Eden's Outcasts (56 page)

The poem relates that, safe in the Alps, the goose regained “the health she had so nearly lost.”
²⁸
Though she was still not entirely well, Louisa was now feeling rejuvenated by her travels. Shortly before leaving Bex for Vevey, the scene of her innocent dalliance with Laddie, she wrote to Niles that she was rising from her ashes in a phoenixlike manner.
²⁹
It was a good thing, Louisa thought, that the books already in print were doing so well, since she could not bring herself to write anything beyond a few odds and ends, more in the way of notes than an actual manuscript. She now caught herself “dawdl[ing] round without an idea in [her] head.”
³⁰
Having been told by her friend Alice that no one did anything in Italy, where she planned to spend the ensuing six months, Louisa looked forward to another half year of idleness before finally getting back to work. European living was agreeing with her so much that, in September, she talked of extending her holiday still further. Although it seemed obvious to her that someone should go home in the spring to look after family business, she saw no reason why May, instead of her, should not be the one to return.

In October, the sisters left Switzerland for Italy, passing through Florence, Milan, Parma, and Pisa on their way to Rome. Whereas the beauty and romance of the ancient city enchanted May, Louisa saw her surroundings, as she put it, “through blue glasses.”
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Not only was poor health dampening her spirits, but some of the anti-Catholic feeling she had imbibed during her teenage years in Boston made her critical of what she saw. She felt continually oppressed by “a sense of sin, dirt, and general decay of all things.”
³²

G. P. A. Healy, whose canvas of Lincoln hangs in the White House, painted this portrait of Louisa on her trip to Rome.

(Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

In December came devastating news. John Pratt, Anna's devoted husband of ten years, had died suddenly. Louisa had long since put aside the jealousy and resentment she had felt when John had first entered the family, and she grieved at his passing. She lamented, “No born brother was ever dearer, & each year I loved & respected & admired him more and more.”
³³
The letters from America indicated that Anna was bearing the situation bravely. Louisa wrote to Anna that the ten happy years the couple had shared could never be taken away. Although she considered cutting her travels short in order to be by her sister's side, Louisa found that there was no need for her presence since a favorite cousin, Lizzie Wells, had rushed to Concord to attend to the dying man. At Louisa's behest, Wells now remained there to fill the place Louisa had left empty. Louisa was still not well, and she thought it prudent to remain where she was and to gather strength in order to be the more useful when she did return. For the time being, she had one way to help her sister and nephews.

Despite her plan to take a break from writing while in Europe, Louisa seems to have begun her next novel before word of Pratt's death reached her.
³⁴
After she heard the news, however, her writing took on a new purpose: both the spirit and the proceeds from this novel must belong to the two “little men” who had been left without a father. She threw herself determinedly into her manuscript, vowing that Anna and “the dear little boys” would not be left in want. She resorted to the most commercially appealing characters she was ever to devise: the March family.

While
Little Men
is ostensibly a sequel to
Little Women
, it greatly differs in spirit and tone from its predecessor. The once irrepressible Jo has been overtaken by both time and responsibility. Although barely two years of real time had elapsed between the release of part 2 of
Little Women
and the appearance of
Little Men
, Jo is now a “thin old woman”—the image of how Louisa viewed herself in the aftermath of war and disease.
³⁵
The focal location of the novel is not the March family home but the boys' academy at Plumfield, which Jo and Professor Bhaer had founded in the last chapter of
Little Women.
Whereas the March home had been a school for life only in a metaphorical sense, the scene of
Little Men
openly proclaims the book's intention to instruct.

Whereas
Little Women
, after its episodic beginnings, acquires both cohesiveness and direction,
Little Men
remains principally a series of anecdotes and sketches. Its lack of thematic unity is easily explained. If the principal building blocks of
Little Women
were Louisa's concrete recollections of Hillside, then
Little Men
emerged primarily from her idealizing imagination. The reviewer from the
Ladies' Repository
of Boston made an apt point in observing, “[T]he first story is real and the second made; and the unmistakable charm of being told straight out of real life, which was the spirit and soul of the earlier work, is wanting in this.”
³⁶

As
Little Men
ventured into the airy realm of idealism, Louisa's inspiration inevitably drifted toward reflections on her father. The novel does not address Bronson's biography any more than
Little Women
had done; Mr. March again remains politely on the story's periphery. Nevertheless,
Little Men
owes its educational spirit and agenda almost entirely to Bronson. When, in 1871, the Alcotts' publisher decided to capitalize on
Little Men
's success by reissuing Elizabeth Peabody's
Record of a School
, Louisa wrote the following lines for inclusion in Peabody's preface: “As many people…inquire if there ever was or could be a school like Plumfield, I am glad to reply by giving them a record of the real school which suggested some of the scenes described in
Little Men
…. Not only is it a duty and a pleasure, but there is a certain fitness in making the childish fiction of the daughter play the grateful part of herald to the wise and beautiful truths of the father.” The “thanks and commendations” for Plumfield, she graciously conceded, all belonged to Bronson.
³⁷

Yet Louisa's statements need some refining. In truth, the genealogy of Plumfield is more complicated, as might be expected from the fact that the Temple School exerted little direct influence on Louisa's own education. She never attended the Temple School. Its last remnant closed when she was five, and her memories of it were few. Indeed, in its vision of school as a kind of extended family, Plumfield more closely resembles another experiment that Louisa remembered more clearly. Rather than simply replicating the Temple School, Plumfield combines the discipline and introspection of that institution with the pastoralism and consociate family structure of Fruitlands. In contrast to Alcott's classroom-centered teaching at the Temple School, Plumfield resembles Fruitlands in that the process of learning is an around-the-clock experience, deriving as much from the work and play of the community as from the formal lessons of the instructor. It was Fruitlands that opened Louisa's youthful eyes to the possibility of forming intimate spiritual attachments on a basis other than blood or romance. From Fruitlands to Plumfield, she transposed the concept that the word “family” might describe adults and children united by a spiritual vision and a moral project.

