Thoreau in Love Schuyler Bishop 9781482059656 Books
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In 1843, a repressive puritanism still hangs over Concord, Massachusetts, and Henry Thoreau, twenty-five years old, wants out. When his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, gives him an opportunity to move to New York City, the lively center of the growing nation, Henry leaves Concord with no thought of ever returning. In his journals, the 250-some pages about his trip to New York have been ripped out, the only substantial number of pages missing from the forty-seven journal volumes. What was so scandalous that Thoreau—or, more likely, his literary executor—decided no one should see it? And why did Thoreau stay only six months in New York? Thoreau’s biographers go out of their way to convince us that the writer was heterosexual, although he never married and wrote freely in his journal about the beauty of men. His poem “Sympathy,” one of the few published in his lifetime, is a love poem to a boy who was his student. About that poem, one celebrated biographer went so far as to say, “When he wrote ‘he’ Thoreau really meant ‘she,’ and when he wrote ‘him,’ he really meant ‘her.'” When in his journal Thoreau wrote, “There is more than maiden modesty between us . . . I have no feature so fair as my love for him,” that same biographer said, “There is little doubt that ‘her’ was meant. . . . There are, indeed, many passages . . . where Henry’s emotional experiences with women are memorialized under a camouflage of masculine pronouns.” By denying Thoreau's real sexuality, scholars have reduced him to a wooden icon. But this sexuality can humanize the man. “Thoreau in Love” imagines the time of the missing pages, when Thoreau emerged from his shell and explored the wider world and himself before he returned to Concord, where he fearlessly lived the rest of his life and became the great naturalist and literary giant.
Thoreau in Love Schuyler Bishop 9781482059656 Books
.One of the last thing Thoreau said to his sister on his lingering death bed was 'I have always loved Ellen Sewall (sic). Most details of Thoreau's intimate social life have been edited out of his published journals and letters- but the few mentions that have slipped through are about women- not men. Including two marriage proposals. You'd be better off reading the letters and diaries of the women that surrounded him at the time for a more accurate depiction (even though they are edited too) than this book. With an author as influential as Thoreau we deserve a complete accounting of his journals and letters as he intended without the severe editing that has occurred since his death along with the letters and diaries of the women he was closest too in his life at the time instead of them rotting in dusty archives so there would be a lot less speculation in this area than exists in present scholarship.Product details
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Thoreau in Love Schuyler Bishop 9781482059656 Books Reviews
I could not help but compare this book to Colm Toibin's The Master. It does not stand well in comparison. Toibin made an oblique approach to his subject creating a moody tapestry with dark figures and shadowed disappointments. This book has its joys and I am glad I read it but it is a shallow impression I will carry, mostly the depiction of New York and America in the 1840's.
Readers of this richly imagined narrative, in which John Schuyler Bishop melds a well-researched literary/historical romance to what we might today call a coming-out novel, will enjoy getting to know the young Henry David Thoreau, who leaves Concord to voyage by ship from Boston to New York in the spring of 1843. An appealing, idealistic young writer in search of his own identity, Henry discovers love in the form of Ben Wickham, a deckhand on ship, who leads him to the truth of who he really is, what he really wants and needs. As a “transcendentalist” in the mold of his mentor Emerson, he learns that his truest feelings should transcend the strictures and expectations of conventional, church-going society — as exemplified by William Emerson, Ralph Waldo’s priggish, more stolid brother, whose children Henry tutors. Thoreau’s experiences in New York are peopled with an entertaining cast of characters — part of the fantasy here is that many if not most of them will be attracted to him, and they will be predominantly male. The most intriguing cameo appearance, for this reader, is the infant Henry James.
Bishop interweaves colorful threads of historical detail into his story. It is fascinating to learn, for instance, that large sailing ships, in their progress down the northern coast, could be helplessly stuck for hours atop sandbars; that Staten Island, whose forests once made it a leafy paradise, was devastated by both 17-year locusts and the axes of shipbuilders and developers greedy for its lumber and its land; that a good place to view a public hanging in Manhattan just might have been the roof of your favorite (male) bordello; that another popular pastime was attending buffalo races in the wilds of New Jersey.
Throughout the novel, Bishop’s writing is energetic, brisk, and it can be wonderfully physical. The ship, on which the journey of Henry’s sexual and emotional awakening begins to occur, is realized not so much by how it looks, as how it sounds. The boat’s old timbers screech and shudder and creak; we hear a “thunderous clap” as the mainsail “snaps to the wind,” a sudden “whump” as the wind hits the sail. The lushness and peace of a sylvan Staten Island is also nicely evoked, and Bishop’s Manhattan is almost Dickensian in its color and rude noise, its squalor and stench. The torrents of rain that soak the city near the end of the narrative show us a New York at its most sodden, its bleariest, where nothing is clear or certain — a condition which powerfully mirrors Henry’s own state of mind before the story resolves.
Exhilarating and a pleasure to read, this is a book I recommend with great enthusiasm.
The 250 missing pages of Henry David Thoreau's journal covering his six month stay in New York represent a treasure chest to the writer of historical fiction. John Schuyler Bishop has brilliantly imagined these missing pages in his novel. His meticulous research of the period brings the reader to New York City (1843) with a vitality and authenticity that we expect from good historical fiction. True as Bishop is to place, he is equally adept in developing character. We agonize with Thoreau as he confronts his sexuality, falls in love and is forced to deal with the dissonance between his emotions and the strict moral code of his society. The supporting characters who provide the novel's context are drawn with historical accuracy and emotional depth. Bishop has done an outstanding job in his effort to fill this significant gap in Thoreau's journal, and hence, his life. Although Thoreau in Love is fiction, you will long ponder the possible reality that Thoreau was, in fact, a gay man. It is certainly a book you will remember.
I'm a student of the transcendentalists (and gay), so how could I resist? Bishop has done a lot of work in making the historical details accurate, and the descriptions of New York are worth the price of the book. I'm still of the opinion that Thoreau was not quite as attractive as Bishop would like him to be, and this does sometimes appear to be a wish fulfillment fantasy on Bishop's part. I'm finding it hard to believe that Thoreau had that much adult fun in his early life! (It would be nice to think so.) I do believe that the next time I pick up Walden I'll feel differently about H. D. Thoreau.
.One of the last thing Thoreau said to his sister on his lingering death bed was 'I have always loved Ellen Sewall (sic). Most details of Thoreau's intimate social life have been edited out of his published journals and letters- but the few mentions that have slipped through are about women- not men. Including two marriage proposals. You'd be better off reading the letters and diaries of the women that surrounded him at the time for a more accurate depiction (even though they are edited too) than this book. With an author as influential as Thoreau we deserve a complete accounting of his journals and letters as he intended without the severe editing that has occurred since his death along with the letters and diaries of the women he was closest too in his life at the time instead of them rotting in dusty archives so there would be a lot less speculation in this area than exists in present scholarship.
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