Many More Thoreaus

ManyMore Thoreaus Walter Hardingand Michael Meyer. TheNewThoreauHandbook. Ne\\York:NewYorkUniversity Press, JlJRO, 2J8 + xviiipp. MarvElkinsMoller. Thoreau in theHumanCommlll1ity.Amherst: University of.t\Iassachusetts Press. 1980,202 + xvi pp. FritzOehlschlaegerand George Hendrick, eds. Toll'a1d the Making of Thoreau'.~Modem Reputation:Selected Corre,1pondence of SA Jones,A. W Hosme1;H. S. Salt, H. G. 0. Blake, andD Ricketson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ll/79,413+ xxpp. EdwaidWagenknecht. Hem:v David Thoreau: What1'vfannerof'Ma11? Amherst: University of MassachusettsPress, I981. 212 pp. Lauriat Lane, Jr. WalterHarding's A Thoreau Handbook 1 gave valuable aid to Thoreauvians ofmany stripes and vintages. At a time when no cumulative bibliographies or bibliographical essays were at hand, with the partial exception of LHUS and the earliest edition of Eight American Authors, 2 Harding's handbook wasable to list and describe nearly all material up through 1957. It is clear fromthe large amount of work on Thoreau from 1958 to now, however, and thecomple~ thought and genuine new knowledge it contains, that Harding's and Michael Meyer's The New Thoreau Handbook could not include as much of the total material, could not comment on it as fully, might find moredifficulty conveying the full range of our interest in Thoreau, and for theseand other reasons might not be of use to as many Thoreauvians. Both handbooks also have a bibliography at the end of each section; these listings continue to be undoubtedly helpful, whatever questions we may raise about thediscussions that precede them. The main body of The New Thoreau Handbook will be of some use to beginningstudents and general enthusiasts. But the more advanced student orscholar might do better to build on the foundations of A Thoreau Handbook , much of it reprinted word for word in The New Handbook, his or her apprehension of Thoreau studies in the last two decades, and only then compare this apprehension with that added to The New Handbook by Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 13, Number 2, Fall 1982 200 Lauriat Lane, J,: Harding and Meyer. Why this might be so can be seen by comparing even briefly the two handbooks, section by section. The Preface to The New Handbook tells us (p. ix), "in general, Walter Harding is responsible for the writing of Chapters One, Two, and Six,and Michael Meyer for Chapters Three, Four, and Five." This, as we shallsee applies only to material not carried over from Harding's A Thoreau Hand~ book. Ideally, given how much material is involved, Harding's first handbook should have been kept in print- I assume it has not-for its intrinsic values and a new, book-length supplement issued. Chapter One, "Thoreau's Life," summarizes Thoreau's own life historv and the history of Thoreau biography. Apart from a guarded reference t~ the "psychological implications" of Thoreau's relation to Edmund Sewall, which ''are only now beginning to be explored" (p. 5), Harding tells much the same story he did in 1959, in about the same words. He also reprints, with a few omissions, his 1959 descriptive survey of Thoreau biography.To convey the discoveries and disagreements of the last twenty years, he adds only two paragraphs, on his Days and Lebeaux's Young Man Thoreau (reviewed in CRevAS, Fall 1978), and a new, open-ended, very generalized conclusion. At the least, he might also have exorcised the accusing ghost of Perry Miller and reassessed Thoreau's relations with his Concord contemporaries , who have undergone their own biographical reassessments since 1959. Chapter Two, "Thoreau's Works," has two purposes, one more straightforward and less controversial than the other. First, it gives us historical and bibliographical facts for each work or category of work, mainly reprinting the earlier handbook but using the new Princeton edition when available. This is obviously still a valuable body of knowledge to have convenient!) ready to hand. Second, the chapter tries to give some sense of the content, flavor and literary worth of each item considered. For obvious reasons this is much more difficult to do, more successful for the essays than for the books, yet inadequate for even the least important of Thoreau's writings.To explain such limitations by the nature...