Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau

27. Proving

108 verso runningfoot 2 7 . P r o v i n g Perhaps because Walden is such an obviously ambitious book with a determinedly elevated tone, Thoreau quickly acquired a reputation as a ponderous, humorless writer. After accusing Thoreau of “gutting ” his works of anything that might make his readers laugh, Robert Louis Stevenson remarked that “he was not one of those authors who have learned . . . ‘to leave out the dullness’.” Writing in 1880, just eighteen years after Thoreau’s death, Stevenson was following the example of James Russell Lowell, who in 1865 had flatly declared that “Thoreau had no humor.” Emerson never mentioned Walden, even in his own journals. Although he accused Thoreau of lacking “a lyric facility and technical skill,” he preferred his friend’s poetry to his prose, which he thought marred by reflexive paradox. In the twentieth century, Leon Edel summarized the case against Thoreau, curtly declaring, “He was not a born writer.” This last judgment, leveled at the author of at least one classic book and a two-million-word journal, now seems astonishingly off. We should remember, however, that several of Thoreau’s contemporaries demonstrated that prolificness does not inevitably signal talent : Margaret Fuller, William Ellery Channing, and Henry James Sr. all wrote at unembarrassed length without showing any natural affinity for literature. Thoreau, on the other hand, may have been one of those writers like Whitman or Neruda (but unlike T. S. Eliot) who need to write a lot in order to produce a small amount of firstrate work: even Walden’s greatest admirers have never made similar claims for the Week, The Maine Woods, or Cape Cod. recto runningfoot 109 What in Thoreau’s work were Emerson, Lowell, Stevenson, and Edel responding to? Although it has become a classic, Walden rarely seems light and effortless. We know, of course, that it wasn’t: Thoreau took seven years and seven drafts to finish it, constructing the book from journal entries and lectures composed over an even longer stretch. This is a recurring pattern with Thoreau: Robert Richardson repeatedly uses the phrase “worked up” to describe Thoreau’s method of turning earlier material into publishable form. Even his apparently offhand journal resulted from carefully revised notes, usually taken the day before. Despite his deafness to Thoreau, Lowell diagnosed the problem: “Neither his attention nor his genius was of the spontaneous kind.” Roland Barthes distinguished between “a labor of knowledge” and a labor “of writing,” defining the latter, “poetic” mode, which he preferred, as “any discourse in which the word leads the idea.” Almost any writer would recognize what Barthes was getting at: writing takes off when you yield the initiative to rhythms and words, but having a point to make can turn it into a torturous translation process, a struggle to find the verbal analogue for something already floating around in your head. When Degas complained to Mallarmé about his inability to write good sonnets, despite “having so many ideas,” the poet replied, “You don’t make sonnets with ideas, Degas, but with words.” Like Degas’s poetry, Thoreau’s work often seems to have been “a labor of knowledge”: he had things to say or experiences to describe. Thus, when he describes waking at night with “a statement which I had never consciously considered before, and as surprising and novel and agreeable to me as anything can be” (as close as Thoreau gets to automatic writing), he explains the phenomenon as the result of previous thought: “There is such a necessity [to] make a definite statement that our minds at length do it without our consciousness” (J, 1 April 1860). Even Thoreau’s excursions—to Maine, Canada, Cape Cod, and Walden itself—were designed less for themselves than as ways to acquire raw material for writing. An assignment set for a friend indicates Thoreau’s own method: Let me suggest a theme for you—to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you, returning to this essay again and again until you are satisfied proving 109 110 verso runningfoot that all that was important in your experience is in it. Don’t suppose that you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you try, but at ‘em again; especially when, after a sufficient pause, you suspect that you are touching the heart or summit of the matter, reiterate your blows there, and...