literature review

38 | NEW STATESMAN | 1 4-20 JULY 2017

THE CRITICS | BOOKS

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2017+28 038 CRITICS BOOKS LEAD Mark Cocker on Thoreau at 200.indd 38 11/07/2017 18:31:23

1 4-20 JULY 2017 | NEW STATESMAN | 39

THE CRITICS | BOOKS

This month marks the bicentenary of the birth of the American author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817- 1862). Despite the century and a half that have passed since his premature death – he was 4 4 when he succumbed to tuberculosis – Thoreau remains arguably the most im- portant writer in the English language on our relationship with the rest of nature.

His book Walden (185 4), widely viewed as his masterpiece, is available today in at least 17 different editions, and such is its enduring status as one of the classics of American literature that the novelist John Updike feared it was at risk of the same literary condition as the Bible: exalted but unread. Despite such misgivings, Thoreau’s continued relevance is indisputable. Almost every word that he ever wrote – much of it unpublished in his lifetime – is still in print in some form or other, including A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865), his collected essays and poems and his monumental, two-million-word journal, which runs to 1 4 volumes.

The prophet of Walden Pond

Nature writer, tax dodger, moralist, activist, pencil manufacturer – 200 years after his birth, Thoreau still surprises

By Mark Cocker

Thoreau was an important thinker on more than just the natural environment. His other great themes were humanity and the pursuit of a moral life. He was, for in- stance, a lifelong opponent of slavery and an inveterate source of succour to runaway slaves. In 1845, having withheld his poll tax for years from the US government on the basis that it was morally unfit to enjoy his meagre contributions, Thoreau was arrest- ed and incarcerated.

The time spent in the town jail may have been no more than a single night, but three years later the experience inspired an essay that became one of the foundational texts on the individual’s moral duty towards unjust or illegal government. The title of the piece, Civil Disobedience, has helped to frame campaigns of resistance to oppressive regimes across the world and has impacted on the lives of millions of people.

All of this global significance comes from a man whose central legend is that he lived, worked, walked, thought, wrote and died in the small Massachusetts town of Concord, where he was born. Among the merits of Laura Dassow Walls’s excellent, wonder- fully exhaustive biography is its ability to tease out and unpick many of the myths about Thoreau. One of them concerns his supposed relish for poverty. The author who wrote, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone,” came from a family of French Huguenot descent that enjoyed increasing middle-class prosperity based on the fac- tory production of graphite pencils.

Nor was the hermit of Walden Pond too unworldly to get involved in commerce. On the contrary, Thoreau was a tinkerer who loved to create or improve the design of things, from boats, houses and machin- ery to orchards and pencil production. It was his refinement of the manufacturing process that sealed the reputation of Tho- reau pencils as among the finest in 19th- century America.

Henry David Thoreau: a Life

Laura Dassow Walls

University of Chicago Press, 615pp, £26.50

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The parental household, in which he lived as a lifelong bachelor, appears to have been peaceful and loving, intellectually elevated, artistic, solidly liberal in politics and broad-minded in matters of religion. What helped determine the young Tho- reau’s attitude towards Christianity was not parental pressure but the many disputes between Concord’s various Trinitarian and Unitarian factions. His creed evolved out of lofty indifference to such squabbles and a growing conviction that life’s only true text was nature, while the proper place for worship was the woods and fields.

In later life Thoreau’s vehicle for such ideas was the many lectures, essays and books that he produced over two decades, in which he perfected a prose admired for its mixture of pithy, aphoristic clarity and

dazzling self-confidence. So it is striking to observe that the young author was noted not for any egotism but for his acute reserve. The youth of Concord used to throw snow- balls at the po-faced young Henry, mocking his big nose and insulting him as “the old maid” or “the Judge”.

Thoreau’s years as a young adult were also marked by a struggle to escape the heavy shadows cast by the two older male figures to whom he was closest. These in- cluded his elder brother, John, who was as popular, outgoing and athletic as Henry was withdrawn and awkward. Yet there was never a hint of jealousy on Thoreau’s part towards his charismatic sibling.

