Authors: John Matteson
Eden's Outcasts (11 page)
Not all of her earliest permanent memories concerned such dire moments. Despite her closeness to Abba, one of her first recollections was of building towers and bridges out of the great tomes in her father's library. Louisa also showed a precocious interest in looking
into
the books. She mulled over the pictures, pretended to read the pages, and scribbled in their margins. Her activities, she later observed, were an apt foreshadowing of her life to come: a life in which books were her most constant comfort; in which building castlesâout of air, at leastânever failed to entertain her; and in which scribbling became “a most profitable diversion.”
57
While Bronson and Abba admonished their girls to resist every selfish, worldly impulse, they encouraged them to indulge every creative and intellectual one. Even as she entered adulthood, their later-born daughter May, who showed artistic talent, would be allowed to draw on her bedroom walls. However, mere bodily appetites were rigorously checked. When Louisa was not yet three, Bronson decided to reenact the Fall of Man in the children's nursery. Humbly taking upon himself the role of God, he placed an apple atop his daughters' wardrobe and explained that the fruit belonged to him. After prompting them to agree that it was wrong for “little girls to take things [from] their fathers or mothers,” he left the room. When he came back, he found that Anna and Louisa had acted perfectly their unsuspected roles as Adam and Eve. Only the core of the apple remained. Louisa, Anna reported, had gotten to the apple first. “I told her she must not,” said Anna, “but she did, and then we eat some of it.” Anna repented; Louisa seemed less sorry. The next day, Bronson left Louisa alone in the nursery with a second forbidden apple. Abba watched unseen as Louisa picked up the object of her desire and put it down several times, saying, “No. No, father's. Me not take father's apple. Naughty! Naughty!” Finally, she lost the struggle. Asked to explain the presence of another apple core, she explained, “Me could not help it! Me
must
have it!”
58
At a birthday party, held jointly for her and her father at the Temple School, Louisa endured another lesson in self-denial. Bedecked with a crown of flowers, Louisa had been told to pass out cake to the other children. Discovering that there was one piece too few, Louisa held on tightly to the last plate. Having watched the tragedy unfold, Abba stepped forward. “It is always better to give away than to keep the nice things,” she said. “I know my Louy will not let the little friend go without.” Louisa handed over “the dear plummy cake” and received a kiss from her mother.
59
It was but one of the countless times in her childhood when the love of a family member was the only consolation for an unfilled stomach.
Her father, however, was finding consolations aplenty. Alcott gave Emerson his 1835 journal and his manuscript of “Psyche.” Emerson sought out Alcott's opinions on his own work, a long essay called “Nature.” They were mutually enthusiastic, and it seemed for a while as if, almost simultaneously, the two works might emerge as complementary pillars of the new New England philosophy, Emerson's work exploring the external world and Alcott's revealing the inner.
Alcott called Emerson's manuscript “a beautiful work,” evincing a “high intellectual character.” He delighted in Emerson's demonstration that the physical world is an emblem of the soul and that the mind “animates and fills the earth.” He also saw his own influence in the book. He observed, “Mr. E. adverts, indirectly to my âPsyche,' now in his hands, in the work.”
60
In the last chapter of his essay, Emerson included a long passage that he claimed to have received from an anonymous “Orphic poet.”
61
The fact that, a few years later, Alcott published a collection of “Orphic Sayings” in Emerson's magazine,
The Dial,
makes it still more likely that Alcott was Emerson's Orpheus.
Emerson's
Nature
remains the quintessential statement of transcendentalism. Alcott's “Psyche,” however, has never been published. Emerson thought that the work contained some splendid passages and that his friend's work sometimes reflected “the rare power to awaken the highest faculties, to awaken the apprehension of the Absolute.” However, he thought it was too long a book for one idea and that Alcott's style was labored and pedantic. Alcott had a regrettable fondness for verbs ending in “eth.” He liked using vague, prophetic-sounding words like “mirror forth,” “shape forth,” and “image” just when a concrete phrasing was desperately needed.
