Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  In mid-July, Louisa received an attractive offer. William Fletcher Weld, a fabulously wealthy Boston shipping merchant, had an infirm daughter, Anna, whose health and character he thought might benefit from travel. Having learned of Louisa’s medical experience and of her unsatisfied wanderlust, he suggested that Louisa accompany Anna and her half brother George to Europe as a nurse and travel companion. Weld envisioned a grand tour for his offspring, including visits to London, the Rhine Valley, Italy, Switzerland, and France. The entire excursion might last as long as a year. Although Louisa had long dreamed of such an opportunity, she at first hesitated to accept. It would be risky to take an extended break from her writing routine just as she was gaining such firm recognition, and she was not sure how her family would manage without her. Despite her concerns, the family verdict was unanimous in favor of her going. Louisa’s 1873 novel Work contains a chapter called “Companion,” tangentially based on Louisa’s tenure with Miss Weld. In the novel, while debating whether to become an invalid’s companion, the heroine, Christie Devon, reflects, “My own experience of illness has taught me how to sympathize with others and love to lighten pain.”9 Louisa possessed the same qualifications, and she had no objection to using them. Thus, after “a week of work & worry,” Louisa packed her trunk.10

  On July 17, the night before she left Concord, the Alcotts entertained William Torrey Harris, on a visit from St. Louis. Harris urged Bronson to get over his inertia and to try to publish his manuscripts; it seemed to him that Bronson’s recent work would find favor with readers of all classes. Harris’s visit also reawakened Bronson’s interest in the Midwest. Alcott reflected that, whereas the transcendentalist era in New England was at an end, a receptive audience for his philosophy might still await him amid the plains and prairies.

  On the morning of the twentieth, as the Cunard steamer China made its way out of Boston harbor, its most illustrious passenger stood not at the bow of the boat gazing forward, but at the stern looking back. Bronson was sorry to see Louisa go. He wrote that, for the moment, the family felt “disposed to blame the good fortune that takes her from us, almost the fair winds that waft her over the waves.”11 He also knew, however, that his daughter needed a restorative trip almost as much as Miss Weld. He saw that she was “a good deal worn with literary labor and deserving some diversion to recruit her paling spirits and fancy,” and he hoped that, when she returned, “we may find her…refreshed, enriched, and polished for the future literary victories which I am sure she is to win.”12

  Louisa found her voyage anything but refreshing. Ocean travel was uncomfortable. It was also soon evident that she and Anna Weld were to be companions only in a nominal sense. Anna played a fine game of backgammon, but this skill seems to have been her chief attribute. She was a peevish young woman with no literary inclinations that Louisa could observe. Indeed, months later, when they stopped in Frankfurt, Anna and George could not fathom Louisa’s interest in seeing Goethe’s home. “Who,” they obtusely demanded, “was Goethe to fuss about?”13

  It was not merely that Anna Weld was a philistine. The commercial nature of their relationship also divided the two women. Although she did not put it into writing, Louisa surely felt the strangeness of the position of one who becomes a friend for hire. To receive money in exchange for smiling at dull conversation, for treating another’s trivial whims and disappointments as weighty matters, for exchanging the contacts and pleasantries one typically reserves for earnest friendships—how could a forthright, honest person like Louisa carry out such duties without a moral twinge? In Work, Christie Devon soothes the invalid entrusted to her by singing, reading aloud, and gently massaging the young woman’s temples with cool water. Louisa likely gave similar attentions to Miss Weld, and it pleased her whenever the latter appeared to improve. Nevertheless, Louisa’s service remained unambiguously a job. Finding no promise of friendship among her fellow passengers either, she kept mostly to her books and did her best to pass the time until Saturday, July 29, when Liverpool finally came into view.

