Eden's Outcasts

IN A PAGE FROM BRONSON'S JOURNALS, OUTLINES OF HIS AND LOUISA'S HANDS OVERLAP.

(COURTESY OF HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY)

Acknowledgments

PROLOGUE

Disgrace

CHAPTER ONE

Beginnings

CHAPTER TWO

A Birthday in Germantown

CHAPTER THREE

The Temple School

CHAPTER FOUR

“Orpheus at the Plough”

CHAPTER FIVE

The Sowing of the Seeds

CHAPTER SIX

First Fruits

CHAPTER SEVEN

Lost Illusions

CHAPTER EIGHT

Father and Daughter

CHAPTER NINE

Destitution

CHAPTER TEN

Orchard House

CHAPTER ELEVEN

War

CHAPTER TWELVE

Shadows and Sunlight

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Journeys East and West

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Miracles

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“The Wise and Beautiful Truths of the Father”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Come Up with Me”

Notes

Bibliography

W
RITING A BIOGRAPHY REQUIRES THE AUTHOR TO LIVE
with his subjects. I am thankful to all the Alcotts and their friends for being such genial and buoyant company. A student of the Alcotts is also fortunate to be part of another family, consisting of those who have dedicated themselves to the study and preservation of the Alcott legacy. In the course of this project, I have been blessed by my associations with Madeleine B. Stern, Jan Turnquist, Sarah Elbert, Daniel Shealy, Joel Myerson, Katharine Houghton, and the late Leona Rostenberg. The staff of Orchard House, especially Jenny Gratz and Maria Powers, were always there with all the answers I needed. I would also like to thank everyone at Houghton Library for their impeccable assistance. Ann Shumard (my big sister) and Lizanne Garrett at the National Portrait Gallery moved with lightning speed to provide images and permissions. Mike Volmar at the Fruitlands Museum was always at the ready when needs arose. To all these extraordinary people, I am profoundly grateful.

Throughout the writing of this book, I have had the pleasure and privilege of teaching in the English department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the City University of New York. I have benefited in particular from the wise counsel and enthusiastic encouragement of three wonderful department chairs, Bob Crozier, Timothy Stevens, and Jon-Christian Suggs, who have always done everything possible to make my ix professional path a smooth and rewarding one. I would be less than what I am if it were not for the wise counsel and selfless support of Marc Dolan and Karen Kaplowitz. If kindness and humor help to make a job worth doing, then virtually every one of my colleagues deserves mention here, but to the following I am especially grateful: Ira Bloomgarden, Effie Cochran, Betsy Gitter, Richard Haw, Ann Huse, Livia Katz, Adam McKible, Marny Tabb, and Cristine Varholy. I also thank Jacob Marini for ably ferreting out grant money for this project during lean times. My thanks go as well to David Yaffe, whose friendship, humor, and encouragement are pearls beyond price.

I would like to thank Bill McPhaul for teaching me to write with precision and Victor Brombert for teaching me how to write with love. I shall be forever grateful to Dan Rodgers, Sacvan Bercovitch, and George Gopen, who embody in my eyes the very best of the teaching profession. I have been enriched beyond measure by the friendship and guidance of my mentors in the Columbia Ph.D. program: Andrew Delbanco, Ann Douglas, Karl Kroeber, Jonathan Levin, John Rosenberg, Priscilla Wald, and, primus inter pares, Robert A. Ferguson.

This book would not exist if it were not for the brilliant professionalism of my agent, Peter Steinberg. At W. W. Norton, I would have been lost without the superb, sensitive editing of Amy Cherry and the advice of Lydia Fitzpatrick. My copy editor, Elizabeth Pierson, was meticulous and supportive throughout the process.

With deep appreciation, I acknowledge a research grant from PSCCUNY.

My wife, Michelle, never threatened to throw me out, even in my worst moments of authorial crankiness. I would have had far less inspiration to write this book if it were not for our daughter, Rebecca, who has probably done more than anyone else to help me understand Bronson and Louisa.

My mother, Rosemary Hamilton Matteson, always wanted to write a book. But life surprised her, and she raised a son who wrote one instead. This is her book.

