Thoreau: “I might have loved him, had I loved him less. . . .”

As an English teacher, retired, I am often asked who I thought was the greatest author.  Or who was my favorite.  The first is a bit tricky; after all, I haven’t read all the great works out there so I was hardly in a position to make such a judgment.  The second one was easy: Henry David Thoreau.  I used to reread Walden once or twice a year, and I’ve taught it several times.  But since I retired and moved to Chicago, I haven’t touched it.  Perhaps it’s living in a big city?  I once imagined that I would retire and live in a small place deep in the woods somewhere, reading and meditating and communing with Nature.  That didn’t work out, nor, at least as I see myself now, would I have liked it; I’m a big city boy at heart.

What brought all this to mind is a novel I’m reading: Thoreau in Love, by John Schuyler Bishop.  The premise of the novel is that Henry heads off to Staten Island to tutor Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brother’s children for six months, which is fact.  Thoreau, an inveterate journal keeper, must have kept a record of his time in New York, but some 200+ pages of his journal during this time have been torn out and lost to us, perhaps by Thoreau but more probably by someone after Thoreau died, perhaps acting as censor.  The novel posits what Henry did during his time in New York: among other things is his trying to come to terms with being attracted to men; in fact, in the novel, he is having an affair with a young sailor he meets on the clipper taking him to New York.

Is there any chance that Thoreau was gay (keeping in mind that the term wasn’t used then and even the concept of “being gay” would hardly have been conceivable)?  Thoreau is generally thought of as being almost asexual.  He was described by his friends as such.  He seems to have been rather a bluenose.  Certainly he never married, and when he proposed to Ellen Sewall, and was turned down, he seemed more relieved than anything.  But the great Thoreau scholar Walter Harding believed there was a very real possibility that Thoreau was, indeed, gay.  While he didn’t include that viewpoint in his biography of Thoreau, The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography, he later wrote an article for The Journal of Homosexuality* arguing just such a case.  Harding points out that in Thoreau’s journals, probably his most important writing, there are many references to men and masculine physical attractiveness--and few about women.  One example: “A man may be young, athletic, active, beautiful.  Then, too, his thoughts will be like his person.  They will wander in a living and beautiful world.”  At one point he describes a young man as a “brawny New Hampshire man . . . bareheaded . . . and in shirt and trousers only, a rude Apollo of a man, coming down from that ‘vast uplandish country’ to the main; . . . with flaxen hair and vigorous, weather-bleached countenance.”  What’s especially interesting about this, aside from the obvious gay undertone, is the use of “vast uplandish country,” a direct quote from Christopher Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander” in a passage talking about the beauty of Hippolytus--a man.  Finally, Harding points to Thoreau’s most famous poem, “Sympathy,” written about a young student of his, Edmund Sewall, younger brother of Ellen.  A link to the poem is provided below; it’s hard not to see this as a love poem.  Since reading Harding’s essay many years ago, I’ve always believed that Thoreau was indeed gay--in a time when such feelings could hardly be acknowledged.  That speculation has influenced my reading of Thoreau ever since.

Thoreau in Love is a good novel.  It’s plausible and well-written.  If you have any interest in Thoreau at all, I would encourage you to read it.  I would especially encourage you to read Harding’s biography also.  And if you can find a copy of the article by Harding, read that too; it’s a convincing argument.

Now, time to reread some Thoreau.  I’ll start with my favorite essay, “Life Without Principle,” and then dive back into the crystalline prose and lucid, relevant ideas of Walden.  But first, Thoreau’s poem to Edmund, “Sympathy”**.
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* Harding, Walter.  “Thoreau’s Sexuality.” Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 21(3), 1991.
**  Thoreau’s poem “Sympathy”: http://www.thoreau-online.org/sympathy.html