On New Year’s Day of 1842, a twenty-six-year-old schoolteacher named John Thoreau was stropping his razor in the family home in Concord, Massachusetts, when the blade slipped and nicked the ring finger on his left hand. It was a slight cut, barely deep enough to draw blood, and John bandaged the wound. A few days later, his finger began to throb, and when he removed the bandage on Saturday, January 8, he found that a portion of the skin was necrotic. That evening he went to the town doctor, who found no cause for concern and redressed the finger. Walking home, however, John began to feel pain in other parts of his body—pain that quickly grew so severe he was barely able to stagger into the house. When he woke the following morning, he found it difficult to open his mouth. That night, his body began to shudder with excruciating spasms. Lockjaw had set in.
In 1842, lockjaw was a disease with which many Americans were familiar. A bacterial infection named for the muscle spasms that make it difficult to speak or swallow, lockjaw (now known as tetanus) triggers spasms not only in the jaw but throughout the rest of the body. As the throat eventually, irrevocably, constricts, breathing becomes impossible; most lockjaw victims die by suffocation. An 1809 painting by Sir Charles Bell, a Scottish surgeon and medical illustrator, depicts a soldier dying of the disease: jaw tensed, neck flexed, fists clenched, toes curled, eyes bulging, back arched so acutely that a medium-size dog could walk underneath. It is a painting that hurts to look at. A vaccine for the disease would not be developed for more than a century. In John Thoreau’s day lockjaw was invariably fatal.
On Sunday, John’s younger brother, Henry, came home from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house, where he had been living and working for the past eight months, to look after John. Henry was a devoted and tireless nurse to his brother, but there was little he could do other than hold him through his spasms and keep him company when they subsided. On Monday, a doctor summoned from Boston told John there was no hope. Death would be painful, he said, but it would come quickly. Though John’s parents, his two sisters, and his brother were agonized, John, whose spiritual beliefs were more traditional than those of his pantheistic brother, was calm: “The cup that my Father gives me, shall I not drink it?” At times John was delirious, at times almost pacific. “His words and behavior throughout were what Mr. Emerson calls manly, even great,” Emerson’s wife, Lidian, reported. Her letters, written to her sister after John’s death and based on Henry’s testimony, are the best account we have of John Thoreau’s last hours: “After J. had taken leave of all the family he said to Henry now sit down and talk to me of Nature and Poetry, I shall be a good listener for it is difficult for me to interrupt you. During the hour in which he died, he looked at Henry with a ‘transcendent smile full of Heaven’ (I think this was H’s expression) and Henry ‘found himself returning it’ and this was the last communication that passed between them.” On Tuesday, January 11, at two in the afternoon, John Thoreau died in his brother’s arms.
When Henry returned to the Emersons’ that evening to tell them of his brother’s death, they were impressed with the young man’s self-possession. Often prickly and headstrong, Thoreau was surprisingly calm. On Wednesday morning, he came back to pack up his clothes and move home. “I love him for the feeling he showed and the effort he made to be cheerful,” wrote Lidian Emerson. “He did not give way in the least but his whole demeanour was that of one struggling with sickness of heart.” Thoreau’s composure may have reflected his extensive reading of the Stoic philosophers. It may also have resulted from what twentieth-century psychologists would identify as the first stage of grief: denial. For nearly two weeks after his brother’s death, Henry sat in the Thoreau home, listless, passive, silent. His sisters led him outdoors, hoping that his love of nature would revive him, but he remained unreachable. Then, on January 22, eleven days after his brother’s death, Henry’s jaw began to stiffen, his muscles to spasm. The doctor was perplexed; lockjaw was not a contagious disease, and there was no sign of any cut. Yet the symptoms were unmistakable. There was nothing to do but wait for the end. Even the unflappable Emerson, writing a letter to his brother William after returning from a lecture he’d given in Boston, was driven to uncharacteristic typographical excess: “My pleasure at getting home on Saturday night at the end of my task was somewhat checked by finding that Henry Thoreau who has been at his fathers since the death of his brother was ill & threatened with lockjaw! his brother’s disease. It is strange—unaccountable—yet the symptoms seemed precise & on the increase. You may judge we were all alarmed & I not the least who have the highest hopes of this youth.”
The symptoms were indeed precise, but they were psychosomatic. Henry did not have lockjaw; what he had was a grief so profound that he had assumed the earmarks of his brother’s fatal illness.
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History does not record the reaction of the Thoreau parents to the death of their eldest son, but Henry David Thoreau’s extraordinary response illustrates how devastating the death of a sibling can be. And yet, just as the sibling relationship in psychology has been minimized in comparison with the Oedipal drama, the loss of a sibling has, in the hierarchy of grief, been subordinate to the loss of a child. Those mourning the death of a brother or sister often say that they have been made to feel the loss is not theirs to grieve, that it “belongs” to their parents—an example of what some psychologists call “disenfranchised grief,” the frequently unacknowledged loss experienced by supposedly peripheral survivors: ex-spouses, lovers, gay partners, grandparents, friends. Surviving siblings report that would-be comforters are far more likely to comment, “How awful for your parents” than “How awful for you.” (Hallmark didn’t begin to sell sibling-specific bereavement cards until the 1980s, long after they had produced cards addressing the loss of parents, grandparents, and children.) The handful of researchers studying sibling loss tend to have lost siblings themselves and, finding no help in the medical literature, sought their own answers.
Losing a brother or sister may be especially traumatic at an early age, when the loss, painful enough in itself, is often compounded by the fact that siblings are unlikely to get much support from parents consumed by their own grief. In 1867, when her favorite son died in a skating accident two days before his fourteenth birthday, Margaret Barrie retreated to her darkened bedroom, leaving her six other children to fend for themselves. After several days had passed, an older sister told six-year-old James, the bewildered youngest son (and future author of Peter Pan), to go to their mother and remind her that she still had another boy. Even after Mary Todd Lincoln spent five weeks in bed mourning the death of her eleven-year-old son, Willie, to typhoid fever in 1862, she found it difficult to be with eight-year-old Tad, because he reminded her of his absent older brother. She stopped inviting Tad and Willie’s best friends to the White House because, she wrote their mother, “It makes me worse to see them”—and thus further isolated her youngest son.
“It has been aptly said that the surviving sibling becomes a double orphan,” write Stephen Bank and Michael Kahn in The Sibling Bond, “losing not only a sister or a brother but also an emotionally available parent.” Those who have lost a sibling when young speak of the unspoken pressure to avoid making demands on grieving parents, to have no needs of their own, to “be good.” In a study of 159 adolescents and adults who had lost a sibling in childhood, more than half had never discussed the death with anyone in their family. Such unacknowledged grief can surface years later as depression, often when the survivors’ own children reach the age their sibling was when he died.
The loss of a sibling can be calamitous at any age. “My beloved brother’s death has cut into me, deep down, even as an absolute mutilation,” wrote the sixty-seven-year-old Henry James to Edith Wharton, after William’s fatal heart attack. One often reads of a widow or widower who, in apparently good health, dies not long after the death of a beloved spouse. The same can be true of brothers. After my wife’s father died at the age of ninety-five, Anne and I were shocked when his younger brother started to deteriorate with astonishing speed. Bill had looked up to—and had tried to live up to—his older brother since they were children. Though for the past ten years they had lived on opposite coasts, they had spoken to each other every Sunday afternoon. Those phone calls, Bill’s last tangible connection to his siblings, his parents, and his childhood, were a fraternal umbilicus. When they stopped, Bill began to stop, too. His wife and sons could not reverse his slide. Severely weakened, he fell, hit his head, and was taken to the ICU, where he died less than six weeks after his brother.
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When most people think of Henry David Thoreau, they think of the Hermit of Concord, the epitome of independence—as if he’d lived his entire life in his one-room cabin on Walden Pond. In fact, Thoreau spent only two years in his cabin (which was, at times, as bustling as a Left Bank café), and for much of his life he was dependent on others for emotional and financial sustenance. During his first twenty-four years, Henry relied heavily on his older brother.
Born two years apart, the Thoreau brothers were unusually close. As children, they shared a trundle bed. John usually fell asleep right away; Henry lay awake watching the stars. It isn’t surprising that on his deathbed, John Thoreau asked his brother to talk to him of nature. Had it not been for John, “the family naturalist,” as one Thoreau biographer calls him, Henry’s lifelong absorption in the natural world might never have taken root. (John’s detailed list of Concord birds was Henry’s first field guide, the template for the hundreds of natural history charts Henry would one day assemble.) Whenever they weren’t in school, they were exploring Concord: digging for arrowheads along its riverbanks, spearing eels in its ponds, watching for hawks over its meadows, sledding its hills, building boats and paddling them on its streams until darkness fell. They invented Indian names for each other, pretending to be braves of the Wampanoag tribe that only a few decades earlier had prowled these same woods. They carved their initials side by side on the railing of the old red bridge over the Concord River. On summer mornings they’d wake before dawn to hike to the cliffs at Fair Haven in order to watch the sunrise. On summer nights they’d build a fire on the shore of Walden Pond, hoping to attract the fish. “We caught pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a thread,” Henry later recalled, “and when we had done, far in the night, threw the burning brands high into the air like skyrockets, which, coming down into the pond, were quenched with a loud hissing.” After John’s death, Henry would remember those early days in a poem: For then, as now, I trust, / I always lagg’d behind, / While thou wert ever first, / Cutting the wind.
