Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Despite her plan to take a break from writing while in Europe, Louisa seems to have begun her next novel before word of Pratt’s death reached her.34 After she heard the news, however, her writing took on a new purpose: both the spirit and the proceeds from this novel must belong to the two “little men” who had been left without a father. She threw herself determinedly into her manuscript, vowing that Anna and “the dear little boys” would not be left in want. She resorted to the most commercially appealing characters she was ever to devise: the March family.

  While Little Men is ostensibly a sequel to Little Women, it greatly differs in spirit and tone from its predecessor. The once irrepressible Jo has been overtaken by both time and responsibility. Although barely two years of real time had elapsed between the release of part 2 of Little Women and the appearance of Little Men, Jo is now a “thin old woman”—the image of how Louisa viewed herself in the aftermath of war and disease.35 The focal location of the novel is not the March family home but the boys’ academy at Plumfield, which Jo and Professor Bhaer had founded in the last chapter of Little Women. Whereas the March home had been a school for life only in a metaphorical sense, the scene of Little Men openly proclaims the book’s intention to instruct.

  Whereas Little Women, after its episodic beginnings, acquires both cohesiveness and direction, Little Men remains principally a series of anecdotes and sketches. Its lack of thematic unity is easily explained. If the principal building blocks of Little Women were Louisa’s concrete recollections of Hillside, then Little Men emerged primarily from her idealizing imagination. The reviewer from the Ladies’ Repository of Boston made an apt point in observing, “[T]he first story is real and the second made; and the unmistakable charm of being told straight out of real life, which was the spirit and soul of the earlier work, is wanting in this.”36

  As Little Men ventured into the airy realm of idealism, Louisa’s inspiration inevitably drifted toward reflections on her father. The novel does not address Bronson’s biography any more than Little Women had done; Mr. March again remains politely on the story’s periphery. Nevertheless, Little Men owes its educational spirit and agenda almost entirely to Bronson. When, in 1871, the Alcotts’ publisher decided to capitalize on Little Men’s success by reissuing Elizabeth Peabody’s Record of a School, Louisa wrote the following lines for inclusion in Peabody’s preface: “As many people…inquire if there ever was or could be a school like Plumfield, I am glad to reply by giving them a record of the real school which suggested some of the scenes described in Little Men…. Not only is it a duty and a pleasure, but there is a certain fitness in making the childish fiction of the daughter play the grateful part of herald to the wise and beautiful truths of the father.” The “thanks and commendations” for Plumfield, she graciously conceded, all belonged to Bronson.37

  Yet Louisa’s statements need some refining. In truth, the genealogy of Plumfield is more complicated, as might be expected from the fact that the Temple School exerted little direct influence on Louisa’s own education. She never attended the Temple School. Its last remnant closed when she was five, and her memories of it were few. Indeed, in its vision of school as a kind of extended family, Plumfield more closely resembles another experiment that Louisa remembered more clearly. Rather than simply replicating the Temple School, Plumfield combines the discipline and introspection of that institution with the pastoralism and consociate family structure of Fruitlands. In contrast to Alcott’s classroom-centered teaching at the Temple School, Plumfield resembles Fruitlands in that the process of learning is an around-the-clock experience, deriving as much from the work and play of the community as from the formal lessons of the instructor. It was Fruitlands that opened Louisa’s youthful eyes to the possibility of forming intimate spiritual attachments on a basis other than blood or romance. From Fruitlands to Plumfield, she transposed the concept that the word “family” might describe adults and children united by a spiritual vision and a moral project.

  The curious fact is that Fruitlands was such a miserable failure while Little Men was such a resounding success, selling in six figures in its first year. The difference rests on a charming irony. In establishing Fruitlands as an actual place, Bronson Alcott, perhaps for the only time of his life, was too much of a realist. The flesh-and-blood utopianism of Fruitlands attracted few followers. Refined into fiction, however, the idea of such a community found favor even among those who claimed that it could never really be. Whereas Fruitlands was experienced only by a handful of impractical dreamers, Plumfield has left its mark on the imaginations of generations of children, sowing seeds of idealism to sprout where they may.

