Margaret Fuller (43 page)

Margaret no longer expected dramatic personal gains from spending a year in Great Britain and the Continent. She’d given up her dream of the life-altering grand tour she had envisioned a decade earlier in the company of young Sam Ward and the cosmopolitan Farrars, which “would have given my genius wings.” At thirty-six, Margaret believed her “mind and character” were already “too much formed” through “a liberal communion with the woful struggling crowd of fellow men.” She had instead worked for a living and reaped the “fruits of spiritual knowledge” these past ten years, seeking common cause with the laborer, the immigrant, the prostitute. Still, traveling with the Springs, who were comrades as well as companions, to survey the Old World’s prisons, manufactories, shipyards, and schools as well as museums, monuments, castles, and cathedrals, would “add to my stores of knowledge”
and allow Margaret to expand her role as conductor of information and ideas in the “great mutual system of interpretation”
she had joined two years earlier as a columnist for the
New-York Tribune.
“If I persevere, there is nothing to hinder my having an important career even now,” she wrote to Sam and Anna Ward, describing her travel plans and looking back on the old missed opportunity. “But it must be in the capacity of a journalist, and for that I need this new field of observation.”

The one romantic notion about the journey that Margaret permitted herself was the hope of reestablishing ties with James Nathan, who had not returned to New York as originally promised. Even before the Springs made their offer, Margaret had begun looking for ways to cross the Atlantic to search him out. Despite his infrequent and sometimes indifferent correspondence, she still felt, for days at a time, “a desire for you that amount[s] almost to anguish,” she wrote to him in the spring of 1846, when four months had passed without a letter. She recalled their “reconciliation” after the breach of the previous April and sent him a sprig of the flowering myrtle she had given him that dreadful day when “we seemed to be separated for ever. But we were not.” Now she begged to know, “Where are you? What are you doing?”
Margaret had done all she could to prove her constancy—“retouching”
several of his travelogues to meet the
Tribune
’s standards and mailing them back to him once they were in print, supplying more letters of introduction, even monitoring Josey’s care from afar as she moved into boarding-house rooms in the city during the winter of 1845–46 to escape the increasingly fractious Greeley marriage and the riverbank scenery that reminded her so vividly of James Nathan. Josey, she mourned in one letter, would “never be the intelligent and fine creature he might, if you had not left him.”
Should she find a way to ship the dog to his master?

But with her travel plans in place, Margaret let Josey go to the new occupants of the Greeleys’ Turtle Bay house when Mary Greeley left with Arthur for a curative stay in Brattleboro, Vermont, and Horace moved into town for the summer. Indeed, as she wrote to Cary Sturgis, with whom she managed to be both forthright and self-dramatizing, “I am going to let everything go in this world and scud where the wind drives.”
She would not let even Ellery Channing’s most recent abandonment of Ellen worry her too much. Ellery, who seemed to step out ahead of Margaret at every turn, had set off for Rome in early March, well before Ellen’s second pregnancy had come to term, claiming his peace of mind depended on reaching the Eternal City in time for Easter and asking Margaret to arrange for him to print his commentaries in the
Tribune;
he would stay for just sixteen days before turning back to Concord, “full of distaste for all things foreign.”
Still, Ellery felt he’d gathered enough material to write a book, a fanciful dialogue called
Conversations in Rome: Between an Artist, a Catholic, and a Critic,
published a year later and scarcely noticed by any but his ever faithful partisan Waldo Emerson.

Although Margaret was careful to keep her desires a secret, she had reason to believe that her own winds of fortune might drive her into James Nathan’s arms once more. In July, a month before her departure on the
Cambria,
she received a letter written from Hamburg in which James Nathan promised to leave word in London as to his whereabouts—perhaps even travel there himself—“and then thanks to god! in all probability shall we meet either there or here.”
He also asked her help in finding a publisher for a book based on his recent travels in the Near East. Eagerly, Margaret consulted with Horace Greeley and reported her employer’s willingness to consider a manuscript, if “brief and vivid” and “repeat[ing] no information” from other travel books. She passed along Greeley’s warning that Nathan could expect little remuneration, “as your name is not known as a writer,” then closed her letter with the advisory “I will expect to find a good letter, if not yourself in London, early in September.”

