Concord as a base of operations for her writing career seemed impossible to Louisa. It was hard to work in a place where there were always financial and physical emergencies. She moved to Boston and took the bold step of renting her own apartment, a room on the top floor of 6 Hayward Place in downtown Boston, a short walk from the Merry’s Museum offices. With delight she christened her room Gamp’s Garret after her erstwhile alter ego, Dickens’s Sairy Gamp, and began writing and editing a magazine for children. In November her sister May joined her to give drawing classes, and Louisa wrote two mysteries and a story about four sisters named Nan, Lu, Beth, and May giving their breakfast to poor neighbors. Otherwise she did nothing at all about writing the book for young girls that Thomas Niles had suggested.
Her father, however, was not so forgetful. He and Abba both did better when Louisa was at home in Concord. Thomas Niles approached him, offering to publish his book Tablets—a manuscript consisting of excerpts from Bronson’s diaries arranged by Zodiac signs—if his daughter wrote the book for young girls that Niles had mentioned to her. Under these pressures—her father, Niles, the debts, her parents’ bad health and helplessness—Louisa May Alcott gave in.
8
Little Women.
1868–1872
January 1868 found Louisa May Alcott back in Boston, happily ensconced in her attic. Alone at last with no one to answer to, in relatively good health, she was thrilled with her new arrangements, her few pieces of furniture and a pot of hyacinth bulbs in her sunny window. During the first week of the month, the first bulb to bloom, a white hyacinth, seemed a good omen and perfumed her rooms with its scent. After her return from Europe, Concord had seemed dumpy and remote. The small, cramped shops along the Milldam, once the bustling center of her little girl’s world, seemed poky and dusty. The country store sold food for people and feed for horses as if there wasn’t much difference. Asa Collier repaired watches and skates. Men with nothing better to do lounged along the walls above the Milldam.
On the other side of town, Orchard House itself, the house that had so magnificently saved the family fortunes and become their first and only home, had peeling paint and a frayed roofline. Her father’s famous zigzag split-rail fence looked as silly as people said—he had used twice as much lumber as he needed to create what he regarded as a thing of beauty. Her name for the house, Apple Slump, seemed more appropriate than ever. For the first time, she felt claustrophobic in the town where she had spent so much of her life. It was a great place to dream about, with its lazy rivers and rolling pastures, but she was relieved to get back to the city.
Boston wasn’t London or Paris, but it had the rhythms and fashions of big-city life. The theater of the Boston streets was never boring. Alcott’s luxury was a hyacinth blooming in January, but those with money found other, sillier things to delight them, and this delighted Alcott. Fashionable Boston women in the 1860s had embraced the bustle, a style that began with a corset laced as tightly as possible to create a tiny waist. Over that went a hoop skirt made of poplin, silk, or lawn, which was held out from the body with horsehair or metal hoops, and over that went an overskirt that was draped and tied as tightly as possible in the back. Necklines were low and trimmed with ribbon or lace. Although this fashion accentuated tiny waists and slender hips and long necks, it also made it impossible to walk normally, and chic women took helpless small steps in their dainty boots with front lacing and high heels and broad square toes. Louisa and her sister May, who had come to Boston in November to stay with Louisa and give drawing lessons, were fascinated and horrified by this spectacle of femininity literally bound and shackled in the fashionable clothes of the day.1
The city itself was in a time of tremendous growth. The Back Bay and the low-lying areas around the Public Gardens were being filled in to create more land, and the shape of the town—a narrow peninsula jutting out into the harbor—was filling in along the sides. Commonwealth Avenue had been laid out and landscaped, and sumptuous brownstones were going up along its broad sidewalks for the city’s new merchant class. Louisa’s mood reflected the mood of the time. “I am in my little room, spending busy, happy days, because I have quiet, freedom, work enough and strength to do it,” Louisa wrote in her journal. “For many years we have not been so comfortable.”2
This moment of solvency, created by Alcott’s prodigious output the previous year, has an ironic sound to it now. The year ahead was to bring Alcott undreamed-of success and wealth, but she was thrilled to have much less than that. In January, Alcott wrote a sassy letter to a married man, Moses Coit Tyler, a University of Michigan professor, who had shown her around London. In her note, she suggested in a high-spirited way that they might return together. “I still cherish the dream of returning for another revel in dear, dirty delightful London. . . . Before sailing I’ll drop you a line suggesting that you put your University in one pocket, your family in another, & come too.”
