Taking the rough with the smooth

In The Ambassadors, Henry James sends Lewis Lambert Strether from Boston to Paris to retrieve Chad Newsome, the wayward heir to a factory at Woollett, Massachusetts. Strether never names the ‘small, trivial rather ridiculous object of the commonest domestic use’ that has enriched the Newsomes, though he does say that it is not clothes pins, baking soda or shoe polish. In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster identifies this ambiguity with James’s ‘uninvolved’ style, then suggests a button hook. Possible resolutions of the ‘Woollett Question’ also include safety matches, alarm clocks, toothpicks and, in a David Lodge campus satire, a chamber pot. I suggest another item from the booming industrial towns of Massachusetts, and a possible inspiration for the ‘obstinate’ runaway, Chad Newsome.

Henry David Thoreau was heir to the Thoreau Pencil Company of Concord, Massachusetts. There was money in wood — the forests of New England supplied material for construction, fuel, and railway sleepers — and that was the problem. Born in 1817, Thoreau was so much the creature of factory-made ‘perfectedness’ that he could pick up by feel alone ‘a dozen pencils at every grasp’. Yet he hated the materialism and hypocrisy of the ‘compact system of civil society’.

Thoreau’s mentor Emerson, who thought that ‘the powers that make a capitalist are metaphysical’, had invested in two plots in the woods near Concord. In 1846, Thoreau settled on one of them, by Walden Pond. With Emersonian ‘self-reliance’ as his ‘Foundation and Ground-Plan’, and Emersonian white pines as his cabin walls, Thoreau built the ‘little world’ of Walden (1854): the bean patch, the mystical botanising, the yogic reverie. Life in the woods sharpened his mind like a pencil at a lathe. ‘Time is but a dream I go fishing in… Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.’

The legend also remains.