variety and that some shades of personality completely escaped him, they were still intrigued by his personal reminiscences, which were genially related and never marred by “the sting of gossip.”17 Bronson himself had concluded that a signal failing of the transcendentalist movement had been its insistence on cosmic universality and its refusal to take adequate account of the person. In a conversation he gave in Boston on March 23, he reflected, “Impersonality—Law, Right, Justice, Truth—these were the central ideas; but where the Power was in which they inhered, how they were related to one another, what was to give them vitality—these questions were quite neglected, and left out of sight.”18 Bronson quietly resolved never again to ignore the individual. Although his prose would never lose its tendency to stray into the ether, his new appreciation of the personal signaled a welcome change in his writing habits.

  Louisa’s recovery and the critical success of her father’s conversations were only the first of the great joys that came to Orchard House that season. On March 28, only six days after Louisa was well enough to leave her room for the first time, she joined her mother and May in looking out on a snow-covered landscape, waiting for Bronson to bring some eagerly anticipated news. Late that night, Bronson, “all wet and white” from the storm, burst through the front door. Waving his bag aloft, he cried out his great tidings: Anna had given birth to a healthy boy. In unison, the three women opened their mouths and, by Louisa’s account, screamed for about two minutes. Then Abba began to cry, Louisa to laugh, and May to pepper her father with questions about the baby’s weight, length, and coloring that he, in his own distracted excitement, could not answer. Red-faced and damp, Bronson could do little more than smile and repeat in a besotted voice, “Anna’s boy, yes, yes, Anna’s boy.”19

  Two days later, Bronson was still in ecstasies when he wrote to congratulate his firstborn daughter. His letter contained a hint of condolence; Anna had been convinced that she was carrying a girl, whom she had decided to name Louisa Catherine. She had given no thought at all to boys’ names, and some days passed before her son acquired the name of Frederick Alcott Pratt. Bronson reassured Anna, saying, “Boys are blessings too.” The rest of his condolences, however, were less congenially phrased. He confessed that he had wished for a boy years ago, when Anna herself was born. Moreover, he added, he
would have found it “a hard joke” if someone had told him that no boys were to join the family until thirty-three years after his “first disappointment.”20 Well intentioned as Bronson’s remarks undoubtedly were, one can only sympathize with Anna. Bringing forth her first child only to be called a “disappointment” by the man whose approval she most coveted, she may well have thought that the harder joke was on her.

  March ended with both Anna and baby in fine condition and Louisa evidently on the road to health. Unfortunately, Louisa’s convalescence was not all that it appeared. During her recovery, Louisa complained to Bronson of a perpetually sore throat. She also found herself “longing to eat, [but with] no mouth to do it with, mine being so sore and full of all manner of queer sensations it was nothing but a plague.”21 Abba had also noted to her brother Samuel, “Her throat and teeth and tongue are in the most tender and sensitive state.”22 Louisa’s sore throat and strange oral sensations were the results not of her disease but of the treatment she had received from the Union Hotel Hospital physicians. Her doctors, following what they considered sound practice in cases of typhoid, had given Louisa heavy, repeated doses of mercurous chloride, a compound more commonly known as calomel. In so doing, they had permanently poisoned her.

  For the next seven years, Louisa had no idea what was wrong with her. Unaware of the toxins that had lodged permanently in her system, she had no accurate explanation for her searing headaches, her chronic weariness, and the intermittent pain in her legs. She had no good name for the condition that had stolen her youthful vigor and was later to disable her for months at a time. She attributed her symptoms to neuralgia or—not implausibly in view of her writing habits—to overwork. It was not until 1870 that, while traveling through France, she happened on an English physician who finally explained that she was suffering the effects of her erstwhile “cure.” Louisa was, in effect, a lingering casualty of the Civil War, and the last twenty-five years of her life were the history of a glacially slow mortal illness.23 Except for the fledgling drafts of Moods, all of the work for which she is now remembered was written after the causes of her death had been set in motion.

  Until the spring of 1863, Louisa had never had a reason to doubt her physical strength. As a tomboy, she had run and played tirelessly. As a robust young woman, she had always relied on her seemingly inexhaustible stamina. While she had lain in the throes of fever and mercury poisoning, that stamina had saved her life. However, the struggle had weakened her permanently. Julian Hawthorne was aghast at the change. He could barely reconcile the “hollow-eyed, almost fleshless wreck [with] the Louisa we had known and loved.”24 It seemed that the alteration had gone far beyond the merely physical. Emotionally, it was as if a veil now separated her from the world. Occasionally, it would slip aside, and “a flash of humor or a shaft of wit would come out of the shadow.”25 At other times, however, it seemed that her illness and the haunting memories of the hospital had marked her with an indelible air of gravity and melancholy. Louisa’s six-week errand of mercy had exacted a staggering cost.

  Yet, strangely, the experience that made a ruin of Louisa’s body also bestowed a host of blessings. The first of these was philosophical. In April, when the fever had left her and before the lasting effects of the calomel treatment became evident, Louisa experienced a rebirth of joy and enthusiasm for life. Now strong enough to go for rides and walks around Concord, Louisa greeted the spring feeling “as if born again[;] everything was so beautiful and new.” She hoped that she too had become a new person, and she speculated that the Washington experience might do her lasting good.26

  Louisa’s ordeal also raised her in her father’s estimation. To Bronson and Abba, their daughter’s recovery was a kind of miracle. Louisa, it seemed, had walked through the same valley as Lizzie, but Louisa had returned. Because of her vitality, Louisa had been easy to take for granted. As much as Bronson might have fretted over the soul of his dark daughter, he had certainly never lost sleep worrying about the soundness of her body. But now Bronson saw her with new eyes. Louisa’s life was transformed from a subject of criticism to a cause for thanksgiving. When Louisa was an infant, Bronson had seen her as a personification of God’s glory. During long years, this perception had at times faded. Now, with this second birth, enacted through illness and recovery, that glory again emerged.

