Can an eyeball have lovers?

‘Yesterday night at fifteen minutes after eight my little Waldo ended his life.’ He gave up ‘his little innocent breath like a bird’. It is easy to dismiss Emerson as a faded sage, whose vaporous hymns to nature or self-reliance seem less vital than the radical provocations of his friends Whitman and Thoreau. Yet there is nothing sepia about the words he scratched into his journal after the death of his five-year-old son in January 1842. ‘What he looked upon is better, what he looked not upon is insignificant.’ ‘Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.’ Fifteen years later, when Waldo’s remains were disinterred and moved to a new plot in Sleepy Hollow cemetery, Emerson opened the coffin and looked inside. He wrote and said nothing about what he saw there.

Eventually he found words for the weirdness as well as the pain of mourning. Two years after Waldo’s death, Emerson wrote in the essay ‘Experience’ that grief was ‘shallow’. It ‘plays about the surface and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which, we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers’. In Waldo, he had ‘lost a beautiful estate, – no more. I cannot get it nearer to me.’ His fading agony was a frustration. He had lost his loss, which ‘leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.’ Emerson wanted readers to stumble over the Latinism that punctuates this numbed passage. James Marcus tells us that it is a botanical term for the part of a plant that is easily shed as it develops. His zingy, empathetic portrait of Emerson grounds our understanding of his writing – perhaps even his wisdom – in his experience of loss. It often comes back to this essay’s claim that grief ‘will make us idealists’. We somehow construct the world that we experience; we see reality only through the ‘distorting lenses’ of our beliefs and moods. The mourner’s memories, like the botanist’s tags, can never quite fix the ‘evanescence and lubricity of all objects’.

Marcus is just the latest of Emerson’s devotees to complain that Americans have got him all wrong. As early as 1897, the radical John Jay Chapman presented him as a fellow iconoclast who had been miscast as an apologist for American selfishness, ‘embalmed in amber by the very forces he braved’. The tendency of biographers to make their own Emersons means that some academics dislike the biographical criticism of his writings. They argue that to value them as the expression of an endearing personality ducks their strangeness and contradictions. This Emerson does come to resemble Marcus at times – a rueful, amused observer of America’s forceful vulgarities, who reflects on the mental discipline required to save its democracy. Marcus skips bits of Emerson’s life that bore or disappoint him. Yet his subject would have defended such whimsical presentism as the ‘creative reading’ without which no ‘creative writing’ is possible. He recommended the student to ‘read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary’. Marcus offers a reading of Emerson’s texts as a commentary on the emotional and political uncertainties of not just his life, but of ours.

‘He draws his rents from rage and pain,’ Emerson once wrote of ‘the writer’, but more narrowly of himself. Born in 1803, he was one of five brothers expected to emulate their father, who was the latest of many Emersons to serve as a Protestant minister in Boston. Mental illness, crises of faith and sudden death scuppered these hopes. Tuberculosis nearly did for Emerson, who had to interrupt his studies at Harvard Divinity School after his eyes became infected and surgeons pierced his corneas. After graduation, he went to Florida to convalesce on a diet of oranges, but the gothic frailties of his family continued to weigh on him. His beacon in adolescence was his aunt Mary, who liked to travel in her burial shroud (she wore out several of them before she died). Her religion was pietist and mystical, but Harvard drilled Emerson in his father’s Unitarianism, a rising theological school that rejected belief in Christ’s divinity as an unscriptural superstition – all the more important, therefore, to emulate his perfect humanity. This blend of scepticism and devotion caused Emerson’s friend Thomas Carlyle to dismiss Unitarians as ‘halfway house characters’ who deserve the ‘bat fate: to be killed among the rats as a bird, among the birds as a rat’.

