Margaret Fuller (58 page)

Joseph Mozier himself had long been a supporter of Margaret, welcoming her into his home in the summer of 1847 shortly after she had parted ways with the Springs and supervising her recovery from an attack of cholera. Since then, Mozier had established his reputation as a sculptor with a portrait bust in marble of Pocahontas; later he completed a similar one of Margaret. Whether she sat for the work during the earlier stay or during her 1849–50 winter residence in Florence with Giovanni and Nino, or whether the firm-jawed heroine he sculpted was, like Pocahontas, primarily a work of Mozier’s imagination, his perception of Margaret as a mannish figure of steadfast resolve and scant femininity is evident in the piece.
Bountiful in his generosity to Margaret, Mozier was privately contemptuous of Giovanni: “the handsomest man,” yet he appeared to be “entirely ignorant,” even “of his own language.” In Mozier’s estimation, Margaret’s husband was “half an idiot.”
Giovanni’s attraction for and to Margaret remained a puzzle he could not solve.

Giovanni’s habitual silence in the company of Margaret’s English-speaking friends, with whom he could not converse, was certainly the source of Mozier’s uncharitable assessment. Most often Giovanni merely escorted Margaret to social events and returned for her later, not wishing “to impose any seeming restraint, by his presence, upon her friends,” wrote William Hurlbert, a more sympathetic member of the American circle. But Giovanni’s inability to speak English may not have been the only reason for his silences. Hurlbert, a recent graduate of Harvard Divinity School, visited the Ossoli apartment on several occasions and noted the “melancholy pleasure” Giovanni took in wearing his uniform at home, reading “from some patriotic book” while Margaret worked “surrounded by her books and papers.” Giovanni’s recollections of war “seemed to be overpoweringly painful,” and his memories of Margaret’s “terrible distress” over his safety caused her husband to break down in the telling; he could communicate well enough, it seemed, to a receptive listener.
Perhaps the awkward muteness in formal gatherings that Mozier took for ignorance or near idiocy was a self-protective numbness, an aftereffect of wartime service and the forced flight from his devastated home city. Or perhaps Giovanni simply displayed a hushed reverence for his wife never before seen in a man of Mozier’s acquaintance. His adoration may have seemed, to the rich American, a kind of mental defect.

Giovanni got along far better with Horace Sumner, the much younger brother of the Massachusetts anti-slavery lawyer Charles Sumner, although at first Giovanni took the “pale, erect, narrow little figure,” a former denizen of Brook Farm, for “some insane person” when the young man accosted Margaret outside the Duomo one day at sunset. “Imagine Brook Farm walking the streets of Florence,” Margaret wrote afterward to George Curtis; “every body turned to look.” Margaret’s nerves began to “tingle with old associations” as the twenty-five-year-old Sumner sputtered on about “walking into the country to see the green.” But soon she was “listening with a sort of pleasure to the echo of the old pastoral masquerade.”
After that first chance encounter, Horace Sumner visited often to give Giovanni lessons in English. By spring he was considering sailing for home with the Ossolis.

It was harder still for Margaret to persuade her old friends in America that “I am just the same for them [as] I was before,” a message she asked her sister, Ellen, to convey to Waldo Emerson in particular, hoping for a letter from him.
For months Waldo did not write, although he passed along with no comment the news to his brother William that “Margaret F. has been near two years married” and “they will probably all come to America” as soon as he heard it in October of 1849.
But then, Margaret had not written directly to Waldo, or to many others. Instead she had enclosed daguerreotype portraits of Giovanni, dressed in his Civic Guard uniform, in the few letters she did send, as if his handsome visage, when passed among the wider circle, might guard against the severe judgments she anticipated. “I expect that to many of my friends Mr Emerson for one, he will be nothing,” she wrote to Ellen, “and they will not understand that I should have life in common with him,” adding that she didn’t think Giovanni would care: “he has not the slightest tinge of self-love.”

