Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  “Life! who knows what it is—what it does?” At the moment he wrote those words, sitting at his green writing desk by the window, the pond glinting through the pines outside, Thoreau had no guarantee that his experiment would work. He knew only that he had to try. This was literally his last move. “If I am not quite right here I am less wrong than before,” he added cautiously, “—and now let us see what they will have.” His purpose was profoundly religious. His house was “a temple . . . made of white pine. Seasoned and seasoning still to eternity,” as natural and welcoming as the shade of a tree. Eating would be a sacred act, “a sacrament . . . sitting at the communion table of the world.”29 And writing? After the long lapse of centuries, it was time “for the written word—the scripture—to be heard.” The trains passed by eight times a day; in two years it would be at least twenty.30 Mass migration had housed him in an Irish laborer’s recycled shanty. The world was changing. Instead of collating scriptures, now he would write one, a new sacred book for the modern age.

  All time must be folded into this time. He was just turning twenty-eight years old, and ever since the age of five, Walden Pond had made the drapery of his dreams. “Well now to-night my flute awakes the echoes over this very water, but one generation of pines has fallen and with their stumps I have cooked my supper.” As he wrote under the new generation of young pines rising around him, time collapsed: his communion supper simmered over the old stumps, and the notes of John’s flute, bequeathed to Henry, came to life again, awakening echoes across the waters even as “the rattle of the rail-road cars” died away in the distance. “Even time has a depth,” he reflected. “Self-emancipation in the West Indies of a man’s thinking. . . . One emancipated heart & intellect—It would knock off the fetters from a million slaves.”31

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  Had he ever imagined retirement to the pond would offer an escape from society, Thoreau soon learned it was the opposite: never before had he been so conspicuous. His house stood just over a low rise from the popular road to the pond, right next to a favorite fishing hole, the weedy hollow known as Wyman’s Meadow, or “Pout’s Nest.” People took to starting conversations on the road. There was the townsman “driving a pair of cattle to market—who enquired of me how I could bring my mind to give up so many of the comforts of life—I answered that I was very sure I like it passably well.—I was not joking.” A neighbor driving a load of wood to Boston complained to him of the cost of living, what with buying pork and tea and coffee, and laying up something against a sick day. “Sir I like your notions,” said a passing railroad worker. “I think I shall live so myself.” In his solitude, Thoreau became a sort of magnet. Most folks he welcomed, especially girls and boys who seemed glad to be in the woods, and young women who “looked in the pond and at the flowers and improved their time.”32

  Others were less kind. “How came Mrs.–––––– to know that my sheets were not as clean as hers?” he exclaimed in Walden. Many retold the story of how Thoreau came across two “young ruffians, sons of influential parents,” pursuing a terrified young woman through the woods. Thoreau protected her and testified on her behalf until the offenders were punished.33 Travelers on the road fired barbs at him as he hoed his crops: “Beans so late!” As for the pond itself, it was hardly the private preserve of Emerson and his friends. “For one hundred years, certain, Walden has been visited at all seasons of the year by hunters, sportsmen, boys, woodchoppers, and landowners,” reminisced Horace Hosmer; men would drink for long hours in a tavern in town, then, on a bet, go for a swim across the pond, “even at midnight.” And visitors? Hosmer, who worked at Walcott’s grocery and restaurant, packed up many a picnic basket for Thoreau’s visitors, “all sorts of people, at all hours”—and, he’d wink, “the baskets were generally loaded for two.”34

  Nor was the pond off-limits to family. Prudence Ward notified a friend that “Henry T” has “many visitors, whom he receives with pleasure & does his best to entertain. We talk of passing the day with him soon.”35 The family made a custom of visiting him on Saturday afternoons, and Henry repaid their visits on Sundays; family friends recalled Cynthia’s pleasure that her son came home every week “to eat a deliciously prepared dinner which their old family cook took pains to have as perfect as she knew how, and which he very evidently enjoyed to the full after his abstemonious days at Walden.” John S. Keyes warned posterity that Thoreau dined sometimes at the Emersons’, too—and at the Alcotts’ and Hosmers’—“and though not intrusive was altogether too egotistic to be either shy or retiring.”36 Waldo Emerson’s son Edward, still a baby during the Walden years, was astonished to learn that Thoreau was supposed to have cut off all family ties and foregone his habit “of appearing from time to time at night-fall, a welcome guest at the fireside of friends. He came for friendship, not for food.”37

