Eden's Outcasts (3 page)

The Pilgrim's Progress
not only held out to Bronson a way of living but, just as importantly, a way of reading every aspect of his experience. In
The Pilgrim's Progress
, a fact is never merely a fact. Every phenomenon is presented to the reader for its metaphorical relevance. Bunyan encourages the reader to regard the world as a divinely created symbol, to be observed for its spiritual, not its literal, significance. It seems beyond question that one of the shared traits that later attracted Emerson and Alcott to each other was their habit of thinking about the visible world, not as a sufficient truth in itself, but as pointing the way toward a greater, more satisfying truth that could be approached only through metaphor. Not long after their friendship began in earnest, during the period in which Alcott's influence on him was strongest, Emerson wrote, “Every natural fact is the symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of mind.”
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Through the observation of metaphor in nature, Emerson reassured himself of the presence of divinity in the world.

But whereas the vision of the world as a physical bodying forth of a Platonic ideal was liberating for Emerson, this way of seeing was to become a disability for Bronson. Emerson had the flexibility to balance his understanding of the world between two seemingly contradictory models. He could accept a world in which every fact had two sides, one related to sensation and the other to morals. “Life,” he wrote in
Representative Men
, “is a pitching of this penny,—heads or tails. We never tire of this game.”
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Bronson saw no attraction in the moral coin toss that Emerson found so fascinating. Solidity, he argued, “is an illusion of the senses. There is nothing solid. The nature of the Soul renders such a fact impossible.”
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Thanks in part to his reverence for
The Pilgrim's Progress
, Alcott's penny had only one side. He seems to have decided early on that it was only the spirit that truly mattered.

Curiously, however, although Bunyan's allegory was pivotally responsible for shaping Bronson's ideas of right conduct, it failed to impress on him the point that its author undoubtedly considered the most fundamental of all: the necessity of embracing the doctrines of Christianity. Bronson was essentially immune to the arguments of orthodoxy. He was confirmed in the Episcopal faith when he was sixteen, and he long remembered how worshippers filled the pews and galleries of the plain, two-storied meetinghouse of his youth. He had enjoyed church, and he always felt that Sundays had been great days in those times.
²⁷
Nevertheless, Alcott's experience of organized religion failed to bind him to its forms and dogmas. He never accepted the idea of Jesus as the Son of God. While he found himself “disposed to consider the author of the Christian system as a great and good and original man,” Alcott could not convince himself to think of Jesus as anything other than a superb specimen of humanity.
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He thought the writings of Confucius, the Bhagavad Gita, and other Eastern texts should be combined with the New Testament to create an ecumenical “Bible for Mankind.”
²⁹
He did not pray, and he taught his children to follow his example, explaining to them that their “thoughts, feelings, and resolutions” mattered more than private communication with God.
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One of the most enduring lessons that the boy appears to have absorbed on those long, pious Sundays was one he would have done well to unlearn. The preaching of those times generally reflects an infatuation with sonorous, convoluted, periodic sentences. In such discursive sentences, a point may be elegantly and elaborately made, but the reader bears the task of reducing the idea to its hard, crystalline form. Robert Richardson has observed that the well-padded, ornate sentence was a mainstay of Emerson's when he was trying to find his way as a minister.
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Indeed, the transformation of Emerson the florid preacher into Emerson the compactly aphoristic, quotable essayist is one of the great marvels of American literature. It was a feat that Alcott found impossible to duplicate. Reading Alcott's journals, one frequently has the sense of a mind that worked through ideas with great deliberation and thoroughness. However, one searches in vain for the quick, decisive stroke. He writes as if assuming that his readers will have much time in which to enfold themselves in the densities of his prose.

Even an invisible, personal faith, however, must express itself in some physical, identifiable way. If Bronson Alcott could not comfortably find that expression through prayer or church membership, then he had to seek some other way. Like most people, he found it natural to evince belief by giving things up. Having no church to prescribe the forms of his self-denial, Alcott arrived at his own conclusions as to what earthly appetites were wrong and impious. He eventually came up with a very long list. He lived much of his life by the creed that one must prefer one's soul to one's body, and the needs of others to the wants of oneself. At its most rampant, his urge toward asceticism seemed to command him almost to relinquish life altogether.

Bronson's one chance at pursuing a formal education came when he was thirteen. His mother's brother, Dr. Tillotson Bronson, a tall, personable man of priestly cast, was then the head of the Episcopal Academy in Cheshire, Connecticut, a school that, as Alcott later recalled, “was a college in everything but the name.”
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Seeing promise in his nephew, Dr. Bronson offered to take the boy under his roof and enroll him in his school. The family agreed, and Bronson rode off with his uncle to see what might be made of him. Bronson's time at the Cheshire Academy was a turning point in his early life. Success at the academy might have meant an eventual matriculation at Yale and a future in the church. It would also have given him something less tangible but perhaps more important. To be a thinker in the truest sense requires being open to the enriching possibilities of a mental tug-of-war. Bronson Alcott did not have this flexibility when he arrived in Cheshire, and if he were ever to absorb it, this would have been an opportune time.

As it happened, his experiences at the academy seem to have had the contrary effect. Children grow up assuming that their own experiences are normal. The discovery of a larger world in which people speak differently and cleave to other assumptions can come as an overwhelming surprise. So it was with Bronson Alcott, abruptly placed in the midst of boys who did not say “nimshi” when they meant “fool” or “ollers” instead of “always.” Cheshire made Bronson feel bumptious and strange. As an old man, he still remembered the sting of being called on to read in front of the other boys and promptly learning that his performance was not up to the mark. If Bronson's private studies had taught him some things his new classmates did not know, they were knowledgeable in matters never dreamed of in his philosophy. He could not fit in. His sojourn among the learned lasted only a month; he could not bear to stay any longer.

