All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen Read Free Book Online

preoccupation with ethical problems, his insistence on the ultimate judgment being a moral one, was due to the fact that all his life he was torn between his theories of conduct and his smothered but not extinct desires for things very incompatible with those theories. The bitter outcry against “Raphael’s sensuality” which his son reports he gave vent to, when he was in Italy, (he was so unpleasantly affected by Raphael’s treatment of the female anatomy that it almost overshadowed his trip) is on a par with his distrust of Margaret Fuller and her way of life. Both she and Raphael’s women, were in different ways, a challenge to the part of his own nature, that he was always on guard against. The man was an artist and had a sense of beauty—when all is said and done, and in another age and milieu from 19th century New England might have been other than he was…I know this thing is not quite what you want for your “New Englander Abroad” theme. But it did seem to me to have a bearing on it and to be (at least so it struck me) a most astonishing document. The business about Margaret not leaving any “deep witness of her integrity and purity” is very precious. The judgment of her generation on her in short, was that she was not a nice woman or she would not have been quite as she was. I’ve always thought that Margaret’s shrinking from facing that verdict with all its implications, was perhaps what made her so reluctant to desert a sinking ship in favour of her native land. The general, vague condemnation about her not being “a nice woman” is so curiously like the comments I hear all the time on Edith Wharton, from the women who were her contemporaries.
    A childhood prodigy and a whirlwind of intellect whose so-called peculiar appearance and manner were remarked on as much as her learning; a writer, translator, journalist, editor, and feminist; a friend and colleague of Emerson and other “luminaries of the New England movement” in the 1830s and ’40s; and a woman whose writings, her friends said, never measured up to her talk—Fuller was a woman Esther could appraise herself against and perhaps model herself on. Fuller’s “Conversations,” the structured, semi-public lecture-discussions she conducted in Boston to give women a place to debate the issues of the day, were a version of the sort of public discourse that Esther favored. When Fuller moved from the claustrophobia of Boston to New York, she went to work for Horace Greeley on the New York Tribune , becoming the first full-time book reviewer in American journalism. (Esther began reviewing for the Tribune in September 1922, the same month she wrote this letter to Wilson.) Fuller then reported for the Tribune in England and Italy, supported Giuseppe Mazzini’s work for Italian unification, and had a child with an ally of his. She died on her return to New York when her ship ran aground and sank off Long Island.
    Esther argued that both Fuller and Wharton encountered resistance that had nothing and everything to do with their work. “The comments I hear all the time on Edith Wharton” had been and were a burden for these women, as they were for an aspiring writer like Esther. With her half-joking suggestion that Fuller stayed on a sinking ship because American moralizing about women’s sexuality was so difficult and endless, Esther turned Fuller’s drowning from an accident into a judgment on such judgments. Which is to say that, reading Hawthorne’s journal, Esther posited the past not as a difference to be repudiated but as a moment—at once distant and almost within living memory—that resonated in the present. And she saw failure as an attribute not of Fuller’s and Wharton’s persons or writing but of their critics.
    Something like this view of American literature and sexual politics existed in the United States in the early 1920s, but it is now hardly remembered. Dorothy Parker, a friend of Esther’s, is probably the only