Fuller's Letters

In April of 1837, Margaret Fuller wrote a rather searching letter to Frederick H. Hedge. She opens with a phrase that I could have said myself: “I have been wishing and wishing, trying and trying to write...” (265). In an effort to actually write, let me turn, for a moment, to a couple of passages in Fuller’s letters from the late 1830s that have been impressing, perplexing, and intriguing me.

A Theory of Friendship in Letters

I am interested in thinking of Fuller’s letters as sort of training documents that teach her friends how to be friends not just to a woman like her, but to her. As much as she is performing her own friendship, being a friend, she is, in these letters, creating and enacting a sophisticated theory of friendship as conversation. At times she is less successful than others, of course. And at times, she wavers in her focus on this doubled-task, but in the letters that interest me particularly, Fuller is both being a friend and teaching her friends--male and female--how to be friends in a new way. The same letter to Hedge, and I like beginning with this letter because Fuller has just met Emerson and Alcott but knew Hedge before them both, includes Fuller chiding Hedge for “writing a piece to ‘cut up’ Mr Alcott” (265). Of course, Fuller hopes that he will not do so, but there are two things about her argument that interest me.

The first is that she firmly places Hedge within their friendship, refusing to let him think of his writing, his ideas, his own arguments without thinking of hers. She writes, “I should be charmed if I thought you were writing a long, beautiful, wise like article showing the elevated aim and at the same time the practical defects of his system. You would do a great service to him as well as the publick” (265). Here Fuller forcefully and gently indicates her opinion on Hedge’s “cut-up” piece, but her criticism is not, necessarily, against his argument, but against his manner of presentation. Hedge had been engaged by James Walker, the editor of the Christian Examiner to review Alcott’s Conversations, but Walker wanted a slash-job done on the book. Hedge agreed to write a severe review, but before he did, he received Fuller’s letter. After reading her concerns, Hedge decides not to write the review at all. There is more to say about that matter, and it might be that Fuller’s letter had no effect, but that’s not my point. I don’t really care if she was able to have the effect that she wanted, what I find fascinating is her desire to place her friend within their friendship at all times. Hedge is not allowed, in Fuller’s logic, to write something without thinking of how his friend, Sarah Margaret Fuller, will react.

Second, Fuller herself performs this manner of being a friend: “If you were here I am sure that you would feel as I do and that your wit would never lend its patronage to the ugly blinking owls who are now hooting from their snug tenements, overgrown rather with nettles than with ivy, at this star of purest ray serene. But you are not here, more’s the pity, and perhaps do not know exactly what you are doing, do write to me and reassure me” (265). Fuller begins this wandering pair of sentences with an effort to imagine how her friend would react to what she is experiencing, demonstrating to Hedge what he should have done before agreeing to write such a negative review about a friend (Alcott) of his friend (Fuller). This seems rather clearly a teachable moment: friends care what their friends think. But Fuller goes one better when she ends the sentence asking for Hedge to write back. See, Fuller understands that fundamentally friends cannot exactly understand each other. She teaches Hedge the necessity, for friendship, of imagining how the other will feel and react, but she also teaches him the necessary uncertainty of that imagining. One cannot wholly understand one’s friends, but one must try. And, the best way to try is to remain in conversation--to do more than to wish and try to write, but to actually write. Hedge is not there (“more’s the pity”), so Fuller begs him to write back and correct her imagination.

I’ll write more on this later--on Fuller’s letters’ pedagogical effects on her correspondents. I hope to write about the letter where she tells Emerson that she likes his study best when he is not in it because then they can really talk. I take her lesson here to be an effort to teach Emerson how to talk to her without condescending, something that he is struggling with when he is in his own home and office.

Oh, My Friends

For now, though, I want to end with something that really surprised me in these early letters. One of my insights has been that Emerson’s theories of friendship prefigure in interesting and important ways, those of Levinas and Derrida (this is not an uncommon position, I’m coming to learn). Derrida centers The Politics of Friendship on Aristotle’s invocation, “Oh my friends, there is no friend.” I want to write about the history of that line at some point (it isn’t actually in Aristotle, but was attributed to him by Diogenes Laertius and then by Montaigne), but for now it’s enough to note that Emerson copied it into his journal and showed that journal to Fuller sometime in 1837.

In August of 1837, Fuller writes to Emerson, “I bear constantly in heart that text of yours ‘O my friends, there are no friends’ but to me it is a paralyzing conviction” (294). Fuller goes on to say that she cannot play the skeptical game like Emerson--she cannot act as if he is her friend, while holding back the belief that there are no friends per se: “Surely we are very unlike the Gods in ‘their seats of eternal tranquility’ that we need illusions so much to keep us in action” (294). She seems to be responding to some position that Emerson took on friendship, some argument about how one must pretend to be a friend in order to perform friendship because, at the root, one is never really a friend. Fuller refuses this possibility and accepts a world with a lot less tranquility.

And yet, her world is rather playful. In the next paragraph, she writes, “However, I must say I feel a desire...to see my dear no friends, Mr and Mrs Emerson” (294-5). Her playfulness, however, has a point--“Mr and Mrs Emerson” are, in fact, her friends, even if Aristotle did say there were no friends.

Teaching is Distracting

Finally, let me end with this comment from Fuller to Hedge:
“As to study, my attention has been concentrated on the subjects about which I teach” (266).

Sadly, me too, SMF. Me too.