But Margaret cared on Giovanni’s behalf. Concerned that “he will feel very strange and lonely” in America, Margaret was “much more anxious about his happiness” than her own.
And so she made an effort to prepare her friends and family in advance. “He is not in any respect such a person as people in general would expect to find with me,” she had written to her mother.
And to Ellen: surely “
some
of my friends and my family who will see him in the details of practical life, cannot fail to prize the purity and simple strength of his character.”
Margaret felt all the more relieved when Margarett Crane wrote a gracious letter of welcome that arrived in late November. Giovanni wept joyful tears—the only tears Margaret had seen him shed, except at the news of his father’s death and the entry of the French into Rome—to think he would be greeted with affection by “
La Madre.
”

Others, like Rebecca and Marcus Spring, wrote to express the kind of hurt that Waldo Emerson must also have felt, stunned that they should have been “left” to “hear these things from others.” Margaret could only plead that she had been “worn out and sensitive from much suffering,” and so could “make my communication” only to those few whose “hearts” had seemed “awake in love to mine at that time.” Where the Springs were concerned, there was no hiding the fact that though Margaret had traveled with the Quaker couple for nearly a year, she had slowly drawn away from them as she made her visit to George Sand in Paris, then threw in her lot with Adam Mickiewicz, and finally took up with the young Italian she’d introduced to them simply as Giovanni. Their differences still jarred. In response to Rebecca Spring’s well-intentioned blessing on Margaret’s son—“it is still better to give the world this living soul than . . . a printed book”—Margaret bristled: “it is true; and yet of my book I could know whether it would be of some worth or not, of my child I must wait to see what his worth will be.”

Margaret still planned to return to America “possessed of a great history,” as she’d written to William Channing even before the climactic events of June 1849.
Each day that it was not too cold in the apartment to take pen in hand, she gave her morning hours to assembling a complete manuscript from pages she had already written. In her letter to the Springs she argued hard in defense of the revolution she had joined, mourned, and hoped to see rise again. The Springs, as Quakers, would condone only “the peace way,” which Margaret agreed was “the best,” in principle. “If any one see clearly how to work in that way, let him,” Margaret wrote. But “if he abstain from fighting against giant wrongs let him be sure he is really and ardently at work undermining them or better still sustaining the rights that are to supplant them. Meanwhile I am not sure that I can keep my hands free from blood.”

Was this a changed Margaret? Nothing proved she was still herself more than such a declaration. Margaret had always been, as she’d once written in a poem, “the much that calls for more,” constant in an ever-expanding ardency.
Yet how would America receive a woman who refused to give the particulars of a mysterious marriage, who considered her book of greater present import than the baby she dearly loved, who condoned violent revolution? “These are not the things one regrets,” she wrote to the Springs of an impulsive loan of money she’d made to the Danish radical socialist Harro Harring, whose roman à clef about Mazzini she had reviewed for the
Tribune;
“we must consent to make many mistakes or we would move too slow to help our brothers much.”

Margaret’s reputation in America was not helped by a very public strike against her the year before, from one of New England’s most highly regarded poets of her generation, James Russell Lowell. Taking offense at Margaret’s dismissal of his work as “absolutely wanting in the true spirit and tone of poesy”
in
Papers on Literature and Art,
the collection she published as she left for Europe, Lowell had returned the blow with a mean-spirited caricature in his
Fable for Critics,
depicting Margaret as a self-aggrandizing virago who boasted of having “lived cheek by jowl, / Since the day I was born, with the Infinite Soul.”
Several of Margaret’s friends, including William Story and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, wrote to Lowell in her defense, asking him to remove the lampoon from his next edition of the book, but he would not. Margaret, who learned of this “plot against me” while still in Rome, was stunned—the lines were “too cruel and too cunningly wrought,” she wrote to Cary Tappan.
She must have felt all the more irked to find that the caricature derived from the old days of the “pastoral masquerade” and to have this particular effigy of herself raised while she was tending grievously wounded Roman soldiers and reporting the latest news from an embattled Italy—coverage that, to his credit, Lowell openly admired.

Margaret never wrote to Lowell herself; “a useless resistance is degrading,” she explained to Cary. Her stern critique of Lowell’s poetry would always seem to her justified; his personal attack on her was not.
But the experience helped inure her to slights she began to detect from American friends, several of whom now urged her not to return. “I pity those who are inclined to think ill, when they might as well have inclined the other way,” Margaret wrote to Cary. “However let them go; there are many in the world who stand the test, enough to keep us from shivering to death.”
She was not without the capacity to see herself as her critics did, but “if my life be not wholly right,” she wrote to William Channing, “it is not wholly wrong nor fruitless.”
When even William begged that for her own sake she reconsider her plans, Margaret advised her friend not to “feel anxious about people’s talk concerning me. It is not directed against the real Margaret, but a phantom.”
To her mother she stated firmly, “I will believe I shall be welcome.”

