Old Books, Rare Friends

by Madeline B. Stern

  Inside Mr. Reichner’s office, the war seldom seemed to intrude. There, once Catalogue One had been circulated, his customers—many of them most distinguished—began to arrive. Having familiarized myself with the great collectors of the past, I now met the great collectors of the present: Lessing Rosenwald, whose holdings in woodcut books and incunabula would go eventually to the Library of Congress; William A. Jackson, the fair-haired boy of Harvard, already an eminent librarian; Zoltan Haraszti, Keeper of Rare Books at the Boston Public Library, whose Hungarian accent charmed the ladies of Beacon Hill; Rachel Hunt, the doyenne of botanical collectors, who insisted upon climbing the tall ladder to look at the topmost shelf.

  My day did not end at 2 P.M. I had fallen in love with old books and I had begun to research on my own the subjects that illuminated the scope of early printing. Gradually my articles appeared: “The Printers of Strassburg and Humanism” (the subject of my Washington talk); “The Libraries of Three Nuremberg Patricians”; the career of the Basle printer-publisher Johann Oporin; “Andreas Rue, Stationer of St. Paul’s.”

  One of my articles, published in the Library Quarterly, attracted the attention of a Reichner prize customer, the distinguished collector Lucius Wilmerding. Mr. Wilmerding kindly invited me to view his library in his mansion at 12 East Eighty-ninth Street. “And certainly you may bring your friend,” he wrote. Of our afternoon Madeleine recorded in her diary: “Visited the home of Lucius Wilmerding … 2 Alices in Wonderland. His home is a little gem set in a great city. The library is a large octagonal room lined with books, some having belonged to Elizabeth.” She did not add that when the butler entered with a five-foot tea service she nonchalantly lit a cigarette, announcing airily, “Leona loves to pour.”

  Lucius Wilmerding was not only a first-rate collector but a most observant host. “Dump it in,” he advised jovially. So I poured while Mr. Wilmerding discussed his books, other collectors, dealers, and my article, which reposed resplendently on his desk close to a signed photograph of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. I felt regal by association.

  I ascended less regal heights when I emptied Herbert Reichner’s wastepaper baskets. Every time he threw a foreign catalogue away, I retrieved it, thus accumulating records of European dealers’ stocks. Through their catalogues a new world of antiquarian greats unfolded for me: Maggs, Quaritch, E. P. Goldschmidt, Davis & Orioli, Weil—all of London; Olschki of Florence; Martini of Milan; Berès of Paris. I speculated about them. What were they like? Were they all mad too? Would I ever meet them?

  Although I may not have been conscious of it, I was preparing and being prepared for the life of an antiquarian bookseller—a life implicit in the apprenticeship I was serving.

  Madeleine SOME OF THE ARTICLES LEONA was researching during her Reichner days had nothing to do with sixteenth-century humanist-printers. Rather, they were centered on the career of Margaret Fuller, whose biography now consumed me. Leona’s articles were outcomes of our joint visits to Boston, Cambridge, and Concord, and one of the most fascinating was “Margaret Fuller’s Roman Diary.” The diary was a tangible relic of the struggle for Italian independence and Margaret’s last years in Rome. It had survived the shipwreck in which Margaret was drowned, in 1850, and Leona had edited it from the water-stained manuscript she had found at Harvard.

  In my biography my purpose was to restore the writer of that diary to life so that I could honestly assert: “Here Margaret Fuller walks again, her blue chenille cord knotted in her hair, her carbuncle ring glittering on her finger, speaks again the words she actually spoke, thinks again the thoughts that once were hers.” I was ambitious to restore both her persona and her background. My hours after teaching at Long Island City High School were spent, therefore, in reading and rereading the sources of Margaret Fuller’s life. Eventually I wrote a series of articles that would, I hoped, become chapters of a full-length biography. In all of them I tried to reproduce Margaret’s times and to reanimate her personality. My biographical technique derived from Van Wyck Brooks’s methods.