62
When he wrote in his journals, Alcott's language was often graceful and cogent. He could also teach and speak with genius. Yet when he tried to write for an audience, his powers abruptly fled.
Emerson urged Alcott not to give up on “Psyche,” counseling him instead not to “let it sleep or stop a day.”
63
His school a brilliant success, and his manuscripts capturing the attention of some of America's best minds, there seemed no reason why Bronson Alcott should not proceed from triumph to triumph. Instead, the very confidence that had carried Alcott so high was about to induce errors of hubris that would soon lead to catastrophe.
Alcott's pride first became visible in the disdain he began to show toward the efforts of those who were helping to raise his children. The various maids hired to assist Abba never met with his approval, and his disparagements in his journals of parents who delegated the care of their children became frequent. Far more disturbing to the family, however, was the critical eye that Bronson turned toward the parenting skills of Abba. Apart from Bronson's strict and fastidious judgments, there is little evidence that Abba was anything less than a loving and able mother, as well as a firm supporter of her husband's theories. Over the coming decades, events would attest to her fierce devotion to her children. Yet Bronson's journals give her scant praise. When reflecting on what he called “the inadequacy of maternal culture” in his home, Bronson found particular fault with Abba's reluctance to discipline the girls.
64
Abba had, he felt, foresworn “positive discipline,” leaving all matters of punishment to him. He was convinced that if he had supervised the children continually, no corporal punishment would ever have been necessary.
65
To stop the flood of animal nature, he wrote, “must be the work of great skillâ¦. [T]heir strength and impetuosity must be guided and tamed by the hand of genius alone.”
66
Although he occasionally admitted that Abba's influence was loving and beautiful, it was clear to him that only one parent under his roof possessed such genius.
67
Alcott's stubborn sense of authority cost him much more dearly in his relationship with Elizabeth Peabody. Initially, all was well between them. Perhaps feeling awkward for having failed to pay her for her services, Alcott invited his assistant to move in with his family. Little dreaming that increased proximity could ever produce ill feeling between her and the employer she so greatly worshipped, Peabody accepted. She initially relished her comfortable room with its handsome fireplace and view of Dorchester Heights. As she took her meals at the Alcotts' table and played with her infant namesake, she gloried in the privileged position she enjoyed within this family that seemed to her the pinnacle of enlightenment.
Soon, however, her increased familiarity with her employer produced friction. She found that Bronson could barely tolerate dissent of any kind. A seemingly trivial dispute with him at dinner over the merits of Sylvester Graham, inventor of the graham cracker, led to a nasty quarrel. Peabody left the table wondering at Bronson's reflexive distaste for any mainstream position, and she started to suspect that Alcott's avowed love of reform was only a mask for envy and misanthropy. Alcott, for his part, was starting to find his friend “offensively assertive.” Their partnership was beginning to fragment.
68
But it was at the Temple School itself that Alcott's pride was setting the stage for his most poignant tragedy. Bronson had begun to carry the religious content of his instruction to a bold new level. In the spring term of 1836, Alcott added a weekly session of conversations with the schoolchildren, dealing with the biblical accounts of the life of Jesus. These discussions were limited to two hours every Wednesday morning, but Alcott soon came to regard them as the most noteworthy business of the school. As she had done in preparation for
Record of a School,
Elizabeth Peabody commenced a partial transcript of these conversations. Emboldened by the success of the previous book, Bronson thought that a volume of these conversations would be the ideal sequel, establishing him as a wise and original commentator on the life and teachings of Christ. In addition, the book would help to prove his dearly held postulate that divine truth was best approached through the thoughts and feelings of the very young.
