Emerson and Thoreau: Figures of Friendship
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Emerson and Thoreau: Figures of Friendship
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253221438 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/04/2010 |
| Series: | American Philosophy |
| Pages: | 222 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Emerson & Thoreau
Figures of Friendship
By John T. Lysaker, William Rossi
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2010 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35388-7
CHAPTER 1
Transcendental Friendship: An Oxymoron?
LAWRENCE BUELL
All that has been said of friendship is like botany to flowers.
Thoreau
My title both is and is not meant as a rhetorical question. However much the Transcendentalists valued solitude and independent-mindedness, the practice of friendship was also clearly important to them, not only in satisfying their human needs as social beings but in furthering the sense of intellectual affinity and mutuality that helped make possible such defining collaborative projects as the Transcendental Club and the Brook Farm commune. On the other hand, Transcendentalist friendship theory — especially as set out in Emerson's and Thoreau's disquisitions on the subject in Essays: First Series (1841) and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) — notoriously defines friendship in such exalted terms as to threaten to make it inoperable. "Friends, such as we desire," Emerson declares, "are dreams and fables" (CW 2:125). Thoreau likens "The Friend" (the friend who is wholly worthy of the name) to "some fair floating isle of palms eluding the mariner in Pacific seas" — a beautiful mirage, "evanescent in every man's experience, and remembered like heat lightning in past summers" (AW 262, 261).
Not that Emerson or Thoreau thought friendship existentially impossible. But they feared it was impossible to achieve, much less sustain, at the level at which they considered the friendship to be ideal. Transcendentalist friendship discourse à la Emerson and Thoreau effectively defines friendship with a capital "F" in the same way it defines reality with a capital "R" or self with a capital "S" — that is, in terms of peak experience, by which standard quotidian experience yields a fitful flame that inevitably dwindles into scattered, memorable moments of exaltation.
The salience of this paradox of friendship in the Transcendentalists' life-records, versus their theoretical rarefaction of friendship virtually out of existence, can and often has been "explained" either psycho-biographically or psycho-culturally. Transcendentalism-watchers are quite familiar with such exegesis. Emerson and Thoreau were both in their own ways reticent and self-protective types, who seemed to many outsiders (and for that matter a number of closer acquaintances) cold fish. Both men knew this full well and berated themselves and each other for it. Furthermore, reserve was — as it still is — a stereotypical New England trait. Temperamental reticence and regional decorum, together with the complications of a transitionally progressive but residually traditional gender ideology, underwrite the subtle element of denigration in Emerson's closest approximation to a portrait of the representative embodiment of his friendship ideal: Margaret Fuller. Emerson's sincere praise for Fuller as a friend is rendered ambiguous by his intimations of something dubiously overheated, possessive, disruptively exotic in her
passionate wish for noble companions, to the end of making life [itself] altogether noble. With the firmest tact she led the conversation into the midst of their daily living & working, recognising the goodwill and intellectually all the points, that one seemed to see his life en beau or in a fine mirage, & was flattered by seeing what was ordinarily so tedious in its workaday weeds shining in so glorious costume. (JMN 11:496)
Again, that telltale "mirage" metaphor: Fuller as the orchestrator of luminous moments of encounter that leave you in limbo, feeling a certain sense of unreality about them and quotidian experience generally. But even though Emerson rather demystifies Fuller's charisma here, neither she nor the friendship ideal ceases to haunt him. As Thoreau wrote of "Economy," so too with both Emerson and Thoreau on "Friendship": it "admits of being treated with levity, but cannot be so disposed of" (Wa 29).
Mentorship and/versus Friendship
All this is simply preamble, however, to what I want now to argue about Transcendentalist friendship theory and practice vis-à-vis the Emerson-Thoreau relation specifically. The central underlying question I pose here is what the double helix of their friendship theory and actual life-history (insofar as we can reconstruct it) has to say about the prospect of a bona fide friendship evolving between a mentor and a mentee.
