(Note: This is an obvious change of pace from Palestine, etc. It's been in progress for a while.)
In October of 2015, the New Yorker
magazine ran an article by award-winning journalist Kathryn Schulz ttitled “Pond Scum: The
Real Henry David Thoreau.” As you surmised, it was unflattering. The “real”
guy behind Walden and Civil Disobedience was, said Schulz:
in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical
about self-control, adamant that he required nothing
beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world. From that inward
fixation flowed a social and political vision that is
deeply unsettling.
The “Pond Scum” title was
catchy, for sure, and the piece was noteworthy for having appeared in a
publication aspiring to the highest standards of advertisements for cashmere
watchcaps.
Content-wise, though, it
was just another in a long line of modern attempts – still underway -- to dismiss
Thoreau. Besides Schulz’s accusation of colossal self-absorption, Henry has
been found
wanting on many another standard. He's been pigeon-holed and dismissed as a mere “romantic” by opponents
of landscape protection. He’s been
accused of hypocrisy because he walked into town from Walden Pond several days
a week and because he waxed eloquent about wildness but seldom left suburban Concord.
His writing, though good enough for Leo
Tolstoy, Mahatma Ghandi, and Martin Luther King, seems to be increasingly dismissed
or misrepresented.
And then
there is the “laundry
sneer.” It has become the very height of fashion in theThoreau-bashing
literature to point out that, while living at Walden, his mother may have once
-- or sometimes, or maybe often, nobody really knows --washed his clothes for
him. This, we are to think, is the ultimate hypocrisy, what with his boasting
about independence and “essential living.” As one
critic, who seems to have confused Thoreau with a Rocky Mountain fur
trapper, put it, “Even I could be a mountain man too if my
mother did my laundry for me.”
Well, nobody ever confused Henry with Mother Teresa,
and his literary style isn’t for everybody. Yet a great deal of the current
Thoreau criticism has a certain meanness to it – a kind of quiet desperation to
make him irrelevant
Myself, I always found Thoreau to be a pretty darn
good paragrapher who both amused me with his ironic humor and challenged me
with the questions he raised. I find his eccentricity refreshing, and his
overall approach to life admirable. I’m a member of that group for whom, as M.
Allen Cunningham
put it, “Thoreau’s writing was a
drug. It knocked my neurons around.”
I have, therefore,
selected a handful of the major charges frequently made against Thoreau, and
will try to explain why, to me, they do not hold up to any serious inspection.
Self-Obsession.
Thoreau does talk a lot about the importance of the individual, and he writes
in the first person because, as he says in Walden, “I should not
talk about myself if there were anyone whom I knew as well. I am confined to
this theme by the narrowness of my experience.” Much of his writing, especially
in Walden, is an effort to better understand himself, a project recommended by
philosophers reaching back at least as far as Socrates.
As for seeming to put his own interests ahead of the
community’s, I always found his discussions about the importance of the
individual as a legitimate warning against the State (or the corporation, or
the Empire) making us all mere cogs in its massive machine. Events since
Thoreau’s time would seem to justify his worst fears.
More specifically, by many accounts Thoreau was
extremely unselfish. At Walden, he left
his cabin unlocked and encouraged people to go in and borrow his books. He hosted
a meeting at the cabin for the Concord Women’s Anti-slavery Society. When
his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne moved to Concord, Thoreau planted a garden for
him as a welcoming gift.
Speaking of friends, he had many more than you might
expect of a guy who believed he “required
nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world.” Some were
intellectuals of note: the poet Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s
wife, Lydian, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott and the entire
family Bronson Alcott family, including Alcott’s daugher Louisa May. There were
others less formally educated, including a Concord farmer named Pratt, at whose
home Thoreau was a frequent visitor, and a French Canadian “woodchopper” named
Alek Thieren, who frequently dropped in on Thoreau at Walden. Thieren, Thoreau
noted approvingly, was gifted with “a
well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his eyes. His mirth was
without alloy. Sometimes I saw him at his work in the woods, felling trees, and
he would greet me with a laugh of inexpressible satisfaction…” (Thoreau, 1854,
136-137).
Thoreau’s closest
friend in his youth was probably his brother John, younger by two years. Not
long after the two brothers took a little expedition on the Concord and Merrimack
Rivers, John cut himself shaving and contracted tetanus, often then called
“lockjaw.” Henry spent a great deal of time nursing John as the latter became
increasingly unwell. Henry’s grief was so powerful that his own jaw literally
froze up in a kind of involuntary sympathetic reaction (Harding, 136).
