Louisa May Alcott

by Susan Cheever

  Fort Sumter was under the command of Major Robert Anderson, a career soldier from Kentucky who had owned slaves but had joined the Union at the start of the war. Opposite him manning the batteries onshore was General P. T. Beauregard, a man who had been one of Anderson’s students when they were both back in a classroom at the United States Military Academy at West Point. At first the standoff was a series of strategy exercises right out of the West Point classrooms. Anderson snuck his troops into Fort Sumter under cover of night. Beauregard, as he had been taught, had thrown up a blockade at the entrance to Charleston Harbor. By April, Anderson’s company was being starved out, and on April 12 the standoff broke. Beauregard’s army shelled the Fort until Anderson and his men surrendered fourteen hours later. No one was killed. Perhaps this made it all seem even more unreal. In May, Louisa May Alcott took a sail out into the forts in Boston Harbor. “Felt very martial and Joan-of-Arcy, as I stood on the walls with the flag flying over me and cannon all about.”25

  The summer seemed to pass in a lazy haze. Louisa and her father were both concerned because their friend Thoreau had gone to Minnesota in the spring for his health. He was having trouble breathing. His health was not getting better. In July, Bronson sprained his ankle. This was an excuse for him to spend weeks at home reading, while Louisa visited her married sister Anna in her “sweet little nest” and worked on Moods. In Concord the roses bloomed, Thoreau got worse, and Bronson Alcott read and wrote in his journals.

  Near the equally sleepy little town of Centreville, Virginia, about twenty miles southwest of Washington, D.C., where President Abraham Lincoln was now in the White House, the Confederate Army had camped at Manassas, Virginia, under the Confederate hero of Fort Sumter, P. T. Beauregard. The Union Army camped to the east and planned an attack to drive the southern armies away from Washington. This attack, many hoped, would be sufficiently decisive to win the war or at least to make it clear that the rebels could not win the war.

  Because the attack was planned for a summer Sunday in July—July 21—and because Washington, D.C., was a place where news traveled fast, and because there wasn’t much to do on that particular day, many people had packed picnic lunches and ridden on horseback or in carriages down to Centreville to spread out on the gentle slopes above Bull Run and have a firsthand look at the pageantry of war. How thrilling to see our boys drive those Confederate soldiers back where they came from! There were ladies in bright-colored summer crinolines and senators and congressmen in shirt sleeves and newspaper reporters. Settling down in full holiday mode, they watched puffs of gun smoke from beyond the hills and approvingly observed Union soldiers march this way and that on the Warrenton Turnpike below them.

  Until that beautiful summer Sunday, war had sometimes been a spectator sport as well as a way of settling arguments. No one realized that this war would be the first modern war, the first war that was less like a duel between gentlemen and more like a vast natural disaster. Union General Irvin McDowell dithered while reinforcements arrived for Beauregard. The back-and-forth of the battle on July 21 was a series of strategic moves in which both generals made many mistakes, but the Union general made more.

  What were the senators and ladies doing there picnicking on a battlefield? “They were there . . . because it never occurred to the authorities to keep them from coming,” wrote Bruce Cat-ton in The Coming Fury. “They were there, in short, because America did not yet know what it was all about; and because they were there they contributed mightily to the fact that an overstrained army driven from the field in defeat dissolved into a wild and disorderly rout which no man could stop.”26

  When the Union Army retreat began, the Sunday picnickers realized that something was amiss. They started to stampede for the bridge over Bull Run. They created a level of hysteria and traffic that finished off the Union strategy and which also, as if it had been calculated to do so, spread word of the terrible defeat faster than the uninvented telephone. Screaming women, terrified of rebel soldiers, shrieked and horses plunged into the water as the retreating army ploughed into the tourists who had come to see them win the war. Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, all but surrendered to the Confederacy in a letter he wrote to the president. “On every brow, sits sullen, scorching, black despair.”27 For two days, the Tribune had been predicting a glorious victory at Bull Run. Now, Greeley wrote, “we have fought and been beaten.”

  In Concord the summer went on quietly, but the news from Virginia was the cloud on the horizon that would build to the perfect storm. The Concord River would wind down through the pastures to meet the Assabet; the cows would come home at nightfall; the finches would sing and the ponds would shimmer; there would be strawberry parties and games of Nine Men’s Morris—but even Concord would never be the same. Within three years, Thoreau and Hawthorne would both be dead, one of lung disease, the other of stomach cancer probably exacerbated by the terrible disagreements brought to the community by the war. Families would be decimated. Louisa would be gravely ill, and her life would never go back to what seemed in retrospect to be the carefree days of her youth.

  6

  Fredericksburg.

  At the Union Hospital.

  1863–1865

  Even after the humiliating rout at Bull Run, the war seemed like a skirmish, especially to the faraway Concord Yankees, comfortable with the righteousness of their abolitionist beliefs. The army and God were on their side; with such allies, many people in New England believed that a war could not be too serious. The South was equally blind; South Carolina Senator James Chestnut facetiously promised to drink all the blood that was shed if war was declared.

