|
|
Thoreau:
Genius Ignored
From the 5th chapter of Genius
Ignored by Lucius Furius
Copyright © Lucius Furius 1997. Used with permission.
Related site: The
Life and Times of Henry D. Thoreau
Return to Thoreau Reader
IT'S NO
WONDER that Thoreau's Walden is more
popular than ever. The condition to which it is the antidote -- the delusion
that material things can bring one happiness, that labor in and of itself
is good, that Nature can be ignored -- has spread from Europe and the United
States to the entire world. Of course we'd sensed that something was wrong
even before we read this book, but needed Henry to bring it into focus,
to strip the detritus from our still superficial lives, revealing bare
rock. We may not agree with what he builds on this rock (the possibility
of individual perfection) but are grateful for the stripping away. Finding
each generation as deluded as those which preceded it, Thoreau continues
to "brag as lustily as a chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost,"
continues to try to wake us up.
Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on July 12, 1817. He was
christened "David Henry", but his parents always called him by his middle
name "Henry". He had a sister Helen who was five years older and a brother
John two years older. In 1819 another sister, Sophia, was born. The family
moved to Boston in 1821, but returned to Concord two years later. Except
for his four years at college and a half-year stay on Staten Island, Henry
lived in Concord for the rest of his life.
As a youth Thoreau spent his spare time exploring Concord's woods, fields,
rivers, and ponds. He remembered visiting Walden Pond when he was only
four years old (when his family was still living in Boston). He was a good
student and his family made a special effort to raise money for his schooling.
He was able to attend Harvard and graduated with the Class of 1837. Though
he later disparaged the value of his Harvard classes -- and all formal
education --, he was an avid reader and great user of libraries (including
Harvard's) throughout his life.
In the autumn of 1837 he obtained a position as a teacher at the Center
School in Concord. Since he couldn't keep his students as quiet as authorities
required -- and since he refused to beat them -- he lasted only two weeks.
In the following months he spent quite a bit of time with Ralph Waldo Emerson,
a fellow resident of Concord, fifteen years his senior and just coming
into his fame.
Thoreau started giving his name as "Henry David" instead of "David Henry".
His neighbors did not approve: dissatisfaction with one's God-given name
was unnatural and unseemly. In typical Thoreau fashion, he never bothered
to have it changed legally.
In May, 1838, when he left on a tour of Maine in search
of a teaching position (at a private school where he would have more freedom)
he carried with him a reference from Emerson:
"I cordially recommend Mr. Henry D. Thoreau, a graduate of Harvard
University in August, 1837, to the confidence of such parents or guardians
as may propose to employ him as an instructor. I have the highest confidence
in Mr. Thoreau's moral character and in his intellectual ability. He is
an excellent Scholar, a man of energy & kindness, & I shall esteem
the town fortunate that secures his Services."(1)
Later that summer, James Russell Lowell, the most influential
literary figure of the mid-19th century, came in contact with Thoreau at
Emerson's: "I saw Thoreau last night and it is exquisitely amusing to see
how he imitates Emerson's tone and manner. With my eyes shut I shouldn't
know them apart."(2)
When he failed to find a position, he and his brother started their
own school, the Concord Academy. Aside from its lack of corporal punishment,
the school was distinguished by its innovative, "hands-on" approach to
learning: scientific experiments, nature walks, field trips to the workshops
of local craftsmen. It was, for the three years it lasted, quite successful
-- almost always having its full number of students.
Henry had several romances during these years. The most serious was
that with eighteen-year-old Ellen Sewall in 1840. He proposed marriage
(by letter!), but was rejected.
The Academy closed in 1841 when John became seriously ill with tuberculosis;
Henry didn't have the will to continue alone. Emerson asked Thoreau to
come and live with him and his family, doing a few hours of work each day
as a handyman/gardener in exchange for room and board. The arrangement
was originally for a year, but was later extended to two.
In January, 1842, Thoreau's brother John died from lockjaw. Though Henry
showed few outward signs of emotion, he developed an illness with all the
symptoms of lockjaw himself. It took several months for him to recover.