The new project offered charming possibilities. Alcott had already shown his power to elicit moral gems from the mouths of babes. He would now have the chance to shine the light of infant wisdom on the highest mysteries that he knew. By calling forth the innocent voices of children, he might impart to the word of God a purer, sweeter expression than it had ever known. But there were problems almost from the beginning. Whereas in
Record of a School,
Bronson had trusted Elizabeth Peabody and the children to speak for themselves, he wanted this book to convey a precise, predetermined tone and message. Subverting the premise of his own project, Bronson preferred for the children to express
his
formulations, rather than their own. Thus, as Peabody transcribed her notes, Bronson sometimes hovered nearby, ready to reword passages that did not suit his vision. Simultaneously, however, Bronson also desired the appearance of placing the children in the foreground. Breaking with Peabody's practice in
Record of a School,
where anonymity had been preserved, he wanted to publish the names of his pupils alongside their statements. Over her staunch objection, he had his way.
In the grace with which they mingled simplicity and profundity, in the gentle reverence with which he and his students shared their ideas of God and Christ, Bronson's
Conversations with Children on the Gospels
may well be his most exquisite written work. Inherent in all of them is Alcott's respect for the mental strivings of the children. Although his own views regarding the Gospels are clearly visible, the conversations seek as much as possible to question rather than assert, to draw an idea out instead of forcing one in. He told his class, “I have often been taught by what very small children have said; and astonished at their answersâ¦. Has truth any age?â¦Is it not immortal? Truth is oldâ¦and Truth is youngâ¦. All wisdom is not in grown-up people.”
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Speaking about the story of the young Jesus in the temple, he made the following suggestion:
Children are often about their father's business and parents are so much interested in their own, that they do not know itâ¦. When fathers keep their children at work and give them no education, yet all the time they can obtain, the children devote to their own improvementâis not that “the Father's” business? Very often children are absorbed in what interests them, and their parents reprove them, and yet they may be about their “Father's business.” And you should not roughly interrupt it.
70
When morality demanded it, Bronson could be firm. For instance, when one child blamed the Jewish people for the death of Christ, Bronson immediately denounced the notion as “a wicked prejudice,” to which the children added, evidently en masse, “There are no right prejudices.”
71
In the main, he was open-minded and Socratic. On occasion, Bronson's tactics frustrated his pupils; they demanded an answer, and he offered only a question. In exasperation, one of the children burst out, “I cannot tell what you think; you sometimes talk on one side, and sometimes on the other. What do you think?” Alcott replied, “I prefer not to reply to such questions, because I do not wish to influence your opinions by mine. I teach what every pure person believes.”
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More than anything, he explained, he was teaching his pupils to know themselves, and this was the most important knowledge.
Nevertheless, Alcott's new manuscript made Peabody nervous. Not only did she feel that Alcott was fatally compromising the honesty of the book by revising her transcriptions, but she thought he was unfairly manipulating his pupils by proposing to identify them. It troubled her as well that she now sensed an air of smug superiority about her employer, which she feared the children might be absorbing as well. What Benjamin Franklin had once called a “foppery in morals,” she now urged her partner to avoid.
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At the suggestion that he was straying into error, Alcott bristled. Peabody formed the distinct impression that the schoolmaster had no interest in any external influence, and like Emerson, she began to lament his arrogance. “It seems no part of his plan,” she wrote, “to search the thoughts and views of other minds in any faith that they will help his ownâ¦. [H]e rather avoids than seeks any communication with persons who differ from himself.”
74
In June 1836, when Peabody took a leave of absence to visit friends in Lowell, her younger sister Sophia moved in with the Alcotts and took over the transcription of the schoolroom conversations. Less circumspect than Elizabeth, Sophia rapturously recorded passages of dialogue that Elizabeth would surely have prudently excised. Thus Elizabeth's editorial touch was missing when it was needed mostâwhen Bronson decided to use the story of the Virgin Mary as an opportunity to introduce his students to the mysteries of birth. When Elizabeth Peabody read the transcript of this conversation and furthermore discovered that one of the children had observed that babies are made out of “the naughtinessâ¦of other people,” she was aghast.
