In the same letter to Cary in which she wrote about the attractions of martyrdom, Margaret asserted that her “natural position” was far from that of a saint: instead “it is regal.—Without throne, sceptre, or guards, still a queen!” She made light of the conceit, one she had entertained since girlhood, in a “May-day” ode she composed for the Greene Street children to sing on their outing to the seashore at the end of the spring term in 1838:
We are the children of the Spring
Our home is always green
Green be the garland of our King
The livery of our Queen!
But in Providence she felt like an exiled ruler, forced to employ “those means of suppression and accommodation which I at present hate to my hearts core” in order to converse with even the best minds of the lesser city. She had “gabbled and simpered . . . till there seems no good left in me.” If springtime brought any “May-gales” to “blow warm & glad / And charm the heart from pain,” as the Greene Street children sang, it was the stiff wind that would drive her to Concord again at the close of school.
By letter, Waldo had turned increasingly confiding—if only about his daily chores. She heard about his pig, his forty-four newly planted pines, his tomatoes and rhubarb, the bugs that “eat up my vines,” and Little Waldo, “as handsome as Walden pond at sunrise” at a year and a half. Sequestered in Providence, she missed him most of all her friends, even as the grounds of their friendship remained uncertain. She had resorted to advertising herself: “I am better than most persons I see and, I dare say, better than most persons you see,” she wrote to him while still in her queenly mood. “But perhaps you do not need to see anybody,” she teased, tweaking Waldo for his perennial pessimism on the subject of friendship.
He wrote back consolingly—up to a point. “It seems to me that almost all people descend somewhat into society,” Waldo commiserated. “All association must be a compromise.” But “what is worst,” he continued distressingly, “the very flower & aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual disappointment is actual society even of the virtuous & gifted.” Did Waldo prefer tending his garden to cultivating friendship? He had already written that he favored communing with his own thoughts in private over communicating with others: “persons except they be of commanding excellence will not work on heads as old as mine like thoughts.” Waldo Emerson was hardly old—only thirty-five. Still, experience had aged him, with the death of his young first wife seven years before and the sad loss of two beloved brothers to tuberculosis since then. “Persons provoke you to efforts at acquaintance at sympathy which now hit, now miss, but lucky or unlucky exhaust you at last,” he temporized. “Thoughts bring their own proper motion with them & communicate it to you not borrow yours.”
Still, Waldo’s sporadic expansiveness—and Margaret’s need—brought a new intensity to the relationship. Once she left for Providence, he began addressing her as “My dear friend” rather than “My dear Miss Fuller” in letters; through the wearying spring of 1838, Margaret progressed from signing herself “Devoutly, if not worthily yours, S. M. Fuller” to the fervent “Always yours, S.M.F.” When Cary Sturgis, now nineteen and ready to defy her father, made a visit to Concord that summer, Waldo was grateful to Margaret for bringing them together: “For a hermit I begin to think I know several very fine people.” Margaret was one of them, and when the opportunity presented itself, he wanted her close by. At the end of summer, when Margaret confided her hope to leave teaching before winter, Waldo insisted she spend the following year in Concord. “Will you commission me to find you a boudoir,” he offered, “or, much better, will you defy my awkwardness & come & sit down in our castle, summon the village before you & find an abode at your leisure? I really hope you mean to come & study here. And to come now.” Waldo needed Margaret too, reluctant as he was to partake of her language of passionate friendship.
Finally illness rescued Margaret. By the fall of 1838 she felt exhausted nearly all the time and missed more days of teaching. She sent for her sister, Ellen, to stay with her and then to serve as her substitute for several weeks. Traveling to Boston, Margaret consulted Dr. Walter Channing, Reverend Channing’s brother and the most respected doctor to women in Boston. In early November, “I heard with unspeakable pain Dr. Channing’s opinion that I must go away.” She would not go away to Concord, but to Groton—“to the quiet of home, and the care of my mother.” She felt sure of a cure there—“I am by nature energetick and fearless; if I should recover my natural tone of health and spirits, I shall not dread labor nor shrink from meeting a circle of strangers as I do now.” Her mother had at last sold the property, and the family needed to vacate the premises by April. “I do not know what we shall do,” Margaret had to admit. “But I do not look beyond.” It was enough to count on “these three months of peace and seclusion after three years of toil, restraint and perpetual excitement.”
At the eleventh hour Margaret found a reason to regret her departure: Charles King Newcomb, the eighteen-year-old son of one of the “coterie of Hanna Mores,” “a new young man, very interesting, a character of monastic beauty, a religious love for what is best in Nature and books.” Charles had just returned from a year at the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia; he was one of those men “rushing back into mysticism”—possibly even Catholicism—whom she had envisioned in her Coliseum Club talk. His spiritual quest intrigued her, as did the opportunity to influence his development—attractions that would draw her to other younger men in coming years. They walked in the evening moonlight in the woods above the city; he wrote her letters “full of affection and faith,” which she had little time to answer, “for all the little imps of care are round me.” Still she urged him, “Write to me, if you will; it gives pleasure.”