In September, 1842, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had just
moved to Concord, recorded his first impressions of Thoreau in his journal:
"Mr. Thorow [sic] dined with us yesterday. He is a singular character
-- a young man with much wild original nature still remaining in him; and
so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own. He
is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat
rustic, although courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an
exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes
him much better than beauty. He was educated, I believe, at Cambridge,
and formerly kept school in this town; but for two or three years back,
he has repudiated all regular modes of getting a living, and seems inclined
to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men -- an Indian life, I
mean, as respects the absence of any systematic effort for a livelihood.
He has been for sometime an inmate of Mr. Emerson's family; and, in requittal,
he labors in the garden and performs such other offices as may suit him
-- being entertained by Mr. Emerson for the sake of what true manhood there
is in him. Mr. Thorow is a keen and delicate observer of nature -- a genuine
observer, which, I suspect, is almost as rare a character as even an original
poet; and Nature, in return for his love, seems to adopt him as her especial
child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness. He
is familiar with beast, fish, fowl, and reptile, and has strange stories
to tell of adventures, and friendly passages with these lower brethern
of mortality. Herb and flower, likewise, wherever they grow, whether in
garden, or wild wood, are his familiar friends. He is also on intimate
terms with the clouds and can tell the portents of storms. It is a characteristic
trait, that he has a great regard for the memory of the Indian tribes,
whose wild life would have suited him so well; and strange to say, he seldom
walks over a ploughed field without picking up an arrow-point, a spear-head,
or other relic of the red men -- as if their spirits willed him to be the
inheritor of their simple wealth.
"With all this he has more than a tincture of literature -- a deep and
true taste for poetry, especially the elder poets, although more exclusive
than is desirable, like all other Trancendentalists, so far as I am acquainted
with them. He is a good writer -- at least, he has written one good article,
a rambling disquisition on Natural History in the last Dial, -- which,
he says, was chiefly made up from journals of his own observations..."(3)
This was how Priscilla Rice Edes, another Concord resident,
saw him in those years:
"'David Henry' after leaving college was eccentric and did not like
to, and so would not, work. The opposite of John in every particular, he
was [a] thin, insignificant, poorly dressed, careless looking young man,
..."(4)
From May to December, 1843, Thoreau lived with Emerson's brother's family
on Staten Island and tutored their children. He had decided to become a
writer and it seemed that being close to the New York publishing scene
might be an advantage. It wasn't. Deciding that he needed to simplify his
life, he returned to Concord. He wanted to write a book with a canoe trip
he and John had taken on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in 1839 as its
theme. It seemed that if he reduced his material needs he could spend far
less time working and far more time studying nature and writing.
In the spring of 1845, he went out to Walden Pond and built a primitive
cabin. He moved in on July 4 and lived there for two years and two months.
His plain, simple life there is described in Walden. Walden Pond
was only a mile from Concord Village. He would go into town to visit friends,
and they would likewise visit him at his hut. He ate with his family or
received food from them at least once a week.
He slept in his cabin each night. One exception was either July 23 or
July 24, 1846, when he was in the Concord Jail for refusing to pay the
poll tax. The amount was small, strictly a matter of principle, a protest
against the government's support of slavery and the Mexican War. His mother
or aunt paid it and he was expelled the next day (irritated at their interference).
Thoreau's move had aroused a great deal of curiosity among his fellow
Concordians; they wanted to know why a Harvard graduate was living in a
cabin in the woods. Thus, along with work on the book he had planned to
write ("A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"), Thoreau prepared
a series of lectures on his life at the pond. In February, 1847, he read
the first of these, "A History of Myself", to the Concord Lyceum. The success
of this and the other lectures convinced Thoreau that he should make them
into a book. By September, 1847, when he once again "became a sojourner
in civilized life", he had finished not only a first draft of A Week
but also an initial version of Walden (about half as long as the
final version).
