Books to the Ceiling

Susan Cheever has penned an eminently readable whirlwind tour of early 19th century Concord, Massachusetts. The subtitle of the book is “Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work.”

In my post on Suzanne Berne’s novel Ghost at the Table, I talked about the Concord luminaries. In my several pilgrimages to that still-lovely town, I’ve been interested primarily in Thoreau and Hawthorne. Susan Cheever’s interest in this group of worthies was sparked by a re-reading of Little Women: “The book amazed me. Far from being the string of bromides I dimly recalled, it was an elegantly written family story of great poignance and skill.” I guess I”ll have to break down and read it – finally!

I consider myself reasonably well read where the lives and works of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau are concerned. Somewhat to my surprise, Cheever depicts a variety amorous rivalries in this famous community. First there’s Ellen Sewall, beloved by both Henry and John Thoreau and won by neither of them. Then there was Margaret Fuller. As Cheever tells it, Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne were all in love with her to some extent, particularly Hawthorne. Now this really perplexed me. From my prior reading, I had gathered that he and Sophia were utterly devoted to each other.

At any rate, Margaret Fuller decamped for Europe before she could irretrievably damage any marriages. In the late 1840’s she fetched up in Rome, where she took an Italian lover by whom she had a son. The story of how Fuller and her family perished in a shipwreck off the coast of Fire Island is one of the more harrowing things I’ve read lately – and I’ve read some pretty harrowing things lately.

Aside from Margaret Fuller’s ill-fated adventures, the Concord writers led what on the surface appear to be provincial, conventional lives. Not so: if the life of the mind is valued at all, their lives were filled with riches. And speaking of riches, Thoreau and Hawthorne subsisted largely on a kind of continuous grant supplied by the incredibly generous Emerson. His first wife, Ellen Tucker, had been wealthy. When she died, tragically at the age of twenty, he inherited her fortune. He was he was brokenhearted, though, and would have much preferred to keep Ellen with him.

Emerson remarried, but one senses that Ellen Tucker remained in his memory as the great love of his life. He and his second wife Lidian started a family, but tragedy struck again when Waldo, age five, succumbed to scarlet fever. Emerson wrote to Margaret Fuller: “Shall I ever dare to love anything again. Farewell and farewell, O my Boy!” Earlier that month – January of 1842 – John Thoreau had also died. He had cut himself while shaving and contracted tetanus.

     [Ralph Waldo Emerson and his grandson Ralph Emerson Forbes]

The people of the early 19th century had virtually no defense against these kinds of opportunistic infections. To make matters worse, the medical treatment of the day was often more injurious than the illness it was supposed to mitigate. A medication called calomel, liberally prescribed at the time for everything from headaches to typhoid fever, consisted basically of a solution of mercury. When Louisa Alcott contracted typhoid, she was heavily dosed with calomel and as a result suffered permanent neurological impairment.

The death of Henry David Thoreau provides the single most moving moment in this book. Cheever calls Emerson’s eulogy “…one of the most extraordinary essays ever written by one friend about another.” The closing lines are heartbreaking in their eloquence:

“‘His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world. Wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.’”

At the time of his death, Thoreau was forty-four years old.

     [The Thoreau family gravesite in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord]