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GLAD TO TH E B RI N K OF FEAR
 G L A D TO T H E
BRINK OF FEAR

A PORTRAIT OF
R A LP H WA LD O E M E R S O N

JAMES MARCUS

Pr i nce­t on U n i v e r sit y Pr e ss
Pr i nce­t on & Ox for d
Copyright © 2024 by James Marcus
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Published by Prince­ton University Press
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All Rights Reserved
ISBN 9780691254333
ISBN (e-­book) 9780691254357
British Library Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Marcus, James, 1959– author.
Title: Glad to the brink of fear : a portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson / James Marcus.
Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023036672 (print) | LCCN 2023036673 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780691254333 (hardback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780691254357 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803–1882—Criticism ad interpretation. |
BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General | PHILOSOPHY /
Movements / Transcendentalism | LCGFT: Literary criticism.
Classification: LCC PS1638 .M288 2024 (print) | LCC PS1638 (ebook) |
DDC 814/.3—dc23/eng/20230824
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Editorial: Anne Savarese and James Collier
Production Editorial: Jaden Young
Text and Jacket/Cover Design: Karl Spurzem
Production: Erin Suydam
Publicity: Alyssa Sanford and Carmen Jimenez
Copyeditor: Leah Caldwell
Jacket image: Engraving of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Stephen Alonzo Schoff.
Based on the drawing by Samuel Worcester Rowse. 1878. Library of Congress.
This book has been composed in Arno Pro with Greycliff CF
Printed on acid-­free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca
10 ​9 ​8 ​7 ​6 ​5 ​4 ​3 ​2 ​1
 For my parents,
Deana and Aaron,
and for my daughter, Nat
 CONTENTS

Introduction 1

1. Finding a Voice 18

2. The Lives of O
­ thers 33

3. One First Love 43

4. The Shining Apparition 57

5. Ruin and Resurrection 73

6. A Conjunction of Two Planets 91

7. The Age of the First Person Singular 110

8. Beautiful Enemies 125

9. The Costly Price of Sons and Lovers 147

10. The Metaphysician on Tour 166

11. Visit to a Cold Island 184

12. Knocking Down the Hydra 196

13. Higher Laws 210

14. An Inspection of the Wreck 226

vii
 viii Con t e n ts

15. Terminus 244

16. Circles 256

Acknowl­edgments 273
Selected Bibliography 275
Notes 283
Index 319
GLAD TO TH E B RI N K OF FEAR
 ​I N T R O D U C T I O N

At ­every f­ amily gathering, t­ here is an u­ ncle you are desperate to avoid.

He is full of advice you ­don’t want, and despite your efforts to slip away,
he always pins you down on the sofa or in that narrow space next to the
refrigerator. Sometimes he appears feeble, but mostly he is inexhaust-
ible in his moralizing. This harmless individual smells of witch hazel and
shoe polish. Sometimes he asks you questions, but he never listens to
the answers. You are simply the unwilling receptacle for his wisdom, all
of which sounds terribly familiar.
At first glance, Ralph Waldo Emerson seems to be the irritating ­uncle
at the feast of American letters. Trust thyself, he keeps telling you. It
sounds like the Victorian version of self-help—­which is why it ends up
on coffee mugs to this very day. What’s more, his insistence on self-­
realization has made him into a mascot for big business. His image has
been enlisted to sell typewriters, cardboard boxes, Turkish cigarettes.
The insurance industry, too, has found him an irresistible branding tool:
Emerson “was the voice of the American dream,” declared a copywriter
for John Hancock Mutual Life in 1961, while also giving him a pat on the
head for arriving at his lecture engagements on time. In this way, our
­great apostle of nonconformity has been transformed into a cheerleader
for the most conformist aspects of American life.
In fact, Ralph Waldo Emerson is anything but a Victorian relic. Nearly
a ­century and a half ­after his death, he remains a visionary figure, who
speaks to our cultural moment with tremendous urgency. So many of the
conundrums of modern American life—­identity, race, i­nequality, eco-
logical apocalypse, and the endless tug-­of-­war between the individual
and the tribe—­were anticipated by this slope-­shouldered prophet in his
rocking chair. This should surprise nobody. He was, ­after all, the first
1
 2 I n t r o du c t i on

