Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  Losing Henry James so soon was yet another in a series of unlucky breaks. But one lucky break occurred when Thoreau entered the Mercantile Association Library and found his old Harvard tutor Henry McKean working therein, who immediately granted him full access to the library’s reading room. In a second lucky break, right on the library’s steps he ran into the era’s leading utopian reformers: Henry Wright, the other half of “the Englishmen” Alcott had brought to Concord, now living in New York; Albert Brisbane, the era’s leading Fourierist; and William Henry Channing, a cousin of Ellery Channing, busy preaching in the city and editing the Fourierist reform journal the Present. Thoreau was dubious about their “Associationist” schemes to reorganize society according to the new principles of social science, but he respected W. H. Channing enough to visit him at home for “a few pleasant hours, discussing the all absorbing questions—what to do for the race.” From then on, Thoreau would address their arguments with the confidence of a man who had looked his opposition in the face—which, he remarked of Channing’s face, would “break with a conchoidal fracture,” so much had Channing made up his mind to find humanity disappointing.73

  The luckiest break of all came when Thoreau called on Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune, whose weekly edition was fast becoming the nation’s largest and most influential newspaper. Also an Associationist, Greeley had helped fund Brook Farm, and he put his weight and enthusiasm behind nearly every reform movement of the day, including Transcendentalism. Greeley adored Emerson and promoted the Dial, so when Thoreau dropped into his busy office, naturally he jumped right up and made him welcome: “Now be neighborly,” he greeted the lonely Thoreau, who in return thought him “a hearty New Hampshire boy as one would wish to meet.”74 When Thoreau completed his first major work—an essay on Carlyle—he sent it to Greeley, who placed it and made sure Thoreau got good money for it. From then on, he would be Thoreau’s friend and tireless literary agent, championing his work to the world and, in private, cajoling an often discouraged writer to be of good cheer and write on. Forging this one friendship made the Staten Island venture, for all its disappointments, worthwhile.

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  The first real setback came when John O’Sullivan rejected Tho-reau’s essay. Thoreau had written a feisty review of J. A. Etzler’s The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, without Labor, by Powers of Nature and Machinery. Emerson had wanted the review for the Dial, but buoyed by their promising tea at the Old Manse, Thoreau sent “Paradise (To Be) Regained” to O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review instead. It was a savvy move, but risky: O’Sullivan supported the communitarian social reforms Etzler promoted—reforms that Thoreau skewered without mercy. There in New York, he’d seen a new world a-building where every social problem had a technological solution. Why bother to make ourselves better, when we can simply remake the world instead? In Etzler’s giddy vision of a geo-engineered planet, man would harness the winds, tides, and sun itself to power machines that will grind down the hills, grade the earth flat, pave it smooth, lay canals and roads, light up the night sky, and thrill the air with nonstop music. Why stop there?—jeers Thoreau. Why not “run the earth off its track into a new orbit, some summer, and so change the tedious vicissitude of the seasons?” Or why bother with the earth at all? Why not “migrate from the earth, to settle some vacant and more western planet”? Etzler, explains the man who understands both labor and machines, forgot to calculate three little things: “time, men, and money.” But technology requires all three: no magic wand would turn Etzler’s fantasy world into reality. What’s more, the future is not an engineering problem but a human problem: “Nothing can be effected but by one man. . . . In this matter of reforming the world, we have little faith in corporations; not thus was it first formed.”75

  A hard look at the corporate world being born in New York’s streets and offices confirmed Thoreau’s Transcendentalist convictions: nature permitted no shortcuts; reform must start with the inner self, not the outer circumstances. O’Sullivan could hardly agree, but he could see Thoreau had written a lively and pointed essay. Perhaps, he mildly suggested, Thoreau might make “some additions and modifications”? Or send him something less controversial—perhaps some of his private little interviews with nature? After all, the journal’s “collective ‘we’” required “a certain pervading homogeneity.” Thoreau responded humbly but did not back down. In the end, remarkably, O’Sullivan relented and ran the Etzler review in his November issue. He also ran, in the October issue, Thoreau’s character sketch “The Landlord,” honoring the country innkeeper who feeds and shelters all comers out of his love for human nature, a portrait of hospitality based on the inn near Wachusett where he and Fuller stayed. This “public” interview with nature made for an interesting experiment, but no one much liked it. When Thoreau’s family asked for a copy, he replied that he had none to send, since he couldn’t afford the fifty cents it cost.76

