PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING

Keying on a remark Thoreau made in his journal on March 25, 1842 , Distinguished Professor Emeritus Walter Harding has commented that his long-term professional/personal involvement in this line of literary and historical research has been for him like “the opportunity of riding by and observing a particularly notable mountain.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1611

Sanctorius was appointed to the chair of theoretical medicine at the University of Padua, where he would teach until retirement in 1624. He would develop or help Galileo Galilei, Giofrancesco Sagredo, and fra Paolo Sarpi to develop a number of scientific instruments, among them a wind gauge, a water current meter, the pulsilogium, and an early version of thermometer, known as the thermoscope, possessing a numerical scale.1 By an experiment that involved suspending himself in an enormous balance in order to weigh his solid and liquid intake against his excretion, he would find that by far the greatest part of a person’s intake of food and drink is lost from his or her body not through urine and feces but through what he came to term our perspiratio insensibilis (in the “Conclusion” chapter, as below, “insensible perspiration”). His treatise DE STATICA 2 MEDICINA (CONCERNING STATIC MEDICINE) would render him so famous that he would even be alluded to by Waldo Emerson: The physician Sanctorius spent his life in a pair of scales, weighing his food. In the 20th Century, Professor Walter Roy Harding would comment that despite even having reviewed Ronald Earl Clapper’s analysis of the editing of the ms drafts of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, he has never grasped the meaning of Henry Thoreau’s Transcendentalist remark “In view of the future or possible, we should live quite laxly and undefined in front, our outlines dim and misty on that side; as our shadows reveal an insensible perspiration toward the sun”:

WALDEN: It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor toad-stools grow so. As if that were important, and there were not enough to understand you without them. As if Nature could support but one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and hush and who, which Bright can understand, were the best English. As if there were safety in stupidity alone.I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. Extra vagance! it depends on how you are yarded. The migrating buffalo, which seeks new pastures in another latitude, is not extravagant like the cow which kicks over the pail, leaps the cow-yard fence, and runs after her calf, in milking time. I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression. Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever? In view of the future or possible, we should live quite laxly and undefined in front, our outlines dim and misty on that side; as our shadows reveal an insensible perspiration toward the sun. The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated; its literal monument alone remains. The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures.

1. Middleton, W.E.K. A HISTORY OF THE THERMOMETER AND ITS USE IN METEOROLOGY. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1966 2. Castiglione, Arturo. “The Life and Work of Santorio Santorio (1561-1636),” tr. Emilie Recht. Medical Life 38 (1931):729-785 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

To me, however, this remark “In view of the future or possible, we should live quite laxly and undefined in front, our outlines dim and misty on that side; as our shadows reveal an insensible perspiration toward the sun” seems a straightforward description of the kind of openendedness that is required of the Transcendentalist, that is the kind of openness and expectation that is needed if one is to hope ever to transcend what has gone before, and what one has become, one’s “residual.” –But one would hesitate to suggest that someone who had worked with the materials of the Transcendentalists for all his life, as Walter Roy Harding had, yet had never in his life acquired even a basic grasp of what the fundamental attitude of transcending amounted to, an attitude that distinguishes every real transcendentalist! He was as bad as the Emerson who presumed that Sanctorius would have spent his entire lifetime sitting on the scales of one of his experiments, like a fakir on a bed of nails: “The physician Sanctorius spent his life in a pair of scales, weighing his food.”3

A WEEK: The anecdotes of modern astronomy affect me in the same PEOPLE OF way as do those faint revelations of the Real which are vouchsafed A WEEK to men from time to time, or rather from eternity to eternity. When I remember the history of that faint light in our firmament, which we call Venus, which ancient men regarded, and which most modern men still regard, as a bright spark attached to a hollow sphere revolving about our earth, but which we have discovered to be another world, in itself, — how Copernicus, reasoning long and patiently about the matter, predicted confidently concerning it, before yet the telescope had been invented, that if ever men came to see it more clearly than they did then, they would discover that it had phases like our moon, and that within a century after his death the telescope was invented, and that prediction verified, by Galileo, — I am not without hope that we may, even here and now obtain some accurate information concerning that OTHER WORLD which the instinct of mankind has so long predicted. Indeed, all that we call science, as well as all that we call poetry, is a particle of such information, accurate as far as it goes, though it be but to the confines of the truth. If we can reason so accurately, and with such wonderful confirmation of our reasoning, respecting so-called material objects and events infinitely removed beyond the range of our natural vision, so that the mind hesitates to trust its calculations even when they are confirmed by observation, why may not our speculations penetrate as far into the immaterial starry system, of which the former is but the outward and visible type? Surely, we are provided with senses as well fitted to penetrate the spaces of the real, the substantial, the eternal, as these outward are to penetrate the material universe. Veias, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates, Christ, ZOROASTER Shakespeare, Swedenborg, — these are some of our astronomers.

ASTRONOMY NICOLAS COPERNICUS GALILEO GALILEI VENUS

3. What I am saying here is that equivalently, Emerson’s analysis of Sanctorius and Harding’s analysis of Transcendentalism are surprisingly superficial. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1833

Professor Cornelius Conway Felton prepared an edition of HOMER, using the illustrations prepared by John Flaxman (1755-1826). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING According to Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966):

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Chapter 3 (1833-1837) -David Henry Thoreau enters Harvard College (president Josiah Quincy), having barely squeezed by his entrance exams and rooming with Charles S. Wheeler Thoreau’s Harvard curriculum: Greek (8 terms under Felton and Dunkin)-composition, grammar, “Greek Antiquities,” Xenophon, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Sophocles, Euripides, Homer. Latin Grammar (8 terms under Beck and McKean)-composition, “Latin Antiquities,” Livy, Horace, Cicero, Seneca, Juvenal. Mathematics (7 terms under Pierce and [Joseph] Lovering) English (8 terms under ET Channing, Giles, W&G Simmons)-grammar, rhetoric, logic, forensics, criticism, elocution, declamations, themes. Mental Philosophy (under Giles) William Paley, Stewart. Natural Philosophy (under [Joseph] Lovering)-astronomy. Intellectual Philosophy (under Bowen) Locke, Say, Story. Theology (2 terms under H Ware)-Paley, Charles Butler, New Testament. Modern Languages (voluntary) Italian (5 terms under Bachi) French (4 terms under Surault) German (4 terms under Bokum) Spanish (2 terms under [Francis] Sales) Attended voluntary lectures on German and Northern literature (Longfellow), mineralogy (Webster), anatomy (Warren), natural history (Harris). Thoreau was an above average student who made mixed impressions upon his classmates. In the spring of ‘36 Thoreau withdrew due to illness -later taught for a brief period in Canton under the Rev. Orestes A. Brownson, a leading New England intellectual who Harding suggests profoundly influenced Thoreau. (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986)

On a following screen is a list of textbooks that were to be used at Harvard for the school year 1833/1834, together with their list prices at the Brown, Shattuck, and Company bookstore, “Booksellers to the University.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1843

Professor Walter Roy Harding, in THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU: A BIOGRAPHY (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966; enlarged and corrected edition, NY: Dover, 1982; Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1992), would allege that in roughly this timeframe Thoreau “conceived the idea of baking the graphite mixture into cylinders just the exact size for the pencils and dispensed with the necessity of sawing out the individual leads. Then, carrying the process one step further, he invented a new machine which drilled holes in the solid pencil woods the exact size of the leads, thus permitting one to ram them in without having to go to the trouble of splitting the woods open and then gluing them back together again.” The professor does not indicate the source from which he had derived this fantastical information, but it must be stated that no such source has ever been found, no such drilling machinery has ever been found, every pencil manufactured by the Thoreau firm that has been examined was in fact fabricated out of two strips of wood that had been glued together around a strip of graphite that was rectangular in cross-section, and nobody in the pencil business even today has ever even heard of an attempt to create such a process, of fabricating pencils by ramming a lead down into a pre-drilled hole, or is able to conceive of how such a manufacturing process might be made to work. In other words this entire story of a Thoreau invention of a new process of drilling out holes and ramming pencil leads down into them amounts to the sheerest congratulatory fabrication, a Fake Fact. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Chapter 7(a) (1839-1843) -On Sept 18, 1839 the Hedge Club proposed the creation of the Dial. Margaret Fuller was the first editor. Thoreau published the following in the Dial: 1st issue -poem “Sympathy” (for Ellen Devereux Sewall) July 1840 -short critical essay on Aulus Persius Flaccus -Roman poet July 1841 -“Sic Vita” Oct 1841 -poem on friendship July 1842 -(Waldo Emerson now editor) “The Natural History of Massachusetts” and “My Prayer” Oct 1842 -8 poems “The Black Knight,” “The Inward Morning,” “Free Love,” “The Poet’s Delay,” “Rumors from an Aeolian Harp,” “The Moon,” “To a Maiden in the East” and “The Summer Rain.” It turned out to be a better than average addition due to the quality of the contributions. October 1843 “A Winter Walk” (essay) January 1844 -Pindar translation and appreciative essay on the anti-slavery weekly Herald of Freedom. In all Thoreau published 31 poems, essays and other contributions in the Dial. The Dial dissolved as the Transcendentalists drifted apart, but Thoreau “still kept the flame of Transcendentalism burning in his own life.”

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Chapter 7(b) (1841-1843) -Thoreau cast about for employment and a living situation. On April 26, 1841 he moved in with the Emersons, agreeing to trade several hours of daily labor in exchange for room and board. In mid-July, 1841 he took a four-day journey to the Wachusett Mountains with Richard Fuller and an essay, “A Walk to Wachusett” was published in the Boston Miscellany on Literature. In January of 1842 John Thoreau Jr. died of lockjaw in Henry’s arms. Henry became despondent and developed his brother’s symptoms for a time. Meanwhile, Waldo Emerson lost his son Waldo. Mutual grief brought the two men closer together. In July of 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne moved into the Old Manse in Concord and after Emerson’s introduction, he and Thoreau became friends. Hawthorne went out of his way to praise Thoreau in his prefaces to Mosses from an Old Manse and The Scarlet Letter. Thoreau published “Paradise (to be) Regained,” a critical piece in an 1843 edition of United States Magazine, and Democratic Review with help from Hawthorne and later “THE LANDLORD,” a popular sketch for the same periodical. Thoreau was elected curator for the Concord Lyceum in November of 1843 and arranged an outstanding schedule of lecturers for that winter. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Chapter 8 (1843) -Anxious to further his literary career Thoreau arranged a job near NYC as a tutor for Waldo Emerson’s brother’s children at their home in Staten Island. But the more he saw of New York, the less he liked it: “I am ashamed of my eyes that behold it.” Meeting Henry James, Jr., however, “naturalized and humanized New York” for Thoreau. Horace Greeley volunteered to serve as Thoreau’s literary agent, but Thoreau found publishers of periodicals more interested in “safety” than in his unorthodox work. Thoreau found his employment and his relations with his employer unsatisfactory and suffered from homesickness. He returned to Concord in November after only a half year’s employment, but he did establish valuable contacts, and particularly with Greeley, who would aid him throughout the rest of his literary career.

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar” Chapter 9 (1843-1845) -Thoreau returned to live at home in Concord. He worked at the family pencil business to settle his debts. He established his lifelong friendship with Ellery Channing, who had married Margaret Fuller’s sister and moved to Concord. Before Channing moved to New York to work at Horace Greeley’s tribune, he and Thoreau climbed Greylock (the saddleback adventure from A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS). Although their personalities were quite different, their friendship became “the most intimate and most lasting of Thoreau’s life.” Thoreau once again partook of the vital Concord environment, developing an interest in the anti-slavery movement and participating in Waldo Emerson’s short-lived weekly discussion groups with Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Channing and others. The talks failed because the participants were too self-conscious thinking, “who will now proceed to say the finest thing that has ever been said.” The pencil business flourished and the Thoreaus, with the help of Henry’s landscaping and carpentry, built a new house (the Texas House) just outside of Concord. (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1845

April 1, Tuesday: The Alcott family’s “Hillside” that eventually would become the Hawthorne family’s “The Wayside” had in January come to be owned by trustees for Mrs. Amos Bronson Alcott (until 1852). At this point the family moved in, and the house would provide a home for Mr. and Mrs. Alcott and their four daughters until, on November 17, 1848, they would relocate by train to a basement apartment on Dedham Street in the South End of Boston. OLD HOUSES

Bronson Alcott immediately proceeded to cut Horatio Cogswell’s wheelwright shop into two halves and tack these onto the main house as wings. He also combined several small rooms into a larger kitchen, built new stairs, cleaned out the well and installed a new pump, and constructed a shower stall apparatus in which buckets of water were raised overhead with pulleys and counterweights and dumped mechanically over the bather.

It rained and melted the remaining ice on Walden Pond, which had been dark-colored and saturated with water.

WALDEN: In 1845 Walden was first completely open on the 1st of April; in ’46, the 25th of March; in ’47, the 8th of April; in ’51, the 28th of March; in ’52, the 18th of April; in ’53, the 23rd of March; in ’54, about the 7th of April. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING Early in the day it was very foggy, and as Henry Thoreau chopped young pines into studs for his shanty, using his borrowed axe, he heard a stray goose groping about over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog. (In the famous 1962 John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance advertisement illustration by Tom Covell, however, he is listening to the distant drumming of a Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus in the forest.) TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Incidentally, in case one wonders why Thoreau was not utilizing the construction technique known as balloon framing in the construction of his shanty, Professor Walter Roy Harding has asserted that the reason was that actually balloon framing is used only for houses of more than one story. This is inaccurate, and one wonders who might have told Harding such a fabulation. Houses of one story, and split-levels, equally with houses of multiple stories, get conventionally framed and braced in the balloon manner. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1865

July: Henry James, Sr. panned Louisa May Alcott and her MOODS in the North American Review. Miss Alcott’s “decided cleverness” mixed with “ignorance of human nature, and her self-confidence in spite of this ignorance” but the publication itself, although “very seldom puerile,” seemed “innocent of any doctrine whatever.” The main male heart-throb, Mr. Adam Warwick, seemed according to James’s intuition to be a literary portrait of the predatory child seducer, and he concludes with an ironic delivery of the Official Truth of the matter:

There are, thank Heaven, no such men at large in society.

Yeah, right, that is in fact what we are supposed to pretend, don’t you know? Miss Alcott, if you have any information about the practices of predatory child seducers, our polite society, as represented by Mr. James, desires that you to have the sense to in the future keep your fucking mouth shut about it. You might, little girl, sometime in the future write a very good novel –per Mr. James– provided you will be satisfied to describe only what you have seen, wink wink, nudge nudge.

President Andrew Johnson, after consulting with his cabinet, decided to try former United States Senator and former Confederate President Jefferson Davis for treason in a civil court rather than before a military tribunal.

Francis Jackson Meriam was discharged for disability from the 57th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. US CIVIL WAR

An article on Henry Thoreau by the Reverend John Weiss (one of the ringleaders of the student-protest rioting of that period, in which Thoreau had neglected to participate) appeared on pages 96-117 of The Christian Examiner LXXIX:

We could sympathize with his tranquil indifference to college honors.... He was cold and unimpressible. He passed for nothing, it is suspected, with most of us [his college classmates]; for he was cold and unimpressible. The touch of his hand was moist and indifferent, as if he had taken up something when he saw your hand coming, and caught your grasp upon it. How the prominent, grey-blue eyes seemed to rove down the path, just in advance of his feet, as his grave Indian stride carried him down to University Hall. He did not care for people; his classmates seemed very remote. This revery hung always about him, and not so loosely as the odd garments which the pious household care furnished. Thought had not yet awakened his countenance; it was serene, but rather dull, rather plodding. The lips were not yet firm; there was almost a look of smug satisfaction lurking round their corners. It is plain now that he was preparing to hold his future views with great setness and personal appreciation of their importance. The nose was prominent, but its curve fell HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING forward without firmness over the upper lip, and we remember him as looking very much like some Egyptian sculpture of faces, large-featured, but brooding, immobile, fixed in a mystic egoism. Yet his eyes were sometimes searching as if he had dropped, or expected to find, something. In fact his eyes seldom left the ground, even in his most earnest conversations with you. He would smile to hear the word “collegiate career” applied to the reserve and inaptness of his college life. He was not signalised by the plentiful distribution of the parts and honours which fall to the successful student. Of his private tastes there is little of consequence to recall, except that he was devoted to the old English literature, and had a good many volumes of the poetry from Gower and Chaucer down through the era of Elizabeth. In this mine he worked with a quiet enthusiasm. ...He went about like a priest of Buddha who expects to arrive at the summit of a life of contemplation, where the divine absorbs the human.... Now it is no wonder that he kept himself aloof from us in college; for he was already living on some Walden Pond, where he had run up a temporary shanty in the depths of his reserve.... But he had no animal spirits for our sport or mischief.

Kathryn Schulz, who writes for The New Yorker, has glanced into the cold eyes of a “Pond Scum” Henry Thoreau, and has engaged in a deep reading of WALDEN, and she finds credible some of these observations that his classmate the Reverend John Weiss made about him: Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau, in 1817, the third of four children of a pencil manufacturer in Concord, Massachusetts. In 1833, he went off to Harvard, which he did not particularly like and where he was not found particularly likable. (One classmate recalled his “look of smug satisfaction,” like a man “preparing to hold his future views with great setness and personal appreciation of their importance.”)