Thoreau's relationship with animals was magical. Frederick
Willis recalled visiting him at Walden Pond (in July 1847) with the Alcott
family:
"He was talking to Mr. Alcott of the wild flowers in Walden woods when,
suddenly stopping, he said: 'Keep very still and I will show you my family.'
Stepping quickly outside the cabin door, he gave a low and curious whistle;
immediately a woodchuck came running towards him from a nearby burrow.
With varying note, yet still low and strange, a pair of gray squirrels
were summoned and approached him fearlessly. With still another note several
birds, including two crows, flew towards him, one of the crows nestling
upon his shoulder. I remember it was the crow resting close to his head
that made the most vivid impression upon me, knowing how fearful of man
this bird is. He fed them all from his hand, taking food from his pocket,
and petted them gently before our delighted gaze; and then dismissed them
by different whistling, always strange and low and short, each little wild
thing departing instantly at hearing his special signal."(5)
Thoreau never married, but it is wrong to assume that he
was a hermit. With the exception of his two years, two months, at Walden
Pond, he lived with either the Emersons (for the two-year stay mentioned
above and for ten months in 1847-8) or his own family (mother, father,
sister, aunts) for his entire life. He wasn't a guy you'd be inspired to
greet with a big kiss or a hug, but he did value his family and his friends.
He had feelings:
"I do not remember ever seeing him laugh outright, but he was ever
ready to smile at anything that pleased him; and I never knew him to betray
any tender emotion except on one occasion, when he was narrating to me
the death of his only brother, John Thoreau, from lockjaw, strong symptoms
of which, from his sympathy with the sufferer, he himself experienced.
At this time his voice was choked, and he shed tears, and went to the door
for air. The subject was of course dropped, and never recurred to again."(6)
Some residents of Concord accused him of sponging off his parents. This
was definitely not the case. He made major contributions to the
family's pencil manufacturing business, both through his own labor and
through improvements in the manufacturing process. He did odd jobs as a
handyman, carpenter, and gardener for his own family and for other families.
In his thirties and forties, he was a successful surveyor. It's true that
he never worked that much -- perhaps an average of 10-20 hours per week
-- but he spent and required even less. My point: Thoreau was genuine.
He loved nature and lived a frugal, ascetic life, not just in his years
at Walden Pond but in the years which followed as well.
His townsmen wanted to know why he had gone to jail rather than pay
the poll tax. On January 26, 1848, Thoreau delivered a lecture to the Concord
Lyceum on "the relation of the individual to the State". It was published
as an essay , "Resistance to Civil Government," a year later. (It did not
receive its more widely-known title, "Civil Disobedience," until after
Thoreau's death).
In his A Fable for Critics, published
in 1848, the influential James Russell Lowell included a portrait which
was widely assumed to apply to Thoreau and Ellery Channing:
"There comes ________, for instance; to see him's rare sport,
Tread in Emerson's tracks with legs painfully short;
How he jumps, how he strains, and gets red in the face,
To keep step with the mystagogue's natural pace!
He follows as close as a stick to a rocket,
His fingers exploring the prophet's each pocket.
Fie, for shame, brother bard; with good fruit of your own,
Can't you let Neighbor Emerson's alone?
Besides 't is no use, you'll not find e'en a core,--
________ has picked up all the windfalls before."(7)
Walter Harding, the pre-eminent biographer of Thoreau,
contends that this accusation "postponed for a whole generation, if not
longer, any true recognition of Thoreau's individual genius".(8)
Thoreau did, however, have some powerful supporters. There was Emerson,
of course, and Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune (and
author of the Horatio Alger books), who, in the May 25, 1848, issue, printed
an extensive "extract from a private letter we have just received from
a very different sort of literary youth -- a thorough classical scholar,
true poet, ..." Greeley was a loyal and enthusiastic supporter of Thoreau
throughout his career.
Thoreau had been unable to find a publisher for A Week on the Concord
and Merrimack Rivers. Finally, he accepted an offer from James Munroe
& Co. to print the book with no up-front cost to himself if he would
promise to pay for any copies which didn't sell.