  Almost inevitably, he approved of the results. And since my Life of Margaret Fuller would be my first biography, I kept the recorded reactions of my readers—of readers like Mr. Brooks, to whom I submitted my articles; of readers for publishing houses; and eventually, after publication, of professional critics and reviewers. Their letters to me and their newspaper critiques, kept all these years in scrapbooks, trace the history of my first biography and point the way to my second.

  Between June 1940 and Autumn 1941 my articles were carried by scholarly quarterlies, trial runs, so to speak, of what would become chapters on Margaret’s early girlhood, her stay in Providence, her work on the Dial, her proletarian summer in the West. But finding a publisher for the biography would prove difficult. In 1940, while I was still in medias res, Viking came out with Mason Wade’s Margaret Fuller: Whetstone of Genius. There was the pressing question of whether the market could sustain two biographies of a woman with dynamic but limited appeal. It was true that my point of view, unlike Wade’s, was feminist. My own brand of feminism was probably in my genes. It came from within, it went way back in my life, and it was based on a strong egalitarian concept. Why should my brother—or any other man—be able to do thus and so if I could not? The egalitarian view continued, unconsciously or subconsciously, until, by the end of the 1930s, I could identify very naturally with the woman who had said of other women: “Let them be sea-captains, if you will.” Neither Leona nor I was part of a feminist movement; a militant feminist movement did not yet exist. But my point of view was strongly feminist, firmly supportive of women’s right to do whatever men did if they wished—to be soldiers or sailors, miners or sea-captains, if you will. It was early in the biographical genre for the infiltration of such an attitude, and it would take nearly half a century for such pioneer efforts to be valued.

  In addition to the feminist approach to my Margaret Fuller, my technique was a revolutionary one, attempting to reproduce conversation and thought in a work of nonfiction. It was a technique that appealed to one critic at least, the distinguished author of the popular Flowering of New England, who, on September 27, 1940, wrote to me, renewing my determination along with my hopes:

  I am delighted with your second chapter on Margaret Fuller, and I think you have worked out a most interesting form. I do not think publishers should be put off because of Mason Wade’s book, for your treatment constitutes a mode of approach that makes the subject for me entirely novel. This accumulation of exact detail makes your book by far the best on the subject, assuming that you can carry it through to the end with the same skill, truthfulness and feeling for proportion. So far it is indeed a remarkable achievement. Only you must not slip even once. If there had been twenty biographies of Margaret Fuller, this would make the subject entirely fresh, and I hope you will persist and get it published.

  What you are doing is a work of art … I have lived more Margaret Fuller in these two chapters than in all the six or seven biographies of her. I do indeed congratulate you … and I should have no objection if you cared to show this to a publisher.

  I did indeed care to show “this” to a publisher, specifically to Mr. Brooks’s publisher, E. P. Dutton and Company. John Macrae, firm president, responded:

  November 19, 1940

  I have been giving a considerable amount of thought to your manuscript, The Life of Margaret Fuller. Frankly, I have enjoyed reading what you have had to say about Margaret Fuller. It seems to me that it is essential that you should complete The Life of Margaret Fuller … it is my strong feeling that you can complete the necessary work without having to go to Italy. I appreciate why you cannot properly go to Italy under the present conditions.

  I believe it would be wise for you to come down here to my office to have a conference with me …

  There is no lack of books about Margaret Fuller. On the other hand, I feel that you have done something for Margaret Fuller which her previous biographers have failed to do.
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  The first conference took place on November 26, 1940, at 3:30 P.M. It was followed by other conferences, by presentations of partial manuscripts, and, at long last, by a working draft of the entire manuscript. Elliott Beach Macrae, Dutton’s secretary and treasurer, reported to me on May 29: “I think we can safely say that we shall make an offer of publication providing our terms are acceptable.”