Emerson nested comfortably among the bats at first. He became minister of Boston’s historic Second Church and in 1829 married the poetic, frail Ellen Tucker, who joked that a blood spot could serve as her consumptive family’s coat of arms. Her death from tuberculosis sixteen months into the marriage sank Emerson’s clerical career and began his writing life. His grief was as macabre as it was protracted: a year or so after her death, he had her coffin dug up so that he could see her face. But it also led him to the idealist rejection of Anglo-American empiricism; his position soon became known (derisively) as transcendentalism. Marcus, who skates over the detail of Emerson’s vast reading, notes that he knew all about Kant and Coleridge, transcendentalism’s lodestars. Yet he argues that it was Ellen’s death that brought home to him the ‘occult relation’ between the mind and nature, by disrupting it. Someone who has ‘just lost by death a dear friend’ feels ‘a kind of contempt of the landscape’, Emerson noted in his first book, Nature (1836). He had written it after a restorative trip to Europe. The taxonomies of molluscs and dead birds he saw in the Museum of Natural History in Paris deepened his sense of the ‘radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts’.

Before heading to Europe, Emerson had left his church after a disagreement about his refusal to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. The Eucharist was already a diminished rite in Unitarian churches, where it involved politely commemorating Christ rather than consuming his body. Marcus suggests that Ellen’s death had turned him not just against ‘particular forms’ in religion, but against pledging faith in any one person. The sermon in which he announced his rebellion protested that the ‘noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus’ was unnecessary because ‘the soul knows no persons’ and ‘invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe’. Emerson later coined a metaphor to explain this cosmic self-emptying, which his brush with sight loss made all the more resonant: in Nature, he described the way the solitary walker becomes a ‘transparent eyeball’, pervaded by the landscape it perceived. In such fugitive raptures, an individual’s experience is no longer personal to them, but universal – it reveals the way all minds are configured to grasp reality. At a stroke, Emerson abolished the need for mediatory religion. God became just a fancy word for this homology between self and world.

When he unveiled these heresies in an address at Harvard Divinity School, he kicked up a mild furore. Unitarians denounced him, invitations to deliver sermons dried up and he gradually subsided from a reverend to a mister. That left him needing a new pulpit in which he could ‘convert life into truth’ and make a living. He found it in the lyceums – lecture halls that were becoming hugely popular in New England. Their nominal aim was instruction, but as with podcasts today they usefully filled the dead air of modern life. Their committees initially asked local worthies to speak for free, but soon tempted speakers with honorariums. Emerson topped their star system. Over the next half century, he delivered around fifteen hundred lectures, on itineraries he planned himself. For months at a time he rode the railways, traversed frozen rivers on foot and holed up in grim hotels. He crossed the Mississippi, the Appalachians and the Atlantic, by steamer to Liverpool. Lancashire became the heartland of his celebrity.

Lyceums dictated not just Emerson’s topics – ‘History’, ‘Self-Reliance’, ‘Politics’ – but the way he tackled them. Lectures are performances unified less by argument than by the charisma of the speaker. Many of those who heard Emerson retained a memory of his baritone or the squeak of his boots rather than his thesis. With no gift for speaking extempore, he manufactured lectures from his journals – a record of his reading and experiences that he had started in adolescence. By 1839 he had already filled a hundred notebooks. By producing a master index to his journals, which was already four hundred pages long by 1847, he could mine his corpus, assembling passages in response to a title prompt. He altered as he shuffled, sometimes on the podium itself, cutting out linking clauses for a mysterious swing. Even more condensation and juxtaposition turned his lectures into essays. The aim was to make every sentence a saying, an ‘infinitely repellent particle’. Marcus tactfully calls the result ‘tough sledding’. When I read through the first and second series of Essays (1841, 1844), I found myself putting them down between paragraphs, then within paragraphs. Rebarbative words sent me to the dictionary. Maxims led nowhere or twisted back on themselves, like the stairs in the Piranesi engravings that Emerson hung in his study.

