THE THOREAU YOU DON'T KNOWWhat the Prophet of Environmentalism Really Meant
ROBERT SULLIVAN (Collins)
Look at the cover design and drawing of this book — yes, judge a book by its cover! — and this one is a winner. The wry smile and almost a wink from a many petaled thorny one Henry David Thoreau.
Now looking over my near half-century Thoreau library, with all his books, the tome Journals, all the biographies and scholarly books, the Emerson tribute, the Channing biography, and of course the two books still running current today and where Robert Sullivan wisely skinny-dipped in and out of for his own Thoreau portrait: Walter Harding's The Days of Henry Thoreau, and Robert Richardson's Henry Thoreau: A Life of Mind. What I like about the Sullivan is it is new, somewhat brash, opinionated, respectful, quite thorough on Henry of Concord with its bits of Emerson, Alcott, Channing, Fuller, even his time away from home when within the vicinity of Whitman; in other words the author is a whipper-snapper so he knows a whipper-snapper. We haven't had a book on Thoreau in any part of the modern era quite like that and since Ellery Channing's slim volume, which I always liked. Channing described Thoreau's hut on Walden Pond as a "wooden inkstand" because of how much writing he got done while out there. This new biography complements that juicy image.
Just to imagine the changes during Thoreau's short life time — and he died at about the same age as Jack Kerouac, Franz Kafka, Flannery O' Connor, DH Lawrence, Jack London — in other words in the prime of life — in 1830 when Thoreau was a boy there was 23 miles of railroad track in all of America. By the time he died, thirty-two years later, there were 30,000 miles of track. A time of expansion, as colonial agriculture was being overwhelmed by the early stages of industrial capitalism. Here was a young writer grown into the woods and fields with such a passion for words and meaning that he pored over the 17 dictionaries he owned when in from the outdoors.
His masterpiece Walden (and others like myself would argue for all his Journals, the seed bed of all his writings) earned Thoreau $96.60 in royalties. The shimmering classic even managed to go out of print in the author's lifetime, but Thoreau convinced a publisher just before his death to reissue the book, and it's been sailing in print ever since. It was from Bronson Alcott where Thoreau borrowed an ax to begin work at Walden Pond, and from this same close friend he caught his last cold in 1861 which marched ahead into influenza, then severe bronchitis, and Thoreau was never well again. He was dead within a year.
As for the hut at Walden Pond — when the "experiment" (of less than two years) was over with, Thoreau sold the hut to Emerson (whose land it was perched on) who then sold it to the farmer Hugh Whelan. Whelan took the whole hut and put it up onto a cellar hole he dug by hand (there today near Walden Street in Concord) where it started out as a shed, then part of a larger building which is no longer anywhere. Vanished into thin air. No plaque or memorial. The very best history of America is under your bootsoles, ignored, hidden away, circulating in the fields and streams.
My very favorite story about Thoreau from any book or scholarly study, is how when he only had a few weeks left to live and the family had moved his bed downstairs to the parlor so he was available for visitors, and they came and came. His friend H.G.O. Blake came, too, all the way down from Worcester. On ice-skates.
Now looking over my near half-century Thoreau library, with all his books, the tome Journals, all the biographies and scholarly books, the Emerson tribute, the Channing biography, and of course the two books still running current today and where Robert Sullivan wisely skinny-dipped in and out of for his own Thoreau portrait: Walter Harding's The Days of Henry Thoreau, and Robert Richardson's Henry Thoreau: A Life of Mind. What I like about the Sullivan is it is new, somewhat brash, opinionated, respectful, quite thorough on Henry of Concord with its bits of Emerson, Alcott, Channing, Fuller, even his time away from home when within the vicinity of Whitman; in other words the author is a whipper-snapper so he knows a whipper-snapper. We haven't had a book on Thoreau in any part of the modern era quite like that and since Ellery Channing's slim volume, which I always liked. Channing described Thoreau's hut on Walden Pond as a "wooden inkstand" because of how much writing he got done while out there. This new biography complements that juicy image.
Just to imagine the changes during Thoreau's short life time — and he died at about the same age as Jack Kerouac, Franz Kafka, Flannery O' Connor, DH Lawrence, Jack London — in other words in the prime of life — in 1830 when Thoreau was a boy there was 23 miles of railroad track in all of America. By the time he died, thirty-two years later, there were 30,000 miles of track. A time of expansion, as colonial agriculture was being overwhelmed by the early stages of industrial capitalism. Here was a young writer grown into the woods and fields with such a passion for words and meaning that he pored over the 17 dictionaries he owned when in from the outdoors.
His masterpiece Walden (and others like myself would argue for all his Journals, the seed bed of all his writings) earned Thoreau $96.60 in royalties. The shimmering classic even managed to go out of print in the author's lifetime, but Thoreau convinced a publisher just before his death to reissue the book, and it's been sailing in print ever since. It was from Bronson Alcott where Thoreau borrowed an ax to begin work at Walden Pond, and from this same close friend he caught his last cold in 1861 which marched ahead into influenza, then severe bronchitis, and Thoreau was never well again. He was dead within a year.
As for the hut at Walden Pond — when the "experiment" (of less than two years) was over with, Thoreau sold the hut to Emerson (whose land it was perched on) who then sold it to the farmer Hugh Whelan. Whelan took the whole hut and put it up onto a cellar hole he dug by hand (there today near Walden Street in Concord) where it started out as a shed, then part of a larger building which is no longer anywhere. Vanished into thin air. No plaque or memorial. The very best history of America is under your bootsoles, ignored, hidden away, circulating in the fields and streams.
My very favorite story about Thoreau from any book or scholarly study, is how when he only had a few weeks left to live and the family had moved his bed downstairs to the parlor so he was available for visitors, and they came and came. His friend H.G.O. Blake came, too, all the way down from Worcester. On ice-skates.
An excellent companion essay might be "The Thoreau Problem" by Rebecca Solnit from the new anthology American Earth, ed. Bill McKibben (The Library of America)
~ In Memory ~
Deborah Digges
~ In Memory ~
Deborah Digges
