The Annotated Little Women Page 45

A prouder young woman was seldom seen than she, when, having composed herself, she electrified the family by appearing before them with the letter in one hand, the check in the other, announcing that she had won the prize! Of course there was a great jubilee, and when the story came every one read and praised it; though after her father had told her that the language was good, the romance fresh and hearty, and the tragedy quite thrilling, he shook his head, and said in his unworldly way,—

  In an autographed sentiment, Bronson Alcott offered advice almost identical to Mr. March’s. (From the collection of the editor)

  “You can do better than this, Jo. Aim at the highest, and never mind the money.”

  “I think the money is the best part of it. What will you do with such a fortune?” asked Amy, regarding the magic slip of paper with a reverential eye.

  “Send Beth and mother to the sea-side for a month or two,” answered Jo promptly.

  “Oh, how splendid! No, I can’t do it, dear, it would be so selfish,” cried Beth, who had clapped her thin hands, and taken a long breath, as if pining for fresh ocean breezes; then stopped herself, and motioned away the check which her sister waved before her.

  “Ah, but you shall go, I’ve set my heart on it; that’s what I tried for, and that’s why I succeeded. I never get on when I think of myself alone, so it will help me to work for you, don’t you see. Besides, Marmee needs the change, and she won’t leave you, so you must go. Won’t it be fun to see you come home plump and rosy again? Hurrah for Dr. Jo, who always cures her patients!”

  To the sea-side they went,9 after much discussion; and though Beth didn’t come home as plump and rosy as could be desired, she was much better, while Mrs. March declared she felt ten years younger; so Jo was satisfied with the investment of her prize-money, and fell to work with a cheery spirit, bent on earning more of those delightful checks. She did earn several that year, and began to feel herself a power in the house; for by the magic of a pen, her “rubbish” turned into comforts for them all. “The Duke’s Daughter” paid the butcher’s bill, “A Phantom Hand” put down a new carpet, and “The Curse of the Coventrys” proved the blessing of the Marches in the way of groceries and gowns.10

  Wealth is certainly a most desirable thing, but poverty has its sunny side, and one of the sweet uses of adversity, is the genuine satisfaction which comes from hearty work of head or hand; and to the inspiration of necessity, we owe half the wise, beautiful, and useful blessings of the world. Jo enjoyed a taste of this satisfaction, and ceased to envy richer girls, taking great comfort in the knowledge that she could supply her own wants, and need ask no one for a penny.

  Little notice was taken of her stories, but they found a market; and, encouraged by this fact, she resolved to make a bold stroke for fame and fortune. Having copied her novel for the fourth time, read it to all her confidential friends, and submitted it with fear and trembling to three publishers, she at last disposed of it, on condition that she would cut it down one-third,11 and omit all the parts which she particularly admired.

  “Now I must either bundle it back into my tin-kitchen, to mould, pay for printing it myself, or chop it up to suit purchasers, and get what I can for it. Fame is a very good thing to have in the house, but cash is more convenient; so I wish to take the sense of the meeting on this important subject,” said Jo, calling a family council.

  “Don’t spoil your book, my girl, for there is more in it than you know, and the idea is well worked out. Let it wait and ripen,” was her father’s advice; and he practised as he preached, having waited patiently thirty years for fruit of his own to ripen,12 and being in no haste to gather it, even now, when it was sweet and mellow.

  “It seems to me that Jo will profit more by making the trial than by waiting,” said Mrs. March. “Criticism is the best test of such work, for it will show her both unsuspected merits and faults, and help her to do better next time. We are too partial; but the praise and blame of outsiders will prove useful, even if she gets but little money.”

  “Yes,” said Jo, knitting her brows, “that’s just it; I’ve been fussing over the thing so long, I really don’t know whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent. It will be a great help to have cool, impartial persons take a look at it, and tell me what they think of it.”

  “I wouldn’t leave out a word of it; you’ll spoil it if you do, for the interest of the story is more in the minds than in the actions of the people, and it will be all a muddle if you don’t explain as you go on,” said Meg, who firmly believed that this book was the most remarkable novel ever written.

