Emerson Among the Eccentrics

Emerson among the Eccentrics is a biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his cadre of Transcendentalist friends. It’s one of the better non-fiction books I’ve read in a while.

Emerson among the Eccentrics had been on my reading list since reading reviews of the book 1996. I had always wondered about the historical context of those writers. Emerson and Thoreau wrote self-confidently about self-reliance; where did they fit, economically and socially? Hawthorne’s allegories were set in the bleak Puritan past; was his life like the distilled misery of his work?
Having lived in the Boston area for a dozen years, I also wondered about cultural geography; were there aspects of 19th century Concord that could be detected in late 20th Century Cambridge/Somerville?
Concord Outdoors
Cousins of the English Romantics who traipsed through the English countryside at the dawn of the industrial revolution, the Transcendentalists saw divine spirit in the hills and streams. For recreation, they strolled in the woods of Concord, spent weekends on Monadnock, took strenous vacations climbing Katahdin in Maine. My friends in Boston, inveterate weekend hikers, were their direct spiritual descendents, though REI and AMC have commodified the experience in the interim.
19th century Concord was more civilized than Thoreau’s sketches but much more rural than contemporary suburbia. The transcendentalist crew kept serious gardens, where they grew a substantial amount of their fruit and vegetables. Planting and weeding and harvesting, pests, storms and freezes play a notable role in personal journals; though various efforts at full-time farming, such as the Fruitlands commune, and the Alcott’s farm failed notoriously.
Intellectuals in their native habitat
As Digby Baltzell wrote in the classic Puritan Boston, Quaker Philadelphia, New England had a strong intellectual tradition. The cultural tradition — and contrast with the Mid-Atlantic states — was clear to me when I moved to the Boston area after having grown up in suburban Philadelphia.
Mid-19th century America hadn’t yet developed the culture of professionalism that would dominate the intellectual classes in future generations. The parents of the Transcendentalists were ministers, teachers, lawyers; some sailors and factory owners. Their children went into medicine, engineering, and business management.
Colleges trained young men for the ministry and emerging professions; there were no degree programs in history and literature; Germany was starting to pioneer the structure of modern academia.
The Transcendentalists descended from a Puritan age, where preachers held crowds spellbound with hours-long sermons. After leaving the Unitarian ministry, Emerson made a living as a secular preacher, traveling the country on lecture tours. The Transcendentalists grew their own journals for a while, then found publishers in New York and Boston, in emerging literary venues like the Atlantic.
There were distinctive 19th century institutions, the Atheneum (private library) and the Lyceum (private adult education club), that provided venues for amateur and semiprofessional teaching and learning. Intellectuals like Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott supplemented their income with this sort of private education.
So, New England intellectuals who make a living on the public lecture circuit, writing essays and occasional books, are working in a local tradition.
The transcendentalists seem to have existed in a mileu of genteel financial struggle. Their social equals were judges, politicians, and business people. They occupied a snootier social rung than farmers and tradepeople, but the Concord crowd seemed less exclusive than than the famous jingle, either because they were less snobby, or because Carlos Baker doesn’t notice, perhaps because the Brahmins still ran the show without competition from the Irish, Jews, and other uncouth immigrant populations.
It was difficult to make a living as an intellectual and writer, but it was possible. Carlos Baker shares Emerson’s bias about responsibility for making a living and taking care of family and friends, and implicity compares the transcendentalists along this axis.
Emerson was able to a decent living as free lance writer and public speaker. Family money helped, but wasn’t enough to live on alone.
Hawthorne struggled to make a living as a writer, wrote children’s books and took various white-collar jobs or the money, and occasionally assistance from friends to make ends meet, finding financial success as a novelist later in life. Bronson Alcott (Louisa May Alcott’s father) was a dreamer and a professional conversationalist who never had quite enough practical skills to make a living.
While Thoreau, in Baker’s narrative, is less of a idler than the self-created myth, Ellery Channing, really does come off as a slacker. Channing frequently left jobs at random times, took vacations when his wife was pregnant, and didn’t fulfill his early literary promise either.
For talented women, the gates weren’t open wide, but they were open. Margaret Fuller and Louisa May Alcott supported themselves as writers and editors.
Social idealism
The social idealism of the New England intellectuals, who advocated abolition, women’s suffrage, nature worship, and various sorts of utopian living, of course, has a direct line of descent through various generations of liberal thought and practice, including John Muir’s environmentalism, beat slackerism, and 60s civil rights activism and communal experiments.
The earnest idealism of the next generation New England social reformers was lampooned in Henry James The Bostonians. The spiritual descendents of the transcendentalists are still earnestly planning social reform.
The Puritan-descended Transcendentalists seemed (at least in Baker’s treatment) to err in their sexual experiments on the side of celibacy rather than libertinism. Emerson extended friendship to the female intellectuals of the circle, and kept those relationships platonic (despite the occasional jealousy of his wife.) Nathaniel Hawthorne contrasted liberating passion to Puritan moralism; but was married and happily monogomous in life.