Between writing stories and editing Merry’s Museum, making a flannel bathrobe for her mother and a new bonnet for May, Alcott savored intellectual Boston. She heard Fanny Kemble read Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice; she went to dinner with Caroline Hall Parkman—the daunting Boston dowager who would be the mother of historian Francis Parkman; and she traded jokes with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., who commented on her height. “How many of you children are there?” he asked, referring to the Alcott girls as he craned his neck to look up at Alcott’s face.
On other evenings, she traveled to nearby Dorchester to appear at a benefit as Mrs. Pontifex in Charles Dance’s Naval Engagements, or she took the part of Lucretia Buzzard in John Maddison Morton’s The Two Buzzards. On January 24, her second hyacinth bulb bloomed a pale blue. With her father she went to the annual meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society and heard Wendell Phillips give a lecture. “Glad I have lived in the time of this great movement,” she wrote of abolition, “and known its heroes so well. War times suit me, as I am a fighting May.”3
Although the Civil War had officially ended, the bitter disagreements between the North and the South had not. Eighteen sixty-eight was a time of struggle and desperation in much of the United States as President Andrew Johnson, a man who seemed to be in favor of flouting the intentions of Congress and the principles for which the war had been fought, approached impeachment.
So as circumstances seemed to get better for the Alcott family, the country sank into one of the ugliest and most disruptive times in history. In the North, people fervently believed that the war was fought over universal freedom for all men (women were still not mentioned), but many in the South insisted on believing that the war had been fought over the issue of secession. In the meantime, the population of 4 million African Americans, most of whom had no homes to return to or jobs or education, began to assimilate itself into the country as free men and women.
Into this miserable, violent mix came a small secret society that christened itself the Ku Klux Klan. Named for the Greek word kuklos, “circle,” the Klan at first seemed nothing more than an expression of vigilante discontent. By 1868, however, the Klan’s brutality and violent tactics were famous and had spread terror throughout the southern states.
On Friday, February 14, a week before Senator Thaddeus Stevens drafted a formal resolution of impeachment for President Johnson, Louisa May Alcott’s third hyacinth bloomed a lovely, fragrant pink. Alcott wrote and did some sewing and then went out and bought a squash pie for dinner. It was a snowy cold day, and as she trudged back to her room, she dropped the pie box and watched helplessly as it fell end over end to the sidewalk. But things looked up as she got back to her building to find an editor, a Mr. Bonner of the New York Ledger,4 who offered her a crisp $100 bill as an advance on a column she agreed to write about advice for young women. “So the pink hyacinth was a true prophet,” Alcott wrote. “I planned my article while I ate my dilapidated pie.”5
The job as editor of Merry’s Museum paid $500 a year, and Alcott was able to supplement this with pieces for Frank
Leslie, the New York Ledger column, and children’s pieces for another magazine called Youth’s Companion. In the wake of the Civil War, writing for children was enjoying a surge of popularity. Childhood, as Philippe Ariès has pointed out, is a relatively recent invention. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, children were thought of as small adults whose entire value was that, as adults, they would be able to work and take their place in society. Now, in the expansion of the Yankee consciousness, children were beginning to be perceived as something more, a species with their own special needs and desires.
Children’s books like Oliver Optic’s narratives and magazines for boys, and magazines like Merry’s Museum and editors looking for advice for young women began to proliferate. Thomas Niles persisted in asking Alcott to write her book for young girls. From the Roberts Brothers offices at 143 Washington Street, he could see books by Oliver Optic being loaded from the booming publisher Lee & Shepard at 149 Washington Street. Mary Mapes Dodge’s Hans Brinker; or, the Silver Skates was still selling well two years after publication. Surely, Niles reasoned, there must be a market for novels written for girls.
As Niles was well aware, his author Louisa May Alcott was swanning around Boston doing everything but writing a book for young girls. Again he approached Bronson Alcott, who had previously reassured him about his daughter’s intentions.
