New Bedford was Daniel Ricketson’s neighborhood, and sure enough, the instant Ricketson heard Thoreau was coming, he whipped out the letter he’d shelved back in October, added a note inviting Thoreau to stay with him, and dropped it in the mail. Thoreau promptly accepted, and by return mail Ricketson sent instructions to take the evening train on Christmas Day—instructions that Ricketson promptly forgot.28 On Christmas morning, 1854, he rushed to meet the noon train, only to return home, disappointed. Thoreau, meanwhile, arrived on the evening train as instructed and found no one there to meet him. Ricketson was just clearing the snow off his front steps when he saw “a man walking up the carriage road carrying a portmanteau in one hand and an umbrella in the other—He was dressed in a long overcoat of dark color, and wore a dark soft hat.” A peddler of small wares, he assumed, but the peddler walked up to him and stopped. “You do not know me,” said the stranger. “It at once flashed on my mind that the person before me was my correspondent whom I had expected in the morning, and who in my imagination I had figured as a stout and robust person, instead of the small and rather inferior looking man before me. However I concealed my disappointment and at once replied, ‘I presume this is Mr. Thoreau.’”29
Out of this ludicrous series of miscues was born a remarkable friendship. Ricketson was a wealthy Quaker who had given up a career in law to live on the fortune his great-grandfather had made in the whaling industry. He was a perennial student and well-meaning dilettante dabbling in a dozen pastimes—writer, poet, local historian, naturalist, reformer, and abolitionist—and a nervous hypochondriac who spent most of his waking hours in his “Shanty,” a writer’s cabin warmed by an open fire and filled with books and papers. A few feet away stood Brooklawn, the fine large family home presided over by his wife, Louisa Ricketson, and made lively by their four children, Arthur, Walton (who became a well-known sculptor), Anna, and Emma. As he and Thoreau talked into the night, Daniel’s disappointment melted away. The effect on Henry was instantaneous: “I went to walk in the woods with R. It was wonderfully warm and pleasant. . . . I felt the winter breaking up in me, and if I had been at home I should have tried to write poetry.”30 “Dear Walden,” a cheery Ricketson saluted Henry a week later, already inviting a return visit; Thoreau bounced back a sunny reply. In a flash the two were old friends, intimate, open, and relaxed, teasing each other in one moment, in the next fondly laughing off their frequent and mutual annoyances.
After a day’s ramble through the woods and a drive around the area, the overstimulated Ricketson did not feel well enough to attend Thoreau’s lecture, so Walton stayed with his father while Louisa and the “young folks” went to the New Bedford Lyceum. Thoreau’s audience was large and, once again, baffled. “I think he puzzled them a little,” admitted one listener; the lecture was thoughtful, agreed the local newspaper, but “decidedly peculiar.” Ricketson assured his new friend that several “sensible” people liked it.31 What else could Thoreau have expected? New Bedford was a seaport boomtown riding high on the whale-oil industry, and the lecture hall was filled with wealthy merchants, captains, carpenters, coopers, and sailors on shore leave, all dedicating their lives to reaping the ocean for huge profits. What sense could they have made of Thoreau’s warning that the pursuit of profit would cost them their souls?
