CITY GARDENS: THOREAU IN NEW YORK

The names Emerson and Thoreau immediately conjure up certain associations in those even peripherally aware of American cultural history. New England. Transcendentalism. Nature. Walden Pond. Perhaps hobgoblins and self-reliance. Those with more interest in the two men would be aware that Thoreau spent time in Emerson’s home and living on his property and that the relationship was, as the euphemism goes, complicated.

But there is a lesser-known aspect to the Emerson-Thoreau relationship involving a place not normally linked to either of them, New York City, and another Emerson in addition to the famous one. William Emerson, Ralph Waldo’s brother, lived on Staten Island, New York, from 1837 to 1864, serving as a Richmond County judge. And for several months in 1843, Henry David Thoreau worked as a tutor to William Emerson’s son Willie and spent a great deal of time wandering the fields and beaches of the rural island that was still many years away from formal incorporation into the city. Thoreau also made frequent trips into Manhattan on Commodore Vanderbilt’s ferry. Through his correspondence with Waldo in Concord and the letters exchanged between Waldo and William, we have a record of this interval in Thoreau’s life, as he began to redefine the writer’s place in—and apart from—an increasingly urban and commercial America.

In a letter of March 12–13, 1843, Waldo Emerson outlines for his brother some reasons Thoreau wants to take up William’s offer to tutor his son and reside with the family in New York. Thoreau would like “to be the friend and educator of a boy & one not yet subdued by schoolmasters.”[1] Emerson continues: “I have told him that you wish to put the boy & not his grammar & geography under good & active influence that you wish him to go to the woods & to go to the city with him & do all he can for him.” Thoreau, then, wanted to shape young Willie, to provide the kind of education he felt lacking in the young people of his time, one based on experience as much as books, relying on direct contact with the world as a means of ethical growth. An education that would not “subdue” independence, what Emerson calls (in “Self-Reliance”) “the nonchalance of boys” that represents “the healthy attitude of human nature.” Thoreau would share with the boy his own learning process in exploring—and confronting—New York.

However, as Emerson writes to William on April 3, Thoreau doesn’t want too much sharing, too much closeness to the family. Above all, he desires a room of his own, “to be at night the autocrat of a chamber be it never so small—6 feet by 6—wherein to dream, write & declaim alone.” Thoreau seeks this solitude in proximity to the city, where he hopes for “literary labor from some quarter.” The pattern of Walden Pond is already established: minimal expenditure on basic needs, a private space in sylvan surroundings not far from the larger community, work allowing time to write, read, and think. The goal was always, as he writes in his journal around that time, “to live as I could, not devoting much time to getting a living.”[2] The phrase “to live as I could” suggests both limitation and freedom: the position at William Emerson’s home and the literary marketplace of the city provide for but also potentially threaten the work of writing that Thoreau so much values. It is a question of how time is to be used—in getting a living or in “living,” which implies work in which time is redeemed rather than wasted or equated with money. Thoreau perhaps hoped that by being near New York but not in it, residing with a family but in his own private space, he could achieve this balance of society and solitude, livelihood and vocation.

The visit did not start out propitiously. “I have been sick ever since I came here,” Thoreau writes on May 23. He isn’t sure of the cause: “a cold, bronchitis, acclimation, etc. still unaccountably.” He awaits “experiences” but feels “a great way off from New York” at his Staten Island perch. Manhattan must be “seen and dwelt in.” He has so far been there once, and his first response seems surprisingly Whitmanesque: “Everything disappears there but the crowd . . . The crowd is something new, and to be attended to.” It has the potential to transform institutions, albeit with the risk of destructiveness: “[the crowd] is worth a thousand Trinity Churches and Exchanges while it is looking at them, and will run over them and trample them under foot one day.”

Yet the more he attends, on subsequent visits, the less he likes. The crowds seem more oppressive, the buildings imprisoning, the treeless streets foul. Luxury abounds while packed slums breed crime and disease. By June 8, Thoreau is complaining to Waldo Emerson:

This is much more the response we would expect from Thoreau, as he searches for the individual in the crowd; New England high-mindedness confronts the vulgar brashness of New York, its mixture of affluence and squalor. Thoreau’s crankiness erupts, his impatience with the emerging mass society and its slavish habits, magnified in the populous city. He seems to welcome his aversion. Yet he is also struggling to comprehend his country’s inevitable future.

