Solid Seasons: The Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson

Curator of Collections at the Walden Woods Project's Thoreau Institute Library and editor of the 2004 classic, Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, together with a handful of other major editions of Thoreau's writings and one of Emerson's, Jeffrey S. Cramer offers a biographical sketch of Thoreau and Emerson's relationship and the first compilation of their most important writings about friendship and each other in Solid Seasons. The sketch does not feature any surprises, but it provides a captivating, concise, and yet quite comprehensive introduction to the book's beautifully organized selection of primary writings.Solid Seasons is divided into three sections of roughly equal length: Part 1 is Cramer's biography of the Thoreau-Emerson friendship; part 2 contains Thoreau's philosophical, religious, and personal reflections on friendship generally and Emerson specifically, culled from Thoreau's books, essays, letters, and Journal; part 3 features Emerson's philosophical, religious, and personal reflections on friendship generally and Thoreau specifically, taken from Emerson's books, essays, letters, journals, notebooks, and unpublished manuscripts. Cramer does not engage with twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship in the biographical section but goes directly to nineteenth-century sources to tell the story. The result is a narrative as trustworthy as any yet produced on the subject thanks to Cramer's deep acquaintance with the Thoreau and Emerson archives and his meticulous sourcing of facts. It is also a narrative that, in broad strokes, will be familiar to readers of Robert Sattelmeyer's “Thoreau and Emerson” (1995), Harmon Smith's My Friend, My Friend: The Story of Thoreau's Relationship with Emerson (1999), and Laura Dassow Walls's Henry David Thoreau: A Life (2017): Thoreau reads his Concord neighbor Emerson's Nature as a Harvard undergraduate and is impressed; he meets and befriends him in 1837; he moves in with him in 1841 to become his gardener, handyman, and apprentice; he suffers a devastating loss along with him in 1842 when his brother John and Emerson's son Waldo die suddenly; and he moves out in 1843 as tensions rise over his failure to live up to Emerson's expectations as a writer. After an unhappy stay in Staten Island tutoring in Emerson's brother William's family, Thoreau returns to Concord and lives on Emerson's land at Walden Pond for two years—in this period, he spends his famous night in the Concord jail and writes “Civil Disobedience”; Thoreau begins another stint at the Emersons' home in 1847 while Ralph Waldo is lecturing in Europe, and they become closer from a distance; Thoreau moves out when Emerson returns, and they fall out after A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers fails commercially and critically in 1849; following a difficult period in the early 1850s in which he and Emerson are no longer close emotionally, Thoreau breaks through with Walden in 1854, and though the two men bicker from time to time, they are better friends in the latter half of the 1850s, uniting in their support of John Brown in 1859; Thoreau succumbs to tuberculosis in 1862, and Emerson gives, revises, and publishes his eulogy, characterizing his younger friend as a supremely gifted naturalist, a noble soul, and a multitalented genius whose lack of ambition kept him from “engineering for all America” (97)—a portrait that will define him for generations of readers.In part 1 of Solid Seasons, Cramer delivers this story compellingly, introducing seldomly mentioned information and some new observations along the way. In his account of Thoreau's heady first days with Emerson in 1837, Cramer includes a delicious anecdote about Emerson telling Thoreau he had discovered a heretofore-unknown musical instrument, “the ice-harp,” which turned out to be a coat of ice on the pond that produced “a new note in nature” when the Transcendentalist threw a stone on it from the shore (12). Cramer points out that, early on, Thoreau wrote about Emerson in his journal while Emerson quoted or paraphrased Thoreau in his (12–13). As Thoreau began to feel “out of step with Emerson,” Cramer notices, he wrote the first version of his famous “different drummer” passage from Walden in his journal (20). Cramer tells a fine story of Thoreau sitting in Emerson's pew at church while his mentor was on tour, which he views (rightly, I think) as an instance of Thoreau's taking “some relish in substituting