One First Love

"It’s a bit of an outlier because it’s not by Emerson at all, but I find it tremendously moving. It’s a book you have to read to understand him, even though there’s hardly a word by him in it. To make a short story even shorter: Emerson met Ellen Tucker when she was 16 and he was 24. He’d gone to Concord, New Hampshire (not Massachusetts) to preach and encountered this beautiful and scintillating teenager. He went back to Concord to preach some more; they got engaged when she was 17; they got married. “Miniature portraits were the FaceTime of the era: they’d open them up and look at each other’s faces” Ellen already had tuberculosis when they met. What you have to understand is that tuberculosis was the greatest killer of adults in the 19th century aside from war. It was a great terror—it was called the White Plague, or—more romantically—the Captain of Death. Emerson’s family was especially terrified of it because he had already lost siblings to tuberculosis, and it was probably involved in his father’s early death as well. It ran in his family and in Ellen’s, too. In other words, there was a death sentence hanging over this beautiful romance. It’s as though the whole love story is in the conditional tense—but he fell deeply in love with her, and vice versa. Now, none of his letters to her have survived. There’s no question he wrote a great many of them, and she saved them. He most likely burned them later in life. If they ever turned up, that would be amazing. But we do have these 40-odd letters addressed to him. Really, they’re all that survives of Ellen, except for a painted miniature that she gave him during their engagement. They both had one. It was the FaceTime of the era: the miniature portraits were in these red leather cases, and they’d open them up and look at each other’s faces. It does. There’s such a powerful personality there—such charm and poetic sensibility. There’s some very beautiful language. But she also joshes Emerson in a way I find fantastically funny. She’s constantly calling him Grandpa. You realize that Emerson was a person who needed someone in his life to make fun of him. I’m not sure to what extent his second wife did that, but it’s clear that Ellen really knew how to tease him. The letters are so full of ardor and personality and you can really see why he fell in love with her. Her death really destroyed him for a long while. He never stopped loving her, and he never stopped mourning her. It was a shadow over the rest of his life. His second wife, Lidian, very much knew that she was the successor, and could never quite measure up. When their first child was born, she was named Ellen Tucker Emerson, after Lidian’s predecessor. Emerson said that Lidian suggested it, and perhaps she did, in an act of great generosity and mild masochism. Anyway, Ellen was always a looming figure in Emerson’s life, and these letters help to explain why. They were not reprinted for many years. They were seen as too intimate. But I’m very moved by them, and can easily imagine how they moved Emerson as a young and love-besotted man. What he has to offer the modern American reader is that he’s a great American writer. He’s a great aphorist. You have to accustom yourself to look for the great, blazing, revelatory sentences, because that’s his delivery system. He is also the begetter and the shaper of so much in contemporary American culture. His emphasis on self-reliance, self-creation and individualism is the cornerstone of how Americans regard themselves still . He wasn’t the only one to make that argument, but because he wrote about it so beautifully and spent decades lecturing to regular people about it, he was the one who injected it into the cultural bloodstream. Sometimes his influence is quite roundabout. Take the case of contemporary evangelicalism in America. Emerson was not an evangelical in any way. The exploding Protestant sects of his day, the Methodists and Baptists, were not at all his cup of tea. Yet his emphasis on a personal relationship to God, one that requires no ministerial middleman, aligns very closely with evangelical thinking. That’s the apple falling far from the tree, I’ll grant you that, but I think there’s a dotted line there. More broadly, Emerson can tell you an incredible amount about what it means to be a contemporary American, about what it means to be a human being. That’s a lot to deliver for someone writing nearly two centuries ago, whose “old arctic habits” kept him at a distance from most other people. Let’s fact it, Emerson is a weirdo of genius, in a certain way. But once you get past some of the barriers to entry, he’s a very human personality. You can fall in love with him. Most likely you will."