Who's Waldo?
by Connor Harrison
Princeton University Press, 336pp, ISBN 9780691254333, £25.00
‘American nature was a splendid, empty theater,’ wrote Professor Larzer Ziff on the early republic. If we are to take his lead, then Ralph Waldo Emerson might be considered America’s first actor. Emerson performed so that he might become a mirror to Americans, well aware that no two people ever see the same reflection; that the point of a mirror is that we might briefly see a new aspect of ourselves.
An American in need of some new refraction of light, James Marcus first picked up a book of Emerson’s essays ‘during a difficult period’ in his life: ‘I was struggling with a chronically ill spouse, a vulnerable child, and, in the end, a collapsing marriage. I was very lonely.’ What he discovered in Emerson was ecstasy, or at least the potential for it. Marcus, an atheist desperate for revelation, stumbled upon the same ex-minister so many have before. In my own case, I bought a copy of Emerson’s Nature and Selected Essays because I had read Whitman and, moved by the ecstasy of Leaves of Grass, thought to try a little more American exceptionalism. What followed was the morning air that Whitman’s grass needed to grow (never mind the countless other poets Emerson has oxygenated), an exceptionalism of the national, personal, poetic. His essays speak most directly today to the literary atheist, those confused types, taking their spirituality by the sentence. Emerson, writing just north of the proverb, inspires in certain readers a fast devotion, and as Marcus puts it, ‘[t]he recognition seems mutual. It is, weirdly, like falling in love’.
Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson is, before anything else, a personal text. That is a difficult distinction, generally, especially when addressing Emerson, and even more so when discussing a biography about him. ‘All history becomes subjective,’ he writes in ‘History,’ ‘in other words there is properly no history, only biography.’ What has passed before our time remains a dead text without translation. It is only at the point of contact — at the moment of subjectivity — that history can be said to exist at all. When Emerson says biography he of course means the life we have now, as it grows and will be read in another present. But Marcus has not written a traditional biography, though biography certainly occupies the majority of his book. Glad to the Brink is a personal text because it is about Marcus, the point at which Waldo became subjective, or when the former discovered in the latter something of ‘[h]is own secret biography [. . .] in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born.’
A portrait, then, is an appropriate subtitle, since it is made up as much of the sitter as it is of the paintbrush. Glad to the Brink moves from chapter to chapter, decided not by chronology or analysis, but by emotion; by proximity; the occasions when, as Marcus puts it, the spectre of American letters ‘spoke to me most directly’.
The result is a flesh-and-blood Waldo, ageing and suffering the degradations of lecture tours and unwanted social calls, the humid nights spent with women and men on his mind, days and years worn into his desk, relatives passing out of his hands and into the Sleepy Hollow cemetery. Marcus’s prose, as well as his choice of scenes, complements this physicality. Unlike Waldo, he is conversational, practical. ‘When do you become yourself?’ he writes in the first chapter. ‘[T]he question is trickier than it sounds. At birth, we are presented with the raw materials of identity. But these are almost random. They are winnings from a game of genetic roulette, just waiting to be cashed out. What comes next is a long trek down the wind tunnel of childhood, the buffeting impacts of family and society and religion.’ Later, detailing the heat of Waldo and Thoreau’s early friendship, Marcus writes that:
Waldo’s embrace of his new friend went far beyond professional matters. He clearly loved Thoreau. There may have been a homoerotic element to his attachment - both men had been powerfully drawn to other men, and had further benefited from the era's blurry sense of male intimacy. A man could share a bed, or frequent professions of love, without being labeled homosexual. He was simply a creature of feeling. I am not suggesting that Waldo and his young charge got up to some sort of sexual mischief on the shores of Walden Pond (although anything is possible). Yet they shared the sort of exalted communion that Waldo described in ‘Friendship’. They demonstrated that such a thing was possible, despite what Waldo elsewhere called ‘the porcupine impossibility of contact’ with other people.