He could write fluently when he felt like it. English Traits (1856) turned the observations of a lecture tour into a saturnine panorama of an artificial island, a sooty garden crammed with the loot of empire. It was because he valued ‘provocation’ over ‘instruction’ that he made the essays almost unreadable. He wanted to sting his readers into self-reliance – into realising that the truth was in themselves, not books. A ‘nation of men will for the first time exist’ when ‘each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men,’ Emerson said in an 1837 commencement address at Harvard College. This address later became known as a point of origin for American letters, a democratic revolt against European high culture that soon bore the portentous title ‘The American Scholar’. Yet Emerson encountered the superstitious craving for authority in Europe too. It was especially embarrassing when he was asked to be Moses: as he boarded ship to return to Boston in 1848, Arthur Hugh Clough wailed for help in escaping the spiritual desert into which Carlyle had led them. He deflected Clough with a joke, placing his hands on him and ordaining him ‘bishop of all England’.

The convolutions of Emerson’s prose – not to mention his riddling poems – replicate the darting transitions of his thought. ‘Nominalist and Realist’, an essay from the second series, lists the ‘wild absurdities’ that result from the ‘monstrous’ marriage between a mind and the intractable stuff on which it works. ‘Speech is better than silence; silence is better than speech; – All things are in contact; every atom has a sphere of repulsion; – Things are, and are not, at the same time, and the like.’ There was no getting away from ‘this old Two Face, creator-creature, mind-matter, right-wrong, of which every proposition may be affirmed or denied’. These stuttered antinomies capture his ping-pong between a bodiless idealism and a wry admission that nature ‘will not be Buddhist’ and ‘rushes into persons’. The gratuitousness of nature and the stubbornness of other people are no bad thing. They get us out of our heads; they stop us from classifying the world to death. In the justly celebrated essay ‘Circles’ from the first series, Emerson described the consumption of ‘opium and alcohol’ as the unhealthy expression of a healthy desire ‘to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why’ and so to let in what is new. Evoking the mind’s awareness of its own fallibility in the manner of his hero, Michel de Montaigne, he claimed that ‘I simply experiment’ as ‘an endless seeker’.

This scepticism means we should discount Emerson’s tendency to present himself as merely a euphoric stenographer of the natural world. His rhapsodies almost persuaded Carlyle to flee London, the ‘accursed lazar house of quacks and blockheads and sin and misery’ for ‘the backwoods, with a rifle in my hand, God’s sky over my head’. Yet he resembled most North Americans in being a firmly suburban man who visited the wilderness only when it was handy to do so. Concord, where he settled in a house on the turnpike road to Cambridge, was an industrial village that soon got a railway line to Boston. He tempted Carlyle to come and see the woodland he bought on Walden Pond by noting it was only two weeks from Cheyne Row by steamer and train. (Like many who hate London, Carlyle was reluctant to leave it and didn’t go.)

Emerson knew that you can’t flee to the wilderness, because it is a human creation. The backwoods had grown only after his ancestors had cut down the old growth forest and largely eradicated its Indigenous inhabitants. People hew nature not just with axes, but with language. ‘The world is a Dancer; it is a Rosary; it is a Torrent; it is a Boat; a Mist: a Spider’s Snare; it is what you will,’ he wrote in his journal. ‘Swifter than light the World converts itself into that thing you name and all things find their right place under this new and capricious classification.’ When writers set out to report on nature, it was vital that they recognised the history and politics baked into the words they used. One reason for Americans to do so with particular care was that they lived in a society that extenuated slavery by claiming it was natural.

The way​ an impersonal mind relates to other people was an even thornier problem than its relation to nature. Can a transparent eyeball have lovers, or even friends? Emerson joked in ‘Experience’ that we should treat men and women ‘as if they were real: perhaps they are.’ But it would be wrong to call him emotionally stunted. In 1835, he remarried and set up home with Lydia Jackson in Concord. They had three children and he became a keen if inept grower of apples and pears (horticulturalists took his garden as a case study in how not to do it). This clubbable, carnivorous man chided Thoreau for his indifference to social and bodily pleasures. After his death in 1882, Emerson’s funeral eulogy disingenuously ascribed to ‘one of his friends’ the quip that you could no more grasp Thoreau’s arm than ‘the arm of an elm tree’. Yet Emerson’s acquaintances said the same of him. Jane Welsh Carlyle said he had no nature, just ‘a sort of theoretic geniality’. Her husband found him to be ‘elevated but without breadth, as a willow is, as a reed is’. When John Ruskin met him, he was sorry to find that he was ‘only a sort of cobweb over Carlyle’.

