Eden's Outcasts (57 page)

Nevertheless, there was no way for Louisa to remain faithful to the image she had created for herself. In the first place, the image of Jo with which she identified herself was internally inconsistent, owing simply to the realities of time. There are two Jo Marches: the athletic teenager of
Little Women
and the matronly Aunt Jo of
Little Men
and, much later,
Jo's Boys.
With the typical greediness of human beings, Louisa's readers wanted to imagine that she was both Jos at once. This in itself was a feat that no illusionist could perform, but her devotees demanded still more. They wanted to imagine Jo/Louisa as a petite, perky young woman with unlimited stores of laughter and goodwill. Louisa secretly prayed for a pox to descend on them. She complained, “Why people will think Jo small when she is described as tall I don't see, & why insist that she must be young when she is said to be 30 at the end of the book?”
⁴⁶
It must have been peculiar and even painful for her to reflect on the ever increasing distance that separated the older Jo March, still sprightly and energetic, from the real-life original, a self-confessed “tired out old lady…with nothing left of her youth but a yard or more of chestnut hair that
won't
turn grey though it is time it did.”
⁴⁷
Louisa wrote this description of herself when she was still not forty-two.

In contrast, her father was acting like anything but a tired old man. Between 1869 and 1875, years that saw him age from seventy to seventy-six, he took four tours of the Midwest, where he now regularly found eager audiences for his conversations. He hoped to make annual western excursions thereafter and was deterred from doing so only because he could not bring himself to leave Abba, whose health was growing considerably weaker. He was in regular contact with his St. Louis friend William Torrey Harris, and in Illinois he had found a loyal friend in Dr. Hiram K. Jones, a devotee of the ancient Greeks who led an active and intellectually vibrant Plato Club in Jacksonville.

It was now not unusual for Alcott to return to Concord after several months of speaking with eight hundred dollars in his pocket. He spoke against religious orthodoxy and in favor of a “New Church” in which worship would be free, individual, and spontaneous. He inveighed against the writings of Darwin, which he lacked the scientific knowledge to fully appreciate but in which he perceived a threat to free will and a challenge to the spiritual nature of humankind. “Any faith declaring a divorce from the supernatural, and seeking to prop itself upon
Nature
alone,” he averred, “falls short of satisfying the deepest needs of humanity.”
⁴⁸
To his great pleasure, Bronson had many opportunities to address school audiences, to whom he expounded his theories of education and moral culture. As was now habitual with him, he also regaled his audiences with verbal sketches of his great transcendental brethren, tending to save for last a discourse on Louisa. He liked to tell of how, as a girl, she came home from school one day and said the master could not spell, and it was no use for her to attend his school any longer. Alcott told his listeners that, thereafter, she said she was merely visiting the school as an observer. With a touch of humor, he added that she had never stopped observing. Explaining his own current popularity, Alcott conjectured that people were treating him well for his daughter's sake.
⁴⁹

On the night of July 23, 1872, Emerson's house caught fire. Neighbors rushed to the family's aid and, in a desperate attempt to save the philosopher's library, began pitching books by the armload out the windows. Louisa stood guard over the scorched, sodden pile.
⁵⁰
Though some were damaged, none of the precious volumes was lost. The structure was saved, but the Emersons were forced to relocate while extensive repairs were undertaken. Emerson suffered deeply from the shock of the blaze, and Bronson was also stunned. He lamented, “We shall never sit again
in the same rooms
!”
⁵¹

