In later years, Louisa always claimed that a more astute publisher could have made more money with Hospital Sketches. She was probably correct. Nevertheless, she acknowledged, writing the book “showed me my style, & taking the hint I went where glory waited me.”34 Moreover, it was thrilling for her to go around Concord toward the end of summer and see her neighbors laughing and crying over the book. She could not quite contain her mirth upon learning that one rash youth had bought eight copies at once. From Venice the American consul—the future literary lion William Dean Howells—sent his compliments to Nurse Periwinkle.
Perhaps the crowning tribute to Hospital Sketches came that September. A company of Concord soldiers, recently under fire at Gettysburg, came home to a town bedecked with flags and patriotic wreathes. Louisa wrote of seeing Welcome Home banners stuck “in every stickable place.”35 The town drum corps, consisting of eight little boys trying to cope with eight large drums, strove doggedly to stay in rhythm. Julian Hawthorne, recently accepted to Harvard College, helped to produce enough lemonade “to flavor Walden Pond.” A score of Concord’s fairest young ladies, May Alcott among them, donned white frocks to serve the refreshments. Louisa brought out her nurse’s uniform for the occasion and supervised preparations, unaware that a small ceremony was being planned for her as well. The company of sixty young veterans marched up to Orchard House. There, the captain called the column to a halt, the company wheeled to face the home, and the men raised their caps in salute to Louisa. After briefly mingling with the crowd that had come to watch the parade, the men fell back into ranks, gave a hearty cheer for the proud ex-nurse, and marched on.36
Louisa could claim another noteworthy product of her weeks at Union Hotel Hospital: her poem “Thoreau’s Flute,” which Sophia Hawthorne admired enough to send to James T. Fields at The Atlantic. Louisa was highly gratified to have the poem appear there, but her response was tinged with a worldly consciousness that was now sadly characteristic. She wrote, “being a mercenary creature I liked the $10 [received for the poem] nearly as well as the honor of being…‘a literary celebrity.’”37
In January, Louisa had been near death. Only seven months later, she was one of the most celebrated women in Massachusetts. In his journal, Bronson noted the favorable reviews of her book and expressed his own judgment that it was “handsomely printed, and likely to be popular,” especially among army personnel. He wrote, “I see nothing in the way of a good appreciation of Louisa’s merits as a woman and a writer. Nothing could be more surprising to her or agreeable to us.”38
Bronson was continuing to garner praise for his supervision of the schools, even if Concord’s real political power resided in more conservative hands than he would have liked. Like many grandparents, he was evidently more at ease with his grandchild than he had been with his own offspring. When, in his journal, he noted Freddy’s infantile accomplishments, it was no longer with the clinical eye of an eager pseudoscientist but with the simple pleasure of a proud patriarch. In October, Bronson looked forward to the day, not far off, when little Freddy would be able to take solid food. He promised Anna that when the baby was ready for fruit, he would have all he wanted from Grandpa’s garden.
It seems that Anna’s success as a new mother, as well as Louisa’s emerging stature as an author, was inspiring Bronson to imagine what he himself might now achieve. He sent a copy of “The Rhapsodist,” his essay on Emerson, to James Fields, who commented on it favorably. Bronson was working on an idea for a book of characters, in which he would sketch the personalities and ideas of the many luminaries he had known, including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Carlyle, the elder Henry James, and Margaret Fuller. His sketch of Thoreau, called “The Forester,” had already been published in The Atlantic Monthly in April 1862. If he had failed to keep pace with the great minds around him, there still might be a place for him as their biographer.