  “But Mr. Allen says, ‘Leave out the explanations, make it brief and dramatic, and let the characters tell the story,’ ” interrupted Jo, turning to the publisher’s note.

  “Do as he tells you; he knows what will sell, and we don’t. Make a good, popular book, and get as much money as you can. By and by, when you’ve got a name, you can afford to digress, and have philosophical and metaphysical people in your novels,” said Amy, who took a strictly practical view of the subject.

  “Well,” said Jo, laughing, “if my people are ‘philosophical and metaphysical,’ it isn’t my fault, for I know nothing about such things, except what I hear father say, sometimes. If I’ve got some of his wise ideas jumbled up with my romance, so much the better for me. Now, Beth, what do you say?”

  “I should so like to see it printed soon,” was all Beth said, and smiled in saying it; but there was an unconscious emphasis on the last word, and a wistful look in the eyes that never lost their child-like candor, which chilled Jo’s heart, for a minute, with a foreboding fear, and decided her to make her little venture “soon.”

  So, with Spartan firmness, the young authoress laid her first-born on her table, and chopped it up as ruthlessly as any ogre. In the hope of pleasing every one, she took every one’s advice; and, like the old man and his donkey in the fable, suited nobody.13

  Her father liked the metaphysical streak which had unconsciously got into it, so that was allowed to remain, though she had her doubts about it. Her mother thought that there was a trifle too much description; out, therefore, it nearly all came, and with it many necessary links in the story. Meg admired the tragedy; so Jo piled up the agony to suit her, while Amy objected to the fun, and, with the best intentions in life, Jo quenched the sprightly scenes which relieved the sombre character of the story. Then, to complete the ruin, she cut it down one-third, and confidingly sent the poor little romance, like a picked robin, out into the big, busy world, to try its fate.

  Well, it was printed, and she got three hundred dollars for it;14 likewise plenty of praise and blame, both so much greater than she expected, that she was thrown into a state of bewilderment, from which it took her some time to recover.

  “You said, mother, that criticism would help me; but how can it, when it’s so contradictory that I don’t know whether I have written a promising book, or broken all the ten commandments,” cried poor Jo, turning over a heap of notices, the perusal of which filled her with pride and joy one minute—wrath and dire dismay the next. “This man says ‘An exquisite book, full of truth, beauty, and earnestness; all is sweet, pure, and healthy,’ ” continued the perplexed authoress. “The next, ‘The theory of the book is bad,—full of morbid fancies, spiritualistic ideas, and unnatural characters.’ Now, as I had no theory of any kind, don’t believe in spiritualism, and copied my characters from life, I don’t see how this critic can be right. Another says, ‘It’s one of the best American novels which has appeared for years’ (I know better than that); and the next asserts that ‘though it is original, and written with great force and feeling, it is a dangerous book.’ ’Tisn’t! Some make fun of it, some over-praise, and nearly all insist that I had a deep theory to expound, when I only wrote it for the pleasure and the money. I wish I’d printed it whole, or not at all, for I do hate to be so horridly misjudged.”

  Her family and friends administered comfort and commendation15 liberally; yet it was a hard time for sensi
tive, high-spirited Jo, who meant so well, and had apparently done so ill. But it did her good, for those whose opinion had real value, gave her the criticism which is an author’s best education; and when the first soreness was over, she could laugh at her poor little book, yet believe in it still, and feel herself the wiser and stronger for the buffeting she had received.

  “Not being a genius, like Keats, it won’t kill me,”16 she said stoutly; “and I’ve got the joke on my side, after all; for the parts that were taken straight out of real life, are denounced as impossible and absurd, and the scenes that I made up out of my own silly head, are pronounced ‘charmingly natural, tender, and true.’ So I’ll comfort myself with that; and, when I’m ready, I’ll up again and take another.”

  1. red bow. In February 1861, as Alcott worked on her novel Moods, her mother made her “a green silk cap with a red bow, to match the old green and red party wrap, which I wore as a ‘glory cloak.’ Thus arrayed I sat in groves of manuscripts” (Louisa May Alcott, Journals, p. 103).

