Walden, By Way of Salinas

A conversation between Henry David Thoreau and John Steinbeck

There is a waiting room, somewhere past the last chapter, reserved for writers who described the American landscape so lovingly that the country turned around and used their sentences to sell it calendars. Ansel Adams is in there, permanently trying to leave. So is Willa Cather. And in one corner, by a window that looks out on either a pond or a wheat field depending on the light, sit Henry David Thoreau and John Steinbeck, who have been waiting one hundred and eleven years to have this argument.

Thoreau got there first, which he will not let anyone forget. He arrived in 1862, thin as a bean pole, having contracted the tuberculosis that killed him while counting the rings of a tree stump in a snowstorm, because someone needed to know exactly how old the tree was and it might as well be him. Steinbeck came later, in 1968, off a bad heart and a good Nobel Prize, still faintly smelling of the outboard motor fuel from a boat he and a marine biologist named Ed Ricketts had taken into the Gulf of California to look at starfish and conclude, cheerfully, that most human suffering comes from asking nature to mean something.

This is, in fact, more or less where the conversation begins.

"You spent two years at a pond a mile and a half from your mother's kitchen," Steinbeck says, "and wrote a book that's been handed to every friendless fifteen-year-old boy in America ever since, to tell him society's a swindle and he was right to feel that way about it. I drove the whole country in a camper with a French poodle who won most of our arguments, and wrote a book that got handed to that same boy's grandfather. Between us we've raised about three generations of young men convinced the trouble is always the neighbors."

"Walden is not a brief against neighbors," Thoreau says. "It is an account book. Twenty-eight dollars and twelve cents, total, for the house, and I named every board. I did not ask the boy to despise the village. I asked him to notice what the village was billing him, and for what."

"Twelve cents itemized, and not one line for who split the wood."

"I split the wood."

"I know. It's in the book. Twice, so nobody'd miss it."

Here it should be said, in the interest of literary honesty, that these two men would have despised each other's company within about four minutes of actual acquaintance, and might have been correct to. Thoreau surveyed land for a living — walked it, measured it, pounded stakes into it — and concluded from long practice that the only entanglement worth having with the American landscape was a private, nearly monastic one, a man and a hoe and a bean row and the sound of his own unbothered mind. Steinbeck grew up watching that same landscape get surveyed, measured, and staked by banks, and concluded that private communion with nature was a luxury unavailable to anyone who did not already own the pond. Thoreau went to Walden to prove a man could need almost nothing. Steinbeck wrote about people who needed almost nothing and were dying of it.

"You want to know what I truly think of Walden," Steinbeck says. "I think it's the finest real-estate listing in American letters. One careful owner, exceptional light, previous tenant achieved enlightenment, some assembly required. It still shows better than any cabin I ever slept a night in — and I slept in plenty that had actual families going hungry inside them."

"And I have read The Grapes of Wrath," Thoreau says. "A magnificent, aching ledger of what is done to men when land becomes property instead of a trust. Which is my argument, sir, proven at the scale of a continent instead of a woodlot. I congratulate you on the scale. I do not envy you the proof."

This lands closer to a truce than either man expected, and it is worth pausing on, because it is the actual hinge of the thing. Thoreau's nature is a corrective — an answer to the fever of getting and spending, taken privately, one man at a time, on the theory that if enough individuals refuse the fever the society built on it will have to change too, eventually, embarrassedly. Steinbeck's nature is a diagnosis. He does not think the Joads failed to achieve a proper transcendental relationship with the earth of Oklahoma. He thinks the earth of Oklahoma was mortgaged out from under them by men in county seats who had never once stood in it, and that no amount of correct private feeling about beans was going to fix a problem that was actually about deeds and dust and the Bank, which in his telling becomes a kind of impersonal weather system all its own, a thing that "breathed through the country" — Thoreau's storms are moral tutors; Steinbeck's storm is foreclosure.

"You had one virtue I lacked," Steinbeck admits. "You never once let a banker into the argument. Every sentence in Walden reads like Concord never heard of a railroad. That's the cleanest hypocrisy in American prose — a man living free of commerce a mile and a half from a train that ran four times a day past his window, on land he didn't own, borrowed from a friend who did just fine out of commerce, thank you."

"I heard the whistle," Thoreau says. "I used it — as a man notes weather, and does not mistake the weather for his master. I did not pretend the rail was absent. I declined to let it set the hour of my rising. That is the whole of the discipline, and it costs nothing to attempt. Not the absence of the world. The refusal to be set by it."

"That refusal comes cheap to a Harvard man with a garden a mile from his mother's stove, who could walk to town for pie the minute self-reliance got tiresome — which, by your own journal, it regularly did. My people didn't get to decline being set by the world. The world came and set them. At the point of a deputy's gun, if you want to call that weather too."

A worse essay lets Steinbeck win here — the sociological knockout, the transcendentalist proven naïve, a closing shot of Thoreau chastened at his pond while the wretched of the earth stream past on Highway 66. Both men deserve better than that. The inner weather is the one country a man can't be evicted from — small comfort across a Dust Bowl, but the one thing tyranny never fully takes. Tom Joad's closing vow — wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there — is Thoreau's self-reliant soul in a workman's coat, on loan through Casy, the ex-preacher, in a jail cell: a fellow ain't got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody. Steinbeck always claimed he dealt only in biology, tide pools, and Ed Ricketts's refusal to ask what anything ought to be. And yet, despite himself, he kept writing transcendentalists in overalls.

"You stole from me," Thoreau says, and for the first time looks something like pleased.

