Solid Seasons. Jeffrey S. Cramer
Notes
I read John Lehmann’s 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 accounts—journal 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 Emerson’s biographical sketch of Thoreau, an expanded version of the eulogy he delivered at Thoreau’s 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 events—and not detail every walk, every conversation these friends shared together—to 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
A Biography of the Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson
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, Nature, published. That same year the seventeen-year-old Concord-born Henry David Thoreau was attending Harvard College.
Stories vary as to how and when they met, but one story Emerson told is this:
My first intimacy with Henry began after his graduation in 1837. Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Emerson’s sister from Plymouth, then boarded with Mrs. Thoreau and her children in the Parkman house, where the Library now stands, and saw the young people every day. She would bring me verses of Henry’s,—the “Sic Vita,” for instance, which he had thrown into Mrs. Brown’s window, tied round a bunch of violets gathered in his walk,—and once a passage out of his Journal, which he had read to Sophia Thoreau, who spoke of it to Mrs. Brown as resembling a passage in one of my Concord lectures.1
Emerson was generous with both time and money, and his assistance to the young Thoreau was no exception. Emerson loaned Thoreau money in May to travel to Maine to look for a teaching position, accompanied by his personal recommendation: “I cordially recommend Mr. Henry D. Thoreau, a graduate of Harvard University in August, 1837, to the confidence of such parents or guardians as may propose to employ him as an instructor. I have the highest confidence in Mr. Thoreau’s moral, character and in his intellectual ability. He is an excellent scholar, a man of energy and kindness, and I shall esteem the town fortunate that secures his services.”2 He also wrote to Josiah Quincy, president of Harvard College, trying to secure some financial aid for Thoreau by attributing his lower academic standing to illness rather than any other cause.
Thoreau’s interest in Emerson was also increasing. Having borrowed and read Emerson’s Nature from the college library twice while attending Harvard, he purchased a copy to give to his classmate William Allen, calling it, in an echo of Robert Burns’s “Epistle to a Young Friend,” “neither a sang nor a sermon.”3 He sang Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” in the choir at the dedication of the Obelisk at Concord’s North Bridge in July 1837. And then on August 31 Emerson delivered the Phi Beta Kappa address to Thoreau’s graduating class at Harvard. “The American Scholar” was hailed by Oliver Wendell Holmes as America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.”4 It spoke of and to “Man Thinking,” not an intellectual and academic cerebration, but a thinking with the entirety of soul and self-trust, culminating in the triad, “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.”5
At the time of his graduation, Thoreau was not yet keeping a journal, so his immediate reaction to his Harvard commencement is not known, but when he gave his first public lecture