Figuring, page 21
It made me very happy to see such a woman, so large and so developed a character, and everything that is good in it so really good. I loved, shall always love her.
She saw in Sand—in her bold idealism, in her distributed affections, in the baseline benevolence that underpinned her defiance of convention—a mirror of how she herself wanted to be seen. In a passage permeated by a subconscious self-defense, Fuller adds:
She needs no defence, but only to be understood, for she has bravely acted out her nature, and always with good intentions. She might have loved one man permanently, if she could have found one contemporary with her who could interest and command her throughout her range; but there was hardly any possibility of that, for such a person. Thus she has naturally changed the object of her affections several times…and I am sure her generous heart has not failed to draw some rich drops from every kind of wine-press.
She left feeling about George Sand the way Maria Mitchell had felt about Mary Somerville—filled with affectionate admiration greater than she had felt for any other woman, tethered to a sister planet by a shared sun.
But Fuller’s most momentous encounter in Paris was with the revolutionary Adam Mickiewicz—Poland’s greatest poet, exiled in France, revered by his compatriots as a prophet of a new age of liberty. Mickiewicz, eleven years her senior, had introduced Emerson’s writing in Paris with the same ardor with which Fuller had introduced Goethe in New England. He had just been fired from the Parisian university where he taught for challenging the authority of the Church. When they met, she immediately felt “a deeper-founded mental connection,” but also recognized an aliveness beyond the cerebral—the very thing she had accused Emerson of lacking. In Mickiewicz, she found “the intellect and passions in due proportion for a full and healthy human being.” He further impressed her with his devotion to women’s emancipation—he had read Woman and invited Fuller to a gathering of his young acolytes, to whom he proclaimed that the era of women’s liberation had arrived and Margaret Fuller was its chief action-prophet. He would describe her as “the only one to whom it has been given to touch that which is most decisive in today’s world and to comprehend in advance the world to come.”
Most magnetizing of all, however, was the way he spoke to her—with the respect of a kindred intellect and an embodied candor uncottoned in the artifice of propriety. Mickiewicz urged Fuller to confront the parts of life and of herself that she had left unexplored behind pretexts of moral rectitude—the disembodied “lonely position” she had lauded in Woman as the choice of “saints and geniuses” who had risen above life “undisturbed by the pressure of near ties.” After their momentous first meeting, he wrote to her:
You have acquired the right to know and maintain the rights and obligations, the hopes and exigencies of virginity. For you, the first step in your deliverance and in the deliverance of your sex…is to know if it is permitted to you to remain a virgin.
There is a curious logical parallel between Mickiewicz’s sentiment and the question Albert Camus would pose a century later in one of the most piercing and profound opening passages in literature:
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards.
A disembodied life, Mickiewicz seems to suggest, is no life at all—Fuller must decide whether an embodied life is worth living.
With her chronic conflation of admiration and attraction, Fuller felt for a time that she might be falling in love with this impassioned intellect. Whether he would become the object of her awakening to the sensual dimensions of love was yet to be seen, but he certainly became its catalyst. In a twenty-four-page letter to her American travel companion, Rebecca Spring, Fuller articulated the first glimmers of that awakening:
You ask me whether I love [Mickiewicz]. I answer, he affected me like music or the richest landscape; my heart beat with joy that he at once felt beauty in me….Still, I do not know but I might love still better to-morrow. I have never yet loved any human being so well as the music of Beethoven, yet at present I am indifferent to it. There has been a time when I thought of nothing but Michael Angelo, yet the other day I felt hardly inclined to look on the forms his living hand had traced on the roof of the Sistine. But when I loved either of these great souls I abandoned myself wholly to it; I did not calculate. I shall do so in life if I love enough.
Fuller soon left Paris for Rome. “Those have not lived who have not seen Rome,” she would later write to Emerson from the city that became her final home. Within months of her fiery correspondence with Mickiewicz, she would come to see him not as love object but as guru and confidant who guides her to the version of herself that learns to “love still better”—love that another would reap.
This is the paradox of transformative experience: Because our imagination is bounded by our existing templates of how the world as we know it works, we fail to anticipate the greatest transformations—the events and encounters so unmoored from the familiar that they transfigure our map of reality and propel us into a wholly novel mode of being. This is as true of civilizations—the ancient Greeks could never have fathomed the miraculous cascade of inventions that let me read Plato on a digital tablet via wireless Internet aboard an airplane—as it is of our individual imaginations.
