Who was the Mr. L. who wanted more dramatic and vivid stories than the author could supply?
Firing my wonderment, increasing my perplexity, were other veiled remarks in those journals of Louisa’s. A few years later she was receiving orders not only from L. but from a mysterious E., who “wanted a long story in twenty-four chapters, and I wrote it in a fortnight.” There was no doubt in my mind that Louisa Alcott was writing vivid and dramatic tales in white heat, but what were they all about, where were they published, and what byline had she used?
Alcott’s masterpiece offered even more exciting hints that its author had had a large clandestine literary output. Part I of Little Women contains an enchanting chapter entitled “Secrets,” and one of Jo March’s secrets is whispered to her confidant, Laurie. “I’ve left two stories with a newspaperman, and he’s to give his answer next week.” That suggestive whisper resounded thunderously in my ears by the time I reached Part II of Little Women and the chapter called “Literary Lessons.” There, Jo sees “a pictorial sheet” with a “melodramatic illustration of an Indian in full war costume, tumbling over a precipice with a wolf at his throat, while two infuriated young gentlemen, with unnaturally small feet and big eyes, were stabbing each other close by, and a disheveled female was flying away in the background with her mouth wide open.” And in that gaudy sheet Jo reads a tale that is a “labyrinth of love, mystery, and murder” belonging to “that class of light literature in which the passions have a holiday, and when the author’s invention fails, a grand catastrophe clears the stage of one half the dramatis personae, leaving the other half to exult over their downfall.” Moreover, Jo March boldly resolves “to try for the hundred-dollar prize offered” in the paper’s columns “for a sensational story,” and her manuscript actually does win the prize. Her $100 check is followed by others as, “by the magic of a pen, her ‘rubbish’ turned into comforts” for her needy family. “The Duke’s Daughter paid the butcher’s bill, A Phantom Hand put down a new carpet, and the Curse of the Coventrys proved the blessing of the Marches in the way of groceries and gowns.”
Later on, Louisa Alcott singled out the “facts” in Little Women “that are true” and she included in her list “Jo’s literary … experiences.” Why should they not have been true? Certainly Louisa Alcott needed the money that sensation stories could earn; her family was habitually in need of “groceries and gowns.” In addition, she was, in her early career especially, searching for genres, eager to experiment. Why not a foray into the sensational genre? Fearful to shock, she would surely have kept such ventures secret, but just as surely she would have enjoyed them. But the questions persisted, for, despite the scattering of clues, not one of them led to any certain identification of title or of any pseudonym she may have used.
Yet another chapter in Little Women did provide a colorful, if covert, description of Jo March’s publishers. In the chapter entitled “A Friend” the avid reader is informed that Jo March “took to writing sensation stories, for in those dark ages, even all-perfect America read rubbish. She told no one, but concocted a ‘thrilling tale,’ and boldly carried it herself to Mr. Dashwood, editor of the Weekly Volcano … she dressed herself in her best, and … bravely climbed two pairs of dark and dirty stairs to find herself in a disorderly room, a cloud of cigar smoke, and the presence of three gentlemen, sitting with their heels rather higher than their hats, which articles of dress none of them took the trouble to remove on her appearance.” Jo’s interview with Mr. Dashwood follows and in the course of it she tells him that she is far from a novice, having won a prize for a tale in the Blarneystone Banner. When Mr. Dashwood accepts her story, Jo “rashly” takes “a plunge into the frothy sea of sensational literature” and “eager to find material for stories … she searched newspapers for accidents, incidents, and crimes; she excited the suspicions of public librarians by asking for works on poisons; she studied faces in the street, and characters, good, bad, and indifferent, all about her … and introduced herself to folly, sin, and misery.”
Certainly Jo’s—Alcott’s?—publishers seemed a trio worth searching for, but no number of questions I might ask public librarians would identify the Weekly Volcano or the Blarneystone Banner or Mr. Dashwood and his two partners.
