Maatstaf. Jaargang 30

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Harold Beaver Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862): The American art of autobiography

De Tocqueville was both logical, in his coolly Cartesian manner, and prophetic. The notion that fiction would somehow give way to non-fiction in the American republic had been the key to his analysis of its fledgling literary scene. Why? Because among a democratic people, he argued, poetry would not be fed with legends or old traditions. The poet would not ‘attempt to people the universe with supernatural beings’. Myth, therefore, was out; so was romance. ‘The destinies of mankind’ he prophecied,

- man himself, taken aloof from his country and his age, and standing in the presence of Nature and of God, with his passions, his doubts, his rare prosperities and inconceivable wretchedness - will become the chief, if not the sole, theme of poetry amongst these nations.^1.

Resounding words, to be echoed independently by a native American. There will come a time, Emerson wrote in his journal, when ‘novels will give way, by and by, to diaries and autobiographies; - captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experience that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly!’^2. That knowing man, of course, was Emerson himself. But another, amazingly, was to be his disciple and lodger and errand-boy, Henry David Thoreau. It was young Thoreau who excelled above all, by the consensus of later generations, at discriminating among his experiences and recording truth truly.

The publication last year of the first volume of Thoreau's Journal (1837-1844), in a handsome and textually form,^3. is a good moment to reassess the man who wrote some two million words in thirty-nine notebooks, found packed at his death in a home-made box. They were his life's soliloquy: ‘“Says I to myself” schould be the motto of my journal’ (11 November 1851). It was the one job he worked at steadily for twenty-four years (1837-1861). At times he suspected that he lived only for them. Like Walden pond itself, they were the mirror of his mind's eye:

The lake is a mirror in the breast of nature, as if there were there nothing to be concealed. All the sins of the wood are washed out in it. See how the woods form an amphitheatre about it - and it becomes an arena for all the genialness of nature. It is the earth's liquid eye - it is blue or grey, or black as I choose my time. In the night it is my more than forty feet reflector.
(2 December 1840)

Or was there something narcissistic about this obsession? Something close to preening before his diary?

Certainly he played a role. ‘I am startled when I consider how little I am actually concerned about the things I write in my journal’ (18 June 1840). But is was precisely in the journal that he learnt the equivocal role of the personal pronoun, which is the opening theme of

1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in Ameca, tr. Henry Reeve, 2 vols (New York: Knopf, 1945), vol. ii, book 1, ch. xvii, p. 81.

2. W.H. Gilman, ed., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 13 vols (Harvard University Press, 1960), vol. viii, pp. 418-19.

3. In The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau (Princeton University Press, 1981), under the general editorship of John C. Broderick. Entries after 1844 are quoted from The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, eds Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen, 14 vols (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906).

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Walden. Who is this authorial ‘I’? What is this all-reflective and reflexive ‘eye’? (‘I must confess there is nothing so strange to me as my own body - I love any other piece of nature, almost, better’: 21 February 1842.) Quite consciously he posed now as some American St. Francis, now as some latterday Scheherazade, now as some wild Indian of the woods. Watch him watching himself:

Drifting in a sultry day on the sluggish waters of the pond, I almost cease to live - and begin to be. A boat-man stretched on the deck of his craft, and dallying with the noon, would be as apt an emblem of eternity for me, as the serpent with his tail in his mouth. I am never so prone to lose my identity. I am dissolved in the haze.
(4 April 1839)

Or:

I sit in my boat on walden - playing the flute this evening - and see the perch, which I seem to have charmed, hovering around me - and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom - and I feel that nothing but the wildest imagination can conceive of the manner of life we are living. Nature is a wizzard. The Concord nights are stranger than the Arabian nights.
(27 May 1841)

His most sustained passage on the art of journal-keeping runs as follows:

