The Thoreau You Don’t Know

At Book Court not long ago, where I went to hear Mimi Zeiger talk about Tiny Houses, I was reminded of Thoreau and his own tiny house by the shores of Walden Pond. I took the train to Concord many times when I was living in Cambridge, and on an early date with Jenn we got drenched in a rainstorm on the way back from the pond. (She continued to go out with me anyway.)

Leaving the bookstore, I looked at a schedule of readings and was sorry to see that I had missed Robert Sullivan reading from his new book The Thoreau You Don’t Know.* I loved his books The Meadowlands and Rats, and was curious to see what he would make of Thoreau, the writer I have probably delved deeper into than any other.

A lot, as it turns out. The Thoreau You Don’t Know is largely devoted to blowing up the usual image of Thoreau as a recluse, a crank, a skulker, a prig, even a jerk. (It is also devoted to erasing the false idea that Thoreau drew a sharp line between nature and man, and came down hard on the side of nature. Those who complain that Thoreau’s cabin wasn’t in the wilderness, and that he took his laundry home for his mother to clean, miss the point that Thoreau was interested not so much in pure wilderness as in the places where man and nature interacted.)

The Thoreau you don’t know sang, danced, played the flute, looked after Ralph Waldo Emerson’s children, and threw big watermelon parties. Though he avoided the usual careers that awaited a college graduate (medicine, law, religion) he was hard-working not only as a writer but in more practical ways. Answering a question from his alma mater, he wrote, “I am a Schoolmaster—a Private Tutor, a Surveyor—a Gardener, a Farmer—a Painter, I mean a House Painter, a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-Laborer, a Pencil-Maker, a Glass-paper Maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster.”

The Thoreau You Don’t Know is full of things I didn’t know about Thoreau, and am glad I do now. He owned seventeen dictionaries. He subscribed to a magazine called Businessman’s Assistant. He did magic tricks: making pencils disappear, then pulling them out of children’s ears. He once trapped a bothersome woodchuck and carried it two miles away rather than kill it. (I once did something similar with a raccoon.)

And he liked Walt Whitman and New York City quite a bit more than is usually reported. “When I think of them together,” writes Sullivan, “the ultimate city poet and the ultimate nature writer, the divide between city and country, between nature and civilization, melts away like a polar ice cap.”

*As it happens, I didn’t entirely miss the reading. It’s available on Sullivan’s quirky and engaging book blog. ....