Experiencing nature with Peter the Wild Boy - John Williams argues with Emerson and Thoreau

Butcher’s Crossing begins with a pair of epigrams that, if properly understood, could replace the novel, although I had to read the novel to understand them, so what good do they do?  The first is a long slab of Emerson’s “Nature” which can be compressed thusly: “satisfaction… tranquil… halcyons… Indian summer… knapsack of custom… sanctity which shames our religions… judges like a god.”  Strange, gassy stuff.  The second epigram is a little different.  Poets, Emerson, perhaps, prescribe nature as “the grand cure” for “sick spirits”:

But who froze to death my teamster on the prairie?  And who made an idiot of Peter the Wild Boy?

This is so odd that it can only come from Herman Melville, stripped out of who knows what context from The Confidence Man (1857).  Will Andrews, the center of Butcher’s Crossing, abandons the knapsack of custom for the wilderness, for its Emersonian judgment, and his sick spirit is, in fact, cured, but the medicine has some powerful side effects.

In Butcher’s Crossing, the authentic experience of Nature destroys the self.  Personality is effaced by wildness.  All of the characters, not just Andrews, regress in the wild.  Or perhaps they do move forward, stepping out of their humanity, beyond personality, beyond thought.  Thoreau develops an idea like this in the “Higher Laws” chapter of Walden, the chapter I found hardest to understand.

Thoreau, however, also associated experience of nature with knowledge of nature:

Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation.  She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. (“Higher Laws,” first paragraph)

This comes just after Thoreau resists the temptation to devour alive a woodchuck, but I think he means this.  Thoreau became an expert naturalist.  Andrews approaches nature with expectations, but knows nothing, absolutely nothing, and he learns nothing about nature along the way.  Everything he learns in the novel – how to ride a horse, how to skin a buffalo – only leads to further mental numbness.  Perhaps that is what he was seeking.

Andrews' ignorance extends far past nature:

Soon, almost to his surprise, it occurred to Andrews that he did not know the Bible well enough to talk about it even in Charley Hoge’s terms – had not, in fact, ever read it with any degree of thoroughness.   His father had encouraged his reading of Mr. Emerson, but had not, to his recollection, insisted that he read the Bible. (45)

Andrews’ father is a Unitarian minister!  I even wonder how well Andrews read Emerson.*  Further down on the same page, Andrews remembers his attempts to “become a transparent eyeball” (a “phrase from a lecture by Mr. Emerson that he had attended”, emphasis mine) in “the fields and woods” near Cambridge.**  Andrews never reads anything, or writes anything.  At Harvard he feels nothing but “meanness and constriction.”  Buried in his buffalo hide sleeping bag, waiting out a Rocky Mountain blizzard (182-3), Andrews is entirely constrained, but there is no meanness, nothing outside himself.

I believe Williams is critiquing the fecklessness of one side of Emerson and Thoreau’s response to nature.  He wants to bring the danger and wildness back into the picture.  Thoreau seems to have learned a similar lesson after he wrote Walden, but I have only read passages of the “Ktaadn” chapter of The Maine Woods, which contains Thoreau’s shattering encounter with real wilderness, so I cannot be sure.  Williams carefully outlines the negative space of an alternative path.  Tomorrow, I will glance at another disciple of Emerson and Thoreau, another authentic encounter with Nature, but one that is brimming with personality.

*  Or how well anyone reads anything.  See p. 199, when Andrews asks Charley to read something from his Bible.

**  A later, almost literal exercise in transparent eyeballing results in a three-day snow blindness (202).   Who made an idiot of Peter the Wild Boy?

The Wuthering Expectations Best of 2009

Three extra-large Humiliations were crossed off my list: Walden, The Scarlet Letter, and The Flowers of Evil, all highly rewarding.  Let's set those aside, though. 

Some fleeting highlights:

1. Thoreau recommends the "rich sweet cider" of the frozen-thawed apple.  "Your jaws are the cider-press."  ("Wild Apples").

2.  Charles Baudelaire smashes an itinerant glass saleman's backback of samples with a flower pot, just to hear the smash ("as of lightning striking a crystal palace"), to introduce some beauty into this ugly world of ours. "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!"  (Paris Spleen, "The Bad Glazier").

