A STRANGE LIFE E-Book

Louisa May Alcott

• Herausgeber: Notting Hill Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 206

Beschreibung

Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) is, of course, best known as the author of Little Women (1868). But she was also a noted essayist who wrote on a wide range of subjects, including her father's failed utopian commune, the benefits of an unmarried life, and her experience as a young woman sent to work in service to alleviate her family's poverty. Her first literary success was a contemporary close-up account of the American Civil War, brilliantly depicted in Hospital Sketches drawn from her own experience of serving as an army nurse near the nation's capitol. As with her famous novel, Alcott writes these essays with clear observation, unforgettable scenes, and one of the sharpest wits in American literature. Blending gentle satire with reportage and emotive autobiography, Alcott's exquisite essays are as exceptional as the novels she is known for. Published together for the first time, this delightful selection shows us another side to one of our most celebrated writers.

Leseprobe

Notting Hill Editions is an independent British publisher. The company was founded by Tom Kremer (1930–2017), champion of innovation and the man responsible for popularising the Rubik’s Cube.

After a successful business career in toy invention Tom decided, at the age of eighty, to fulfil his passion for literature. In a fast-moving digital world Tom’s aim was to revive the art of the essay, and to create exceptionally beautiful books that would be cherished.

Hailed as ‘the shape of things to come’, the family-run press brings to print the most surprising thinkers of past and present. In an era of information-overload, these collectible pocket-size books distil ideas that linger in the mind.

A STRANGE LIFE

Selected Essays of Louisa May Alcott

–

Edited and Introduced by Liz Rosenberg

Preface by Jane Smiley

Contents

– Title Page –– Preface by Jane Smiley –– Introduction by Liz Rosenberg –– How I Went Out to Service –– Transcendental Wild Oats –– from Sketch of Childhood –– from Letters from Dinan –– from Women of Brittany –– from The Flood in Rome and Visit from a King –– My Boys –– from Happy Women –– Hospital Sketches –– About the Authors –– Copyright –

JANE SMILEY

– Preface –

When we were growing up, there were plenty of books we read on our own, and one of them, for me, was Little Women (1868). It was famous, it was for girls, and every library had lots of copies. It was easy to read, and the best part about it was that you could attach yourself to any of the four girls – Meg, the beauty, Jo, the independent one who likes writing, Beth, the sweetheart, or Amy, the youngest, who wants to be an artist. I was an only child, and I think, for me, reading Little Women was like observing one of our neighboring families in more detail than was possible by visiting or peeking through the window (even though I liked to try). The other book series I enjoyed, The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and children’s horse books, had no literary pretentions, so I think Little Women also showed me not only how to depict different personalities in a way that was complex and understandable, but also what it felt like to be alive in a historic period that I knew was important.

The sad and dramatic life that Alcott herself endured is well depicted in the introduction to this collection. I knew nothing about that when I was young, but now that I have been writing for many years, I can clearly see how Alcott’s character and her experiences meshed when she began to write. She wanted to be independent, she wanted to explore, she wanted to help her family, because her father, Bronson, or Amos Bronson, was well-meaning but unable to provide for them most of the time (let’s call him a prescient and intelligent vegetarian pre-hippie). He was also friends with American writers who lived in their neighborhood and who have now been immortalized by their own unique inventions: Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Because of these connections, Alcott would have understood that writing was a form of independent expression that challenges readers and also shows the author herself what she is really thinking and feeling. But because of the financial ups and downs of her family, whatever Alcott wanted to express in her work often had to be put aside so that she could write something that made money.

Alcott didn’t want to write a girls’ book – she thought that the essays and the books she was writing under her pen name, A. M. Barnard, were more interesting. But her editor prodded her and when she finally got started, she experienced something that I’ve also experienced – imagining the characters, setting and plot of your book carries you away, and after a bit, and maybe a rough start, the words and ideas seem to flow out of you and onto the page – who you are and what you know seeps into everything you write even when you aren’t trying to make a statement. Little Women turned into a pleasure for Alcott, and sparked Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886). I can relate to that, too. Every writer knows that you can’t predict which of your works is going to make money and which is going to fade into the background. You always retain a different attachment to each one, but as your career progresses, you learn more and more about how your readers feel by understanding which ones they prefer.