  2. She did not think herself a genius. Alcott did not think herself a genius, either. Nevertheless, Julian Hawthorne tells of a dinner in Boston at which the novelist Henry James, seated next to Alcott, made bold to tell her, “Louisa—m-my dear girl—er—when you hear people—ah—telling you you’re a genius you mustn’t believe them; er—what I mean is, it isn’t true” (Shealy, ed., Alcott in Her Own Time, p. 203).

  3. these hours worth living. Jo’s creative process mirrors that of Alcott herself. In 1872, while writing her adult novel Work, she wrote in her journal, “Fired up the engine, and plunged into a vortex, with many doubts about getting out. Can’t work slowly, the thing possesses me, and I must obey till it’s done” (Louisa May Alcott, Journals, pp. 183–84). Three years earlier, she had noted, “Am afraid to get into a vortex lest I fall ill” (Louisa May Alcott, Journals, p. 171). Alcott would write obsessively for weeks, barely stopping to eat or sleep, and would then fall into long periods of dull inertia. These work habits, coupled with the presence of depression and mania in her family tree and with various hints in her fiction, have fueled speculation that Alcott had some moderate form of bipolar disorder (Matteson, Eden’s Outcasts, pp. 304–6).

  4. People’s Course. During the winter of 1865–66, John Peter Lesley, a member of the National Academy of the United States, gave a series of lectures in Lowell, about twenty miles from Concord. They included a talk on “The Origins of Architecture” that dealt extensively with the pyramids. Though Louisa could not have attended the lecture, her father did. He wrote, “I know not when I have enjoyed any words of a naturalist like his . . . Lowell Lectures.” The course mentioned here was almost surely based on Lesley’s lectures. In 1869, Alcott published a story called “Lost in a Pyramid: or, The Mummy’s Curse.”

  5. Mrs. S. L. A. N. G. Northbury. Alcott pokes fun at the tremendously popular American sensationalist writer E.D.E.N. Southworth (1819–99). Southworth wrote more than sixty novels, many of them serialized in Robert Bonner’s magazine the New York Ledger. Her most famous work was 1859’s The Hidden Hand.

  The astonishingly prolific writer E.D.E.N. Southworth (1819–1899). (Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Transfer from the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 2.2002.9. Photograph: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College)

  6. Cheops, scarabei. Paduan explorer and proto-archaeologist Giovanni Belzoni (1778–1823) helped to lay the foundations for modern Egyptology. Cheops is the largest and oldest of the pyramids at Giza. Scarabei are decorative images of beetles, fashioned from a variety of substances and used as seals, amulets, jewelry, and so forth.

  Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778–1823), equally estimable for his contributions to archaeology and to facial hair. (Photograph by the British Library / Robana via Getty Images)

  7. hundred dollar prize. In 1862, shortly before beginning her service as an army nurse, Alcott submitted her story “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” in hopes of winning a hundred-dollar prize offered by Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. The story won and was printed the following June.

  8. earthquake. Alcott recalls the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which also figures prominently in Voltaire’s 1759 satire Candide.

  9. To the sea-side they went. Mrs. Alcott took Lizzie to the seashore at the resort town of Swampscott, Massachusetts, for several weeks in August 1857, in hopes of curing the lingering effects of Lizzie’s scarlet fever. The vacation had little effect on Lizzie’s condition.

  10. groceries and gowns. Alcott paid many of her family’s debts with the proceeds from what she called her “blood-and-thunder tales.” The titles in this paragraph are fictitious.

  11. cut it down one-third. Jo’s experience parallels Alcott’s trials regarding her first published novel, Moods. After promising to publish it, printer James Redpath then demanded that Alcott cut the book down by half. Alcott refused but later consented to editing the work severely when another publisher, Aaron Loring, made a similar request. Alcott was disappointed with the published version, whose “chapters seemed small, stupid, and no more my own” (Louisa May Alcott, Journals, p. 133). She rewrote and reissued Moods in a form that better expressed her intentions in 1882.

  12. fruit of his own to ripen. In 1868, at the age of sixty-eight, Bronson Alcott stopped waiting. That year, he published Tablets. In his seventies and early eighties, he produced a succession of other books, including Concord Days (1872), Table-Talk (1877), New Connecticut (1881), and Sonnets and Canzonets (1882).

