Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau

14. Genius

58 verso runningfoot 1 4 . G e n i u s Although Emerson famously said of Thoreau that “his biography is in his verses,” he described those verses as “rude and defective,” concluding that Thoreau’s “genius was better than his talent.” Without citing Emerson as the source of this famous judgment, Henry James extended its application to Thoreau’s prose, declaring in 1879 that “whatever question there may be of his talent, there can be none, I think of his genius. . . . He was imperfect, unfinished, inartistic . . . ; it is only at his best that he is readable.” Why did Emerson and James arrive at this opinion? What aspects of Thoreau’s writing prompted it? While any list of writers with more talent than genius will always be a long one, the reverse is not the case. What American writers have had more genius than talent? Whitman? Gertrude Stein? Hart Crane? Thomas Wolfe? Has this imbalance occurred more frequently in America? And is it more common with writers, as opposed to other kinds of artists? We can start to answer these questions by noting that an artist needs to be lucky enough to have a genre available to him that suits his genius. Imagine if Larry Hart had come along before the flowering of the Broadway musical: he would have become, at best, simply a talented light-verse writer, a reduced version of his own ancestor, Heinrich Heine. Had Elvis Presley arrived before rock and roll, he might have developed into a minor version of his idol, Dean Martin, himself a lesser Sinatra. Elvis, of course, helped to invent the genre his genius required, and his ability to do so suggests a way to think about Thoreau and Walden. G recto runningfoot 59 Less lucky than Hart and Presley, Thoreau had no talent for poetry or fiction, the available genres, and thus, he routinely struggled to find a mode suitable to his genius, “a very crooked one,” he admits (41). He occasionally acknowledged the problem: “We sometimes experience a mere fullness of life, which does not find any channels to flow into,” he wrote in his journal. “I feel myself uncommonly prepared for some literary work, but I can select no work” (J, 7 September 1851). One response to this impasse was a stubborn assertion of independence that anticipates Emerson’s criticism: “It is a waste of time for the writer to use his talents merely,” Thoreau declared. “Be faithful to your genius. Write in the strain that interests you most. Consult not popular taste” (J, 20 December 1851). Thoreau also developed a working method: the “inspirations” entered so freely in his journal were “winnowed into Lectures, and again, in due time, from lectures into essays.” The lectures, in turn, became books, but Thoreau himself recognized the problem: And at last they stand, like the cubes of Pythagoras, firmly on either basis; like statues on their pedestals, but the statues rarely take hold of hands. There is only such connection and series as is attainable in the galleries. And this affects their immediate practical and popular influence. (J, summer 1845) In his perceptive essay on Thoreau, Robert Louis Stevenson proposed that “the true business of literature is with narrative”: “Dry precept and disembodied disquisition, as they can only be read with an effort of abstraction,” will never have the effect of a simple anecdote . Because “Thoreau could not clothe his opinions in the garment of art, for that was not his talent,” Stevenson diagnosed—because, in other words, he couldn’t invent a story—“he sought to gain the same elbow-room for himself, and to afford a similar relief to his readers, by mingling his thoughts with a record of experience.” Thus, trying to make his statues hold hands, Thoreau forced the record of his excursions, thoughts, and inspirations into clunky receptacles. The Week compresses a two-week trip into one, devoting a chapter to each of the seven days. But the book, as critics have always noted, is really a hodge-podge of journal entries, poems, previously published essays, literary criticism, and nature description. It’s a cutgenius 59 60 verso runningfoot and-paste collage anticipating both filmmaking and the word processor . As Samuel Johnson said of Paradise Lost, “None ever wished it longer.” Walden subjects its raw material to another procrustean bed, reducing Thoreau’s twenty-six-month stay in the woods to a single year...