Instead, Hirschhorn and Greaves propose that Louisa May Alcott was suffering from some kind of immune disease, probably systemic lupus erythematosus, a disease that attacks nerves, skin, bones, and joints and causes migraine headaches. Their evidentiary pièce de résistance is an 1870 portrait of Alcott that shows the characteristic malar, or butterfly, rash of lupus. It’s a nice idea, but I have looked often at the same portrait, and I do not see what they see.
All of this brings up the question of how history and biography are best understood. Is it possible, for instance, to argue that Louisa May Alcott’s friend Henry David Thoreau was homosexual? Does it matter if he was? Is it interesting to catalogue Alcott’s various physical symptoms, push aside the way she explained them, and how she thought of them and come up with a more “informed,” or at least more modern medical diagnosis? And what of the mental states of the men and women we study when we study biography? Is it important to know that Ulysses S. Grant was an alcoholic, that Ralph Waldo Emerson suffered from acute senile dementia in the last years of his life?
On the one hand, understanding the nineteenth century through the lens of twenty-first-century knowledge and understanding and research may throw more light on people we struggle to know because of their accomplishments. Their work speaks to us, and so we want to know who they were. We connect with them on the page and this makes us hunger to connect with them as people. Yet in our postcolonial world, there seems to be a kind of imperialism to this assumption that our context is the superior context. Instead of immersing ourselves in the context of Louisa May Alcott’s life, we drag her into our own as if what we know about illness, say, is far superior to what was known in 1865. This is true in many ways.
Are we doing our subjects a favor when we transpose them into the modern world? Do we really understand them better by imposing our own patterns of knowledge onto them? The purest biographers struggle to re-create the context of the times they write about; they take their subjects on their own terms. Biography is a shifting form, and more and more writers supplement what they can’t know—exactly what it felt like to live in 1864—with what they can know—exactly what it feels like to live in 2010. This can shed light on the hearts and minds of their characters, but it can also obscure them.
Certainly physical diagnoses are easier to make in retrospect than those of mental illness. Physical symptoms are relatively static, while mental reactions and behaviors are deeply influenced by the culture and the family and the historical context in which they happen. In Alcott’s case, the diagnoses out of context are further complicated by her status as an artist. What kind of abnormal perceptions of the world contribute to the making of art?
Alcott and her friends and inspirations Emerson and Thoreau were sharp exceptions to the modern observations that connect the creative impulse to excessive drinking and other kinds of self-destructive behavior. The American nineteenth-century writers, including Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Longfellow, were not a group of alcoholic womanizers, as some European and British writers at that time seemed to be and as some American writers later became. Many of the Concord group were vegetarians who leaned toward temperance. Nevertheless, their creative impulses may have been intertwined with abnormal mental states—Alcott’s manic vortices, for instance.
How are these states to be understood? Those who would label them, the English critic Charles Lamb wrote, are in error.
The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject but has dominion over it. . . . Where he seems most to recede from humanity, he will be found the truest to it. From beyond the scope of nature if he summon possible exigencies, he subjugates them to the law of her consistency.11
Moods is a failure in many ways, although it’s hard to discern from the surviving manuscripts what it may have been like in the original version. In the end, Alcott persisted in thinking that the problem with the novel was the cutting she had been urged to do in order to get it published. The shortened version seems to merge Alcott’s more serious writing—the lean informative paragraphs of Hospital Sketches—with her old habits of melodrama and sentimentality.
In Chapter 1, two lovers meet in a shadowy room after a red sunset in dangerous, romantic Cuba. Adam Warwick tells his fiancée Ottila that he wants his freedom. “If he had lifted his strong arm and struck her, it would not have daunted with such pale dismay. An instant she stood like one who saw a chasm widening before her, which she had no power to cross . . . she seized the imploring hands in a grasp that turned them white with its passionate pressure.” Shame burns Ottila’s dark cheek, ire flames up in her eyes, but she gives Adam leave to go. With its melodrama and inflated language, this chapter might as well have been written by A. M. Barnard for Frank Leslie.
Chapter 2 of Moods is worlds away in tone and content. In simple, cozy language, it introduces Sylvia Yule, a spirited young girl who has just secretly visited a neighbor’s garden and found herself browsing uninvited in his library. The neighbor is the older Geoffrey Moor, who will eventually persuade the young Sylvia to marry him. She agrees only because she is convinced that the man she truly loves—Adam Warwick—has gone away and married someone else and is never coming back.
Reading this novel, it’s hard not to hear the clanking of metaphysical machinery going on in the background. Having set up Sylvia as a ditzy young girl enraptured by Adam Warwick, Alcott has to make Geoffrey Moor gentlemanly and intellectual but in no way an object of passion. At first Sylvia turns Moor down, and he vows to wait. Then Ottila herself shows up—wild and beautiful and just visiting from Cuba—and announces she’s engaged to Warwick. Then there is a series of misunderstandings that causes Sylvia to think Warwick has married someone else while she waited for him. Rejected and bereft, she throws herself into Moor’s waiting arms.