Although far less is known about John than about his famous brother, the available evidence agrees that while they shared many interests, they had very different personalities. (Edward Emerson’s observation that “These brothers were just enough unlike to increase the interest and happiness of their relation” has the whiff of the politic.) The terms used by their fellow Concordians to describe John (“genial,” “pleasant,” “serene,” “loving,” “saintly minded,” “a bright spot,” “a flowing generous spirit,” “the life of every gathering”) were near-antonyms of those they used to describe Henry (“shy,” “silent,” “rigid,” “brusque,” “unsympathetic,” “in the green apple stage,” “an odd stick”). John was said to be an extroverted version of the father for whom he had been named, an easygoing pencil manufacturer too tenderhearted to be much of a businessman. Henry was said to have inherited his contrary ways from his mother, an ambitious, garrulous woman (her hard-of-hearing husband occasionally feigned deafness to tune out her voice) who ran a boardinghouse in the Thoreau home. John was comfortable in his skin; Henry’s didn’t yet seem to fit. Even as a child, Henry was a distant, defensive, irascible fellow who looked at the ground when he talked to you—an embryonic version of the man Nathaniel Hawthorne would describe as “the most unmalleable fellow alive.” At school, none of their classmates could remember Henry ever playing with them in the yard. He preferred, they said, to stand on the sidelines and watch. (A leading local lawyer found Henry so solemn he called him “the Judge,” and Thoreau’s schoolmates took up the nickname.) John, by contrast, would sit by the hour on the fence outside the schoolhouse and regale his classmates with stories and jokes, making them laugh until it hurt. John was the more popular brother. He was also considered the more promising. And if his sister Sophia’s portrait of him can be trusted (one biographer, deeming it “atrocious” and calling the painter “feebly artistic,” suggests that it cannot), John was better-looking than Henry, his nose less prominent, his chin stronger, his features more aquiline, his mouth curled into a winsome half-smile rather than a quizzical frown, his hair shorter and more kempt.
If Henry was chagrined at being unfavorably compared with his older brother, he didn’t show it. No one in Concord thought more highly of John than did Henry himself. He called John his “good genius.” John was not only a beloved older brother but a father figure as well; Henry looked up to him as he couldn’t look up to their amiable but feckless father. John’s gregariousness also had an unintended fringe benefit for his brother. Henry drew all the companionship he needed from his older brother, allowing him to indulge his reclusive side, to withdraw even more than he might have otherwise, to become even more himself. Emerson, who was among Thoreau’s closest companions in adulthood, famously remarked that Thoreau had no friends. That may have been true after John’s death. But for the first twenty-four years of Henry’s life, he had a friend, a best friend.
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The brothers were parted in the fall of 1833 when Henry went off to Harvard. (Although John was considered the more promising, Henry was the more bookish, and by the time Henry was of college age the family finances were in better shape than they had been two years earlier, when John finished his education at the age of sixteen and went to work as a teacher.) Henry frequently came home to see his family or to recuperate from an illness. When they weren’t together, the brothers wrote each other playful, affectionate letters. After graduation, Henry, at loose ends, biding time in his father’s pencil-making operation, turned again to his brother, suggesting that after John finished the school year they head west to search for teaching jobs. “It is high season to start,” wrote Henry, with youthful brio. “The canals are now open, and travelling comparatively cheap. I think I can borrow the cash in this town. There’s nothing like trying.” Although John agreed to the proposal, nothing came of it, and Henry, of course, would ultimately choose to do his traveling in Concord. But in the fall of 1838, Henry convinced his older brother to leave his teaching post in Roxbury and join him in running Concord Academy, a small private school Henry had opened a few months earlier. Under Henry, it had done well enough, but with the universally admired John taking over as preceptor (what might today be called headmaster), the first families of Concord seemed even more willing to entrust their sons and daughters to the school. Soon there were twenty-five children enrolled, and a growing waiting list.
Unsurprisingly, the Thoreaus had somewhat unusual ideas of what constituted good teaching. “We should seek to be fellow students with the pupil,” wrote Henry, “and we should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him”—a credo that could serve as mission statement for many a progressive school over the following century. The Thoreau brothers didn’t neglect the traditional subjects. John taught grammar, geography, and mathematics in the downstairs classroom. Henry, by virtue of his Harvard education, handled the more advanced courses upstairs, including Latin, Greek, French, physics, algebra, geometry, and natural history. The brothers could be just as strict as their public-school counterparts. Henry kept one pupil after school nearly an hour because he had omitted an “et” while reading a Latin sentence. Yet some of the curriculum raised eyebrows among more pedagogically conservative Concord parents. Each morning, following prayers, one of the brothers offered a brief talk (on the beauties of the seasons, for instance, or on the existence of an all-powerful being), a sort of philosophical palate cleanser to set the stage for the day’s work. There were field trips—to the office of the Yeoman’s Gazette to watch the compositors set the day’s news in type; to Pratt’s gunsmith shop to observe the regulating of gunsights; to Fair Haven Bay to learn surveying; to the banks of the Concord River to watch John and Henry apply a fresh coat of tar to the bottom of their latest handmade boat. Students who boarded with the Thoreaus were taken to local lectures; one evening, for instance, they heard Emerson speak on literature at the Lyceum. Saturday mornings were devoted to composition. (“N.B. Writing will be particularly attended to,” noted a newspaper announcement for the school.) “The boys sometimes write their lives or those of some venerable Aunt Hannah or Uncle Ichabod,” one student wrote to his parents, adding that he himself had composed two themes on less personal topics: birds and berries, subjects on which one of his instructors would write a great deal in the years to come. “Mr. Thoreau reads [a]loud those compositions which he thinks will please the scholars, which sometimes occasions a great deal of laughter.”
Concord Academy students spent an unusual amount of time out of doors. Recess was extended to half an hour (three times the norm), during which period the classroom windows were opened to provide fresh air for the children when they returned—apparently something of a revolutionary concept. At least once a week, the Thoreau brothers led the entire school into the surrounding countryside to pick blackberries, gather chestnuts, search for arrowheads, study flowers under a magnifying glass, take a swim, or row on one of the town ponds, while their teachers told them about the life cycle of the frog or about the Indians in whose footsteps they followed. (John, ever-thoughtful, occasionally brought melons from his garden for the students, or cut strips of birch bark and bent them into drinking cups for thirsty girls.) Each spring John and Henry provided the students with small hoes so they could plant their own vegetables in an old potato patch Henry had plowed next to the school. A good deal of the Concord Academy curriculum consisted of precisely what the Thoreau brothers would have been doing even if they hadn’t been teaching—a continuation of the fraternal explorations they’d undertaken since childhood.
John, who joked and played games with the students at recess, was the favorite. He talked to them “like an affectionate big brother,” according to one student; wrote them playful letters; and put them at their ease. Many years later, a former student would compare him with Arnold of Rugby, the legendary headmaster immortalized in Tom Brown’s School Days, adding, “To me that man seemed to make all things possible.” John thought more of others, it was said, Henry thought more of himself. Henry was “respected,” recalled one student, while John was “loved.” Although Henry got along well with the students, they thought him a little stiff and standoffish. The boys called him “Trainer Thoreau”—trainer being their nickname for soldier—because his erect posture and long, measured stride had a bit of military starch. They occasionally teased him. Once they cut out a picture of a booby from the almanac and passed it around, laughing and saying it reminded them of Henry. At the same time, Henry seems to have been one of those gifted, idiosyncratic teachers whom students always remember. Long after his death, elderly Concordians would recall in detail Henry’s morning talks, his original way of explaining things. After an outbreak of profanity among the male students, for instance, he brought them together and said: “Boys, if you went to talk business with a man, and he persisted in thrusting words having no connection with the subject into all parts of every sentence—Boot-jack, for instance—wouldn’t you think he was taking a liberty with you, and trifling with your time, and wasting his own?” Henry then shoehorned the word boot-jack into a sentence at frequent intervals to illustrate the absurdity of swearing. There was something marvelous about a teacher who could tell the month of the year by what flowers were in bloom, who could find arrowheads seemingly on demand, who told them that a cobweb was a handkerchief dropped by a fairy, and who once shot a sparrow for his students so they could examine it more closely. (Those who can’t imagine the animal-loving Henry toting a flintlock shotgun to school may be interested to know that both Thoreau brothers were enthusiastic young marksmen; indeed, after shooting the sparrow, Henry, when no other game came in view, took potshots at a snowball balanced on a fencepost.) At the end of each day, as Henry was heading home, a child or two, hoping to hear more of his stories, would reach for his hand. Louisa May Alcott, a student at Concord Academy and herself something of a rebellious loner, had a schoolgirl crush on Henry she never entirely outgrew. Years later she drew a fictional portrait of him in her novel Moods, writing “power, intellect, and courage were stamped on his face and figure, making him the manliest man that Sylvia had ever seen.”
These were halcyon days for the brothers. Henry, who had started writing poetry, expressed his joy at being reunited with John—and revealed the extent of his identification with him—in a poem titled “Love”:
We two that planets erst had been
Are now a double star,
And in the heavens may be seen,
Where that we fixed are. . . .
That double star would be threatened when they fell in love with the same woman, setting off an interlude in the life of the Thoreau brothers that, if it hadn’t ended so sadly, could have furnished the ingredients for a Preston Sturges screwball comedy, complete with love-besotted poetry, two marriage proposals, a priggish clergyman, a maiden aunt named Prudence, and a giraffe. In 1839, Ellen Sewall, the lively, intelligent seventeen-year-old daughter of a prominent Unitarian minister from Scituate, had come to Concord, where her aunt boarded at the Thoreaus’, for a two-week stay. She spent much of that time with the Thoreau brothers, who escorted her to their favorite spots for hiking, rowing, berrying, and arrowhead-hunting. Henry also took her to gape at the “camelopard” exhibited in Concord by a traveling show. Evenings, there were suppers at which the Thoreau brothers played music, Henry on the flute. At one such gathering, the young people tried their hand at phrenology, which was in vogue at the time, and took turns interpreting the bumps on one another’s heads. When Henry, “reading” Ellen’s cranium, announced that she had no bumps at all, the rest of the group howled with laughter; according to phrenology, a bumpless head indicated that its owner was either a genius or an idiot.