One interview Alcott gave later in life did offer further suggestions about the nature of the wild and melodramatic stories she may have contributed to such sensational sheets. She had remarked to her interviewer:
I think my natural ambition is for the lurid style. I indulge in gorgeous fancies and wish that I dared inscribe them upon my pages and set them before the public … How should I dare to interfere with the proper grayness of old Concord? The dear old town has never known a startling hue since the redcoats were there. Far be it from me to inject an inharmonious color into the neutral tint … To have had Mr. Emerson for an intellectual god all one’s life is to be invested with a chain armor of propriety … And what would my own good father think of me … if I set folks to doing the things that I have a longing to see my people do? No, my dear, I shall always be a wretched victim to the respectable traditions of Concord.
But had she indeed been such a victim? I did not think so. She knew too much about graphic nineteenth-century story papers and their publishers. Surely she had indulged in that “lurid style” for which she had a “natural ambition.” It was essential for Alcott’s biographer to uncover the truth of her literary life and identify whatever stories she had written but never acknowledged. What was in those narratives that pictured her characters “doing the things” she had “a longing to see” her “people do”?
A visit to an Alcott collector in early 1942—one of many visits Leona and I paid to family descendants and scholars in the natural course of researching a biography—propelled us on the rosy path to discovery.
Carroll Atwood Wilson lived on Horatio Street in Greenwich Village. Urbane, handsome, he was distinguished in every way, in the law that was his profession and in book collecting that was his hobby. His collecting interest embraced thirteen authors, ranging from Emerson to Hawthorne, from Trollope to Hardy. Among his “representative men” was one representative woman—Louisa May Alcott. Greeting us cordially, he enthusiastically showed us his signed volumes, his first editions, his presentation copies, his manuscripts and letters. Among the last was a remarkable one written by Aaron K. Loring around 1864 to Louisa. In it, publisher Loring outlined his standards for popular literature:
A story that touches and moves me, I can make others read and believe in … I like a story of constant action, bustle and motion … I like a story that … goes steadily on increasing in interest till it culminates with the closing chapter leaving you spell bound.
Surely Jo March had followed such standards for the Blarneystone Banner and the Weekly Volcano, and if Jo March had done so, had not Louisa Alcott?
All three of us mused aloud about that arresting letter, and our musings prompted our host to say to me, “Really, Miss Stern, you should devote all your time to your biography and get it written and published. Why don’t you apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship so that you can stop teaching and work on Louisa?”
Then he turned to Leona. “All of us know that Jo March wrote sensation stories and published them in secret. The three of us suspect that Louisa Alcott did the same thing over some pseudonym. Maybe her publishers might throw light on her literary career. Miss Rostenberg, I know from your articles that you are interested in publishing history. Why don’t you go ahead and discover Louisa’s pseudonym and the thrillers she wrote?”
We did not forget Carroll Wilson’s injunctions. During spring vacation of 1942 we visited Harvard’s Houghton Library, recently opened and as elegant as its holdings were extraordinary. Its manuscript room was presided over by Carolyn Jakeman, to whom we presented our requests for Alcott material. In due course a page brought four boxes of letters and manuscripts to our table. We began to sift through the family papers and memorabilia.
In 1942 neither computers nor
word processors existed. In the profound silence of the Houghton Library manuscript room not even a portable typewriter clattered. The pencil was the soundless tool of transmission from original manuscript to twentieth-century notebook. Leona vividly recalls both the scene and the action in the drama that followed:
I busied myself with Box II of the Alcott manuscripts. After contemplating a brief dossier from an Alcott third cousin in Syracuse referring to inflated prices, I tossed it aside and espied a small clutch of letters that seemed to belong together. As I picked up one of them, I immediately felt hot and cold and strangely faint. The letter was dated January 21, 1865; it was addressed to “Dear Miss Alcott,” and it said: “You may send me anything in either the sketch or Novelette line that you do not wish to ‘father,’ or that you wish A. M. Barnard, or ‘any other man’ to be responsible for, & if they suit me I will purchase them … Let me hear from you. Very Truly Yours J. R. Elliott.”
My wild warwhoop shattered the dignified silence of the manuscript room of Houghton Library. Miss Jakeman stared reprovingly. Mady dropped her pencil. I scarcely believed my eyes. I had fulfilled Carroll Wilson’s injunction. Now I knew the pseudonym. I also knew the name of the publisher. Mr. Elliott was surely the E. of Louisa Alcott’s diary.
