
Lord Jim
'You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends'. David Stuart Davies looks at
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Jan
13
Jan
20
“I am afraid I shall not write till
I get home, for all I do is scribble odds and ends as notes, and dawdle round without
an idea in my head. Alice says no one does anything in Italy, so after another
six months of idleness, I may get back and go to work,” predicted Louisa May Alcott in a
letter to her family from Vevey, on Lake Geneva, on – do bear this date in mind – 20 September 1870. The acclaimed
author of Little Women (1868) had been travelling through Europe for
four months, on what she hoped would be a year-long vacation with a dual remit,
encompassing both her creative life and her familial responsibilities.
On the latter front, Alcott achieved what she’d set out to do: help her youngest
sister May make the most of her stay in Europe, where she had been invited to
join her friend Alice Bartlett – she of the
cheeky remark about Italy – on the Grand
Tour. May had made a condition of her going that Louisa should also travel with
them; while Alice paid for May’s expenses,
Louisa was on hand as self-appointed duenna and provider of further financial
support for her sister, a talented painter keen to take in the artistic riches
of the old continent.
Louisa understood that yearning; equally, she
appreciated the importance of congenial society, for that was what she had
lacked on her first trip to Europe, in 1865, as a companion to the invalid Anna Weld and her half-brother
George. Back then, when she couldn’t have afforded the journey on her own,
attending to “the Weld
incumbrances” had been a
disagreeable necessity.[1]
Four years later, she would mine her memories of this experience abroad as
inspiration for Amy March’s voyage
through Europe in Good Wives (1869), Part Two of Little Women.
This second volume had confirmed the
extraordinary popularity of the adventures of the March sisters, further
catapulting its author into the literary stratosphere, notwithstanding her own
reservations about the quality of her work.
Alcott would continue to hold ambivalent feelings about writing for the
audience who had decreed her success, noting in her diary – nearly a decade since her
commercial triumph – that she was “tired of providing moral pap for
the young.”[2]
She had an even more conflictual relationship
with fame; besides the constant pressure to produce new material came the
invasive demands of her adoring public. As early as 1869, she had to contend
with encroachments on her privacy and the other pitfalls of celebrity culture: “People begin to come and stare at
the Alcotts. Reporters haunt the place to look at the authoress, who dodges
into the woods […] and won’t be even a very small lion.”[3]
Alcott thus seized on May’s entreaty that they should travel
to Europe together as a chance for a break from prying eyes, as well as from “the [publishing] treadmill”, even though “requests from editors to write for
their papers or magazines” followed her
across the Atlantic. [4] She
declined these offers but, in spite of her prediction to the contrary, she did
pick up the pen before her return to the United States, and she did so in Italy
of all places. At the time of her letter from Vevey, Alcott had been chomping
at the bit to leave for the next stage of the journey, which had been delayed
by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870.
Bizarrely, especially since Alcott had cut
her teeth with Hospital Sketches (1863), a semi-autobiographical volume
inspired by her service as a nurse during the American Civil War, the political
and human dimension of the Franco-Prussian conflict hardly gets a mention in
her journal, barring a reference to the arrival of French refugees in town. In
her letters too, the war features primarily as an impediment to her plans.
Alcott found Switzerland dull, and had her heart set on reaching Rome, May’s most coveted destination. “Little Raphael” would not be alone in finding
inspiration in the eternal city; it is there that Louisa started writing again,
spurred by two very different tragic events.
In December 1870, the Tiber burst its banks
causing a catastrophic inundation; this natural disaster rounded off a very
turbulent year for Rome. Only three months earlier, to be precise on – wait for it – 20 September, the troops of
Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy had stormed the ancient Aurelian walls, conquering
the city and freeing it from papal rule, thus completing the unification of the
Kingdom of Italy. As we know, Alcott missed the “breach of Porta Pia”, which is memorialized in Italian
toponomy in the presence of Via XX Settembre in every major city. She did,
however, witness the flood, as well as the King’s fleeting, unofficial visit to
bring relief to the population; she wrote about these historic events in a letter
to an undisclosed recipient, most likely the editor of the Boston Evening
Transcript, where it was published on 3 February 1871.
At the end of 1870 Alcott had other, more
personal misfortunes on her mind: a matter of days before the river had brought
destruction to Rome, she had read in a newspaper of the death of John Pratt,
her brother-in-law and the model for John Brooke, Meg’s husband in Little Women.
She had just hit her stride with the composition of Little Men when a letter
from home confirmed that Pratt had died suddenly on 27 November.[5]
She intensified her work on the manuscript, so “that John’s death may not leave A. [her eldest sister Anna] and the dear
little boys in want.” True to character, Louisa stepped into the role of the absent pater
familias, turning to the creative effort as a source both of financial
security and of emotional solace: “In writing and thinking of the little lads,
to whom I must be father now, I found comfort for my sorrow.”[6]
Little Men pays tribute to Pratt in the account of his
fictional counterpart’s legacy to
the younger generation; the chapter devoted to his untimely demise ends with
his ten-year-old son relinquishing his childhood nickname in order to embrace
his adult identity as his father’s heir: “Don’t call me Demi anymore. I am John
Brooke now.” In fact, the
whole volume can be read as a homage to another paternal role model, the towering
male figure in Alcott’s life: her
father Bronson, whose progressive educational principles inform the boys’ school set up by Jo March and
Professor Bhaer.