3. We spend eighteen hours or so sitting next to Judge Pyncheon.  Hawthorne tells us about the Judge's big day.  They're going to nominate him for Governor!  Why won't Judge Pyncheon move?  "Rise up, Judge Pyncheon!" (Chapter 18 of Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables).

4. A Kazakh railroad worker battles his prize bull camel.  We gaze upon a sturgeon; the sturgeon gazes upon us.  (Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years).

5.  All that Yiddish literature, so much, so good.  The futile attempt of I. L. Peretz's poor student to come up with a story that's not about the blood libel. ("Stories").  Hodl's farewell to her father, Tevye the Dairyman.  "Let's talk about something more cheerful.  Have you heard any news of the cholera in Odessa?" (Sholem Aleichem, "Hodl," Tevye the Dairyman).

6.  Arthur Hugh Clough can't get milk for his coffee.   ("Amours de Voyage").

7.  Cranford, Silas Marner, Villette.  Three perfect novels, allowing for some variety in one's standards of perfection.  The methods varied, too: Eliot compressed, Gaskell tied up loose ends, and Brontë pushed, hard.  If I end up marvelling more at Villette, it's because it is so complex, and because after just a bit of looking at secondary souces I have developed the crackpot notion that I possess an original idea about the novel.  Forthcoming in 2010, if I can bring myself to do the work, which I mightn't.

8.  The moment in Flaubert's "A Simple Heart" when they put the stuffed parrot - no, you'll have to go see for yourself.  Is this story the best thing Flaubert ever wrote?  Talk about perfection.

I just want to keep going.  The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan.  Edouard Mörike's  Mozart's Journey to Prague.  Gérard de Nerval's Sylvie.  "The benediction of the air."  John Galt!

I should skip this last part.  No, it's eating at me, since I just read it.  Worst of the year:  the second half of A Study in Scarlet (1887), the first Sherlock Holmes novel.  The Holmes-free Utah section is so, so bad, an undramatic jangle of clichés.  It's not only terribly written on its own, but once we return to Holmes, its dreadfulness has somehow even soaked into Watson's journal, tainting the rest of the novel.  The first half was all right!

We may ask ourselves, almost with dismay, whether such works exist at all - Robert Louis Stevenson on Thoreau

I have been reading ahead in preparation for the forthcoming Wuthering Expectations Scottish Literature Challenge*, in particular for a planned assault on the books of Robert Louis Stevenson.  Stevenson's first published book, An Inland Voyage (1878) is a clever little travelogue of Stevenson's canoe trip in northeast France with a pal.  It's a curious coincidence that Henry David Thoreau's first published book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), is about a canoe trip with his brother.

I noticed that Stevenson had published a number of earlier essays, often about nature or walking, such as "Roads" (1873) and "Walking Tours" (1876), which were presumably unrelated to Thoreau's magnificent essay "Walking" (1862), or "A Winter Walk," or "A Walk to Wachusett."

At some point, though, reading An Inland Voyage, I begin to pick up a number of strange hints of Thoreau (although Whitman, not Thoreau, is specifically mentioned).  Now I wish I had written some of them down.  I'm thinking of passages praising the simple life, or working class labor, or a number of nicely done descriptions of the rivers.  Shallow, compared to Thoreau, but the whole book is one the shallow side. 

And then consider that both men died at the age of 44, from lung ailments or complications thereof.  This could no longer be dismissed as mere coincidence.  The order of my argumentation may be off here.

And what's this, an 1880 Cornhill Magazine essay entitled "Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions."  It's a fascinating mix of respect and mockery, sympathy and repulsion.  Fundamentally, Stevenson was much more of a sensualist than Thoreau, as is almost everyone, and he refused to give Thoreau any credit for his asceticism.  A subtext of the essay, one of many, is Stevenson's aversion to Thoreau's celibacy - see Part IV (p. 134+).  The essay was published while Stevenson was on his honeymoon in Napa Valley, so I would be inclined to forgive his criticism even if I disagreed, which I don't.  I thought the "Higher Laws" section of Walden, in which Thoreau resorts to Hindu scripture to justify his asceticism, seemed weakly argued, or I badly misunderstood the argument, which is likely in that tricky book.