The same year, between western journeys, Bronson also published a second successful book.
Concord Days
purports to be six months of entries from Alcott's 1869 journal. The work is divided into a half dozen sections, each named for a month, moving sequentially from April to September. Dated as if to represent a chronological record, it treats topics as diverse as Goethe, The Ideal Church, and Berries. Yet the organizing principle of
Concord Days
is much looser than it first appears. Far from an authentic six-month window into Alcott's life, the book offers material written over a span of more than thirty years. It is an eclectic scrapbook of Alcottiana, including excerpts not only from journals of various years but also transcripts of conversations with adult audiences; biographical sketches of Hawthorne, Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and others; and even a long extract from the once-pilloried
Conversations with Children on the Gospels
. Shedding the egotism of his youth, he also quotes extensively from the work of others, including poetry from Ellery Channing and journal entries from Thoreau. In the background of the work, the seasons change. Apple blossoms appear, Independence Day comes and passes, and near the end, autumn breathes coolly on Walden Pond. Although its noteworthy qualities are many,
Concord Days
may be most significant as a book of friends. As compared to earlier times, his ideal life was no longer so much one of celestial reveries. It was centered, instead, among the people he admired and loved.

The structure of
Concord Days
both reflects and denies the passing of time; although the selections appear to proceed sequentially, Alcott leaps blithely from year to year, even decade to decade with barely an acknowledgement. In sections on Plato and Plotinus, even ancient days are revisited and revived. Alcott begins
Concord Days
on a melancholy note, gazing around his study at the massive volumes of his journals, “showy seen from without, with far too little of life transcribed within.”
⁵²
His lament is twofold. He complains both that his life has been too empty of achievement and that, even when a moment was worth recording, he lacked the artist's skill to render it adequately in print. “[C]ould I succeed in sketching to the life a single day's doings,” he writes, “[I] should esteem myself as having accomplished the chiefest feat in literature.”
⁵³
As a whole, however,
Concord Days
puts the lie to Alcott's laments, both as to the insignificance of his life and his failure to preserve it in a vibrant form.
Concord Days
may be thought of as a kind of prose
Leaves of Grass
, lacking Whitman's genius but partaking of his desire to transmute the whole of his experience into a living book. Alcott was attempting, as Whitman described his own project, “to put
a Person,
a human being…in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, in America, freely, fully and truly on record.”
⁵⁴
Alcott invites the reader for “a turn about his grounds, a sally into the woods, climbing the hill-top, sauntering by brook-sides.”
⁵⁵
We pass through his garden, are asked to observe the rustic fences and gates made by his own hands, and are offered a place by his open fire. We meet his friends, peer into his books, and perhaps fidget a bit as he drones on a trifle too long on his theories of Genesis and the foibles of the current age. What Whitman wrote of his leaves can also be said of
Concord Days
: “Camerado, this is no book, / Who touches this touches a man.”
⁵⁶

To a lesser, though still important, extent,
Concord Days
also touches on a family. May Alcott, sketchbook in hand, walks with her father as he visits the site of Thoreau's hut. Bronson's grandsons sail toy boats on the brook and amuse him with “their playful panorama.” Without naming her, he praises Abba, wondering what he would have left undone, or have done badly, “without her counsels to temper [my] adventurous idealism.” The family as a whole, Bronson adds, “is the sensitive plant of civility, the measure of culture…. Sown in the family, the seeds of holiness are here to be cherished and ripened for immortality.” Louisa's presence is seldom felt, unless perhaps in Alcott's advice to aspiring writers: “You may read selections [from your manuscript] to sensible women,—if young the better; and if it stand these trials, you may offer it to a publisher.”
⁵⁷
Does this allusion mean that Alcott had solicited the literary advice of Louisa, surely the most sensible younger woman in his acquaintance? Unfortunately, there is scant evidence to suggest that Bronson either did or did not share manuscripts and suggestions with her. Hints like this one, however, give grounds for speculation.

Although
Concord Days
begins with melancholy, it ends with cheerful exhortation. In the closing subchapter, “Ideals,” Alcott urges his readers to realize the best that is in them and to seek out tasks that demand more than a lifetime can give them. “Step by step,” he writes, “one climbs the pinnacles of excellence; life itself is but the stretch for that mountain of holiness…. Who ceases to aspire, dies. Our pursuits our prayers; our ideals our gods.”
⁵⁸

Louisa, like her father, had not ceased to aspire. She still dreamed of winning a reputation as an author of serious novels for adults. In November 1872, two months after Bronson published
Concord Days
, came an opportunity to do just that. Henry Ward Beecher's magazine, the
Christian Union
, offered Louisa three thousand dollars for a serial to run in weekly installments for six months. She accepted the thousand-dollar advance and proceeded to resurrect an unfinished manuscript she had begun even before she had written the first draft of
Moods.
She had called the project “Success” when she had first conceived it in her midtwenties. Now, she supplanted that optimistic noun with one that she had learned to see as the more fundamental truth of existence:
Work.

