The American Scene; Making of Walden

Good morning, this is Howard Vincent doing the art for the American scene for Illinois Institute of Technology. Let's come back to the art of literature today and one of the great American classics, well it's a classic, it's great isn't it? Walden by Henry David Thorough. Maybe most of you have read Thorough. I wonder though, I think back my own college days, I hadn't read Thorough by the time I finished college, I didn't come to it until I was, I thought adult and yet I hope that in the last year, in the many years since I graduated from college and now that this book has gained a such a large public that they are reading it, people are reading it in high school and people are simply reading it, not having to take it in courses. Well it is a classic and although a classic is oftentimes explained as a book which is everybody talks about but nobody ever reads, I think there are a lot of people read Walden. It's a fascinating book and today we're going to have a man with us, Professor Lyndon Shanley of Northwestern University,

who is Dean out there and also a professor of English, he combines the two operations with great agility. He has written a book about Walden called a Making of Walden and it is a fascinating study of the manuscripts and the way that Thorough evolved this book. He corrects a lot of wrong ideas that people have had that Thorough simply sat down and wrote about his experience out there at the pond for two years and that there was very little craftsmanship or strategy or structure in the book. This is nonsense of course as he has pointed out but let's get at the at Walden in general with the Professor Shanley who knows so much about the book. Lynn, about the making of your book and the making of Walden, two things which are what about it, what started you off? Why I was going to do an edition of Walden and so I went out to the Huntington Library to look at their manuscripts, simply to get material. But when I began studying the

manuscripts I found out that in spite of the vast disarray that they were in I could distinguish seven different versions by color of paper and the handwriting and so forth. And this allowed me to make clear that he began writing the book when he was at the pond and indeed wrote the first version when he was at the pond before he left in 1847 but he never was able to publish it until 1854. He finished in 47 at the pond and published it seven years later so there was a big gap. And he was rewriting it during the seven years and there are roughly eight different versions of the book and it doubled in size from 1847 to 1854. What you publish here in the making of Walden after your introduction is the first version. That's right. That's the core, the knob, the knob. I would think so. Yes. And then

what happened is he went ahead from this knob. When would you date the knob of it? 47 or 48? Well, no, very specifically he was writing it in 1846 and in 1847, right there at the pond. And it is the knob but you've got to remember that it's only half as long as the final one. It is in slightly different order and is the shape of the book becomes much clearer. And the book and the content becomes richer because what happened was that as he looked back upon his experience at the pond, he decided that what he had written wasn't adequate, wasn't an adequate representation of what this experience had been and what it meant to him. And as a result he used material, used experience and ideas that came to him later to

bring out the full, well first of all I'd say the full pleasure of this experience. And secondly the significance of the experience. Well this is very interesting because several weeks ago we had Waller Blair who's going to book on the making of Huck Finn. And the same thing happened, the same misapprehensions about Huckaberry Finn were there that he just sat down and wrote about his boyhood. But actually what he did was bring the present on his boyhood and they all interlapped and here you have the seven years as being extremely important. He's assessing his earlier experiences, gaining perspective, emotion recollected and tranquility. Very much, very much so. Yes, well that's really an interesting and it corrects the sentimentalism we all have about the author just sitting down and writing. But what made you interested in Waller in the first place? You say you went out. I just read it. Well I enjoyed it so much. Well I read it as you did well on in my early

life. And when I read it I was so taken by it that I went to read more about him and read a good deal in his journal. And it seemed to me that what I wanted to do at that point was, as I say, an annotated edition of Waller in which I would use other writings of his to show further developments of the same ideas in his book, as were in his book, or to put in ideas that in a sense didn't agree with something he might have said in Waller. Because at one point in his journals he said, thoughts of different days will not cohere. I mean he recognized that a man is not always consistent in his feelings particularly. I think his ideas were consistent pretty much throughout his whole life though there was the change in his attitude toward reform and to his part in reform. No foolish consistencies though. No no no no consistencies for the sake of it. He couldn't anyone who's going to write a journal for that fills 14 volumes. Isn't going to agree with himself everywhere. Oh no. Today for

instance you're quite happy about Chicago because it's the sunny day and the lake is shining. But last Sunday when you wanted to take your wife out with a new Easter hat you hated the place. Yes. Except I don't keep a journal. Well then you're not a writer. No. Yes you are. You wrote this book. Well not the status of Waller and it has a rather dominant position now in American literature wouldn't you say? I think without any question that if you asked anyone to name the ten, well I'd say the ten best books, the ten greatest artistic triumphs in American literature that this would certainly be one of them. The writing in it is almost perfect. It says what he wants to say and he has very many different kinds of things to say and he does each one of them as it ought to be done. It's always clear and I think forceful. It has a variety of rhythms, a variety

of moods and ideas that very few writers could find the right things for. I would follow you Lynn you say it's almost perfect. I say it's perfect. I mean the... Well I'm cagey. Yes you are. You are big scholarly cautious. And you don't have to indulge in what the thorough calls the sublime -o... Sublime -o -ship slip shot. Slip shot. The manner of talking, well I am dog when it's there. He's in there for it. No. But as he said he drives his sentence of home like driving a nail into the fuzzing. Yes he's the furring. For the furring. Yes. He writes that way and you can't pick up a... He's excited by sheer style no matter what he's saying. But what is he saying? What made him write this book? You wrote about making a wall in him but what made him make wall in? What was he getting after? Well there were two things. He went out to the pond because he had

