Books: Realometer

THOREAU — Henry Seidel Canby —HoUghton Mifffin ($3.75).

Emerson was proud of his prickly protégé Thoreau, called him “As free and erect a mind as any I have ever met.’ Just the same, two years of Thoreau as handyman around the place was more than enough for Emerson. Said witty Elizabeth Hoar: “I love Henry but do not like him,” and Emerson, who knew how she felt, often quoted her wisecrack. Even closer to Henry was his crony, Poet Ellery Channing, who wrote the first Thoreau biography. Channing once confessed: “I have never been able to understand what he meant by his life.”

What Thoreau really meant by his life was even less clear to succeeding generations, began to clarify at last under the triumph of industrialism, the rise of dictatorships. In the 1930s this “friend of woodchucks and enemy of the State emerges as the most read and most readable U. S. writer of his time.

Henry Seidel Canby’s Thoreau, dressiest biography of him so far, is timely rather than definitive. Canby unearths scant new material, finds no satisfactory answers to such speculations as: Was Henry in love with Emerson’s wife? Was it Margaret Fuller, the Transcendentalist, to whom he sent his famous “hollow shot” No to a marriage proposal? The fact is that Thoreau’s own writings contain just about all there is on Thoreau.

Transcendentalists complained that he was too practical (“Strictly speaking,” said Henry, “morality is not healthy”). Religious folk called him an infidel (“One world at a time,” said Thoreau when a friend came to his death bed to talk about the next world). “Practical men” called him a dreamer and escapist, were annoyed at his criticism of their pioneering (“a filibustering toward heaven by the great western route”). Poets thought him too science-minded, his language too earthy. Conservatives thought his Civil Disobedience revolutionary (“I do not care to trace the course of my dollar . . . till it buys a man or a musket to shoot one with. . .”). Radicals and reformers like Alcott thought him anti-social (“God does not approve of the popular movements,” said Henry, who believed in reforming oneself first). The good citizens of Concord simply called him a loafer who had thrown away a Harvard education.

Modern readers gauge Thoreau’s genius by the qualities his contemporaries disliked. His eccentricities, prickliness, perversities, were in fact the Yankee thorns that protected him against the embrace of the Transcendentalists, the fashionable gentilities of the Lowells and Longfellows, the transient Utopianisms of the Alcotts, the dated rhetoric of his contemporaries. What moderns can see, what his contemporaries missed, is that Thoreau meant what he said. He was, he declared, a “Realometer,” working his feet “downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice and tradition, and delusion, and appearance … to a hard bottom.”

Thoreau’s modern reputation is a testament to his Yankee stubbornness in sticking to his realistic problem. “I wanted,” said Thoreau, “to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it … of if it were sublime, to know it by experience. … If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.”