Emerson's Memory Loss

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Emerson’s Memory Loss Christopher Hanlon Arizona State University

1. Burning Bush

About a month after the 1872 blaze that consumed Bush, the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s daughter Ellen Tucker Emerson communicated to her father’s friend and literary executor, James Elliot Cabot, an account Cabot would omit from his 1887 two-volume biography titled A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson. While his neighbors strug gled to rescue papers, books, and furniture from the burning two-story house, Emerson, according to Ellen, “deliberately” flung other belongings into the inferno: specifically, mementos of his first wife, Ellen Tucker, who had died of tuberculosis slightly more than forty years earlier in 1831, and of his first son, Waldo, who had succumbed to scarlatina eleven years after that, in 1842.1 But then, Ellen was not present at the fire, most about which she must have constructed from reports given by eyewitnesses outside the family, people who describe Emerson as having seemed disoriented, unaffected by the loss of his underinsured home and its library and office where he had penned most of his oeuvre. In a letter written a few days after the blaze, Anna Alcott Pratt describes “the Poet of Amer ica wandering forlornly about in an old muddy coat, & no stockings smiling serenely if any one spoke to him, & looking calmly on the wreck of his home as if it were of no special consequence to him.”2 The serene smile, the calm look, the air of disconnection: these are the signature descriptors marking so many depictions of Emerson during roughly the last decade of his life. In his eulogy for Emerson written in 1882, Whitman describes Emerson’s remoteness as the indicator of his serenity, even his

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J19 wellness: “How I shall henceforth dwell on the blessed hours when, not long since, I saw that benignant face, the clear eyes, the silently smiling mouth, the form yet upright in its great age—to the last, with so much spring and cheeriness, and such an absence of decrepitude.”3 The fact is that at the point in his life to which Whitman refers, Emerson was mostly unable to speak, though even before his aphasia became so absolute, Emerson’s increasingly disoriented state prompted others to explain away his distance as a form of transcendental reverie. In 1874, one journalist claimed that “there is ‘an awful distance in his impersonal gray eyes,’ and the man seems at times as if changed to a far- off, cold, intellectual iceberg,” just as another correspondent, writing for the Chicago Tribune, assessed Emerson’s mute, distracted presence at Alcott’s Concord School in 1880: “The lips of the Sphinx are sealed, and their peaceful expression and the faraway look in the eyes would seem to indicate that the discussion going on has not sufficient interest to draw him from the calm joy of reverie.”4 Along what continuum does transcendental bliss verge unto something more blank, suggesting that very debility by which Whitman insisted Emerson had remained untouched? I begin sketching these two facts of literary history—Emerson’s dementia along with its many understated renderings—because a tendency to repress the facts of Emerson’s senescence also produces a relative silence concerning his very late work, some of which material will make up the focus of this essay because it situates Emerson’s experience of memory loss within what strikes me as Emerson’s revision of his prior—and still more circulated— ideas on individuality, of independent thought, and of the body’s relation to the mind. And if part of my purpose is to push back against a tradition of euphemism where Emerson’s memory loss is concerned, I could hardly turn to a better corrective than that provided by Ellen Tucker Emerson. Though clearly Emerson was in the throes of some form of dementia by the time of the fire, Ellen herself would date the period of his significant memory loss to 1866 or 1867. In the detailed account of Emerson’s physical and mental state she provided Dr. Edward Clarke the September following the blaze, she reported, “Memory went first. He used to be remarkable for never forgetting errands &c. It must be 5 or 6 years since that faculty failed, and now for as much as 3 years he has been unable to remember that he was asked to do things, even when reminded of details of asking.”5 Indeed Emerson’s impairment seems to have been evident even earlier—a family friend of the Emersons, George Willis Cooke, recalls him rising to speak at a Shakespeare

Christopher Hanlon · Emerson’s Memory Loss

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J19 anniversary meeting of the Saturday Club in 1864, when Emerson “stood for a minute or two, and then quietly sat down.” But unlike Ellen, and in keeping with the tradition of denial already well underway by the time he published his reminiscence, Cooke waves away the devastating implications of his own story, suggesting that when “Speech did not come,” Emerson “serenely permitted silence to speak for him.”6 And yet by 1872 he was unable to edit his own work, Ellen makes clear. Writing to Clarke that year, she reported, “I just took his proofs to read for him. He said ‘I get an impression in reading them that they talk too much about the same thing, but I cannot find out.’ There were 27 pages. One sentence slightly varied came in four times, another twice word for word” (CW 8:ccxxx– ccxxxi). To prevent such repetitions in public, Ellen was constantly at her father’s side during speaking engagements over the course of the 1870s. Oliver Wendell Holmes, sounding the keynote of much Emerson biography since, noted in 1884 Ellen’s caretaking at these events even as he obscured her purpose. “With her helpful presence and support he ventured from time to time to read a paper before a selected audience,” he writes. In his account, Ellen “followed him with assiduous, quiet, ever watchful care”—but what were her frequent interjections if not merely “an echo before the words whose voice it was to shape for him when his mind faltered and needed a momentary impulse”?7 Sowing confusion, or perhaps relaying his own, at those moments concerning precisely what bringing order to chaos entailed for Ellen—among other issues, which voice had echoed the other—Holmes’s tortured syntax eschewed the clarity of a few other eyewitness reports. Reviewing one of Emerson’s final addresses—an 1879 delivery of “Memory” in Boston— one journalist found that Emerson’s delivery on that occasion “was sadly interrupted by the inroads of old age . . . upon the very faculty he wished to describe. It took two instead of one to read the lecture . . . had it not been for her assistance, the lecture might have come to an end several times before the limits of the manuscript had been reached.”8 Even in his interview notes dated 1882, Cabot records that Ellen professed to having “sat in terror” as her father read publicly in April 1872, realizing at that point that “his memory is entirely gone.” So Ellen’s impression of Emerson’s unhinged state the night his house burned is jarring, but not because Emerson scholars have been sincerely unaware that during the last decade of his life Emerson probably had Alzheimer’s disease. Anecdotal evidence of Emerson’s senility jars the critical apparatus through which it somehow still travels because

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Figure 1. Detail, James Eliot Cabot, interview notes from discussion with Ellen Tucker Emerson, June 1882. Courtesy Houghton Library, Harvard University. Item #bMs Am 1280.235 (711), box 79.