Thoreau made Stevenson nervous about writing, too.  Taken literally, which I'm not convinced is the right way to go, Thoreau's precepts in Walden's "Reading" chapter are unforgiving - he does not admit that too many books are worth reading.  Stevenson had not yet published a novel, but he was writing stories, and beginning to understand his talent.  After quoting Thoreau's description of great prose ("the prose writer has conquered like a Roman and settled colonies") Stevenson acidly comments: "We may ask ourselves, almost with dismay, whether such works exist at all but in the imagination of the student."  (127)  He understood that his own works, current and planned, would not qualify.

But Stevenson next turns to a demolition (accurate, as we now know) of the idea that Thoreau just sat down "nonchalantly" and naturally wrote flawless first drafts.  Stevenson is insightful about Thoreau the writer.  The digression drags in Shakespeare and Scott, and is unnecessarily long, but it's kind of cute, one writer defending another. 

That's one point of sympathy between the two men, the two writers.  Another is that Stevenson does understand Walden's basic project, or part of it:

A certain amount, varying with the number and empire of our desires, is a true necessary to each one of us in the present order of society; but beyond that amount, money is a commodity to be bought or not to be bought, a luxury in which we may either indulge or stint ourselves, like any other.  And there are so many luxuries that we may legitimately prefer to it, such as a grateful conscience, a country life, or the woman of our inclination. (123)

See what I mean about the subtext?  That woman is definitely not in Walden.

Quotations from Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882), volume 8 of the 1914 Biographical Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Scribner's Sons.

* Which you should not do. You should wait until mid-January. Anything you read now doesn't count. No, does not count.

I was determined to know beans – and maples, and apples, and squirrels

Robert D. Richardson is describing Thoreau’s Apollonian spirituality:

Where the Christian yearns to be redeemed, and the Dionysian to be possessed, the Apollonian yearns to know, to see clearly, to perceive. (Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, 194)

Thoreau is in some ways hard for me to approach, but here I find a sympathetic connection.  Although I would hardly attach much spiritual meaning to it, my own approach to the world is Apollonian.  In a famous joke in “The Bean-Field” chapter of Walden, Thoreau says that he “was determined to know beans.”  He is joking, and he is speaking metaphorically, yes, but he also means exactly what he says.  Among the aspects of the world he wanted to know about were beans.  He planted beans beside Walden Pond less to sell or eat them as to understand them.

Here’s one way Thoreau really impresses me.  He knew things.  About literature, about languages (he studied six languages at Harvard), and about nature, especially, nature.  Animals, weather, birds, and, overwhelmingly, plants.

Reading Thoreau tempts me (Anecdotal Kurp also tempts me) to plow through the two million words of Thoreau’s journals.  I have been leafing through a 1984 paperback reprint (Gibbs M. Smith, Inc.) of the 1906 edition, complete in fourteen volumes, averaging 460 pages each.  Most remarkable is the slighter fifteenth volume, The Journal of Henry David Thoreau: Botanical Index. What could that be?

Buckthorn (Common) = Rhamnus cathartica (COMMON BUCKTHORN)
Buckwheat = Fagopyrum sagittatum (BUCKWHEAT)
BUGLEWEED = Lycopus spp.
Bulbostylis capillaries (HAIR-LIKE BULBOSTYLIS) – see Fimbristylis capillaries, Scirpus capillaris
Bulrush = Cyperus papyrus (PAPYRUS)

I’ve omitted the page references, the point of the index.  Capital letters signify the modern common name, lower-case Thoreau’s name.  The index includes 135 pages like this. References to maples alone take up a page and a half.

By the twenty-fifth of September, the Red Maples generally are beginning to be ripe.  Some large ones have been conspicuously changing for a week, and some single trees are now very brilliant.  I notice a small one, half a mile off across a meadow, against the green wood-side there, a far brighter red than the blossoms of any tree in summer, and more conspicuous.  I have observed this tree for several autumns invariably changing earlier than its fellows, just as one tree ripens its fruit earlier than another.  It might serve to mark the season, perhaps. (“Autumnal Tints”)

Thoreau here reveals one of his tricks, the source of his uncanny ability to predict a few days in advance the flowering of trees in the spring.  He paid profound attention to the actual world around him.  Thus the precise ordering of the fall colors, by species, in “Autumnal Tints,” or the discussion of to distinguish the flavors of wild apples by season or his genuine excitement when, on a trip through Michigan, he finally sees the legendary crab-apple tree (“Wild Apples”), or his (to us banal) lecture “The Succession of Trees,” in which he observes that squirrels and jays transport the seeds of trees long distances.

