Silences (19 page)

Alcott’s orotund sentences went right
on, till Hawthorne “rose lazily to his feet, and said quietly: ‘We cannot see that thing at so long a range. Let us go to dinner,’ and Mr. Alcott suddenly checked the droning flow of his prophecy and quickly led the way to the dining-room.”

Her dislike for Alcott, “the vague, would-be prophet,” is unconcealed and sometimes vitriolic. She found Emerson’s deep respect for him “almost painful to
see.”

For all Emerson’s flattering and receptive attention to her, his “exquisite courtesy,” she felt he regarded her not as Rebecca Harding, writer, human being, but as some kind of specimen:

            
He studied souls as a philologist does words, or an entomologist beetles. He approached each man with bent head and eager eyes. “What new thing shall I find here?” . . . He took from each man
his drop of stored honey, and after that the man counted for no more to him than any other robbed bee.

Hawthorne, by contrast, was the Boston feeling all over again, vivified by the happiness and sense of privilege of being near the revered writer who meant so much to her.

There was one awkward evening though. Elizabeth Peabody, Hawthorne’s sister-in-law, seized the presence of the celebrated,
mysterious author of
Life in the Iron Mills
as an occasion for a surprise party. “They’ve been here [back from Europe] two years,” she told Rebecca, as townspeople filtered in, “and nobody has met Mr. Hawthorne. People talk. It’s ridiculous! There’s no reason why Sophia should not go into society. So I just made an excuse of your visit to bring them in.”

Hawthorne’s wife rescued him; he was permitted
to escape. Rebecca understood, approved—but “I have not yet quite forgiven [Miss Elizabeth] the misery of that moment.”

The next morning Hawthorne took Rebecca for a long walk; made a special point of showing her the Old Manse where he had lived when he first married; and then, perhaps at her request, they wandered through Sleepy Hollow cemetery. He was in high spirits. “Yes,” he said, surveying
the surroundings, the hills and river below, “we New Englanders begin to enjoy ourselves—when we are dead.”

They sat a long while in the deep grass and quiet beauty, the sense of communion strong between them. It was that bad time in Hawthorne’s life Van Wyck Brooks describes so affectingly:

            
He had wasted away. . . and, hard as he tried to write, pulling down the blinds and locking
his door, he could not bring his mind into focus. The novel became two novels, and the two became four. . . . [All] drifted in confusion through his mind, their outlines melting into one another. Even his theme eluded him. . . until he could scarcely bear to touch his blurred and meaningless manuscripts.
^*

What kinship did he feel with this young writer beside him, for whom he had broken his seclusion?
He had written greatly of the unpardonable sin, of irremediable evil within. She had written—in one instance close to greatly—of another kind of unpardonable sin, of an evil she believed was socially remediable. He was near the close of his work.
^**
Her literary life was at the beginning. Or so it seemed.

            
As we walked back, the mists gathered and the day darkened overhead. Hawthorne
. . . grew suddenly silent, and before we reached home the cloud had settled down again upon him, and his steps lagged heavily.

                  
I left Concord that evening and never saw him again. He said good-by, hesitated shyly, and then, holding out his hand, said:—”I
am sorry you are going away. It seems as if we had known you always.”

With that accolade, she turned toward home.

There
was a stop in New York, where she stayed with the Frémonts. One Sunday she sat in an immense audience as an invited guest at Plymouth Church, where the most unusual of the tributes to her was paid. Henry Ward Beecher, that “huge, lumbering man,” foremost preacher of his day, had sat next to her at a dinner party, had listened to her tell of and sing certain old forgotten backwoods hymns. That morning,
in her honor, the congregation sang, one by one, all of those hymns. “I shall never forget that morning.”

In Philadelphia, the personal (and secret) reason for the journey from home waited: L. Clarke Davis. Their correspondence, begun with his admiration for
Life in the Iron Mills
a year before, continuing with the request that she become a contributor to
Peterson’s,
had deepened into intimacy—on
his side, into courtship. He was attracted by what would have made most men shun her: her very achievement, seriousness, power; her directness and sardonic eye for sham; the evidence of a rich secret life.

He, like her, was schooled in protective reticence. Freed in letters from the self-consciousness of outside selves, social situations, the dialogue of bodies, they had come to know each other
in a way that their actual presence might have precluded. Now they wanted the presence.

They were delighted by what they found. He liked her reticence with others. He liked her unvarnished, outspoken, intense. He liked her physically. It was reciprocal. By the time the week was over, they had agreed to marry.

There is no record of when she told her family. For thirty-one years (except for those
unknowns out of whom she wrote Lo, Hugh Wolfe, Holmes), they had been her emotional life. In the last years she had come closer and closer to her solitary, austere father. Bound to them as deeply as she was, she could not help but care what their reaction would be.

At that time, a woman who had not married by the age of thirty-one had long ago ceased to be thought of as marriageable. There would
be the flavor of something unnatural, vaguely shameful
about it happening now. To Rebecca’s father, not yet completely recovered, the impending loss might be considered betrayal—so dependent had he become on her devotion and companionship. And both parents would naturally feel concern about the nature of the match.

Clarke Davis was four years younger than Rebecca, without established situation
or income. He had to work on various additional jobs (editing legal periodicals, reading for
Peterson’s)
to support himself while he clerked in a law office, preparing for the bar. How then could he responsibly marry? Furthermore, he was a declared abolitionist, and radical.

The family secreted the knowledge among themselves. No public announcement of the betrothal was made. But Rebecca must
have made her determination to marry Davis clear: it was understood that the marriage
would
eventually take place.

