Louisa May Alcott

by Susan Cheever

  Alcott would be sick for the rest of her life and very sick for the next decade, suffering debilitating headaches, dizziness, and strange pains in her legs as well as overwhelming exhaustion. She had left for the war a vigorous and energetic woman; she returned a true casualty. Yet the war also changed her writing style forever. The literary recognition that had eluded her, in spite of a killing amount of hard work, almost immediately began to come her way.

  During the homesick watches of the night at the Union Hospital, Alcott had written a poem in memory of her friend Thoreau, who had died in 1862. Titled “Thoreau’s Flute,” it already incorporates a leaner, more visual style in spite of being a flowery memorial poem:

  His pipe hangs mute beside the river

  Around it wistful sunbeams quiver,

  But music’s airy voice is fled.

  The poem, which Alcott promptly forgot, was discovered by her father in her luggage during her illness and passed on to the Hawthornes, who in turn passed it to Louisa’s old friend and nemesis James T. Fields. In May he published it in the Atlantic.

  Louisa had written detailed, vivid weekly letters home during her time in the hospital, and these letters were then published in the antislavery newspaper the Commonwealth and reprinted everywhere. In a world of slow, erratic communications, Alcott’s sympathetic and heartbreaking descriptions of the cost of war were avidly read by the families of soldiers. By June, as Louisa began to be able to move around and think of writing again, both Roberts Brothers and James Redpath bid to make her letters into a book. She chose the publisher James Redpath, who paid her the amazing sum of $200 for the book, which was titled Hospital Sketches and printed in an edition of 1,000. Alcott received 5 cents a copy and a percentage of the profits were donated by Redpath to the children of Civil War casualties. The book sold well and earned her a great deal of praise and a nice letter from her friend Henry James. “I find I’ve done a good thing without knowing it,” she mused after the publication of letters she had written to her family in the heat of the moment, letters she had not been composing as she would compose a book.

  Whitman and Alcott hadn’t met in Washington, but their literary careers began to overlap when they got home. The success of Hospital Sketches got Whitman’s attention because he too wanted Redpath to publish his account of helping in the Union hospitals, to be titled Memoranda of a Year. By August of 1863, he was writing to Redpath that his book would be something “considerably beyond mere Hospital Sketches.”46 Redpath declined. For the first time in her life, Louisa May Alcott was being asked for writing, more and more writing. Frank Leslie wanted more of her A. M. Barnard stories. James Redpath wanted another book, and Roberts Brothers also wanted a book from her. Even James T. Fields clamored for more stories for his magazine and for another book from Louisa May Alcott, formerly the teacher who couldn’t write. The literary gods are fickle. Once they had belittled her; now they were fighting over her! “There is a sudden hoist for a meek & lowly scribbler who was told to ‘stick to her teaching,’” Alcott exulted in October of 1863. She knew just which book would be the next, and by January she had gone back to work on Moods.

  7

  The Writer.

  1861–1867

  Moods was Louisa May Alcott’s first serious novel, although she had been writing seriously for more than ten years. Finished for the first time in 1861, and read in the evenings in the parlor aloud to her delighted and enthusiastic family, Moods has not survived as a popular favorite. Women who loved Little Women have often never even heard about Moods. With the exception of scholars who are interested in both Louisa May Alcott and feminist studies, little has been written about it.

  Yet Moods was clearly of great importance to the author herself. Of all the books she wrote and published, Moods was the one she cared about the most. It delighted her in the writing, sending her into a vortex of creativity so intense she did not eat or sleep for days at a time. Its edited, shorter form came to her in a dream. With its twin topics of the connection between love and marriage and the destructive nature of impulse, it embodied her own preoccupations. It obsessed her long after it was done.

  While she was originally working on it in 1861, her writing was interrupted first by the visit of John Brown’s family to Concord, and then much more seriously by her own Civil War service and almost fatal illness. When she was finally able to work again after coming home from the Union Hospital, she turned to Hospital Sketches. The success of that book raised her hopes, and she returned to the manuscript of Moods. Yet getting the novel published turned out to be a lengthy and painful process—a process in which Louisa May Alcott’s patience, tolerance, ability to accept criticism, and writing talent were all taxed to the limit.