But “a new young man” was not enough to lure Margaret from the close proximity of enigmatic, “unhelpful, wise” Waldo Emerson. In December, after a tearful parting with her “row” of pupils, who presented her with an “elegantly bound” set of Shakespeare, Margaret was off to the “vestal solitudes” of Groton. “I do not wish to teach again at all,” she declared. She knew she might not have her wish, but she expected to devote at least a year to “my own inventions” before attempting once more to effect “my dreams and hopes as to the education of women,” if necessary. And: “What hostile or friendly star may not take the ascendant before that time?” For now, making her escape from Providence mattered most of all. She had felt there “always in a false position,” teaching when she would rather be writing, gabbling when she wished to converse. Margaret had advised her students that a woman must strive to discover and attain “everything she might be.” “Who would be a goody that could be a genius?” she had demanded of Waldo Emerson. It was time for Margaret to answer her own question.
• IV •
CONCORD, BOSTON, JAMAICA PLAIN
Caroline Sturgis
Samuel Gray Ward
Anna Barker Ward
Margaret Fuller
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ellery Channing
Ellen Kilshaw Fuller
10
“What were we born to do?”
MARGARET RARELY THOUGHT THE POETRY SHE WROTE—to express private longings or, at times, rhapsodic joy—was publishable. The elegy to Waldo Emerson’s brother Charles, published in a Boston newspaper in 1836, had a specific occasion and also a purpose: to communicate her sympathy to the grieving older writer in the weeks before their first meeting. But when James Clarke printed several verses that she’d sent him by letter in his Western Messenger, without asking her permission, she was outraged: “all the value of this utterance is destroyed by a hasty or indiscriminate publicity,” she complained. She felt “profaned” to have these “overflowings of a personal experience”—they were lines she’d written to comfort herself in the months of crisis after Timothy Fuller’s death—offered up to strangers’ eyes. There was nothing
“universal” in them that might “appeal to the common heart of man,” as the works of a true poetic genius like Byron or Goethe would. Fortunately, only her mother had recognized the lines as her work; James at least had the sense not to print Margaret’s name.
Yet when John Sullivan Dwight asked if she’d like to attach her name to the two verse translations he’d chosen for his anthology Select Minor Poems of Goethe and Schiller, Margaret was happy to be identified, even though she considered her renderings of Goethe’s lyrics into English “pitiful” and “clumsy” compared to Dwight’s. But what name would she choose? Three years before, her “Lines” on the death of Charles Chauncy Emerson had appeared with an ambiguous “F” as signature. Now, at Margaret’s request, “Eagles and Doves” and “To a Golden Heart, Worn Round His Neck” were listed on the contents page of Select Minor Poems as the work of “S. M. Fuller”—concealing, for those who didn’t know her, the fact that she was the only female among the contributors to the volume, and signaling to those who did that she was one of the boys. Margaret had not graduated from Harvard with them, but here at last she joined the triumvirate of young, disaffected Unitarian ministers, James Clarke, Henry Hedge, and her old friend William Henry Channing, their names printed in full alongside a handful of New England literary men: G. W. (George Wallis) Haven, N. L. (Nathaniel Langdon) Frothingham, and C. P. (Christopher Pearse) Cranch. Here too appeared George Bancroft, who’d earned his doctorate at Göttingen and whose screed against Brutus had prompted Margaret’s first anonymous publication five years earlier, before her father’s death. Now she was Bancroft’s equal in the pages of a landmark volume, the first translation from German in George Ripley’s ambitious series Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature.
Perhaps some of the verses she’d submitted to Dwight were clumsy, but these two were not. And even if they weren’t her own private “overflowings,” the Goethe lyrics expressed poignantly Margaret’s twin preoccupations with frustrated ambition and failed love. In the first, a fledgling eagle, wounded in the wing by a “huntsman’s dart,” loses the “power to soar”; as the young eagle stares longingly into the heavens, “a tear glistens in his haughty eye.” A pair of doves befriend the “inly-mourning” bird and remind him that although he cannot fly or hunt, he can still feed on the “superfluous wealth of the wood-bushes,” drink from the brook, take pleasure in flowers, trees, and sunset: “the spirit of content / Gives all that we can know of bliss.” It was a lesson Margaret would never fully master, but rehearsing the lines surely eased her hungry soul.
“To a Golden Heart” sings a darker tune, but one that must have provided Margaret the solace of fellow feeling as she worked out her translation, still lacking a love to replace her infatuation with George Davis. A spurned lover wears a heart-shaped medallion around his neck, a “Remembrancer of joys long passed away,” a gift from his beloved Lili. The poet laments, “Stronger thy chain than that which bound the heart,” yet he cannot bring himself to put aside “the prisoner’s badge.” His lost love binds him, defines him.
