PORTRAIT OF AN EXPANSIVE MIND
Followed by the Lark illuminates the life of Henry David Thoreau
Followed by the Lark Helen Humphreys Harpercollins
Every morning, Helen Humphreys and her dog go for a walk. And it’s rarely a brief stroll. It’s a two-hour adventure into the natural world.
This daily excursion has become central to this award-winning writer’s life. It explains the purpose underlying her luminous new novel, Followed by the Lark, which has Humphreys leading the reader into the life and mind of Henry David Thoreau, the 19th century naturalist whose Walden would become an enduring classic of American literature.
“I think, increasingly every day as I get older, that this walk has become the most important part of the day.” Humphreys, 62, is on the phone from her home in Kingston — but only a few minutes away from the natural beauty that continues to nurture her. “I go to the same place usually, so I can see patterns in the seasons, in the plants and animals — how things are growing or not growing or changing.
“So I guess it feels like a meditative practice I do at this point, and it really grounds everything else in my life.”
It has also fuelled some of her most revered books. In her 2015 novel, The Evening Chorus, a prisoner of war retains his sanity by studying bird life through five years of confinement. The Lost Garden, published in 2002, is a novel about the discovery of an abandoned garden in England’s west country and its effect on troubled lives. Her non-fiction success, The Frozen Thames, chronicled the changing life of a fabled river through the seasons. And then there’s Field Study, alias Meditations on a Year at the Herbarium.
For Humphreys, a walk in the woods represents something fundamental. “It provides a lot of comfort and meaning.” Just as it did for Thoreau more than a century and half ago.
She looked at Thoreau’s 19th century world centring on Concord, Mass. — especially his beloved Walden Pond, which gifted him with his most profound connection with nature — and she found a kinship.
“I guess I saw similarities to our own world, especially with regard to climate and the environment,” Humphreys says. “And I thought there was a way to translate it from his time into our time — to examine things in his world that are similar to our world. I’d been reading him for years, and I thought we had a similar sensibility. So I felt I could inhabit him for this book.”
There’s a miniaturist quality to Followed by the Lark. It offers a series of episodes — many of brief snapshot immediacy — that follow Thoreau’s life from his first encounter with Walden as an enraptured five-year-old to his death at the age of 44. The novel often has the texture of a tone poem — a mood piece in which small moments can count for a great deal. Consider, for example, Thoreau’s thrilling discovery of an out-ofseason buttercup, and you find yourself sharing his wonder.
“I think that’s what his life was,” Humphreys muses. “I think that that’s what all our lives are about — small things that can become miraculous. A buttercup on a hillside — in November? That’s a miraculous thing. I think that’s why we can still connect with Thoreau even though the things happening in our natural world are so devastating and depressing. The miracle of nature remains the same.”
This is not your conventional biographical novel. Humphreys has often chafed at what she sees as the limitations of fiction. So if her take on Thoreau’s life emerges as impressionistic — well, so be it.
“It just felt the right way to do this book — this series of tiny moments and hopefully have them all come together,” she says firmly.
Yet a wider world asserts its sometimes troubling presence — in the effect of a new railroad line on the pond, the Thoreau family’s crusade for the abolition of slavery, the approaching shadow of civil war, Thoreau’s relationship with influential figures of the day like poet Ralph Waldo Emerson and destructively obsessive abolitionist John Brown — and, in his poignant, lifelong mourning for the dead brother he loved and worshipped.
Mythology can easily turn suspect so Humphreys wanted to bring some clarity to Thoreau’s world.
“There’s been a lot of idealizing of his time and of him — and romanticizing of nature. But actually what he was experiencing was quite apocalyptic. There was the arrival of the railroad. There were constant forest fires, one of which he himself set accidentally, and there was a rise in hunting to the point of extinction. Coyotes and deer were almost extinct from overhunting. We tend to look at the past as a more idyllic time when they were not having the kind of environmental catastrophes we have. But back then a kind of environmental apocalypse was also happening.”
Ultimately with this novel, however, she was in search of the inner nature of man who loved nature with a passion and wrote about it sublimely, who was devoted to his family and surrounded by friends, yet would embrace solitude and treasure the tiny 3-by-4.5-metre boat he built for himself on Walden Pond at the age of 27.
“He was a challenge because he has written so well and so much about himself,” Humphreys confesses. “I didn’t want to repeat things we were already familiar with. I was, of course reading all his journals and tried to find places where he would only mention something but not elaborate. Then I felt I could write and expand on that and watch for patterns in his life.”
Thoreau was a land surveyor by profession and this obviously involved taking measurements, but the evidence that this practice consumed his very life fascinates Humphreys. “I was asking — why was he measuring things all the time? And then I thought — no, he’s measuring a lot during times when he’s upset.” So there was the occasion when, distressed over a moose-hunting expedition, he got out his measuring tape to check out a doomed animal’s proportions.
Humphreys was always seeking opportunities to open up “places” in Thoreau’s life that hadn’t been examined previously. The portrait that emerges from this book is of a sweet-natured man of endless intellectual curiosity, especially when it came to the natural world. Yet even though surrounded by friends, certain loneliness emerges, a sense of confusion over his own nature, and a yearning for more in his life in terms of relationships. Humphreys treads cautiously here despite decades of speculation over Thoreau’s sexuality.
“I think he clearly preferred the company of men to women — apart of course from family,” she says. “But I didn’t want to put a specific sexual orientation on him — after all, in his time that might be something he wasn’t even aware of.” She wasn’t trying to shy away from this issue, but also saw no justification for explicitness. “It’s very unclear whether he ever had sex with anybody.”
Besides, in writing this novel, she had more important things on her mind.
“I hope readers take away the miracle of nature and how beautiful the world actually is, even though we’ve made such a mess of it.”
A buttercup on a hillside — in November? That’s a miraculous thing. I think that’s why we can still connect with Thoreau even though the things happening in our natural world are so devastating and depressing. The miracle of nature remains the same.
Helen Humphreys