  This was the summit of Thoreau’s success in the New York literary market. Early in June he’d written hopefully, “I have not set my traps, yet, but I am getting the bait ready.” Four months later he had to admit that “my bait will not tempt the rats; they are too well fed.”77 To his family he spilled out the grim details: he was pounding New York’s streets without effect, pushing into the offices of every bookseller and publisher, only to be told they had no money to pay contributors, or if they did—like the Harper brothers, on their way to founding a publishing empire—they were unwilling to chance an unknown writer. To Emerson he was blunt: “Literature comes to a poor market here, and even the little that I write is more than will sell.” The popular journals “are overwhelmed with contributions, which cost nothing, and are worth no more.” The best journal, the Knickerbocker, excluded Transcendentalism on principle, but they’d gotten Thoreau out their door by pleading poverty instead. “Only the Ladies Companion pays”—“but I could not write anything companionable,” he joked mordantly with his mother.78

  There was other trouble as well. Thoreau had recovered from “bronchitis” only to find himself attacked by something more insidious: narcolepsy, the “demon” said to haunt his mother’s side of the family. When Uncle Charles nodded off midsentence, it was a family joke, but for Henry it was growing desperate. “This skirmishing interferes sadly with my literary projects,” he confessed to his anxious mother, “and I am apt to think it a good day’s work if I maintain a soldier’s eye till night-fall.” A month later he was no better: “I find it impossible to write or read except at rare intervals.” By then he had to admit to Emerson that being unable to keep his eyes open rendered him an invalid.79

  His narcolepsy may have been congenital, or another symptom of latent tuberculosis, but it also registered real psychic conflict and pain. Thoreau was deeply unhappy at Judge Emerson’s and thoroughly frustrated with the obstacles palisading around him on the streets of Manhattan. Worse, Emerson’s expectations for him put him in an impossible bind. On the one hand, he was supposed to carry Transcendentalism into the heart of America’s commercial center and make a national name for himself; on the other hand, Emerson wanted him to bolster up the Dial. The Etzler review—a sharp satire on a hot-button issue, targeting the Associationist reformers on their home ground and in their house journal, too—was calculated to kick Transcendentalism up a notch into a national controversy. For all his complaining, Thoreau now had O’Sullivan’s ear, and Greeley’s, too. He’d even begun a new essay, “A Winter’s Walk,” a dreamy, evocative, intimate love letter to the tough New England winter and the metaphysical fire that burned underneath it, deep in nature’s Puritan heart. O’Sullivan and Greeley would have snapped it up in a New York minute, earning him national attention, but Emerson wrote him that “Our Dial is already printing, and you must, if you can, send me something good by the 10th June certainly, if not before.” And so “A Winter’s Walk” disappeared instead into the back pages of the Dial.80

  Even worse, Emerson hated it. “H.D.T. sends me a paper
with the old fault of unlimited contradiction,” he sniped. “The trick of his rhetoric is soon learned. It consists in substituting for the obvious word & thought its diametrical antagonist. . . . It makes me nervous & wretched to read it, with all its merits.”81 So he edited out his worst objections, smoothing Thoreau’s phrasing and softening his meaning—editorial interference that would, in time, drive Thoreau wild with fury, but not now, and not from Emerson. “I see that I was very blind to send you my manuscript in such a state,” he replied abjectly. “There are some sad mistakes in the printing.”82 And when Emerson saddled him with a new assignment—translations of Pindar (as suggested by Newcomb)—Thoreau could not refuse. “I . . . wish he were better worth translating,” he replied wearily. Would Emerson take instead the Aeschylus tragedy Seven Against Thebes? Send something, pleaded Emerson. In October his tone is still more demanding: “Where are my translations of Pindar for the Dial? Fail not to send me something good & strong.” Thoreau complied, and Pindar appeared in the Dial’s last two issues. His Aeschylus translation, dramatizing resistance to civil government, was never published.83

