Thoreau in Love (2 page)

I have travell’d this wide world over
,

And now to another I’ll go

I know that good quaters are waiting

To welcome old Rosin the beau
.

Edmund Sewell, who was a student at Henry and John’s experimental school, loved to sing that song, and when he and Henry were together in private, he would change the last line to, “To welcome old Henry my beau.” Henry smiled at the thought of Edmund, then his mind went to Margaret Fuller, who with Waldo had created
The Dial
as a forum for new American writing. “Not that again,” he said quietly to the passing trees.

Emerson had told Henry his poem “Sympathy” was brilliant, filled with passion. “Give it to Margaret,” he’d said, “She’s taking charge of the next issue. I’m sure she’ll want it.” Henry gave Margaret the poem he’d written about Edmund, and eagerly awaited her verdict. But after not hearing a word for two very long days, he went to her and asked what she’d thought of his poem.

“Your poem? I thought you were kidding. It wasn’t a joke?”

“A joke? You thought my poem was a joke?”

Margaret gaped. Then she shrugged and, her head twitching, said, “It’s a love poem to a boy.”

Yes, Henry had written the poem in a passion, but having Margaret put it so bluntly caused him to flush with shame. Still, he waited for pearls, a criticism, a “We’d love to put it in
The Dial
.” Better a “Henry, it’s magnificent.” But when again she spoke, all she could say was, “It’s a love poem to a boy.” She called for Waldo, and when Emerson entered the room, Henry thought he was saved. But what did the Great One do? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Margaret said, “Waldo, help me on this.” And Henry thought, No. Help
me
on this.

“It’s a love poem to a boy,” she said, not to Henry, but in explanation for her inability to say anything else. Waldo blushed.

At last, Henry found his tongue. “You said you wanted new writing, something different. Experimental poetry.” He looked to Waldo for an encouraging word, but Waldo seemed too intent on his own shoes. Henry plowed on. “It’s not base love, it’s Platonic love, in the Greek tradition. Anacreon.” Still nothing from the Great One. When Margaret repeated, yet again, “It’s a love poem to a boy,” Henry stormed from the room.

Two hours later, he returned from tramping through the fields and woods and found Margaret and Waldo in Waldo’s study, with “Sympathy” on the table beside Margaret’s chair. Calmly, he asked, “Is there no chance you’ll put it in
The Dial
?”

“Maybe Waldo will put it in, but not while I’m in charge.”

The stagecoach bounced down the roadway, squeaking and squealing, the horses hooves and wooden wheels thundering on the hard dirt. Henry focused on the greening fields outside the window, his mind filled with fond memories of being in a tent with Margaret’s brother Richard. His thoughts then turned to Ellery, who’d married Margaret’s younger sister. “Serves her right,” snickered Henry. At Harvard, they all knew Ellery dropped out because Henry, fed up with Ellery’s fawning, rebuked him right there in the market-place and told him he never wanted to see him again. What was it about Ellery? He and Henry were so similar in so many ways. They were the same height with a similar build and a passion for walking and for nature. But there was something in the way Ellery looked at Henry that terrified him. Didn’t everyone in Concord see that the one Ellery wanted to spend all his time with was Henry.

“What I need is a friend like Emerson, but closer my age. Someone like me, who’s just beginning to live.” Looking at the slim package Waldo had given him, he said, “Maybe Giles Waldo? Or Will Tappan?”

Speculations about what Giles and Will might be like turned to thoughts of Edmund. From the day Master Sewell entered their classroom, Henry was sure they would be friends forever, but now he was forbidden to see him. “Most likely I’ll never see him again.” Then to Stearns Wheeler, his roommate at Harvard, dazzling in his Byronic collar: “Gone to Europe. And left me behind.” Henry smirked; what with the other passengers screaming to be heard over the sounds of the now speeding stage, no one could possibly hear his quiet interjections. “And John.” Henry focused on the spring green fields and trees, the oxen and the cows, the brooks and ponds that disappeared quickly from sight. Thinking of the harebrained, get-rich-quick schemes he and his brother came up with and just as quickly abandoned, he smiled, then sucked in his lower lip.