Margaret’s own standing as an author had risen even higher in the year since James Nathan left New York City.
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
appeared in a London edition in England, she was delighted to learn, when she received a copy of the finished book, handsomely bound as a volume in the Clarke’s Cabinet Library series. No international copyright laws protected American authors, so she would gain nothing from sales of this pirated edition, but Margaret was nonetheless “very glad to find it will be read by women there,” she wrote to her brother Richard—all the more so, once she decided to follow her book to England.
To her frustration, Greeley’s business partner Thomas McElrath—narrow-minded and known to be a “close calculator”
—was stalling on a second edition of the book in the United States, but the impasse helped Margaret decide to accept the offer of her friend Evert Duyckinck to publish a selection of her
Dial
and
Tribune
essays with the New York firm Wiley and Putnam.

In the last hectic days before boarding the
Cambria,
she haggled with John Wiley about which essays to include. Wiley deemed several of her choices too controversial on religious grounds, particularly her favorable review of a volume by Shelley, a known atheist. Margaret shot back: “The attractive force of my mind consists in its energy, clearness and I dare to say it, its catholic liberality and fearless honor. Where I make an impression it must be by being most myself.” Holding to her own views would draw a “sufficient and always growing sympathy” in her readers, she insisted.
Margaret had discovered this by writing ever more biting editorials—arguing in favor of suffrage for black New Yorkers in “What Fits a Man to Be a Voter?” and against capital punishment in “Darkness Visible”—without costing the
Tribune
any readers. Yet because of time and space constraints,
Papers on Literature and Art
was shorter and less fully representative of Margaret’s “catholic” interests than she would have liked, though it appeared in print just in time to serve as a calling card in literary drawing rooms on the other side of the Atlantic.

The harbor at Liverpool, where most commercial as well as passenger vessels like the
Cambria
docked after an Atlantic crossing, dwarfed even New York City’s teeming waterfront. Margaret found the miles of piers “slower, solider,” but no “less truly active . . . than at home,” she wrote in her first
Tribune
letter from abroad, searching from the outset for signs of both difference and commonality to support her comparative observations.
The problems of industrialization had gripped the Old World in advance of the New, she understood, and sending home “packages of seed”—ideas ripe for transplant to American soil—would be a large part of her self-appointed mission as correspondent, as she’d written in her “Farewell” column for the
Tribune.
Margaret and the Springs merged their literary and reform agendas to devise a schedule that included, in their first “nine days of wonder,”
tours of the Mechanics Institutes at Liverpool and Manchester—adult education centers providing night classes and libraries for working men and women—as well as audiences with Harriet Martineau, the young Matthew Arnold, and the aged William Wordsworth in their Lake District retreats.

Wordsworth, in his “florid, fair old age,”
was more beloved by his neighbors for his kindness than for his poetry, Margaret learned by quizzing her innkeeper, and Wordsworth himself seemed to value the pastoral environs of Ambleside and Grasmere as much for their distance from “the real wants of England and the world . . . the cry of men in the jaws of destruction”—the mill and mine workers of the English Midlands, the beggars of London and Glasgow—as for the rugged landscape that had drawn him there decades earlier.
Even the peaceable Lake District shopkeepers, Margaret reported, wished the seventy-six-year-old poet laureate would take a stand in the parliamentary debates on the protectionist Corn Laws or on the Factories Act, which aimed to limit working hours of women and children to ten per day. Disappointed that Wordsworth was no crusading Byron—nor, for that matter, an Emerson, who had, when prevailed upon, written his 1838 letter to President Van Buren decrying the Cherokee removal and spoken against slavery in an 1844 address in Concord—Margaret wished that he had at least settled in a “more romantic” setting than his Rydal Mount cottage, with its neat avenue of hollyhocks. The house and grounds seemed to her “merely the retirement of a gentleman, rather than the haunt of a Poet.”

