Who proposed to Henry?

 I love short stories. I especially love a short story about a historical event that is so well researched that it’s hard to tell where the fiction starts. Guy Davenport and Bernard Malamud wrote wonderful specimens.

If you know contemporary writers who are interested in that genre, please pass along a suggestion: I’d love to read a story about who proposed to Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau, 30, was staying at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house while the great man was lecturing in Europe. Thoreau wrote him a letter on Nov. 14, 1847, that reported:

 

I have had a tragic correspondence, for the most part all on one side, with Miss ——. She did really wish to — I hesitate to write — marry me. That is the way they spell it. Of course I did not write a deliberate answer. How could I deliberate upon it? I sent back as distinct a no as I have learned to pronounce after considerable practice, and I trust that this no has succeeded.

 

Thoreau goes on, but that’s the gist of it.

Canby thought it likely that Sophia Foord, 43, was the proposer. But he made a case that it was Margaret Fuller, 37, the first editor of The Dial.

Canby said that he hoped it was Fuller, a brilliant woman who was frequently exasperated by Thoreau and his writing.

To me, the question is: What did any woman see in the man?

Thoreau was not widely viewed as companionable. As Canby described him in another context:

 

A chestnut bur, hiding its sweetness, Thoreau was to most men.

 

Who would pursue a chestnut bur? I would love to meet her.

Fiction writers can get to questions that historians cannot. 

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 261 and 245.

I’ve gone on about this sub-genre of short story. Here are two examples:

“Davenport: ‘John Charles Tapner,’” Nov. 22, 2022.

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2022/11/davenport-john-charles-tapner.html

“Malamud: ‘In Kew Gardens,’” March 20, 2024.

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2024/03/malamud-in-kew-gardens.html

What it's like to write a book

 Here’s Annie Dillard on what’s it like to write a book: 

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.

 

I’m not sure it would be a good idea to share that view with freshmen studying English Composition. It probably wouldn’t have helped me decide what to do with myself.

Still, I wish I’d had a better sense, early in life, of the many different things that writers have tried to do — or could try to do. I wish I’d had a better sense of the possibilities.

 • Source: Annie Dillard, The Writing Life; New York, HarperPerennial, 1990, p. 52. 

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard said this about writing:

 

It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.

 

One of the recurring themes of this online collection of notes is that writing doesn’t start with questions of craft. Dillard talked about writing as a way of life, rather than a collection of skills or competencies.

I suppose you saw her obituary in the newspapers too.

• Source: Annie Dillard, The Writing Life; New York, HarperPerennial, 1990, p. 11.

Scuppernongs

 Ancient Algonquian speakers noticed the sweetbay magnolias and named the river in North Carolina askuponong, place of the sweetbay tree. In the early 1800s, Europeans noticed the bronze-colored grapes growing on the riverbank and called the grape and the river Scuppernong.

The grapes are muscadines. Most muscadines are purple to black. The coloring of the scuppernongs is the work of a recessive gene — as simple as blue eyes in humans.

Muscadines grow in states along the coast from Delaware to Texas. They grow up the Mississippi Valley to the Missouri. As I boy, I pillaged vines at my grandparents’ places in East Texas and West Tennessee. But I have never seen anything like the vines in the Georgia Piedmont.

I owe readers a clarification: I’d spoken of August as the peak month for wild muscadines here. The vines  are still producing. I have learned to think of peak months.

I’m interested in the grapes because the idea of “sustainability” has been spreading from biologists to farmers.

European grapes are wonderful, but they are susceptible to Pierce’s disease, caused by bacteria. Muscadines are naturally resistant, which is why an amateur naturalist like me is baffled by the bumper crop. If you’re a farmer, we’re talking about the lower costs of fighting pathogens and less chance of crop failure.

• Source: Peter C. Andersen, Ali Sarkhosh, Dustin Huff, and Jacque W. Breman, “The Muscadine Grape (Vitis rotundifolia Michx)”; askifas, n.d. The site is run by extension agents associated with the University of Florida.The article is here:

https://ask.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/HS100

Footnote, with skaters

 A showoff, a Greek statue and stooped man went skating.

It’s not a joke — just a footnote on American literature.

Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne lived in the same village — Concord, Mass. — and knew each other. Hawthorne’s daughter Rose Lathrop left an account of the three writers skating on the river.

 

Henry Thoreau is an experienced skater, and was figuring dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice‚ very remarkable, but very ugly, methought. Next him followed Mr. Hawthorne who, wrapped in his cloak, moved like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately and grave. Mr. Emerson closed the line, evidently too weary to hold himself erect, pitching headforemost, half lying on the air. 

 

Lathrop thought her father would have liked to have been better friends with Thoreau. But Thoreau wasn’t much interested in Hawthorne’s writing.

Henry Seidel Canby says Thoreau read for knowledge and disliked fiction. Canby’s verdict:

 

There can be no other American man of letters who read so little American literature.

 

• Sources: The passage on the skaters is from Rose Lathrop’s “Memories of Hawthorne.” It’s quoted in Henry Seidel Canby’s Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, p. 174. Canby’s note on Thoreau’s reading is on p. 188.

What book should be taught in schools?

 The Guardian, a newspaper that does interesting things, recently asked some writers to recommend a book that should be taught in schools. The writers were asked to pick a book they thought would inspire a lifelong love of reading.

No spoilers. No comments on the selections. A link to the list is below.

If I were a newspaper editor, I’d ask the question of political candidates.

In the old days, we used to send questionnaires to candidates for public office. We published the replies.

What book do you think should be taught in public schools?

An answer might tell voters about the kinds of things that are on the candidate’s mind.

• Source: Kate Mosse, “’Bold, brilliant, thrilling’: leading authors on the novels every school should teach”; The Guardian, 5 Sep 2026. It’s here:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/sep/05/bold-brilliant-thrilling-leading-authors-on-the-novels-every-school-should-teach

Book fair in Dahlonega

 We are at the Regional Book Fair at the University of North Georgia in Dahlonega.

If you’ve ever thought about starting a tabletop publishing company, this is one of the benefits.

If you’re a bookseller, no matter how small, you get to sit at a table and talk to people who love to read. Some are English professors and some are grandmothers looking for a children’s book. They will tell you what they like and what they don’t. I am taking notes.