it unsettles a tacit agreement among so many commentators that the available facts concerning Emerson’s derangement in late life shall not be addressed in a plainspoken way. During the last decade of his life, we are continually informed, Emerson’s “powers and energies declined”; in his last years he “drifted into his twilight”; Emerson’s “hold on earth gradually relaxed” as he experienced difficulty with his memory.9 According to Stephen Whicher, “Age came gently to Emerson. At the age of sixty- one he noted in his journal, ‘Within I do not find wrinkles and used heart, but unspent youth.’ ”10 Even if Emerson was “aware of failing forces,” his poem “Terminus” and its resolution that “it is time to be old” serve as confirmation, for Whicher, of Emerson’s dignified descent unto death. The scholarship of John McAleer transmits the most unusually vivid report of Emerson’s eventual senility even as it embeds the evidence in the most elaborately constructed denials. Edward Bok, an admirer of Emerson’s, a window-washer from Brooklyn who visited Concord to gain an audience through Louisa May Alcott five months prior to Emerson’s death, describes in his 1922 memoir an Emerson who forgets there are other people in the room the moment he turns his back; who forgets Alcott’s identity; who believes that Carlyle had visited only that morning and would return the next day; who brings the attenuated Ellen to tears through these lapses and the eradicated histories they signify. But rather than taking up the cue in order to investigate in a serious way Emerson’s state, McAleer turns on Bok, whom he mocks for having carried an autograph-book, to whom he condescends for having “failed to realize he had been privy to that rarest of mortal transfigurations, a vision of Emerson dwelling in the land of the ideal.”11 Van Wyck Brooks renders Emerson’s final decade in similarly soft focus. “Many were the pleasures of old age,” he points out. Though “for some time his memory had been hiding itself,” though Emerson lost first proper names and then common words, these unmistakable signs of neurological degeneration become for Brooks the evidence of Emerson’s personal sublimation. “Gradually, year by year, the outline had grown indistinct and the halo gayer and brighter, till at last there was left only a sense of presence.” “Within,” Brooks somehow knows, “he felt no change,” since “age


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J19 could never alter his own happy temper.” Emerson’s final years, in Brooks’s rendering, were a happy dotage punctuated with the occasional conferment of honors. “His mind was quiescent now and his radical feelings had vanished,” he explains.12 It is with respect to such language that Ellen’s account of Emerson’s behav ior the night his Concord house burned jolts the polite codes into which the issue of his memory loss has been embedded. For there is Emerson, hurling into the flames of his burning home the material remnants of his first marriage, observed—if only in her mind’s eye—by the daughter who after all incarnates his memory of that marriage, like all namesakes a word made flesh: Ellen Tucker Emerson. Had he not written, in the 1841 “Self-Reliance,” “Why drag this corpse of your memory?” (CW 2:33). In that first series of Essays, Emerson had asked the question in order to prompt his reader toward living in the moment without regard for the past, the same sort of deliberate forgetting that allows one to consider consistency merely the hobgoblin of little minds. And yet by the time he published “Self-Reliance” in his thirty- eighth year, Emerson had already begun to accumulate corpses either to remember or forget. Surely Emerson’s metaphor relays the cadaverous dimension of memory, for the word “remember” implies a project involving a corpse, a refiguration and re-membering that in the end signifies a restoration of bodies, the return of that which we crave so greatly as to fear our own wanting. There would be more corpses than Ellen Tucker’s either to drag behind him or not, including his brothers, including Fuller and Thoreau, and including also— most productively and lyrically treated by Emerson’s best readers—Waldo’s corpse, whom Emerson would remember in the 1844 “Experience” even as he refused to use his name. (“In the death of my son, now more than two years ago,” he writes there [CW 3:29].) In a way that is remindful of Stanley Cavell’s moving reading of Emerson’s conception of aversion as a process of incessantly turning away (which as Cavell points out logically entails a just as incessant turning toward13), Emerson incessantly remembered his corpses, as when he peered into Waldo’s casket upon its removal to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in 1857, fifteen years after the boy’s death; as he had similarly looked into Ellen Tucker’s twenty-five years earlier in 1832, only a few months after hers; even as when, in 1882, his memory having long failed him, Emerson nevertheless remembered Waldo to the last: “Oh that beautiful boy,” he is said to have muttered as he died.14 Immolating his corpses at Bush, Emerson seems to have enacted his own contestations with memory at a moment when his was fast

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J19 abandoning him. Recollected by one who was not present for another who would omit the account from the official act of remembering that became the family-authorized, first biography of Emerson, this arresting, painful snapshot of Emerson also addresses itself to the editorial and curatorial partnerships that would manage so closely our collective image of Emerson. For we too are present in this drama of deciding not to remember; ultimately it is our memory of Emerson that has been shaped and delimited by the decisions of Ellen, Cabot, and so many others since who have enjoined the process of forgetting how much Emerson forgot. Interrogating the platitudinous codes surrounding Emerson’s dementia is not my final aim here, though these have created difficulties for Emerson’s serious readers over the past century and a half. Instead, my purpose over the remainder of this essay will be to point up the extent to which Emerson’s changing patterns of cognition— especially those connected with his waning memory and his resulting reliance on Ellen—reoriented two key formulations Emerson had developed throughout his career: his sense of the relationship between the mind and the body, and his privileging of self-reliant, inviolate consciousness as the acme of intellectual integrity. Since the text to which I turn—Natural History of Intellect, Emerson’s Harvard lecture series of 1870–71—is itself an artifact of the period of Emerson’s career when his memory loss reshaped his protocols for producing and delivering work, I also examine the conceptual shifts of the lecture series as they register in the material condition of the text, shaping it in ways that place it at odds with the editorial criteria of the recently completed Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson—a circumstance that has resulted in the expulsion of this crucial text from the current official canon of Emerson’s work. 2. Body and Mind

I will address the details surrounding that removal shortly but should note at this point that one of its effects is to encourage readers of Emerson to forget yet something else: that during the last decade of his life, Emerson was propounding more than ever upon memory. A lecture series he delivered at Harvard early in 1870 and then again early in 1871, partly drawn from prior writings going back to 1858 but also comprising much new material, Natural History of Intellect included two installments under the title “Memory,” and other lectures in the series make it clear that Emerson had come to understand mnemonic processes as a core dimension of the intellectual phenomena he was at-


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J19 tempting to treat as formations of nature— scientifically classifiable, and yet as poetically suggestive to Emerson as Faraday’s law of induction or the preserved animalculae of the Jardin des Plantes. Emerson had intended Natural History of Intellect to culminate his career, and indeed he continued to deliver lectures drawn from “Memory” well after he was able to speak publicly on his own. In one way the lecture series extended the investigation Emerson initiated in the 1836 essay Nature, which had also supposed that the operations of consciousness were a part of the natu ral world, linked in sympathetic relation with the natu ral phenomena from which poets draw metaphors and other wise reorga nize understanding and reason. (For which reason, Emerson would state in Nature, “Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance” [CW 1:18].) And yet Natural History of Intellect breaks from so much else that is quintessential about Nature. For instance, the lecture series abandons another way of thinking that is inaugural for Emerson, one that disaggregates the mind from the body altogether. That perspective appears early in the 1836 essay, where Emerson installs a division between every self and what he calls “NOT-ME,” a category including the natu ral world as well as our own bodies (CW 1:8). That moment from Nature articulates an everyday dualism to which so many at some level subscribe: that sense that nature, including the human body, is not-me, that the self inhabiting the body is surely something beyond its mere tissues— a spirit floating at the epicenter of neurological penumbrae. But that’s an assurance Emerson offered well prior to the decade during which his own body and mind changed so profoundly. In the portions of the Natural History manuscripts now stored under the heading of “Memory,” he strikes a very different chord, abandoning his older habit of isolating mind from body: “The body is the impairment,” he writes there. “The body is the River of Lethe: its continual flowing and change is the cause of oblivion.”15 It’s not a statement he included as he delivered an earlier version of “Memory” in 1858, part of his series titled Natural Method of Mental Philosophy, and there’s more too in the later, 1870 rendition reconceived for inclusion in Natural History of Intellect to gain distance from the immateriality of the 1836 Nature. The very title of the 1870–71 lecture series announces Emerson’s consideration of the mind not as a metaphysical phenomenon but rather following natu ral scientists who study, for instance, anatomy and physiology. In fact, Emerson begins the series chiding his humanistic audience for their dismissive airs