The Ossolis didn’t have the funds for all three to travel by Cunard, the steamship line that had brought Margaret to Liverpool from Boston in a record twelve-day crossing four years earlier. Margaret learned of a barque, a three-masted merchant ship called the
Elizabeth,
leaving from Livorno for New York in May on a transatlantic voyage expected to last two months or longer. The captain was willing to take on a few passengers once he’d filled his hold with “marble and rags,” Margaret’s way of referring to the cargo: 150 tons of Carrara marble, silk and fine paintings, and a sculpture by the best known of America’s expatriate artists, Hiram Powers.
The
Elizabeth
would have to suffice, and the sturdy, slow-moving craft began to seem a wise choice as news reached Margaret of the wrecks of three swifter vessels making Atlantic crossings that spring, including the
Royal Adelaide,
a steamship whose 250 passengers all drowned off the British coast.

Through the last days of March, Margaret attended Easter week services in the Duomo and at the gleaming white Basilica of Santa Croce with Giovanni, then devoted herself to preparations for travel as the “Siberian winter” turned to a steady April rain—beginning, Margaret noted, on April 4, the day she and Giovanni observed as an anniversary.
The time had come to wean Nino from “his great stout Roman mother in the flesh,” as Margaret could not afford the wet nurse’s passage nor continue to employ her in the United States.
Margaret would need to acquire “an immense stock of baby-linen,” since clean water for laundry would be in short supply on board ship, as well as “poultry, a goat for milk, oranges and lemons, soda hardbread, and a medicine chest.”
Her head was “full of boxes, bundles, pots of jelly, and phials of medicine,” an array of necessities all the more bewildering as Margaret had never before given much thought to packing for “a journey for myself, except to try and return all the things, books, especially, I had been borrowing.”
But her energy was high. “I have never been so well as at present,” she wrote to Sam Ward.

Margaret still found time for visits to the Uffizi, which during the winter months had been too cold for her to linger in front of Titian’s Venuses or Fra Angelico’s angels. “I feel works of art more than I have ever yet,” she wrote to Sam. “I feel the development of my own nature as I look on them; so many hid meanings come out upon me.” Two “new (old) Raphaels” had been discovered on canvases beneath other paintings in the collection—one of them a “lovely Madonna.” A
Last Supper,
also attributed to Raphael, had turned up in a Florentine coach house, once the refectory of a nearby convent. Margaret thought the image, now being copied by a prominent engraver, would make a fit companion to the print of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous
Cenacolo
in Milan that Sam had brought back so many years ago from his own European tour, the one Margaret had missed, during which he had fallen in love with Anna Barker.

The surge of aesthetic responsiveness inspired Margaret to write an essay describing her favorite works in the Vatican galleries, which she sent to the
United States Magazine and Democratic Review.
The published essay could serve as a reminder too for a “sufficient number of persons” in editorial posts of Margaret’s wide-ranging journalistic capabilities, to “enable me to earn frugal bread” once back in America.
In the essay’s opening pages, Margaret could not help but recall the days of May and June 1849, when the gardens surrounding the Vatican had been “full of armed men” and cannons were concealed in the shrubbery. But Margaret’s memory also carried her farther back to the “divine images”—sculpted figures of Perseus, Apollo, Ariadne—she’d studied on one particular torchlight tour of the galleries and knew would “remain to exhilarate and bless all my after life,” the years ahead in America.

Returning home after errands or excursions to “find always the glad eyes of my little boy to welcome me” meant that Margaret had “never felt so near happy as now.” Her “tie” with Nino, so “real, so deep-rooted,” was an “unimpassioned love,” which “does not idealize and cannot be daunted by the faults of its object”—so unlike the romantic passions she’d experienced, which had so often ended in disappointment. Nothing but a child “can take the worst bitterness out of life.”
Margaret realized the “great novelty, the immense gain”
of motherhood: “nothing else can break the spell of loneliness.”