Eden's Outcasts (2 page)

In April 1837, the couple had three daughters, ranging in age from six years to twenty-one months. As a supremely dedicated educator, fascinated by the undiscovered secrets of child development, Bronson had traced the progress of each of these girls literally from birth, compiling notes and commentaries that ran into the thousands of pages. It could justly be said that no father in America knew his children more thoroughly. Knowing them so well, he was keenly aware of how different they were. The eldest daughter, Anna, and the third daughter, Lizzie, had their father's even, placid temperament. Bronson had striven consciously to rear what he thought were perfect children, and Anna and Lizzie were living testaments to his theories of infant culture. But the middle daughter, now nearly four and a half years old, defied her father's attempts at understanding. Highly energetic, resistant to discipline, she had an innate turbulence that her father had tried without success to tame. She was, in Bronson's view, a creature of “impatience, querulousness, forwardness.” From an early period, she had been “the undisciplined subject of her
instincts,
pursuing her purpose, by any means that will lead her to their attainment.” Her father saw in her “signs of impending evil.”
¹⁸

Yet if this second daughter was fierce in her passions, she could be equally zealous in her loyalties. The critic Van Wyck Brooks told a story, more valuable perhaps for its mood than for its literal truth, of the day when, in preparation for the Temple School auction, the sheriff came to empty the premises of the fine books and furnishings that the schoolmaster had bought on credit and could no longer afford to keep. Brooks reports that the sheriff was going about his work when, suddenly, the teacher's daughter strode across the room toward him shouting, “Go away, bad man, you are making my father unhappy!” The anecdote ends with the schoolmaster, leading this daughter with one hand and her older sister Anna with the other, walking down the stairs “with mournful steps and slow.”
¹⁹
The impatient, forward daughter who is said to have defended her father's classroom and his feelings with such ferocity was named Louisa May.

When he used the words “mournful steps and slow” to describe the Alcotts' exit from the temple that had so recently housed the father's wondrous school, Brooks intentionally echoed the closing lines of Milton's
Paradise Lost
, in which the disgraced but wiser Adam and Eve, “with wandering steps and slow,” make their way out of the lost Garden of Eden.
²⁰
Brooks chose aptly, for few Americans have ever tried so passionately to construct a latter-day Eden than Bronson Alcott, first in his attempts to create the ideal school for young children, and later in his efforts to establish a saintly community of scholars in which money would be unknown, where no creature would profit by the suffering of any other, and where every participant would be received and loved as a member of an enormous family. By the same token, however, few have paid so high a price for trying to find perfection in a fallen world.

Alcott's second daughter was too young to attend her father's ideal academy at the temple. Nevertheless, her relationship with her father, acted out within an unusually close and interdependent family, was to be made still closer by a series of astonishing coincidences. Bronson and Louisa May Alcott shared the same birthday, November 29. Although they were born thirty-three years apart, the books that made their literary reputations were published in the same month. And at the end of it all—well, perhaps that coincidence is best reserved for the final chapter. In any event, the similarities in their lives were more than a matter of timing.

For Louisa as well as for Bronson, life was a persistent but failed quest for perfection. First, she was to labor vainly to conquer her fierce temper and stubborn willfulness, trying to find the paradise that her father always swore lay within her. Then, she would struggle to bring happiness and comfort to a family continually besieged by want. Later, she would go to war, doing all in her power, if not to make America a paradise, then at least to make it a place where all people would be free. Still later, as a novelist, she would strive to produce in fiction what she could not bring about in the world: a vision of humanity enriched by personal sacrifice and enlightened by unselfish love. Both Bronson and Louisa May had ambitions of altering the world through literature. In ways that neither anticipated and in widely varying degrees, they succeeded. Yet it was in the lives they lived, rather than in the words they wrote or spoke, that they fought hardest for redemption: both to redeem themselves from their perceived failures and to redeem the world at large from the wickedness that both father and daughter sought earnestly to reform. They wanted perfection. In their search for it, they inevitably discovered flaws both in the world and within themselves. Pursuing paradise, they continually confirmed themselves as Eden's outcasts.

