When we think of Henry David Thoreau, we think of him at Walden. Indeed, readers might be forgiven for imagining that he passed his entire adult life there, planting beans and bouncing pebbles off the frozen surface of the pond. But, in fact, Thoreau spent little more than two years in the cabin. The rest of the time, he lived as a paying customer at his family’s boarding house in Concord, Massachusetts. Yes, he sang the praises of perpetual motion. (“Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow,” he once wrote.) Yet he largely stuck to his burrow, with one notable exception: a protracted pajama party, in two distinct chapters, at the home of his great friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Thoreau first joined the Emerson household in April of 1841. At that point, Emerson was dallying with communitarian ideals, and doubtless found the idea of a house guest more palatable than carting manure at the nearby utopian compound of Brook Farm. Also, Emerson adored his young friend. He viewed Thoreau as a disciple, factotum, personal healer. “I work with him as I should not without him,” Emerson informed his brother William, adding that the newest member of the house was “a scholar & a poet & as full of buds of promise as a young apple tree.”
At the outset, of course, Thoreau was very much the junior partner in the relationship. Emerson was already an established writer and theological maverick, having published “Nature” (1836) and ditched his pulpit at Boston’s Second Church. Thoreau was a recent college graduate who had washed out as a schoolteacher. Fourteen years younger than his host, he did his best to walk like Emerson and talk like Emerson—a feat of mimicry that the poet James Russell Lowell described as “exquisitely amusing.” This was hero worship on steroids, with a strong filial twist.
It was also something more than that. Shortly before taking a brief trip with his idol, Thoreau wrote in his journal, “Our friend’s is as holy a shrine as any God’s, to be approached with sacred love and awe.” This sense of friendship as a spiritual undertaking, a fusion of kindred souls, flowed in both directions. So did the capacity to bring joy and, ultimately, inflict pain. You could say that the story of Thoreau and Emerson was a love story. It was complicated, however, by Thoreau’s growing attachment to his mentor’s wife.
Lidian Emerson was an unlikely love object for Thoreau. She was, in 1841, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two with mixed feelings about her marriage—she revered her husband, whom she called Mister Emerson, but viewed his disparagement of Christianity with mounting distress. It’s not that Lidian was a Bible-thumping zealot. Her sense of belief was eclectic, encompassing Calvinist stringency and Unitarian sunshine. (She had even gone through an anchorite phase as a teen-ager, starving herself and jumping over furniture as a character-building exercise.) Yet she was troubled by Waldo’s views—“Make your own Bible,” he once wrote—and, feeling isolated from her smiling, swan-necked spouse, began girding herself for the long voyage of matrimony.
She was also an endearingly neurotic person. If, in the course of straightening out the house, she had put a bigger book on top of a smaller one, she would awake in the middle of the night to correct the wicked arrangement. She felt the most powerful sort of empathy for every living thing—cows, cats, chickens—and preferred to escort a spider outside rather than kill it. As the years went by, she retreated into the hypochondriacal mists, keeping four or five stout medical textbooks by her bed and dosing herself with, in her husband’s words, “poppy and oatmeal.” No doubt Lidian was sick from time to time. But, like so many women of the era, she probably took to her bed as a silent protest against domestic drudgery and emotional starvation.
Into this scene came the short, homely, ardent, Waldo-worshipping figure of Thoreau. I cannot imagine any sort of traditional flirtation between the two. Indeed, Thoreau was so shy that he was unable to pass through the Emerson kitchen, with its two young maids, without blushing. In addition, these were two busy human beings: Lidian ran a bustling household, feeding not only her own family but a parade of Emerson fanboys and transcendental tourists; Thoreau, on any given day, would be planting trees, playing with the children, or constructing a cunning wooden box for his mentor’s gloves.
Certainly there are fossilized hints, here and there, of a growing rapport. Having failed to bring her husband back into the Unitarian fold, Lidian shared her spiritual impulses with Thoreau instead. On January 24, 1843, when Emerson was away lecturing, Thoreau informed him that Lidian “almost persuades me to be a Christian, but I fear I as often lapse into Heathenism.” Lidian herself was pleasantly surprised by Thoreau’s attendance, however fleeting, at church. On another occasion, touched by his uproarious excitement at having received a music box as a gift, she noted, “I like human nature better than I did.”
None of this is the stuff of romance. Yet something was afoot. Some deep feeling germinated during those long days in the white house on the Cambridge Turnpike. It is strange to have no record of that feeling as it developed, because Thoreau and his circle documented their lives in something close to real time. You had hardly experienced a thing before you had written it down. But perhaps Thoreau’s growing attachment to Lidian was simply too radioactive, and too treacherous, for him to commit to paper.