In regard to those grey-blue eyes, we can inspect a recent colorized image of Thoreau prepared by Ron Koster:

http://www.psymon.com/art/#new

Professor Walter Roy Harding has taken this inventive article from 1865 to be the original source for the Fake News items that have been created over the years, and retold and retold, about a jail encounter between Thoreau and Emerson: “Why are you in jail?” “Why are you not?” Weiss continued, however: What an easy task it would be for a lively and not entirely scrupulous pen to ridicule his notions, and raise such a cloud of ink in the clear medium as entirely to obscure his true and noble traits! It now appears that Weiss’s speculation about the harm that might be done to Thoreau’s reputation through easy ridicule from “a lively and not entirely scrupulous pen” — was all too accurate. For in October of this year 1865, in the North American Review, James Russell Lowell’s gratuitously derogatory and mocking article “Thoreau’s Letters” would be appearing. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1872

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. put out a new edition of TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST with significant changes.

Alexander Hay Japp’s MEMOIR OF N. HAWTHORNE.

In England, building the reputation of her father with the help of Robert Browning, Una Hawthorne prepared certain unfinished The Atlantic Monthly manuscripts as SEPTIMUS FELTON; OR, THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. This would be prepared in Boston by James R. Osgood in terra-cotta cloth decoratively stamped in black and gilt, inside a half-morocco slipcase.

According to an “Afterward” on page 474 of the Dover Edition of Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU: A BIOGRAPHY, Henry Thoreau’s grave was moved from the New Burying Ground to

Authors’ Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery “ten years or so after the original burial,” which would be at about this point. Walt Whitman would write about a visit he would make to Concord during the Fall of 1881, that he “spent a half hour at Hawthorne’s and Thoreau’s graves. I got out and went up of course on foot, and stood a long while and ponder’d. They lie close together in a pleasant wooded spot well up the cemetery hill, ‘Sleepy Hollow.’ The flat surface of the first was densely cover’d by myrtle, with a border of arbor-vitae, and the other had a brown headstone, moderately elaborate, with inscriptions. By Henry’s side lies his brother John, of whom much was expected, but he died young.” Clearly, as of Whitman’s visit in 1881 at least, Henry’s grave DIGGING UP THE DEAD HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING had already been relocated to the tourist spot they were calling Authors’ Ridge, and clearly, the headstone Walt saw in 1881 was dissimilar to the severely plain and small one that is above Henry’s body now. One wonders what that inscription said. (By 1874 the old Thoreau family stones would be recycled to cover a drainage ditch, and new “neat, plain, brown” ones set in place above the graves. The cemetery association keeps spare gravestones for Henry’s grave in a shed somewhere, as these memorabilia do seem from time to time to wander away.)

The Brooks family house that stood where the Concord Free Public Library now stands, at the intersection of Main Street and Sudbury Road, was at this point moved to 45 Hubbard Street.

Bronson Alcott’s CONCORD DAYS4 (pages 11-17):

4. Bronson Alcott. CONCORD DAYS (Boston: Roberts Brothers). Although this volume was issued in 1872, according to a date past the title page, it appears to be a series of journal entries (with some other stuff inserted) initiated between April and September of 1869. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING My friend and neighbor united these qualities of sylvan and human in a more remarkable manner than any whom it has been my happiness to know. Lover of the wild, he lived a borderer on the confines of civilization, jealous of the least encroachment upon his possessions. “Society were all but rude In his umbrageous solitude.”

I had never thought of knowing a man so thoroughly of the country, and so purely a son of nature. I think he had the profoundest passion for it of any one of his time; and had the human sentiment been as tender and pervading, would have given us pastorals of which Virgil and Theocritus might have envied him the authorship had they chanced to be his contemporaries. As it was, he came nearer the antique spirit than any of our native poets, and touched the fields and groves and streams of his native town with a classic interest that shall not fade. Some of his verses are suffused with an elegiac tenderness, as if the woods and brooks bewailed the absence of their Lycidas, and murmured their griefs meanwhile to one another,—responsive like idyls. Living in close companionship with nature, his muse breathed the spirit and voice of poetry. For when the heart is once divorced from the senses and all sympathy with common things, then poetry has fled and the love that sings. The most welcome of companions was this plain countryman. One seldom meets with thoughts like his, coming so scented of mountain and field breezes and rippling springs, so like a luxuriant clod from under forest leaves, moist and mossy with earth-spirits. His presence was tonic, like ice-water in dog- days to the parched citizen pent in chambers and under brazen ceilings. Welcome as the gurgle of brooks and dipping of pitchers,—then drink and be cool! He seemed one with things, of nature’s essence and core, knit of strong timbers,—like a wood and its inhabitants. There was in him sod and shade, wilds and waters manifold,—the mould and mist of earth and sky. Self- poised and sagacious as any denizen of the elements, he had the key to every animal’s brain, every plant; and were an Indian to flower forth and reveal the scents hidden in his cranium, it would not be more surprising than the speech of our Sylvanus. He belonged to the Homeric age,—was older than pastures and gardens, as if he were of the race of heroes and one with the elements. He of all men seemed to be the native New-Englander, as much so as the oak, the granite ledge; our best example of an indigenous American, untouched by the old country, unless he came down rather from Thor, the Northman, whose name he bore. A peripatetic philosopher, and out-of-doors for the best part of his days and nights, he had manifold weather and seasons in him; the manners of an animal of probity and virtue unstained. Of all our moralists, he seemed the wholesomest, the busiest, and the best republican citizen in the world; always at home minding his own affairs. A little over-confident by genius, and stiffly individual, dropping society clean out of his theories, while standing friendly in his strict sense of friendship, there was in him an integrity and love of justice that made possible and actual the virtues of Sparta and the Stoics,—all the more welcome in his time of shuffling and pusillanimity. Plutarch would have made him immortal in his pages had he lived before his day. Nor have we any so modern withal, so entirely his own HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING and ours: too purely so to be appreciated at once. A scholar by birthright, and an author, his fame had not, at his decease, travelled far from the banks of the rivers he described in his books; but one hazards only the truth in affirming of his prose, that in substance and pith, it surpasses that of any naturalist of his time; and he is sure of large reading in the future. There are fairer fishes in his pages than any swimming in our streams; some sleep of his on the banks of the Merrimack by moonlight that Egypt never rivalled, a morning of which Memnon might have envied the music, and a greyhound he once had, meant for Adonis; frogs, better than any of Aristophanes; apples wilder than Adam’s. His senses seemed double, giving him access to secrets not easily read by others; in sagacity resembling that of the beaver, the bee, the dog, the deer; an instinct for seeing and judging, as by some other, or seventh sense; dealing with objects as if they were shooting forth from his mind mythologically, thus completing the world all round to his senses; a creation of his at the moment. I am sure he knew the animals one by one, as most else knowable in his town; the plants, the geography, as Adam did in his Paradise, if indeed, he were not that ancestor himself. His works are pieces of exquisite sense, celebrations of Nature’s virginity exemplified by rare learning, delicate art, replete with observations as accurate as original; contributions of the unique to the natural history of his country, and without which it were incomplete. Seldom has a head circumscribed so much of the sense and core of Cosmos as this footed intelligence. If one would learn the wealth of wit there was in this plain man, the information, the poetry, the piety, he should have accompanied him on an afternoon walk to Walden, or elsewhere about the skirts of his village residence. Pagan as he might outwardly appear, yet he was the hearty worshipper of whatsoever is sound and wholesome in nature,—a piece of russet probity and strong sense, that nature delighted to own and honor. His talk was suggestive, subtle, sincere, under as many masks and mimicries as the shows he might pass; as significant, substantial,—nature choosing to speak through his mouthpiece,— cynically, perhaps, and searching into the marrows of men and times he spoke of, to his discomfort mostly and avoidance. Nature, poetry, life,—not politics, not strict science, not society as it is,—were his preferred themes. The world was holy, the things seen symbolizing the things unseen, and thus worthy of worship, calling men out-of-doors and under the firmament for health and wholesomeness to be insinuated into their souls, not as idolaters, but as idealists. His religion was of the most primitive type, inclusive of all natural creatures and things, even to “the sparrow that falls to the ground,” though never by shot of his, and for whatsoever was manly in men, his worship was comparable to that of the priests and heroes of all time. I should say he inspired the sentiment of love, if, indeed, the sentiment did not seem to partake of something purer, were that possible, but nameless from its excellency. Certainly he was HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING better poised and more nearly self-reliant than other men. “The happy man who lived content With his own town, his continent, Whose chiding streams its banks did curb As ocean circumscribes its orb, Round which, when he his walk did take, Thought he performed far more than Drake; For other lands he took less thought Than this his muse and mother brought.” More primitive and Homeric than any American, his style of thinking was robust, racy, as if Nature herself had built his sentences and seasoned the sense of his paragraphs with her own vigor and salubrity. Nothing can be spared from them; there is nothing superfluous; all is compact, concrete, as nature is. His politics were of a piece with his individualism. We must admit that he found little in political or religious establishment answering to his wants, that his attitude was defiant, if not annihilating, as if he had said to himself: — “The state is man’s pantry at most, and filled at an enormous cost,—a spoliation of the human common-wealth. Let it go. Heroes can live on nuts, and free-men sun themselves in the clefts of rocks, rather than sell their liberty for this pottage of slavery. We, the few honest neighbors, can help one another; and should the state ask any favors of us, we can take the matter into consideration leisurely, and at our convenience give a respectful answer. “But why require a state to protect one’s rights? the man is all. Let him husband himself; needs he other servant or runner? Selfkeeping is the best economy. That is a great age when the state is nothing and man is all. He founds himself in freedom, and maintains his uprightness therein; founds an empire and maintains states. Just retire from those concerns, and see how soon they must needs go to pieces, the sooner for the virtue thus withdrawn from them. All the manliness of individuals is sunk in that partnership in trade. Not only must I come out of myself, if I will be free and independent. Shall one be denied the privilege on coming of mature age of choosing whether he will be a citizen of the country he happens to be born in, or another? And what better title to a spot of ground than being a man, and having none? Is not man superior to state or country? I plead exemption from all interference by men or states with my individual prerogatives. That is mine which none can steal from me, nor is that yours which I or any man can take away.” “I am too high born to be propertied, To be a secondary at control, Or useful serving man and instrument To any sovereign state throughout the world.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1905

Four hundred and eighty-nine copies of THE FIRST AND LAST JOURNEYS OF THOREAU, edited by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, were printed in 2 volumes for members of the Bibliophile Society. VIEW THE PAGE IMAGES

Sanborn alleged that much of the material Thoreau had inserted into his account of his adventure, with his brother John Thoreau, Jr. on the Concord and the Merrimack rivers into the mountains of southern New Hampshire in 1849, actually had originated during this 1844 hiking tour with Channing into the mountains of western Massachusetts and New York state: “This journey Thoreau in THE WEEK breaks into two parts, printing the last first, near the beginning of his “Tuesday,” where it runs on for fourteen pages. Then ... he takes up the tale of his tramp from Shelburne Falls on the Deerfield River, up the valley of that stream, and over the Hoosac Mountain, through which the railroad has since bored its way.” Professor Walter Roy Harding has commented, in attempting to rework this Sanborn material, that:

In 1905 Henry Thoreau’s friend and biographer Franklin Benjamin Sanborn edited the manuscript for a volume limited in distribution to the 489 members of the Bibliophile Society of Boston, Massachusetts. Enough has been said elsewhere of Sanborn’s high—handed editorial techniques so that I need add little other than to say that in general he added confusion to the already existent chaos. Instead of following either the order of the manuscript or a chronological order, he skipped around haphazardly, sometimes quoting Thoreau literally, sometimes paraphrasing, and often omitting — but never indicating which of the three techniques he was following at the moment. His edition gives an entirely misleading picture of the manuscript, though in fairness to Sanborn, it should be added that when he did follow the manuscript, he showed remarkable ability in deciphering Thoreau’s atrocious handwriting. Since Sanborn’s time several other scholars have looked at the manuscript but have given it up as a hopeless confusion. The real stumbling block has been the numbering of the pages. 8ecause tradition said that they had been numbered by Thoreau (Evadene Swanson, “The Manuscript Journal of Thoreau’s Last Journey,” Minnesota History, XX, 1939, 170), it was assumed that they must be in the order he wished them. Yet Lyndon Shanley’s experience with the Walden manuscripts (The Making of Walden, Chicago, 1957) and Arthur Christy’s with the Harvard Thoreau manuscripts (The Transmigration of the Seven Brahmans, New York vi 1932) should have made scholars aware of the fact that most of Thoreau’s manuscripts have become badly jumbled through the years.

MINNESOTA TIMELINE OF JOURNAL HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1908

Professor Walter Roy Harding has pointed out that Although it is not widely known, the earliest doctoral dissertation on Thoreau was done by an Ella Knapp at the University of Michigan in 1899, entitled “A Study of Thoreau.” Samuel Arthur Jones thought very highly of it and wrote Fred Hosmer that Knapp sees into Thoreau “farther than anyone who has thus far published anything about him.”5 Unfortunately the University of Michigan copy of the dissertation has been lost, and although Jones said he was going to see that a copy got to the Concord Free Public Library, there is none there now. Miss Knapp later taught at Goucher College, but Oehlschlaeger has told me that there seems to be no trace of a copy there. Harding asked: Does anyone know where a copy can be found?

5. Oehlschlaeger & Hendrick, TOWARD THE MAKING OF THOREAU’S MODERN REPUTATION, page 233. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1917

April 20, Friday: Walter Roy Harding was born in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. In World War II he would be a conscientious objector.

The United States of America and the Ottoman Empire severed diplomatic relations.

The main offensive in the 2d Battle of the Aisne was halted. By taking 130,000 casualties the French had advanced 500 meters. WORLD WAR I HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1937 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING Hoping that the Californian coastal climate would improve his eyesight, Aldous Huxley moved with Gerald Heard to the United States and became a writer of screenplays. In this year his STORIES, ESSAYS, AND POEMS and his AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF PACIFISM were published. Also, in ENDS AND MEANS, he pointed out that there doesn’t seem to be much disagreement over what it is that we are all trying to achieve as everybody seemed to be desiring a world of “liberty, peace, justice and brotherly love.” What we seemed to be disagreeing about, he opinioned, was the way to get there from where we were at the moment. He included in this treatise a chapter on war because at the moment “Every road towards a better state of society is blocked, sooner or later, by war, by threats of war, by preparations for war.”

“War is not a law of nature, nor even a law of human nature. It exists because men wish it to exist.... It is enormously difficult for us to change our wishes in this matter; but the enormously difficult is not the impossible.”

Interestingly, Huxley played the Orientalist card. Against all historical evidence, he asserted that it had been militarized Christianized Westerners who had wished war into existence — in the East, the Chinese, when left to themselves, naturally aspire not to conflict but to “an ordered and harmonious society,” and in India, Buddhists still have not forgotten about ahimsa, “doing no harm” to living beings. “It is one of the tragedies of history that the Westernization of China should have meant the progressive militarization of a culture which, for nearly 3,000 years, preached the pacifist ideal.... Alone of all the great world religions, Buddhism made its way without persecution, censorship or inquisition. Its record is enormously superior to that of Christianity, which made its way among people wedded to militarism.”

Huxley suggested that for some participants, war had been supplying a sense of purpose which otherwise would be wanting in their lives. They had been going to war in order to feel that they are alive because, in a state of peace, they felt as if they were purposeless, aimless, almost already dead. Others, tempted by the idea that they might be able to get away with some hot fantasy, had found the lawlessness that comes with a state of war to be an attraction — maybe they’d get to rape someone, maybe they’d get to torture someone, maybe they’d get to steal something, for sure they’d get to kill somebody and then gloat about it. For some of us war was what it took to make life at least interesting. –But these are reasons from the past, Huxley pointed out, because in our contemporary era of mechanized mass destruction, war isn’t what it used to be.

“Modern war destroys with the maximum of efficiency and the maximum of indiscrimination, and therefore entails the commission of injustices far more numerous and far worse than any it is intended to redress.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

Huxley suggested that there were also reasons why the non-participants in war, the “civilians” as it were, desired war. One of these reasons would be Nationalist Chauvinism: people “like to have excuses to feel pride and hatred”; professional military leaders, although they are not the sort to put themselves personally in harm’s way, are guys with a built-in job-performance problem: they are forever in need to create excuses for the display of their superior professional competence. The manufacturers of armaments need for the armaments already manufactured to be depleted and expended — so there can be more government contracts so they can make some more money.

“What is needed is the complete abolition of the arms industry. Those who prepare for war in due course get the war they prepare for.”

Nevertheless, all this is not merely to be laid at the doorstep of the military/industrial complex:

“The manufacturers of armaments are not the only merchants of death. To some extent we all are.”

In fact, the way we choose to live our lives creates occasion for war:

“Even in so far as we behave badly in private life we are all doing our bit to bring the next war nearer.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

Therefore we need to turn ourselves around, choosing to live our lives in an utterly different manner, a manner which, rather than forever creating occasion for war, forever creates occasion for peace.

At some point Thoreau scholar Walter Roy Harding would come across this book, ENDS AND MEANS by Aldous Huxley, and it as well as his appreciation of Henry Thoreau, “the most Chinese of all American authors in his entire view of life,” would cause Walter to declare himself a conscientious objector to all war.

OHNE MICH!

Walter would be serving out WWII not in uniform but as an orderly in hospitals and mental institutions. (Presumably, his coast guard brother was disappointed in him for this and, presumably, his Baptist church was not a lot of help to him in obtaining his deferment from active duty as a combatant.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1939

Hubert H. Hoeltje, “Thoreau in Concord Church and Town Records” on pages 349-59 of The New England Quarterly. Volume 12, number 2.