This is or ought to be a high-stakes issue for any thinking person, be they student or teacher, parent or child, supervisor or supervisee. I relate to this as a parent who is in the process of renegotiating his relations to much-loved and also much-respected grown-up children. I also relate to this as a teacher who is edging toward retirement, and who has felt close to a great many wonderful students (not to mention those I have admired as persons when they were less wonderful students), some of whose hair is now even grayer than my own. And I would very much like to believe that such transformations are possible at least sometimes — i.e., for mentor-mentee relationships to evolve into friend-friend relationships. I even dare to hope that this has happened in my own life. And I know that I am not alone. While I was drafting this very paragraph, I was called away to attend the memorial service of the late William R. Hutchison, to whose scholarship all of us interested today in the history of Transcendentalism as a religious movement are hugely indebted. At the service, one of his prize students of a few decades past, now himself a distinguished historian of religion, delivered an eloquent and compelling tribute to Bill as "mentor and friend, two in one." Would that my former students thought so about me.
Scrolling back now to the nineteenth-century context of the subject at hand, in the archives of Emerson family history we find a similar testimony. Ronald Bosco and Joel Myerson's recent biographical study of the Emerson brothers prints for the first time an affectionate tribute delivered at the dinner following Emerson's 1837 Phi Beta Kappa oration by Edward Everett, whom Emerson later memorialized as the most charismatic Harvard professor of his day: a tribute not, however, to Ralph Waldo, but to his precocious brother Edward. "My relation with [him]," Everett affirms, "was one of the kindliest relations, that can subsist between man and man, that of a pupil grown up to be a friend" (Bosco and Myerson 2006, 69).
Yet both theory and history also testify against the likelihood of such outcomes, insofar as the highest kind of friendship presupposes a position of equality. Anthropologist Robert Brain asserts categorically that across cultures a position of "equality" is integral to the formation of friendship (1976, 20). Even if this over-generalizes, it seems broadly to hold for Western thinking. Aristotle deems equality in "excellence and virtue" to be "the perfect form of friendship." Mentor-mentee relations would fall, for Aristotle, into the lower category of instrumental friendship, friendship based on "the useful." Montaigne insists peremptorily on "too great inequality" as a bar to friendship, disallowing the possibility of true friendship between parent and child and even between the sexes, inasmuch as — so he alleges — "the ordinary capacity of women is inadequate for that communion and fellowship which is the nurse of this sacred bond." And for Simone Weil, "a bond of affection" which contains any degree of "necessity" as she calls it, such as dependence, fatally compromises that "autonomy" of individuals which is indispensable for friendship in the proper sense. Although Montaigne and Weil stand at utterly opposite poles on the question of autonomy per se — he claims that true friends commingle their souls into one without reserve, whereas she likens friends to parallel lines that meet only in God — the principle of equality is indispensable to both.
And neither Emerson nor Thoreau contests this point. On the contrary, Emerson demands that the friend
not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine. I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than an echo. (CW 2:122–123)
This last sentiment came back to haunt Emerson's relations with both Thoreau and Fuller when they did nettle him to the point that he reacted defensively, and then accused him of not practicing what he preached. But that does not mean that he did not believe what he says here; and Thoreau substantially agrees. Indeed, Thoreau goes even further in this Blakean vein wherein "Opposition is true Friendship," when he declares that "we have not so good a right to hate any as our Friend" (AW 282).
On the other hand, another tradition of friendship theory allows for, even stresses, the inevitability and at times indeed the auspiciousness of inequality in friendship. For Jacques Derrida, friendship by definition begins with inequality; "it is to love before being loved." And similarly, Nietzsche asserts that
A good friendship originates when one party has a great respect for the other, more indeed than for himself, when one party likewise loves the other, though not as much as he does himself, and when, finally, one party knows how to facilitate the association by adding to it a delicate tinge of intimacy while at the same time withholding actual and genuine intimacy and the confounding of I and Thou.
At first sight, this seems to be an uncannily precise description of how the Emerson-Thoreau friendship (if indeed that's the right word for it) historically began, as well as one that might apply more generally to mentor-mentee relations which blossom into something more.
So how should we size up the relation Emerson sustained with his various mentees? For in principle, we do need to talk also about mentees in the plural — there were dozens, if not hundreds — since Emerson was a perpetual encourager of youthful talent, indeed sometimes talent that was not so youthful that he took under his wing anyhow, like Bronson Alcott, who was even a little older than he. Each case turned out differently. At one extreme, the mercurial minor poet Ellery Channing, who never came near to living up to what Emerson fancied his early promise to be, became intimidated and demoralized by him. At the other extreme, Margaret Fuller started out much more intellectually and emotionally dependent on Emerson than she ended up, and he seems to have respected her for it. This does not in itself prove that they became true friends, according to the somewhat discrepant ideals the two of them held as to what counted as such. Fuller wished for a greater degree of intimacy than Emerson was willing to grant. Still, regardless of such complications, in my own judgment this was probably as close an approximation to a friendship of equals as Emerson ever formed with a significantly younger person who began as his admirer. But the Emerson-Thoreau relationship is a case that is not only unique in the history of Transcendentalism; it is also strikingly original within world literary history: Thoreau as a protégé is intensely and carefully prepared from his earliest manhood to become a canonical figure in his own right — and he succeeds, to such an extent that his reputation has arguably eclipsed his mentor's. To what extent, though, is friendship a part of that story?