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J19 about science generally. “I have used such opportunity as I have had,” he begins, “and lately in London and Paris, to attend scientific lectures; and in listening to Richard Owen’s masterly enumeration of the parts and laws of the human body, or Michael Faraday’s explanation of magnetic powers, or the botanist’s descriptions, one could not help admiring the irresponsible security and attitude of the naturalist; sure of admiration for his facts, sure of their sufficiency. They ought to interest you,” Emerson continues: “if they do not, the fault lies with you” (CWE 12:3). The sciences should claim the attention of humanists in 1870, says Emerson, for the promise of their application to what Emerson calls “a higher class of facts”: “Could not a similar enumeration be made of the laws and powers of the Intellect, and possess the same claims on the student?” he asks. “Could we have, that is, the exhaustive accuracy of distribution which chemists use in their nomenclature and anatomists in their descriptions, applied to a higher class of facts; to those laws, namely, which are common to chemistry, anatomy, astronomy, geometry, intellect, morals and social life;—laws of the world?” (CWE 12:3–4) An empirical, scientific account of the mind seems inevitable in 1870 to Emerson, who then declares that “I believe in the existence of the material world as the expression of the spiritual or the real, and in the impenetrable mystery which hides (and hides through absolute transparency) the mental nature, I await the insight which our advancing knowledge of material laws shall furnish” (CWE 12:5). Laura Dassow Walls describes Emerson as having helped establish a “Culture of Truth” in the United States in turning from religiosity to science.16 Here, even for his advocacy of a scientific examination of the intellect, Emerson provides nothing like an overview of the significant research taking place in his day. But the shift from the dualism of Nature that Natural History of Intellect represents—its interest in forming a continuum between human intelligence and other facets of the natu ral world in ways that move the discussion from philosophy to natural history—resonates with a more general turn toward somatic understandings of the mind underway at almost the moment of Emerson’s delivery. As much recent scholarship has demonstrated, over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, mental processes were increasingly understood in terms of a greater integration of psychic with somatic systems, biological matrixes composed of brain cells, the ner vous system, and the electrical, chemical, magnetic, or reflexive processes through which such systems interacted and in which were comprised a series of psychological effects. As if heeding such developments, Natural History of Intellect begins by imag-


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J19 ining a science of intellection, even if Emerson also makes clear he has no intention of trying to talk like a scientist. Instead, his natural history of intellect will consist of “anecdotes of the intellect; a sort of Farmer’s Almanac of mental moods.” Intending to “confine my ambition to true reporting of its play in natural action, though I should only get one new fact in a year,” Emerson pitches his investigation as an application of Yankee record-keeping, diurnal journaling, a Walden of the mind. The last decade of Emerson scholarship has demonstrated the steady attention Emerson paid to scientific efforts at understanding the natural world—Nature was an expression of that focus, and so Emerson’s shift from the dualistic thought showcased in that essay may seem to follow a matter of course. An earlier and more publicized departure from idealist accounts of personhood during Emerson’s lifetime included phrenologists such as Johann Gaspar Spurzheim or Orson Fowler, and the evidence would suggest that Emerson had attempted to take such figures seriously even while expressing discomfort with phrenology in the essay “Fate” (1860), and even if, unlike Whitman, he was never compelled to have his chart drawn. But during the late 1860s and early 1870s, as Emerson was preparing the manuscripts that would become Natural History of Intellect, one of the most prominent figures in the movement away from mind/body dualism was Henry Maudsley, a Yorkshire-born psychiatrist trained at University College London and eventually elected to the Royal College of Physicians, for which he delivered the 1870 Gulstonian lecture series later bound by Macmillan under the title Body and Mind (1871). By the time of that lecture series, Maudsley had already distinguished himself as a leading physiological theorist of mental phenomena. Maudsley’s 1867 book The Psychol ogy and Pathology of the Mind, which was reviewed extensively in the United States and Britain, embroiled him in controversy with theological authorities including the archbishop of York, who argued in an 1868 address before the Edinburgh Philosophical Society that physiological investigations into mental phenomena were a form of positivism and atheism, and the American Methodist Quarterly (Thomson 1871, 344), which lambasted Maudsley and other physiologists for advancing “a disgusting and sensualizing philosophy.”17 Physiological investigations of the mind going back to the 1830s had promoted a view of the ner vous system as a network of reflexive action as crucial an avenue for mental activity as the sort guided by conscious volition, and contributors to that neuro-physiological view of human nature such as William Carpenter, James Hill, and Thomas Laycock

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J19 preceded Maudsley in his own study of the ner vous system as the organic seat of the mind. But more than these prior researchers, Maudsley was outspoken in characterizing physiological conceptions of the mind as a break with a longer metaphysical tradition, and he saw the criticism he and other researchers endured as the dying gasp of philosophical customs whose accounts of mind and self were undermined by physiological research. In his preface to Body and Mind, Maudsley regretted being, he said, “forced into apparent encroachment on questions which [I do] not in the least wish to meddle with,” but he also writes there that “the very terms of metaphysical psychology have . . . hindered [researchers of mental phenomena] to an extent which is impossible to mea sure; they have been hobgoblins to frighten him from entering on his path of inquiry, phantoms to lead him astray at every turn after he has entered upon it, deceivers lurking to betray him under the guise of seeming friends tendering help.”18 In The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, Maudsley had complained that “the metaphysician deals with man as an abstract or ideal being, postulates him as a certain constant quantity, and thereupon confidently enunciates empty propositions,”19 and by 1871 he amplified the charge in his claim that metaphysical psychologists were ignorant of the very physiological research they dismissed: “The physiological inquirer into mind may, if he care to do so, justly protest against the easy confidence with which some metaphysical psychologists disdain physiological inquiry, and ignore its results, without ever having been at pains to make themselves acquainted with what these results are, and with the steps by which they have been reached.”20 A similar suggestion shapes the opening of Emerson’s Natural History lectures, for even aside from urging his audience to take seriously the prospect of a scientific understanding of intellect, Emerson imagines that possibility in terms of a departure from metaphysics. “I confess to a little distrust of that completeness of system which metaphysicians are apt to affect,” he explains there. “ ’T is the gnat grasping the world” (CWE 12:12). Later he supposes that “metaphysics is dangerous as a single pursuit. . . . Metaphysics must be perpetually reinforced by life; must be the observations of a working man on working men; must be a biography . . . ” (CWE 13) In Body and Mind Maudsley would complain that entering into debate with metaphysicians placed physiological researchers at rhetorical disadvantage, since “he must use words which have already meanings of a metaphysical kind attached to them, and which, when used, are therefore for him more or less a misinterpre-