All her life, Margaret Fuller had encountered those who would be of consequence to her—her intellectual heroes, her collaborators and champions, the objects of her infatuations—either through formal letters of introduction by existing friends or through informal circles of acquaintanceship. Our choices shape our circumstances, which in turn further cement the foundation from which we make our choices. What Fuller imagined she wanted in an ideal partner was a composite of the traits she most cherished in the various people she knew—Emerson’s independence of thought, the sweetness of Anna Barker’s adoration, Sam Ward’s worldliness and intellectual curiosity, Mickiewicz’s impassioned candor. No one person contained all she yearned for, nor was she able to imagine being fulfilled by anything different—different not by degree but by kind—from these familiar incomplete satisfactions.
We navigate the unknown frontiers of the social universe through a sextant of existing relationships—nearly every new person we meet is within only a few degrees of separation from someone we already know. But every once in a while, pure chance intercedes to remind us that whatever structures of control we may put into place, however much we may mistake the illusion of choice for the fact of choice, randomness is the reigning monarch of the universe.
11
BETWEEN SINEW AND SPIRIT
On the evening of April 1, 1847, Holy Thursday, as Maria Mitchell’s comet is hurtling toward Earth, Margaret Fuller meets by chance the man with whom she would spend the remainder of her days—a man with no direct link to anyone in her cosmos of connections, unlike anyone she ever thought she desired. “The Heart has many Doors,” Emily Dickinson would write. We bolt most of them with our preconceptions.
Fuller would keep their relationship a secret until just before her death, so the exact circumstances of their first encounter are shrouded in the haze of her self-protective perfidy. Here are the most probable facts gleaned from her carefully controlled revelations to a handful of close friends:
Margaret had lost her way in Saint Peter’s Cathedral—perhaps the only person in the crowd of thousands more enchanted by Michelangelo’s art on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel than by the Holy Week services. Swallowed by the chaos of worshippers, she wandered in agitated disorientation, looking for her American traveling companions. Across the grand vault, a tall, slender young Italian espied the visibly flustered foreigner and offered his aid.
Giovanni Angelo Ossoli peers out of the sole surviving daguerreotype of him with calm, dark, deep-set eyes anchored by a stately Grecian nose, the femininity of his delicate features offset by a trim mustache and thick, level eyebrows that face each other with the subtle upfurrow of questioning alertness. Something about his air of benevolent composure and quiet self-possession with an edge of melancholy must have spoken to Fuller, for she took his arm in the middle of the crowded cathedral. The two proceeded to look for her friends—in vain. By the time they relinquished the search, the evening had spilled into night. Ossoli—as Margaret would call him from that day to her last—offered to escort her home, even though his own abode lay in the opposite direction. He spoke no English and she had only a rudimentary grasp of Italian, so whatever animated the forty-five-minute walk, it wasn’t the familiar intellectual repartee of her walks with Waldo or the emotional effusions of her travels with Caroline. Ossoli, eleven years younger than Fuller and motherless since the age of six, had no sense of her cultural stature and couldn’t admire her for her work, of which he could not have read a single word. Something else magnetized his nature to hers and hers to his—something as uncerebral and ineffable as the effect of a Beethoven sonata.
Nine days after the encounter at St. Peter’s, in a letter to Rebecca and Marcus Spring, she penned her most succinct and self-aware romantic history:
I have never sought love as a passion—it has always come to me as an angel bearing some good tidings. I have wished to welcome the messenger noble, but never to detain it, or cling with a weak personality to a tie which had ceased to bind the soul. I believe I should always do the same, however I might suffer from loss or void in the intervals of love….I do not know whether I have loved at all in the sense of oneness, but I have loved enough to feel the joys of presence, the pangs of absence, the sweetness of hope, and the chill of disappointment. More than once my heart has bled, and my health has suffered from these things but mentally I have always found myself the gainer, always younger and more noble.
Disappointment itself can become the drug that perpetuates the addictive cycle of ill-fated obsessions. These elated intellectual infatuations with persons of genius, followed by abysses of despair at the lack of reciprocity, were Fuller’s single most consistent emotional experience. Not yet ready to relinquish this familiar pattern, she was eager to fill the “void in the intervals of love” once more.
“I have not yet formed any friendship of the mind,” she reported of her time in Rome in a letter to her brother penned two weeks after she met Ossoli, who was a poor candidate for the patterned part. Fuller had already cast another actor in it: the young American painter Thomas Hicks, whom she met through that degrees-of-separation swing of her social sextant—Mickiewicz made the introduction. In the twenty-three-year-old artist, who had left America for Europe the year she published Woman, the thirty-six-year-old Fuller found a ready screen onto which to project her templated fantasy. But the cycle contracted faster than any previous, and she was soon contending with the “chilling disappointment” she knew so well. In a letter from April 23, addressing him as “Dear youth,” she indicted Hicks with a fickleness of heart for failing to make time for her—“I can always find time to see any one I wish to; it seems to me it is the same with every one.” In that part-blameful, part-beseeching way of the jilted, she appealed to him to see the meeting of souls she felt they shared:
You are the only one whom I have seen here in whose eye I recognized one of my own kindred. I want to know and to love you and to have you love me; you said you had no friendliness of nature but that is not true; you are precisely one to need the music, the recognition of kindred minds. How can you let me pass you by, without full and free communication. I do not understand it, unless you are occupied by some other strong feeling. Very soon I must go from here, do not let me go without giving me some of your life….I wanted to speak to you with frank affection, and I could not. Something prevents—what is it? Answer.