There’s more. When Thoreau noticed a five-year-old
neighbor walking to school in the snow with inadequate clothing, he delivered a
coat to the boy’s home and became friends with his Irish-immigrant family. He
loaned money to another impoverished immigrant family, the Flannerys. He took
up collections for Irish immigrants, wrote letters for immigrants who couldn’t
write. And, as Harding reports” (313):
When he learned that [an Irish
immigrant] was trying to raise money to bring his family across the Atlantic to
join him, Thoreau got up a subscription paper and went from door to door asking
for contributions and loans.
In the fall of 1844, the year before Thoreau moved to
Walden Pond, his family bought some property in town to build a house on. The
supposedly self-absorbed Henry immediately upped his working hours at the
pencil factory to help finance the project, cutting back on the precious hours he
otherwise spent daily walking the woods and fields. And then, as Hardy writes:
‘Henry … dug the cellar, and stoned it himself. Then
with his father he did the actual building (177-8).’
He wasn’t done there, though. The house at first, says
Harding,
… looked bare and lonely,
so Thoreau set to work again, made a bank around the house, and then planted
about forty trees, including fourteen apple trees, a grapevine, and a syringa
bush among others (178).
It’s true of course that Henry benefitted from helping
his parents get their own house. He himself lived in it later, though never for
free – he meticulously paid his father for “board.” But these actions and others demonstrate that
he was nothing like the self-obsessed slacker he has sometimes been depicted
as.
One paragraph in one of the best Thoreau biographies
further blows away the idea that Henry cared little for anyone but himself.
Walter Harding, in The Days of Henry Thoreau, cites testimony
from a Concord contemporary of Thoreau named Mrs. Edwin Bigelow. She happens to
have been “the acknowledged leader of Concord’s participants in the Underground
Railroad.” Bigelow, says Harding, has “testified”:
… that rarely a week went
by without some fugitive [slave] being harbored overnight in town and sped
along his way before daylight. Henry Thoreau more than any man in Concord
looked after them, she said, caring for them for the night, purchasing their tickets,
escorting them to the station (316-17).
Thoreau,
furthermore, often took the runaways to a station away from Concord – in West
Fitchburg – because it was smaller and they would feel safer. And even more,
“for further protection,” Thoreau was known to
… accompany them on the
trains for a while, although taking care to sit in separate seats so as not to
attract attention (p 317).
None of the above strike me as the behavior of a man obsessed
only with his own interests.
As noted above, Schulz allows that Thoreau’s
self-obsession led to “a social and
political vision that is deeply unsettling.” Thoreau certainly did have
opinions that related to politics, but I’m not sure he ever had anything like a
political or social vision. He despised politics, was never associated with any
political “isms.” Some of his statements about government and do-gooding have
been snatched up by disciples of the Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand school of “free-market”
economics. It seems doubtful, though, that, given his abhorrence of human exploitation
and disdain for money grubbing, he would have had any sympathy with their
cause.
If Thoreau did have an
official political platform, it might be boiled down to a few basic tenets:
1. Opposition to slavery per se and other forms of
human exploitation.
2. Opposition to nationalism, militarism, and
countries -- especially his own --invading one another.
3. Support for the preservation of wildlands.
As regards a “social”
platform, most of his commentary here is by way of advocating certain habits of
living that worked for him. These included finding time to meditate, walk
outside, and write. Foregoing a lot of material wealth was a way he could make
these things happen.
How any of this could be
categorized as “alarming,” remains unexplained to me, despite the efforts of
Shulz and others to make it clear.
Humorlessness. Thoreau is frequently portrayed as a
puritanical “sore head” (that’s Garrison Keillor) in great need of lightening
up. Yet a very large portion of what he wrote was intended – and, in his time,
greatly appreciated -- as ironic humor. Walden is full of wry references to
events and people that were in the news at the time, much like the material of
late night talk show hosts nowadays. He developed essays and Walden chapters by
reading them as lectures at the Concord Lyseum and similar venues. These were
well attended and much appreciated for their jokey references. His mentor,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, noted about one of them that the audience "laughed
till they cried" (Hohn).
At another lecture,
Thoreau read from a draft of what would become the first chapter of Walden.
That chapter has been described by Shulz as "dry, sententious,
[and] condescending."
But the attendees don't seem to have agreed. A Salem newspaper said that the
talk was "done … in a strain of exquisite humor, with a strong
undercurrent of delicate satire against the follies of the times.” It kept the
audience, the reviewer notes, “in almost constant mirth.”