It was published on May 30, 1848. Thoreau's account of the trip is interesting,
but occupies less than half of the book. The rest is poems, quotations,
historical information, and philosophizing whose connection with the narrative
is frequently rather tenuous. There are some excellent observations of
nature, but all in all the book seems rather "literary", stilted, meandering
-- not a bad book, just suffering terribly in comparison with its successor.
There were at least twelve reviews (at least four in British periodicals).
More than two-thirds were positive.
Despite the widespread reviews, sales of A Week were poor. Beginning
in 1849 Thoreau had to start making payments to Munroe. Though the publisher
had agreed to bring out Walden soon after A Week, the failure
of the latter made them (and other publishers) leery of the former.
On October 27, 1853, he wrote in his journal:
For a year or two past, my publisher, falsely so called, has
been writing from time to time to ask what disposition should be made of
the copies of "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" still on hand,
and at last suggesting that he had use for the room they occupied in his
cellar. So I had them all sent to me here, and they have arrived to-day
by express, filling the man's wagon, -- 706 copies out of an edition of
1000 which I bought of Munroe four years ago and have ever since been paying
for, and have not quite paid for yet. The wares are sent to me at last,
and I have an opportunity to examine my purchase. They are something more
substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights
of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin.
Of the remaining two hundred and ninety and odd, seventy-five were given
away, the rest sold. I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes,
over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.
He lost $275 on the book. He had had to pay $290 for unsold copies; income
from sales was $15.
The people around Concord who had thought Thoreau a
fool were vindicated. James Kendall Hosmer, a boy at this time, remembered
being told that Thoreau "... had written a book no copy of which had ever
been sold.... The edition fell dead from the press, and all the books,
one thousand or more, he had collected in his mother's house, ..."(9)
Thoreau continued to add new material to Walden, trying out various
pieces with Emerson and other friends and in lectures to the public, revising
it based on their feedback. The book went through numerous drafts between
1847 and 1854 when Thoreau felt it was really done. Ticknor & Fields
agreed to publish it and an edition of 2,000 copies was produced in August,
1854.
Walden is a masterpiece of prose style. The profound ideas are
expressed with simplicity and eloquence -- and an excellent use of metaphor.
(It's interesting to note that Thoreau had steeped himself in that progenitor
of metaphor, the Iliad, during these years.) Here are some of my
favorite passages:
I should not talk so much about myself if there were
anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this
theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require
of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own
life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such
account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he
has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.(10)
By closing the eyes and slumbering and consenting to
be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine
and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations....
I have read in a Hindoo book, that 'there was a king's son, who, being
expelled in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a forester,
and, growing to maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the
barbarous race with which he lived. One of his father's ministers having
discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his
character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. So soul,' continues
the Hindoo philosopher, 'from the circumstances in which it is placed,
mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some holy
teacher, and then it knows itself to be Brahme.' I perceive that
we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our
vision does not penetrate the surface of things....(11)
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet
downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition,
and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through
Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church
and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to
a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and
say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui,
below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall
or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, ...(12)
Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the
family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and partly with a
view to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from
a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time
to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences
were very memorable and valuable to me, -- anchored in forty feet of water,
and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands
of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the
moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal
fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging
sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the night breeze, now
and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling
about its extemity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow
to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand,
some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very
queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast
and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which
came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as
if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into
this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as
it were with one hook.(13)
... There is solid bottom everywhere. We read that
the traveller asked the boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom.
The boy replied that it had. But presently the traveller's horse sank in
up to the girths, and he observed to the boy, 'I thought you said that
this bog had a hard bottom.' 'So it has,' answered the latter, 'but you
have not got half way to it yet.' So it is with the bogs and quicksands
of society; but he is an old boy that knows it. Only what is thought, said,
or done at a certain rare coincidence is good. I would not be one of those
who will foolishly drive a nail into mere lath and plastering; such a deed
would keep me awake nights. Give me a hammer, and let me feel for the furring.
