Eden's Outcasts (61 page)

Not all her interest, however, was concentrated on the private sphere. Twenty-seven years earlier, Louisa's mother had organized a petition to the Massachusetts constitutional convention, demanding the extension of all civil rights to women.
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In 1873, she had boldly declared, “I am seventy-three, but I mean to go to the polls before I die, even if my daughters have to carry me.”
¹¹⁸
However, Abba Alcott had died without ever having fulfilled this dream. Louisa's own chance came in March 1880, when a change in the law permitted the tax-paying women of Concord to vote for the school committee. Wasting no time, Louisa became the first Concord woman ever to register to vote. On the appointed day, she appeared with nineteen other women at the town meeting where the balloting was to occur. Bronson was also there, and “with a fatherly desire to make the new step as easy as possible,” he proposed that the ladies should be allowed to vote first. The motion carried, and the twenty women filed forward to deposit their ballots. No sooner had the last female vote been cast than Judge Ebenezer Hoar shocked the assembly by moving that the polls be closed. Before any objection could be mounted, this motion also carried. Not only had the women voted, but they had cast the only ballots to be tallied. Louisa noticed that some of the men looked disturbed at having been denied their rights. However, after more than two centuries of exclusively male suffrage, many agreed that, for one day at least, turnabout was fair play.
¹¹⁹

That spring, as Louisa voted, read, walked, rested, and tried to forget the loss of her sister, Bronson forged ahead with an architectural project that greatly absorbed his attentions. Anxious lest his school should pass a second summer without a permanent home, he had the foundations laid in March for a building that he called “the Hillside Chapel.” It was built only twenty-five paces or so up the hill from the side door of Orchard House. The structure strongly represents the values of the man who conceived it. Unpainted and somewhat rough in its appearance, wrought from solid New England timbers, the chapel invites the visitor to enter through a sharply peaked doorway, reminiscent of Gothic forms. One immediately walks up a wooden flight of stairs into the building's single room: a lecture hall with a high ceiling and a slightly elevated stage across the far side to accommodate speakers. Large enough for oratory, it is intimate enough for Bronson's favored medium, a conversation. Like the summer house that Alcott had built for Emerson a generation earlier, it savors of the untutored but earnest beauty of a premodern era.

As the second annual sessions of Bronson's school unfolded at the newly finished chapel, Louisa made preparations for Lulu. In early September, she put the last touches on the nursery and said a prayer over the white crib where the baby was to sleep. On September 19, Bronson chose red ink instead of black to write the first two words of his journal entry: “She Comes!” Louisa went to the pier in Boston that day for the long-anticipated meeting. As one baby after another came into view, she wondered whether each in turn might be hers. At last, the ship's captain emerged from the crowd, holding a little child dressed in white and sporting a crown of wispy yellow hair. There was a moment of recognition. Louisa held out her arms and said the baby's name. Lulu gazed at the strange woman for an instant and then said quizzically, “Marmar?” Seconds later, she was nestled close against her aunt “as if she had found her own people and home at last.” For many nights afterward, Louisa would creep into the nursery to assure herself that it was not all a dream and that Lulu was really there.
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Bronson called the child “a new trust and study…for us all” and added, “Childhood and age are the complements of life and human culture.”
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On October 12, 1880, Bronson departed on what was to be his final western tour. In many respects, it was the grandest of all, lasting until May 14 of the following year and covering thirty-seven cities and towns. Heedless of the usual effects of age—he turned eighty-one during the course of his journey—he traveled five thousand miles and sometimes spoke three times a day. Although he charged nothing for more than half his appearances, he earned between a thousand and twelve hundred dollars, at a time when a new house sold for less than four thousand dollars and a night in a New York hotel cost a dollar. No longer needful of life's necessities, Bronson used some of the money from his tour to add a new wing to the Thoreau house. It seems that he did not feel fully alive unless he was altering his landscape in some fashion.