Alcott is so fascinating as a person and a writer that many biographies have been written about her (and several about her father). One of the dilemmas of being a novelist is how much of your own experiences, and of your own character, are you going to allow into your work? You are supposed to be writing fiction, and often your novels are inspired by things you have overheard, witnessed or read about. Something that struck you, even if it was a simple remark, made you curious to investigate whatever it was, and the novel you plan is not about you – in fact, there might be things in your mind or your past that you would like to keep to yourself – but you are who you are, and those things seep into the novel you are writing. I think that, for readers, one of the most fascinating things about Little Women is what Alcott may be divulging about her own life. I think I’ve read Little Women five times, most recently when I was asked to write an essay about one of the sisters. I chose Amy because I noticed things about her that I hadn’t noticed before – that in a lot of ways her life prefigured the modern lives of girls (school, ambition, bullying, relationships, coming up on her own with a way to navigate the complexities of her existence while her parents are overwhelmed with other issues). Certainly, Jo, with her literary ambitions, resembles Alcott herself, and Amy resembles her artist sister May. But the danger of allowing your friends or family into your work is that characters have to behave like characters – with good qualities and bad ones, in order to make the plot interesting. The thing is, as hard as you try to keep them out of your work, because you are fond of them or loyal to them, they are what you know – and when I was writing my essay about Amy, I wondered if May ever read Little Women and was annoyed by the portrayal of Amy.

But maybe she was happy or amused to be included – a friend of mine appeared in my novel Duplicate Keys, as well as in the novels of The Last Hundred Years Trilogy, and a short story or two. Part of the reason was that sometimes I had to include a soldier who had actually seen war. A few years ago, he said to me, with a laugh: ‘How many times are you going to kill me off?’ I replied: ‘You write what you know,’ but I should have said: ‘You write what you want to know.’

It seems to me that one of Alcott’s principal characteristics was her curiosity, and ‘Hospital Sketches’, the essay in this volume about her experiences during the Civil War, reveals that – she knows it’s dangerous, she knows that anything could happen, she knows she will see lots of things that are sad and maybe even traumatic, but she wants to help, and more than that, she wants to find out what there is to know. The way she writes about what she witnesses as a nurse is maybe the most idiosyncratic and interesting depiction of war that I have ever read – she is alert to the torments and also the absurdities of the day-to-day life of the hospital and how the patients and the nurses do their best to put up with them. She has a woman’s perspective – she doesn’t write about courage or strategy, victory or defeat, she writes about the peculiarities of survival. We know that her experience must have been traumatizing, but her fascination with details keeps her going.

Alcott’s work, especially Little Women, is much loved, but it doesn’t gain her the respect that we accord to Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf or George Eliot. I think that the essays in this book show that she was at least as interesting and original in her way of looking at her world as these three (all of whose novels I love) are. She offers a view of the nineteenth century that we haven’t seen before, and that is extremely enlightening.

LIZ ROSENBERG

– Introduction –

Louisa May Alcott is best known for her classic American novel for young readers Little Women (1868), but she earned her first taste of literary celebrity as an essayist. That should surprise no one for her writing genius defied genre. In many ways, her finest essays are even more brilliant – or perhaps more consistently brilliant – than her novels and stories. Three of these essays alone – ‘Hospital Sketches’ (1863), ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’ (1873) and ‘How I Went Out to Service’ (1874) – are, as they used to say in Charles II’s day, worth the price of admission. Anyone who has read and loved any of her novels will recognize her characteristic style, energy and wit in them.

Louisa May Alcott was born in 1832 into a family of high idealists: lovers of equality, ideas and books. Her first playthings, as a toddler, were her father’s volumes from his private library and she composed her first poem, ‘To the First Robin’, when she was eight. She learned to express herself and share her observations of the world in the childhood journals her parents required their four daughters to keep and in her early written observations, Alcott identifies and scorns hypocrisy, especially when it harms the poor, the helpless and the young. Later, in journals and letters written in her teens (precursors of her nonfiction), she exercises the eagle eye of a reporter; she is irreverent and astute. For instance, she described the highly-respected Julia Ward Howe, author of the American anthem ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’, as a ‘straw colored supercilious lady with pale eyes and a green gown in which she looked like a faded lettuce.’ Her elders would have been appalled had they read her notes.

In line with the literary and social ideals of her family, Alcott’s education was eccentric, yet exalted. As one of the founders of American Transcendentalism – that abstract American cousin to British Romantism – Alcott’s eccentric philosopher father Bronson Alcott encouraged great figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne to educate his daughters. While Emerson loaned Alcott books from his library, Thoreau became her first earth science teacher, escorting the four Alcott sisters on nature walks and canoe rides, pointing out the flora and fauna (and more fancifully, the fairies) of New England.

Alcott’s first published ‘real’ book, as she called it, was called Flower Fables, published in December, 1854. It was a collection of fairy tales written for Ellen Emerson, the daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Inscribing the first copy to her mother, Alcott wrote: ‘I hope to pass in time from flowers and fables to men and realities’, which, of course, she did in both her essays and her novels for young people.

In one of the stand-out essays in this collection, ‘How I Went Out to Service’, Alcott records her labors as a young, naïve and over-worked domestic servant. When Alcott was about fifteen, her mother began an informal employment agency geared to help the poor and Alcott became one of her early ‘clients’, going out to keep house for a miserly lawyer in Dedham, Massachusetts.