Taking nearly two weeks to answer, Hicks pronounced himself unfit for Margaret’s ardor in a sorrowful and self-pitying letter:
I would like to tell you all about myself, you would then see that there is but little fire in the hut and that could you enter you would find but a few embers on the hearth of a lonely ambitious man….You speak of my youth; is it by years then that life is measured? Do you not perceive that my heart has grown grey?
Blackened by disappointment in the young artist, Fuller—whose boundary between her personal and professional passions was as porous as that between the intellectual and the erotic—renounced art itself. In a despondent letter to William Channing back home, she declared for the first time her shifting focus from literature and the arts to politics and social reform:
Art is not important to me now. I like only what little I find that is transcendentally good….I take interest in the state of the people, their manners, the state of the race in them. I see the future dawning….I must be born again.
This shift in foci may have been what drew her thoughts back to the young Ossoli, who lacked both intellectual and artistic refinement but was passionately devoted to the cause of Italian unification and independence from Austrian rule—a cause in the noble ideals of which Fuller saw “the most striking contrast to our own country.” They began spending time together, first because Ossoli provided an invaluable inside perspective for Fuller’s journalistic work, and then because she sensed while with him something arrestingly novel: an attentive presence that seemed to cherish her company not for her mind or accomplishments but simply for who she was. He appeared to have the answer to the question she had asked of the open sky all those years ago: “How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean?”
The seven weeks that followed were filled with the private mystery of early love. But two facts do survive: that one midspring day, Ossoli proposed marriage to Margaret; and that she declined it. In her public writings, she had dismissed marriage as “a contract of convenience and utility”; in her private letters, she had escalated the indictment to a “corrupt social contract.” Quite apart from her reservations about marriage and any qualms she may have had about their age difference, she was unable to let whatever feelings Ossoli awakened eclipse her cerebral unease at the fact that, despite being governed by a native sweetness and an unfaltering moral compass, he was unschooled and unlettered. Nearly two years later, just before her death, Fuller would finally confide in her sister:
Our meeting was singular, fateful I may say. Very soon he offered me his hand through life, but I never dreamed I should take it. I loved him, and felt very unhappy to leave him; but the connection seemed so every way unfit, I did not hesitate a moment.
With this conflicted but unhesitating conclusiveness, Fuller left Rome in the late spring of 1847 and set out to travel through northern Italy. But this “exceedingly delicate person,” as she would describe Ossoli, had impressed himself upon her soul—this man “so sweet in his disposition…so harmonious [in] his whole nature,” who had “not the slightest tinge of self-love,” who was not self-satisfied or encrusted with the shell of narcissism that encases insecurity but simply “happy in himself,” buoyed by “the purity and simple strength of his character.” She would later write to a friend in America:
My relation to Ossoli has been like retiring to one of those gentle, lovely places in the woods—something of the violet has been breathed into my life, and will never pass away.
In his theory of color and emotion, published the year of Fuller’s birth, Goethe had limned violet as a hue that, though of an “active character” and “unquiet feeling,” one can “find a point to rest in.”
Two years after the chance encounter that brought her and Ossoli together, Fuller would capture the uncharted connection at the heart of their bond:
My love for Ossoli is most pure and tender, nor has any one, except my mother or little children, loved me so genuinely as he does. To some, I have been obliged to make myself known; others have loved me with a mixture of fancy and enthusiasm, excited by my talent at embellishing life. But Ossoli loves me from simple affinity;—he loves to be with me, and to serve and soothe me.
Years earlier, just after her thirty-fourth birthday and midway through writing Woman, Fuller had despaired in her journal:
With the intellect I always have, always shall, overcome; but that is not half of the work. The life, the life! O, my God! shall the life never be sweet?
In Ossoli’s sweetness, she saw an invitation to “the life, the life!” In a letter to one of her few Italian intimates, Fuller painted him as a simple man of confident constancy and unambivalent affinities:
He has very little of what is called intellectual development, but unspoiled instincts, affections pure and constant, and a quiet sense of duty, which, to me, who have seen much of the great faults in characters of enthusiasm and genius, seems of highest value.