Both poems speak a man’s feelings; Margaret was, after all, translating Goethe. Was it the masculine voice of these griefs that made her consider them “universal,” appealing to the “common heart of man,” unlike her own “overflowings”? It would take several years for Margaret to move beyond the relative safety of critical writing, to feel certain that her private thoughts as a woman had universal appeal, and longer still to bring “Margaret” into her byline. For now, she was gratified to have a place in the anthology and to find her biography of Goethe announced in Dwight’s preface: “there is reason to expect, before long, a life of Goethe, from one qualified, in an eminent degree, for such an arduous task.”
Home in Groton for the first months of 1839, the last months she would have a home there, Margaret turned her attention to completing her translation of Johann Peter Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of His Life, also advertised by Dwight as “in course of preparation.” She had not lived at home since the last years of Timothy Fuller’s life, and the stern family patriarch loomed large in her imagination as she walked the grounds each morning, then returned to her papers, “lying in heaps” about her, to work over the words of her adopted father figure. The book amounted to a “monologue” by Goethe, not a true conversation, she observed in her translator’s preface. There had been no chance to listen to Timothy reminisce about his life and work in the manner of Goethe’s young disciple Eckermann, nor had Margaret been inclined to draw him out, to her regret. Yet she remembered how, even when he was alive, she had always missed her father, a man so full of his own plans for his oldest daughter that he failed to see her clearly. Goethe’s words and life example, summarized in her preface, answered her need now: “He knew both what he sought and how to seek it.”
Margaret felt relieved to have escaped Providence and the grueling round of classes, and she hardly missed Boston, where “it was all tea and dinner parties, and long conversations and pictures” on her stolen visits over the past two years, she recalled in a letter to James Clarke. But as the April deadline to vacate the Groton homestead neared, reserving time for the translation became increasingly difficult. She spent hours sorting through her father’s papers—a “hackneyed moral” might be drawn from them, Margaret decided, as she catalogued the remnants of an ultimately frustrated career. Timothy’s bitter withdrawal from public life had been his undoing. Certainly it had brought the family nothing but hardship, compounded now with “the disorders of a house which has lost its head.” Her guilty grief for Timothy was beginning to include more rancor than reverence.
Packing, arranging for the rental of a farmhouse in Jamaica Plain that she would share with her mother and brother Richard (five miles from Boston, with land enough to pasture the family cow), playing a few final melodies on the piano her father had bought her—all this brought on headaches and back pain. The piano, which would be sold at auction along with many of Timothy’s books and other family belongings, was a relic of that distant time when Margaret had idealized Ellen Kilshaw and imagined for herself a life of feminine accomplishment rewarded by an advantageous marriage. Marriage, she would one day write, “is the natural means of forming a sphere, of taking root on the earth”—how much “more strength” was required “to do this” alone!
Now Margaret refused to give up the task near to hand—her translation—even if it meant dictating to her brother Richard and correcting his pages, a process nearly as laborious as writing them out herself. The work, and the knowledge that it was expected, kept her driving toward completion—“as if an intellectual person ever had a night’s rest,” she sputtered to Waldo Emerson. On her twenty-ninth birthday, May 23, 1839, she signed her translator’s preface at her desk in the new house, Willow Brook, in Jamaica Plain, and sent the manuscript to press, a full volume from the pen of “S. M. Fuller.”
Waldo was delighted with her Conversations, and with Margaret’s preface in particular—“a brilliant statement.” The translation was “a beneficent action for which America will long thank you.” Most of all, the book gave him confidence that “you can write on Goethe” with “decision and intelligence,” and in “good English”; already she had managed, in Conversations, to “scatter all the popular nonsense about him.”
Margaret had confided in Waldo her worry that she might not be capable of the larger biographical project, and he’d commiserated as he worked to finish his own first book of essays, a more ambitious undertaking than the slim volume Nature and one that, like a full biography, so easily “daunts & chills” a writer. Trusting in her powers would help conquer the fear that she might not write a book worthy of her subject: “self possession is all,” he counseled, and “our hero”—Goethe—“shall follow as he may.” The knowledge that Waldo Emerson accepted her as a comrade in authorship may have boosted Margaret’s confidence as much as his backhanded compliment: “I know that not possibly can you write a bad book a dull page, if only you
indulge yourself and take up your work proudly.” She had grown up with praise phrased mostly in negatives.
Yet how much could Margaret afford to “indulge” herself? Could she “ransom more time for writing,” as she once expressed her ever-present need, than the few months she’d set aside while still in Groton and the stolen moments since the move to Willow Brook? Writing a book was far different from translating one, albeit one with a “brilliant” preface. She promised Waldo she would write a trial chapter of her Goethe biography that summer—“speed the pen,” he’d urged—and then threw herself “unremittingly” into several months of “thought and study,” knowing she would have to reckon with finances come fall. She’d already begun negotiations with the parents of three former Greene Street School pupils for the girls to board with the Fullers in Jamaica Plain, sharing the rent and paying Margaret to complete their education. Ever since Bronson Alcott had shorted her on wages, Margaret had been careful to set terms precisely and well in advance; in Providence she had instituted the practice of billing by the quarter-hour for private language lessons, so as not to let her instinctive generosity erode her profits.
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