He describes individuals encountered in Manhattan, such as Henry James (father of the novelist), a quasi-mystic philosopher who formulated radical new versions of religious doctrine. Thoreau writes this of him on June 3:

A single man amid the crowd, James represents the antithesis of New York values, a decidedly impractical figure in a city already dedicated to money, power, and status. Thoreau also visited other friends of Waldo Emerson, perhaps instinctively seeking out people who would reinforce his own ambivalence about the city; he plunges into the center of things but finds reassurance in the eccentric and the like-minded.

There were also more practical visits in Manhattan, including one to Horace Greeley, the editor of the Tribune. By and large, however, Thoreau continues to maintain a distance from New York, physically and intellectually. His letters to Emerson keep him connected to bucolic Concord and its knot of idealists, while he gains sustenance, as always, from nature—observing, recording. Staten Island’s woods, hills, and fields abut the burgeoning metropolis but retain their rustic quality. The island becomes his retreat, as indeed it was for many New Yorkers: William Emerson’s neighbors and friends included several prominent Manhattanites with farms or country houses, among them William Cullen Bryant, who combined an active city career with a love of nature and solitude. Like them, Thoreau is trying to achieve a balance between the city’s social opportunities and nature’s restorative (even morally regenerative) power.

Thoreau especially enjoys the beaches and the ocean, of which he’d had little experience as yet. (He would visit and write memorably about Cape Cod in 1849.) He contrasts the cramped city with the seashore, where everything “is on a grand and generous scale.” He emphasizes the effects of viewpoint:

As in his more formal writing about New England woods and waterways, Thoreau here displays his characteristic ability to be surprised by the world seen anew. Unlike Concord or even Boston, however, New York presents sharp contrasts that still seem to define the city, geographically and socially: crowded enclosure and green space, the constant presence of people and a sense of isolation—sometimes inducing loneliness, sometimes offering the balm of self-sufficiency. Thoreau suggests the necessity of perspective, of what we might now call psychological distance, in a city that can seem too close, too full. It can devalue the isolated self, whereas the ocean evokes and symbolizes the expanse that can exist within people as individuals.

Experiencing New York causes Thoreau to question society’s direction as well as his own place in the emerging culture. Throughout the letters runs the theme of idylls and potential utopias in a rapidly changing American society that has not lived up to its promised-land beginnings. The experimental communities of Brook Farm and Fruitlands are frequently mentioned. Despite their skepticism about these communities, both Emerson and Thoreau saw them—and the dreamers who dreamed them—as noble dissenters from an urbanizing, money-crazed nation. Thoreau was, as ever, more radically unworldly (and solitary) than Emerson, for whom “rich and roomy Nature” (a phrase from a September 1843 letter) was always a kind of metaphor representing an imagined fulfillment in an alternative society. As Thoreau withdraws from Manhattan, Emerson praises him for it but always reminds his younger friend of the practicalities. In a letter of July 1843, Emerson writes from Concord about a Boston publisher who had promised to pay Thoreau “within a year.” Emerson has his doubts. He discusses his garden, planted partly by Thoreau:

Emerson here calculates the financial yield of nurtured nature, mostly without the symbolic significance Thoreau tends to give such calculations. Emerson writes in the context of Thoreau’s failure to sell much work in New York, a fact Thoreau bemoans in September: “Literature comes to a poor market here, and even the little that I write is more than will sell.”

Meanwhile, Thoreau plants trees on Staten Island: “Have inserted three or four hundred buds (quite a Buddhist, one might say).” The wordplay is typical Thoreau, of course, as is the linking of planting and writing. Commercial Manhattan so far provides neither material nor spiritual sustenance, but writing itself, like gardening, has other rewards—the Buddhist reference is apt. Planting trees and describing the process become one creative activity, the human and the natural meshed. Thoreau attempts to sow his idyllic place as he goes along, the work itself in a way becoming that place. He works to cultivate the moment, to align with nature’s perennial forces as a defense against the vicissitudes of society.

