Book Fair: Kurp on Thoreau

I’ve never met Patrick Kurp, but I think I’ve gotten to know him over the past couple of years through my regular reading of his weblog, Anecdotal Evidence. You could say that AE is a “literary” blog, but this term is imprecise. Patrick is strong on poetry, particularly modern poetry, but he reads widely; and he is especially strong on the nature and possibility of literature, on what it means to lead a literary life. I am delighted to have Patrick here today as a contributor to the Underbelly summer Book Fair

The Journals of Henry David Thoreau was published in 14 volumes by Houghton Mifflin in 1906, 44 years after the author’s death at age 44. A century later you can still find that first edition in university libraries and discriminating book shops, where its heft and stolidity lend it a misleadingly stuffy, off-putting appearance. Its contents, more than Walden or “On Civil Disobedience,” are the essential Thoreau -- flinty, funny, closely observed, beautifully written. What Whitman said of Leaves of Grass may be said with greater justice of the Journals: "This is no book, / Who touches this touches a man." The first entry, written when Thoreau was 20 and newly graduated from Harvard, is dated Oct. 22, 1837:

“`What are you doing now?’ he asked. `Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry to-day.

“He” is Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau’s mentor, neighbor, rival and landlord. One of many ways to read the Journals is as Thoreau’s prolonged wrestling match with Emerson, his senior by 14 years. Thoreau starts, like his friend, as a good transcendentalist, an heir of the English Romantics and German idealism. Emerson was merely the catalyst; Thoreau, the unprecedented American compound. Read him with precursors and historical context in mind, but mostly read him as a word-generating wonder of nature. His published Journals total more than 2 million words, a bottomless tonic for readers weary of postmodernism. At the bottom of the year, on Dec. 26, 1854, he writes:

I went to walk in the woods with R. It was wonderfully warm and pleasant, and the cockerels crowed just as in a spring day at home. I felt the winter breaking up in me, and if I had been at home I should have tried to write poetry.

A week and a half later, on Jan. 7, 1855, he notes:

The delicious, soft, spring-suggesting air, -- how it fills my veins with life! Life becomes again credible to me.

Thoreau is read as a naturalist, folksy philosopher, proto-environmentalist, anarchist, cranky Yankee and abolitionist. All are true but incomplete. What unifies them is Thoreau the writer. In the Journals you witness his evolution from callow romantic poseur to a prose artist of the first rank. Readers of the Journals tend either to favor the earlier, self-consciously “philosophical” years, or the later, more densely scientific passages. I’m a partisan of the latter, though the demarcation is never absolute. His best biographer, Robert D. Richardson, has called the Journals “a vast accumulation of fact and observation across which Thoreau could strike a line of purpose at any time.” They are the American volume to take to that bookless desert island, and Thoreau is the master of American prose, his only rivals being Lincoln and Henry James. Here, chosen at random (Sept. 25, 1851), is a sample:

Some men are excited by the smell of burning powder, but I thought in my dream last night how much saner to be excited by the smell of new bread.

Afterthought: For those not ready to tackle the 14-volume Houghton Mifflin edition, there is a crisply-edited one-volume Penguin edition of the journal from 1851 (link). Again, all the Book Fair posts here.