Henry David Thoreau
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Through the fall of 1847, Alcott reveled in the work—his “Sylvan” style of building, he called it, all sweeping mystic curves. After sweating over it all day, he dreamed of it all night. Thoreau found it more of a nightmare. Aunt Maria fretted that Alcott “pulls down as fast as he builds up,” which was bad enough; worse, one time, the top rafter was accidentally knocked off, and Henry had to leap for his life into a nearby haystack.10 In November Thoreau alerted Emerson that things were growing serious: Alcott’s air-castle needed some foundation in the laws of physics and mathematics. “‘Did you ever study geometry?’” he hollered to Alcott one day. “‘The relation of straight lines to curves—the transition from the finite to the infinite? Fine things about it in Newton & Leibnitz.’—But he would hear none of it.” But Alcott did hear the jibes of passersby who stopped to stare: it was odd, the strangest thing they ever saw, a whirligig. Still, it had a certain charm; even Thoreau admitted it had a “disposition to be beautiful.”11 Through the winter it sat unfinished, but next spring Alcott roofed it with thatch and moss. As a poet’s lodge it proved useless, being open to rain and mosquitos, but to everyone’s surprise it stood for many years, a two-story picturesque wonderment of art—at least, to some. When Emerson’s mother saw it, she snorted and dubbed it “the Ruin.” Emerson paid Alcott $50 for his labor, Thoreau $31.50, and for years afterward he funneled money to Alcott for repairs—a clever way, friends suspected, to help Alcott’s struggling family.12
By contrast, Thoreau’s Walden house, built with such care and craft, met a very different fate. Three weeks after Henry moved out, Emerson rented it to his gardener, Hugh Whelan, who planned to move it up by the road, enlarge it, plant an orchard, and move in with his family. By January Hugh had moved the house, dug the cellar hole, and bought the stones to line it, but there things sat, for he quarreled with his wife and left Concord, vowing never to return, leaving the unstoned cellar to slump and swallow one end of the house. The thing was still fixable, Thoreau wrote Emerson in January—he’d envisioned his house as the first of a new and thriving Walden community, and he still hoped Emerson could manage it “to be a home for somebody.”13 Instead, Emerson let it decay until September 1849, when he sold it to a local farmer who moved it a couple of miles north as a storage shed for corn. There Thoreau’s beloved house rotted slowly away, visited now and then in after years by Sophia or Ellery Channing, until the owners pulled it down in 1868, recycling the usable boards to build a shed and repair a barn, where, legend has it, a few boards linger on to this day. The rest dissolved back into the elements—sun and earth, rain and frost—of which it had been composed.14
The forest, too, was dissolving. Locomotives were sparking fires in Walden Woods, damaging valued timber; in November, Thoreau reported to Emerson, the woods by his Walden field had burned clear to the road on one side and to the fence rail on the other, set ablaze by “Lucifer.” Years would not repair such “a great loss.” Next May, that same Lucifer set fire to Emerson’s own woods. Indignant, Emerson demanded the railroad pay him damages (they did), and once he was home, he sold them the burned-over acres.15 But far worse was under way: with the railroad making cheap Maine lumber readily available, Concord landowners were converting their now useless Walden woodlots into ready cash, fuel for railroad engines and lumber for railroad ties, maybe getting a crop or two of rye or English hay out of the cutover land. For two centuries the Walden forest had been valued and sustained. Thoreau remembered how Walden Pond, in his youth, was “completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods,” with grapevines embowering the coves into deep caves through which a boat could pass. Now he watched the trees fall. By 1854, the year Walden was published, nearly all the woods had been clear-cut, laying waste Walden’s shores: “Now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water.” Thoreau’s muse was silenced; “how can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?”16