Henry was smitten by the end of the first day, John not long thereafter. They each responded according to character. Henry confided in his journal, writing poems in Ellen’s honor. One green leaf shall be our screen, / Till the sun doth go to bed, / I the king and you the queen began one; another echoed the double-star poem he’d written about his brother. As ’t were two summer days in one, / Two Sundays come together, / Our rays united make one sun, / With fairest summer weather. Five days after Ellen’s arrival, Henry sounded like an old hand at courtship, at least in the safety of his journal: “There is no remedy for love but to love more.” However, he wasn’t such a fool for love that he sacrificed all his principles. When Ellen asked him to accompany her to church one Sunday morning, he refused. All outdoors, he informed her, was his place of worship. John was more socially sophisticated than his brother. (One can’t imagine Henry writing to a friend, as John did shortly before Ellen’s arrival, “there is naught here save a few antiquated spinsters, or December virgins, if you will; and well may I sing, ‘What’s this dull town to me? no girls are here.’”) He was also more forward; after Ellen departed, finding that she had left behind some arrowheads, he sent them to her, along with a flirtatious letter and a mounted insect as an in-joke. (A third young Concordian, a vacationing Harvard student, was also enamored of Ellen, but, seeing her monopolized by the Thoreau brothers, retired from the fray.) For her part, the young girl seems to have felt strongly, too; according to her own account, she cried all the way to Lexington in the stage coach and, on arriving home in Scituate, wrote to her aunt that her fortnight’s visit had been one of the happiest times of her life. By then, her name had been carved into the railing of the old red bridge over the Concord River—between the initials of the Thoreau brothers. Four weeks later, on the last day of August, at the start of a long-planned boat trip, John and Henry would paddle beneath those initials.
Who knows what really happened between the brothers on that voyage? We have only Henry’s account, written six years after the journey and four years after John’s death and intended, in part, as a memorial to his brother. But thoughts of Ellen must have hung between them as they plied the river in the boat in which they had courted her so recently. When they returned, John left immediately for Scituate, where he had a successful visit, although Ellen’s five-year-old brother kept calling him “Henry.” Over Christmas vacation, the Thoreau brothers made a joint pilgrimage to see Ellen. Afterward, they expressed their sibling rivalry in gifts. Henry, perhaps sensing that Ellen’s father needed wooing as much as Ellen, sent Reverend Sewall a book of poems by Jones Very, under whom Thoreau had studied Greek at Harvard. John, covering several bases at once, sent some South American opals for Ellen’s natural history cabinet, some books for her eleven-year-old brother Edmund, and a long letter to five-year-old George, which closed, “I send you Sir nothing but a letter, and now if sister has read it through to you very carefully you may give her a kiss for me and wish her a Happy New Year!!” Whereupon Henry trumped his brother by sending Ellen some of his own poems, including one in which he recalled their afternoons on the river. The Thoreaus competed not only for Ellen but for her brothers. John made a special friend of George, while Henry was so taken with Edmund that he wrote him a famously enigmatic love poem, “Sympathy” (Lately alas I knew a gentle boy, / Whose features all were cast in Virtue’s mould . . .). Whether Thoreau’s feelings for Edmund were a projection of his feelings for Ellen or his feelings for Ellen were a projection of his feelings for Edmund is a subject of controversy among Thoreau scholars.
It is not known whether the Thoreau brothers discussed their common interest in Ellen, but it is likely that at some point Henry dutifully stepped aside so that his elder brother might pursue his suit. The following summer, after Ellen revisited Concord, John made two trips to Scituate. On the second, while he and Ellen were walking on the beach—and Aunt Prudence had tactfully paused to rest on some rocks—John proposed. Ellen accepted. By the time they reached home, however, she realized she had made a mistake; Henry was her preferred Thoreau. In any case, her mother made her break off the engagement, certain the news would dismay Ellen’s father, a hard-line Unitarian who disapproved of Emerson and his circle. John returned, despondent, to Concord. Henry may have felt sorry for his brother, but he also saw new hope for himself: “Night is spangled with fresh stars,” he wrote in his journal. In November, Henry proposed to Ellen in a letter. Her father was furious—Henry, being the “transcendental brother,” as he sardonically referred to himself, was an even more objectionable son-in-law than John—and insisted she write in a “short, explicit and cold manner to Mr. T.” and refuse him. She did. (Four years after rejecting the Thoreaus, Ellen married a Unitarian minister and went on to have ten children. But her feelings for the brothers endured. At some point she scissored out all references to them in her diary, and, late in life, told her daughter she had felt almost in love with both of them.)
Whether Henry was really in love with Ellen, with Edmund, with the idea of love, or with whatever his brother loved, is not clear. Neither is the interlude’s effect on the brothers’ relationship. Some biographers believe that the brothers grew less close. There is, for instance, no evidence of their taking another trip together after their voyage on the Concord. But that may have been for other reasons. In January 1841, two months after Henry’s proposal had been refused, John came down with a cough he couldn’t shake. Although Henry would describe his brother as a “sturdy oak,” John had always been less robust than he. John occasionally suffered from nosebleeds so violent that he fainted, and there were days when what he called “colic” (but was more likely early-stage tuberculosis) kept him housebound. Even when healthy, he weighed only 117 pounds. John soon grew too weak to teach. Henry didn’t wish to continue without his brother, and on April 1, 1841, they closed their school.
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If there was a growing distance in their relationship, Ellen Sewall may not have been the only cause. During the years he taught school with his brother, Henry was also undergoing a period of ferocious intellectual growth, fueled in large part by his new friendship with Emerson. Henry began to keep a journal; started to write poetry; was introduced to Margaret Fuller and other leading thinkers of the day; became a Transcendentalist; published in The Dial; lectured at the Concord Lyceum; and, given the run of Emerson’s vast library, expanded the ambitious program of reading he had started at Harvard, plowing through Aeschylus, Virgil, Goethe, and Fenelon in the original. It was as if he had a second, separate life, a life of the mind he couldn’t share with his brother. Though John was intelligent and well-read (on January 27, 1841, he and Henry had taken the affirmative in debating Bronson Alcott at the Lyceum on the topic “Is it ever proper to offer forcible resistance?”), he didn’t share his brother’s intellectual seriousness. While Henry enjoyed teaching and was, in his way, good at it, there is little doubt that, even had John remained healthy and the school doors open, Henry eventually would have defected. With Emerson’s support, Henry was beginning to identify himself as a writer.
Henry found in Emerson, who was fourteen years his senior, not only a mentor but the wise, paternal figure his own father had never been and for whom his brother had stood in. For Emerson, too, the relationship filled familial needs. During the previous three years, he had lost two brothers, for whom he had the deepest affection and the highest hopes, to tuberculosis. When Emerson met Thoreau, he may have found in this brilliant, peculiar young man a rough-hewn surrogate for his late brothers. Furthermore, Emerson had lost his father on the eve of his eighth birthday, and though he was the third of six sons, he had, in many ways, become the head of the family; as his own brothers died, he became an elder brother to many young writers, of whom Thoreau was the most promising.
In the early years of their relationship, Thoreau worshiped Emerson as devoutly as a young boy ever worshiped his older brother. In one of his early poems, “Friendship” (a subject to which he would return all his life), Thoreau writes of Two sturdy oaks I mean, which side by side, / Withstand the winter’s storm, / And spite of wind and tide, / Grow up the meadow’s pride, / For both are strong. Whether the poem referred to his new friendship with his illustrious neighbor or to his deep-rooted bond with his beloved brother can’t be determined; likely both were on his mind. Both were vital to Henry. The intellectual stimulation he couldn’t get from John, he got from Emerson; the easy affection he couldn’t get from the emotionally removed Emerson, he got from John. (Like all Concordians, Emerson was fond of John, who had built him a bluebird house and had thoughtfully taken his son Waldo to a traveling daguerreotypist for his portrait, a portrait that became even more precious to Emerson after Waldo died a few months later.) But Emerson inadvertently, unknowingly, challenged John for Henry’s attention. Henry appeared to make a choice when, three weeks after the Thoreau brothers closed their school, he accepted Emerson’s invitation to move into his home for a year. In return for room and board, Thoreau would serve as handyman, carpenter, chimney sweep, gardener, intellectual foil to Emerson, playfellow for his four children, companion to Lidian, and, during Emerson’s frequent absences on lecture tours, man of the house. Thoreau ostensibly made the move for financial reasons, but any post-Ellen awkwardness in his relationship with his brother must have made it easier to leave. The Emerson house was only a short walk from the Thoreaus’, and Henry, no doubt, returned home for frequent dinners. It was from Emerson’s house that, eight months after he had moved in, he hurried home to be at his dying brother’s side.
If lockjaw was a common phenomenon in 1842, “sympathetic illness” was all but unknown. One of the first references in the medical literature would appear more than a century after Thoreau was stricken, when psychiatrist Erich Lindemann, in a 1944 study of 101 patients grieving the death of a loved one, found numerous instances in which their grief had been complicated by “the acquisition of symptoms belonging to the last illness of the deceased.” Two decades later, in a study of 58 children whose psychiatric conditions were linked to the death of a sibling, the psychologist Albert Cain found that nearly half had suffered “hysterical identifications” with the sibling’s prominent symptoms, including pains, convulsions, asthmatic attacks, and, in one case, paralysis. Cain noted that these symptoms may be delayed (as in Thoreau’s case) “when there is necessity for maintaining the morale of others.”
Cain also found that these hysterical identifications were usually associated with a sense of guilt. In half of the children he saw, guilt “was rawly, directly present,” even five years or more after the sibling’s death. “Such children felt responsible for the death, sporadically insisted it was all their fault, felt they should have died too, or should have died instead of the dead sibling. . . . They mulled over and over the nasty things they had thought, felt, said or done to the dead sibling, and became all the guiltier.” Their guilt led to depression, accident-proneness, punishment seeking, constant testing behavior, and other forms of acting out. Cain observed that surviving siblings often sensed that their parents wished that they, not their sibling, had died.