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J19 tation . . . and so one cannot but think it would have been well if he could have had his own words exactly fitting his facts, and free from the vagueness and ambiguity of a former metaphysical use.”21 For his part, Emerson confesses at the outset of Natural History of Intellect that “I think metaphysics a grammar to which, once read, we seldom return,” just after referring to metaphysics as a form of “inward analysis [that] must be corrected by rough experience” (CWE 12:13). If, like Maudsley, Emerson developed a sense of antagonism between the posture of metaphysical philosophy and the project of writing a natural history of intellect, still more resonant is the rejection of mind/body dualism each thinker articulates in 1870. “The conception of mind as a mysterious entity,” Maudsley explains in Body and Mind, “different essentially from, and vastly superior to, the body which it inhabits and uses as its earthly tenement, but from which its noblest aspirations are thought to be to get free, still works openly or in a latent way to obstruct the study of its functions by the methods of physical research.” For that matter, “we shall make no progress toward a mental science if we begin by deprecating the body: not by disdaining it, as metaphysicians, religious ascetics, and maniacs have done, but by laboring in earnest and inquiring spirit to understand it, shall we make any step forward.”22 “I wish to know the laws of this wonderful power,” Emerson would state at Harvard in 1870 and 1871, “that I may domesticate it. I observe with curiosity its risings and its settings, illumination and eclipse; its obstructions and its provocations, that I may learn to live with it wisely, court its aid, catch sight of and feel its splendor, feel its approach, hear and save its oracles and obey them.” Emerson wished, he said, “to see the mechanics of the thing” (CWE 12:14). None of which is to say that Emerson exactly enlists himself in Natural History of Intellect with physiological researchers such as Maudsley. For one thing, Emerson makes no attempt to provide anything like an overview of contemporaneous physiological research into mental phenomena. That project had been undertaken by Emerson’s fellow member of the Saturday Club (and eventual biographer), Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had written of reflexive neurological activity in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table in 1858 and The Professor at the Breakfast-Table in 1860 (and would again, in a way, in The Poet at the Breakfast-Table in 1872 as he described poetic creation as a form of involuntary act).23 Holmes’s 1870 Harvard Phi Beta Kappa address, Mechanism in Thought and Morals, was delivered two months after Emerson’s first mention at Harvard of the “mechanics” of thought he

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J19 wished to observe and some eight months prior to his second delivery of the lecture series 1871 (in fact Holmes inscribed for Emerson a bound copy of his own lecture that year 24). Taking form very nearly in one another’s midst, Holmes’s and Emerson’s Harvard lectures speak to similar preoccupations with mind and memory, even as Holmes positions himself explicitly within the somaticist polemics of the day. Setting out to sketch “that part of our mental and bodily life which is independent of our volition,” Holmes insists that the mind is inseparable from its organic tissues, and in making his argument he turns frequently to the phenomenon of memory. “The problem of memory is closely connected with the question of the mechanical relation between thought and structure,” he remarks, before elaborating the extent to which memory—like other faculties of mind—is absolutely dependent on corporeal mechanisms from which it cannot be divorced. “How intimate is the alliance of memory with the material condition of the brain,” he reminds us, “is shown by the effect of age, or disease, of a blow, of intoxication.”25 Like Holmes, referring himself to the faculties through which human consciousness sifts the piles of information Holmes imagines as if engraved upon the surface of brain tissue, Emerson draws us into an apprehension of their limits in Natural History of Intellect. “I say, this command of old facts, the clear beholding at will of what is best in our experience, is our splendid privilege,” he writes. “We learn early, that there is a great disparity of value between our experiences. Some thoughts perish in the using. Some days are bright with thought and sentiment, and we live a year in a day. Yet these best days are not always those which the memory can retain. This water once spilled cannot be gathered” (CWE 12:102). Elsewhere in the lecture Emerson opines that “never was there a truer fable than that of Sibyl’s writing on leaves which the wind scatters” (CWE 12:95), and both moments imply that the nature of memory is not so aptly approached through tropes of mimetic preservation as through the experience of forgetting. Forgetting brings us closer to understanding memory because while “memory is used by the will,” it nevertheless “has a will of its own.”26 On the one hand, the formulation surely speaks to Emerson’s sense of deepening affliction— elsewhere in the manuscripts to the 1870–71 “Memory,” a section neither Cabot nor Edward Emerson includes in their printings of Natural History of Intellect, he remarks that “the memory is called treacherous. It is a sieve. . . . It dies in old age.”27 And yet the syntax here also resonates with the terms over which somaticists and idealists did battle in


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J19 Emerson’s and Holmes’s day, when much of the controversy was often put in terms of whether the brain was an “instrument” of the mind or rather its only seat. Having a will of its own, Emerson’s memory now seems to him, at times, treacherous—at other moments, something like another person altogether sharing “anecdotes.” “It sometimes occurs that Memory has a personality of its own, and volunteers or refuses its informations at its will, not at mine,” he suggests: “One sometimes asks himself, Is it possible that it is only a visitor, not a resident? Is it some old aunt who goes in and out of the house, and occasionally recites anecdotes of old times and persons which I recognize as having heard before, and she being gone again I search in vain for any trace of the anecdotes?” (CWE 12:97) For his part, and for all his commitment to a somatic account of mind, thought, and action, Holmes suggests a similar interest in memory as if having a will of its own. “It is not strange that remembered ideas should often take advantage of the crowd of thoughts, and smuggle themselves in as original,” Holmes observes. For him, memory’s material impermanence is what conditions thought as irreducibly polyphonous, a constantly chattering set of interlocutors at the breakfast-table. In a similar fashion whereby thinkers often experience old ideas as suddenly novel, “Honest thinkers are always stealing from each other,” Holmes insists; “Our minds are full of waif and estrays which we think are our own,” such that “Innocent plagiarism turns up everywhere” (MTM 52–53). Holmes imagines that this prospect of experiencing another’s stream of thought as our own marks the moment when “the orator only becomes our mentor”: “the moment when he himself is surprised, captured, taken possession of, by such a sudden rush of fresh inspiration” (MTM 55). For Holmes, the underlying lesson applies not only to orators, since “we are all more or less improvisators. We all have a double, who is wiser and better than we are, and who puts thoughts into our heads, and words into our mouths” (MTM 56). The double who (like Ellen Tucker Emerson, whose voice Holmes would later situate, in his biography of Emerson, in such an ambiguous dialogue with her father, wherein it is difficult to know whether it is Ellen or Waldo who echoes the other), tells us what to say, what to think, what to write, reverberates through so many other formulations by means of which Holmes attempted to address that increased depth of field made available when perspective disperses across multiple points of view: the stereoscope, for one example; the parallax, to take another.