The two are married, and on their wedding trip they run into none other than Warwick, who has come at last to reclaim his true love—Sylvia. He feels the same way as she does—of course he does—but she is married to the man they both love and admire—the greathearted Geoffrey Moor. There is lots of arguing, tearing of hair, and gnashing of teeth before Warwick and Moor are both drowned in a dreadful shipwreck. Sylvia’s decision is tragically no longer necessary. The reader almost breathes a sigh of relief.
How can the writer who created the powerful, moving portraits of dying men at the Union Hospital in Hospital Sketches and then, a few years later, the iconic feminine figures that still define our world in Little Women, have written a trite, labored melodrama like Moods? The book is certainly support for the old writing adage to write what you know. In Hospital Sketches, Alcott was writing from experience, an experience in which the intrinsic drama was so great that she was able to find power in appearing to tone it down. Men dying, wounded, men trying to reach their families before the end, bravery in the face of intense physical and psychological suffering, all animated Alcott’s prose.
In Little Women, Alcott was also writing from experience, compressing years of difficult life into a few vividly remembered stories. The two books are suffused with real yearning, a yearning for a different kind of family, a yearning for a different kind of war, a fierce yearning for the extension of life itself. But the drama in Moods doesn’t ring true, and too often it slips into a weaker version of Alcott’s blood-and-thunder voice. Do writers know when they are writing well? In this case, the author herself loved the weakest book the best of the three.
At first, when Moods was finally published at Christmas in 1864, things seemed to go well. Loring ran out of the first printing of a hundred right away and had to bring out a second. In the meantime, Alcott’s reputation had grown enough so that the editor James Elliott offered to give her $75 instead of $50 if she allowed him to put
her real name on her latest blood-and-thunder story—“V.V.; or, Plots and Counterplots,” a lurid tale of another gorgeous woman with a black heart and the men she lures to their doom. Alcott turned him down. Even an extra $25 in a year when her total earnings were less than $300 was not enough to allow Louisa May Alcott to emerge from the hiding place provided by A. M. Barnard.
As January and February unfolded, the response to Moods became less ebullient. For the first time in her writing career, Louisa May Alcott found her work under attack. People she didn’t even know wrote her letters criticizing the book she loved so much. Sometimes she felt that readers had failed to understand her ideas because she had to shorten the book. “Moods is not what I meant to have it, for I followed bad advice & took out many things which explained my idea,” she wrote another editor, Moncure Daniel Conway, in February. “I see my mistake now for I find myself accused of Spiritualism, Free Love & all sorts of horrors.” Alcott was so upset and defensive at the reactions she got that by March she was even answering some of the critical letters from people she didn’t know. “Half the misery of our time arises from unmated pairs trying to live their legal lie decorously to the end at any cost,” she wrote one stranger, a Mr. Ayer. Later in the same letter, she switched defenses, asserting that the book is not about marriage at all but about “the effect of a moody person’s moods upon their life.”
Although the publication of Moods was painful, as her letter to Mr. Ayer shows, Alcott was swept away by what was happening in the world around her. In March 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated for the second time, and in April the Civil War came to an end. Alcott’s difficult spring was just one point of pain in perhaps the most painful months ever suffered by the United States of America. On March 4, as Alcott braced herself against criticisms of the book she loved the best, Washington, D.C., turned out for the inauguration.
If God is a storyteller and history is being written by a single intelligence, the events of March and April of 1865 suggest that He turned His computer over to Shakespeare for a while and went out to take a coffee break. The inaugural festivities started with bands and floats and the first companies of African-American Union troops.
Lincoln was not in his carriage; he was in the Senate Chamber preparing to give his second inaugural address, the speech of a lifetime. His words had to be powerful enough to reach both the victors in the war that had just claimed 600,000 lives and the bitterly defeated. For his new vice president, Lincoln had chosen a simple, eloquent speaker from Tennessee with a fervent devotion to the Union itself. A tailor by trade, and a former slaveholder, Andrew Johnson had not received the thorough investigation he might have at a moment when the president had less to do.
The pressures of an actual inauguration were apparently too much for this tailor from Tennessee. By the time he had entered the Senate Chamber to take the oath of office before a group that included the cabinet, the Senate, the Supreme Court justices, and Mrs. Lincoln, the fortifying whiskey he had probably been drinking all morning got the better of him. Standing before Chief Justice Salmon Chase to take the oath, Johnson instead launched into a drunken, obstreperous tirade. “Your President is a plebeian,” he began, “I am a plebeian—glory in it.” He berated the senators, who did not understand that they were only there because of the “little people.” Johnson continued almost incoherently. His captive audience began to whisper in horror. “There is something wrong,” said War Secretary Edwin Stanton. Attorney General James Speed closed his eyes. “Johnson is either drunk or crazy,” he murmured. About halfway through Johnson’s embarrassing display, President Lincoln entered the Senate Chamber holding his speech. As he left the chamber and walked out onto the Capitol steps to deliver his own address, Lincoln ordered those around him not to let Johnson outside.12
Lincoln’s speech was short, brilliant, and one of the finest speeches ever made. Schoolchildren still learn it by heart. Its clear phrases ring absolutely true. If the country could have been healed with words, Lincoln’s second inaugural might have done it. “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in.” Lincoln’s voice rang out over the crowds now bathed in afternoon sunlight, the crowds of freed slaves and their former owners, the crowds of wounded soldiers and their widows and orphans, the crowds including the freed slave and leader Frederick Douglass, who had a premonition of murder that day, the crowds including John Wilkes Booth, who later boasted of being within shooting range.
