Literature and Love Triangles: What It Was Like in Concord
In 1880 Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered the hundredth lecture of his career, at the Concord Lyceum in Concord, Massachusetts. Reflecting on the intellectual restlessness of his peers, the 77-year-old patriarch of American letters remarked, “I suppose all of them were surprised at this rumor of a school or sect, and certainly at the name Transcendentalism. . . . Meetings were held for conversations with very little form . . . of people engaged in studies, fond of books, and watchful of all the intellectual light from whatever quarter it flowed.”
Over some 25 years, writers including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, and Margaret Fuller went to Concord to join a vibrant community nurtured by Emerson and write some of the most important works of American literature. Those imposing figures are made deeply and at times absurdly human in Susan Cheever’s new book, American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work (Simon & Schuster, 223 pages, $26). “This is not only a story about ideas and their power to form a national identity,” Cheever writes, “it’s about love triangles and the difficulties of raising children, about grief and inspiration and bad advice and passionate friendships, about the ebb and flow of daily life and the New England seasons in a small town.” Cheever, the bestselling author of Note Found in a Bottle and Home Before Dark, paints Emerson’s Concord as a sexy, subversive place and spikes her story with irreverent humor.
Emerson’s 1836 essay “Nature” is considered the watershed moment for what came to be called Transcendentalism. Influenced by the work of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who wrote that “a wonderless age is Godless,” Emerson argued for a new way of viewing the raw wilderness of America, as a place to be not tamed or feared but embraced. God would be found not in churches but in the beauty of forests, and knowledge must come not from lecturers but from close observation of the world around one.
In “Nature” he also called on American writers “to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect,—What is truth?” His ideas stirred a generation of writers and intellectuals, an idiosyncratic group Cheever calls “the original hippies” and compares, in the book’s title, to the writers who clustered in the London neighborhood of Bloomsbury in the decades before World War II.
Emerson wasn’t only the Concord group’s intellectual founder; he was also its main economic support, “the sugar daddy of American literature,” in Cheever’s words. Using a fortune inherited from his first wife, he lured the pioneering educator Bronson Alcott to Concord by promising to help pay his rent, secured a home for the Hawthornes, and loaned Thoreau the money to build a small cabin on Walden Pond. It wasn’t always utopia, though. Hawthorne squabbled with his landlord; Thoreau alienated people with his uncompromising worldview; and Alcott’s idealism ensured poverty for his family.
One of the love triangles Cheever describes involved Fuller, a feminist editor, writer, and journalist. Cheever calls this fiercely independent thinker a “Dorothy Parker woman in a Jane Austen world.” There is no evidence of a sexual relationship between her and Emerson, but they wrote endless, passionate letters to each other, and she often stayed in his house in Concord. Meanwhile she took moonlit walks with Hawthorne and, amid the tension between the two men in her life, was possibly the inspiration for The Scarlet Letter’s Hester Prynne. In 1850 Fuller drowned in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, along with her Italian lover and infant son.
One of the most interesting characters in the book is Louisa May Alcott, who moved to Concord when she was eight, after her father’s experimental school in Boston went bankrupt. Bronson Alcott wrote in Observations on the Spiritual Nature of My Childrenthat she had a “deep-seated obstinacy of temper”; however, being the black sheep of the family made her a keen observer. She wrote a wickedly funny satire of her father’s experimental communities called Transcendental Wild Oats. “Are there any beasts of burden on the place?” asks one character, having heard about Bronson Alcott’s support of animal rights. “Only one woman!” is the reply, referring to Alcott’s long-suffering wife.
With her father engaged in high-minded, impractical pursuits, Louisa worked as a governess to keep the family afloat and dreamed of being a writer like her hero Thoreau. Her first real success, which came after many rejections and a few minor publications, was the 1864 volume Hospital Sketches, an account of her time as a nurse in a Union hospital in Washington. The experience launched her literary career, but it also left her crippled with mercury poisoning, the result of a misguided attempt to cure typhoid fever.
After Hospital Sketches, she turned out potboilers under a pseudonym and wrote a passionate, now-forgotten novel called Moods. When her publisher suggested that she write a “girl’s story,” she grumbled that it would make her “a literary nursemaid providing moral pap for the young.” The result, Little Women, was an instant bestseller when it was published in 1868, and it still is popular today. According to Cheever, its author “transformed the lives of women into something worthy of literature. Without even meaning to, Alcott exalted the everyday in women’s lives and gave it greatness.”
After her runaway success Alcott stayed in Concord even when Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau had passed away. She offered financial support to her friends and family and continued to write full time. In 1888, exasperated by her responsibilities, she wrote, “Shall I ever find time to die?” Two days later, she did.
She was the last of the group of remarkable writers whose work had marked a new era of American intellectual independence with some of the most important works of the century. When Thoreau died, in 1862, Emerson delivered a eulogy that seems to speak for all of that forward-looking literary movement: “No truer American existed than Thoreau. He lived for the day, not cumbered and mortified by his memory. If he brought you yesterday a new proposition, he would bring you today another not less revolutionary.”