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As the winter of 1848 wore on, Lidian’s health began to fail, casting a cloud of worry over the household. Henry withheld the news from the lonely and overtaxed Emerson, knowing how he needed those warm and witty letters from home. In January Emerson responded with unguarded love: “Let who or what pass, there stands the dear Henry,—if indeed any body had a right to call him so,—erect, serene, & undeceivable. So let it ever be!” The endearment broke through Henry’s guard and brought a gush of gratitude: “Dear Waldo”—never before had Henry called Emerson by his familiar name—“Whatever I may call you, I know you better than I know your name.” The sudden intimacy unleashed Henry’s pent-up worry over Lidian, who, he admitted, had been bedridden for weeks without telling her husband, and was now too sick and weak with jaundice to write at all—“as yellow as saffron.” All winter long, with Lidian sick in bed, Henry devoted himself to the children. Every night he read to them from the Diadem, a children’s annual: “All the annuals and ‘diadems’ are in requisition, and Eddy is forward to exclaim when the hour arrives, ‘Now for the dem dems!’” While Ellen offered her “wise criticisms,” Edith protested that he turned the pages too soon—and thus they went through the Penny Magazine, too, “first from beginning to end, and then from end to beginning, and Eddy stared just as much the second time as the first.”17
Despite Henry’s reassurances, Waldo grew almost frantic with worry. He was beset with money troubles, for times were hard in England and his lectures were earning only a fraction of the promised profits. Debts at home were mounting, too, and time and again he had to instruct Lidian to borrow money from William. “I shall never dare to go from home again,” he fretted, if it caused such “a crop of annoyances and pains.”18 Yet his days abroad were hugely full. Emerson was being honored as a celebrity and entertained as an equal by the British Empire’s greatest names, and he had a front row view of world history: that spring he put aside his worries over the cost and ventured a side trip to Paris, walking straight into the street violence of the Revolution of 1848. Even then, Margaret Fuller was filling the front pages of the New-York Tribune with riveting dispatches from Rome, where she had joined the fight for the Roman Republic; fearing for her life, Emerson begged her to return home with him, not knowing she had fallen in love with an Italian rebel and given birth to their child.
Yet as world history was surging forward, the news that mattered most to Waldo came from home. Soon Lidian was writing him of her recovery: there in the brightening spring, Henry was setting out pear trees “of which you, dear husband, will gather and eat the fruit, I hope.” Even as she wrote, she reported, Henry was in the midst of his nightly “go-to-bed frolic” with Eddy, who informed his mother “that Mr T. has first swallowed a book, then pulled it out of his (Eddy’s) nose, then put it into his (Mr T.’s) ‘pantalettes.’ I tell Henry I shall send you word he is in his second childhood, a wearer of pantalettes.” How strongly each loving anecdote “draws me homeward,” sighed Waldo, counting the days, weary of being toasted in Britain as America’s newest literary lion.19
What was in Henry’s heart during these long and busy months as surrogate father and man of the house? He kept no surviving journal, and from the record one can surmise both a time of happy contentment and a time of deep psychic distress. As Lidian descended into the depths of her lonely illness, she wrote letters that the faraway Waldo found too appalling to keep, and to which he replied, in despair, that “a photometer cannot be a stove,” that “the trick of solitariness never never can leave me.”20 Love for a distant Emerson—distant even when he was present—was one thing Lidian and Henry shared. This had drawn them together before, and it did so even more strongly now, for Henry’s own love for Lidian was certainly the deepest he ever knew for a woman to whom he was not related. Yet it puzzled him to define the exact nature of their relationship.