  A grimy, functional city, Liverpool impressed Louisa primarily with the number and desperate appearance of its beggars. She was glad the following Monday to board a train for London, the city of Dickens, Thackeray, and Carlyle that had lived in her imagination since childhood. As the train passed through the countryside, Louisa described what she saw as “unyankee.” Each field seemed newly weeded and every garden looked as if it had just been put in order. What impressed her most profoundly, however, was the lack of urgency that she saw in all directions. “Nothing was abrupt,” she wrote home to her father, “nobody in a hurry, and nowhere did you see the desperately go ahead style of life that we have. The very cows in America look fast…but here the plump cattle stood…with a reposeful air that is very soothing.”14 In this placid climate, Louisa realized by contrast the extent to which not only her nation, but she herself, was propelled by restless desire. It is no accident that she addressed to her father in particular her reflections on the headlong speed of American life. Bronson had long been infuriatingly deliberate, taking it almost as a point of honor to reject the prevailing sharp-elbowed bustle of his country. Now, Louisa was discovering a place that seemed in sympathy with her father’s principles.

  The four days that the two women spent in London were dull and drizzly, and matters were made worse by Miss Weld’s complaints of poor health. Two days after their arrival, Louisa was able to persuade her fussy companion to come with her to Westminster Abbey. Although Miss Weld was soon fatigued, Louisa managed to perform a pilgrimage of sorts, paying homage at the tombs of Spenser, Milton, and Ben Jonson. On the whole, she felt as if she had fallen into a novel.15

  Once her parents got over the strangeness of having an empty place at the dinner table, Louisa’s departure caused relatively few changes in the daily routine at Orchard House, except that, under Bronson’s indifferent management, the bills again stopped getting paid on time. If falling back slightly into debt did not faze him, Bronson did find himself ruffled by a piercing critique of Moods in the North American Review. On the brighter side, the notice praised the second half of the novel for its beauty and vigor, and the reviewer kindly stated that only two or three Americans were currently capable of writing a better novel. In its harsher passages, however, the review was scathing. It complained that the book was “innocent of any doctrine whatever” and commented particularly on the author’s ignorance of human nature and her confidence in spite of her ignorance.16 Bronson hotly denounced the review as being “of a popular cast, flippant, and undeserving.”17 What may have hurt Bronson most deeply was that the piece was written by the son and namesake of his old friend and philosophical sparring partner, Henry James Sr. Although Bronson was doubtlessly aware that the younger Henry had some literary inclination of his own, many years were still to pass before the world would hear about The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. As it was, Bronson must have wondered what this young, unproven upstart knew about writing a novel, anyway.

  As the leaves turned and fell, Bronson busied himself by building a new front fence, fashioning the gates with his own hands and working the posts and stretchers into designs that he proudly pronounced “grotesque.” Given the modern understanding of the word, it hardly sounds as if Bronson was paying himself a compliment. To Bronson, however, grotesqueness signaled a love of natural objects for their own sake, as well as a conscious rejection of fixed artistic laws. Bronson continued to admire John Ruskin, who had argued for a positive kind of grotesque, resulting from the play of a serious mind and giving pleasure to the viewer according to the delight the worker had taken in making the artifact.18 Bronson built his fences like a true Ruskinian disciple, disdaining the straight lines of his neighbors’ pickets and refusing to paint his work “with some tint that nature and art alike disown.”19 In his midsixties, Bronson was taking as much joy as ever in the work of his hands. As always, the only toil that struck him as real came directly from his own brain
, limbs, and tools. The power of capital—things created for their exchange value or the ability of money to create well-being and advantages––remained either too abstract or too demeaning for him to accept.

  By contrast, in Europe, Louisa had never stopped thinking about how to turn almost everything she saw into a salable product. Her journey up the Rhine, her stay in a French pension, and a day’s wanderings through London in search of the places she had known only through reading Dickens: all would eventually be converted into short articles for The Independent, a New York journal with an interest in travel pieces.20 Louisa was now very little different from the woman who, three years later, was to write the book that made her famous. Her attachment to family, her fierce and countervailing need to proclaim her independence, and her profound regard for self-sacrifice and shared struggle were all firmly established parts of her character and were ready to emerge as components of her literary vision. There remained but one more indispensable formative experience before the defining phase of her career might begin. It was waiting for her in Vevey, Switzerland, at a pension nestled behind five tall poplar trees on the shore of Lake Geneva.

