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99  F I V E Authorizing Emerson’s Biography Cabot and/or Edward Emerson From 1875 through 1882, James Elliot Cabot (1821–1903) served as literary executor to a writer still living—very much like the relationship James Anthony Froude had with Thomas Carlyle. That Cabot was able to escape Froude’s notorious fate as Emerson’s fifth biographer is due in part to what Edward Emerson would years later call a “perfectly upright” rectitude that made Cabot constitutionally resistant even to appear to violate a private trust. In part, too, Cabot subscribed to views of biography that were by the 1880s retrograde and relatively safe. But to a large degree, his work on the biography was shaped and limited by the complicated personal circumstances he found himself in, especially, it turns out, in his troubled collaboration with Edward Waldo Emerson. — I — It was Edward Emerson, we recall, acting for the family, who asked Cabot in 1877 to write Emerson’s biography, in addition to the duties of literary executor that he had already agreed to two years before. Cabot said yes, but not without reservations. Real biography, he believed, required the historical perspective of a half-century or more; he planned only to gather material for some better Emerson biographer in the future and “to put in shape what information is at hand & can be got from his journals & mss.” Cabot was probably right about the need for historical perspective. But he 100 C H A P T E R F I V E might also have thought himself an unsuitable biographer for more personal reasons. Emerson’s will officially named Cabot literary executor in 1876, more than three decades after the two men first met. What seemed like a long acquaintance, however, was (as in the case of all the biographers save Edward ) a pretty sporadic one. A Harvard graduate in the class of 1840—by his own admission he was a lackluster and unfocused student —Cabot followed his graduation with a three-year European tour that he called in his autobiography “mental sauntering and the picking up of scraps, very unfavourable to my education.” Actually, the trip was seminal to his intellectual development, for in Europe he discovered the German metaphysics that led him to a lifetime interest in “a harmonious reality that transcended the finite.” While there, he also discovered Emerson’s writings, and upon his return to the United States in 1843 he began an acquaintance, first by mail, later (in 1845) in person, that would last until Emerson’s death. Emerson found the young Cabot “a rare scholar, though a better metaphysician than poet” and cultivated the fledgling writer as he did so many other young men of promise ; throughout the 1840s and 1850s Cabot appears in Emerson’s journals on membership lists for projected clubs and contributors ’ lists for proposed magazines. For his part, Cabot the son of privilege took a casual career path: completing a law degree but practicing only two years; studying natural history at Harvard with Louis Agassiz; trying his hand at architecture, translation, criticism, and editing. Not until Cabot was admitted to the Saturday Club in 1861 did he and Emerson have the opportunity for regular contact with each other at its monthly meetings. In short, Cabot’s steadfastness, organization, and intelligence, rather than their personal relationship, may have recommended him for the task of managing Emerson’s literary legacy. As Simmons aptly puts it, when Cabot was named Emerson’s literary executor “he was neither family, disciple, a literary man in his own right, nor even a close friend.” At least one other person close to the Emerson family shared Cabot’s doubts about his suitability—William Henry Channing, one of the family friends who encouraged Edward to find a suitable biographer for his father in 1877 and offered frequent, albeit unsolicited, advice to Lidian about her husband’s legacy. During the summer of 1882, just months after Emerson’s death, Cabot’s wife Elizabeth visited England, where Channing had been living since the 1860s. On July 22 she wrote to her husband to say that Channing offered to have lunch with her and share information about Emerson . “I think all he really wants is to talk himself,” Elizabeth noted wryly, Authorizing Emerson’s Biography 101 “& I shall try hard to get some facts out of him tho I doubt his accuracy.” Still, she reported later, the luncheon went well. Channing offered his help with the Memoir and told her he...

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