The Ice Harp, page 16
Sam swats the cat, which camels his back, then trots away, his tail defiantly raised.
“Damn it all, Mr. Emerson, be reasonable! This man is wanted for murder, and I have to take him in.”
“It isn’t enough just to say the word pear. You must sink your teeth in it.”
“It’s all right, Mr. Emerson. I’ll go with the constable.”
“Mr. Stokes, I can’t let you do that.”
I round on Staples. “God is in this man. Would you take Him to your jailhouse?”
“Yes, if Judge Keyes gave me a warrant for His arrest. Stokes, it’s time we were going.”
“Waldo, dear, let the constable do his job.”
“Is that you, Ellen? You know how weak my eyes are.”
“It is, husband. You’ve been making quite a fuss. I could hear you in the next world.”
“My brain’s unwell, Ellen. I feel the seams of my skull opening like a rusty old boiler’s.”
Time has settled on me a dumb palsy—my portion of the fate that I’ve always sought to deny.
Ellen laughs, and I am made to think of roses and silver.
“Your ghosts are peeking out like a priest’s cassock from underneath his alb.”
“Or a Dutch gal’s petticoat from beneath her skirts.”
“Don’t be coarse, Waldo.”
“Ellen, it’s been such a long time since I last saw you.”
“Not since 1832, when you walked to Roxbury to visit my grave. My remains had not yet been removed to Mount Auburn, which is a much more pleasant place to lie. I thank you for it. But to open the coffin and look at me was unseemly, husband!”
“You saw me?”
“I was embarrassed by the smell and the state of my clothes.”
She appears no worse for nearly a half century in the tomb.
“I had to prove to myself that you were dead. Something so very young and lovely—how could it be? I would have been a poor husband not to have given Hades a chance to change his mind and send you back to me.”
“The jangle of your ice harp would not have charmed his savage breast!”
“I missed you so very much, wife.”
“You’ve been a poor husband to Lydia.”
The reproach is deserved, and well I know it, recalling that I once told Margaret Fuller that the universe was my bride. I made my wife—the second one, I mean—suffer by my folly. Vain posturing is laughable, contemptible even, never more so than in an elderly philosopher. But in spite of Ellen’s chastening, I seem bent on perpetuating the image of the fatuous lover.
“The fire that captivated me remains even after all these years.”
What mawkishness, Emerson, how like a mooning schoolboy!
“After all this time, mine has gone quite out, Waldo.”
How wounding!
“The morning air is raw. Won’t you let me rekindle the old flame that soldered us?”
She bridles indignantly. “I beg your pardon?”
“Don’t misunderstand, Ellen; a conflagration, except for one I might produce in a heap of dead leaves, is beyond my waning powers.”
“What fiddle-faddle! I do believe your wits have turned like poor old Bulkeley’s.”
I’m desperate to have her stay awhile. “The grave’s a cold and lonely place, my dear.”
“As if the soul requires mufflers, mittens, or Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup!”
“As long as you walk abroad today, why not have a cup of tea and a digestive biscuit?”
She stares down her nose at me, as one might do a toad squatting in the path.
“Won’t you at least say whether or not I was right to scorn the idea of a heaven?”
“Farewell, Waldo. Oh, the gift of white oak leaves you left on my coffin … It was a meaningless symbol, like so many others in your repertory.”
Without another word, she leaves life’s little stage for what is said to be reality, located on the other side of the proscenium arch. The golden trumpets of the morning announce her exit.
Sam Staples takes an ancient revolver from its holster. I doubt it’s been fired since the War of the Rebellion.
“I’m too old to stand in the yard and jaw, Waldo. Either we go inside and talk peaceably or I’m going to have to arrest you, too.”
“Stick out your neck, Emerson. It’s an old scrawny one, but it may be found acceptable to God nonetheless.”
“John Brown, why don’t you find some live coals to squat on?”
“What do you say, Waldo? Are you going to behave yourself?”
“Don’t talk to my husband as if he were a child, Sam Staples!”
“Lydia! Is it you?”
“Who else? I took an early train.”
She opens the gate and walks into the yard, carrying her satchel.
“I see you fixed the gate, Mr. Emerson.”
“Yes, I did, Queenie.”
“It squeaks.”
“I’ll oil it after I’ve seen to this business.”
Sam returns the revolver to its holster. “I meant no disrespect, Mrs. Emerson, but your husband is interfering with the performance of my duty.”
“Mr. Emerson, that’s my best corn broom! For heaven’s sakes, put it down!”
I see that I’ve been foolishly aiming a Shaker broom at Sam Staples. I surrender it to the constable, who gives it to Lydia, who leans it against the back door—but not before giving the doorstep a decisive domestic sweep.
“ Why don’t you come inside, Sam, and I’ll fix you breakfast. You, too, Mr. Stokes.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
Sam scratches his ear, weighing a temporary stay of justice against a good breakfast.
“I suppose it would be all right. I didn’t get a chance to eat before Lyman Bierce came banging on my door.”
