Silences

by Shelly Fisher Fishkin

  The power of reticence again. The bitterness with which Rebecca felt this restriction is revealed by her obsessed fascination with Ellen, “a girl of the laboring classes,” who wandered penniless and freely through state after state, looking for a soldier brother who had disappeared. In later years, Rebecca wrote Ellen’s story not once, but twice, the second time as fiction. The first was “Ellen” in Peterson’s, 1863; the second in the Atlantic, July 1865.

  In the uninterrupted hours that came sometimes now, free too of the worst of the weight of concern about her father, Rebecca returned to serious writing: another Civil War story, David Gaunt, published in 1862 in the Atlantic. The sense of torn loyalties, intermixed right-wrong, “hands wet with a brother’s blood for the Right,” are in this too. A pacifist minister, after agonizing introspection—must murder be the way to justice, peace?—enlists in the war against slavery; is betrayed by his noble beliefs into killing his benefactor. A love theme (she Confederate, he Northern, of course) twines mawkishly through it all, and there is a distraught, watery, hasty quality to the writing.

  The distraught quality was not only in the story. Her schoolteacher brother, Wilson, needing to go to Boston anyway, had agreed to take her with him in early June. Now that the trip was definite, its terrors and temerities overcame her. In the long ordeal-hours sitting by her father without the stay of her writing, it had come to seem odd and dreamlike that she was an established writer, let alone one thought fit to be invited into the most select of companies. In her was something of Hugh Wolfe’s outsider feeling of “a mysterious class that shone down with glamour of another order of being.” She who was reticent, who had kept to herself, would be on display, expected to respond. She who was backwoods and self-taught and terribly conscious of the deficiencies of that; she who was lonely, opinionated, defiantly so if necessary (for that was the other side of her reticence, a tart outspokenness), was going into the Temple of Athens, where perhaps she had no right, was an interloper. Frightening.

  It was in this condition that she arrived at the Fieldses’. She had come to the right house. Annie Fields, that great “angel in the house” of literature, was so excited by the prospect of having her admired Rebecca there that her joy was infectious. “You never knew, did you, Annie,” Rebecca wrote later, “how downrightedly scared and lonesome I felt that night, and how your greeting took it all away.” In the sun of this genuine love and delight in her company, Rebecca bloomed.

  All through her Boston visit, she had the exhilarating experience of being her best self, without self-consciousness. No one seemed put off by directness, or participation, or interest, or seriousness. She was feted, dined, entertained, honored, appreciated, by the Brahmins, the Atlantic circle, the Areopagites. They found her intellectually impressive, witty, captivating; in one recorded instance, shockingly full blooded and direct, for she observed that women too, not only men, feel physical desire.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, “the Autocrat [of the Breakfast Table], to whom the whole country was paying homage,” was delighted to discover their mutual love for inscriptions in burying yards (“the strange bits of human history to be found or guessed at in them”) and took a day off to show her his favorite gravestones in Mount Auburn cemetery.*

  At an evening reception, Rebecca went over to talk with

  . . . a tall, thin young woman standing alone in a corner. She was plainly dressed, and had that watchful, defiant air with which the woman whose youth is slipping away is apt to face the world which has offered no place to her.

  She had wanted so much to meet her, she told Rebecca, that she had walked all the way home to Concord for her one decent dress. “ ‘I’m very poor’. . . she had once taken a place as a ‘second girl’ [maid].” It was Louisa May Alcott.*

  Before I met her I had known many women and girls who were fighting with poverty and loneliness, wondering why God had sent them into a life where apparently there was no place for them . . . soon after [Louisa] wrote her “Hospital Sketches.” Then she found her work and place in the world.

