GLAD TO THE BRINK OF FEAR: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by James Marcus
James Marcus’s new biography of the great Transcendentalist writer, lecturer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson opens with a sharp contrast. On the one hand, Marcus writes, there is Emerson as he is portrayed by others, the “irritating uncle at the feast of American letters,” the “cheerleader for the most conformist aspects of American life.” Then, there is Emerson as he truly is: the “great apostle of nonconformity,” and “anything but a Victorian relic.” Marcus proposes to portray the latter.
But that first Emerson is a straw man. Fine and diverse writers have been paying tribute to the apostle of nonconformity for a long time. Indeed, it’s safe to say that no intellectual writing on Emerson today imagines him as a Victorian relic, and certainly no one writing, today, in the journals to which Marcus himself, an accomplished editor, translator and critic, regularly contributes.
We are better off considering “Glad to the Brink of Fear” not as the first portrait of the real Emerson, but as part of a wider canon. This is, rightly, how we encounter new performances of a classic role and see it in fruitful counterpoint to its predecessors: Each interpreter of Hamlet, from John Barrymore to Riz Ahmed, shows us something new and vivid.
Marcus’s writing is lively and precise, vigorously colloquial. It is full of knowledge and affection. The voice is distinctive, and Marcus is autobiographically present in some of the book’s best passages — his visits to Emerson’s study and gravesite in Concord, Mass.; his communing with his subject over shared grief.
His portrait of Emerson, the man, is finely wrought; this Emerson has a body as well as a mind, and Marcus writes movingly about Emerson’s fears of blindness and tuberculosis. His Emerson is a man in relationships — with his enticing Harvard classmate Martin Gay; with his first wife, Ellen, ill with tuberculosis when they met, dead of “the red wheezers” at 19; with his second wife, Lydia, whom he renamed Lidian, and who put doughnuts up the chimney to feed a lurking rat.
This is also a man making a living. Marcus sets out what Emerson earned from his lectures and books (his Boston publisher did a poor job of distributing), the fatigues he endured on lecture tours, the astonishing variety of responses his talks evoked.
And finally, this Emerson is a man dealing with dementia. Marcus’s account of the disease has a loving, lacerating intensity. So does his portrayal of the fire that burned the family home in 1872, as the elderly Emerson looked on, benevolent and clueless, even throwing some of his own mementos back into the burning house. Marcus brings to life his final hours, Emerson’s shock of recognition that death has come for him, his last, mostly incomprehensible words.
Marcus must reckon with the problematic and contradictory aspects of Emerson, too, and he admits it’s difficult. “I wanted my hero to behave like one,” he writes — an honest but dangerous confession.
It is not that Marcus does not see Emerson’s flaws; but at times it feels as though he softens them. Not always — he is impressively fair on Emerson’s slow movement toward speaking out against slavery — but often. Emerson’s deeply troubling justification of “Britain’s imperialist plunder of the Indian subcontinent” is described too flippantly as “wince-making.”
He also softens some of the great anti-Emersonian sentiments; he quotes Melville’s praise, but not the passage in a letter in which he claims that Emerson’s “gross and astonishing errors & illusions spring from a self-conceit so intensely intellectual and calm that at first one hesitates to call it by its right name.” Marcus leaves undiscussed Emerson’s failure to recognize that Thoreau was maybe a greater writer than he was, and to concede that his friend and fellow Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller’s life in Europe fulfilled profound ambitions for a woman’s literary power and romantic partnership that Emerson’s Concord could not gratify.
And while he excels at drawing the man’s rounded humanity, Marcus’s portrait of Emerson as a writer often disappoints. Describing genius is always a challenge — but Marcus makes the challenge unnecessarily daunting. He does not, for one thing, consider the possibility that Emerson’s journals are his best form. (Disclosure: I published a book in 1988 claiming that they were exactly that — but the claim is not eccentric.)
Nor does he look at Emerson’s best poems — “Uriel,” for example, which Robert Frost called “the greatest Western poem yet.” He is interested in the biographically rich poetry, “Threnody” and “Terminus.” Marcus’s focus on the essays and lectures is also more biographical than critical, his analyses lively but familiar.
These are significant limitations. But to return to an earlier analogy: If this were a show — a staging of a masterpiece — I would pay good money to see it. Not because it is perfect or unprecedented, but because it is alive and provocative.
GLAD TO THE BRINK OF FEAR: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson | James Marcus | Princeton University Press | 334 pp. | $29.95