g­ reat American writer. He was also among the first to articulate what we
have come to think of as our national character: self-­reliant, self-­
conscious, scornful of institutional pomp and with a built-in bullshit
detector. We are, in Emerson’s view, theoretically modest but plainly
superior to our mummified Old World counter­parts. We are reflexively
pragmatic but with a deep vein of spiritual yearning and, yes, spiritual
confusion.
Born in Boston in 1803, when the United States was a backwater with
a population of fewer than four million, Emerson insisted that we shed
the inferiority complex of the ex-­colonial. ­Europe, he insisted, was the
past. The ­f uture was ­here, in what Emerson conceived of as the vast
vacancy of the North American continent. Of course this was a mytho-
logical view of the place, which happened to be tenanted by several
hundred thousand Native Americans, even a­ fter the genocidal d­ ecades
preceding Emerson’s birth. It was poetry, not policy. Yet Emerson’s
sense that the invention of Amer­i­ca marked a deep rupture with the
Old World, and not simply a small-­town, stump-­clearing continuity,
was correct—­and bracing. “Our day of dependence,” he wrote in 1837,
“our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a
close.”
Casting off the cultural yoke of E
­ urope was a major act of rebellion.
But Emerson was a rebel in other aspects of life, too, the most dramatic
being his abandonment of ­organized Chris­tian­ity. This was a radical act
for a man in his position. Like seven generations of his ­family before
him, he was a clergyman. Indeed, an Emerson baby was more or less a
pastor-­in-­miniature, lacking only divinity classes and a clerical collar.
Emerson’s pulpit, too, was a historic one: the Second Church of Boston,
which had previously h­ oused the heavy-­hitting Puritan divine Cotton
Mather.
By the time Emerson was appointed, in 1829, the congregation had
shucked off its Puritan rigidities in ­favor of Unitarianism. This was the
most mild-­mannered of Protestant creeds, which denied that Christ was
the son of God and rejected the Calvinist doctrines of original sin and
predestination. Surely such an elastic system of belief would give the
young pastor plenty of room for his own uncertainties. Yet Unitarian-
 I n t r o du c t i o n 3

ism, just thirty years ­after it had gained a toehold in a rapidly developing
nation, was already a l­ ittle calcified. It was now the faith of well-­heeled
Bostonians—it was a belief system with a powdered wig on its head and
silver buckles on its shoes.
It was besieged, as well, on two sides. The Congregationalists, from
whose midst the Unitarians had sprung, ­were infuriated by the trans-
formation of Jesus into a mortal man and ­human beings into ­f ree
agents. Meanwhile, ­there was the explosive rise of evangelical Chris­
tian­ity in the United States, which began in the early ­decades of the
nineteenth ­century. The Methodists, the Baptists, the Disciples of
Christ—­along with a wild profusion of splinter sects, buzzing like
mayflies through the bright air of belief—­would soon swamp both
New ­England creeds.
Emerson’s exit from the pulpit in 1832 cannot be understood outside
of this context. The Second G ­ reat Awakening, that tsunami of evangelical
fervor, had been building in the United States for the past three d­ ecades.
Half the country had de­cided that the old forms of worship w ­ ere empty.
They wanted something more real, more visceral. They wanted to speak
directly to God, and have Him respond in kind. Emerson was never an
evangelical: his temperament and training inclined him in the opposite
direction. Yet he, too, was ­eager to knock down any barrier to direct com-
munication with the divine. A pastor in this sense was a middleman—­a
broker of spiritual goods. Why not simply mothball the old faiths and, as
Emerson put it, “enjoy an original relation to the universe?”
He paid a price, of course, for walking away from the Second Church.
He lost his job and an ironclad position in the very society his ances-
tors had helped to create. (Six years ­later, a visitor to an upper-­crust
Boston ­house­hold noted that his hosts had been taught “to abhor and
abominate R. W. Emerson as a sort of mad dog.”) It was only by break-
ing with the church, however, that Emerson was able to discover his true
vocation. He would be an essayist—­a creator of secular sermons, you
could say, whose ecstatic, icon-­smashing prose grabbed readers by the
lapels and left them shaken, tickled, transformed. “The maker of a sen-
tence,” he once wrote, “launches out into the infinite and builds a road
into Chaos and Old Night, and is followed by t­ hose who hear him with
 4 I n t r o du c t i on