  “Southern secessionists believed northerners would never mobilize to halt national division or that they would mount nothing more than brief and ineffective resistance,” writes historian Drew Gilpin Faust in This Republic of Suffering. “Neither side could have imagined the magnitude and length of the conflict that unfolded, nor the death tolls that proved its terrible cost.”1 Three million men took up arms between 1861 and 1865, Faust points out. During the American Revolution less than a hundred years earlier, the army numbered 30,000 men at most.

  Reading the history of 1860 and 1861 induces a strange kind of vertigo. It’s like watching someone head pell-mell for the edge of a cliff that they just don’t see. Even President Abraham Lincoln, elected in November of 1860, didn’t seem to understand what was happening. The future Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, visiting Washington as a civilian, was profoundly disturbed by Lincoln’s equanimity in the face of disaster. “The country is sleeping on a volcano,” he wrote in his memoirs.2

  The men of this country were not only unprepared for war, Faust writes, they were unprepared for it in a lopsided way. Many young men, ardent in what they believed was the cause of justice, went to war ready to die. Very few of them had thought about what it would feel like to kill. Dying for a great cause was the right thing to do, but they had been taught that killing was wrong.

  Although Lincoln himself may have underestimated the stubbornness and animosity of his detractors (he was elected without appearing on some Southern ballots), his election by the forces of abolition was the first in a line of political dominoes that led straight to perdition. By February eleven states named themselves the Confederacy. In April, Fort Sumter fell.

  In Concord, life went on more placidly. John Brown’s family came to stay at Orchard House, but they were treated like any welcome houseguests. Louisa was obsessed with working on her novel Moods, the story of a young girl very much like her younger self named Sylvia Yule. Throughout her writing life, Louisa had written two kinds of stories. The first, which she called her “blood and thunder” stories, were written, at least consciously, entirely for money.

  During the time she was writing Moods, for instance, being interrupted by her dozens of domestic obligations—sewing, hostessing, nursing her mother—she also found time to churn out one of the melodramas that she sent primarily to Frank Leslie’
s Illustrated Weekly under her pseudonym, A. M. Barnard. “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” is a short story about a beautiful woman who has been summarily dumped by her true love for a younger woman. She plots revenge—a revenge involving a much younger man—and the whole thing ends in a florid disaster. The two younger people fall in love and jump off a cliff.

  It’s easy to see Louisa May Alcott in both the melodramas that she was writing and in what she thought of as her more serious work. When Pauline is in love, “some mental storm, swift and sudden as a tempest of the tropics, had swept over her and left its marks behind.”3

  When Sylvia Yule is in love, which happens as she cards wool with Adam Warwick in a scene of exaggerated domestic tranquillity, “Sylvia had quite forgotten herself, when suddenly Warwick’s eyes were fixed full open upon her own . . . human eye had never shed such summer over her. Admiration was not in it, for it did not agitate; nor audacity, for it did not abash; but something that thrilled warm through blood and nerves, that filled her with a glad submission to some power, absolute yet tender, and caused her to turn . . .”4

  In “Pauline,” Alcott’s writing is less guarded, and the bones of her argument push right through the prose. Revenge is not a good idea. In both her “rubbishy” writing and her earlier serious writing, Alcott’s work is flawed by her intellectual ambitions. She lived in a house where ideas were all-important, in a community that made its living from ideas. But these ideas sabotaged her prose and her plots for a long time. No one reads novels for ideas alone. We all read for storytelling and if, when we have finished a lovely story in which the writer has taken us by the hand and gently guided us to places we have never seen before, our ideas are slightly changed then we are grateful. It was not until six years later that her storytelling skills caught up to her thinking.

  Moods was to be her first novel, the kind of book that might get her attention from the James T. Fieldses of this world; she thought it would be the kind of book that would put her in the company of the great men who had always been her inspiration. At first Moods was a novel that seemed to have a life of its own. It obsessed Alcott for months, during which she forgot to eat or sleep and stayed up all night at her small desk scratching away with a quill pen. At least she had the support of her family. “Mother wandered in and out with cordial cups of tea,” she wrote in her journals, “worried because I couldn’t eat. Father thought it fine, and brought his reddest apples and hardest cider for my Pegasus to feed on. . . . I didn’t care if the world turned to chaos if I and my inkstand only ‘lit’ in the same place.”5

  All writing is an act of obsession, but fiction writing requires a higher level of intensity. To write fiction, a writer must let the subconscious bubble up into full view and then tame and shape the images into some kind of coherent story and some kind of coherent theme. The descent into the subconscious can be terrifying and time-consuming. For a novelist, the real world falls away and the world of the novel takes on a vividness and fascination that can’t be matched by people or happenings in the pale, ordinary, slow-moving actual world. The characters of the imagination seem to have a mysterious claim on the writer’s time and attention. In this kind of trance, it is extremely hard to perform as a good wife, daughter, or mother.