It was just sixteen months before that John had his accident and came down with lockjaw. But Henry still wondered, though he never gave voice to it, whether it really had been an accident. John was distraught after Henry moved out of the family’s house and into the Emersons’, where he did odd jobs in exchange for his room and board. Henry tried to mollify John, but John was unforgiving.

On the first of January, 1842, Henry went to his family’s house on Main Street to get one of his old journals. As he opened the back door, Helen laid into a lively piece on the piano in the front parlor, so Henry, not wanting to disturb the musicale, snuck up the stairs to his old attic aerie. And there was John, bleeding profusely, having badly gashed the tip of his left hand’s ring finger. “I was stropping my razor.” But there was too much blood. To Henry, it seemed he’d caught John in the act. But the act of what? “Don’t tell mother,” said John.

Henry took him by the arm and said, “Downstairs, we’ve got to bandage this.”

“I have to put it in snow,” said John. He ran down the stairs and out the back door. Henry stood stunned for a moment, surveying the bloody mess, then he took after John and found him out on the side of the road, shivering, his hand buried in a pile of dirty snow. Back inside, John’s finger was tightly bandaged. The bleeding stopped, and everyone thought that was that. But eight days later, suffering from a painful swelling of his jaw, John unwrapped the bandage and discovered that the skin beneath had mortified. He went to his mother. “Mother, look. And my jaw, it hurts so.” By that night, he was having convulsions.

A doctor called in from Boston confirmed their worst fears. John had lockjaw, horribly painful, incurable lockjaw. Henry moved back home, to take care of his brother. But there was no taking care possible. Anytime anyone even touched John he screamed in pain, and then he convulsed with muscle spasms so painful he flew off the mattress, flipped and flopped and curled in a ball, trying to relieve the pain. So Henry just sat with him. Two days later, John died, his last breath sucked while Henry held him. The whole family was in shock, but especially Henry. While the others grieved vocally and in each other’s arms, nothing they tried could rouse Henry. For ten days he said little and did nothing but sit slumped in a chair, shivering from chills. Then his throat swelled, just as John’s had. Convinced that he too had lockjaw, Henry took to his deathbed. For two days he experienced muscle contractions and spasms so painful he screamed through his clenched jaw. But not having lockjaw, Henry recovered.

Still, death was in the air, and the day Henry got out of bed, Emerson’s son Waldo, just five years old, came down with scarlet fever. Three days later he succumbed, and what had been a frigid, miserable January became even bleaker.

Henry spent the rest of that winter with the Emersons, helping out, doing chores, grieving with Lidian. Waldo was inconsolable. He withdrew into his study; then, unable to bear the thought that at any minute his little boy might scamper into the room and onto his lap—or, worse, that he wouldn’t—he scheduled lectures in Boston, New York, up and down the New England coast, anywhere but Concord, where the memories were too painful.

Lidian, left in the cold by her husband, heaped her attentions on Henry, giving him hope, bringing him back to life and relieving him of the awful feeling that if he’d just stayed living at home, John might not have died.

That April, on one of his short visits home, Waldo gave Henry a stack of scientific surveys he’d picked up in Boston, and an assignment: Use all your outdoor knowledge and write a natural history of Massachusetts. For
The Dial
. Henry threw himself into his writing. Lidian knew not to disturb Henry while he was writing, but the minute he came down the stairs, she was on him. Henry understood the pain Lidian felt, and he tried to help her, sitting with her, taking her for walks, reading together, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Carlyle and Chaucer, holding her when she burst into tears, but it was never enough. To escape her entreaties, Henry took to the woods, feeling like the meanest young man in the world. But as he walked and focused on and studied the life around him, his spirits rose. It was on these walks that he came to understand that he was alive, that his life, like all life, was fleeting, and that it was time for him to start living fully and to devote himself to his writing. By early May, Henry had sixty pages for Waldo to read.

Lidian was thrilled when Waldo said he wanted to publish Henry’s “Natural History” in the July issue of
The Dial
. “Now that you’re finished with that, we’ll have more time to spend together.”

“Lidian, I’m not finished, I’m just beginning.”

