"When He Became My Enemy": Emerson and Thoreau, 1848-49

Abstract

T HE friendship of Emerson and Thoreau, like the relationship between Hawthorne and Melville or Fitzgerald and Hemingway, is a rich event in literary history, one important not only for what drew the men together but also for what drove them apart. Particularly close during the late 1830s and early 1840s, Emerson and Thoreau had become seriously estranged from one another by 1850 and never managed to reestablish their old intimacy thereafter, although they continued to be close in some ways until Thoreau's death in 1862. The impact of their falling out appears to have been more personally devastating to Thoreau, for Emerson was clearly the great companion of his early years, the one on whom he had most staked his intense aspirations for a transcendental friendship. For Emerson, on the other hand, Thoreau, though clearly a central figure in the older man's life, was finally only one of several younger friends and proteges who ultimately proved to be personal and professional disappointments to him. Although the significance of Emerson and Thoreau's estrangement has been discussed and the overall course of their relationship well charted, the specific origins of their quarrel have remained obscure. Joel Porte, for example, who has aptly demonstrated that the writers' conflict lay at the heart of a deep philosophical split within American romanticism, one that perhaps doomed the transcendentalists to a minor role in the culture of their day, observes that What exactly happened to cause a blowup of the friendship between the two no one knows, and Walter Harding,