Professor Townsend Scudder III’s JANE WELSH CARLYLE.

Walter Roy Harding took his B.S.Ed. at the Massachusetts State College at Bridgewater and went to work as the principal of Central Grammar School in Northfield MA, a position which he would fill into 1941. When World War II came, he would do a stint of alternative service with Civilian Public Service at Presbyterian Hospital. His pacifism was grounded in Thoreau and also in Aldous Huxley’s 1937 ENDS AND MEANS.

Presumably, his coast guard brother was disappointed in him for this, and presumably, his Baptist church was not a lot of help to him in getting his deferment. After the CPS unit at Presbyterian Hospital closed Walter went to do service in a mental hospital in New Jersey until the war ended and he was released from this alternative service. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1941

Summer: This was the summer of the “Thoreau Birthday Mecca.”6

Walter Roy Harding, conscientious objector against war who would choose alternative service in a hospital and a mental asylum rather than uniformed service during World War II, became the Secretary of the Thoreau Society, a position in which he would serve until 1991, at which point his role would change to that of Founding Secretary.

6. Believe it or not, this was not aimed at alienating Muslims, any more than the almost equally inappropriately designated “Jubilee” of 1991 was aimed at Jews or fundamentalist Christians — but please, all you WASPy guy-types out there, let’s not be scheduling any “holocaust” barbecues or “powwow” picnics or “suttee” bonfire parties in the immediate future. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING In this year Walter Roy Harding also began to edit the Thoreau Society Bulletin, a task which would continue uninterrupted despite the utter failure7 of other attempts in this genre such as the University of Minnesota’s Thoreau Quarterly.

7. In journal publishing, “utter” is a code word indicating retention of subscription money. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1944

May: Allen Ginsberg, a student at Columbia University, met Jack Kerouac at Edie Parker’s apartment on 118th Street in New York City. Together they would visit William S. Burroughs in his apartment on Riverside Drive.

It was the consideration of the Nazi Burgomeister of the village of Velpke near Helmstedt, Germany, that Polish female slave laborers were spending far too much time attending to their own infants, and not being productive enough at their slave tasks on the local farms as well as in the factories of the area, such as the Volkswagen factory at nearby Wolfsburg. A center was established for these infant charges in an old factory building lacking running water, electric lights, and a telephone connection, and they were forcibly removed from their slave mothers. The Reich labor Office ordered a former teacher, Frau Billien, to take charge of this institution and supervise the four Polish and Russian slave girls who were installed in the building to tend these infants. None of these attendants had ever before cared for an infant. Some months later Volkswagen required possession of the old building, and it would be discovered that 84 of the infants had already died through the disregard of their caretakers and the deprival of mother’s milk. According to the Velpke village register the most common causes of death had been general weakness, dysentery, and intestinal catarrh. (A British Military Court would sentence two of these care providers to death, and three to long terms of imprisonment.) WORLD WAR II

Walter Roy Harding wrote in this notes that “Rather the significant contribution of Thoreau is what might be termed his ‘mind-set.’ We need to produce more citizens who will question things as he did. If we study his pattern, we may learn the secret of producing such men. If we succeed, we will have taken one of the greatest strides toward producing that ideal democracy about which so much is said and so little done these days. For it is only through an enlightened, questioning citizenry that we may achieve such a utopia. Therein lies the value of Thoreau.”

In a poll of 52 correspondents conducted by Look Magazine, Senator Harry S Truman was selected as one of the ten most useful officials in Washington DC (it is an interesting comment on the innocence of those times, that anybody would have dared to ask news media people for their judgment about the merits of politicians, or that anybody would have considered such opinions to be of any relevance).

At this point Winston Churchill had received his first small batch of germ bombs from the Indiana Ku Klux Klan in Vigo near Terre Haute, for testing, but construction of the Chemical Warfare Service’s 6,100-acre Vigo HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING Ordinance Plant had only just been completed and American production was far behind schedule.

The plant was supposed to be producing some 50,000 4-pound bombs per month by that summer, out of an order for 500,000 such devices, but there wasn’t a fat chance in hell of that happening.8 There was another plant in Indiana that was due to start production late in 1944 and was to begin producing about 625,000 germ bombs monthly, with a portion of this grand supply to be available to the English air force early in 1945, but that was all big talk and at this point they had to confess to a disgruntled Churchill that there would not be enough anthrax bombs for even a “token” destruction of German cities until the end of 1944 at the earliest. What if the wicked Germans had a chance to surrender before we righteous people had a chance to rise up in our wrath and kill them all?9 GERM WARFARE

Here is the matter, as it has been recorded on the Internet by the Vigo County, Indiana people themselves 8.The Ku Klux Klan has been accused of a lot of stuff, but it has never been accused of efficiency.

9.The German populations that had been selected for extermination had been, in alphabetical order, those of Aachen, Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Wilhelmshafen. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

LETS GET TOGETHER FOR GERM WARFARE! HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING (emphasis supplied; see URL http://web.indstate.edu/community/vchs/thhist.htm): The Second World War created abnormal economic conditions in many cities, but Terre Haute escaped the problem due to its lack of durable goods manufactures. Instead, Terre Haute produced peacetime goods, largely food items, and supplied labor to three nearby ordnance plants. The A and P (Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea) Company’s Quaker Maid plant was said to have been the world’s largest food processing factory under one roof. In one of these plants, the Terre Haute Ordnance Depot, biological agents for antipersonnel bombs would have been produced had the war continued. The city received the nation's 100th United Service organizations (USO) facility in 1943, and it proudly accepted designation as the country's foremost recruitment center of women serving in the navy (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, or WAVES). In 1945 when the navy launched the SS Terre Haute Victory, a 10,800 ton armed cargo ship, it carried a library and recreational equipment purchased with funds raised in a city campaign. The rousing activities of the war effort — troop send-offs, victory gardens, bond sales, civil defense drills, parades, and ceremonies — only briefly diverted attention from Terre Haute's almost congenital social and economic plight. In all years but two between 1940 and 1961 the city found itself on some form of federal chronic unemployment list. New factories, such as Pfizer Chemical (1948), Allis-Chalmers (1951), Columbia Records (1954), and Anaconda Aluminum (1959), could absorb only a portion of job seekers from folded businesses. Manufacturing establishments declined from 134 in 1947 to 131 twenty years later. The community lost about 6,000 jobs between 1950 and 1960. The census tally that showed an increased of 9,807 residents in the 1940-60 period masked the loss of work places and jobholders. The census figure represented gains through annexations, including the attachment of Harrison Township in 1957, not a net gain of recent arrivals. National magazines and state newspapers persisted in featuring the iniquities of the city. The image of a debauched community plagued local administrators. Successive mayors tried, more or less, to blot out gambling and prostitution, the volume of which, in any case, had decreased significantly from prewar levels. Isolated incidents, such as the 1957 disclosure that Terre Haute was a base for a large gambling syndicated, stoked HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING the media's fires. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1947

Walter Roy Harding took his MA at the University of North Carolina and became an instructor in English at Rutgers University.

The Historic Charleston Foundation was established to oversee a revolving fund with which to purchase threatened historic properties, restore them, and sell them with protective covenants. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1948

In Volume VIII of the edition A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LIFE, historian Allan Nevins delivered himself of the judgement that “Thoreau’s income from his books and papers was zero.” According to the bibliography of this treatise, Nevins drew his understanding of the life of Thoreau from a biography of John Burroughs!

Walter Roy Harding’s “A Check List of Thoreau’s Lectures” was published in the Bulletin of the New York Public Library 52: 78-87.

Edwin Way Teale’s DAYS WITHOUT TIME.

There was an adaptation of Schiller’s play MARY STUART, with alternate parts on alternate nights for Judith Anderson.

Fall: Walter Roy Harding placed an amusing piece about Henry Thoreau’s favorite uncle Charles Jones Dunbar, “Uncle Charlie Comes to Concord,” in the magazine Nature Outlook:

http://www.walden.org/Institute/thoreau/about2/H/WalterHarding/ UncleCharlie.htm HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1950

1950: Some materials prepared by Francis Henry Allen were printed by the Thoreau Society as a 28-page booklet THOREAU’S EDITORS: HISTORY AND REMINISCENCE.

During this decade William Griswold examined a barn on the Brooks Clark Farm that had repair boards on it that did not match the other boards. These repair boards did not seem to him to correspond to the description Henry Thoreau had given of the ones he had used on his shanty at the pond. Oral tradition remains clear that the barn and its boards are still on a former Clark farm on Estabrook Road. The owner of the property where “everyone” says the barn resides took down a small barn on the place in recent years, saving the boards for a buyer who never went through with the deal. However, the address of this barn is not the Brooks Clark Farm, but one down the road from it, and this barn was one owned by a related –but different– Clark. A group examined this wood but achieved no enlightenment. How the idea arose, that the barn with the Walden shanty’s boards was on this other property, was impossible to establish. There are no records of there having been a barn-moving, but that is not to say that barns cannot be moved. Could people have started confusing the two HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING properties at one time and this continued until it became a widely-accepted myth? Or did the Clarks lend spare boards to one another as the need for them arose?

Concordian Marion Wheeler went to the spot where the barn containing the timbers of the hut last stood. She was shown this by the late Gladys Clark – a member of the Clark family which brought the hut to the farm. The location was at the Brooks Clark farm, on the edge of the Estabrook Woods, which agrees with the written documentation available. EMERSON’S SHANTY

Walter Roy Harding took his PhD at Rutgers, on the basis of a study of Thoreau’s correspondence from 1836 to 1849.

At one point Professor John Dewey confessed to Dr. Harding that he really didn’t know that much about Thoreau:

I am wondering why I have never gone to the source in his case. Has he been presented with too much austerity — as a kind of The Last Puritan? HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1951

Walter Roy Harding became an assistant professor at the University of Virginia. CABIN ESCAPISM AND HOW IT GREW:

“We went to the wilderness because 100 years ago a man wrote a book.”

YEAR PERSON BOOK PLACE

1889 Philip G. Herbert, Jr. LIBERTY AND A LIVING Long Island

1951 Vena Angier and AT HOME IN THE WOODS: LIVING Hudson Hope, Bradford Angier THE LIFE OF THOREAU TODAY British Columbia

1968 Edward Abby DESERT SOLITAIRE Utah

1971 Charles Seib THE WOODS: North Carolina ONE MAN’S ESCAPE TO NATURE

1974 Annie Dillard PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK Virginia

1978 George Sibley PART OF A WINTER mountains of Colorado

1983 Gilbert Byron COVE DWELLER Maryland’s eastern shore

1987 Anne LaBastille BEYOND BLACK BEAR LAKE Adirondack Mountains HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING Vivian Constance Hopkins, in SPIRES OF FORM: A STUDY OF EMERSON’S AESTHETIC THEORY (Cambridge, page 243n), indicated that there exists a late manuscript fragment in the collection labeled “Notes on Thoreau,” in which an aged Waldo Emerson was speculating that:

lost a good book which, instead of being “dropped by its author,” hound is “thrown up,” thus slipping the leash of (allowing to run off) a “fleet hound” lost “such command of property as he desired” bay horse lost “the wife of his dream” turtle-dove

WALDEN: In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate. I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

(The interest of this, of course, is that it is an utterly inane analysis, while yet deriving from a source which presumably should have been capable of giving careful attention to the subject matter. Professor Walter Roy Harding has pointed out that in Waldo Emerson’s poem “Forerunners” there had been a hint of the combination of Henry Thoreau’s hound, horse, and dove.)

The The WALDEN other parable analyses HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1954

Professor Walter Roy Harding prepared THOREAU: A CENTURY OF CRITICISM, which was published by Southern Methodist UP, and A CHECKLIST OF EDITIONS OF WALDEN, which was published by the U of Virginia P. Also, in this year he edited Charles Mayo Ellis’s AN ESSAY ON TRANSCENDENTALISM, which was being republished by Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints.

10 Per Alexander Kern’s THE RISE OF TRANSCENDENTALISM 1815-1860, Transcendentalism is: • An intuitive idealism which accepts ideas as ultimates. • A view of the imagination or intuition (reason) giving a direct apprehension of reality which the logical faculties (understanding) cannot furnish. • The concept of an organic universe in which Nature, suffused by an immanent God, corresponded with spirit in such a way that the connections and indeed the whole could be grasped by contemplation and intuition. • A living religion in which miracles seem natural. • The divinity of man, who consequently did not need salvation. • A concept of Genius which could produce works of art by recording its intuitions through the use of nature symbols. • A freedom and spontaneity in art to permit the creation of works liberated from the artificialities produced by talent or mechanical rules alone. • An individual moral insight which should supersede the dollar as the standard of conduct. • Self-improvement as the primary avenue of social improvement. • Individualism, i.e. reliance on God, rather than conformity to the will of a political or social majority. • An optimism about the potentialities of individual lives and the universe.

10. Kern, Alexander, “The Rise of Transcendentalism, 1815-1860.” In TRANSITIONS IN AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY, ed. Harry Hayden Clark. Durham NC: Duke UP, 1954. 245-314. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

My own take is that Henry Thoreau’s personal brand of Transcendentalism boils down to a repudiation of the dogmatic attitude which he was so frequently encountering in others of his milieu. For some, not Transcendentalists, answers generate closure. When we get The Answer the conversation’s over; if we’ve already got The Answer — said conversation needn’t even begin. Henry had a kind of openness, whereas they had a kind of authoritativeness or closedness that was noticeably hostile to his openness. His general expectation was “Since this is what I’ve been supposing until now, I wonder whether I might now be able to transcend this, get beyond this — into something further.” In a dogma eat dogma world, Henry was, in a word, engaging. His attitude was “OK, now what?”

Unfortunately, for some of the other folks who identified themselves as Transcendentalists, Transcendentalism became only their next opprobrious opportunity to create correct creed — and close things off again.

And, some historians of intellectual history now presume, Henry was merely a low-rent imitator of these real movers and the shakers of that era such as Emerson. Generally, it is these other Transcendentalists who have now become in intellectual history the type cases of What Transcendentalism Was — with our Henry reduced to the status of somebody who lived in town but just didn’t get it. (Sad but true. :-) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1956

Walter Roy Harding became an associate professor at the State University of New York at Geneseo.

Professor Harding’s “Thoreau as Seen by Fredrika Bremer” appeared in Thoreau Society Bulletin 54. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1957

Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THOREAU’S LIBRARY was published by the Thoreau Society. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1958

Professor Walter Roy Harding and Carl Bode turned Professor Harding’s PhD dissertation into a comprehensive edition of Thoreau’s CORRESPONDENCE , published by the New York University Press. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1959

Professor Walter Roy Harding’s A THOREAU HANDBOOK was published by New York UP, and he was promoted to full professor and became chair of the Department of English at SUNY – Geneseo.

Publication of Richard Rovere’s SENATOR JOE MCCARTHY: “[L]ike Hitler, McCarthy was a screamer, a political thug, a master of the mob [who] usurped executive and judicial authority whenever the fancy struck him.” His supporters had been “the bat-haunted Minute Women of the U.S.A. ... Texas millionaires ... the China Lobby ... the ‘hard’ anti-Communist intelligentsia of New York ... from the outmost fringes, where grievances and anxieties were the strongest and the least grounded in reason; where the passion for authoritarian leadership was greatest; where the will to hate and condemn and punish could most easily be transformed into political action.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1960

Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THOREAU, MAN OF CONCORD was published by Holt, Rinehart (in 1990 this would become the basis for THOREAU AS SEEN BY HIS CONTEMPORARIES). Also, in this year he edited Bronson Alcott’s ESSAYS ON EDUCATION, 1830-1862, which was being published by Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1962

Milton Meltzer and Professor Walter Roy Harding’s A THOREAU PROFILE (“drawn largely in his own words with 250 pictures”) was published by Crowell, Professor Harding’s THOREAU’S MINNESOTA JOURNEY: TWO DOCUMENTS was published by the Thoreau Society, and his edition of HENRY DAVI D THOREAU’S WALDEN AND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE was published by Shelley. RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT MINNESOTA HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1963

Professor Walter Roy Harding edited A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, published by Holt, Rinehart, as well as the JOURNAL in the 1906 edition, republished as two big volumes by Dover. In addition his edition of Thoreau’s ANTI-SLAVERY AND REFORM PAPERS was published by Harvest. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1964

Professor Walter Roy Harding edited SOPHIA THOREAU’S SCRAPBOOK for publication by the Thoreau Society.

COLLECTED POEMS OF HENRY THOREAU, enlarged edition.

Translation of Thoreau materials into Portuguese in Brazil: ESCRITOS SELECIONADOS SOBRE NATUREZA E LIBERDADE. Série Clássicos da Democracia, vol. 25. Tradução de Aydano Arruda. Contém: “Desobediência Civil,” “Onde vivi e a razão por que vivi,” “Naufrágio,” “Domingo,” “Caminhada,” “Cartas familiares selecionadas.” São Paulo: IBRASA. 167 pages. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1965

Professor Walter Roy Harding became Editor In Chief of the Princeton University Press’s THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU, a position in which he would serve until he became a member of their Executive Committee in 1973, and he became chair of the Humanities Division at SUNY – Geneseo. He edited the volume THE THOREAU CENTENNIAL, published by Press of the State University Of New York.

His THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU: A BIOGRAPHY was published by Alfred A. Knopf.

