James Marcus's Reading List

"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."

"This book includes all of Emerson’s work, basically. If you buy this, you have it all in the palm of your hand, starting with Nature and going on for another 1,250 pages or so. Nature is the blueprint for everything Emerson wrote after it. It lays out the core of his notion of Transcendentalism, which again has everything to do with the vast superiority of subjective and intuitive understanding. Another thing I love about Nature is that it includes a personal note, all the more intensely moving for being so rare. Nature was written around the time that Emerson’s brother Charles died. There’s a very beautiful moment where he’s arguing that we shape nature by perceiving it. It’s an interesting pre-Heisenberg idea, that you change what you perceive by perceiving it. Then there’s this passage, which I’ve read a million times: Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. Such beautiful sentences, so deeply felt. The loftiness of the essays can sometimes be their failing, but there’s also an amazing prophetic voice you can hear leaping out of them. There are certainly sentences in Emerson that Whitman could have written, and vice versa. There’s also a shared American sensibility. This is crucial to all of Emerson’s writing. I’d argue that he’s the first great American writer—but he’s certainly the first great American writer determined to be American. The first who thought incessantly about how an American writer would differ from, say, an English writer. Many of the essays take up those questions: How are we different as Americans? How is an American artist different from a European artist? It sets up a highly contradictory set of emotions in all of his work. Emerson is heavily steeped in the tradition of British and Continental writing; those are his heroes. Yet he has such a strong iconoclastic urge. So, he’s simultaneously worshipping his pantheon and smashing it. He can’t stop himself. He didn’t like urban settings very much. He went to New York City several times, and since his brother lived in Staten Island, he would go visit there or give lectures in Manhattan. But he didn’t care for it. The bucolic setting: that was where he thought beauty and truth were to be found. But America, as a gigantic geographical entity, did strike Emerson as sublime: a source of poetry and transcendence. To give him his due, he traveled much more widely than most Americans of his day, because he was a rock star of the Lyceum circuit. Of course he was a person who spent most of his time sitting in his room. “Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.” That was his credo. But he did travel extensively, doing 50 to 100 speaking gigs a year. Emerson’s Transcendentalism was underpinned financially by the estate he got from the death of his first wife, which was mostly stocks and bonds. It came to a little more than $23,000, a very considerable sum in that day. Still, he needed to lecture to make a living. The later two books— English Traits (1856) and The Conduct of Life (1860)—sold reasonably well for the time, but the earlier books, Nature and the two Essays , while hugely important intellectually and culturally, sold in tiny numbers. This was partially because the publishing infrastructure in this country was not very advanced. They’d be printed by a publisher in Boston who would hardly lift a finger to sell them anywhere else. His early audience is a small subset of American lovers of literature and heavy philosophical thought. Boston is the powerhouse of American intellectual life, at least during the first half of the 19th century. If you could make it there, you could make it anywhere as an intellectual and a writer. But once Emerson set up his network with Carlyle and other British writers, his fame traveled to England fairly early. By the time he went for a second trip, he was a known figure. He would lecture in England as well. It wasn’t really about selling huge numbers of books—it was about the impact you could make in that world. He helped Carlyle enormously in America, yes. His deteriorating relationship with Carlyle is also funny and interesting. Carlyle was very cranky to begin with, so as he got more cranky, well, you can only imagine. Meanwhile, Emerson’s temperament moved in the opposite direction. As Carlyle became more obstreperous and impossible, Emerson became more and more tranquil and impossible to ruffle. Jane Carlyle—also a cranky person and very skilled at conveying it—found that infuriating. She hated the fact that he was now a tranquil, serene, smiling man who simply would not rise to the bait. Later, as his cognitive life began to deteriorate, that affect was kind of a mask as well, for not being able to engage anymore. To a degree, he felt himself Carlyle’s junior when he first encountered him. Remember, Emerson was just discovering his own vocation as a writer. He met Carlyle during his first trip ever to Europe, after the trauma of his wife dying and leaving the Church. Though still unformed in some ways, his voice was tremendously inspired by the sound of Carlyle’s. He went to meet him out in the country, and it was a lovefest. Carlyle saw Emerson as his American disciple—as this angelic, beautiful young man who responded to the tone of his voice and transposed it into a Yankee register. And as you mention, Emerson labored very hard on behalf of Carlyle’s literary career in America. He acted as his agent, seeking publishers for his work and brokering deals. “Emerson was discovering the incendiary part of his own personality as a writer, whereas Carlyle was no longer excited by his work” But with Emerson’s burgeoning reputation, Carlyle felt like he’d been flattened out a bit. It must have been difficult to see someone else’s stardom on the rise while his was somewhat on the wane. But I’m talking about something else beyond literary fame: he could see that Emerson was discovering the incendiary part of his own personality as a writer, whereas Carlyle wasn’t quite as excited by his own work anymore. There’s a whole separate book of Emerson’s correspondence with Carlyle, because they wrote so many letters to each other. (I should say it can be procured as a free ebook .) Their letters are great. They write in a very high register, a sardonic one, with a certain humor."

"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."