  Louisa had left America the day after the release of An Old-Fashioned Girl. She returned on the same day that Little Men appeared in American bookstores. The twelve-day voyage from England aboard the steamer Malta was anxious and uncomfortable. Not only had Louisa’s fourteen months overseas failed to put an end to her chronic pain, but a number of the passengers on the ship were stricken by smallpox. Unaware that her bout with the disease twenty years earlier had immunized her against a second infection, Louisa moved nervously among the sufferers.38

  When the interminable journey finally ended and she disembarked in Boston, she was greeted by the welcome sight of her father and Thomas Niles, who had come to meet her with a great red placard advertising Little Men pinned up in their carriage. She was delighted to learn that the book had sold fifty thousand advance copies. On arriving at Orchard House, she found matters in better shape than she might have expected. Her upstairs room had been “refurnished and much adorned by Father’s earnings.”39 Although Anna still mourned the loss of her husband “like a tender turtle-dove,” she was physically well and met her sister’s solicitous gaze with a look of serenity.40 The nephews were now tall, bright lads who pleased Louisa not only with their cleverness but also with their devotion to their grandmother. Marmee herself, however, looked weak and aged, and Louisa resolved never to travel far from her again. Friends of both Bronson and Louisa descended on the house in droves, and the general excitement moved Bronson to write that no season in his recent memory had been so crowded with surprises.41

  Amid all the bustle, Louisa took time to repay one last debt. In 1862, James T. Fields, the editor of The Atlantic who had told her to stick to teaching, had lent her forty dollars to help her furnish a kindergarten. He had told her, perhaps with a note of derision, that she could repay him when she had made “a pot of gold.” Louisa had forgotten neither the loan nor the words that had gone with it. She now sent the money back with many thanks and with perhaps the slightest hint of revenge.42

  The joy of Louisa’s reunion with the family gave way to darker reflections in July when news came from Syracuse that Abba’s brother Samuel had died. Slighting Emerson for the moment, she called her uncle “our best friend for years.” She added, “Peace to his ashes.”43

  Coming home temporarily did for Louisa what her time overseas had failed to accomplish. For a month after her return, she felt better than she had felt for two years. She was too accustomed to the frailties of her body to expect good health to last, but she enjoyed it heartily until, in July, the inevitable slide into discomfort began again. She did have the strength to go on writing, or failing that, to revise scores of pages of odds and ends for publication as a sequence of bagatelles known collectively as the Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag series. The first volume in the sequence appeared in 1872 and was eventually followed by five others, the last appearing in 1882. Although of relatively slight importance to understanding Alcott as a writer, the Scrap-Bag series says much about the acumen of Louisa and her publishers as businesspeople. The books were small and easily portable—just the thing, as Roberts Brothers surely anticipated, to purchase as an amusement for a child going on a holiday or to stuff into a stocking at Christmas. Their anecdotes are short, simple, and well suited to the casual reader. The series emerged from a desire to find yet another niche in the reading market that Alcott’s writi
ng might address, and Louisa was more than fit for the task of filling it.

