Margaret Fuller

by Megan Marshall

  On nights like this Margaret “concentrated on our relation as never before.” “It seems to me not only peculiar but original,” she wrote to James Nathan, feeling more certain that “indeed there are soul realities,” with “mein liebster” at a safe distance. “I have never had one at all like it, and I do not read things in the poets or anywhere that more than glance at it.” She could feel James Nathan’s thoughts “growing in my mind . . . your stronger organization has at times almost transfused mine.” There had been “moments when our minds were blended in one,” and this “unison” beat “like a heart within me.” She had given him Shelley to read, but there is “no poem like the poem we can make for ourselves”: “is it not by living such relations that we bring a new religion, establishing nobler freedom for all?” How hard Margaret worked to persuade herself—and James Nathan—of their disembodied “unison.” As she wrote in a Tribune essay that July, titled “Clairvoyance,” on the “wonderful powers” of the mind, “time and space” may yet be “annihilated” so that “lovers may be happy.”

  In late July, Margaret finally received a packet of letters from James Nathan, only to learn that “the affair that has troubled you so long” had found no “definitive and peaceful issue” —the “poor maiden” was yet to be settled elsewhere. Worse, James Nathan appeared to have no thought of coming back to America. Margaret struggled to temper the language of her return letters. “Now is the crisis,” she informed him; he must “find a clear path” out of his entanglement. She appreciated, at least, the “tender and elevated” tone of his letters, which allowed her to hope “we [may] ever keep pure and sweet the joys that have been given.” Adopting Margaret’s own theory for the moment, James Nathan had assured her that “the precious certainty of spiritual connexion” was “worth great sacrifices,” and theirs would “bear the test of absence.” If she was indeed so much in his thoughts, Margaret responded, he must make note of the precise dates and times. Then they would compare notes and see whether there was a simultaneous “rush of our souls to meet . . . as used to be the case.” Yet, in retrospect, James Nathan’s sudden departure now seemed to her “sad and of evil omen.”

  Margaret begged him to have his portrait taken for her as a keepsake, preferably “a good miniature on ivory”—“but do not have it taken at all unless it can be excellent.” If he didn’t return, what would she do with Josey, who shook salt water all over Margaret’s pretty dresses and whose eyes seemed to be infected? The dog would need someone else to walk him. Margaret had not tramped in the woods since James Nathan left; she refused to climb the low wall that he had always lifted her across. Would he never return to take her in his arms again?

  Rather than walk in the woods, Margaret had been visiting the new Female Refuge in the city, established by Rebecca Spring and other women of the Prison Association to help former prisoners find work after their release. “I like them better than most women I meet,” Margaret wrote darkly to James Nathan of the inmates. “They m[ake] no false pretensions, nor cling to shadows,” though she suspected they hid from her the “painful images that must haunt their lonely hours.” When she wrote in her journal several months later that the year 1845 “has rent from me all I cherished, but . . . I have lived at last not only in rapture but in fact,” Margaret had in mind both her love for James Nathan and her encounters as journalist and volunteer with lives harder than her own.

  Margaret had delayed her New England vacation, once planned for July, in order to receive her first letters from James Nathan as soon as they reached New York. But when only one “cold and scanty” missive followed the July packet in late August, she made arrangements to travel north to Cambridge and Concord in early fall. Waldo had made a short but satisfactory visit to Margaret in Turtle Bay in June while staying with his brother on Staten Island. That autumn at Concord, however, “our moods did not match.” Waldo was “with Plato”—preparing his lectures on “Representative Men”—Margaret wrote afterward to Anna Ward, and “I was with the instincts.” Did she have Sam’s letter on Platonic affection still in mind?

  Cary Sturgis was increasingly occupied with a new beau—William Aspinwall Tappan, a wealthy New Yorker who had caught Waldo’s fancy two years earlier. Waldo had published a poem by Tappan in one of the last issues of The Dial, but mostly he enjoyed the young man’s company. Tappan spoke “seldom but easily & strongly,” Waldo approved, and he “moves like a deer.” Cary had taken an interest simply “because he is the greatest unknown to me now.” She would marry Tappan in 1847 and move with him to Highwood, a country estate on property owned by Sam Ward in the Berkshires; they were still mysterious to each other, but the match satisfied Waldo, who had done everything he could to push them together, no longer able to tolerate the fascination Cary held for him at close range.

  Over the summer, Henry Thoreau had built a small log cabin on land Waldo Emerson had recently purchased at Walden Pond to preserve the wooded acreage, and he had been living alone there since July. Ellen and Ellery Channing had moved into a new house on the outskirts of town at Punkatasset, leaving Ellen “very lonely and unhelped,” and Margaret worrying, “for she is to have another little one in Spring.” Two-year-old Margaret Fuller Channing—Greta—would soon be joined by a sister, the infant Caroline Sturgis Channing.

  The presence most palpable to Margaret that fall was Timothy Fuller’s. On the tenth anniversary of her father’s death, she wrote to James Nathan at “just about [the] time he left us and my hand closed his eyes.” Sitting at her writing desk, Margaret stared at that hand, which since that day “has done so much”: edited a literary journal for which she had supplied more articles than anyone else, written two books and nearly one hundred newspaper pieces. Her writing hand seemed “almost a separate mind.”

