The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (43 page)

A writer on an environmental website recently complained, “While philosophizing about self-sufficiency in his solitary shack, he would drop off his laundry at his mother’s place back in town”; even Garrison Keillor got involved in the laundry question—“He wrote elegantly about independence and forgot to thank his mom for doing his laundry”; there’s even a collection of short stories called
Thoreau’s Laundry
, as well as a website that sells a Thoreau laundry bag. Search engines having a genius for incoherent categories, I also learned that Thoreau, New Mexico, a pleasant little town on Interstate 40, has four Laundromats.

The standard allegation, the reader will note, is that Thoreau’s mother, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau, did his washing, not his sister, and no one suggests that she had to fetch it first. Besides which, he had two sisters, Sophia and Helen. The sneering follow-up message I got from the person who claimed that Thoreau was a man whose sister did his washing made me feel crummy for a day or so during an otherwise ebullient period of being around people that I love and who love me back. I composed various ripostes in my head.

Having grown up with parents who believed deeply in the importance of being right and the merit of facts, I usually have to calm down and back up to realize that there is no such thing as winning an argument in this kind of situation, only escalating. Facebook’s verb “friend” is annoying, but its corollary, “unfriend,” is occasionally useful.

I decided against unfriending and opted for simply avoiding the person into whose unfriendly fire I’d strayed. The thing to do was to seek out more convivial company. I had dinner the next night with my friend Thomas, whom I’ve known almost twenty years and at whose wedding I was best man. A half-Burmese Londoner, he’s only been in this hemisphere about five years, and he told me that reading
Walden
recently helped reconcile him to American individualism by exhibiting it as something energetic and eccentric as well as assertive. We began to correspond about Thoreau, and that dialogue deepened what was already a great friendship. I know two actual Thoreau scholars—one whom I met in the 1990s in Reno, and another who sought me out via Facebook (before the incident in question) and with whom I’d corresponded a little. I turned to them for more informed opinions on the washing. I wasn’t going to argue about it; but I did want to know the truth for my own satisfaction.

The first acquaintance, Professor Michael Branch at the University of Nevada, Reno, was tired of hearing about the laundry: “The problem with explaining how much work the guy did is that you end up defending the wrong cause. I’ve stepped into this bear trap before,” wrote Branch. He listed some of the kinds of labor the shaggy Transcendentalist performed, including teaching, surveying, and running his family’s pencil factory. But, he cautioned, “once you make this case, you’ve accidentally blessed the idea that paying attention to the world, studying botany, and writing a shitload of amazing prose isn’t real work. Better to just say he never did a damned thing except write the century’s best book and leave it at that. Lazy fucker.”

Do we care who did the chores in any other creative household on earth? Did Dante ever take out the slops? Do we love housework that much? Or do we hate it that much? This fixation on the laundry is related to the larger question of whether artists should be good people as well as good artists, and probably the short answer is that everyone should be a
good person, but a lot of artists were only good artists (and quite a lot more were only bad artists). Whether or not they were good people, the good artists gave us something. Pablo Picasso was sometimes not very nice to his lady friends, but he could paint. I was friends with the artist and filmmaker Bruce Conner for a quarter century, and his unreasonable insistence on perfection made his work brilliant and his company exacting and sometimes terrifying.

It wasn’t as though if he hadn’t made those seminal films and assemblages he would’ve been an uncomplicated good guy; it’s not as though he was giving to art what he should have given to life; he was putting out what he had, and it was a huge and lasting gift on this impure earth, even if it came from an imperfect man. Thoreau was a moralist, a person who wrote about what we should do, how to walk, or how to fight the government about slavery; and a moralist holds himself up to a higher standard: does he, so to speak, walk his talk? Or so moralists are always tested, but their premises are right or not independent of whether or not they live up to them. Martin Luther King Jr. was right about racism and injustice whether or not he led a blameless life. Digging into his dirty laundry doesn’t undo those realities, though the FBI tried to blackmail and undermine him that way.

