Gracefully Insane by Alex Beam Read Free Book Online

as the family’s finances permitted. When not at McLean, he boarded in a rooming house and sometimes helped out on Israel Putnam’s farm in Chelmsford. More tragically, in
1828, another brother, Edward Bliss Emerson, suffered an unexpected nervous breakdown and was sent to McLean. Edward’s institutionalization weighed heavily on his older brother Ralph, who was somewhat in awe of Edward’s accomplishments. The boy had finished second in his Harvard class, unlike Ralph Waldo, who finished thirtieth out of thirty-nine; Edward had just been accepted into law practice with Daniel Webster. It is from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s pen that we have one of the first descriptions of the shock a family member experiences when visiting a loved one in the mental hospital:
    He has been now for one week thoroughly deranged&agreat deal of the time violent so as to make it necessary to have two men in the room all the time.... His frenzy took all forms; sometimes he was very gay & bantered every body.... Afterward would come on a peevish or angry state & he would throw down every thing in the room & throw his clothes &c out of the window; then perhaps on being restrained wd. follow a paroxysm of perfect frenzy & he wd roll & twist on the floor with his eyes shut for half an hour.
    There he lay—Edward, the admired, learned, eloquent, thriving boy—a maniac.
    Edward died of tuberculosis at age twenty-nine. Robert lived in the Boston area until he died at age fifty-two.
    Emerson had another McLean connection, one that he documented more thoroughly than his familial ones. At the recommendation of Miss Elizabeth Peabody of Salem, Emerson befriended a young Harvard Greek tutor and poet named Jones Very. Even by the standards of Emerson’s eccentric inner circle, Very was odd. At the beginning of the 1838 academic year, Very shared with his students and his supervising professor the news that he was the Son of God and that the Second Coming of Christ was at hand. This was news Harvard apparently was not ready to hear. The tutor was shipped back to Salem, where he played a similar trick on his friend, Miss Peabody. Invading her
parlor early one Sunday morning, he placed his hands on her head and announced that he had come to baptize her with the Holy Ghost and with fire (Matthew III, Chapter 11).
    “I feel no change,” Miss Peabody told Very.
    “But you will,” said Very. Soon afterwards, one of his cousins had him forcibly removed to McLean.
    Very spent only a month in the hospital, lecturing the patients on poetry and Shakespeare and regaining some inner calm. Upon his return, the Salem locals credited McLean’s superintendent Luther Bell with saving the tutor and poet “from the delusion of being a prophet extraordinaire.” They thought this had been accomplished by righting Very’s “digestive system,” which had been “entirely out of order.”
    Emerson embraced Very upon his release, inviting him out to his Concord home and even editing a book of his poems, gratis, for publication. But some members of Emerson’s coterie still bristled at the presence of this high-maintenance divine. Bronson Alcott, an oddball himself, praised Very as “a mystic of the most ideal class ... a phenomenon quite remarkable in this age of sensualism and idolatry” but complained that Very was “insane with God” and “diswitted in the contemplation of the holiness of Divinity.”
    Then, almost as dramatically as he had acted up, Very inexplicably calmed down. “Very no longer felt God-directed,” according to Emerson’s biographer John McAleer. “The result was he had become a dull fellow.” He returned to Salem, where he lived quietly for another thirty-two years. “His kindly, careworn face,” McAleer writes, was “a melancholy reminder to those who saw it of the afflatus that had, for a brief moment, exalted him before it departed forever.”
    Emerson immortalized his “treasure of a companion” in his famous essay “Friendship,”