The essay is as deft as anything she ever wrote. Alcott’s sanctimonious minister-employer proves to be a liar, glutton and predator with designs on the poor young author. ‘He presented me with an overblown rose, which fell to pieces before I got out of the room, pressed my hand, and dismissed me with a fervent “God bless you, child. Don’t forget the dropped eggs for breakfast.”’ Part of the tragi-comedy in the essay is that throughout the innocent narrator doesn’t see his misbehavior coming, but the reader does. Much like a narrator from a Jane Austen novel, Alcott sees, but does not understand, what lies ahead.

In 1861, the unknown Alcott presented this essay to Boston’s most distinguished publisher, James Field, at the newly-created Atlantic Monthly. He glanced through the piece and dismissed her with a condescending: ‘Stick to your teaching, Miss Alcott. You can’t write.’ To add insult to injury, he offered her forty dollars as a loan to start her own school. Luckily for us all, a quiet young editor named Thomas Niles sat beside Fields during this interview, listening in. Years later, he would commission, edit and publish Little Women.

Alcott’s first truly successful published essay was ‘Hospital Sketches’, based on her own experience of being a nurse in the American Civil War. It captured the attention of a reading public hungry for news of the war, but it was not written with an eye toward fame. Culled from letters home and journal notes, Alcott herself thought it a hodge-podge of writing and chronicles, unlikely to interest anyone: she was simply recording her experiences and she was more shocked than anyone when it became a popular sensation. First published in serial form and later, in 1863, as a book, ‘Hospital Sketches’ provided rare on-the-ground reportage of the long, bloody conflict from a war nurse’s perspective – a thing unheard of at the time. It features a narrator called ‘Nurse Periwinkle’, though nearly everything else in it derives from real life. Alcott herself nursed sick and dying Union soldiers; witnessed their arrival from the catastrophic battle at Fredericksburg and served as head of the night ward after only two weeks on the job. ‘It was a strange life: asleep half the day, exploring Washington the other half, and all night hovering, like a massive cherubim, in a red rigolette, over the slumbering sons of man.’ She also contracted typhoid pneumonia that nearly killed her, and was heavily dosed with the wonder drug calomel, the mercury poison that finally did.

Grateful nineteenth-century readers found, in ‘Hospital Sketches’, their first real-life account of the soldiers’ experiences of the Civil War. Alcott’s was new journalism before the phrase was ever invented, and readers embraced it. War news traveled northward slowly and unreliably, but ‘Hospital Sketches’ filled the gap for anxious Yankee families and friends. Still, Alcott was amazed by its reception: ‘I cannot see why people like a few extracts from topsy-turvy letters written on inverted tea kettles,’ she marveled. Only later did she admit that these autobiographical and realistic essays ‘pointed the way’ toward her true writing material and style.

Since some of the essays in this collection are very long, I have occasionally trimmed the text by using ellipses, taking care to keep flavor and meaning intact. They are also not presented here in chronological order. One of the latest is an autobiographical essay based on Alcott’s unhappy early childhood experience on a communal farm. Written in 1873, ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’ alternates broad comedy with tragedy as it records in detail the near dissolution of the Alcott family. The commune, even at its most populous, was too small to succeed, and it housed eccentrics and bona fide lunatics equally. The utopian experiment was a dismal failure, for the commune and for the Alcotts personally, who nearly froze and nearly starved, and at the end of it all Bronson suffered a breakdown.

Surely these events were traumatic for a ten-year-old child, and this may partially explain why Alcott waited to write about it so late in life. But Alcott never lingers on the psychological devastation. Instead of dwelling in the self-reflection typical of memoir, she focuses on the characters around her and records the homely details of daily life (‘unleavened bread, porridge, and water for breakfast; bread, vegetables, and water for dinner; bread, fruit, and water for supper’), leaving little room for disbelief. It must all be true, because it sounds true. Indeed that is part of her genius as an essayist and memoirist: she is as succinct as a newspaper reporter. Her prose canters along; she covers great distances in the fewest words; there is no dilly-dallying. Alcott once advised an aspiring writer: ‘The strongest, simplest words are best.’

On more than one occasion she halted publication of her non-fiction work because she felt it was not true, not deep enough. This happened with a linked series of European travel essays, excerpted here from an unfinished collection of her travel writing called Shawl Straps. Another piece, intended as a travelogue of American places, she cut short early on, fearing that writing superficially might become a bad habit. She refused to become an imitation of herself.

Nor was she able or willing to keep a straight face throughout. In her lighter tone – for her tone, throughout her essays, is flexible – she captures, for example, the comic anxiety of the amateur traveler: ‘put my tickets in every conceivable place … and finish by losing them entirely. Suffer agonies till a compassionate neighbor pokes them out of a crack with his pen-knife.’

