Louisa May Alcott

by Susan Cheever

  Then later in January, Emerson once again was faced with an unthinkable loss when his five-year-old son Waldo contracted scarlet fever. Three days later, the boy was dead, and Emerson grieved fiercely. “All his wonderful beauty could not save him,” he wrote to his beloved Aunt Mary Moody Emerson. “My boy, my boy is gone. Fled out of my arms like a dream.”18 That morning the young Louisa dropped by the Emerson house to see if Waldo was feeling better. She never forgot the broken man who answered the door. Gaunt and grey, Emerson was almost unrecognizable when he told Louisa that his son was dead.

  After two dreadful deaths and two wrenching funerals, Alcott’s needs seemed less burdensome to Emerson. The Alcotts too had lost a son a few years earlier, a boy who had only lived a few minutes but whose birthday was a memorial to him for the rest of Abba Alcott’s life. Bronson had been given the sad job of taking the baby’s body to the May family plot at the Granary Burying Ground in Boston, near the Temple School. Now, Alcott himself seemed to be in deep trouble. By 1840, he had four girls, a wife whose father had practically disowned her, at least as far as the present was concerned, and who had recently suffered a miscarriage. As always, in spite of her own hard life, Abba Alcott was worried about her brilliant husband. “If his body don’t fail, his mind will,” she wrote to her brother.

  In Concord, as the awful winter wore on, Emerson’s old friend Alcott the Hoper seemed less burdensome and cranky. So amid all this grief, only two weeks after the death of his beloved son, Emerson offered Alcott the $500 he needed for a summer at Alcott House in England. He added a letter of introduction to Thomas Carlyle in London, a man whom Emerson had met and also revered. Alcott was thrilled. Once again his hoping had been proved to be correct. “My passage is paid,” he exulted in a letter to his wife back in Concord the night before he sailed from Boston to Southampton on the small ship the Rosalind on May 7, 1842. “The ten sovereigns are in my red pocketbook, with the bill of exchange for twenty pounds on Baring Brothers & Co.”19 With many letters of introduction and his charm set to stun, Bronson Alcott descended on a London where the reform movement was at its height. Here was a Connecticut Yankee with money in his pocket, letters from the smartest men in America, and a way of listening enraptured by the speaker’s ideas. Back in Concord, Bronson’s brother Junius moved into the Hosmer Cottage to help with the family.

  Bronson would be away for six months of the three years the Alcott family spent in the Hosmer Cottage, and these were months—four of them summer months—which Louisa enjoyed to the fullest. They were months of taking walks with Thoreau, who told her that the cobwebby way the dew formed on the Concord grass in the morning was really handkerchiefs left by fairies, and months of going for long lazy rides in Thoreau’s hand-built boat. As they swished down the shallow river, the landscape seemed to come alive when Thoreau pointed out the way the scarlet tanagers lit up the scene, or a great horned owl perched on a log in a way that made it look just like a branch, or a heron stood on one impossibly thin leg in the middle of a sandbar waiting for fish. Louisa was ten years old going on eleven. She was a girl who had experienced some of the most severe deprivation imaginable and plenty of what we now might call abuse, but she was also being schooled in one of the most beautiful places on earth by some of the greatest minds of the century.

  Bronson was delighted by London, where he met Carlyle and was feted by the growing leaders of the reform movement. He was even more enchanted by the school at Ham Common named after him. “A week’s stay in this abode of divine purposes and loveliest charities, has quite restored me to a good degree of health and vivacity,”20 Bronson wrote home. Everyone he met pleased him. Visiting the school seemed like a “return home”; it was like being back at the Temple School, he wrote. Unfortunately his principal admirer, James Greaves, had died in the interim, but there were many other admirers to take his place. The men Bronson met—Henry Gardiner Wright, the headmaster of Alcott House, and Charles Lane, one of its backers—seemed to understand him as he had never before been understood.

