Cramer Jeffrey S. - Solid seasons: the friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson

Table of Contents

Contents

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 Poets 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, 18171862Friends and associates. | Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 18031882Friends and associates. | Authors, American19th centuryBiography. | FriendshipUnited StatesHistory19th 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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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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

I read John Lehmanns 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 accountsjournal 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 Emersons biographical sketch of Thoreau, an expanded version of the eulogy he delivered at Thoreaus 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 eventsand not detail every walk, every conversation these friends shared togetherto 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.

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

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,