Eden's Outcasts (47 page)

That same Christmas of 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman offered a gift to President Lincoln: the city of Savannah, Georgia. As the Alcotts rang in the year 1865, the end of the war was finally in sight. In February, Louisa worked awhile on “Success,” but finding that thrillers were half the work and paid better than serious fiction, she “soon dropped it & fell back on rubbishy tales.” Two months later, on Sunday, April 2, Grant's army marched into Richmond. The night before, Louisa had been in Boston, watching Edwin Booth in a production of
Hamlet.
She called his performance the finest she had ever seen him give. In a Maryland rooming house, Edwin's younger brother John was plotting a different spectacle.

L
IKE MANY AMERICANS, BRONSON ALCOTT APPRECIATED
Abraham Lincoln much more deeply after Booth's bullet had been fired and Secretary of War Stanton had solemnly pronounced that his former chief “belong[ed] to the ages.” Although he had broken from his habitual abstention from the polls to vote for Lincoln in 1860, and again in 1864, Bronson had felt more enthusiasm for union and abolition than for the candidate who represented them. However, on April 15, 1865, when word came of the horror at Ford's Theatre, Alcott's estimate of Lincoln instantly transformed. He called the fallen president “a martyr to justice and republicanism” and a “cherished idol,” whose death had plunged the country into a woe in which “all men” took part. With reflexive optimism, however, Bronson predicted that Lincoln's murder would “knit us in closer and more religious bonds to God and the right, and redound to the preservation of our national honor and glory.”
¹

Like her father, Louisa was initially horrified to hear of the assassination, but her later reflections were complex. Although she had reveled in the fall of Richmond, she now wrote, “I am glad to have seen such a strange & sudden change in a nation's feelings.”
²
She did not explain just where this gladness came from. Perhaps her experience of life had made her more at home with bittersweet emotions than with pure jubilation. In much of Louisa's writing, the emotional keynote is not unreflective joy, but the darker but more durable happiness that comes from hardships bravely shared. In the days of late April 1865, the nation collectively experienced feelings that were continually present in Louisa's heart. For once, the world appeared to feel as she did. On the day of mourning, only one sight struck her as significant enough to record in her journal: the novel spectacle of a black man and a white man walking arm in arm. She “exulted thereat.”
³
For the moment, there seemed to be every reason to suppose that a republic of freedom and equality was at hand.

For Louisa and her family in general, there was less cause for sorrow than for celebration. Despite Louisa's own misgivings about the book,
Moods
had already gone into a third printing.
⁴
Her magazine potboilers, published under the name of A. M. Barnard, were selling briskly. On June 24, the day that would have marked Lizzie's thirtieth birthday, Anna gave birth to her second son, John Sewall Pratt. The prospects seemed as glorious outdoors as in. Bronson told his journal that he had never known “such a series of bright, benign days…as if Nature, partaking of the temper of the country, had also begun her cycle of reconstruction to intimate her sympathy and delight in the brilliant prospects and peaceful reign of our new republic.”
⁵
On Independence Day, he wrote, “the republic now begins to look sweet and beautiful, as if honest, patriotic citizens might walk upright without shame or apologies.”
⁶
Before the war, Alcott had always known that his ideal republic was unattainable because of slavery. It now seemed to him that the country was free to enter an era of enlightenment and justice.

Bronson hoped that the war would be only the first episode in a surging national movement toward deeper social reforms. He was mistaken. The reserves of American idealism were deep, but they had been drained low by four years of unspeakable violence. Relatively few Americans now took any interest in further moral crusades. It now seemed not only prudent but natural for people to start putting their own interests first. As the massive productive energies that had been mobilized to fight a war were converted to peaceful ends, per capita wealth and the availability of consumer goods soon reached unprecedented levels. No longer finding its heroes on the battlefields of Tennessee and Virginia, the nation took to measuring people by their audacious acquisition and lavish expenditure of money. Far from the golden age that Alcott anticipated, the nation instead entered a gilded one, soon to be derided by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their famous satire. America had learned, as Walt Whitman was to put it, “the lessons of the concrete.”
⁷

As far as the philosophical mood of the nation was concerned, Bronson Alcott's moment seemed to have passed. Despite his highly capable performance, even his position as superintendent of the Concord schools was taken from him. The day before Lincoln's assassination, Alcott learned that he was to be removed from office, evidently as a result of an obscure political deal.
⁸
It was to people like his daughter Louisa, who was rapidly learning how to write for a commercial audience and who still carefully noted every dollar earned in her journals, that the postbellum age appeared to belong.