While Thoreau was at his unlocked shanty on Walden Pond only one item of any consequence had been lifted. That had been his copy of Homer’s ILIAD (Volume 2 of POPE’S WORKS). It had been lifted by the woodchopper Alek Therien and had come to be in the possession of a descendant. This descendant, still resident in the community, would agree to be interviewed on the topic, and would admit to possession of the volume in question, only if the matter could be put in the very best possible light — and so in THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU the professor kept a promise, by indeed putting the ancestor’s theft in the very best possible light: Although Therien had had little formal education, he was keen and alert. The two often talked of books. Quite naturally their discussion turned to one of Thoreau’s favorite authors, Homer. And when Therien told Thoreau that he thought Homer a great writer, “though what his writing was about, he did not know,” Thoreau took his ILIAD down and translated portions for him. Therien was so delighted that he later quietly borrowed Pope’s translation from the cabin and forgot to return it. Thoreau was to wonder in WALDEN where it had gone to.

(Harding would later report that upon this man’s death the volume in question was searched for by his heirs but they were unable to locate it among his belongings.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING Per Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965: “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar” Chapter 5 (1838-1841) -Henry Thoreau opened his own tutoring service in June 1838 and by October he had taken over as master of Concord Academy, where he was soon joined by his brother John. John taught the “English branches” and Henry Greek, Latin, French, physical and natural sciences, philosophy and history. The school was successful and very highly regarded but was discontinued after 3 years due to John’s illness. John and Henry left for a trip on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers on Aug 31, 1839. The fourteen day journey “on the surface was simply a vacation lark of the two young men. But as the years passed, it had a growing significance in Thoreau’s mind.” The trip provided much of the eventual material for A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986)

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar” Chapter 6 (1839-1842) Thoreau’s Loves -Ellen Devereux Sewall visited Concord and the Thoreau house in June of 1839. Henry fell deeply in love with her and began to write love poems immediately. His brother John also fell for her, and went to visit her immediately after their river trip (at Scituate). Henry “stepped aside” for brother John, whose proposal of marriage was refused. Henry proposed later by mail but, as his journal indicates, expected the refusal he received. Henry never forgot Ellen and shortly before his death avowed “I have always loved her.” Henry fell in love again in 1842 with Mary Russell but it came to nothing. After 1842 Henry Thoreau was a confirmed bachelor and outwardly portrayed a Victorian aversion to the subject of sex. (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Chapter 7(a) (1839-1843) -On Sept 18, 1839 the Hedge Club proposed the creation of the Dial. Margaret Fuller was the first editor. Henry Thoreau published the following in the Dial: 1st issue -poem “Sympathy” (for Ellen Devereux Sewall) July 1840 -short critical essay on Aulus Persius Flaccus - Roman poet July 1841 -“Sic Vita” Oct 1841 -poem on friendship July 1842 -(Waldo Emerson now editor) NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS and “My Prayer” Oct 1842 -8 poems “The Black Knight,” “The Inward Morning,” “Free Love,” “The Poet’s Delay,” “Rumors from an Aeolian Harp,” “The Moon,” “To a Maiden in the East” and “The Summer Rain.” It turned out to be a better than average addition due to the quality of the contributions. October 1843 “A Winter Walk” (essay) January 1844 -Pindar translation and appreciative essay on the anti-slavery weekly Herald of Freedom. In all Thoreau published 31 poems, essays and other contributions in the Dial. The Dial dissolved as the Transcendentalists drifted apart, but Thoreau “still kept the flame of Transcendentalism burning in his own life.” (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1966

Professor Walter Roy Harding reported in this year that CAPE COD had been Henry Thoreau’s “sunniest, happiest book.” More recently Bob Pepperman Taylor has regarded such a take on such a book, concerned as it is with violent death and arbitrary violence, as simply “bizarre.” –And the Harding who has been the perpetrator of such a trivializing misreading would be, Taylor points out, for some time considered “the dean 11 of Thoreau studies”! It is in his chapter “Fraternity” of AMERICA’S BACHELOR UNCLE: THOREAU AND THE AMERICAN POLITY (Lawrence KA: UP of Kansas, 1996) that Taylor takes up the book CAPE COD for consideration, intending by an exemplary close reading to demonstrate that actually this sunniest, happiest book on violent death and arbitrary violence offers a Thoreauvian civil disobedience political analysis of overlooked sophistication:

On the opening pages of CAPE COD Thoreau says, “I did not see why I might not make a book on Cape Cod, as well as my neighbor on ‘Human Culture.’ It is but another name for the same thing.” The problem of this book and of a number of Thoreau’s other travel, or “excursion,” writings, is the problem of human solidarity. How is it that human beings are, or might be, held together in coherent, meaningful morally respectable community? In light of its history, and since contemporary residents of the Cape “are said to be more purely the descendants of the Pilgrims than the inhabitants of any other part of the state,” this is an ideal setting for evaluating the nature and character of a social fabric.... this problem of human community can first be approached negatively: What are the forces that threaten the shared experiences and commitments essential to any healthy community? In CAPE COD Thoreau considers in some detail two of the most privatizing elements of human life, death and the yearning for personal salvation (or, in more general and secular language, for an independent moral integrity), and the problems they pose for human solidarity. Thoreau severely criticizes three major responses to these forces within the American experience, all of which represent attempts to prevent the dissolution of common life: charity, our historical narratives,

11. It would be in this year that Walter Roy Harding would leave the chair of the Humanities Division at SUNY – Geneseo, becoming University Professor. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING and religious intolerance. But we know from other writings, most importantly “A YANKEE IN CANADA”, that he is even more critical of societies that do not even aspire to civic concern or moral consensus, societies that are built only and self-consciously upon brute political force. For Thoreau, we desperately need a moral community, but the models that exist for such communities in the American tradition are significantly flawed.... Thoreau’s concern in this book is not economic (as it is in WALDEN or “LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE”). He is here interested in the impact that nature and death have on the forces of social integration, on the relationships between citizens and individuals. And what he finds is terribly disturbing.... Thoreau was well acquainted with the overwhelming frustration the living may face in properly relating to, sympathizing with, and grieving for the dead. Death threatens the stability of community not only in an economic or material sense but in an emotional, affective sense as well. It strains and threatens to rend the foundation of individualized concern upon which meaningful community is built.

We may contrast this, as Bob Pepperman Taylor does, with the sort of CATCH-22 political analysis which is to be found in “A YANKEE IN CANADA”: What Henry Thoreau sees in Canada is blatant political oppression: an attempt by the English to create a political community through the frank imposition of physical force. In CAPE COD Thoreau concludes that religious imposition is a flawed method of creating social solidarity, that our telling of history is incomplete and dishonest, and that our charity is a thin and hypocritical fraternal gruel. But his observations in Canada demonstrate to him that brute force is the most cynical method of all for imposing a sense of social unity. This is illustrated by the way in which a tyrannical military robs its own soldiers of their manhood. It is impossible to give the soldier a good education, without making him a deserter. His natural foe is the government that drills him. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING Professor Walter Roy Harding. THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU: A BIOGRAPHY. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966; enlarged and corrected edition, NY: Dover, 1982; Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1992: “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Chapter 10 (1845-1847) -Thoreau began building his hut on Emerson’s newly purchased land adjacent to Walden Pond. Ellery Channing, who had advised Thoreau to move there and begin “the grand process of devouring himself alive,” described the cabin as “a wooden inkstand.” When he moved in on July 4, 1845, he furnished it very simply and added a fireplace in the fall. The site was not, as has been popularly presumed, isolated. “Hardly a day went by” when Thoreau didn’t have visitors such as his sister and mother, Channing, Emerson, Bronson Alcott and other locals, or go to town himself. He completed the first drafts of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS and the first two drafts of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS as well as making several lyceum appearances in which he discussed Thomas Carlyle and his Walden experiment. But by 1847 Thoreau felt he had “exhausted the benefits of life there” and moved in with the Emerson family while Ralph Waldo was in Europe. However, Thoreau considered the Walden experiment a “resounding success” in which he advanced “confidently in the direction of his dreams.” (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING During this year and the following one, Ronald Earl Clapper would be an acting instructor at UCLA.

A complete edition of WALDEN became available in the Marathi language. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU: A BIOGRAPHY (NY: Alfred A. Knopf; an enlarged and corrected edition would be put out by Dover in 1982 and another edition would be published by Princeton UP in 1992).

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

This seems like an interesting biography, however I just skimmed through looking for details on Thoreau’s relationships with women. Thoreau’s mother, Cynthia, is described as a dynamic woman who was involved in charities and reform. She dominated not only her meek husband, but the whole household. And she had the reputation in the neighborhood of being an excellent wife and mother. Thoreau had two unsuccessful affairs with women. When he was twenty-two he fell in love with Ellen Devereux Sewall but, unfortunately, so did John Shepard Keyes and John Thoreau, Henry’s brother. John Thoreau proposed first, and Ellen accepted although she regretted doing so because she realized that she loved Henry. Then her mother encouraged her to break off the engagement because it would hurt her Unitarian father to have a Transcendental son-in-law. So when Henry proposed she unwillingly rejected him also. She married Joseph Osgood instead and evidently had a happy marriage. Thoreau remained friends with the Osgoods and visited them frequently. For motherly consolation after Ellen’s rejection, Thoreau turned to Mrs. Lucy Jackson Brown who was Emerson’s sister-in-law. She was twenty years Henry’s senior and boarded with the Thoreaus. However Thoreau was not discouraged yet; he fell in love again. This time it was with Mary Russell, a friend of Mrs. Emerson’s. She was three years younger than Thoreau. He wrote a poem to her “To the Maiden in the East” but she did not return his affection. This was his last romance. Thus Thoreau remained a confirmed bachelor who delighted in jibing at women and marriage. He replaced women with nature, and told the Reverend David Wasson that marriage as an institution is like a skunk cabbage. Harding then interjects, “It should be added that perhaps Wasson did not fully realize how much affection Thoreau had for skunk cabbages.” (Katherine A. O’Meara, May 26, 1989)

THE PORTABLE THOREAU / Henry David Thoreau; edited and with an introduction by Carl Bode (NY: Viking Press, originally issued in 1947, re-released in 1957 and 1963, reissued in 1964 and 1966 with the addition of HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING presumptuous psychobabble).

A new version of Kenneth Walter Cameron’s 1941 work on RALPH WALDO EMERSON’S READING: A GUIDE FOR SOURCE HUNTERS AND SCHOLARS TO THE ONE THOUSAND VOLUMES WHICH HE WITHDREW FROM LIBRARIES, TOGETHER WITH SOME UNPUBLISHED LETTERS AND A LIST OF EMERSON'S CONTEMPORARIES, 1827-1850 ...; ALSO OTHER EMERSON ... THE CHARGING RECORDS OF THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM (NY: Haskell House). Incomplete documentation of Emerson’s borrowings at three different libraries: The Boston Athenaeum, The Harvard College Library, and the Harvard Divinity School Library. Each book is listed twice; once by author and a second time in chronological order according to the date of Emerson’s borrowing. In the latter of these listings, the dated return of the book is included as well, in addition to any specific volume number. (Stephen R. Webb, February 20, 1986) Intended as a guide for source-hunters and scholars to the one thousand volumes which Emerson withdrew from libraries. This book also includes a list of Emerson’s contemporaries whose book borrowings are inscribed in the charging records of the Boston Athenaeum. Besides those from the Athenaeum, Emerson’s book charging records include those from the Harvard Divinity School’s and Harvard College Libraries. In general, Emerson’s reading as described in these lists focuses on classical and romantic philosophers but also particularly on biographies and memoirs. (David J. Pink, January 1992) A helpful listing of Emerson’s library charges from the Boston Athenaeum, Harvard College Library, and Harvard Divinity School; with titles, authors, dates of publication and of Emerson’s withdrawals, as well as notation of which library the materials were taken from. [Cecily F. Brown, March 1992] HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

Also, his THOREAU’S FACT BOOK and his THOREAU’S HARVARD YEARS (Hartford CT: Transcendental Books).

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

Walter Harding “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1967

Professor Walter Roy Harding’s EMERSON’S LIBRARY was published by U of Virginia P and his THOREAU’S —> TURTLE NEST was published by St. Onge. Also, in this year he edited William Ellery Channing, the Younger’s —> COLLECTED POEMS 1817-1901 for Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, and THE VARIORUM CIVIL —> DISOBEDIENCE, published by Twayne. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1968

There were 3 publications in this year by Professor Walter Roy Harding:

Professor Walter Roy Harding. WALDEN AND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE: THE VARIORUM EDITIONS. NY: Washington Square P, 1968 RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT

Professor Walter Roy Harding. THEO BROWN AND HENRY THOREAU. Gaudeamus, 1968

THEO BROWN AND HENRY THOREAU. Thoreau Society Bulletin #23 (Rochester NY: Gaudeamus Press, 1968)

Professor Walter Roy Harding. THE VARIORUM WALDEN, originally published in 1962 by Twayne, was reissued in this year by Pocket Books. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1969

Professor Walter Roy Harding’s and Milton Meltzer’s 1962 volume A THOREAU PROFILE was reissued by the Thoreau Lyceum.

Kenneth Walter Cameron’s THE MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM DURING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE; MATERIALS FOR THE STUDY OF THE ORAL TRADITION IN AMERICAN LETTERS: EMERSON, THOREAU, HAWTHORNE, AND OTHER NEW-ENGLAND LECTURERS (Hartford, Connecticut; Box A, Station A, Hartford 06126: Transcendental Books).

Bronson AlcottESSAYS ON EDUCATION, 1830-1862, edited by Professor Walter Roy Harding (Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1971

CLIFFS NOTES of Lincoln, Nebraska put out one of their black-and-yellow ponies, on WALDEN.

(The author of the above was Joseph R. McElrath, Jr.)

J. Lyndon Shanley opinioned –evidently making this up off the point of his gourd– that “The reviews and 12 notices on WALDEN’s first appearance were not such as to create any considerable demand for it.”

WALDEN-SAROVARA, translated by Banarasidasa Caturvedi (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi)

In this year Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE VARIORUM WALDEN, published in 1962 by Twayne and in 1968 by Pocket Books, was reissued by Washington Square, his HENRY DAVID THOREAU, A PROFILE was published by Hill & Wang, and his A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOREAU SOCIETY BULLETIN BIBLIOGRAPHIES, 1941-1969 was issued by Whitston. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

12. J. Lyndon Shanley (ed.). “Historical Introduction” for WALDEN (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971, page 368) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1973

Professor Walter Roy Harding became Distinguished Professor.

Robert M. Thorson received the B.S. in Earth Science Teaching at Bemidji State College in Minnesota and became a Teaching Assistant in the Department of Geology at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1975

Professor Walter Roy Harding edited Thoreau’s SELECTED WORKS, published by Houghton, Mifflin.

Robert M. Thorson received the M.S. in Geology at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1980

Townsend Scudder III retired.

Robert M. Thorson became an Assistant Professor in Geology and Geophysics at the University of Alaska– Fairbanks.

Professor Walter Roy Harding and Thomas Blanding’s A THOREAU ICONOGRAPHY was put out by the Thoreau Society.

Professor Walter Roy Harding’s and Professor Michael Meyer’s THE NEW THOREAU HANDBOOK (NY: New York UP). TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1982

Robert M. Thorson became the Director of the Alaska Tephrochronology Center at the Alaska–Fairbanks and the Head of Earth Surface Processes in the Earth Sciences Division in the University of Alaska Museum. He founded and became Director of the Alaska Quaternary Center at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks.

Professor Walter Roy Harding’s 1965 biography THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU was reissued by Dover. His edition IN THE WOODS AND FIELDS OF CONCORD: SELECTIONS FROM THE JOURNALS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU was published by in Salt Lake City, Utah by Peregrine-Smith and he became Distinguished Professor Emeritus.