Cain was studying psychiatric cases. Feelings of guilt, however, are common after most sibling deaths. When his fourteen-year-old brother, Jack, was killed in a horrific table saw accident, twelve-year-old Johnny Cash felt as if he, too, had died. The boys had been inseparable. When not working side by side in their father’s Arkansas cotton fields, they swam, climbed trees, and fished. “Jack was my big brother and my hero: my best friend, my big buddy, my mentor, and my protector,” Johnny recalled. Jack had been the golden boy in the impoverished Cash family, a strong, considerate, reliable fellow who planned to become a preacher. Johnny was a scrawny, cigarette-smoking rebel. At night, while Jack studied the Bible, Johnny listened to blues and gospel on the radio. On the day of Jack’s death, Johnny had begged his brother to come fishing with him; Jack said he couldn’t, that the family needed the money he earned making fence posts in the high school agriculture shop. Afterward, Johnny kept thinking that if only he’d been able to persuade Jack to go fishing, his brother would still be alive. The guilt he felt was reinforced by his father, who, when drunk, told Johnny he should have been the one to die. During Johnny Cash’s subsequent decades of drinking, drug use, and other self-destructive behavior, it seemed almost as if he was taking his father’s words literally.
Guilt may encourage a surviving sibling to feel he must stand in for his dead brother. The concept of a “replacement child” goes back to the Bible. After Cain killed Abel, Eve gave birth to a third son, whom she called Seth, from the Hebrew word for “set” or “appointed,” believing God had sent him to her as a substitute for her dead son. (The Bible does not tell us whether Seth followed in Abel’s footsteps, careerwise, but in Antiquities of the Jews, the first-century historian Josephus refers to Seth as “a virtuous man” and “of excellent character.”) As in Eve’s case, the notion of a replacement child can be taken literally, when parents conceive a child to replace a child who has died, often giving the newborn his deceased brother’s name. (In Albert Cain’s study, there were a few instances in which grieving parents renamed a living sibling for the dead child.) Nine months and ten days after the death of their first child, Salvador, to a gastrointestinal infection at the age of twenty-one months, Salvador and Felipa Dali had a second child, whom they also named Salvador. The second Salvador grew up in the shadow of the first. His brother’s photograph hung over his parents’ bed, his toys still lay scattered in the house, and his memory was invoked constantly by his parents, who referred to him as a “genius.” When the second Salvador was five, they took him to his brother’s grave and told him he was the reincarnation of his dead brother. Desperate to prove to his parents that he was unique, he became a tantrum thrower, an intentional bedwetter, and a lifelong exhibitionist. In his histrionic life and Surrealist art, he sought the attention he never got from his parents. “All the eccentricities which I commit, all the incoherent displays are the tragic fixity of my life,” he wrote. “I wish to prove to myself that I am not the dead brother, but the living one.”
Surviving siblings may feel unspoken pressure to replace the lost sibling by living up to his example or by living for him—keeping him, in a sense, alive through themselves. One way to do that is to assume part of his identity. That identification can be physical: Henry David Thoreau trying on John’s illness; Robert Kennedy wearing Jack’s old navy jacket; six-year-old Joshua Fleck asking, after the death of his identical twin to brain cancer, that a piece from Shayne’s blue blanket be sewn into his own matching blue blanket; the professional football player Arnaz Battle tattooing the face of his younger brother, who drowned at the age of three, on his arm so that, as Battle put it, “he would always be with me.”
That identification can be figurative, as when a surviving sibling takes on some of the personality traits or ambitions of the lost sibling, a phenomenon psychologists refer to as “living for two.” (The expression is made literal by the southern folk superstition that when one twin dies, the surviving twin inherits his strengths. Thus Elvis Presley grew up believing, as his mother assured him, that he had inherited the talents of his stillborn twin, Jesse.) Seventeen-year-old Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) read widely in radical politics, but when his older brother, Alexander, who had introduced him to the work of Karl Marx, was hanged for his part in the attempted assassination of the tzar, Lenin grew determined to translate theory into action. The young Bill Tilden was a naturally gifted tennis player but didn’t take the sport seriously until his beloved older brother, a talented amateur who had taught him the game, died of pneumonia when Bill was twenty-two. After that, said a friend, “Nobody ever worked so hard at anything as he did at tennis.” Ranked seventieth in the country at the time of his brother’s death, he was world champion four years later. When twenty-three-year-old army scout David Weir was killed in Baghdad in 2006, his eldest brother, Chris, a twenty-seven-year-old financial officer from Tennessee, volunteered to complete his brother’s service, one of numerous instances in which someone has enlisted after his brother has been killed in battle. Following his younger brother John’s death, the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, co-creator of New York’s Central Park, looked after his sister-in-law and her three young children. Eventually, Olmsted and his sister-in-law would marry and have four more children of their own, in a kind of organically evolving levirate marriage: the tradition, widely practiced in the ancient world and still found in some parts of India and Africa, in which the brother of a deceased man is obligated by law or custom to marry his brother’s widow.
“Living for two” can be an inspiration and a burden. When his devout, sweet-tempered older brother was killed in the Korean War, thirteen-year-old Jerry West, suspecting his parents would rather he had died, took out his bitterness on the basketball court. “The pressure I felt was to compensate, to account for my brother David’s death,” he later said. Competing with an inner fury that was almost frightening, he would become one of the greatest players in history. He would also suffer periodic bouts of crippling depression. When seven-year-old Arthur Nixon, the fourth of five brothers in Whittier, California, died of meningitis in 1925, his twelve-year-old brother Richard felt guilty, believing that a rock thrown by a neighbor had contributed to his brother’s death, a rock from which he felt he should have been able to protect his younger brother. “I think it was Arthur’s passing that first stirred within Richard a determination to help make up for our loss by making us very proud of him,” his mother recalled. “Now his need to succeed became even stronger.” Eight years later, Richard’s older brother, twenty-three-year-old Harold, the handsome, dashing, devil-may-care golden boy of the Nixon family—all the things Richard felt he wasn’t—died of tuberculosis. Richard “sank into a deep, impenetrable silence,” according to his mother. When he emerged from his depression, twenty-year-old Nixon, already a stridently ambitious young man, became even more driven. “From that time on, it seemed that he was trying to be three sons in one,” said his mother. (His failed 1960 presidential campaign was made more excruciating by the fact that his opponent, John F. Kennedy, exemplified many of the qualities that Harold Nixon had possessed.) Though Richard Nixon would eventually win the presidency and become the most powerful man in the world, he felt a lifelong sense of inadequacy—he’d never be as handsome, charming, or graceful as his older brother. And, in the end, he would lose that power by self-destructing, as if he felt at some level that he didn’t deserve his success.
In Maus, a graphic memoir detailing his parents’ experience as Jews in wartime Poland, the cartoonist Art Spiegelman describes the difficulty of being raised in the shadow of a “ghost-brother”—an older brother he never knew who had died during the war at age five or six. “I didn’t think about him much when I was growing up,” writes Spiegelman, who was born after his parents survived Auschwitz and came to the United States. “He was mainly a large, blurry photograph hanging in my parents’ bedroom. . . . The photo never threw tantrums or got in any kind of trouble . . . It was an ideal kid, and I was a pain in the ass. I couldn’t compete.” In 1944, after his older brother, Joe, died while carrying out a secret bombing mission over the French coast, Jack Kennedy told a friend that for as long as he could remember, he had defined himself through his competition with his brother. Now that brother was gone. Yet the competition would never end. He would forever be compared with a brother whose greatness had been made permanent by death. “I’m shadowboxing in a match the shadow is always going to win.”
The stress of being a replacement child can be corrosive. Although there is no way to identify the precise strands that combined to turn the young Adolf Hitler into a mass murderer, the psychologists Stephen Bank and Michael Kahn believe that his status as a replacement brother was a crucial factor. Before Adolf’s birth, three Hitler children had died in infancy, and his parents were desperate to cauterize their grief by raising a healthy son. When Adolf was eleven, his elder half-brother, Alois, who resented Adolf’s favored status, quarreled bitterly with their father and ran away to England, where he was arrested and jailed for theft. Later that year, Adolf’s six-year-old brother Edmund died of the measles. Hitler’s bedroom overlooked the cemetery wall behind which Edmund had been buried; according to neighbors, he spent countless hours sitting on that wall, staring into the graveyard. After Edmund’s death, the outgoing, well-mannered boy who had excelled in school became a problem child, brooding and defiant. “Torn between fulfilling the father’s angry demands to be a perfect replacement sibling and the exiled Alois’s call to be impulsive, Adolf Hitler turned inward and became openly hostile to everyone’s expectations,” wrote Bank and Kahn in The Sibling Bond. “His status as a replacement child (five times over), in the context of an already overclose maternal relationship and a strict father, can be seen as a major organizing factor in the development of Hitler’s sadism and his arrogant claim to superiority and invulnerability.”
* * *
On the surface, Thoreau’s psychosomatic lockjaw was a dramatic measure of his identification with his beloved older brother, no doubt exacerbated by the trauma of nursing him during the last two days of his agonizing death. Henry and John had shared much of their lives. They had attended school together, taught together, explored Concord together, taken vacations together, even fallen in love with the same woman. Now they were sharing the same illness. Thoreau himself saw it this way. On March 14, writing of John’s death to a friend, he explained, “I have been confined to my chamber for a month with a prolonged shock of the same disorder—from close attention to, and sympathy with him, which I learn is not without precedent.” Indeed, Thoreau identified so strongly with his brother that he may unconsciously have felt he couldn’t go on without him. Conversely, he may have felt guilty that even before his brother’s death, he had begun to “go on without him” by pursuing a career as a writer and by moving away from home—and away from his ailing brother. Thoreau’s illness may also have been an expression of “survivor guilt,” that phenomenon by which someone may feel intense guilt after surviving an accident fatal to others.