In the autumn of 1863, as Bronson worked on his sketches of famous friends, Louisa was writing at high speed, trying to keep up with the suddenly enthusiastic demand for her work. Redpath wanted another book. James T. Fields, the same editor who had once told Louisa to stick to teaching, also inquired about a book. For the time being, Louisa satisfied him with a story for The Atlantic—a tale of race and revenge that she titled “My Contraband.” Narrated by Miss Dane, a Civil War nurse, the story tells of Robert, a freed slave who works as an orderly in Dane’s hospital. Among the critically wounded patients, Robert discovers a Confederate captain, Ned Fairfax, the son of Robert’s deceased former master, who, by way of an illicit union with a slave woman, was also Robert’s father. Robert prepares to murder the captain, for, as he further reveals to Miss Dane, the younger Fairfax had once sold Robert to another plantation so that he might force himself on Robert’s young wife, Lucy. Nurse Dane talks Robert out of killing the captain, persuading him to go to Massachusetts and start life as a free man while Dane searches for Lucy. In gratitude, Robert takes the nurse’s last name as his own. On learning that Lucy committed suicide after being disgraced by the captain, Robert joins the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, the famous African-American regiment led in real life by Robert Gould Shaw. Coincidence again intervenes. Robert and Captain Fairfax, fully recovered, meet in battle. After mortally wounding Robert, Fairfax is killed. Before he dies, Robert finds himself under the care of Nurse Dane, who looks on as he leaves “the shadow of the life that was [for] the sunshine of the life to be.”39
“My Contraband” treats its title character with measured respect, and the story overtly challenges the image of the passive, long-suffering slave on which Harriet Beecher Stowe had relied in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Nurse Dane insists on calling her orderly “Robert” instead of the more condescending “Bob,” and Alcott emphasizes that her hero is “no saintly ‘Uncle Tom.’”40 Unfortunately, Alcott’s resistance to this stereotype is somewhat blunted by the fact that Robert is of mixed race. Whereas Stowe had argued that people of pure-blooded African descent were naturally disposed toward saintly Christianity, she had also suggested that slaves with some Caucasian blood were innately rebellious and resentful of servitude. If Alcott intentionally distinguished Robert from Uncle Tom, she also made him predictably similar to Stowe’s mixed-blood rebel George Harris. She substituted one racial commonplace for another.
“My Contraband” is more successful in its examination of the ties that unite human beings and in illustrating that love, not money, creates the more durable claims. Although the story concerns slavery, the possessive pronoun in its title refers to the bond of affection between Nurse Dane and Robert, not to a condition of ownership. Elsewhere in the story, Alcott reiterates the idea that possessive pronouns should only connect human beings if love exists between them; Robert pointedly declines to use the word “our” when referring to his and Fairfax’s father because he is ashamed to use language that would link the three of them together. Lucy’s suicide also shows the limits of ownership, serving notice that Fairfax can never possess her. “My Contraband” suggests that we can call our own only those whom we hold in our hearts.
Success was all very astonishing to Louisa. So many of her dreams were now being fulfilled that she felt as if the world were coming to an end. On being offered another teaching job, she took ever so slightly smug pleasure in replying, “[M]y time is fully occupied with my pen & I find story writing not only pleasanter than teaching but far more profitable.”41 Louisa viewed the change in her fortunes as a Cinderella story, except that she refused to acknowledge any fairy godmother. She wrote that she had experienced “a sudden hoist for a meek and lowly scribbler who…never had a literary friend to lend her a helping hand!”42
Coming from a young woman who lived next door to Hawthorne, who had rowed across Walden Pond with Thoreau, who had been granted free access to Emerson’s library, and whose father’s home had welcomed countless other literati, this claim of literary isolation comes as a surprise. To be sure, Louisa had lacked financial comfort, but in terms of the variety and
depth of her literary acquaintances, was there a young woman in America who could claim to be her superior? Whatever the merits of Louisa’s characterization, what may matter most is her motivation for stating it. She remained slow to accept or acknowledge help from others. She had absorbed both the radically communitarian ethic that had underlain Fruitlands and the spirit of Yankee independence expressed in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” From these contradictory influences, she had taken equally contradictory lessons. It was heavenly for Louisa to be able to give; it was awkward at best for her to admit to receiving. The monetary debts that her family had accrued, she was in haste to repay. The invisible, non-dischargeable debts of influence and encouragement that she owed to Emerson, Thoreau, and indeed her own father, she found strangely hard to confess. At the same time that she wrote her stories, Louisa was constructing a personal narrative in which she needed to be either the lonely victim or the unaided hero.
