Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Bronson and Louisa escorted her as far as the dock. Prey to all the throat-constricting feelings that come with parting, they stood and watched as their blue-clad “dear girl” waved her handkerchief and the ship receded toward the horizon. “God be with her!” Louisa told her journal. Reflecting on all that May had lately done to sustain and support their parents, she added, “She has done her distasteful work faithfully, and deserved a reward.”81 Without May’s blithe and energetic presence, Orchard House at once felt older and quieter. Anna took over May’s role as housekeeper, while Louisa soldiered on as “nurse, chambermaid & money maker” and complained in her journal of “dull times.”82

  In Louisa’s estimation, 1877 began well.83 Anna’s son Fred rang in the year by playing “America” on the piano. Bronson, having recently written a series of short pieces called “Philosophemes” for Harris’s Journal of Speculative Philosophy, was putting the final touches on another book, Table Talk, a volume similar in both tone and topics to Tablets and Concord Days. Abba, though by no means energetic, was “cosey with her sewing, letters…and the success of her ‘girls.’”84 She especially enjoyed having Louisa nearby during the dreary winter days. Her daughter’s presence created “a new atmosphere in the house—and we all feel more protected when she is about us.”85 Louisa gave herself a much-needed break from juvenile literature, accepting an offer to write a novella for a Roberts Brothers project called the No Name series. The premise of this series was to solicit manuscripts from well-known authors and then publish them anonymously, inviting the readers to guess the author of each work. Louisa contributed A Modern Mephistopheles, a thrilling tale reminiscent of her early anonymous potboilers. Everything under the Alcott roof seemed the picture of industry and stability. Yet this year would be the Alcotts’ last at Orchard House.

  It is ironic that the Alcott family’s years at Orchard House—a place that, during their years of occupancy, brimmed with the joy, vitality, pain, and passion that make up the very core of living—should have been framed by a pair of lingering deaths. In 1858, the Alcotts moved into the house before there had even been time to transport Lizzie’s remains to a permanent resting place. Now, almost two decades later, the failing health of Abba dominated their thoughts as they prepared to leave the home that they had known longer than any other. The decision to leave the house was Abba’s. She made her wishes known after Louisa helped to buy Anna and her boys the house on Main Street that had belonged to the Thoreau family. As her illness worsened, Abba wanted as much of her family to be with her as possible. It was decided that she and Bronson would move along with Anna and the boys. Louisa would live there when she was in town. Anna and her sons moved into the Thoreau house in July, but it was impossible for the rest of the family to follow immediately, for Abba was now extremely feeble. In early September her condition declined dramatically. The doctor’s diagnosis was “water on the chest,” and he told the family that the beginning of the end had come. Although Abba protested that Louisa’s cares were already too many, Louisa forgot her own needs “in taking care of poor Marmee, who suffered much and longed to go.”86

  In September, making one of the obtusely insensitive gestures of which he was sometimes guilty, Bronson left his ailing wife and traveled to Connecticut to spend time in the region of his birth. He returned at the beginning of October, hoping that his stories of Abba’s old friends in Brooklyn, Connecticut, would rally her spirits. To his surprise, she was too exhausted even to listen to him. She desired only sleep. The next day, she was still too tired and feeble to listen long to her husband’s stories. Outside, the autumnal weather was beautiful, and Bronson set about gathering his abundant harvest of grapes. Within the walls of the old house, however, the talk was of medicines and worry. A nurse was brought in to look after Abba, and Anna came to be on hand in case her mother worsened. The family received a stream of anxious visitors. Lidian Emerson, Frank Sanborn’s wife, and untold others all brought presents of fruit or flowers, as well as their good wishes. What mattered most to Abba, however, was having her family nearby. She used her daughter’s childhood nickname when she said, “Stay by, Louy, and help me if I suffer too much.”87