The war wound down. “Richmond taken on the 2,” Louisa May wrote in her journal at the beginning of April, “Hurrah!”13 A week later, it was over; after four years of war, General Robert E. Lee officially surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. As Lincoln had forecast in his inaugural, the terms of the surrender were generous. The Confederate soldiers were free to go home with their horses, and officers were allowed to keep their guns. Six days later, President Lincoln went to Ford’s Theater to see a comedy—Our American Cousin—and was mortally wounded by a shot fired at close range from southern patriot John Wilkes Booth. Concord and the rest of the nation were plunged into mourning. Six weeks after the inauguration, the eloquent, wise Lincoln was dead and Andrew Johnson was president.
Whatever went on in the world or in her own life, Alcott still nurtured an obsession with her first novel. The world may have had a mixed reaction to Moods, but she was not finished with it. In 1864 when it was first published, and in 1865 when reviews came in, she was in her early thirties, unworldly, a woman writing for the money to keep her family afloat. In 1882 her circumstances were entirely different. She was a middle-aged, wealthy, and well-respected writer, and she sat down and rewrote and restructured Moods yet again, trying to get it right once and for all. Moods was republished in 1882 in the new version. By that time, Alcott was a beloved mentor and writer for young girls, known for her cozy voice and stunning honesty. By that time, everything published under her name sold off the charts.
After the winter and spring of 1865, a dramatic time both for Louisa May Alcott and for the nation, one of Alcott’s dearest wishes came true, although not in the way she had imagined it. As the nation careered toward disaster and impeachment, Reconstruction and its dreadful backlash, a wealthy Boston shipowner decided his invalid daughter, Anna, should travel to Germany to take the waters. Nineteenth-century health spas featured mineral baths and massage, and some of the most desirable of these were in Germany and Austria. William Fletcher Weld, who had his own Black Flag fleet of barks and brigs and steamships, had heard that Louisa May Alcott had nursing experience, and he asked Alcott if she would go to Europe as Anna’s companion, embarking from Boston in July with Anna and her brother George, who would leave them at Liverpool.
Louisa had some doubts. She would be traveling as the paid servant of a pretty, wealthy, and querulous young girl—perhaps the nightmare of her service with the dreadful Richardson in New Hampshire flashed through her deciding mind. On the other hand, she was a thirty-two-year-old woman with wanderlust, who had never been outside of New England except for her memorable six weeks in Washington, D.C., during the war. The war was over now. Her career also seemed at a standstill. How could she resist a year of traveling abroad? So on July 18, she said her Concord good-byes and boarded the Fitchburg train for Boston. With passport stamped, she joined Anna Weld and her brother on board the steamship China, a packet of the Cunard line. On the morning of July 20 the China weighed anchor for the nine-day crossing to Liverpool, and Louisa watched as her world receded behind her, the hills of Boston fading in the distance.
At Liverpool the two women boarded a train for London at the Lime Street Station, and Louisa May Alcott began to believe that she was actually in another country, another world. Everything looked different. She was delighted by the neatness of the gardens and cottages of the English countryside. “Nothing was abrupt, nobody in a hurry, and nowhere did you see the de
sperately go ahead style of life that we have,” she wrote her father from London. “The very cows in America look fast, and the hens seem to cackle fiercely over their rights like strong minded old ladies; but here the plump cattle stand up to their knees in clover, with a reposeful air that is very soothing, and the fowls cluck contentedly as if their well disciplined minds accepted the inevitable spit with calm resignation, and the very engine instead of a shrill devil-may care yell, like ours, did its duty in one gruff snort, like a beefy giant with a cold in his head.”14
Writing is a craft like anything else. Much of it can be taught; practicing writing makes writing better. There are rules for good writing and ways of reading that foster good writing. At heart, though, there is a mystery to what brings sparkle and power to something as simple as a line of words on a page. Writers often write their best when they are feeling their worst. Sometimes subjects they would rather avoid elicit their finest prose. Writers rarely know what alchemy of time, place, and mood will find their truest voice. If they write every day, it’s because they do not know which days are the ones that count. Louisa May Alcott was no exception.
The prose she cared about the most, whether it was her essay about six weeks of servitude in New Hampshire—an essay marred by her own unexplored feelings—or a novel about a love triangle, seemed to be the writing that had the least power, the least fluidity, the least leverage over her readers’ hearts and minds. The writing she cared about the least, her letters home, is her best at this point in her life. Self-consciousness is one of the greatest enemies of good writing, and on this trip Alcott’s awareness that she was writing with a capital W seemed to fade.
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