Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  Thoreau’s address propelled him into the most militant ranks of radical abolitionists. William Lloyd Garrison printed “Slavery in Massachusetts” in the Liberator on July 21, and on August 2, Horace Greeley reprinted it in the New-York Daily Tribune, calling it “a genuine Higher Law Speech” with lightning bolts of dark humor. Many will blame us for printing it, said Greeley, “but our back is broad and can bear censure.”92 The National Anti-Slavery Standard picked it up on August 12 under the headline “Words That Burn,” pronouncing the old imputation that Thoreau was a mere imitator of Emerson “little better than profanity.” As for Thoreau, his Journal notes only: “A sultry night the last—bear no covering—all windows open—8 Am—To Framingham.” He checks off a few flowers, and closes: “A very hot day.”93

  Over the next several weeks the heat deepened, turning his attic chamber into an oven and forcing him to spend his evenings downstairs with the family. Thoreau felt close and dissipated, “cheap and vulgar,” “invaded and overrun.” Suddenly his name was everywhere. In May, the New York publisher Charles Scribner wrote asking him, as one of the “American authors of importance,” for information for an entry in his new Cyclopaedia of American Literature.94 On June 7, his publisher James T. Fields embarked for England with proof sheets of Walden in hand, to publish it there and so secure copyright. Ticknor and Fields were working hard for Walden, which they believed was one of the highlights of the season: as Fields wrote to his English contacts, “Walden is no common book and is sure to succeed.” Alas, he became so seasick that he had to leave the ship at Halifax and return to Boston; in his absence, no English publisher would take on the radical American book.95 Greeley fired up his publicity machine, and by July, advance notices of Walden, complete with excerpts, were breaking into the newspapers even as word of Thoreau’s Framingham protest speech spread. Thoreau was being styled as the “Massachusetts Hermit” who had stepped boldly into the glare of radical abolitionism—the glare in which Walden was published to the world.

  Though the official publication date was not until August 9, copies were leaking out: the first was sold on August 1, Thoreau received his on August 2, and soon orders were coming in from Virginia to Maine, New Orleans to San Francisco. On August 8 Thoreau wrote Blake, affecting disdain for all the attention, “Methinks I have spent a rather unprofitable summer thus far. I have been too much with the world.” On August 9, his Journal entry reads in its entirety:

  Wednesday Aug 9th To Boston

  Walden Published. Elder berries XXX. Waxwork yellowing X.96

  That Wednesday in Boston, carrying his author’s copies, Thoreau dined with Bronson Alcott and left one with him; the rest he carried to Concord. He was having his chanticleer’s crow at last. Would anybody hear him?

  Reading Walden

  Walden was born in face-to-face conversation with friends and neighbors who freely asked “impertinent” questions and expected honest answers in return. As Thoreau stood before them early in 1847, his house could authenticate his every word: come and see! But by 1854, Walden was no longer. Of course the pond was still there, but most of the trees were cut, and his house was gone. Nothing marked the site but a weedy cellar hole. If the meaning of his years there were to live on, Thoreau needed to recreate his performance as a book, convert the material place—the wooden-floored house reeking of woodsmoke and damp wool, pine needles tracked underfoot, the mouse drawn on the door—into a space of words. His other difficulty was to locate his readers. Thoreau knew plenty of town scoffers sneered at him behind his back, but he also knew that dreamers and “poor students” like him too often lived in quiet desperation. To all the others—not just the scoffers but the “strong and valiant” natures who relish things as they are—he asked only that, should they try on the coat that is Walden, they not “stretch the seams” lest they ruin it for those whom it fits.97

  A Week imagines life flowing irretrievably down the river of time, but Walden imagines life lit by passion and pain into a single, many-faceted diamond. Robert Frost was impressed by this: “Think of the success of a man’s pulling himself together all under one one-word title.”98 Yet despite its aura of timelessness, Walden insists on literal, historical reality. It needs the rough edges: the railroad’s whistle, the woodchucks gnawing his beans, Zilpha muttering curses over her pot. This insistence on materiality reverberates through the ideational content of Walden, especially drawing our attention to how personal and social identities depend on material facts and actions. The long opening chapter, “Economy,” makes us feel how building that house is (re)building a self, literally from the ground up; but this time the choices will be made “deliberately,” with full consciousness of their costs. When Thoreau moves in on Independence Day, as the narrator tells us three times, we recall America itself was founded as a nation of citizens who did not inherit the conditions of their lives, but built them.