My Journal is that of me which would else spill over and run to waste. - gleanings from the field which in action I reap. I must not live for it, but in it for the gods - They are my correspondent to whom daily I send off this sheet post-paid. I am clerk in their cointing room and at evening transfer the account from day-book to ledger.
It is as a leaf which hangs over my head in the path - I bend the twig and write my prayers on it then letting it go the bough springs up and shows the scrawl to heaven. As if it were not kept shut in my desk - but were as public a leaf as any in nature - it is papyrus by the river side - it is vellum in the pastures - it is parchment on the hills - I find it every where as free as the leaves which troop along the lanes in autumn - The crow - the goose - the eagle - carry my quill - and the wind blows the leaves - as far as I go - Or if my imagination does not soar, but gropes in slime and mud - then I write with a reed.
(8 February 1841)

This art, then, psychologically, is founded on two principles: that of accountancy and of a kind of intellectual chastity. It is a matter of saving - not spending - both cash and sexual resources; of orgasms withheld; of dissolution and dissipation averted. For a man as notoriously anti-bourgeois as Thoreau these are mighty bourgeois principles. Yet the insertion of ‘prayers’ and that springing bough also add a transcendent touch. What Thoreau is really rewriting in his sly way, is the parable of the sower. He too is a sower of the word: only he writes on nature (whether paper or vellum), by means of nature (whether by quill or reed), of the things of nature. Such is the American parable of self-transcendence. His model, however, was strictly European and classical. It was the art of the pensée, or epigram, from which Montaigne and Bacon gamered the raw material for their essais/essays. Thoreau cannot resist the closure of an aphorism and a compendium of tags might be picked from his journal to inscribe on every page of the calendar for years. There is always wit, and sometimes even the hint of a wise-crack:

An honest misunderstanding is often the ground of future intercourse.
You cannot rob a man of anything which he will miss.

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He who resists not at all will never surrender. He will get to the goal first who stands stillest.
When a dog rans at you whistle for him. Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried.
We cannot well do without our sins, they are the highway of our virtue.
A child asked its father what became of the old moon, and he said it was cut up into stars.

There is a strong and consistent strain of a developing morality here. Not all are as sententious, or as contentious for that matter. Here was the stuff to be developed at book length. But how, that was the question. As A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) seemed to prove, he was a failure as a writer. Of a print run of a mere thousand, 706 copies were returned to him:

Of the remaining two hundred and ninety and odd, seventy-five were given away, the rest sold. I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself. Is it not well that the author should behold the fruits of his labor? My works are piled up on one side of my chamber half as high as my head, my opera omnia. This is authorship; these are the work of my brain.
(28 October 1853)

He could not, it seemed, construct a book, He could not plot an organic design to contain and develop his pensées. His journal entries were always of the here and now, as an epiphany or illumination: what he was to call in Walden ‘the nick of the time’, ‘the meeting of two etemities, the past and future, which is pricisely the present moment’. Even there he ran in to a Wordsworthian problem. How should he account for the present? Should he act now or postpone the recollection to future tranquillity? His answer, significantly, was both. ‘It is fatal to the writer to be too much possessed by his thought. Things must lie a little remote to be described’ (11 November 1851). Or again:

I would fain make two reports in my Journal, first the incidents and observations of today; and by tomorrow I review the same and record what was omitted before, which will often be the most significant and poetic part. I do not know at first what it is that charms me. The men and things of today are wont to lie fairer and truer in tomorrow's memory.
(27 March 1857)

Facts were recalcitrant. Thoreau could report amusing gossip as well as anyone: of a kitten running berserk and leaping from the attic window, of his mother's reminiscences, or of his occasionally tetchy relations with Emerson, ‘I doubt if Emerson could trundle a wheelbarrow through the streets,’ he grambled, ‘because it would be out of character’ (30 January 1852).