After an intermission of congratulation, hilarity, and several cigarettes, we returned to our seats, and I meticulously copied every word of every one of the batch of five letters written by J. R. Elliott to “Dear Miss Alcott.”
The first letter was dated January 5, 1865, and it included the name of one of Miss Alcott’s—A. M. Barnard’s?—clandestine stories, “V.V.” It also provided the name of the periodical that had carried it, The Flag of Our Union. And its letterhead identified Mr. Elliott’s firm, “Office of Elliott, Thomes & Talbot’s Publications, Journal Building, 118 Washington Street, Boston, Mass.” Mr. Elliott’s partners were Wm. H. Thomes and Newton Talbot. The disguise of Mr. Dashwood and his associates had been penetrated. The smoke filled room of Jo March’s publishers had been entered.
The three other letters filled out the picture of the Concord writer in a vortex of secret literary creativity. A letter of June 15, 1865, mentioned another title, “The Marble Woman,” and informed author A. M. Barnard that Mr. Elliott’s friends thought it “just splendid” and he thought that “no author of novels need be ashamed to own it for a bantling.” At the same time, J. R. Elliott assured Miss Alcott that he had “not given currency to the idea that ‘A. M. Barnard’ & yourself were identical.” The final letter in the precious group of letters was dated August 11, 1866, and it referred in glowing terms to yet another product of A. M. Barnard’s racy pen: “The story entitled ‘Behind a Mask’ is accepted. I think it a story of peculiar power, and have no doubt but my readers will be quite as much fascinated with it as I was myself while reading the Ms. I will give you $65. for it … I should like another by the 20th of September.”
In a state of overwhelming euphoria we returned home, determined to trace the thrillers contributed by A. M. Barnard in the mid-sixties to James R. Elliott’s Flag of Our Union. At any other time but the early 1940s this would have been a comparatively simple matter; but in 1942 the exigencies of war intervened and blocked our purpose. Leona journeyed to Washington to examine The Flag of Our Union at the Library of Congress, where the best run of the periodical was deposited. The journey was fruitless. All issues of the Flag had been placed in safekeeping for the duration; their location was as well kept a secret as Louisa’s thrillers themselves.
We did find at the Boston Public Library some issues of the Flag containing the effusions of A. M. Barnard. Then, too, to our delight, checking the author’s pseudonym in the card catalogue of the New York Public Library, we pounced upon the following entry: V.V./ BY A. M. BARNARD/ COMPLETE. The story, a narrative of a vindictive and malevolent femme fatale, had been reprinted as a dime novel and bound up by the New York Public Library in a nondescript volume of “Pamphlets Various.” We immediately enlightened the Reference Division that, as the anomalous and pseudonymous offspring of Louisa May Alcott, V. V. should be removed to a more exalted location in the library’s Rare Book Division.
In addition to all this, a letter deposited in the Orchard House at Concord revealed still another market for the tireless spinner of tales. That letter, written in December 1862, had been sent to her while she was nursing in the Civil War and informed Miss Alcott that “Your tale ‘Pauline’ this morning was awarded the $100 prize for the best short tale for Mr. Leslie’s newspaper … Allow me to congratulate you on your success and to recommend you to submit whatever you may hereafter have of the same sort for Mr. Leslie’s acceptance.”
Now we had identified not only the Weekly Volcano but the Blarneystone Banner, not only the E. of Alcott’s journal but the L. The L. was Frank Leslie, newspaper magnate, lord of a journalistic empire on New York’s Publishers’ Row, whose star vehicle was Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. In the graphically illustrated folio pages of that gaudy weekly we found Jo March’s prizewinner, a two-part serial entitled “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” by “a lady of Massachusetts.” In that startling story of feminist anger, violent revenge, and the sexual power struggle, the unnamed “lady of Massachusetts” had let down her literary hair.
