The Great American Speculator

Emerson is a difficult subject for a biography; on one hand, a biographer must compete with his journals. And because some of Emerson's most famous and important essays were in the mode of biography–the strange and wonderful “Representative Men” series–Emerson’s portraitist must also compete with Emerson on another front: the extraordinary shape and color of Emerson’s own biographical insights necessarily compete with his erstwhile biographer’s:

Napoleon is thoroughly modern, and, at the highest point of his fortunes, has the very spirit of the newspapers. He is no saint,- to use his own word, "no capuchin," and he is no hero, in the high sense. The man in the street finds in him the qualities and powers of other men in the street. He finds him, like himself, by birth a citizen, who, by very intelligible merits, arrived at such a commanding position that he could indulge all those tastes which the common man possesses but is obliged to conceal and deny: good society, good books, fast travelling, dress, dinners, servants without number, personal weight, the execution of his ideas, the standing in the attitude of a benefactor to all persons about him, the refined enjoyments of pictures, statues, music, palaces and conventional honors,- precisely what is agreeable to the heart of every man in the nineteenth century, this powerful man possessed.

Emerson’s deft syncretism, his barrage of gnostic assertions, and creative misreadings of history, literature, poetry, and theology threatens at all points to be more interesting than contemporary scholars. As a biographical miniaturist, Emerson is rivaled only by Nietzsche and Freud, both of whom he influenced. The risk, however, in writing a biography of a writer like Emerson (or Nietzsche or Freud or Montaigne et al), is not to be less interesting than the subject (that’s the melancholy fate of the biographer), it’s actually to obscure and banalize the source material: to make the subject too much like us, too familiar, too much a contemporary. Emerson’s miniature biographies succeed because they are written in service of the massive dynamism of their subjects, resisting the urge to deflate and explain-away and contemporize, deconstruct and deflate.

James Marcus, in his new biography and critical reassessment of Emerson, Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson, is mostly aware of how alien his subject’s sensibility is to our own, and how difficult, and distorting, it can be to explicate Emerson in our modern terms:

… the essays, for which he is best known, can be tough sledding for a modern reader. They move in mysterious ways. They decline to hold your hand or pat you on the back. They revel in pretzel-shaped paradox. They practically invite you to pry loose the incandescent material—to make up a private anthology of the most explosive bits and leave the rest behind.

Emerson covers his tracks; his conclusions lack premises; he speaks from an implicit sense of authority; he was trained as a preacher–and it always shows. Marcus is right about this, correctly identifying that Waldo (as Emerson was known to his friends) “believed that grasping the manifold and metaphoric connections between things was the whole point of thinking in the first place.” He wasn’t a philosopher or historian; he was a speculator, a metaphysician interested in the invisible, in what could be inferred rather than observed. Emerson’s intellectual heroes were Plato, Swedenborg, and Goethe; his own theories of fate and the oversoul are as true, in an analytical sense, as Goethe’s color theory, which is to say not true at all: not demonstrable, not scientific.

Emerson’s essays aren’t chatty, narrative, accessible; they are dense; their logic is buried to the hilt. They are still intuitively rich but forbidding. So while Marcus correctly highlights the strange, almost alien aspects of Emerson for contemporary readers (who may, at this point, only remember Emerson from a few select passages of “Self-Reliance” required by high-schools) there are times in the book when he, almost despite himself, can't resist sharing his anxiety that Emerson might not have been proper a 2020s-era liberal. I think the following passage, which ought to have never made it to print, is a good example:

I wore a mask. I got the shots. I cursed the anti-vaxxers I saw every night on television. Yet some part of me responded to the siren song of individualism, as deeply embedded in American life as a Pavlovian reflex. I understood the skeptical attitude toward the leviathan of big government—the bumbling giant that can see people only in their faceless, bar-coded aggregate—and sometimes wondered whether the cloth mask wasn’t a kind of fig leaf. I could, in other words, feel the pitched battle between the one and the many going on in my own head. Truly, the pandemic could have been dreamed up as a stress test for Emerson’s ideas. How can we survive apart? How can we survive together?

Not only is this thought experiment–was mass Covid panic Emersonian?–irrelevant, it’s misleading; people in Emerson’s time faced diseases that were far more virulent and common than ours. Emerson's own son, Waldo, died of Scarlet Fever; his first wife and brother died of tuberculosis; child and all mortality was significantly higher than the worst month of Covid; Emerson, like everyone in the early 19th century, had no notion of the safetyism of 2020. Throwing masks at a TV wouldn't have computed, does not compute, for many reasons–the least of which being that someone from Emerson’s time would have understood that 2020 was an unbelievably safe year to exist on earth, relatively. The above passage betrays an acute and undigested personal anxiety over the fact that contemporary liberalism simply isn’t Emersonian.

Emerson’s texts–not the dead man beamed into the present–reject conformity with institutions, parties, expert opinion. Period. And yet while Emerson couldn't be like us, we can be Emersonian. People throwing popcorn at their MSNBC in 2020 were not good or thoughtful readers of the essays, needless to say; Marcus’s immersion in the great author’s works did not spare him the temporary idiocy of expert-worship–and to pretend otherwise is a kind of bad faith (to put the onus on Emerson to be more like us rather than the other way around). To speculate on whether Emerson would have been in a K95 at the supermarket is not the point; the important thing is that a corpus of texts has come down to us that provides, and would have provided a platform from which we could have thought differently about current events…

But I digress. Broadly, I liked Glad to the Brink of Fear. The chapters on Emerson's first love, his wife Ellen, who died of tuberculosis, on Emerson's difficult friendship with Thoreau, in the early years of his second marriage to Lydia, are all excellent. Behind this relatively short book, there's real reading and research. Realistically, we're talking about an era in which everybody wrote long letters and often kept extensive diaries; Marcus, having mastered the reading, has a knack for pulling out anecdotes that are illustrative and rich. I have a better sense of Ellen Tucker's personality. I didn't know much about her wit, her vitality, her good humor. Thoreau’s friendship with Emerson is also well adjudicated: Thoreau began to grow out of his idol's advice and come into his own as an intellectual partner, which threatened Waldo. I like Marcus's shrewd insight that Thoreau, in many ways, was a better Emersonian than Emerson: less dependent on money, truly self-reliant in a material sense; Thoreau could deal with the material world, actually work with it, grow things, work in the woods, build, taste, touch, in ways that were impossible for Emerson himself. Emerson theorized about nature but preferred the comforts of civilization. Thoreau took the Emerson program literally and proved better at it than the master. This is good biographical criticism.

Finally, Marcus eschews close reading of any of the essays, and I understand the basic justification for that: he’s writing for a general, not academic audience, and each major essay collection, or even atomic essay, would be deserving of a monograph; that is completely fair. However, many of Marcus’s claims–not that they’re wrong or misjudged–lack intellectual chains of custody. We're told that the transmutation of journal passages into essays was critical to Emerson's method. We're told that Emerson, live on stage during his lectures, of which he did thousands, would shuffle passages and digress like a jazz musician, riffing on a standard–and that this was a key part of his compositional method, but we don’t see the evidence. Tracing at least one major Emersonian thesis from journal to lecture to printed essay would have better served the book’s purpose: to introduce a general audience to Emerson (who has long-since fallen out of cultural favor and style) and to unpack the art behind the many apothegms.

I came away from the book wanting to have a better grasp of the blunt force impact that the tragic events of Emerson's life had on his ideas. Marcus tells us that Emerson's essays often rehearse a cosmological fatalism (Calvinism blended with Romanticism), but the roots and evolution of this belief are not legible in the book. As much as the biographical material–about Emerson’s marriages, his friendships, his deep and abiding grief–is well-selected, Marcus never manages to link it to the philosophical; we understand that Emerson suffered, that he lived, and the he wrote well, but the genesis, and deep-inner logic of some of the greatest essays ever written remain opaque (but perhaps this is just what their author intended).

Matthew Gasda is a writer and director.