But Thoreau had other reasons to feel culpable. In his psychobiography of Thoreau, Richard Lebeaux points out that despite the reverence he felt for his older brother, Henry surely also felt rivalry—for their parents’ love, for their students’ affection, for their neighbors’ approval, and, most recently and keenly, for the heart of Ellen Sewall. “Because he loved his brother so much, Thoreau experienced unbearable guilt,” writes Lebeaux, who believes that John’s death was the central event in Thoreau’s life and in his growth as an artist. “His psychosomatic illness could be interpreted as a way of punishing himself and trying to share the fate of John, thereby relieving his guilt.” Had such a theory been expressed in 1842 pre-Freudian Concord, it would doubtless have been considered as ludicrous as a teacher who believed he could learn from his students. And yet it is possible that Thoreau sensed among the townspeople, on some level, disappointment that saintly John and not irascible Henry had been the Thoreau brother to die.
On January 27, two weeks after John’s death and three days after Henry’s symptoms began to fade, Henry’s grief was compounded when five-year-old Waldo, his favorite among the Emerson children, died of scarlet fever. “I feel as if years had been crowded into the last month,” he wrote on February 21, two days after opening his journal for the first time since John’s death. Friends said of Thoreau that it seemed as if a part of him had been torn away. To the outside world, he struggled to put John’s death into perspective. “Soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing along the river which he frequented, as pleasantly as ever,” he wrote Lucy Brown, Lidian’s sister, on March 2. “The same everlasting serenity will appear in this face of God, and we will not be sorrowful, if he is not.” One senses Thoreau trying to talk himself back into health. But his despair surfaced in his journal. “My life, my life! why will you linger? Are the years short and the months of no account? . . .” he wrote on March 11. “Why, God, did you include me in your great scheme? Will you not make me a partner at last?” Two days later, in his journal, he was again philosophical: “The sad memory of departed friends is soon incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as their monuments are overgrown with moss. Nature doth thus kindly heal every wound. By the mediation of a thousand little mosses and fungi, the most unsightly objects become radiant of beauty.” But his entry of March 26, two and a half months after John’s death, was more raw. “Where is my heart gone?” he asked. “They say men cannot part with it and live.” By mid-April, he had moved back to the Emersons’, but he was still too weak and despondent to work in the garden.
If Thoreau’s psychosomatic illness and severe depression can be considered a form of symbolic death, it would lead to a corresponding rebirth. As spring moved into summer, Henry’s brave words about nature’s healing powers took root, and he began to find in its matter-of-fact cycle of death and regeneration a measure of consolation. A key Transcendentalist tenet was a belief in the spiritual significance of natural events. John had kindled his interest in nature; John’s death made nature seem even more vital. Wandering the woods and fields he had explored with his brother, he felt closer to John, a feeling he would express in a poem, “Brother Where Dost Thou Dwell?” written sixteen months after John’s death:
Where chiefly shall I look
To feel thy presence near?
Along the neighboring brook
May I thy voice still hear?
Dost thou still haunt the brink
Of yonder river’s tide?
And may I ever think
That thou art at my side?
Henry not only immersed himself in nature, he began to write about it. In April, Emerson had suggested he review five recent books of natural history for The Dial. (Devastated by the death of his son, Emerson was trying to prod his surrogate son back to life.) “Natural History of Massachusetts” was Thoreau’s first nature essay and, in retrospect, it is clear that he had found his calling. Written with a naturalist’s powers of observation and a poet’s gift for description, Thoreau’s “review” was a freewheeling discussion of the themes he had been wrestling with in the aftermath of John’s death: the inevitability of change, the fragility of life, death and rebirth. He wrote of spring’s annual renaissance with an exuberance approaching ecstasy, concluding, “Surely joy is the condition of life.” In finding recovery and renewal in nature, he began to find recovery and renewal in himself. “It was the beginning of a very creative six months of work, it was a big step toward staking out his own special subject matter, and it was a significant move away from ‘Dialese’ and the Emersonian manner to a style of his own,” writes Robert Richardson in his intellectual biography of Thoreau. “His characteristic form and his characteristic style both emerged over the remaining months of 1842.” Thoreau’s creative surge (by the end of the year he had completed a second nature essay, started a third, and composed a lecture on Raleigh—whose heroic life and noble death may have brought John to mind) was matched by his physical industriousness (he worked in his father’s pencil-making operation, helped build a new family house, and planted gardens for both the Hawthornes, who would be moving to Concord that summer, and the Emersons). Even before John’s death, Thoreau had been feeling adrift: he had lost a possible spouse, been deprived of a job, and was beginning to doubt his future as a writer. The death of the brother with whom he so identified would nearly kill him. But it would also force him to find his own identity. “His discovery of himself came directly and rapidly out of the tragic losses of January,” concludes Richardson. “It is almost as though John’s death freed him.”
* * *
In The Wound and the Bow, Edmund Wilson argues that suffering often furnishes the raw material for art. The psychiatrist George Pollock, noting how many writers, artists, and musicians lost siblings in their youth, suggests that grief may spur creativity as a kind of compensation. Pollock cites James Barrie, the six-year-old boy whose older brother died in a skating accident. Their mother had done little to hide her preference for that older brother, a handsome, charming scholar and athlete. After David’s death, his small, grave, apparently unexceptional younger brother attempted to comfort his near-catatonic mother by impersonating him: dressing in David’s old clothes, assuming his mannerisms, even learning his characteristic whistle. When replacing his brother failed to work, James, in the years to come, more successfully diverted his mother by writing stories and plays and reading them aloud. Writing, observes Pollock, became James’s way of getting his mother’s attention. One of the stories he told her would evolve, decades later, into Peter Pan, which Barrie, surely thinking of his lost brother, subtitled “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.”
Although psychologists have only recently turned their attention to sibling loss, writers have for centuries tried to come to grips with it in literature. The Roman poet Catullus memorialized his dead brother in several poems, including a formal tribute that ends with the famous salute ave atque vale (“hail and farewell”), and a starkly haunting lamentation (“You, brother, have destroyed my happiness by your death: all my soul is buried with you . . . ”). After his younger brother John died in a shipwreck in 1805, William Wordsworth was so stricken he could write no poetry for several months. But then he began work on Elegiac Verses, in which he sought to immortalize his brother. “I shall . . . never be at peace till, as far as in me lies, I have done justice to my departed Brother’s memory,” he wrote a friend. Samuel Clemens felt crushing guilt after his younger brother, Henry, died in a riverboat explosion at the age of nineteen. Clemens had gotten his brother a job on the boat, and would have been on board, too, had he not debarked a few days before the accident. Throughout their boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri, the restless, mischievous older brother had tormented the exasperatingly well-behaved younger brother—pelting him with clods of dirt, dropping a hollowed-out watermelon on his head from a third-story window. But he had also looked out for him, and by the end of adolescence, Samuel felt that the pensive Henry was one of the few people who knew him well. Eighteen years after the accident, Clemens would resurrect an exaggerated version of Henry in his first novel. “He is Sid in Tom Sawyer,” wrote Mark Twain in his autobiography. “But Sid was not Henry. Henry was a very much finer and better boy than Sid ever was.”
Writing about a lost brother is, of course, a way of keeping him alive. Tolstoy and Thomas Wolfe are among the novelists who have dealt with the death of a brother in their fiction; Uwe Timm, Mikal Gilmore, and Brent Staples have struggled with it in memoir; Eugene O’Neill rendered it in drama. For Jack Kerouac, writing about his older brother, Gerard, was a way of trying to keep himself alive. Much of Kerouac’s short life, in fact, could be seen as a search for the nine-year-old boy who died of rheumatic fever when Kerouac was four. After Kerouac met Neal Cassady, the charismatic car thief who would become his muse, he told Allen Ginsberg that Cassady might well be Gerard reborn. In Visions of Cody, his worshipful novel about Cassady, Kerouac declared, “Cody is the brother I lost.” The real brother would be enshrined in Visions of Gerard, an impressionistic novel about the “saintly” boy “who warned me to be kind to little animals and took me by the hand on forgotten little walks.” Kerouac came to believe that Gerard was, in a sense, the author of his books—that his elder brother was alive and speaking through him.
But if his brother’s death fueled Kerouac the writer, it devastated Kerouac the man. Gerard had served as a buffer between his meek, impressionable younger brother and their domineering mother. The mother’s grief for her older son, along with her subsequent overprotectiveness of her younger son, placed even more strain on an already confused Oedipal relationship. For years after his brother’s death, Jack, beset by nightmares, slept in his mother’s bed, an arrangement his mother did nothing to discourage. His self-esteem suffered as his mother simultaneously babied him—long after he had grown—and compared him with the angelic brother with whom he could never compare. “It should’ve been you that died, not Gerard,” she’d say. Kerouac did his best to oblige her, pursuing a lifelong course of self-destructive behavior that left him broke, broken, and alcoholic. He was living with his mother when he died of a hemorrhage caused by acute liver damage at the age of forty-seven.
* * *
It is interesting to speculate what would have become of Thoreau had his brother not cut his finger that New Year’s Day. John, of course, had drawn Henry into the social life of Concord to the extent that he was able, and, under his continuing influence, Henry might have been drawn in still further. Without John, Henry became, if anything, even more reclusive. But had John Thoreau lived, wrote Edward Emerson, and had Ellen Sewall accepted Henry’s proposal, “who shall say but that the presence of these blessings would have prevented his accomplishing his strange destiny? For his genius was solitary, and though his need for friendly and social relation with his kind was great, it was occasional, and to his lonely happiness the world will owe the best gifts he has left.”
Further, John’s death seemed to kindle in Henry a new sense of purpose, as if he needed to make something of himself not only to live up to John but to live for him. Twenty-three months before his brother’s death, he had mused in his journal: “On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.” Without John’s death, Henry might never have become Thoreau.