The accumulation of Waldo’s domestic loves — whether with Thoreau, his second wife and longest companion, Lidian, or with his short-lived son — despite his awkward, emotional distance, projects before the reader a man in his world, one whose long body once brushed against bedsheets. You can almost see him sitting at home, white-haired and losing words like currency, listening for the empty sounds made by a long-dead child. Part of this is achieved by Marcus’s judicious use of anecdote and incident — his novelistic eye for sentiment and scene — that keeps Waldo embodied. Midway through the book, we are presented briefly with Waldo ‘at the end of his life, with his memory almost gone’, and yet still, ‘he would turn to Lidian and ask, “What was the name of my best friend?” She would answer, “Henry Thoreau.” And Waldo, peering back through the mist of their beautiful entanglement, would say, “Oh, yes, Henry Thoreau.”’
But let’s step back from the red blood cells of Waldo and return to Emerson the writer, the reflective American on his stage. We read his essays first-hand and understand this new image is between our eye and the refracted light. ‘A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within,’ he writes at the outset of ‘Self-Reliance’. ‘In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.’ Emerson’s dream, to deliver us to ourselves, to approach always a future, whether individual or American. In Glad to the Brink of Fear, however, we are reading instead a record of that gleam of light, as it flashed across Marcus’s mind. By involving himself personally in his biography, he holds the mirror at a certain tilt.
How ought we read Emerson today, then? Selectively, according to Marcus, who has taken his subject’s advice — of reading ‘for the lusters’ — and applied it wholesale to his study. ‘What needs to be said, first of all,’ Marcus writes in his introduction, ‘is that he wrote some of the greatest American sentences — hundreds, maybe thousands of them. His golden hits have been quoted so many times that they are hard to view with a fresh eye.’ What follows is a short list of those sentences: ‘An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man,’ for example, or ‘Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world, a heaven’. Though Emerson’s sentences are some of the most beautiful we have (American or otherwise), it seems an odd tactic, since the sentences are hardly in need of help. As Marcus says himself, wearily, the Emersonian sentence is an advertising staple, printed cheap on fridge magnets, coffee mugs, notebooks, pastel home décor.
Later, he lingers on certain essays, including ‘Nature’ and ‘Self-Reliance’. Marcus’s commentary engages less with Emersonian academics than you’d typically expect, and because of that, there is an honest clarity to the writing. It is the workings of a man taking pleasure in Emerson’s word: ‘Now comes the part that moves me, that makes my skin prickle no matter how many times I read it.’ In the spirit of his whole project, the merit of the readings comes from Marcus’s clear emotional investment. At other times, his analysis suffers under the literal or an insistence on the biographical. This seems unfair, given the nature of the book. But take the section on ‘Nature’, where Marcus writes:
There is, to be sure, a personal element to his prophecy. Man will enter this new world ‘without more wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight’. Here, surely, is another allusion to Waldo’s own earlier struggle with blindness, not to mention the lost brother whose death had deprived him of vision in every sense of the word.
Even aside from that final, strained comparison between the blind man and death, I’m not sure how this ‘personal element’ serves a reader new to Emerson. Is the metaphor strengthened by this insistence on ‘Waldo’s own earlier struggle’, or might the poetics of ‘Nature’ stand securely on their own? And if allusions are to be looked for here, there is a much easier line drawn from Emerson’s rejuvenated blind man, able to look to some future ‘dream of God’, and St. John’s blind man of Siloam, his sight restored by the hands of Jesus; a man clearer-eyed than the backward-looking Pharisees. ‘And Jesus said, For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind.’
In a later reading of ‘Threnody’, Emerson’s mourning of Waldo Jr., Marcus sticks to surfaces. After quoting one of the strongest images from the poem – the unused, painted sled, the corded wood, the gathered sticks; a corner of the world no longer turning – Marcus draws our attention to the line ‘Nature’s sweet marvel undefiled’. ‘You don’t miss your son because he was perfect,’ he writes. ‘The suggestion, surely unintended, is that you would miss him less if he were imperfect. But perhaps it was easier to mourn, or to let go of, an abstraction of childhood rather than the actual boy whose voice was still ringing in your ears.’