If anything, Louisa may have had too many literary advisors when, in October, she finished another draft of Moods, at the request of James Redpath. Alcott later described the process of revising Moods, in somewhat fictionalized form, in the “Literary Lessons” chapter of Little Women. Every member of the March family has a clear idea of how to turn Jo’s novel into a masterpiece, but each suggestion leads her further from her original conception. Perplexed by their earnest but skewed advice, Jo revises her novel into a hodgepodge that, in its attempts to please all, pleases no one. It seems that the Alcott family’s reactions to the Moods manuscript were less critical. In a letter to Redpath, Louisa claimed that her parents and sisters considered the story “fine.” Moreover, although Louisa noted with pleasure that her manuscript made her family laugh and cry, she also wrote, “they are no judges,” suggesting that she was not likely to be easily swayed by their suggestions.43 However, potent pressure to revise came from prospective publishers, whose specifications forced Louisa to reshape her story in ways she instinctively disapproved and soon came to heartily regret.
The chief problem with the manuscript was its length. By Louisa’s own admission, it was so vast as to be appalling. Still, she hoped that only “one or two things” would need to be omitted. She was not prepared for the shock she received when Redpath summoned her to the printing house and explained that, to make the book salable, she would have to cut it down by half. Louisa refused outright; she felt she had already edited the book almost as much as either she or it could bear. She withdrew the manuscript from Redpath’s consideration and never dealt with him professionally again. Bronson suggested that she send the book to Hawthorne’s publisher, Howard Ticknor, but he responded with a polite refusal. The manuscript went back on a shelf, its future uncertain.
Next door to the Alcotts, another story was drawing to a close. Bronson spent the last Sunday evening of February 1864 with Hawthorne. After more than twenty years of acquaintance, the novelist remained distant and aloof, much to Bronson’s regret. Still willing to overlook the novelist’s eccentricities, Alcott continued to desire a closer relationship and wrote, “[I] see him seldomer than I would were he more disposed to seek his neighbors.”44 Alcott also noted that Hawthorne had stopped writing but seemed not to have guessed the cause: Hawthorne was gravely ill. By the beginning of May, he was no longer concealing his frailty. He planned a trip to New Hampshire with his old friend former president Pierce in hopes of recovering his strength. Shortly before Hawthorne’s departure, Alcott was with his grandson when he caught sight of Hawthorne at the gate of Wayside. They spoke briefly, with Hawthorne only asking Alcott if he was well. Exchanging a few pleasantries seemed to be all that Hawthorne could manage, and Alcott wondered how a man in such poor condition could withstand a journey. A few days later, news arrived from Plymouth that Hawthorne had died. The next day, Louisa sent Sophia a bouquet of violets, picked on the hill where Hawthorne had been fond of walking. Although Sophia sent Louisa a note of thanks, Louisa felt a discomfort that kind words and a handful of violets could do little to dispel. She wrote, “We did all we could to heal the breach between the families but they held off, so we let things rest.”45 On the twenty-third, a day “serene and suitable for a poet’s sleep,” Louisa helped arrange the flowers for Hawthorne’s funeral.46 Although Bronson listed many of the famous attendees in his journal, including Pierce, Emerson, and Longfellow, he did not mention whether Abba and May were there. Sophia Hawthorne described her husband’s funeral as a festival of life. The occasion moved Bronson to reflect not so much on the deceased in particular but more generally as to the passage of time. “Fair figures one by one are fading from sight,” he wrote.47
Louisa still vacillated over what to do with Moods. While financial interest argued for a speedy publication, Louisa’s artistic sense told her not to compromise on the book’s contents. The dilemma might have lasted longer had it not been for the intervention of Caroline Dall. A long-time acquaintance of the Alcotts, Dall had gotten to know Louisa’s mother well through their shared interest in charitable causes.48 While visiting the Alcotts in September, Dall read over some of Louisa’s stories. Favorably impressed, she asked whether she might take the manuscript of Moods home with her. Dall adored Moods. She declared that no other American author possessed Louisa’s promise and that, despite some unevenness in execution, the book was “often magnifecent [sic].”49 She forwarded it to her friend the publisher A. K. Loring. Loring also took an extreme liking to the story, but his view echoed Redpath’s: the book must be cut down. His other advice was both commercially sensible and staunchly middlebrow. He liked “a story that touches and moves me…a story of constant action, bustle and motion.”50 His instincts told him that readers were likely to skip conversations and descriptive scenes in their haste to find out what the characters were going to do. For Loring, activity should culminate in a forcibly told lesson in life, leaving the reader not only enchanted but morally improved. In short, Loring wanted a best-seller, not a thoughtful disquisition on the human heart and mind.
