John Burroughs and the Place of Nature

One: Great Neighbors: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Writer’s Place

1Great Neighbors Emerson, Thoreau, and the Writer’s Place The Moving-Picture Brain Nearing the end of his long life and lengthy career, John Burroughs made plans for publishing three volumes of essays over a three-year period, in return for which the publisher Houghton Mifflin guaranteed him an annuity of two thousand dollars. Burroughs regarded the amount as insufficient. On October 12, 1918, he wrote to the editor Ferris Greenslet that he would need double the sum; a year later, he lowered his request to twenty-five hundred dollars. Greenslet resisted, pointing out in a letter of November 26, 1919, that the sales of all of Burroughs’s books in 1918 had dipped below five hundred dollars. By the end of 1919, Burroughs was ready to accept the two thousand dollars and promised Greenslet “a book of about 40.000 words, or half the size of one of my other volumes. Emerson & his Journals, & Thoreau, a Critical Study, would be the contents. Perhaps we can find a good title later.” On January 5, 1920, Burroughs sent his editor the manuscript of the proposed volume on Emerson and Thoreau, and ten days later he wrote again, expressing his confidence that he would be able to bring out the three volumes within the three years of the annuity . But his health had already begun to fail, and the octogenarian’s plans never materialized. Despite two winters spent recuperating in southern California, within fifteen months he was dead.1 The material from the final years appears in the two posthumous volumes of Burroughs’s Writings, edited by Dr. Clara Barrus under the titles Under the Maples and The Last Harvest.2 Most of these brief essays are not of great importance, but the three essays on Emerson and Thoreau in The Last Harvest form the core of a forty-thousand-word book that Burroughs 14 Great Neighbors 15 never finished. “Emerson and His Journals,” “Flies in Amber,” and “Another Word on Thoreau” are significant critical essays in their own right, and they indicate the abiding importance of Emerson and Thoreau for Burroughs as a literary naturalist and ecocritic. The three essays show how Burroughs tends to see Emerson and Thoreau together, interpreting the two predecessors in terms of one another. The project also suggests that at the end of his life Burroughs was attempting to interpret the work of Emerson and Thoreau for a new generation. His fundamental angle of interpretation features ideas of place, particularly the place of nature in American culture. Burroughs may already have suspected that the interpretive attempt would fail, not for lack of health and time, but because the new generation was no longer interested in nature writers like him. In his journal for November 9, 1916, for instance, he noted that his audience was slipping away from him: The magazine writer has a new problem: how to address himself to the moving-picture brain—the brain that does not want to read or think, but only to use its eager shallow eyes, eyes that prefer the shadow and ghosts of things to the things themselves, that rather see the ghosts of people flitting around on the stage, than to see real flesh and blood. How an audible dialogue would tire them! It might compel them to use their minds a little—horrible thought! For my own part, I am sure I cannot interest this moving-picture brain, and do not want to. It is the shallowest brain that has yet appeared in the world. What is to be the upshot of this craze over this mere wash of reality which the “movies” (horrible word!) offer our young people?3 As amusing as the private diatribe against silent “movies” may be, it expresses a real sense of the writer’s cultural displacement, and it clearly indicates the widening gulf between Burroughs and the modern world. Ironically, the moving-picture brain has not dissolved into shallow shadows ; instead, Burroughs has nearly disappeared from the literary landscape of American literature. And whatever else one thinks of the radical shift in sensibility—not all moviegoers need think of themselves as possessing “the shallowest brain that has yet appeared in the world”—it suggests that 16 Chapter One Burroughs seeks to retrieve a literary audience by educating readers about a common ancestry and refreshing their memory of the American literary map. The first paragraphs of “Flies...