  October 8 was Abba’s seventy-seventh birthday, and the family marked the day with what Louisa called “a sad little celebration.”88 The bright morning sun shone in on a profusion of flowers. In addition to the gifts that Anna, Louisa, and he offered her, Bronson presented his wife with a letter. He turned his thoughts to the past. “May we not say, happy hours, if not years, have been ours, and blessed in our children, our children’s children. Our cup has been full, sometimes overflowing with gladness, and may we not thank the giver of life for our fullness of blessings.” With surprising frankness, he wished his wife “a happy transit into the new existence.”89 Abba herself thought the day had been beautifully celebrated, but a shadow hung over the day. Everyone knew that Abba would not have another birthday. Louisa hired a nurse in hopes of giving herself a bit of rest. Nevertheless, she still pushed herself beyond her endurance and also fell ill. For a week, it appeared that both mother and daughter might pass away. However, as she put it, Louisa pulled through and got up slowly to help her mother die.90

  Their patient’s health had forced Bronson and Louisa to delay the move to Main Street countless times. At last, however, on November 14, they transported Abba from Orchard House to Anna’s home. As her family carried her upstairs in an armchair, Abba softly joked, “This is the beginning of my ascension.”91 Both she and Bronson liked the new house. Bronson called it “a picture,” and even if the study was smaller than the one he had left behind, he thought it an honor to sit in the same room where Thoreau had written. Nestled in a room filled with sunshine, flowers, and old-fashioned furniture, Abba was, at least, comfortable. After a week in her new surroundings, however, she ceased to care for anything. Bronson and Louisa both advised May, still in Europe, not to come home now; she would not be assured of finding her mother alive even if she sailed at once. On Sunday, November 25, Abba spoke her last words to Bronson: “You are laying a very soft pillow for me to rest upon.” Louisa found the words emblematic. “In truth,” she wrote, “his love has always been that to her energetic spirit through this long companionship of nearly fifty years.”92 As the sun set and a steady rain fell outside, Abba Alcott fell asleep in Louisa’s arms. Although Orchard House remained in his name, Bronson decided that he would never live there again. It would not be the same house without Abba. Orchard House stood tenantless until June 1880, when Alcott’s friend Harris came from St. Louis and rented it.

  For a while, both Bronson and Louisa needed to look for reasons to keep on living. Louisa reported that her father seemed “restless, with his anchor gone.”93 The following June, as Louisa planned to write a memoir of her mother, she and Bronson went through Abba’s papers, copying over some of her letters and journals. It was especially melancholy work for Bronson, who found that his late wife’s papers gave him an admittance to her inmost soul that not even nearly a half century of marriage had done. Much of what he found made him sad and even ashamed. “My heart bleeds,” he wrote, “with the memories of those days, and even long years, of cheerless anxiety and hopeless dependence.” With bitter self-accusation, he rued “my seeming incompetency, my utter inability to relieve the burdens laid upon her and my children during these years of helplessness.” His error, as it now seemed to him, had been an excess of faith; he had “trusted too confidingly to that justice and generosity which Christian professions imply.”94

  And yet, even now, it seemed to him that he had not been precisely wrong. He had lived for the best of purposes, and if he had anticipated too much generosity from the world, he had expected no more than he had been prepared to give. He still could not quite concede the terrible possibility that, in a sinful world, a spirit filled with too much faith, hope, and charity might itself be guilty of a fault. He was grateful, at least, that Abba had found her compensation through her daughters. He reproached
himself with the thought that she had not gotten enough of it from him. In turn, Louisa found that she could not write the memoir of her mother; her emotions were too powerful. Instead of weaving her mother’s writings into a published work, she chose to commit the great majority of them to the flames. Her decision has cost historians priceless insights into the mind of an extraordinary woman.

