Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau

4. Baskets

20 verso runningfoot 4 . B a s k e t s Early in “Economy,” Thoreau spins an anecdote into a parable: Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!” exclaimed the Indian, as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off,—that the lawyer only had to weave arguments, and by some magic wealth and standing followed,—he had said to himself ; I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. (16) The basket that Thoreau could not sell, of course, was his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, whose publication he had been forced to underwrite and which, as one critic observes, was B recto runningfoot 21 “a commercial disaster, one of the worst-selling books by an eventually -canonized author in American literary history.” The book’s failure plunged Thoreau into debt; he had to take back the unsold copies, thereby prompting his wry comment, “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself” (J, 27 October 1853). William E. Cain draws the conclusion Thoreau himself had reached: “He would not make a living from literature.” In fact, Thoreau was one of the first artists to encounter a peculiarly modern problem. Any writer, painter, or musician working in a new style would now have to assume that between the introduction of innovative work and its acceptance by the public a gap would inevitably exist. An artist wanting a paying career would have to reduce it. This situation first appeared most prominently in France. In the wake of the French Revolution, the demise of the stable patronage system, which had rested on a small, sophisticated coterie, ready to commission and purchase art, resulted in an entirely new audience for painting—the bourgeoisie, newly come to power (both politically and financially) but less sophisticated, less secure about its own taste. Such an audience (the prototype of the generalist lost in a world of specialization) inevitably proved conservative, lagging behind the increasingly rapid stylistic innovations stimulated in part by this very system (which, after all, became a marketplace, thriving on novelty ). Mass taste, in other words, now had to be educated to accept what it did not already know. Some artists simply looked for other ways to support themselves. Stendhal, who worked primarily as a quasi diplomat, resigned himself to not matching Balzac’s commercial success: “I’ve bought a ticket in a lottery,” he boasted, “the grand prize of which amounts to this: being read in 1935.” He was right, of course, but unless an innovative artist remained content with posthumous success (represented as the only “genuine” kind by Balzac’s Lost Illusions, a principal source of the avant-garde myth), he would need to develop strategies to eliminate the gap that would otherwise starve him. In many ways, the French impressionist painters were the first avant-garde movement to think collectively and systematically about this dilemma. Some of them were working class and without other sources of income. When their work began to be rejected by the annual salons, virtually the only avenue to commercial success, they baskets 21 22 verso runningfoot set in motion what retrospectively appear as “The Eight Rules for Starting an Avant-Garde.” 1. Collaboration. Outsiders working...