Louisa May Alcott

by Susan Cheever

  Six weeks later when the baby was born and safely healthy, Louisa was finally readmitted to her family. She took the stage back to Concord, the one place in the world where she was allowed to run free. No wonder she refused to have anything to do with the golden-haired, blue-eyed baby girl who had brought on her exile. Once again, Louisa was required to suppress her natural feelings of jealousy about her sisters and her natural feelings of anger at her parents. She lived a life in which such feelings were not allowed. No wonder her early work is studded with passionate storms, murders, and melodramas.

  In his inspired community-building that year, Emerson had also put together a new magazine, one of the first intellectual magazines in America; Alcott had christened it The Dial. Margaret Fuller was the editor. The plan was to have George Ripley and Elizabeth Peabody, as well as Alcott, Thoreau, and Emerson, work together to produce something that would be the voice of their romantic new way of seeing the world. Their critics dubbed this view Transcendentalism—the belief, in short, that intuition could trump reason or what Perry Miller has defined as “the first outcry of the heart against the materialistic pleasures of a business civilization.” Bronson Alcott began work on a long piece for The Dial titled “Orphic Sayings.” They were mocked in the Boston press as “Gastric Sayings,” and Emerson’s brother William called them “Alcott’s unintelligibles.” Fuller didn’t like Alcott’s work, and she didn’t want to print Henry David Thoreau’s work either. Thoreau kept submitting poems and essays to The Dial. Fuller rejected them or edited them heavily. When Thoreau complained to Emerson, Emerson took Fuller’s side. The Dial lasted for four years, with Fuller as its editor for two of them. Emerson, who had planned to spend time helping Fuller with the new magazine, was distracted by his own work. In the spring of 1841 he published his own Essays, First Series.

  By the autumn of the Alcotts’ first year in Concord, it was clear that Bronson’s plan to become a farmer and support the family through manual labor was not going to work. The family would have food but nothing else. Abba Alcott, as always, was the family member who raised the alarm when it came to financial problems. Fuel and many other things needed to be paid for with money. She asked her father and brother for help, but they were tired of Bronson’s needs. Emerson was distressed at the plight of the family, and when he visited, he often left some money behind, hidden in the sofa cushions or under a candlestick. Abba Alcott dismissed her laundress and began to look for a paying job for herself. Anna and Louisa both became expert seamstresses and the family took in sewing.

  Emerson came up with what he hoped would be a solution, again. The Alcotts would move in with his family—his wife, Lidian, and their two young boys. The two women would manage the household, and Bronson would work the land. Abba was desperate, but even in her desperation she knew this would not work. Then in February Abba’s wealthy father sickened and died, leaving a will that left his daughter as poor as ever and feeling hurt and rejected. Colonel May had divided his fortune strictly according to person rather than according to need. Even the small sum he had left to Abigail, his will spelled out, was not to come under the “control of her husband or the liability of his debts.”11 Worse, the paltry $2,000 she would inherit was to be held in escrow for an indefinite length of time because of her husband’s debts. That Thanksgiving the Alcott family gathered around a plate of apple pudding.

  Yet the three years that the Alcott family spent living in the Hosmer Cottage that Emerson had rented for them by the river were, in retrospect, idyllic. “Those Concord Days were the happiest of my life, for we had charming playmates in the little Emersons, Channings, Hawthornes and Goodwins with the illustrious parents and their friends to enjoy our pranks and share our excursions,”12 Louisa wrote later. In spite of everything, Louisa met Thoreau and Emerson, two men who would be lodestones in her intellectual development. These were two men she fell in love with in her own preadolescent way, men for whose thoughts and eccentricities she was as hungry as only a family black sheep can be.

  It is hard to know how much Louisa saw of Emerson in those early years at the Hosmer Cottage, but it is certain that he opened his library to her as soon as she was old enough to use it. As her father’s patron, Emerson was often a visitor at the Hosmer Cottage and Louisa also frequently played with the Emerson children and wrote poems for Emerson’s daughter. Louisa May Alcott’s first published book, Flower Fables, in 1854, was a collection of stories she had told Ellen when they were girls. “Emerson remained my beloved ‘Master’ while he lived,” she wrote, “doing more for me, as he did for many another young soul, than he ever knew, by the simple beauty of his life, the truth and wisdom of his books, the example of good.”13

  Bronson Alcott was hard to idolize, but Waldo Emerson was an easy man to worship. Louisa would walk across town and leave anonymous bunches of wildflowers on his door when she had time in the morning. Sometimes, from the trees she would see him smoking the cigar that his wife did not allow in the house, then putting it out and stashing it in a hollow rail in the fence.

  Her connection to Henry David Thoreau was more passionate, and in many ways Thoreau is the model—as Martha Saxton has suggested in her biography Louisa May Alcott: A Modern Biography—for the mischievous boy next door in Little Women, Laurie Lawrence. Also, in her novel Moods, a young woman is caught in a love triangle with two men: an Emerson-like intellectual and a Thoreauvian naturalist named Adam Warwick who had a “massive head, covered with waves of ruddy brown hair, grey eyes that seemed to pierce through all disguises, and an eminent nose.”14 In the novel as in real life, Warwick/Thoreau’s ungainly appearance hid a man in tune with the world and nature, a great heart and a powerful yet innocent intellect.