The next day the small man who looked like a peddler of small wares pocketed “What Shall It Profit?” once again and set out in a misty rain over rough seas to Nantucket, thirty miles offshore, his head “hanging over the side all the way.” The seasick Thoreau spent the evening recovering at the home of an old whaling captain, Edward W. Gardiner, who regaled him with whaling stories: in this land a man must go a-whaling before he could marry, and have struck a whale before he could dance; Gardiner’s own relative had been drowned, like Ahab, by a whale. Nantucket had long since been stripped of trees, and the sea captain’s mission in retirement was to replant new pine forests. Thoreau listened closely while Gardiner drove him to Siasconset on the outer shore, pointing out his tree plantations and discoursing on the costs and sources of bulk pine seed. “These plantations must very soon change the aspect of the land,” Thoreau noted. Concord, too, was stripping the land of its trees. Would this be a way to hasten the land’s regeneration? He filed away the thought. At the Nantucket Athenaeum they showed him curious artifacts brought by sailors from the South Pacific, but when he asked about the local Native Americans, he was shown only a photograph of the last Indian on the island, a basket of huckleberries in his hand. Thoreau was too late; the man had died less than a month ago.32
Thoreau’s notoriety drew a large audience who traipsed through the rain and mud to hear “What Shall It Profit?”. Three times before it had bombed, but the worldly Nantucketers loved it. “This is the very audience for me,” Thoreau crowed. The next morning his ship set out in the morning mist, only to get lost in the fog off Hyannis (once, said Captain Gardiner, it took five weeks for the mail ship to land), guided in by careful soundings and, at last, “the locomotive’s whistle & the life boat bell.”33 Thoreau was back in Concord by evening. Two days later, New Year’s Eve, he walked on the frozen river to Fairhaven Bay. “How glorious the perfect stillness and peace of the winter landscape,” he exulted. He was free; the winter was all his. Thoreau carried “What Shall It Profit?” to audiences twice more that season, but only close to home. Four days later he had a splendid time with his old friends at Worcester, where he rambled around Quinsigamond Pond, pausing to interview a Wabanaki making baskets and a Mr. Washburn making telegraph wire. Six weeks later, on February 14, 1855, he concluded the season by reading the now-battered pages of “What Shall It Profit?” one more time, to the Concord Lyceum. Nothing happened there to make him regret his decision to cancel his lecture tour. It would be nearly two years before Thoreau stepped onto the lecture podium again.
Illness and Recovery
In December Thoreau had fretted at missing winter; now he was out in it daily. Far from envying the boys skating, now he was one of them—thirty miles in a few hours! This was truly “the winter of skating.” On February 4, he and William Tappan spread their coattails to the wind like birds and sailed down Pantry Meadow on the ice “like a graceful demon in the midst of the broad meadow all covered and lit with the curling snow-steam,” leaping over the foul places to save their necks. Everyone marveled at the cold. The ice came so close to the town center one could step from the rear of the bank “and set sail on skates for any part of the Concord River valley.”34 In February the cold stopped the clock, bedsheets froze about their faces as people slept, and fingers were so numb they “must leave many buttons unbuttoned.” The cat mewed to have the door opened, then was disinclined to go out, returning hours later from some barn smelling of meadow hay; “we all took her up and smelled of her, it was so fragrant.” Indoors, Thoreau thawed his ink and wrote. Outdoors, he traced what mice, partridges, and foxes had written on the snow. He watched Therien the woodchopper cut down the great chestnuts that had shaded his Walden house: seventy-five tree rings, and the axe broke, it was so cold. Sophia’s plants froze in the house. It was important, thought Thoreau, to describe the weather, for “it affects our feelings. That which was so important at the time cannot be unimportant to remember.”35
Near the end of a cold, blustery March—so raw that even Thoreau’s patience was fraying—he met his future biographer: Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. The ambitious Harvard senior had dropped in on Emerson the previous fall, and Emerson, impressed, invited Sanborn to open a school in Concord, right away—they needed one badly. Thoreau and Sanborn almost crossed paths in January, when Thoreau dropped off a copy of A Week at Harvard for a student who had written a kind essay on him for the Harvard Magazine. Sanborn took the book without recognizing its author and duly passed it along. Only hours later did he put two and two together, when he saw Thoreau deep in conversation with Thaddeus Harris—too late to introduce himself. So he wrote an unctuous letter spiced with an undergraduate’s careless contem
pt—“ask me what I think of your philosophy, I should be apt to answer that it is not worth a straw”——a put-down that Thoreau’s reply diplomatically ignored.36
Sanborn moved fast: on March 13 Emerson offered him the schoolhouse rent free, twenty pupils, and a salary of $850. Two days later he and his sister Sarah arrived in Concord, arranging to rent Ellery Channing’s upstairs rooms and take their meals across the street with the Thoreaus. Later Sanborn sketched a typical dinner: a deaf Mr. Thoreau presiding silently while Henry led the conversation, pausing patiently when interrupted by the “loquacious” Cynthia, taking up his train of talk exactly where he’d left off the instant she was done, Sophia joining in energetically all the while. When Thoreau paid his new neighbors a formal call, Sanborn judged him to be “a sort of pocket edition of Emerson,” plainly dressed in unfitted clothes, ruddy and weather-beaten like “some shrewd and honest animal—some retired, philosophic woodchuck or magnanimous fox.”37 There was talk of Thoreau’s coming on as a teacher, which he declined, although he often led the students—including various young Emersons, Alcotts, and Hawthornes together with Henry James’s sons Wilkie and Bob and a daughter of John Brown—out on Saturday excursions.38 On May 12, two of Sanborn’s Harvard friends brought his furniture up from Cambridge in a wagon, and the three men borrowed Thoreau’s boat (moored, as it was, in their own backyard) for a leisurely float down the Concord River. Sanborn was home.