Do not depend on the putty. Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully
that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,
-- a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse. So will
help you God, and so only. Every nail driven should be as another rivet
in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. ...(14)
Emerson described the days following publication: "We
account Henry the undoubted King of all American lions. He is walking up
& down Concord, firm-looking, but in a tremble of great expectation."(15)
There were at least 15 positive reviews and about three negative ones:
The Unitarian Christian Register: "We suppose
its author does not reverence many things we reverence; but this fact has
not prevented our seeing that he has a reverential, tender and devout spirit
at bottom...."(16)
The Boston Atlas: "There is not a page, a paragraph
giving one sign of liberality, charitableness, kind feeling, generosity,
in a word -- heart...."(17)
Nathaniel Hawthorne didn't care for Thoreau quite so
much by this time as he had in 1842. He wrote in a letter to a friend:
"He despises the world, and all that it has to offer, and, like other
humorists, is an intolerable bore. I shall cause it to be known to him
that you sat up till two o'clock reading his book; and he will pretend
it is of no consequence, but will never forget it. . . . he is not an agreeeable
person, and in his presence one feels ashamed of having any money, or a
house to live in, or so much as two coats to wear, or having written a
book that the public will read -- his own mode of life being so unsparing
a criticism on all other modes, such as the world approves."(18)
Nevertheless, Hawthorne recommended the book to a variety of friends in
England (where he was then serving as the U. S. consul in Liverpool) and
had copies shipped to them from the United States.
In the year following its publication more than 1700 copies of Walden
(out of the original printing of 2,000) were sold. Sales declined rapidly
in subsequent years, however.
Thoreau included some literary self-criticism on the inside cover of
his journal for the fall of 1855:
"My faults are:--
Paradoxes,--saying just the opposite,--a style which may be imitated.
Ingenious.
Playing with words,--getting the laugh,--not always simple, strong,
and broad.
Using current phrases and maxims, when I should speak for myself.
Not always earnest.
"In short," "in fact," "alas!" etc.
Want of conciseness."
Thoreau decided to arrange a nationwide lecturing tour, similar to the
ones at which Emerson had been so successful. Despite the fact that Greeley
publicized Thoreau's availability in the New York Tribune, he received
only one firm offer (from Hamilton, Ontario). There was no nationwide tour.
Thoreau continued to lecture at towns nearer to Concord.
Thoreau's two-million-word journal contains remarkably few insights
into his inner life. Some of the entries from 1856 and 1857 are exceptions:
(January 20, 1856) In my experience I have found nothing so truly impoverishing
as what is called wealth, i.e., the command of greater means than you had
before possessed, though comparatively few and slight still, for you thus
inevitably acquire a more expensive habit of living, and even the very
same necessaries and comforts cost you more than they once did. Instead
of gaining, you have lost some independence, and if your income should
be suddenly lessened, you would find yourself poor, though possessed of
the same means which once made you rich. Within the last five years I have
had the command of a little more money than in the previous five years,
for I have sold some books and some lectures; yet I have not been a whit
better fed or clothed or warmed or sheltered, not a whit richer, except
that I have been less concerned about my living, but perhaps my life has
been the less serious for it, and, to balance it, I feel now that there
is a possibility of failure. Who knows but I may come upon the town,
if,
as is likely, the public want no more of my books, or lectures (which last
is already the case)?
(October 18, 1856) ... I see that my neighbors look with compassion
on me, that they think it is a mean and unfortunate destiny which makes
me to walk in these fields and woods so much and sail on this river alone.
But so long as I find here the only real elysium, I cannot hesitate in
my choice. My work is writing, and I do not hesitate, though I know that
no subject is too trivial for me, tried by ordinary standards; for, ye
fools, the theme is nothing, the life is everything. All that interests
the reader is the depth and intensity of the life excited....