The second scholar I wrote to was also a Michael, Michael Sims, who was working on a book about the young Thoreau, and he was well primed for the question. “Thoreau did visit the village almost every day, and see his parents, and do chores around the house for them,” he wrote. He continued:

While he was at Walden, they were in a house he helped build the year before he moved to the cabin—he and his father mainly—so he had considerable goodwill in the bank. During his entire adult life, he paid rent while at his parents’ boarding house, and paid it faithfully, with records sometimes kept on the backs of poems or other writings. He worked in the garden, helped keep the house in good repair, provided foods from his own garden, and so on.

People did drop by the cabin to bring him food sometimes, but people dropped by each other’s houses with food all the time. It was the most common gift. He brought other people food, especially melons. (He was
legendary for his talent in raising a vast array of melons.) I don’t know if I have an actual record of the family doing his laundry, but I’ll check as I go through some of that over the next month. But I would bet they did sometimes do his laundry. He was quite emotionally dependent upon his family, especially his mother, but he also contributed constantly. When his brother died young, Henry helped take up the slack in financial help. When his father died, Henry became not only the man of the house but the major force in the pencil business (which he had already almost revolutionized with his analysis of better ways to make pencils). So I think what I’m trying to say is that even at Walden he was very much a part of the family in every way.

After looking into the laundry accusations, I opened
Walden
again and examined the section where he does his accounts, which, as the historian Richard White points out, were a sort of parody of nineteenth-century preoccupations with efficiency and profitability, with the pettiness of keeping score and the souls of bookkeepers. He mentions “washing and mending, which for the most part were done out of the house, and their bills have not yet been received.” It’s not clear if that’s out of his own cabin or his mother’s house, during the Walden era, but it suggests that maybe his washing was done by strangers in a commercial transaction, or that maybe he thought that the question of who did the laundry was amusing and made an indecipherable joke about a bill his family wasn’t really going to send.

He was, after all, the man who warned us against enterprises that required new clothes, often wore shabby ones, and was certainly not very concerned about having clean ones. He never married and did little to make work for women and did quite a bit of dirty work himself, including shoveling manure—of which he wrote, “Great thoughts hallow any labor. To-day I earned seventy-five cents heaving manure out of a pen, and made a good bargain of it.” He worked quite hard, often for his sisters’ benefit, though he also played around with the idea of work, appointing himself inspector of snowstorms and proposing that his employment could be watching the seasons, which he did with such precision, describing what bloomed when and which bird species arrived on what date in his corner of Massachusetts, that his journals have been used to chart climate change
in the present. We call that work—which was also so clearly a pleasure for him—science.

Intermittently, throughout his adult life, he was also struggling with tuberculosis, the disease that killed his older sister, Helen, in 1849 and sometimes sapped his strength long before it killed him in 1862. At the time of his death, he was lying in bed downstairs in a parlor with his younger sister Sophia at his side. Though we talk so much about the twenty-six months he dwelt at Walden Pond, he spent most of the rest of the forty-five years of his life at home with his family, as an intimate and essential part of what appears to have been an exceptionally loving group.

Labor was divided up by gender in those days, but it’s hard to argue that women always had the worst of it in an era when men did the heavy work on farms and often the dirtiest and most physically demanding work around the house (in those days of outhouses, chopping wood, shoveling ashes and coal, handling horses and livestock, butchering, pumping water, and other largely bygone chores). Everyone worked around the home, until they became so affluent no one worked beyond the symbolic femininity of needlework. In between those two poles was a plethora of families who had hired help with the housework. I don’t think women were particularly subjugated by domestic work in the centuries before housewives in the modern sense existed, though gender roles themselves deprived them of agency, voice, and rights. Thoreau’s sisters resisted and maybe overcame them without their brother’s aid.

Thoreau’s mother ran a boardinghouse, and yet another writer on Thoreau, Robert Sullivan, points out that, like a lot of nineteenth-century households, they had help, and that the Transcendentalists were uncomfortable with the hierarchy of servants and employers. (Emerson tried having the maid sit at the dinner table with the family, but the cook refused to do so.)

