An environmental influence, 200 years on
Henry David Thoreau’s biography available for milestone birthday
A friend of Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden: Or Life In The Woods (1854) and still today a god among environmentalists everywhere, once remarked that if you “(Gave) him sunshine, and a handful of nuts,” he was a happy man.
Thoreau, who died of tuberculosis at only 44, spent much of his short life outdoors: tramping through woods, climbing mountains and boating on rivers, all the while keeping detailed and extensive notes in his journals about trees, plants, wildlife and (increasingly as he aged) the deleterious effects of humanity on the natural world. He lived to see his beloved Walden Pond, where he spent two years, two months, and two days living in the small house that he built on his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson’s property, suddenly bristling with No Trespassing signs.
This year we celebrate Thoreau’s 200th birthday (he was born on July 12, 1817), and to mark that anniversary, the University of Chicago Press has released Laura Dassow Walls’s keenly awaited biography of the writer. It is much the longest biography to date, and while not exhaustive (I was left wondering, for example, whether Thoreau ever read his contemporaries Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick or Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush), it does paint a detailed portrait of Thoreau and is exceedingly well written, even poetic in places. Walls, who teaches English at the University of Notre-Dame, has made excellent use of the various Thoreau archives and is patently a master of the Thoreau literature, which is extensive.
Thoreau almost slavishly followed Voltaire’s comic advice to cultivate his garden. He rarely left his hometown of Concord, Mass., and then mostly for nature trips, some of them rather hard-going for him and his various companions. He visited a foreign country only once, when he went briefly to Quebec in 1850. (“What I got by going to Canada was a cold,” he wrote).
He seems to have heard an opera only on one occasion (it was Bellini’s I Puritani), and to have noticed a work of art only once as well (it was a genre picture by Frederic Church). If he heard any classical music in Boston or New York, where he lived briefly in the early 1840s, Walls doesn’t mention it. He knew Nathaniel Hawthorne and Emerson and Bronson Alcott (whose daughter wrote Little Women), but his reading seems not to have included much fiction.
Thoreau’s abiding passions were to be exercised in nature. A fish or an apple tree or the hiss of a snake could send him into ecstasy. At the age of 40, he was still collecting birds’ nests like an eight-year-old boy and smelling up his parents’ house (where he lived much of his adult life) with specimens he brought home from walks.
He was an amateur naturalist in the very best sense, and had much to teach the professionals of his day. The great scientist Louis Agassiz (whose racial theories later brought him into disrepute) and the famous Harvard botanist Asa Gray both benefitted from Thoreau’s conversation and his remarkable gifts of observation. He was a great friend to those of his acquaintances who could keep up with him, though one complained that “If you flinched at anything he had no more use for you.”
Walden has never been out of print, and it continues to bewitch readers who admire its philosophy and its practical advice for living à la campagne and on one’s own. (The cabin on Walden Pond was not, however, exactly isolated. Thoreau could walk to town and had frequent guests. He even took his laundry home for washing.)
His essay “Civil Disobedience” inspired Tolstoy and Gandhi and Martin Luther King, among many others, and he stood up for John Brown, after the failed attack on Harpers Ferry in 1859, when many people in America were calling for Brown’s execution.
Indeed, Thoreau was a lifelong abolitionist, and he took pleasure from Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) primarily because he deemed it slavery’s coup de grâce. (All humans are equal if all humans are in a common line of descent.)
Thoreau saw the beginnings of the Civil War, but it is a terrible irony of fate that he did not live long enough to see passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.
His influence has never waned, and many of his then-original views (on the importance of First Nations culture, for example, or on the establishment of wilderness preserves) are now common coin and help to sustain his memory. Walls’s biography will do the same. Bruce Whiteman is a Toronto poet and reviewer.