* * *
On July 4, 1845, three years after John’s death, Henry moved into the cabin he had built near Walden Pond. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” he would observe, in one of the most famous sentences in American literature. He also went there to write about John, about the fourteen-day voyage they had taken six years earlier, a voyage that had become an emblem of Henry’s deep feeling for his brother. He began to think of the trip as fodder for a book—his first, a sort of memorial tribute to John. Each morning, sitting at his old Concord Academy desk, overlooking the place where he and his brother had spent so much time, he wrote about that memorable journey, reliving their days on the river, bringing John back to life.
The work went well. By the following summer, he had finished a first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. He read aloud from the manuscript to friends who made the walk along the northern edge of the pond to his cabin. After hearing an excerpt on a cold March evening in 1847, Bronson Alcott wrote in his diary:
The book is purely American, fragrant with the life of New England woods and streams, and could have been written nowhere else. Especially am I touched by his sufficiency and soundness, his aboriginal vigor,—as if a man had once more come into Nature who knew what Nature meant him to do with her,—Virgil, and White of Selborne, and Izaak Walton, and Yankee settler all in one. I came home at midnight, through the woody snow-paths, and slept with the pleasing dream that presently the press would give me two books to be proud of—Emerson’s “Poems,” and Thoreau’s “Week.”
“Presently,” in A Week’s case, would stretch to two years. Even after he had submitted it to publishers, Thoreau, a notorious perfectionist, continued to revise the manuscript; given its subject, he may have found it especially hard to let go. In any case, even with Emerson and Hawthorne lobbying on his behalf (Emerson, touting it to an editor, called it “pastoral as Isaak Walton, spicy as flagroot, broad and deep as Menu”), A Week was turned down by four publishers. A fifth finally agreed to take it on, as long as Thoreau would repay the printing costs if the book didn’t sell. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers was finally issued on May 30, 1849, ten years after the trip that had inspired it, seven years after John’s death.
* * *
Thoreau had retreated to Walden in order to “simplify” his life, but the book he wrote there was anything but simple. A Week (for dramatic purposes, the two-week trip was compressed into one) is, on the surface, a travel narrative, recreating the brothers’ voyage in the Musketaquid, the fifteen-foot skiff they’d built in the spring and named after the Indian word for the Concord (“Grass-ground River”). As a travel narrative, A Week is rather tame. Although Thoreau compares the Concord with the Nile and invokes “the Scythian vastness of the Billerica night,” the Concord was a gently flowing river, the end-of-summer weather was balmy, and the brothers’ experience seems as sweetly innocent as a Boy Scout camping trip. (Their most thrilling adventure may have been the hot pursuit of a runaway melon that had floated downstream.) Spliced at frequent intervals into the narrative are loosely related Thoreauvian riffs: on the fish of the Concord River; on the arrival of the white man in North America; on the Roman satirist Aulus Persius Flaccus; on traveling on the Sabbath; on epitaphs; on waterfalls, and so on. As Emerson observed to a potential publisher, “The narrative of the little voyage, though faithful, is a very slender thread for such big beads & ingots as are strung on it.” (Many of these beads and ingots were first published in The Dial and subsequently squeezed into the manuscript over the years, making A Week something of an anthology: Thoreau’s Greatest Hits, 1841–1849.) Strewn here and there are snippets of popular song, excerpts from the Gazetteer, scraps of poetry, and a commonplace book’s worth of quotations from Homer, Confucius, Jamblichus, Chaucer, Tennyson, Ossian, Aubrey, Sadi, Chateaubriand, Simonides, Mencius, Bokhara, John Smith, Sieur de Monts, Gower, Goethe, and Mother Goose, to name a very few. The book’s overstuffed, kitchen-sink quality makes it seem, at times, the work of a graduate student who can’t finish his dissertation.
A Week is a curious memorial. Thoreau never mentions John by name, never describes him. Indeed, after the epigraph (Where’er thou sail’st who sailed with me, / Though now thou climbest loftier mounts, / And fairer rivers dost ascend, / Be thou my Muse, my Brother—) the word brother appears only twice. Thereafter, John becomes part of “we” and “us,” making the two brothers seem almost as if they are one, as in Henry’s “double star” poem. Several years earlier, Thoreau had taken on John’s illness; now it was as if he were absorbing his brother’s persona. The brothers seem extraordinarily close as they head north, singing as they row: naming the islands they pass; identifying the birds overhead; pausing under a willow to slice open another melon from Henry’s garden; camping on the shore, using their mast for a tentpole and their sail for a tent; drinking cocoa boiled in river water; eating fish they’d caught, berries they’d picked, and the occasional loaf of bread purchased from a local farmer; reading the 1839 American Gazetteer by the light of a lantern; talking of old friends by the campfire; sharing a buffalo skin and a blanket (as they had once shared a trundle bed); lying awake together listening to the wind on the water. It may have been the nearest the brothers ever came to their childhood dream of being Indians.
Thoreau nowhere mentions his brother’s death, but images of death abound: a fisherman swinging a scythe in the meadow, “himself as yet not cut down by the Great Mower.” Frequently comparing life to a river that runs inexorably to the sea, Thoreau ruminates on transience and permanence, on decay and renewal, on time’s passage, on the thin line between sickness and health—themes he had wrestled with and written about since John’s death, and which he would wrestle with and write about for the rest of his life. (“Some are reputed sick and some are not. It often happens that the sicker man is the nurse to the sounder,” wrote Thoreau, surely thinking, perhaps guiltily, of John’s final days.) But Thoreau accepts life’s cycles, acknowledging that while his brother is dead from the smallest accident, he is still alive: “we walk on in our particular paths so far, before we fall on death and fate, merely because we must walk in some path.” In short, life, like the river on which he and his brother paddled, goes on.
On the eve of their final day, the wind changed and came out of the north. “That night was the turning point in the season,” Thoreau wrote. “We had gone to bed in summer, and we awoke in autumn.” It was cold and breezy. The brothers were on the river before dawn. Hoisting their sail, with wind and current at their backs, they flew downstream, covering the fifty-mile return journey in a single exhilarating day Thoreau would always remember. That evening, their boat arrived at its familiar spot on the Concord riverbank, the faint depression it had left on the bulrushes still apparent. The brothers, wrote Thoreau, “leaped gladly on shore, drawing it up, and fastening it to the wild apple-tree, whose stem still bore the mark which its chain had worn in the chafing of the spring freshets.” Nothing had changed, and yet when he wrote these lines, six years later, Thoreau knew that everything had changed.
Writing A Week was a way of what a psychologist would now call “working through” John’s death. On that account, it may have been a success. The book itself was a critical and financial failure. (Another book written at Walden would make Thoreau’s reputation, if not his fortune.) Although some reviewers found it thoughtful and original, many more were annoyed by the digressions. “We come upon them like snags,” wrote James Russell Lowell, “jolting us headforemost out of our places as we are rowing placidly up stream or drifting down.” The publisher did little to promote A Week, and of 1,000 copies printed, only 219 were sold. In 1853, a wagonload of 706 unsold copies appeared at the Thoreau home; their author lugged them armful by armful upstairs to his attic bedroom. “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes,” he wrote drily in his journal, “over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.” Thoreau was dismayed that his first book, his memorial to John, had been so poorly received. To pay off the $290 debt—a fortune to someone who had lived on 58 cents a week at Walden—he would have to make pencils, thousands of them, over the next few years. For the rest of his life, when, occasionally, people wrote to him requesting that he sell them a copy of A Week, which could no longer be found in bookstores, he was uncharacteristically, almost pathetically, grateful.
Years after his brother’s death, according to Sophia, Henry was rarely able to mention his brother by name. If it happened to be mentioned by others, tears came to his eyes. In 1854, when he told his new friend Daniel Ricketson about John, Thoreau turned pale and had to go to the door for air. Ricketson said it was the only time he ever saw Thoreau show deep emotion. For a long time after John’s death, Thoreau refused to sing. But singing eventually became a link to John. A friend recalls that the only time he heard Thoreau “speak” of his brother was when he sang “Tom Bowling,” a sentimental ballad about a drowned sailor he had often sung with John. (His form was of the manliest beauty, / His heart was kind and soft, / Faithful, below he did his duty, / But now he’s gone aloft.”) It became Thoreau’s favorite song, and when friends heard him sing it—or “Row, Brothers, Row,” which reminded Thoreau of his weeks on the river with John—in a voice as gruff as his personality, they knew of whom he was thinking.
For several years, Thoreau had nightmares on the anniversary of his brother’s death. Even as he regained his equilibrium, he suffered periods of depression. “What am I at present? A diseased bundle of nerves standing between time and eternity like a withered leaf that still hangs shivering on its stem,” Thoreau wrote in his journal in January 1843, a year after John’s death. “A more miserable object one could not well imagine.” He found it painful to walk past Emerson’s barn, on which hung the bluebird house his brother had made. Then, too, there was the Musketaquid, the boat Henry and John had built. During the summer after John’s death, Thoreau had often visited the Hawthornes. One evening, after dining with his friends, Thoreau and his host went for a row in the Musketaquid. Afterward, Thoreau offered to sell the boat to Hawthorne for seven dollars. The offer was accepted, the buyer noting that he wished he could “acquire the aquatic skill of its original owner at as reasonable a rate.” It is said that Thoreau sold the boat because he needed the money. No doubt he did, but he may also have parted with it because the boat was a too-painful reminder of John; indeed, the date was August 31, three years to the day since he and John had set off in that same boat on their memorable trip. The following April, on the eve of moving to Staten Island, where he would tutor Emerson’s nephew, Thoreau asked Hawthorne for one last ride in his old boat, which its new owner had rechristened Pond Lily. In early spring, there was still ice on the river. They rowed up the North Branch of the Concord, put ashore, and climbed a snowy hill. On their return, the boat was leaking, so they clambered aboard a large cake of ice and floated back down the river, towing the Pond Lily behind them.
