Eden's Outcasts (60 page)

Both William Torrey Harris and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody addressed the attendees at the Concord School of Philosophy. They are shown here beneath a large tree a few yards from the Hillside Chapel.

(Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

With great excitement, Alcott pitched his idea to anyone who would listen and solicited participants for his symposium. On January 19, 1879, he and Sanborn composed a prospectus to be sent to interested parties across the country. Despite his failing faculties, Emerson promised to take part. So, too, did William Torrey Harris, Dr. Jones, Peabody, Bronson's erstwhile partner in abolitionism Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and a small cadre of Harvard professors. Letters in response to the prospectus poured in from as far away as Kansas. Uncharacteristically for an Alcott project, plans for the gathering came together with astonishing ease. Alcott christened his brainchild the Concord School of Philosophy.

The school convened on July 15, 1879, with Bronson as its dean and Orchard House as its lecture hall. As a practical matter, the number of pupils in the school was limited to fifty since no more than that could be squeezed into the available space.
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As it was, they filled both the study and the adjoining room. All the area within hearing distance was spoken for. Those lucky enough to find a spot in the main room filed in past walls decorated with portraits of Whitman, Pascal, Shakespeare, Emerson, and Alcott himself. A reproduction of Raphael's
The School of Athens
also looked down on the scene.
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The faculty typically occupied a sofa that extended halfway across one end of the lecture room. The lecturer sat in the central seat, with Alcott on his right and Sanborn on his left.
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According to the press reports, although Harris was perhaps the most erudite member of the faculty, Alcott was the most striking personage. At least one observer considered him “in feeling and spirit, the youngest man of the faculty.”
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While the lectures were being delivered, he was silent, attentive, apparently wrapped up in thought. When the speaker finished, however, it was usually Alcott who began the responsive conversation. Soon six or seven students were taking part. On occasion, the hour reserved for discussion expanded to two. A correspondent wrote of the silver-haired dean, “He has never said better things than he is saying now…. He never seemed happier. His face glows with enthusiasm, and is radiant with joy.”
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On August 2, Emerson gave his sole address of the session, a lecture titled “Memory.” In one sense, his choice of topic was a bit awkward, since his own memory was now thoroughly unreliable. On the day when he spoke to the Concord School, he appeared with his daughter Ellen at his side, who patiently helped with his phrasings when words escaped him and guided his eyes when he lost his place in his manuscript. In another way, however, Emerson's decision to speak about memory could not have been more apt, for there was no fitter time or place for memory than Alcott's parlor in the summer of 1879. For some of its attendees, the great marvel of Alcott's school was its power to make the past seem present. The students were gathered in the room adjoining the one where Anna Alcott was married. Intentionally or not, the faculty represented most of the salient events in Alcott's life. The Temple School was there in the person of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. The flower of transcendentalism, now sere and faded, still glowed in the serene face of Emerson. The struggles for abolition were remembered in the persons of Sanborn and Higginson, and the western prairies where Alcott had won a loyal following had sent their ambassadors in Harris and Hiram Jones. Thoreau, too, was present in an indirect sense. One evening, the attendees of the school gathered at a nearby church to hear H. G. O. Blake, the editor of Thoreau's published works, read excerpts from the sage's journal. One of Blake's selections seemed especially to fit the mood of the occasion: “There is no remedy for love but to love more.”
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Up from Boston to help manage the event, Louisa found that the drift of the school's discussions lay outside the range of her intellectual interest. Indeed, the sight of so many gifted minds immersed in what she regarded as idle disputation struck her as somewhat scandalous. She confessed that if the Concord philosophers had more philanthropy in their blood, she would have found the proceedings enjoyable. However, she decided, “speculation seems a waste of time when there is so much real work crying to be done. Why discuss the Unknowable till our poor are fed & the wicked saved?” She also groaned a bit beneath the burden of keeping up with the needs of the multitude of visitors who descended on the family. Louisa counted sixteen callers in one day as she and Anna did their best to “keep the hotel going.”
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Despite the impracticality and annoyance of it all, however, she looked on the Concord School with both pride and amusement. It delighted her to see that her father had had his dream realized at last. He was, she wrote, “in glory, with plenty of talk to swim in.” She also enjoyed observing the blow that was being dealt to Concord's redoubtable provincialism. As the budding philosophers from across America swarmed about the town, roosting on the Alcotts' steps “like hens waiting for corn,” it was hard for the locals to continue to maintain that all the culture of the nation was native to Concord.
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The success of the Concord School's inaugural season instilled Bronson with renewed vigor and ambition. Even the absence of Abba was less painful now. At seventy-nine, he scorned the notion that “at three-score and ten, or at four score even,” one should equate age with infirmity and give one's consent to oblivion.
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That fall, he undertook another tour of the Midwest, this time only as far as Ohio, remarking that he actually found the excursion easier than in younger days. At every stop on his itinerary, he knew that friends would greet him with a warm bed, an ample table, and of course the conversations that were his greatest delight. Now that Abba was gone and Orchard House was no longer home, he sometimes must have felt more at home on the road than at his own hearthside.