In warm weather he would take what he liked to call “fluviatile excursions,” wading up and down the rivers nude, wearing only a hat for protection from the sun. In deference to Victorian sensibilities, he confined most of those excursions to the more secluded Assabet River. Why he did not lose a toe or other important appendage to snapping turtles, always prevalent in the Concord rivers, is a wonder. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1983

Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THOREAU’S LIBRARY of 1957 was updated and republished as “A New Checklist of Books in Thoreau’s Library” in Joel Myerson’s STUDIES IN THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, 1983. Professor Harding became emeritus. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING Walter Roy Harding. “Thoreau and Eros,” pages 145-159 in THOREAU’S PSYCHOLOGY. Gozzi, Raymond D., ed. Lanham MD: UP of America, 1983 “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Henry Thoreau’s respected biographer, Walter Roy Harding, notes the reluctance of Thoreau scholars to deal with an important aspect of Thoreau’s character, his sexuality, that seems vital to the understanding of Thoreau. Harding argues convincingly that Thoreau was a non-active homosexual. Harding’s argument rests on twelve points: the “gentle-boy” poem written to Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., the many references in his journals to boys whom he found attractive and the single reference to an attractive woman, the amorous comments he makes about a specific but unnamed man in his Journal of October, 1840, the “more than platonic warmth” of the “Friendship” essay in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, his preoccupation with nude male bodies as evidenced in his journals, subconscious evidence such as his spelling of “buoyant” as “boyant,” Thoreau’s frequent comments on the physiques of laborers in both his JOURNAL, in WALDEN, and in WEEK, his relatively few comments on women, his attraction only to “safe” women much older than him, his cynicism toward marriage, his troubled courtship of Ellen Devereux Sewall, Edmund’s sister, which eventually breaks down, and the repeated comments by Thoreau’s friends that he was not tempted by the opposite sex, that Thoreau was pure. Harding argues that Thoreau was “too conditioned by the society he lived in to accept them [his homosexual inclinations], and too conscientious to indulge them.” He argues that Thoreau’s sexuality has four implications for the understanding of his works: It may help to explain the striking amount of guilt Thoreau expresses in the journals, and it could be what caused Thoreau to rebel against his society. Thoreau’s repressed sexuality could be explain by the many times he uses the word love to describe his affection for things in nature, and it could explain Thoreau’s tremendous creative energy, energy that might be partially due to his efforts to sublimate his sexual desires. (Scott G. Kassner, February 14, 1986) As stated in the previous review, Harding’s argument is that there is ample evidence to suggest that Thoreau was a “non-practicing” homosexual. My reason for reviewing the article again was to see how detailed his information was and find out what it meant for Thoreau’s writing. First Harding cites earlier suggestions that Thoreau’s writings have strong homoerotic tones. He then discusses twelve areas of interest that support his thesis, the most interesting of which are the “gentle boy” poem, written to Edmund; his essay on friendship in WEEK, which Harding says is written with “a warmth that is somewhat more than platonic”; and Thoreau’s many descriptions of and appreciation for nude men and workers physiques. Harding can only speculate on Thoreau’s sexual activity and suggests that Thoreau may have remained a virgin all of his life. The evidence cited for this contention is Thoreau’s emphasis on purity, comments on his purity by his acquaintances, and, perhaps the most unreliable argument, that there is generally no known gossip about homosexual activity by Thoreau or his friends in Concord during Thoreau’s lifetime. Thoreau’s homoerotic tendencies are important in understanding his work, Harding asserts, because they help explain possible sources for the strong guilt feelings found in much of his unpublished writings, his early rebellion against society, and his creative force. Harding also suggests that Thoreau may have sublimated his homosexuality into his love for nature. In a footnote, Harding says he has done more research on the topic since this paper was given in 1978 which largely substantiates his claims. (James J. Berg, April 20, 1989) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1984

Robert M. Thorson became a Research Affiliate having to do with Earth Surface Processes at the University of Alaska Museum in Fairbanks, Alaska and became an Assistant Professor of Geology & Geophysics in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Connecticut.

Walter Roy Harding edited Thoreau’s JOURNAL in the 1906 edition, which he had previously re-edited as two big volumes by Dover in 1963, for republication by Peregrine-Smith. In this year Professor Emeritus Harding became the first faculty member of the SUNY system to be awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree.

Isaac Oelgart laid out a very nicely prepared book or booklet of quotations from the 1906 edition of the JOURNAL, entitled H.D. THOREAU ON PARTRIDGES: SELECTIONS FROM HIS JOURNAL 1851-1860. Copy #26 of this oeuvre is in the special collections of the Library of the University of California – Santa Barbara. It is difficult for me to imagine why Mr. Oelgart limited himself to the JOURNAL, and to imagine why he began his excerpts as late as 1851, and to imagine why the excerpts he selected missed so many of Thoreau’s interesting comments — perhaps he considered that the collector’s world of rich bored people trying to impress other rich bored people needed one more beautifully produced book but that the customers for such a genre wouldn’t be much involved with the concepts lurking behind by the beautifully shaped letters? HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING Victor Carl Friesen, in his THE SPIRIT OF THE HUCKLEBERRY, described the passage in A WEEK about Thoreau wanting to lead a “purely sensuous life”:

The emphasis on “purely” seems to suggest that his life be whole sensuous, not necessarily excluding the rational life but plainly giving it a sensuous basis. “Purely” also seems to suggest “purity,” so that a “purely sensuous life” would be one where the senses are undefiled by dissipation, a life where crystalline senses are extensively used in a wholesome appreciation of nature. A third suggested meaning could point to a life where one has a kind of supersensory perception, capable of hearing “celestial” sounds and capable of learning “that there is a nature behind the ordinary.”

Since, in A WEEK, Thoreau imagines the color of his soul to be “bright invisible green,” it is possible that this talk about a “purely sensuous” life is a synesthesia, a shift of words from one framework to another, a use of the words pertaining to the body and to the senses within the framework of the discourse of the soul and of the mind. Examples of Thoreau’s use of synesthesia: the crackling of hemlock boughs in a fire was like mustard to his ears (February 20, 1854), a sparrow’s song was as distinct as a spark of fire shot into the forest (July 26, 1857), the chinking note of the shrike sounded like much ice in the stream (March 7, 1859), the trills of the bluebird were curls of sound (March 18, 1853) and were so many corkscrews assaulting and thawing the torpid mass of winter (March 18, 1853), etc. Here is Friesen about synesthesia, on page 74:

A study of a writer’s synesthetic transfers, the shift of words from the vocabulary of one sense to another, tells us something about how his imagination works. With Thoreau, in a sample of forty synesthetic images, the subject in about two-thirds of them has to do with sounds, and two-thirds of that number derive their vocabulary from the sense of sight. Most of the remaining subjects are concerned with sight, while the sense of touch, thermal and tactile, provides a vocabulary for about one-third of the total transfers. In any literary synesthesia it is usual for the majority of transfers between two senses to have the vocabulary taken from the higher level of the sensorium. Thoreau’s many examples of visual audition are “conventional” in this regard, since sight is at a higher level than sound…. [V]isual terminology [is] richer than acoustic terminology … sight is Thoreau’s dominant sense. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1986

Paul Benjamin Auster had taken on a position as lecturer at Princeton University — a post he would continue to hold until 1990. His short story GHOSTS reconfigured elements of a discarded Beckettish play BLACKOUTS. Auster described it to Joseph Mallia as “Walden Pond in the heart of the city.” It is ostensibly about a detective named Blue who is hired to spy on someone named Black by someone named White. All this detective is able to do, however, is wait and watch, as slowly he turns inward: One night, therefore, Blue finally turns to his copy of WALDEN. This time has come, he says to himself, and if he doesn’t make an effort now, he knows that he never will. But the book is not a simple business. As Blue begins to read, he feels as though he is entering an alien world. Trudging through swamps and brambles, hoisting himself up gloomy screes and treacherous cliffs, he feels like a prisoner on a forced march, and his only thought is to escape. He is bored by Thoreau’s words and finds it difficult to concentrate. Whole chapters go by, and when he comes to the end of them he realizes that he has not retained a thing. Why would anyone want to go off and live alone in the woods? What’s all this about planting beans and not drinking coffee or eating meat? Why all these interminable descriptions of birds? Blue thought that he was going to get a story, or at least something like a story, but this is no more than blather, an endless harangue about nothing at all. It would be unfair to blame him, however. Blue has never read much of anything except newspapers and magazines, and an occasional adventure novel when he was a boy. Even experienced and sophisticated readers have been known to have trouble with WALDEN, and no less a figure than Emerson once wrote in his journal that reading Thoreau made him feel nervous and wretched. To Blue’s credit, he does not give up. The next day he begins again, and this second go-through is somewhat less rocky than the first. In the third chapter he comes across a sentence that finally says something to him -Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written- and suddenly he understands that the trick is to go slowly, more slowly than he has ever gone with words before. This helps to some extent, and certain passages begin to grow clear: the business about clothes in the beginning, the battle between the red ants and the black ants, the argument against work.... What he does not know is that were he to find the patience to read the book in the spirit in which it asks to be read, his entire life would begin to change, and little by little he would come to a full understanding of his situation.... TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

A winged cat (just like in WALDEN) was reported in Anglesey, Wales. Shortly after being photographed it moulted its furry “wings.” CATS WITH WINGS

Translation of Thoreau materials into Portuguese in Brazil: WALDEN, OU A VIDA NOS BOSQUES. Coleção Armazém do Tempo. Introdução e tradução de Astrid Cabral. Contém em apêndice “A desobediência civil.” São Paulo: Global. 331 pages. Reed. Aquariana, 2001 (346 pages.); Novo Século, 2007 (288 pages.).

Richard O’Connor, the author of “The Irish Shanties at Walden Pond” in the Thoreau Society Bulletin for 1986 (182:7), informed Professor Walter Roy Harding that this dead horse of WALDEN had been disposed of, not in one of the natural sink holes in Walden Woods, but in the old cellar hole which Thoreau characterized as “some homestead of the Stratton family.” Refer to the JOURNAL for January 11, 1857:

WALDEN: There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable heath of Nature was my compensation for this.

WALDEN: Farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road in the PEOPLE OF woods, are marks of some homestead of the Stratton family; whose WALDEN orchard once covered all the slope of Brister’s Hill, but was long since killed out by pitch-pines, excepting a few stumps, whose old roots furnish still the wild stocks of many a thrifty village tree.

JOSEPH STRATON BRISTER FREEMAN

FIGURING OUT WHAT AMOUNTS TO A “HISTORICAL CONTEXT” IS WHAT THE CRAFT OF HISTORICIZING AMOUNTS TO, AND THIS NECESSITATES DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN THE SET OF EVENTS THAT MUST HAVE TAKEN PLACE BEFORE EVENT E COULD BECOME POSSIBLE, AND MOST CAREFULLY DISTINGUISHING THEM FROM ANOTHER SET OF EVENTS THAT COULD NOT POSSIBLY OCCUR UNTIL SUBSEQUENT TO EVENT E. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1989

Walter Roy Harding’s THOREAU AS SEEN BY HIS CONTEMPORARIES, a revised and expanded version of his THOREAU, MAN OF CONCORD of the year 1960, was published in New York by Dover: Edward Winslow Watson (resident farmer), upon Thoreau visiting Plymouth a year or two after Walden’s publication: “‘I’ve read somewhere in one of your books that you “lost a hound, a horse, and a dove.” Now what do you mean by it?’ ... ‘Well, Sir, I guess we have all had our losses.’ ‘That's a pretty way to answer a fellow,’ replied the unsatisfied student of a fellow-poet and lover of nature” (quoted from Ellen Watson, “Thoreau Visits Plymouth,” Thoreau Society Bulletin XIX for October 1947, page 1). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

WALDEN: In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate. I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

[It] will probably never be solved to everyone’s satisfaction. — Walter Roy Harding and Carl Bode (eds.) THE CORRESPONDENCE OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. NY, 1958, page 749

The The WALDEN other parable analyses HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1991

With 50 years of service, the role of Walter Roy Harding at the Thoreau Society changed from Secretary to Founding Secretary.

For a year Robert M. Thorson would be a Visiting Scholar in Geography at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

April: Walter Roy Harding offered the readership of the Journal of Homosexuality the welcome insight that although Henry Thoreau has often been described as lacking in sexual drive, both the life and the writings do exhibit a pronounced vein of homoeroticism. As a prepared fall-back position Harding hastened to add that, thank Heaven, there seems to be an entire absence of concrete evidence of Thoreau ever having engaged in any actual sexual or homosexual conduct — so no-one need think any the less of him on account of this difficulty! The suggestion was made that instead of becoming sexually active Thoreau had wisely channeled his unfortunate and difficult eroticism in the direction of an intense affection for natural phenomena.13

(The Professor, now deceased, has received quite a payoff, from his fellow Thoreauvians, for his discretion! — I am adding this paragraph more than a quarter-century later, during April 2018, and am prepared to report that the Thoreauvians of Concord have during this period made such material almost impossible to obtain. In order to obtain the text I have prepared below, I needed to make a special order to obtain printed material out of storage, from a university library, after which I have needed to re-enter the text electronically and correct manifold typographical irregularities, and recalibrate footnotes, and, relying upon scholarly fair-use laws, disregard multiple emphatic copyright-infringement warnings. I think that it goes without saying that in more than a quarter-century no Thoreauvian scholar has made adequate use of these materials, or even referred to them in a seemly manner.)

13. Discussing this article with me in a street conversation, the author alleged that other –unnamed– Thoreau scholars had been pleading with him for years to keep this under wraps. They having devoted their lives and their careers to exploring this man’s literary productions, they feared they would be destroyed as the public turned away from him. Harding bragged to me that after having accepted this selfish advice for years, and after having faithfully kept his silence out of collegiality while suppressing evidence, finally he had achieved the courage to speak out. (I listened to this heroic braggery and said nothing, but quite frankly, my thought was of the very distinct possibility that Harding himself had been the unnamed Thoreau scholar who had been thus pleading for his own silence in order that the public not turn away from an author he himself had come to perceive, in his conflicted duality of attitudes, as a mere homo.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING THOREAU’S SEXUALITY

Walter Harding, PhD, State University College, Geneseo, New York

Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 21(3) 1991  1991 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

ABSTRACT. Although Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) has often been described as lacking in sexual drive or at most a rather reluctant heterosexual, a close study of his life and writings indicates the presence of a pronounced vein of homoeroticism — although there seems to be no concrete evidence of any homosexual activity on his part. Cognizance of that homoeroticism helps one to understand many elements of his fife and writings and suggests that his intense love of nature may have resulted from sublimation of that homoeroticism. As Perry Miller pointed out some years ago, scholars over the years have come to some astoundingly different conclusions as to Henry David Thoreau’s sexuality. Early biographers tend to see him as asexual — that is, lacking in sexual drive. By the turn of the century they looked upon him as somewhat heterosexual. Miller thought of him as androgynous.14 In recent years, some have begun to speak of him as homosexual. Yet, astonishingly, with all these varied opinions, very little effort has been expended in examining the facts. I believe it is time to consider the facts. At first glance there is seemingly plenty of evidence that Thoreau was sexually cold. A number of his friends testify to that effect. Ellery Channing, his closest friend and biographer, said, “Henry made no account of love at all.”15 Horace Hosmer, a pupil and lifelong friend, recalled that Thoreau “did not appear to have the ‘love-idea’ in him; is, he did not appear to feel the sex-attraction.”16 George Bartlett, another Concord contemporary, said Thoreau’s “interest in the sex opposite to his own, was almost nil.”17 Bronson Alcott, one of his close friends, said Thoreau “seemed to have no temptations. All those strong wants which do battle with other men’s nature, he knew not.”18 And Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his eulogy delivered at Thoreau’s funeral, said, “He chose wisely, no doubt, for himself to be a bachelor of thought and Nature.... He had no temptations to fight against, -no appetites, no passion.”19 Even Thoreau himself spoke often of his own coldness, saying, “I do not melt; there is no thaw in me”20 or “There is a ... crust over my heart.”21

