Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  There comes ——, for instance; to see him’s rare sport,

  Tread in Emerson’s tracks with legs painfully short;

  How he jumps, how he strains, and gets red in the face,

  To keep step with the mystagogue’s natural pace!

  It was the same snicker from a decade before: “Fie, for shame, brother bard, with good fruit of your own, / Can’t you let Neighbor Emerson’s orchards alone?” Lowell’s clever slur, echoed endlessly by generations of reviewers, would dog Thoreau for the rest of his life. His response was to keep writing. He knew “Ktaadn” was like nothing Emerson had ever written, and that “Resistance to Civil Government” defied Emerson’s patronage, even if it took shape under Emerson’s roof. But the old wound was unhealed, and Lowell’s barb left its mark.

  Thoreau gave nine lectures from Walden in six towns over the next six months, earning him over a hundred dollars in fees and invaluable publicity.67 Reviews were always opinionated and often positive, though most reviewers took their cue from Lowell and pegged Thoreau as an Emerson imitator. But the publicity stoked curiosity, and Thoreau was catching on to how the marketplace worked: when a Gloucester newspaper panned him, he shrugged it off as good advertising. Getting out into the world helped him strengthen ties with old friends, too, starting with the Hawthornes. Nathaniel tipped off his Salem friends that his guest was Greeley’s mystery man, the poet on the pond, and on November 22, 1848, Thoreau created “quite a sensation” in Salem with his Walden lecture’s “exquisite humor” and “delicate satire against the follies of the times.” Sophia Hawthorne was enchanted and wrote her sister Mary that Thoreau had risen quite above his old arrogance and was “as gentle, simple, ruddy, and meek as all geniuses should be”—even “his great blue eyes” outshined and “put into shade a nose which I once thought must make him uncomely forever.”68 After catching up with the Hawthornes, Henry traveled with Nathaniel to Cambridge, to dine with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Hawthorne had alerted Longfellow to Thoreau’s wearisome “iron-pokerishness,” but also praised him as a man of thought and originality. Longfellow, who had dined with Thoreau at the Emersons’ the week before, proved receptive: some months later he pronounced “Resistance to Civil Government” to be “extremely good.”69

  Thoreau, in short, was a hit. Aunt Maria was finally pleased: Salem seemed to be “wonderfully taken” with him; they had invited him back. Soon he would be lecturing in Portland, Maine, too—good paying engagements!—and “he is preparing his book for the press, and the title is to be Waldien (I don’t know how to spell it) or life in the woods. I think the title will take if the Book don’t.”70 After Salem and the somewhat chilly reception in Gloucester around Christmas, he tried out his third Walden lecture in Concord, before a friendly audience, just after New Year’s. Then he was back in Salem in February and Lincoln early in March. Two weeks later he spoke in Portland as an equinoctial rainstorm pounded the rooftop. The audience listened “wide awake” for a good two hours to his “unique, original, comical, and high-falutin” thoughts.71 Portland’s praise caught Greeley’s ear, and in April 1849 he penned a sprightly publicity paragraph on Thoreau at Walden that was reprinted in newspapers across the country. A week later Greeley printed a rejoinder by a so-called Timothy Thorough who, baffled, asked his wife what she thought of such goings-on. Well, she answered, this foolish fellow must be “a good-for-nothing, selfish, crab-like sort of chap” shirking his duties as a man. Greeley further stoked the controversy by penning an indignant reply, and the affair ricocheted around the nation, unhindered by anything Thoreau actually wrote. Greeley’s publicity stunt tapped into something deep, and the resulting caricature of Thoreau persists to this day.72

  Thoreau capped his first season as a professional lecturer by presenting all three Walden lectures in Worcester, spaced a week apart, to an audience that included H. G. O. Blake and his circle of friends. The local newspapers scoffed—“A wheel-barrow, with an Irishman for its vitals, renders the world a far better service,” said one—but some in the audience connected with the “sylvan philosopher” and his message.73 Blake and his circle, who probably organized the series, would invite Thoreau back so many times that Worcester became a testing ground second only to Concord in importance. And the method Thoreau established of developing his writings by watching his words miss or hit home with a living audience stayed with him; behind his pages are the faces of thousands of men and women, often opinionated and always unpredictable, who laughed, argued, and, sometimes, rolled their eyes.