  After hearing Frederick Douglass indict the Declaration of Independence as a lie, Thoreau turned Douglass’s anger toward his own moral outrage: his elders’ contentedness to prosper commercially on the backs of slaves, rather than working to finish the promise of America’s great Revolution, gave the lie to their every ideal. Thoreau’s anger and contempt can make us squirm today, when those who ride still ignore the many who are ridden upon—inexcusable in a democracy, constituted as it is by the daily decisions made by every citizen. Hence emancipation must begin with self-examination: “What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.” Or as Saint Augustine wrote in his Confessions: “I was held back not by the fetters put on me by someone else, but by the iron bondage of my own will.” What Wilberforce, Thoreau asked, will emancipate the self?

  The original Walden put Thoreau front and center, building his own world, pounding nails, plowing beans, walking the rails to Concord, and accounting for every halfpenny: a solid warm house, he proclaimed with a Yankee flourish, for $28.12½. Top that! It’s a story riddled with moral lessons piled on until even the most sympathetic reader tires. Young Thoreau, yearning for truth, high on his soapbox needling his elders for their follies, defending himself from their catcalls with his own implacable wit, and making them wince through their laughter: that was the book he put away in 1849 and did not publish.

  The Thoreau of 1852 was a very different man, chastened by failure and mellowed by family life. Had Walden prepared him to meet the challenges of Main Street? If not, his achievement there had been pure, but limited: it meant one could attain virtue only by leaving society. A utopia of one? The Thoreau who dusted off the old manuscript, hoping at last to make wholes of parts, could imagine himself as more than a preacher haranguing his audience—he could imagine himself as an agent of change. This required him to reorient his book. Nearly the entire second half was written not by the hermit at the pond but by the walker on Main Street, brimful of discovery—the practical surveyor training his moral compass on people and their doings. His new pages turned outward to what would later be called “the environment.” Before, he told us what he thought; now he will show us how he sees. These chapters founded the genre of “nature writing,” but Thoreau did not understand nature as other, existing outside the self or beyond town boundaries. Instead, Thoreau understood nature as a higher truth encompassing the self and society, a dynamic truth shot through with all the forms of life swirling around and collecting themselves into a whole with Walden, not Thoreau, at the center.99 In these pages, Walden blossoms as a holograph of the planet and of one human life, lived as a prism refracting the sunlight onto the page.

  To pivot from the old material to the new, from philosophy to poetry, Thoreau crafted a dramatic device that has cost him many readers.100 In “Baker Farm” he staged John Field, the impoverished Irish bogger who had sheltered him during a thunderstorm, as the embodiment of failure, the deserving victim of the narrator’s aggression. But the failure is the narrator’s as well: Thoreau staged himself as a pedantic meddler who hectors the family with a
pile of proverbs, then turns away in disgust when the poor Irish immigrants gape at him uncomprehending instead of magically mutating on the spot into “philosophers” like himself. Many have found Thoreau’s ethnic slurs here unforgiveable. But the Fields are the vehicle of a central metaphor, even though that metaphor is problematic. The Fields stand in for readers who, bogged down in old ways, make the same tragic mistake of assuming a better life means working harder to earn more money to buy more stuff—tea, coffee, meat—thus buying into the very economy that feeds off slave labor, and fueling the machine Atropos, “Fate,” the destroyer of worlds and consumer of souls.

  Thoreau, the person, really did want to change our lives, or at least make us confront the conditions of our lives and, if we cannot change those conditions, realize the extent to which the fault is our own. But by the midpoint of Walden, Thoreau, the narrator, has, thus far, changed nothing. The reader, just like the Fields, gapes at him in uncomprehending rapture—then goes on exactly as before, selling their life to buy a few consumer trinkets. If Thoreau cannot persuade the desperate and hungry Fields face-to-face, with his house at his back and all Walden before, how can he hope to persuade the reader, so far in the future, his house a ruin and Walden gone? At this moment, Thoreau’s great book is, by his own account, a failure.

