Natural wonder

A new look at Thoreau’s essays

By John Freeman

The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau Edited by Lewis Hyde, North Point Press; New York, 390 pages, $35.

It may seem apocryphal to the many Americans who read and loved Walden growing up, but Henry David Thoreau — avatar of self-reliance, lover of walks, famed naturalist — was largely unknown during his lifetime. When he died of tuberculosis at age 44, Thoreau had published just three books, all of which were commercial failures. His first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, (1849) sold just 200 copies. When his publisher sent him the remanding 800 copies, Thoreau cheekily wrote in his journal: “I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which I wrote myself.”

And yet, in spite of this lack of recognition, Thoreau was an intensely productive writer. Thanks to his frugality — and the handouts of his aunt, as well as those of friend Ralph Waldo Emerson — he lived off just six weeks worth of “work.” The rest of the year he spent traveling, observing, and writing. And so, after his death, his executors had a mountain of manuscripts of poetry, essays, and journals to bring into print. When Houghton Mifflin gathered together his collected writings in 1906 it stretched to some 21 stout volumes.

Thoreau’s reputation as a naturalist, thinker, and prose stylist has grown enormously in the last 100 years as more manuscripts have been dredged up and salvaged. But there is one nit-picky coda to this excavation of his work, which is that, like many posthumously recognized writers, the Thoreau readers have grown to love — and hate — has been shaped by the busy hands of his literary executors.

In an attempt to correct this, Lewis Hyde, a professor of creative writing at Kenyon College and also the author of a terrific book of criticism, Trickster Makes this World, has assembled and edited a collection of 13 essays — only those Thoreau worked on during his lifetime. As Hyde explains in his thoughtful introduction, “Prophetic Excursions,” many of the essays considered to be written by Thoreau were in fact patched together long after his death, doing a disservice, Hyde says, to the original work.

The reason being that Thoreau did not merely sit down to write essays, Hyde says; he mulched them like leaves. His writing method was to wander in the woods, jotting down notes, which he would in turn transcribe into journals. Then, Thoreau would pillage his journals for ideas for an address, which he would boil down into a coherent theme. After giving the address several times, only then would Thoreau begin the process of editing his thoughts into an essay form.

The volume’s first piece, “Natural History of Massachusetts,” reveals that this constant revision worked Thoreau’s prose to a state as rhythmic and fluid as high verse:

“As I went forth early on a still and frosty morning, the trees looked like airy creatures of darkness caught napping; on this side huddled together, with their gray hairs streaming, in a secluded valley which the sun had not penetrated; while the shrubs and grasses, like elves and fairies of the night, sought to hide their diminished heads in the snow.”

Unlike modern essayists, Thoreau can be philosophical and straightforward in the same utterance. His sentences begin in the known world and burrow inward, drawing purchase on strings of epigrammatic phrases, such as this one, from “A Life Without Purpose.”

“The community has no bride that will tempt a wise man. You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business. An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not. The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are forever expecting to be put into office.”

One of the things Hyde’s selection reminds us of is that Thoreau’s thoughts on politics and nature came from the same wellspring. His meditation on the natural history of his home state begins with a dismissal of politics; conversely, “Slavery in Massachusetts” closes with a wistful riff on the beauties of the Concord River.

Whether paying homage to Mt. Kathadin or pleading for an appreciation of abolitionist John Brown in “The Last Days of John Brown,” Thoreau’s tone is intimate, engaged, and serious. Hyde is right to point that Thoreau, along with Melville, is the closest thing American literature has to a prophet. His essays prefigured so much of American life, especially our negligence of the natural world.

Yet, in spite of being the bearer of hard truths, the Thoreau that emerges from these essays is warm and witty, the kind of man unafraid of God. In fact, when he was on his deathbed, trying to prepare some of these essays for print, an aunt asked him if he would like to make his peace with God. In reply, Thoreau said he had never quarreled with Him. Indeed, how true.

John Freeman can be reached at jfreeman4@nyc.rr.com.