No, that would have to wait until he left the Emerson household. He remained there, with some brief interruptions, through May, 1843. At that point, Thoreau found a way to escape his mentor’s gravitational orbit while still remaining tethered to the family: he moved in with Emerson’s brother William, in Staten Island. There he would tutor William’s son, recoil in horror from the urban density of Manhattan—and, apparently, pine for Lidian. On May 22nd, not long after his arrival, he wrote her a letter:
The letter goes on for some time in this vein. It is very exalted, to say the least—a reflection of Thoreau’s powerful feelings for Lidian and also a kind of evasive maneuver, a mussing of the trail, since those feelings were forbidden by definition. If she were his sister, she certainly couldn’t be an object of sexual desire. That went double for the moon, whose virginal glow is nicely sanitizing in this context. The letter continues with one of Thoreau’s loveliest affirmations, especially heartening during a time of pandemic lockdowns: “Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance. They make the latitudes and longitudes.” Then it cools down to a chummier temperature, with regards passed along to the children and to Emerson’s aging mother, “whose Concord face I should be glad to see here this summer.” Thoreau could hardly have ended on a more respectable note.
Perhaps, you say, this was an isolated outburst from a lonely man. Perhaps, too, it was simply an example of the breathless vocabulary of friendship that was common then and less so now. But this letter was followed by another, on June 20th, after Lidian had written back to him. (Her reply is lost.) Thoreau tells his correspondent that he has gone to the top of a hill at sunset to read what she has written. The words are alive for him, almost audible: “Your voice seems not a voice, but comes as much from the blue heavens, as from the paper.” Then he moves on to another celestial metaphor:
Is this love? It lacks any sort of erotic heat, which is not surprising. Thoreau, a sensualist when it came to the natural world, seemed to view his own physicality as terra incognita. “I must confess there is nothing so strange to me as my own body,” he had confided to his journal the previous year. “I love any other piece of nature, almost, better.” Granted, he had just lost his beloved brother to lockjaw, before he himself came down with (psychosomatic) symptoms of that very same disorder. He had reason to distrust his own flesh and blood.
But it was the notion of strangeness that repelled him. At Emerson’s elbow, he had conceived of a universe in which all things were connected—except, with dismaying frequency, himself. “How alone our life must be lived!” he lamented in his journal. “We dwell on the seashore, and none between us and the sea.” Lidian, who had spent years trying to penetrate the sealed compartment of her husband’s solitude, had somehow gained entrance to Thoreau’s. She was not at all strange to him.
At this point, many a Thoreauvian will be crying foul. These days, we understand Thoreau to have been a nonpracticing gay man, whose retreat to his weatherized cabana at Walden was not only a blow struck against New England timidity but an anti-heteronormative broadside. It took a little while to arrive at this consensus. Walter Harding, one of his great modern biographers, was initially scolded for soft-pedalling this aspect of his subject in “The Days of Henry Thoreau” (1965). As an act of contrition, Harding did a second forensic sweep through Thoreau’s œuvre, which caused him to revise his position and more or less anoint Thoreau as a gay man in a 1991 issue of the Journal of Homosexuality. By now, there is an entire literature dedicated to Thoreau’s role as a queer avatar. So where does that leave his relationship with Lidian?
My answer would be: exactly where we found it. Not because I believe that Thoreau had any sort of sexual relationship with Lidian. Nobody seems to believe that, with the exception of the novelist Amy Belding Brown, who imagines a semi-plausible tryst in the hayloft in “Mr. Emerson’s Wife” (2005). The mistake is to treat Thoreau’s relationship with Lidian as a kind of shell game, with a plain old heterosexual romance lurking beneath any number of concealments. Instead, I would argue, it is a perfect specimen of his magnificent confusion about men and women and love and sex.
It’s not as though he never spoke out on these topics. Thoreau wrote a pair of essays, “Love” and “Chastity & Sensuality,” which should theoretically clear the air for us. Yet they are, in the main, flimsy things. In the first essay, Thoreau resorts to the transcendentalist decoder ring, which translates each and every form of goodness into another: “The lover sees in the glance of his beloved the same beauty that in the sunset paints the western skies.” He also suggests that the quickest way to torpedo such emotions is to divulge them.