Home again, Rebecca sat down almost at once to write—not romance, not another Civil War story (though the war was as agonizing to her as ever)
^*
—but, out of the “wrong, all wrong” caring center from which
Life in the Iron Mills
came, an almost unendurable account of the misuse, the
refusal of development to a blind slave child, “an infant Mozart,” a musical genius. “Blind Tom” appeared in the
Atlantic
in November 1862.

Was
there a Blind Tom? A “coal-black” child “of the lowest negro type, from which only field-hands can be made,” who never received instruction, yet played consummate counterpoint on the piano to music heard for the first time as he played; could reproduce
perfectly from memory any music heard once—”intricate symphonies, Beethoven, Mendelssohn—intact in brilliancy and symmetry”; who, left to himself, composed “unknown, wild . . . harmonies which he had learned from no man. . . . one inarticulate, unanswered question of pain in all.”

Was
he paraded before audiences (“a more fruitful source of revenue than tobacco-fields”), subjected to exhausting
tests, exhibited at the White House (“Being a slave . . . never was taken into
a Free State; for the same reason his master refused advantageous offers from European managers.”)? And

            
. . . that feature of the concerts which was the most painful . . . the moments when his master was talking [to the audience], and Tom was left to himself,—when a weary despair seemed to settle on the
distorted face and the stubby little black fingers, wandering over the keys, spoke for Tom’s own caged soul within . . . all the pain and pathos of the world [in it].

Was it so? Or is this fiction, the kind of fiction that is truth for the tearing possibility in it?
^*

“You cannot help Tom, either,” she ends, addressing the North directly, revealing her consciousness of more than parlors during
her stay there:

            
He was in Richmond in May. But (do you hate the moral to a story?) in your own kitchen, in your own back-alley, there are spirits as beautiful, caged in forms as bestial, that you
could
set free, if you pleased . . . they are more to be pitied than Tom,—for they are dumb.

Whatever transport there was in the writing of it, the small payment the
Atlantic
made was shock
into a different reality. She set herself to concoct a serial,
The Second Life,
for
Peterson’s,
and wrote to Fields, appealing to him to make such writing unnecessary. Even anonymously, she told him, she did not want to write the thrillers, Gothics, mysteries, plot romances suitable for
Peterson’s.
She wanted to write only her best, for discriminating
Atlantic
audiences. But
Peterson’s
was now
paying $300 and more a story, $1,000 and more for serials.
Atlantic
had paid $200 for the six-part
Margret Howth,
$400 for the book publication of it.

            
As times are, I am not justified in refusing the higher prices . . . I thought that I could say to you as a friend . . . that I hope Mr. Ticknor and you will give as much for future articles as you can legitimately afford.

She did
not explain that “as times are” had to do with the economic necessities of a forthcoming marriage: hers. It was not until January, half a year after the betrothal, that the Fieldses were told in a letter to Annie, her closest (and only) woman friend:

            
It isn’t easy for me to tell you this I don’t know why. But you who are so happy in your married life will know how to ask for a blessing
on mine. I
want
to tell you . . . of someone else, but it is harder than even to talk about myself. When you know him you won’t think much of
me,
in comparison. . . . Our marriage was to have been the first of the winter, but I had to defer it [because of family illness] until March the 5th, and . . . it will be strictly private. . . . Will you please . . . not to speak of this to anyone? No one
here knows it except ourselves. . . . I never told you what my name would be—Davis. But I never
had
such trouble to write a letter before. O Annie, my summer days are coming now.

My summer days are coming now.

All that had been impressed on her from babyhood impelled her to the believing of it. “Love and marriage—a woman’s fulfillment.” “When you loved, you fulfilled the law of your woman’s
nature.” You were no longer of those whom “God had thought unworthy of every woman’s right, to love and be loved.”

My summer days are coming now.

All that was passionate and loving and had had to be denied in her nature, never doubted it. “Nature vindicates her right, and I feel all Italy glowing beneath the Saxon crust.”
^*
“The
natural
need to love and be loved.” Nature, God, Right; Need, Law, Fulfillment.

And yet, and yet:

Rebecca, writer, thirty-two, had known another kind of summer days, fulfilling another
need and law of her nature, vindicating
another kind of natural right. Where was
their
place to be?

In “Paul Blecker,”
^*
a mawkish story begun about the time of her letter to Annie, there is a girl (not otherwise like Rebecca), wanting marriage, children,
and
to use her “dumb power” in men’s world of achievement. She “is perpetually self-analyzing—in a hysteric clinging, embracing the chimera
of the Women’s Rights prophets with her brain, and thrusting it aside with her heart.” But heart and brain are not separates. To attain the health of happiness, they must find harmony—not be split in a war within the being that must contain them both. Chimera is a monster only in myth; in actuality, it is a whole organism containing both female and male.

A part—or the whole? War or harmony? Myth
or reality? The needs and laws of nature? What would happen now?

Rebecca Harding, thirty-two, and Clarke Davis, twenty-eight, were married on March 5, 1863, in Wheeling. Only her family was present. No honeymoon. They went directly to Philadelphia, to the home of Clarke’s sister Carrie, where for the next fourteen months they were to live. It was a house crowded with children; meals and housekeeping
had to be shared; Carrie was often ill, and always (it was her house) present.

Even more than Clarke, Rebecca came to marriage with strongly established patterns of living, including the practice of solitude. Now neither had even the physical space of a room of one’s own. The most intimate and tasking of relationships had to seek a tenable way to live in the midst of the clamor of everyday unavoidable
relationship with others—necessitating (Rebecca, as a woman, would feel it most) constant consciousness and consideration for them.

In Wheeling, years of close living had bought the safety of unspoken understanding; knowledge of limits, one’s own and others’;
what to accept, resist, avoid; what one spoke of, what was best kept silent. Here it was all to be learned.