Little Men, or Life at Plumfield does what it says in the subtitle,
in that it is essentially a school story. It is also – no two ways about it – the weakest instalment in the
tetralogy. There is only so much that Mother Bhaer’s “wilderness of boys” can do both plot-wise and in
terms of psychological development, not least because they are generally
younger than Jo and her sisters were at the beginning of the March family saga – witness John Brooke Jr.’s maturation above, which is more
of a promise of things to come than the thing itself. Unlike its predecessors,
this is not a coming-of-age novel; it’s Plumfield’s ‘character arc’ we are following, and not quite
its pupils’.
Reprising the metaphor of the harvest, which
had brought Part 2 of Little Women to a close, the final chapter of Little
Men focuses on whether the Bhaers’ pedagogical experiment has yielded any
fruits. The signs are promising, but we’ll have to wait until Jo’s Boys, and How They Turned Out (1886) to
have a full measure of the success of this enterprise. By comparison, the
cyclical structure from Christmas of absence and want to Christmas of
togetherness and plenitude had provided an overarching narrative tightness
already in Part 1 of Little Women to counterbalance Alcott’s tendency to write in
self-contained sketches. In Little Men, this signature episodic style
remains unchecked, and is accentuated by the presence of a large cast of
characters.
Jo’s extended household comprises no fewer than
twelve boys, a sizeable proportion of whom are biological family members: her
own children Rob and Teddy, Professor Bhaer’s nephews Franz and Emil, and the
above-mentioned Demi Brooke, whose twin-sister Daisy gets the total for this
initial crop up to a baker’s dozen. The
arrival of orphaned street musician Nat Blake allows Alcott to (re)introduce
the whole bunch to her readers, who are thus neatly positioned as newcomers in
need of familiarizing themselves with the unorthodox pedagogical ways of
Plumfield.
The opening also revisits the
tried-and-tested trope of the outsider looking in and yearning to belong. In Little
Women that role had been Laurie’s, who still thinks of himself as the first
of Jo’s boys. It is
fitting that the young Mr. Lawrence should be making the case, and footing the
bill, for Nat’s enrolment at
Plumfield. Nat’s musical
talent is another trait that endears him to his sponsor. I trust it’s not too much of a spoiler to say
that the protégé will follow in Laurie’s footstep by marrying into the
family, having outperformed his benefactor in the pursuit of an artistic
career.
Mind you, Laurie never needed to earn an
honest crust, musically or otherwise. In Little Men, he comes into his
own as a munificent patron of the arts, and of Jo’s worthy schemes. Not that we see
a lot of him, or of the adult Marches. The focus is on their charges, whose
sheer number does not leave room for anybody else, nor – in some cases – for much depth either. Several
chapters suffer from Alcott’s ‘completist instinct’ and read a bit like lists: in one
we are told about what everyone grows in their small plot of land; in another
everyone gets to tell a story. I’m not sure we need these meticulous accounts
of twelve or more variations on each individual theme, usually an
exemplification of the Bhaers’ educational
methods, but there you go. This is Alcott’s narrative method. Take it or
leave it.
In case we hadn’t noticed, she is very upfront
about it: “As there is no
particular plan to this story, except to describe a few scenes in the life at
Plumfield for the amusement of certain little persons, we will gently ramble
along in this chapter [VIII, ‘Pranks and
Plays’] and tell
some of the pastimes of Mrs. Jo’s boys.” It’s worth pausing here to remember
how radical this attention to the ordinary and the quotidian was, particularly
in writing for children. Alcott’s young
readers could see themselves in the pages of her books. And so the passage goes
on to explain: “I beg leave to
assure my honored readers that most of the incidents are taken from real life,
and that the oddest are the truest; for no person, no matter how vivid an
imagination he may have, can invent anything half so droll as the freaks and
fancies that originate in the lively brains of little people.”
The one catalogue that is quite handy comes
in Chapter II, where we get a brief description, one by one, of all the
children at Plumfield at the time of Nat’s arrival, including the seven
pupils not hailing from the extended March clan. Some of these characters are
mono-dimensional and clearly there to make up the numbers. Alcott needs them – and needs the variety they
represent in ages, abilities and aptitudes – to show that everybody deserves a
chance and can flourish, if only they identify the right vocation and cultivate
their talent. The wonderfully named Tommy Bangs stands out head-and-shoulder
from this lot, as “the scapegrace
of the school, and the most trying scapegrace who ever lived.” As for the rest, I challenge you
to read the chapter for yourself and guess who makes the cut and who instead
will be dispatched in Jo’s Boys.
Still, there is much to enjoy in Little
Men. Loveable rogues like Tommy Bangs provide the richer narrative
material, of course. Another five years, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
will perfect the type in its eponymous protagonist and his companion Huck Finn.
