Writer and Naturalist Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

I’ve always loved Henry David Thoreau, and I’ve always loved Edward Abbey. Today I came across a longish essay by Abbey on Thoreau that was by far and away the best thing I ever read about the man from Concord. The first essay in his collection Down the River is entitled “Down the River with Henry Thoreau.” It is at the same time a love letter and a critique.

Writing his thoughts on Thoreau while rafting down the Green River in Utah to where it joins the Colorado, Abbey recognizes the greatness of Thoreau—as well as the fact that he is something of a stick-in-the-mud. Always sociable, he had few real friends other than Ralph Waldo Emerson; Nathaniel Hawthorne thought he was something of a bore. And although he proposed to two local women, he was rejected by both, and very likely died a virgin.

Abbey writes:

Poor Thoreau. But he could also write, in the late essay “Walking,” “The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.” Ferity—now there’s a word. What could it have meant to Thoreau? Our greatest nature lover did not have a loving nature. A woman acquaintance of Henry’s said she’d sooner take the arm of an elm tree than that of Thoreau.

It is possible that we might not have a good time if we encountered Thoreau in the flesh. But then, I wonder if I would like hanging with Honoré de Balzac or Marcel Proust, hoisting a brewski with Charles Bukowski, drinking tea with Emily Dickinson, or chatting with G. K. Chesterton. What each of this figures created was an edifice more than a personality. One honors the edifice while acknowledging that we might think the personality to be a bit yucky, perhaps even slightly repellent.