Leona, I felt, should announce her discovery to the scholarly world. She certainly had ample material for an article that would reveal the secret of Louisa Alcott’s pseudonym and hint at the nature of the stories for which she had used it. She agreed, and began with a reference to Jo March and the Weekly Volcano and from there moved on to Louisa Alcott and The Flag of Our Union. She gave considerable attention to the firm of Elliott, Thomes and Talbot—a colorful trio—and touched upon the type of story A. M. Barnard had written for them—“tales of violence and revenge peopled with convicts and opium addicts.” The article concluded with the printing of the five explosive letters.
Leona’s study, “Some Anonymous and Pseudonymous Thrillers of Louisa M. Alcott,” appeared in the summer 1943 issue of Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. Not long after, it was reviewed in the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, where the eminent bookman Lawrence C. Wroth conducted a column, “Notes for Bibliophiles.” In it he wrote:
Miss Leona Rostenberg gives most of us something of a shock by her revelation of a well concealed literary activity … From Miss Rostenberg’s discoveries we learn that the author of “Little Women” wielded a purple-tipped pen when, hiding behind the name “A. M. Barnard,” she released her inhibitions and in the 1860’s wrote various tales for “Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper” and for the Boston penny dreadful “The Flag of Our Union.”
Along with Lawrence Wroth, Carroll Wilson sensed the important implications of the discovery. But, perhaps because of the restrictions imposed by the war, perhaps because of the limited circulation of the Bibliographical Society Papers, those implications were not picked up by any scholar-detective. At the time, no one made the attempt to unearth further stories scribbled by a masked author with a “purple-tipped pen.” The magnifying glass would not be applied to the corpus of Louisa Alcott’s sensational narratives until three decades had passed.
Meanwhile, I had not forgotten Carroll Wilson’s suggestion, recommending that I apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship, and I acted on his advice, in the wake of our discovery, preparing a seven-page single-spaced prospectus elaborating my “Plans for Work”:
My purpose is not only to integrate the life of Louisa May Alcott with her times but to trace her literary development from the witch’s cauldron to the family hearth … I am convinced that such a biography … will be a contribution to knowledge, first because there exists a bulk of heretofore unused material; secondly because none of the existent biographies of Louisa Alcott has attempted the integration of background with character that I hope to accomplish; and finally because no critical study of Louisa Alcott’s work has ever been made.
Along with my bulky proposal, I su
bmitted letters from my sponsors.
On Sunday, March 14, Henry Allen Moe, secretary-general of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, telephoned, asking me to visit his office the next day at 4:30. Much excitement, discussion, and wonderment followed, and directly after school on Monday I bused to 551 Fifth Avenue. My diary records the ordeal of interrogation:
I sat at a long table & was pelted with questions from the two elders [Dr. Adlon and Mr. Moe]: “What did Margaret Fuller write about ‘The Raven’?” Couldn’t answer well. “What about your method of note-taking?” Long, heavy pauses. I know I left them with a poor impression. Came home exhausted & my darling Leona popped in to surprise me & hear my tale.
My diary also records the sequel to that interview. On March 24, 1943, I wrote:
Day of Days. I heard this morning that I have been awarded a Fellowship by the JSGuggenheim Foundation. 12 months. $2000. Hurray!!!!!!!! … Leona called for me at school … Lil shook all over from excitement—a real palsy de delirium exquise … Wrote to thank all my “sponsors.”
Half a century ago, the Guggenheim was sufficiently distinguished to merit a listing of Fellows in the newspaper. I would be in very good company. My corecipients included not only those who would become illustrious in my own field—Randall Stewart, biographer of Hawthorne; William Charvat, student of professional authorship—but Martha Graham and Vladimir Nabokov. I arranged for my fellowship to begin in September, and on August 31 I wrote in my diary: “Tomorrow I start my Guggenheim-ship. May this be a fruitful year.” By September 9 I was even more exuberant: “The night before school—therefore a night to celebrate my release …
I hope I shall make some interesting discoveries & do a good job.” By the following month I would write: “My life is pleasant—almost, I fear to say—charmed. I spend most of my days digging at the library with the ultimate aim of revivifying the past.”
Old Books, Rare Friends Page 13