“Outcast” was a word Alcott used to describe himself in 1837, and he did not exaggerate. His fall was all the more devastating because it had been so sudden. In February, he had written of his lofty hopes of redeeming the world. His “present purpose” was “to restore to the perverted and debauched sense of man, some of the worthier conceptions of [the] divine relations, and of the instinct, from whence they take their rise. I would, first, attract the notice of man to the original nature of childhood, as the fit means of quickening the parental sentiment, which slumbers, or is overlaid, in the hearts of too many mothers.” Almost daring fate, he had proclaimed, “the winds and waves of the terrestrial reach not the stable foundation of my faith; nor can they overthrow or efface [the] one purpose of my heart.”
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Barely a month later, however, his journal reflected a terrible change. His patrons were withdrawing their support. The public, swayed by “vague and false accounts of my enterprise,” had turned against him. Alcott could not find “a single individual who apprehends my great purpose, and is ready to step forward and aid me in this hour of need.”
²²
Alcott knew that, in the early months of 1837, something more precious than a library had been lost. The crisis at his school had arisen from a scandal of his own creation, a scandal touching on matters of sex and blasphemy. The newspapers and the pulpits were resounding with claims that he was depraving his students with impious and filthy ideas, casting scorn on the Bible, and schooling young children in the “naughtiness” by which babies were made. According to the press, he had, from a sheer love of notoriety, defied the sentiment of the wise and good and polluted the moral atmosphere.
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Even many of Alcott's most loyal supporters, who had eagerly greeted the opening of the school and lauded its novel, progressive mission, were wondering privately whether their friend had lost his direction. His reputation was in ruins.

He had never laid an improper hand on any of his pupils, and no one insinuated that he had. His intentions toward the children had been only the best, and he had never, in his own view, breathed a corrupting word to them. It was with Alcott's words, however, that the people of Boston had taken issue, so violently that he could no longer cross the Common without overhearing whispers or having boys jeer at him. There had even been talk of mob action. Only a year before, his teaching methods, which had not changed, had made him one of the most admired men in the city. The sudden reversal of fortune was all but inconceivable. Alcott confided to his journal, “what my future movements shall be, time must decide. At present, I see not my way.”
²⁴
When present and future are equally in doubt, there is only one other vista upon which to gaze. One must begin, therefore, with a backward glance along the road that had led Bronson Alcott both to glory and dishonor.

I
N A NUMBER OF SIGNIFICANT WAYS, LIFE DID NOT FULLY BEGIN
for Bronson Alcott until the year 1828, when three defining events occurred within months of one another: he paid his first visit to the city of Boston; he first heard the preaching of a young Unitarian minister named Ralph Waldo Emerson; and he proposed marriage to a fascinating woman named Abigail May. The city was to speak to his most celestial dreams, only to reject him when he dreamed too boldly. The minister was eventually to become his dearest, most understanding friend, and the woman was to become his loving companion for nearly fifty years. During the twenty-eight years that preceded this time of changed horizons, his life had been gradually taking one form. The city, the friend, and the lover altered that form profoundly, but the young man on whom they acted was already unusual.

Born Amos Bronson Alcox, he entered the world before dawn on Spindle Hill in the town of Wolcott, Connecticut, in the rugged hill country west of Hartford, on November 29, 1799, the eldest in a family that would eventually boast of eight children. The town had been incorporated only three years earlier, so recently that some people were still getting used to calling it Wolcott, instead of the previous name of Farmingbury.
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The new baby's family, too, was still working out just what to call itself. His paternal great-grandfather, the first white man to settle in the area, had spelled his name Alcock, after the fashion of his English ancestors, but by the time of Bronson's father's generation, the name had changed to Alcox. It continued in this form until the early 1820s, when Bronson and his cousin, Dr. William A. Alcox, agreed to change the name to Alcott. Around the same time he took the name Alcott, he ceased calling himself Amos and thereafter routinely signed his name A. Bronson Alcott. In the interest of clarity and at the risk of anachronism, the boy whom everyone called Amos will be referred to here by his adult name of Bronson.

If it took the Alcox family some time to work out the details of their name, there was little doubt in their minds as to who they were. While growing up, Bronson learned from his parents, Joseph and Anna, that he was directly descended from one of the men who had crossed the Atlantic on the
Arbella
in 1630 with Governor John Winthrop. It was on that voyage that Winthrop had given the sermon that first identified Puritan New England as “a city upon a hill.” Winthrop had cautioned his shipmates that, as they set out to do the work of the Lord in a forbidding wilderness, the eyes of the world would be upon them. If the people of New England broke faith with God and fell away from a standard of moral perfection, he warned, “we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world [and] we shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants.”
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Those early New Englanders saw it as their mission to found a spiritual Eden that would enlighten and redeem the world. Reform and redemption, in a different sense, were also to be the missions of Bronson Alcott's life.