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That Holmesian dispersal of perspective speaks not only to much of what Emerson asserts in Natural History of Intellect about what thinking really is but also to the very textual condition of the lecture series. That is to say, the manuscripts of Natural History of Intellect are in a state the editors of the Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson justifiably call “corrupted” as they disqualify the lecture series from inclusion in this newly re- established, official rendition of the Emerson canon. At the same time, these lectures repeatedly address that dilated aperture through which, Holmes tells us, honest thinkers are always stealing from each other, forwarding in the process a view of intellection to break with Emerson’s prior enshrinements of serious thinking as necessarily and inviolately self-reliant. Natural History of Intellect, in other words, belongs to a fundamentally dif ferent point of view from that of the first series of Essays or the other early texts that constitute the opening volumes of the Collected Works project from its beginning in 1871, and it cannot but unsettle the editorial principles established for the Collected Works that year. This is because Natural History of Intellect balances at the crux of that doubling Holmes describes, the point of insertion whereby someone else, “who is wiser and better than we are, and who puts thoughts into our heads, and words into our mouths,” enters into our thoughts, and, in the case of Natural History of Intellect, impresses upon the text itself. The corrupted nature of the lecture series has to do with its multiple positions of enunciation, but indeed this multiplicity is part of what the lecture series theorizes; the very textual features that render it unfit for inclusion in Emerson’s oeuvre are also what the lectures hypothesize and enshrine. I should note that quandaries of the type Natural History of Intellect produces have resulted in the ejection of other late texts from the Collected Works than the 1870–71 lecture series. In producing what would become the first standard edition of Emerson, Cabot included three volumes of materials later editors of the Collected Works would leave out; in accounting for that omission, these later editors explain that these materials constitute “posthumous volumes” formed only under Cabot’s executorship (for that reason, the early editors of the Collected Works projected a separate scholarly edition of Emerson’s later lectures). Proceeding in accordance with editorial principles most associated with Sir Walter Greg, the project’s original editors explain that the Collected Works seeks to establish a text “closest to the author’s initial coherent


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J19 intention”; that for the sake of establishing guidelines for future editors, it considers that “initial coherent intention” to be embodied in the copytext (each resetting of a printed work being more likely to produce “non-authorial corruption” [CW 2:xxxiv–xxxv]). And yet, in the case of Emerson’s late and unpublished work, many source texts are heavi ly emended, and others are recopied, in hands other than Emerson’s. Explaining the principles of selection guiding their stewardship of what appeared eventually in 2001 as two volumes of Later Lectures, Ronald Bosco and Joel Myerson write, “We have edited only texts that survive entirely in Emerson’s hand, rejecting without notice . . . all emendations in the copy-text by Cabot, Ellen Emerson, and Edward Waldo Emerson,” even as they note specifically the problem of Ellen’s “intrusion” into many of Emerson’s manuscripts (LL 1:xli). “Our intention throughout this edition,” they explain, “is to represent Emerson’s, not his executors’, creation of texts” (LL 1:liv). These purposes align with the procedures described thirty years earlier under Slater’s editorship of the Collected Works project, and yet those editorial principles could not but strain with the production of volume 8, Letters and Social Aims—a text that, as Bosco and Myerson put it in their expanded rendition of Slater’s statement, confounds the presuppositions of authorial intentionality that had informed Slater et al. in their production of the first volume of Collected Works in 1971. Compiled by Cabot and Ellen, with Emerson as a third but “passive participant unable to make the necessary selections and revisions himself” (CW 8:ccxvii), Letters and Social Aims renders practically irrelevant the intentionalist editorial theory adopted at the outset of the Collected Works project. Jerome McGann’s account of a more collaboratively produced text might seem more germane to such a book as Letters and Social Aims, Bosco and Myerson hazard, but even McGann’s suppositions about authorial agency (even one produced “not as a personal possession,” as McGann suggests, but rather at the junctures of “social nexus”) fail to encompass the unusual circumstances of this book, which Bosco and Myerson purport to be authored by someone possessed of “no active intentionality” (CW 8:ccxvii).28 The textual theories cited by Slater, later updated by Bosco and Myerson, and that inform the editorial processes resulting in the Collected Works as well as what these volumes cannot include, are thus deeply concerned with relationships of intentionality and subjectivity. Perhaps in this way they also address what disability theorists interrogate as yet another conceptualized continuum between body and mind.

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J19 The art historian Tobin Siebers calls into question that nexus in pointing out that “traditionally, we understand that art originates in genius, but genius is really at a minimum only a name for an intelligence large enough to plan and execute works of art—an intelligence that goes by the name of ‘intention.’ Defective or impaired intelligence cannot make art according to this rule.”29 Certainly long- standing conventions of literary appreciation require texts to have arisen from a singular and unimpaired consciousness, a seat of authority and self- determining intentionality, in order to qualify for consideration as a literary object. Such notions of textual integrity dovetail with ideas with which Emerson is most usually associated, including especially his arguments for a self-reliant mind as sine qua non for the public intellectual. The notions of literary authority that stem from that model would scrutinize a text such as Natural History of Intellect, since, like Letters and Social Aims, Emerson’s Harvard lecture series is preserved in manuscripts heavi ly edited and recopied by Ellen. Their state causes Bosco and Myerson to comment in their historical and textual introduction to Later Lectures that “it is . . . our conclusion that the state of lecture manuscripts following 1871 that we inspected does, indeed, make impossible the preparation and publication of Emerson’s lectures after that date in any coherent and responsible fashion.” “To be sure,” they continue, “all of these materials will have to be accounted for by the editors of later volumes in Harvard’s Collected Works” (LL 1:xl–xli), but the final volume of that project, released in 2013 and titled Uncollected Prose Writings, also excludes Natural History of Intellect. The text has, as it were, dropped from our memory of Emerson. Texts such as Natural History of Intellect are, in the sense described by the Melville editor John Bryant, “fluid texts” whose condition suspends the articles of thought that literary texts manifest between multiple authorial and editorial sensibilities— texts that write large the extent to which all texts are thus suspended. “Modern readers,” Bryant explains, typically assume that the “job” of textual scholarship—we dare not call it art—is to sift through this corruption and “otherness” and establish an authoritative or definitive text for common use. But when we inspect the causes of this “textualterity” (to lift for a moment another critic’s portmanteau), we find more than just the accidents of textual transmission; we begin to envision a fuller phenomenon, tied to historical moments but always changing and