In mid-July, Louisa received an attractive offer. William Fletcher Weld, a fabulously wealthy Boston shipping merchant, had an infirm daughter, Anna, whose health and character he thought might benefit from travel. Having learned of Louisa's medical experience and of her unsatisfied wanderlust, he suggested that Louisa accompany Anna and her half brother George to Europe as a nurse and travel companion. Weld envisioned a grand tour for his offspring, including visits to London, the Rhine Valley, Italy, Switzerland, and France. The entire excursion might last as long as a year. Although Louisa had long dreamed of such an opportunity, she at first hesitated to accept. It would be risky to take an extended break from her writing routine just as she was gaining such firm recognition, and she was not sure how her family would manage without her. Despite her concerns, the family verdict was unanimous in favor of her going. Louisa's 1873 novel
Work
contains a chapter called “Companion,” tangentially based on Louisa's tenure with Miss Weld. In the novel, while debating whether to become an invalid's companion, the heroine, Christie Devon, reflects, “My own experience of illness has taught me how to sympathize with others and love to lighten pain.”
⁹
Louisa possessed the same qualifications, and she had no objection to using them. Thus, after “a week of work & worry,” Louisa packed her trunk.
¹⁰

On July 17, the night before she left Concord, the Alcotts entertained William Torrey Harris, on a visit from St. Louis. Harris urged Bronson to get over his inertia and to try to publish his manuscripts; it seemed to him that Bronson's recent work would find favor with readers of all classes. Harris's visit also reawakened Bronson's interest in the Midwest. Alcott reflected that, whereas the transcendentalist era in New England was at an end, a receptive audience for his philosophy might still await him amid the plains and prairies.

On the morning of the twentieth, as the Cunard steamer
China
made its way out of Boston harbor, its most illustrious passenger stood not at the bow of the boat gazing forward, but at the stern looking back. Bronson was sorry to see Louisa go. He wrote that, for the moment, the family felt “disposed to blame the good fortune that takes her from us, almost the fair winds that waft her over the waves.”
¹¹
He also knew, however, that his daughter needed a restorative trip almost as much as Miss Weld. He saw that she was “a good deal worn with literary labor and deserving some diversion to recruit her paling spirits and fancy,” and he hoped that, when she returned, “we may find her…refreshed, enriched, and polished for the future literary victories which I am sure she is to win.”
¹²

Louisa found her voyage anything but refreshing. Ocean travel was uncomfortable. It was also soon evident that she and Anna Weld were to be companions only in a nominal sense. Anna played a fine game of backgammon, but this skill seems to have been her chief attribute. She was a peevish young woman with no literary inclinations that Louisa could observe. Indeed, months later, when they stopped in Frankfurt, Anna and George could not fathom Louisa's interest in seeing Goethe's home. “Who,” they obtusely demanded, “was Goethe to fuss about?”
¹³

It was not merely that Anna Weld was a philistine. The commercial nature of their relationship also divided the two women. Although she did not put it into writing, Louisa surely felt the strangeness of the position of one who becomes a friend for hire. To receive money in exchange for smiling at dull conversation, for treating another's trivial whims and disappointments as weighty matters, for exchanging the contacts and pleasantries one typically reserves for earnest friendships—how could a forthright, honest person like Louisa carry out such duties without a moral twinge? In
Work
, Christie Devon soothes the invalid entrusted to her by singing, reading aloud, and gently massaging the young woman's temples with cool water. Louisa likely gave similar attentions to Miss Weld, and it pleased her whenever the latter appeared to improve. Nevertheless, Louisa's service remained unambiguously a job. Finding no promise of friendship among her fellow passengers either, she kept mostly to her books and did her best to pass the time until Saturday, July 29, when Liverpool finally came into view.

