Solid Seasons
ALSO EDITED BY JEFFREY S. CRAMER
Essays by Henry D. Thoreau: A Fully Annotated Edition
I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau
The Maine Woods: A Fully Annotated Edition
The Portable Emerson
The Portable Thoreau
The Quotable Thoreau
Robert Frost Among His Poems: A Literary Companion to the Poet’s Own Biographical Contexts and Associations
Thoreau on Freedom: Selected Writings of Henry David Thoreau
Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition
Solid Seasons
All original material copyright © 2019 by Jeffrey S. Cramer
Page 316 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
First hardcover edition: 2019
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Images courtesy of the Walden Woods Project
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cramer, Jeffrey S., 1955– author.
Title: Solid seasons : the friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson / Jeffrey S. Cramer.
Description: First hardcover edition. | Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018045435 | ISBN 9781640091313
Subjects: LCSH: Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862—Friends and associates. | Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803–1882—Friends and associates. | Authors, American—19th century—Biography. | Friendship—United States—History—19th century.
Classification: LCC PS3053 .C83 2019 | DDC 818/.309 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045435
Jacket design by Sarah Brody
Book design by Jordan Koluch
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To friends—
past, present, and future
Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Journal, February 3, 1840
No word is oftener on the lips of men than Friendship.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Contents
Foreword
Part I: Solid Seasons
A Biography of the Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson
Part II: Thoreau
Friendship
(from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers)
Selected Writings on Friendship
Thoreau on Emerson
Part III: Emerson
Friendship
(from Essays: First Series)
Selected Writings on Friendship
Emerson on Thoreau
Thoreau
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Texts
Abbreviations Used in the Notes
Notes
Bibliography
Foreword
I read John Lehmann’s Three Literary Friendships in 1984. It explores the relationships of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, and, the reason I bought the book at the time, Robert Frost and Edward Thomas. Literary friendships have always intrigued me. Public lives as expressed through their shared writings give us one portrait; personal lives through their private writings give another. The questions for me are how may the two be reconciled, and how does the theme of friendship inform their writings?
To begin work on this book, I placed contemporary accounts—journal passages, letters, documents, etc.—of both subjects together, making visible some relational patterns that might otherwise have been overlooked. Combining public and private records allowed me to trace the intricacies and intimacies of their friendship. It was a relationship not only deeply integral to both men on a personal level but also important to the history of American thought and letters. Any biography that concentrates on either Thoreau or Emerson tends to diminish the other figure because that person is, by the nature of biography, secondary. In this book, both men remain central and equal.
It is my hope that their friendship may be seen in a new light and that I did not become the “great inquisitor” Emerson described in “The Method of Nature” who merely attempts to
bore an Artesian well through our conventions and theories, and pierce to the core of things. But as soon as he probes the crust, behold gimlet, plumb-line, and philosopher take a lateral direction, in spite of all resistance, as if some strong wind took everything off its feet, and if you come month after month to see what progress our reformer has made,—not an inch has he pierced,—you still find him with new words in the old place, floating about in new parts of the same old vein or crust.
It was essential to find the truth of their friendship and not simply present the “same old vein or crust” by relying on myths that have been perpetuated or stories that have remained incomplete because they appeared more dramatic that way. In order to do that, I did not rely on any story told in previous biographies or critical works. I traced stories back, whenever possible, in an attempt to find out if there was a reliable source, and to not merely repeat what had been told before.
Part I of Solid Seasons tells the story of their friendship; Parts II and III let the two friends speak for themselves about friendship generally and about each other specifically; the book concludes with Emerson’s biographical sketch of Thoreau, an expanded version of the eulogy he delivered at Thoreau’s funeral.
No biography is definitive; no examination of a life is complete. “I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture,” Emerson wrote in “Experience.” I have chosen to concentrate on decisive moments and events—and not detail every walk, every conversation these friends shared together—to offer, in Solid Seasons, a new view of an old story: the meaning of friendship. The essence of friendship, Emerson said, was “entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.” Thoreau defined it as the “unspeakable joy and blessing that results to two or more individuals who from constitution sympathize.”
PART I
Solid Seasons
I . . . have had what the Quakers call “a solid season,” once or twice.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, to Henry David Thoreau, February 1843
There was one other with whom I had “solid seasons,” long to be remembered, at his house in the village . . .