I suppose it is not just the knowing of things that I appreciate in Thoreau, but the way he demonstrates the worth of knowing these particular things.  That’s Thoreau the writer at work, not the naturalist.  I know a lot about famous writers, and which books they wrote when, and what relation those books might have with each other.  Other good writers have apparently convinced me that this knowledge is valuable.  I should read one of them again. Thoreau is causing doubts.  Which is, of course, his job.

The crank within - the crank after all - Henry David Thoreau and the usefulness of cranks

Yesterday I called Henry David Thoreau a crackpot, which is unfair.  He's not a crackpot.  He's a crank.

But there is a certain divine energy in every man, but sparingly employed as yet, which may be called the crank within, - the crank after all, - the prime mover in all machinery, - quite indispensable to all work.

That's from "Paradise (To Be) Regained" (1843), a review of a book by a genuine crackpot.  It summarizes Walden pretty well: one man's search for the indispensable crank within.  I may be taking the quotation out of context.  A bit.

We need cranks to keep us honest.  When Thoreau claims that he lived in a little house by Walden Pond rather than, say, a cave, because "[i]n such a neighborhood as this, boards and shingles, limes and bricks, are cheaper and more easily obtained than suitable caves, or whole logs, or bark in sufficient qualities" ("Economy"), he does not really mean much of it.  He's goading the reader, perhaps goading himself.  He might have instead built a capacious tub in downtown Concord, if Diogenes had not already pinched the idea.

There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once - for the root is faith - I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails.  If they cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have to say.  For my part, I am glad to bear of experiments of this kind being tried; as that a young man tried for a fortnight to live on hard, raw corn on the ear, using his teeth for all mortar.  The squirrel tribe tried the same and succeeded. ("Economy")

If squirrels could do it, why can't you, huh?  No, Thoreau knows that we're not squirrels.  I hope that last line, at least, reveals the laughter in Thoreau's eyes, or pen.  Whatever Thoreau might or might not have done in reality, Walden is writing, metaphor, and play.  He has a taste for the paradox, and a taste for the parable, like other well-known useful cranks.

I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, but I should be proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this score than was found with the Walden ice.  Southern customers objected to its blue color, which is the evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy, and preferred the Cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes of weeds.  The purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

Part of my title is borrowed from a recent Jackson Lears review essay in The New Republic.  The part about John Muir is pretty good.

I have never yet met a man who was quite awake - in which I try to awaken, and confess to the existence of my PhD

Last summer (right here, actually), I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house -

No, not exactly. But I did leave a fine job for something riskier. No more "free" trips to Tokyo for me. 

Henry David Thoreau knew what I was experiencing:

Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? (Walden, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For")

I am a pretty good calculator - that is, in fact, my profession - but I was overcome with drowsiness.  I am far from sure that I am awake now, and have grave doubts about the existence of that "poetic or divine life."

Henry David Thoreau claimed "that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living," but of course he recommended that we live in railroad crates (be sure to punch out an air hole) and eat unsalted corn meal cakes, along with the occasional woodchuck or fried rat.  I may have to work for more than six weeks, although that's just what Thoreau knew I was going to say: "One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres, told me that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the means" ("Economy").  Fortunately, I don't have the means, either, although I am working on the problem.

One thing I have become, this fall, and will remain through May, is that exploited drudge, the adjunct professor.  I am professing a social science, in which I have a PhD, which I don't think I have ever mentioned before, as irrelevant to literary matters.  Wuthering Expectations remains constant - it is, as before, bad for my career, something I should not be doing.  Teaching has been so much more meaningful than my previous job that it is like a joke.  So I hope to hoe this particular row of beans for a while.