Bronson considered the natural surroundings of his youth surpassingly beautiful, and as a grown man he loved to recall “the light, blithe season of my boyhood and youth…breathing the air of my native hills…treading their summits at morning's dawn.”
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It is still an attractive place, where maple and cherry trees still rise lush and tall and ferns grow thick as grass. However, Alcott preferred not to recall that the soil was rocky and inhospitable to farming, and even he could not romanticize the relentless cold of the winter. The town was a still further cry from paradise. The year Bronson turned seventy-five, a history of Wolcott was published. The local pastor who wrote the introduction confessed “there is but little that is interesting in these remnants of a farm life which must, at its best, have been unusually prosaic and dreary.”
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Wolcott generally distrusted new ideas, and the notions of Deism and dissent that were making inroads in northeastern cities placed some of the residents literally in mortal fear. When Bronson was still a baby, one of the church deacons solemnly foretold that, if that dangerous infidel Thomas Jefferson were elected president, “the meeting houses would be burned to the ground, and Christians would be burned at the stake.”
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The city on a hill that Bronson romanticized was only a struggling town on a wind-beaten slope.

In 1806, Bronson's school day was interrupted by a total solar eclipse. Not knowing what else to do, Bronson and a group of boys gathered stones and threw them upward toward the bewildering phenomenon. In his excitement, Bronson stepped awkwardly and fell, dislocating his shoulder blade. More than sixty years later, Bronson reflected that this boyhood misfortune had been a prophecy of his life to come—“tilting at the sun and always catching the fall.” Nevertheless, Bronson relished the memory of throwing the stones more than he rued the pain of the accident, and this too was true of his life. He wrote, “I suppose I am to toy with the sunbeams as long as I am dazzled by them.”
⁶

That same year, following the community's usual practice of wasting nothing and making do with whatever the Lord made handy, Bronson's father cobbled together two old buildings near the top of the hill to make a new house for the growing family. It was the first home that Bronson would remember. The widemouthed chimney kept the ground floor comfortably warm in wintertime, but upstairs, where Bronson slept, he gave thanks for the thick coverlets that his mother quilted. Well into old age, he was to recall the downstairs room for its deep-seated armchairs, its uncarpeted but scrupulously scoured floor, and the pipe and almanac that sat on the mantelpiece.
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In an autobiographical poem, he remembered his home as a picture of domestic industry: his father weaving a basket, his mother spinning thread, and his sisters minding their sewing while his brothers peeled apples. Significantly, the only person in the scene not engaged in gainful work was Bronson himself. Instead, he sat to one side, finding “his Elysium” in his books.
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Bronson's seeming idleness was a puzzle to his father, Joseph Alcox. A grave, quiet man, Joseph was a skilled farmer whose frugality and preference for his own handiwork prompted him to make his own tools.
⁹
In bad weather, he could be found in his shop, crafting farm implements that he sold to neighboring farmers for extra money. During Bronson's boyhood, his father could lay claim to the best-tilled, best-fenced farm in the district. Of him, Bronson wrote, “He gave himself to life with the earnestness & simplicity of a child. He was the most diffident person I have ever known.”
¹⁰
A man of few ambitions, either for himself or his family, Joseph took little part in public affairs and paid his bills. He was a man of virtues that, in later life, his eldest son found it easier to admire than imitate. Joseph could teach his son how to make farming implements and how to plow a straight furrow. But he was illiterate, and he could take no greater hand in his son's education.

It is tempting to look for parallels between the early life of Bronson Alcott and that of a boy born to another struggling family in rural isolation a little more than nine years later. Like Abraham Lincoln, Bronson grew up working the soil alongside a father who could barely read and write. The two boys were also similar in their innate thirsts for knowledge, in the shallowness of the intellectual springs from which they were first compelled to drink, and in the fact that whatever culture came to them was supplied by the maternal side of the family. Bronson learned his ABCs by copying letters with chalk on the floor of his mother's parlor. On winter days, if no chalk was available, he continued his practice by tracing letters with his finger in the snow. Anna Alcox, née Bronson, came from a family of some stature, and it was said that her arrival on Spindle Hill brought with it “a refinement of disposition and a grace of deportment” that had a good effect on the local minds and manners.
¹¹
Her eldest son considered her “a woman of great good sense, sweetness of disposition, industry, and engaging manners.”
¹²
The mild expression of her eyes always remained in Bronson's memory. She was a kindhearted, gentle mother who saw that her children never suffered from a lack of affection.