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J19 always manifesting one set of interests or another. The very nature of writing, the creative process, and shifting intentionality, as well as the power ful social forces that occasion translation, adaptation, and censorship among readers—in short, the facts of revision, publication, and reception—urge us to recognize that the only “definitive text” is a multiplicity of texts, or rather, the fluid text.30 Bryant’s description of fluid textuality addresses the flummoxing circumstance that late works of Emerson’s such as Natural History of Intellect embody; they fall outside the standard for inclusion set forth in the Collected Works because they so fully complicate the paradigms of authorship and intentionality attending that project from genesis to completion.31 Emerson’s lectures—typically arranged and re-arranged from unnumbered manuscript leaves as well as from journal entries— cannot but generate such textual multiplicities as Bryant describes. But as Bosco points out, the leaves of Natural History of Intellect are not simply in disarray; parts of the manuscripts make clear that “by the late 1870s Ellen Emerson was working on wholesale revisions,” and that these papers became the basis of the rendition of Cabot’s, and then Edward Emerson’s, editions of Emerson’s Complete Works (LL 2:99). In making much of such facets of Emerson’s manuscripts, I trust not to seem naive about the nature of literary authority in the nineteenth century, when (for instance) an absence of international copyright law tended to submit republishable works to reshaping processes well outside the purview or guidance of those authors. And in situating Emerson’s manuscripts as the site of a certain volatility, I do not mean to replicate the privileging of print publication over script against which Margaret Ezell warns in her study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literary culture, a way of thinking about literary texts often attended by its own variously gendered economies.32 Quite the contrary—the last decade of nineteenth-century Americanist literary scholarship has made it clear that in speaking about all sorts of antebellum texts, often one can isolate a singular authorial consciousness only advisedly. But Natural History of Intellect distinguishes itself even— perhaps especially—within such a context of precarious textual authority because the account of mind to which the series commits itself refuses to attribute intellectual production to a single or confined intentionality. Strikingly, these lectures render fluid the boundaries Emerson had more usually worked to shore up in earlier texts such as “Self-Reliance”

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J19 or his address on the American Scholar, the psychological barriers more often taken to delineate one intelligence from another. Whereas “genius” in the account issued in “Self-Reliance,” for example, stands heroically aloof from external influence (“Honor,” he insists there, “is self- dependent, self- derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree” [CW 2:35]), here it appears interpenetrated with the intelligence of other people. “Life is incessant parturition,” he writes. “ There are viviparous and oviparous minds; minds that produce their thoughts complete men, like armed soldiers, ready and swift to go out and resist and conquer all the armies of error, and others that deposit their dangerous unripe thoughts here and there to lie still for a time and be brooded in other minds, and the shell not be broken until the next age, for them to begin, as new individuals, their career” (CWE 12:18). Is thinking akin to combat, Emerson seems to ask, or rather to parenting? If some ideas mature only when nursed in the consciousness of other thinkers, Emerson’s notion of oviparous thought partakes of a larger natural history whose tendency is to efface separations between the cognitive processes of “parents” and their “progeny.” “The perceptions of a soul,” Emerson continues, “its wondrous progeny, are born by conversation, the marriage of souls; so nourished, so enlarged. They are detached from their parent, they pass into other minds; ripened and unfolded by many they hasten to incarnate themselves in action, to take body, only to carry forward the will which sent them out” (CWE 12:18). For that reason, as Emerson explains later, “To be isolated is to be sick, and in so far, dead” (CWE 12:21). Isolation is for him now a form of arrest and ossification. “An individual body,” he writes, “is the momentary arrest or fixation of certain atoms, which, after performing compulsory duty to this enchanted statue, are released again to flow in the currents of the world. An individual mind in like manner is a fixation or momentary eddy in which certain ser vices and powers are taken up and minister in petty niches and localities, and then, being released, return to the unbounded soul of the world” (CWE 12:28). That’s a statement to characterize any par ticular mind in its relation to others, but at the same time Emerson directs his almanac of mental moods in terms to implicate his memory loss as well as his degrading hold on language— paradoxically—in the processes of intellectual enlargement with which he now associates his involvedness with other minds. It is striking how often in Natural History of Intellect Emerson is drawn to figures of speech emphasizing muteness, taciturnity, a failing eloquence. For if Emerson’s purpose in the lecture series, as he explains, is to provide a


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J19 compendium of intellectual life, the keynote is of privation. Near his opening Emerson challenges a consideration of intellect as plenitude, “an ethereal sea” to which “every human house has a waterfront.” Far more mercurial a thing than that, “visiting whom it will and departing from whom it will, making day when it comes and night when it departs,” intellect is in Emerson’s natural history “no fee or property of man or angel.” As if to imagine intellect’s departure in terms of his own accelerating difficulties with the recall of words, much of Natural History of Intellect leans on metaphors of ineffability. Mind itself is “too rare for the wings of words,” he tells us; every thinker who makes a serious approach to the subject “comes to light where language fails him” (CWE 12:17). Recalling a similar argument from the 1836 Nature, Emerson now contends that “every object in nature is a word to signify some fact in the mind” (CWE 12:5). (“The use of natural history is to give us aid in super natural creation,” he had explained in Nature: “The use of the outer creation is to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation” [CW 1:18].) But now Emerson reconsiders that prior transcendentalist notion in terms of his own inarticulacy: “But when that fact is not yet put into English words, when I look at the tree or the river and have not yet definitively made out what they would say to me, they are by no means unimpressive” (Emerson 1904, 12:5). “We find ourselves expressed in nature,” he notes much later in the lecture, “but we cannot translate it into words” (CWE 12:37). How often Emerson found himself, at this stage in his life, unable to translate thoughts into words we will never fully know, though the reports of eyewitnesses like George Willis Cooke, Edward Bok, and Ellen herself intimate much. Equally obvious is the prosthetic and reifying role Ellen played, herself clearly more than simply amanuensis as she prompted him at lectures and reworded him in writing. Emerson’s thought, unfolded now like a recovered manuscript in the mind of Ellen Tucker Emerson—taken from him and yet in the process actualized in the circuit of its return— becomes for Emerson a kind of suddenly foreign object, carried forward anew by wondrous progeny. 4. Wondrous Progeny

Developing further in Natural History of Intellect the familial metaphor according to which thoughts become like wondrous progeny carry ing forth, now independently of our will, Emerson describes the process through which “nimble thoughts . . . animate and alter, and presently [are] antagonized by other thoughts which they first aroused, or by