"I stole from Ricketts, who never read a word of yours and would've found you unbearable inside ten minutes. He taught me a starfish doesn't sin. So maybe the Joads didn't either — they just got rained on by other men's arithmetic, same as I told you. That's a marine biologist declining to moralize a tide pool. It is not your transcendentalism, whatever you'd like to call it after the fact."

"Call it what you like. Waders or a toga, it is the same animal: the conviction that land is not merely a ledger, that it holds a claim on a man older than any claim he can file at the county courthouse. You arrived by way of a starfish. I arrived by way of a bean. History, I imagine, will note only that we arrived."

Steinbeck, to his credit, laughs — a real laugh, the kind that surprises the laugher.

"All right," he says. "Here's where we actually part ways, and I'll say it plain, because plain is the only way I know how to say anything. You went to the woods to strip life down to what's essential, on the theory the essential is where truth lives. I've spent my whole life suspicious of essential. Way I see it, essential is a story rich men tell poor men to make the poverty sound like a philosophy they chose. I never once wanted less for anybody. I wanted the Joads to have more — a house, a wage, a doctor for the baby that doesn't survive the flood in my closing chapter. I wrote that chapter with a rage I've never entirely put down, and no pond, however clear, was going to fix what made me write it."

Thoreau is quiet for a moment. Even a century past caring what people think of him, he minds this one.

"I did not ask the poor to want less," he says, finally, and this time there is no aphorism ready, which for Thoreau is itself a kind of confession. "I asked the comfortable to notice how little was actually required for the thing they called comfort — so the surplus, and there is always a surplus, might be seen for what it is. Not a reward. An excess, kept on a shelf while other men's children go barefoot in your closing chapter. Simplicity was never a sermon for Tom Joad. It was a sermon for the man who owned the land Tom Joad worked, and could not say why he needed forty thousand acres of it to feel safe. I have preached to the wrong congregation for two centuries running. That is not a flaw in the doctrine. That is a flaw in who framed it for sale, and hung it, eventually, on a poster."

It's the closest thing to a confession either man will offer, and it explains why these two writers keep getting handed to Americans as opposites — the hermit and the reporter, the pond and the highway — when they were actually running the same experiment from opposite ends of the American income distribution. Both men distrusted the story the country told about itself: that the vastness of the land was proof of its virtue, that a continent so wide must contain a wideness of soul to match, manifest and destined. Thoreau tested that story with a hoe, alone, and found it could not survive a man actually counting his own needs. Steinbeck tested it with a truck full of families evicted from their own myth, and found it could not survive contact with a bank examiner. Both, oddly, believed the fix was the same: attention. Thoreau's word for it was "wakefulness." Steinbeck, through Casy, called it trying to see "what they was doing, without no jedgment."

"I will grant you this," Thoreau says. "You never once described a landscape as beautiful without also naming who could not afford to stand in it."

"And I'll grant you this," Steinbeck says. "You never once described a bean row without making a man feel he'd wasted his whole life buying furniture."

There is a pause after that — the kind two men take when they have reached the friendly part of an argument and do not quite trust it yet. It is Thoreau who breaks it, and he does not do it kindly. Or rather, he does it in the only kind way available to him, which is to ask the thing straight.

"May I put an ungenerous question to you."

"You've been putting them to me for the length of this essay."

"This one has a name. Vietnam."

Steinbeck says nothing for a moment. Outside, the light is doing whatever it is doing — pond, lettuce field, take your pick.

"I went to jail one night," Thoreau says, "rather than pay a tax that would have bought one more bullet for a war I considered a theft of land — Mexico's, wanted for the trouble of wanting it. I wrote an essay about that night that has outlived me by some distance. You spent a career teaching this country to weep for people run off their land by other men's greed. And near the end of your life you went to a country on the far side of the world and wrote dispatches that cheered on a war that burned that country's land to ash to keep it out of the wrong hands. I know your son was there, in uniform, and that the two of you did not agree about it, and that the disagreement had not resolved when you died. I am not asking to score a point. I am asking because I do not understand it, and because you, of everyone in this room, ought to be the one who could explain it to me."

"I don't have the answer you're fishing for," Steinbeck says, finally. "I told myself it was a promise — you make a promise to stand by a place, you keep it, same as you'd keep one to a neighbor you weren't altogether sure you liked. My boy went over believing something different than I did, and his letters home took some of the shine off what I believed, though I never once told him that plainly, in words he'd have recognized as me backing down. I kept telling myself I was watching what Ed and I watched in the Gulf — men doing what the tide made them do, no judgment in it. Took me the better part of two years to understand that was a coward's peace, dressed up as biology so I wouldn't have to call it what it was. I died before it ended, Henry. I don't know what I'd have said if I'd lived to see how it came out. Maybe nothing. Maybe I'd have written another closing chapter and called us even. I don't know. I've had a hundred years in this room to work on an answer, and I still don't have one worth giving you."

Thoreau does not have a rejoinder for this, which has not happened in this room in a hundred and eleven years, and does not happen again for the rest of the afternoon. Neither man moves to fill the silence or end it. Somewhere, right on schedule, a calendar company is already deciding which one of them gets July.

A note on the form: this piece is a work of imaginative nonfiction. The dialogue is invented, in the tradition of imagined-encounter essays, to explore a real intellectual kinship and real tension between two writers who never met. The biographical facts referenced — Thoreau's night in jail over the poll tax and the Mexican war, the cost breakdown of the Walden house, the published quotations from Walden and The Grapes of Wrath, and Steinbeck's 1966–67 dispatches from Vietnam alongside his son's own service and dissent there — are accurate. Steinbeck died in December 1968, before the war ended.