Nevertheless, Bronson tore himself from the hospitalities of his western friends to return to Concord in time to celebrate a milestone: his eightieth birthday on November 29. Louisa came up from Boston so that, as she turned forty-seven, she and her father could be together. Although Louisa's health made merrymaking feel like hard work, she did her best to put on a festive mood. Bronson, however, had no trouble feeling happy; his return had been brightened by the news that he found waiting for him. On November 8, in Paris, May had given birth to a daughter, named Louisa May Nieriker in honor of the baby's illustrious aunt. “Surely,” Bronson told his journal, “a generous Providence bestows blessings profusely upon us.” He felt confident that Abba was smiling down from heaven upon May and her baby, and he was equally sure that, when life was done, the entire Alcott family would share a reunion “in holier bonds of affection.”
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It could not be otherwise, he reasoned, in a universe where “Love never perishes.”
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Louisa also exulted. “Too much happiness for me” was the phrase she wrote in her journal.
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Her choice of words was telling, however, for there was something unnamable about this happiness that she did not trust. Although the first reports from France gave no cause for alarm, she could not free herself from forebodings. She felt strangely as if the atmosphere of bliss could endure only for a moment, as liable to vanish as the last golden leaves of autumn. Her premonitions were soon confirmed. News came that May had suffered complications after the delivery. She was too ill to nurse her child, and the tone of the communiqués from Paris grew anxious. Louisa yearned to be with her sister. However, she herself was not well enough to attempt an ocean journey, and she could not possibly reach Paris in time to be of any service. Her helplessness struck her as a penance for her sins, which seemed greater to her than to anyone around her. On Christmas Eve, a local man drowned in the Concord River. Louisa took the accident as an omen. All she could do was wait.

On the morning of December 31, Bronson was at the Concord post office, hoping to receive more news. Louisa, who had again left her rooms in Boston and was staying with her father, came downstairs to find Emerson, holding a telegram and gazing, red-eyed, at May's portrait. Ernest Nieriker had cabled Emerson instead of wiring the Alcotts directly. He trusted that the aging philosopher would know how to soften the blow. Nieriker's thoughtfulness was futile, for Emerson was overcome himself. Choked, perhaps trembling, he could only say, “My child, I wish I could prepare you; but alas, alas!” He handed her the telegram. Weeks of worry had already done for Louisa what Emerson could not. “I
am
prepared,” she said as she took the message from him.
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She read the stark words without surprise. Later that morning, she told the news to her father and her now sole surviving sister. Two days earlier, May had died.

No other event was ever so hard for Louisa to bear. The birth of her niece had taken her to the heights of happiness, and the sudden fall was almost impossible to accept. May had also had premonitions about the outcome of her pregnancy. She had written Louisa, “If I die when baby comes, don't mourn, for I have had as much happiness in this short time as many in twenty years.”
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Yet these recollected words gave only bittersweet comfort. By an odd coincidence, the news of May's death arrived on the final day of a decade that had seen much in the way of triumph for both Louisa and her father. Now, those victories meant no more than a handful of ashes. Louisa's old observation that everything seemed to go by contraries with her was never more achingly true. Now every single branch of her family had been touched by death, and a strange, scarred remnant was all that was left of the Alcotts in their prime.

Bronson and Louisa both sought solace in writing. Bronson wrote a sketch of May in his journal, in which he praised her lively fancy, her positive, independent manner, and her fine sense of honor and decorum. He recalled with pride that “failure was unknown in her vocabulary of effort.” He retained a clear image of the last time he glimpsed her, standing on the deck of the eastbound steamer and waving her handkerchief until she was lost in the distance.
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Louisa tried to block out the pain by plunging into a vortex. She was at work on another children's novel,
Jack and Jill
, and the project seemed to offer a shelter from memory. The stratagem failed. The tide of sorrow swept over her, and she put aside her work in tears. She felt that there had been a mistake. It was wrong that May should have been taken when her life was at its richest, while she, Louisa, had done her work and would have gone without regret.

As they had done when Lizzie died, Louisa and her father also tried to console themselves with poetry. In an eight-stanza elegy written less than a week after the news arrived, Bronson achieved a poignant simplicity of language that had too often eluded him. In the lines “Ah! gentle May, / Couldst thou not stay? / Why hurriedst thou so swift away?” there is perhaps no poetic genius, but the spareness conveys perfectly the helpless incomprehension of grief. One stanza in particular shows plainly a father's anguish:

 

I wake in tears and sorrow:

Wearily I say,

“Come, come, fair morrow,

And chase my grief away!”

Night-long I say,

“Haste, haste, fair morrow,

And bear my grief away!”

All night long.

My sad, sad song.
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Louisa's poem is a summation of her sister's life, according a stanza to each of the parts that existence had called on her to play. It is a biography told through quickly rising and subsiding images, flashing forth and disappearing as rapidly as May's life had passed away. Syntactically, each stanza is a sentence fragment, emphasizing the incompleteness of the subject's foreshortened life. Louisa's words, inadequate though they were, were her only way of preserving a trace of her “maiden, full of lofty dreams, / Slender and fair and tall,” who never ceased “seeking everywhere / Ideal beauty, grace and strength.”
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Apart from the many messages of condolence that came from France, England, and America, the lone consolation was May's baby, who, by all the reports they received from Ernst Nieriker, was healthy and thriving. They soon learned, to their great excitement, that the baby would soon be with them. It had been May's dying wish that her daughter would be sent to America for Louisa to raise. Treating his wife's desires as a sacred trust, Nieriker arranged for his daughter to be sent to America during the autumn of her first year. By a means that she would never have anticipated or asked for, Louisa was at last to be a mother. Months before the girl was to arrive, Louisa had given her a nickname, “Lulu,” and she spent much of the summer cleaning and fussing about in anticipation of her adopted daughter's arrival.