The gulf between Emerson and other people began at home. Lydia sometimes teased but just as often cosseted his transcendental solipsism. She agreed to rename herself Lidian, which he thought sounded better, and to name their first daughter after his dead wife. Emerson’s nickname for her was ‘Asia’ – a loving way of saying he couldn’t be bothered to plumb her mysteries. Lidian was soon taking to her bed for long periods, while Emerson made remarks in his journal about the futility of marriages that had run their course. He was tempted by Fourierist dreams of replacing monogamy with a web of frictionless couplings, but much preferred talking about sex to doing it. He imagined intercourse with Margaret Fuller and the other alluring women he met in Concord taking place without the ‘help of organs’. They tired of his indecision and married other people.

Only Carlyle, ‘infinitely solitary’ in London, understood such loneliness. But he went sour in isolation and told Emerson that writers should enter society solely to attack ‘the Vile Pythons of this Mud World’ with ‘sun arrows’ and ‘red hot pokers’. Although the two men drifted apart over Carlyle’s racism and ‘musket worship’, later 19th-century readers often detected in Emerson the same contempt for democratic banalities. He could sound Carlylean at times, describing institutions as the ‘lengthened shadows’ of great men or ‘enormous populations’ as ‘hills of ants, or of fleas – the more, the worse’. ‘Scholars’ – his word for intellectuals – cheapened themselves by trying to sway democracies. Emerson’s first venture into politics merely depressed him. In 1838, he wrote a public letter to President Van Buren, warning him against the violent eviction of the Cherokee nation from their lands. Yet the very text conceded its pointlessness: he confessed that his neighbours thought it a ‘burlesque’ plan to ask a Democratic president not to steal or kill.

Our flag emoji politics would have dismayed Emerson. For ‘intellectual persons’ to employ catchphrases or join campaigns meant ‘leaving your work’ – betraying yourself by taking ‘ideas from others’. This was why in 1840 he rejected George Ripley’s invitation to join his phalanstery at Brook Farm. It wasn’t just that he doubted the feasibility of socialism: even trying it was the coward’s way out. His stuffy house had become a ‘prison’, but Brook Farm would just be a ‘prison a little larger’ and ‘I wish to break all prisons.’ To flinch from herd thinking was no self-indulgence because, he wrote in an essay of 1838, the ‘spontaneous teaching of the cultivated soul, in its secret experience and meditation’ could be more powerful than armies. Since all minds are in the end the same, Emerson’s powerful souls could learn from the great people of the past. Carlyle worshipped heroes because they delivered us from debased parliamentarianism. Emerson’s Representative Men (1850) found a different use for Napoleon or Goethe: as the ‘collyrium’ (eye medicine: corneas were never far from his mind) that enabled us to see ‘new possibilities’ for democracy.

The question of how intellectuals should respond to the South’s efforts to entrench and expand slavery throughout the US has always seemed a decisive test of the practical bearing of this solitary politics. Was self-reliance just a cover for dreamy quietism? The belated publication of Emerson’s anti-slavery writings in 2002 established that he took an honourable part in abolitionism. The remark on ‘leaving your work’, delivered to a packed New York Tabernacle in 1854, was a rhetorical feint, suggesting that the Fugitive Slave Act must be truly monstrous if he had needed to quit the woods to denounce it. Marcus makes clear however that Emerson was slower to move on abolitionism than Lidian or many Unitarian ministers. He was incurious about his family’s past entanglement with slavery. Although he celebrated Concord’s militiamen for firing the ‘shot heard around the world’ that started the War of Independence, his grandmother Phebe remembered that day differently. She had fainted when a Black man burst, axe in hand, into her bedroom: it was Frank, their loyal slave, warning her that the redcoats were on the way.