I would like to answer that friendship is involved to a significant degree. For not only is this the historical instance of an intimate mentor-mentee relation that I have studied most closely, it would also seem to be one of the most auspicious, considering (as I argue in my book Emerson) that Emerson was the quintessential "anti-mentor": one who disclaimed the desire to enlist disciples and cheerfully anticipated the prospect of his own supersession as American letters, culture, and thought continued to evolve. Here in gist is my present view of the matter: On the one hand, the terms of the Transcendentalist theory of friendship both men espoused militated against the possibility of their ever becoming "friends." On the other hand, in their life-practice they arguably became so, however modern scholars have been predisposed to think otherwise. So my summary answer to the question my title posed is: Yes, Transcendental friendship is oxymoronic; but it does not follow from this that its theorists were less than friends in practice. I hope that this précis is both pointed enough to serve as a signpost for the rest of this essay, and tantalizing enough to keep my explication from seeming anticlimactic.
Friendship in Theory
The intertextual links between Thoreau's 1849 disquisition on friendship in A Week and Emerson's "Friendship" essay of 1841 are so thick that it is well to start by reminding ourselves that (almost certainly) neither man is the prototypical friend the other has chiefly in mind.
Emerson's essay was published in the wake of that moment in his life when he was most drawn by the idea of "a circle of godlike men and women variously related to each other, and between whom subsists a lofty intelligence." Here Emerson hints at a recurring dream he realized in part and never gave up on trying to realize more fully: to attract a critical mass of like-minded people of both sexes to Concord who would provide all the best pleasures of intellectual stimulation and sociality. The individuals he especially had in mind at this point were probably Margaret Fuller, Caroline Sturgis, Samuel Gray Ward, and Anna Barker — the latter two of whom, to both Emerson's and Fuller's chagrin, proceeded to get married and go their own way. The real-life "ideal" reader that epistolary records suggest Emerson had most pointedly in mind, as the essay was in preparation, was young Samuel Ward — exactly Thoreau's age (fourteen years younger than Emerson), but from a higher socioeconomic class. Ward was a genteel and refined artistic dilettante who later blossomed (or faded, depending on your view) into the "wizard of Wall Street." While putting the finishing touches on "Friendship," Emerson alerted Ward that he hoped to send it to him — as evidently he later did — for "I would gladly provoke a commentary from so illuminated a doctor of the sweet science as yourself. I have written nothing with more pleasure, and the piece is already indebted to you and I wish to swell my obligations" (CL 7:391–392).
As for Thoreau, whose essay on friendship in the "Wednesday" chapter of A Week was composed with a decade's experience of Emerson as his primary coach and encourager, the model imagined reader may well have been his mentor, whom the text explicitly lauds (as Walden studiously does not). But the model for the Friend of Thoreau's essay, to the extent it is based on a particular individual, is almost surely his late elder brother John, who accompanied him on the trip that his book memorializes.
