by Jim Bernhard
Finding little quiet or privacy to write, Thoreau persuaded Emerson to let him build a cabin, which he made from an old chicken coop, on a piece of land at Walden Pond. He remained there for two years, writing and developing his simple philosophy of nature. His principal writings are two books, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden, or Life in the Woods, and an essay, Civil Disobedience. In them, he explains his version of Transcendentalism, which emphasizes reverence for nature, a preference for a life of great simplicity (“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes”), resistance to civil authority and its taxing power, and opposition to commercial development, waste, pretension, and slavery. Walden became a classic.
Like all Transcendentalists, Thoreau emphasized the importance of life in the present and gave little thought to the possibility of an afterlife. He wrote in his journal: “Take time by the forelock. Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this.”
Thoreau developed tuberculosis when he was eighteen, and he suffered periodically from it the rest of his life. One night in 1859, he decided to count the rings on some tree stumps during a rainstorm, and he developed a severe case of bronchitis, from which he never fully recovered. Over the next three years, he suffered continual pulmonary problems and was at last confined to his bed. Aware that he was not long for the world, his aunt asked him if he had made his peace with God. Thoreau replied, “I did not know we had ever quarreled.” He was serene in facing the prospect of his death. “For joy I could embrace the earth,” he wrote in his journal. “I shall delight to be buried in it.” As death approached, Thoreau was heard to say, “Now comes good sailing,” followed by two cryptic words: “moose” and “Indian.”
He died on May 6, 1862, at age forty-four. At his funeral, Bronson Alcott read selections from his work, and Emerson delivered a eulogy in which he said, “The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. . . . His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.”
Originally buried in his mother’s family plot, Thoreau was later moved to Authors Ridge in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.
WALT WHITMAN
“Bacchus-browed, bearded like a satyr, and rank” was Bronson Alcott’s description of the poet Walt Whitman when they met in 1855. It was a description in keeping with Whitman’s undisciplined, boisterous, free-wheeling, and possibly unwashed poetic persona.
Born in West Hills, Long Island, New York, on May 31, 1819, the second of eight children, Walter Whitman Jr. was known as “Walt” from infancy. He moved with his family to Brooklyn when he was four, left public school when he was eleven, and then worked as an apprentice on several newspapers. He tried teaching, but returned to newspaper work and held various jobs as a reporter and as editor of the Brooklyn Eagle and the Brooklyn Daily Times.
The publication of Leaves of Grass, his constantly evolving collection of poems, brought acclaim from the literary establishment, including Thoreau and Emerson, who wrote to congratulate him on the “beginning of a great career.” Whitman imprudently quoted Emerson’s letter without permission in a subsequent edition of Leaves of Grass—which infuriated the Sage of Concord.
Whitman moved to Washington, D.C., and worked as a nurse during the Civil War. At war’s end, he stayed on in Washington with clerical jobs at the Departments of the Interior and Justice. His real career was the constant tweaking and reissuing of Leaves of Grass, which included such strikingly innovative poems as “I Hear America Singing,” “Song of Myself,” “I Sing the Body Electric,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”—the last two about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Many of his poems have imagery that is graphically sexual, creating a raffish reputation for Whitman. He never married and never had any permanent relationship with anyone of either sex. He had close friendships with several younger men, but despite rampant speculation, there is no solid evidence that these were sexual in nature. He claimed on occasion to have fathered six illegitimate children, but there is no proof that this was so.
When he was fifty-three, Whitman suffered the first of several “whacks”—his name for strokes—that left him progressively more paralyzed for almost two decades. He moved to Camden, New Jersey, to be near his brother, and lived there the rest of his life.
Whitman professed no formal religion, but his thinking was obviously influenced by the Deism of Jefferson and Franklin. For Whitman, the soul was immortal and in a state of constant development, and his poems often speak of death as a natural and sometimes welcome end to life. In “When Lilacs Last in the Courtyard Bloom’d,” one section is a “death carol,” in which Whitman writes:
Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.
In “Great Are the Myths,” Whitman also welcomes death:
Great is Death—sure as Life holds all parts together, Death holds all parts together,
Death has just as much purport as Life has,
Do you enjoy what Life confers? you shall enjoy what Death confers,
I do not understand the realities of Death, but I know they are great . . .
And in “Whispers of Heavenly Death,” Whitman conveys the unfathomable mystery of what is to come:
Darest thou now O Soul,
Walk out with me toward the Unknown Region,
Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?
No map there, nor guide,
Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,
Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.