  13. suited nobody. The reception accorded Moods was more encouraging. Alcott told her journal, “Though people didn’t understand my ideas owing to my shortening the book so much, the notices were mostly favorable & gave quite as much praise as was good for me” (Louisa May Alcott, Journals, p. 138).

  14. three hundred dollars for it. According to Alcott’s journals from 1865 through 1867, she received $327 in royalties from Moods.

  15. comfort and commendation. Abba Alcott was very pleased with Moods. She read it more than twenty times and wrote, “I look upon this early effort of Louisa’s as . . . quite remarkable. . . . Her descriptions of scenes [and] motives are admirable. I am charmed with it” (LaPlante, Marmee and Louisa, p. 215).

  16. “it won’t kill me.” In his preface to Adonais, an elegy for the great English Romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) averred that Keats had been so crushed by the Quarterly Review’s negative criticism of his poem Endymion that the shock had hastened his death from tuberculosis.

  CHAPTER V.

  Domestic Experiences.

  LIKE most other young matrons, Meg began her married life with the determination to be a model housekeeper. John should find home a paradise; he should always see a smiling face, should fare sumptuously every day, and never know the loss of a button. She brought so much love, energy, and cheerfulness to the work, that she could not but succeed, in spite of some obstacles. Her paradise was not a tranquil one; for the little woman fussed, was over-anxious to please, and bustled about like a true Martha, cumbered with many cares.1 She was too tired, sometimes, even to smile; John grew dyspeptic after a course of dainty dishes, and ungratefully demanded plain fare. As for buttons, she soon learned to wonder where they went, to shake her head over the carelessness of men, and to threaten to make him sew them on himself, and then see if his work would stand impatient tugs and clumsy fingers any better than hers.

  They were very happy,2 even after they discovered that they couldn’t live on love alone. John did not find Meg’s beauty diminished, though she beamed at him from behind the family coffee-pot; nor did Meg miss any of the romance from the daily parting, when her husband followed up his kiss with the tender inquiry, “Shall I send home veal or mutton for dinner, darling?” The little house ceased to be a glorified bower, but it became a home, and the young couple soon felt that it was a change for the better. At first they played keep-house, and frolicked over it like children; then John took
steadily to business, feeling the cares of the head of a family upon his shoulders; and Meg laid by her cambric wrappers, put on a big apron, and fell to work, as before said, with more energy than discretion.

  While the cooking mania lasted she went through Mrs. Cornelius’s Receipt Book3 as if it was a mathematical exercise, working out the problems with patience and care. Sometimes her family were invited in to help eat up a too bounteous feast of successes, or Lotty would be privately despatched with a batch of failures which were to be concealed from all eyes, in the convenient stomachs of the little Hummels. An evening with John over the account books usually produced a temporary lull in the culinary enthusiasm, and a frugal fit would ensue, during which the poor man was put through a course of bread pudding,4 hash, and warmed-over coffee, which tried his soul, although he bore it with praiseworthy fortitude. Before the golden mean was found, however, Meg added to her domestic possessions what young couples seldom get on long without—a family jar.

  Fired with a housewifely wish to see her store-room stocked with home-made preserves, she undertook to put up her own currant jelly. John was requested to order home a dozen or so of little pots, and an extra quantity of sugar, for their own currants were ripe, and were to be attended to at once. As John firmly believed that “my wife” was equal to anything, and took a natural pride in her skill, he resolved that she should be gratified, and their only crop of fruit laid by in a most pleasing form for winter use. Home came four dozen delightful little pots, half a barrel of sugar, and a small boy to pick the currants for her. With her pretty hair tucked into a little cap, arms bared to the elbow, and a checked apron which had a coquettish look in spite of the bib, the young housewife fell to work, feeling no doubts about her success; for hadn’t she seen Hannah do it hundreds of times? The array of pots rather amazed her at first, but John was so fond of jelly, and the nice little jars would look so well on the top shelf, that Meg resolved to fill them all, and spent a long day picking, boiling, straining, and fussing over her jelly. She did her best; she asked advice of Mrs. Cornelius; she racked her brain to remember what Hannah did that she had left undone; she reboiled, resugared, and restrained, but that dreadful stuff wouldn’t “jell.”