Like Alcott, Mark Twain is at pains to point out that the incidents in Tom
Sawyer are drawn from life.[7]
Children fight, get lost, get into scrapes. But while Twain portrays an almost
exclusively masculine domain, Alcott mixes things up by exploring the potential
of a co-educational approach, and by showing that traditionally feminine
qualities do not always match the gender they are ascribed to: for example,
Franz is “domestic”, Demi is not “a manly boy” (much to his father’s – and nobody else’s – chagrin), whereas Nat is “as docile and affectionate as a
girl”, so that
Professor Bhaer refers to him lovingly as “his ‘daughter’”.
Conversely, the girls’ games are full of violence and
mayhem, as “poor Teddy” finds out at his expense, “for the excited ladies were apt to
forget that he was not of the same stuff as their long-suffering dolls. Once he
was shut into the closet for a dungeon, and forgotten by the girls, who ran off
to some out-of-door game. Another time he was half-drowned in the bath-tub,
playing be [sic] a ‘cunning little
whale.’ And, worst of
all, he was cut down just in time after being hung up for a robber.” None of the imagined scenarios
pertain to the domestic sphere, contradicting the notion – entertained by Jo – that the girls would have a
refining influence on the boys.[8]
In concocting a whole range of different
personalities, Alcott doesn’t forget to
nod to family resemblances; take the youngest female additions to the brood:
Bess (a.k.a. Goldilocks or the Princess), Laurie and Amy’s daughter, is angelic and
precious, while Josie, the Pratts’ new baby, promises to be unconventional as
the aunt she’s named after.
Or, to put it bluntly, Bess is an absolute bore in her nauseating perfection, a
distillation of her parents’ graces
without any of their redeeming qualities, and Josie one to keep an eye on. All
will be revealed in Jo’s Boys. Sneak preview: while her sister Daisy has
inherited Meg’s home-making
streak, Josie takes after her mother in her passion for acting. Theatrical
shenanigans are bound to ensue.
If you’re already familiar with Little
Men, you’ll know that I’ve left out from the roll call the
two characters with the greatest narrative impact: Dan and – the name itself’s a promise – Naughty Nan. With each of them,
Alcott could have easily developed enough material for two separate spin-off
series, and more’s the pity
that she didn’t do so.
Somebody ought to. It won’t be me (there’s a thought, though!). What I can
offer instead is a spin-off blog post. Meanwhile, I hope the present one has
done enough to pique your curiosity about the new generation of little men and
women, and what they did next.
Quotations from Alcott’s letters and
journals are from the following two volumes respectively:
The Selected Letters of Louisa May
Alcott, ed. Joel
Myerson and Daniel Shealy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987).
The Journals of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989).
[1] Letter to Abigail May Alcott, Geneva, June 29 1870, Selected Letters,
p.139.
[2] ‘January, February 1877’, Journals, p. 204.
[3] ‘April 1869’, Journals, p. 171.
[4] Letter to Mr. Thomas Niles, Bex [Switzerland] August 7 1870,
Selected Letters, p. 144. Alcott
had written part one of Little Women in about two and a half months,
between May and July 1868, only to gain speed (!) when Thomas Niles had asked
for a sequel, which she started in November 1868 and dispatched to the
publishers on 1 January 1869. This punishing schedule had left Alcott feeling “used up”, and in two minds about the
wisdom of carrying on in this fashion: “Roberts wants a new book, but am
afraid to get into a vortex lest I fall ill” (‘April 1869’, Journals, p. 171).
[5] Alcott’s already mentioned letter to an unknown recipient, containing
sketches of the flood of Rome and the King’s visit, closes with
this brief, personal section: “I hope the New Year
opens well and prosperously with you. I was just getting well into my work on
‘L.M.,’ when sad news of dear ‘John Brooke’s’ death came to darken our
Christmas and unsettle my mind. But I now have a motive for work stronger than
before, and if the book can be written, it shall be, for the good of the two
dear little men now left to my care, for long ago I promised to try and fill
John’s place if they were left fatherless”, ‘Rome, December 29 1870, Selected
Letters, p.158.
[6] ‘1871 – Rome’,
Journals, p.177. The new novel opens with the following inscription: “To
Freddy and Johnny, the Little Men to whom she owes some of the best and happiest
hours of her life, this book is gratefully dedicated by their loving ‘Aunt
Weedy’”.
[7] From the ‘Preface’ of Tom Sawyer: “Most of the adventures recorded in this
book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest those of
boys who were schoolmates of mine.”
[8] The quoted paragraph begins: “No pen can describe the adventures of these ladies, for in one short afternoon their family was the scene of births, marriages, deaths, floods, earthquakes, tea-parties and balloon ascensions. […] Fits and fires were the pet afflictions, with a general massacre now and then by way of change.”
Image: Orchard House, Concord, Massachusetts, home of the Alcott family from 1858 to 1877. Credit: Brian Jannsen / Alamy Stock Photo