Margaret Fuller (14 page)

Margaret’s first reviews may have been the pieces rejected by the
Christian Examiner
the previous year; both were ambitious in intent but were haphazardly structured. Even Clarke, who published them gratefully, was aware of their flaws. When Margaret pressed him for criticism, “no matter how severe,”
he responded that the essays were too digressive: “We feel like an explorer in a Kentucky cavern; there are so many side-passages, opening to the right and left, leading upward and downward.” Further, her language was “too elevated,” and her wide literary reference escaped her readers: “They know nothing of books.” Margaret wrote the way she spoke, Clarke told her, and her sparkling conversation could at times be “too lofty.”
The digressions and allusions that entertained and impressed in Cambridge parlors were off-putting in print.

Yet Margaret was true to her word, accepting James’s “severe” criticism and eager to correct the missteps of “one [who] has talked so much and written so little.”
Margaret understood that she had not yet learned to craft her thoughts in formal prose, and her isolation—her desperate need to converse—fed the problem. “This going into mental solitude is desperately trying,” she’d written to Henry Hedge; “to me the expression of thought and feeling is to the mind what respiration is to the lungs.”
These awkward early attempts convinced Margaret, whose innate verbal facility had never failed her, that “the art of writing, like all other arts, requires an apprenticeship,” and she was now willing to serve it.
“My grand object is improvement,”
she assured James, to whom she had once admitted her fear that she might “die and leave no trace.”
Now she wished to leave more than a trace: an indelible mark of distinction.

Where once she had resisted mixing with the “common-place people” of Groton, Margaret now made up her mind to “engage” with them. At times she would “talk incessantly” with her neighbors, “full of intense curiosity” to understand “that strange whole the American publick” she hoped to address.
The real possibility of reaching a public through her writing began to ease the sense of deprivation and envy she felt at being barred from the ministry. A year before she had written with regret to Henry Hedge that “I am not yet
intimate
with any of the lower class. I have not the advantages of a clergy man.”
Her break into the writing profession gave a purpose and legitimacy to seeking out both the “common” and the “low,” as she initially perceived Groton’s gentry and its working class.

By August too, Margaret had spent several weeks with the Farrars on a tour of upstate New York’s natural wonders. She’d begged her father for his “consent” to the time off and for the funds to support the trip: “Oh do sympathize with me—do feel about it as I do—.” She even proposed that Timothy reduce the sum of her eventual inheritance, her “portion” of the family estate, by two hundred dollars, if advancing her the fifty-seven dollars necessary to cover the cost of the excursion created anxiety for him now.
Timothy agreed to the plan without making the deduction, and soon Margaret was on her way by steamboat up the Hudson River to West Point and Trenton Falls in a traveling party that included one of the Farrars’ student boarders, Sam Ward. Seven years younger than Margaret and captivatingly handsome, the son of a Boston financier, Sam Ward was wealthy and talented enough to toy with the idea of a career as an artist after graduation from Harvard. The two became fast friends on the journey, and Sam readily agreed to serve as Margaret’s escort to Newport on her way back to Boston, where she planned to introduce him to Anna Barker, his female counterpart in youth, good looks, and, for Margaret, magnetic power.

The “romantic rocks”
at Trenton Falls and the “gorgeous prospect” from the summit of Kaatskill Mountain, its “immense hotel” seemingly “dropped there by magic,”
contrasted with the social whirl of “dressed dolls”
(excluding Anna, of course) and moneyed men at Newport, gave spice to Margaret’s letters home. Here was an opportunity to try out her skills as a travel writer. When, in late summer, the Farrars proposed that Margaret join them, along with Sam Ward and Anna Barker, on a yearlong tour of Europe, departing from Boston in the summer of 1836, Margaret began working to persuade her father of the necessity—and practicality—of this longer and far more costly journey. She needed the schooling of a European tour to fulfill her promise as a writer; the investment now would yield rewards later. Despite her family’s straitened finances, Margaret began to believe it would happen.