Talked, of tried to talk, with R.W.E. Lost my time - nay, almost my identity. He, assuming a false opposition where there was no difference of opinion, talked to the wind - told me what I knew - and I lost my time trying to imagine myself somebody else to oppose him.
(24 May 1853)

But he wanted more than facts, more than exact widths and lengths of cascades or the graph-like statistics (he became a surveyor by profession) of the ‘Height of Cliff Hill above the River’ (15 November 1840). Emerson observed this side of Thoreau teasingly in his own journal:

Yesterday to the Sawmill Brook with Henry. He was in search of yellow violet (pubescens) and menyanthes which he waded into the water for; and which he concluded, on examination, had been out five days. Having found his flowers, he drew out of his breast pocket his diary and read the names of all

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the plants that should bloom this day, May 20; whereof he keeps account as a banker when his notes fall due; Rubus triflora, Quercus, Vaccinium etc. The Cypripedium not due till tomorrow. Then we diverged to the brook, where was Viburnum dentatum, Arrow-wood.
(21 May 1856)

Thoreau was well aware of the danger: of disappearing in a void between the inert ‘fact’ and the aspiring pensée:

I, too, would fain set down something beside facts. Facts should only be as the frame to my pictures; they should be material to the mythology which I am writing; not facts to assist men to make money, farmers to farm profitably, in any common sense; facts to teil who I am, and where I have been or what I have thought: as now the bell rings for evening meeting, and its volumes of sound, like smoke which rises from where a cannon is fired, make the tent in which I dwell. My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologie. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought, - with these I deal.
(9 November 1851)

Myths too were real; and the ‘mythology’ he was writing by that time was of Concord, or more precisely of Walden. That is why he refused to busy himself, to practice his profession. ‘The art of life, of a poet's life,’ he wrote, ‘is, not having anything to do, to do something’ (29 April 1852).

It is in this, and only in this, sense that Thoreau was drop-out:

I am living this 27th June 1840 - a dull cloudy day - and no sun shining. The clink of the smith's hammer sounds feebly over the roofs, and the wind is sighing gently as if dreaming of cheerfuller days. The farmer is ploughing in yonder field - craftsmen are busy in the shops - the trader stands behind the counter - and all works go steadily forward - But I will have nothing to do - I will teil fortune that I play no game with her, and she may reach me in my Asia of serenity and indolence if she can.

Finally he would not even budge from Concord: neither east nor west, neither to Europe nor ‘to Califomia or Pike's Peak’. Concord was his mythology; all mythology could be recovered in Concord. ‘Of what consequence’, he asked, ‘whether I stand on London bridge for the next century - or look into the depths of this bubbling spring which I have laid open with my hoe?’ (18 June 1840). Or again: ‘Then I am sure that what we observe at home, if we observe anything, is of more importance than what we observe abroad. The far-fetched is of the least value’ (30 January 1852). Or again:

I think I would rather watch the motions of these cows in their pasture for a day, which I now see all headed one way and slowly advancing - watch them and project their course carefully on a chart, and report all their behavior faithfully - than wander to Europe or Asia and watch other motions there; for it is only ourselves that we report in either case, and perchance we shall report a more restless and worthless self in the latter case than in the first.
(5 October 1856)

There was something self-defensive about all this, of course. Thoreau did eventually travel to Maine, to Canada, even (in the final extremities of the tuberculosis which killed him) to Minnesota. But he had no need to travel, he realized, to discover the extraordinary social and racial perversities of the world:

About three weeks ago my indignation was roused by hearing that one of my townsmen, notorious for meanness, was endeavoring to

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get and keep a premium of four dollars which a poor Irish laborer whom he hired had gained by fifteen minutes' spading at our Agricultural Fair. Tonight a free colored woman is lodging at our house, whose errand to the North is to get money to buy her husband, who is a slave to one Moore in Norfolk, Virginia. She persuaded Moore, though not a kind master, to buy him that he might not be sold further South. Moore paid six hundred dollars for him, but asks eight hundred.
(1 November 1853)

He explodes with pent up venom at the very thought of the Massachusetts govemment that connived at the Fugitive Slave Act. The politics of the age, as much as anything, prompted him to piek up Montaigne's old conundrum: who then is the Indian? who is the wild man? who is the cannibal? For the Indian reigned supreme in his mythology. All vestiges of his past (in pestles, or arrowheads, or soapstone sherds) were sacred. He longed to meet him in the woods ‘like wild caribous and moose’ (18 June 1840). The whole aim and imaginative effort of his life was to make himself worthy of the Indian.

