Review: John Banville on James Marcus’s Emerson

There is something in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s life and work that speaks directly to the troubled heart. Certainly he had troubles enough of his own, including the early deaths of a beloved wife and an infant son. Yet in resisting despair he did not spare himself. His unflinching candor can startle, yet consoles and even invigorates. In the essay “Experience,” one of his grandest achievements, he mentions, almost in passing, the loss of Waldo junior, who died in 1842 at the age of five. “In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more.” As James Marcus, who hints at pains and losses in his own life, observes in a new book, Emerson “would entertain any thought.”

Marcus, “an editor, translator, and critic,” is careful to present his book as a portrait, not a biography. Although he pays due tribute to scholars such as Robert Richardson, whose Emerson: The Mind on Fire is surely definitive, he takes a freewheeling, improvisatory approach to his subject. Scholars may object to the result, which is in places so breezy it almost blows itself over, but the enthusiasm overall is endearing, and persuasive.

As W.H. Auden drily remarks in the poem “Who’s Who,” “a shilling life will give you all the facts.” There are facts aplenty in this book, as much if not more than you could want. Nevertheless, Marcus insists, “I will go with my instincts and resist the gravitational pull of chronology, its onward-rushing logic and crisp complacency. I will find Waldo where I find him.”

One of the keener pleasures of the book is the warmth with which Marcus portrays Emerson’s first, brief marriage. In 1827, when he was twenty-four and still a clergyman, Emerson met the sixteen-year-old Ellen Tucker, in Concord, Massachusetts, the town with which in afteryears he was to be so closely associated. That day he was there to deliver a paid-for sermon. The occasion had a secular consequence, however, for within weeks the couple were engaged.

Ellen was a remarkable young woman, despite chronic ill-health. As she wrote to Emerson, “amongst other complaints with which I am afflicted and which entitles me to the most fragile corner on the list of invalids—I have certainly contracted the disease of Love.” Later, when they were married and he was off on a trip, she compared their anticipated reunion to “the trembling merger of raindrops on a windowpane.” At the “instant of meeting,” she wrote, “there is a universal jar—a thrill—remember and watch your window when the sky weeps.”

In this and other instances of Ellen’s way with words and feelings, Marcus rightly compares her to Emily Dickinson; but her liveliness, humor, and intellectual acuity also remind us of Henry James’s cousin Minny Temple, an equally captivating, doomed young woman. On February 29, 1832, Ellen died of consumption; she was twenty. Just over a year later, Emerson had her tomb opened in order to view her remains. What was he looking for? Marcus writes:
he had already begun to toy with the notion that the material world was a kind of thin skin stretched over a deeper reality. What he called natural facts—objects, animals, a pebble or a persimmon or another person—were there to be seen through. Perhaps, mercifully, he saw through this one.

Emerson would marry again, and Marcus is shrewd and generous in his consideration of the second Mrs E.; but we are left with the sense that the earlier loss and subsequent grief affected him, and his thinking, for the rest of his life. In October of the year of Ellen’s death, he quitted his religious ministry. From there on, he would travel with a pen as his free lance, and a splinter of ice in his heart.

Marcus’s final chapter, “Circles,” is a fond and sometimes wry summing up both of his subject’s life and the book’s portrayal of it. The end was sad, of course—Emerson’s mind fell gradually into decay—but not sorrowful. Throughout, Marcus has been skilful and revealing in his choice of quotations; here, at the close, he adduces one of the most beautifully affecting fancies the philosopher ever entertained:
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

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John Banville’s novel The Singularities was published last year.

Please join us this Sunday for a conversation with

Chris Benfey

, Benjamin Taylor, author of the new book Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather, Book Post author Anthony Domestico, and more, on the occasion of the conclusion of our winter reading of Cather’s My Antonia. No need to have followed the group or read the book to join, though you can get it at a discount from our Book Post partner bookseller Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi. More info here.

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