Ralph Waldo Emerson is a giant of American letters, but thanks to his insistence on “self-reliance,” his writing has become a go-to reference for those who endorse a particular brand of American individualism, one grounded in capitalism and selfishness. For instance, an insurance company once called him “the voice of the American dream.” But according to the editor and critic James Marcus, he was not a spokesman but “the first great American writer.” Luckily for us, the enforced ruminative time of the pandemic led Marcus to write a book on Emerson, bringing him back to his mystical roots — the playful and insightful “Glad to the Brink of Fear.”
Marcus is aware of Emerson’s reputation when he’s offered to readers in a boring, high-school-survey way. He introduces his subject as “the irritating uncle” who smells of “witch hazel,” someone you might be eager to avoid at the family gathering of American letters. But Marcus is intent on showing Emerson for who he truly was — a visionary. Emerson’s rebellion began when he threw off the family mantle of clergyman and embarked on a career as an essayist or, as Marcus puts it, a writer of “secular sermons.” But this doesn’t mean Emerson had lost his faith in God; in fact, as Marcus argues, detaching from the church set him on a path to seek the living God — who is in the present moment, in the leaves on the tree, in the child’s cry, in our daily thoughts — and to help develop the philosophy that would come to be called transcendentalism.
Emerson’s life touched many points of American history — so many that it can seem too weird to be true. A few instances include: Louisa May Alcott standing watch over Emerson’s papers as his house burned; John Brown boarding at Emerson’s house soon before his raid on Harpers Ferry; Emerson visiting the White House while Abraham Lincoln’s sons were getting haircuts; and Emerson meeting 13-year-old Theodore Roosevelt on the Nile. Suffering from tuberculosis, a disease that would kill most of his family and his adored frenemy Henry David Thoreau, Emerson traveled to St. Augustine, Fla., where he met Achille Murat, a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte — but more important, Emerson’s first atheist. Murat and Emerson never met again after the time they spent together in the South, but their passionate discussions about God and the meaning of life inspired Emerson for the rest of his life. “There is a pleasure in the thought that the particular tone of my mind at this moment may be new in the universe,” he wrote, “that the emotions of this hour may be peculiar and unexampled in the whole eternity of moral being. I lead a new life.”
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Back in Massachusetts, he met a 16-year-old girl named Ellen (he was 26) who was also suffering from tuberculosis, though a far more advanced case of it. They married, despite Ellen describing her family’s coat of arms as “a drop of vermeil,” and she died two years later. The graveyard where she was buried became “pleasanter to me than the house,” Emerson wrote. The mystery behind death was too much for his curious mind. A year later, he wrote in his journal: “I visited Ellen’s tomb & opened the coffin.” “Exactly what he saw we do not know,” Marcus writes, as Emerson did not elaborate. “In any case, he had already begun to toy with the notion that the material world was a kind of thin skin stretched over a deeper reality.”
An irritating uncle, perhaps, but another adjective might be “intense.” “He sounds like nobody else,” Marcus writes. His essays are “the sound of a man thinking,” and Marcus is not afraid to point out the occasional blind spots in that thinking. “I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist,” Emerson wrote in “Self-Reliance,” “that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.” “This is ugly,” Marcus writes. And later, about a similar line, “This is brilliant rhetoric and still ugly.” It’s easy to see, from Marcus’s scholarship, how Emerson became the patron saint of capitalists and anti-vaxxers.
Marcus’s passion for his subject and his understanding of what makes a successful biography mean this book is delightful for any reader, however much (or little) they previously know about Emerson. He provides deep analysis of the essays without ever lapsing into an academic tone. The most thrilling chapter is about Emerson’s friendship with Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. In later chapters, Marcus sensitively attends to Emerson’s cynical posture (and eventual about-face) on the subject of the abolition of slavery. And when Emerson grieves for his son Waldo, who died of scarlet fever at 5, Marcus is wise on both Emerson’s writing and the very nature of grief. (“Oh, that beautiful boy!” Emerson is said to have muttered on his deathbed.)
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Marcus is good, funny company. Though Emerson’s friendships with both men and women may have also been romantic, Marcus concedes: “Waldo is probably the least erotic of all great American writers.” When Fuller insisted on a physical relationship with Emerson, who was married, he wrote to her, “Spirits can meet in their pure upper sky without the help of organs.” Marcus exclaims: “No organs, huh?” When Waldo was born, Emerson’s description of the baby was rather staid. Marcus interjects, “He might as well have been describing a laser printer.”
But what is ultimately most charming about “Glad to the Brink of Fear” is the influence that Emerson’s life and work have had on Marcus. A visit the author makes to Emerson’s house reveals that thin veil between the material world and the hereafter. “There Waldo holed up to write, in the small second-floor study with its smoke-blackened walls and forbidding portraits of Puritan divines, who would have had little use for the pantheistic bombshell he was preparing,” Marcus writes. Later, when considering Emerson’s relationship with his father, lines Emerson could have written: “Only Saturn devours his undoubtedly delicious sons. The rest of us, looking back on all the thoughtless things we said and the pain we never meant to inflict, eat our words instead.”
There is something wonderful about the idea that Emerson will never die because of his writing, and that all of us carry on in the lives and thoughts of others. A biography that manages to prove its point — that a living God is the acknowledgment that nothing is ever truly dead — through its own prose as well as its subject’s is an Emersonian miracle indeed.
Jessica Ferri is a writer based in Berkeley, Calif., and the author, most recently, of “Silent Cities San Francisco.”
Glad to the Brink of Fear
A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson
By James Marcus
Princeton. 328 pp. $29.95
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