American Philosophy (7 page)

The Emersons and Lees went way back—so far back that their long-standing relationship was forged during the American Revolution. It's impossible to understand American philosophy without grasping how it sprang from this conflict. Emerson's grandfather, William, had built the Old Manse in Concord in 1769, a building that now commemorates the first battle of the Revolution. He'd been the chaplain of the Provincial Congress when it met in Concord in 1774, and then he took up the post of chaplain for the Continental Army when the war began. When he died from camp fever while on campaign, Emerson's father, also a William, was a boy of only seven.

Lee's revolutionary roots were even more distinguished. He could trace his family back to Anne Hutchinson and John Cotton. Hutchinson was the Puritan woman who dared to contradict the Puritan ministers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636. Cotton was the minister who inspired her to do so. The freethinking Hutchinson was fed up with her Puritan leaders' draconian work ethic. The settlers no longer had to be strictly obedient to the British crown, but in those early years the Puritans demanded ever-greater obedience from their followers. Hutchinson was tired of taking orders. Inspired by Cotton's sermons, she argued publicly that salvation could not be achieved through good works alone but turned on the acceptance of grace, a personal conversion that had absolutely nothing to do with the church hierarchy of the Puritans. She was exiled for her belief—truly radical in her day—that religious salvation came hand in hand with political and personal freedom. Her ideas percolated through the next five generations of American thinkers. Many years after Hutchinson's death, one of her descendants gave birth to Henry Lee's grandfather, Joseph. By this point the Lee family was no longer terribly interested in ideological or theological matters. Their revolution was to be fought not over the Bible, but over economics and politics. Joseph Lee's family was one of the most powerful shipping clans in America at a time when the British colonial taxes were particularly onerous. On December 16, 1773, Joseph and several hundred of his most zealous buddies decided to dump English tea into Boston Harbor. When the Boston Tea Party led to the Revolution, Lee allowed his merchant ships to be recommissioned as privateering vessels, and the Beverly Privateers of the American Revolution were born.

What must it have been like to have ancestors like this? More than a little intimidating, I imagined. The unspoken goal for nineteenth-century American thinkers was to live up to their families' revolutionary spirit. No small trick, considering the relative peace and stability that existed in the early 1800s. In the 1830s Emerson and Lee, each in his own way, decided to rebel against the one American institution that hadn't undergone radical transformation in the previous century—Harvard. Harvard hadn't changed with the Revolution; it was dominated first by a bunch of old-school Calvinists and then by a surprisingly conservative group of Unitarians. Both groups staunchly disapproved of the liberal Unitarianism that had begun to gather momentum. Echoing his ancestors' rejection of institutionalized religion, Emerson argued that salvation could be achieved through intuition of the divine in nature. He was a proper adult when this debate began, and he made a well-respected career of his iconoclasm. Lee was an improper teenager at the time and resorted to other methods of protest.

Lee entered Harvard at the age of sixteen in 1834. Back then, the college wasn't an altogether reputable place. The students terrorized unsuspecting tutors and partied hard, and Lee was no exception. In his first year, his class of freshmen initiated what has come to be known as the Harvard Rebellion of 1834. One day, a Greek tutor by the name of Dunkin asked a freshman, John Bayard Maxwell, to recite his lesson. The pupil refused and was suspended for insubordination. In response, his classmates set Dunkin's room on fire. Things escalated from there. The president of Harvard was burned in effigy, guards were badly beaten, and tutors, all of them, were physically intimidated. Amid the chaos, Lee bolted one of his tutors into his bedroom—screwing the door closed from the outside, making it impossible for the tutor to escape. For this relatively harmless prank Lee was suspended and exiled to the manor house of Ezra Ripley, the minister in the nearby town of Waltham.