  As a result of the euphoria inspired by this statement, my mother, Leona, and I drove out to the White Turkey Inn in Danbury, Connecticut—by that time I had bought a little car—and our luxurious meal began with the inn’s celebrated cheddar cheese soup. Of course we toasted Margaret Fuller and the book, Van Wyck Brooks, and E. P. Dutton, in wine provided by Leona. It was the kind of joyous occasion that can never quite be duplicated.

  By this time, Van Wyck Brooks had read the entire manuscript and written an endorsement that would eventually be emblazoned on the jacket of my Life of Margaret Fuller:

  I think this is a fine book, and I feel it should be published. It confirms all my feelings in reading some of the chapters in magazines. It is true that three other lives of Margaret Fuller have appeared, within the last fifteen years, and that Margaret Fuller is a limited subject. But this book is, of its kind, so very good that I feel one should ignore these facts.

  What makes the book so good is the mass of concrete detail, which has been handled in a masterly fashion. The author is saturated in her subject and in the context of the subject, and, as one who knows this context more or less, I can vouch for its general authenticity.

  The book is sound, and moreover it is immensely readable. It is a novelized biography but thoroughly grounded in fact, and it quite throws into the shade the lives I have mentioned. I think it is a capital book. There is still a large public for such authentic pictures of our way of life.

  Meanwhile, there were further visits to the Dutton offices on Fourth Avenue, often with Leona, and, during yet another summer in Maine, I continued polishing and revising. Now in the more habitable cottage called Sunnybank, not far from out first cottage, I completed the final version and wrote my foreword, beginning: “Every reader knows that with each generation comes the need for reinterpreting the past to the present. Today the purpose of biography seems to be to search out the parallels that exist between our day and earlier times.”

  Copies of my biography were emerging from the bindery by December 7, 1941. Were there any parallels between our Day of Infamy and the days of infamy Margaret had observed in the Rome that during her last years had been “her country”? Now, a century later, our country was facing powers more baleful than any she had ever witnessed. Would the story of her life be at all meaningful to a nation taking up arms in its most horrendous war?

  The question is answered by excerpts from the reviews. My first biography was undoubtedly a succès d’éstime, but it was also a financial failure. Most reviewers heaped praises on my head, but reviewers did not buy books. Those who did were concerned, not with the author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, but with Pearl Harbor. I tried to concentrate on reviews rather than on sales, and for the twenty-nine-year-old author of a first biography I found heady praise indeed. On page 1 of the New York Herald Tribune Books, George Whicher called the biography “a consummate example of the art,” re-creating “scenes and conversations … on the basis of authentic documents.” In the New York Times Herbert Gorman found Fuller “brought to life again” and congratulated the author.

  In addition, publication was followed by several requests to speak. Dutton’s publicity department informed me that the Women’s National Book Association had invited me “to speak before the lady booksellers of New York City at their monthly dinner … at the Hotel Pennsylvania.” This I did, recalling for the group of “lady booksellers” how, before our first visit to Concord, Leona Rostenberg had said to me, “You know, Margaret Fuller would make a fine subject for a biography … Why don’t you try it?”

  Then too Adelaide Hawley, who conducted a WABC radio program, “Woman’s Page of the Air,” asked me to “guest” and gave me a fine opportunity to air my biographical purposes and intentions. And in October of 1942 Professor Harry R. Warfel, of the University of Maryland, asked me to join a panel at the next meeting of the Modern Language Association. “We all would like to hear something,” he wrote, “about your magnificent Margaret Fuller or about any other ideas you wish to give away on the subject of biographical writing.” Two months later—one year to the day after the Day of Infamy—Professor Warfel wrote again: “MLA seems to have been called off.” The restrictions of travel necessitated by the war could make no exceptions for Margaret Fuller, Citizen of the World.

  By that time I had already begun work on another biography. Both the Times and the Tribune carried my request for manuscripts and letters as well as personal recollections of another nineteenth-century woman, almost universally known as America’s best-loved author of juveniles. Leona had made a second suggestion that would turn out to be even more fruitful than her first. Soon I would be in full pursuit of Louisa May Alcott.

