Emerson's Protégés: Mentoring and Marketing Transcendentalism's Future
Emerson's Protégés: Mentoring and Marketing Transcendentalism's Future
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Overview
Author David Dowling’s history of the professional and personal relationships between Emerson and his protégés—a remarkable collaboration that alternately proved fruitful and destructive, tension-filled and liberating—is a fascinating true story of altruism, ego, influence, pettiness, genius, and the bold attempt to reshape the literary market of the mid-nineteenth century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300206760 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/26/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
David Dowling is assistant professor in the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication and author of several books, most recently Literary Partnerships and the Marketplace: Writers and Mentors in Nineteenth-Century America. He lives in Iowa City.
Read an Excerpt
Emerson's Protégés
Mentoring and Marketing Transcendentalism's Future
By David Dowling
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 David DowlingAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-20676-0
CHAPTER 1
Emerson's Hero: Mentoring Margaret Fuller
Of the three Emerson protégés who ventured into the antebellum New York City literary market to launch their careers, only Margaret Fuller would emerge an unqualified success. Ellery Channing and Henry Thoreau squandered a series of opportunities with contacts arranged by Emerson. In contrast, Fuller became a celebrated literary editor and columnist for the Tribune while living in New York. Even from abroad, her dispatches from revolutionary Italy became America's primary source of information about the war. So how could her protracted and engrossing apprenticeship under Emerson—a transcendentalist philosopher and metaphysician labeled abstract and incomprehensible to the point of irrelevance by detractors—have contributed, if at all, to her success? Or was her socially engaged reform writing and support of the Italian revolution a form of rebellion against him? Did she finally become such a powerful voice in American literature and journalism despite, rather than because of, Emerson's influence?
The historical condition of newspaper writing and antebellum publishing frames this chapter's twofold emphasis on Fuller's work with Emerson on the Dial—during which he helped promote and publicize her career—and on the importance of her Emersonian mentorship in laying the foundation for her subsequent success in the world of New York City journalism. From 1836 to 1839 Fuller played the role of adoring young scholar to Emerson's renowned mentor. Then from 1839 to 1840 during her Dial editing years she made a concerted move toward professionalization that would serve her eventual transition to Horace Greeley's Tribune. The principle of self-reliance and the critique of institutional corruption, materialism, and social injustice at the core of Emersonian transcendentalism equipped her with an outlook ideally suited to her position as literary editor. The trajectory of her career corresponds with Emerson's pattern of enthusiasm, adoption, and judgment of his protégés. His relationship with Fuller would end not in disappointment, but in his eventual acceptance of her for the fully realized and accomplished professional she became. She achieved her success primarily through the periodical press, flourishing in both the Dial and the daily newspaper world of the Tribune.
Fuller's professional development occurred in the context of the revolution of authors' salaries in antebellum America, particularly in newspapers and magazines. She took the ethical role of writing and editing for the periodical press to be saddled with monumental responsibility for the shaping of the nation's moral principles. In Papers on Literature and Art, she illustrated such power and concomitant moral responsibility given the surges in print production and mass distribution of reading for an expanding populace more literate and solvent than ever before. Forgery is the controlling image in the lines she quotes from Cornelius Mathews to highlight the potential for corruption in journalism, reflecting her anxiety about mounting materialism in the culture, a trend encompassing authorship as seen in the revolutionary salaries paid by Robert Bonner, New-York Ledger editor-publisher and consummate capitalist. "A dark-dyed spirit he, who coins the time,/ To virtue's wrong, in base disloyal lies,/ Who makes the morning's breath the evening's tide/ The utterer ofhis blighting forgeries." Commitment to the powers of good, which was embodied by Fuller's own progressive feminism and criticism of corrupt government institutions, is poetically captured by Matthews in an image of journalist as heroic truth speaker: "To know the instant and to speak it true/ Its passing lights of joy, its dark sad cloud/ To fix upon the unnumbered gazers' view," unflinchingly facing the White Whale-like mass audience of readers, "is to thy ready hand broad strength allowed."
Teaching philosophical independence was Emerson's primary objective as mentor. It was a role well suited to his agency and guidance through the perilous waters of the increasingly competitive literary market. Despite his efforts, many of Emerson's promising youths—those "many extraordinary young men who never ripened, or whose performance in actual life was not extraordinary," as he describes in "Heroism"—failed as professionals (CW, 2:153). It might appear that he did not provide the right scaffolding for their success in the publishing industry. But many of his disciples other than Fuller resisted his generous assistance in the market. He usually began by publishing their work in the Dial and referring them to his publisher, James Munroe. Munroe's marketing prowess, however, was so abysmal that one of his authors, Alexander Hill Everett, complained in 1846, "Munroe did not seem to me to be doing quite so much as he might to get my book into circulation. Would it not be wise to have some placards placed at the windows of shops where it is sold, and perhaps have it advertised more freely?"