References to Queen
Adelaide having “the whooping cough,” or to a nineteenth century explorer who
traveled the world, as Thoreau said, “to count the cats in Zanzabar” were funny
at the time. It’s easy to see why they don’t seem as much today. But just
because his jokes are outdated doesn’t mean Thoreau was humorless.
Hypocrite. His writing has been misunderstood – or
misrepresented – in other ways too. His critics love to point out that even as
he posed as a hermit immersing himself in wildness, he walked into town several
times a week to dine out with friends, hang out at the post office, and visit
his family.
Well, he did indeed write
about the solitude he enjoyed at Walden.
But he never claimed to be a complete hermit or survivalist of the kind
now shown on popular "reality TV" shows. An entire Walden chapter is devoted to the
people he ran into or who came by the cabin; another is devoted to “The
Village.” In the latter he freely admits to walking into town regularly, never
guessing that he would, a century and a half later, be pilloried for it. These
visits even lead to one of his most eloquent passages, a discussion of his
meditative walks back to his cabin from town after dark:
It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in town, to
launch myself into the night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and
set sail from some bright village parlor or lecture room, … with a merry crew
of thoughts, leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even tying up the helm
if it was plain sailing. (Walden, 165).
We don’t demand of anyone
else that they be either a complete hermit or a social butterfly, choose one or
the other. We all need our own personal ratio of solitude to human interaction.
Thoreau relished solitude more than most do. But he also enjoyed socializing, even
if for him it was best done in smaller doses than many prefer. His critics
demand more than is possible. If he is overly solitary, he’s a selfish
misanthrope; if he’s not hermitic enough, he’s a hypocrite.
Hypocrite About
Wildness
Much has been made
in recent times of the fact that, while extolling “wildness,” Thoreau never
lived farther than a mile from town. He almost never left New England, and
never went farther west than Minnesota. And this, to many, makes him a phony.
It’s true enough that the
landscape around Concord was far from a pristine wilderness in the mid-1800s.It
was, however, very much wilder than it is now. And it was perhaps as wild as
many places we have officially designated as “wilderness” today, with their
detailed maps, their trail signs every few miles, their designated campsites, their
permit systems, and their trained teams of rescuers ready to save adventurers
from their own bad decisions.
Said Henry himself:
I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty,
any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house,
without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by
the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the woodside. There are
square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant.
This was plenty of
wildness for a man with Thoreau’s imagination and powers of observation. Never
tiring of it, he was out and about in the woods, fields, and wetlands virtually
every day, in every season, for years on end. And as a result he became an
advocate for something still critically important for the sanity of humanity:
the protection of pockets of wildness, even if small, right in and around our
towns and cities. “every town
should have a park,” he
says,
or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred
or a thousand acres, either in one body or several, where a stick would never
be cut for fuel, not for the navy, not to make wagons, but stand and decay for
higher uses - a common possession for instruction and recreation.
As for Thoreau’s trips
further afield, they were no luxury tour. His three trips to the “Maine Woods”
are the most well-known, and the central Maine of the mid-1800s was still, in
most respects, an extremely vast and wild place. His trips were strenuous and
gave him a rather thorough immersion in ….. And they inspired in him a couple
of sentences well worth our appreciation today.
Two Kinds of
Wildness
This brings us directly to what may be
Thoreau’s most famous line: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”
What is it about that simple sentence that appeals to so many of us today? I
believe the appeal is in Thoreau’s double-meaning of “wildness.” Thoreau here
is referring to both the wildness of landscape and of the mind. Or, in other
words, to the wildness that is lost when we over-civilize the land, and the
wildness that is lost when we over-domesticate our own selves.
When we over-domesticate ourselves, we
become like fenced-in cows as opposed to their wild cousins, the deer or the
caribou. There is a certain physical fitness that is lost, but also – and more
importantly -- a mental alertness. The more domesticated we are, the more we
think like the herd. We become indoctrinated to the prevailing way of thinking,
which often involves the preservation of the social order above all else. Or,
to put it more simply, domestication turns us into cowardly, lazy conformists
without us even knowing it.
This, I think, is Thoreau’s point in the
essay, “Walking,” from which the famous “wildness” quote is drawn. In the very
first paragraph, he says he wishes to make an “extreme” statement for “absolute freedom
and wildness” (my italics). So he’s a self-admitted extremist. But only an
extreme statement will do because:
“…there are enough
champions of civilization; the minister, and the school-committee, and every
one of you will take care of that.”