  There were rich hours talking with Annie of books, of others, of themselves. Rebecca discovered that her friend, whose gifted, dedicated expenditure of self had already made the Fieldses’ house a center of inspiration and hospitality for writers, herself hid a painfully shy need to write.**

  Concord was a different experience. Some profound, unrecorded hurt which she never forgave occurred to Rebecca there. It never healed, indeed cankered with the years, and had serious consequences to herself, her attitudes, her writing. The nature of it is implied in the way she writes more than forty years later of Bronson Alcott and of Emerson, in her guarded (and not necessarily reliable) reminiscences, Bits of Gossip, published in 1904:

  . . . the first peculiarity which struck an outsider [was] . . . that while they thought they were guiding the real world, they stood quite outside of it, and never would see it as it was. . . . Their views gave you the same sense of unreality, of having been taken, as Hawthorne said, at too long a range. . . . Something was lacking, some back-bone of fact. . . . To the eyes of an observer belonging to the commonplace world, they . . . walked and talked . . . always apart from humanity.

  She stayed with the Hawthornes at Wayside, Hawthorne who permitted almost no visitors now. “Here comes the Sage of Concord,” Hawthorne told her at breakfast early her very first morning. “He [Alcott] is anxious to know what kind of human beings come up from the back hills in Virginia.”

  Emerson came shortly thereafter. Her tongue was “dry with awe” (“I went to Concord, a young woman from the backwoods, firm in the belief that Emerson was the first of living men”). It loosened, after listening the entire morning, along with Emerson and Hawthorne,* to Alcott’s “orotund” sentences, his “paeans to the war . . . the armed angel which was wakening the nation to a lofty life unknown before.”

  I had just come up from the border where I had seen the actual war; the filthy spewings of it; the political jobbery in Union and Confederate camps; the malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks, and glutted by burning homes and outraged women, the chances in it, well improved on both sides, for brutish men to grow more brutish, and for honorable gentlemen to degenerate into thieves and sots. War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums.

  Rebecca found herself tartly, though tremblingly, saying substantially the above.

  This would-be seer who was talking of it, and the real seer who listened, knew no more of war as it was, than I had done [as a child] in my cherry-tree when I dreamed of bannered legions of crusaders debouching in the misty fields.

  Alcott’s orotund sentences went right on, till Hawthorne “rose lazily to his feet, and said quietly: ‘We cannot see that thing at so long a range. Let us go to dinner,’ and Mr. Alcott suddenly checked the droning flow of his prophecy and quickly led the way to the dining-room.”

  Her dislike for Alcott, “the vague, would-be prophet,” is unconcealed and sometimes vitriolic. She found Emerson’s deep respect for him “almost painful to see.”

  For all Emerson’s flattering and receptive attention to her, his “exquisite courtesy,” she felt he regarded her not as Rebecca Harding, writer, human being, but as some kind of specimen:

  He studied souls as a philologist does words, or an entomologist beetles. He approached each man with bent head and eager eyes. “What new thing shall I find here?” . . . He took from each man his drop of stored honey, and after that the man counted for no more to him than any other robbed bee.

  Hawthorne, by contrast, was the Boston feeling all over again, vivified by the happiness and sense of privilege of being near the revered writer who meant so much to her.

  There was one awkward evening though. Elizabeth Peabody, Hawthorne’s sister-in-law, seized the presence of the celebrated, mysterious author of Life in the Iron Mills as an occasion for a surprise party. “They’ve been here [back from Europe] two years,” she told Rebecca, as townspeople fil
tered in, “and nobody has met Mr. Hawthorne. People talk. It’s ridiculous! There’s no reason why Sophia should not go into society. So I just made an excuse of your visit to bring them in.”

  Hawthorne’s wife rescued him; he was permitted to escape. Rebecca understood, approved—but “I have not yet quite forgiven [Miss Elizabeth] the misery of that moment.”

  The next morning Hawthorne took Rebecca for a long walk; made a special point of showing her the Old Manse where he had lived when he first married; and then, perhaps at her request, they wandered through Sleepy Hollow cemetery. He was in high spirits. “Yes,” he said, surveying the surroundings, the hills and river below, “we New Englanders begin to enjoy ourselves—when we are dead.”

