Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Despite the impracticality and annoyance of it all, however, she looked on the Concord School with both pride and amusement. It delighted her to see that her father had had his dream realized at last. He was, she wrote, “in glory, with plenty of talk to swim in.” She also enjoyed observing the blow that was being dealt to Concord’s redoubtable provincialism. As the budding philosophers from across America swarmed about the town, roosting on the Alcotts’ steps “like hens waiting for corn,” it was hard for the locals to continue to maintain that all the culture of the nation was native to Concord.107

  The success of the Concord School’s inaugural season instilled Bronson with renewed vigor and ambition. Even the absence of Abba was less painful now. At seventy-nine, he scorned the notion that “at three-score and ten, or at four score even,” one should equate age with infirmity and give one’s consent to oblivion.108 That fall, he undertook another tour of the Midwest, this time only as far as Ohio, remarking that he actually found the excursion easier than in younger days. At every stop on his itinerary, he knew that friends would greet him with a warm bed, an ample table, and of course the conversations that were his greatest delight. Now that Abba was gone and Orchard House was no longer home, he sometimes must have felt more at home on the road than at his own hearthside.

  Nevertheless, Bronson tore himself from the hospitalities of his western friends to return to Concord in time to celebrate a milestone: his eightieth birthday on November 29. Louisa came up from Boston so that, as she turned forty-seven, she and her father could be together. Although Louisa’s health made merrymaking feel like hard work, she did her best to put on a festive mood. Bronson, however, had no trouble feeling happy; his return had been brightened by the news that he found waiting for him. On November 8, in Paris, May had given birth to a daughter, named Louisa May Nieriker in honor of the baby’s illustrious aunt. “Surely,” Bronson told his journal, “a generous Providence bestows blessings profusely upon us.” He felt confident that Abba was smiling down from heaven upon May and her baby, and he was equally sure that, when life was done, the entire Alcott family would share a reunion “in holier bonds of affection.”109 It could not be otherwise, he reasoned, in a universe where “Love never perishes.”110

  Louisa also exulted. “Too much happiness for me” was the phrase she wrote in her journal.111 Her choice of words was telling, however, for there was something unnamable about this happiness that she did not trust. Although the first reports from France gave no cause for alarm, she could not free herself from forebodings. She felt strangely as if the atmosphere of bliss could endure only for a moment, as liable to vanish as the last golden leaves of autumn. Her premonitions were soon confirmed. News came that May had suffered complications after the delivery. She was too ill to nurse her child, and the tone of the communiqués from Paris grew anxious. Louisa yearned to be with her sister. However, she herself was not well enough to attempt an ocean journey, and she could not possibly reach Paris in time to be of any service. Her helplessness struck her as a penance for her sins, which seemed greater to her than to anyone around her. On Christmas Eve, a local man drowned in the Concord River. Louisa took the accident as an omen. All she could do was wait.

  On the morning of December 31, Bronson was at the Concord post office, hoping to receive more news. Louisa, who had again left her rooms in Boston and was staying with her father, came downstairs to find Emerson, holding a telegram and gazing, red-eyed, at May’s portrait. Ernest Nieriker had cabled Emerson instead of wiring the Alcotts directly. He trusted that the aging philosopher would know how to soften the blow. Nieriker’s thoughtfulness was futile, for Emerson was overcome himself. Choked, perhaps trembling, he could only say, “My child, I wish I could prepare you; but alas, alas!” He handed her the telegram. Weeks of worry had already done for Louisa what Emerson could not. “I am prepared,” she said as she took the message from him.112 She read the stark words without surprise. Later that morning, she told the news to her father and her now sole surviving sister. Two days earlier, May had died.

