For Love of the World: Essays on Nature Writers

Back and Down: Loren Eiseley's Immense Journey

Back and Down LOREN EISELEY'S IMMENSE JOURNEY Turn to any of the figures about whom Eiseley writes: Bacon, Darwin, Emerson, Thoreau, Jeffers. These "representative men" are all selfcharacterizations , partial portraits in the conspicuous self-presentation of his work. He speaks in All the Strange Hours of the "concealed essay," a modification of the personal essay in which "personal anecdote was gently allowed to bring under observation thoughts of a more purely scientific nature." But concealed does not conceal the accommodation he found for the tension he had been made to feel in the double claim of science and literature. "Science and Humanism ," a rubric in The Star Thrower, puts these claims in current terms. There Eiseley addresses them in respect to C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures, only to deny the opposition, which he says-and his work notably proves-is an illusion . Nor does the curious word concealed conceal his predilection for the essayist 's trying out of autobiography. "Nature and Autobiography," another rubric, puts the issue in these terms. It may be that concealed, which awakens suspicion , answers to and reveals the condition stated in what immediately follows his definition: "That the self and its minute adventures may be interesting every essayist from Montaigne to Emerson has intimated, but only if one is utterly, nakedly honest and does not pontificate." I am not alone in feeling troubled by Eiseley, not because I would have him tell me more than he does or speak otherwise, but because, as Robert Finch says in a review of The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley, he is often "stagy and sentimental ." Fred Carhsle, who had several interviews with Eiseley, says in the preface of his book that he had been wrong in assuming that Eiseley would "reveal things about his hfe that he did not carefully control or stage." Eiseley's concern for his "public image," he found, was impregnable. Staging the self and making it the focus of feeling may account for his popularity (popularity, I suspect, is what his scientific colleagues held against him); this, and the somber prophecy against which he raised his hope, which reminds me of Lewis Mumford , with whom he corresponded. In every sense, Eiseley is a truer autobiographer than Mumford, his autobiographical impulse primary, deep and genuine, prompted from the start by a desperate need to create and confirm his identity and forestall the nemesis that he figures as the Other Player. Even so, he inordinately dramatizes himself and stages over and over the scenario of his hfe. He takes life, as all of us must, by the handle of the self, but the self noticeably plays this role. I speak of scenario because, as James Olney observes in a review of All the Strange Hours, Eiseley's avowed autobiography, he "has written this same book, under various disguises and titles, more than half a dozen times before." But I cite what he says only for its general truth: All the Strange Hours is not the same book, being at once fuller and more masterful than the "obhque autobiograph[ies]," as Olney calls the earher work, and dependent on them for its overwhelming resonance. My appreciation does not cancel my criticism so much as show what comes of reading all of a writer's work and sharing his "inner galaxy." Years ago, when I dismissed Eiseley, it was on the evidence of brief acquaintance: this, contrary to the way I read. And since my dismissal took the form of refusing to direct a dissertation on him proposed by a very good student, contrary to my willingness to follow a student and participate in new work. This is the single instance (and I regret it) of not accepting an invitation to enter on work suggested because thought to be congenial with my interests, and I think that I rejected Eiseley then for the very reason that he engages me now, his use of the idea of correspondence . By the time I was asked to consider Eiseley, I was more critical than I had been of this idea as it enters so centrally in the work of the Romantics-no 180 'e E I S E LEY longer pleased with the symbolic displacement of the world (the things of the world) by the mind and its symbolic appropriation to the end of aggrandizing the self, as if self-culture were the ultimate vocation. I...