14. Perry Miller. CONSCIOUSNESS IN CONCORD. (Boston, 1958), p. 82. 15. Ibid., p. 96. 16. William Ellery Channing. POEMS OF SIXTY-FIVE YEARS. (Philadelphia, 1902), p. xxxviii.. 17. George Hendrick, ed. REMEMBRANCES OF CONCORD AND THE THOREAUS. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), p. 131. 18. Raymond Gozzi, ed. THOREAU’S PSYCHOLOGY. (Lanham: UP of America, 1983), p. 154. 19. Ralph Waldo Emerson. THE COMPLETE WORKS: CENTENARY EDITION. (Boston, 1903), X, 454. 20. Henry D. Thoreau. JOURNAL. (Boston, 1906), VI, 87. (Hereinafter identified in the text as J.) 21. Ibid ., III, 313. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING The thought of marriage distressed Thoreau. Kicking a skunk cabbage, he told David Wasson, “There, marriage is like that,”22 He said, “If common sense had been consulted, how many marriages would never have taken place.”23 He complained in his Journal, “The marriage which the mass of men comprehend is but little better than the marriage of beasts” (J V369). He commented that “It would be cruel to laugh at [those who] have actually allied themselves to one whom they thought their wife and found out their mistake too late to mend it” (J XII:384). And in one of his commonplace books, he copied out, “Take your wife’s opinion and act in opposition to it.”24 When his friend H.G.O. Blake married, Thoreau sent him as a wedding present admonitory essays on “Love” and “Chastity and Sensuality,” telling Blake, “There can be nothing sensual in marriage,”25 though adding a note saying he was sending the essays “with diffidence and shame, not knowing how far 1speak to the condition of men generally, or how far I betray my peculiar desires.”26 The sexual act he apparently thought of only with abhorrence and disgust. He complained, “We are begotten and our life has its source from what a trivial and sensual Pleasure.”27 He even found it difficult to imagine “what the essential difference between man and woman is that they should be thus attracted to one another.”28 Nor could he accept any jesting on the subject of sexual relations. He complained of indecent graffiti he saw on the walls of outhouses and even chastised Nature for creating the “obscenity” of the phallic fungus (J IX:117). When the more earthy Ellery Channing tried to share off-color jokes with him, Thoreau was always repelled (J III:33S, 406-7; IV:185). He chastised children in his school for using indecent language,”29 and thought little boys should be whipped for “impurity” (J II:341), despite his well-known objections to the use of corporal punishment. He even went so far as to renounce sex completely, extolling the virtues of absolute chastity, speaking of it, ironically, as “the flowering of man”30 and the “perpetual acquaintance with the All” (J IX:246). Thoreau’s usual reaction to women was one of embarrassment or annoyance. Emerson tells us Thoreau blushed at the presence of the maids whenever he walked through the Emerson kitchen.31 Thoreau himself said, “I confess that I am lacking a sense, perchance, in this respect, and I derive no pleasure from talking with a young woman half an hour simply because she has regular features. The society of young women is the most unprofitable that I have ever tried” (J III:116). He added, “It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady” (J III:168). He suspected his friends of attempting to foster his interest in marriageable young ladies and condemned them for it (J III:116). We thought women 22. Frank P. Stearns. SKETCHES FROM CONCORD AND APPLEDORE. (New York, 1895), p. 26. 23. Henry D. Thoreau. EARLY ESSAYS. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975), p. 269. 24. Ms., Library of Congress. 25. Thoreau. EARLY ESSAYS, p. 274. 26. Henry D. Thoreau. CORRESPONDENCE. (New York, 1958), p. 288. 27. Henry D. Thoreau. JOURNAL. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981- ), II, 324. (Hereinafter identified in the text as PJ.) 28. Thoreau. EARLY ESSAYS, p. 268. 29. Walter Harding. THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU. (New York, 1965), p. 80. 30. Henry D. Thoreau. WALDEN. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971), pp. 219-20. 31. Ralph Waldo Emerson. JOURNALS AND MISCELLANEOUS NOTEBOOKS. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1960), VIII, 400. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING “lacked brains” (J III:258) and “scruples” (3 II:116), were “presumptuous” (PJ I:247), “feeble” PJ XII:356), “trifling” (J XIII:52), and “an army of non-producers” (J XtI:342); their clothes were “too showy and gaudy” (J IV:92), and the perfumes they used as bad as a “muskrat’s odor” (J V:82).32 In all of Thoreau’s voluminous writings I have found only one example where he thought a woman physically attractive -when he met a housewife in the Berkshires in 1844 and described her as “a frank and hospitable woman, who stood before me in a dishabille, busily and unconcernedly combing her long black hair while she talked, giving her head the necessary toss with each sweep of the comb, with lively, sparkling eyes, and full of interest.”33 Much more typical when he bothers to mention women at all is his description of one he saw on Cape Cod: “a Nausset woman, of a hardness and coarseness such as no man ever possesses or suggests. It was enough to see the vertebrae and sinews of her neck, and her set jaws of iron, which would have bitten a board-nail in two in their ordinary action.”34 We cannot ignore the fact that Thoreau once proposed marriage to Ellen Sewall, but in doing so he seems to have taken for granted in advance that she would turn him down.35 Virtually all his biographers have looked upon their “romance” as “an experiment in the philosophy of love,” as Canby says, with little if any physical basis.36 One other incident should be mentioned. In 1847 Thoreau received a proposal of marriage from Sophia Foord (or Ford), a governess for the Emerson children. Thoreau immediately wrote Emerson, then in Europe on a lecture tour: I have had a tragic correspondence, for the most part all on one side, with Miss Ford. 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. Indeed, I wish that it might burst, like hollow shot, after it had struck and buried itself and made itself felt there. There was no other way, I really had anticipated no such foe as this in my career.37 Since Miss Foord has been described as “a dark-skinned pudgy featured woman” fifteen years older than Thoreau and apparently going through some sort of emotional disturbance at the time, it is not surprising that Thoreau turned her down, but the violence of the images he looses in writing Emerson suggests overkill.38 Typical of those young men who wish to avoid marriage, Thoreau seemed to find only those women to be of interest who were patently unavailable married women such as Lidian Emerson and 32. Strangely, however, Thoreau was seemingly fascinated by women’s ear· drops and I do not know what to make of it. See PJ, I, 304; J, II, 18; J, XII, 354. 33. Henry D. Thoreau. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980), p. 182. 34. Henry D. Thoreau. CAPE COD. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988), pp. 36-7. 35. Harding, p. 102. 36. Henry S. Canby. THOREAU. (Boston, 1939), pp. 121-2. For a more detailed discussion of Thoreau's relationship with women, see Gozzi, pp. 152-4. 37. Thoreau. CORRESPONDENCE, pp. 190-1. 38. Harding, p. 227. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING her sister Lucy Jackson Brown, or the elderly, such as Mary Moody Emerson. He was careful to point out to Mrs. Emerson that, “I think of you as some elder sister of mine”39 and what he liked about Mary Moody Emerson was her “masculine” appreciation of poetry and philosophy (J III:114). Thoreau was perfectly aware that his were not the usual reactions of a man to the opposite sex. He tells us: My nature pauses here, I do not well know why. (PJ 11:235)) I confess that I am lacking a sense, perchance, in this respect. (J 111:116) I am sure that the design of my maker when he has brought me nearest to woman was not the propagation but rather the maturation of the species. (J II: 185) He could think of women only in a mother or sister relationship, adding, “I cannot imagine a woman no older than I,”40 and confessed, “My most intimate acquaintance with woman has been a sister’s relation, or at most a Catholic’s virgin mother relation.”41 Although Thoreau found little attraction to the other sex, he did, nonetheless, feel a deep longing for love and companionship, as exemplified by: I pine for want of a companion, (J III:390) What if we feel a yearning to which no breast answers. I walk alone. My heart is full ... I knock on the earth for my friend. I expect to meet him at every turn. (J VII:416-7) Our life without love is like coke and ashes, -like the cocoanut in which the milk is dried up. (PJ 1:390-1) I would live henceforth with some gentle soul such a life as may be conceived, double for variety, — single for harmony. (PJ I: 103) There are those I love among men, who will know that I love them though I tell them not. (J II:391) It is not easy to find one brave enough to play the game of love quite alone with you. (PJ 1:373) It is enlightening to note that in none of these quotations does Thoreau use the feminine gender. Where he is specific as to sex, he uses the masculine pronoun. Thoreau often found himself deeply emotionally attracted to members of his own sex. It was something deep within him and all-compelling, something he was not at ease with, something he felt he must hide — not only from others, but even at times at least from himself: When some rare specimen of manhood presents itself, they are some fresher wind that blows, some new fragrance that breathes. They make the landscape and the sky for us. (PJ I:98) My nature, it may [be] is secret. Others can confess and explain; I cannot. It is not that I am too proud, but 39. Thoreau. CORRESPONDENCE, p. 103. 40. Henry D. Thoreau. FIRST AND LAST JOURNEYS. (Boston, 1905), I, 108. 41.Canby, p. 162; PJ, I, 5. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING that is not what is wanted. ...I am under an awful necessity to be what I am. (J III:146) Like cuttlefish, we conceal ourselves, we darken the atmosphere in which we move; we are not transparent. I pine for one to whom 1 can speak my first thoughts; thoughts which represent me truly, which are no better and no worse than I.... Our sin and shame prevent our expressing even the innocent thoughts we have. I know of no one to whom I can be transparent instinctively. I live the life of the cuttlefish; another appears, and the element in which I move is tinged and I am concealed. (J IW315) My acquaintances sometimes imply that I am too cold.... It is not that I am too cold, but that our warmth and coldness are not of the same nature; hence when I am absolutely warmest, I may be coldest to you.... That I am cold means that I am of another nature. (J III:146-7) He found young men to be particularly attractive: When a man is young and his constitution and body have not acquired firmness, i.e., before he has arrived at middle age, he is not an assured inhabitant of the earth, and his compensation is that he is not quite earthy, there is something peculiarly tender and divine about him.... The young man is a demigod.... He bathes in light. He is interesting as a stranger from another sphere. (J XIII:35) Like many intellectuals, he seems to have had a particular preference for men from the laboring classes: You can tell a nobleman’s head though he may be shovelling gravel beneath it six rods off in the midst of a gang with a bandana handkerchief tied about it.42 Even the tired laborers I meet on the road, I really meet as traveling gods. (PJ II:175) Despite his usual anti-military attitudes, he was also attracted to soldiers. Upon visiting the military establishment at Quebec in 1850, he said, “One regiment goes bare-legged to increase the attraction. If you wish to study the muscles of the leg about the knee [which he obviously did], repair to Quebec” (J 11:401). And several years later, looking back upon his Quebec visit, he reminisced about the young Englishman he had seen there “whose clear, glowing English complexion I can still see” (J III:338- 9). Even the local Concord militia he thought made “a handsome appearance” (J I:479). He was intrigued by nude male bodies and liked to imagine an athlete stripping for “what a display of muscle” (J XI:260). He loved to watch boys swimming naked, peering out of the woods at them: Boys are bathing at Hubbard’s Bend, playing with a boat (I at the willows). The color of their bodies in the sun at a distance is pleasing, the not often seen flesh- color.... What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his note-book, that men are forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest 42.J. Lyndon Shanley. THE MAKING OF WALDEN. (Chicago, 1957), p. 174. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING penalties. (J IV:92) He reveled in the “alabaster whiteness” of swimmers in Walden Pond, thinking them “fit studies for a Michel Angelo.”43 The sight of naked hired men in the river attracted him (J VII:14). Although he rarely speaks of any of the fine arts, he does single out the nude Apollo Belvidere statue as a favorite (J VI:56). In his imagination he visualized priests exposing themselves (J III:95).44 Often when he saw a physically attractive young man, he assumed that he was also intellectually attractive: A man may be young, athletic, active, beautiful. Then, too, his thoughts will be like his person. They will wander in a living and beautiful world. (J XIIf:69) Men can help one another indeed ... by being gods to oneanother [sic] -objects of adoration. (PJ II:246) When he saw a man swimming in Fair Haven Bay, too far away to be recognized, he imagined “he is a poet in his yet obscure but golden youth” (J VI:417). Yet on another occasion he thought “a man may be an object of interest to me” even though he could not speak (J I:461). And sometimes his interests were anything but intellectual as when he speaks in his early essay “The Service” of “a fellow ... [who] yields to me as the air to my body! I leap and dance in his midst, and play with his beard till he smiles.”45 As one reads through Thoreau’s Journal and even his more formal works, he is struck, by the frequency with which Thoreau on his walks and travels mentions seeing men who are attractive to him -a young peddler on Cape Cod is described as “an unusually good specimen of Young America” (J 1X:422-3); a man in a passing boat as “a vision bound to [the] land of the blessed” (J IL423); a fellow passenger on a stage coach as “a handsome man about thirty years old, of good height, but not apparently robust, of gentlemanly dress and faultless toilet”;46 a woodchopper as “more ideal than in any picture I have seen” (J II:254); another woodchopper as “stout and handsome” (J XII:30); a neighbor as “a representative of the divinity on earth” (J iI:207); another neighbor to whom he “bowed instinctively”;47 a stone-mason, “a young man of our own age,..., We could still distinguish the strokes of his chisel for many sweeps after we had left him”;48 or another fellow-passenger on a coach, “a handsome man.... [with] a fair white complexion,,,, [who] might have passed for a divinity student.”49 The list could be continued almost indefinitely. In an early draft of WALDEN Thoreau wrote: Sometimes there would come half a dozen men to my house at once — healthy and sturdy working men, descended from sound bodies of men. ...I met them so often in the woods — that they began to look upon me at least as one of 43.Thoreau. WALDEN, p. 177. 44. Thoreau was astonishingly relaxed about nudity for his time and place and often waded completely naked for miles along the Assabet River. 45. Henry D. Thoreau. REFORM PAPERS. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973), p. 8. 46. Henry D. Thoreau. THE MAINE WOODS. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972), p. 161. 47. Henry D. Thoreau. COLLECTED POEMS. (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins P, 1965), p. 102. 48. Thoreau. WEEK, p. 234. 49. Thoreau. MAINE WOODS, p. 161. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING their kin ... One a handsome younger man a sailor-like- Greek-like man.... There appeared in some of these men even at a distance, a genuine magnanimity equal to Greek or Roman, of unexplored and uncontaminated descent -The expression of their grimed & sunburnt features made me think of Epaminondas of Socrates and Cato.50 But it is interesting to note that he cut this passage out before he published WALDEN. Many of Thoreau’s comments on young men are of greater length, as for example, his report in A WEEK on attending the local Concord cattle-show: Every farmer lad too appears to scud before [the wind], — having donned his best peajacket and pepper and salt waistcoat, his unbent trousers, outstanding rigging of duck, or kersymere, or corduroy, and his furry hat withal,-to country fairs and cattle- shows.... Amos, Abner, Elnathan, Elbridge, -51 “From steep pine-bearing mountains to the plain.” I love these sons of earth every mother’s son of them, with their great hearty hearts rushing tumultuously in herds from spectacle to spectacle, .., “Wise nature’s darlings”.... “Such as had no love for nature . .. at all, Came lovers home from this great festival.” ...Their fairest cattle and richest fruits ... are all eclipsed by the show of men. ...This is the true harvest of the year.”52 When Thoreau was locking through the canal at Cromwell’s Falls on his WEEK journey, he noticed a “brawny New Hampshire man ... bareheaded ... and in shirt and trousers only, a rude Apollo of a man, coming down from that ‘vast uplandish country’ to the main; ... with flaxen hair and vigorous, weather-bleached countenance.” They stopped and “parleyed awhile, and parted not without a sincere interest in one another.”53 What makes Thoreau’s comment particularly interesting is that his quoted phrase, “vast uplandish country,” is taken from Christopher Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander,” which in context reads: Had Hippolytus Leander seen, Enamored of his beauty had he been: His presence made the rudest peasant melt, That in the vast uplandish county dwelt; The barbarous Thracian soldier, mov’d with naught, Was mov’d with him, and for his favour sought. Some swore he was a maid in man’s attire, For in his looks was all that men desire, A pleasant smiling cheek, a speaking eye, A brow for love to banquet royally; And such as knew he was a man would say, “Leander, thou are made for amorous play.”54

In other words, even a man indifferent to love would fall in 50. Shanley, pp. 173-4. The references to Greece in this and many other passages undoubtedly reflect in part at least the Hellenic cult of body worship so popular among the Romanticists in both England and America of Thoreau’s time. Epaminondas, a Theban general, was notorious for his homosexuality. 51. That Thoreau had particular young men in mind is indicated by the fact that all these names, even the most unusual, occur in Concord records of the time. 52. Thoreau. WEEK, pp. 336-7. Of the lines of verse that Thoreau quotes here, the first and last are from Christopher Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander” (Lines 116 and 96), and the second from William Drummond’s “A Pastoral Elegy on the Death of Sir William Alexander” (Lines 97-8). 53. Ibid., pp. 200-1 54. Lines 77-88. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING love with him. On his first trip to the Maine Woods, Thoreau chose a young lumberman, Tom Fowler, to be one of his guides. Thoreau was obviously attracted to him, and in an unpublished manuscript described him as “a young and ingenuous waterman ... [with] the 55 noble frankness of a forest child. In his JOURNAL, Thoreau praised Fowler as one who “had had much intercourse with rude nature” (PJ II:346) and went on to quote from Thomas Heywood’s “The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels”: I for my part (Think others what they please) accept that heart, Which courts my love in most familiar phrase, And that it takes not from my paeans or praise, If any one to me so bluntly come, I hold that he loves me best that calls me Tom. (PJ 11549)

Although Thoreau quotes the lines quite out of context (as he often does), the quotation does indicate Thoreau’s emotional involvement with Fowler. Perhaps the most notable example of Thoreau being attracted to a young man is that of Alek Therien, the now well-known “French- Canadian woodchopper” of WALDEN. Therien, exactly Thoreau’s age, came down to Concord from Quebec to live with relatives and earn his living in various menial occupations. Concord Yankees in general tended to look down on French-Canadians as much beneath themselves. Therien was apparently a fairly boorish man with little education and no great intellect, but he was so handsome that he was spoken of about town as “a prince in disguise.”56 Thoreau was enough enthralled with him that he devoted more space to him in Walden than he did any other person, more even than to Emerson, Alcott, and Channing combined, describing him as “a true Homeric or Paphlagonian man.”57 In describing Therien he incorporated into his text obviously to enhance it, words that he had originally used to describe his Maine lumberman, Tom 58 59 Fowler!” What is more, as he tells us in WALDEN, Thoreau in reading to Therien from Homer’s ILIAD, chose specifically the well-known passage on Achilles’ affection for Patroclus. Therien never married and in later years went steadily downhill, ending as a drunkard. Once, as Emerson tells us,60 when Therien appeared intoxicated at Thoreau’s door, Thoreau, savagely disappointed in his former idol, told Therien that the best he could do for himself was to cut his own throat. Only an intense emotional involvement could have led Thoreau to make as cold-hearted and atypical a remark as that. And then there is Thoreau’s interest in Edmund Sewall, the eleven-year-old brother61 of Ellen, who was later a pupil in Thoreau’s boarding school. Young Sewall had come to Concord to