Well into 1855, Thoreau’s Journal simmered happily along. It was spring, and everywhere the work of killing was going on. Through his telescope he watched Garfield shoot a red-tailed hawk out of the sky and hunters boat through the meadows, shooting muskrats. He dodged bullets to retrieve a beautiful duck floating dead in the water, and found it was a rare merganser. Jacob Farmer said he trapped a hundred mink a year, and Goodwin the hunter took twenty-five pouts and one perch at Walden. Hunting with his telescope instead, Thoreau watched a herring gull “stroking the air with his wings.” He hunted with his hands, too, reaching into a stump and clasping a flying squirrel on a guess. It struggled and bit his fingers; Thoreau tied it up in a handkerchief and brought it home. He spent the evening watching it fail to fly, leaping pathetically from the furniture, only to plop ridiculously onto the floor. Next day he returned the defeated little being to the same stump, where, eyeing him closely, it skimmed down and away from him, up a nearby maple, then “away it went in admirable style, more like a bird than any quadruped I had dreamed of,” steering around the trees like a hawk.39 Finding a screech owl in a knothole, he reached in and stroked it. Like a cat, the little owl “reclined its head a little lower and closed its eye entirely.” One day, when a few loafers jeered at him, he was ready: “Halloo, Thoreau, and don’t you ever shoot a bird then when you want to study it?” “Do you think that I should shoot you if I wanted to study you?”40
But that May, something started to go terribly wrong. Thoreau’s Journal entries thinned and frayed; the sparkle dimmed. By June 17, Emerson was deeply worried. “Henry Thoreau is feeble, & languishes this season, to our alarm,” he wrote his brother William. “We have tried to persuade him to come & spend a week with us for a change.” Ten days later, in a letter to Blake, Thoreau finally admitted the truth: “I have been sick and good for nothing but to lie on my back and wait for something to turn up, for two or three months.” He wrote to cancel their plans for a summer excursion. Nearly three months later, he interrupted his Journal to confess to “four or five months of invalidity and worthlessness.”41 The weakness had started in his knees and spread from there, leaving him, at its worst, barely able to walk.
The cause was uncertain. Dr. Bartlett was at a loss. Was it psychosomatic—depression following the completion of Walden, brought on when Thoreau realized he could never again come up to his lifetime’s achievement? The notion is plausible, given the unyielding press of ambition that had driven him so hard all through 1854. Yet what of the sheer exuberance through the winter, the joy radiating from the Journal, the tireless energy of long days skating in the bitter subzero cold, tracking in the deep snow, sailing in the raw and blustery spring? More likely Thoreau was leveled by a flare-up of his chronic tuberculosis, caused when a lesion in his lungs ruptured and sent the virulent bacilli coursing through his body to lodge in his knees and hips, inflaming the bone and degrading the muscle. By April he had known something was up, and he was taking all the recommended precautions. At their first meeting, Sanborn had noted that he wore a beard on his throat. This was not a fashion statement: “Galway whiskers,” worn from ear to ear below the chin, were thought to prevent consumption by warming the throat, keeping cold air away from delicate lungs. Growing throat whiskers, together with taking plenty of exercise in the fresh outdoor air, were understood to be the best defense against the mysterious, wasting disease. Everything Thoreau did would have been approved as a reasonable precaution.