  Many readers and writers have speculated on the real-life models for Louisa May Alcott’s characters. Readers of Little Women, especially, often talk as if Louisa May Alcott were Jo March, although even basic research shows that this is far from true. Was Laurie really based on Henry David Thoreau or was he based on Louisa’s friend Alf Whitman, as she once wrote, or was he perhaps modeled on the Polish pianist with whom she had a whirlwind romance on her first trip to Europe and who followed her to Paris for a heady two weeks when she was thirty-four years old?

  What is the connection of fictional characters to the writer and to the people in the world around the writer? My father was a fiction writer who always insisted that the characters in his novels and stories had no connection to the real characters in our lives. He insisted on this even though there were many striking similarities, and even though he sometimes seemed to be reporting as much as he was imagining. My father believed—and many critics agreed with him—that literature had to be read as if it were a self-contained dream. To begin to deconstruct it into the elements of the writer’s life was to destroy its power and reduce it to gossip. Of course, most fiction writers use the nuts and bolts of their own experience to build their imaginative mansions, but by taking a character like Laurie apart detail by detail and trying to match him up with what we know about the life of Louisa May Alcott, we certainly violate his delicious, rosy-cheeked, heartbroken, and ultimately redeemed character.

  Yet this conflation of art and life is now thought to be an important aspect of studying any work of fiction. Was Dickens a child molester? Was Scott Fitzgerald mean to Zelda? These questions are part of the study of literature as it is taught today. Have we gone too far in trying to bring great works of the imagination down to the detective work we have done on the lives of great writers? Are we robbing ourselves of the knockout experience of reading a great work of literature as if it were a given and not the creation of just another struggling human being?

  Reading Louisa May Alcott’s papers at the Houghton Library at Harvard, the scholar comes upon repeated requests to destroy the letters one is about to read. Yet there are the letters in question, sorted into neat folders for convenient perusal. The flyleaf of Abigail May Alcott’s journals is sternly inscribed with a similar warning. “Do not
loan this book or allow any use of it for publication. Keep in the family always or destroy. Such were the wishes of Mrs. Alcott, & L. M. Alcott to whom the diaries were given by her mother.” Yet I calmly pull the folder over to my laptop and type in the best passages from the journals. Am I bringing the past to life with diligent research? Or am I violating the most intimate wishes of those I revere?

  The Hosmer Cottage where the Alcotts lived for three years is still there next to the railroad bridge built in 1844, a year after the Alcotts left the west side of Concord and went farther west to Harvard, Massachusetts. It’s near the Concord River and the docks where canoes can be rented, and the little house has been thoroughly renovated with asphalt shingles and a gleaming yellow façade. Once an outbuilding on a larger farm, it has become a house among houses. Between it and the river there are a dozen new houses, many only a few years old, most built in a kind of inflated architectural version of the clapboard and shutters of nineteenth-century New England. The road going by, which was once a dirt track, is heavily traveled asphalt now; the Hosmer Cottage has security signs on its small front yard although no one seems to be home. Because of the traffic, there is no possibility of stopping even for a minute to gaze at the house where the Alcotts lived in those slower years before the car and the train and electricity and the telephone, in a world we can hardly imagine.

  As it became clear that the experiment of living off the land wouldn’t work, and as they realized that moving in with the Emersons was also impractical, the Alcotts began to search for another alternative. Alcott began giving the occasional “Conversation,” a kind of interactive community talk that would ultimately be his most reliable source of income. Conversations were the movies and dinner theater of New England in the nineteenth century. Many scholarly men traveled around, often stopping at a local Athenaeum, the kind of educational assembly hall in which New England men and women imagined themselves descended from Greek orators and their listeners, or at the house of a town worthy to give their Conversations, which were usually paid by subscription.

  Even Margaret Fuller, breaking the mold of masculine supremacy in all things intellectual, gave Conversations, often traveling from city to city on successive nights throughout New England and in New York. A typical Conversation was announced to be on a specific topic: Civil Disobedience, or Socrates, or A Definition of Man. Sometimes the visiting lecturer would stay in town for successive nights and give a series of Conversations.

  On the night of a Conversation, at about seven in the evening after an early supper, the town thinkers would gather in a parlor or in a local meeting hall to hear the visiting speaker opine on the announced subject. They sat in pews or in Hitchcock and Windsor chairs around a table with an oil lamp. Sometimes local sages served as questioners to elicit more thinking from the visitor, or sometimes the audience asked the questions. Alcott with his combination of Connecticut Yankee bearing and the southern manners he had picked up as a peddler on the Virginia plantations was a slightly exotic and wholly confident lecturer. Apparently, onstage he sometimes had a brilliance and immediacy absent in his writing style. “He is very noble in his carriage to all men,” wrote Emerson, “of a serene and lofty aspect and deportment.”15

  Alcott’s “Conversations” were modeled on his classroom. He took for himself the kind of absolute authority that he had as a schoolmaster. He hoped to encourage the audience to speak for themselves on his subject rather than to harass them with prefabricated ideas, but it was often a sleepy, preoccupied audience. As he spoke, sometimes in vague abstractions, a strange kind of hypnosis sometimes seemed to hang in the air over the listeners. It wasn’t that any of what he said made perfect sense, but somehow the whole of the evening—the high-ceilinged room, the uncomfortable chairs, and the drone of his voice—seemed to make sense.