  Such reports reveal the simple fact that Walden Pond was hardly wilderness; it was a familiar part of Concord’s daily life, as it had been for two hundred years. Moving there hardly removed Thoreau from the circles of family, friends, and village life, and he made a point of maintaining his friendships as before. As for all those festive family dinners, how hurt Cynthia would have been had her own son refused her famously generous table! And Thoreau kept on taking jobs as the town handyman, just as he’d done for years—jobs on which he depended for his modest but still necessary income. For a dollar a day, good pay for a day laborer, he built fences, painted houses, did carpentry, bricked up at least one chimney, and performed a host of other odd jobs, often for Emerson—who was not above interrupting Henry’s literary labor when he needed a fence built, a cellar floor laid, or the new schoolroom in the barn fitted up for classes. Once, when Thoreau was building a woodshed behind the Kettell house, his horse spooked and kicked him flat out on his back, spraining his stomach so badly that for some years he had trouble with heavy lifting and had to cut back on the jobs he accepted.38 In one sense, moving to the pond at the edge of town had changed nothing, for he went about his life much as he’d always done.

  Yet of course it changed everything. Never before had he been so self-sufficient or enjoyed such control over how he spent his hours. Even when he moved back to town, he never lost this new sense of independence. And never before had he attracted so much attention. As a son in the bustling Thoreau household or yet another inmate at the Emersons’, Thoreau was invisible. But now, living alone on the pond in ostentatious simplicity, right in sight of a main road, he became a spectacle. It’s not clear that Thoreau anticipated this. His original determination to live deliberately and confront only the essential facts of life, voiced so movingly in his earliest days at the pond, show his design to pursue an inward journey, but the accidental circumstances that made that journey possible meant it would be performed on a very public stage. His two years, two months, and two days living at Walden Pond became and would forever remain an iconic work of performance art. The surprise is how quickly and effectively Thoreau understood what was happening and pivoted his vision and goals to take advantage of it, starting with those first curious passersby drawn by the sound of his axe. After all, what good is a reporter, even of God Himself, without someone to report to? As soon as Thoreau found himself explaining himself to another, the conditions for Walden were laid.

  But those conditions built in a certain irresistible damage that Thoreau could not control. His self-declared experiment demanded pure intentions and an integrity of purpose, which from the first he cast in religious terms as the devotional retreat of the religious hermit. Many have called his Walden house a “hermitage.” But pursuing this devotional path as a middle way, not out in the wilderness but on the edge of town—“just far enough to be seen clearly,” in the phrase of the philosopher Stanley Cavell—forced Thoreau, an intensely solitary introvert, to devise a public persona that could stand up to all the scrutiny and defend his private self from the glare of publicity. Paradoxically, he found himself in the very role he extolled in his essay “The Landlord,”
living openly on the highway with no lock on his door, offering hospitality and a good story to all who came by, no matter what their motives. But, as he remarked, the innkeeper “keeps an inn, and not a conscience.”39 Hence the bind: for since Thoreau was also the town gadfly and keeper of the public’s conscience, his every act was a sermon, and his every encounter—even a casual meeting on the road—was a challenge to explain, to justify, to proselytize.

  From then on, there would no casual meetings with Henry T. As word spread, circumstances he hadn’t anticipated and couldn’t control were turning him into a new kind of being, that product of modern commerce and communications: a celebrity. Meeting Thoreau became an Event, the kind of thing one retailed to posterity. As a consequence, all those harmless and loving dinners at home, where he dropped off his laundry, caught up on the news, packed in a good meal, and maybe carried away a pie for breakfast laid him open to endless charges of hypocrisy. No other male American writer has been so discredited for enjoying a meal with loved ones or for not doing his own laundry. But from the very beginning, such charges have been used to silence Thoreau.40