Otherwise, 1881 was a less productive year than most for the Alcotts. Louisa was so busy with Lulu that she wrote only one line in her journal from January to September. Lulu was a delight to Bronson's eyes as well. Borne back to the past by nostalgia and the presence of a toddler, he gave his friends copies of a long autobiographical poem,
New Connecticut
, which recounted his youth and adolescence on Spindle Hill. His only annoyances of the moment were Lulu's doctors, who recommended the addition of meat to her diet. Bronson railed against these men who “would demonize the little saint” and swore to guard against such assaults on the sweetness of her soul.
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In September, Bronson and Louisa went together to have tea at Frank Sanborn's house and to converse with Sanborn's houseguest, Walt Whitman. Whitman was somewhat intimidated by the company, which also included Emerson, and he seemed to be choosing his words with some delicacy. Now in his sixties, he stooped a bit and leaned on a staff for support, but Bronson still detected “a certain youthfulness…speaking forth from his ruff of beard and open-bosom collar.”
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Whitman approached Bronson as the living historian of transcendentalism, and he peppered the older Alcott with questions about Fuller and Thoreau. He asked, too, about Emerson, who, though physically present in the room, was now too mentally enfeebled to make extensive responses. Bronson tried to persuade Whitman to accept his theory of the fall of Adam and Eve, but he found the younger man impervious to the idea that human beings were creatures of sin. To the contrary, Whitman declared that existing civilization was an improvement on all that had gone before, and he looked confidently to America as the eventual birthplace of a new, still better type of man.
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Bronson must have been both surprised and gratified to find a prophet even more optimistic than himself.

In December, Louisa received a letter from a poor woman in the Midwest who had no money to buy Christmas presents for her children. The children had suggested that she write to Santa Claus. Instead, she wrote to Miss Alcott. More amused than offended by the presumption, Louisa put together a box of gifts. Lulu, much interested in the proceedings, generously offered to add some of her own favorite toys. Louisa graciously declined. After sending the package, Louisa did what she almost always did on the heels of a funny occurrence. She wrote a story about it, which she sold for one hundred dollars.
¹²⁵
The incident was marvelously typical of the two sides of Louisa. When the call for charity came, she answered it readily. However, she was almost reflexive in her ability to turn the situation into art, and then into profit. A time was fast coming, however, in which even her resourceful spirit would be tested to the full.

T
HE YEAR
1882
BEGAN WITH GOOD NEWS. IN JANUARY,
Roberts Brothers published Louisa's revised edition of
Moods
—the author's last word on the book that had bedeviled her for more than twenty years. In her preface to the revised edition, Louisa thought it wise to explain the original purpose of the novel. She wrote that, despite the public's perception, she had never meant to write a book about the institution of marriage. Rather, she had intended to explore “the mistakes of a moody nature, guided by impulse, not principle.”
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Louisa believed that the fundamental idea of the book was still sound. Indeed, she had found that her mature observation and experience had confirmed much of what her younger mind had grasped by intuition and imagination. It was time, then, to give her first novel “a place among its more successful sisters; for into it went the love, labor, and enthusiasm that no later book can possess.”
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The 1882 edition of
Moods
is more than a revision. “Restoration” is a more aptly descriptive word. All traces of the novel's subplot have been expunged, and through its excision, the novel gains substantially in clarity. The story is now Sylvia's, and her inner conflicts are clearly the problems most in need of resolution. Instead of presenting only one instance of Sylvia's self-destructive impulses—her rash investigation of the brushfire—the revised text draws her twice more into danger. Early in the novel, she makes her way to a rock on a stormy seacoast and sings forth her delight in the windswept scene while, unobserved, the rising tide comes in and all but inundates her path to safety. As the water rushes in, the mercurial Sylvia, still unconscious of her peril, feels her spirits plummet as she thinks of her dead mother and reflects that it might be pleasant to join her. Only Warwick's arrival at the critical moment saves her from drowning. The episode, initially joyous, ends with the emotional feel—and very nearly the effect—of a suicide attempt. Later, on a boating expedition with Warwick, Moor, and her brother, Sylvia heedlessly rejoices when a violent thunderstorm disrupts the outing. As her boatmates row for their lives, Sylvia laughs and strains to experience every impression of the storm, even as lightning strikes nearby. Almost fifty years earlier, when Louisa was two, Bronson had written about her, “On the impetuous stream of instinct, she has set sail, and, regardless, alike, of the quicksands and rocks of the careering…countercurrents that oppose her course, she looks only toward the objects of her desire and steers proudly, adventurously…. The stronger the opposing gale, the more sullenly and obstinately does she ply her energies.”
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Given the Alcotts' practice of sharing journals, Louisa may well have known about Bronson's early description of the bold sailing of her reckless spirit. If her father's journal entry was not the direct inspiration for Sylvia's stormy boat ride, the echoes are nevertheless strong.