  They sat a long while in the deep grass and quiet beauty, the sense of communion strong between them. It was that bad time in Hawthorne’s life Van Wyck Brooks describes so affectingly:

  He had wasted away. . . and, hard as he tried to write, pulling down the blinds and locking his door, he could not bring his mind into focus. The novel became two novels, and the two became four. . . . [All] drifted in confusion through his mind, their outlines melting into one another. Even his theme eluded him. . . until he could scarcely bear to touch his blurred and meaningless manuscripts.*

  What kinship did he feel with this young writer beside him, for whom he had broken his seclusion? He had written greatly of the unpardonable sin, of irremediable evil within. She had written—in one instance close to greatly—of another kind of unpardonable sin, of an evil she believed was socially remediable. He was near the close of his work.** Her literary life was at the beginning. Or so it seemed.

  As we walked back, the mists gathered and the day darkened overhead. Hawthorne . . . grew suddenly silent, and before we reached home the cloud had settled down again upon him, and his steps lagged heavily.

  I left Concord that evening and never saw him again. He said good-by, hesitated shyly, and then, holding out his hand, said:—”I am sorry you are going away. It seems as if we had known you always.”

  With that accolade, she turned toward home.

  There was a stop in New York, where she stayed with the Frémonts. One Sunday she sat in an immense audience as an invited guest at Plymouth Church, where the most unusual of the tributes to her was paid. Henry Ward Beecher, that “huge, lumbering man,” foremost preacher of his day, had sat next to her at a dinner party, had listened to her tell of and sing certain old forgotten backwoods hymns. That morning, in her honor, the congregation sang, one by one, all of those hymns. “I shall never forget that morning.”

  In Philadelphia, the personal (and secret) reason for the journey from home waited: L. Clarke Davis. Their correspondence, begun with his admiration for Life in the Iron Mills a year before, continuing with the request that she become a contributor to Peterson’s, had deepened into intimacy—on his side, into courtship. He was attracted by what would have made most men shun her: her very achievement, seriousness, power; her directness and sardonic eye for sham; the evidence of a rich secret life.

  He, like her, was schooled in protective reticence. Freed in letters from the self-consciousness of outside selves, social situations, the dialogue of bodies, they had come to know each other in a way that their actual presence might have precluded. Now they wanted the presence.

  They were delighted by what they found. He liked her reticence with others. He liked her unvarnished, outspoken, intense. He liked her physically. It was reciprocal. By the time the week was over, they had agreed to marry.

  There is no record of when she told her family. For thirty-one years (except for those unknowns out of whom she wrote Lo, Hugh Wolfe, Holmes), they had been her emotional life. In the last years she had come closer and closer to her solitary, austere father. Bound to them as deeply as she was, she could not help but care what their reaction would be.

  At that time, a woman who had not married by the age of thirty-one had long ago ceased to be thought of as marriageable. There would be the flavor of something unnatural, vaguely shameful about it happening now. To Rebecca’s father, not yet completely recovered, the impending loss might be considered betrayal—so dependent had he become on her devotion and companionship. And both parents would naturally feel concern about the nature of the match.

  Clarke Davis was four years younger than Rebecca, without established situation or income. He had to work on various additional jobs (editing legal periodicals, reading for Peterson’s) to support himself while he clerked in a law office, preparing for the bar. How then could he responsibly marry? Furthermore, he was a declared abolitionist, and radical.

  The family secreted the knowledge among themselves. No public announcement of the betrothal was made. But Rebecca must have made her determination to marry Davis clear: it was understood that the marriage would eventually take place.

  Home again, Rebecca sat down almost at once to write—not romance, not another Civil War story (though the war was as agonizing to her as ever)*—but, out of the “wrong, all wrong” caring center from which Life in the Iron Mills came, an almost unendurable account of the misuse, the refusal of development to a blind slave child, “an infant Mozart,” a musical genius. “Blind Tom” appeared in the Atlantic in November 1862.

  Was there a Blind Tom? A “coal-black” child “of the lowest negro type, from which only field-hands can be made,” who never received instruction, yet played consummate counterpoint on the piano to music heard for the first time as he played; could reproduce perfectly from memory any music heard once—”intricate symphonies, Beethoven, Mendelssohn—intact in brilliancy and symmetry”; who, left to himself, composed “unknown, wild . . . harmonies which he had learned from no man. . . . one inarticulate, unanswered question of pain in all.”

