Eden's Outcasts (30 page)

As the calendar moved on toward autumn, his condition worsened. He was denying himself food and rest, acting more and more as he had done in Still River. He developed a persistent cough. There came, at last, a day when some internal threshold was breached. No one knows just what happened, but he wrote a poem about it later, encapsulating his fight to recover his sanity. Aptly, he called it “The Return,” and it begins like this:

 

As from himself he fled,

Outcast, insane,

Tormenting demons drove him from the gate.

Away he sped,

Casting his woes behind;

His joys to find—

His better mind.

 

Bronson centered the lines on the page, as if to emphasize the restored sense of balance that he came to feel after his inner storm subsided. But the poem begins with a moment of extreme imbalance, a psychic terror that seemed so real that the author had physically to run from it.
²⁰
In Bronson Alcott's time, there was no neurologist or psychologist to explain his sometimes alarming states of mind. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to ask some indulgence from those who condemn Alcott's failure to earn a living for his family. If his episodes of hallucination and delusion in Still River in 1844 and in Boston in 1849 show us anything, it is that Alcott was suffering from a recurring disability, evidently exacerbated during periods of unusual stress. It seems that there really was a limit to the amount of mental strain that he could safely withstand. At times, he may truly have been incapable of regular employment. Alcott can be seen as suffering from a condition that he could not control, as a man who was, in fact, doing the best he could to meet the demands of life, but finding that he could only do pathetically little.

Alcott was not deaf to the gossip that denounced him for permitting Abba “to delve for the family” and accused him of “indifference to its welfare.” He felt that the whisperings were unfair, but he did not know how to defend himself. “So it must seem to outsiders,” he wrote, “nor will any words of mine put fairer face on things. No explanation can take the place of deeds in their eyes, and I must stand for the time as a thriftless if not a heartless and incapable fellow. So let it seem; but let it not be so.”
²¹
The only justification he could give was that he “had one set of gifts and not the other, and fell so obliquely on my time that none caught my point of view to comprehend the person I was.” He had left the body out of his equation for success. He now saw that this had been as disastrous an error as if he had omitted the soul.
²²

Bronson's ordeal left him an invalid, and he referred to his hoped-for recovery as a “restoration from the dead.”
²³
He sought sanctuary in Concord. In September, he traveled there twice, staying first with Emerson and later with the Hosmers, only a short walk from the cottage where he had lived in 1840. He took morning walks with Thoreau, pausing to loaf and discourse on the grassy hillsides. He swam with Emerson in Walden Pond and talked with him about the new book,
Representative Men
, that Emerson was making ready for press. Bronson found a precious tonic in the cool air, the peaceful mornings, and the invigorating sun. Being in Concord, it seemed to him, was like the touch of the earth to the mythical giant Antaeus, who lost his strength whenever his feet left the ground. Believing that Abba would be similarly rejuvenated by a visit to the town, he invited her to join him for at least “one clear day” before winter. He wanted her not only to visit Concord but also travel with him to Fruitlands, where, he reminded her, “
A man once lived
.”
²⁴

Between visits to Concord, he returned briefly to Boston. As during the aftermath of Fruitlands, family played a central role in his recovery. His poem “The Return,” which begins with such torment, ends with a peaceful homecoming:

 

Recovered,

Himself again

Over his threshold led

Peace fills his breast,

He finds his rest;

Expecting angels his arrival wait.

 

After that strange, distracted summer of 1849, Bronson never again experienced a mental breakdown. Now, as he returned to Boston to face the world with renewed health, the question was no longer whether his family could save him, but whether he could return the favor.

During 1849, Bronson was not the only Alcott who toiled excitedly over a lengthy manuscript. Motivated in more or less equal parts by an urge to create, a desire for escapism, and the hope of earning some money for her family, sixteen-year-old Louisa set herself to work on her first novel,
The Inheritance
, which was never published in her lifetime. Louisa wanted nothing more fervently than to escape poverty. Not surprisingly, then,
The Inheritance
is a Cinderella story. The heroine, the impeccably virtuous Edith Adelon, is the penniless hired companion of a fabulously wealthy English family, the Hamiltons. Whereas the two children of the widowed Lady Hamilton behave generously toward Edith, her beauty and grace earn her the enmity of a Hamilton niece, Lady Ida Clare, who spends most of the novel plotting Edith's downfall. In the course of her ministrations to the poor, Edith encounters a stranger who, unbeknownst to all, harbors the secret of the heroine's birth. He sends her a packet containing a letter disclosing that her father was the long-lost heir to the Hamilton fortune. The packet also contains the father's will, naming Edith as the heiress to the very lands where she has been a servant. In a spectacular spirit of self-sacrifice, however, Edith contrives to destroy all evidence of her windfall, and her father's will is saved from burning only by the chance intervention of a servant boy. When, in the book's penultimate chapter, the Hamiltons confront Edith with the rescued document, she tears it to pieces, stating that she prefers her humble place among the loving Hamiltons to a place of rank and wealth. Providentially, a wealthy young lord is standing by to offer his own hand and fortune to her, but we are meant to understand that Edith did not expect his proposal when she gave up her fortune.

Observed in the light of the author's circumstances,
The Inheritance
is a fascinating piece of self-revelation. On the one hand, the story fiercely defends the virtue of loyalty and asserts a stout preference for family over fortune, very much in keeping with the Alcotts' system of values. By the same token, however, Edith rebels against her father by scorning his “will” both literally and figuratively, rejecting his intentions in favor of her own higher moral sense.
The Inheritance
ingeniously argues a point that the stormy, self-willed Louisa would gladly have explained to her father: that one can both be loyal to family and virtue
and
defy one's parents' wishes at the same time. Like much of her later fiction,
The Inheritance
is a covert plea for understanding the difficult process by which both characters and author must work out the ambiguities of personality and right behavior.