  The immediate result of all this was that Thoreau, who went to Walden to write one book, instead wrote two. The first, the one he’d been planning all along, was A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, his elegy for John—and now for his younger, more innocent self, and for the world they’d shared together, which was swiftly passing away. As A Week grew in range and depth, so did Thoreau’s understanding of the ways the Industrial Revolution was already, in less than a decade, rewriting the New England landscape, as the ribbons of railroad displaced commerce from the rivers of yore. For years Thoreau had been collecting passages for it in the “Long Book,” adding paragraphs as they came to him, building it up piece by piece like a mosaic. Working steadily out at his “inkstand” by the pond,41 his dedication and discipline were paying off. By fall 1845 he had the first draft in hand, and by spring 1847, the book was done (or so it seemed at the time), and Emerson was helping him shop it around to prospective publishers. Into A Week, this intensely personal and private work of his Walden days, Thoreau poured all the best of his younger self, all the passion and poetry of three decades.

  The second book, Walden, was something else again. It was born on July 5, 1845, his first morning at the pond, when he opened a new journal by announcing why he’d come there to live. Fresh, saucy, iconic passages, now familiar to generations of readers, sparkle in its pages like gold in a Yukon riverbed. Thoreau’s voice here is wholly new: bold, lyric, yearning, prophetic, confrontational. It’s the voice not of a confiding poet but of a prophet, a teacher discovering how—since, it turns out, he’s up on a soapbox—to speak in a way that others will hear. From then on, there were two Thoreaus: one quiet, introspective, self-questioning, intensely private, occasionally depressed, and often in poor health; the other brash, boastful, self-certain, loud, and healthy as the rooster crowing to bring in the dawn. As the second Thoreau would trumpet in the motto to Walden, “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.” Modulating between these two self-extremes would open up, in the years to come, the full resources of Thoreau’s artistry. He would ever after wrestle uneasily with this new creation, “Thoreau,” this outsize doppelgänger born in those first conversations over the pine timbers of a house still raw with pitch and splinters, who would grow up to narrate his creator’s life to the entire world.

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  Taking charge of this new character meant consciously organizing his newly simplified life at the pond into widening circles of responsibility: house, neighbors, nature. There in his house would be everything needed, and nothing more. Pride of place went to the simple green-painted pine writing desk that Thoreau had used since the summer of 1838, placed front and center under the Walden-facing window, holding his notebooks. While there was no lock on the door, there was a lock on his desk, and the wear in the wood shows he used it. One chair sat at the desk, two more near a little three-legged table that held a few books; whenever he wanted company, he set one of the chairs outside his door. Extra visitors could spill over onto the sturdy little cane bed behind the door, a platform recycled from a Chinese sofa bed onto which Thoreau nailed legs and stretchers. This cot was his bed for the rest of his life. It was low enough for children to climb onto but high enough, they later remembered, that their feet didn’t quite reach the floor—and just high enough for Channing, when he stayed for a fortnight that first summer, to sleep underneath, like a bunk bed.42

  Thoreau’s needs were ludicrously simple: for vanity, he kept a three-inch looking glass off the cover of a shaving box; for cleanliness, a dipper and a washbasin, and, for water, all of Walden Pond, in which he bathed every morning when he could. In summer when the lake was too warm to drink, he portaged cool water from Brister’s Spring over the hill. If he had a privy, no record of it survives. As for a kitchen, that first summer he cooked in a hole in the earth lined with stones on which he built a fire: one early visitor recalled their earthen dinner of “roasted horn pout, corn, beans, bread, etc.”; the fish were, with a little salt, “delicious.” For bread Thoreau mixed meal with lake water, spreading the dough on a stone and baking it in his earth oven: unleavened flatbread. Once he had finished his chimney—built of used bricks and pond stones and mortared with white sand from the pond—he could cook on a hearth; for his second winter, he installed a stove. For kitchenware he had a kettle, a skillet, a frying pan, a jug for oil and another for molasses, three plates, two knives, two forks, one spoon, and a cup.43 No wonder so many of his visitors brought picnic baskets.