The scenes restored to
Moods
in 1882 make explicit what the 1864 edition left obscure: that Sylvia Yule is a heroine determined to
feel
, even if her forays into sensation and emotion threaten to annihilate her. Implicit in the 1882 edition of
Moods
is a critique of the romantic notions of the transcendentalist movement, particularly its faith in nature as a benevolent and restorative influence. Louisa believed that nature is a fitful, savage force and that sympathetic conformity with its energies can physically and psychologically shatter a human being.

The 1882
Moods
is also more candid as to the precarious nature of Sylvia's mental health, making clear that her excesses of emotion raise continual threats to her well-being. The revised text also comments more frankly on her mercurial personality, calling her “a changeful thing,” haunted by “the melancholy of a temperament too mixed to make life happy.”
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With a directness of voice only partially developed in the earlier edition, Sylvia is now free to say, “I know that I need something to lean upon, believe in, and love; for I am not steadfast, and every wind blows me about…. I ask all whom I dare to help me, yet I am not helped…. So Is tumble to and fro, longing, hoping, looking for the way to go, yet never finding it.”
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Along with the broader elaboration of Sylvia's condition come new reflections on how her suffering might be eased. In another restored passage, Sylvia entertains Warwick, Moor, and her brother by acting a series of scenes from Shakespeare. Warwick intuits that performance and imagination are therapeutic tools for Sylvia, noting that “pent-up emotions can find a safer vent in this way than in melancholy dreams or daring action.” He also adds that less restraint, not more, is likelier to change Sylvia for the better: “Let her alone, give her plenty of liberty, and I think time and experience will make a noble woman of her.”
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He turns out to be only partly right. Sylvia needs not only freedom but a good talking to.

This she receives when, as in the original version, she seeks advice from her cousin Faith after telling Moor of her love for Warwick. Faith's basic prescription does not change; she still believes that Sylvia should give her love to neither of the two men who have sought it. In the revised text, however, she adds a stirring injunction; Sylvia can, and must, achieve a fundamental change in character: “You have been the victim of moods, now live by principle, and hold fast by the duty you see and acknowledge.”
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The 1882 Sylvia heeds this advice with a will that the 1864 Sylvia could not have mustered. Moor returns, not to watch his beloved but erring wife slip tragically into the grave, but to discover that she has, indeed, learned to become a good and devoted wife. Now no longer marred by the moods that nearly wrecked her youth, Sylvia prepares for a future in which love and duty will go hand in hand. Despite this happy ending, it is easy to regret the reform of the younger, more impulsive Sylvia, who, for all her mental disturbance, was a good deal more fun.

In the 1864
Moods
, Sylvia dies, the judgment of her doctor being that she “had lived too fast, wasted health ignorantly, and was past help.” Sylvia converts this diagnosis into a cosmic judgment, claiming, “It is I, who, by wasting life, have lost the right to live.”
⁸
By 1882, Louisa had revised not only her novel but also her thoughts about one's ability to overcome emotional distress. The 1882 text reflects peace of mind and a firm confidence in the power of self-control. In the first published text of
Moods
, the reconciliation between Mr. Yule and his daughter, while indicative of a moral rebirth on Sylvia's part, is not sufficient to save the latter from death, and Sylvia's father blames himself for his daughter's downfall. In the later text, however, when Sylvia rescues her relationship with her father, she also saves herself. In the 1882 text, the sentimentalized death in the family at the end of the novel is Mr. Yule's, not Sylvia's. Instead of an edifying sermon, Mr. Yule's last gift to Sylvia is a kiss, and his last words to her are a simple blessing. They have learned to communicate, not with lectures, but with love.