In the face of the suggestion that his instinctive methods of approaching knowledge might be inadequate, Bronson clenched himself still tighter against outward criticisms and clung ever more devotedly to his private god: a belief in his own genius, begotten within him by a wise and all-sustaining Nature. Throughout his life, his criterion for an idea was neither whether it was practical or provable, but whether it resonated with his spirit. Over time, the faith that he was both right and righteous became essential to Bronson; to renounce it would have been to lose all bearings in a bewildering world.

After his abortive attendance at the Cheshire Academy, Bronson's formal education was essentially at an end. He embarked on a series of small ventures, none of which led him anywhere in particular. He thought for a while that he might follow in his father's footsteps as a farmer. He worked awhile as a clockmaker and sold religious tracts from door to door. More than five years passed, and still he found nothing new to engage his soul.

He found out something important about that soul when he was sixteen. Hearing that there was to be a public hanging, he walked sixteen miles with William in order to see it. When the condemned man was thrown down and his neck snapped, Bronson fainted dead away. Another time, he was horrified to see a group of prisoners being marched up from their subterranean cells and driven to work at bayonet-point. He did not get over the effect of these sights for some time.
³³
These experiences deepened his aversion to cruelty, which in later years became virtually absolute.

Such moments, however terrible, marked moments of excitement in a life of numbing routine. Eventually, the sameness of Bronson's surroundings and the idleness of his condition became unacceptable. His plan of escape was only half-baked when he put it into practice. He had, it seems, a vague understanding that schoolmasters from the northern states were wanted in the South. He had few qualifications, but, he must have reasoned, no fewer than his likely competitors. A month and a half shy of his nineteenth birthday, he traveled to New Haven and boarded the sloop
Three Sisters
for Norfolk, Virginia.

Upon arriving, he soon discovered that he had been misinformed; there was no teaching work available. He resorted to a fallback plan, becoming one of the throng of Yankee peddlers who wandered the country, selling all manner of small items to whoever would buy them. The Yankee peddler was a common sight from Cape Cod to Lake Erie, from Canada to Kentucky. It was common for young New England men to spend the winter traveling the upper South on trading expeditions, and return in the spring with the fruits of their industry and enterprise.
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Literally thousands of these young men, most of them barely out of their teens, loaded wagons with combs, clocks, tinware, and other Yankee notions, selling them rapidly, and often at high profits.
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For his part, Bronson found the business instantly absorbing. He got off to a promising start by purchasing a stock of almanacs for three pennies each and promptly selling them for three times that amount. During the next five years, he made a total of five peddling trips to Virginia and the Carolinas, sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of various relatives. Laden with an assortment of soaps, jewelry, thimbles, scissors, playing cards, and almost every other thing imaginable, he walked along country roads and found shelter in friendly cottages and houses. Years later, he recalled how he had slogged through the Dismal Swamp at night in foul weather, picking his way through muddy pools and fallen cypresses, discerning his path with the help of lightning flashes.
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In his haphazard wanderings, he got to know a fairly large piece of the country.

Bronson got to know himself as well. He took particular pleasure when his wanderings took him to the homes of the tidewater gentry, who sometimes repaid him in something more valuable than money: the opportunity to sample the graces and good manners of a class he had never known before. Near the age of eighty, he looked back on these times and averred that an observing peddler “cannot well fail of becoming more of a gentleman and make a fuller acquaintance of human nature by his calling…. A boy of genius disguised as a peddler has advantages denied to the courtier, even, of learning the laws of etiquette and civility.”
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When possible, he persuaded the people he visited to open not only their parlors to him but also their libraries. Indeed, it later seemed to him that he might have fared better in his business if he had not neglected it for “intellectual pleasures.” By his own later admission, Bronson was too bashful and unlettered to take full advantage of the social opportunities that came his way through his contact with the worldly, cultivated families who welcomed him. Nevertheless, their influence enabled him to shed some of his awkwardness and to return home “a better behaved if not a wiser youth,” imbued with the beginnings of a more gracious manner. For the first time, he was, he wrote, “disposed to meet people, [my] elders at least, respectfully.”
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Years later, an English acquaintance declared that Alcott possessed the courtly manners of “a very great peer.”
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During this time, too, he made his first acquaintance with slavery, on very close terms. He sometimes slept in the cabins of slaves and awoke to find himself in the midst of their daily lives. In later years, he was destined to become a dedicated abolitionist—a proud friend of William Lloyd Garrison and a staunch admirer of John Brown. However, Alcott's experiences as a peddler did not immediately awaken him to the cause of freedom. Indeed, when he first heard Garrison speak, he found the latter's condemnations overly sweeping. No doubt mindful of his former hosts among the First Families of Virginia, whom he was prepared to forgive a great deal, Bronson criticized Garrison for his “want of discrimination…between the slave-holder who keeps his slaves from motives of expediency and the one whose principles are in favor of slavery.”
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For a man of the spirit, Bronson was acquiring a taste for finer things, and in his first whiff of refinement he began to look on his beginnings with a mild hint of superiority and scorn. In January 1820, while on one of these adventures with his younger brother Chatfield, Bronson wrote his parents his earliest surviving letter, boasting of turning a thirty-three percent profit on his wares. Reading this letter, one is struck immediately by the artificiality of Bronson's tone. He writes of his pleasure in having learned that his parents are “in circumstances affluent enough to preclude the idea of complaining.” He laces his first paragraph with words like “perusal,” “dissimulation,” and “felicitated,” always seeking the elaborate word to do the work of a simpler one. It is not so much a letter as a performance. Bronson was either trying to win his parents' compliments or to lord his self-taught erudition over them. Likely enough, he was trying to do a little of both. He wanted to sound like anything but the son of a subsistence farmer.