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Walden
A Biography of the Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson
When Ralph Waldo Emerson moved to Concord, Massachusetts, in October 1834, he was thirty-one years old and boarding with his step-grandfather in the Old Manse. His first wife had died from tuberculosis. He had travelled to Europe where he met Thomas Carlyle, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He had begun to give public lectures. When he moved into his own home, Bush, the following year, he was remarried, financially independent, and about to have his first book, Nature, published. That same year the seventeen-year-old Concord-born Henry David Thoreau was attending Harvard College.
Stories vary as to how and when they met, but one story Emerson told is this:
My first intimacy with Henry began after his graduation in 1837. Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Emerson’s sister from Plymouth, then boarded with Mrs. Thoreau and her children in the Parkman house, where the Library now stands,
and saw the young people every day. She would bring me verses of Henry’s,—the “Sic Vita,” for instance, which he had thrown into Mrs. Brown’s window, tied round a bunch of violets gathered in his walk,—and once a passage out of his Journal, which he had read to Sophia Thoreau, who spoke of it to Mrs. Brown as resembling a passage in one of my Concord lectures.1
Emerson was generous with both time and money, and his assistance to the young Thoreau was no exception. Emerson loaned Thoreau money in May to travel to Maine to look for a teaching position, accompanied by his personal recommendation: “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 and kindness, and I shall esteem the town fortunate that secures his services.”2 He also wrote to Josiah Quincy, president of Harvard College, trying to secure some financial aid for Thoreau by attributing his lower academic standing to illness rather than any other cause.
Thoreau’s interest in Emerson was also increasing. Having borrowed and read Emerson’s Nature from the college library twice while attending Harvard, he purchased a copy to give to his classmate William Allen, calling it, in an echo of Robert Burns’s “Epistle to a Young Friend,” “neither a sang nor a sermon.”3 He sang Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” in the choir at the dedication of the Obelisk at Concord’s North Bridge in July 1837. And then on August 31 Emerson delivered the Phi Beta Kappa address to Thoreau’s graduating class at Harvard. “The American Scholar” was hailed by Oliver Wendell Holmes as America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.”4 It spoke of and to “Man Thinking,” not an intellectual and academic cerebration, but a thinking with the entirety of soul and self-trust, culminating in the triad, “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.”5
At the time of his graduation, Thoreau was not yet keeping a journal, so his immediate reaction to his Harvard commencement is not known, but when he gave his first public lecture the following spring in Concord, he revisited the memory: “One goes to a cattle-show expecting to find many men and women assembled, and beholds only working oxen and neat cattle. He goes to a commencement thinking that there at least he may find the men of the country; but such, if there were any, are completely merged in the day, and have become so many walking commencements, so that he is fain to take himself out of sight and hearing of the orator, lest he lose his own identity in the nonentities around him.”6
Whether he felt himself losing his identity at his commencement, or whether this was in reaction to or in fear of his falling into the pull of Emerson’s orbit, it was something with which Emerson would agree, and which he made explicit in his address: “I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.”7
Friends and followers came to Concord to meet with Emerson, often commenting on Thoreau as an Emerson wannabe. Among those present in July 1838 was James Russell Lowell, briefly suspended from Harvard, who found it “exquisitely amusing” to see how Thoreau “imitates Emerson’s tone and manner. With my eyes shut I shouldn’t know them apart.”8 A decade later Lowell was even more stringently satirical in A Fable for Critics, in which he wrote,
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 orchards alone?9
But Lowell wasn’t alone in seeing Thoreau adopting Emersonian characteristics. David Haskins Greene, Thoreau’s Harvard classmate, was
quite startled by the transformation that had taken place in him. His short figure and general caste of countenance were, of course, unchanged; but in his manners, in the tones and inflections of his voice, in his modes of expression, even in the hesitations and pauses of his speech, he had become the counterpart of Mr. Emerson. Mr. Thoreau’s college voice bore no resemblance to Mr. Emerson’s, and was so familiar to my ear that I could readily have identified him by it in the dark. I was so much struck with the change, and with the resemblance in the respects referred to between Mr. Emerson and Mr. Thoreau, that I remember to have taken the opportunity as they sat near together, talking, of listening to their conversation with closed eyes, and to have been unable to determine with certainty which was speaking. It was a notable instance of unconscious imitation.10