for Emerson when the opportunity arose” (38). Commenting on Thoreau's close bond with Emerson's wife Lidian, Cramer proposes insightfully that “they shared an emotional intimacy that each sometimes failed to find in Emerson, and that there was a confidence and trust that, again, they missed in Emerson” (49). Cramer offers particularly strong accounts of the tragic events of 1842 and their aftermath and of Thoreau's night in jail.Solid Seasons strives for balance when it addresses Thoreau's and Emerson's failings or their unflattering conduct. While noting that “Thoreau's opinion about women has often been considered misogynistic” (89), Cramer also calls attention to good things Thoreau had to say about Caroline Dall, Margaret Fuller, and Mary Moody Emerson, whom he found to be exceptional. Cramer does due diligence to Thoreau's dark time following the break with Emerson without casting him as self-pitying. Perry Miller wrote memorably that Thoreau's “luxuriating in friendship and in its inadequacies becomes simply monstrous” in his Journal of this period (Miller, Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau's Hitherto ‘Lost Journal’ (1840–1841) Together with Notes and a Commentary [New York: Houghton, 1958], p. 92); Cramer calls the early 1850s a “period of perplexity” (77) for Thoreau and observes that he at least approached blaming himself for his quarrel with his mentor (78). When discussing Emerson's infamous characterization of Thoreau's night in jail as “mean and skulking, and in bad taste,” Cramer shows that Emerson actually devoted a number of pages of his journal to the incident, weighing the pros and cons, and that in one powerful passage—which Cramer cites in full—he was manifestly proud of Thoreau for his action (55–56).Solid Seasons seems to depict Thoreau and Emerson as more evenly balanced in terms of their impact upon one another than tradition would usually have it. “Their influence was,” Cramer writes, “from the very beginning, mutual” (13). As evidence, he cites instances where things “Thoreau said and did find their way into [Emerson's] work” (13). From what I can see, however, in Cramer's examples, Emerson endorses Thoreau's words and deeds when they reflect a commitment to self-reliance—a doctrine and a practice he developed well over five years before he met Thoreau—or when they exhibit the younger man's inimitable genius. Thoreau did not play an important role in the genesis of Emerson's core tenets, but studies of Thoreauvian transcendentalism from Sherman Paul's The Shores of America: Thoreau's Inward Exploration (1958) to David Robinson's Natural Life: Thoreau's Worldly Transcendentalism (2004) suggest, at least to me, that Emerson's ideas influence even Thoreau's most celebrated texts if one looks carefully (see Ronan, “Thoreau without Emerson?” The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies 27 [2019]: 143–49). Yet, far from being a strike against Thoreau, I believe this to be one of the most fascinating and mysterious aspects of his work—that he can be so indebted to Emerson and yet so astonishingly original at the same time. In an 1863 journal entry cited by Cramer, Emerson writes, “[I]n reading [Thoreau], I find the same thought, the same spirit that is in me, but he takes a step beyond, and illustrates by excellent images that which I would have conveyed in a sleepy generality” (100). This is a good way to begin the story, but I suspect that there is much yet to be told about it—Thoreau's writings on friendship, for example, do not stand out for their imagery.Part 2 and part 3 of Solid Seasons open with Thoreau's and Emerson's essays on friendship from 1849's A Week and 1841's Essays: First Series, respectively. Then, in each section, Cramer presents the writers' other principal statements about friendship and about one another chronologically. Cramer closes part 3 with Emerson's revised eulogy, “Thoreau.” (Though he started writing on friendship earlier, Emerson is placed in part 3, presumably, because he outlived Thoreau.) Readers are therefore introduced to Thoreau's and Emerson's major transcendentalist works on friendship and then given the opportunity to situate them within the context of the men's evolving thoughts on the topic and on their relationship. Overall, Solid Seasons offers an excellent biographical introduction to its collection of primary texts. Furthermore, I am certain that Cramer's painstakingly thorough compilation of Thoreau's and Emerson's writings on friendship will be valuable to scholars of their thought in the future.