Reading Robert Sullivan’s, The Thoreau You Don’t Know, recently inspired me to visit the Concord Museum in Concord, Massachusetts. The museum contains the furnishings from Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond along with a replica of Emerson’s study, and it is easy to imagine the two of them there engaged in lively conversation.
Thanks to the book and my visit I have been able to shape a much clearer mental picture of Thoreau than the one I had before, that of the naturalist loner, and I have come to appreciate how much time this “classically trained handyman” (Sullivan) spent looking for work in a tough economy.
Thoreau knew how to work with both his hands and his head. In the course of his relatively brief life, he taught school, farmed, mastered the craft of pencil making, fixed and built machines, surveyed land, and shoveled manure. In between he wrote A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, poems, essays, and a journal that runs to 47 volumes.
Of necessity (and I believe choice as well), Thoreau also knew how to attend to the practical realties of life, while at the same time pursuing a greater purpose. He often earned his keep by taking care of the daily needs of others, e.g. serving as a secretary and au pair for Emerson.
It was Emerson, who in 1843 arranged for Thoreau to go to New York City to tutor his brother William’s son. Thoreau saw this opportunity as a means to an end—breaking into the publishing industry. His heart wasn’t in the task of tutoring, but it provided room and board and access to editors and publishers in the city who might hire him.
Thoreau tried “networking,” meeting as many people as possible in the hope that one of these “loose ties” would lead to a job. He also followed the community-building approach that I advocate. He got nothing from the former, but tremendous benefits came from his relationship with Greeley, someone he simply “clicked” with and stayed in contact with over time.
THOREAU’S WORK SEARCH
His timing was awful. Sullivan writes: “After the panic of 1837, 90% of the factories in New England were closed and [Thoreau] was far too observant not to have noticed that unemployment had become a way of life.” Like someone trying to establish himself in a new field today, he knew what he was up against.
Yet, despite illness (the tuberculosis which would take his life at the age of 44) and a marketplace where “money was not to be had,” he pressed on with the same diligence, good humor and perseverance he showed plowing fields and planting beans.
He made cold calls, banging on the doors of every publisher and editor in town, using the sales skills he had learned working in his family’s pencil business. He experienced the same feelings of urgency and weariness work-seekers do today, but his letters reveal a lightness of attitude and an acceptance of his situation which kept him moving forward.
Take for example this excerpt from a letter he wrote to an editor:
But I see that I must get a few dollars together presently to manure my roots…. Is your journal willing to pay anything, providing it likes an article well enough?
Or this passage from a letter to his mother describing his manner of presenting himself:
I find that I talk with these poor men as if I were over head and ears in business and a few thousand were no consideration to me—I almost reproach myself for bothering them thus to no purpose—but it is a very valuable experience—and the best introduction I could have.
COMMUNITY-BUILDING
Thoreau left New York without a job, but he did make genuine connections based on common interests while he was there. One of them was Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune and a man who was well-connected in political circles. He and Thoreau enjoyed each other’s company because of their shared passion for social reform and because they both felt they were “country boys” in the big city.
There is no evidence that Thoreau ever asked Greeley for a job, nor that Greeley ever offered him one. We do know, however, that they remained friends for the next twenty years, and that Greeley functioned as his literary agent, placing his writings in magazines without taking a commission, and making sure he got paid for his work. Given Thoreau’s need for autonomy and time to write, this arrangement probably served him far better than a job would have.
Rather than pitching him the way he did other editors and publishers, Thoreau appears to have simply let his relationship with Greeley unfold, and he was rewarded by having one of the most prominent literary figures of the time brand him as “a true poet.”
Thoreau tried “networking,” meeting as many people as possible in the hope that one of these “loose ties” would lead to a job. He also followed the community-building approach that I advocate. He got nothing from the former, but tremendous benefits came from his relationship with Greeley, someone he simply “clicked” with and stayed in contact with over time.
It is interesting that a person so often seen as a hermit living alone in the woods was so highly skilled at community-building. Sullivan does a great job of debunking the Thoreau-as-recluse myth by pointing out that he had very practical reasons for going to the cabin on Walden Pond. All his life Thoreau had lived in other people’s houses, and to pursue his life’s work—writing—he needed a “room of his own,” to borrow a phrase from Virginia Woolf.
Walden Pond is only a short walk from Concord, and there is every indication that Thoreau continued to maintain strong relationships with friends and colleagues there before, during, and after his retreat.
The Transcendentalists were an eclectic mix of intellects, and they depended on each other to fill in the gaps. Thoreau was able to live comfortably in primitive conditions while studying the wild, which Emerson was not, even though his love for nature was equal to Thoreau’s, but it was Emerson made it possible for him to go to Walden by providing the land and the money.
Living in community was a way of life for these Concord neighbors. You can feel it in the museum, looking through the doorway into Emerson’s study, listening to a recording of the words of people who spent long hours there in deep conversation, or simply, like a very young Louisa May Alcott, stopping by to borrow a book.
You know it to be true when you visit the land where the Concord intellectuals used to walk together. It is now Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, and they are buried there on “Author’s Ridge” where people from all over the world come to leave rocks, wildflowers and thank-you notes at the little round headstone that marks the grave of the man who couldn’t get a job in New York.