DISGRACE

A
T THE HOUGHTON LIBRARY OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY,
there sits a massive collection of letters, news clippings, and other memorabilia compiled over the span of seven decades by Amos Bronson Alcott, a dedicated educator and reformer, a close friend of Emerson and Thoreau, and the father of the four sisters whom his second daughter, Louisa May Alcott, immortalized as Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy in
Little Women
. Among these documents, neatly folded and carefully preserved, is a sales receipt from an auction that occurred when Louisa was only four years old and her father thirty-seven.
¹
Bronson Alcott believed that every aspect of life had a lesson to impart, and he saved documents that reminded him not only of his successes but also of his most painful defeats. He kept this receipt long after any dispute might have been raised concerning it. He kept it, it seems, to help himself remember the cost of his pride, of his idealism, and of his all-too-ready faith in the capacity of ordinary people to embrace unfamiliar ideas.

The auction took place in Boston on April 13, 1837. The national economy was in the throes of a financial panic, and the prices asked for the merchandise were not high. Inspecting the lots before the sale began, a bargain hunter with scholarly leanings would have delighted in the richness of the sale: globes, school furniture of the highest quality, and busts of Socrates, Shakespeare, and Milton. And then there were the books—at least three hundred volumes, painstakingly assembled by their collector, too often with borrowed money. Many of them were literary classics. Some of them were English editions with the best leather bindings—a rare sight for American eyes, even in literary-minded Boston. Prospective buyers gazed upon the essays of John Locke and the poems of Byron and Shelley. Commentaries on the Bible sat side by side with books on elementary education. An appraising eyebrow or two were probably raised at a five-volume set of the dialogues of Plato. Without any particular ceremony, the sale commenced. A two-volume set of Coleridge's letters went for $2.25. A six-volume edition of Sir Walter Scott's novels changed hands for $1.50, and a book of family prayers went for thirty cents. Book by book, piece by piece, the library, the furniture, and everything else came under the hammer until all was gone. After the auctioneer deducted his commission and other expenses, the net proceeds of the sale came to $158.64. Alcott wrote in the aftermath of the sale, “their value in coin will, at this time, release me from pecuniary embarrassment.”
²
Although the high-sounding phrase may have served for a moment to mask the starkness of his situation, Alcott well knew that he was losing far more than he was getting.

It is not recorded whether Alcott bothered to attend the auction. Although he had paid out “not a little of [his] small earnings” for the auctioned items, going perilously into debt to do so, he had bought only a portion of them for his personal use. Rather, the busts and desks, as well as fully half the books, had graced the interior of a small primary school, housed upstairs in the Masonic temple on Tremont Street. Founded by Alcott less than three years earlier, the Temple School had fallen on desperate times. Perhaps with the sale of the furniture and the library, it might somehow be kept afloat a while longer. Alcott tended to suffer most indignities in silence. He did not yet speak of the possibility that the school might soon have to close forever. At the moment, he seemed saddest to be losing the volumes of Plato, which, aside from his wife Abigail and his daughters, were possibly what he held dearest in the world. Nevertheless, Alcott, his hair already graying, tried to put on a brave face. The loss of the dialogues would have caused him much more grief, he said, if he had not already acquainted himself so thoroughly with their spirit.

An otherworldly perfectionism typified Alcott, a man who continually proclaimed the unimportance of the world of things. Like Plato himself, who posited a world of ideal forms of which our own world was only the shadowy, shattered image, Alcott prized ideas infinitely more than physical objects. The fact that he was forced to live a material existence seemed at best a misfortune and at worst a cosmic mistake. Before Alcott's marriage to Abigail May, the brother of his prospective bride had accurately observed Alcott's fundamental bent. He wrote to his sister, “Don't distress yourself about his poverty. His mind and heart are so much occupied with other things that poverty and riches do not seem to concern him.”
³
Because he valued them so highly, understandings of the spirit tended to come into Alcott's grasp without effort. The material trappings of the world, however, he tended to ignore, and they in turn seemed almost willfully to keep their distance from him.