  Had Emerson wished to undermine Thoreau’s confidence and sabotage his nascent career, he might have chosen just such means. He might also have furthered his designs by singing the praises of the young men who had replaced Thoreau in his affections—which he did. Charles Newcomb was, as ever, irresistible; Ellery Channing was happily settled into the house next door—the one Thoreau had fixed up for him—and “works very steadily thus far & our intercourse is very agreeable to me.”84 For a time Emerson’s new “genius” was Benjamin West Ball, “a prodigious reader & a youth of great promise” who might, “with a little more repose of thought . . . be a great companion.”85 More lasting was his infatuation with the two young men who had ushered Thoreau to the alehouse on his first day in the city, William Tappan and Giles Waldo. Emerson had entreated Thoreau to meet Tappan, “a lonely beautiful brooding youth,” and the “young Washington phoenix, Giles Waldo,” and share in their “beautiful friendship.”86 Thoreau found them congenial, but no more. Giles Waldo withered under his inquisition: “My interview with Thoreau has shown me how desperately ignorant I have been content to remain of books,” he wrote Emerson dejectedly. Tappan’s “more reserved and solitary thought” earned more of Thoreau’s respect, but just as yet, he wrote Emerson acidly, “the heavens are not shivered into diamonds over their heads.” Perhaps, Emerson replied testily, Thoreau was being unfair.87

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  Word was troubling on other fronts as well. On May 25, Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane bought a ninety-acre farm near Harvard village. Early in June they set off in good spirits to found their utopian community, Fruitlands. As Louisa May Alcott recalled, they made up in idealism what they lacked in practical knowledge, which was nearly everything. Lane tried to recruit Thoreau, writing him that their beautiful green landscape wanted only “a Thoreau’s mind to elevate it to classic beauty.” They could use his practical experience, too—and, as Lane perceptively added, “I have some imagination that you are not so happy and so well housed in your present position as you would be here amongst us.”88 But Thoreau stayed put. Then came a bitter blow from abroad. In Leipzig, Germany, while pursuing the studies that should have made his name, Charles Stearns Wheeler, Thoreau’s Harvard roommate and most trusted friend, died suddenly of gastric fever. On July 21, in a letter to Helen, Thoreau wrote a eulogy of his brave friend: Wheeler’s “patient industry and energy—his reverent love of letters—and his proverbial accuracy” would have done such good for the world, giving it “a sort of connecting link between men and scholars of different walks and tastes.” “So much remains,” Thoreau sighed, “for us to do who survive.”89

  As autumn approached, Thoreau pushed himself hard. “I’m a good deal more wakeful than I was,” he reassured Cynthia, “and growing stout in other respects, so that I may yet accomplish something in the literary way.” Desperate to earn money, he tried peddling subscriptions to the American Agriculturalist. On his first go, he got caught in a historic rainstorm and sheltered for the night with Giles Waldo. His absence alarmed William Emerson, and in reporting to his brother, Thoreau had to downplay the incident. “I could heartily wish that this country wh. seems all opportunity, did actually offer more distinct & just rewards,” Waldo Emerson wrote back, but it looked “more like crowded England & indigent Germany, than like rich & roomy nature. . . . But,” he added unhelpfully, “the few cases are deceptive.” After all, Thoreau’s friends in Concord were doing fine. Emerson’s reassurance only drove the knife deeper.90 Thoreau’s letters home, once resolute, became wistful, then acutely homesick. At first he’d missed the Emersons, but more and more he wrote long, newsy, nostalgic letters to his own family. In one, he envisioned the parlor on a Sunday evening: Cynthia poring over “some select book, almost transcendental perchance”; “Father has just taken one more look at the garden” before absorbing himself in the newspaper; “Helen has slipped in for the fourth time to learn the very latest item”; Sophia is away visiting the Thoreau cousins in Maine, “but Aunt Louisa without doubt is just flitting away to some good meeting.” On October first, he dropped a hint: “I don’t know when I shall venture home.”91