Perhaps it was not just a distaste for activists but what he described to an acquaintance as his ‘mild natural colourphobia’ that explained why he didn’t speak against slavery till the mid-1840s. His universalism sat oddly with a growing faith in ‘blood’ as an explanation for the fate of peoples. The Anglo-Saxon origins of the English explained their greatness. Freedom coursed only through Teutonic veins. It was not primarily the human toll of slavery that offended Emerson but the fact it was offensive to the ‘genius of the Saxon race’. Although many transatlantic abolitionists harboured dismissive attitudes towards Blacks, it is startling that Emerson’s reflections on slavery began with genocidal musings: he confided to his journal that ‘so inferior a race’ as the African ‘must perish shortly like the poor Indians’. His insistence that Africans would be ‘exterminated’ if ‘feeble’, but saved if they could make themselves ‘an indispensable element of a new and coming civilisation’, was a twisted expression of self-reliance. But it did lead him to see slave revolts as more important in ending slavery than the speechifying of philanthropists. He quipped that the British had emancipated slaves in their empire because, ‘like other robbers, they could not sleep in security.’

Violence worked. The Emersons became extremists who were prepared to see the end of the Union before the moral contamination of New England. They abhorred the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which criminalised Northerners who refused to assist in returning escaped slaves. On 4 July 1855, Lidian decorated their fence posts in black crepe in protest. Emerson revered the puritan guerrilla John Brown and approved of his saying that he would rather ‘a generation’ died a ‘violent death’ than see the Declaration of Independence or the Golden Rule of moral reciprocity violated. Shortly after the outbreak of war in 1861 and following early reverses for the Northern states, Emerson wrote to the parents of a dead colonel that ‘one whole generation might well consent to perish, if by their fall, political liberty and clean and just life could be made sure to the generations that follow.’ At the unveiling of Concord’s monument to its dead, he said that war had unveiled the ‘secret architecture of things’. Death, once more, makes us idealists.

Emerson’s embrace of a libertarian nationalism finally established him as a great American. Yet it also marked the beginning of his strange defeat. There was still much to do and Marcus dutifully reports on it. He became a grandfather. In 1871, his son’s wealthy father-in-law took him to California, where he named a giant sequoia after Samoset, the first Native American to encounter the Puritan colonists of New England. After a fire damaged his home, Emerson visited Egypt to recuperate. No book of ‘Egyptian Traits’ followed, because Alzheimer’s had begun to rob him of memories, then words. By the early 1870s, he could barely speak to the admirers who flocked to Concord. He became a brand all the same. It helped that during the 1850s Emerson’s writing had moved on from high-wire transcendentalism. The Conduct of Life (1860), his last and most popular volume of essays, was soft on the merchant princes of Boston and laboured the virtues of duty and self-improvement. Publishers began to issue collections of his sayings, encouraging a view of self-reliance as a life-hack fitting people to the exigencies of the market rather than a rebel call. Long before his death in 1882, the embalming of Emerson had begun.

Marcus likes popping up in his own text. When he does so, it is often to report signs that the US did not develop as Emerson might have wanted. Unitarianism is a spent force, but so is transcendentalism. Instead, megachurch pastors deliver their lucrative spiels on TV. Global warming means that Walden Pond is snow-free in December. Sleepy Hollow has a parking lot and resounds to the slamming of SUV doors. Yet Emerson found few truths more vivifying than the reflection that ‘the results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable.’ The only certainty was ‘transition’; ‘the coming only is sacred.’ Marcus’s anxieties over the future of American culture cause him to present Emerson as more invested in the US than he was. He never expected his voice to prevail in ‘this our talking America’. But just as he devoured books of every time and place, so he hoped to spring minds anywhere and everywhere from their prisons. Books must not be ‘sepulchres’, he once told his journal, but ‘gardens and nurseries’ of new language.