(January 11, 1857) For some years past I have partially offered myself
as a lecturer; have been advertised as such several years. Yet I have had
but two or three invitations to lecture in a year, and some years none
at all. I congratulate myself on having been permitted to stay at home
thus, I am so much richer for it. I do not see what I should have got of
much value, but money, by going about, but I do see what I should have
lost. It seems to me that I have a longer and more liberal lease on life
thus. I cannot afford to be telling my experience, especially to those
who perhaps will take no interest in it. I wish to be getting experience.
You might as well recommend to a bear to leave his hollow tree in the woods.
He would be leaner in the spring than if he had stayed at home and sucked
his claws....
(April 23, 1857) How rarely a man's love for nature becomes a ruling
principle with him, like a youth's affection for a maiden, but more enduring!
All nature is my bride.
In his later years, Thoreau spent, if anything, even more time observing
and recording. The journals from this period are filled with detailed,
scientific observations. Different people had very different views of him
as a scientist/naturalist:
1. An old farmer (as recorded by Mrs. Daniel Chester French):
"'Henry D. Thoreau -- Henry D. Thoreau,' jerking out
the words with withering contempt. 'His name ain't no more Henry D. Thoreau
than my name is Henry D. Thoreau. And everybody knows it, and he knows
it. His name's Da-a-vid Henry and it ain't never been nothing but
Da-a-vid
Henry. And he knows that! Why one morning I went out in my field across
there to the river, and there, beside that little old mud pond, was standing
Da-a-vid
Henry, and he wasn't doin' nothin' but just standin' there -- lookin' at
that pond, and when I came back at noon, there he was standin' with his
hands behind him just lookin' down into that pond, and after dinner when
I come back again if there wan't
Da-a-vid standin' there just like
as if he had been there all day, gazin' down into that pond, and I stopped
and looked at him and I says, "Da-a-vid Henry, what air you a-doin'?" And
he didn't turn his head and he didn't look at me. He kept on lookin' down
at that pond, and he said, as if he was thinkin' about the stars in the
heavens, "Mr. Murray, I'm a-studyin' -- the habits -- of the bullfrog!"
And there that darned fool had been standin' -- the livelong day -- a-studyin'
-- the habits -- of the bull-frog!'"(19)
2. Abby Hosmer:
"One day ... we children saw Mr. Thoreau standing
right down there across the road near the Assabet. He stood very still,
and we knew he was watching something in the water. But we knew we must
not disturb him, and so we stayed up here in the dooryard. At noontime
he was still there, watching something in the water. And he stayed there
all afernoon.
At last, though, along about supper time, he came up here to the house.
And then we children knew that we'd learn what it was he'd been watching.
He'd found a duck that had just hatched out a nest of eggs. She had brought
the little ducks down to the water. And Mr. Thoreau had watched all day
to see her teach those little ducks about the river.
And while we ate our suppers there in the kitchen, he told us the most
wonderful stories you ever heard about those ducks."(20)
In 1858 Thoreau's nemesis, James Russell Lowell, editor of the newly-founded
Atlantic
Monthly, solicited a contribution from Thoreau. Thoreau submitted an
account of a trip he had taken to Maine in 1853 which was accepted and
published. Unfortunately, Lowell omitted (apparently because he considered
it blasphemous) the following sentence: "It [a pine tree] is as immortal
as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above
me still." Thoreau was extremely upset and refused to have any dealings
with Lowell for the rest of his life.
It was sometime in 1859 that one of Thoreau's townsmen
"innocently told him after riding through Walden woods in his sleigh that
he had never seen anything so beautiful in his life and that if there had
been men there who knew how to write about it, it would have been a great
occasion for them. . . ." (21)
(obviously unaware that a book named Walden had ever been written).
It was also in 1859 that Ticknor & Fields finally sold the last copy
of Walden. It had taken one year to sell the first 1700 copies and
5 years to sell the last 300. They decided not to reprint it.