It was, he proposed a year later, love for a “Sister,” “One in whom you have—unbounded faith—whom you can—purely
love.” Li-dian was, like young Edmund Sewall, both deeply attractive to him and profoundly unattainable, and in both cases his response was classically Platonic. “I still think of you as my sister. . . . Others are of my kindred by blood or of my acquaintance but you are mine. you are of me and & I of you I can not tell where I leave off and you begin.” “I am as much thy sister as thy brother—Thou art my brother as much as my sister.” It was hardly physical attraction, for to him her body was merely a “veil” that vanished utterly, leaving them both pure spirits, together: “When I love you I feel as if I were annexing another world to mine. We splice the heavens. . . . the feminine of me.” Or the feminine of Waldo—embodying their united spiritual ideals better than Emerson himself. Whether this made Lidian mother instead of sister, himself son instead of brother, Henry couldn’t say. What he could say was that she was life giving, and the light he saw in her eyes was creative, inceptive. She was nothing less than his morning star.21
This raises, without resolving, the question of Thoreau’s sexuality. Here, too, his reflections are to modern ears both unsettlingly innocent and far too fluid to pin to customary gender roles. Thoreau could write, without embarrassment, “I love men with the same distinction that I love woman—as if my friend were of some third sex,” he added. Those “friends” were often men: Emerson, Alcott, and Channing, of course, as well as others to come. They were also women: Lidian and Lucy, Anna Russell, Margaret Fuller, and yes, Ellen Sewall—and perhaps Sophia Foord, before she violated his ideal by proposing marriage. All had keen intellects and, with the exception of Ellen, were married already or old enough—or, eventually, young enough—to render marriage moot. With such women Thoreau found companionship and even, as with Lidian, something virginal and sacred: “The end [purpose] of love is not house keeping,” he hypothesized, but “the letting go of the house.” Around the time of Foord’s proposal, he observed, “Considering how few poetical friendships there are It is astonishing how many men and women are married,” as if men yielded too easily “to nature without consulting their genius”—an apt description of Ellery Channing’s deteriorating marriage with Ellen Fuller. “The end of nature is not the propagation of the species,” he continued, but something higher: lovers should “incessantly stimulate each other to a loftier and purer life.” We love flowers for their blossoms, not their seeds.22
When Thoreau put into words his yearning for companionship, his pronouns were often male; when he was physically attracted to someone, they were often, though not always, men. But no evidence exists that he acted or felt he could act on those attractions. Instead he made himself into what Emerson called “the bachelor of thought and nature,” living an outwardly unremarkable life in a family of unmarried aunts, uncles, and siblings, in a town where unmarried men and women were common; Thoreau “was more unlike his neighbors in his thought, than in his action.”23 Some of that thinking emerged in his tortured chapter on “Higher Laws,” where he battled with his sensual, animal self: “Nature is hard to be overcome,” he concluded fiercely, “but she must be overcome.” Yet he had in mind not so much repression as sublimation. He imagined life attaining to “purity,” in which “the spirit” could “pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion”—a “generative energy” that, when controlled and contained, “invigorates and inspires us.” Why, he wondered, cannot we speak of bodily functions—eating, drinking, voiding excrement and urine—without shame? “In a pure society,” he ventured, “the subject of copulation would not be so often avoided from shame,” hinted and winked about, “but treated naturally and simply.” For why should we be ashamed of the temple that is our body? And not be artists of our body, sculptors and builders of that “temple” instead? Until Walt Whitman published his poetry, such thoughts had no common language for expression.24
To a friend, Thoreau confessed, “The intercourse of the sexes, I have dreamed, is incredibly beautiful, too fair to be remembered,” “an inexpressible delirium of joy” that he associated with “true marriage.” But he would know it only in dreams. The flowering of passion in “beauty & art” was his true calling, which he guarded fiercely with what he called (in the language of his day) “chastity.” In another day and place, his ascetic vocation might have called him to monasticism, as it did his friend Isaac Hecker, who in turn urged monkhood on Henry; a deleted phrase in Emerson’s eulogy recognizes that Thoreau was nearest to “the old monks in their ascetic religion.”25 For Thoreau the deepest existential gulf between self and other was neither caused by gender difference—what greater miracle can be imagined, he wrote, than to look through each other’s eyes for a moment!—nor resolved by defending sexual differences. In another place and time, he might have found his life’s partner with a man. For Thoreau, however, in Victorian Concord, that door was closed. In his acute, unspeakable awareness of difference from those around him, he crafted a self of fluid but carefully guarded sensuality and intense, thwarted romantic energies, and he poured those energies, with ever-increasing passion, into his devotional life as an artist and prophet—an “azad,” he wrote in Walden, a “religious independent” who, being fruitless, could be “a free man,” as free as the evergreen cypress.26
