Eden's Outcasts (13 page)

What comes easily to us, we suppose must be effortless for all. Emerson wrote with relative ease. Having heard the fluency of Alcott's speech and having read the moody play of light and dark in the pages of his journals, he thought it no great task for Alcott to conquer the world in print. But the words that came at Alcott's bidding when he wrote for himself or spoke continued to elude him when he tried to write for others.

In the meantime, Alcott struggled on with the remnant of the Temple School. To reduce expenses, he first moved the school from its beautiful upstairs space to a darker, smaller room downstairs. Bronson himself was slipping into a darker, more introspective period. He was, he wrote, “an Idea without hands.”
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When the downstairs school also proved too expensive, he closed it in June 1838. At the urging of a few loyal constituents, he tried teaching one more time, opening a school for the poor in his own parlor at 6 Beach Street, the less fashionable home to which the family had recently moved. This new school showed early promise, and the initial enrollment of fifteen rose encouragingly to twenty. However, the deathblow to this school was soon in coming.

As Bronson tried to face the collapse of his career with dignity and calm, his spirits were buoyed by the hope that, at last, he might have a son. As Abba's delivery time drew near, Bronson wrote to his mother that, despite all appearances, he found the future “bright and encouraging.” He proclaimed himself “still the same Hoper that I have always been” and declared that he would continue to hope “through the tombs.” He told his mother that, before he wrote again, another hoper would have joined the family. “I have the promise of a Boy,” he added, and he predicted that the newborn's sisters would “jump for joy.”
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On April 6, 1839, Bronson and Abba had their boy. But the joy evaporated almost immediately. Though fully formed and outwardly perfect, the baby lived only a few hours. Bronson could barely bring himself to mention the loss. For years afterward, Abba observed April 6 as a personal day of mourning.
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History has little to say about the parents of Susan Robinson—little more than that, in the first half of 1839, they asked to enroll their daughter in Alcott's school and that they were black. Most teachers of Alcott's time would have dismissed the Robinsons out of hand. Alcott welcomed Susan. To his everlasting credit, he seems to have regarded her as neither more nor less deserving of special notice than any other new student. Indeed, no one would even remember the girl's first name if Anna Alcott had not mentioned it in her journal. However, the parents of Alcott's white students wasted no time in sending Bronson an ultimatum: if Susan remained, they would depart. Bronson's notation of the exchange was contemptuously brief: “My patrons, through Dr. John Flint, urge dismissal of the Robinson Child. I decline.”
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Overnight, Alcott's remaining support eroded. All of the parents except for the Robinsons and Bronson's longtime colleague William Russell withdrew their children. Of the five children available for him to teach, three were his own daughters.

It was over. By standing up for the humanity of Susan Robinson, Alcott had at last committed professional suicide. However, he at least had the satisfaction of knowing that the end had come, not under a cloud of disgrace, but in a small but significant blaze of courage. When he closed his books and dismissed his class on June 22, 1839, his career as a schoolteacher had come to an end.

Although he tried to maintain an outward stoicism in the face of his misfortunes, Bronson's private thoughts were resentful. Mentally, he took refuge in a fortress of self-righteousness, issuing scathing judgments against even the most mundane of worldly affairs. When Abba sent him to the butcher for a piece of meat and the tradesman sold him a more expensive cut than he requested, his condemnation was merciless. “What have I to do with butchers?” he snarled. “Death yawns at me as I walk up and down in this abode of skulls. Murder and blood are written on its stalls…. I tread amidst carcasses. I am in the presence of the slain.”
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When Emerson wrote him a check for groceries, requiring him to venture into a bank to cash it, Alcott reacted as if he had been forced to enter a house of prostitution. Before his distracted eyes, the bank building transformed into “Mammon's Temple” where clusters of pagan devotees consulted “on appropriate rites whereby to honour their divinity.”
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He rejected an invitation to dine with Emerson, Fuller, and the historian George Bancroft, scorning, as he saw it, to descend to “the tables of the fashionable, the voluptuous, the opulent.”
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The simplest of kindnesses were now wicked temptations; the most moderate pleasures were damning indulgences. To carry his martyrdom to its apotheosis, Bronson had to be utterly in the right; the world had to be thoroughly wrong.