Spring turned to summer, Henry held to the hope that Waldo would return from a lecture tour and become again Lidian’s loving husband. But on his short stays home, Waldo wanted nothing to do with Lidian. And then he was off again, to Brook Farm, to New York or Boston. Henry threw himself into his writing as never before. And when he wasn’t writing, he went boating on the river with another struggling writer, his new neighbor and friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, or sauntered the woods in search of what he called the Wild Holy Land. He also took a four-day walk to Wachusett Mountain with Margaret Fuller’s brother Richard. And all the while he resented having to take care of the emotional needs of Emerson’s wife.

He didn’t want to alienate Waldo, but he could no longer bear Lidian’s clinging, her endless sadness. Summer turned to autumn and, as always in Concord, to dark winter. Though he was often ill and coughing that autumn, Henry sometimes wondered if being ill wasn’t easier than having to put up with Lidian. He wrote up as an essay his “Walk to Wachusett,” but Emerson didn’t like it, wouldn’t put it in
The Dial
. Henry knew he had to leave Concord. But where would he go?

Since what had become known as the Panic of 1837, hundreds of Concord’s families, unable to pay their mortgages, had loaded their belongings onto wagons and gone west, to the frontier or the Oregon Trail, never to be seen or heard from again. Henry had thought many times of joining one of those families, but he knew in his heart that the West, though it had a wildness he craved, was not for him. So where?

Nowhere just yet. He needed to rework his translation of
Prometheus Bound
, which Waldo said he would publish in January’s
Dial
. The trip he and his brother had taken on the Concord and Merrimac rivers was just coming together in his mind as an essay. In addition, he was scheduling lectures for the Concord Lyceum, including one he’d give himself on Sir Walter Raleigh. And, though Emerson was rarely home, when he was it was like old times, with brilliant people and lively debate. Yes, Henry was sick for weeks on end, but then his health and spirits recovered.

Candlemas Day of 1843 the sun shone bright, foretelling six more weeks of winter, but in early March Waldo came home and warm winds blew from the south, melting the snow and thawing the ground. In a burst of enthusiasm, Henry threw open the parlor windows, and said to Lidian, who was of course following just behind him, “Isn’t the fresh air splendid?”

Lidian held herself and said, “Do we really need the windows open?” Her face was waxy white.

“No, fine, we don’t need fresh air. We don’t need anything different. Let’s just carry on the way we are.” His anger grew with each shut window, and after they were all closed he announced he was going for a walk and, knowing she wouldn’t go out in the melting snow, snidely asked Lidian to join him.

Lidian’s response was from
Julius Caesar
, which they’d recently read: “I do observe you now of late: / I have not from your eyes that gentleness / And show of love as I was wont to have.”

Henry fumbled for Brutus’s response to Cassius, but not remembering it said, “
A fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi
.”

“You love to lord your knowledge over me.”

“I’ve a cliff before me, wolves behind.”

“Don’t you see, Henry, you’re the only reason I’m alive.”

Henry erupted. “Don’t you see what you’re doing to me?” Then, understanding what she’d meant, he said, “I trust you’re not serious.”

Lidian’s large, sad eyes locked plaintively on Henry’s, provoking him into a fury.

“It’s that laudanum, isn’t it? You took it again.”

Lidian cast her eyes downward. “You’re never here.”

“I’m always here; don’t you blame it on me. You said you’d stop taking it, Lidian. Don’t you see what it’s doing to you?”

“Henry, is everything all right?” came Waldo’s voice from the study.

“Everything’s fine,” boomed Henry sarcastically. Then, quietly to Lidian, “Go to him. He came home for you.”

“He doesn’t want me.”

“He does,” lied Henry. Lidian’s sad face, obviously intended to suck Henry back into her world, instead infuriated him. “Forget Waldo. You have Edith and Ellen. They need you.”

“They’re girls. They don’t need me. They’re hardly even mine.”

“They are yours, and they do need you.”

“He’s been hiding in his library since the hour he returned. He’d be thrilled if I died. Then he could say how much he loved me. And take up with his devoted Margaret.”

“Lidian, that’s not fair. She’s not even here.”

“But she will be, won’t she?”

“They’re working on
The Dial
.”

“Indeed they are. You’d think it was the only thing that mattered. Don’t you see, Henry? He doesn’t want me. I’m the albatross he’s forced to lug about.”

Henry wanted to say, No, Lidian, you’re the albatross I’m forced to carry about, but he knew he couldn’t. “I don’t know what to say.”