Perhaps Thoreau, his mother, and his sisters all had their washing done by the same servant, or servants, who Sullivan suggests were likely to be recent Irish immigrants. Ireland’s Catholics, fleeing the potato famine and British brutality, had started to arrive in the 1840s, and a torrent of desperate Irish would pour into this country for several decades. In his
journal entry for June 9, 1853, Thoreau expresses sympathy for an Irish maid named Mary who told him she quit her position on a dairy farm because she was supposed to do the washing for twenty-two people, including ten men with two pairs of dirty overalls apiece.

The project of liberation is never-ending, most urgent at its most literal but increasingly complex as it becomes metaphysical. Only free people can care about slaves or prisoners and do something about slavery and prisons, which is why the project of liberating yourself is not necessarily selfish (as long as you don’t go down that endless solitary path marked After I’m Perfect I’ll Do Something for Others, but stay on the boulevard marked My Freedom Is for Your Liberation Which I Must Also Attend to Now). On October 13, 2012, a few weeks after the unpleasant interchange about prisoners and laundry, I went to San Quentin State Prison to hear the prisoners read.

San Quentin was even more prisonlike than I’d imagined, with a patchwork of intimidating architectural styles: some crenellations like a medieval fortress, guard towers, sheer walls, razor-wire coils, warning signs, and entrance via steel gates that actually did slam shut with an echoing clang. We, the mostly female, mostly white audience for the reading, had been sent a long list of colors we were not allowed to wear: blue, of course, but so many other colors that finally only black and purple and pink and patterns seemed safe for sure, so we looked as though we were going to a funeral or a punk concert. The prisoners were wearing various shades of blue, work boots or running shoes, and some jewelry. One had a Santa beard, one had dreadlocks, and the Latino murderer had a sharp pompadour and thick mustache. Only one of them looked young.

They read in the Catholic chapel, which was cold, low slung, made of cinder blocks, with a pure white crucified Jesus on the wall and grillwork visible through the fake stained glass. A lot of the stories were moving; some were unsettling, particularly the ones in which old rages and convoluted senses of causality (as evidenced by the passive tense used to describe killing a friend) lived on and women seemed more like possessions than fellow human beings. The category of maximum-security prisoner did not describe the range of these men. I was most touched by Troy Williams’s
straightforward account of weeping when he told his daughter, via telephone, that his parole had been denied. He was fearful of being seen to cry in a tough place like prison, but someone reached out to him, and he found a little more humanity than he expected.

“What kind of a prison have I put my child in?” he asked himself, expanding the idea of prison to include the way she was tied to his fate and locked out of his life. My friend Moriah had brought me to the event; she had been the year before and was moved not just by what she heard but by the fact that the small cluster of strangers from outside was about the most significant audience these guys were going to get. She had heard about it because her daughter was in school with a girl who lived in the same household as Zoe Mullery, the creative writing teacher who had for six years or more come once a week to work with these men. One of the men wrote in his biography in the handout we all received, “I picked up a book and was able to depart the brutal confines of the penitentiary, as well as the margins of my depressed mind. Reading became an escape without my actually escaping.”

Zoe later told me that she had once looked at the history of the word
free
and it might interest me. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary, free
has the same Indo-European root as the Sanskrit word
priya
, which means “beloved” or “dear.” If you think of etymology as a family tree, the dictionary says that most descendants of that ancient ancestor describe affection, and only the Germanic and Celtic branches describe liberty. The scholars say that the word may hark back to an era when a household consisted of the free people who were members of the extended family and the unfree ones who were slaves and servants. Family members had more rights than slaves and servants, so even though “free” in the United States is often seen as meaning one who has no ties, it was once the other way around. Which is another way of saying that freedom has less to do with that Lynyrd Skynyrd “Freebird” sense of the word (in which we don’t care about prisoners or anyone else) and more to do with the idea of agency.