  All this was wonderful publicity—for the wrong book. Just as the national audience was itching for an argument over Walden’s biting social commentary, Thoreau was about to publish A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers—something very different. In the eighteen months since he took it off the market, it had nearly doubled in size. The great beads and ingots that worried Emerson had swelled alarmingly. Early in 1849, Thoreau sent it to Longfellow’s publishers, the Boston firm Ticknor and Company, who replied that they would take Walden—but not A Week. Then they relented: they would take A Week if Thoreau paid the printing costs up front, $450 for a thousand copies, half to be bound.

  They might as well have asked him for the moon. Thoreau turned back to James Munroe, whose terms were still terrible, but not strictly impossible—instead of asking for money up front, Munroe offered to print a thousand copies, paying costs out of the sales of the book. If the book didn’t sell, Thoreau would guarantee reimbursement in full. Henry’s family was worried. “How he will pay for it I don’t know, for I fear it will not sell well,” Maria fretted; she thought parts of it sounded “very much like blasphemy.” Cynthia agreed that Henry put things into his book “that never ought to be put there,” and even Helen was uneasy. But Henry stood firm.74 After all, Emerson had published with Munroe under the same terms and done just fine. And Emerson had repeatedly urged him to take the plunge and print it at his own risk, assuring him it would sell. Alcott loved A Week, and when he told Hawthorne that Thoreau had his book in press, Hawthorne—assuming he meant Walden—rejoiced at the news and assured Thoreau of success. “I have thought of you as a reader while writing it,” Thoreau replied gratefully,75 and dived into correcting the proof sheets as they rolled off the press.

  Spring 1849 was tense. Thoreau’s handwriting was terrible, and the proof sheets were riddled with errors. He was busy with many lectures and his first wave of surveying jobs. When Elizabeth Peabody asked him for “Resistance to Civil Government,” he gamely added it to the pile, warning her he had no time for revisions. Worst of all, his sister Helen was dying. She’d long dreamed of a career in teaching and social activism, but poor health had kept her from it. Now it was painfully clear that her time was short. Henry hurried home from his lecture trip to Maine, canceling his engagement in Bangor and putting off, once again, his dreamed-of second excursion with Thatcher. By May 1, Helen was insisting there should be “not the least gloom” attached to her funeral. Henry brought a visiting daguerreotypist home, knowing that the Emersons’ one consolation in their grief had been a portrait John Thoreau arranged of young Waldo just weeks before they both died.76 Now Henry would do the same for his sisters. A delicate and ethereally composed Helen looks out from her portrait with luminous unflinching eyes, a trace of a smile playing about her lips. Sophia—who hated her first portrait so much that she had it retaken—looks out earnestly, as if arrested by the camera, impatient to leap up out of the frame and get on with her day. Henry had none taken of himself. Tense, busy, expectant, in a household shadowed by cares, he labored on.

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  There’s nothing quite like an author’s excitement upon beholding his first book. On May 26, 1849, Henry Thoreau took the train to Boston to pick up his author’s copies of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River: a thick, plain, brown-bound volume. He left one copy to be mailed to Blake in Worcester and stopped off to give another to Bronson Alcott in person. Alcott sat down and read it through in two days straig
ht: “An American book,” he admired, “worthy to stand beside Emerson’s Essays on my shelves.”77 Other responses were slower in coming. The first major public notice, and the most nationally prominent, appeared two weeks later on the front page of Greeley’s New-York Tribune—and it set a deeply damaging tone. A Week, it opened, if not quite a “fresh, original, thoughtful work,” was very nearly so, and Thoreau’s nature descriptions had an “Aeolian sweetness.” But his verse was “halting” and his philosophy execrable, “a bad specimen of a dubious and dangerous school.” Worst of all was the blasphemy. Mr. Thoreau dared to assert that the sacred books of the Brahmins were “nothing inferior to the Christian Bible”—a “revolting” attack on good sense, good taste, and all received opinion, which the author should humble himself by using the pages of the Tribune to retract.78