The island provides not only a retreat but also a catalyst to memory, which modern American life was beginning to devalue (a fact that Emerson occasionally, if equivocally, celebrates and that Thoreau generally deplores). Thoreau has traveled to New York yet remains home (or homeless); he wants—as always—to experience the world as home, to make habitable its strangeness. He indulges in some near-nostalgia, writing in the July 8 letter of “pilgrims taking your way by the red lodge . . . to the still cheerful woods,” of Hawthorne “with whom I sauntered, in old heroic times, along the banks of the Scamander,” of William Ellery Channing, the Unitarian elder whom the transcendentalists venerated. The past becomes a focus for Thoreau’s yearnings, especially when his present surroundings seem unpromising, when he cannot find hope in them. Time collapses here; history permeates the present. The “old heroic times” constitute mythic periods of the cultural past blending with Thoreau’s personal memories. The modern, future-focused city recedes. “I have not been to New York for a month,” he informs Emerson near the letter’s end.

Never the nature worshipper and rarely nostalgic, Emerson expresses impatience with some of Thoreau’s more ecstatic descriptions of the woods. He also questions the use of oxymoron, a typical Thoreauvian mode of bringing apparent opposites together. On September 8, Emerson writes about a piece by Thoreau he is editing, an account of a “Winter’s Walk” in Concord (which, Thoreau earlier noted, he was finishing “in the midst of a Staten Island summer”):

Emerson, no great lover of large cities himself, nonetheless offers his habitual corrective to Thoreau’s rustic rhapsodies. Yet the linked oppositions here (public solitude, domestic wilderness) suggest that around the time of the New York visit Thoreau was trying to discover a way of living in the emerging American society, with its busy crowds, that would preserve values represented by nature and the lone individual. A public world containing solitude, a wildness domesticated, the domestic remaining in some sense wild. These contradictions and possible combinations were much on Thoreau’s mind during his New York stay.

He was there, of course, for specific practical reasons. But journeys and residences always had another—he would approve of the term “higher”—purpose for Thoreau. Living in New York became a means of inquiry into living itself. In the rapidly moving city he cultivated a place of stillness, a real place but also another version of that more elusive place he perpetually sought.

Despite his attraction to the wooded seaside setting of William Emerson’s home, Thoreau was not especially happy in the Emerson household. Judge Emerson did not share Thoreau’s temperament or perspectives. Margaret Fuller once wrote of William that he was “as unlike his brother as possible: he is very gentlemanly, very amiable very clear headed, but a mere businessman.”[3] If Waldo was sometimes impatient with Thoreau’s impractical idealism, William found it baffling and off-putting. He did respect Thoreau and considered him a good influence on Willie. And he expressed sympathy about Thoreau’s inability to make money, perhaps partly because William himself had his own financial troubles over real estate deals. But there was little of the intellectual and spiritual communion Thoreau looked for (and rarely found) in friendships.

Nor did Thoreau find young Willie congenial company. Although he continued his tutoring and took the boy on outings in the fields and forests and across the bay to the city, Thoreau always needed his time alone. He escaped often to the small “room with a fire” that Waldo had arranged for him to have. To some extent this was an escape from the Emersons. He writes skeptically—sarcastically even—of the nuclear family into which he has briefly entered but from which he feels separate. In a journal entry dated 21 October 1843, Thoreau apparently refers to the family’s “hollow glazed life” that is

The lawyer-businessman’s family “resides” but does not “live”; the word “hollow,” used twice in this entry, suggests a spiritual emptiness, material comfort without grounding in what Thoreau considered a life truly lived. The habitation is not fully inhabited, wants vitality. He was not finding a home in this chilly household. Most likely, he never expected he would. He would not easily play the role of eccentric uncle in the proto-suburban isolated family; he would remain the outsider, the observer. He felt himself displaced from the emerging mass society, the commodity culture reshaping New York, and middle-class domesticity provided no comfort. It was not the house but its natural setting that promised relief from what we would now term modern alienation. But Thoreau remained in between, a commuter in transit from big-city ambitions to an imagined green respite. And back again. He foresaw both the need for and the disillusionment with suburban idylls.

In mid-December 1843, Thoreau left William Emerson’s home and returned to Concord. Despite their differences, the parting was friendly. The visit to New York seems to have been another station in a pilgrimage not so much toward an ultimate goal as toward finding the goal within the pilgrimage.