Thoreau was rebuffed in one proposal of marriage, declined another proposal, and had emotional friendships with men, but there’s no evidence he was anything but celibate.
Margaret Fuller had extravagant crushes on Emerson, and various other friends of both genders, but was persistently rebuffed, until her marriage, in her late-30s to an Italian petty nobleman. Fuller had some sort of physical relationship with one suitor in her 30s, and conceived a child with her Italian lover before they married (it is not completely clear whether they ever had a ceremony); but they were accepted as married by their peers. Exceedingly tame, by Byronic standards.
Whitman, who met the New England crew, frequented a Bohemian circle in New York, and a working class gay community, with norms rather different from the chaste New Englanders.
Differences
The mid-19th Century is on the far side of the chasm opened by modern medicine and modern technology. Emerson lost a young son to scarlet fever; Ellen, Emerson’s first wife and Thoreau both died of tuberculosis; people were sick often, early death was common. Louisa May Alcott’s health was ruined by the mercury treatments given to cure typhoid; calomel may have been part cause of Lydian Emerson’s lifelong invalidism.
The train came to Concord in the middle of the century, replacing the stage coach to Boston. Train travel allowed Emerson to criss-cross the country on lecture tours. The pace of life was faster than the revolutionary era, when it took weeks for letters to cross the US, and months to cross the Atlantic; but much slower than today, when Concord is a suburb of Boston; email and phone calls bridge distance instantly. The slower pace of life facilitated hospitality and leisure travel. Friends visited for weeks or months. Vacations lasted months (if you had money, and could afford vacation).
In summary; traces of Emerson’s New England could be seen in the New England I lived in, though has the world changed tremendously.
The characters
Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” was a spiritual concept; it meant that a person should find and trust the divine spark within. Despite occasional rhetoric about solitude, Emerson was enmeshed in a world of family, friends, and work. He supported his mother, invalid wife, children, and mentally ill brother with his writing and public lecturing. He encouraged his friends to settle in Concord, and socialized often with his friends in town, and frequent visitors.
Emerson’s sociable yet distant demeanor troubled the people in his life. His first wife died young of tuberculosis; his second wife and closest friends complained that he was always somewhat aloof. Emerson maintained his trademark optimism despite experience of suffering; two brothers, his beloved first wife, youngest son died young. Emerson’s optimism contrasted oddly with the chronic illness and depression of his second wife, Lydian.
Thoreau comes across more favorably than the Marxist stereotype of an upper-class slacker. Thoreau was the steward of the Emerson household, managing repairs, tradespeople, orchards, gardens, and child care. (The house manager role was taken over, after Thoreau’s death, by Ellen Emerson, the daughter of Ralph Waldo and Lydian.) He did carpentry, surveying, teaching, and gardening for cash and calories, wrote regularly and carefully, and kept his needs small enough to be met by his slim income.
Thoreau’s cottage in the woods near Walden pond was just a couple of miles from the Concord center of town. He had a reputation as being somewhat brusque and awkward, but maintained long friendships with Emerson, Fuller, Channing, and the other members of the transcendentalist clan. Even in the years in the cottage, he was infinitely more socialized than, say, Ted Kaszinski.
Margaret Fuller, one of the book’s livelier characters, was new to me. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville were required reading in school; Margaret Fuller wasn’t in the canon, though she was a leading figure in the transcendentalist circle. She was editor of the Dial, the short-lived but influential Transcendentalist publication, and was hired by Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune as the first book-reviewer in the US. Her peers thought she was brilliant, though it is hard to say why without knowing her work. Her passionate declarations of love embarrassed her restrained friends of both sexes, and Carlos Baker too.
Hawthorne in life was extremely shy, but (by the evidence in this book at least), happily married, though harried by chronic difficulties in making a living as a writer. His private writing quoted in the book was delightfully direct by 19th century standards, and funny, too. Biographical writing that portrays Hawthorne purely as a miserable neurotic take Hawthorne out of context, and underestimates the artistry in his work.
Emerson among the Eccentrics?
I don’t know whether the the title was written by the book’s author or the publisher. Baker’s sketches reveal varying levels of mental stability, economic sufficiency, social responsibility, and political activity among the transcendental crowd.
But the portrait sketches of Emerson and his friends don’t seem to be primarily about eccentricity to me. Unlike, say, the writings of Henry James, Baker doesn’t provide a ground of bourgeois “normality” to show off the oddness of these intellectual idealists; nor does he have the squeamish ambivalence about the intellectual role found in James and the later Brahmin descendant, Henry Adams.
The book reveals the texture of daily life for Emerson and his friends, and places their life and work in a lively social, cultural, and political context. If you have any curiousity about the time and people, the book is well worth reading.