In the meantime, in her pieces for Merry’s Museum, Louisa was finding a rhythm of writing that seemed to work well for children’s stories.
She would think about the stories for a while, let them grow in her mind, and then write them quite quickly with no revision or restructuring. Oddly she was finding that the material on which she spent the least time was the most successful. She still allowed herself to be sucked into a kind of writing vortex, but the process was much less agonizing, and when she had finished writing the story, she was done. She was beginning to feel her way into a fresher version of the style that had taken over when she wrote Hospital Sketches. Her prose simplified and gained power. She stopped Writing and began to write.
Although Alcott’s little room was precious to her, a sky parlor where she could spin yarns like a spider, the pull of her family’s needs was stronger than the delights of independence. She was, in fact, married to her family and their needs as surely as if they had commemorated it with a ceremony and vows. Bronson Alcott came to Boston to consult with Thomas Niles about his book, Tablets, to once again promise Niles that Louisa was hard at work, and to remind Louisa that she had to write this book for girls. Bronson knew how to wield his paternal powers of persuasion. He summoned her back to Concord.
Reluctantly, but resigned to her own servitude at the hands of her parents, Alcott packed up the furniture and books in her beloved garret. “Packed for home as I am needed there,” she wrote. “I am sorry to leave my quiet room, for I’ve enjoyed it very much.” On February 28 after a few blissfully productive months—eight long tales, ten short ones, twelve stage appearances, and lots of editorial work—Louisa May Alcott quit her post as editor of Merry’s Museum and headed home to Concord to write a book she didn’t want to write in a place she didn’t want to write it.
March is New England’s mud season, and March of 1868 was unseasonably warm. The roads melted into icy slush, and the walking in Concord—especially for someone in long skirts—was plodding and unpleasant. New Englanders say that their weather year consists of nine months of winter and three months of “damn poor sledding.” That March in Concord was damn poor sledding and not much of anything else good. For Louisa the chilly March sun and the endless errands of Concord made her days in Boston seem like a shimmering dream. In April she may even have regretted not getting in to see Dickens in his final American reading. Perhaps this time she would have seen beyond the crimped hair and false teeth to the writer whose work had meant the world to her.
As always, Dickens’s readings were as carefully planned as his novels—he was part of London’s theatrical community, the actress Ellen Terry was his longtime love, and he had tremendous respect for stage drama of all kinds. His readings always lasted exactly ninety minutes and used the same props—a maroon curtain behind him, a footrail next to the lectern, and a block to the side where he rested his hand or elbow during the performance. Dickens rehearsed his readings again and again, memorizing large sections of his own work and acting out different parts and voices under an arrangement of gaslights that made the scene even more dramatic. He knew the work so well that he could rewrite and improvise on the spot, depending on the mood of the audience. The book he appeared to be reading from was there as a prop.
Alcott had been disappointed by his age and artificiality when she saw the great man read in London. But in April in Boston, he was indeed an old man, nearing the end of his lecturing and his writing. The six-month tour of this country had left him exhausted, although it paid well, netting the amazing sum of $140,000. His final reading in Boston—he would be dead two years later—was a heartbreaker. He ended his reading after the applause with these words: “In this brief life of ours, it is sad to do almost anything for the last time. . . . Ladies and gentlemen, I beg most earnestly, most gratefully, and most affectionately, to bid you, each and all, farewell.” He embarked for England just hours ahead of a federal agent who had been sent to collect taxes on his United States earnings.
By the time the elderly Dickens left Boston, Alcott, who still lived her life by memorized passages from Martin Chuzzlewit and The Pickwick Papers, was mired in the finally diminishing Concord mud. It wasn’t until May, when the winter finally lifted and signs of new life were everywhere around her, that Alcott finally sat down to write her book for young girls.
There are two kinds of masterpieces: those that use great leaps of the imagination to bring extraordinary scenes and adventures onto the page, and those that reveal the ordinary. The latter show us in a fresh way the very things we have known all along. Until she sat down to write a book for children, Louisa May Alcott had been reaching for the extraordinary as she did in her blood-and-thunder tales and even in her serious novel. Now she relaxed.