The New York stay was hardly the first time Thoreau felt a need for renewal in the contemplation and description of nature. But the visit showed him that such renewal was possible and necessary even—especially—in the biggest, busiest cities. That understanding has a wider significance. Thoreau’s experience looks forward to an urban and suburban era. As with the national parks and the environmentalist movement, Thoreau influenced later ideas about the nature of cities and especially nature in cities. By the 1830s, places like Staten Island were becoming suburban havens as much as weekend or summer resorts, a process accelerated in New York by cholera outbreaks that continued for several years. Landscaping and gardening around suburban houses increased in importance—not only as aesthetic cultivation of the earth but also as a perceived stimulus to overall health. Arcadias were envisioned within commuting distance. The miasmic, coarsening aspects of urban living could be ameliorated not far from the metropolis.

And inside it: this was the era of the great city parks in New York—Central Park and Prospect Park, both designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, another neighbor of William Emerson. Olmstead drew from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau (as well as Ruskin and other British writers) the idea that cities needed green oases for physical and spiritual recreation. Parks, like suburban gardens, could have a revitalizing influence. In America, this idea continued a longstanding belief in the salutary effects of closeness to the natural world. As Witold Rybczynski remarks in his book City Life, American cities imagined themselves differently from European ones; although New World cities were “surrounded by nature,” they did not emphasize “the contrast between the natural and the man-made” but instead “naturalized” the city. This naturalization was also a move “away from Europe and toward the American Indian urban model, in which architecture was subordinated to the landscape.”[5] Thoreau’s residence in suburbanizing New York woods that would one day be part of the city itself suggests he envisioned just such a place—both human-created and natural.

Such imaginings found expression in a particular form: the garden city, a town-like urban community built around greenbelts and parks. Originating in Europe, the garden city concept reached its apex in America. Even in city centers, Americans wanted a kind of redemptive greenness in which nature would weave itself through the city’s fabric, extending into the wilderness and bringing pieces of that wilderness in. Hence the artfully achieved wildness of nineteenth-century American parks. Those composed patches of forest resemble Thoreau’s writing and rewriting of nature, his turning nature into books that reflect it and attempt to link it with human culture. The garden cities would have some of the spirit of Walden and Walden. Thoreau’s stay in New York perhaps fueled his quest for such new forms of community, like the Native American settlements he admired—combining nature and culture, the raw and the cooked, as it were. Thoreau did not want to live in the woods; he valued cities as cultural centers and repositories of civilization. His ambivalence and his imaginings presage a different kind of city, ringed by suburbs amid woods and partially wooded itself. Even New York, contrary to the popular image, in fact became such a city as it expanded, with abundant green spaces in its urban core and large stretches of woodland on its outer edges.

Thoreau anticipates the modern need for urban stimulation and industry as well as its underside: a fear that the individual on whom democracy places such importance is in danger of being diminished, his or her freedom replaced by uniformity. Of course, it was his encounter with the city that reinforced his sense of the isolated individual and therefore of his or her value. Conformist pressure in small-town Concord became the threat of mass identity in New York, but that threat was also an incentive for the resisting self to create open, less oppressive places, in its outward environment and inside itself, close to yet apart from the crowd. These places would serve as antidotes to the dehumanizing forces of modern industrial life. Thoreau wanted to redeem the busy capitalist clockwork America was becoming (nowhere more so than in New York). We cannot, he would write in Walden, “kill time without injuring eternity.” His sojourn in New York provided experience, at a slight distance, of the most hectic and temporal of cities and gave a strong impetus to his lifelong project: cultivating (through plants and trees, through words) the garden amid the machines.

NOTES

1. The quotations from the letters exchanged between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau are taken from “The Emerson-Thoreau Correspondence: The Dial Period,” by F. B. Sanborn, The Atlantic Monthly, May 1892. The article is available at http://eserver.org/thoreau/letters.html. See also “A Calendar of the Correspondence of Henry D. Thoreau,” in Studies in the American Renaissance, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), 325–399. For Emerson’s correspondence, see The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939, 1990–1995).

2. Odell Shepard, Ed. The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals. (New York: Dover, 1961), 33.

3. Robert N. Hudspeth, Ed., 31 March 1839. The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 6 vols. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983–1994), 2:62–63.

4. The quotation, as well as the suggestion that this entry refers to William and family, come from Joel Myerson and Ronald A. Bosco, The Emerson Brothers: A Fraternal Biography in Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 343.

5. Witold Rybczynski, City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World (New York: Scribner, 1995), 81.