Bronson felt he could no longer live in a city, where, he claimed, Bacchus held court and the Prince of Devils ruled the mob.
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For some time, he had wanted to dwell among people of simpler values, who spoke with “greater purity than the artificial citizen or closeted bookworm.” If there was to be a future for him, it must be close to the soil—and close to Emerson. In the first week of April 1840, with Abba expecting the couple's fourth child, the Alcotts gathered their modest belongings, loaded them onto the stage at Earl's Tavern on Hanover Street, and took the road that led to Concord.

T
HE CONCORD RIVER, WHICH FLOWS BY THE TOWN THAT
bears its name, was known to the native tribes as Musketaquid, or Meadow River, because of the flat grasslands that lined its banks. In the summertime, it is from four to fifteen feet deep and from one hundred to three hundred feet wide. Around the time the Alcotts arrived, the winter ice on the river and the surrounding ponds broke up, cracking with a sound as loud as cannon fire. For some time after the ice had receded, the wind remained cold and bracing. In his book
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
, Thoreau wrote of these winds and how they “heav[e] up the surface into dark billows or regular swells,” so that the water looks like “a smaller Lake Huron,…very pleasant and exciting for a landsman to row or sail over.”
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In the more temperate months, wild grapes and cranberries grew thick there. Woodcocks, rails, and bitterns waded shyly through the marshy areas, and finches and titmice flitted through the air. A child wandering the banks, as Louisa often did, would sometimes surprise a muskrat or hear a splash as a startled terrapin plunged to safety. Her younger sister Lizzie, a few months short of her fifth birthday, took to her new pastoral surroundings with particular delight, and her father rejoiced that there were now “fields and woods, and brooks and flowers to please my little Queen.”
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In the 1840s and for many decades thereafter, the lazy, peaceful river seemed to some visitors to have impressed its nature upon the inhabitants of the town. Even three decades after the Alcotts first set up housekeeping in the town, a visitor “could see no factory operatives going to work, dinner pails in hand,—no farmer driving his oxen afield—only two or three tranquil shopkeepers just taking down their shutters and one young lady having a ‘constitutional' on horseback.”
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During the years that she lived there, Louisa May Alcott came to regard it as “one of the dullest little towns in Massachusetts.”
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Yet with residents like Emerson, Thoreau, and, from time to time, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Concord deserved its reputation as the literary epicenter of pre–Civil War America. However, this reputation rested on fewer than a half dozen citizens. Take away Concord from the United States, and the United States seemed a relatively unlettered country. But take away a handful of persons from Concord, and Concord was no different from any other Massachusetts town. In
Walden
, Thoreau wondered aloud, “What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell…. Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of Concord?…Alas! What with foddering the cattle and tending the store, we are kept from school too long, and our education is sadly neglected.”
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Nevertheless, Bronson Alcott tended to see only possibilities in a new place, and his arrival in Concord signaled to him a rebirth of hope. In the days just after the family settled into Hosmer Cottage, the fresh spring weather gave him reason to believe in new beginnings. Eight days after Alcott first hung up his coat at the cottage, Emerson stood on the banks of Walden Pond as the south wind blew and warm light filled the woods. Emerson turned and said to a companion, “This world is so beautiful that I can hardly believe it exists.”
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Alcott was glad to be a part of this beauty, and he was also glad that the cottage met the approval of Abba and the girls. For the first time in years, Abba was going about the house singing.
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Bronson wrote to Sam May with ebullient spirits. The neighbors, he told his brother-in-law, were courteous and kind, and he found his garden rich in promise. “I sow again in hope,” he wrote, “and know full well that my harvest shall come in in due season, and there shall be bread and fullness in the land.” The first harvest Bronson pulled from the soil of his new property was a metaphor. He suggested to May that his life thus far had been that of “an impatient husbandman, misauguring the signs of the spring time” and scattering his seed in the least hospitable of seasons, while the snow and frost still covered the fields. He swore that his late disappointments had taught him priceless lessons in faith, patience, and humility. Bronson claimed to have renounced all his pretenses as a moral and spiritual teacher. He wished no longer to set himself in opposition to “things as they are” and “the powers that be.” He said that he sought only to achieve peaceful relations with the soil. “[I]n the bosom of nature, under the sky of God,” he felt more certain of the fitness of his position than ever before.
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And yet, in the midst of optimism, his departure from Boston had some of the flavor of an exile, and he made no effort to shield his children from his sense of having been wronged. Nine-year-old Anna reported in her journal:

As far as education went, at least, the Alcott daughters had little cause to complain. Anna was enrolled at the Concord Academy, a school then under the management of Thoreau and his elder brother John. At the same time, Louisa and Lizzie took their lessons from a Miss Mary Russell, who taught at Emerson's house.

It is impossible to know the extent of the contact that took place between Louisa and Emerson. However, Louisa received some memorable lessons during this time from Anna's teacher Henry Thoreau. Since graduating from Harvard in 1837, Thoreau, now twenty-two years old, was taking the first steps in his career as a writer. The previous September, he and John had gone on the boating excursion that was to supply the basis for Thoreau's first book,
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
. In addition to teaching at the academy, Thoreau was trying to become a poet and was exchanging manuscripts with Emerson. He was also at work on some pieces, both poetry and prose, that he hoped might be included in the first issue of a literary journal on which Emerson and Margaret Fuller were collaborating. Nevertheless, he found time to lead bands of local children through the woods and meadows near the town, pausing to point out the native birds and flora, which he knew like members of his family. When the season was right, Thoreau transformed his young followers into a crew of blackberry and huckleberry hunters, armed with empty baskets and a zeal for discovery.

Thoreau was not a handsome man. More than twenty years later, when she transformed Thoreau into the fictitious Mr. Warwick in her novel
Moods
, Louisa made note of his “massive head, covered with waves of ruddy brown hair, gray eyes that seemed to pierce through all disguises, [and] an eminent nose.” But the ungainly features expressed a rare character; over the years, Louisa came to discern “power, intellect, and courage” stamped upon his face and figure.
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Thoreau was not an inexhaustible talker like Louisa's father, but he put meanings into silences that others struggled to put into words. In the book about his river journey with his brother, Thoreau would later write, “The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings. It is an intelligence above language.”
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This intelligence, along with knowledge of nature, he shared with Louisa and her friends.

Unlike Emerson and Louisa's father, who appreciated nature principally as a collection of visible symbols of moral truth and the human spirit, Thoreau took a scientific and technical interest in nature. Still, he knew how to capture the imaginations of a young audience, and he fueled the fantasies of Concord's children by telling them that tanagers set the woods afire and by likening goldenrod to the banners of medieval crusaders. An anecdote much favored among Alcott enthusiasts tells of how Thoreau called young Louisa's attention to a cobweb and told her it was a handkerchief dropped by a fairy. He sometimes invited Louisa and the other children onto his boat and took them for cruises across the placid river. When the mood struck him, he played a flute, choosing a melody to harmonize with his feelings or the beauties of the landscape. During the first summer that the Alcotts spent in Concord, Thoreau wrote entries in his journal that might well have been apropos of his journeys with the children: “Any melodious sound apprises me of the infinite wealth of God.” “Floating in still water, I too am a planet, and have my orbit, in space, and am no longer a satellite of the earth.” On their excursions, Louisa likely felt in her heart what her mentor wrote one August day: “Surely joy is the condition of life.”
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Never a model of feminine propriety, Louisa climbed elm trees, clambered over fences, and readily accepted dares from neighborhood boys to leap from the highest beam of a nearby barn. Her exuberant rambles contrasted with the discipline on which her father insisted at home, where a stimulating spirit of inquiry existed side by side with a solemn sense of duty. Always determined to make learning imaginative, Bronson contorted his body to represent letters of the alphabet for the edification of his daughters. With his silvery voice, he read aloud from the Bible and
The Pilgrim's Progress
. However, he promptly withheld enjoyment if the girls had not faithfully prepared their lessons. Still persuaded that the most effective punishment lay in knowing that one had caused another person to suffer, he would sometimes go without his own dinner if his daughters had not satisfied his expectations.