  Her first submission was to James Redpath. Although Alcott had some questions about the way Redpath had published Hospital Sketches, she yielded to the pressure of his desire to see her next book. She was thrilled at the passion this publisher showed for her work, a passion so unlike the reluctance or neutrality of previous publishers, including that of James T. Fields. At the beginning of February 1864, an excited Redpath himself appeared in person at Orchard House in Concord to collect the manuscript, promising to have it out in book form by May. The next day, he telegrammed Louisa, asking her to come down to Boston to see the printers about the book. When she got to Redpath’s office, however, his news was quite different than what she expected. The book was too long to publish in one volume, he told her. Two-volume novels were almost impossible to sell. He liked the book, but would it be possible for her to cut it in half?

  Alcott responded with the restrained fury of a writer who has been asked to eviscerate a book that has come to be like a child to her. No, she said. She took her manuscript and left for the train back to Concord. “I had rather have Fields or some other publisher get it out,” she wrote in her journal. “Redpath does not suit me though he does his best I believe.”1

  But Fields and Niles and all the other publishers were suddenly scarce. Alcott had become quite famous at this point in her life. She was regularly feted, and fans had started coming to Concord to try to catch a glimpse of her. Yet this didn’t help when it came to the publishing of the book that was her heart’s desire. In April, Alcott sent her manuscript to Howard Ticknor, who had joined with the famous James T. Fields to create the already well-respected publishing house of Ticknor & Fields. Ticknor had a different but equally daunting reaction to the manuscript of Moods. He wrote Alcott a letter familiar to all writers who have received many rejections. He said that he found the book interesting but that the publishing house had so many books on hand that they could not publish her novel at the time.

  By now Alcott’s attitude toward publishers had taken a turn from the confidence and enthusiasm of a year before. She felt quite sure, she wrote, “if they wouldn’t have it there must be something good about it. Don’t despair Moods,” she wrote addressing the book directly, “we’ll try again by & by.” In a later annotation of her journals, Alcott scrawled next to this entry, “Alas, we did try again!”2

  Then in September a friend of Bronson Alcott’s named Caroline Dall, a writer and lecturer who also counted herself as a Transcendentalist—she had hosted one of Bronson’s Conversations in her Boston home—came with her teenage daughter to spend the night in Concord at the Alcotts’. Always a woman of action, Dall had come on a series of missions to the Alcotts, a family once again famously on the brink of financial disaster. She was to try and get a job for Bronson, she would help May sell her artworks in Boston, and she would read the manuscript of Louisa May Alcott’s Moods, critique it, and try to find a publisher. Dall loved the book. She became an ardent fan, writing Alcott of Moods that “no American author had showed so much promise, that the plan was admirable, the execution unequal but often magnificent,” Louisa wrote in her journals.3 Thus began a relationship that was to yield as much pain as pleasure.

  Two letters discovered by scholar Helen Deese in the Caroline Dall papers at
the Massachusetts Historical Society in the 1990s show that Alcott’s connection with Dall was prickly almost from the start. In spite of Dall’s approval, an approval great enough for her to have forwarded the manuscript with her recommendation to another publisher, A. K. Loring, she couldn’t resist writing a long letter of criticisms and suggestions to which Alcott responded again as if protecting a vulnerable child. “You call Sylvia deceitful, . . .” Alcott wrote, “but how many girls of 18 would have done any better. . . . Women instinctively hide much of themselves, & are called brazen huzzies if they don’t. Very few are clear in their minds, steady in their feelings, or wise in their judgments, & when in love, good heavens! What blind bats both men & women are.”4

  The manuscript went off to A. K. Loring, who liked it very much, he said, but he thought it was way too long for publication. Loring urged Louisa May Alcott to cut; again she refused. “Was much disappointed, said I’d never touch it again & tossed it into the spidery little cupboard where it had so often returned after fruitless trips,” she wrote.5 In the meantime, Alcott embarked on another one of her romances to be published under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard. Money was tight and she also worked on a volume of stories for children and on what she hoped would be a second serious novel, titled Work.

