THE INVISIBLE HAND
A bit of neatening, of course, and punctuation, the period, the comma. The taped text is always a great, gluey blob, and what is needed are sentences dry and separate as kernels of corn. A close reading of taped books suggests that the invisible hand is less busy than might be imagined. Punctuation, laying it out, pasting it up. The real labor of the books returns to the source, the wretched bulk of the testimony, the horror of its vast, stuttering scale. The collector is much impressed, and perhaps depressed, by the challenging magnitude. He has lifted it, sorted it, had secretaries hard at work to contain the monstrousness of what his machine has brought into being.
We notice the invariable publicity given to numbers: the thousands of pages, the millions of words, the long, long hours of interviewing, the large cast tracked down. The insistence upon number indicates that it is a validation. But a validation of what, of whom?
Tapes are what they are, no more and no less than themselves. They are the property of the speaker, even if he has freely surrendered his rights; surrendered or not, nothing belongs to the author. Excision, deletion, yes, and placement, the packaging of the property. It is accepted that the gibberish must be shaped up and, thereby, allowed to become itself, the speaker’s words made legible.
Additions are a moral problem. The author can receive his book as a liberal, in all senses, gift, but he cannot reciprocate, cannot in good faith add decorative phrasing and color as an advancement of the verbal interest and appeal of his given text. For the imaginative writer, wit and a pleasing intervention of adjective and image might be a natural temptation. But here the prohibition seems clear. The author’s own words in the mouth of an interviewed subject are artificial, illicit, a reverse and most peculiar form of plagiarism. There is little evidence that the compiler of talk feels this as a constraint. What is needed from time to time is the practical matter of emphasis, keeping the attention of the reader.
The Executioner’s Song is the apotheosis of our flourishing “oral literature” thus far. (To see it as Mailer’s best book, as many have done, is much too fast. Mailer is a river of words, ornamental, evocative words, and cascading notions and designs. There is no plainness, flatness in him, but there is, was, a lot, in the tapes.)
He—and Capote also in his different construction—had a plot and, through none of their devising, an adjunct in the death penalty. This publicly ordained ending from which there was no escape might have prompted Mailer to his most genuine contribution to the tale of Gary Gilmore. Mailer’s mark on the book is an accentual one. By accent, placement, and distribution, and finally insistence, no matter what a contrary cynicism about reality might have suggested, he created a romance. From Schiller’s pit, we can say that Mailer has excavated a Liebestod, possibly proposing it as a redemption of the squalor of this long, long death trip so arresting to the voyeur in most of us.
We can imagine a fraudulent tape-recorded production offered by a shy recluse as his own thousand pages of unheard sound. No, that would mean writing—and the tape recorder is first and last a labor-saving instrument.
1985
THE GENIUS OF MARGARET FULLER
SO PASSED away the loftiest, bravest soul that has yet irradiated the form of an American woman: thus wrote the editor Horace Greeley. Yet before this noble soul, Margaret Fuller, passed away, many would have forgone irradiated in preference for irritated. She was brave and lofty, and she did irradiate and also irritate, irritate herself especially with strained nerves, fantastical exertions, discomforts large and small.
Margaret Fuller, a New England creation, commemorated in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge in impressive blocks of stone, was born in the wrong place, the place thought to be the only right one for an American intellectual in the nineteenth century. That is, she was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, around Harvard, Boston, Concord, and all the rest. She sprang out of the head of all the Zeuses about: her father Timothy Fuller, Emerson, Goethe. The head being the protesting organ it is, she suffered lifelong from migraine headaches, and even as a young girl left on the scene more than a bit of the fatigue and sense of pounding insistence thought to be the dispensation of a learned woman. There were many enlightened and cultivated women about, but she was the only seriously learned one in her circle, perhaps in the country.
As a life, a biography, hers is the most dramatic, the most adventuring of all the “flowerings.” Her life was strikingly split into two parts by experience and ended by tragedy. Staying at home in Concord and Boston, she might have ended as comedy.
