‘Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson’
By James Marcus
Princeton University Press, 344 pages

In “The Late George Apley,” Ronald Colman, playing the stuffy Bostonian of the film’s title, has on his shelf of classics a collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays. By the late 19th century the radical transcendentalist had become a mainstay of the ruling class.

He was a favorite of Andrew Carnegie, who no doubt was attracted to the Emersonian argument that wealth brought with it “its own checks and balances. The basis of political economy” that brooked no governmental interference: “The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply. Do not legislate. Meddle, and you snap the sinews with your sumptuary laws.”

This was a far different Emerson than the one who had earlier “accepted the need for a strong government when it came to the destruction of slavery,” James Marcus points out. Not to mention an even earlier Emerson, who scorned the abolitionists as fanatics who engaged in what we would today call “virtue signaling.”

It is the great virtue of Mr. Marcus’s portrait (which perhaps should have been titled “Portraits of Emerson”) that he takes his author off the shelf to show just how the writer and man evolved, making his powerful belief in individualism mean many different things to industrialists, Boston Brahmins, political radicals, and to the variegated audiences who heard him lecture.

Emerson’s famous line that a “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” comes to mind. He had the courage to contradict himself and believed that not to do so would stifle the self-correcting ethos of genius.  Emerson endowed everyone, in a true democratic spirit, with a touch of genius. To resort to another cliché, readers of Emerson make for strange bedfellows.

Mr. Marcus has not written a conventional literary biography — so, for example, we learn a good deal about Emerson’s childhood after his death is recounted. It makes one wonder why this maneuver does not occur in more biographies. After all, the meaning of childhood makes more sense when the reader has a grasp of what followed. Otherwise, it can become quite awkward in biographical narratives when the biographer breaks the chronological framework and flags in some childhood incident what is to come in the subject’s later life.

Mr. Marcus has written a companionable biography, by which I mean he always seems right next to the reader, explaining his approach as he goes along and places himself in relation to his subject. This is biography as an invitation to a conversation, and Mr. Marcus does it so deftly that he never seems intrusive. Instead, he makes us aware of the problems he has to negotiate and thereby makes us his allies: “The task of the biographer, then, is to locate those golden hours, using one’s own sensibility as a kind of divining rod.”

Along the way, Mr. Marcus recurs to how other Emerson biographers have handled certain events and issues, and how they, and sometimes Mr. Marcus, get “sucked into the biographical vortex,” with so many facts to sort: “The biographer aims at an ever deeper level of detail, assembles each molecule of experience, and gets nowhere.” 

This sense of futility has a chastening outcome: the “papers, notebooks, letters, journals, all resting in their climate-controlled reliquaries—these do not make a life.” Hence, his insistence on a “portrait,” which is, by definition, partial.

One of the most satisfying aspects of this portrait are the portraits of others with whom Emerson confabulates: his first wife, dying of tuberculosis and writing a sensitive poetry full of the dashes that Emily Dickinson favored; Henry David Thoreau, a young Emerson acolyte imitating the master and eventually becoming rather irksome; Margaret Fuller, so full of Emerson she rather alarms his second wife, who copes rather well, anyway, with her much-in-demand husband.

As Emerson draws near death, losing his memory and his grasp of words, Mr. Marcus slows down his narrative, giving way to a meticulous description of the fatal day, surrendering, it seems, to every last detail, telling how it was to die for those of us who were not there.

As it happens, two of Emerson’s future biographers were at his deathbed: “a strange sensation,” Mr. Marcus notes, “they start the minute you stop.”

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography” and “Ronald Colman: Hollywood’s Gentleman Hero.”