Hawthorne-Melville Whitman Emerson Thoreau
Thoreau & Co.
3 clippings from the internet
http://www.galha.org/glh/204/gossip.html:-
Caleb Crain's American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature describes how openly homophobic American society has been in the past but reveals how cleverly, nevertheless, love between men was written about. Nontheists or borderline nontheists who were mentioned include Ralph Waldo Emerson (the Unitarian who translated homoerotic poems of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz and who had a youthful crush on a fellow student named Martin Gay); Henry David Thoreau (whose journals never mention women and some of whose essays express the beauty and agony of love between men); and Herman Melville (author of Billy Budd, who recognized that male sexual desires are a fact of shipboard life and who had an unusual emotional attachment to Hawthorne).
http://www.c-span.org/guide/books/booknotes/chapter/fc081395.htm:-
..And there were new friendships. Emerson found himself strangely and powerfully attracted by a new freshman named Martin Gay. With an unembarrassed frankness he wrote in his journal about the disturbing power of the glances he and Gay exchanged. He would remain susceptible to such crushes, expressed at first through glances, all his life; most of them would involve women. Later he wrote about the quickness with which a glance could arous e a depth of interest. He had a sort of theory of "the glance." And while he heavily crossed out the Martin Gay journal notes at some later time, his initial recording of them indicates his essential emotional openness. He may have been quiet, he certainl y did not cut a commanding figure, but he did not shrink from direct experience.
...In Dispersion, Thoreau vows to show that all trees bear seeds, despite “a lingering doubt in many minds.”What “lingering doubt” is Thoreau addressing? In 1991, a quarter of a century after publishing his biography of Thoreau, Walter Harding added an important postscript to his analysis of his subject: an essay in the Journal of Homosexuality arguing that Thoreau had “a specific sexual interest in members of his own sex.” This aspect of Thoreau’s sensibility has remained strangely quarantined from mainstream Thoreau scholarship, despite Harding and gay scholars such as Henry Abelove, Jonathan Ned Katz, and Michael Warner. Richardson has consistently downplayed it. (So allergic is Richardson to all things Freudian that he took the precaution of omitting Thoreau’s childhood and adolescence from his biography.)
Page from Thoreau´s journal.
Of course, Thoreau could not have thought of himself as a homosexual as we understand the term, but he did think of himself as chaste and childless. A careful reader of Darwin and a close observer of nature, he wondered what it meant that he dispersed no seed of his own. (He half-asserted, half-speculated in his journal that “The end of marriage is not the propagation of the species— If you & I succeed there will have been men enough—any more than the object of the blossom is to mature the seed.”) He also knew that in his relationships with men, his emotions were often more turbulent and demanding than his partners: “Methinks that I carry into friendship the tenderness & nicety of a lover,” he admitted in his diary.“The Dispersion of Seeds” and “The Succession of Forest Trees” do celebrate reproduction, but not quite as sunnily as Richardson believes. Thoreau celebrates reproduction by death, devouring, excretion, accident, and inattention. He shows life propagating itself in ways that are neither magical nor obvious. A squirrel buries a nut, and if the squirrel dies, a hickory tree is born. With a cherry, nature bribes “wild men and children” to swallow cherrystones and thus transport them to fallow ground. Though you may not notice it, oak seedlings have already sprouted among your pines, and pine seedlings among your oaks.
There is no more sex in “The Dispersion of Seeds” than in Walden. When Thoreau describes male and female willows, he refers to them as “sterile” and “fertile.” Generation in nature, as Thoreau describes it, is a paradox. Pine seeds may come from pine trees, but pine trees kill the pine seedlings under their skirts. “Few oaks spring up under an oak wood,” Thoreau observes. There is a pun in the title of Thoreau’s lecture: by the “succession” of forest trees, he means, strictly speaking, their reproductive failure. Oaks do not succeed to oaks; pines do. It is bad luck for a pinecone—or an apple or an acorn or a writer—not to fall far from the tree that bore it.As with “Wild Apples,” then, Thoreau was continuing his autobiography by other means. It was his fate as a writer, after all, to be seeded by Emerson’s genius, and then stunted by his shadow. Failed roots fascinate Thoreau. He digs up roots of hickory, oak, and walnut and counts the rings on each aborted stub—the evidence of years and years of attempts to shoot up into trees, thwarted by frost, fire, rabbits, cows, and men. Scarred, gnarled, and yet still willing to burgeon, the roots speak to Thoreau of his own case. Anyone with a rosy view of the life of intellectuals, he recommends with a snarl, should “go and dig up a dozen seedling oaks and hickories, read their biographies, and see what they here contend with.”
This is not quite the “interest in fecundity” that Richardson describes, but the fecundity of Thoreau’s life was not a family sort. As a bachelor in nineteenth-century New England, Thoreau was expected to help care for the sick, the dying, and the dead. It was no accident that when Margaret Fuller drowned, Thoreau was deputized to search for her body and any of her manuscripts that may have washed ashore. Nor was it an accident that the sight of the drowned shook him deeply, and should probably be counted among the things that happened to Thoreau in 1850 to change his writing so irrevocably. He was the Transcendentalist assigned to look at death. He saw it differently than the others. Only Thoreau would have praised John Brown and his fellow conspirators by calling them “the very best men you could select to be hung.”
In his journal in 1850, Thoreau described “a shrike pecking to pieces a small bird.” After recording the details of the image, he noted that “I find that I had not associated such actions with my idea of birds. It was not bird-like.” It was certainly not a pretty picture of nature; it would have been difficult to sell. Yet Thoreau detected a kind of strength in the cruelty. Nature could be liberal with life only because it was liberal with death. It stints on neither. That was a fact of its wildness, which Thoreau loved. “It is not the part of a true culture to tame tigers,” he once wrote, “any more than it is to make sheep ferocious:” Not to look at death would rob life of its edge—which is why we should want to distinguish what Thoreau wrote from what he died without finishing.