  It was the end of September 1865 when Louisa and the Welds arrived at this place of unique beauty, one where, as the younger Henry James observed a few years later, grandeur and charm were constantly interfused and harmonized. Through the sloping land above the lake, visitors followed grass-grown footpaths through fertile orchards. Quaint villages nestled so deeply in the greenery that an observer looking upward from the lake hardly knew they were there. The particular shimmer of the lake also impressed itself on people’s imaginations and memories. To James, the water seemed to fling up its blue reflection into his approving eyes.21 The blueness of the water also struck Louisa as she and the Welds arrived under sail from Lausanne. She was equally enchanted by Pension Victoria, where George Weld told his half sister and Louisa good-bye and departed for Paris. The pension, which the two ladies called home until December 6, lay at the base of a hillside adorned by a vineyard and a rose garden. Looking up from behind the house toward the summit, one could see a venerable chapel and a stately chateau. On the opposite side, a terrace wall rose directly out of the lake and was continuously washed by its waters. The terrace looked out across the lake, dominated by the white Alps of Savoy, which greeted Louisa’s eyes “shining in the sun like some celestial country seen in dreams.”22

  The pension played host to an assortment of guests whose diversity Louisa found both amusing and eye-opening. Across the residence’s dinner table, her frank American gaze met the stare of a Russian baron, whose manner Louisa considered turbulent and barbaric. She chuckled inwardly at an overfed Frenchman who imagined that he resembled the emperor and was continually striking Napoleonic poses. Two elderly sisters from Scotland engaged Louisa’s literary interest by prattling about Sir Walter Scott, whom they claimed to have known personally in their youth. An Irish dowager, morbidly immersed in recollections of death, sat heavily bedecked in crepe and would not remove her black gloves even at meals.

  Nearby sat a handsome, courtly English colonel of “gigantic powers” who had accepted the task of filling his six pale little daughters with knowledge and excruciatingly correct breeding, although he seemed to have denied them the luxury of personalities.23 His half dozen captive pupils seemed to be all the same age, and their father and mother dressed them identically. They spoke four languages and were walking storehouses of geological and astronomical data. Nevertheless, Louisa felt sorry for the sextet of scholars, whom she dreaded to approach lest they respond with a torrent of historic dates or algebraic equations. Anyone who knew her history would have understood Louisa’s pity as she heard the colonel lecture his children on “the Spanish inquisition, the population of Switzerland, the politics of Russia, and other lively topics, equally well suited to infant minds.”24 The barrage of information against innocent brains surely reminded her of the methods of Dr. Blimber in Dickens’s Dombey and Son, and more personally and painfully, the imperious assaults of Charles Lane. Her father’s strange but gentle methods seemed obviously preferable to the teachings of all the colonels in England.

  Louisa reserved her harshest judgments, however, for another guest of military rank: Colonel Polk, a former Confederate who had brought his wife and daughter to Europe to distance himself from the memory of the war that had cost him virtually all his property, including five hundred slaves. Throughout their uneasy time under a shared roof, Colonel Polk routinely raised Louisa’s blood pressure with tales of Yankee treachery and his fervent assertions that his loving slaves had been forced away by the northern armies and were yearning yet to come back to their master. A different story was recounted by the Polks’ black servant Betty, who privately told Louisa and one of the English ladies that the family’s more able-bodied slaves had run off as soon as the Union soldiers had come near. Those too old to fend for themselves had lingered in the hope that, having extracted a lifetime of labor from them, Colonel Polk might now repay his debt by taking care of them. Instead, Betty said, “He runned away hissef, and lef ’em to starve.”25 When the Englishwoman circulated this account among the other guests of the pension, the Polks, who had thus far enjoyed the sympathy of most of the guests, saw their popularity fade appreciably, much to Louisa’s delight. However, the colonel was still not deterred from singing the praises of Jefferson Davis and gleefully recollecting how a rebel surgeon had intentionally amputated the healthy limb of a wounded northern soldier. Hearing such anecdotes, Louisa must have reflected that, while the war may have ended, the peace had not begun.