  Thoreau was deeply hurt, for he assumed the anonymous reviewer was Greeley himself, his trusted friend—perhaps in an attempt to whip up another controversy. Sadly, his anger and blame were misplaced, for the review was written by someone else, probably George Ripley.79 As for Emerson, he said nothing—except once, in a letter to an English friend, to whom he complained four days before Thoreau picked up his author’s copies that “there is nothing very good to tell you of the people here, no books, no poets, no artists.” He mentioned Thoreau’s book only as an afterthought. When Theodore Parker asked him to review it in the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, Emerson pointedly refused: “I am not the man to write the Notice of Thoreau’s book. I am of the same clan and parish.” Such qualms had not prevented him from writing helpful reviews of other friends’ work, but for Thoreau he offered instead a list of names of potential reviewers. Parker, long wary of Thoreau, found to his surprise that he rather liked the book, which he sent not to any of those whom Emerson had suggested but to that emerging arbiter of literary good taste: James Russell Lowell.80

  It could have been worse. Lowell procrastinated for six months, but when he finally got around to writing his review, it was surprisingly balanced. He found much to praise in the book’s tasteful parts, particularly in Thoreau’s enchanting nature descriptions. The worst he could say, aside from dismissing Thoreau’s verses as “worsification,” was that the book’s many digressions hit “like snags, jolting us headforemost out of our places as we are rowing placidly up stream or drifting down.” Out of proportion and out of place, they “mar our Merrimacking dreadfully. We were bid to a river-party, not to be preached at.” Aunt Maria thought Lowell’s review was “beautiful,” “so just, and pleasant and some parts of it so laughable that I enjoyed reading it very much.”81 But by the time Lowell had his say, it was December 1849, and much too late. The book was dead.

  The problem was not the number of reviews: Emerson helped Thoreau mail seventy-five copies to friends and possible reviewers, and it was widely reviewed in the United States and England. Nor was it the nature of the reviews—many were favorable, and even the negative ones could have excited interest. The problem was Munroe. He didn’t publish books; he only printed them. He refused to advertise, and he had no distribution network. One could purchase Thoreau’s book only by visiting Munroe’s shop in Boston or by ordering it from Munroe by mail. This business model had worked for Emerson, who was already well known and whose fame was centered in Boston. But for a first book by an unknown author seeking a national audience, it was a disaster. Hawthorne had also taken a hit from Munroe; three years after Munroe printed his Twice-Told Tales in 1841, six hundred copies remained in storage, unsold. Emerson tried to steer Fuller’s first book to Munroe, too, and a naive Thoreau had urged her to publish it at her own expense—but Fuller, wisely, took Summer on the Lakes to a publisher who spared her from assuming the risk for books they could not, or would not, market. Thoreau, by contrast, was in real trouble. His book sold barely over two hundred copies. The man who took pride in building a house for $28.12½ owed his publisher $290—a year’s ordinary wages. It would take him four years to pay it off, dollar by hard-earned dollar.

  Perhaps the saddest irony of Thoreau’s life is that the book he went to Walden to write, an elegy to his brother and closest friend, became an elegy to so many other losses: his sister Helen; his friendship with Emerson; his hopes for a literary career. Helen died of tuberculosis on June 14, 1849, just two weeks after her brother’s book became a reality—long enough to share the family’s pride and joy, for surely there was some, despite the misgivings. Of the four children, only Henry and Sophia remained. The women of the family laid Helen out in state in the family parlor, as was the custom. Four days later, in a gesture of deep respect, both the town’s ministers, the Unitarians’ Barzillai Frost and the Trinitarians’ William Mather, performed her funeral in the Thoreaus’ parlor, honoring Helen’s refusal to attend their churches since she found their doors open to slaveholders but closed to the defenders of the enslaved.