  Was he paraded before audiences (“a more fruitful source of revenue than tobacco-fields”), subjected to exhausting tests, exhibited at the White House (“Being a slave . . . never was taken into a Free State; for the same reason his master refused advantageous offers from European managers.”)? And

  . . . that feature of the concerts which was the most painful . . . the moments when his master was talking [to the audience], and Tom was left to himself,—when a weary despair seemed to settle on the distorted face and the stubby little black fingers, wandering over the keys, spoke for Tom’s own caged soul within . . . all the pain and pathos of the world [in it].

  Was it so? Or is this fiction, the kind of fiction that is truth for the tearing possibility in it?*

  “You cannot help Tom, either,” she ends, addressing the North directly, revealing her consciousness of more than parlors during her stay there:

  He was in Richmond in May. But (do you hate the moral to a story?) in your own kitchen, in your own back-alley, there are spirits as beautiful, caged in forms as bestial, that you could set free, if you pleased . . . they are more to be pitied than Tom,—for they are dumb.

  Whatever transport there was in the writing of it, the small payment the Atlantic made was shock into a different reality. She set herself to concoct a serial, The Second Life, for Peterson’s, and wrote to Fields, appealing to him to make such writing unnecessary. Even anonymously, she told him, she did not want to write the thrillers, Gothics, mysteries, plot romances suitable for Peterson’s. She wanted to write only her best, for discriminating Atlantic audiences. But Peterson’s was now paying $300 and more a story, $1,000 and more for serials. Atlantic had paid $200 for the six-part Margret Howth, $400 for the book publication of it.

  As times are, I am not justified in refusing the higher prices . . . I thought that I could say to you as a friend . . . that I hope Mr. Ticknor and you will give as much for future articles as you can legitimately afford.

  She did not explain that “as times are” had to do with the economic necessities of a forthcoming marriage: hers. It was not until January, half a year after the betrothal, that the Fieldses were told in a letter to Annie, her closest (and only) woman friend:

 
It isn’t easy for me to tell you this I don’t know why. But you who are so happy in your married life will know how to ask for a blessing on mine. I want to tell you . . . of someone else, but it is harder than even to talk about myself. When you know him you won’t think much of me, in comparison. . . . Our marriage was to have been the first of the winter, but I had to defer it [because of family illness] until March the 5th, and . . . it will be strictly private. . . . Will you please . . . not to speak of this to anyone? No one here knows it except ourselves. . . . I never told you what my name would be—Davis. But I never had such trouble to write a letter before. O Annie, my summer days are coming now.

  My summer days are coming now.

  All that had been impressed on her from babyhood impelled her to the believing of it. “Love and marriage—a woman’s fulfillment.” “When you loved, you fulfilled the law of your woman’s nature.” You were no longer of those whom “God had thought unworthy of every woman’s right, to love and be loved.”

  My summer days are coming now.

  All that was passionate and loving and had had to be denied in her nature, never doubted it. “Nature vindicates her right, and I feel all Italy glowing beneath the Saxon crust.”* “The natural need to love and be loved.” Nature, God, Right; Need, Law, Fulfillment.

  And yet, and yet:

  Rebecca, writer, thirty-two, had known another kind of summer days, fulfilling another need and law of her nature, vindicating another kind of natural right. Where was their place to be?

  In “Paul Blecker,”* a mawkish story begun about the time of her letter to Annie, there is a girl (not otherwise like Rebecca), wanting marriage, children, and to use her “dumb power” in men’s world of achievement. She “is perpetually self-analyzing—in a hysteric clinging, embracing the chimera of the Women’s Rights prophets with her brain, and thrusting it aside with her heart.” But heart and brain are not separates. To attain the health of happiness, they must find harmony—not be split in a war within the being that must contain them both. Chimera is a monster only in myth; in actuality, it is a whole organism containing both female and male.