  In earlier times, Bronson might have found solace in conversation with Emerson. Now, however, somewhat embarrassed by his increasingly common lapses of memory, Alcott’s oldest friend was seeking solitude, and his friends were reluctant to disturb him. For want of individuals who could satisfy his yearnings for intellectual friendship, Bronson sought to take part in meetings and conferences. However, some of these forays proved unfortunate. At a meeting of the Moral Education Association in Boston in May 1878, he held forth on a subject on which he would have been well advised to keep silent: the importance of pure heredity. As Alcott was speaking, a child happened to wander toward the platform. Bronson gestured toward the boy as a handy personification of ideal Christian heredity. It was then pointed out to him that the child in question was the offspring of a Mr. and Mrs. Hazard, who were prominent in the scandalous Free Love movement.95 Sometimes, the results of his appearances were more sad than comic. When Bronson rose to speak at a conference of Unitarian ministers, a Reverend Ware brusquely told him that he was in no sense a minister and had no right to address the body. To Alcott’s mortification, not a single person present said a word in his defense. He bitterly told his journal, “I am, I perceive, left to the conviction of being still deemed an outcast, an Ishmaelite.”96

  Louisa also suffered in the aftermath of Abba’s death. A great warmth had gone out of her life, and she could find no motive to go on. Her only comfort was that she had realized her ambition of making her mother’s final years easy. It can be argued that, ever since she was a child, Louisa’s two dominating raisons d’être had been to earn her father’s approval and to assure her mother’s comfort. The first goal had long been accomplished; the second no longer existed. Louisa told her journal, “My duty is done, and now I shall be glad to follow her.”97 Feeling empty and futile, she settled in for a winter of idleness, ill health, and wistful reminiscence.

  No good news came until spring, and then it came from far away. On March 22, May Alcott, now thirty-seven, was married in London to Ernest Nieriker, a handsome Swiss businessman some fifteen years her junior. May’s letters describing Nieriker and their happiness together were ebullient. At a great distance Louisa shared their happiness. She sent them a wedding present of a thousand dollars and tried without success to figure out how to visit the couple. Despite her obvious pleasure, a grain of the old sibling jealousy crept into the journal entry in which Louisa meditated on her sister’s good fortune. “How different our lives are just now!—I so lonely, sad, and sick; she so happy, well and blest. She always had the cream of things.” But then the generous side of Louisa’s spirit won out. She continued, “…And deserved it. My time is yet to come somewhere else, when I am ready for it.”98

  Unlike Louisa, Bronson seems not to have felt like waiting for his time to come to him. On the contrary, Abba’s passing seems to have persuaded him that now, more than ever, he must hasten to realize the dreams that he had not yet fulfilled. He intended to live his remaining years of good health with a cheerful determination to do all that his aging mind and body would allow him to accomplish. He knew that there was no better way to remember Abba than to continue “cherishing her generous counsels and following in the path of her unselfish example.”99 Improbable as it seemed, there were still a handful of triumphs left for Bronson Alcott.

  The first and most important of these was finally to give substance to an air castle that he and Emerson had built together almost forty years earlier, while they and Margaret Fuller were collaborating on The Dial: a philosophical college to be established in Concord. The stimulus to revive the idea returned in the summer of 1878 when a group of midwestern thinkers, led by Hiram Jones, the Illinois Platonist, came to Concord for two weeks of philosophical discussions. Alcott had a delightful time trading insights with his visitors, and he started to have thoughts about what might be done the following year. A year-round college was out of the question, being beyond both Alcott’s financial means to establish and beyond his physical stamina to administer. Instead, Alcott envisioned a monthlong summer course of lectures, to be held, for want of a better venue, in the parlor of Orchard House. Tuition would be affordable—only fifteen dollars for the entire session—and students of all ages and either sex would be received on equal footing. In composing his ideal faculty, Alcott drew on a lifetime of friends and acquaintances. He could count on Frank Sanborn, and he hoped to entice William Torrey Harris, who had not yet moved east from St. Louis. His longtime friend Ednah Cheney would certainly be there, and he also wanted to include his great teaching colleague from the 1830s, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. And, of course, the venture would be unthinkable without the presence of Emerson, even though that worthiest of worthies had now lost much of his former mental vigor.

