Glad to the Brink of Fear

I am lucky enough to have inherited my grandmother's copy of the complete works of Emerson, signed and dated Violet Wyld, 1898, when she was 23. Sadly, I know very little about her personally as she died before I was born, but the book nevertheless creates an invisible bond of common appreciation. James Marcus has written an engaging biography of one of the presiding spirits of American culture who was much more than the prophet of self-reliance and individualism and who declared that his great topic was the infinitude of the private man - celebrated in his essay The Oversoul. Marcus himself does not share Emerson's spiritual outlook, characterising himself as a shrivelled and melancholy materialist. Readers may remember my review last summer of The Magnificent Rebels, which documented the influence of the Jena set on American transcendentalism.

The author argues that Emerson remains a visionary figure, ‘who speaks to our cultural moment with tremendous urgency’ on conundrums such as identity, race, inequality, ecological apocalypse, and the tension between the individual and the suffocating conformity of the tribe. He was also a rebel who cast off his inherited Christianity in favour of a broader spiritual perspective, and took up – eventually – the anti-slavery cause, even while maintaining an undercurrent of racism. His essays are secular sermons, and it is interesting to learn that his indexed journal provides much of the raw material and the most memorable quotations. He also earned his living through lecture tours, a novelty at the time enabled by the new railway network. Emerson's outlook was also shaped by the loss of his first wife and especially by the death of his son Waldo. He alchemically ‘converts life into truth’- a powerful turn of phrase.

He was a pioneer in what has now become character education, distinguishing fate as given and character as the core of human freedom – while also recognising his own flaws and shortcomings. His friendships with Thoreau, Carlyle, Margaret Fuller and others play an important role alongside his family life. In 1872, his house caught fire, and there is a vivid description of people rushing into Waldo's study to retrieve books, manuscripts and papers, throwing them out onto the wet grass. He himself compounded the purging effect by throwing certain items back into the blaze, noting laconically in his journal ‘house burned.’ The author notes Emerson's observation that any life can be boiled down to a handful of exemplary anecdotes where our life ‘is an apprenticeship to the truth.’ I was particularly touched by the smiling portrait with his son Edward and holding his grandson Charles – there is a sense of benign wisdom that still resonates from his life and writings.