  No other event was ever so hard for Louisa to bear. The birth of her niece had taken her to the heights of happiness, and the sudden fall was almost impossible to accept. May had also had premonitions about the outcome of her pregnancy. She had written Louisa, “If I die when baby comes, don’t mourn, for I have had as much happiness in this short time as many in twenty years.”113 Yet these recollected words gave only bittersweet comfort. By an odd coincidence, the news of May’s death arrived on the final day of a decade that had seen much in the way of triumph for both Louisa and her father. Now, those victories meant no more than a handful of ashes. Louisa’s old observation that everything seemed to go by contraries with her was never more achingly true. Now every single branch of her family had been touched by death, and a strange, scarred remnant was all that was left of the Alcotts in their prime.

  Bronson and Louisa both sought solace in writing. Bronson wrote a sketch of May in his journal, in which he praised her lively fancy, her positive, independent manner, and her fine sense of honor and decorum. He recalled with pride that “failure was unknown in her vocabulary of effort.” He retained a clear image of the last time he glimpsed her, standing on the deck of the eastbound steamer and waving her handkerchief until she was lost in the distance.114 Louisa tried to block out the pain by plunging into a vortex. She was at work on another children’s novel, Jack and Jill, and the project seemed to offer a shelter from memory. The stratagem failed. The tide of sorrow swept over her, and she put aside her work in tears. She felt that there had been a mistake. It was wrong that May should have been taken when her life was at its richest, while she, Louisa, had done her work and would have gone without regret.

  As they had done when Lizzie died, Louisa and her father also tried to console themselves with poetry. In an eight-stanza elegy written less than a week after the news arrived, Bronson achieved a poignant simplicity of language that had too often eluded him. In the lines “Ah! gentle May, / Couldst thou not stay? / Why hurriedst thou so swift away?” there is perhaps no poetic genius, but the spareness conveys perfectly the helpless incomprehension of grief. One stanza in particular shows plainly a father’s anguish:

  I wake in tears and sorrow:

  Wearily I say,

  “Come, come, fair morrow,

  And chase my grief away!”

  Night-long I say,

  “Haste, haste, fair morrow,

  And bear my grief away!”

  All night long.

  My sad, sad song.115

  Louisa’s poem is a summation of her sister’s life, according a stanza to each of the parts that existence had called on her to play. It is a biography told through quickly rising and subsiding images, flashing forth and disappearing as rapidly as May’s life had passed away. Syntactically, each stanza is a sentence fragment, emphasizing the incompleteness of the subject’s foreshortened life. Louisa’s words, inadequate though they were, were her only way of preserving a trace of her “maiden, full of lofty dreams, / Slender and fair and tall,” who never ceased “seeking everywhere / Ideal beauty, grace and strength.”116

  Apart from the many messages of condolence that came from France, England, and America, the lone consolation was May’s baby, who, by all the reports they received from Ernst Nieriker, was healthy and thriving. They soon learned, to their great excitement, that the baby would soon be with them. It had been May’s dying wish that her daughter would be sent to America for Louisa to raise. Treating his wife’s desires as a sacred trust, Nieriker arranged for his daughter to be sent to America during the autumn of her first year. By a means that she would never have anticipated or asked for, Louisa was at last to be a mother. Months before the girl was to arrive, Louisa had given her a nickname, “Lulu,” and she spent much of the summer cleaning and fussing about in anticipation of her adopted daughter’s arrival.

  Not all her interest, however, was concentrated on the private sphere. Twenty-seven years earlie
r, Louisa’s mother had organized a petition to the Massachusetts constitutional convention, demanding the extension of all civil rights to women.117 In 1873, she had boldly declared, “I am seventy-three, but I mean to go to the polls before I die, even if my daughters have to carry me.”118 However, Abba Alcott had died without ever having fulfilled this dream. Louisa’s own chance came in March 1880, when a change in the law permitted the tax-paying women of Concord to vote for the school committee. Wasting no time, Louisa became the first Concord woman ever to register to vote. On the appointed day, she appeared with nineteen other women at the town meeting where the balloting was to occur. Bronson was also there, and “with a fatherly desire to make the new step as easy as possible,” he proposed that the ladies should be allowed to vote first. The motion carried, and the twenty women filed forward to deposit their ballots. No sooner had the last female vote been cast than Judge Ebenezer Hoar shocked the assembly by moving that the polls be closed. Before any objection could be mounted, this motion also carried. Not only had the women voted, but they had cast the only ballots to be tallied. Louisa noticed that some of the men looked disturbed at having been denied their rights. However, after more than two centuries of exclusively male suffrage, many agreed that, for one day at least, turnabout was fair play.119