55. Thoreau. WALDEN, p. 148. 45. Ibid., p. 144. Leonard Neufeld. “The Making of Alek Therien.” Concord Saunterer XII (l977) #2, 12-4. 56.Thoreau. WALDEN, p. 148. 57. Ibid., p. 144. 58. Neufeld, pp. 12-14. 59. P. 144. 60. JOURNALS, XV, 239. 61. As for Thoreau’s interest in boys, George Frisbie Hoar, who grew up in Concord with Thoreau, said, “I knew Thoreau very intimately.... He was very fond of small boys” (AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SEVENTY YEARS. New York, 1903, I, 70). And George W. Cooke, who also knew the Concord scene well, said, “Thoreau loved the society of boys” (“The Two Thoreaus,” Independent, XLVIII. December 10, 1896, 1672). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING visit his grandmother, Mrs. Joseph Ward, who was the star boarder in the Thoreau household, on June 17, 1839. Five days later Thoreau wrote in his JOURNAL: I have within the last few days come into contact, with a pure, uncompromising spirit, that is somewhere wandering in the atmosphere, but settles not positively anywhere. Some persons carry about them the air and conviction of virtue, though they themselves are unconscious of it, and are even backward to appreciate it in others. Such it is impossible not to love; still Is their loveliness, as it were, independent of them, so that you seem not to lose it when they are absent, for when they are near it is like an invisible presence which attends you. (PJ I:74) Two days later Thoreau wrote his well-known poem “Sympathy” about Edmund, saying in part: Lately, alas, I knew a gentle boy, Whose features all were cast in Virtue’s mould, As one she had designed for Beauty’s toy, But after manned him for her own stronghold .... So I was taken unawares by this, I quite forgot my homage to confess; Yet now am forced to know, though hard it is, I might have loved him, had I loved him less. (PJ I:76) It is obvious, 1 believe, from a reading of both the poem and the journal entry that Thoreau’s relationship with Edmund was a highly rarified and intellectual one, with little if any of the physical about it. As Thoreau said on another occasion, “In all cases we esteem rather the suggested ideal than the actual man” (J II:232). Thoreau gave a copy of the poem to Edmund who showed it to his parents. They apparently seeing nothing wrong with it not only asked Thoreau to write another poem for Edmund’s younger brother, but later enrolled Edmund as a boarding pupil in Thoreau’s school. There were others however who were disturbed by the tenor of the poem. Both Emerson and Frank Sanborn, Thoreau’s friend and biographer, insisted that Thoreau had written the poem about Ellen despite irrefutable evidence that Thoreau had written the poem before he ever met Ellen. In October of 1840, Thoreau wrote another series of interesting entries in his Journal: October 17, 1840. In the presence of my friend I am ashamed of my fingers and toes. I have no feature so fair its my love for him. There is more than maiden modesty between us, ...We should sooner blot out the sun than disturb friendship.... October 19, 1840. My friend dwells in the distant horizon as rich as an eastern city there. There he sails all lonely under the edge of the sky, but thoughts go out silently from me and belay him.... He seems to move in a burnished atmosphere, while I peer in upon him from surrounding spaces of Cimmerian darkness, His house is incandescent to my eye, while I have no house, but only a neighborhood to his.... October 20, 1840. My friend is the apology for my life. In him are the spaces which my orbit traverses. (PJ 1:190-2) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING Note that all the pronouns are masculine. No one has as yet succeeded in identifying the subject of these entries, but it should be noted that he also says in his entry for the 18th “I cannot make a disclosure-you should see my secret” (PJ I:191). It should also be noted that immediately after writing these entries, Thoreau wrote his letter to Ellen Sewall proposing marriage, Could it be that suddenly realizing he was getting involved in a relationship that would have been condemned by his contemporaries, he leaped violently in the opposite direction to prove to both society and himself that he was “normal”? There are further evidences of Thoreau’s homoerotic inclinations. Take for example his reading interests. He was an inveterate reader, reading almost constantly and widely in many fields. There was, of course, in his day comparatively little homoerotic literature available, but he succeeded in uncovering a surprising amount of it and responded to it with some intensity. Among the Greek classic writers, the bisexual hedonist Anacreon appealed enough to Thoreau that he translated selections for the 62 Dial and later included these selections in his WEEK. At least three of the poets he translated (“On a Silver Cup,” “To a Dove,” and “To a Swallow”) were homoerotic in nature and originally addressed to the beautiful young man Bathylus whom Anacreon loved63 and one in which Anacreon had depicted his loved one as a filly, Thorear1 rewrote changing the filly to a colt.64 Thoreau also translated Pindar, another classical writer noted for his homosexual themes.65 Thoreau was also struck by the many accounts of male friendships scattered through the classics and cites many of them in his own writings: Damon and Pythias (J X:127); Tityrus and Meliboeus (from Virgil’s Eclogues);66 Kallias and Autolykos (from Xenophon’s “The Banquet”) (PJ I:129); Achilles and Patroclus (PJ II:172); and Orestes and Pylades (PJ 1:103). Speaking of such pairs, Thoreau added, “But why should not we put to shame those old reserved worthies by a community of such?” (PJ I: 103).He also quoted frequently from the Persian homosexual poet Sadi.67 One of Thoreau’s favorite authors was Christopher Marlowe, whom, as we have already seen, he cited frequently. Of Marlowe’s works his especial favorite was “Hero and Leander,” which he singled out as having read “with great pleasure” (PJ I:457) and “without being wearied” (PJ II:115). That he was specifically aware of the homoerotic content of the poem is indicated in the passages he quoted to describe the young lads at the cattle show and the “rude Apollo” he met on the Merrimack River. Note also the passage he quoted from William Drummond when he saw the boys at the cattle show and the passage from Thomas Heywood he quoted about Tom Fowler. Thoreau read widely about the American Indian and found there a number of passages of homoerotic interest. Notable among these was Alexander Henry’s TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES IN CANADA from which 62. Pp. 225-31. 63. Richard Bridgman. DARK THOREAU. (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982), p. 54. 64. Ibid., p. 6. 65. Henry D. Thoreau. TRANSLATIONS. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986), pp. 111-33. 66. Henry D. Thoreau. EXCURSIONS. (Boston, 1906), p. 311. 67. WALDEN, p. 79; WEEK, 69, 79, 304, 388. While none of these particular references is homosexual, they do reflect Thoreau's wide acquaintance with Sadi. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING Thoreau quoted extensive passages on the warmth of the friendship between Henry and the Indian chieftain Wawatam in 68 both his JOURNAL (PJ 11: 101-2)and in his WEEK. His unpublished Indian notebooks, now in the Pierpont Morgan Library, Thoreau quoted a passage from the JESUIT RELATIONS about a tribe of Indians who “are very ardent for women & yet more for boys.” Note also 69 his reference in CAPE COD to the naked men kissing and pawing each other. It is interesting that when Thoreau was choosing an Indian guide in the Maine Woods, he turned one down because he was “too dark-colored, as if with African blood” (J IX:486) and chose instead Joe Polis, whom he said had “perfect Indian features and complexion.”70 A recently discovered portrait of Polis confirms his handsomeness.”71 When Thoreau met Walt Whitman and read his LEAVES OF GRASS in the then notorious second edition with all its homoerotic imagery, he wrote his friend Blake in great excitement, “That Walt Whitman, of whom I wrote to you, is the most interesting fact to me at present. I have just read his 2nd edition.... and it has done me more good than any reading for a long time.”72 Emerson tells us that Thoreau carried his copy of LEAVES OF GRASS around Concord “like a red flag-defiantly, challenging the plentiful opposition there”73 and he sent a copy of it to his English friend Thomas Cholmondeley as an outstanding American book. One of the few other nineteenth-century volumes of poetry which he owned was Tennyson’s IN MEMORIAM, again a volume known for its homoerotic undertones.74 Thoreau’s favorite ballad, which he often sang for his friends, was “Tom Dowling,” which speaks of Tom’s form as of “the manliest beauty” and describes him as “the darling of our crew.” But particularly interesting is the fact that Thoreau searched out and read S.G. Squier’s THE SERPENT SYMBOL, a detailed and explicit study of phallic worship among the Indians of Central America.75 Thoreau thought one’s dreams always worthy of analysis, saying, “The nearest approach to discovering what we are is in dreams” (PJ I:304-5). Joan Burbick has pointed out that Thoreau’s dreams are filled with “figures of heroic maleness.”76 When he looked at the clouds in the sky, he noticed, as in a Rorschach test: Dark, heavy clouds ... exhibiting the forms of animals and men. ...Why do we detect these forms so readily? - whales or giants reclining, busts of heroes, Michael- Angelic, There is the gallery of statuary, the picture gallery of man. (J 11:258, see also V1:345) In answer to Thoreau’s question about detecting the forms, it is axiomatic that we see what we know and love best. In his observation of nature, Thoreau was often reminded of the

68. Pp. 274-5. 69. P. 12. 70. MAINE WOODS, p. 157. 71. Robert F. Sayre. “Charles Bird King’s Joseph Porus and Thoreau’s Maine Woods Guide,” Thoreau Journal Quarterly, XIII (July, 1981), 10. 72. CORRESPONDENCE, p. 444. Whitman, in his turn, when he received a copy of A WEEK from Thoreau, tore out the section on Anacreon to place in a special file (Lawrence Buell. “Whitman and Thoreau.” Calamus, VIII (Aug. 1973), 25). 73. Horace Traube. WITH WALT WHITMAN IN CAMDEN. (New York, 1914), 111, 305. 74. Walter Harding. THOREAU’S LIBRARY. (Charlottesville, 1957), p. 91. 75. Robert Sattelmeyer. THOREAU’S READING. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988), p. 272. 76. Joan Burbick. THE ART OF DAYS. (Middletown: Wesleyan University, unpublished dissertation, 1975). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING attractiveness of young men: Nature now, like an athlete, begins to strip herself in earnest for her contest with her great antagonist Winter. In the bare trees and twigs what a display of muscle. (jXf:26O) The beech ... is an interesting tree to me, with its neat, close, tight-looking bark, like the dress which athletes wear. (J V:173) The weeds are dressed in their frost jackets, naked down to their close-fitting downy or flannel shirts. Like athletes they challenge the winter. (J XII:394-5) Yellow leaves remind Thoreau of “the complexion of young men” (J XI:218). Roses in “their promise of perfect and dazzling beauty” remind him of “most youths” (J IV:142). He seems preoccupied with young men’s unshaven cheeks: The year has the down of youth on its cheek. (J V:146-7) Grasses [are] as delicate as the down on a young man’s cheek. (J IX:l59) The sorrel ... has become the tanned and inbrowned cheek of manhood. (J V:241) Many Thoreau scholars have noted his preoccupation with sexual, particularly phallic images. His excitement over finding a phallic fungus is well-known. He took nearly two full pages to describe it in his JOURNAL (J IX:215-7) and his drawing of it was so realistic that his 1906 editors deleted it. His choice of images is sometimes astounding to say the least. He says he loves “to see a man with a tap-root” (J IV:16). He dreams of swallowing a snake and wonders, mixing his images somewhat, “How many ova have I swallowed?” (J lI:393). He says, “The growing man penetrates yet deeper by his roots into the womb of things” (J II:203). He notes, “If there were but one erect and solid standing tree in the woods, all creatures would go to rub against it.”77 And, in what Richard Lebeaux has pointed out78 as one of his most infelicitous expressions, in speaking of seeing some potato plants, he comments, “It does one good to see their bails dangling.”79 Thoreau was prone throughout his life to adulate strong masculine figures. Sir Walter Raleigh was one of his earlier heroes, as evidenced by his essay on Raleigh.80 His youthful essay on “The Service”81 is a glorification of hero worship. Emerson, in his eulogy for Thoreau, emphasized the impact of three “heroes” -John Brown, Joe Polis (the Indian), and Walt Whitman-on Thoreau's later years.82 Thoreau often meditated on what he called “friendship,” although it is often difficult to know whether he is thinking about friendship or love.”83 In his so-called essay on friendship 84 embedded in the “Wednesday” chapter of his WEEK, he used the 77. WEEK, p. 217. 78. Richard Lebeaux. THOREAU’S SEASONS. (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1984), p. 206. 79. CORRESPONDENCE, p. 331. 80. EARLY ESSAYS, pp. 178-218. 81. REFORM PAPERS, pp. 3-18. 82. Thoreau’s sister Sophia insisted that Emerson delete this passage from the printed version of the eulogy because she did not wish her brother to be associated with the notorious Whitman (Harding, DAYS, p. 376). 83. Ellery Channing said, “Now, Henry made no account of love at all, apparently. He had notions about friendship” (p. xxxviii). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING word love or its derivatives fifty-one times and the essay is pervaded with words such as intercourse, passionate, embrace, erection, mate, and penetrate that have sexual connotations. And, in the same vein, is it only a coincidence that in speaking of men he so frequently uses the words erect or erection, as, for example: [Speaking of the “intercourse of men”] I suddenly erect myself in my thoughts, or find myself erected in finite degrees above the possibility of ordinary endeavors. (J IX:480-1) I almost shrink from the arduousness of meeting man erectly day by day. (PJ 1:230)85 And is it only a slip of the pen when, as many scholars have noted, he almost invariably misspells buoyant as boyant?86 Upon examining this evidence about Thoreau’s sexuality, what conclusions can we reasonably come to? I believe the following: 1. He was not without a sexual drive.87 2. Thoreau’s heterosexual drive was very low, indeed almost non- existent. His few actions and comments in that direction seem more to have been inspired by a desire to conform to what was expected of a male in his society than by a sexual urge, 3. Both his actions and his words, consciously and/or subconsciously, indicate a specific sexual interest in members of his own sex. Was Thoreau homosexually active? To the best of my knowledge no concrete evidence of any such activity has ever come to light. It is perfectly possible, of course, for him to have had a few homosexual incidents without our finding any evidence of it, but I think it highly unlikely for him to have engaged in such activity with any frequency without at least some whisper of it leaking out, particularly in a town as small and tightly knit as Concord was in Thoreau's day.88 It is to be noted that Thoreau’s Concord contemporaries seemed to emphasize such words as “pure” and “virtuous” in speaking of him, something they most certainly never would have done if they had the least suspicion that he was actively homosexual.89 What then was the outlet for all Thoreau’s sexual energy? The answer is, I believe, to be found in Freud’s theories of sublimation, when he tells us: When we find that in the picture presented by a person’s character a single instinct has developed an excessive strength ... we make the ... assumption that it found reinforcement from what were originally sexual instinctual forces, so that later it could take the place of a part of the subject’s sexual life. ...The 84. Pp. 259-89. 85. See also: PJ I, 174, 204, 209, 230, 314, 419; II, 88, 121. 86. See, for example: PJ I, 145, 165, 206, 213, 221, 305, 330, 454. 87. That he was sexually potent is testified to by Thoreau himself. In the privacy of his journal he makes numerous references to “spilling my seeds” or similar wordings. Whether these references are to masturbatory incidents or nocturnal emissions is never quite clear, but in either case it is clear that he could and did achieve orgasm. See J II, 472; III, 80-2, 121; and VI, 483, among others. 88. There was a homosexual scandal in Concord involving a number of Thoreau’s contemporaries which resulted in some of the participants being driven from town. So even despite Victorian reticence such activities were not left unreported. I am indebted to the late Mrs. Herbert Hosmer and the late Mrs. Leslie Anderson, both long-time residents of Concord, for details of this affair. 89. Walter Harding. THOREAU AS SEEN BY HIS CONTEMPORARIES. (New York: Dover, 1990), pp. 9, 16, 30, 41. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING research becomes to some extent compulsive and a substitute for sexual activity; but owing to the complete difference in the underlying psychical processes ... the quality of neurosis is absent ... and the instinct can operate freely in the service of intellectual interest.90 The dominating interest of Thoreau’s life was Nature. Virtually every day of his adult life he devoted a minimum of four to five hours (and often much more) to the study of nature. in his short lifeline-he lived only to the age of forty-four -he produced more than three million words of polished, professional, publishable prose, the larger portion of it devoted to his love of and studies of nature, Readers are often struck by how much of it is couched in erotic terms: How rarely a man’s love for nature becomes a ruling principle with him, like a youth’s affection for a maiden, but more enduring! All nature is my bride. (J IX:337) I love and could embrace the shrub oak with its scanty gal.ment of leaves. (J IX:146) Nature ... lies at length, exposing her flanks to the sun. I feel as if I could ... stroke and kiss the very sward, it is so fair. (J XII:97) I am like a bee searching the livelong day for the sweets of nature. Do I not impregnate and intermix the flowers? (J III:470) As Victor Friesen has well pointed out,91 over and over again in reporting on nature, Thoreau begins his sentences with the words “I love .... “Thoreau’s love life was centered on nature. He himself said, “To sigh under the cold cold moon for a love unrequited, is to put a slight upon nature; the natural remedy would be to fall in love with the moon and the night, and find our love requited” (PJ I:223). The thwarting of his desires backfired into his genius. CONCLUSION This then is the relevancy of Thoreau’s sexuality: Had he not redirected those energies, it is very possible he might never have become the literary master he did. It explains quite conclusively why he never married -and as has often been pointed out, a Thoreau married would have been a very different Thoreau. It helps to explain why he went to Walden to live alone at just that point in his life when most men are marrying and settling down to raising a family. It may help to explain some of that sense of guilt which haunts so many of his pages.92 It undoubtedly explains the astounding frequency of comments on handsome young males in his pages and conversely the paucity of comments on young ladies.93 I would also suggest that possibly some of Thoreau’s lifelong radicalism, the completely different angle of vision with which he viewed the world around him, his perennial habit of questioning all things may have derived from 90. Sigmund Freud. LEONARDO DA VINCI AND A MEMORY OF HIS CHILDHOOD. (New York, 1964), pp. 27-30. 91. Victor Friesen. THE SPIRIT OF THE HUCKLEBERRY. (Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 1984), p. 12. 92. Gozzi, pp. 155-6. 93. Lonnie Willis. FOLKLORE IN THE PUBLISHED WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. (Boulder: U of Colorado, unpublished dissertation, 1966) reports finding eighty-one distinct references to boys in Thoreau's Journal and only one to a girl. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING his realization that he was different from others. Thoreau’s sexuality was of course by no means his only driving force, but, as with a11 of us, it was an important factor in making him the man he was. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1992

April 1, Wednesday: The “Tigers” of Serb leader Arkan moved into Bijeljina. They began a program of murder, harassment, and intimidation against the Muslim civilians. 24 people were killed.

Scientists found the largest living organism, a giant fungus covering 12 hectares, in the forest on the border of Michigan and Wisconsin.

A memorial concert was given in memory of William Schuman at the Juilliard Theater in New York City.