“Lectures multiply on my desk”: Thoreau Finds His Audience
In March 1848 came an unlooked for opportunity to explore that high vocation with Harrison Gray Otis Blake, the man who became Thoreau’s first real disciple. Harry Blake lived in nearby Worcester. As an 1838 Harvard Divinity School graduate, he had helped instigate and publish Emerson’s breakthrough critique of conventional Christianity, “The Divinity School Address.” In the ensuing firestorm, Blake had dropped out of the ministry and taken up teaching, often inviting Emerson to lecture in Worcester. Something Thoreau said caught his ear, and after reading, of all things, Thoreau’s obscure “Aulus Persius Flaccus,” Blake was inspired to write a fan letter: “I would know of that soul which can say ‘I am nothing.’ I would be roused by its words to a truer and purer life.”27
Roused himself, Thoreau sat down at his green desk in the prophet’s chamber and poured out heart and soul. “I am glad to hear that any words of mine, though spoken so long ago that I can hardly claim identity with their author, have reached you,” he opened. “It is not in vain that man speaks to man. This is the value of literature.” In the rest of the letter, Thoreau explored his hopes, dreams, and philosophy; gave counsel; radiated wisdom; and yearned for a higher life. Never before had anyone triggered such a generous response from him. “I need to see you,” he closed. “Perhaps you have some oracles for me.”28 Blake did; he wrote back immediately. The two became lifelong friends, exchanging frequent visits and often traveling together. Many times Blake invited Thoreau to lecture in Worcester, often in his parlor, where Harry and his wife Nancy gathered their friends to listen and converse. Thoreau wrote fifty more letters to Blake, the last from his deathbed. Whenever a new one arrived, Blake would call together his circle—above all the philosophical tailor Theophilus Brown, who lived nearby—to read and weigh Thoreau’s words. In after years, Blake became his friend’s literary executor, and though, sadly, someone destroyed Blake’s half of their correspondence, he treasured Thoreau’s papers, publishing four volumes of excerpts from Thoreau’s Journal and creating his first modern audience—an audience that grows to this day. Such, indeed, is the value of literature.
What’s more, Blake gave Thoreau what he most needed: the conviction that he had something to say and an audience to whom he could say it. “Lectures begin to multiply on my desk,” he wrote happily to Emerson.29 He had brought away from Walden a whole stack of unfinished projects, including a complete first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a nearly finished draft of Walden, a rough draft of “Ktaadn,” and more—indeed, much of his life’s work. He took up each project in turn, polishing it and turning it loose in the world. At Walden, Thoreau had learned how to live a wr
iter’s life; now at Emerson’s, he was living it still, surrounded by manuscripts in various stages of composition, a different project for every mood and interest, each one finding its unique voice and stance relative to the others and all of them together composing a literary ecology.
The one project Thoreau completed at Walden Pond was, in effect, an essay on how to write. The over-the-top pyrotechnics of Emerson’s Scottish friend Thomas Carlyle had intrigued Thoreau since he first encountered them at Harvard. Carlyle broke every rule Professor Channing ever prescribed and danced like the devil on the shards. In writing about Carlyle, Thoreau cared less about what he said than how he said it—that is, his “style,” meaning, Thoreau explained, “the stylus, the pen he writes with,” literally the point where a mind, in meeting the blank paper, meets the whole world. What was really at stake was Thoreau’s own pen, Thoreau’s own style. The essay he finally published, “Thomas Carlyle and His Works,” reads like a final exam in a long, self-taught course in how to stop sounding like a Harvard graduate, how to start reaching farmers and mechanics as well as preachers and professors. Old people, wrote Thoreau, shook their heads at Carlyle’s “foolishness” and “whimsical ravings,” but young people got it: his craziness was good plain English. Defending Carlyle gave Thoreau permission to sound like himself. “Exaggeration! was ever any virtue attributed to a man without exaggeration? was ever any vice, without infinite exaggeration? Do we not exaggerate ourselves to ourselves, or do we recognize ourselves for the actual men we are? Are we not all great men? . . . The lightning is an exaggeration of the light.”30