  As the title of the Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag series reflects, Louisa found some value in blurring the distinction between her real self and her fictitious alter ego, Jo March. Just as her imagined character had taken on many of the features of her creator, so too did Louisa find fun in partially becoming Jo, attaching stories to her name and using Jo’s persona to narrate events that had happened to the real woman. Sometimes she referred to her real family as “the Marches.”44 When she wrote to one fan, she took the identification still further, averring that her father was, like Mr. March, a minister.45 It is possible that Louisa elided the distinction between herself and Jo because she sensed that the character she had created—genial, happily married, and above all, healthy—was a more appealing persona for the public than the real woman she had become. In her depictions of Jo, as well as in the more literally autobiographical pieces in the Scrap-Bag series and elsewhere, Louisa did not hesitate to romanticize both the situations she described and the characters of heroines. Louisa plainly understood the commercial appeal of sketches and stories that played gently on the reader’s sentiments, and she lavishly obliged her public with images of self-reliant young women braving daunting odds with the encouragement of loyal and loving friends. At the same time that Louisa was satisfying her reading public, she was adroitly managing the public’s perception of her real-life personality. The Louisa May Alcott who appears in her autobiographical sketches is as brilliantly crafted a heroine as Jo March ever was.

  Nevertheless, there was no way for Louisa to remain faithful to the image she had created for herself. In the first place, the image of Jo with which she identified herself was internally inconsistent, owing simply to the realities of time. There are two Jo Marches: the athletic teenager of Little Women and the matronly Aunt Jo of Little Men and, much later, Jo’s Boys. With the typical greediness of human beings, Louisa’s readers wanted to imagine that she was both Jos at once. This in itself was a feat that no illusionist could perform, but her devotees demanded still more. They wanted to imagine Jo/Louisa as a petite, perky young woman with unlimited stores of laughter and goodwill. Louisa secretly prayed for a pox to descend on them. She complained, “Why people will think Jo small when she is described as tall I don’t see, & why insist that she must be young when she is said to be 30 at the end of the book?”46 It must have been peculiar and even painful for her to reflect on the ever increasing distance that separated the older Jo March, still sprightly and energetic, from the real-life original, a self-confessed “tired out old lady…with nothing left of her youth but a yard or more of chestnut hair that won’t turn grey though it is time it did.”47 Louisa wrote this description of herself when she was still not forty-two.

  In contrast, her father was acting like anything but a tired old man. Between 1869 and 1875, years that saw him age from seventy to seventy-six, he took four tours of the Midwest, where he now regularly found eager audiences for his conversations. He hoped to make annual western excursions thereafter and was deterred from doing so only because he could not bring himself to leave Abba, whose health was growing considerably weaker. He was in regular contact with his St. Louis friend William Torrey Harris, and in Illinois he had found a loyal friend in Dr. Hiram K. Jones, a devotee of the ancient Greeks who led an active and intellectually vibrant Plato Club in Jacksonville.

  It was now not unusual for Alcott to return to Concord after several months of speaking with eight hundred dollars in his pocket. He spoke against religious orthodoxy and in favor of a “New Church” in which worship would be free, individual, and spontaneous. He inveighed against the writings of Darwin, which he lacked the scientific knowledge to fully appreciate but in which he perceived a threat to free will and a challenge to the spiritual nature of humankind. “Any faith declaring a divorce from the supernatural, and seeking to prop itself upon Nature alone,” he averred, “falls short of satisfying the deepest needs of humanity.”48 To his great pleasure, Bronson had many opportunities to address school audiences, to whom he expounded his theories of education and moral culture. As was now habitual with him, he also regaled his audiences with verbal sketches of his great transcendental brethren, tending to save for last a discourse on Louisa. He liked to tell of how, as a girl, she came home from school one day and said the master could not spell, and it was no use for her to attend his school any longer. Alcott told his listeners that, thereafter, she said she was merely visiting the school as an observer. With a touch of humor, he added that she had never stopped observing. Explaining his own current popularity, Alcott conjectured that people were treating him well for his daughter’s sake.49

  On the night of July 23, 1872, Emerson’s house caught fire. Neighbors rushed to the family’s aid and, in a desperate attempt to save the philosopher’s library, began pitching books by the armload out the windows. Louisa stood guard over the scorched, sodden pile.50 Though some were damaged, none of the precious volumes was lost. The structure was saved, but the Emersons were forced to relocate while extensive repairs were undertaken. Emerson suffered deeply from the shock of the blaze, and Bronson was also stunned. He lamented, “We shall never sit again in the same rooms!”51