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J19 thoughts which are sons and daughters of these” (CWE 12:19). Sons and daughters, first aroused by and then reshaping the “parent” thoughts which are in that sense no longer solely the parent’s, now serve to reify, to incubate, to parent those parent thoughts, perhaps to clothe them in language. “Who has found the bound aries of human intelligence?” Emerson thus asks (CWE 12:16). In her rewarding examination of Emerson’s interest in embryology, Jennifer Baker has demonstrated that even with his reading of Robert Chambers’s 1844 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Emerson was moved to “clarify . . . the genius’ relation to the rest of humankind.”33 But still more radically than in his 1848 Mind and Manners in the Nineteenth Century or his 1858 The Natural Method of Mental Philosophy, Emerson’s later account of intellection in Natural History of Intellect distinguishes itself for its assertion that all thinking is at some level communal, all subjectivity intersubjective. “As the sun is conceived to have made our system by hurling out from itself the outer rings of diffuse ether which slowly condensed into earths and moons,” he explains, “by a higher force of the same law the mind detaches minds, and a mind detaches thoughts or intellections. These again all mimic in their sphericity the first mind, and share its power” (CWE 12:17–18). Such fluid boundaries of human intelligence anticipate William James’s notion from The Principles of Psychol ogy of a “fringe” wherein thoughts interplay and subjectivities converge, wherein one mind resolves itself to another.34 In fact Emerson insists that “there is no solitary flower and no solitary thought,” for though such thoughts may come “single like a foreign traveller . . . find out its name and it is related to a power ful and numerous family” (CWE 12:21). Again, the trope of filiation captures for Emerson a process of cooperative or aggregated thought, just as it betokens a notion that joint intelligence activates something previously dormant. Which should bring us back to the textual state of Natural History of Intellect. For if these manuscripts render the series unfit for inclusion in the Collected Works, they also embody the intrafamilial form of intellection Emerson theorized even as his ability to do so independently waned. Certainly in an increasing sense as Emerson aged, Ellen became his memory as well as his voice, and on the occasions when circumstances forced him to speak and recall on his own, the difference is obvious. In a letter to Ellen in 1873, he appears to have forgotten that she is his addressee, instructing her to “tell Ellen that she must repeat once more the message about the Carlyle photograph, or proof, or whatever,


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J19 (I have no recollection of what it is,) which she wishes brought home by Mrs Clover Adams.”35 Later he resigns himself to Ellen’s care and admits his own increasing frailty in a letter to Elizabeth Peabody in December 1875, writing, “I rarely write even a note in these days, my daughter Ellen supplying my deficiences [sic]” (LRWE 10:180). Writing to Samuel Gray Ward a few months later, he confessed, “I have ceased to write even notes—partly because my daughter Ellen is a skillful scribe and fast coming to absolute government of her papa” (LRWE 10:184). Helping Emerson, governing him, inscribing his words: Ellen’s role in her father’s life grew increasingly essential in the production of texts— letters, readings, a book—that would envelop distinctions between assistant, “scribe,” editor, and author even as they effaced the borders of her voice and his. A joint letter from Ellen and her father to James Bradley Thayer in July 1876, part of an effort to ferret out errors that had bedev iled the first edition of Letters and Social Aims, tellingly slips between pronouns: “Do tell me what we shall do, and make us again your debtors,” she, he, they write (LRWE 10:188–89). In a letter to Ellen dated August 16, 1877, Emerson confesses bafflement at cuts she has made to “Perpetual Forces,” due to be published the following month in the North American Review—but also promises that he will defer to her judgment whether able quite to understand or not (LRWE 6:307). In one remarkable, though unfortunately undated, letter to Ellen, Emerson quips about having told Jane Norton “that you write all my letters (not to mention my lectures).”36 Asked in 1879 which lecture Emerson planned to deliver at an upcoming event of the Concord School of Philosophy, an exhausted Ellen replied, “I have not yet decided.”37 But even to acknowledge Ellen’s work on behalf of her father is not enough; there is something else here as well to do with the fluidity or sociality of exchange characterizing the editorial, curatorial, or authorial project to which Ellen Tucker Emerson committed herself and her father. Ralph Rusk noticed decades ago Ellen’s practice of collecting her father’s signature—having him sign a page scores of times, for instance— in order to then snip the signatures into slips of paper she would then paste beneath letters Emerson had dictated (or perhaps, if we are to take Emerson’s version seriously, that she had written herself). That said, how does one describe the form of intervention we find on many sheets of the manuscripts for Natural History of Intellect, as exampled on this page from “Memory?” Here indeed appear other slips of paper, thoughts purloined from elsewhere, rearranged in the midst of other thoughts, rendering to palimpsest this and other leaves of the Harvard lecture series

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Figure 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson with Ellen Tucker Emerson, MS for “Memory” (lecture 2), lecture given at Harvard University, May 7, 1870, March 3, 1871; courtesy Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association deposit, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Item #bMS Am Lit 1280.212 (6).

Emerson had described as his most impor tant work, the zenith of everything, and in which he imagines (indeed on this very page) that “the experience and the thoughts of the past have a new value every moment to the advancing mind,” since “what was an isolated belief or conjecture, our later experience instructs us how to place in just connection with other views.” It’s not plagiarism, Holmes explains in Mechanism in Thought and Morals, when the thoughts of another wander into the midst of our own—honest thinkers are always stealing from each other; as William James might put it, all subjectivities associate at the fringe. That is Ellen’s handwriting on the slips she or someone else has pasted over Emerson’s, though elsewhere Emerson’s own inscriptions travel from one page to another, but what of it? As Natural History of Intellect would have it, when “the perceptions of a soul” are “detached from their parent, they pass into other minds,” and in at least that way become something like “wondrous progeny” (CWE 12:18).


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J19 In the only monograph she leaves us, a biography of her mother, Ellen Tucker Emerson at one point attaches to her manuscript a fragment of one of Lidian Jackson Emerson’s dresses. “I desire here to pin onto this paper a pattern of a similar calico dress that her mother made for her,” she writes, before doing exactly that.38 Detailing a postbellum history of “writing with scissors,” Ellen Gruber Garvey describes US scrapbooking during the period as a project of data management as well as self-expression—scrapbooks, she demonstrates, “open a window into the lives and thoughts of people who did not respond to the world with their own writing.”39 Ellen Tucker Emerson was a writer, of course, though often in an entangled and self-effacing sense. Still her preservation of the swatch from her mother’s dress, like her cutting and pasting of her father’s manuscripts— a process that, like the forms of memory Emerson describes in Representative Men, “disposes them in a new order”—positions her somewhere between author, secretary, and scrapbooker, which is to say that she enacts her father’s suspicion that where memory is concerned, there is little difference. How can Natural History of Intellect be excluded from the Collected Works? How can it not? Reading the texts Emerson produced as his memory dissolved brings the challenge of discerning someone else who worked to be forgotten, someone who thus barely registers in our discussions of nineteenth- century literary history, but who seems to have had a profound effect on its course. Just as impor tant, it unsettles some of the key terms underwriting Emerson’s enshrinement, those that emphasize to the exclusion of other motifs Emerson’s early advocacy of radical individualism. Writing about the various agendas at play during par ticular stages of the Emerson industry over the past century and a half, scholars such as Robert Habich and Randall Fuller have underlined the contingent processes behind Emerson’s canonization (and in that way, the instability inherent in all projects of literary memory). Recalling where Emerson went as his memory waned thus extends Habich’s and Fuller’s effort to understand that contingency even as it engages controversies still brewing among many Americanists who read Emerson: for instance, Christopher Newfield, who finds the “corporatist” Emerson at odds with the “individualist” version; or John Carlos Rowe, who argues that Emersonian individualism cannot reconcile with the communitarian energies behind Emersonian abolitionism—that Emerson needed to leave behind his transcendental abstractions in order to treat other people, as he recommends in “Experience,” as if they were real.40 Natural History of Intellect doesn’t exactly lay bare such Manichean understandings of