“A man can attend but one funeral in the course of his life, can behold but one corpse,” Thoreau wrote, after walking the Cohasset shore in 1849 and coming upon scores of corpses from the recently shipwrecked Irish brig St. John. For Thoreau, John’s death would reverberate when his sister Helen died of tuberculosis two weeks after the publication of A Week; when he was dispatched by Emerson to Long Island in 1850 to search for the body and manuscripts of the shipwrecked Margaret Fuller; when he served as pallbearer for twenty-three-year-old Lizzie Alcott, who died of scarlet fever in 1858; when he handled the funeral arrangements for Emerson’s mentally disabled brother, Bulkeley, who died in 1859; and when he nursed his father, John Thoreau Sr., in the months before he died that same year. Wrote Thoreau: “I perceive that we partially die ourselves through sympathy at the death of each of our friends or near relatives. Each such experience is an assault on our vital force.”
* * *
As Thoreau struggled to put John to rest, his relationship with Emerson became increasingly vexed. Despite trying to help him get A Week into print, Emerson had been frustrated by Thoreau’s endless revisions and disappointed in the final product. But the tension had deeper roots. Emerson, fourteen years older, had been a father figure for Thoreau. After John’s death, he became something of a surrogate brother as well. (Emerson, of course, knew what it meant to lose a brother, having lost three to tuberculosis.) Thoreau began to feel less comfortable about following the beat of Emerson’s drum. Accusations that he was an imitation of Emerson had long rankled him. After meeting Thoreau in 1838, Lowell had written that the young poet echoed Emerson’s tone and manner so completely that “With my eyes shut, I shouldn’t know them apart”; ten years later, in A Fable for Critics, he publicly lampooned Thoreau as a literary thief who “follows as close as a stick to a rocket, / His fingers exploring the prophet’s each pocket.” Although Thoreau was grateful to Emerson for all he had done for him, he chafed under the weight of his debt. For someone who prided himself on his autonomy, he found it galling to be so dependent. Even at Walden, where he wrote what would become the bible of independent living, he was living rent-free on Emerson’s land. He sensed Emerson’s exasperation with his lack of tangible literary accomplishment, with the seeming lack of ambition in the young man he had hoped might epitomize the “American Scholar” he’d called for in his 1837 Harvard Phi Beta Kappa address. (Twenty-five years later, in his eulogy for his friend, Emerson could not help sounding a note of disappointment that “instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry-party.”) Thoreau, of course, had ambitions. Increasingly, however, they were ambitions that weren’t Emerson-approved. Indeed, Thoreau was in the process of outstripping his mentor, though it would not be fully apparent till long after both had died. Throughout the forties, Thoreau began slowly, painfully, to assert his literary and emotional (if not financial) independence. As in many mentor-disciple relationships, an affiliation that had been paternal had become fraternal, and the sibling rivalry began to emerge.
There were other strains. Thoreau and Emerson were moving in different directions, in different circles. Thoreau’s world was growing—geographically—ever smaller, Emerson’s ever larger as he became a writer of international stature. Thoreau was becoming increasingly solitary, Emerson increasingly social. (Emerson wrote an exasperated mock-letter in his journal: “My dear Henry, A frog was made to live in a swamp, but a man was not made to live in a swamp. Yours ever, R.”) There was tension on the domestic front, too. Thoreau had lived at Emerson’s for a total of two years and ten months—eight months longer than he had lived at Walden Pond. (Recalled Emerson’s son, “He was to us children the best kind of an older brother.”) Even the preternaturally serene Emerson must have felt a twinge when, far from home on a lecture tour, he received a letter in which Thoreau cheerily informed him that Emerson’s three-year-old son, Edward, had asked him, “Mr. Thoreau, will you be my father?” (Thoreau had added, not entirely helpfully, “So you must come back soon, or you will be superseded.”) And he cannot have been oblivious to the bond between Thoreau and Lidian, for whom Emerson himself found it difficult to show affection. It is likely that Thoreau was, for a time, and in his own awkward way, in unrequited love with Emerson’s wife; it is possible that he felt an unconscious rivalry with his benefactor for her affections, echoing his rivalry with his brother for the hand of Ellen Sewall.
Both men had exacting ideals of friendship; each found it impossible to live up to the other’s. It is ironic that, as they wrote essays about the importance of friendship, both men were, at some level, profoundly lonely—Emerson since the deaths of his first wife, his brothers, and his son Waldo, Thoreau since John’s death. Even more ironic, they discussed their loneliness with each other. Their friendship became increasingly knotty; there were periods of polite estrangement. They complained about each other in their journals, like schoolgirls quarreling via their diaries. In 1857, Thoreau wrote about their friendship as if it had ended, in lines, according to the biographer Henry Seidel Canby, “which for the expression of personal grief are not equalled elsewhere in Thoreau’s Journal or the letters, except at the death of his brother John.” Although their frayed relationship never irrevocably tore, neither did it ever entirely mend.
* * *
The loss of a sibling changes the fraternal hierarchy. After Joe Jr.’s death, Jack became the eldest Kennedy brother, inheriting all the hopes and ambitions their father had invested in Joe. “It was like being drafted,” Jack told a reporter. “My father wanted his eldest son in politics. ‘Wanted’ isn’t the right word. He demanded it.” Jack was now living for two, as his old Choate headmaster pointed out in a letter to Jack’s parents: “I’m sure he never forgets he must live Joe’s life as well as his own.” During the 1952 race for the Senate seat that was to have been Joe’s, the notion of Jack as a “replacement brother” became a campaign selling point. “John Fulfills Dream of Brother Joe Who Met Death Over the English Channel” was the headline on an eight-page brochure. As Jack took Joe’s place, Bobby took Jack’s place, serving as his campaign manager—the role Jack would have filled for Joe. The order of succession in the Kennedy family was as clear as that of the English throne. “Just as I went into politics because Joe died, if anything happened to me tomorrow, Bobby would run for my seat in the Senate,” Jack said in 1959. “And if Bobby died, our young brother, Ted, would take over for him.”
In 1968, it was Ted’s turn. “Like my brothers before me I pick up a fallen standard,” he said in a speech eleven weeks after Bobby’s death. In the space of twenty-four years, through a series of almost unimaginable tragedies, Ted Kennedy had gone from being the youngest of four brothers to being the eldest. (On inauguration weekend in 1961, Jack had presented him with a cigarette box, engraved with the words, “And the last shall be first.”) For the erstwhile baby of the family—the least promising Kennedy, the butt of his brothers’ jokes, the chubby one his sisters wanted to cover in football, the one who would describe himself as having been in “a constant state of catching up”—the burden proved overwhelming. Kennedy’s subsequent stumbling—the alcohol, the partying, the women—could be interpreted not just as the grief and confusion of a man struggling to live up to his martyred brothers but as acts of self-preservation by a man fighting off the fate decreed for him by his father. His was a nearly unwinnable task: there were those who couldn’t forgive him for not being his brothers, and there were those who couldn’t forgive him for being so much like them.
Kennedy began to catch up to his brothers only when he stopped trying. After losing the Democratic nomination in 1980, he abandoned his quest for the presidency and settled into life as a senator—not, perhaps, the prize his father had wanted, but the political niche for which he may have been best suited. He was a natural legislator. Now he threw his full energy into the job. Remarried to a woman who made him happy, he seemed, finally, to be his own man.
In 1994 I wrote a magazine profile of the then sixty-two-year-old senator. As I followed him through the halls of Congress for a week, I could see ample evidence of his vestigial status as youngest brother. He was deferential, conciliatory, willing to compromise, eager to please—the very qualities that helped make him, some say, the best politician of all the Kennedy brothers. But this quintessential youngest brother had become the only Kennedy brother who lived long enough to have gray hair. He had assumed responsibility as the family patriarch, watching over not only his own children and grandchildren but his brothers’ children and grandchildren; walking fatherless nieces down the aisle; showing up at graduations; remembering birthdays, baptisms, and confirmations. At the same time, he had assumed responsibility to his country for representing what was left of the Kennedys. And if he seemed to have made his way out from under the shadows of his brothers, it was clear those shadows would always be there.
At week’s end, I interviewed the senator in his two-bedroom pied-à-terre on a quiet street in Boston’s Back Bay. The walls and tables, like those of his Senate office, were covered with family photographs and memorabilia. I had been advised by a Kennedy aide not to ask him anything about his brothers until late in the interview, not because he would refuse to speak about them but because he would get so tied up emotionally that “although the words would come out, he wouldn’t be there” for the topics that followed. It was good advice. When I finally asked Kennedy how he felt about being surrounded in his homes and offices by pictures of his brothers, inarticulateness descended as suddenly and inexorably as static on a radio. As long as we’d stuck to the safe ground of legislation or the pleasant ground of children and grandchildren, his voice had been rich, lively, and relaxed. Now it was slower, thicker, softer. He bumped awkwardly along, stumbling over words, having trouble completing even a single sentence. “Well it’s interesting because . . .” he said. “I mean the things that sort of catch you may . . . in terms of my brothers and family members, you’re not quite sure when these things are going to come. You can pass different pictures and, you know, walls, for a very considerable period of time and then something will sort of catch it, you know, something will reawaken . . . waken you.”
He could have stopped after a sentence or two but he blundered ahead—the youngest sibling, still trying to please. A man who was usually in perpetual motion was now motionless. His hands rested on the table, like those of a child saying grace. His face got even redder than usual, swelling with effort. It was clear to me that the meaning lay not in the words themselves but in the silence that separated them.
The week before I met him, he had given the eulogy at Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s funeral. Now I asked whether her death had marked an end of an era for him, as it seemed to for many Americans who had never met her. His voice dropped even lower, his always watery eyes got more so, and he talked in jerks and pauses, like someone trying to get traction in mud. “It has . . . I mean for me it was an individual . . . human being . . . as . . . mention in terms of the members of my family . . . I think it was a rollback to another time, bringing back all kinds of recollections and memories.” He and I both knew he was talking about the death of his brother John; the message was in the body language, and the words were a meaningless overlay. He meandered a bit more, then said, almost in a whisper, “It just created a very powerful . . . moment and . . . you know, I mean you can’t anticipate those kind of factors, but it was for real . . . certainly was for me.” He was silent a long moment. He had wound down to the end.