  Different writers find this trancelike state in different ways. The trance in which Louisa was writing Moods was interrupted by war news, by her mother’s illness, and by the arrival of the Brown family as houseguests. Louisa’s journals during these months alternate between times when she is sunk in a creative fervor, leading the vivid parallel life of her own novel, and times when she emerges to express her desire to fight in a real war. She longs “for battle like a warhorse when he smells powder,” writes this sheltered twenty-eight-year-old.6

  When it came to writing a novel, Louisa May Alcott was much more of an expert than she was on the matter of war. She was an obsessive reader who had imbibed Dickens’s novels and memorized speeches from Pickwick Papers, a reader who so completely identified with one of Dickens’s characters that she often called herself Sairy Gamp after the tipsy, outrageous, eye-rolling Mrs. Gamp, who serves as a comic nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit. From Dickens she had learned that even unimportant people with little money could be made important in literature. From this master too she had learned the difference between sentimentality—which he used to great effect—and melodrama. She also read the novels of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding as if they were how-to manuals for a writer. Her reading of Jane Eyre, by the English Charlotte Brontë and published by Harper & Brothers in the United States in 1848, profoundly influenced her own ideas about what women should and could write. Charlotte and her sister Emily also taught Alcott a valuable lesson about the kinds of women who make arresting characters.

  Writing and reading were the two activities in which the difficult Louisa had also managed to please her father. In many ways, he was disappointed in his large-boned, temper-prone, passionate, hyperactive daughter, but when it came to books, they shared a voracious intellectual curiosity. Louisa’s reading was wide and careful. In one typical month, June of 1861, she read Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution (“his earthquake style suits me,” she wrote in her journal);7 W. S. R. Hodson’s Twelve Years of a Soldier’s Life in India, which Emerson had recommended to her; and a life of Thomas More, which he also lent; as well as three contemporary novels: Charles Auchester by Elizabeth-Sara Sheppard (“charming”), Evelina by Fanny Burney (an eighteenth-century novel that Alcott reread), and Henry Fielding’s Amelia, which she thought “coarse and queer,” remembering what someone had written of Fielding’s contemporary Richardson—that “the virtues of his heroes are the vices of decent men.”8

  Her father also approved unequivocally of her writing. There were still things about Louisa—including her dark looks and her abundant energy and her propensity to challenge almost any statement—which clearly displeased him. Nevertheless, she was the reader and the writer of the girls, and therefore often the only one who could be his companion in discovering interesting new works and in talking about things they had both read. Bronson had always wanted to be more successful as a writer than he was; Louisa shared his ambition and his passion for prose.

  When she finished her first draft of Moods, she called the family together and held them spellbound in the parlor as she read. “It was worth something to have my three dearest sit up till midnight listening with wide open eyes to Lu’s first novel,” she wrote.9 Even better, her reluctant father said two lovely things: “Emerson must see this.” And “Where did you get your metaphysics?” All the discouragement in the world from the likes of editor James T. Fields could not have made a dent in the deliciousness of being the approved center of her own family.

  In January of 1862, Louisa May Alcott took another teaching job. Unlike her father, she had never enjoyed teaching, but the success of Elizabeth Peabody’s new Boston school that was based, as Bronson Alcott’s schools had been, on the progressive principles of the Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi was so successful that an additional school for poorer children was needed. The Peabody school charged $10 a pupil, the school being offered to Louisa May Alcott as headmistress and chief teacher would charge $6 and convene in a room at the Warren Street Chapel.

  The school wasn’t making enough to provide room and board, so Alcott stayed with whoever invited her or, often, commuted home to Concord after school on the train. It was an ordeal, from the social pretensions of her erstwhile hostesses to the teaching itself, and Louisa longed for her writing. “Hate to visit people who ask me to amuse others,” she wrote in her journal, “and often longed for a crust in a garret with freedom and a pen.”

  For a while during the school year, she even stayed with James T. Fields and his wife, Annie, and their family. Fields had enrolled a nephew in the school, and he also lent Alcott $40 for books and supplies. His admonition that she should stick to her teaching because she couldn’t write must have resounded bitterly in her head as she dragged he
rself through the dreary days of teaching. This semester, although she didn’t know it, was mercifully the end of her teaching career. She would never preside over another classroom.

  After school let out, she spent the summer in Concord, writing the lurid stories that embarrassed her but thrilled Frank Leslie. At Orchard House, she slept in her low-ceilinged upstairs bedroom and tried to make herself useful domestically as well as financially. She planted a vegetable garden and did the sewing. July was spent with the Willis family in the White Mountains, taking hikes and reveling in nature. In August her story “Debby’s Debut” was published in the Atlantic Monthly, and the editors sent a check for $50. The family celebrated “Marmee’s birthday” in October, Louisa wrote, using her pet name for Abba, and Louisa visited her sister Anna and her new husband in the cottage they had rented.

  Eventually, the war came home to the Alcotts. As their neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in an article in the Atlantic, “There is no remoteness of life and thought, no hermetically sealed seclusion, except, possibly that of the grave, into which the disturbing influence of this war does not penetrate.”10 As winter came on, with its premonitions of being shut in by the icy cold and snow, Louisa made a decision that would change her life. She was sick of knitting and sewing for the Concord boys who had joined the army, and her restlessness grew painful. “Wanted something to do,” she wrote in her journal.11 She had heard that nurses were needed, and she applied to be a Civil War nurse at a hospital in Washington, D.C.