“In many ways, our biography is patterned after the ‘lives and letters’ format made popular in the nineteenth century, in which extensive quotations from the subject’s correspondence are woven into a continuous narrative of the subject’s life.” So Ronald Bosco and Joel Myerson write in the preface to “The Emerson Brothers: A Fraternal Biography in Letters” (Oxford University Press, 416 pages, $49.95). Indeed, I immediately thought of Elizabeth Gaskell’s classic biography of Charlotte Bronte, in which the subject’s letters dominate to such an extent that the biographer seems, at times, an editor rather than an interpreter of a life.

This impression is misleading, though, since Gaskell’s selections and her diction emphasize the ladylike Charlotte and subtly dampen her subject’s passionate nature, transforming her into a Victorian comestible. Messrs. Bosco and Myerson do something of the same for Ralph Waldo Emerson. They domesticate the renowned individualist, making him seem far less radical than the writers of essays such as “The American Scholar.”

Their Emerson – called Waldo throughout the narrative – is a man acutely conscious of his family’s 200-year history in America. When his older brother,William, decided not to pursue the pulpit – the favored occupation of generations of Emerson males – it was Waldo, an indifferent student at Harvard and a slow developer, who felt called upon to fill William’s role.As Messrs. Bosco and Myerson observe of his younger siblings, “[W]henever a writer spoke of them [Edward and Charles] in comparison to their older brother Waldo,he,rather than they,suffered by the comparison.” Edward and Charles were brilliant phrasemakers and scholars, and had they not been cut down by disease (neither man made it out of his 20s),it is to be wondered what prodigies they might have performed.

Waldo outlived and outperformed his brothers, and perhaps he would have done so even if they had remained beside him. For if Waldo seems in this book more family-bound and tradition-minded than other biographies make him out to be, it also could be argued on the basis of this fraternal biography that he resigned from Boston’s Second Church in 1832 (before either Edward or Charles died) precisely because he felt, even more than his brothers, the oppressive pull of the Puritan past.

It took many years for Waldo to evolve into the transcendentalist who saw in himself and in every individual an entire universe. “I feel the centipede in me,” he wrote in his journal. Emerson came to feel he could crack open the world’s significance by dwelling upon the infinitesimal and the particulates of personality.

We know the Emerson of the poems, essays, and journals, but the letters published in this biography for the first time present not only a man with a different voice, but also a mind creating itself through the epistolary form. As Messrs. Bosco and Myerson point out, previous scholars (biographers included) have tended to focus on Emerson as a subject “surrounded by and developed through reference to a cast of increasingly renowned characters.”

Emerson looks different, his two new biographers emphasize, when seen in relation to his brothers. On February 23, 1827, the 24-year-old Emerson, corresponding with his 19-year-old brother, Charles, then convalescing in St. Augustine, Fla., observed:

The river of life with you is yet in its mountain sources bounding & shouting on its way. … Vouchsafe then to give to your poor patriarchal exhorting brother some of these sweet waters. Write. Write. I have heard men say … they had rather have ten words viva voce from a man than volumes of letters for getting at his opinion. – I had rather converse with them by the interpreter. Politeness ruins conversation. You get nothing but the scum & surface of opinions. … Men’s spoken notions are thus nothing but outlines & generally uninviting outlines of a subject, & so general, as to have no traits appropriate & peculiar to the individual. But when a man writes, he divests himself of his manners & all physical imperfections & it is the pure intellect that speaks. There can be no deception here. You get the measure of his soul. Instead of the old verse, “Speak that I may know thee.” Brandish your pen therefore, & give me the secret history of that sanctuary you call yourself.

Written like a true biographer! Here Emerson demands from his brother an openness of soul that will correspond with Emerson’s own desire to fathom the world. To know more of his brother is to rejuvenate himself. To see life as Charles does is also, for Waldo, a way of seeing. This is why he exclaimed in a journal entry (December 8, 1834), “what poems are many private lives.”

Like Samuel Johnson, who believed anyone’s life well told would make a fascinating biography, Emerson eschewed “vulgar greatness,” the kind that makes reviewers crave only biographies about “important” people.These fascinating letters include not only correspondence among the brothers but also between them and their formidable aunt, Mary Moody Emerson (Waldo called her a genius), their mother, the much beloved Ruth Haskins Emerson, and Charles’s fiancee, Elizabeth Hoar. This is really a work of prosopography, a collective biography that shows how central the family grouping was to Emerson and his generation.

Emerson discovered a personal appeal in the moral value of a life, played out against one’s obligations to the past and present, to the family, and to the self, as exemplified in his stepgrandfather, Ezra Ripley, the subject of Waldo’s observation that a “man is but a little thing in the midst of [the] great objects of nature,” who yet may “abolish all thoughts of magnitude & in his manners equal the majesty of the world.”

Ronald Bosco and Joel Myerson are to be commended for reviving that singular sense of majesty. Their book presents not only a novel way of reintegrating Emerson into the world out of which he arose, but also an inspiring evocation of biography itself as the way to illuminate the secret sanctuary of the self.

crollyson@nysun.com