  Transformed from an obscure, small-town failure, a debtor, and an object of mockery in Concord to a progressive hero in London, Bronson Alcott could hardly believe his luck. “Providentially I was directed hither,” he wrote home. Then he referred to a new plan that may have caused sharp ambivalence in his wife and daughters. “Next week we have a meeting of those who are waiting for a new order of things, and this new plantation in America is the topic among others for discourse.”21 Bronson, who had perhaps wisely turned down the possibility of living in other men’s Utopias, was now sufficiently confident to imagine that he might start his own. How he could have thought that the problematic Henry Wright and Charles Lane and his son could blend in with his own boisterous family in a tiny cottage in a remote Massachusetts village is hard to imagine. But Bronson, as always, hoped for the best.

  So on September 28, 1842, Alcott; Wright, who left his wife and baby behind because of the difficulty of the voyage; and Charles Lane, his son, and his life savings, all set sail on the ship Leland. They were headed for Boston with the intention of founding a New Eden, Bronson Alcott’s personal Utopia, which he now called the Consociate Society.

  At first the great adventure of a personal Utopia created with someone else’s money, the third such great adventure of her father’s in Louisa’s ten years, seemed to go well. Soon enough the little Hosmer Cottage was far too small for the fan club Bronson brought with him. Loyal Emerson had faithfully called at the Hosmer Cottage and invited Wright and Lane to stay in his larger house. They moved into Emerson’s house, but they were back within a week. Lane apparently needed to be the man in charge. The Alcotts allowed him to control them; Emerson did not. Emerson slowly came to dislike the two Englishmen, calling them the “two cockerels.” Lane and Alcott’s plans were a subtle undermining of the community Emerson had imagined he was building in Concord.

  As the days grew colder and night came sooner and sooner—and New England winters are brutal—the Hosmer Cottage seemed to shrink. The despotic Lane had become a power in the household, usurping the Alcott parents. Lane was the only one of them who had any money, and this may have contributed to the way Abba and Bronson turned their children over to a regimen of cold baths at 6 A.M., enforced music lessons, study under Mr. Lane, and very little time for running free and indulging in play.

  “Circumstances most cruelly drive me from the enjoyment of my domestic life,” Abba Alcott wrote in her journal in November after a few months under the rule of Charles Lane. “I am almost suffocated in this atmosphere of restriction and gloom . . . perhaps I feel it more after five months of liberty.”22 If these men were to establish a Utopia, they were off to a bad start. Lane and Alcott began looking for a place in which they might begin a new world order.

  Henry Wright was the first defector. At first he had seemed to be missing the wife and baby he had left behind in England, but at a reform meeting he went to with Lane and Alcott, he met a woman named Mary Gove. Mary Gove had been married to an older man whom she despised and had devoted her life to demonstrating for feminist and reform causes. For her it was love at first sight. Soon enough the handsome former headmaster of Alcott House was gone, moved to the parlor of Mary Gove’s parents’ house in Lynn, leaving his devotion to the future of mankind behind him.

  Bronson Alcott’s authority was being questioned in his own family, the one place where he had always had a natural and absolute authority. Although less crowded with Wright gone, the Hosmer Cottage atmosphere seemed to breed delusions. Writing of an Edenic, Utopian community, Alcott had speculated, “Providence seems to have ordained the United States of America, more especially New England, as the field wherein this idea is to be realized in actual experience.”

  The Transcendentalist idea of God, a God who can be found in the song of the thrush or the smile of a friend or the innocent question of a child, was profoundly revolutionary in times when most people felt that God was located firmly in churches, the Bible, and perhap
s in an unimaginable afterlife.

  But destabilizing God seems to have occasionally been too much for Bronson Alcott; at the Temple School it was the Gospels, taught with a portrait of Jesus at his back that started the trouble. Now, in search of his own earthly kingdom, Alcott seemed to get loonier and loonier. He refused to pay his taxes—much as his friend Thoreau would do two years later—and was arrested by a local official, Sam Staples, who held him in jail until a neighbor bailed him out.