  The light and airy unfinished house was perfect for summer, but as fall approached, Thoreau weatherproofed it by buying a load of cheap shingles, planing them straight, and shingling the roof and sides. While the open rafters with the bark on and the rough brown knotty pine boards pleased his eye, inside they were too drafty for comfort. So that November he reluctantly plastered the interior, learning by trial and error and living at home with his family until it dried. Back inside in early December, with stumpwood crackling on the hearth and shadows flickering around the rafters, he felt he “first began to inhabit” his cozy house, “kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room” all at once—small, to be sure, but all the larger for being entirely his own.44

  In one of Walden’s most famous one-liners, Thoreau declared he kept three chairs: “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” His most frequent visitors were his closest friends: the farmer Edmund Hosmer, the poet Ellery Channing, and the philosopher Bronson Alcott, who that second winter walked over every Sunday, plus the occasional call from his “landlord and waterlord” Emerson, or the French-Canadian woodchopper Alek Therien, “who made his last supper on a woodchuck which his dog caught.”45 But society didn’t only come to his door; he went out and found it as well. One Saturday late in August, a sudden thunderstorm sent Thoreau running for shelter to a nearby hut, where he found the Irishman John Field with his “broad faced” boy and his wife Mary, an infant on her knee. Thoreau recorded the story of the “honest, hard working” John and his “brave” wife, who longed to catch a piece of the American dream. The owner of Baker Farm had hired John to “bog” for ten dollars an acre and the use of the land for a year. It was a hard sharecropper’s life, a bad bargain, thought Thoreau. With the horizon all his own, John Field was stuck in his “boggy” Irish ways, “thinking to live by some derivative old country mode in this primitive new country,” not to rise in this world until he or his posterity got wings to their feet.46

  Those wings were hard to come by. At the far end of the pond lived Hugh Coyle, whose wife worked in town. “Colonel Quoil” had fought at Waterloo before emigrating from Ireland to America, where he, too, became a Concord ditcher. Thoreau spoke to him once and tried to show him Brister’s Spring, where good water ran even in the heat of summer, but the alcoholic
old man was too weak to walk that far. Soon after, he collapsed on Walden Road and died. Thoreau, troubled, spent an afternoon studying Coyle’s eerie, weed-infested house before the town burned it down.47

  These experiences turned Thoreau’s attention outward to the other inhabitants of Walden woods—ruined houses, ruined lives. One had to look hard to see their traces, but Thoreau found them. Hugh Coyle was not an anomaly, but the last of a struggling community, a rural slum of outcasts, drunks, and derelicts.48 There was Cato Ingraham, “slave of Duncan Ingraham, Esquire,” an African living alone in a little house his owner built in 1795 in exchange for his labor, the last of perhaps a dozen slaves who’d moved to Walden woods. All that remained was a half-filled cellar hole, visible beyond the beanfield at the head of the path to Goose Pond. There was also John Wyman the potter, who had squatted in the house that became Hugh Coyle’s, digging the clay for his pottery from the pond’s silty banks. His son Thomas, also a potter, had bought the acres under Thoreau’s house (hence “Wyman’s field”) and later sold them to Emerson.49

  Zilpah White, enslaved until the Revolution, had declared her freedom by building her own one-room house; she lived as a “hermitess” near Thoreau’s future beanfield for over forty years, depending on the pennies she earned spinning flax into linen and making baskets, brooms, and mats. Arsonists burned down her house in 1813, killing her chickens, cats, and dog. Zilpah rebuilt and survived another seven years until her death at eighty-two. Kicking aside the leaves, Thoreau unburied a few bricks from her chimney. Brister Freeman, another of Concord’s slaves, had fought in the Revolution and declared his personal independence through his surname. Eager to establish his independent identity, he bought an acre on the hill north of Walden Pond, “Brister’s Hill,” where he planted an orchard, kept a few pigs, and raised a family with his African wife Fenda, “who told fortunes, yet pleasantly.” Every fall Thoreau crunched gratefully into a few of Freeman’s “wild and ciderish” apples.50 A few steps beyond stood the tiny house of John Breed the barber. Local boys burned it down in 1841; Thoreau raced out from Emerson’s, where he was living, to watch it burn. The next night he returned to commiserate with Breed’s son, a field hand, who’d come by to mourn his childhood home. Breed, like Coyle, had died drunk on Walden Road, in 1824; his wife’s clothes were all from the Concord Female Charitable Society, which regularly made donations to churchgoing Zilpah White as well.51