I read John Lehmann’s Three Literary Friendships in 1984. It explores the relationships of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, and, the reason I bought the book at the time, Robert Frost and Edward Thomas. Literary friendships have always intrigued me. Public lives as expressed through their shared writings give us one portrait; personal lives through their private writings give another. The questions for me are how may the two be reconciled, and how does the theme of friendship inform their writings?
To begin work on this book, I placed contemporary accounts—journal passages, letters, documents, etc.—of both subjects together, making visible some relational patterns that might otherwise have been overlooked. Combining public and private records allowed me to trace the intricacies and intimacies of their friendship. It was a relationship not only deeply integral to both men on a personal level but also important to the history of American thought and letters. Any biography that concentrates on either Thoreau or Emerson tends to diminish the other figure because that person is, by the nature of biography, secondary. In this book, both men remain central and equal.
It is my hope that their friendship may be seen in a new light and that I did not become the “great inquisitor” Emerson described in “The Method of Nature” who merely attempts to
bore an Artesian well through our conventions and theories, and pierce to the core of things. But as soon as he probes the crust, behold gimlet, plumb-line, and philosopher take a lateral direction, in spite of all resistance, as if some strong wind took everything off its feet, and if you come month after month to see what progress our reformer has made,—not an inch has he pierced,—you still find him with new words in the old place, floating about in new parts of the same old vein or crust.
It was essential to find the truth of their friendship and not simply present the “same old vein or crust” by relying on myths that have been perpetuated or stories that have remained incomplete because they appeared more dramatic that way. In order to do that, I did not rely on any story told in previous biographies or critical works. I traced stories back, whenever possible, in an attempt to find out if there was a reliable source, and to not merely repeat what had been told before.
Part I of Solid Seasons tells the story of their friendship; Parts II and III let the two friends speak for themselves about friendship generally and about each other specifically; the book concludes with Emerson’s biographical sketch of Thoreau, an expanded version of the eulogy he delivered at Thoreau’s funeral.
No biography is definitive; no examination of a life is complete. “I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture,” Emerson wrote in “Experience.” I have chosen to concentrate on decisive moments and events—and not detail every walk, every conversation these friends shared together—to offer, in Solid Seasons, a new view of an old story: the meaning of friendship. The essence of friendship, Emerson said, was “entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.” Thoreau defined it as the “unspeakable joy and blessing that results to two or more individuals who from constitution sympathize.”