something of wild, creative delight.” As a description of both Emerson

the writer and his eventual audience, this can hardly be bettered.

···

Ah, Emerson’s prose! What needs to be said, first of all, is that he wrote
some of the greatest American sentences—­hundreds, maybe thousands
of them. His golden hits have been quoted so many times that they are
hard to view with a fresh eye. Yet they have lost ­little of their snap, vigor,
and residual sadness:
A foolish consistency is the ­hobgoblin of l­ ittle minds, adored by ­little
statesmen and ­philosophers and divines.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

In e­ very work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they

come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

­ ere is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just
Th
lost by death a dear friend.

­ very spirit builds itself a ­house; and beyond its ­house, a world; and
E
beyond its world, a heaven.

A strange ­process too, this, by which experience is converted into

thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last

wake up in Naples, and ­there beside me is the stern Fact, the sad self,
unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak

dilutions: the surest poison is time.

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, ­under a

clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special
good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.

The sentence was Emerson’s unit of thought. He called each one an

“infinitely repellent particle,” meaning that it was constructed to stand
 I n t r o du c t i o n 5

on its own, not lean lazily against its neighbors. If he had come clean and
billed himself as an aphorist, that would have been dandy. Yet he was an
essayist, who looked both to Michel de Montaigne and to the homily-­
speckled format of the sermon for his model. This created an odd friction
in his work. The essayistic form usually depended on logic and linearity,
while the self-­sufficient nature of his sentences worked in the opposite
direction. Emerson glued them together, and they kept flying apart.
This is all by way of saying that the essays, for which he is best known,
can be tough sledding for a modern reader. They move in mysterious
ways. They decline to hold your hand or pat you on the back. They revel
in pretzel-­shaped paradox. They practically invite you to pry loose the
incandescent material—to make up a private anthology of the most
explosive bits and leave the rest ­behind. No won­der Emerson himself
described his creations as “anecdotes of the intellect, a sort of Farmer’s
Almanac of ­mental moods.”
It’s worth persisting. ­These are, let’s recall, the essays that electrified
Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Margaret Fuller, Friedrich Nietz­
sche, Emily Dickinson, and William James (for whom Emerson was not
merely a spiritual godfather but an a­ ctual godfather). A prolonged dip
into “The American Scholar” or “Self-­Reliance” or “Circles” remains an
adventure. You get the glimmers of ecstasy, the tonic zing of the best
sentences, and a superb dose of Yankee swagger as Emerson dispatches
one sacred cow ­after another, often by the herd.
All of t­ hose sentences required time. Emerson’s method was to pile
them up in his journals, which he kept for six ­decades. ­Here was an
enormous catchment for ­whatever he thought, dreamed, read, experi-
enced, lamented. He once described the journals as a “savings bank,”
but they ­were more like an open-­pit mine—­a ­giant deposit of unpro­
cessed ore that supplied most of the rhetorical gold in his published
work. In many cases he buffed and reshaped this raw material before
embedding it in an essay. But often he transplanted it intact—­and just
as often, the original formulations w ­ ere superior in terms of speed, im-
mediacy, and self-­disclosure. I think Emerson recognized the usefulness
of having both a private voice and a public voice. Talking to yourself was
a spiritual excavation, full of intensity and acrobatics, while talking to
­others forced you to connect.
 6 I n t r o du c t i on