By the time Thoreau wrote his sad letter to Blake, he was bracing for a long recovery. He was supposed to be deep in the Maine woods by then, paddling a canoe. Instead he was an invalid, heartsick and deeply lonely. “I walk alone,” he confided to his Journal. “My heart is full. Feelings impede the current of my thoughts. I knock on the earth for my friend. . . . but no friend appears, and perhaps none is dreaming of me.” The more his misery mounted, the lonelier he got, until in the midst of writing Blake to cancel their plans for a visit, he couldn’t bear it. Come now!—he added impulsively to his Worcester friends; come to Concord. You can attend our antislavery meeting, and next morning we’ll head out to Cape Cod together. I can manage only short walks, but we can have long talks.42 Blake and Brown were both too busy to break away, but the wayward Channing was willing—indeed, lounging on the beach had been his idea in the first place. The Cape it would be.
· · ·
The beach had been on Thoreau’s mind since April: for three years his manuscript about Cape Cod had been gathering dust on George Curtis’s desk at Putnam’s, stalled since Thoreau had withdrawn “A Yankee in Canada” midway through publication after Curtis censored his remarks on religion. Greeley had begged Thoreau not to break with the valuable and well-placed Curtis, and now his advice was paying off: on the heels of Walden’s success, Curtis dug out the old manuscript, dusted it off, and decided to run it as Putnam’s summer travel series. By April Thoreau was correcting the proofs for the first monthly installment, and on July fourth, even as he and Channing were boarding the holiday train to Boston bound for Cape Cod, the July issue was hitting the booksellers with the second installment. Thoreau and Channing, those knights of the umbrella and bundle, might have looked like tramps before, but now they would return as celebrities.
After rushing to meet the steamer, they arrived at the wharf, only to be told the captain had decided to lay over for the holiday. They spent the day visiting the galleries of the Boston Athenaeum, where Thoreau studied Frederic Church’s sublime sun-washed canvas “The Andes of Ecuador,” then watching a regatta. They overnighted with the obliging Alcotts, who were packing to move to a rent-free house in Walpole, New Hampshire. Next morning they sailed to Province-town and the following morning they took the first stage to North Truro, arriving at 6:00 a.m. and walking a mile through the fog to the Highland Lighthouse. Since Thoreau’s last stay there in June 1850, the lighthouse keeper, James Small, had added a boardinghouse for $3.50 a week, and they settled in for the next two weeks. It’s still not too late to join us, Thoreau urged Blake; the table was “not so clean as could be desired,” but it was better than Provincetown, and Small was intelligent, a good man to deal with. “Come by all means,” he pleaded. His Worcester friends still couldn’t come, but Thoreau enjoyed himself anyway, relishing the sea fog and a bracing nor’easter, bathing in the ocean, botanizing here and there, talking with the locals, and filling pages of his neglected Journal with notes. He and Channing left early on July 18, sailing back with so little wind that they did not reach Boston Harbor until candlelight. “Methinks I am beginning to be better,” T
horeau reassured Blake.43
Then came bad news. Just as Putnam’s was running the third installment of Cape Cod, “The Beach,” in August, even as Thoreau was thanking them for payment and sending revisions for the September installment, Curtis canceled the rest of the series. Why? Thoreau surmised they heard he planned to expand the series into a book, which was, he wrote back to Curtis, news to him. But Curtis equivocated. The real problem wasn’t Thoreau’s future publication plans—it was his tone. Curtis had already cut the more indelicate passages, which bowdlerization Thoreau astonishingly accepted in silence. But when Curtis got down to reading the next installment, “The Wellfleet Oysterman,” he must have choked in dismay. Irreverent and profane, this was the chapter that had made the Concord audience “laugh ’till they cried.” Worse still, even the cleaned-up versions of the previous chapters had already offended the Cape’s residents, who were complaining in the newspapers. Better, reasoned Curtis, to feed the prickly Thoreau a fake excuse than be honest and ignite his wrath. As Curtis wrote his publisher, just send it all back to Thoreau. “He has an overweening conceit . . . and it will deplete him grandly.” It did. Thoreau, sick and defeated, glumly asked Curtis to return the remainder. Once again, he had been burned by America’s timid and censorious press. “It costs so much to publish,” he sighed in his Journal, “would it not be better for the author to put his manuscripts in a safe?”44
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