And yet, for all his allegiance to the invisible, Alcott was not indifferent to appearances, and the ones he liked best were those that reminded him of himself. One day, when leading a discussion on the subject of “Angelic and Demonic Man,” Alcott entertained his listeners with his description of the kind of person who best reflected divine beauty and intelligence. The angelic man, as Alcott imagined him, had light-colored hair and clear blue eyes. He did not rely on logic, a faculty too easily contorted by evil, but on the gentler perceptions of the heart. The angelic man shunned the contentiousness of argument but delighted in the shared sympathies of genial conversation. When Alcott concluded, his description was answered with knowing smiles and probably a few rolled eyes. The speaker had just finished describing himself.
⁴

Others who described Alcott tended to emphasize qualities that seemed not quite to belong to this world. They often discovered that they had said more about his character than his bodily presence. Alcott's dearest friend and benefactor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, called him “a God-made priest” and “a world builder.”
⁵
Henry David Thoreau, a man renowned for the sharp lines of his descriptive prose, seemed stumped when it came to the gentle schoolmaster. After a day with Alcott, Thoreau told his journal, “He is broad & general but indefinite.” Alcott was for him “a geometer—a visionary—The Laplace of ethics.” When Thoreau called Alcott a “sky-blue” man, it was not clear whether he was referring to Alcott's eye color or his idealism.
⁶
In the first published version of his short story “The Hall of Fantasy,” Nathaniel Hawthorne immortalized Alcott with the following tribute:

One should suppose that Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne knew something about their subject, for Alcott's influence was interwoven not merely intellectually but personally into the lives of all three. Alcott was Emerson's most constant friend for more than forty-five years. When Alcott had conversations with his pupils at the Temple School recorded for posterity, Hawthorne's future wife, Sophia Peabody, acted as one of his scribes. In 1852, when Hawthorne was looking for a house in Concord, Massachusetts, it was Alcott's property that he wound up purchasing. When Thoreau was preparing to take up residence on the banks of Walden Pond, he discovered that he needed to borrow an ax to cut timber for his cabin. Apparently, he borrowed Alcott's. When Thoreau remembered the incident in
Walden
, however, he omitted the name of the lender. Instead he recorded, “The owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye, but I returned it sharper than I received it.”
⁸

This vignette might stand as an emblem of the kind of relationship Alcott tended to have with his better-remembered companions. Alcott cherished his theories and inspirations even more than his ax, but as with his ax, he was seldom able to hone his ideas into the form that would cut most efficiently. He shared his ideas almost as freely as he shared his tools, and it was in the hands of others that both acquired their gleaming sharpness. His contributions often received scant acknowledgment. Alcott was very likely the “Orphic poet” whom Emerson quotes at length toward the end of
Nature
, but his name is nowhere to be found. The spirit of Alcott pervades Hawthorne stories like “The Celestial Railroad” and the previously quoted “Hall of Fantasy,” yet the paragraph in the latter that identifies him by name was stricken from all published versions of the tale save the first. Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne all would have been great if they had never met Bronson Alcott. But none of them would have been precisely the same.

There was, of course, one renowned nineteenth-century American author who would never have existed at all without Bronson Alcott: his daughter, Louisa May. But even in his own daughter's work, Bronson is represented as a compromised figure, sometimes caricatured for the sake of comedy and sometimes wholly absent even when circumstances cry out for his presence. Most famously, when Louisa transformed herself and her sisters into Little Women, the March family's patriarch is almost absent from the narrative. Even when Mr. March at last makes his grand entrance in chapter 22 of the novel, almost the first words devoted to him are, “Mr. March became invisible….”
⁹

Indeed, to examine Alcott and his influence on those around him is sometimes to have a sense of dealing with an invisible man. This invisibility forms a key part of Bronson Alcott's curious destiny. The workings of his mind were misunderstood even by many of those who were closest to him, and the bulk of his writing was barely known to anyone, even in his own time. The one medium of communication of which he was an acknowledged master, the spoken word, vanished the moment he created it. The grand, ambitious projects by which he hoped to establish his name and unveil his ideas before the world tended to collapse into humiliation and futility. So long as Alcott could move within the sphere of the ethereal and evanescent, he moved with radiance and grace. As soon as he stepped into the world of things and actions or tried to project a durable image of himself, he began to lose his balance. When he attempted to astonish the world by performing a truly great task—and he found such tasks almost fatally irresistible—his ease, common sense, and good fortune deserted him entirely, and he fell to earth with a thud. The people who laid the best claim to understanding Alcott seem to have regarded him as a word made flesh, as a collection of ideas and principles that seemed only coincidentally to have lodged inside a body.