  In theory, Bronson Alcott and his family were embarked on the dream of a harmonious community. In practice, they were living in a Yankee version of a banana republic ruled by a petty despot who decreed that plates were a silly luxury, so the family meal of apples and bread was eaten off napkins. Lane also commanded that no one should eat cheese or milk or sugar, and that the family must continue to feed a poor neighbor family even when their own stomachs were growling. Abba Alcott was treated like a servant, responsible for arranging laundry and housekeeping. Then in the evenings, she was expected to listen to Mr. Lane lecturing on the barbarism of the family unit and the predatory nature of women and the evil intoxications of maternal love. Lane decided that he would write for The Dial. The dark Hosmer parlor was often filled with men eating Abba Alcott’s thrifty cooking, messing up the place, and furiously talking to Charles Lane and planning the future.

  Lane and Alcott were part of a movement called Associationism, which originated in France with a philosopher named Charles Fourier. Fourier had laid out very specific plans for communities in which people’s best selves would enable them to thrive in an atmosphere of new freedoms and a closer connection with the land. The Hosmer parlor was often crowded with men who might live in the New Eden once it was established: one Mr. Larned who had lived for a year on crackers and another year on apples, and another man who had just been released from an insane asylum, where he had been unjustly imprisoned by his relatives, he said.

  Since their marriage, Abba Alcott had been steadfast in supporting her husband. No matter what her husband had done, no matter how often her father warned her away, no matter what her feelings about moving from Germantown to Boston and Boston to Concord in order to accommodate her husband’s dreams, Abba Alcott had always believed in Bronson Alcott’s genius. Abba hadn’t forgotten their courtship, his reticence and the happiness of their connection at a time when she had been all but relegated to the disenfranchised class of Boston spinster. He still dazzled her with his confident looks, his surprising ideas, and his profound moral sense.

  Abba and Bronson had a deep connection that would not be severed, but it could be altered. Now, jammed into a tiny isolated cottage with an interloper who despised her and everything she stood for, Abba’s feelings began to shift. Her father’s last wish had been to separate his money from Bronson’s dreams. Torn between two powerful charismatic men, Abba wavered. Whatever she thought of her husband, Abba did not like being contemptuously bossed around by Charles Lane. Things got so bad that on Christmas Eve of 1842, Abba walked out of the Hosmer Cottage and headed for Boston, leaving her four daughters and husband behind. This was the first time that the pressure of Bronson’s associates drove Abba out of her own home, but it was not to be the last. In good times, her passionate marriage to Bronson superseded Abba Alcott’s devotion to her children. In bad times her anger and disappointment with her husband also eclipsed her obligations to her four daughters.

  Abba’s departure was a domestic disaster. Without her, there was no one to care for the children or cook or do the laundry and keep house, all chores which Abba had been doing with no thanks and little respect. Charles Lane took it upon himself to visit the May family in Boston, where Abba had retreated for comfort. Lane charmed the family. Bronson then sat down and wrote a pleading letter to his wife. It worked, and after the New Year, Abba returned to the Hosmer Cottage. Lane treated her with much more respect, writing her persuasive and loving notes, but there was still no question that he had taken over the running of the house and family from its rightful masters. Bronson, a natural autocrat, was somehow in thrall to Lane, perhaps because of his money, perhaps because of his experience, and perhaps because Lane claimed to be a fervent admirer of all things Alcott.

  The misery at the Hosmer Cottage that winter also had a profound effect on the lively, irrepressible Louisa. She began to write. On her tenth birthday at the end of November, as the leaves left the trees naked and the cold settled in for good, as the ponds froze over and the wind began to feel like an enemy, her mother gave her a pencil case. Forced inward by Mr. Lane’s restrictions and the crowded unhappiness around her, she started with poetry and soon enough began creating a series of gorgeous fantasy tales that she and her sisters would act out when Mr. Lane permitted it. When a child is ten, adult behavior appears to be mysterious, but it is sharply noticed and remembered. Until this winter, whatever else had happened, her father had been the authority in the family and her mother his fan, his believer, and his biggest supporter. As this family constellation began to shift and the family power leeched away from Bronson Alcott into the hands of a stranger, a normal child might respond with anxiety and fear. Louisa began her career as a storyteller. In her stories, for the first time, she christened the Alcotts “the pathetic family.”

