Emerson's True Self Revealed

...Yet Waldo loved her...

...His life had taught him that peace comes only from within...

...Acknowledging that the Concord sage's literary reputation is somewhat dim in comparison with those of the other great figures of the "American Renaissance," Allen maintains that Emerson "is beginning to take his rightful place in their company...

...As for his writing, Aunt Mary told the young Waldo, "Like Cicero, your poetry will not be valued because your prose is so much better...

...He always brought to writing some of the passionate exuberance his personal relationships lacked...

...At 47, he recorded one of his few recollections of their relationship:" 1 heard his voice...(as Adam that of the Lord God in the garden...

...Drifting into the ministry for lack of a better profession, he disliked its social duties (which his father had performed so much better...

...This faculty insulated him against the most injurious influences of his God-obsessed Aunt, while enabling him, in the metaphor of Samson's riddle, to gather honey out of the bitterness...

...If his friends loved him most for the self revealed in his essays, Allen makes clear that it was, ultimately, his true self...

...it was their suppression that resulted in a transcendent philosophy of the mind as its own spiritual kingdom, far superior to transitory, perishable matter...

...Despite his more serene nature, Emerson was just as strong-willed as his formidable Aunt Mary...

...In fact, as Allen shows, his feelings were too strong to be confronted...

...The young minister soon developed theological scruples, resigned his parish and for the remainder of his long life supported himself by preaching his own gospel...

...A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other quite external event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you...

...He has taken as his title the familiar form of address used by Emerson's friends, he explains, because it should "have more favorable connotations for readers of this biography than the forbidding three names, which carry associations with the trinominal New England contemporaries Henry Wadsworth Long fellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose genteel writings have not worn as well as Emerson's...

...For half a century their names have been eclipsed in American literature by Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, whose voices grow louder and clearer with each passing decade...

...a lambent flame that will not burn playing on the surface of my river...

...and I vainly endeavoring to hide myself...

...Language is fossil poetry," Emerson wrote, knowing that the roots of words, if traced back far enough, all refer to physical objects, no matter how abstract the modern usage...

...At his graduation from Harvard, for example, President John T. Kirkland scolded him for his indifferent scholastic performance (30th in a class of 59...

...Allen thinks this oedipal story jars slightly with thecharacter of the elder Emerson, a rather easygoing Congregational minister of great social charm, and suspects that Waldo may actually have felt the loss bitterly...

...that this fact takes no more deep hold than other facts, is as dreamlike as they...

...Or, "The certainty of death is a charter from every gross feat-live while we live-tomorrow we may be forever free from the grossness of a putrid carcase...

...His faith in human potential and "self-reliance" speaks directly to the basic American dream of independence and the self-made man...

...he valued her originality, and spoke kindly of her even after she would no longer enter his house because of a quarrel about religion...

...For Emerson, however, it meant something sterner: " Nothing can bring you peace but yourself...

...It can never be so...

...In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shall always drag her after thee...

...His own heart, a veritable Walden Pond, had no tides and failed to respond to warmer natures...

...Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles...

...Years later, he wrote sadly at the death of his beloved firstborn son, "Alas...

...Emerson was convinced all his life that" I am born a poet, of a low class without a doubt, yet a poet...

...He was unquestionably one of our seminal thinkers...

...The third child of eight, he survived all his siblings by many years...

...Writers & Writing EMERSON'S TRUE SELF REVEALED BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL ay Wilson Allen's Waldo Emerson (Viking, 751 pp., $25.00) is the first major examination of the great Yankee democrat of the spirit since Ralph L. Rusk's Ralph Waldo Emerson appeared in 1949...

...1 chiefly grieve that I cannot grieve...

...Gay Wilson Allen argues that Waldo Emerson lived the "good life" praised by Plato and Aristotle, a conclusion amply supported by this very human biography...

...When she succumbed to tuberculosis at 20, he protected himself by deifying her memory...

