Louisa May Alcott

by Susan Cheever

  While Louisa gallivanted in New York, Philadelphia, where she heard Henry Ward Beecher preach and was unimpressed, and Boston for the Centennial Ball, her mother became sicker and sicker during the winter back home in Concord. After a summer in Concord taking turns with May to care for their mother, Alcott dispatched May back to Europe to continue her studies in art. “The money I invest in her pays the sort of interest I like,” she wrote in her journal. Through their travels in Europe and their cooperative care of the aging Abba, May and Louisa had become extremely close. Their bond seemed the strongest in either of their lives, a bond based on shared experience and mutual appreciation. All Louisa’s anger at May’s childhood fastidiousness had disappeared, and all of May’s squeamishness at her sister’s outspokenness had burned away in the fires of time. This time, though, the Alcott blessings were to lead May down a complicated path. While she studied in Paris, May met and fell in love with a Swiss businessman, Ernest Nieriker.

  In the fall of 1877, Abba Alcott, surrounded by what was left of her family—Louisa, Anna, and Bronson—quietly sickened in the upstairs bedroom of her house in Concord, across from the portrait of her ancestor, the recanting witchcraft judge Samuel Sewall.

  Nursing her panting, moaning mother was too much for Louisa and she collapsed, lying across the hall in her own bedroom for a week, seemingly near death herself. At this point in her life, as a forty-four-year-old woman with more than a decade to live, Alcott seems to have sickened again. For years the results of the mercury poisoning had been gone and she had led a relatively normal life. Now illness began to be her constant companion and preoccupation.

  On the fourteenth of November both patients were carefully moved to Anna’s new house in downtown Concord. There, Abba died quietly and happily with little pain. “O how beautiful it is to die, how happy I am,”10 she told her gathered family. Abba was buried in Sleepy Hollow with a eulogy by the Reverend H. W. Foote, the minister of Boston’s King’s Chapel, where the lanky, reforming Abba Alcott had married the self-invented philosophical Bronson more than forty years earlier. Two days after the funeral, Louisa and her father quietly celebrated their forty-fifth and seventy-eighth birthdays.

  Abba’s death brought a new wave of exhaustion and despair for Louisa, who had realized her dream of financial stability but was often too sick or too tired to enjoy it. Anyone who dreams of wealth and fame might be warned by this story of a woman who struggled so hard to make money that by the time she reached her goal she could no longer appreciate its benefits. “My duty is done,” she wrote after Abba’s funeral, “and now I shall be glad to follow her.”11

  But the rich, contradictory life of Louisa May Alcott had a few acts left to go. This woman, who had grown up in the heart of American Literature in a flowering New England where everything seemed possible for the minds and souls of men and even women, reached her forties having won a share of fortune and fame that few even dream of. She had moved so often that when she finally had a real family home—Orchard House—she felt claustrophobic and shut in between its narrow walls.

  May was devastated with sorrow and guilt at not being home when her mother died. At the same time, she had fallen in love with the sensuous, visually ravishing way of life she had found in France. There, May had made a life for herself, and her work as a painter had been recognized. Back in Boston, she was known as the woman who had loaned tools to and encouraged the young sculptor Daniel Chester French. But in Paris, a still life of hers was chosen to hang in the same Paris salon that rejected two canvases by her friend Mary Cassatt. Her copies of Turner were hailed by no less a critic than John Ruskin. Her book Studying Art Abroad and How to Do It Cheaply also won her a reputation as an American writer.

  In New England, her talents were eclipsed, first by those of her father and then by those of her sister. In France, where she and Ernest had settled near Paris in Meudon, she found an artistic home. She was also in love with France for many other reasons. The mouth-watering food, the heart-lifting landscapes, the French admiration for beauty in all its forms made her feel that she had at last found her place. In memory Concord seemed small, grim, and uncomfortable next to the delights of Paris and the French countryside. Ernest Nieriker, a twenty-two-year-old with a thriving French business, was fifteen years younger than May, but he seemed connected with the seriousness of art and the deliciousness of life in Europe. May married him in a quiet ceremony on March 22, less than six months after her mother’s death, with none of her family in attendance.

