My Friend, My Friend: The Story of Thoreau's Relationship With Emerson

Rating:
Summary: A Venn diagram drawn through text
Review: Casual readers should not be put off by the academic or esoteric treatment suggested by the title of this book. For _My Friend, My Friend_ serves as a good overall biography of both Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson and describes in understandable terms the transcendental movement as well. The added focus is what each man thought of friendship in general and how it pertained to his relationship with the other. Newbies to the works and lives of these two men would do well to start their education with this volume. Ardent fans of either writer will find they disagree with some of the author's suppositions, though, especially in the discussion of how the men's real lives differed with the public personas they each created. Even so, it's an engaging read.

Rating:
Summary: A Venn diagram drawn through text
Review: Casual readers should not be put off by the academic or esoteric treatment suggested by the title of this book. For _My Friend, My Friend_ serves as a good overall biography of both Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson and describes in understandable terms the transcendental movement as well. The added focus is what each man thought of friendship in general and how it pertained to his relationship with the other. Newbies to the works and lives of these two men would do well to start their education with this volume. Ardent fans of either writer will find they disagree with some of the author's suppositions, though, especially in the discussion of how the men's real lives differed with the public personas they each created. Even so, it's an engaging read.

Rating:
Summary: Engrossing Biography of a Friendship Requires Some Cautions
Review: Harmon Smith has provided us with an engaging story of a friendship between two of America's leading thinkers and writers of the 19th century--Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Friendship was central to the Transcendental Movement, a platonic ideal that never quite materialized, so it is here as Smith puts their lives under the microscope. He captures their humanity in a way no other biographers have, because he is able to separate the mythic "Henry David Thoreau" from the human. The cautions come when Smith turns away from the microscope to record a narrative that often includes his own projections into the minds and hearts of his subjects. Worst of all is his use of the old Oedipal complex of Freud projected onto Henry and his mother Cynthia. There is little to no substantiation for such a supposition, and so one must realize where the book fails to use a wise discretion. It is, nevertheless, a wise and wonderful portrait of a friendship that lasted three decades.

Rating:
Summary: Thought Provoking - Biography at its Very Best
Review: This dual biography deserves far more attention than it is likely to get. That's a shame, because it skillfully explores not only the complex relationship between two great men, but the very nature of friendship itself.

Living in an age that obsesses about sexuality in all relationships, it is hard for us to understand the place that the concept of mystical friendship held for tne intellectual rebels of the early 19th century. Emergson, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller and the rest of their circle explored this theme over and over--in platonic love affairs that crashed and burnt on the rocks of sexual attraction, in attempts at communal life that foundered when individuals could not give themselves to the needs of the group, and as we see so clearly in this biography, in negotiating the shoals of the mentor/protege relationship.

The focus of the book is the mentor role that was so comfortable for Emerson and increasingly frustrating to his protege, Thoreau. Emerson, whose fame grew throughout the period of this friendship never truly respected Thoreau's achievements, particularly not his masterwork, Walden, though he was instrumental in supporting Thoreau through the many years it took to produce that masterwork. It is ironic that in our time Thoreau's work still sells and still maintains its relevance to new readers while the once famous Emerson is now only a dim presence of interest only to scholars of American Intellectual History.

Smith does the biographer's job masterfully, drawing heavily on primary sources to give the reader enough information to draw his own conclusions about what might have been going on inside both men as their friendship evolved. He has plowed through mountains of source material--as just about everyone involved in this high octane intellectual circle Concord left multivolume memoirs, journals and letters--and distilled out the truly important quotations and details that show us the subtle developement of this friendhsip.

That said, I did not personally agree with Smith's own opinions about the psychological factors at work. My biggest complaint, as someone who has also spent significant amounts of time with the primary sources here (in my past life as a history Ph.D. candidate) is that Smith ignores the extent to which Emerson's character was formed by the death first of his father and then of his beloved first wife, who was dying of TB even as they wed. Early life taught Emerson that to feel love was to feel pain. So he spent the rest of his life barricading himself behind the intellectual defenses that kept him from feeling anything too deeply. Emerson's tragedy was that he sent out strong tendrils of love and affection throughout his life, and then coldly cut off everyone--not just Thoreau--who responded. But it is hard today, when we are largely sheltered from such things, to imagine what it would be like to live in a world where your father, wife, and oldest child each died just as you had come to love them.

Smith also describes Thoreau as someone who never separated from his mother and saw her in the inaccessible women he got attached to, using this to explain his failure to ever form an adult relationship with a woman. I think he misses the far more likely explanation that like many men who never came to terms with their natural homosexuality, Thoreau found himself attracted to the women who were the sexual objects of the men who were the focus of his true attraction--be it his brother's sweetheart or Emerson's wife--because this was a way to get closer to these men who were actual objects of his love. But again, it would be a grave mistake to try to cast Thoreau as a 19th Century Gay poster boy. It is quite likely, given the culture he lived in, that Thoreau himself never much a clue of what it is he was truly attracted to.

But it is when considering issues like this, that the true value of this book emerges: because the author gives you enough data to let you draw your own conclusions, without cloying analysis or politically correct projections of the concerns of our generation on these people of another age.

I hope this book gets noticed by those who nominate books for one of the prestigeous literary prizes it so clearly deserves, bringing it to the notice of more readers!

Rating:
Summary: titillating gossip
Review: Why are we so interested in the gory details of private lives? Does it really matter? In this case, I would say not at all. Why bother with such questions when you could be reading the juicy details of Thoreau and Emerson's sometimes rocky friendship? The warp and weft of their relationship formed such an intricate pattern over the years that one cannot help but be fascinated.

Rating:
Summary: titillating gossip
Review: Why are we so interested in the gory details of private lives? Does it really matter? In this case, I would say not at all. Why bother with such questions when you could be reading the juicy details of Thoreau and Emerson's sometimes rocky friendship? The warp and weft of their relationship formed such an intricate pattern over the years that one cannot help but be fascinated.