She was born into an incestuous air, this world that provided as a wife the sister of one’s best friend, as a husband, the son of a family connection. Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody; Emerson married Ellen Tucker; Henry Adams married Marian Hooper, the daughter of Dr. Hooper and a Sturgis on the maternal side. This sexual handiness,as it were, the prudent over-the-fence alliances, narrowed experience in Margaret Fuller’s circle but seemed to produce around Boston and Concord a domestic placidity that encouraged the high notes of Transcendentalism, a local philosophical blending, an indefinable idealism of the divinity within humanity, union with nature, the “eternal One.” Henry Adams, thinking of Emerson and pondering his own non-Boston experience of the nation as a whole, thought all this naïf.
(It is almost elevating to learn from a discreet footnote here and there that Clarence King, the distinguished geologist and Adams’s great friend in The Education of Henry Adams, was the common-law husband of a New York black woman and the father of a son by her. King himself was from Newport, Rhode Island, and a graduate of Yale rather than Harvard; perhaps this climate slightly to the south had an effect upon this far-flinging, if that is what it was. Allowing for the condescension of “common-law,” King apparently wished to do right and to honor the union. Upon his death, Mrs. King brought a lawsuit to secure for her son the trust fund assured her in King’s letters. She lost, defeated by the WASPs and their mastery of per stirpes.)
Margaret Fuller did not attract the passion for neighborly unions. Indeed, one might say her only true American lover was Professor Perry Miller of Harvard, born more than a century later. Margaret Fuller herself was born in 1810 and was thus seven years younger than Emerson. She was the daughter of Timothy Fuller, a scholarly man, graduate of Harvard, representative in Congress from Massachusetts, and later a practicing lawyer. His education of his daughter began early. Like John Stuart Mill, she was put in the stocks, and one of her finest pieces of writing has to do with the memory of her father’s wish to make her “heir to all he knew.”
Thus I had tasks given me, as many and various as the hours would allow, and on subjects beyond my age; with the disadvantage of reciting to him in the evening, after he returned from his office. . . . I was often kept up till very late; and as he was a severe teacher, both from his habits of mind and his ambition for me, my feelings were kept on the stretch till the recitations were over. Thus frequently, I was sent to bed several hours too late, with nerves unnaturally stimulated. The consequence was a premature development of the brain, that made me a “youthful prodigy” by day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare and somnambulism, which at the time prevented the harmonious development of my bodily powers and checked my growth, while, later, they induced continual headaches, weakness, and nervous affections, of all kinds. As these again reacted on the brain, giving undue force to every thought and every feeling, there was finally produced a state of being both too active and too intense, which wasted my constitution, and will bring me—even although I have learned to understand and regulate my now morbid temperament—to a premature grave.
Overwork, as she names it. Hysteria and the nightmares, whatever torments remembered, the result was a storehouse of knowledge and certainly an identity, even a vanity. Long after her father subsided as a tutor, she spent her youth in frantic application, reading, as Emerson wrote, “at a rate like Gibbon’s.” Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s biography has her, at
the age of fifteen, up at five, with the hours laid out: one for the piano, one for Sismondi’s European Literature in French; then Brown’s philosophy, then a lesson in Greek; in the evening, two hours reading in Italian, a bit of walking, more piano, and retiring at eleven to write in her diary.
Thus, we have the forced bud continually self-forced, nerve-wrung, eccentric, and, as we might expect, proud of her learning, aggressive in conversation, tremendously eager for friends, given to crushes, and yet with it all a devoted daughter. Timothy Fuller died suddenly, leaving the family in a bad way. At this moment, Margaret had planned to accompany the Farrar family to Europe. But she gave it up and remained at home to help in the support of her brothers and sisters. This meant teaching. First, a spell at the Temple School, Bronson Alcott’s leafy squirrel house of learning; and then a real position for two years in Providence, whence in a letter to Emerson she made one of her many confident pronouncements that were to be long remembered and to decorate her memory in the manner of a bit of local scandal: “I see no divine person; I myself am more divine than any I see—I think that is enough to say about them.” After two years, she returned to Boston to make her way as a writer, beginning with a translation of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe.