Frank Sanborn, educator, reformer, and journalist, shortly after his move to Concord in 1853 dismissed Thoreau as “a sort of pocket edition of Mr. Emerson, as far as outward appearance goes, in coarser binding and with woodcuts instead of the fine steel-engravings of Mr. Emerson. He is a little under size, with a huge Emersonian nose . . . He dresses very plainly, wears his collar turned over like Mr. Emerson. . . . He talks like Mr. Emerson and so spoils the good things which he says; for what in Mr. Emerson is charming, becomes ludicrous in Thoreau, because an imitation.”11 One journalist, on hearing his talk on “White Beans and Walden Pond,” thought Thoreau “might very probably attain to a more respectable rank, if he were satisfied to be himself, Henry D. Thoreau, and not aim to be Ralph Waldo Emerson or any body else.”12
If this was something Emerson himself recognized in the early days of their friendship—“I am very familiar with all his thoughts,—they are my own quite originally drest.”13—he soon became exasperated by the comparison which would persist long after Thoreau’s death. Emerson defended his friend: “I am sure he is entitled to stand quite alone on his proper merits. There might easily have been a little influence from his neighbors on his first writings: He was not quite out of college, I believe, when I first saw him: but it is long since I, and I think all who knew him, felt that he was the most independent of men in thought and in action.”14 Emerson had no patience for narrow views of Thoreau. “Now and then I come across a man that scoffs at Thoreau,” he told Pendleton King in 1870, “and thinks him affected. For example, Mr. James Russell Lowell is constantly making flings at him. I have tried to show him that Thoreau did things that no one could have done without high powers; but to no purpose.”15
Thoreau’s mother also saw a resemblance, although with a more maternal reference—“How much Mr. Emerson does talk like my Henry.”16
Emerson and Thoreau would take long walks together, boat on the river, have discussions alone or with others in Emerson’s circle in Emerson’s study or around the dinner table with family. On October 22, 1837, during one of their many exchanges, Emerson tried to think of people who kept journals. He could only name the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, his neighbor Amos Bronson Alcott, his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and himself. “Beside these,” he wrote the next day, “I did not last night think of another.”17 It was at this time that he asked Thoreau the question that became the first entry in Thoreau’s two-million-word journal: “‘What are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry to-day.”18
The journal, for both writers, was an integral part of their process. Thoreau’s journal contains around two million words, Emerson’s over three million. For both men, journals were the work of a lifetime but not their life’s work. They laid the groundwork for the lectures and essays and books that were to follow. When Thoreau and Emerson combed their journals for material, it mattered little when, where, or even what circumstance had prompted an entry, as long as the text reflected the theme of what they were currently writing. “It is surely foolish,” Emerson expressed in his
journal, “to adhere rigidly to the order of time in putting down one’s thoughts, and to neglect the order of thought. I put like things together.”19
Emerson considered his journal his “Savings Bank. I grow richer because I have somewhere to deposit my earnings; and fractions are worth more to me because corresponding fractions are waiting here that shall be made integers by their addition.”20 It was similar for Thoreau. “Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg,” he wrote, “by the side of which more will be laid. Thoughts accidentally thrown together become a frame in which more may be developed and exhibited. Perhaps this is the main value of a habit of writing, of keeping a journal,—that so we remember our best hours and stimulate ourselves.”21
Their work habits, however, were quite different. Emerson wrote that Thoreau “knew but one secret, which was to do one thing at a time, and though he has his evenings for study, if he was in the day inventing machines for sawing his plumbago, he invents wheels all the evening and night also; and if this week he has some good reading and thoughts before him, his brain runs on that all day, whilst pencils pass through his hands.” Emerson found in himself “an opposite facility or perversity, that I never seem well to do a particular work until another is due. I cannot write the poem, though you give me a week, but if I promise to read a lecture the day after to-morrow, at once the poem comes into my head and now the rhymes will flow. And let the proofs of the Dial be crowding on me from the printer, and I am full of faculty how to make the lecture.”22
At the end of 1837 Lidian Emerson wrote that her husband had “taken to Henry with great interest,” finding him uncommon “in mind and character.”23 It was these moments of uncommonness and originality, mixed with Thoreau’s contrariness, that often interested Emerson.