One of my own favorite passages in that
essay is this:
I love even to see the
domestic animals reassert their native rights, — any evidence that they have
not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor’s cow
breaks out of her pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a
cold, gray tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow.
It is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi. This exploit confers some dignity
on the herd in my eyes, — already dignified. The seeds of instinct are
preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in the bowels
of the earth, an indefinite period.
And so, for Thoreau, freedom and
wildness are inseparable. Free thinking, free speech, freedom from slavery, and
freedom from conformist thinking all require both an internal and an external
wildness.
At
the same time, he wanted nothing through the sacrifice of someone else. As he
put it in “Civil
Disobedience,”
“If I devote myself
to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not
pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first,
that he may pursue his contemplations too.”
Mama’s Boy (The Laundry Sneer).
“‘I would bet that fewer Americans have
read Walden than have heard that Thoreau’s mother did
his laundry.’ So observed Jedediah Britton-Purdy in The New Republic in 2017.
Another commentator,
the gifted essayist Rebecca Solnit, put it this way:
There
is one writer in all literature whose laundry arrangements have been excoriated
again and again, and it is not Virginia Woolf, who almost certainly never did
her own washing, or James Baldwin, or the rest of the global pantheon. … Only
Henry David Thoreau has been tried in the popular imagination and found wanting
for his cleaning arrangements, though the true nature of those arrangements are
not so clear.
There is even a
play about this supposed outrage: “Laundry
Day at Mrs. Thoreua’s” -- “based on the fact, confirmed in many places,
that Henry David Thoreau brought his laundry home to his mother while he was
living at Walden Pond.”
Alas, however,
the “fact” about Mrs. Thoreau, though probably true, has
not been “confirmed in many places”. It has never been confirmed at
all, but rather repeated in many places. There is only one contemporary
source for the laundry sneer, and that is from Thoreau himself. In Chapter One
of Walden he says:
“washing and
mending . . . for the most part were done out of the house, and their bills
have not yet been received.”
Thoreau scholars
seem to agree that Henry was most likely referring to his mother, even though,
as mentioned, there exists no absolute proof of this. But the really important
question is, simply, Who cares?
Well, it seems
that for about 150 years, nobody did. A Thoreau scholar named Renalli conducted
an exhaustive examination of all things laundry as they might relate to
Thoreau. He found not a single reference to Henry’s mom doing his laundry until
well into the twenty-first century. This was by the writer Paul
Theraux, who in an introduction to a new edition of The Maine Woods, in 200_,
said that Thoreau “did not mention that he brought his mother his dirty laundry
and went on enjoying her apple pies.”
From there the
laundry sneer spread like a modern pandemic, showing up even in the most
unlikely places. You might not think, for instance, that the Chief Scientist at
The Nature Conservancy would have little interest in Thoreau’s dirty socks. You
might think that that guy, one Peter Kareiva, would be too busy trying to
conserve nature. Kareiva has actually moved on from that job, but while holding
it he developed a Power
Point presentation in which he seems to have enjoyed denigrating Thoreau
for outsourcing his laundry and Edward Abbey for once admitting to feeling
lonely in his fire tower.
Why the
Animosity?
As mentioned, the
most important question in this discussion might be: Why the downright meanness
toward Thoreau? It’s easy to see why anyone might not enjoy reading his work,
and there are reasonable rejoinders to any of his many strong opinions. But why
the need to create hypocrisies that are not really there and to paint him as a
virtual sociopath?
Solnit has one
answer that probably covers a lot of it: that “pretending to care” about his trivial
inconsistencies is “a way of not having to care about Thoreau.”
Most importantly,
Thoreau is subversive. His constant calls to question authority and to re-think received wisdom are dangerous
to our youth. Socrates was executed for
similar crimes.
In “Civil Disobedience,” for one example,
Thoreau calls for an outright revolt:
… when a
sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of
liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a
foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon
for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.
People that subversive
are not likely to be left alone. They need to be taken down a peg or two.
Malcolm X has been permanently labelled as a violence-endorsing extremist.
Martin Luther King’s sex life will continue to be scrutinized, and his
objection to his country’s brutal violence against poor people around the world
has been effectively censored from the TV ads celebrating his greatness.
Returning to Thoreau, I
find remarkable the number of people I talk with who have “heard” of his
various hypocrisies. They haven’t read much of his work, nor even much about
his life, but they have a vague feeling he’s not to be much admired.
They are missing out on
a lot.