  Trapped in dreary old New England as she read May’s sparkling letters, the sick Louisa let her jealousy show in her journals. “How different our lives are just now!” she wrote in reference to her erstwhile closest companion. “I so lonely, sad, and sick, she so happy, well, and blest. She always had the cream of things, and deserved it. My time is yet to come somewhere else, when I am ready for it.”12 Although May constantly urged her sister to visit, to come and live forever in the heaven-on-earth she had discovered, Louisa’s illness intervened. Louisa planned to go in September, but Anna broke her leg. As always, her obligations to her family came first.

  Time after time, Louisa planned to go back to Europe, and time after time, some crisis in the extended Alcott family made the trip impossible. If she had known what was going to happen, of course visiting May would have come first. But May seemed, as always, annoyingly happy in her new paradise. Perhaps it was hard to read her letters, with their condemnation of the very life Louisa was leading and had, in fact, devoted herself to leading. “America seems death to all aspirations of hope and work,” May wrote thoughtlessly. “Nothing would ever induce me to live in Concord again.” May gave a party in Meudon and lovingly described covering her table with “fine damask, my pretty silver and plenty of flowers and a green grape-leaf dish piled high with peaches, pears and grapes. . . . Salmon salad, Gervais cheese, cold tongue, nice cake and paté douceurs such as only the French can make, gave us a charming lunch, finished with wine.” May wrote that if Louisa came to visit, “she will never want to live in Stupid America again.”13

  May’s delight intrigued her sister but also disturbed her. The woman whom her father called “Duty’s faithful Child” had always been less interested in her own comforts than in the comforts and opportunities of her family. May was very good at helping herself to what she needed; Louisa was very good at helping others get what they needed. Wrapped in her own moods, Alcott retreated to her bedroom, often refusing to come down and greet the many visitors her father entertained in his study. Her journals reflect her physical pain and psychic despair. “Life is not worth living this way,”14 she wrote in April of 1879.

  As always the coming of the warm weather lifted the spirits of everyone in Concord. Alcott bought herself a phaeton pulled by a little white horse to tool around in. Of course, Bronson used the little carriage as much as she did. The lilacs bloomed, the mud gave way to the earthy smells of moss and fern, and birdsong accompanied the sound of brooks. Alcott rented out Orchard House. Her father was off on another western tour, and she went back to Boston, where a new doctor, a Dr. Rhoda Ashley Joy Lawrence, who had studied at the Boston University School of Medicine and established a pleasant nursing home at Dunreath Place in Roxbury just south of Boston, told her that she was doing well. In the meantime, word came that May was pregnant.

  Alcott still snapped out of her low mood to do the right thing as a reformer and concerned citizen. She visited the Concord prison one Sunday and spoke to the inmates, telling them a story and getting so carried away by their attentive faces that she spoke for longer than she intended. She was the first woman to register to vote in Concord school committee elections. She contributed essays on women’s suffrage to the Woman’s Journal.

  In July her father’s latest project, a School of Philosophy that drew 400 philosophers to Concord over the summer months, began in Bronson’s study. His first lecture was on Plato. Later the school migrated to a frame structure behind Orchard House. Bronson’s phi
losophers were fed and entertained and cleaned up after by Louisa and Anna. Both sisters found this a mixed blessing.

  On November 8 in Paris, May Alcott Nieriker gave birth to a girl named Louisa May after Alcott. The baby was called Lulu. By the beginning of December, the news turned black. The baby was healthy, but May was not doing well. “The weight on my heart is not all imagination,” Alcott wrote. “She was too happy to have it last.” Of course, Louisa blamed herself for not visiting and for not being there to help her sister in trouble. “Such a tugging at my heart to be by my poor May alone so far away.”15

  By all accounts, Ernest Nieriker was an exemplary husband, but apparently there was nothing he could do. On December 31, Louisa went downstairs to find her old friend and master Emerson in the parlor with tears in his eyes looking at the portrait of May hanging against the back wall. Nieriker, thinking this would make the blow easier, had sent Emerson a telegram saying that May was dead. The old man, bowed with yet another grief, had walked down the snowy incline of the Lexington Road and into town to bear his sad news. It actually seemed too much to bear. At least, Louisa wailed into the pages of her journals, Ernest would have the baby to comfort him.