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J19 Emerson, but it shows us that Emerson and Ellen Tucker Emerson found their own ways of negotiating the interstices of society and solitude as they defined the meaning of their own collaboration, thus fixing the value of all that Emerson would forget. Which is to say, very lastly, that the corrupted condition of the manuscript is also a provocation to its readers. Perhaps where Emerson’s memory loss is concerned—to pull yet another of his phrases from its original place in order to set it to alternative purpose—the ruin or the blank is in our own eye. Notes 1. Cabot’s revised notes of interviews with Ellen Emerson, June 1882, bMS Am 1280.235 (711), box 79, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 2. Anna Alcott Pratt, qtd. in Madeline B. Stern, “The Alcotts and the Emerson Fire,” American Transcendental Quarterly 36 (Fall 1977): 7–9. 3. Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman: The Con temporary Reviews, ed. Kenneth Price (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), 284. 4. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, January 3, 1874; qtd. in Alexander Ireland, Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Life, Genius, and Writings, a Biographical Sketch (London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co, 1882), 288–89. 5. Qtd. in Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols., ed. Joseph Slater et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971–2013), 8:ccxxx. Further citations to this edition are made parenthetically as CW and include volume and page. 6. George Willis Cooke, “The Saturday Club,” New England Magazine, September 1898, 32. 7. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1884), 294. 8. “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” Massa chu setts Ploughman and New England Journal of Agriculture, June 21, 1879, 2. 9. Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 557; John McAleer, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1984), 653; Stephen E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), 170. 10. Whicher, Freedom and Fate, 196. 11. McAleer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 53. 12. Van Wyck Brooks, The Life of Emerson (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1932), 309, 310, 306, 307. Two outliers to this tradition of understatement require mention here. The first is Ralph Rusk, whose unflinching The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1949) addresses both Emerson’s decline and the duties Ellen Tucker Emerson assumed on her father’s behalf (455–56, 487). But second, in his historical introduction to volume 8 of the Collected Works project, Ronald Bosco sweeps aside nearly a century and a half of polite euphemism concerning Emerson’s later years, pursuing details of Emerson’s mental as well as physical condition that other biographers have obscured through oblique vignettes. See particularly Bosco’s hypothesis that most biographers’ “difficulty in arriving at an appropriate ‘end’ to Emerson’s life may be attributed either to their acceptance of the popu lar wisdom which holds that Emerson’s last years dramatically undermine the vitality characteristic of his personal life and rise to prominence as Amer ica’s premier public intellectual from the 1830s to the late 1860s, or to their sense that, given the active ‘Emerson factory’ at work reconstructing and studying his life and thought since even before he drew his last breath, Emerson’s life among us as a cultural presence has not yet ended” (CW 8:xxxvii). 13. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 59. 14. Cabot, James Elliot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson: In Two Volumes (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1887), 683. 15. Houghton Library, Lectures and Sermons, bMS A, 1280.212 [6]). In posthumous printings of Natural History of Intellect, the sentence is rendered, “For the true river Lethe is the body of man, with its belly and uproar of appetite and mountains of indigestion and bad humors and quality of darkness.” See Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 vols.,


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J19 ed. Edward Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1904), 12:107. Subsequent citations of this edition appear parenthetically as CWE and include volume and page number. 16. Laura Dassow Walls, Emerson’s Life in Science: The Culture of Truth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 15. 17. William Thomson, The Limits of Philosophical Enquiry: Address Delivered to the Members of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, November 6, 1868 (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1868); and Thomson, “Philosophy, Metaphysics, and General Science,” Methodist Quarterly Review 23 (1871): 344. 18. Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind: An Inquiry into their Connection and Mutual Influence, Specially in Reference to Mental Disorders (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1871), v–vi. 19. Maudsley, The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1868), 9. 20. Maudsley, Body and Mind, v. 21. Ibid., vi. 22. Ibid., 13. 23. Recent studies on the impact of neurology on US lit er ature and culture include Justine S. Murison, The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth- Century American Lit er ature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Jane F. Thrailkill, Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Rachel Ann Malane, Sex in Mind: The Gendered Brain in Nineteenth- Century Lit er ature and Mental Sciences (New York: Peter Lang, 2005); and Randall Knoper, “American Literary Realism and Ner vous ‘Reflexion,’ ” American Lit er ature 74, no. 4 (December 2002): 715–45, which also details the connections between Holmes’s neurological beliefs and his literary output. 24. Emerson’s inscribed copy of the volume is noted in Walter Harding, Emerson’s Library (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1967), 138. 25. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mechanism in Thought and Morals, An Address Delivered Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University, June 29, 1870 (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1871), 69. Parenthetical references to this edition are abbreviated as MTM. For an overview of the extent to which Holmes committed himself to similarly somaticist accounts of diverse human intellectual functions, see Peter Gibian, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chap. 7, esp. 192. 26. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2 vols., ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Meyerson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 2:103. Parenthetical references to this edition are cited as LL and include volume and page number. 27. Houghton Library, Lectures and Sermons, bMs Am 1280.212 [5]. 28. Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 48. Though she is concerned with the omission of writings other than Natural History of Intellect from volume 10 of Collected Works, Phyllis Cole suggests that an edition including Emerson’s contribution to The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli or his manuscript “Mary Moody Emerson” would necessarily draw from “a more interactive, socialized construction of authorship itself.” See Phyllis Cole, “The New Emerson Canon,” Resources for American Literary Study 37 (2014): 271. 29. Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 15. 30. John Bryant, The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 2. 31. Noting that the manuscript of “Memory” consists of “several hands,” the textual scholar Nancy Craig Simmons describes the document as a “composite” of materials dating from Emerson’s first writings on memory dating from the 1850s along with others formed in the 1870s. “A comparison of the essay with these sources reveals both Cabot’s fidelity to Emerson’s words,” Simmons points out, “and his freedom in making a new order,” and indeed Simmons demonstrates the extent to which Cabot had been willing to adjust Emerson’s prose as he rearranged. See Simmons, “Arranging the Sibylline Leaves: James Elliot Cabot’s Work as Emerson’s literary Executor,” Studies in the American Re naissance (1983): 358. 32. Margaret Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1999), 42–44. 33. See Jennifer J. Baker, “Emerson, Embryology, and Culture,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 3, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 25. 34. William James, Principles of Psychol ogy, 2 vols. (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 1:158–60.

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J19 35. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols., ed. Ralph Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press. 1939), 10:114. Further references to the edition are cited as LRWE. 36. The letter is dated simply “Tuesday Night,” and it appears in the Emerson Family Correspondence, at the Houghton Library, MS Am 1280.226.1280.21. 37. Qtd. in McAleer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 630. 38. Ellen Tucker Emerson, The Life of Lydian Jackson Emerson, ed. Delores Bird Carpenter (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 6, 212n3. 39. See Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Re naissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4. 40. See Christopher Newfield, The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in Amer i ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 22–26; 67–72; and John Carlos Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Lit erature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 21.