Hokey mystic or hard-headed abolitionist and sceptic?
GLAD TO THE BRINK OF FEAR A portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson
JAMES MARCUS 344pp. Princeton University Press. £25 (US $29.95).
HALFWAY THROUGH James Marcus’s Glad to the Brink of Fear, I found myself in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, face to face with the sage of Concord. The bronze bust of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with his mild smile and hawkish nose, sits on a pedestal just steps away from George Washington, Frederick Douglass and Thomas Edison. Although Daniel Chester French’s sculpture is considered an impressive likeness (Emerson quipped “that is the face that I shave”), it called to mind the goal of Marcus’s bracing book: to puncture the image of Emerson as icon – the overly cheerful idealist, the hokey mystic gushing about finding oneness with nature, the genial dispenser of self-help platitudes such as “trust thyself” and “find the journey’s end in every step of the road”. Marcus wants to drag Emerson down from that pedestal and reveal the complex, doubt-ridden, shape-shifting, flesh-and-blood man behind the effigy. He deliberately calls the book a “portrait” rather than a biography, but think cubist canvas rather than realist rendering – prismatic, partial, filled with clashing planes and contradictory angles.
Frustrated that Emerson is still often viewed as a smiling apostle spouting the gospel of American individualism from his lofty perch, Marcus aims to present a different Emerson – radical and experimental in his writing and thought, rebellious and nonconformist by temperament, keenly aware of loss and existential despair, enmeshed in the political fray of his day and profoundly relevant to contemporary issues and debates. None of this is breaking news: from the postwar American poet Robert Duncan declaring “I read my Emerson dark”, to brilliant reinterpretations of Emerson by scholars such as Richard Poirier and Stanley Cavell in the 1980s, to the essay collection The Other Emerson (2010), edited by Branka Arsić and Cary Wolfe, there have long been efforts to rescue him from reductive caricature – to demonstrate, for instance, that the prophet of self-reliance was equally obsessed with social relations and community, or that the Transcendentalist visionary was also a proto-modernist, pragmatist, sceptic and materialist.
But even if Marcus treads some old ground in setting up his argument, Emerson would hardly have been surprised. “There is no pure originality”, he wrote. “Every book is a quotation.” And it does little to diminish this book’s many charms and revelations, as Marcus brings to life that “other Emerson” – the one shot through with contradictions, the mystic who keeps “stubbing his toe on the quotidian” – in new and refreshing ways. It is probably for
