Thoreau Today

Henry David Thoreau in the Literature and Culture of the 21st Century

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

March 2008

Megan Marshall's article "The Impossible Art of Deciphering Manuscripts," posted February 8, 2008, in Slate, focuses in part on a new scholarly edition of poet Robert Frost's private notebooks. "The work, first published in early 2007," Marshall writes, "had been heralded as offering a rare glimpse into the reclusive poet's creative process. But now the notebook transcriptions appear to be riddled with errors that made Frost look like 'a dyslexic and deranged speller.'" In examining the Frost case, Marshall turns to Thoreau: "'Human beings were not meant to be consistent,'" explains Elizabeth Witherell, director of the Thoreau Edition—an enterprise begun at Princeton in 1966, three years after Robert Frost's death, and now based at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She might have been summing up the spiritual philosophy of Henry David Thoreau, the iconoclastic writer and naturalist, as notorious in documentary editing circles for his terrible handwriting as for the night he spent in jail after refusing to pay taxes in an anti-slavery protest. But no, it is the mistake-prone editor she speaks of: 'Every time we force ourselves into consistency, we fail.' Accurately rendering authors' jottings, often intended only as notes to self, into regular type verges on the impossible.

"Elizabeth Witherell describes the process of reading Thoreau's journals for the press as 'like driving over a deeply potholed road—you read along and when you come to a word you can't understand you back up and run at it again with the force of what you do understand as momentum.' Drawing on her knowledge of Thoreau's usual subjects and vocabulary, the context of the passage, and the range of word choices in mid-19th-century American English, Witherell finds the passage eventually 'resolves into something recognizable.' Although graduate students trained by editors like Witherell to help in the process are increasingly unfamiliar with 19th-century script–or even any script at all in the keyboard age–Internet expertise can be a help. Googling "Hanno the Carthaginian" nets pages of hits; "Hannof the Carlingian," none. "These days, university presses can no longer afford to employ the roomful of proofreaders that, at Princeton anyway, examined the earliest volumes put out by the Thoreau Edition. Now it's all up to the project editors."

Most editors of scholarly editions have stories to tell about the one word that stumped them. For decades, the founding editor of the Thoreau Edition, Walter Harding, believed Thoreau had written the word Ecology in a letter of the 1850s, trumping the first known use of the term by eight years. The OED had even changed its entry to include Thoreau's usage on Harding's say-so. But when a botanist pressed him on the claim, Harding searched further and realized that what he'd taken for a capital E was really a G. Geology was the word Thoreau had written.

A review in the February 17, 2008, Irish Independent by Christina Park, of Caitlin O'Connell's The Elephant's Secret Sense says that elephants can run quietly on tiptoe, then adds, "You would think such behaviour would have drawn attention before but, as the writer Henry David Thoreau (quoted in this book) points out, 'It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.'" This quote appears widely on the Internet (nearly 10,000 google hits), but I have yet to see a source cited. It reads to me like a misremembered paraphrase of Thoreau. Oy. [Update: Reader Bob Miller writes, "The source of this quote is a Journal entry for August 5, 1851. Torrey and Allen give the words as follows: 'The question is not what you look at, but what you see.' In the Princeton edition of the Journal, Volume 3, pages 354-5, the words are: 'The question is not what you look at--but how you look & whether you see.'"]

Thoreau's vision (and Thoreau on seeing) might be the topic of a book-length study, I think. "We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, and then we can hardly see anything else" (Journal, Nov. 4, 1858).

Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, is a community "that still struggles with whether it wants to be Henry David Thoreau or P.T. Barnum when we grow up" according to David Lauderdale in his brief article about Frank Chapman, the former mayor of Hilton Head, who died recently in Maine. Writing in the February 10, 2008 issue of The Island Packet Lauderdale closes by quoting Chapman as saying, "I support long-range views as opposed to short-term commercial adventurism," and concluding, "That's Henry David Thoreau, not P.T. Barnum. Our tent is going to have to be big enough for both of them."

A February 9, 2008, article by Carrie Seidman in the Albuquerque Tribune profiles "longtime Albuquerque nuclear protester Chuck Hosking" who, a caption says, "has displayed his banners outside Kirtland Air Force Base at least once a week for twenty-five year." Seidman says Hosking has influenced the likes of Lou Nicholas, who is now a college teacher but years ago was a young civil engineer working for the Air Force who often rode his bike past Hosking's signs. Seidman says that Nicholas, who had been reading Thoreau, "thought about Hosking and the others he saw at the gates and wondered: Could they be the living Thoreaus? And if so, do I dare join them?" Seidman writes, "In the early 1990s, Nicholas left the Air Force for good. He 'free fell,' he said, with no job, little money and the emotional wreck of a divorce adding to the taunts of those who questioned his sanity. Then he went to a Quaker event and met someone he realized was the 'living Thoreau' at the Kirtland gates. Not long after, he held the end of a banner opposite Hosking."

The Thoreau-Wabanaki Trail Map is now available. It shows Thoreau's day-by-day routes exploring in Maine in 1846, 1853, and 1857.

Thoreau Yesterday

Madeline B. Stern's biography of Stephen Pearl Andrews, The Pantarch (University of Texas Press, 1968), refers to Thoreau several times, once in a list of names of thinkers who influenced Andrews: "From Hegel and Bakunin, from Hitchcock and McCosh, from Comte and Thoreau, he had picked the plums to use as ingredients in his colossal pie." ("McCosh" refers to Scottish-born philosopher James McCosh, whom came to the U.S. to assume the presidency of what is now Princeton University, and "Hitchcock" to geologist Edward Hitchcock.)

Taylor Stoehr's Free Love in America: A Documentary History (AMS Press, 1979) describes the case of "Edwin C. Walker and Lillian Harman, who went to jail [in 18TK] for cohabitating without as license in Valley Falls, Kansas" as being "less in the tradition of [free-love advocate] James Clay than that of Henry Thoreau—that is, less a matter of victimization than of propaganda by the deed."

About Ezra Hervey Heywood, Stoehr writes, "Heywood was born 'Hoar'—a relative of Emerson's friend judge Samuel Hoar, who (tradition has it, perhaps falsely) paid Thoreau's tax to get him out of Concord jail—but Ezra's family thought the name too suggestive, and changed it to Heywood. His later career showed him more plain-spoken than his kinfolk, and even more intractable than Thoreau, and often in need of bail."

From F. Schuyler Mathews' Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music (first published 1904), under "Cedar Waxwing": "There is also a burred note, which Thoreau calls his 'beady note.'" Not that Thoreau should be taken as an authority in this case. See Bradford Torrey's interesting and insightful "Thoreau as a Diarist," (pdf), from the January 1905 issue of Atlantic Monthly for comments on Thoreau's difficulty in identifying birds. (Have you ever wondered about those "night-warblers" and "seringo birds" he describes?)

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