Making the Emerson Text Adequate: Problems, Approaches and Revisions

Making theEmersonTextAdequate: Problems, ApproachesandRevisions GayWilsonAllen. Waldo Emerson: A Biography. NewYork:The VikingPress, 1981.751 + xxvi pp. Emersonin His Journals. Selected and edited by Joel Porte. Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. 588+xxpp. DavidRobinson.Apostle of Culture: Eme1sonas Preacher and Lecturer. Philadelphia:Universityof Pennsylvania Press, 1982. 205+xivpp. EnkIngvarThurin. Emerson as Priest of Pan: A Study in the Metaphysics of Sex. Lawrence:The Regents Press of Kansas, 1981. 292+xviiipp. John Stephen Martin Thecentral problem of Emerson studies, itwas once said, is that of accounting forEmerson's impact upon the reader. We know his "ideas" but we do not easilygrasp why they have effect upon us as·readers, for they are often dated asNeo-Platonic, Romantic or Transcendental. Indeed, in his own day, when the"ideas"were in vogue and receptive audiences came to enjoy his lectures, Emerson was enthralling, but no one was sure what he was saying: he did something to those "ideas" which transformed them. For a long time this problem has seemed the result of our not having full access to the more personalaspects of Emerson's life, for the assumption has been that to know whathe said to himself or to close friends and family would provide keys to the ideas of his published works. There was an awareness that this private sidewas initially guarded or filtered by Emerson's son, Edward Waldo, and thenan awareness that to get the full record would require a new edition of Emerson'sjournals and miscellaneous notebooks. In the meantime, since the 1940s, scholarship has interpreted Emerson's "ideas" from what portions of the private man were available; and here, as Joel Porte put it, it was clear thatmany interpretations assumed that beneath the public Emerson "there liesa finite consciousness troubled with a tragic sense of contingency and loss." 1 Indeed, several of the very best critical interpretations have spoken ofhowEmerson's thought and work were either a result of expressing those personal tragedies or else a symbolic if not rhetorical response to smooth CanadianReview of American Studies, Volume 16,Number 2, Summer 1985,205-219 206 John Stephen Martin awaythose private experiences for survival.2The point is, the current problem of accounting for Emerson's impact on the reader has been approached from two distinguishable directions: by trying to find more personal "documents" on the presumption that in them Emerson will explicitly clarify his "ideas" and indicate their meaning as he used them; or by structuring a "finite consciousness" (called "Waldo" at home) through which influences and "ideas of the time" pass, are intensified by experience, and then are exited with artful expression and moral force. Neither approach, I suggest,is adequate because of their inherent limitations. The true job is in making the available texts of Emerson- both "public" and "private" - adequate for an explanation of Emerson's transmutation of the pressures of his lifeintoart that is universal and enduring. The newly-completed sixteen-volume Harvard edition of Emerson's numerous journals and notebooks is the direct result of the first approach/ They are intended to replace Edward Waldo Emerson's ten-volume edition of 1909-14,which pruned out entries which undermined Emerson's imageas the Sage of Concord in his private hours, as presented in his 1889 memoir. 4 Bliss Perry, in The Heart of Emerson's Journals (1926), recognized thisfact when he spoke of the journals as Emerson's "Savings Bank" into whichhe dropped "one golden coin after another," and concluded that, despite ''some overwriting of spiritual experience," "these defects are scarcely noticeable'' because "there is a gain in incisiveness and in that sheer brilliance of tone which characterizes the great passages of the Essays" (1958 ed., p. vii).Here the public image of Emerson "corrected" what one expected of the private man. Thus, when the Harvard edition began to appear, one understood how personal crises were often parallels to his works and gave a new sense of Emerson's "mind play," leading to re-appraisals of the connections between life and thought. But the new edition is also large and somewhat unwieldyin its scholarly referencing apparatus, and this abundance of facts does not come up with the private keys to explicating the public...