While I am not particularly fond of Emerson’s poetry, for its abstractions and Victorian cloudiness, Marcus seems to be hearing ‘Threnody’ off-key. Waldo Jr. died aged five, a tree barely out of its seed. Nobody is more convinced of perfection than the parents of a child lost in youth. This perfection is not abstract, but a present fact for Emerson. Like prayers for the miraculous — usually from those who cannot stand the loss of a loved one – the poem mourns that Nature could not pause, will not change, for the sake of one life. Which brings us to the voice of the ‘deep Heart’, one that Marcus writes as telling Emerson to ‘look beyond the transience of his son’s short life: “My servant Death with solving rite / Pours finite into infinite.” This just doesn’t cut it,’ he continues, ‘not as consolation, and not as poetry, since the best lines are surrounded by gobs of Transcendental gossamer.’ And yet, in the lines that follow that servant, Death, is the same lesson we find throughout Emerson’s work.
My servant Death, with solving rite,
Pours finite into infinite.
Wilt thou freeze love’s tidal flow,
Whose streams through Nature circling go?
Nail the wild star to its track
On the half-climbed zodiac?
Light is light which radiates,
Blood is blood which circulates,
Life is life which generates,
And many-seeming life is one –
Wilt thou transfix and make it none?
Lusters; gobs of Transcendental gossamer; golden lines. This is how Marcus has read Emerson and, more importantly, how he is selling Waldo. Of course, most reading is eventually reduced to those ‘lusters’, those moments of deep or sudden pleasure. But this ought not be a conscious process. Like memories, we cannot designate which will stay or fade, and each reader will discover a new set of golden lines. ‘I will not try to unpack the entire essay,’ Marcus writes of ‘Self-Reliance.’ ‘That would require a chapter many times longer than this one, even if I simply copied out the best bits — which is actually my ideal prescription for reading Waldo's essays.’ He goes on: ‘Once you accept your role as reader is to winnow the aphoristic wheat from the chaff, Waldo’s essays suddenly seem less forbidding.’ This I think is a strange proposition. Marcus has written his biography out of love. The book is filled with a familial kind of attention, as one might offer to a favourite grandfather. This of course doesn’t mean there can’t be criticism, or that Marcus can’t prefer this Emerson to that one. But this strand of thought that runs through Glad to the Brink anticipates disappointment; a pre-emptive defensive stance. We are reminded regularly of the ‘stodgy bits’, in the essays, that Marcus is ‘put off by the piety of his prose’, and that ‘Love’ contains ‘an awful lot of rapture’.
To winnow wheat from chaff, you must first draw the wheat from the field. To read Emerson as if your duty is to skim his essays, plenty of wheat is bound to be lost. And given Marcus’s suspicions of how Emerson’s prose is adopted by the self-help industry – cleaving the hopeful sentence from its environment — it seems a cynical approach. It’s an approach better understood when considering where Marcus is looking: to the future reception of Ralph Waldo Emerson, that old American lecturer, making grandiose statements about value, leisure, the earth, Jesus, racial determinism, slavery; waxing poetic on what you ought to be doing with your one, God-given life. Where exactly does a figure like this fit in 2024, in fifty years or a hundred? Like anyone in love, Marcus is hoping the affair never ends, and that those finding Emerson today might see what he does. This is why I believe Glad to the Brink is a wonderfully sentimental text, and why it works best when Marcus is most honest with us. When he isn’t, things begin to feel like a sales pitch; like this car might not make it out of the lot. It is an attempt to repackage and explain a writer in terms of relevancy. We see this plainly in its sentences: ‘Had yet another female consciousness been steamrolled out of existence by an alpha-dog male?’, Marcus asks of Lidian and Waldo’s marriage. Elsewhere, he throws in phrases like emojis into a eulogy, such as when he is describing the ‘mansplaining members’ of the Transcendental Club. Here’s another one: ‘A tiny, perspiring audience would upload words to the Over-Soul – that Emersonian cloud of consciousness.’
What this does — all this reduction, the attempt to hold Emerson under the glare of brief, internet terminology, the need to connect the essays to biography — is suggest Emerson might not in fact be relevant. By playing his biography this way, Marcus brings to the forefront questions of legitimacy: is he useful to our century, yes or no? Is Emerson a luster or a lump of literary coal? If we are to treat with our dead writers this way, then only time can tell. And it will. And at the same time, for as long as there are people writing long, loving overtures to Waldo, building images of him from paper, there will be readers falling for his words. Words like those in ‘Experience’: ‘The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know.’