  LOUISA MAY

  ALCOTT’S MASK

  Madeleine THE RECONSTRUCTION of Margaret Fuller’s life may have required the skills of a “trained historian” and even of “an expert writer of fiction,” but it seldom if ever required the cerebration of a Sherlock Holmes. On the other hand, it appeared early on in my research on Louisa May Alcott that her restoration would demand the magnifying glass of a literary sleuth. Certain areas of her literary life, especially of her life prior to the creation of Little Women, seemed shadowy and hidden. To supplement the family income—for so long on the poverty level—she had at age nineteen become a domestic servant, but no one knew for whom she had worked or what the emotional results of the experience had been. She had, after her fame was secured, contributed an anonymous novel to her publisher’s No Name Series, A Modern Mephistopheles. In that narrative, so unlike her customary fiction, such lurid themes as hashish and mind control had played a role. During her penurious salad days, had she perhaps written other tales that deviated radically from the pattern of sweetness and light with which she was identified?

  I spent the early months of my research asking but not yet answering those intriguing questions. On the subway my head was buried in nineteenth-century literary histories; even at my desk in school I leafed through the journals of Louisa’s revered Ralph Waldo Emerson or the Walden of her neighbor Thoreau. In the crumbling pages of nineteenth-century weeklies and story papers at the New York Public Library I found Alcott’s name or initials attached to tales previously unassociated with her. I planned articles on her addiction to the stage or her nursing work in the Civil War. As I wrote in my diary: “In my desperation to keep my desk cleared I go through many unimportant activities every day—keeping up with correspondence, checking bibliography, etc. All drops in the bucket—but a biographer’s work necessitates such drops.”

  As the drops in the bibliographical bucket accumulated, my suspicion mounted that Louisa Alcott had indeed produced a corpus of deviational narratives. She might have hidden the details of her double literary life, but she had scattered through her letters and her journals and even in Little Women itself a plethora of clues. I needed to don my deerstalker, take up my magnifying glass, and embark on the hunt.

  In that hunt her own clues would guide me. Among her letters was one she had written on June 22, 1862, to her young Concord friend Alf Whitman, who would be one of the models for the glamorous Laurie of Little Women. In it she had confided to him:

  I intend to illuminate the Ledger with a blood & thunder tale as they are easy to “compoze” & are better paid than moral & elaborate works of Shakespeare, so dont be shocked if I send you a paper containing a picture of Indians, pirates wolves, bears & distressed damsels in a grand tableau over a title like this “The Maniac Bride” or “The Bath of Blood. A thrilling tale of passion.”

  Had Louisa Alcott, author of the innocuous Flower Fables and future
author of the domestic saga Little Women, actually “compozed” blood-and-thunder tales? If so, what were the titles she had concocted for them, titles like The Maniac Bride and The Bath of Blood? And if indeed she had written such narratives, where had they been published? Or was she simply exercising her bubbling sense of humor and teasing her young friend Alf Whitman?

  Suspicion was heightened by the tantalizing clues she had jotted in her journals. Alcott frequently used initials in place of names in those diaries, which were, after all, not designed for publication. When, after her death, in 1888, her journals were made available to her large and enthusiastic public, they were edited by a family friend, Ednah Dow Cheney, who, in the interests of decorum, did not hesitate to remove full names and insert initials instead. What was left for an avid Sherlock Holmes was highly tantalizing.

  In that very same year of 1862 when she had written her intriguing letter to Alf Whitman, Alcott had recorded in her journal:

  Wrote two tales for L. I enjoy romancing to suit myself; and though my tales are silly, they are not bad; and my sinners always have a good spot somewhere. I hope it is good drill for fancy and language, for I can do it fast; and Mr. L. says my tales are so “dramatic, vivid, and full of plot,” they are just what he wants.

  A few months later she added:

  … Rewrote the last story, and sent it to L., who wants more than I can send him … I reel off my “thrilling” tales, and mess up my work in a queer but interesting way.