  The same year, between western journeys, Bronson also published a second successful book. Concord Days purports to be six months of entries from Alcott’s 1869 journal. The work is divided into a half dozen sections, each named for a month, moving sequentially from April to September. Dated as if to represent a chronological record, it treats topics as diverse as Goethe, The Ideal Church, and Berries. Yet the organizing principle of Concord Days is much looser than it first appears. Far from an authentic six-month window into Alcott’s life, the book offers material written over a span of more than thirty years. It is an eclectic scrapbook of Alcottiana, including excerpts not only from journals of various years but also transcripts of conversations with adult audiences; biographical sketches of Hawthorne, Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and others; and even a long extract from the once-pilloried Conversations with Children on the Gospels. Shedding the egotism of his youth, he also quotes extensively from the work of others, including poetry from Ellery Channing and journal entries from Thoreau. In the background of the work, the seasons change. Apple blossoms appear, Independence Day comes and passes, and near the end, autumn breathes coolly on Walden Pond. Although its noteworthy qualities are many, Concord Days may be most significant as a book of friends. As compared to earlier times, his ideal life was no longer so much one of celestial reveries. It was centered, instead, among the people he admired and loved.

  The structure of Concord Days both reflects and denies the passing of time; although the selections appear to proceed sequentially, Alcott leaps blithely from year to year, even decade to decade with barely an acknowledgement. In sections on Plato and Plotinus, even ancient days are revisited and revived. Alcott begins Concord Days on a melancholy note, gazing around his study at the massive volumes of his journals, “showy seen from without, with far too little of life transcribed within.”52 His lament is twofold. He complains both that his life has been too empty of achievement and that, even when a moment was worth recording, he lacked the artist’s skill to render it adequately in print. “[C]ould I succeed in sketching to the life a single day’s doings,” he writes, “[I] should esteem myself as having accomplished the chiefest feat in literature.”53 As a whole, however, Concord Days puts the lie to Alcott’s laments, both as to the insignificance of his life and his failure to preserve it in a vibrant form. Concord Days may be thought of as a kind of prose Leaves of Grass, lacking Whitman’s genius but partaking of his desire to transmute the whole of his experience into a living book. Alcott was attempting, as Whitman described his own project, “to put a Person, a human being…in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, in America, freely, fully and truly on record.”54 Alcott invites the reader for “a turn about his grounds, a sally into the woods, climbing the hill-top, sauntering by brook-si
des.”55 We pass through his garden, are asked to observe the rustic fences and gates made by his own hands, and are offered a place by his open fire. We meet his friends, peer into his books, and perhaps fidget a bit as he drones on a trifle too long on his theories of Genesis and the foibles of the current age. What Whitman wrote of his leaves can also be said of Concord Days: “Camerado, this is no book, / Who touches this touches a man.”56

  To a lesser, though still important, extent, Concord Days also touches on a family. May Alcott, sketchbook in hand, walks with her father as he visits the site of Thoreau’s hut. Bronson’s grandsons sail toy boats on the brook and amuse him with “their playful panorama.” Without naming her, he praises Abba, wondering what he would have left undone, or have done badly, “without her counsels to temper [my] adventurous idealism.” The family as a whole, Bronson adds, “is the sensitive plant of civility, the measure of culture…. Sown in the family, the seeds of holiness are here to be cherished and ripened for immortality.” Louisa’s presence is seldom felt, unless perhaps in Alcott’s advice to aspiring writers: “You may read selections [from your manuscript] to sensible women,—if young the better; and if it stand these trials, you may offer it to a publisher.”57 Does this allusion mean that Alcott had solicited the literary advice of Louisa, surely the most sensible younger woman in his acquaintance? Unfortunately, there is scant evidence to suggest that Bronson either did or did not share manuscripts and suggestions with her. Hints like this one, however, give grounds for speculation.