* * *
As he entered middle age, Thoreau spent less time with writers and philosophers, more with farmers and fishermen; less time at his desk, more in the forest. “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits,” he wrote, “unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.” “Sauntering” makes it sound as if his daily hikes were casual neighborhood strolls intended to burn off a few calories; in fact, they were systematic research expeditions. As he put it, “I go out to see what I have caught in my traps which I set for facts.” To harvest those facts, Thoreau dressed himself up as a sort of one-man natural history lab. Clad in browns and greens for camouflage (making him look, he said, “the color of a pasture with patches of withered sweet-fern and lechea”), he wore an oversized straw hat with the lining gathered in midway to form a “scaffold” on which to transport botanical specimens (kept moist, he said, by “the darkness and the vapors that arise from the head”); carried a walking stick (its edge marked in inches and feet for measuring the length of a pickerel or the depth of the snow) and his father’s old flute instruction book (in which to press flowers and plants); and sported pockets custom-tailored to accommodate his notebook, Thoreau Pencil, spyglass, microscope, jack-knife, twine, ruler, and surveyor’s tape (as well as any sticks, stones, seeds, nuts, or apples he came across that required further scrutiny or digestion). Despite being weighed down like a Yankee peddler, Thoreau, employing what a friend referred to as “his grave Indian stride,” was able to cover as many as thirty miles in a single day, often leaving Ellery Channing—the sometime poet who, since John’s death, had become the closest thing Thoreau had to a hiking partner—huffing and puffing in his wake. Just as the young Thoreau had struggled to keep up with his older brother, Channing was always a few steps behind the indefatigable Thoreau; just as John had been the personable member of the fraternal pair, Thoreau seemed positively affable next to the moody, grandiose Channing. Though Thoreau was only four months older than Channing, there was no doubt who was the older brother in this relationship, no doubt who was “cutting the wind.”
Thoreau found himself approaching nature less transcendentally and more scientifically. He kept careful notes on the level of the rivers, the depth of the snow, the temperature of the ponds, the size of the seedling roots, the number of rings on the tree trunks, the blossoming of the flowers, the leafing of the plants, the colors of the morning and the evening skies, the arrival and departure of the birds. He collected and identified more than 800 of the 1,200 known plant species in the county. His attic bedroom doubled as a natural history museum in which, on shelves he’d made of river driftwood, he arrayed his pressed plants, lichens, birds’ eggs, hornet’s nests, arrowheads, spear points, Indian hatchets, and minerals, as well as a supply of nuts, of which, says Channing, “he was as fond as squirrels.” He brought home birds’ nests to dissect, crow scat to examine, snapping turtles to measure, peepers to study (they escaped and took up temporary residence in the family piano). He spent hours in close encounters with the local fauna; watching a tortoise lay its eggs, monitoring a hawk’s nest until the fledglings flew away. “He knew the country like a fox or a bird,” said Emerson, recalling a walk on which Thoreau “drew out of his breast-pocket his diary, and read the names of all the plants that should bloom on this day, whereof he kept account as a banker when his notes fall due.” Thoreau’s goal was nothing less than to classify and catalogue each stage in the development of every plant and animal in Concord. (In the early 1860s Thoreau would begin to enter his accumulated data on vast charts that tracked the natural history of each day of each month over the course of his eight years of observation.) At the same time, to make his modest living, he was working as a surveyor, mapping the boundaries of the land he had first explored with his brother.
Some biographers dismiss Thoreau’s late-life obsession with natural science as a comedown from the moral and philosophical musing for which he is best known. (Emerson considered it a tragic waste of talent, and Thoreau himself worried that in focusing on the facts of the natural world he might lose sight of its poetry.) Others maintain that it was a leap forward, pointing the way toward what we now call conservation ecology. True, Thoreau was interested in science, but there was something more going on. Not only was he trying to document every last detail of the natural world around him, he was trying to become part of that world himself. On hot summer days, like an early prototype of John Cheever’s Swimmer, he made a point of stripping and swimming in every pond or creek he came to; sometimes he waded down entire rivers end-to-end in nothing but his hat; once, he stood so long in a pond, observing bullfrogs, that a passing farmer assumed his own father had gone drinking and lost his way home. He’d follow a fox’s trail by its scent; catch bees, release them and try to track their flights; flap his elbows at his sides and utter “something like the syllables mow-ack with a nasal twang and twist in my head” to attract the flocks of geese that flew overhead; feed mice and birds from his palm; scratch frogs’ noses with his finger; catch and release fish with his bare hand; let snakes coil around his leg; tame a flying squirrel and watch it glide across his room. (He returned it to its hemlock tree the next day.) “I wanted to know my neighbors, if possible,—to get a little nearer to them,” he said. More, he wanted to be them. He said he sometimes felt like a hound or a panther, and confessed to an occasional urge to devour a woodchuck raw. Reading his journals one senses in him a growing ambition to be as wild as the wilderness itself—either to devour the wilderness, or to let it devour him. Seventeen years after he wrote love poetry to Ellen Sewall, he found a new paramour. “There was a match found for me at last,” he wrote in December 1856. “I fell in love with a shrub oak.” After John’s death he had looked for his brother in nature. Now he wanted to become part of nature. He wanted, perhaps, to rejoin John. It may not be too much to say that Thoreau’s famous observation on staying close to home—“I have travelled a great deal in Concord”—reflected an unconscious desire to stay close to John and the places they loved.
For Thoreau’s obsession with nature’s cycles was entwined with increasing thoughts of his own natural cycle. “I think that no experience which I have to-day comes up to, or is comparable with, the experiences of my boyhood . . .” he wrote in 1851, four days after his thirty-fourth birthday. “In youth, before I lost any of my senses, I can remember that I was all alive, and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction.” Thoughts of his childhood were juxtaposed with thoughts of his own end. “The woods I walked in my youth are cut off,” he wrote, after hiking to Walden Pond, where part of the forest had recently been razed. “Is it not time that I ceased to sing?” Where once he had risen with John before dawn to watch the sunrise, now he hiked at midnight under the full moon, delighting in the way his familiar world was transformed under a softer light. As we grow older, he observed ruefully, “we have more to say about evening, less about morning.” He wrote increasingly of loss: the slaughtering of the wild pigeons, the dwindling of fish, the disappearance of the Indians. In autumn, he liked to row his boat filled with willow leaves that had fallen from the tree under which the boat was moored. He was fascinated by leaves; he compiled a list of the order in which local trees budded and leafed; he catalogued the sequence and gradations of their tints as they aged and decayed. “How beautifully they go to their graves!” he wrote, adding, “They teach us how to die.”
* * *
It had been John, of course, who taught Henry how to die. And when Thoreau’s own death came, there was a sense that he had long been ready. On December 3, 1860, Thoreau was out in the snow counting rings on a cut hickory tree. He came down with a cold, which spiraled into bronchitis, which lured tuberculosis—the family disease—from dormancy to full-blown virulence. By January 1862, it became apparent that the forty-four-year-old Thoreau would not recover. Every account of his death stresses his acceptance. “During his long illness I never heard a murmur escape him, or the slightest wish expressed to remain with us,” his sister Sophia wrote. “His perfect contentment was truly wonderful. None of his friends seemed to realize how very ill he was, so full of life and good cheer did he seem.” Indeed, during his last months, “the most unmalleable fellow alive” became patient, pleasant, almost charming—a lot, in fact, like John. He held court for a parade of friends, neighbors, and even strangers who knocked at the door, some of whom he had long treated with indifference or scorn, telling them stories, describing his previous night’s dreams, consoling those who sought to console him. He refused opiates, telling Channing that he “preferred to endure with a clear mind the worst penalties of suffering, rather than be plunged in a turbid dream of narcotics.” Kept awake by pain, he’d ask his sister to rearrange the furniture so that it might cast interesting shadows on the wall. When he could no longer manage the stairs, his rattan day-bed, which he had built himself and used at Walden, was brought down from his attic bedroom to the front parlor. There he lay, no longer surrounded by his birds’ nests and arrowheads but by the flowers, fruit, jars of jelly, and game given him by neighbors, a generosity that moved him to comment, “I should be ashamed to stay in this world after so much has been done for me. I could never repay my friends.” (His sister records the story as evidence of his heartfelt gratitude, but it is hard not to suspect an underlay of the mordant Thoreauvian wit.) Even then, Thoreau insisted on being helped to the table so he could eat with his family, saying, “It would not be social to take my meals alone.” By temperament and choice, Thoreau was a Stoic—woe to those who, hiking with him, had complained about the pace—but as he lay in his bed, he may also have been thinking about the grace with which his brother had faced death. Death, of course, had been another way, the final way, in which John had gone before him, “cutting the wind.”
His brother was much on his mind. Though emaciated and coughing uncontrollably, Thoreau worked whenever he had the strength, trying to keep up his correspondence, to organize his manuscripts, to edit several nature essays for The Atlantic, to complete his catalogue of Concord’s biota. When he could no longer hold the pencil in his trembling fingers, he dictated his letters and editorial changes to his sister, even as his voice faded to a whisper. When he could no longer see to read, Sophia read to him. He spent some of the last months of his life going over A Week. His Walden publisher had offered to reissue it; to Thoreau, it must have seemed a measure of vindication for the book that was so close to his heart. Once again, he was back on the river with his brother. On the morning of May 6, he gave a longtime friend, a former Concord Academy student, an inscribed copy. Below the epigraph (“Be thou my Muse, my Brother”) he had taped several strands of John’s hair. A little later, he asked Sophia to read aloud from the last chapter, which describes that giddy final day of the trip, when the brothers flew at astonishing speed toward home. After she read the sentence, “We glided past the mouth of the Nashua, and not long after, of Salmon Brook, without more pause than the wind,” Thoreau reportedly said, “Now comes good sailing.” A few moments later, he died.