  That spring, as Louisa voted, read, walked, rested, and tried to forget the loss of her sister, Bronson forged ahead with an architectural project that greatly absorbed his attentions. Anxious lest his school should pass a second summer without a permanent home, he had the foundations laid in March for a building that he called “the Hillside Chapel.” It was built only twenty-five paces or so up the hill from the side door of Orchard House. The structure strongly represents the values of the man who conceived it. Unpainted and somewhat rough in its appearance, wrought from solid New England timbers, the chapel invites the visitor to enter through a sharply peaked doorway, reminiscent of Gothic forms. One immediately walks up a wooden flight of stairs into the building’s single room: a lecture hall with a high ceiling and a slightly elevated stage across the far side to accommodate speakers. Large enough for oratory, it is intimate enough for Bronson’s favored medium, a conversation. Like the summer house that Alcott had built for Emerson a generation earlier, it savors of the untutored but earnest beauty of a premodern era.

  As the second annual sessions of Bronson’s school unfolded at the newly finished chapel, Louisa made preparations for Lulu. In early September, she put the last touches on the nursery and said a prayer over the white crib where the baby was to sleep. On September 19, Bronson chose red ink instead of black to write the first two words of his journal entry: “She Comes!” Louisa went to the pier in Boston that day for the long-anticipated meeting. As one baby after another came into view, she wondered whether each in turn might be hers. At last, the ship’s captain emerged from the crowd, holding a little child dressed in white and sporting a crown of wispy yellow hair. There was a moment of recognition. Louisa held out her arms and said the baby’s name. Lulu gazed at the strange woman for an instant and then said quizzically, “Marmar?” Seconds later, she was nestled close against her aunt “as if she had found her own people and home at last.” For many nights afterward, Louisa would creep into the nursery to assure herself that it was not all a dream and that Lulu was really there.120 Bronson called the child “a new trust and study…for us all” and added, “Childhood and age are the complements of life and human culture.”121

  On October 12, 1880, Bronson departed on what was to be his final western tour. In many respects, it was the grandest of all, lasting until May 14 of the following year and covering thirty-seven cities and towns. Heedless of the usual effects of age—he turned eighty-one during the course of his journey—he traveled five thousand miles and sometimes spoke three times a day. Although he charged nothing for more than half his appearances, he earned between a thousand and twelve hundred dollars, at a time when a new house sold for less than four thousand dollars and a night in a New York hotel cost a dollar. No longer needful of life’s necessities, Bronson used some of the money from his tour to add a new wing to the Thoreau house. It seems that he did not feel fully alive unless he was altering his landscape in some fashion.

  Otherwise, 1881 was a less productive year than most for the Alcotts. Louisa was so busy with Lulu that she wrote only one line in her journal from January to September. Lulu was a delight to Bronson’s eyes as well. Borne back to the past by nostalgia and the presence of a toddler, he gave his friends copies of a long autobiographical poem, New Connecticut, which recounted his youth and adolescence on Spindle Hill. His only annoyances of the moment were Lulu’s doctors, who recommended the addition of meat to her diet. Bronson railed against these men who “would demonize the little saint” and swore to guard against such assaults on the sweetness of her soul.122

  In September, Bronson and Louisa went together to have tea at Frank Sanborn’s house and to converse with Sanborn’s houseguest, Walt Whitman. Whitman was somewhat intimidated by the company, which also included Emerson, and he seemed to be choosing his words with some delicacy. Now in his sixties, he stooped a bit and leaned on a staff for support, but Bronson still detected “a certain youthfulness…speaking forth from his ruff of beard and open-bosom collar.”123 Whitman approached Bronson as the living historian of transcendentalism, and he peppered the older Alcott with questions about Fuller and Thoreau. He asked, too, about Emerson, who, though physically present in the room, was now too mentally enfeebled to make extensive responses. Bronson tried to persuade Whitman to accept his theory of the fall of Adam and Eve, but he found the younger man impervious to the idea that human beings were creatures of sin. To the contrary, Whitman declared that existing civilization was an improvement on all that had gone before, and he looked confidently to America as the eventual birthplace of a new, still better type of man.124 Bronson must have been both surprised and gratified to find a prophet even more optimistic than himself.

