Whatever I May Call You

Oct 27

Written By LoLC

Visiting historic places can evoke a sense of history that we cannot otherwise know. When we can occupy personal spaces, and experience how historical people inhabited these same rooms and landscapes, we can see aspects that inspired them, gain fresh perspectives, and make new connections. When a historic home, such as the Emerson House, retains the personal objects used by the people who lived there hundreds of years ago, a further contextualized layer is added to our experiences of the past anchored in place. The Emerson House collection bears many testaments to Henry David Thoreau’s close friendship with the family, and the times he resided together with them in their home. Other than his birthplace—where the Thoreau family resided briefly in his infancy—the Emerson House is currently the only home that Thoreau lived in that is open to the public as a museum. It was a place that he frequently visited, where he joined in conversation, made things with his hands, presented lectures, and partook in everyday life.

Recently, a visitor to the Emerson House was inspired to ask if Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau called one another “Waldo” and “Henry” when they were in a room together. To have been a fly on the wall! This is one thing that the house itself can’t tell us. Without time travel, we can never know the actual words spoken between the two men in a period on the cusp of sound recording, but personal documents— letters and journals—can offer us insight.

We found a somewhat surprising answer. In his book Solid Seasons: The Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jeffrey S. Cramer points to the first letter in which Thoreau addressed Emerson by his diminutive name, “Waldo.” Thoreau began, “For I think I have heard that that is your name” (qtd in Cramer, page 70). This letter was written in 1848, when Emerson was lecturing in Europe and Thoreau was in residence at the Emerson home, staying with Emerson’s wife, Lidian, and their children at Emerson’s request. This was nearly eleven years after the two men met in 1837; seven years after Thoreau had first come to live with the Emersons in 1841; six years after the friends had mourned together the double loss of Thoreau’s brother John and the Emersons’ eldest son Waldo in January 1842; and three years after Thoreau had moved into his house on Emerson’s Walden Pond wood lot. Letters were a more formal mode of communication, but, for many years, Thoreau had been fondly called “Henry” by Ralph Waldo and Lidian Emerson, and was known as “Uncle Henry” to their young children (p. 38).

Previously, Thoreau had addressed his letters to Emerson, “My Dear Friend” (pp. 42, 69). This was perhaps owing to his deference to his elder and esteemed friend, who was fourteen years older than Thoreau. It was a term that carried deep affection, reflecting their familial relations and intimate kinship, for Thoreau continued, “Whatever I may call you, I know you better than I know your name” (p. 70). Thoreau would oftentimes, thereafter, refer to Waldo as “my friend,” (rather than by name) in his journal.

More than fifteen years after his friend’s death, Emerson, then 75 years old and suffering from aphasia, could no longer recall Henry Thoreau’s name. Although he had to call into the next room to ask Lidian to supply the words ‘Henry Thoreau,’ Emerson remembered his “best friend” no matter what he was called (p. 102).

— K.L. Martin, PhD, Emerson House guide