  But all else that Louisa heard and saw at the Pension Victoria paled in comparison with a single radiant acquaintance: a young Polish man who cut a striking figure in his blue-and-white university suit and cap and whose name gave her New England tongue no end of difficulty. In The Independent, she gave his first name as Stanislas and abandoned her effort at his surname after the initial W., advising her readers that “two hiccoughs and a sneeze will give the last name better than letters.”26 In truth, Louisa knew the name of Ladislas Wisniewski as well as her own. Ladislas’s brief but unforgettable passage through the life of Louisa May Alcott began with a cough. Sitting by the fire at the pension on a blustery autumn day, Louisa heard someone in the adjoining passageway trying to clear his lungs as the wind rushed in through an open door. She soon beheld a tall, thin young man of about twenty with an intelligent face and the prepossessing manners of a foreigner. With nothing more than courtesy in her mind, she moved over slightly to make a space for him before the fire.

  Ladislas’s delayed reaction, however, betokened more than courtesy. That evening at dinner, finding that he was seated too far from her to initiate much conversation, he surprised Louisa by rising and bowing toward her. Raising his glass to his casual benefactress, he announced in French, “I drink good health to the Mademoiselle.”27 Louisa, wondering perhaps whether she was observing the correct form, returned his wish, but the shadow that instantly crossed his face informed her that her reply had not satisfied him. It dawned on her that he had intended something more heartfelt than a compliment. She was not conscious of any feelings toward Wisniewski until the following day when, during a friendly conversation, he disclosed a pair of facts that she found almost irresistible. He was, he said, a veteran of a recent nationalist revolt against the occupying forces of Tsar Alexander. In broken English—the prettiest Louisa had ever heard—he told of being thrown into prison after taking part in a student uprising. Reminded of the “brave boys in blue” she had tended in Georgetown, Louisa was already in a fair way to being captivated.28 Her sympathies became fully engaged, however, when she discovered the reason for young Ladislas’s cough. As a result of his struggles against the tsar, the young Pole’s health had been broken. During his imprisonment, he had contracted tuberculosis. Ladislas tried to make light of his disease and did not care to mention it. Nevertheless, Louisa believed that this boy in blue, like John Suhre and so m
any of the others she had met in Georgetown, was dying.

  However, it was impossible in Ladislas’s company to think only of the foreboding future. Despite his weakened state, the young man was a whirligig of a fellow. The topics of conversation into which they drew each other seemed unending, even though Louisa’s bad French and Ladislas’s limited exposure to English presented some barriers. Louisa decided on a less cumbersome nickname for Ladislas, “Laddie,” and appointed herself his English tutor. Laddie responded by helping Louisa, never a quick study at languages, with her French. Louisa found his progress more impressive than hers, although she wrote that he would occasionally slap his forehead and exclaim, “I am imbecile! I never can will shall to have learn this beast of English!”29 Laddie was also an accomplished musician. With a Russian woman who was also staying at the Victoria, he put on impromptu piano recitals. Louisa had long enjoyed the writings of George Sand. Only a few days before arriving at the pension, she had taken time in Frankfurt to buy some pictures of her bohemian idol. Now, as she listened to her own minor Chopin, it must have seemed to her that, in a modest way, she had stepped into George Sand’s world. In a stylish cravat and collar, Laddie seemed to grow more deeply inspired the longer he played. Louisa wrote that, as he and the Russian came together in their artistic furor, the piano vibrated, the stools creaked, and the candles danced in their sockets. The guests at the pension sat rapt as the four hands flew over the keys, and it seemed faintly possible that both the musicians and the instrument might vanish into a musical whirlwind.