"You Are Ours"

THE LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON (592 pp.) --Ralph L. Rusk -- Scribner ($6).

In many ways Ralph Waldo Emerson is the most satisfying of American writers. The fame of other great New Englanders seems to vary with literary revivals, new discoveries and new editions, but neither changes in literary fashions nor new research have reduced Emerson's stature in the slightest; he grows more impressive, in his unassuming serenity, as more is known about him. He is as eloquent as Herman Melville but without Melville's frequent posturing and bombast, as civilized as Henry James but without James's mannerisms, as imaginative as Poe but without Poe's melodrama, as just as Hawthorne at his best. His phrases, like Shakespeare's, have become part of the language.

This new biography makes it clear how Emerson struggled to keep close to the common life. It was not easy. Born in Boston in 1803, the son of a preacher, forbidden to play with "rude boys," Ralph Waldo used to hang on the fence, peering down the street in the hope that he would discover what a rude boy was.

Palms in Paris. No previous biographer has detailed the nagging poverty of the Emerson family as closely as Author Rusk --the boarders in the house, and the gifts of money that arrived at the last moment. Other biographers have told the story of Emerson's teaching after his graduation from Harvard; Biographer Rusk gives the subjects he assigned to his girl students for English composition, his comments on their papers. Other biographers have touched lightly on the tragedies in Emerson's family; Rusk tells in detail of his brother Bulkeley, who lived past middle age without developing mentally; of his brother Edward, whose mind gave way briefly at the moment of his greatest promise, and who was taken to the asylum by Emerson himself; of another brother, Charles, supposedly the most gifted of the family, who died on the eve of his marriage and at whose grave, according to one account, Emerson burst into a short, near-hysterical laugh.

Pastor of the Second (Unitarian) Church in Boston at 26, making five pastoral visits a day and caring for his young bride (who died after a year and a half of marriage), Emerson revolted against what he called the "official goodness" of his position. The arguments that led to his resigning his pastorate (his refusal to administer the Lord's Supper) seem somewhat unreal in this account; more clearly traced is his growing conviction that the only way he could be a good minister was to leave the ministry.

He kept his stern sense of conscience. In Paris, after a conversation with an English friend who jested broadly of the charms of the grisettes, he noted in his diary: "When I balance the attractions of good and evil, when I consider what facilities, what talents a little vice would furnish, then rise before me not these laughters, but the dear and comely forms of honour and genius and piety in my distant home, and they touch me with chaste palms moist and cold, and say to me, You are ours."

Freedom in Concord. At first glance, Professor Rusk's biography seems to tilt the figure of Emerson as Americans have come to know him. The work of a 60--year-old professor at Columbia University, it is a massive, detailed, thorough, factual study, the first biography in 60 years to reflect a careful sifting of Emerson's unpublished manuscripts and papers. Heretofore, the standard source books on Emerson have been the work of his literary executors, James Elliot Cabot and Edward

Emerson. They have presented the essential facts of Emerson's life, and a good deal of colorful detail, upon which critics and biographers have speculated ever since. Some of the resulting literary studies, of which the work of Van Wyck Brooks is the masterpiece, are among the most engaging criticism in English.

The greatest limitation of Rusk's book is its lack of enthusiasm and feeling. It shows Emerson as far more practical, sometimes calculating, and much less steadily conscious of his purpose in life than has been believed. One great discovery concealed or slurred over by previous biographers is that much of Emerson's life was dull. Moreover, Rusk admits that he has been greatly attracted by one aspect of Emerson--his struggle "to keep his little area of personal freedom safe from encroachment." The emphasis is consequently upon his independence, his reserve with family and friends, his ties with and his distance from the members of his congregation and the citizens of Concord.

Rusk goes over the tedium and labor of Emerson's lectures with great detail. A reader not familiar with Emerson's writing might get from this book an impression that he was a rather colorless ex-clergyman who lived a good but uneventful life in a dull New England town, and that the chief distinction of his career was that he successfully avoided being monopolized by any person or idea.

And yet so many of the facts in the book are new that no such characterization can do it justice. Almost every page of this biography yields some new or little-known fact about Emerson or his contemporaries, and if the first result is to make his life seem slow and somewhat sad, the final one is likely to make his career seem even more extraordinary and his achievement even greater.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.