Her determination to make the journey intensified after her meeting at summer’s end with Harriet Martineau, England’s best-known woman writer, who was traveling in the United States to gather material for a book on contemporary life in Britain’s former colonies. Martineau, who had made her name with a series of popular books explaining the principles of political economy to general readers—the audience Margaret hoped to win with her own writing—was staying with the Farrars in Cambridge. Margaret expected to “see her,” she wrote to James Clarke, “but it is not probable I shall become acquainted.” She knew that “many will be seeking” out Martineau, “and as I have no name nor fame I shall not have much chance.”
Earlier that summer she had failed, despite her proficiency in the German language, to attract the interest of Dr. Francis Lieber, a German reformer passing through Boston. Though a friend of James, Lieber evidently did not possess his capacity to appreciate intellectual distinction in women: “I was to him only Miss Fuller, an unmarried female of no mark or likelihood,” Margaret sighed.

But Martineau, like Eliza Farrar and Ellen Kilshaw before her, instantly saw Margaret’s promise—indeed, recognized her as a kindred spirit. The two attended Harvard commencement together. Seated beside her new friend—a true international celebrity—as a succession of talented seniors took the podium to exhibit their public speaking abilities, Margaret inwardly prayed that “I should not be haunted with recollections of ‘aims unreached occasions lost,’” she wrote afterward in her journal. She prayed, as well, that Harriet Martineau might become the “intellectual guide” she still sought, the friend who “would do—what none has ever done yet, comprehend me wholly, mentally and morally, and enable me better to comprehend myself.” More than either Eliza Farrar or Maria Child, Margaret recognized, Harriet Martineau “has what I want”: “vigorous reasoning powers, invention, clear views of her objects, and she has trained to the best means of execution.”
When Martineau learned of Margaret’s projected European trip, she shifted her own return voyage so that she could sail with the Farrars, and she offered to serve as Margaret’s entrée into society—Martineau’s own “brilliant circle”—once the party arrived in England.

Margaret was also edging into influential circles close to home. Ralph Waldo Emerson had settled halfway between Boston and Groton in the county seat at Concord, Massachusetts, on returning from his own yearlong European tour. The third in a line of influential ministers stretching back to colonial times, Emerson had shocked Boston by resigning a prestigious pulpit when his congregation refused to support him in abandoning the ritual of communion—a practice he considered primitive and idolatrous. His firm defiance had gained him followers in the younger generation of Unitarian ministers—Clarke, Hedge, and others who were Margaret’s friends; Emerson’s proud self-exile conferred dignity on their own errands into the wilderness. Whenever possible, they attended Emerson’s increasingly popular Boston lectures espousing a nonsectarian inquiry into human nature, which, as one early listener, the gifted teacher and Transcendentalist writer Elizabeth Peabody, wrote, gathered together “all the most important ideas—which we value—as this age’s
spirit.
”

Now that they were almost neighbors, Margaret angled for a meeting with “that only clergyman of all possible clergymen who eludes my acquaintance.”
She considered his the most powerful “of any American mind,” and she wished to “know him in private.”
But Emerson, who continued preaching in country pulpits on a “supply” basis, always seemed to appear in Groton when Margaret was away. Henry Hedge aided the cause by sending Emerson the manuscript of Margaret’s translation of
Tasso.
Now Waldo, as he was known to close friends, the name passed down from an ancestral Puritan family, was asking to meet Margaret. In the summer of 1835, she wrote James that a correspondence had commenced and “the reverend, and I are tottering on the verge of an acquaintance”—even as she learned that the widower was engaged to marry for a second time.

Margaret had heard that Lydia Jackson, or “Lidian,” as Waldo insisted on renaming his fiancée, evoking the Greek “Lydian” musical scale and preventing the awkward elision of vowel sounds in “Lydia Emerson,” was a woman “of character and manners entirely unlike” Ellen Tucker Emerson, the child bride Waldo had married six years before, when she was eighteen and he twenty-six, and who had died of tuberculosis after only seventeen months of marriage.
Lidian was a year older than Waldo, at thirty-three a woman of settled personality, unlikely to remind him of the pretty young poetess he still actively mourned. Despite his status as an engaged man, Waldo’s position as “reverend” allowed him a freedom in forming relationships with other women as counselor, confessor, or spiritual guide—even with an “unmarried woman of no mark or likelihood,” but with a fierce appetite for distinction, like Margaret. But could Margaret make a place for herself in the threesome of Waldo, Lidian, and the shade of Ellen?