I hiss. “The damned polecat.”
“Are you hungry, Mr. Stokes?”
“I am, ma’am; thank you kindly.” A soldier’s appetite is truly prodigious.
“Come into the kitchen, you two. And wipe your feet.”
Sam and James Stokes apply their boot soles to the scraper and troop into the kitchen.
“Kindly slice a loaf of bread, Mr. Stokes. Do you take your eggs scrambled?”
“That’d be fine, Mrs. Emerson.”
I dawdle in the dooryard, not knowing what to do with myself.
“When I was in Florida, I ate alligator steak and boiled owl with a nephew of Bonaparte.”
Since none appears to have heard my remark, I may not have spoken it aloud.
“Poke up the fire, Sam.”
“Right you are, Mrs. Emerson.”
“Coming, Mr. Emerson?”
“In a moment, Lydia.” The gall, to have called her by any other name!
Louisa Alcott walks across the road. I expect she has come for her cloak. But it is the recent commotion that has brought the author of “blood and thunder” tales to my front gate.
“Waldo, whatever are you doing?”
“Did Bronson pull up the tracks in the cellar? It may not be too late to save James Stokes. Tell me, Lu, that the Underground Railroad still runs underneath Orchard House!”
She looks at me as though I were Nancy Barron crooning a mad song.
Standing in the dooryard, I bid farewell to “Old” Brown, who gives an equivocal nod of his head, which may be approbation or disparagement. His stern ghost flies back to his body, which lies a-mouldering in the grave. Go, blindworm, go.
I glance at the hemlock trees I planted when little Waldo was born, unless these standing tall before me supplanted them after they had fallen to blight, borers, or old age. We depart this world; that much is certain. We leave behind a measure of words according to our facility. If they be praised or belittled or even misunderstood is no concern of ours. More than likely, our eulogies will be fulsome, and the reports of our ill deeds inflamed.
In my fancy, I see Abe Lincoln on the steps of the bandstand. My fire out at last, I lie on the ground before him, together with all my dead. Using words spoken by the prince of Verona over the bodies of Romeo and Juliet, he declares, “Some shall be pardon’d, and some punishéd.”
Will I taste sweet mercy or bitter inclemency? Or may it be, as I sometimes think, that the trump to awaken us to hear our doom pronounced will never sound at all?
* * *
L’envoi
IN THE SPRING, THE GOLDEN BEES of Pindus will return to the garden, although I may not be here to greet them. It little matters if I am not, so long as some others are. I say, let all who will, pluck apples from the trees and feast on pears, sacred to Pomona. Let the gates of the poorhouse and the asylum be unlocked. Let mad Nancy Barron out to play on the banks of the river, amid willows, alders, and aspens. Let God make good on the promises of His prophets. We do not ask for manna, only for our daily bread. Let the sacred books be kissed one last time before being put away in the narrow cupboards of the spiteful. Let places of worship be turned into schoolhouses. From the winsome minarets let men and women be called to study mercy. Let the roofs of the temples, mosques, and churches be breached to admit the light and air of the natural world, from which all truths radiate, so that our children and theirs can greet the golden bees in the one true paradise of the world before the inward fire is quenched.
AFTERWORD
THIS BOOK, THE TENTH IN The American Novels series, reprises the principal themes that emerged during their writing: the injustices that continue to vex and vitiate the republic, the deaf ear many turn to its tolling bell, our final estate and the meaning and purpose of our brief earthly tenure, and the use of language to discover and dissemble. Time and again, I have written myself into a corner, pursuing an answer to the old conundrum: whether individuals are obligated to act against wrongdoing or are obliged by uncertainty to “hang fire,” in that picturesque Jamesian image. Stated another way, the dilemma is this: If we reject universal moral laws as an aspect of absolutism and adopt relativism in their stead, how are we to judge others and ourselves? The issue is not original, but it is critical nonetheless. I am not excused from having to confront it because I am unequipped to be a philosopher or a theologian or because so many other men and women have struggled with it. Each of us is required to take up the grave matters of the age and of the day, as though no one before us has considered them.
In the present novel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, toward the end of his life, is obliged, by the arrival of a black deserter, to make an ethical choice. Naturally, I can only imagine how Emerson the idealist and stoic would have acted or failed to act. I am the author of his crisis, as well as of its resolution; his choice—the one I give him—therefore may have more to do with me than him, of the me I wish myself to be. (Resolutions occur more often in literature than in life.)
To speak publicly against slavery in the violent years leading up to the Civil War took courage, even in New England. Emerson did not become active in the abolitionist movement until August 1844, seven years after his wife Lidian had done. In the fiction I have set in 1879, he faces, in the concentrated form of drama, the moral dilemma that he faced prior to the Civil War, in which the dilemma seemed to have been resolved. (More than a million men, north and south, were gored on its horns, to use the old metaphor.) It continues to divide us. (The January 6 insurrection and its aftermath show us how much.)