And connect he did. The conventional emphasis on Emerson as a

solitary—­a man most at home in his America-­sized mind—­shouldn’t
blind us to the fact that he was an extremely public figure. For almost
fifty years, he was a star of the national lecture cir­cuit. He spoke at the-
aters, libraries, hospitals, and churches. On other occasions, he plied his
trade in ramshackle prairie venues, and sometimes acted as his own
booking agent and producer. In a good year he might give as many as
eighty lectures, charging from ten to fifty dollars a pop.
Two ­things should be kept in mind h­ ere. First, at the time of Emerson’s
birth, the United States was still a country starved for entertainment. In
part this can be chalked up to the pleasure-­hating impulses of the Puritans,
who w ­ ere nonetheless so desperate for titillation that they sought it out in
high-­minded tracts and sermons. By the 1830s, when Emerson began tour-
ing, ­things had loosened up considerably. Yet the itinerant lecturer re-
mained a primary form of entertainment for most Americans, delivering
something halfway between a TED talk and a sermon, with a dash of
standup comedy tossed in for good ­measure. Emerson was among the top
attractions, with a sporting attitude ­toward the often primitive amenities
in the American interior, not to mention the brutal winter and some very
tough audiences. “The climate and p­ eople,” he noted, “are a new test for
the wares of a man of letters.” It was a test he was determined to pass, as he
read his latest lecture to one frontier focus group ­after another.
Some of ­these listeners felt their patience fraying by the end of the
­evening. Rutherford B. Hayes, the f­ uture U.S. president who attended
several of Emerson’s lectures during the 1850s, conceded that he held the
“undivided attention of his audience”—­but that “­there is no such t­ hing as
one of his thoughts following from another.” Yet Emerson’s popularity
was no fluke. Newspapers regularly described his platform manner in ec-
static terms: he was, in the eyes of one such reviewer, a “spiritual prism
though which we see all beautiful rays of immaterial existences.”

···

What was he talking about, both on the page and on the stage? Emerson
addressed a ­great many topics in his ­career. He shared his thoughts on
 I n t r o du c t i o n 7

nature, beauty, language, ethics, history, politics, friendship, poetry,

power, money, slavery, fate. What’s more, ­these topics ­were fluid—­they
had a kaleidoscopic tendency to intermingle in the author’s mind. This
­wasn’t from lack of focus. No, Emerson believed that grasping the mani-
fold and meta­phoric connections between ­things was the w ­ hole point of
thinking in the first place. “Man is an analogist,” he wrote, “and studies
relations in all objects. He is placed in the center of beings, and a ray of
relation passes from ­every other being to him.”
The urge to trace t­ hese relations was, for him, an old one. Emerson
had been a metaphor-­besotted creature since he was a child. One of his
first surviving letters, sent to his b­ rother William when Emerson was
eleven years old, consists largely of pictograms—­what we would now
call emojis. “Hope” is a ­little man with a hoop. “I” is represented repeat-
edly by an eye, peering off to the side or straight at the reader.
I ­don’t want to make too much of this youthful frolic. Still, it looks
ahead to a mature writer who enshrined m ­ etaphor as the primary tool
of perception. Every­thing was itself and something ­else. The material
world, what we agreed to call real­ity, could never be exhausted, since its
­every fact pointed to some corresponding fact in the spiritual realm. In
the wrong hands (and sometimes ­those ­were Emerson’s hands), this
could turn into a strategy of avoidance. You could dodge difficult ques-
tions by alchemizing them into something ­else—­into meta­phorical
moonshine. For the most part, though, it made his prose magical, with
an almost surreal leaping from limb to limb of the author’s argument.
That argument, more often than not, was about the self. Emerson
certainly wrote about all ­those topics listed above. But once they went
through the spiritual prism, they often turned into sustained conversa-
tions about the one and the many, the soul and society. His mightiest
topic was “the infinitude of the private man.” E ­ very h­ uman being, Em-
erson insisted, should negotiate terms with the ­great world, and not
rely on the standardized contract handed down by the church, the
state, or the village elders.
This conviction was not his alone. By the early 1830s, ­there was a
loose network of kindred spirits scattered throughout New ­England.
Many, like Emerson, w ­ ere Boston clergymen who had grown impatient
FIGURE 1. First page of RWE’s letter to William Emerson, November 10, 1814.
Courtesy of Emerson Family Correspondence, Houghton Library,
Harvard University, MS Am 1280.226 (Box 23: 2012).
 I n t r o du c t i o n 9