Confined to his home in Camden in his last years, Whitman died there at 6:43 p.m. on March 26, 1892, at the age of seventy-two. The New York Times of March 27 had this detailed account of his last hours:
He began to sink at 4:30, and grew gradually weaker until the end. As soon as his attendants noticed that he was failing, they sent a messenger for his physician, Dr. McAllister, who arrived at the house at 5:45 o’clock [sic]. He immediately saw that his patient was dying and that he could do nothing for him.
The end was very peaceful. The aged poet when asked by the physician if he felt any pain answered in an almost inaudible voice, “No.”
About twenty minutes before his death he said to his attendant, Warren Fitzsinger: “Warren, shift,” meaning that he should turn him over. These were his last words and they were uttered so low as to be hardly distinguished. [Other accounts say that Whitman’s words were actually “Hold me up, Warren, I want to shit.”] His heart continued to beat for ten minutes after there was any noticeable aspiration. He remained conscious until the last, but, owing to his extremely weak condition, he was unable to converse with his few faithful friends who were gathered around him in his last hours. . . .
Mr. Whitman had been in bed since the 17th day of last December, when he was taken sick with pneumonia, by which his death was indirectly caused. After several weeks of suffering, his physicians, Dr. Daniel Longacre of this city and Dr. McAllister of Camden, pronounced him cured. The disease, however, left him so weak that it was impossible to predict when he might die from the failing of his vital powers. . . . At times he took no nourishment at all for several days, and at other times he ate heartily and seemed to enjoy his food, which consisted mainly of milk punch, toast, eggs, champagne, oysters, and occasionally bits of meats.
An autopsy was performed by Professor Henry W. Cattell of the University of Pennsylvania, who found that the cause of Whitman’s
death was “pleurisy of the left side, consumption of the right lung, general miliary tubercular abscesses, involving the bones, and pachymeningitis” (thickening of the membrane around the brain). The right lung was found to be completely useless, and the left lung was down to one-eighth capacity.
Whitman was laid out in a simple gray wool suit in a casket of English quartered oak with oxidized trimmings and interior lining of corded silk. A silver plate on the lid bore the simple inscription in old English text: “Walt Whitman.” The funeral at 3:00 p.m. on March 29, attended by mourners estimated in the thousands, featured remarks by Robert G. Ingersoll, “the Great Agnostic.” No clergyman was on the program. Whitman’s remains were placed in a recently completed tomb in Harleigh Cemetery, on the outskirts of Camden, in a spot Whitman had chosen. The tomb is a substantial structure, built of massive rough granite blocks, some of them weighing over seven tons.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, hailed today as one of the greatest novels ever written, died in obscurity, forgotten by so many that one columnist remarked that the very few who did remember him thought that he had died years earlier. The New York Times reported, “There has died and been buried in this city . . . a man who is so little known . . . that only one newspaper contained an obituary account of him, and this was but of three or four lines.”
As for Moby Dick, it was a failure when it first appeared, selling fewer than three thousand copies and earning Melville only a little over $1,000 in lifetime royalties.
Born to a socially prominent family in New York City on August 1, 1819, Melville led an unexpectedly adventurous early life following his education at the Albany Academy and Columbia Preparatory School. Melville’s father was forced into bankruptcy, and Herman worked in his brother’s store and also taught school—but not for long.
When he was eighteen, he shipped out for Liverpool as a cabin boy on a merchant ship. He returned to New York and had several teaching jobs, but then the sea called again, and he sailed as a crew member on the Acushnet for the South Seas. He jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands and was held captive by a band of cannibals. He then signed on aboard an Australian ship and shortly led a mutiny of the unpaid crew. Jailed in Tahiti, he escaped and returned to the United States. He shipped out again aboard a whaling vessel to Hawaii, where he joined the crew of the frigate United States and eventually returned to Boston.
Melville began a literary career, using his seagoing adventures to write the novels Typee and Omoo, which were bestsellers. He married Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of the chief justice of Massachusetts, and they had four children. Melville continued to write successful novels and stories for various journals.
In 1851, he published Moby Dick, first in England and two years later in the United States. With few exceptions—such as praise from Nathaniel Hawthorne—it was poorly received. “An ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact,” said the London Athenaeum. Its failure reversed Melville’s fortunes as a writer. He traveled to Europe and then, in desperate need of income, embarked upon American lecture tours talking about the charms of Roman statuary.