She found it almost impossible to write at an easy, measured pace. As with
Moods
and
Little Women
, she “fired up the engine.” “The thing possesses me,” she told her journal, “and I must obey till it's done.”
⁵⁹
If the sense of creative abandon was still the same, however, it was no longer accompanied by the romantic sense of sacrificing herself for art. She now likened herself to a galley slave, chained to her oar by Beecher's thousand dollars. She drove herself beyond reason, and when she put aside her novel, it was to write eight shorter tales she had promised another publisher for thirty-five dollars each. Shortly after
Work
was completed, she accepted another offer to write another ten tales at fifty dollars each. Once the fastest running girl in all of Concord, Louisa was turning into a literary Atalanta, pausing too often to snatch up a few more golden apples while the prize she most desired, a truly brilliant novel for a mature audience, slipped away from her.

Objectively speaking, there was now no real need for her to press herself so mercilessly. Despite the abundance that surrounded her, however, and despite the fact that her work brought her less and less pleasure, Louisa could not stop writing. To some who have experienced poverty early in life, no subsequent amount of money or security seems entirely sufficient, for one lives forever in the fear that a time of need will come again. Concerned that one day her talent, or more likely her popularity, might desert her, she told the editor of the
Boston Globe
, “I find that I must make my hay while my sun shines, & so wish to earn all I can before Fortune's wheel takes a turn & carries me down again.”
⁶⁰
She kept writing, too, because, on an emotional level, she could not help herself. There was a compulsive quality to her experiences of the vortex, and she seemed unable to resist the allure of the poetic maelstrom even when she knew that such prolonged fits of creativity were bad for her health. Then, too, she may have worked herself to exhaustion because she saw no further benefit in rest. A year of relaxation in Europe had not restored her health, and after speaking with Dr. Kane, she had good reason to believe that wellness would never truly come again. If she were to be ill whether she worked or not, the decision could only have been obvious.

Because she needed to produce three copies of
Work
—one for Beecher and one each for her English and American book publishers—Louisa wrote three pages at once, one on top of another, using impression paper. The uncomfortable steel pens that she used, coupled with the added pressure needed to make a triple impression, resulted in permanent partial paralysis to her thumb. She then taught herself to write with her left hand. Her constitution was less and less able to withstand the punishment she inflicted on it, and at last she slowed her pace for fear of a breakdown. In November a terrible fire in Boston disrupted her writing. In February, she was again forced to stop work when a telegram from Bronson urged her to return to Concord because it was thought that Anna was dying of pneumonia. Thankfully, the fire spared Louisa's apartment, Anna survived her illness, and the manuscript of
Work
went on. In March 1873, it was done.

The story of the frequently ill-starred attempts of a plucky young woman, Christie Devon, to find employment that can sustain both her body and soul,
Work
takes up a theme that Alcott introduced in
An Old-Fashioned Girl
, in which Fanny Shaw wonders if the time would ever come “when women could earn a little money and success, without paying such a heavy price for them.” The heaviest possible price is almost exacted from Christie, whose failed attempts to find a secure place in the working world bring her within moments of suicide. Two of Alcott's philosophical heroes, Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, had urged that labor is the process by which a person achieves full humanity. While Alcott agreed that work could be ennobling, she had also learned firsthand that undercompensated, unappreciated work could wear down and diminish the laborer. As Christie discovers, performing the very tasks that strengthen her competence and character leads a leisure-loving society to regard her as an inferior. Almost throughout
Work
, Alcott's female characters either possess practical knowledge and strength of character but lack the worldly means to make a difference in society, or vice versa.