  There was another reason for Bronson to see Louisa from a new perspective. In late March, when Louisa was out of danger, Bronson wrote a letter to his mother, now in her nineties but still mentally alert. In it, he told of Louisa’s service to the army, her resulting illness, and the anxious weeks of her recovery. He wrote, “That was our contribution to the war and one we should not have made willingly had we known the danger and the sacrifices.”27 It is a significant statement. Ever since he had first met Charles Lane, Bronson had valued no human activity more highly than self-sacrifice. Certainly, Louisa had sacrificed before this time, accepting menial jobs and churning out potboiler fiction in an attempt to pay down the family debt. However, these gestures of self-sacrifice had been made for money, and any enterprise connected with cash had a lesser value in Bronson’s eyes. Now Louisa had sacrificed nobly and grandly. Bronson had finally come to recognize that some sacrifices are too great to expect from anyone. Louisa’s willingness to die for liberty and union, coupled with her very nearly having done so, was heroic in his eyes. At a devastating price, she had earned a place in her father’s admiration that she was never to forfeit.

  Louisa’s nursing experience also transformed her as a writer. Before she had gone off to war, her tales had an aspect of grotesque fantasy that betrayed a lack of experience in the world. Now, her fertile imagination was tempered by a sad but strong knowledge of the way things were. As Julian Hawthorne observed, “Her experiences influenced her writing, manifestly mellowed and deepened it; she could not have touched a million hearts except from the depth of her own.”28 Her time at the hospital also gave her a sudden wealth of writing material. She now had an authentic story to tell, and she did not guess how eager people would be to hear it. At the beginning of May, the Army of the Potomac, now under the inept command of Joseph Hooker, suffered a demoralizing defeat at Chancellorsville, and the fortunes of the Union in the eastern theater declined to their lowest point. Northern readers were ready for patriotic inspiration. Earlier that spring, someone, almost certainly Bronson, had shared Louisa’s letters from Georgetown with Frank Sanborn and his friend Moncure Conway, who had joined forces to edit an antislavery journal called the Boston Commonwealth. The two men were quite taken with Louisa’s descriptions, which they found witty and full of sincere feeling. Partly teasing, but in truth very much in earnest, Sanborn asked Louisa in April if she would like to revise her letters into a collection of short literary sketches, to be serialized in the magazine.

  Louisa thought Sanborn and Conway rated her work too highly, but as always, she needed money. Perhaps just as importantly, her long, unavoidable hiatus from writing may have been starting to wear on her. Drafting the sketches probably seemed like a good way to convince herself that life was returning to normal. And if she required any more incentive to start writing again, that same April brought an envelope from Frank Leslie, containing a check for one hundred dollars. Her anonymous thriller, “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” had won the contest she had entered the previous autumn. Louisa speedily finished reworking her hospital letters and recollections, and on May 22 the first of four “Hospital Sketches” graced the pages of the Boston Commonwealth. The date marked a water-shed in her literary career. The sketches were popular beyond Louisa’s highest expectations, and by her own account, people bought the issues of the Commonwealth faster than the printer could supply them. In the 1860s, the word “hit” was already being used to connote a popular success. To Louisa’s bemused wonder, she had one on her hands. “I find,” she wrote, “I’ve done a good thing without knowing it.”29

  Henry James Sr., wrote to applaud her “charming pictures of hospita
l service.”30 To reward her efforts, he sent along a copy of his own book, Shadow and Substance. Far more wonderfully, however, not one but two publishers approached her with offers to release her sketches in book form. The two competitors for her work were the firm of Roberts Brothers and a fiery Scottish abolitionist named James Redpath. A raw novice in the domain of book publishing in the summer of 1863, Louisa had little sense of the comparative practical merits of the two printers. She eventually leaned toward the Scotsman. Redpath, a friend of Sanborn’s, had had at least some connection with Bronson for several years. Shortly after Lincoln’s election, Redpath had written to Bronson, asking him to attend an antislavery convention that Redpath had organized.31 Now, as he angled for the rights to Hospital Sketches, Redpath courted not only Louisa’s favor but Bronson’s as well, sending the latter a complimentary copy of his company’s edition of the abolitionist Wendell Phillips’s speeches, lectures, and letters. Bronson praised the book, as well as Redpath’s personal service to the cause of freedom in publishing such a “solid and superb” volume.32 There can be little doubt that Bronson wanted Redpath as Louisa’s publisher. For her part, Louisa liked Redpath’s politics, and her Alcott sensibilities may also have been swayed by the Scotsman’s promise to donate at least five cents from each copy sold to orphans made homeless or fatherless by the war. Louisa had gone into nursing to advance the cause of union and freedom; she thought it only right that her book should also promote that cause.

  Bronson was undoubtedly pleased when Louisa signed her contract with Redpath, though Louisa herself came to regret the decision. Despite Redpath’s honorable convictions, Louisa gradually recognized that he was unskilled as a publisher and was more interested in allocating her profits virtuously than in maximizing them. When Redpath became more insistent and sanctimonious as to the percentage to be donated to orphans, Louisa reminded him that her family, too, knew what it was to receive alms, and that so long as the Alcott fortunes remained precarious, her charity must begin at home. She wrote to him, “I…am sure that ‘he who giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord’ & on that principle devote time and earnings to the care of my father and mother…. On this account I often have to deny myself the little I could do for other charities, & seem ungenerous that I may be just.”33 Like her parents, Louisa was deeply generous. Unlike them, she was learning to temper her giving impulse with prudence.