Professor Walter Roy Harding wrote in the Virginia Quarterly Review (page 277, Volume 68) about “The Adventures of a Literary Detective in search of Thoreau”: A few years ago Marcia Moss, the indefatigable curator of special collections at the Concord Free Public Library, called my attention to a manuscript of recollections of mid-19th- century Concord that had recently been given to them. It had been found in an attic in Cambridge. It was unsigned, and no one in the family knew its origin other than as indicated in a postscript which read, “Andover, Massachusetts, November 10, ’91.” It was obvious from its contents that it had been written by a woman who had been a child in Concord during the 1840s. The only other seeming clue was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s identification of the writer therein as the “Doctor’s little girl.” But the Hawthorne family doctor at the time was Josiah Bartlett, who had no daughter of an age appropriate to have written the recollections. No other appropriate doctor in Concord turned up in the medical directory. The author did happen to mention, however, that she was long interested in botany. When I showed the manuscript to Thomas Blanding, the Thoreau authority in Concord, he picked up on this and said he vaguely recollected that Ellery Channing mentioned a Concord woman botanist in his biography of Thoreau. Checking, I found the name of Annie S. Downs, identified as “that admirably endowed flower writer ... [who] died in 1901.” Her only book in the Concord Library was an atrocious verse history of the town of Andover that had not been circulated in 80 years and had to be searched out of storage. An inscription in the book revealed she had once attended Bradford Academy, now Bradford College, but calls to Bradford College revealed only that the secretary of the alumni association and the curator of the Bradfordiana collection were both abroad for the summer, so no records were available. If she wrote a history of Andover, Massachusetts, probably she had had some connection with the town, but the reference desk in the town library had no record of her. “Try the historical society. It is just down the street and today is the only day it is open this month. In fact, it closes in half an hour.” There was no Annie Sawyer Downs in the society’s name files, but in the 1901 folder of the chronological file there was a tiny sliver of an unidentified newsclipping which said, “Died, Annie Sawyer Downs, the well-known verse writer, December 7, 1901”! “Are there any newspaper files for Andover at the turn of the century?” “Yes, there are microfilms at the library.” So back to the library I went and out with the microfilms for 1901 and the first issue of the weekly newspaper after Annie’s death. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING But, alas, not a mention of Annie in the first issue or the second. Fortunately in rewinding the film, the name “Annie Sawyer Downs” caught my eye. Here, to my astonishment, in an issue dated several days before her supposed death was a lengthy account of her funeral! Obviously the clipping in the historical society had been misdated. The funeral account stated she had been born Annie Sawyer in Concord and lived there through her childhood, was long especially interested in flowers, and published poetry regularly in various religious journals. But what about Hawthorne’s comment about her being the “Doctor’s little girl”? Back to Concord to check the vital statistics. There was no record of her birth — apparently her parents had never filed one. But a little more than a year before her birth there was record of the marriage of a Dr. Sawyer of Manchester, N.H. to a Concord girl. Why was he not in the medical directory? He was a homeopathic physician, and they were boycotted by the prevailing more conventional physicians. A check with Arlin Turner, the biographer of Hawthorne, confirmed that Mrs. Hawthorne occasionally consulted Dr. Sawyer, much to her husband’s dismay. So Annie Sawyer Downs was unquestionably the author of the manuscript. Thomas Blanding later turned up evidence for me that she had delivered the paper at the dedication of the Lawrence, Massachusetts, Public Library in 1892. Mrs. Downs’ paper was filled with anecdotes, most of them familiar, of the many famous Concordians, but there was one about Thoreau that I had never heard, and I think it worth retelling. Let me give it in Annie’s own words: Mr. Thoreau’s services as a land surveyor were in constant demand, and whenever we met him as we roamed the woods and fields, he was very cordial and never failed to direct us to the ripest blueberries and to the trees which bore the best chestnuts. His familiarity with animals was an ever present wonder to us. He pulled the woodchuck out of his hole by the tail, the hunted fox came to him for protection, and we once saw two wild striped squirrels run into his open waistcoat, and he had only to put his hand in the water to bring out the much coveted trout. But no entreaties ever induced him to show us where his rare floral friends made their homes. He had no secrets, however, from Mr. Minot Pratt, and only a couple years before his death I had an amusing interview with him. Mr. Pratt had promised to take me to the only place in Concord where the climbing fern could be found. I had given my word of honor that I would not tell, and in due season we were on the ground. In the midst of our enjoyment we heard a snapping of twigs, a brisk step, in the bordering thicket, and in a second Mr. Thoreau’s spare figure and amazed face confronted us. Mr. Pratt answered for my trustworthiness, and so won over Mr. Thoreau by representing what a deed of charity it was to enlighten my ignorance that he climbed with us into our clumsy vehicle and by circuitous ways took us to the haunt of a much rarer plant which he said nobody else in Concord had ever found. I was sincerely grateful and not backward in telling him so. But noticing an odd twinkle in Mr. Pratt’s eye, I asked him later what it HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING meant. He told me he had known of the plant years before Mr. Thoreau found it, and that the spot was not a half a mile from where Mr. Thoreau had discovered us. He had doubled and redoubled upon his track simply to puzzle and prevent my ever finding the place again. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1993

Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU: A BIOGRAPHY of 1965, reissued by Dover in 1982, was again reissued, this time by Princeton University Press.

The manuscript of the 3rd edition, further revised, of Henry S. Salt’s THE LIFE OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU, was retrieved from the papers of Raymond Adams, edited by George Hendrick, Willene Hendrick, and Fritz Oehlschlaeger, and for the first time published. (It is now available for $14.95 in paperback from the U of Illinois P. Walter Roy Harding once characterized this effort as “Of all the biographers of Thoreau, Henry Salt best captures Thoreau’s spirit.”)

COMPARE IT WITH 2D ED. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1995

China introduced its Maternal and Infant Health Protection Law by which “inferior births” were to be prevented from becoming a burden on the state and society (before it received this name, it had been laboring under the rubric “Eugenics Law”). EUGENICS

In his extreme age (his 79th year), without adequate editorial support or pre-publication review despite the fact that his memory was failing (he would die early in the following year), Professor Emeritus Walter Roy Harding’s annotated edition of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN had been put out by Houghton, Mifflin Company, a trade-press publisher with more greed than good sense. The text of WALDEN that this publisher had sneaked into this volume, to accompany Professor Harding’s notes, turned out to be far more corrupt than that of any edition previously published by The Riverside Press, or for that matter by any publisher anywhere, and the commentary would have benefited from more review and analysis from any other Thoreau scholars — who would of course have been able and eager to pitch in under such circumstances. All in all, this was a fairly nasty sort of trick for a for-profit corporation to play on a helpless old man. This edition of Thoreau’s WALDEN is so thoroughly corrupt a text as to excite awe, and as such it could not possibly have been seen by Walter prior to publication. It may well turn out to be the most corrupt WALDEN text every produced. This sort of egregiousness is particularly alarming in close proximity with a commentary which repeatedly waxes picky about printer errors in the 1854 first edition, errors which have long ago been set right and should long ago have been forgotten (such as the fact here placed on record that in the 1854 edition the word “occasionally” had in the chapter on “Visitors” been spelled “occcasionally”). Among the errors which one may detect upon a chance scan of the pages there are misspellings, omissions of punctuation, incorrect punctuations, absence of spaces, and so on and so forth.94 On the following screen I will recite a few of the more obvious and egregious errors of this edition:

94. Fortunately, this edition has now been replaced by the superior work of Jeffrey S. Cramer, in THOREAU’S WALDEN: A FULLY ANNOTATED EDITION, put out by Yale UP during August 2004. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

• Page 7: the text should read “bones” rather than “hones” • Page 44: Trinity Church did not burn, but fell into disrepair and (if my source is correct) was replaced between 1839 and 1846. • Page 55: The 2nd Bank of the US building in Philadelphia is not Egyptian, but Greek Revival. • Page 111: “tantivy” — Harding gives it as an adverb, “at full gallop,” which I think does not fit the context very well, even when rendered as his “fast flying.” The OED puts Thoreau’s “tantivy” under the noun definition, “a rapid gallop.” I have always assumed, however, that Thoreau meant by tantivy, a sound. This fits the sentence, “the tantivy of wild pigeons ... gives a voice to the air.” The OED provides two meanings of a tantivy as a sound. • Page 163: the text should read “homœopathic” rather than “homeopathic” • Page 171: the text should read “life” rather than “line” • Page 216: In a context in which Walter is expostulating in the margin about the fact that in some editions an erroneous hyphen has been allowed by editors to creep into Thoreau’s word “recreate,” this text represents the word as “re-create”. • Page 248: the text should read “pertinent” rather than “pertintent” • Page 251: Presumably in Note 3, Thoreau’s “orchading” is a printer’s typo for “orcharding.” • Page 277: In note 2, the philologist studied by Thoreau was Richard Trench, not Richard Trent. (Incidentally, in Note 4 on this page, referring to the “Waldenses,” it had been in the Lyon, France of the 12th Century that Pierre Waldo attempted to live a life similar to the life of Jesus, and Thoreau surely would not have been referring to anything that was going on to the remote inheritors of this movement of the Holy Poor as of the 15th Century in particular.) • Page 42: “morning which” should be “morning: which” • Page 120: The word “vale” should have a period after it. • Page 120: adjust the length of the line ending “trivial words” • Page 158: One of the right curlyquotes should be a left curlyquote. • Page 199: there should be a space after the comma in “nobles,and” • Page 226: the title of the Huber work speaks of “Mours” rather than “Moeurs” and of “Fourmis,” ants, not “Fournis.” • Page 262: there should be a space after the period in “serenity.I” • Page 288: Note 1 on this page refers the reader to a note 2 on page 292, and there is no such note. • Page 312: Note 9 should specify “1838 to 1842” rather than “1839 to 1842.”

Harding unhelpfully glosses the following passage in WALDEN by supplied the irrelevant and false and demeaning disinformation that Friend George Fox had lived in a hollow tree: Better not keep a house. Say, some hollow tree; and then for morning calls and dinner-parties! Only a woodpecker tapping.

This sort of gloss –even were it accurate and relevant, rather than false and demeaning– would do nothing much to enhance anybody’s rereading of WALDEN; it speaks not only to the low quality of some academic contributions today but also to the fact that a trade press like Houghton Mifflin will publish literally anything to turn a buck. We had cause to wonder how Harding might have acquired his strange notion that Friend Fox while in process of founding the Quakers had been living in a hollow tree. We were tempted to put this errant HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING piece of nonsense down as a piece of Cavalier calumny casually passed along by a poor scholar by way of a mere unscholarly trade press — but in Book III, Chapter 1 of Thomas Carlyle’s SARTOR RESARTUS we can see how Harding might carelessly have acquired such a notion: “I can neither see nor move: not my own am I, but the World’s; and Time flies fast, and Heaven is high, and Hell is deep: Man! bethink thee, if thou hast power of Thought! Why not; what binds me here? Want, want! — Ha, of what? Will all the shoe-wages under the Moon ferry me across into that far Land of Light? Only Meditation can, and devout Prayer to God. I will to the woods: the hollow of a tree will lodge me, wild-berries feed me; and for Clothes, cannot I stitch myself one perennial suit of Leather!”95

Evidently Harding had been merely taking with blank uncomprehending seriousness a mere piece of fun that a 19th-Century British journalist and racist had once poked at the Religious Society of Friends in the pages of a literary magazine in 1834!

The only known reference for Carlyle’s conceit, so eagerly bought into by Harding, would be a passage in Fox’s writings in which he commented that “I fasted much, walked abroad in solitary places many days; and often took my Bible, and sat in hollow trees and lonesome places till night came on.” That passage would of course be evidence merely for a practice of frequent retirement for private devotional meditation and prayer not at all uncommon in Fox’s day and age, and as such entirely innocuous, and definitely not material that would support any sort of derogation.

96 Walter Roy Harding’s jottings in this so-called “VARIORUM” edition of WALDEN suffer from a fatal ambiguity as to the sorts of person who make up his audience. Is this an audience for whom the reading experience is to be further enriched, even enhanced, by the provision of connections to other cultural materials, or is this, very distinctly different, an audience for whom Thoreau’s offerings are to be “dumbed down” to the lowest common denominator?

An example of the former category above, material for an audience that is seeking the enrichment and enhancement of its reading experience, would be found in Harding’s pointing from certain unascribed quotations in the “Solitude” chapter to specific points in the FOUR BOOKS of China. An example, by way of contrast, of the latter category above, dumbing WALDEN down to the lowest common denominator for an audience consisting of dunderheads, would be found in Harding’s glossing of Thoreau’s “With thinking ... friends sometimes” by means of the stupidly simplistic remark “Thoreau was constantly aware of the fact that he was never able to lose himself completely in any emotion.” Again, I find it utterly pointless for Harding to attempt to gloss a sentence such as this one from the “Solitude” chapter, “The farmer can ... form of it,” by an observation that in the 1st edition of 1854 an inappropriate comma had crept into the text after the word “remunerate” — especially when, in the previous paragraph of this utterly corrupt 1995 Houghton Mifflin reprinting, the word “dervish” has been misspelled as “dervis.” Again, why in this blue-eyed world does the contemporary reader need to be distracted, in a book that itself contains so many egregious printer errors, with the utterly irrelevant and inconsequential detail that in the 1st edition “occasionally” had been set into type by the printer as “occcasionally”? And to whom –heaven help us– is it of use to be informed, alongside 95. Thomas Carlyle’s source for this may well have been merely the following innocuous passage from George Fox’s description of his troubled adolescence, in his JOURNAL: But my troubles continued, and I was often under great temptations; and I fasted much, and walked abroad in solitary places many days, and often took my Bible and went and sat in hollow trees and lonesome places till night came on; and frequently in the night walked mournfully about by myself, for I was a man of sorrows in the times of the first workings of the Lord in me. Needless to say, there is no connection whatever between this and Thoreau’s passage in WALDEN, which Walter Roy Harding supposedly was in the process of elucidating: Better not keep a house. Say, some hollow tree; and then for morning calls and dinner-parties! Only a woodpecker tapping. 96. An edition using such a name as “Variorum” should have been one citing textual variations between drafts of the manuscript, as Ronald Earl Clapper has done — but instead this is merely a garden-variety “Annotated” edition, mistitled. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING Thoreau’s remark “I have heard of a man ... believed to be real,” that Walter Roy Harding has “been unable to discover the source of this story”? –Is it somehow informative, to be apprised of the fact that even the most diligent citation-checker may sometimes fail to uncover the single source for a remark which clearly had been allowed to remain by its originating author in an indeterminate condition?

The marginal notations of this edition are sometimes quite poorly edited. For instance, in the context “in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples and listening to her fables,” a marginal notation such as “Simples are medicinal herbs” would be considerably more straightforward than a cryptic remark such as “Medicinal herbs” alone.

At one point, Professor Harding seems to suggest that Thoreau had been prevaricating when he wrote that he lived a mile from any neighbor, lying because although he makes no mention of this in WALDEN, the families of the Irish laboring men who were creating the railroad embankments and tracks were still living along the tracks alongside the pond while he was in residence at the pond. However, Harding provided no evidence for his conceit that anyone was still living there in that temporary Irish settlement, nor has anyone we have contacted seen any evidence for this.

All in all, this edition is as flawed in execution as it was in conception.

One can find some excuse for the annotated edition of WALDEN that Philip Van Doren Stern prepared in 1970, because that volume was conceived and executed well prior to the invention of an adequate publication technology. But what is the excuse for such a retrograde maneuver as this one, as of 1995?

It has been a waste of publishing money, money which might have been much better allocated.

And the egregious error of this edition has compounded itself, for year after year, the good folks in Concord who purport to be today’s representatives of Thoreau had been putting this crapulent edition out onto their shelves for sale to new generations of unsuspecting customers, at outrageous purchase prices — have, indeed, been recommending it to their unsuspecting newbie tourist customers! HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING In an appendix to this “variorum WALDEN” volume, Walter Roy Harding offers a series of the more stupid and pointless and simplistic analyses of Thoreau’s parable of the hound, the bay horse, and the turtledove.

WALDEN: In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate. I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.

In this regard it is informative to consider two points: • Each and every one of the numerous stupid and pointless and simplistic analyses of the hound/ horse/turtledove paragraph included by Harding has the unfortunate effect of pre-emptively excluding and delegitimating each and every other one of those analyses, as if the function of such literary detective-work were to capture a criminal rather than to reap from the reading of the text a spiritual benefit.

• It is clear that the function of Thoreau’s paragraph in the flow of his chapter, the function of his chapter in the agenda of his book, and the function of his book in our silly lives, have been entirely left out of consideration by these various commentators and annotators during more than a century and a half of speculative readings of this mysterious paragraph, in such manner as to suggest that HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING for them, text and context have been situated in two entirely separated universes.

Harding was, of course, not a disinterested source — it was not per his agenda, for Thoreau’s passage about the lost hound, the lost bay horse, and the lost turtle-dove to receive any appropriately meaningful and important interpretation. For example, in 1958 he had predicted:

[It] will probably never be solved to everyone’s satisfaction. — Walter Roy Harding and Carl Bode (eds.) THE CORRESPONDENCE OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. NY, 1958, page 749 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING

1996

April 10, Wednesday: Walter Roy Harding died after donating his collections to The Thoreau Society (the Society would of course for decade after decade do nothing whatever about Harding’s 1991 work on Thoreau’s homoeroticism, except conceal it — but that must most certainly have been expectable in the light of its initial 5 years of lack of responsiveness).

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2018. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: April 25, 2018 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

PROFESSOR WALTER ROY HARDING WALTER HARDING the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.