  Then one night in October when the air was crisp with the coming of winter, Louisa suddenly saw a way to cut her beloved novel down in length without ruining it. She had gone to bed as usual in her little corner room. Startled wide awake in the middle of the night by her vision, she got up and started to write. By morning she had slipped back into what she called the vortex, in which she “wrote like a thinking machine in full operation.”

  It took a week of writing day and night to remove ten of the book’s thirty chapters. At the end of that time, Alcott felt that she had improved the book that she had earlier thought could not be cut. Later, she came back to her original opinion.

  Much of the drama surrounding the writing and publishing of Moods reappears a few years later as Chapter 27 of Alcott’s masterpiece Little Women, a book she did not want to write as much as she wanted to write Moods. “Having copied her novel for the fourth time, read it to all her confidential friends, and submitted it with fear and trembling to three publishers, she at last disposed of it on condition that she would cut it down one-third, and omit the parts which she particularly admired,” cracks Jo March as she submits her novel. Even then in fiction as in life, her editors were not satisfied. In another edit, Alcott writes, Jo March “laid her firstborn on her table, and chopped it up as ruthlessly as any ogre.”6 In Little Women, the novel is published to both praise and blame. Jo March is surprised to find that the parts she took from real life are reviewed as “impossible and absurd” while the parts she drew from her imagination are pronounced “tender and true.”

  Loring loved the cuts that Alcott sent him and proposed to publish the book immediately, which he did. At last! By Christmas of 1864, Alcott received ten copies of her novel, signed with her real name. Yet the novel’s actual publication was close to traumatic. Having cut and recut it until she thought her ideas themselves had been made incomprehensible, she was amazed and abashed at the attention the book received. Many wrote to say how much they had liked it, including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emerson, and Franklin Sanborn.

  The book got a good review in Harper’s Weekly but was damned in the North American Review by a man Louisa thought of as a friend—Henry James. James, in his early twenties and making his literary mark, had good and bad things to say about the book, but the bad things he had to say were awful. After scolding Alcott for trying something that had already been done much better by Europeans, and saying that her professed subject, a doctrine of affinities, made no sense, he wrote, “We are utterly weary of stories about precocious little girls.” The two most striking facts with regard to Moods, he concluded, “are the author’s ignorance of human nature, and her self-confidence in spite of that ignorance.”7

  Nevertheless, Alcott and James remained friends, and his close reading of Moods was the beginning of the deep influence her writing had on his writing. Of course, the very precocious little girls of whom James claimed to be weary are the heroines of many of his own novels: Daisy Miller in Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady, and Verena Tarrant in The Bostonians. Writing in the Massachusetts Review, Alfred Habegger points out that the heroine of James’s first novel, Watch and Ward, is referred to twice as “precocious.” It’s easy to see Alcott’s influence as it flowed from Little Women, with its feisty, outspoken American heroine Jo March, to James’s Portrait of a Lady, with its feisty, outspoken American heroine Isabel Archer. The powerful influence of Alcott on her young friend began earlier with Moods.8

  What was it about this novel that Louisa May Alcott couldn’t let go? Why did this book, of all her work, obsess her long after it was first published? In the first version, a simple story of a young girl who fails to obey the dictates of her heart—the man who made her feel like summer disappears and she’s unable to wait for him—Alcott seemed to be writing about the differences between love and marriage.