...This sense of concreteness enabled him to embody his metaphysical doctrines in pithy utterances, as in his dismissal of materialism?Things are in the saddle/And ride mankind"?or his contention that the art of good writing was "conversation folded many times thick...

...His second wife, Lidian, evidently suffered from the knowledge that she could never mean as much to him...

...Allen demonstrates that Emerson's theories, cheerful as they may be, were painfully come by...

...When debased, this sunny optimism results in the rhetorical platitudes of the political platform or the pulpit?a trust in the power of positive thinking that drives people from doctors to faith healers...

...This singular woman was a religious fanatic whose journals contain such observations as, "Oh how I hate to eat, for 1 perform nothing suffer nor enjoy nor feel nothing for piety truth sympathy [sic...

...She oversaw the education of her nephews, driving some of them to such feats of academic excess that they ruined their health and died prematurely...

...He accused Fuller (who secretly loved him) of having a heart "that unceasingly demands all, & is a sea that hates an ebb...

...yet to Victory I am born," he declared in his journal...

...True, the tragedies imperiling such a philosophy of self-trust are explored in the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville, and Henry James, but its triumph is embodied in Emerson's life and works...

...Though it took place when the boy was only eight, all his life Emerson appeared to resent this parent...

...And he was a winner-A man who, in spite of many tragedies, made a happy life, turned a difficult marriage into domestic tranquility, and managed through his writings to do exactly what he wanted while bringing joy to others...

...Men and women were initially drawn to him, and subsequently often disappointed by his emotional temperance...

...These similarities to his aunt nevertheless did not affect his "gift for humor, an ability to look at himself from the point of view of a detached bystander, to see his shortcomings not with the tragic regret of his Aunt Mary but as the comic failures of a limited person...

...His emotional stoicism in the face of death was molded in early childhood...

...Eccentric, emotional, irascible, Mary would seem to have had little in common with her nephew...

...He died peacefully in advanced age, among friends and family, with his writings greatly admired both here and abroad...

...The graceful way in which he accepted the handicaps of old age," Allen says reverently, "gives the last chapters of his biography a tone of Shakesperian romance, reminiscent of The Winter's Tale...

...In old age, suffering from senile aphasia, he could still be witty: Searching for words to ask for his umbrella, he said, "I can't tell its name, but I can tell its history...

...I am Defeated all the time...

...he had only applied himself when the subject captured his imagination...

...But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God...

...Allen believes she taught him to be scrupulous about motives, and helped to foster his tendency to exalt spirit over body...

...But they scarcely fared better with what the great man ruefully called his "arctic habits...

...The wording of the memory, in any case, helps account for the resentment of authority that informed the son's attitudes toward church and government and made him an apostle of Independence...

...My singing [to] be sure is very 'husky,' & is for the most part in prose...

...If we read nothing else of his in school, we all remember that famous passage from "Self-Reliance" where he proclaims that "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines...

...The feminist champion Margaret Fuller recorded a number of instances of Lidian's jealousy toward the intellectual young women who gathered around the Emerson menage...

...With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do Speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon-balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day...

...Indeed, as Allen aptly shows, the power of Emerson's pen lies in the strength of his metaphors, rather than in the consistency of his philosophy...

...One crucial death seems to have been that of Emerson's father...

...He felt that she had been the making of him...

...Most men gamble with [Fortune]," Emerson observed, "and gain all, and lose all as her wheel rolls...

...Besides, quarreling with him here would place us in the company of those petty functionaries upon whom he heaps scorn...

...Though seldom emotional, Emerson's passions were deeply stirred by his love for his dying first bride, Ellen...

...Allen concentrates more on the intimate emotional life of his subject, the writer of the private journals and letters who balances the public figure of the essays...

...According to Allen, the greatest influence on Emerson was his father's volatile sister, Mary Moody Emerson...

...Do not believe it...

...Any sophomore can enumerate the fallacies inherent in this approach, yet no argument can dent the higher truth of Emerson's sublime "lapidary" style...

...Strangers take it away...

...This is my nature & vocation...