  “It is a pure hand thus far from evil,” Margaret was glad to say, and “it has given no false tokens of any kind,” unlike (she grew more certain of it by the day) James Nathan’s hand. “My father,” she asked, “from that home of higher life you now inhabit, does not your blessing still accompany the hand that hid the sad sights of this world from your eyes”?

  A decade earlier, before his death, Margaret had suffered under Timothy’s stern authority, so accustomed to his failure to express his affection that—until the fortunate moment when she had been so ill, just before his sudden last sickness—she had burst into tears over the unexpected benediction. Perhaps this history with her living father, rather than Timothy’s premature death, was the source of the “childishness” that drove her to seek Platonic relations with men whose affection flickered just beyond her reach.

  But now she wondered whether her father’s blessing did “still accompany” her. Margaret asked the question of “my friend” James Nathan—no longer mein liebster. She gave the answer herself: “I think it does. I think he thus far would bless his child.”

  • VI •

  EUROPE

  George Sand

  Adam Mickiewicz

  Giovanni Angelo Ossoli

  17

  Lost on Ben Lomond

  WHEREVER SHE WENT, HE FAILED TO APPEAR. THAT WAS the troubling undercurrent of Margaret’s first weeks traveling abroad with her New York friend Rebecca Spring and her husband, Marcus, both reform-minded Quakers, and their nine-year-old son, Eddie, for whom Margaret served as tutor. (The Springs’ younger child, Jeanie, had been left behind with relatives.) Margaret could not have made the trip without accepting the generous terms of the governess position, which covered meals and lodging as well as her fare on the Cunard steamer Cambria in a record-setting Atlantic crossing of ten and a half days in early August 1846. Horace Greeley helped support the venture too, paying Margaret his highest rates and advancing her $120 on fifteen dispatches, which she initially titled breezily, “Things and Thoughts in Europe.” With no fanfare, she had become America’s first female foreign correspondent. Margaret continued to sign her columns with the distinctive yet anonymous star, intent simply on writing up the best mater
ial she could find and branding it with her own increasingly “radical” sensibility—a term she began to use as a badge of honor as she established bonds with Europe’s freethinking exiles and activists.

  Margaret no longer expected dramatic personal gains from spending a year in Great Britain and the Continent. She’d given up her dream of the life-altering grand tour she had envisioned a decade earlier in the company of young Sam Ward and the cosmopolitan Farrars, which “would have given my genius wings.” At thirty-six, Margaret believed her “mind and character” were already “too much formed” through “a liberal communion with the woful struggling crowd of fellow men.” She had instead worked for a living and reaped the “fruits of spiritual knowledge” these past ten years, seeking common cause with the laborer, the immigrant, the prostitute. Still, traveling with the Springs, who were comrades as well as companions, to survey the Old World’s prisons, manufactories, shipyards, and schools as well as museums, monuments, castles, and cathedrals, would “add to my stores of knowledge” and allow Margaret to expand her role as conductor of information and ideas in the “great mutual system of interpretation” she had joined two years earlier as a columnist for the New-York Tribune. “If I persevere, there is nothing to hinder my having an important career even now,” she wrote to Sam and Anna Ward, describing her travel plans and looking back on the old missed opportunity. “But it must be in the capacity of a journalist, and for that I need this new field of observation.”

  The one romantic notion about the journey that Margaret permitted herself was the hope of reestablishing ties with James Nathan, who had not returned to New York as originally promised. Even before the Springs made their offer, Margaret had begun looking for ways to cross the Atlantic to search him out. Despite his infrequent and sometimes indifferent correspondence, she still felt, for days at a time, “a desire for you that amount[s] almost to anguish,” she wrote to him in the spring of 1846, when four months had passed without a letter. She recalled their “reconciliation” after the breach of the previous April and sent him a sprig of the flowering myrtle she had given him that dreadful day when “we seemed to be separated for ever. But we were not.” Now she begged to know, “Where are you? What are you doing?” Margaret had done all she could to prove her constancy—“retouching” several of his travelogues to meet the Tribune’s standards and mailing them back to him once they were in print, supplying more letters of introduction, even monitoring Josey’s care from afar as she moved into boarding-house rooms in the city during the winter of 1845–46 to escape the increasingly fractious Greeley marriage and the riverbank scenery that reminded her so vividly of James Nathan. Josey, she mourned in one letter, would “never be the intelligent and fine creature he might, if you had not left him.” Should she find a way to ship the dog to his master?

  But with her travel plans in place, Margaret let Josey go to the new occupants of the Greeleys’ Turtle Bay house when Mary Greeley left with Arthur for a curative stay in Brattleboro, Vermont, and Horace moved into town for the summer. Indeed, as she wrote to Cary Sturgis, with whom she managed to be both forthright and self-dramatizing, “I am going to let everything go in this world and scud where the wind drives.” She would not let even Ellery Channing’s most recent abandonment of Ellen worry her too much. Ellery, who seemed to step out ahead of Margaret at every turn, had set off for Rome in early March, well before Ellen’s second pregnancy had come to term, claiming his peace of mind depended on reaching the Eternal City in time for Easter and asking Margaret to arrange for him to print his commentaries in the Tribune; he would stay for just sixteen days before turning back to Concord, “full of distaste for all things foreign.” Still, Ellery felt he’d gathered enough material to write a book, a fanciful dialogue called Conversations in Rome: Between an Artist, a Catholic, and a Critic, published a year later and scarcely noticed by any but his ever faithful partisan Waldo Emerson.