A grimy, functional city, Liverpool impressed Louisa primarily with the number and desperate appearance of its beggars. She was glad the following Monday to board a train for London, the city of Dickens, Thackeray, and Carlyle that had lived in her imagination since childhood. As the train passed through the countryside, Louisa described what she saw as “unyankee.” Each field seemed newly weeded and every garden looked as if it had just been put in order. What impressed her most profoundly, however, was the lack of urgency that she saw in all directions. “Nothing was abrupt,” she wrote home to her father, “nobody in a hurry, and nowhere did you see the desperately go ahead style of life that we have. The very cows in America look fast…but here the plump cattle stood…with a reposeful air that is very soothing.”
¹⁴
In this placid climate, Louisa realized by contrast the extent to which not only her nation, but she herself, was propelled by restless desire. It is no accident that she addressed to her father in particular her reflections on the headlong speed of American life. Bronson had long been infuriatingly deliberate, taking it almost as a point of honor to reject the prevailing sharp-elbowed bustle of his country. Now, Louisa was discovering a place that seemed in sympathy with her father's principles.

The four days that the two women spent in London were dull and drizzly, and matters were made worse by Miss Weld's complaints of poor health. Two days after their arrival, Louisa was able to persuade her fussy companion to come with her to Westminster Abbey. Although Miss Weld was soon fatigued, Louisa managed to perform a pilgrimage of sorts, paying homage at the tombs of Spenser, Milton, and Ben Jonson. On the whole, she felt as if she had fallen into a novel.
¹⁵

Once her parents got over the strangeness of having an empty place at the dinner table, Louisa's departure caused relatively few changes in the daily routine at Orchard House, except that, under Bronson's indifferent management, the bills again stopped getting paid on time. If falling back slightly into debt did not faze him, Bronson did find himself ruffled by a piercing critique of
Moods
in the
North American Review
. On the brighter side, the notice praised the second half of the novel for its beauty and vigor, and the reviewer kindly stated that only two or three Americans were currently capable of writing a better novel. In its harsher passages, however, the review was scathing. It complained that the book was “innocent of any doctrine whatever” and commented particularly on the author's ignorance of human nature and her confidence in spite of her ignorance.
¹⁶
Bronson hotly denounced the review as being “of a popular cast, flippant, and undeserving.”
¹⁷
What may have hurt Bronson most deeply was that the piece was written by the son and namesake of his old friend and philosophical sparring partner, Henry James Sr. Although Bronson was doubtlessly aware that the younger Henry had some literary inclination of his own, many years were still to pass before the world would hear about
The Portrait of a Lady
,
The Ambassadors
, and
The Golden Bowl.
As it was, Bronson must have wondered what this young, unproven upstart knew about writing a novel, anyway.

As the leaves turned and fell, Bronson busied himself by building a new front fence, fashioning the gates with his own hands and working the posts and stretchers into designs that he proudly pronounced “grotesque.” Given the modern understanding of the word, it hardly sounds as if Bronson was paying himself a compliment. To Bronson, however, grotesqueness signaled a love of natural objects for their own sake, as well as a conscious rejection of fixed artistic laws. Bronson continued to admire John Ruskin, who had argued for a positive kind of grotesque, resulting from the play of a serious mind and giving pleasure to the viewer according to the delight the worker had taken in making the artifact.
¹⁸
Bronson built his fences like a true Ruskinian disciple, disdaining the straight lines of his neighbors' pickets and refusing to paint his work “with some tint that nature and art alike disown.”
¹⁹
In his midsixties, Bronson was taking as much joy as ever in the work of his hands. As always, the only toil that struck him as real came directly from his own brain, limbs, and tools. The power of capital—things created for their exchange value or the ability of money to create well-being and advantages––remained either too abstract or too demeaning for him to accept.