Thoreau: A Life

Nonfiction

Renaissance woodsman

THOREAU: A Life

Laura Dassow Walls

615 pp. University of Chicago Press

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

Thought we knew all about Thoreau, did we? An idle, eccentric hermit who spent two solitary years in a hut at Walden Pond and wrote a book about it? And sometimes took the Alcott girls out to wander the Concord meadows and catch butterflies?

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Thoreau was a graduate of Harvard College, a meticulous naturalist who contributed to scientific studies, was elected to natural history societies, knew Greek, Latin, German and French, and could read other languages. He studied and developed empathy with American Indians, conducting anthropological research before the term existed. He overcame his love of solitude to become a witty and popular lecturer and a fiery abolitionist speaker. A century ahead of American hippies, he became fascinated with Eastern religions and assembled a library of such writings. He was fond of machinery and insatiably curious; he seldom passed a work site or a factory without stopping to find out how things worked. His dwelling at Walden was a small but proper house with a cellar and glass windows, not a cabin and certainly not a hut. And although he “traveled much in Concord,” he traveled elsewhere, too, as far west as Minnesota.

In a monumental research job, Walls has produced a Pulitzer-worthy biography of America’s iconic (arguably the first) nature writer. The author appends 115 pages of notes at the end, plus a useful index. It appears that she has read every one of the two-million-plus words written by Henry David Thoreau, as well as thousands written to and about him.

The book Walden was not a flop; critics praised it from the beginning. It was Thoreau’s first book, self-published, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, that sold only 200 copies and resulted in his famous quip, “I have a library of 700 books, 500 of which I have written myself.”

Far from a hermit, Thoreau was a sought-after companion and a friend of many of the thinkers of the day. He was committed to his family and lived most of his life with them. He not only worked at his father’s pencil factory, he researched and developed a pencil lead that was considered far superior to that of any of his competitors. He was in demand as a surveyor, produced survey maps of much of Concord, including Walden Pond, and supported himself in that profession when writing proved insufficient.

Puzzling over the arrowheads that often surfaced in local soil, Thoreau came to understand the oneness with nature enjoyed by the first inhabitants of New England. When a band of Penobscots camped on the banks of the river, he took his notebook and went to talk to them, probing into their customs, their ways of survival, their language. Initially imbued with the prejudices of the day which considered Native Americans savages inferior to whites, he was astounded to find that his Indian guide, so much at home in the woods of Maine, subscribed to a newspaper and could read it.

Never married, he proposed to only one woman in his life (and was refused) and fled from another who proposed to him. His family was his anchor. Walls quotes one observer who described the Thoreau dinner table: “…a deaf Mr. Thoreau presiding silently while Henry led the conversation, pausing patiently when interrupted by the loquacious Cynthia, taking up his train of thought exactly where he’d left off the instant she was done, Sophia (his surviving sister) joining in energetically all the while.”

Walls weaves succinct description seamlessly into the narrative. Here are Thoreau’s parents: John was “French from the shrug of his shoulders to his snuff box, fine boned, fine trained, well bred, a gentleman by instinct…clean hearted and clean tongued…if few noticed John, everyone noticed the indomitable Cynthia, who stood a head taller than her husband and was one of the most famous talkers of the day, full of wit and anecdote spiced with sarcasm.”

Public lectures were a popular means of entertainment, and the writer found success by delivering some of his papers on the lyceum circuit. A small and unimpressive figure, carelessly dressed, he surprised some of his reviewers:

“He bewilders you with the mists of Transcendentalism, delights you with brilliant imagery, shocks you by his apparent irreverence, and sets you in a roar by his sallies of wit, all without any apparent effort…quaint, infinitely amusing—a true American original.”

Yet with anger, not drollery, Thoreau saw the hypocrisy of slavery in a “free” country; he was at the forefront of Concordians who wrote and spoke against the Fugitive Slave Act. Walls’ analysis of Thoreau’s seemingly contradictory selves is both thoughtful and readable: “One speaks for nature; the other for social justice…Thoreau was no hermit…he found society in nature, and nature he found everywhere, including the town center and the human heart.”

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Once a journalist chasing facts for The Boston Globe, Marty Carlock finds it’s more fun to make things up. Her short fiction has appeared in a dozen-plus journals and quarterly publications. She’s author of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston and several unpublished novels. She sometimes writes for Sculpture and Landscape Architecture magazines.