A recurring theme: I’m trying to think about writing — not the craft of writing but the part that comes before it.
Imagine Henry David Thoreau at 25, being told by everyone that he really should find a career. He’s got a degree from Harvard, though he often wonders what it’s for. He’s tried keeping a school. There had been more spectacular failures, one can suppose.
He worked for Emerson for a while, and the great man got him a gig tutoring a nephew. Ralph Waldo’s brother William was a businessman on Staten Island, close enough to give Thoreau a gateway to the publishing world of New York.
The problem, in 1843, was there wasn’t much of a publishing world.
Poe was scraping by, barely, with poetry and short fiction. Longfellow was publishing poetry, but it’d be another decade before he felt he could leave his teaching job and focus on writing.
Can you imagine Thoreau trying to write for a market? Doing a knockoff or cover of one of Poe’s horror stories, for example? Or a long poem narrating the exploits of a Revolutionary War hero?
No one was writing the kind of thing that Thoreau wanted to write. He was interested in the question of the best way to live. He wanted to conduct tests and trials — to travel on rivers or hike across Cape Cod or maybe live in a cabin at Walden Pond — and report on the experiences. What could he learn? What could he convey to friends and readers?
That’s a vital bit of knowledge, finding out what it is that you want to do. Thoreau wasn’t clear when he left college.
He was clearer after seeing the glittering publishing world of New York. By seeing what was there, he got a better sense of what he didn’t want to do. And it wasn’t long before he began thinking about books that contained reports of his investigations and what he’d learned.
• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 128-49.