  Although Margaret was careful to keep her desires a secret, she had reason to believe that her own winds of fortune might drive her into James Nathan’s arms once more. In July, a month before her departure on the Cambria, she received a letter written from Hamburg in which James Nathan promised to leave word in London as to his whereabouts—perhaps even travel there himself—“and then thanks to god! in all probability shall we meet either there or here.” He also asked her help in finding a publisher for a book based on his recent travels in the Near East. Eagerly, Margaret consulted with Horace Greeley and reported her employer’s willingness to consider a manuscript, if “brief and vivid” and “repeat[ing] no information” from other travel books. She passed along Greeley’s warning that Nathan could expect little remuneration, “as your name is not known as a writer,” then closed her letter with the advisory “I will expect to find a good letter, if not yourself in London, early in September.”

  Margaret’s own standing as an author had risen even higher in the year since James Nathan left New York City. Woman in the Nineteenth Century appeared in a London edition in England, she was delighted to learn, when she received a copy of the finished book, handsomely bound as a volume in the Clarke’s Cabinet Library series. No international copyright laws protected American authors, so she would gain nothing from sales of this pirated edition, but Margaret was nonetheless “very glad to find it will be read by women there,” she wrote to her brother Richard—all the more so, once she decided to follow her book to England. To her frustration, Greeley’s business partner Thomas McElrath—narrow-minded and known to be a “close calculator” —was stalling on a second edition of the book in the United States, but the impasse helped Margaret decide to accept the offer of her friend Evert Duyckinck to publish a selection of her Dial and Tribune essays with the New York firm Wiley and Putnam.

  In the last hectic days before boarding the Cambria, she haggled with John Wiley about which essays to include. Wiley deemed several of her choices too controversial on religious grounds, particularly her favorable review of a volume by Shelley, a known atheist. Margaret shot back: “The attractive force of my mind consists in its energy, clearness and I dare to say it, its catholic liberality and fearless honor. Where I make an impression it must be by being most myself.” Holding to her own views would draw a “sufficient and always growing sympathy” in her readers, she insisted. Margaret had discovered this by writing ever more biting editorials—arguing in favor of suffrage for black New Yorkers in “What Fits a Man to Be a Voter?” and against capital punishment in “Darkness Visible”—without costing the Tribune any readers. Yet because of time and space constraints, Papers on Literature and Art was shorter and less fully representative of Margaret’s “catholic” interests than she would have liked, though it appeared in print just in time to serve as a calling card in literary drawing rooms on the other side of the Atlantic.

  The harbor at Liverpool, where most commercial as well as passenger vessels like the Cambria docked after an Atlantic crossing, dwarfed even New York City’s teeming waterfront. Margaret found the miles of piers “slower, solider,” but no “less truly active . . . than at home,” she wrote in her first Tribune letter from abroad, searching from the outset for signs of both difference and commonality to support her comparative observations. The problems of industrialization had gripped the Old World in advance of the New, she understood, and sending home “packages of seed”—ideas ripe for transplant to American soil—would be a large part of her self-appointed mission as correspondent, as she’d written in her “Farewell” column for the Tribune. Margaret and the Springs merged their literary and reform agendas to devise a schedule that included, in their first “nine days of wonder,” tours of the Mechanics Institutes at Liverpool and Manchester—adult education centers providing night classes and libraries for working men and women—as well as audiences with Harriet Martineau, the young Matthew Arnold, and the aged William Wordsworth in their Lake District retreats.

  Wordsworth, in his “florid, fair old age,” was more beloved by his neighbors for hi
s kindness than for his poetry, Margaret learned by quizzing her innkeeper, and Wordsworth himself seemed to value the pastoral environs of Ambleside and Grasmere as much for their distance from “the real wants of England and the world . . . the cry of men in the jaws of destruction”—the mill and mine workers of the English Midlands, the beggars of London and Glasgow—as for the rugged landscape that had drawn him there decades earlier. Even the peaceable Lake District shopkeepers, Margaret reported, wished the seventy-six-year-old poet laureate would take a stand in the parliamentary debates on the protectionist Corn Laws or on the Factories Act, which aimed to limit working hours of women and children to ten per day. Disappointed that Wordsworth was no crusading Byron—nor, for that matter, an Emerson, who had, when prevailed upon, written his 1838 letter to President Van Buren decrying the Cherokee removal and spoken against slavery in an 1844 address in Concord—Margaret wished that he had at least settled in a “more romantic” setting than his Rydal Mount cottage, with its neat avenue of hollyhocks. The house and grounds seemed to her “merely the retirement of a gentleman, rather than the haunt of a Poet.”