From the first, she was a figure, a star, a somewhat blinding one, constantly talked about as a sight to be taken in, like Bronson Alcott’s unworldliness and Thoreau’s recalcitrance. Conversation was her love and even if some were fearful in approach because of the intrepid “truthfulness” of her social exchanges (“Stand from under!” Emerson cautioned himself), she had the trait of all conversationalists; an immense availability. She liked to visit and sometimes stayed too long. One of the saddest periods of her youth came after her father’s decision to retire from the Boston scene and to take his family to the smaller village of Groton, thus removing his daughter from the company of the young men and professors around Harvard with their spiritual and intellectual interests.[1]
Her mission was self-culture, as one memorialist phrased it. And always the wish to uplift others, friends, anyone. She practiced a kind of hot Transcendentalism alongside Emerson’s cooler sort. She could be found holding an arm, gazing into eyes, insisting upon inspiration, sublimity, and grow, grow, grow.
She was very noticeable to the men around Harvard, some of whom she had known earlier at a private academy where she, although a female, was allowed at fifteen to go for special study in Greek recitation. There was her mind to startle and also her appearance, her black cloak, and many odd features of the head, not always easy to describe.
The Transcendentalist Frederic Hedge, her friend from his Harvard days: “No pretension to beauty then or at any time, her face was one that attracted, that awakened a lively interest.”
Emerson: “nothing prepossessing. Her extreme plainness—a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids—the nasal tone of her voice—all repelled; and I said to myself, we shall never get far.”
Poe worried about her upper lip, which, “as if impelled by the action of involuntary muscles, habitually uplifts itself, conveying the impression of a sneer.”
William Henry Channing on the matter of her neck found its curve “swan-like when she was sweet and thoughtful, but when she was scornful or indignant it contracted, and made swift turns, like a bird of prey.”
J. R. Lowell: “a pythoness.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes: “ophidian.”
The concentration upon appearance is somewhat overwrought among those who took beauty if it arrived on the doorstep and did without if a fine and useful character prevailed. Emerson’s first wife, Ellen Tucker, has been described as a “remarkable beauty”; Ellen Fuller, Margaret’s younger sister, was a romantic charmer who married the romantic, quite unsteady, charmer Ellery Channing. Henry Adams, writing about his engagement to “Clover” Hooper, said, “She is certainly not handsome; nor would she be quite called plain, I think.”
So, Margaret Fuller was homely, even distracting in mannerisms, but she charmed by an overwhelming responsiveness and curiosity and had many women friends from whom she received confidences and to whom she gladly gave advice. Emerson, in his essay after her death, wrote that she wore her friends “like a necklace of diamonds around her neck” and that “her friendships, as a girl with girls, as a woman with women, were not unmingled with passion, and had passages of romantic sacrifice and ecstatic fusion.”
Be that as it may, it was her habit throughout her years in America to presume on male friendships, pushing them to intentions that were not forthcoming, with a result very distressing to her spirits. She is so often not quite in touch, confused perhaps by the dramas of friendship, a sort of insufficiency in nuance, missing signals. Soul mates appeared—or so it seemed—but her “soul” was too soon declarative and consuming.
First, her cousin George Davis is said to have “thwarted her.” Then a true falling in love with a member of her circle and a close friend, Samuel Ward: “No, I do not distrust you, so lately have you spoken the words of friendship. You would not be so irreverent as to dare to tamper with a nature like mine, you could not treat so generous a person with levity. . . if you love me as I deserve to be loved, you cannot dispense with seeing me. . . . J’attendrai.” Still, the nest-like scene, and it turned out that Samuel Ward, a close friend, was going to marry another close friend of his and also a close friend of Margaret Fuller’s—Anna Barker. Later in New York she was to experience the painful debacle of her “romantic” connection with a man named James Nathan.