Looking backward, Bronson drew a picture of himself as “a comely child, his aspect sage, benign, / His carriage full of innocence and grace; / Complexion blond, blue eyes, locks brown and fine, / And frank expression in his rosy face.”
¹³
He had not been perfect, he knew; he remembered himself as a willful boy, more interested in his idle fantasies than doing the work that the world and his parents foisted on him. Although he was permitted both in the morning and in the evening to write in his journal and devour his books, the time allotted never seemed enough for him.

Bronson never regretted having grown up on Spindle Hill. “It kept me pure,” he wrote. “It soothed and refined my disposition. It was discipline and culture to me. I dwelt amidst the hills. I looked out upon rural images. I was enshrined in Nature. God spoke to me while I walked the fields.” To his mother's gentle teachings, the hill added its own mute messages. “Nature was my parent,” Bronson observed, “and from her, in the still communings of my solitudes, I learned divine wisdom, even when a child.”
¹⁴

Learning more conventional lessons, however, posed a problem. He was, he remembered, “confined to the narrow range of thought which…a small, isolated town could furnish…removed from the means of moral and intellectual improvement.”
¹⁵
The available schooling was meager, and Bronson's progress was further impaired when he had to miss sessions to help with the planting, harvesting, and other exigencies of the Alcox farm. On those days when Bronson could attend, he received his lessons in a frame building that he later described as “disconsolate,” unsheltered from the piercing sun in the summer and frozen by bleak winds in the winter. The children shivered through their lessons as they sat on stiff benches hacked from pine boards.
¹⁶
The schoolmaster was usually some favorite or relative of the district committee members, and the students were instructed in a mechanical fashion that called on no faculty other than memory. The parish library, the only ready source of printed material, contained fewer than a hundred volumes and was essentially defunct by the time Bronson was in his teens.

It was not long before the curious boy started looking for ways to distance himself intellectually from his environment. Using his father's tools, he made his own violin from a maple tree. In less active moods, he sat on the hillside, musing about the future. Apart from his mother, Bronson's only ally in this search for broader horizons was his cousin William, about sixteen months his senior. As teenagers, they exchanged stories and hand-delivered weekly letters to each other, discoursing as best they could on the books they read and their newfound ideas. They read each other's journals and discussed their dreams. They both thought that teaching might make a good profession, and they even aspired to authorship.
¹⁷
Bronson eventually sought leave from his father to cease working on Saturday afternoons, so that he might scour the area for more books. Families from miles around received visits from Bronson, inquiring whether they had any to lend him. Eventually, with the help of his cousin, Bronson began to accumulate a personal library from the castoffs of local parlors. A Bible was an early acquisition. Another find that influenced Bronson profoundly was James Burgh's
The Dignity of Human Nature.
¹⁸
Also available on many a farmer's shelf was
The Pilgrim's Progress
, John Bunyan's venerable allegory of salvation, which had lost little of its popularity among the God-fearing since it first appeared in 1678. Unable to acquire his own copy, Bronson repeatedly borrowed the book from his cousin Riley, committing favorite portions to memory. He carried
The Pilgrim's Progress
into his father's fields, stealing moments while resting the family's oxen to thumb its pages.
¹⁹
After a long day's labor, he would sit in the chimney niche, with a candle in his hand, poring over the book's “enchanted pages” until late at night. When he was seventy-three, the very same copy of the book at last became his, placed in his hands by Ruth Frisbie Alcott, Riley's widow. Bronson seems never to have received a gift with heartier thanks.
²⁰

Far more than any other book,
The Pilgrim's Progress
captivated Bronson. He called it his “dear, delightful book” and later claimed that it was his most efficient teacher and the dictionary by which he learned the English tongue.
²¹
Looking back over a span of decades, he felt that it had done more than give a contour to his education and his thinking about spiritual matters:

If
The Pilgrim's Progress
teaches anything, it teaches one not to take the world's judgments at face value. It firmly proclaims the narrowness of the way that leads to salvation. One either serves the false gods of wealth and the good opinion of one's neighbors, or one serves the true God of Heaven. There is no third option. According to Bunyan, the person who lives in the service of temporal legality and civility has chosen a path to destruction; to heed the advice of the Worldly Wiseman, who praises earthly comforts and counsels only so much morality as would make one's way easiest in the current life, is to submit ultimately to spiritual bondage. Bunyan's stern warnings against temptation and self-gratification found an avid listener in young Bronson.
Paradise Lost,
it seemed to him, was a book to be read.
The Pilgrim's Progress
was a book to be lived. The allegorical trials of Bunyan's Christian seemed perpetually to reflect Bronson's own struggles toward a kind of earthly perfection.
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