This is where Emerson and Lee first met, at the home of Ezra Ripley. An odd fellow, Ripley was respected by the traditional members of the Harvard community, but unlike most of them, he welcomed debate between conservative and liberal thinkers. Emerson was thirty-four when the young Lee was “sentenced” to Waltham, and they met during one of Emerson's visits. Their interaction was fleeting at the time, but Emerson came to see Lee as more than an average hooligan. In the next three years Emerson would write and then deliver two of the most critical lectures on the failures of Harvard and, by extension, the failures of the American educational system: “The American Scholar” and the “Divinity School Address.” In these lectures he poetically gave voice to the general sentiment of Lee's class of 1834: American education and religion needed to leave the dogmatism of the past behind and tailor their lessons to the promise and innovation of young minds.

“The American Scholar,” delivered in 1837, was at first widely admired. “We will walk on our own feet,” Emerson promised, “we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds … A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.” Anne Hutchinson would have been proud. Equal parts egalitarian and progressive, “The American Scholar” was just reverent enough to keep from alienating the stuffy Harvardites. But the “Divinity School Address” was another matter. Given in the summer of 1838, the lecture pulled no punches regarding the role of church hierarchy in pursuing salvation—saying it had none. At the outset, Emerson said, “Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those most sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.” For the Harvard overseers, this was blasphemy, and they proclaimed that Emerson would never again give a lecture on college grounds. The proclamation almost held: He wasn't invited back for thirty-two years. Only in 1870 was he asked to give the University Lectures that initiated graduate studies at Harvard. And who welcomed him back? The onetime hooligan Henry Lee.

Lee remained a troublemaker, but he had become famous during the Civil War for organizing Union troops in Boston when President Lincoln called for the defense of Washington in 1861. With this reputation and ample family funds, he was invited to serve on the Harvard Board of Overseers in 1867; he accepted and held the post until 1879. He oversaw the construction of Memorial Hall, the massive High Victorian Gothic building at the center of campus, and supported the organization of the University Lectures, which included a very grateful Emerson and a young philosophical upstart named Peirce. Just days before the elderly Emerson returned to lecture at Harvard, he was invited to James Elliot Cabot's Brookline home, where Henry Lee's children were putting on a play of
Alice in Wonderland
.

How had Lee's copy of
Letters and Social Aims
gotten to West Wind? Emerson probably gave Lee the book in 1875, and when Lee died, in 1905, his family probably gave the book to Richard Cabot (James Cabot's son). Richard Cabot and William Ernest Hocking had taken Royce's classes together in the 1890s and become best friends. In fact, Richard Cabot introduced William to Agnes O'Reilly, whom he would later marry. Cabot was the namesake and godfather of Hocking's son, Richard—Jill, Penny, and Jennifer's father and the most recent owner of West Wind. So when Richard Cabot died in the 1930s, the book became part of Hocking's time capsule. Looking back, I had the realization that at one point in the not-so-distant past, philosophy wasn't the sort of thing that was discussed only at formal conferences and in arcane journals. It was exchanged over dinner, between families. It was the stuff of everyday life.

The more time I spent on the Hocking estate, the more it seemed that all roads in American philosophy converged at West Wind. Yet looking around the library, it was impossible not to feel utterly alone. Nobody cared about this circuitous history. Nobody cared anymore about self-reliance or about the possibility that philosophers could also be political or existential heroes. Philosophy was no longer intensely personal.

Emerson and the rest of his cohort encouraged their readers to face the unavoidable tragedies of life with Promethean fortitude. After my disaster with the tire iron, to say nothing of the seeming tragedy of the rest of my life, I thought all of this was a pipe dream. Life was tragic—they'd gotten that much right—and on a few rare evenings, ensconced in a first-floor nook with Hocking's notebooks on idealism, bathed in the warm glow of the Tiffanies, I'd almost bought into their just-so story about self-reliance and salvation. This wouldn't be one of those evenings. Instead, I pulled myself up from the rocker, slunked across the library, looked up to pay my respects to the portrait of Agnes, and went directly upstairs.

*   *   *

In the attic, I pulled the cord on the one overhead bulb, which turned out to be wholly insufficient for snooping. So I fished out my headlamp from my pocket and worked my way back into the eaves, where Penny Hocking had spent many a summer day. There, her mother, Katherine, had assiduously stored box after box of family correspondence, many of the letters written in the early nineteenth century from such places as Chicago, Albuquerque, and San Francisco—parts of the country that were, at the time, frontiers. I had some vague idea that these rivaled the books for being the most valuable part of the library, at least monetarily speaking, but I wasn't an antique collector or that sort of history buff, and these letters were deeply personal for the current generation of Hockings. So I avoided them. I didn't want to trespass any more than I already had.