The second essay is more revealing. Thoreau plays two roles at once: the libertine, who argues that sexual matters should be discussed more frankly, and the prude, who is visibly relieved that they are not. There is some blather about abstinence as virtue, with lust elbowed out of the way by what Thoreau calls “loftier delights”—purity, nerve, heroism. He’s all for virginity, too. But then he gives his stamp of approval to the botanical kingdom, whose “organs of generation” are “exposed to the eyes of all.” In other words, we should all be like shameless flowers, wearing our promiscuity on our sleeves or stamens. It’s a surprising and hilarious reversal, followed by the most honest paragraph in either essay:
Sex, to Thoreau, was no more than a rumor, a rapidly dissipated dream. Love was something else: the last miraculous thing. He had no idea what to make of it, drawn as he was to both women and (mostly) men, eager to share his feelings and utterly convinced that such disclosure would kill them off for good.
There is, as I mentioned, a second chapter. In September of 1847, Thoreau returned from the wilds of Walden to civilization—that is to say, to Emerson’s house. There was a certain irony to the transition. By the pond, he had already been living on Emerson’s land, which his friend had purchased a few years earlier, declaring himself “landlord and waterlord of 14 acres.”
But the conditions of his residency had changed. For one thing, the balance of power had shifted between Thoreau and his guru. By 1847, he had written drafts of one book, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” and assembled much of the raw material for “Walden.” He was no longer a sidekick—indeed, his mastery of large-scale narrative now outstripped his mentor’s. Meanwhile, the friendship between the two men had been fraying. As early as 1843, Emerson complained that Thoreau’s prose, with its constant paradox-wrangling, made him “nervous and wretched.” He viewed his former protégé’s avoidance of the poll tax, and his subsequent night in jail, as “skulking and in bad taste.” And Thoreau was no less jaundiced, complaining about Emerson’s characteristic detachment: “I was never so near my friend when he was bodily present as when he was absent.”
The other great difference was that, during Thoreau’s second stay, which lasted about eight months, Emerson was away on a lecture tour in Britain. His willingness to let the younger man serve as his familial proxy suggests that a substantial reservoir of trust remained between the two. But it also meant that the roles had changed: if Thoreau and Lidian had been playing at young lovers the first time around, they had now switched to husband and wife. “Lidian and I make very good housekeepers,” Thoreau informed Emerson in a letter on November 14th. (“She is a very dear sister to me,” he quickly adds, lest his correspondent get the wrong idea.) Thoreau also took particular pleasure in the Emerson children, who adored their pinch-hitting paterfamilias. Indeed, in the same letter quoted above, he seems to be goading his old patron. Young Edward Emerson, he notes, had asked him, “Mr. Thoreau, will you be my father?”
Lidian, for her part, took to her bed for much of Emerson’s absence. His lengthy withdrawal from family life depressed her, as did his chilly and correct replies to her letters. Her vulnerability probably intensified her relationship with Thoreau. They were, after all, both in thrall to the same man, and to each other—a love triangle of a peculiar and exasperating kind. Again, we have no way of knowing what happened between them. There is an intriguing emptiness here, another installment of what Thoreau had earlier called their “unfinished silence.” Had his feelings for Lidian vanished?
I think not. In 1848, most likely after Emerson had returned and Thoreau exited the household for good, Thoreau addressed Lidian once more, this time in his journal. He doesn’t use her name, but the continuity with his earlier missives from Staten Island is undeniable. “I still think of you as my sister,” he writes. “I presume to know you. Others are of my kindred by blood or of my acquaintance but you are mine.” He adds, “I can not tell where I leave off and you begin.”
This was no mere declaration of love but an ecstatic merger, or at least the desire for one. Thoreau goes on at length, producing something beautiful, perhaps as much intoxicated by that beauty as by the subject at hand. “When I love you I feel as if I were annexing another world to mine,” he declares. “We splice the heavens.” He concludes with a wild apostrophe, Biblical in its rhetoric and the flip side, one imagines, of his consistent feelings of solitude and strangeness:
What catches my eye here is the last phrase, its wonderfully muddled sense that male and female are interchangeable, and possibly besides the point. It was gender fluidity before we had a name for it, and a reshuffling of the romantic deck. Speaking of which, Thoreau might never have spoken again to Lidian about his feelings, not after they stopped playing house in 1848. He might never have made peace with his own physical self, that parcel of matter that always struck him as uncanny, perplexing, queer (in his sense of the word and perhaps in ours). “I fear bodies,” he once wrote, “I tremble to meet them.” But souls were another thing, and he surely felt that Lidian had peered into his, and he into hers. It was a heaven-splicing operation, and that may be the best definition of love this great solitary ever came up with.
This essay has been drawn from “Now Comes Good Sailing: Writers Reflect on Henry David Thoreau,” which is out this month from Princeton University Press.
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2021-10-11 21:14:00Z
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