  Thoreau’s charity consisted literally of trying to teach John Fields to fish. But as Walden’s narrator returns home with his own string of fish, he is filled with shame for craving animal food. What follows is “Higher Laws,” a queasy self-examination of the killing his appetite demands; this is the chapter that sent Thoreau to Chesuncook to witness George Thatcher’s moose hunt. He anatomized the reality of this violence in “Chesuncook,” but in Walden, he wrote instead as a tortured Puritan compelled to put down beastly appetites: “Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome.” Those very words made Thoreau pull back from his prudery in dismay, ashamed of his own shame. If we truly revered human nature, would we not, like the Hindu lawgivers, speak simply and openly of our bodily functions, of “how to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine and the like”? Instead of fighting to “overcome” our bodily nature, we should accept and redeem it.

  And so Thoreau closed this chapter, the turning point of his book, by staging himself a second time, this time as “John Farmer” sitting on the threshold one September evening. That is, what we are seeing when we see Thoreau within the pages of Walden is not the author who so carefully staged the book, but the book’s protagonist, who, in the course of the year and a day, is utterly changed by the experience. John Farmer, the next stage in this metamorphosis, yearns for rest while his mind natters on with plans and contrivances for the next day’s work. The notes of a distant flute reach his ears, but half-heard and dismissed, “out of a different sphere from that he worked in,” until gently they do away with street and village and state, asking him to come out of this “mean moiling life.” But how? “All that he could think of was to practice some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect.”101 It is, at least, a beginning.

  “Brute Neighbors” completes the turn: Thoreau opened it with yet a third mocking self-portrait, this time as the navel-gazing “Hermit” interrupted by the “Poet”—a sprightly Ellery Channing with his faithful dog, who jollies the Hermit out of his involuted thoughts to come along fishing. In a flash, the hectoring and self-consumed philosopher transforms into a lyric poet himself, the neighborhood Orpheus who asks as he sets off for the river, fishing pole in hand, “Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world?” The beholding that follows begins with the little wild mouse who sits on his palm nibbling cheese from his fingers, and extends ever outward, peopling Walden Woods with life not his own, most of it not even human: an unseen world conjured into being. As Thoreau reminded himself, “Poetry implies the whole truth. Philosophy expresses a part of it.”102

  Bending Walden toward the cycle of rebirth meant opening it to seasonal change and the ways that living “in season” alters the rhythm of living and thinking. As winter drives life “into a corner,” it proves not “mean” but rich and warm. The narrator surrounds his hearth with visitors, including the freed slaves and impoverished laborers whose circle he has joined and the “brute neighbors” who shelter beside him, like the wasps he accepts until they disappear into the cracks. The human “economy” of his first chapter thus enlarges to a new concept—not “eco-nomia,” or management of the household, but “eco-logia,” ecology, the speaking of the household, composed of a thousand voices: mice and wasps, rabbits and squirrels, jays and chickadees, and also his human friends, Bronson Alcott, Ellery Channing, Edmund Hosmer and (with a chill) Ralph Waldo Emerson—the closest Thoreau came to meeting Greeley’s request for sketches of his famous friends. Walden Pond itself, iced over now, catches his surveyor’s eye, so the narrator literally takes the measure of this personality, too, finding the long-lost bottom of the pond that will turn out, in the end, to be bottomless after all.