As Louisa made the first tentative steps toward her eventual career, her father, at fifty, faced the daunting task of resurrecting his own professional life. His name remained sufficiently notorious in Boston that he could not teach there. Therefore, he redoubled his efforts in the art he had first begun to craft in the 1830s. Beginning in December 1848, while still contending with his mental demons, he sought to earn a living by perfecting the art of public conversation.

Almost by design, an Alcott conversation was evanescent. Like an improvised musical solo, it was produced in order to fill the air with a momentary pulsation, imparting a flash of insight before moving on to the next equally ephemeral spark. In 1868, in an article titled “An Evening with Alcott,” an anonymous news correspondent gave a description of the effect that Alcott created:

Alcott's conversations were intimate and personal. No one who ever saw him converse had the impression of seeing a great orator. “Standing and facing an audience,” wrote the newspaperman just quoted, “he is as much out of his place as an editor is out of his element in the pulpit.” Seated in an elegant parlor, however, among a circle of educated listeners, Alcott transformed himself. He became an unrivaled philosophical and aesthetic talker, “the sole and unique Master of the Arm-chair.”

When Bronson spoke to an uninitiated audience, he explained to them that, in his definition, conversation was an endeavor to find points on which a company could sympathize in feeling. He thought it inappropriate for anyone to present his own individual views for the sake of argument or debate. Such assertiveness had its place among larger companies, but the leader of a conversation had a gentler task: to provide common ground. He aspired to “touching those fine chords in every heart which will inspire them to respond to one's own experience.” When he did not do so, he failed. “Conversation,” Alcott insisted, “is not a comparison of opinions…. Conversation should be magnetism.”
²⁶

For Alcott, conversation also meant improvisation. The advance publicity for a conversation typically announced nothing more than the general theme of the discussion, such as a literary figure like Aeschylus or Dante, or perhaps a virtue like civility. Alcott especially liked to explore an idea through a famous person who exemplified it: he conversed on Order as represented by Daniel Webster and Humanity as personified by William Ellery Channing. Although he prepared carefully, he seems never to have walked into the room with any prepared text. He had, it seems, the unusual gift of being able to offer a steady flow of impromptu observations on complicated matters without losing either his train of thought or a kind of dramatic tension. Of course, to preserve the conversational quality of the evening, Alcott also needed to respond to queries and observations from the audience; his conversational art form was not only performative but participatory, demanding flexibility as well as focus. In its aesthetic feel, an Alcott conversation might well be likened to the work of a jazz soloist.

Evidently, it was in their participatory aspect that Alcott's conversations were most likely to fall short of the mark. Few members of Alcott's typical audience were up to the twin challenges of adding thoughtfully to the conversation while also keeping their partisan opinions and personal egotisms in check. As early as 1837, following a conversation on self-sacrifice, Alcott lamented in his journal that he had almost given up the idea “of pursuing a subject in its direct and obvious bearing, with persons whose minds seem quite unfitted to the effort.”
²⁷
Thirty years later, he had apparently not solved the problem. The author of “An Evening with Alcott” observed that the conversation he witnessed was not a conversation in any ordinary sense, for no one had conversed. Rather, “the old man eloquent has all the evening all to himself—for the scattered spray of talk at the close of his discourse bears about the same relation to [conversation] that coppers do to the regular currency.”
²⁸

Alcott regarded his conversations as a distinct genre of communication, which he hoped eventually to raise to an art form. He wrote in his journal in 1856, “Alcott is making the Conversation,” just as he believed that Garrison had “made” the Convention, Greeley the Newspaper, and Emerson the Lecture. All these media, Alcott thought, were “purely American organs and institutions, which no country nor people besides ours can claim as we can.” The reporter who wrote “An Evening with Alcott” considered the conversation “a feature of social life peculiar to Massachusetts,” and was of the opinion that its flavor was “as essentially Yankee as…the Baldwin apple or the Concord grape.” Curiously, however, as the writer was obliged to admit, the conversation lacked the traits that one instinctively associated with New England thinking. Alcott's conversations in particular were neither practical nor shrewd nor sharply definite in their opinions. They did not offer “common sense,” but only “uncommon sense.”
²⁹

As Alcott was well aware, however, his conversations were not a potent recipe for making money. In the years from 1848 to 1853, they earned a total of $750—a living wage for about six months.
³⁰
In marked contrast to her father, Louisa became acutely conscious of the details of her personal finances. Beginning in 1850, at the age of eighteen, she kept a record in which she noted down to the dollar the amount of money that she took in every year. She was now keenly aware of the family's financial straits and eager to do what she could to alleviate them.

Alcott's life nearly came to an end in the summer of 1850, when he and the rest of the family contracted smallpox from, as Louisa put it, “some poor immigrants whom Mother took into our garden and fed one day.”
³¹
The girls caught the disease only slightly. Abba's case was somewhat worse. Bronson became dangerously ill and, for several weeks, was too weakened to leave his bed. Thankfully, he recovered without suffering the facial scarring that often came with the disease. It was yet another instance, though hardly the last, of the price the family paid for its kindness to others.

Meanwhile, the women of the family struggled to keep bodies and souls together. Louisa now taught a school on Suffolk Street, which her father wistfully visited, wishing that he could have a school again. Louisa would gladly have given him hers. The vocation that he adored left her utterly cold. After teaching for two years, she reached the unabashed conclusion that she hated it. Although necessity drove her back to the classroom a number of times, she never changed her mind. At the same time, however, the professions that she found most appealing—acting and writing—seemed beyond her reach. But idleness was unacceptable, and not only as a matter of family economy. It was essential to Louisa's nature always to be doing or planning something. The question for her was not whether to be active, but how.