Emerson and Margaret Fuller formed a complicated alliance and one of the most interesting friendships between a man and a woman in American literature. Before their meeting and while Emerson was still a clergyman, she was somewhat doubtful of fame in the pulpit. “It is so easy for a cultivated mind to excite itself with that tone.” On the other hand, she was eager to show him her translation of Goethe’s drama Tasso. They met in 1835, and she first visited Emerson in Concord in 1836. “His influence has been more beneficial to me than that of any American, and from him I first learned what is meant by an inward light.”
Emerson found her, at the age of twenty-six, well read in French, Italian, and German literature but needy in the matter of English literature. He pressed upon her the works of Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Herbert, Sir Thomas Browne, and others. The absence of English fiction represents Emerson’s indifference to the form as perhaps too much shackled to event and casual life. Of Dickens he wrote: “London tracts . . . local and temporary in his tints and style, and local in his aims.”
Margaret Fuller “adored” Mme. de Staël and was often called the “American Corinne” because of her dramatic and romantic presentation of herself. She came to forgive George Sand for the laxness of her life and greatly admired her and her work. But what would she have thought of the refined obscenities of Clarissa? Of Tom Jones or Tristram Shandy? The mixed and complex English fictional tradition cannot be what Emerson meant when, in “The American Scholar,” he called for “the meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and gait of the body,” but where was one to find the expression of “the common and the low” if not in English fiction? It is the development of Margaret Fuller’s style—not to be laid at the door of Emerson—that suffered from an absence of dogs and cats and rude particulars and the humorous. She did not have Emerson’s wit, his rapid concentration of an image, a quick short sentence. She told him that he used too many aphorisms, and he said that if he used too many, she used too few.
Her letters are a heat of energy, warmth of friendship, family love, and family duty, a blazing need to communicate, no matter the aching head and midnight coming on. In the New England period, there is also a wrenching struggle with nature, the woods, sunsets, moonlights. “The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles.” Emerson: “What is a farm but a mute gospel?”
The s
weetness of the Massachusetts countryside, the little villages, the fields and woods and streams. This is what they had—literary genius in a sort of retirement; rustication, snowy nights and early flowers. The great writer Thoreau redeemed the nature-writing workshop in Concord with his daunting struggle in letters and notebooks to catch the kiss of a moonbeam and honor the hoot of a barn owl. It was Thoreau’s genius to carry landscape and weather as far as they could go.
Hawthorne in his notebooks fought with the whortleberry bush and the gleam from the lighthouse at Marblehead. “And its light looked very singularly, mingling with the growing daylight. It was not light, the moonshine, brightening as the evening twilight deepens; for now it threw its radiance over the landscape, the green and other tints of which were displayed by daylight, whereas at evening all those tints are obscured.” And so on, with here and there a hit: the neighbor’s ox who looked very much like Daniel Webster.
Margaret Fuller attempted, early, a composition on the passion-flower and would sometimes advise one to see a certain sunset at exactly a quarter to six. A great deal of moonlight occupies her pen. Emerson, in his memoir, is rather contemptuous of her naturing, even though he himself may be said to have led the charge for these confrontations.
Margaret’s love of beauty made her, of course, a votary of nature, but rather for pleasurable excitement than with a deep poetic feeling. Her imperfect vision and her bad health were serious impediments to intimacy with woods and rivers. She never paid—and it is a little remarkable—any attention to natural sciences. She neither botanized, nor geologized, nor dissected.
What was not known then, and certainly not known to herself, was that her nature was profoundly urban and her talent, in the end, was for sightseeing, meeting people, for issues; her gifts as a writer were for a superior journalism. Everything that happened, in her head, in her reading, in her travels, was there to be used. In 1843, she made a journey to the western part of the country, and the next year her first original book was published, Summer on the Lakes. She sees a lot, thinks about the Indians, the settlers, Chicago, immigrants, and forswears a descriptive account of Niagara Falls. “Yet I, like others, have little to say, where the spectacle is for once great enough to fill the whole life and supersede thought, giving us only its presence. . . . We have been here eight days, and I am quite willing to depart. So great a sight soon satisfies, making us content with itself, and with what is less than itself.”
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 43