But on my last visit, the shelf next to the boxes had bothered me, so I flipped on the high beams and went digging. Headlamps are uniquely modern devices. I was, for the first time all day, the master of my own brightly lit, if pitifully small, dominion. I got to determine, with pinpoint accuracy, what I saw and what I didn't. The visible world was mine and mine alone. The unseen world didn't matter, because I said so. My dominion in the attic felt secure and protected, like a private island in the middle of the ocean. I cast my beam around a few corners, and then the “O'Reilly books” entered my spotlight.

When Agnes's father, John Boyle O'Reilly, the Irish revolutionary and—as far as the English were concerned—terrorist, was condemned to a sunbaked penal colony in Australia, he had risked everything to escape. I'd overlooked this shelf for many months, thinking that it had nothing to do with the history of Transcendentalism and American pragmatism. My angle of vision had kept me from seeing what was now patently obvious: Most of the books weren't written by O'Reilly. They were written by one of his closest American friends: Walt Whitman.

Lined up like sentinels were early editions of
Leaves of Grass
; I recognized the brown leather cover of the 1860 edition. This was the third printing. In the years that followed its initial 1855 publication, Whitman had decided that his work was too short. He'd been right about the massive volume that came out a few years later: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” I paged through quickly: “I am larger, better than I thought, / I did not know I held so much goodness.” I had finally come to terms with James's dark meditation at Holden Chapel, and perhaps I could even accept Emerson's suggestion that I should be self-reliant, but Whitman's buoyancy—that I could not abide. William James would, with equal parts admiration and bafflement, call the famous poet one of the temperamentally optimistic. Whitman even wrote anonymous reviews of his own writing—sparklingly reverent reviews. He sought out an endorsement of
Leaves of Grass
from Emerson and emblazoned the praise from his “master” on the spine of later volumes: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” Emerson was nonplussed but could hardly criticize Whitman's ingenuity—after all, Whitman had probably just taken Emerson at his word: “genius borrows nobly.” Once his reputation was solidified, Whitman sat for dozens of daguerreotype portraits and gave them away like business cards. Many of these photos—now framed and under glass—became heirlooms, passed from one generation to the next as evidence that the family had once cared about poetry and ideas. Even the Hockings were not immune from this sort of display.

The frame was oblong and larger than I'd expected—it was on the floor, propped haphazardly against the shelf. I pulled it out of the shadows and wiped the grime from the glass. There was Whitman, peering out like Rip Van Winkle. Beneath the portrait was a note:

Camden, New Jersey

March 26, 1885.

Dear Boyle,

I send you some mail with this little roll of pictures—take your choice, what you like for yourself. Send one to Bagenal, as I have not got his address … I am well as usual—but am very lame—Have not been anywhere outside for over a year …

Walt Whitman

The discoveries at West Wind were no longer shocking, but the idea that things so precious could go to waste so easily was deeply unsettling. Then again, sometimes West Wind could be exasperating: “I am well
as usual
,” Whitman wrote. How could one be at once “very lame” and “well as usual”? You'd have to be either a superhero or a liar.

A mature and healthy Whitman met John Boyle O'Reilly four years earlier, in February 1881, at the inaugural meeting of the St. Botolph Club, a literary society that was modeled after the Century Association in New York. Its membership list read like a Who's Who of Boston: Henry Cabot Lodge, John Singer Sargent, and Henry Houghton and George Mifflin of the eponymous publishing house were all in the club. St. Botolph's was a swanky Brahmin affair that convinced Whitman—if he still needed convincing—that he'd finally made it into the New England literati. He was in the process of finishing what many scholars consider the last true edition of
Leaves of Grass
. The little volume had started as twelve poems but three decades later was edging toward four hundred. When Emerson died, in 1882, Whitman sought other champions, and O'Reilly, who was quickly becoming a cultural icon in Boston, fit the bill.