  Walden opens in spring with a fractured and furious narrator who can diagnose despair in others because he knows it so well in himself: an Ishmael casting off into the world ocean of Walden. By the second spring, the narrator is remade, and ready; healed, whole, and strong. The man who railed at the Fields to change has instead changed himself, proceeded through a cycle of rebirths from philosopher through farmer and hermit to poet. The payoff of that initial uncomfortable encounter with the Fields has finally begun, the conceit finally completed, with the poet integrating all that came before. As the raw wound of the railroad’s “deep cut” thaws and flows, he sees in the flowing sands the canvas of creation, revealing the great truth that we live not on the surface of a dead planet but in and through a living earth, like a leaf unfolding. As the pond whoops and thaws into quick and shimmering life, he sees the coming of Cosmos out of Chaos, a spiritual understanding so deep that he can even accept the grossness of a dead and rotting horse, death and sacrifice not as the betrayal of Nature’s beauty but the sign of a “universal innocence” that transgresses the limits of our life, sublime, intimate, and terrible. The man who embraced the dying body of his brother admits the terrible truth that bodies, too, melt and flow like sand on the beach of Fire Island.

  The fables of rebirth Thoreau offered in his “Conclusion” include his own Walden experiment: time swept it away, to be resurrected by art. For more than two years Thoreau dedicated himself to perfecting Walden, putting off everything else, refusing to compromise with Time; and as he added the finishing strokes, it “suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma.” On his title page he emblazoned his motto: “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.” And on his final page, he greeted the eternal dawn with a chanticleer call: “The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” He who, midway through Walden, had been arrested on the threshold of life, is now himself the player on the flute, whose notes reach the ears of those who, hearing, might be released to begin their own journey toward the dawn. The ceremony enacted at Walden, and in Walden, creates a kind of miracle: scripture written, as Emerson imagined, in our own time, by a man both in and out of time itself.

  PART THREE

  Successions

  CHAPTER NINE

  Walden-on-Main (1854–1857)

  For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

  Mark 8:36

  “What Shall It Profit?”: Thoreau after Walden

  “We account Henry the undoubted King of all American lions,” said Emerson; “He is walking up & down Concord, firm-looking, but in a tremble of great expectation.” Walden was barely three weeks old, but already the reviews were putting a sprin
g in Henry’s step. Alcott, to whom he’d given the first copy, read it straight through that very night, reread it the next day, and predicted it would “find readers and fame as years passed by.”1 Higginson wrote from Worcester to thank Thoreau for “Slavery in Massachusetts,” which he thought surpassed everything else published in that terrible week, and added that after peeking at Walden’s proof sheets, he’d snapped up two copies.2 It’s a “hit,” raved Richard Fuller—full of faith and nobility, a fruit sure to “keep and grow more golden mellow and fragrant with the years.” “You have made a contribution to the permanent literature of our mother tongue,” declared Senator Charles Sumner; Emerson added that it was “cheerful, sparkling, readable, with all kinds of merits, & rising sometimes to very great heights.”3 Not everyone was so admiring—the monastic Hecker warned Brownson of its “pride, pretension, and infidelity,” and Hawthorne, even as he bought two copies as gifts, groaned that few readers would have the “resolution” to get to the end of it—but at last Thoreau had good reason to hope (or fear) that he stood on the brink of literary fame and fortune.4

  The print reviews were plentiful and mostly warm, even effusive. “Get the book,” advised the Boston Daily Bee. “You will like it. It is original and refreshing; and from the brain of a live man.” “A fresh bouquet from the wilds, fragrant and inspiring,” said a New Jersey newspaper. The New Bedford Mercury was “enchanted” with its freshness and charm, and rejoiced that its seeds of moral truth would “spring up and flourish and beautify new homes.” One New York reviewer marveled at Thoreau’s “great mastery of language”; another called it “half mad, but never silly.” The Christian Register delighted in its “acute and wise criticisms upon modern life” as well as its “playful humor and sparkling thought,” though one Boston critic fretted at Thoreau’s “selfish philosophy,” and the offended New York Times carped that “Mr. Thoreau denounces everything that indicates progress.” British reviewers were also kind. Walden was “a brave book, one in a million, an honour to America, a gift to men,” wrote one, “worth reading and re-reading”; George Eliot, in the widely read Westminster Review, praised Thoreau’s “deep poetic sensibility” and the “sturdy sense mingled with his unworldliness.”5 Thoreau could hardly ask for more. Walden was finding its readers. The lowering fear that he had failed his friends and disappointed his family finally lifted; from now on, Henry Thoreau could face the future knowing that he had written a great and lasting book.