Eden's Outcasts (26 page)

Hillside signified a new kind of liberty in Louisa's life as well, for it was here that, for the first time, both she and Anna acquired rooms of their own. Louisa had spent her preteen years with almost no experience of privacy. Understanding that some aspects of mind and character can be perfected only in solitude, Abba made Louisa's room as appealing an oasis as possible. She positioned Louisa's workbasket and desk by a window, and a steady perfume emanated from dried herbs kept in the closet. Perhaps best of all, the room had a door that opened directly onto the garden so that Louisa could slip off into the woods without being detected. “It does me good to be alone,” Louisa wrote, and she began to thrive emotionally as she acquired a sense of a self, flourishing in the absence of parental surveillance.
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Hillside was a sanctuary for Bronson as well. He, too, found the refuge from critical observers that he desperately needed. The breakdown he had experienced after Fruitlands and the periods of delirium that followed had produced long-lasting effects on his spirit. In his journal soon after New Year's Day 1846, he wrote, “There is a martyrdom of the mind no less than of the body.” Mentally, he was still on the cross. He asked himself who were the teachers of the age. After writing the names of Emerson, Garrison, and Carlyle, he at first wrote his own but then scratched it out, adding the notation, “no—for me the time is not quite ready.”
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Bronson thought it was time to wait, though just what he was waiting for, he himself could not have said.

Taking his unfitness for public life as proof of his integrity, Bronson turned away from activity outside his gateposts. The notes that he took on his typical daily routine reveal that he was far from idle, but they also show that he was principally absorbed in perfecting life within his domestic sphere. He rose at five, lit the fires, and helped the children with their ablutions. Breakfast was accompanied by conversation and the reading of a hymn. He devoted much of the early morning to reading and study but reserved the hours between ten and noon for instructing his daughters. Between the midday meal and three o'clock, he worked in the garden. He filled the remaining hours before supper by reading aloud with Abba and the girls. His garden and his children were his two emblems of hope and promise. Within two years, Bronson's almost single-handed labor transformed the neglected property into a place of rustic enchantment. He had planted a thriving orchard of two hundred apple and peach trees. The field that he cultivated on the other side of Lexington Road yielded abundant crops of beans, celery, cucumbers, spinach, potatoes, and other vegetables. A grapevine trailed near the piazza, and a fountain bubbled among well-tended flowerbeds. Hillside was, in a sense, a second Fruitlands without the complications of a consociate family. Although life at Hillside did not have the same experimental thrust of Fruitlands, life with Bronson Alcott was always something of an experiment.

Children, of course, require more managing than bean plants, and it takes far longer to judge the success of their cultivation. Here too, however, Bronson was reasonably content with the results. From time to time, his daughters joined him in the garden. Louisa helped with the weeds as her father expounded on the virtues, both practical and symbolic, of the herbs he had planted.
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On the hill behind the house, the girls' play fantasies bore the marks of their father's reading; when the four clambered toward the summit, they consciously reenacted the journey of Bunyan's Pilgrim toward the Celestial City. Bronson's incessant need to instruct and enlighten continued at the dinner table. At mealtimes, Frederick Willis remembered, Bronson always simplified his language so that even the smallest listener would understand him. Holding an apple on his fork, Alcott might give a miniature lecture on its growth and development. Willis was fascinated by these performances and found Alcott's language charmingly poetic.
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If nothing else, Bronson's dinner-table homilies made his daughters more ardent apostles of vegetarianism. Once, a visitor to the Alcotts' home arrived to discover the girls energetically shoveling coal into the cellar. They eagerly cried out to him, “See what vegetables will do? It's all vegetables!”
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By and large, the people of Concord smirked at Bronson's philosophizing; a popular joke held that Emerson was a seer and Alcott was a seersucker.
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However, they could not deny that the quartet of girls he was raising were an asset to the community—“self-helpful, kindly, and bright” as Emerson's son Edward put it.
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“I know not,” Bronson wrote, “that I am not serving mankind as greatly in these humble services—in setting trees and teaching my children, these human shoots—as in the noisier and seemingly more widely useful sphere of public activity.”
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Another humble service Bronson gladly continued to perform was to act as a companion to Emerson and Thoreau. As the latter made ready to take up residence at Walden Pond, Alcott followed his friend's preparations with interest. Alcott did not hesitate to lend his own efforts to Thoreau's experiment in ideal living. He was on hand at the beginning of May for the raising of Thoreau's house. Thoreau remarked that no man had ever been more honored by the character of his raisers than he was, and he trusted that they were destined to assist at the raising of loftier structures one day.
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Alcott was a frequent visitor to Thoreau's hut on the pond, coming, as Thoreau put it, “through the village, through snow and rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp through the trees.”
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In
Walden
, Thoreau repaid Alcott's companionship with a heartfelt tribute, hailing his neighbor as the man of the most faith of any alive. It mattered little, Thoreau implied, that Alcott had no current occupation, for when his day finally came, “laws unsuspected by most will take effect, and masters of families and rulers will come to him for advice.” Thoreau did not foresee that Alcott could ever die, for the simple reason that Nature could not spare him.
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Henry David Thoreau. Louisa never forgot his “power, intellect, and courage.”

(Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery)

Bronson's attempts to please his other great friend, Emerson, had more mixed results. Emerson's enthusiasm regarding Alcott had cooled somewhat. Certainly, he had been embarrassed on behalf of transcendentalism when Fruitlands fell apart. Much of Emerson's diffidence, however, resulted from the content of his character, rather than from any particular failing on Alcott's part. Something in Emerson's Yankee individualism made it both difficult and unnecessary for him to form warm personal attachments. His ability to find companions suffered because of his innate high-mindedness; he expected from friendship a more powerful unity of spirits than could be provided by mere mortals. “The higher the style we demand of friendship,” he wrote, “of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood…. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables.”
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Alcott was probably better able than anyone else at working his way around the defenses that Emerson erected against social intimacy. Even so, there were now fewer meetings between them than Alcott would have wished, causing him to value the time they shared all the more. He wrote fondly of days in May and June when the two strolled to Walden Pond, trading observations that Alcott thought would make a pretty volume, if only he had the genius for transcribing them.
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Bronson especially enjoyed entertaining Emerson in the rustic summer house he had built from willows on the grounds of Hillside. He considered himself the happiest of men to receive the poet under a canopy made by his own hands. His hospitality was to have a comic upshot. In the summer of 1847, Emerson made the mistake of admiring Bronson's summer cottage a bit too enthusiastically. Alcott was eager to do a favor for his friend, and Emerson understood the importance of giving Alcott a chance to feel useful. Bronson was promptly enlisted to construct a similar bower on Emerson's land. Alcott embraced the task with bold ambition, hoping both to reward his friend's many acts of kindness and to try out a fantastic theory of architecture that had been germinating in his brain. Alcott called his new style of building “the Sylvan,” and through it he strove to free the structure from right angles and artificial forms. Rather, the building should look as if it had grown in autochthonous fashion from its natural surroundings.

Bronson enlisted the help of Thoreau, who had just ended his stay at Walden, and was soon laying the first timbers in the August heat.
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He created nine arched entrances, to represent each of the ancient Muses. The roof dipped toward the center, but no one was sure whether this was an aspect of the design or a sign of imminent collapse. Day by day, the house took and changed shape, until it resembled the temple of some lost East Asian cult. Thoreau, who knew a few things about geometric relations and physical laws, began to be appalled. Generously, Emerson averred that a Palladio had been lost to the world when Alcott chose education and philosophy over architecture. Nevertheless, he confided to Margaret Fuller that he was becoming alarmed by the building's dimensions and apparent lack of stability. He began to refer to the structure as “Tumbledown Hall.” His wife, Lidian, was terser. She called it “The Ruin.”
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Inevitably, townspeople came by to gawk and snicker. Alcott comforted himself by recalling that people had also laughed at Michelangelo. In the end, Alcott's judgment was somewhat vindicated, since the derided “Ruin” stood for fifteen years. When Tumbledown Hall was finished, Bronson had given his friend both a unique gift and a wonderful story to tell.

However much Emerson meant to Bronson during this time, he meant still more to Louisa, who found in him both a literary idol and a sympathetic ear. Judging that the girl had some special merits, Emerson gave Louisa free access to his library. A brisk eight-minute walk separated Hillside from Emerson's home. Louisa, in her perpetual hurry, probably covered the distance in less time. On one of her visits, Emerson offered Louisa a little-known book,
Goethe's Correspondence with a Child
, consisting of a series of letters between the great German poet and a young woman named Bettine von Arnim. The idea of a young woman seeking wisdom from the elder sage appealed powerfully to Louisa. She wanted to be Emerson's Bettine, and she soon found ample excuses to spend more time under her hero's roof. Her attentions to him took on the form of an innocent, impossible courtship. She sang Mignon's Song “in very bad German” under his window and picked bouquets of wildflowers to leave at his door. She wrote him letters in which she laid bare her soul but, she later thanked heaven, was too shy and prudent to send them. Imagining him at her side, she went for meandering walks at night and gazed at the moon from the strong branches of a cherry tree until the cries of the owls scared her to bed.
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Apparently, Emerson was either oblivious to the crush or politely ignored it. Louisa soon got over her passion, and she eventually burned the letters, but Emerson remained her “master,” doing more for her, she was sure, than he ever knew. After his death, she recalled with warmest gratitude “the simple beauty of his life, the truth and wisdom of his books, [and] the example of a good, great man untempted and unspoiled by the world.”
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Louisa also came along on some of her father's visits to Thoreau at the pond. In scholarly moods, Thoreau listened as the Alcott girls recited to him in French and German.
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A much better linguist than either Emerson or Alcott, Thoreau could have taught the Alcott sisters Latin and Greek, as well as some Native American languages, if he had been asked to. Instead, he gave them an easy, practical course on how to love the world.

Back at Hillside, Abba typically took charge of the evening's entertainment. Both Abba and Louisa were fond of whist, and they often invited neighborhood girls for an evening card party. As much as she enjoyed the game, it was sometimes nearly impossible to lure Louisa into the parlor if she had become engrossed in a good book. Other evenings, the Alcott girls would work at their sewing as one of them read aloud from Scott, Hawthorne, or Dickens. The last was a particular favorite, and the girls excelled in dramatizing scenes from his work. During her teen years, Louisa received essentially no formal schooling outside the home. However, reading Dickens with her family, poring over Goethe in Emerson's library, and scrambling through the woods with Thoreau comprised a unique education in themselves.