‘The charm of the Indian to me’, he noted in Emerson's handsome house, ‘is that he stands free and unconstrained in nature - is her inhabitant - and not her guest - and wears her easily and gracefully’ (26 April 1841). His was the romantic presence that haunted the American wilderness, that wooed him away from the mild Lake Poets. ‘It is only the white man's poetry - we want the Indian's report. Wordsworth is too tame for the Chippeway’ (18 August 1841). Long extinct tribes flitted around him, over him:

Strange spirits - daemons - whose eyes could never meet mine. With another nature - and another fate than mine - The crows flew over the edge of the woods, and wheeling over my head seemed to rebuke - as dark winged spirits more akin to the Indian than I. Perhaps only the present disguise of the Indian -
(19 March 1842)

‘Why there is only so much of Indian America left -’ he concluded, ‘as there is of the American Indian in the character of this generation.’

That was to be his life-long task. Thoreau left behind a scrap-book of some 2,800 pages in eleven notebooks, entitled ‘Extracts relating to the Indians’ (from Cartier, Champlain, the Jesuit Relations, Gookin, Lewis and Clark, Heckewelder, Schoolcraft, Morgan, etc. etc.). He combed the early sources, sorted and jotted, but the magnum opus was never completed. He himself became the crabbiest amalgam: part research student and writer, part handyman and naturalist-as-Indian. To which Emerson, in his memorial address, bore witness:

He knew how to sit immovable, a part of the rock he rested on, until the bird, the reptile, the fish, which had retired from him, should come back and resume its habits, nay, moved by curiosity, should come to him and watch him.
It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. He knew every track in the snow or on the ground, and what creature had taken this path before him... Under his arm he carried an old music-book to press plants; in his pocket, his diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife, and twine. He wore a straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray trousers, to brave scrub-oaks and smilax, and to climb a tree for a hawk's or a squirrel's nest. He waded into the pool for the waterplants, and his strong legs were no insignificant part of his armor...
He confessed that he sometimes felt like a hound or a panther, and, if bom among Indians, would have been a fell hunter. But,

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restrained by his Massachusetts culture, he played out the game in this mild form of botany and ichthyology.

That was the paradox. He longed to be both a part of the wilderness and surveyor of the wilderness, both hunter and scientist. He longed to expose primeval mysteries, while simultaneously reinstating and confirming those mysteries. As he put it in Walden:

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable... We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

All was paradox, as the whole conservationist movement today (which is his heir) remains a paradox. Thoreau was gloomily aware of his so-called faults:

My faults are:
Paradoxes - saying just the opposite - a style which may be imitated.
Ingenious.
Playing with words - getting the laugh - not always simple, strong, and broad.
Using current phrases and maxims, when I should speak for myself.
Not always earnest.
‘In short,’ ‘in fact,’ ‘alas!’ etc.
Want of conciseness.
(2 September 1854)

It raises a smile to see a writer so self-consciously and insistently niggling away at his ‘faults’. If they ever seem faults, that can only be through their mild excess. We value Thoreau as a writer precisely because of his ingenuity, his verbal play, his sly wit, his immaculate concision, and, above all, his paradoxical opposition to the ruling dogmas of his age.

What in moments of introspection he most criticised, readers today are most likely to regard as his greatest strengths. Precisely today the republication of his journal, in however many volumes, will seem neither paradoxical nor remotely excessive.