This was partly a result of Thoreau’s dawning self-confidence, which he ac- quired through his Harvard education and was something that the family did not ex- tend to their less-gifted elder son. The other more tragic reason was John’s death from tetanus in 1842, when he was just 26 years old. Henry was capsized by the event and eventually made his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a kind of memorial to his brother. Yet John’s early death had the unforeseen consequence of freeing Thoreau to cut his own increasingly individual path.

The other pivotal figure in his life was his Concord neighbour, the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was already famous when they first met. Their relationship continued until Thoreau’s death, by which time his material and intellectual debts

to the older man were massive. He often lived with and worked for Emerson, shar- ing household life as if he were a family member. Thoreau was also inducted into the wider society of Emerson’s transcen- dentalist coterie, which included the mystic and teacher Amos Bronson Alcott, the poet William Ellery Channing, the journalist and proto-feminist Margaret Fuller and the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. These con- nections expanded Thoreau’s horizons and helped bring his work to the attention of authors or editors, while hugely assisting his earliest efforts to be published.

The link between the two men may have survived, but it was often intensely troubled. Perhaps the force field created by Emerson’s reputation carried too high a voltage for the younger, unknown writer

to flourish comfortably within its orbit. Critics such as James Russell Lowell sneered that Thoreau’s ideas were merely fruits stolen from his neighbour’s orchard. One of the small complaints I have of Walls’s biography is that she is too reluctant to step out from the daily facts to intrude her own opinions on these broader themes.

Walls is a distinguished academic spe- cialising in Thoreau and the wider intellec- tual world of 19th-century New England. But her biography, the first major study in a generation, prefers to illuminate rather than to diagnose the character of its subject. All Walls will reveal about his relationship with Emerson is what Thoreau tells us. He repeatedly produced obituary notices of the friendship, while the other man noted: “As

for taking Thoreau’s arm I should as soon take the arm of an elm tree.” For all their name-calling, however, their vital friend- ship strangely endured.

One of the benefits of Walls’s biographi- cal method is that, in accumulating the mi- nutiae of his daily life, she enables the read- er to appreciate some of the contradictions in Thoreau’s character. One such example arises from his late career as a land surveyor, to which he brought the gifts of technical problem-solving and meticulous observa- tion. Thoreau was much in demand about Concord and while it gave him an hon- est crust as he tried to write, his surveying work directly assisted the industrial con- version of a landscape he cherished. Many of the woods he surveyed were clear-felled and destroyed. He may have asked his read- ers to “get your living by loving” but Tho- reau also helped to kill the things he loved.

Even more compelling is the opportunity she provides to examine Thoreau’s reputa- tion as the consummate woodsman who, in Virginia Woolf ’s words, “could lift a fish out of the stream with his hands [and] charm a wild squirrel to nestle in his coat”. In Maine, however, where Thoreau made several arduous expeditions into the fur- thest reaches of the Penobscot watershed, he hired as a guide a Native American called Joe Polis. This tribal elder, who was also a political champion of his people and well versed in the equally treacherous swamps of the white man’s politics, was frequently astonished by the childlike lack of survival skills exhibited by his Yankee clients. Not that the author bragged. “He begins where we leave off,” was Thoreau’s verdict on the relative merits of the white and red man, when it came to living off the land.

What this new book allows us to appreci- ate is Thoreau’s essential human qualities. He may well have been a lesser person than his legend. He may have been found want- ing when measured by the moral strictures issued in his blistering – and, let’s be fair, humorous – writings.

Yet in his study of nature Thoreau dem- onstrated the same omnivorous appetite and intellectual qualities as his contem- poraries Alexander von Humboldt (1769- 1859) and Charles Darwin (1809-82). He was a poet, philosopher and writer every bit the equal of Emerson. His masterpiece is a prototype for an entire literary genre, a text that mediates between the author’s self and the more than human parts of na- ture. As Walls writes, “Walden blossoms as a holograph of the planet and of one human life, lived as a prism refracting the sunlight on to the page.” l Mark Cocker’s new book, “Our Place”, will be published in 2018 by Jonathan Cape

The youth of Concord used to throw snowballs at Thoreau, insulting him

as “the old maid” or “the Judge”

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2017+28 038 CRITICS BOOKS LEAD Mark Cocker on Thoreau at 200.indd 40 11/07/2017 18:31:24

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