`It Is Not Natural For a Man to Write This Well Every Day'

Henry David Thoreau is at his least attractive as a political thinker, which is why his work appeals, fleetingly, to adolescents. If they are not abidingly interested in natural science, American intellectual history or great prose, their enthusiasm inevitably wanes when they have rent to pay and children to feed.

Walden is one of the few books I have carried around with me and pored over with Talmudic intensity and devotion. I was then in my early twenties, but soon I rejected Thoreau and his example. I suppose he was a reproach to me and to the choices I had made, and that accounts for some of my rejection, but his privileged berth in life – Harvard, a father in business, a 19th-century New England town and its tolerance for eccentricity – enabled Thoreau to live a life devoted to writing as an end in itself. Yet, in his youthful arrogance, Thoreau presumed to lecture others on the proper conduct of life. As a result, only in the last decade or so have I reclaimed Thoreau on my terms, by rescuing him from himself. Alfred Kazin, as intense an admirer of Thoreau the writer as I, has the honesty to point out the obvious:

“All his feelings are absolutes, as his political ideas will be. There is none of that mocking subtlety, that winning ability to live with contradiction, that one finds in Emerson.”

And this, from the same chapter in An American Procession:

“For youth the center of the world is always itself, and the center is bright with the excitement of the will. There is no drama like that of being young, for then each experience can be overwhelming.”

Young people and addicts of any age share this quality. Each experience must be a “peak” experience – pure, intense, extreme, an end in itself. Anything less is fraudulent and cowardly. How interesting that Thoreau the teetotaler should so often use intoxication as a metaphor for exalted feelings. This is the familiar Holden Caulfield stance of perpetual adolescence. Of course, without the self-centeredness of youth and its blindness to contingency, the species might not possess the necessary brazenness to survive. Kazin again:

“Thoreau’s creed is refreshing. But anyone who thinks it a guide to political action at the end of the twentieth century will have to defend the total literary anarchism that lies behind it.”

Kazin is withering on the subject of Thoreau and his vehement support for John Brown:

“Now John Brown brought to the surface what had long been buried in the soul of Henry David Thoreau….All the damned-up violence of the man’s life came out in sympathy with Brown’s violence. Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry clearly roused in Thoreau a powerful sense of identification. Apocalypse had come.”

Kazin might be talking about the privileged, white, middle-class kids who joined the Weathermen and built bombs – like the daughter, ironically named Merry, in Philip Roth’s An American Pastoral. Today we would diagnose John Brown for precisely what he was – a terrorist and religious fanatic, though Thoreau was not alone when he likened Brown to Jesus Christ. More than 30 years before he wrote An American Procession, in a review of Thoreau’s journals (reprinted in The Inmost Leaf), Kazin defined Thoreau’s enduring appeal:

“…it is the unflagging beauty of the writing, day after day, that confirms its greatness among writers’ journals. It is not natural for a man to write this well every day. Only a man who had no other life but to practice a particularly intense and truthful kind of prose could have done it -- a man for whom all walks finally came to an end in the hard athletic sentence that would recover all their excitement…For in and through his Journal he finally made himself a prose that would fully evoke in its resonant tension and wildness the life he lived in himself every day.”

Even Kazin’s praise carries an implied rebuke. Thoreau lived to write. But without his family (especially his sister Sophia) and friends like Emerson, he could never have composed his two published books, his posthumous travel volumes, his poetry, essays and letters, and the 2-million-word journal he kept for 24 years. Thoreau accomplished all that work and was only 44 when he died.