Her essays are rich with unerasable moments, and as in her greatest works of fiction, they strike the intersecting point between tragedy and comedy. If she tugs on heartstrings in these essays – and most assuredly she does – she also demonstrates a clear awareness of the funny side of life.

Alcott understood that habitual use of humor and exaggeration might incline readers to doubt the veracity of her non-fiction and at the end of ‘Hospital Sketches’, she urges the reader to believe what is only partly true: ‘such a being as Nurse Periwinkle does exist, that she really did go to Washington, and … these Sketches are not romance.’ Her fiction found its roots in real-life experiences and her non-fiction always contained kernels of invention. Most of the time she shrugged off strict distinctions between fact and fiction.

Similarly, Alcott’s essays always showcased her beliefs in abolition, suffrage and equal rights. (Although her language does not always accurately reflect this, for instance when she refers to ‘colored people’.) Perhaps because her mother had labored in Boston’s worst slums, campaigning tirelessly for healthier, safer working conditions, fair pay and equal opportunity, Alcott became a vocal supporter of the rights of women to vote, early and late, and shared her mother’s dedication to such causes.

One of the essays here, ‘Happy Women’, fiercely defends women’s inalienable right to remain single. In her fiction for young readers, she became known as ‘The Children’s Friend’, an accolade that was both enriching (financially and otherwise) and limiting. Essay writing allowed her to say openly what her children’s stories could only suggest.

After the enormous success of ‘Hospital Sketches’, her serious novels – Moods (1864) and Work (1873) – were published, but received tepid reviews at best and poor sales. Had these – or any of her subsequent gothic novels, published under a series of pseudonyms – succeeded, we might never have had Little Women, nor any of its sequels. As it was, Alcott tumbled into children’s literature. In the 1860s and 70s a new pseudonymous ‘Oliver Optic’ series of books for boys flooded a new market and Thomas Niles, the young editorial assistant who had seen ‘How I Went Out to Service’ rejected out of hand, wanted to test the publishing waters for girls, believing there was a vacuum waiting to be filled. He used a blend of charm, encouragement and family pressure to persuade Alcott to try her hand at a girl’s juvenile novel. Privately she noted in her journal: ‘I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.’ The one saving grace, she believed, was the story’s reality: ‘we lived it.’

Alcott’s autobiographical essays, such as ‘Hospital Sketches’, ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’ and ‘How I Went Out to Service’, are closer in tone, style, voice and subject matter to Little Women than any of her early fiction, and if one wants to see the author of the March family chronicles in the making, one need look no further than into these essays. Even if they were not the literary jewels they are, they would be worthy of attention and it’s not often that we get to see a great author coming into her own before our eyes.

As a woman and as an author, Alcott was a force of nature. For most of her life she wrote for eight hours a day, in addition to her other labors, which included scrubbing and sewing throughout the night, cleaning and cooking and teaching school. A side effect of the mercury poisoning she suffered as a result of the typhoid pneumonia meant that Alcott often wrote with an aching arm and a painfully swollen leg propped up on a stool. But throughout her life, the writing ‘machine’, as she called herself, had to keep producing in order to earn money to keep ‘The Pathetic Family’ (her private name for the Alcotts) afloat. She could not afford to sentimentalize or write lengthy and rambling descriptions; or to hold forth like her father. She knew she must please the public or starve.

None of these essays collected here were ever intended to be her ‘real’ work – that ambition she reserved for her unsuccessful literary adult novels – but the warm reception of ‘Hospital Sketches’ gave her confidence to trust her own voice and material. Without that ‘hint’, as she called it, she never could have written Little Women and it proved to her that readers crave truth as well as invention. Under the most challenging circumstances, she kept on writing, celebrating the good and calling out the bad. She rejected sentimentality and self-pity in an era that encouraged both, especially for women who were expected to faint away at the first obstacle. That was not Louisa’s way. ‘I was there to work, not to wonder or weep …’

– How I Went Out to Service –

(1874)

When I was eighteen I wanted something to do. I had tried teaching for two years, and hated it; I had tried sewing, and could not earn my bread in that way, at the cost of health; I tried story writing and got five dollars for stories which now bring a hundred; I had thought seriously of going upon the stage, but certain highly respectable relatives were so shocked at the mere idea that I relinquished my dramatic aspirations.

‘What shall I do?’ was still the question that perplexed me. I was ready to work, eager to be independent, and too proud to endure patronage. But the right task seemed hard to find, and my bottled energies were fermenting in a way that threatened an explosion before long.

My honored mother was a city missionary that winter, and not only served the clamorous poor, but often found it in her power to help decayed gentlefolk by quietly placing them where they could earn their bread without the entire sacrifice of taste and talent which makes poverty so hard for such to bear. Knowing her tact and skill, people often came to her for companions, housekeepers, and that class of the needy who do not make their wants known through an intelligence office.