But what I should especially stress about the two discourses is a telling difference in emphasis notwithstanding convergence on a number of points, e.g., that friendship should be conducted on the highest moral plane, that friends should be utterly sincere with each other, that so-called friendship is typically a shabby affair compared with what friendship ought to be, and that friendship of the very highest kind is rare, exceedingly hard to attain, and indeed is obtainable only in fleeting moments. ("Like the immortality of the soul," writes Emerson, it is "too good to be believed" [CW 2:116].) Perhaps the single most revealing indicator of this underlying difference between the essays, however, is their different way of handling the device of the tortuous hypothetical letter to one's would-be friend. The tenor of the two letters differs sharply.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Emerson & Thoreau by John T. Lysaker, William Rossi. Copyright © 2010 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsAbbreviations for Emerson, Thoreau, and Carlyle CitationsIntroduction / John T. Lysaker and William RossiPart 1. Transcendental Contexts1. Transcendental Friendship: An Oxymoron? / Lawrence Buell2. Forgiving the Giver: Emerson, Carlyle, Thoreau / Barbara PackerPart 2. Emerson's "Friendship"3. "In the Golden Hour of Friendship": Transcendentalism and Utopian Desire / David M. Robinson4. Emerson and Skepticism: A Reading of "Friendship" / Russell B. Goodman5. On the Faces of Emersonian "Friendship" / John T. LysakerPart 3. Thoreau's Divergent Melodies6. "In Dreams Awake": Loss, Transcendental Friendship, and Elegy / William Rossi7. "Let Him Be to Me a Spirit": Paradoxes of True Friendship in Emerson and Thoreau / Alan D. HodderPart 4. Giving Friendship for Life8. Giving Friendship: The Perichoresis of an All-Embracing Service / James Crosswhite9. Leaving and Bequeathing: Friendship, Moral Perfectionism, and the Gleam of Light / Naoko SaitoWorks CitedList of ContributorsIndexWhat People are Saying About This
Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalists had a lot more to say about friendship than is generally thought, and this is a good point of departure for these new readings.
"Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the two giants of American transcendentalism, enjoyed a friendship that was both positive and negative. They had mutual intellectual interests, liked and admired each other, and shared many of life experiences. But their friendship was also challenged by personal rivalries, disappointments, and misunderstandings—which is to say that their friendship mirrored the friendships that many experience. Lysaker (philosophy, Univ. of Oregon) and Rossi (English, Univ. of Oregon) believe that by studying Thoreau and Emerson's unique friendship and also their writing on the subject of friendship one can learn much about the mysterious and sometimes contradictory elements that tie all humans in friendship. Released in the 'American Philosophy' series, this book comprises nine essays by scholars from a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, English, education, and religion. Divided into four sections—'Transcendental Contexts,' 'Emerson's "Friendship,"' 'Thoreau's Divergent Melodies,' and 'Giving Friendship for Life'—the essays interpret various aspects and characteristics of the bond that the two men shared. Close examination of their written essays, letters, and journals does in fact enrich understanding of what the two men experienced. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. — Choice"
Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the two giants of American transcendentalism, enjoyed a friendship that was both positive and negative. They had mutual intellectual interests, liked and admired each other, and shared many of life experiences. But their friendship was also challenged by personal rivalries, disappointments, and misunderstandings—which is to say that their friendship mirrored the friendships that many experience. Lysaker (philosophy, Univ. of Oregon) and Rossi (English, Univ. of Oregon) believe that by studying Thoreau and Emerson's unique friendship and also their writing on the subject of friendship one can learn much about the mysterious and sometimes contradictory elements that tie all humans in friendship. Released in the 'American Philosophy' series, this book comprises nine essays by scholars from a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, English, education, and religion. Divided into four sections—'Transcendental Contexts,' 'Emerson's "Friendship,"' 'Thoreau's Divergent Melodies,' and 'Giving Friendship for Life'—the essays interpret various aspects and characteristics of the bond that the two men shared. Close examination of their written essays, letters, and journals does in fact enrich understanding of what the two men experienced. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. — Choice
Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the two giants of American transcendentalism, enjoyed a friendship that was both positive and negative. They had mutual intellectual interests, liked and admired each other, and shared many of life experiences. But their friendship was also challenged by personal rivalries, disappointments, and misunderstandings—which is to say that their friendship mirrored the friendships that many experience. Lysaker (philosophy, Univ. of Oregon) and Rossi (English, Univ. of Oregon) believe that by studying Thoreau and Emerson's unique friendship and also their writing on the subject of friendship one can learn much about the mysterious and sometimes contradictory elements that tie all humans in friendship. Released in the 'American Philosophy' series, this book comprises nine essays by scholars from a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, English, education, and religion. Divided into four sections—'Transcendental Contexts,' 'Emerson's "Friendship,"' 'Thoreau's Divergent Melodies,' and 'Giving Friendship for Life'—the essays interpret various aspects and characteristics of the bond that the two men shared. Close examination of their written essays, letters, and journals does in fact enrich understanding of what the two men experienced. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. — Choice
Addresses an issue—friendship—that is of crucial importance to the ethical and social visions of Emerson and Thoreau.
Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalists had a lot more to say about friendship than is generally thought, and this is a good point of departure for these new readings.