FIGURE 1. Continued.

with what he called the “corpse-­cold Unitarianism of Brattle Street,”

serving up the “thin porridge or cold tea” of an attenuated faith. They
­were in no sense a uniform group. Some, like Emerson or the pioneering
feminist Margaret Fuller, ­were primarily writers. ­Others ­were activists.
Bronson Alcott, for example, was an ardent if exasperating advocate for
educational reform, while Orestes Brownson inveighed against capital-
ism and declared Jesus “the prophet of the workingmen.” What they had
Another random document with
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 LV
A BLITHE twenty minutes or so after Lady Violet had “flown,” Elmer
and Mame decided to get a move on. For one thing Elmer’s curiosity
had been tremendously piqued by the surprise that had been
predicted. What could it be? Lady Violet, he supposed, was just
pulling his leg. Yet he didn’t think so really; he knew she was not the
kind of person to break a solemn promise. Still there was nothing to
deduce from the attitude of Mame. The aider and abettor of Lady
Violet was giving nothing away. The stars were very bright, the air for
the time of year quite balmy, the pavements of London were dry as a
bone. All the conditions, therefore, were favourable for outdoor
exercise. Indeed, as Elmer said, or it may have been Mame who
said it, the evening was just ideal for the purpose.
Mame put on her lovely new cloak trimmed with fur, or at least Elmer
put it on for her. Then Elmer got into his overcoat and clapped on his
smart gibus, which gave him such a look of distinction, that a loafer
cadging for pence just beyond the courtyard of the hotel promptly
addressed him as Captain.
The mutt got the coppers all right. It was not so much that Elmer was
susceptible to that kind of flattery, as that just now he was not in a
mood to refuse anything to anybody. He was moving about this
evening in an enchanted world.
At every step they took in it now, the world through which they were
moving seemed to grow more entrancing. For one thing there was a
powerful magic in the stars. The strip of moon, too, as Mame
remarked, seemed to be trying to put one over on them. She made
this observation while they were in the act of steering each other
across the perilous vortex from Northumberland Avenue to Morley’s
Hotel, and nearly barging into more than one of their compatriots in
the process.
However, they crossed in safety. Then they crossed again by the
National Gallery and sauntered gaily along until they came to that
great landmark in Mame’s adventurous life, the Carlton Hotel. She
gave a long look at it as they went by. Even on this night of marvels
she could not pass that consecrated spot without a sense of
amazement and gratitude.
They turned up by the Haymarket, according to plan, and then slowly
rounded the corner into Piccadilly Circus. And then it was in this
identical moment that the goods were delivered in the most
unexpected and convincing way. The surprise that had been
solemnly promised Elmer appeared right before his eyes.
A flaming electric sign winked letter by letter from the starlit sky.