Louisa's life was already assuming the contours that were to characterize it for the next twenty-five years or more: an almost impossibly dissonant combination of superior intellectual opportunities and frightful worldly deprivation. A typical day for Louisa began with a trip to Emerson's house and might continue with a nature walk with Thoreau, only to end with a homeward trudge to a cottage where there was sometimes insufficient food, where the father wore the mantle of a social outcast, and where the mother tried to bear up under the weight of mounting debts and disappointments. Louisa's life was in one sense lavishly wealthy. In another, it was perilously poor.

Bronson had not ceased trying to check Louisa's discordant impulses, and he still did not fully accept the fact that she was fundamentally not like him. A poem that he wrote for her on her birthday in Concord encapsulates the struggle he perceived in her: “Two Passions strong divide our Life / Meek gentle Love, or boisterous strife.”
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It was all too clear which passion appeared to be winning. That same year, Emerson gave a lecture titled “Education,” which offered some advice that Bronson might have profitably heeded in his relations with Louisa. Nature, Emerson said, had no love for repetitions. Nevertheless, he added, “a low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character…an expectation which the child, if justice is done him, will nobly disappoint.” The father who insisted on re-creating himself through his offspring was unconsciously doing his utmost “to defeat [the child's] proper promise and produce the ordinary and mediocre.”
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Alcott may well have heard this lecture. Very likely, he supported its sentiments. But to agree philosophically is easier than to act accordingly.

As Louisa's awareness of both good and evil broadened and deepened, her father chopped wood and cut straight furrows through the uneven ground. When he was not working for himself, he hired himself out to neighbors. In good weather, he was always at work outdoors. On inclement days, he wrote or found some task in his modest woodshop. The children went to school in the village, while he and Abba did “all that farmers and farmers' wives find necessary.” By the first day of summer, he boasted of a fine growing crop of vegetables, more than enough to supply the family. He felt that his labors were giving him a primeval dignity, and that God had been kind, not severe, when He had sent Adam “into the fields to earn his Bread in the sweat of his face.”
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But Alcott's hiatus from moral teaching was already over. He told his mother that he meant to go back to a classroom as soon as the public realized the good he could do them. In the meantime, a handful of young men and women found their way to his cottage for conversation and enlightenment.
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For now, though, the visual poetry of his new rustic life enchanted him. “My garden shall be my poem,” he rhapsodized. “My spade and hoe the instruments of my wit and skill, my family and the Soul, my world of reality and faerie.”
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Self-consciously, Bronson was striving to epitomize the spirit that people were learning to call “transcendental”: agrarian, antiurban, and individualistic to the point of indifference to the outside world. William Ellery Channing, from whom much of the new consciousness had first emanated, responded enthusiastically to Alcott's bucolic retreat, which realized one of the minister's most dearly held ideas: the union of labor and culture. In Channing's judgment, Alcott, “hiring himself out for day-labor and at the same time living in a region of high thought” was very likely the most interesting sight in Massachusetts. “Orpheus at the plough,” Channing added, “is after my own heart.”
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Emerson also quietly applauded Alcott's agrarian impulse. He wrote in his journal, “I see with great pleasure this growing inclination in all persons who aim to speak the truth, for manual labor and the farm.”
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Curiously, moving to Concord and taking up the implements of a farmer were the most popular steps Bronson had taken in years.
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