Walden - much of Thoreau's writing - is a challenge.  You are not, he says, doing it right.  Living, eating, reading - you're not doing it right.  Fortunately, Thoreau is a crackpot, so I can easily dismiss him.  I could not eat the fried rat with good relish (see "Higher Laws"), assuming he means "with enthusiasm" and not "with spicy Indian pickles," in which case, fire up the deep fat frier. 

He's right, I'm not doing it right, and neither is he, nor will we ever.  I guess I did not actually need Walden to know all this - I have just read it for the first time - but I can use the challenge to keep trying.  "We need to be provoked - goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot."  I don't mind Thoreau's poke in the ribs.  It helps me stay awake.

His only illustration is his own biography - Emerson criticizes his friends

Emerson's journals - most of his writings - are an enormous project of self-criticism and self-improvement. No surprise than that they also contain criticisms of his friends, a central part of his life, criticisms that are constructive and penetrating:

"Henry Thoreau is like the woodgod who solicits the wandering poet & draws him into antres vast & desarts idle, & bereaves him of his memory, & leaves him naked, plaiting vines & with twigs in his hand. Very seductive are the first steps from the town to the woods, but the End is want & madness." August 1848, p. 391.

And here's the most famous knock on Thoreau:

"Thoreau wants a little ambition in his nature. Fault of this, instead of being the head of American Engineers, he is captain of a huckleberry party." July 1851, p. 426.

Emerson constantly doubts and questions the value of his own work, and you can see the element of self-criticism in his portraits of Thoreau. And I should point out that Emerson considered Thoreau something like the Greatest Man Alive. I've misplaced the reference, but somewhere in his journal he describes Thoreau as the only man who actually lives by Emerson's ideals. Not the only other man - Emerson excludes himself. But then there's Emerson's frustration - if you're so smart and talented, get out of your canoe and do something.

Thomas Carlyle, Branson Alcott, Margaret Fuller - along with his barbs, Emerson occasionally expresses amazement that he has been able to associate with these people, great intellects, original thinnkers, brilliant weirdos. But here he is on Alcott:

"Unhappily, his conversation never loses sight of his own personality. He never quotes; he never refers; his only illustration is his own biography. His topic yesterday is Alcott on the 17 October; today, Alcott on the 18 October; tomorrow, on the 19th. So will it be always... this noble genius discredits genius to me." April 1842, p. 281.

This counts as Emerson humor, at least the middle part. Is it also a bit mean? True, but mean? I'm not sure I have the strength of character to hear this sort of thing about myself. When, up above, I called his criticisms "constructive", I meant theoretically. Heard and understood in the proper spirit. How that would actually work, even, or especially, coming from one's closest friends, I have no idea.

This was all private, of course, just for Emerson and posterity. Emerson could be kind of a cold fish, but was not actually cruel, I don't think. It all slept in the journal.

On him they could not calculate - a note on Thoreau, Emerson, and Reverend King

"Mr Webster told them how much the war cost, that was his protest, but voted the war, & sends his sons to it. They calculated rightly on Mr Webster. My friend Mr Thoreau has gone to jail rather than pay his tax. On him they could not calculate. The abolitionists denounce the war & give much time to it, but they pay the tax."

July 1846, Ralph Waldo Emerson's journal, Emerson in His Journals, pp. 358-9.

This is a tricky passage, full of irony. Webster is the great Senator, a hero of Emerson's. Here we see an early warning of the complete disillusionment that will come a few years later when Webster voted for the Fugitive Slave Act.

Another irony is that neither Emerson or Thoreau are really protesting the Mexican War in and of itself. They are opposed to the war because they believed it was waged in the interests of expanding slavery. Thoreau wrote about his protest in the 1849 "Civil Disobedience" essay, which eventually leads us to Rev. King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Thoreau's protest was an unusually productive one.

But yet another irony is that Emerson was one of the abolitionists who paid the tax. He didn't go to jail. Emerson was fully aware of this irony.

Yet another: Emerson and Thoreau were both intellectually indebted to Thomas Carlyle. Around the time Thoreau published "Civil Disobedience," Carlyle was vigourously defending black slavery. This is why intellectual history is so interesting - ideas move around in such mysterious ways. One of the many strands of history that lead to our new President made an important stop in that jail cell in Concord.

I have been reading a lot of Emerson lately; I think I'll spend the week with him.