  Yet in a strange and generous last wish, May Alcott showed that for all her turning against America she had not lost the religion of her childhood and of her family—she was a devout Alcott first and everything else second. She had deeded her daughter Lulu to her sister, asking that the baby be sent to Concord as soon as possible to be raised by her maiden Aunt Louisa. There were delays. The baby was sick. The baby couldn’t travel. Perhaps Ernest Nieriker, having lost his wife, was not eager to give up his baby daughter.

  Nevertheless, whatever their reluctance to part with the beautiful little girl, Nieriker and his sister Sophie decided to comply. Alcott sent a trusted nurse from Boston, a Mrs. Giles, to go to Switzerland and fetch her darling sister’s baby. Thus a middle-aged New England spinster who had never lived with a man suddenly became the eager mother of a tiny, helpless ten-month-old baby. Just when Louisa was convinced her life was over and felt herself ready to die, her life began again.

  10

  Lulu.

  1880–1888

  The death of May was devastating. The two sisters had become best friends in their travels, and because of Louisa’s financial success, May had been able to build a significant career as a painter out of a talent that her family had found merely charming. In this way, she was very much like Louisa—she took her own art more seriously than many who saw it. Then just as she had found love and been starting her own family, the story was cut short in a way that was unbearable for her family. “Of all the trials in my life, I never felt any as keenly as this,” Louisa wrote in her journal. “Tried to write . . . to distract my mind, but the wave of sorrow kept rolling over me & I could only weep and wait till the tide ebbed again.”1

  In the cold winter months after May’s death, Alcott received many letters from Ernest Nieriker and his sister Sophie. A box filled with May’s possessions and clothes brought fresh grief. Soon, though, Alcott started making preparations for the arrival of her baby niece. May’s last wish was eccentric; it would separate her baby from her only living parent. Did May realize that raising a child would be the only way to distract the Alcott family from their loss? During the summer, Alcott began to prepare. She made a will leaving her copyrights to John Pratt, who was to divide the profits from them between his brother, his mother, himself, and Lulu.

  As the summer ended, Louisa spent evenings in the nursery she had created in the upstairs rooms, praying over the empty little white crib that she had prepared for her Lulu. On September 19, Alcott, frail and in ill health, took the train to Boston to wait on the wharf for the steamer that would bring her sister’s baby to her new home. Each baby that came off the boat made her heart leap. Finally the boat’s captain appeared holding “a little yellow haired thing in white, with its hat off as it looked about with lively blue eyes,” Alcott wrote. She held out her arms for the baby, who seemed to sense that she was meeting her new mother. “Marmar,” she said to Louisa, as if she had come home.

  Alcott’s journals, usually plain and graphic and filled with dry detail, allow some rhapsodizing about the amazing little Lulu. Her little body was perfectly formed, Louisa delighted, with a pug nose, yellow down on her head, and a tan from being at sea. “A happy thing laughing and waving her hands, confiding and bold, with a keen look in the eyes so like May who hated shams & saw through them at once,” she wrote in her journal.

  Orchard House had been rented out, so Alcott brought Lulu home to the new Alcott house on Main Street, the old Thoreau house that she had bought for Anna and her boys and which became the new center of the family. Abba moved to the new house in the last days of her life, but her death had blown the center out of the Alcott family. After decades in Orchard House, they returned to the kind of peripatetic life that had been characteristic of Louisa’s early years. Then necessity had dictated many moves; now she chose to move. For the rest of her life, Louisa and everyone dependent on her would be perpetually moving from house to house.