But the Dial and Munroe were not Emerson's only resources. Among the many book publications he arranged, his protégés' work appeared with Ticknor and Fields (Thoreau), Carey and Hart (Christopher Cranch), Little, Brown and Company (Ellery Channing and Jones Very), James R. Osgood and Company (Channing), and Cupples, Upham and Company (Channing). Emerson was of course the reason Greeley had all but given carte blanche to his protégés to publish with his Tribune. But none capitalized on Emerson's assistance like Fuller. Her access to the Dial she turned into an editorship; her access to Greeley she turned into a permanent staff position, the first held by a woman.
Fuller believed that commercial considerations and the market were always already integral facets of authorship, transcendental or otherwise. She resisted the Brook Farm experiment in communal living because it pretended to escape commercial culture altogether. "I doubt they will get free from all they deprecate in society," she predicted, foretelling much of the financial anguish that befell the knot of dreamers Nathaniel Hawthorne would satirize in The Blithedale Romance. Elizabeth Peabody was also aware of the apparent contradictions between the pursuit of professional authorship and the transcendentalist denunciation of trade. She commented that "when commerce seemed about to be reformed out, I had come to Boston on my first commercial enterprise, to which some collateral circumstances conspired to open a prospect of success in obtaining the means of subsistence." Peabody apparently appreciated the irony of fighting against the tide of the market at the very moment of her entrance into it. Fuller had always viewed authorship as an economically grounded enterprise. Writing was among the many professions she would pursue, initially out of need to support her family following the death of her father. In Women in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller would emphasize the importance of women entering the public world to fulfill their professional potential. Emerson was instrumental in enabling Fuller to adapt transcendental authorship to the market, mainly because his dialectic on commerce was large enough to accommodate earnest aggressive free market enterprise.
Emerson mentored Fuller at a time when print culture was rapidly burgeoning into an early form of what we now recognize as "mass culture." Instead of reflecting a neat, static division between high and low culture, the literary market was in the process of radically subdividing into a multitude of dynamic overlapping readerships. Despite his misgivings voiced in Walden's "Reading" toward the popular prose fiction of the story papers, Thoreau had also observed in his journal that print culture sorted itself not into literary and popular categories, but into an array of highly specialized markets for literature. Emerson similarly noted "the library of the present age had become an immense miscellany" in which it seemed that "every opinion old and new, every hope and fear, every whim and folly has an organ."
Transcendentalist authorship appears in greater alliance with this developing mass literary market than we may have supposed, especially in light of Emerson's contention that "it is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner." Emerson originally made this statement in the context of denouncing the narrow interests of specialized reformers who have "become tediously good in some particular but negligent or narrow in the rest; and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result" (CW, 3:154). Such reformers typify the market's increasing specialization that had conspired to turn men into extensions of their tools, a condition embodied by "the tradesman [who] scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft" (CW, 1:53). Rather than suggesting no work should be done in the market, a charge typically directed at Thoreau, Emerson asserted that an "ideal worth" should be attached to one's vocation, as he urged in the famous passage of "The American Scholar." Professional writing should thus avoid the "penny wisdom," the "soul destroying slavery to habit" that makes "literature become frivolous" in Emerson's view (CW, 1:89–90). Thus profound implications emerge for remaining in the establishment of the commercial world and improving upon it. Fuller pursued exactly this objective in her position at the Tribune, refusing "to make a sally against evil by some single improvement, without supporting it by a total regeneration," such as the universal education of the masses she advocated (CW, 3:154). Emerson did not of course passively comply with the logic of surplus capitalism, but was acutely aware of the market's capacity to embody his most valuable principles of self-reliance and radical individualism. Escapist consumerism he clearly rejected, but a preponderance of his writing is saturated with economic language to describe his spiritual quest for the Universal Being. He commonly reformulated the ordinary language of the market so that descriptions of self-culture appear in financial terms. His intention in doing so was not always ironic or satirical. Transcendentalists, he believed, should meet the commercialization of letters more imaginatively than with summary disapproval. The instruments of production for mass culture, according to Emerson, should be utilized in the most liberal sense to humanize social values, conventions, and the institutions that perpetuate them, a belief evident in his theory of newspapers. In this way Emerson believed that, without succumbing to narrow sectarian squabbling, the periodical press might be harnessed by a transcendental author like Fuller to reach the masses with its salient social criticism.