  In December, Louisa received a letter from a poor woman in the Midwest who had no money to buy Christmas presents for her children. The children had suggested that she write to Santa Claus. Instead, she wrote to Miss Alcott. More amused than offended by the presumption, Louisa put together a box of gifts. Lulu, much interested in the proceedings, generously offered to add some of her own favorite toys. Louisa graciously declined. After sending the package, Louisa did what she almost always did on the heels of a funny occurrence. She wrote a story about it, which she sold for one hundred dollars.125 The incident was marvelously typical of the two sides of Louisa. When the call for charity came, she answered it readily. However, she was almost reflexive in her ability to turn the situation into art, and then into profit. A time was fast coming, however, in which even her resourceful spirit would be tested to the full.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “COME UP WITH ME”

  “Hope, and keep busy; and, whatever happens, remember that you can never be fatherless.”

  —LOUISA MAY ALCOTT,

  Little Women, chapter 16

  THE YEAR 1882 BEGAN WITH GOOD NEWS. IN JANUARY, Roberts Brothers published Louisa’s revised edition of Moods—the author’s last word on the book that had bedeviled her for more than twenty years. In her preface to the revised edition, Louisa thought it wise to explain the original purpose of the novel. She wrote that, despite the public’s perception, she had never meant to write a book about the institution of marriage. Rather, she had intended to explore “the mistakes of a moody nature, guided by impulse, not principle.”1 Louisa believed that the fundamental idea of the book was still sound. Indeed, she had found that her mature observation and experience had confirmed much of what her younger mind had grasped by intuition and imagination. It was time, then, to give her first novel “a place among its more successful sisters; for into it went the love, labor, and enthusiasm that no later book can possess.”2

  The 1882 edition of Moods is more than a revision. “Restoration” is a more a
ptly descriptive word. All traces of the novel’s subplot have been expunged, and through its excision, the novel gains substantially in clarity. The story is now Sylvia’s, and her inner conflicts are clearly the problems most in need of resolution. Instead of presenting only one instance of Sylvia’s self-destructive impulses—her rash investigation of the brushfire—the revised text draws her twice more into danger. Early in the novel, she makes her way to a rock on a stormy seacoast and sings forth her delight in the windswept scene while, unobserved, the rising tide comes in and all but inundates her path to safety. As the water rushes in, the mercurial Sylvia, still unconscious of her peril, feels her spirits plummet as she thinks of her dead mother and reflects that it might be pleasant to join her. Only Warwick’s arrival at the critical moment saves her from drowning. The episode, initially joyous, ends with the emotional feel—and very nearly the effect—of a suicide attempt. Later, on a boating expedition with Warwick, Moor, and her brother, Sylvia heedlessly rejoices when a violent thunderstorm disrupts the outing. As her boatmates row for their lives, Sylvia laughs and strains to experience every impression of the storm, even as lightning strikes nearby. Almost fifty years earlier, when Louisa was two, Bronson had written about her, “On the impetuous stream of instinct, she has set sail, and, regardless, alike, of the quicksands and rocks of the careering…countercurrents that oppose her course, she looks only toward the objects of her desire and steers proudly, adventurously…. The stronger the opposing gale, the more sullenly and obstinately does she ply her energies.”3 Given the Alcotts’ practice of sharing journals, Louisa may well have known about Bronson’s early description of the bold sailing of her reckless spirit. If her father’s journal entry was not the direct inspiration for Sylvia’s stormy boat ride, the echoes are nevertheless strong.