  The answer was not long in coming, for he was clearly miserable. The few surviving pages from his Journal evoke his despair: “I walked through New York yesterday—and met no real and living person.” “I hate museums. . . . They are catacombs of Nature.” Most telling of all is a bleak portrait, dated October 21, of what must have been William and Susan Emerson’s house: “O I have seen such a hollow glazed life as on a painted floor which some couples lead—with their basement parlor with folding doors—a few visitors cards and the latest annual.” The very children seemed to cry “with less inwardness and depth than in the cottage,” here where people did not live, only resided. “There is no hearth in the center of the house.”92 Desperate for a hearth, Thoreau decided to come home for Thanksgiving. Bring a lecture for the lyceum! responded Emerson. Soon Thoreau was back in Concord, taking tea with Emerson and Orestes Brownson, escorting Brownson to the lyceum, introducing his old mentor to the curators and enjoying his lecture on “Demagogues.” On Thanksgiving Eve, it was the turn of “H. D. Thoreau, of New York city,” who spoke on “Ancient Poets.” But H. D. Thoreau was no longer “of” New York. On December 2, Emerson paid him ten dollars for his contributions to the Dial. Thoreau used the money to return to Staten Island, pack up, and come home.

  Still, he did investigate one other possibility: on his way back to New York, he spent several nights at Brook Farm.93 It was a moment of decision. Not only was he suddenly at loose ends, but while in New York he’d been immersed in the excitement over Charles Fourier’s proposals to reorganize society according to the new principles of social science. Now, after two years, Brook Farm was staggering under mounting debt, and voices from New York—W. H. Channing’s new journal the Present, Albert Brisbane’s journal the Phalanx—were converging to produce an existential crisis: Should Brook Farm reorganize as a Fourierist Phalanx? This would mean financial support to keep Brook Farm alive. It would also mean abandoning their original, founding Transcendentalist principles. It’s unclear exactly why Thoreau veered to Brook Farm: Was he merely curious, or was he trying to influence the decision? After all, he’d just published an essay skewering the very kind of utopian social engineering they were debating. Perhaps he was considering a move to Brook Farm?

  If so, he changed his mind. George Bradford posted a worried letter to Emerson: friend Thoreau had gone off in the very midst of a snowstorm, and to Bradford’s shame, not one person had offered to drive him to the railroad station. The insult was bad enough—“we accused ourselves of great thoughtlessness or want of hospitality” (had there been an argument?)—but what really tortured Bradford was the fear that Thoreau, in “delicate” health, had “suffered in his throat in consequence.” Thoreau’s health was fine, but he never went back. A month l
ater Brook Farm formally voted to go Fourierist. The decision split the Brook Farmers, and many left, including Bradford himself, who clearly was on Thoreau’s side: “We are quite indebted to Henry for his brave defense of his thought which gained him much favor in the eyes of some of the friends here who are of the like faith.”94

  Meanwhile, Fruitlands, the other Transcendentalist utopia, was in the final grim stages of collapse. “They look well in July, we shall see them in December,” the skeptical Emerson had commented. Lane didn’t last even that long: late in November, feeling betrayed by the Alcotts, he retreated to Boston, where early in December he wrote Thoreau a warm note of commiseration: “That from all perils of a false position you may shortly be relieved and landed in the position where you feel ‘at home’ is the sincere wish of yours most friendly Charles Lane.”95 Thus there was now exactly one place left to try, one place where Thoreau might feel “at home”—home. He went back to the Parkman house, to John and Cynthia and his sisters, where he had not lived for nearly four years. On December 17, Waldo Emerson wrote his brother William that Thoreau, who thanked him for the payment, had brought away all the possessions he valued and that anything left in his chamber could be disposed of. The Pindar he’d borrowed would be returned through Waldo. That was that. The Thoreau who’d left in May so full of hope returned in December in defeat.