Disappointed, Louisa was at first unable to accept Loring’s commentary. She flung her manuscript into a spidery cupboard and vowed never to touch it again. Of course, it would have been easier for her to give up breathing than to honor this pledge. The next month, a vortex came upon her and she fell to work again on Moods, “as if mind and body had nothing to do with one another.” For two weeks, like “a thinking machine in full operation,” Louisa barely ate or slept.51 Then the fit subsided, leaving her dismal, tired, and complaining of blue devils. Moods, however, had been transformed. Ten chapters had been excised, and the work was now, in Louisa’s judgment, simple, strong, and short. She fired off the rewritten text to Loring, who praised it lavishly. He proposed to publish it without delay.
Louisa’s excitement in learning that her novel was to be published dissipated abruptly when Loring began to send her proofs of the chapters. In print, the chapters seemed small and stupid and no longer her own. It occurred to her that the entire project might be a mistake, but there was no turning back. She corrected the proofs, sent them back, and hoped for the best. Moods was published on December 25, and Louisa received her personal copies in time to give one of them to her mother for Christmas. In the note she penned to go along with the gift, Louisa thanked her mother for the sympathy, help, and love that had meant so much to her during many hard years. Louisa then added, “I hope Success will sweeten me and make me what I long to become more than a great writer—a good daughter.”52
But even as she expressed pride in her accomplishment, Louisa knew that Moods was not all she had hoped it would be. It had been too aggressively poked, prodded, redacted, and rewritten to retain the freshness of its original conception. A subplot was cut back so severely that a once-central character now appeared only in the first chapter, and the relation between her story and the remainder of the novel was rendered vexingly unclear. Louisa had begun the novel as a psychological study of her heroine. By the time the editing was finished, the story no longer read like a nuanced medi
tation on an unbalanced mind, but like a tangled romance. A work of high ambition and extreme candor, Moods fell victim to the inexperience of its author and to the overly commercial sensibilities of its editor.
The Alcott family with Orchard House in the background, around 1865. Louisa is seated on ground at left. Abba is next. Anna Alcott Pratt stands by her son Frederick Alcott Pratt, seated in the baby carriage. Bronson Alcott is at the far right. This is the only known photograph in which Bronson and Louisa appear together.
(Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)
It is a pity that Moods ended up as such a compromise, for no book Louisa wrote ever mattered to her more intensely than this one. Louisa had worked on Moods off and on for more than four years. Even after the book was published, Louisa could not bring herself to leave it alone; she republished the book, heavily revised, in 1882. Even then, it did not satisfy her. Rereading her journals a few years before her death, Louisa wrote commentaries to herself in the margins. All the marginalia dealing with Moods express regret and disappointment, mingled with a certain sad affection for the book she wanted to make great but, after more than twenty years and countless rewrites, was able only to make good.53
Eden's Outcasts Page 37