Even as she was publishing her first essays, circulating her translation of
Tasso,
and expanding her range of acquaintance, Margaret confessed to Henry Hedge a “restless desire to write stories . . . which have nothing to do with my present purpose.”
Although she felt most secure in her critical powers, she did not yet value criticism as highly as fiction or poetry; perhaps she could adapt to fiction her talent for social observation and witty insights about the personalities in her circle. James Clarke’s sister, Sarah, had suggested she “write a novel and make myself a heroine.”
Margaret thought Anna Barker would make a better protagonist. Probably a novel inspired by both characters—“the most gentle Anna and the most ungentle Margaret,” as she’d described their contrasting temperaments in a recent letter to James—would have been best.

But Margaret told none of her friends when she sent out a story—“Lost and Won”—to the
New England Galaxy,
where it appeared in print on August 8, 1835, her fourth publication in less than a year. She intended this one to go unnoticed: she’d taken as her subject the courtship of George Davis and Harriet Russell, spinning her story out of reports that, after the engagement, Harriet had “coquetted” with the rakish Cambridge bachelor Joseph Angier. The minor scandal fascinated Margaret, perhaps because it drew on the Goethean concept of elective affinities
(the notion that sexual attractions sometimes defied convention yet must be obeyed) or because Margaret was secretly pleased to see the man she believed had jilted her pained by his fiancée’s public vacillation—or both. Yet before writing, she satisfied herself that Harriet had returned to proper form, and wrote up the incident as a morality tale illustrating the errant heroine’s restoration to virtue. Margaret portrayed her hero, modeled on George Davis, as having lost, and then regained, his fiancée in this ironically subtitled “tale of modern days and good society.”

All might have been well, had James Clarke not traveled home to New England in late summer, picked up a copy of the magazine, and recognized the thinly disguised lovers as George and Harriet—and himself as model for one of the more admirable male characters. As ever in sympathy with Margaret’s aims, he considered she had spun gold from the straw of his friends’ premarital spat. The story delivered its moral superbly, and he sent a copy to the newlyweds. He seemed to believe that the couple should be proud to serve as inspiration for Margaret’s tale. Instead George and Harriet were outraged, and Margaret turned on James for betraying her secret.

James’s sister, Sarah, attempted to intercede, but by then, in an episode that seemed to enlarge the frame of the story, Margaret had fallen sick with a severe headache and fever—typhoid fever, she said afterward. Her family called it brain fever and feared for Margaret’s life as she grew weaker, shaking with chills and suffering nightmare visions day after day. The fever did not break. Timothy offered a benediction: “My dear,” Margaret recalled him telling her one morning at her bedside, “I have been thinking of you in the night, and I cannot remember that you have any
faults.
You have defects, of course, as all mortals have, but I do not know that you have a single fault.” From Timothy, who considered compliments “hurtful to his children” and “who had scarce ever in my presence praised me,” the words of blessing sounded “strange,” but also moving. So accustomed was Margaret to her father’s criticism that she did not register the stinginess of his message: she had no faults. She heard, instead, a pronouncement of her perfection, which “affected me to tears.”

On the ninth day, her fever broke. Weak and chastened, Margaret survived the autumn. Timothy did not. In late September, almost as soon as his daughter was well, he collapsed one evening after a day spent in the fields, flushed with fever and retching uncontrollably. Eugene was in Virginia teaching, but when Timothy, directing even his last hours, announced he would surely die, the rest of the family, including William Henry, who had returned from the West Indies to a clerkship in Boston, gathered to say their farewells. After suffering two days of intensifying fever and chills accompanied by painful spasms, Timothy Fuller was dead of Asiatic cholera, contracted while working the lowland acres of his Groton farm. He was fifty-seven. At his bedside, Margaret reached out to close her father’s eyes.

8

“Returned into life”

T
IMOTHY’S DEATH BROUGHT BACK FEELINGS MARGARET
had experienced with the loss of her sister Julia Adelaide in childhood. Again her mother receded into grief, “worn to a shadow” with cares she could not face. Margaret felt like an “orphan” now. Summoning an “awful calm,”
she gathered her siblings together around “the lifeless form of her father,” their mother later recalled, and “kneeling, pledged herself to God that if she had ever been ungrateful or unfilial to her father, she would atone for it by fidelity” to his children.