But this spirit did have a body. Bronson Alcott was slender and stood six feet tall. Anyone who, on meeting him, expected to shake the smooth, soft hand of a poet-philosopher would have been surprised by the muscular firmness of Alcott's grasp. The son of a Connecticut farmer, he believed that moral virtue could be strengthened by working the soil. In the bleakest periods of his life, he found comfort as well as income in tending his garden and chopping firewood for himself and his neighbors. It was through horticulture, more than through anything else except his family, that the philosophical Alcott maintained firm contact with the physical world.

His hands were rough. His manners were not. In his youth, when he was old enough to get off the farm, Alcott traveled five times through the South as a peddler of Yankee notions. The experience of meeting southern gentlemen and ladies and often sojourning in their homes made a profound impression. Alcott studied the grace and politeness that were shown him and acquired an almost courtly civility. One of his English friends, Thomas Cholmondeley, reported with some surprise that the American possessed the social polish of a British nobleman.
¹⁰
Surprisingly, however, for a man so dedicated to the world of the unseen, Alcott nursed a surprising weakness for fashion, although he usually lacked the means to indulge that interest very lavishly. After one of his youthful peddling excursions in the South, he squandered his earnings on a fancy suit of clothes. Around Boston, he was known for a somewhat outrageous taste in hats, and the cane he habitually carried was a concession more to style than to infirmity. Farm boy turned gentleman, peddler turned philosopher, Alcott defied attempts at categorization.

People disagreed as to whether Alcott's hair had been blond or reddish in his youth, and by the late 1830s it was already hard to settle the argument because his hair had whitened. It was growing thinner on the top of his head as well, although it extended long and carelessly down the back of his neck, as if by way of compensation. In his most appealing photographs, Alcott wears a calm but expectant expression, and a smile that seems both intelligent and profoundly trusting. Most acquaintances agreed that his most memorable features were his eyes—gentle, pale blue, and deeply set beneath a brow that in some photographs looks faintly Lincolnesque, although the face as a whole lacks Lincoln's gravity and shrewdness. Perhaps the most fascinating description of Alcott, however, came in verse form from the poet John Townsend Trowbridge, who, later in life, edited some of Louisa May Alcott's writings:

But neither a wise man nor a fool would ever truly know Bronson Alcott without becoming acquainted with his family. At the time his library was sold, Alcott had been married almost seven years to Abigail May, a woman who, every bit as much as her husband, believed in the perfectibility of human beings. Abba, as her husband called her, believed that people had been given their weaknesses in order that they might triumph over them, and she stood perpetually ready to aid selflessly in the mighty causes of reform. Though she loved the world enough to change it, she was not always patient with it, and she frequently lost her composure when society refused to know what was good for it. For her husband and children, however, she had almost limitless tenderness and patience, and she had particular esteem for her husband's virtues. In her eyes, he was “an intelligent, philosophic, modest man.”
¹²
She considered him “peculiarly sober [and] temperate,” untainted by even “a single habit of personal indulgence.”
¹³
In her letters, he was her “dear husband” and her “savior.”
¹⁴
In truth, his refusals to compromise with the world sometimes exasperated her. Nevertheless, even when he did not earn enough to supply his family's wants—and such times were alarmingly frequent—she continued to find integrity in his willingness to “starve or freeze before he will sacrifice principle to comfort.”
¹⁵
He returned her admiration. It was she, he wrote, “who first kindled me into that sweeter and holier birth—the gentler and fragrant life of Love.”
¹⁶
When they had been married almost forty years, he wrote of his abundant reasons “to thank the Friend of families and Giver of good wives that I was led to her acquaintance and fellowship when life and a future opened before me.”
¹⁷