  In the winter of 1880, Bronson set off on another lecture tour—because of Louisa’s success, his tours were suddenly mobbed with fans and unusually profitable—and Louisa rented her cousin Lizzie Wells’s house on Beacon Hill in Boston. As it turned out, wealth did not insulate Alcott from domestic problems. The house was a nightmare, and Louisa spent a huge amount of time getting plumbers and handymen in to keep the place running. There, Lulu had her first birthday, which she thoroughly enjoyed. Dressed in new clothes, white boots, and a blue sash, and wearing a small green crown, “the little queen in her high chair sat & looked with delight at the tiny cake with one candle . . . rattle with bells, & some gay cards from her friends,”2 Louisa wrote to Bronson, who had reached Syracuse. At 20 pounds, Lulu was a healthy baby, with typical picture books, flowers, a doll, a silver mug, and a growing vocabulary: Mama, Da, Up!, Bow-Wow, and Dranpa. Delighted by her picture books and with huge expressive blue eyes, the baby preoccupied and amazed her Aunt Weedy.

  The old Thoreau house on Main Street had become a tourist attraction of sorts when Louisa was in residence. When Lulu was taken out for a walk, people would exclaim and try to reach into the carriage and kiss her. Even in Boston, Louisa had become a kind of national treasure in a way that usually offended her. It wasn’t all bad. In the winter of 1880, she had a visit that pleased her from a young man who had heard her speak at the Concord prison and came to tell her that her story had changed his life. He was the best kind of fan—intelligent, grateful, and off to South America with a geological survey party.

  In her fiftieth year, with a toddler to care for and an entire extended family—Anna and her two boys—dependent on her, Alcott kept writing, working on the third volume of what would become the March family trilogy, Jo’s Boys. Her journals suffered. In April she went through her mother’s diaries and destroyed them as her mother had wished. Alcott’s journals record quite a lot of this kind of prophylactic destruction. Perhaps she was inspired by Charles Dickens, who in early September of 1860 had made a bonfire for all his papers and correspondence behind his house at Gad’s Hill in London.

  Louisa’s old friend and idol Ralph Waldo Emerson had been increasingly ill as the years had passed. His memory faded in and out, and his daughter Ellen usually went out with him and traveled with him, often to remind him of basic things like the name of his wife or the town where he had lived his whole life. As this great man faded, many distinguished visitors arrived to say good-bye. Walt Whitman visited, but he and Louisa didn’t talk about nursing.

  Then in April, Emerson contracted pneumonia and died quietly in his sleep. Louisa felt that her world was slipping away. She was back in Boston, staying in rooms at a renovated Bellevue Hotel while Lulu stayed with Anna in Concord, when the news came from Concord that Bronson had suffered a paralytic stroke. Louisa rushed back to Concord, where the ecstatic greeting from Lulu
was the only thing that cheered her. “I felt as if I could bear anything with this little sunbeam to light up the world for me,” Louisa wrote.3

  There was a lot to bear. Bronson, the anchor of Louisa’s world, the man who had invented the religion of the Alcott family out of his own dreams, was inarticulate and felled like a great tree. “It is so pathetic to see my handsome, hale, active old father changed at one fell blow into this helpless wreck,” she wrote her friend Maria S. Porter.4 Although Bronson defied all predictions and recovered faster than the doctors had believed possible, he never wrote or traveled again.

  Now Alcott had two babies to care for, her aging father and the adorable Lulu. She needed help, and her attempts to find satisfactory child care sound familiar to anyone who has ever tried to get help with the complex, intimate task of raising a child. In May, Alcott complained that in Concord they could find no one to help dress, walk, and play with Lulu. Mrs. F., a nurse, turned out to be a drunk; she “got tipsey” and had to go. A pretty Dane was “too lofty” and knew nothing about children. Miss M. had “no idea of government” and she was “sick and sad.” “The ladies are incapable or proud, the girls vulgar or rough, so my poor baby has a bad time with her little tempers & active mind and body,” Louisa wrote.5

  When one of the babysitters, a Miss Cassall, who was “cold & tired & careless” came upon the great American authoress on the floor with her hair down, roaring and romping with her niece, she was horrified by the lack of dignity in her distinguished employer. When Lulu went to kindergarten, Louisa was distressed to see that the teachers were almost as bad as the babysitters. Lulu’s teacher was good at teaching from books, Louisa noted, but she had no ideas about amusing children, and her heart was not in her work. Most of the time, Louisa took care of Lulu, dashing away to care for her father when she had time.