Through the influence of his wife’s family, he landed a low-paying job as a customs collector and held on to it for nineteen years. He suffered from bouts of depression, worsened by the deaths of both his sons, and his wife’s family urged her to have him committed to a mental institution, which she refused to do. He retired when his wife received an inheritance that was sufficient to support them, and he continued to dabble, unsuccessfully, at writing.
Although Melville was a nominal member of the Unitarian church, he remained skeptical of all religions. He wrote: “I have no objection to any person’s religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don’t believe it also. But when a man’s religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.”
The critic Alfred Kazin said that, like Abraham Lincoln, Melville was a “tortured soul who wanted to believe in God in the face of annihilation.” He seems to have had a residual belief in the survival of the soul, as suggested by Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick, who says:
Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.
Melville died in his home in New York City shortly after midnight on September 28, 1891, at the age of seventy-two, of a heart attack that his death certificate described as “cardiac dilation.” He was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx (where the songwriter Irving Berlin was also later interred).
Billy Budd, Melville’s other highly acclaimed work, was published posthumously in 1924.
GEORGE ELIOT
Mary Ann Evans had a face that, if it would not stop a clock, would at least give it pause. Even the prim and proper Henry James reported to his father, “She is magnificently ugly—deliciously hideous. She has a low forehead, a dull gray eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth full of uneven teeth.” She herself likened her appearance to a “withered cabbage in a flower garden.” To be fair, James admitted, “In this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her . . . yes, literally in love with this horse-faced bluestocking.”
Whether or not her horsey looks influenced her decision, when she launched her career as a writer, she changed her name to George Eliot (she said it was because a woman’s name made people think of “silly” romances). Born on a farm estate in Warwickshire on November 22, 1819, she was the author of Middlemarch, which Martin Amis and Julian Barnes agree is the greatest novel in the English language. Mary Ann’s father, the manager of the estate and a devout low-church Anglican, sent her to various schools until she was sixteen, when her mother died and she came home to help run the household. She moved with her father to Coventry and stayed there until his death when she was thirty.
She then traveled to Switzerland with the Charles Bray family, freethinkers whom she had met in Coventry and who greatly influenced her rejection of Christianity. She settled in London and began to write for various journals. As an increasingly accepted member of the literary establishment, she met and fell in love with the philosopher George Henry Lewes, who, inconveniently, was already married to a woman who refused to divorce him. Mary Ann and Lewes, shunned by friends and family for their adultery, lived openly together for twenty-five years until his death in 1878.
In 1854, using the pen name George Eliot, she published her first novel, Adam Bede, which was a success. Her other major novels followed: The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda.
Although she had been raised as an Anglican and continued to attend church until her father’s death, after the 1840s, George Eliot was not a believer in a traditional concept of God or any personal afterlife. She was quoted as saying, “God, Immortality, Duty: how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.”
Two years after Lewes’s death, George Eliot married John Cross, an American banker who was twenty years her junior, and they honeymooned in Venice—where Cross jumped or fell from a hotel balcony into the Grand Canal. Rumors circulated that he wanted to die rather than make love to his ugly old wife. He didn’t get his wish, however, for he survived and the couple returned to London, where George Eliot fell ill with a throat infection. The doctors said it
was laryngitis and nothing to worry about. But coupled with the kidney disease from which she had suffered for several years, this infection led to her death on December 22, 1880, at the age of sixty-one.
Because of her rejection of Christianity, Eliot was denied burial in Westminster Abbey and was instead laid to rest in London’s Highgate Cemetery in a section filled with agnostics, next to Lewes, and not far from where Karl Marx was interred three years later. In 1980, a memorial stone was erected in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
Four years of hard labor in Siberia might not be considered a lucky break by most people—but for Fyodor Dostoyevsky, it was a welcome lifesaver. Minutes before he was to be executed by a firing squad, the tsar commuted his sentence to imprisonment. After serving his term, Dostoyevsky returned to Moscow, full of religious fervor and with a sharpened desire to be a writer.
The son of an army doctor, young Fyodor had set out to be an army engineer—but his interest in literature, social reform, and religion kept distracting him. Born in Moscow on October 30, 1821, he was well schooled in the classics at home and at boarding schools, and then graduated from St. Petersburg’s Army Engineering College. He resigned his army position when he was twenty-three and began to write, publishing his first novel, Poor Folk, followed shortly by The Double.
Dostoyevsky’s interest in social reform led him to join a group of utopian socialists whose activities were considered treasonous by the tsar. This involvement led to his arrest and sentence to death. His prison experiences formed the basis of The House of the Dead and two other novels.
