Henry David Thoreau: What Manner of Man? (review)

reviews 181 Edward Wagenknecht, Henry David Thoreau: What Manner of Man? The University of Massachusetts Press, 1981. 212 pp. $12.50. $5.95 paper. Fronting the essential facts of Henry David Thoreau: What Manner of Man?, the reader must wonder, "what manner of book" goes here? Edward Wagenknecht ingenuously avers that "this book is neither biography nor a piece of literary criticism but simply a study of Thoreau 's character and personality" (p. 47), as if generic assumptions and paradigms of identity are beside the point to the well-intentioned empiricist of well-established fact. Disavowing all hint of the psychological frameworks of Freud and Erikson deftly used by Leon Edel and Richard Lebeaux, among others, to illuminate the mythic from the historical Thoreau, Wagenknecht can do little more than repeat the surface idealizations of Thoreau on his own character. Thoreau is simply the man he said he was; all else is dark, modernist speculation. As his title politely suggests, Wagenknecht argues no clearly focused idea on the character of Thoreau. If the book has a thesis beyond the sheer amassing of Thoreauviana, it is this: "Nevertheless, take him all in all, Thoreau is certainly one of the great sons of joy" (p. 24). This is the kind of book where you can learn, if you want to know, that Thoreau had his teeth out at 34, that he was most likely a virgin, that he wore no underwear, that he loved huckleberries and popcorn, that he hated black clothes and preferred "honest, clay-colored" corduroy , that he liked foxes more than dogs. Wagenknecht's book (he has written over 26, many of them dealing with notable nineteenth-century American writers like Emerson and Lowell) is to my reading a meandering compendium of consensual data and idealized speculation, organized by a loosely held scheme of "Me" and "Not-Me," self and others, seen (nature) and unseen (spirit), grabbag categories that barely fit the epiphanic Emerson. The book reads not so much like Walter Harding's biography, The Days of Henry Thoreau (1965), as like his scholarly excursus, A Thoreau Handbook (1959; reissued, 1980), wherein each topic is surveyed and validated by a massively detailed footnote listing what previous American scholars have established on this singular son of maternal landscapes and paternal defiances. Harding indeed gives the book his blessing, declaring it "an insightful and revealing study of Thoreau's personality, giving a cross-sectional view of the man rather than the longitudinal approach of the standard biographies." But after reading 182 biography Vol. 6, No. 2 what Thoreau said in different places about partridges, turtles, fishes, birds, squirrels, crickets, snakes, and so forth (pp. 132-135), one longs for the longitudinal chronology and cross-sectional insight of a work like Richard Lebeaux's Young Man Thoreau (University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), where father, mother, brother, Emerson, Concord, nature, all figure as characters in an ontology of achieved greatness. Lebeaux had argued that Thoreau's father, John Sr., served Henry as a negative role model of an entrapped and limited identity which an imaginary father like Emerson countered with a transcendental image of brooding greatness. In creating the vocation of a writer committed to nothing less than the cultivation of character and craft, Thoreau opted for more than pencils and taciturnity in the face of rude circumstance. In Lebeaux's summary, "John may have provided his younger son with a blueprint for what to avoid in life: economic entanglements; living on the brink of bankruptcy—always wary of being in debt and of being betrayed by one's business partners; inability to control the circumstances of one's life; commitments that endangered one's autonomy and life-choices." In contrast, Wagenknecht's portrayal is pallid, idealized , and pointless: "Henry's father, John Thoreau, was a quiet man, fond of books and music, who participated in a number of not very successful business ventures, until finally he became one of the pioneer American makers of lead pencils" (p. 10). The father is cast in the mythic image of the son, the pioneer American maker of homespun pastorals and gestural rebellions. For Wagenknecht, Young Man Thoreau is a piece of guesswork, a biography...