Emerson’s responsibility to the just treatment and well-being of all men and women did not end with a proclamation or a constitutional amendment, nor did ours. So must we also choose to act—not once, at a crucial moment in our personal histories, but as many times as we are confronted by injustice or abuse. As Lincoln said in his second inaugural address, “with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in …” (Emerson came to believe utterly in Lincoln, although he would not always believe in or love God, or any other deity, save that which men and women contain within themselves, where heaven is.) The work we are in is not yet finished. And I have not always shown the courage of my convictions.
My aim was to write neither a biography of Emerson nor a historical novel; nonetheless, I tried to be as true to his character and to that of the historical personages surrounding him as I was able. Liberties were taken in the interest of storytelling. For example, Orchard House, where the Alcotts were living at the time this novel is set, is not so near to the Emersons’ on Cambridge Turnpike as I have made it seem. I have made Lidian, who was a chronic invalid, more energetic than she was at this time in her life. I hope not to have misrepresented the ideas of actual people, and I beg the pardon of students and scholars for my errors.
Emerson’s writings, life, and the necessary business of his life were extraordinarily various, as perhaps only those of a nineteenth-century personality could be. In his adage “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” he seems to license inconsistency (never mind the qualifier “foolish”). In fact, he is referring to the developing consciousness, which constantly corrects itself in accord with changing information and experience. Emerson’s view on many subjects, such as science, community, abolitionism,* and the purpose of life, changed over time. In my portrait of him, the way stations of his thought appear not in the order of their arrival but as they would to one whose recollection is as unreliable as an obsolete timetable.
* * *
Postscript. I applied the final coat of polish to this novel during the third week of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Like most others of the world, I am compelled to watch this most terrible of current events. I tell myself that it is the duty of every human to bear witness. But is that enough? John Brown would say no. A year from now, when this book is read, if there is a world left in which to read it, I may have my answer.
_________________
* As late as August 1852, Emerson wrote of his failure to throw himself into “this deplorable question of Slavery,” maintaining that “I have quite other slaves to free than those negroes, to wit, imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts, far back in the brain of man,—far retired in the heaven of invention, &, which, important to the republic of Man, have no watchman, or lover, or defender, but I.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“THE GREATEST GENIUS will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively on his own resources.” Goethe wrote that, and Emerson quoted him, and years later, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., quoted Emerson quoting Goethe. For this book of mine, I have drawn from Richardson’s quotations from Emerson’s writings, as well as from primary sources. I was well served by his Emerson: The Mind on Fire, as well as by Carlos Baker’s Emerson Among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait. Both books were essential to shaping my view, however flawed and imperfect, of the brilliant, restless mind of the Concord genius—Richardson’s for his study of Emerson’s consciousness and the thought that informed it, and Baker’s for his portraits of the Transcendentalists and other literary personalities in Emerson’s orbit. Without those two books, much of the meat of my story would have been off the bone. As I write this, I am aware that Emerson would have frowned on my experiencing him through anyone else’s work but his own.
The title The Ice Harp was suggested by his journal entry on December 10, 1836.
Of additional assistance to me were the American Transcendentalism website; the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse, edited by Iona and Peter Opie; Walt Whitman Speaks, edited by Brenda Wineapple; and the King James Bible (1769 Oxford edition). For Emerson, the Bible was not a book of ancient prophecies and revelations, but a work of moral philosophy valued for its ethical precepts, a text he considered neither more nor less divinely inspired than the dialogues of Plato, the Upanishads, The Four Books of Confucianism, or the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
I thank Coleman Barks for allowing me to excerpt from “Gnats Inside the Wind,” his translation of Mathnawi III: 4624–59 (“Some gnats come from the grass to speak with Solomon” and “gnat plaintiffs”) by the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic poet Rumi, whose work Emerson admired.
I have sometimes put into the mouths of the principal characters their actual spoken or written utterances, without acknowledging them by quotation marks. I believe the marks would have distracted and, perhaps, confused readers, who, I hope, will set disbelief aside and consider my amalgam of monologues, soliloquies, and conversations genuine. (Literary scholars will separate the nuggets from my fool’s gold.)
Once again, I am indebted to Bellevue Literary Press, especially to its publisher and editorial director, Erika Goldman, without whose persisting faith this book and likely the entire series of American Novels would not have gone abroad, doing, it is to be hoped, some good in the world. In an age when the loudest voices seem to shape the national discourse, quiet, reasoned, but no less impassioned, utterances need to be heard. Admirers of truth and beauty—I embrace both—should give thanks to presses committed to the difficult business of their dissemination.
BELLEVUE LITERARY PRESS is devoted to publishing literary fiction and nonfiction at the intersection of the arts and sciences because we believe that science and the humanities are natural companions for understanding the human experience. We feature exceptional literature that explores the nature of consciousness, embodiment, and the underpinnings of the social contract. With each book we publish, our goal is to foster a rich, interdisciplinary dialogue that will forge new tools for thinking and engaging with the world.