Bronson also began 1882 with an impressive flourish of literary creativity. Finished now with transcendental prose, he had turned his efforts to poetry. That winter, he authored forty sonnets that Louisa regarded as “remarkable.”
⁹
In April they were published under the title
Sonnets and Canzonets
. As Frank Sanborn conceded in the essay that introduces the volume, Bronson had made little effort to keep up with the changing poetic styles and conventions of his time, and the verses generally reflect a certain quaintness of expression. Taken as a group, however, the poems are a fitting retrospective of Alcott's life, and they illustrate the extent to which Bronson, in old age, had exchanged the transcendental for the personal. Virtually all of the poems are versified reminiscences, including a charming series of lyrics that tell the story of Bronson's courtship of Abba—some from his perspective, and others from hers. In later poems, Bronson recollects many of his famous friends, including Hawthorne, “Romancer, far more coy than that coy sex” Thoreau, “Masterful of genius…and unique” and Margaret Fuller, “Sibyl rapt, whose sympathetic soul / Infused the myst'ries [her] tongue failed to tell.”
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Bronson also wrote at least one poem for each of his four daughters. Elizabeth receives honor as a “dear child of grace, so patient and so strong.”
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The grief is still fresh in “Love's Morrow,” a poem for the recently departed May that contains the poignant couplet, “Ah! gentle May / couldst thou not stay?”
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The collection also contains a sonnet inspired by Louisa. The aspects of his famous daughter that Bronson chose to emphasize reveal much about his sense of her value as a person. The poem deals with Louisa's nursing service, the act of self-sacrifice by which she finally secured her father's respect. He has relatively little to say about her career as an author or about her popular success. The poem, which bears similarities to Milton's sonnet on his blindness, is expressed in a single sentence, a sentence barely sufficient to contain the deep emotions it exudes:

Louisa worried that, between his writing and his work at the Concord School of Philosophy, her father was driving himself too hard. She sometimes had to remind him that he was eighty-two. Whether or not Bronson appreciated Louisa's fretting, he shrugged it off. In the proem to
Sonnets and Canzonets
, Bronson boasted that he had been “long left unwounded by the grisly foe / Who sometime pierces all with fatal shaft.”
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He continued to believe that, in his vegetarian diet and other moderate habits, he had discovered a fountain of youth. As early as 1870, he had written hopefully of living to see one hundred.
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Six years later, he took an informal inventory of his hereditary ills and was delighted to report that they were few. Given his long practice of temperance, he still saw no reason why he might not “possibly reach my hundredth birthday, and retire with the century, (1899).”
¹⁶

Emerson, however, was almost gone. Some said that he had never recovered from the shock of a fire in his house in 1872. Modern retrospection has raised the likelihood of Alzheimer's disease. Louisa and Bronson both found his decline pathetic to witness. The previous fall, a week before Bronson's and Louisa's birthday, a young man named Edward Bok called on Louisa in hopes that she might gain him an audience with Emerson. Although she cautioned him against expecting too much, Bok insisted that he would rather meet the great man in his weakened state than not at all. When he and Louisa were ushered into Emerson's study, the initial impression was by no means disappointing. Wearing a long black coat, Emerson rose from behind his desk and decorously took the younger man's hand. However, he said nothing. Without explanation, he turned away from his guests and walked toward the window. There he stood, gazing outside as if no one were in the room with him. At length, still without a word, he walked back to his desk, bowed to Mr. Bok, and took his seat. To break the oppressive silence, Louisa asked her old friend if he had read a new book by John Ruskin. With calm surprise, Emerson turned his eyes upon her, trying to recall something. Finally, he spoke: “Did you speak to me, madam?” Louisa replied with tears.
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Even though Emerson was no longer the man they had known, neither Louisa nor Bronson abandoned him. Bronson kept up his frequent visits until the end. Despite Emerson's illness, his parlor remained a gathering place for the intellectuals of Concord. Emerson still presided over these social functions, although he was mostly silent now.
¹⁸

Early in the spring of 1882, Bronson presented his old companion with a copy of
Sonnets and Canzonets
, several of whose verses honored a friendship that had now endured for more than forty-five years. Recalling the literary liaison in which he had been the lesser but in some ways more devoted partner, he looked back on the times when Emerson had patiently striven, without great success, to translate Alcott's flights of inspiration into readable form:

Editing is not often so sensual.

Another sonnet devoted to Emerson warmly evokes memories of mornings when he and Alcott “did toss / From lip to lip, in lively colloquy, / Plato, Plotinus, or some schoolman's gloss.”
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It also recalls leisurely swims in Walden Pond where the two men raised “deeper ripples” and concludes by imagining Emerson gazing fondly at the stars before pressing his head on his pillow. Bronson's lines reveal the depth of the two men's friendship, stated in words that, in another context, might even be taken as erotic. In his friendship and intellectual engagement with Emerson, Alcott found a pleasure that was both intense and entirely chaste—a pleasure that, while not sexual, could be expressed only in the language of Eros.