PRAIRIE CITY

BY ELMER PELL DOBREE

The Book
All the World
Is Reading
“Gee!” gasped Elmer. The secret had been carefully kept; he had not
an inkling! A surprise indeed, a masterpiece of boosting.
Mame’s voice rose in triumph. “Say, listen, Elmer. I’ll tell the world
this is where we put one over on London, England.”
Down Piccadilly they walked on air. No word passed. But to keep in
touch with himself and the mundane realities Elmer took Mame’s
hand. These were sublime moments. Suddenly, high above the
famous street, the sign flamed out again.
“Say, listen, Mame,” began Elmer hoarsely. But even with all his
genius to help him he did not know how to end, so he merely
squeezed her hand.
The dear little go-getter, how slick she was! But she was also
something much better than slick. She was fine and true. A minute
they stood gazing at the recurring sign in all its brilliancy and then,
life being too wonderful to stand still in it, they moved on hand in
hand.
Sure it was destiny they should be walking thus, four thousand miles,
four thousand solid miles, from the dear funny old spot in which they
had walked last. If only Cowbarn, Iowa, could see that sign. The
book all the world was reading; the book that had immortalised the
Folks. Would they recognise themselves in all their humour and their
quiddity?
When speech was possible between them, which was not until they
were near the precincts of the Ritz, it was Mame who dared. “Elmer,”
her voice was very soft, “I’m feeling pretty good about our book.” She
said “our book.” “There’s not one word we’ll ever have to wish away.
The folks aren’t saints, the folks aren’t, but there ain’t a line that’s
mean. There’s nothing to make ’em sorry. Some of the stories you
might have told you didn’t tell. Some of the things you might have
said you didn’t say. Elmer, I’m feeling pretty good about that book.”
Elmer, too, was feeling pretty good. In fact so good was Elmer
feeling, that for all he was fully launched in the realm of letters, he
still couldn’t find a word. Not one word. But like all young men of
force and originality he enjoyed a certain power of action. Quite
suddenly, without premeditation, he put one over on Mame. In the
dark shadow cast by the Ritz arcade, he kissed the little go-getter.
Mame was thrilled by the sheer audacity of the assault. But there
was the authority of the book all the world was reading that the heart
of woman is a queer thing; so she just didn’t mind at all. However,
she did not speak again, until hand in hand they had convoyed each
other past a line of pirates in the guise of taxi cabmen, whom the law
allows to range themselves in a row opposite Devonshire House.
Nay, she didn’t speak until they had passed the end of Half Moon
Street, the other side of the road, and on by the railings of the Green
Park.
It was when they halted to gaze at the bright windows of the Ladies
Imperium that Mame’s soft voice was heard.
“That’s the hen club I belong to.”
Elmer was impressed.
“It’s the Chickest hen club in London.”
Elmer guessed it was.
“Cocks are not admitted. If they was,”—Mame said was, yet she
knew perfectly well it wasn’t grammar,—“I’d take you right in and buy
you a cocktail.”
This was a little too much for the author of Prairie City. Such un-
American play upon words was the palpable fruit of mental stress,
but in combination with the magic of the stars it was a little too much
for Elmer P. Dobree.
“Now, then, Mame Durrance, can that.” And then immediately
opposite those flaming windows and in the lee of the park railings
which hid them well, he kissed her again with rapturous violence.
After this stimulating episode they moved slowly along by the Green
Park. They still walked hand in hand; even now it didn’t seem safe to
let go of each other. But when they came to the Quadriga, that
symbol of victory significantly poised on the top of the park gates,
which is much and justly admired, they stopped and gazed up.
They gazed up at the Quadriga by the royal light of the stars. Their
hands were locked in each other’s. The eternal verities caught them
suddenly. Mighty, mighty forces were flowing through and over,
through and over, this brief and transient, this pitifully brief and
transient, life of man.
“Elmer!” It was Mame’s voice, but hardly more than a whisper, it was
so solemn and so hushed. “Imagine, Elmer, you and me—”
But Elmer said nothing. With a queer tightening of the breast he
continued to gaze upwards to the symbol of victory on the top of the
park gates.
THE END
 NOVELS by J. C. SNAITH

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D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

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 TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
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