  As soon as the ground began to thaw, Alcott and Lane started looking at possible places where they might re-establish their new world order. They traveled to Lincoln and Milton and Roxbury, and finally in May, Mr. Lane found what he had apparently been looking for: the Wyman Farm in Harvard, Massachusetts, twelve miles west of Concord, a place that made the isolated Hosmer Cottage seem like an urban hub. The farm, with its run-down house and outbuildings, was on a hillside that had a lovely view from the top and not much else. The soil that would feed the colonists in their new world was rocky and sour; there were no roads in the vicinity of the house, and no neighbors close by.

  Lane bought the place on May 20, and the deed was signed on May 25. Lane and Bronson named it Fruitlands, and the family started packing to leave Concord. For once, Emerson refused to help financially. In spite of her increasing doubts, Abba Alcott followed her husband’s lead. It was a long way from following the man who had recently been the toast of Boston, the educator of the children of the families with whom she had grown up while living in Federal Court, but Abba went willingly one last time. This would be the last time the Alcott family moved in pursuit of an idea. Until Fruitlands, Abba and Bronson had been united in their dreams of educational reform, community reform, and even new ways of raising their children. After Fruitlands the family would change from being devoted to ideals to being devoted to survival. Bronson’s high-mindedness would continue, but instead of supporting him emotionally, the women around him had to focus on supporting him and themselves financially.

  On an unseasonably cold June 1, 1843, the family packed up their books and the ubiquitous bust of Socrates that had once overlooked the triumphant Temple School and had failed to sell at the auction of the school’s effects. Mr. Lane paid off some of the family debts to the villagers of Concord. Abba’s brother Sam was persuaded to sign a note for $300 for remaining debts and to become a trustee of Fruitlands, and everything was loaded into a horse-drawn carriage for the trip west.

  3

  Fruitlands. Family in Crisis.

  1843–1848

  Good biography scrupulously sticks to the facts. These facts are found in libraries and archives where journals and letters are kept—primary sources, and in other biographies and published books—secondary sources. Yet in spite of this necessary limitation, in spite of the facts, every biography has a story imposed on the facts by the biographer: Bronson Alcott was a genius who loved his girls but couldn’t manage to make a living, or Bronson Alcott was a punitive father who traumatized his daughters. Both are true according to the facts. Little Women is a great novel, the pouring forth of yearning and talent that came together for a mature woman at the height of her creative power, or Little Women was written by a w
riter who had caved into intense and accumulated financial pressure.

  In its own way, biography is more imaginative than the novel and more intimate than memoir. Every biographer reads letters, journals, contemporary accounts, and other biographies to discover the story of their subject’s life. Then they illustrate the story they have imagined using the facts that fit. To me the story of Louisa May Alcott is the story of how a woman finds her place in the world. How can women choose between love and work, or should they gamble that they can have both?

  There are many biographies of Louisa May Alcott, Bronson Alcott, Abba Alcott, and of the Alcott family. They are piled next to me as I write, bristling with the Post-its I use for notations. As I read them again and again, I come on different versions of events. One biographer will take a letter out of context and move it ten years forward so that its meaning is altered. Another will speculate openly, while a third lines up facts in a way that suggests a different conclusion. Even autobiography is storytelling; facts chosen can manipulate the narrative as powerfully as facts imagined manipulate the narrative of a fictional story.

  Nowhere is this malleability of actual events more evident than in various biographers’ descriptions of what happened to Louisa May Alcott and her family between June 1843 and January 1844 when Louisa was ten and eleven and they traveled with the Englishman Charles Lane and his son to a remote farm in Harvard, Massachusetts. Thirty years after the fact, Louisa wrote Transcendental Wild Oats, a cheeky, eloquent account of the time between June 1, when the family arrived on a beautiful hillside with a group of colonists and high hopes, to January 6, when they hastily decamped to rented rooms in a neighbor’s already crowded house in the tiny crossroads nearby called Still River. Her account features a Charles Lane–like tyrant, Timon Lion, and a Bronson Alcott–like follower and patriarch, Abel Lamb.1