Thoreau was greatly affected by John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry
(in October, 1859). Though he didn't belong to any Abolitionist societies
("societies" being anathema to him) he was a radical, uncompromising opponent
of slavery. He and his family had several times harbored runaway slaves
and helped them get to Canada. He had met Brown in Concord in 1857. He
knew that slaveowners had been butchered at Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas,
in 1856, but did not know that Brown was responsible. To others, Brown
was an ineffective madman. To Thoreau, he was a principled man willing
to sacrifice everything, including his life, for those principles. "I was
so absorbed in him as to be surprised when I detected the routine of the
natural world surviving still." He prepared an eloquent "Plea for Captain
John Brown" which he delivered in Concord on October 30, 1859, and again
in Boston on November 1.
For a number of years Thoreau had exhibited mild symptoms of tuberculosis.
Beginning in 1861 the condition worsened. "As ill as he was, Thoreau nonetheless
continued his literary work. Early in February [1862] a request came from
James T. Fields for him to submit some of his writings to the Atlantic
Monthly. Ticknor & Fields, the publishers of Walden, had
purchased the Atlantic in 1859 ... In June
1861 Fields had taken over its editorial direction. Since James Russell
Lowell now no longer had any connection with the magazine, Thoreau was
happy to accede, ... "(22) Fields
accepted the manuscript Thoreau sent and expressed an interest in reprinting
Walden. Thoreau
replied that "he would not only be very happy to see Walden back
in print, but he had 146 bound copies and 450 unbound copies of A Week
in his attic -- an obvious hint to Fields that he would like to see the
earlier book republished too."(23)
Fields agreed to a printing of 250 copies of Walden and on April
12 came to Concord and purchased all the unsold copies of A Week.
One can't help but think -- and it would seem that Thoreau couldn't help
but think -- that Fields did these things, at least in part, out of respect
for the wishes of a dying man.
Thoreau died on May 6, 1862. He was 44 years old. The reprintings of
both Walden and A Week appeared within a month.
Charles Woodbury in his account of his visits with
Emerson from 1865 to 1870 quotes Emerson as saying:
"He [Thoreau] had a great contempt for those who made no effort to
gauge accurately their own powers and weaknesses, and by no means spared
himself, of whom he said that a man gathers materials to erect a palace,
and finally concludes to build a shantee with them."(24)
At the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Evanston, Illinois, on November
12, 1995, there were eight books by or about Ralph Waldo Emerson; 19, by
or about Nathaniel Hawthorne; and 23, by or about Henry David Thoreau.
There were no books by or about James Russell Lowell.
Notes
1. quoted by: Harding, Walter. The
Days of Henry Thoreau, p. 65. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965. LC Card
number: 65-18766. - back
2. quoted by: Harding, Walter.
Thoreau
as Seen by His Contemporaries, p. 180, New York: Dover, 1989. ISBN:
0-486-26160-3. - back
3. Harding, Thoreau as Seen,
pp. 154-5 - back
4. Harding, Thoreau as Seen,
p. 181 - back
5. Harding, Thoreau as Seen, p. 134 - back
6. his friend Daniel Ricketson, Harding, Thoreau as Seen,
p.103 - back
7. Harding, Days, p. 299 - back
8. Harding, Days, p. 66 - back
9. Harding, Days, p. 255 - back
10. Thoreau, Henry D. Walden and Other Writings, p. 1,
New York: Random House, 1992. ISBN: 0-679-60004-3. - back
11. Thoreau, p. 91 - back
12. Thoreau, pp. 92 - back
13. Thoreau, pp. 165-6 - back
14. Thoreau, pp. 309-10 - back
15. Harding,
Thoreau as Seen, p. 172 - back
16. Harding, Days, p. 335 - back
17. Harding, Days, p. 335 - back
18. Harding,
Thoreau as Seen, p. 175 - back
19. Harding, Thoreau as Seen, p. 153 - back
20. Harding,
Thoreau as Seen, p. 182 - back
21. Harding, Days, p. 339 - back
22. Harding, Days, p. 457 - back
23. Harding, Days, p. 458 - back
24. Harding,
Thoreau as Seen, p. 71 - back
Copyright © Lucius Furius 1997. Used with permission.
Return to Thoreau Reader
|
|
|