  When this magic didn’t quite work, when an upstart heckled or questioned him, Alcott sometimes responded with a haughty, wounded silence. During lectures at Emerson’s house in Concord, he was sharply questioned by both Henry James and the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Thomas Wentworth Higginson was not a fan. Neither was Theodore Parker, who questioned him sharply on a different occasion. “Parker wound himself around Alcott like an anaconda,” Emerson wrote later. “You could hear poor Alcott’s bones crunch.”16 Nevertheless, Alcott’s “Conversations” continued to draw audiences in and around Boston for decades.

  For a while, Bronson flirted with the idea of joining Brook Farm, a commune in nearby Roxbury that was just starting up and had already enlisted Nathaniel Hawthorne. But Brook Farm’s founder, George Ripley, required a down payment that the Alcotts didn’t have. Bronson had some talks with Emerson about starting a university in Concord, but that idea didn’t pan out either. Another small Utopian community in Providence, Rhode Island, invited the Alcotts to join. Led by Christopher Greene, a young man who did not believe in private property, this community had taken Bronson Alcott as one of their figureheads. Bronson visited, but he declined their offer. In the meantime, the family grew hungrier and poorer with every day. In December, Abba’s Aunt Hannah came to visit and was shocked by the destitution in which the Alcotts lived. There was no money for necessities and little to eat but sugar, bread, potatoes, apples, and squash.

  If Bronson Alcott was always living on a bet, the odds dictated that he occasionally win. This time help came from England, where his books about the Temple School had started an education movement that had been prospering even as he and his family had been starving. Harriet Martineau, one of the sharp-tongued critics of the Temple School back in 1837, had taken Record of a School and the fateful Conversations with Children on the Gospels home to England with her, where they had been met with excitement and investment.

  James Pierrepont Greaves, a former merchant who had studied under Pestalozzi—the same Swiss educational reformer who had been Bronson Alcott’s inspiration—had started a school in Ham Common, Surrey. When he read Alcott’s two books, he knew he had found someone who agreed with him. Eventually he wrote Alcott an admiring thirty-page letter about his educational principles, and soon he renamed his school Alcott House. Alcott House became a thriving success. In his letters to Concord, Greaves urged Alcott to visit the school that bore his name and carried out his ideas and to meet its headmaster, Henry Gardiner Wright. How could he resist? Alcott’s desperation and Greaves’s and Wright’s admiration obscured their many differences. The Englishmen were businessmen, merchants, and financiers whose money was certainly thrilling for Alcott. They were not overly concerned with philosophy and had far more practical ends than Bronson could ever accept. Even in the matter of the essential nature of children, there were sharp disagreements. Men of Alcott House clung to a belief in the dark side of human nature, and they believed that children were born with the shadow of some kind of original sin. This, of course, was the opposite of the real Alcott’s beliefs about children, with their Wordsworthian clouds of glory.

  There were other disagreements beneath the surface admiration the Alcott House men felt for Alcott. The school had recently almost been disbanded after a scandal caused by a former parlor maid who ended up as the pregnant wife of Henry Wright. Two of the founders had many problems with women; one, Charles Lane, was in divorce court for three years and currently had custody of his nine-year-old son, William. Their solution to the problem of sex was celibacy. For the men of Alcott House, women were nothing more than temptation, and family was regarded as a myth propagated by those who would distract them from the business of reform and education. Bronson, of course, equated family with God, and his marriage and sex life were sometimes close to a religion for him. But in the heat of the moment, all differences seemed small. As the winter set in, Alcott began planning a trip to England and figuring out how to raise the $500 he would need for the trip.

  Emerson, asked for help by Bronson for the umpteenth time, balked. In the 1830s he had been enchanted by Alcott’s teaching and Alcott’s freedom. Now Alcott was a neighbor, a pen
sioner, and a needy friend. Alcott, he had come to think, was only truly interested in Alcott. The examples Alcott used to illustrate his ideas always came from his own life, and he seemed ready to abandon everything, even his wife and children, in order to pursue some new idea that was based on nothing more than some high-flown language. “This noble genius discredits genius to me,”17 Emerson wrote.

  Then in January of 1842, Emerson’s life changed again forever, shattered by more losses than he could have imagined. The first tragedy struck the Thoreau family at a time when Henry was living happily at the Emersons’. A few days after the New Year, John Thoreau, Henry’s beloved older brother, cut his finger with his straight razor while shaving. He thought it was nothing. By the time Concord’s doctor looked at the swollen hand a few days later, it was too late to do anything about the tetanus that had taken over John’s body. Henry left the Emersons to nurse his brother, who was raving and in terrible pain. He died in Henry’s arms. Thoreau, after burying his only brother, seemed to have some kind of breakdown. He also thought he was suffering from tetanus. Slowly he recovered.