Emerson: The Mind on Fire

"I’m not sure I could say it surpasses them. Emerson is the topic of several excellent modern biographies. Among the first, Ralph L Rusk’s The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson , published in 1949, still holds up really well. Another, Gay Wilson Allen’s Waldo Emerson (1982), is tremendously strong. I should also mention Evelyn Barish’s The Roots of Prophecy (1989), a brilliant and deep dive into Emerson’s formative years. Still, I love Robert D Richardson’s book. His tone is warm, judicious and empathetic, but not overly so. In all his biographies—he wrote one on Thoreau , another on Emerson, and one about William James —he sets himself the task of tracing the evolution of a person’s mind. They’re all intellectual biographies, so part of his process is that he reads everything these people read. He basically goes through their own bookshelves, which could be the recipe for a very tedious book, at least in the wrong hands. But in all these cases, it turns out you can’t discuss the mental evolution without telling the life story as well, because they’re too thoroughly intertwined. So you get the life as well as the art. “Every day he’d walk to Mount Auburn Cemetery to see her grave. One time, he just dug it up” I also love the form of Richardson’s biographies, which is always the same: 100 short chapters. Funnily enough, as a graduate student, he really wanted to write a William James biography first, but didn’t consider himself up to the task. Apparently, he just thought, ‘Well, I’ll warm up by writing about Thoreau and Emerson. Because they’re bucolic simpletons, it’ll be much easier to do them first!’ But his dissertation advisor was W Jackson Bate, the great biographer of Samuel Johnson, who more or less told Richardson, ‘Modern people don’t have a lot of time to read, so you should do something in a short form.’ In response, he came up with 100 bite-sized chapters. Of course, these books aren’t lacking in intellectual fiber in any way—they’re long books. But in a biography often laser-focused on Emerson’s intellectual development, the short chapters give you breathing room. The tone is very beautiful. Also, the book includes one of the greatest final chapters ever. Instead of the customary deathbed scene, Richardson describes Emerson in his study at his house, at the end of his life, taking apart the fire at the end of the day. He did this every day; if the fire was still burning, he’d actually separate the logs to make it stop. That night, he finished his task, went upstairs, and never came down again—he died a few days later. It’s not at all a conventional way to end a biography, yet it’s thematically perfect: the book, after all, is called The Mind On Fire . That’s a very famous Emersonian moment. It’s still wild to contemplate. His wife had been dead almost a year, and every day he’d walk out to Mount Auburn Cemetery to see her grave. One time, he just dug it up. He doesn’t explain it in his journal at all; it’s just one sentence. Strangely—well, maybe not strangely—when his son Waldo’s remains were moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery about ten years after he died of scarlet fever, he opened that coffin as well. Richardson frames the incident as evidence of Emerson’s incredible phenomenological curiosity about the world, and I think that’s true. But there’s obviously some emotional freight there, as well. It’s striking. The death of Ellen, his first wife, and the death of his son, Waldo, were catastrophic for Emerson. Those were the deaths that really blighted his life, although he suffered through the deaths of many other loved ones. They reshaped and reconfigured his personality. Emerson certainly was among the best-read people of his time. And we’re talking about an era of insanely voracious readers, who aspired to absorb everything of worth that was being written: history, poetry, philosophy, theology, the whole nine yards. Hilariously, his father, the Reverend William Emerson, complained that Ralph was a rather poor scholar—when he was two years old! Come on! Give the kid a break. But the amount of Shakespeare, the classics, and the Bible in which children were marinated during this period is astonishing to us today, I think. Emerson also came from seven generations of ministers, which entailed being schooled from the moment you could hold a book. As soon as you could read, you read very serious material. Of course, you were taught to read Latin and Greek in school as a child. Emerson had a good grasp of those two literatures, both in translation and in the original. He also read French, and taught himself German, mostly in order to read Goethe in the original. As he grew older, he delved deeply into Eastern literature and Eastern sacred writings, too. Coleridge was another one of these people who tried to read everything —the whole panoply of contemporary literature, including writings on science and philosophy, back when a person could still absorb it all. This was right before the age of specialization started. Incidentally, Emerson loved Coleridge. He met Coleridge and William Wordsworth during his first trip to England. Coleridge was not at the top of his form anymore: he was a stubby old man with snuff all over his collar, but still a splendid rambler and fascinating person. “His father complained that he was a poor scholar when he was two years old” Everything Emerson read was potential metaphorical material. You find an enormous amount of scientific metaphor in his work, along with contemporary as well as ancient history. Everything is grist for the mill. I think it makes his writing incredibly rich, though the sheer range of material makes the biographer’s task more difficult. The one thing Emerson didn’t read a lot of was fiction. Many of the Transcendentalists seemed markedly less interested in fiction. Perhaps they just thought it was too frivolous. Emerson had an appreciation for Walter Scott early on, and he did go hear Dickens read in Boston, but aside from