One tic to notice about nineteenth-century usage has to do with the word “memoir,” which we usually take to mean something like “diary” or “autobiography.” In contemporary parlance, memoirs are written by people about themselves. But nineteenth-century writers often used the term to title books that were one person's memory of another person's life. Hence A Memoir of the Life of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, the 1852 two-volume treatment curated by Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Henry Channing, and Josiah Freeman Clarke in which they attempted to steer the prevailing narrative of their subject, her disruptive, proto-feminist views, and her unconventional marriage. There's also A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Eliot Cabot's family-authorized biography published in 1887, which similarly offered up an Emerson designed to guide the posthumous assessment in particular ways.
James Marcus’ Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson enters willingly into this overlap between biographer and subject, insofar as this “portrait” of Emerson tarries with another story concerning Marcus' own relationship with loss. The first extended aside occurs about fifty pages into the book, after Emerson has lost his first wife, Ellen Tucker, to tuberculosis. Marcus breaks from the trajectory of Emerson's life to describe his own walk around a winter lake as he processes his father's death and impending burial. “I have the lake and the light, which is beginning to disappear, to myself,” Marcus writes. “I head back the way I came, feeling tranquility and desperation, emotions that seem partially borrowed from the landscape itself and are no doubt disguised forms of grief” (58).
Emotions “borrowed from the landscape” reference and reverse Emerson's dictum from Nature (1836) that “nature always wears the colors of the spirit.” Marcus’ sensations of “tranquility” mixed with “desperation” cue up his approach. His reflection, written for a broad and bookish audience, describes an Emerson who replaces the familiar blithe optimist. In Marcus' version, it is Emerson's capacity to enter into grief and to capture in language its vexing, vertiginous forms, that lets him access peculiar experiences of exhilaration. Marcus' subject, then, is both Emerson and his life with Emerson. As in the moment above, this dual focus leads Marcus to shift from his nineteenth-century subject to an instant closer to our present, in prose that sounds diaristic or confessional. At such moments Marcus' readings may cloy some readers.
Marcus's personal curiosity about Emerson impresses the decisions he makes as he forms his account of his subject's life. Take, for example, his treatment of Emerson's relationship with Fuller. “The situation came to a boil in September 1842,” Marcus explains. It happened during a two-week visit with the Emersons, a period that Lidian Emerson initially spent isolated in her room. When Fuller deflected Lidian's invitation for an evening stroll, citing alternate plans to “walk with Mr. E,” Lidian plunged into tears. Lidian tolerated “her husband's (probably) platonic infatuation with Fuller, who was a famously vivacious, brilliant interlocutor and with whom Emerson had fallen into the habit of long walks to discuss, in Fuller's words, ‘as we always do, [. . .] Man and Woman, and Marriage,’” Marcus observes.
That episode in the Emersons’ dining room is dramatic, painful, complex, and telling. Yet it appears nowhere in Robert Richardson's rightly acclaimed biography Emerson: The Mind on Fire [1995], nor Lawrence Buell's Emerson [2004], nor Ralph Rusk's classic The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson [1949]. Megan Marshall, less inhibited or perhaps more interested, does include the incident in her penetrating 2013 biography Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. Seizing on the interpretive possibilities, Marcus is less interested in identifying an Emersonian doctrine concerning the institution of marriage per se—say, placing him in debate with Fuller, who viewed most marriages as “degradation”—than in tracking Emerson's affective response to his dynamics with Fuller and with Lidian. One clue emerges in Emerson's poem, “Étienne de La Boéce,” which he wouldn't complete until 1846: “When the pilgrimage is done, / And we've the landscape overrun, / I am bitter, vacant, thwarted, / And your heart is unsupported.” Thinking of their shared walks, Marcus is quick to acknowledge that “these lines were not explicitly addressed to Fuller” (145). His point is not to assert that the poem is “about” this crucial relationship in American literary history, so much as to use it to suppose a set of possibilities about what Emerson went through, intrapsychically. The lines, as Marcus suggests, “capture the flavor of Waldo's rapport with Fuller: its advances and retreats, its nettling assertions of autonomy, its melancholy endgame” (146).
This interpretation resonates with Marcus' brief, oblique mention of his own experience with two marriages—which he has written about in greater depth elsewhere—as well as a facet of Emerson's relationships with women. That topic has gained intense attention from other scholars, including forthcoming studies by Randall Fuller and Kate Culkin. Glad to the Brink of Fear nests with new work that is doing much to complicate and further flesh out a writer who long ago became unapproachable in United States intellectual history.
What do we need from Emerson today? Marcus' book suggests his own need of an Emerson who reaches beyond pithy aphorisms and into our present in order to touch the very quick of need itself. Marcus describes what it feels like for him to be in Concord: “I thought of my own father, too, who was alive when I wrote the first sentences of this book and who is gone as I write the last ones.” “If I read this book backward,” he asks, “will my father be there to greet me on the first page” (271)? Our relations, as Emerson wrote, can seem so oblique and casual, and yet we yearn so fervently for contact. Glad to the Brink of Fear is as much about that yearning as anything else.