The curious fact is that Fruitlands was such a miserable failure while
Little Men
was such a resounding success, selling in six figures in its first year. The difference rests on a charming irony. In establishing Fruitlands as an actual place, Bronson Alcott, perhaps for the only time of his life, was too much of a realist. The flesh-and-blood utopianism of Fruitlands attracted few followers. Refined into fiction, however, the idea of such a community found favor even among those who claimed that it could never really be. Whereas Fruitlands was experienced only by a handful of impractical dreamers, Plumfield has left its mark on the imaginations of generations of children, sowing seeds of idealism to sprout where they may.

Louisa had left America the day after the release of
An Old-Fashioned Girl.
She returned on the same day that
Little Men
appeared in American bookstores. The twelve-day voyage from England aboard the steamer
Malta
was anxious and uncomfortable. Not only had Louisa's fourteen months overseas failed to put an end to her chronic pain, but a number of the passengers on the ship were stricken by smallpox. Unaware that her bout with the disease twenty years earlier had immunized her against a second infection, Louisa moved nervously among the sufferers.
³⁸

When the interminable journey finally ended and she disembarked in Boston, she was greeted by the welcome sight of her father and Thomas Niles, who had come to meet her with a great red placard advertising
Little Men
pinned up in their carriage. She was delighted to learn that the book had sold fifty thousand advance copies. On arriving at Orchard House, she found matters in better shape than she might have expected. Her upstairs room had been “refurnished and much adorned by Father's earnings.”
³⁹
Although Anna still mourned the loss of her husband “like a tender turtle-dove,” she was physically well and met her sister's solicitous gaze with a look of serenity.
⁴⁰
The nephews were now tall, bright lads who pleased Louisa not only with their cleverness but also with their devotion to their grandmother. Marmee herself, however, looked weak and aged, and Louisa resolved never to travel far from her again. Friends of both Bronson and Louisa descended on the house in droves, and the general excitement moved Bronson to write that no season in his recent memory had been so crowded with surprises.
⁴¹

Amid all the bustle, Louisa took time to repay one last debt. In 1862, James T. Fields, the editor of
The Atlantic
who had told her to stick to teaching, had lent her forty dollars to help her furnish a kindergarten. He had told her, perhaps with a note of derision, that she could repay him when she had made “a pot of gold.” Louisa had forgotten neither the loan nor the words that had gone with it. She now sent the money back with many thanks and with perhaps the slightest hint of revenge.
⁴²

The joy of Louisa's reunion with the family gave way to darker reflections in July when news came from Syracuse that Abba's brother Samuel had died. Slighting Emerson for the moment, she called her uncle “our best friend for years.” She added, “Peace to his ashes.”
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Coming home temporarily did for Louisa what her time overseas had failed to accomplish. For a month after her return, she felt better than she had felt for two years. She was too accustomed to the frailties of her body to expect good health to last, but she enjoyed it heartily until, in July, the inevitable slide into discomfort began again. She did have the strength to go on writing, or failing that, to revise scores of pages of odds and ends for publication as a sequence of bagatelles known collectively as the
Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag
series. The first volume in the sequence appeared in 1872 and was eventually followed by five others, the last appearing in 1882. Although of relatively slight importance to understanding Alcott as a writer, the
Scrap-Bag
series says much about the acumen of Louisa and her publishers as businesspeople. The books were small and easily portable—just the thing, as Roberts Brothers surely anticipated, to purchase as an amusement for a child going on a holiday or to stuff into a stocking at Christmas. Their anecdotes are short, simple, and well suited to the casual reader. The series emerged from a desire to find yet another niche in the reading market that Alcott's writing might address, and Louisa was more than fit for the task of filling it.

As the title of the
Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag
series reflects, Louisa found some value in blurring the distinction between her real self and her fictitious alter ego, Jo March. Just as her imagined character had taken on many of the features of her creator, so too did Louisa find fun in partially becoming Jo, attaching stories to her name and using Jo's persona to narrate events that had happened to the real woman. Sometimes she referred to her real family as “the Marches.”
⁴⁴
When she wrote to one fan, she took the identification still further, averring that her father was, like Mr. March, a minister.
⁴⁵
It is possible that Louisa elided the distinction between herself and Jo because she sensed that the character she had created—genial, happily married, and above all, healthy—was a more appealing persona for the public than the real woman she had become. In her depictions of Jo, as well as in the more literally autobiographical pieces in the
Scrap-Bag
series and elsewhere, Louisa did not hesitate to romanticize both the situations she described and the characters of heroines. Louisa plainly understood the commercial appeal of sketches and stories that played gently on the reader's sentiments, and she lavishly obliged her public with images of self-reliant young women braving daunting odds with the encouragement of loyal and loving friends. At the same time that Louisa was satisfying her reading public, she was adroitly managing the public's perception of her real-life personality. The Louisa May Alcott who appears in her autobiographical sketches is as brilliantly crafted a heroine as Jo March ever was.