that, fiction was something of a dead spot for him. He basically writes all of his great work during this period. From adolescence, Emerson always wanted to be a writer, but in his family, everyone was lobbied to become a minister. It was the family business. You came from six or seven generations of ministers; that’s what you were supposed to do. Emerson really resisted it. Nonetheless, he reluctantly went off to Harvard Divinity School, was ordained in 1829, and served as a Unitarian minister for three years. Meanwhile, he married, and his Ellen wife died of tuberculosis at the age of 19. Her death shattered Emerson, and a huge transformation took place. He stepped down from the pulpit. He no longer felt that the institutional church was a source of enlightenment. As all good writers do, he had something like a nervous breakdown. (I’m just waiting for mine.) As a result, he went to Europe for the first time, which proved to be a tremendously rejuvenating trip. He met Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle (beginning what would become a crucial friendship for both of them). And by the time he sailed back from Liverpool, he had an outline of Nature in his pocket. “Emerson had become a maker of secular sermons” Returning to Concord, he took up residence in the Old Manse, which his grandfather had built—and there he wrote Nature in full. He was a rejuvenated and transformed person. He was going to be a writer now. Sometimes, he still preached on a freelance basis, though he never had a congregation of his own again. But Emerson had become a maker of secular sermons: a lecturer and an essay writer. All of that energy was shunted into a secular approach to wisdom, rather than an institutional one. Now he began his hot streak as a writer and a lecturer. Nature , published in 1836, was his first book. After that, he produced a series of writings that first were lectures and later were transformed into essays. He published both the first and second series of Essays in the 1840s, and subsequently wrote Representative Men (1850) and English Traits (1856). The Conduct of Life , which came out in 1860, was more or less his last book, although two more barrel-scraping collections were assembled later on. But really, his great florescence was from the mid-1830s into the late 1850s. The fact is he lived until 1882—an extraordinarily long life for the period. He was born in 1803 in Boston, in a post-Revolutionary moment. He lived through the Civil War, the Gilded Age, and right into the Industrial Age. He did, however, have a long retreat into dementia toward the end of his life. He’s often cited in writings about Alzheimer’s, it turns out, because his decline was so heavily documented: as a famous public figure, he was watched very closely. His memory went, and obviously his command of language did, too. It’s very poignant to see someone who lived by the word have his command of it gradually subtracted. Attending Longfellow’s funeral with his daughter Ellen, he said to her as they stood by the coffin, “Who is this sleeper?” That’s a good point, actually. Toward the end, he hung on. He persisted in his lecturing career even when he was no longer cogent. Eventually his daughter Ellen, who’d go with him to public appearances, started to sew the pages of his lectures together, because she knew that if he dropped them, he’d have utterly no idea where to start again. But those earlier decades, 1830 to 1860, were incredibly productive. He wrote his greatest work. I would argue that he was a force field of influence for every considerable American writer of that era. Some ran toward him and some ran away from him, but you couldn’t avoid him. Thoreau was his disciple, who you could say outstripped him in some ways. And there was Whitman, obviously, who once noted: “I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.” They were completely different personalities, of course. But Whitman sent Emerson Leaves of Grass , and Emerson immediately recognized Whitman as the great poet, the real thing that America had been looking for. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He sent him this famous letter saying, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” Hilariously, Whitman used it as a blurb without Emerson’s permission. Not only did he use it as a blurb, but he also stamped it in gold on the spine of the next edition of Leaves of Grass . In the annals of self-promotion, it’s a phenomenal moment—one that Emerson was not happy about. Then, there were people who were not direct disciples. Emily Dickinson, for instance, loved Emerson’s work and was very influenced by him. I think if only Emerson could have seen Dickinson’s poetry, he would’ve loved it. He was actually in Amherst while Dickinson was alive, but she refused to come outside and meet him. This is what happens when you’re agoraphobic: you miss out on some great things. Even people like Melville (who I think was very mixed about him and thought he was kind of nuts) and Hawthorne (who also lived in Concord) were influenced by Emerson. Both thought he was a great man, but were skeptical of the perceived looniness and vapours of Transcendentalism. Still, they’re all responding to him in one way or another. His influence reverberates as far out as William James, who was literally Emerson’s godson, not simply his spiritual one. Emerson was very friendly with Henry James, Sr., who was kind of a Swedenborgian nut and self-styled philosopher. Not long after the death of his son Waldo, Emerson was at the James household in Washington Square in New York, and Henry James Sr. asked him to come upstairs and meet his new baby. And there was the infant William James! (A funny idea all by itself.) James asked Emerson if he would be the godfather. I don’t know what Emerson’s duties as godfather were, but William James was later very much in dialogue with Emerson. The point is, the work of those two or three crucial decades had a giant ripple effect on everything that came after in American literature."