  Reverend Mather’s wife remembered how Henry, who also never went to church, sat seemingly unmoved until the service was concluded. As they were about to lift the bier, he stood to wind a music box to a tune “of the sweetest tenderest minor strains that seemed like no earthly tune. All sat quietly till it was through.”82 William Lloyd Garrison printed a passionate remembrance of Helen’s years of service to the abolitionist movement in the Liberator, honoring her patient investigation of the truth, her candor in acknowledging it, and her moral courage in acting on her convictions. In his farewell poem, Henry said that “regret doth bind / Me faster to thee now / Than neighborhood confined.” What he regretted, he did not say. He may not have been as close to the cerebral Helen as he was to the plucky Sophia, but she was his moral lodestar. The minister’s wife was not alone in suspecting Helen had “more sympathy in his peculiar ways perhaps than any other.”83

  By fall 1849, it was painfully clear to Thoreau that the book he wrote to prove himself to Emerson had failed to please him. Worse, by following Emerson’s advice to print it no matter the risk, Thoreau precipitated himself into ruinous financial debt. Tension built through the spring and summer. Even as Emerson complained of Thoreau’s elm-tree stiffness, a distressed Thoreau stammered in his Journal, “(I was never so near my friend when he was bodily present as when he was absent) and yet I am And yet I am indirectly accused by this friend of coldness and disingenuousness— When I cannot speak for warmth—& sincerity.” The crisis broke in September. In private Thoreau spat with cold and bitter fury:

  I had a friend, I wrote a book, I asked my friend’s criticism, I never got but praise for what was good in it—my friend became estranged from me and then I got blame for all that was bad,—& so I got at last the criticism which I wanted.

  While my friend was my friend he flattered me, and I never heard the truth from him, but when he became my enemy he shot it to me on a poisoned arrow

  There is as much hatred as love in the world. Hate is a good critic.84

  Again and again, for years afterward, Thoreau’s Journal would be disfigured by eruptions of raw pain and tortured declarations that his friendship with Emerson had, at last, finally and irrevocably ended. Yet somehow, despite his unrelenting bereavement, it never quite ended. As Thoreau already understood, “Ours is a tragedy of more than 5 acts—this is not the fifth act in our tragedy no, no!”85

  Emerson, in his own journal, seemed unconscious of anything unusual. He had handled Thoreau gingerly for years, without realizing what turmoil he stirred under his friend’s prickly exterior. The one thing neither could bear was leaving the other alone. So although they never entirely trusted each other again, they went on, outwardly pretty much as before: taking walks together; Henry doing odd jobs and Emerson paying him; Henry wandering into the house to rummage through the library, entertain guests, visit with Lidian, romp with the children. Even as tensions built, Thoreau wrote a delightful letter to Ellen, away on Staten Island, filling her in on Eddy’s fifth birthday party: Henry supplied them with “onion and squash pipes, and rhubarb whistles,” and “Little Sammy Hoar blowed them
most successfully, and made the loudest noise, though it almost strained his eyes out to do it.”86 If their personalities set each other on edge, if their impossible Platonic ideal of friendship pushed them apart, that very distance bound them together, walking, talking, provoking each other—a provocation that Emerson, who saw his own self-reliance mirrored in Thoreau’s nay-saying, could not resist. They met sometimes “with malice prepense, & take the bull by the horns,” as Emerson remarked in 1850, but they met, always, intellectual sparring partners to the end.87

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  The failure of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers was the most consequential event in Thoreau’s life as a writer. It is doubly sad that while the book is a flawed masterpiece, it is still a masterpiece. Had it been truly published, rather than printed and laid into storage, it would have taken its place next to Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse and Melville’s Typee as the culmination of the national quest for a distinctive American voice, heralding the breakthrough works of the 1850s—Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, his own Walden, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.88 Thoreau kept faith with his first book: looking back in 1851, he was proud to call it “hypaethral or unroofed,” open to the sky and to all weathers, smelling of “the fields & woods” rather than the study or library. And though he had tossed into it too many of his oldest and dustiest pages—unread Dial essays, musty poems, dry extracts from colonial histories—the pages written at Walden Pond breathe a fresh, wild, outdoors air.