Emerson looked to the market to overcome "the worst feature of the double consciousness" produced by the mind-body dualism of transcendentalism. He located this problem in how "the two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, really show little relation to each other; never meet and measure each other; one prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise; and, with the progress of life the two discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves" (CW, 1:213). Bringing the reflective world of infinitude and paradise "to meet and measure" the "buzz and din" of the market meant synthesizing the ideal and the real, the insular Concord coterie and the teeming urban center, a union he knew from his own success on the lecture circuit contained tremendous power. Further, he felt that the free market allowed individuals to pursue wealth, and that government institutions should not interfere with the process. We should not envy the possessions of the wealthy, he argued, but admire their independence, freedom, and capacity to use capital to realize the ideal. "Wealth brings with it its own checks and balances. The basis of political economy is non-interference. The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply. Do not legislate," he wrote, echoing Adam Smith's laissez-faire philosophy. The liberalism of Emersonian self-reliance drives this notion of the free market, which can be utilized for higher purposes than crass consumerism. Indeed, for the wily entrepreneur, "power is what they want, not candy. Is not then the demand," rather than the material end, "to be rich legitimate?" With such a capacity to accommodate for the market, transcendentalism's otherwise sharp criticism of commerce thus was not entirely to blame for the professional failures of so many Emerson disciples.
Fuller embodied Emerson's sense that "commerce is a game of skill, which every man cannot play, which few men can play well," a game that demands "probity and closeness to the facts." Her transcendentalist training rooted in this commitment to higher truths resonated through her conception of authorship, which, Emerson held, "add[s] a certain long arithmetic" of spiritual significance rather than the narrow pursuit of profit for its own sake. Indeed, Emerson's vision of how "the laws of nature play through trade" encouraged Fuller's entrance into the market. "Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue and they will do themselves justice," he affirmed, for in a "free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and imbecile to the industrious, brave, and persevering" (CW, 6:56). Emerson's vision of transcendentalism did not just make concessions or adjustments to accommodate itself to the tastes of a mass audience. That vision could only claim social relevance if it was dedicated to reimagining the market's potential to spread the curious Concord gospel, which Emerson himself so successfully did through his lectures, and which Thoreau attempted in his New York City gambit. In Fuller, Emerson found his best disciple to realize that objective.
The Accidental Mentor
Beginning with their correspondence in 1836–39, Emerson adopted "a tone of mentor—encouraging and challenging [Fuller] to increase her efforts in writing" at a time when she appears to have had "little influence" over Emerson, according to the standard critical view. This was no one-way conversation, however, but a mutually enriching association. Further, much has been made of Emerson's quarrels with Fuller in his essays "Friendship" and "Love." A great deal of praise for Fuller (and disdain for Thoreau) as promising pupil, however, is expressed in "Heroism," "Manners," and the correspondence. Fuller and Emerson's relationship, though tumultuous, was reciprocally inspirational, and her first two years of work under him were extremely consequential in setting her on the path toward success with Greeley's Tribune, the very position that eluded both Channing and Thoreau. Her chemistry with Emerson during those pivotal two years enhanced Fuller's training and better prepared her to adapt transcendental authorship to the literary marketplace of New York. Thoreau's poetic apprenticeship, on the other hand, left him feeling profoundly incompatible with the commercial context of the antebellum publishing industry. Inspired by Emerson's fiery individualism, Fuller developed a fearless critical voice. Her pragmatic understanding of the authorial role rooted in social and political activism won her prestige in the largest and most rapidly growing literary market. Perhaps most important, she understood the connection between writing and the market the way Emerson had.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Emerson's Protégés by David Dowling. Copyright © 2014 David Dowling. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments, ix,List of Abbreviations, xi,
Introduction. Embodying "The Newness", 1,
PART I. PRIZED PROGENY,
1. Emerson's Hero: Mentoring Margaret Fuller, 33,
2. Henry David Thoreau: A Poet's Apprenticeship, 66,
PART II. TRAFFICKING IN ART,
3. Christopher Cranch: Finding the Painter in the Poet, 101,
4. Samuel Gray Ward: A Financier's Aesthetic, 136,
PART III. RECKLESS ROMANTICS,
5. Ellery Channing: Saturday Afternoon Professor; or, Concord's Mad Poet, 171,
6. Jones Very: A Poet's Zeal, 206,
7. Charles King Newcomb: Emerson's Dark Apprentice, 238,
Conclusion. Awaiting Ascent: Emerson's Dilemma, 261,
Notes, 287,
Index, 323,