Great writing will always be a mystery. Why now, after everything she had been through, reluctantly tackling a novel for young girls, did Louisa May Alcott get suddenly catapulted into greatness? There are two kinds of artists—those who seek and those who find.6 The day she sat down to write during that May of 1868, Louisa seemed to shift from being an artist pushing toward meaning to being an artist able to relax and discover meaning—the way Michelangelo purportedly said that he discovered his statues embedded in the marble he carved.
The muse often seems perverse. Brilliant men in book-lined studies with eager researchers somehow write wooden, muddy prose. Even writers with great ideas often subside into writing that makes those ideas incomprehensible. Instead, someone who has given up writing because he can’t make a living at it, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, will sit down in the aftermath of his mother’s death in a rented house and pour out an incredible, dazzling tale like The Scarlet Letter. Or a man intent on cutting down his drinking and spending by traveling to the south of France, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, will use the trip to write a masterpiece like The Great Gatsby. My own father wrote some of his best stories in a cheap tent, which he had pitched, on the lawn when the house was filled with his family and friends.
A lot has been written about the way great work happens. The poet Edward Hirsch supposes that it takes the ultimate pressure on the human soul to make this enchantment happen: artistic inspiration is “the presence of death,” he wrote. Others, like Sigmund Freud and Arthur Koestler, liken the moment of creation to an accident or a joke. There’s a feeling of lightness, of handing over the reins. The poet Jane Hirshfield has written: “You can think you’re willing it, you can think the Muse mugs you, it’s still a mystery. The kaleidoscope turns, the box is shaken and settles, and some new constellation appears, never seen before, which you either choose to take or you turn or shake again to see what else migh
t come up.”7
There is a parallel between the insights of great work and the insights of great invention that also often seem to happen by accident. Alexander Graham Bell, for instance, famously invented the telephone when he accidentally spilled battery acid on himself and called out for help from his assistant Tom Watson, who heard him through the wires in the next room. Although this particular accident is apocryphal, the two men did seem to discover that the sound was traveling through the wires one afternoon by accident. They were in separate rooms trying out a new system of batteries and solenoids when Bell heard a pinging through the wires, and when he spoke, Watson could hear him.8 “Chance favors the prepared mind,” as Louis Pasteur wrote.
If great works and great inventions happen by accident, careful research can also often show that the accident has been prepared for for years. It was Bell’s understanding of sound, partly developed in his years of work with the deaf, that made him understand the pings he heard through the wire. Man’s accidents are God’s purposes, as Sophia Peabody might remind us. From the perspective of 1868, the writing of Little Women looked like an accident. Because of the accidental coming together of Alcott’s need for a publisher, her concern for her parents, Thomas Niles’s jealousy of other publishers’ successes with children’s books, Bronson Alcott’s unpublished manuscript, and a dozen other things, in May of 1868, Louisa May Alcott after much stalling finally sat down and started writing Little Women.
Yet the accidents that caused the writing of Little Women, seen in hindsight, look more like destiny. Alcott had noticed the resurgence of children’s literature, and she had grown up in a household where children were thought of as the incarnation of angelic good. She had just spent six months editing and writing for a children’s magazine. She had already written at least three stories about a golden band of sisters, and her poem “In the Garret,” just published in the Boston weekly the Flag of Our Union, had begun to create the four characters of Nan, Lu, Bess, and May. In her novel, Anna’s husband, John Pratt, would become a tutor and be named John Brooke because the Pratts had been at Brook Farm. Laurie, the boy next door, would give her a chance to verbally savor the deliciousness that was Polish Laddie in her memory, combined with another friend, Alf Whitman from Lawrence, Kansas. His father? Was that Emerson? The curmudgeon with the astonishing library and financial generosity and the heart of gold? A school she had seen at Vevey would become Laurie’s background, the family post office begun by Abba at Fruitlands would be expanded, the family newspaper the Olive Branch became the Spread Eagle, and Alcott’s Civil War illness, which cost her her luxuriant hair, became Jo’s sacrifice of her hair for the Civil War cause.9
Louisa May Alcott Page 21
