Robert D. Richardson - Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives

THREE ROADS BACK

Three Roads Back

HOW EMERSON, THOREAU, AND WILLIAM JAMES RESPONDED TO THE GREATEST LOSSES OF THEIR LIVES

ROBERT D. RICHARDSON

WITH A FOREWORD BY MEGAN MARSHALL

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright 2023 by The Estate of Robert D. Richardson

Foreword copyright 2023 by Megan Marshall

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Loss has been much on my mind lately, my friend and mentor Bob Richardson wrote to me in July 2019. Bob knew about the death that spring of my life partner, and he offered to send me a manuscript hed just completedabout how RWE HDT and Wm. James dealt with bad losses, he summed up in biographers shorthand. Bob hoped this short book, which he then called simply Resilience, might bring consolation.

Of course I accepted his offer. Soon I was reading the most extraordinary book on the work of mourning I would come across during my season of griefthe book we now know as Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives.

I read that summer as if searching for the right recipehow to do it. In Bobs book I found familiar prescriptions: travel, reading, nature, friendship, journal-keeping, letter-writing. Yet all of this was delivered with heightened impact through a method Bob calls documentary biography, in words and scenes lifted straight from the past, as if the book were a documentary film. Three Roads Back puts readers in the presence of Bobs subjects. We are with Emerson in Paris when he tours the vast botanical collections of the Jardin des Plantes and realizes the limits of the possible are enlarged; with Thoreau as he looks out over the fields of Concord and discovers he is no longer saddened because these particular flowers or grasses will witherfor their death is the law of new life; with William James when he writes in his journal, tragedy is at the heart of us, go to meet it, work it to our ends.

Bobs guiding hand was there too: this documentary has a narrator, a firm-voiced and sympathetic friend. Think of them as fellow human beings, Bob instructs, and surely thats how he saw Emerson, Thoreau, and James after decades of immersion in the details of their lives and works as their biographer. He could deliver the particulars. Time, were often told, is the best, perhaps the only, cure for a deeply felt loss. But how much time? Bob had tallied the divergent spans of months or years it took each of his subjects to return to his desk. This mattered to me. I was worriedwould the fog ever lift, would I write again? I saw that all three of Bobs characters did, in their own time. I might too.

Reading Three Roads Back now, with three years distance from my own bad loss, I realize how much more there is in this small book than I could absorb at a time of need. Bob liked to quote his own mentor, Walter Jackson Bate, on the value of linking ourselves imaginatively with the great figures of the past, through biographical reading and writing. The practice, Bate wrote in The Burden of the Past, allows us to become freerfreer to be ourselves, to be what we most want and value. These lines served as the epigraph to Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Yet Bob was never in the self-help business, not even with Three Roads Back. I had read his manuscript for instruction, seeking a recipe, and I had missed Bobs point.

As much as any of his magisterial biographies, Three Roads Back is a consideration of how Americas foundational thinkers arrived at their ideas. It just happens that death played a role in the processand in the ideas themselves. Emerson, Thoreau, and James were young men when they lost a wife, a brother, a treasured cousin. They were at the dawn of their careers, scarcely cognizant of what might become their lifes work. Although loss was a feature of most young lives in the American nineteenth century, a hard truth to which many were forced to adaptEmerson lost both his father and an older brother by age eight, a younger sister three years laterthese particular deaths, arriving to mingle with and dash our protagonists fledgling hopes for the future, were both devastating and catalytic.

Through a combination of self-examination and confrontation with the facts of the outer world, Bob writes, each of the three ultimately achieved a view of death as an inescapable part of living, and an acceptance that, at some level, there is no death. For Emerson and Thoreau, nature revealed that the very process of decay is a life process. For James, the philosopher of the will, the realization was more profoundly internal: Death sits at the heart of each one of us, he wrote, enabling us to gather the resources within ourselves to maintain a true and courageous spirit. These notions, achieved in bereavement, inspired the mature philosophy each one began to explore and expound in his writing from the moment of recovery.

Genius is the activity that repairs the decay of things, Emerson wrote in his essay, The Poet. A drive to repair the rent in the fabric of their livesthrough which they had glimpsed the near fact of deathimpelled all three. When Bob tells us, Their examples of resilience count among their lasting contributions to modern life, he means two things: we can learn from their examples how to find our way back, and, what they gave us as they moved forward became American philosophy.

Bob wrote these words, this book, just a year before his own death in June 2020, at age eighty-six. He couldnt have known his fate, but if loss was much on his mind that year, perhaps it was because he was looking back on the course of his own life. Although he never wrote of it, Bob had in common with his subjects an experience of early lossthe death of a younger sibling, who happened to share the name of Thoreaus beloved brother, John. Like John Thoreau, John Richardson was a golden boy, popular and athletic, good-natured, cherished. Leukemia took him at age seventeen in a matter of weeks. Older brother Bob, a college student, had been assisting their father on a research trip in England when news of Johns grim diagnosis reached them. His father flew back; Bob returned by Cunard liner with their luggage, arriving home shortly before his brothers death in a hospital operating room during a final surgery.

Is it any wonder Bobs first biography told the story of a writer who held his brother John in his arms as he died, convulsing, delirious, of lockjaw? We need not ask how and when Bob Richardson learned resilience. And we know what it allowed him to do: write the enduring biographical works that are his legacy.