Wild nature was on the itinerary as well, and Margaret had written to James Nathan, inviting him to join her and the Springs for a tour of the Trossachs in Scotland—the Highlands region of deep-water lochs and towering bens she knew so well from reading Scott and Burns. Instead she received a letter from him stating bluntly that he would not meet her anywhere in Europe. Possibly he was miffed by her stark assessment of his literary prospects, but that no longer mattered. James Nathan told her the main reason outright: he was engaged to marry a young German woman.

“I care not,” Margaret forced herself to write in her journal. “I am resolved to take such disappointments more lightly than I have”—more lightly than surprise announcements in the past from George Davis, James Freeman Clarke, and Sam and Anna Ward. But this betrayal was of an altogether different order. “I ought not to regret having thought other of ‘humans’ than they deserve,” she told herself, acknowledging at last that an inhumane James Nathan had played her for a fool, and she ripped the offending letter to shreds. Perhaps she could turn the episode “to account in a literary way”; then at least something productive would come of what otherwise seemed such a waste of “affections and ideal hopes.”
But that impulse was an old one too—what had she gained from the silly tale she’d spun and published anonymously in reaction to the news of George Davis’s engagement?

On the journey from Edinburgh into the Highlands, Margaret insisted on riding in the open air, alone among the baggage on top of the coach, even through an entire day of “drenching” equinoctial rain.
Margaret told Rebecca Spring, who had guessed at James Nathan’s treachery long before, that she was enjoying the view and the speed of travel over Scotland’s uncommonly smooth roads. But Rebecca recognized that her headstrong, overqualified governess was also in a reckless, despairing mood.

Margaret’s love for James Nathan had blossomed at a time of unusual productivity, of both professional and physical well-being, and she had very nearly accepted his challenge to establish a “thorough” relation. “Life seems so full so creative; every hour an infinite promise,” she had written to him in the days after their April reconciliation, as she debated with herself—“I cannot keep in mind prohibitions or barriers or fates.”
Would things have turned out differently if she’d given in to impulse and responded favorably to James Nathan’s advance? But she had let him go, only to endure another solitary year, attending a second Valentine’s Day soiree at Anne Lynch’s Washington Square mansion “alone, as usual,” she’d commented dejectedly to the sympathetic Elizabeth Oakes Smith as she left the party. In her diary that winter Margaret described an oppressive awareness that “I have no real hold on life,—no real, permanent connection with any soul.” She felt disembodied, like “a wandering Intelligence, driven from spot to spot.” Perhaps her fate
was
this: to live alone, to “learn all secrets, and fulfil a circle of knowledge,” but never to experience full communion with another being. The prospect “envelopes me as a cold atmosphere. I do not see how I shall go through this destiny. I can, if it is mine; but I do not feel that I can.”

Now she had gone through yet another cycle of raised hopes and disillusionment. How fitting that her betrayer was a German gentleman of means. When Margaret researched her biography of Goethe, she had studied the correspondence of his young friend Bettine von Arnim, her letters to Goethe as well as those to her friend and mentor, the canoness Karoline von Günderode. Margaret had made a partial translation of these last, published by Elizabeth Peabody as a testament to women’s friendships. Margaret had always fancied herself more like the energetic younger Bettine, a would-be writer and acolyte of the great man Goethe; her intuitive grasp of spiritual matters earned Bettine the nickname “Sibyl.”
But perhaps it was the older doomed Karoline whose fate Margaret was destined to follow: deserted by her lover, a married university professor of high rank, Karoline had fallen into a depression. Bettine tried to cheer her—the young woman even delivered to her friend a handsome French soldier, an “Officer of Hussars” wearing a high bearskin cap, “the handsomest of all youths,” who offered himself as a lover. Heedless of these efforts, Karoline committed suicide on the banks of the Rhine, stabbing herself in the heart with a silver dagger, having earlier showed Bettine the precise spot just below her breast where she planned to drive the blade home.
Such events had once seemed to Margaret unthinkably—safely—distant: women of intellect taking married men as lovers, a young woman procuring a handsome soldier as gigolo for her sorrowing friend, a carefully premeditated suicide. But the enveloping despair Karoline von Günderode felt was not now at all foreign to Margaret.