  Both William Torrey Harris and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody addressed the attendees at the Concord School of Philosophy. They are shown here beneath a large tree a few yards from the Hillside Chapel.

  (Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  With great excitement, Alcott pitched his idea to anyone who would listen and solicited participants for his symposium. On January 19, 1879, he and Sanborn composed a prospectus to be sent to interested parties across the country. Despite his failing faculties, Emerson promised to take part. So, too, did William Torrey Harris, Dr. Jones, Peabody, Bronson’s erstwhile partner in abolitionism Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and a small cadre of Harvard professors. Letters in response to the prospectus poured in from as far away as Kansas. Uncharacteristically for an Alcott project, plans for the gathering came together with astonishing ease. Alcott christened his brainchild the Concord School of Philosophy.

  The school convened on July 15, 1879, with Bronson as its dean and Orchard House as its lecture hall. As a practical matter, the number of pupils in the school was limited to fifty since no more than that could be squeezed into the available space.100 As it was, they filled both the study and the adjoining room. All the area within hearing distance was spoken for. Those lucky enough to find a spot in the main room filed in past walls decorated with portraits of Whitman, Pascal, Shakespeare, Emerson, and Alcott himself. A reproduction of Raphael’s The School of Athens also looked down on the scene.101 The faculty typically occupied a sofa that extended halfway across one end of the lecture room. The lecturer sat in the central seat, with Alcott on his right and Sanborn on his left.102 According to the press reports, although Harris was perhaps the most erudite member of the faculty, Alcott was the most striking personage. At least one observer considered him “in feeling and spirit, the youngest man of the faculty.”103 While the lectures were being delivered, he was silent, attentive, apparently wrapped up in thought. When the speaker finished, however, it was usually Alcott who began the responsive conversation. Soon six or seven students were taking part. On occasion, the hour reserved for discussion expanded to two. A correspondent wrote of the silver-haired dean, “He has never said better things than he is saying now…. He never seemed happier. His face glows with enthusiasm, and is radiant with joy.”104

  On August 2, Emerson gave his sole address of the session, a lecture titled “Memory.” In one sense, his choice of topic was a bit awkward, since his own memory was now thoroughly unreliable. On the day when he spoke to the Concord School, he appeared with his daughter Ellen at his side, who patiently helped with his phrasings when words escaped him and guided his eyes when he lost his place in his manuscript. In another way, however, Emerson’s decision to speak about memory could not have been more apt, for there was no fitter time or place for memory than Alcott’s parlor in the summer of 1879. For some of its attendees, the great marvel o
f Alcott’s school was its power to make the past seem present. The students were gathered in the room adjoining the one where Anna Alcott was married. Intentionally or not, the faculty represented most of the salient events in Alcott’s life. The Temple School was there in the person of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. The flower of transcendentalism, now sere and faded, still glowed in the serene face of Emerson. The struggles for abolition were remembered in the persons of Sanborn and Higginson, and the western prairies where Alcott had won a loyal following had sent their ambassadors in Harris and Hiram Jones. Thoreau, too, was present in an indirect sense. One evening, the attendees of the school gathered at a nearby church to hear H. G. O. Blake, the editor of Thoreau’s published works, read excerpts from the sage’s journal. One of Blake’s selections seemed especially to fit the mood of the occasion: “There is no remedy for love but to love more.”105

  Up from Boston to help manage the event, Louisa found that the drift of the school’s discussions lay outside the range of her intellectual interest. Indeed, the sight of so many gifted minds immersed in what she regarded as idle disputation struck her as somewhat scandalous. She confessed that if the Concord philosophers had more philanthropy in their blood, she would have found the proceedings enjoyable. However, she decided, “speculation seems a waste of time when there is so much real work crying to be done. Why discuss the Unknowable till our poor are fed & the wicked saved?” She also groaned a bit beneath the burden of keeping up with the needs of the multitude of visitors who descended on the family. Louisa counted sixteen callers in one day as she and Anna did their best to “keep the hotel going.”106