  Alcott often noted that marriage didn’t seem to make people happy. She saw nineteenth-century marriage as a kind of domestic slavery for women, who were yoked by law to the financial and emotional whims of their husbands. “Moods is about the other civil war, in which the conflicts were the inner struggle for modern individuality and the simultaneous battle to win for women the rights of man,” writes Professor Sarah Elbert in her introduction to a recent edition of Moods.9

  The sense of liberation that swept the country in the 1840s and ’50s had given rise to a new idea of marriage. The practical, colonial idea of marriage—a nonromantic agreement between two people whose obligations were to have children, keep house, and perhaps clear the land—had more or less been cast aside. In the rush of enthusiasm for emotional truth and freedom, some people began to believe that marriage was a pairing of soul mates, a coming together of two sympathetic beings joined by true love. Once women married, however, they were still expected to follow their husbands both physically and emotionally. It was this clash between the head and the heart that at first seemed to be the subject of Moods.

  Whether the subject of Moods was the constriction of modern marriage or the destruction caused by moody impulsiveness, as Alcott later said, the writing of it brought intoxicating relief, a refuge in Louisa May Alcott’s imagination where she could escape the desperate realities of the family’s diminished life and the tremendous costs of war.

  Although he expressed interest in the novel, Alcott was afraid to show it to Emerson before it was officially published. Geoffrey Moor with his library and his intellect might have been a little too recognizable to Emerson.

  For Alcott, moods were an important topic. She was a creature of violent, often uncontrollable emotional ups and downs. By the time she wrote the book, she had clearly experienced, according to her own journals, many extreme states of mind. She had those few moments of absolute transcendence in the natural world, times that caused her to affirm the existence of God. She had also been seized by vortices of manic writing energy. At times, sometimes because of illness, she had been unable to leave her bed. At one point, she had become so despairing that she thought of suicide. Yet at other times, her rugged, durable cheeriness was the mainstay of her family.

  In his biography of Louisa and her father, Eden’s Outcasts, John Matteson suggests that Louisa May Alcott may have been bipolar or suffered from what we diagnose today as a mood disorder. “The question demands to be posed: if Louisa May Alcott were alive today, might she herself have been diagnosed with some form of manic-depressive illness?” he writes.10

  Matteson marshals a lot of evidence for his diagnosis. Bipolar disorder, formerly known as manic-depression, is hereditary and the Alcotts were famously erratic. Louisa’s Uncle Junius ultimately killed himself in 1852. He cites the brilliant Kay Redfield Jamison, who wrote, “Many lines of evidenc
e indicate a strong relation between mood disorders and creative achievement.” Then he quotes Jamison in an e-mail to him as writing, with an ambiguity of syntax worthy of Bronson Alcott, that his evidence “does not irrefutably show, but is consistent with, the strong likelihood that Louisa May Alcott suffered from a form of manic-depressive illness.” When Matteson telephoned the late Alcott biographer Madeleine Stern, however, she disagreed with him, contending that there was not enough evidence to diagnose Alcott.

  Whatever Louisa May Alcott’s mental and physical illnesses may have been, this controversy points out the problems with what has become a subsidiary Alcott industry—twenty-first-century diagnoses of her nineteenth-century illnesses. Was she bipolar? Was her chronic illness after her Civil War experience all from the mercury poisons in her system that were periodically reawakened, as Martha Saxton has written? Or did her continuing symptoms, as Madeleine Stern has suggested in her biography of Alcott, stem from meningitis contracted on her dreadful trip home from Washington to Concord with her father in January of 1864?

  In 2007, Dr. Norbert Hirschhorn and Ian Greaves from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health published a long, detailed paper that is a history of Louisa May Alcott’s illnesses beginning with the pneumonia and then the typhoid and mercury poisoning contracted in Washington, D.C. Hirschhorn and Greaves conclude from contemporary descriptions that Louisa May Alcott’s death at the age of fifty-five was from a cerebral brain hemorrhage suffered after years of ailments, headaches, generalized aches, and severe stomach and throat pain that caused her to write that she was a “prisoner to pain.” The mercury that poisoned her in 1863, they point out, would have cleared her system within a year—although mercury can do permanent damage. Even though she took morphine and many other drugs to kill the pain, she was not addicted to painkillers.