some writing to do. And because he really couldn't do it at home. His mother ran a boarding house and there were too many women around clacking all the time. And furthermore he didn't want to spend a lot of time working to make his living. So he decided to go out and live in the hut and cut down on expenses. And while he was there he kept being asked by people. What do you do there? How do you live? Aren't you scared being down there? What would you do if he got sick? And so he decided he'd tell them because he was deeply enjoying the life. And he knew that for him and possibly for others this would be a very rich experience. And secondly he wanted to tell the people in his own impudent way what was wrong with their own lives. I mean their attitude toward him was, well you're crazy. But

he turned around on them in the first chapter particularly. And said no I'm not crazy, you are. And so what you have is a book that is mainly autobiographical narrative. Simply telling how wonderful this was. And it's set in fundamentally two chapters of primarily a persuasive argument pointing out what he thought were the mistakes that people made in their demands on life in the values that they were looking for. And he set up against those values values of his own. And then in the main body of the book in the narrative giving a full example of the goodness of a life lived in an attempt to get the values that he wanted. Life occurring to principles. Yes, if you will, life lived according to your own desires, your

own wants, your own needs, your own aspirations. And I wanted to point here that didn't he go out to Walden on July 4th 1845? This was a coincidence. It was just coincidence that there was no kind of... No, he would have thought that was a, he would have thought that was a shoddy piece of bravado. No, it was purely coincidental. But is it a rather amusing to me to see Henry walking out the road to Walden, all of the neighbors coming into town to celebrate his life? Of course the trouble is that I don't think he'd have done very much about helping them to celebrate since he was angry at the government at the time. The Mexican War was close upon us and he didn't like the way the government behaved most of the time anyhow. That's a good new idea. He might very well have said, what are you celebrating Independence Day for? None of you have any independence. He would have come very close to saying that to a great man. Well, that brings up the point that that business of his dislike of the Mexican War is going to jail for that night. And he put people off by saying, why won't you in jail? I mean, instead they're looking at him

saying, what are you doing here? Why aren't you here? Yes, if he said it. Yeah, if he said it. But it fits, possibly because he might very well have said to people, why did you pay your taxes? He's a little bit like Grandpa Vanderhoff in play. You can't take it with you when the income tax man came around and said, look Mr. Vanderhoff, you haven't paid your income tax. You're taxes. Well, I'm not going to. Well, why? What do you want him for? Well, we got an army in the Navy. Well, I'm not interested in the Army in Navy. I'm not going to support him. This was Grandpa Vanderhoff. My Rose line wasn't exactly like that, but it's the general attitude. We're striking a sympathetic card at this moment, of course, with taxes so recent in our minds. But you say this wasn't accident is going out. The two years, you say he went out in order to drive life in the corner to examine it. But may I suggest that he went out? Is this a fact, and I just, my suggestion is just silly.

He went out there to write the week on the Concord Merlin. Yes, this was that he had a piece of work to do, which was primarily to write a week on the Concord Merlin Mac Rivers. And he felt that he could not get the time if he stayed home in Concord. As I said, a lot of people around, and he wouldn't be left alone. They wouldn't leave him alone. You know what it's like trying to write a book. So he decided he'd go on out and live at the pond and live cheaply and be alone and free. He was not, in any sense, a hermit. This was his way of getting a room and a library with no telephone in it. Or writers today. What do they do? They go down to Mexico, they go to Iraq, Ireland and Maine. Yeah, but he didn't have enough money to get anywhere but out into the pond or out near the pond. And he did write. He did write a version of a week on the Concord Merlin Mac Rivers. But it, too, was rewritten after he had finished it at the pond. I see. Well, if he went out there to do one, then

another book came on him. In other words, he went out to confront himself as an artist as much as anything. You say, confront his life. Yeah, I'm not sure. I tend to question whether or not you'd use this word. I don't think it was a solemn as going out to confront himself. Well, he found out something when he got there. I know. It's a solemn when we pull it out. These artists can talk about that moment of their dedication. It gets awfully pompous and silly and stupid when they do it. But it happens somehow. There comes a moment when one begins to say, here is what I want to do. Here's what I'm going to do. Oh, yes, that. Yes, that's, that's sure. I agree that he had simply made up his mind that he wasn't going to. You see, he'd been, he'd tried tutoring down at Staten Island for Emerson's, was his brother or his cousin who lived down there. Before that, he'd lived at Emerson's for quite a period of time, being a sort of general handyman. And he'd also been back with his family and helped, helped them. But all these things weren't a fearing. With what he knew he wanted to do, what in the sense you might say, he felt he had to do and that was get this book

done. A week on the Concord and Merrimack River. He had some reviews, too, that he wrote. But it maybe was just to get away and live his life. Had he written there much before, before they started on the Concord and Merrimack, or did his essays come out mainly outwards? Oh, he'd written a few essays. But no major piece had been done before that. What, this is jumping the gun. Well, what would have happened to Thorough how he lived? This is a completely irrelevant model. But what would have happened? Would he have gone on writing and would he have married or what? He wouldn't have married, I think. No. I don't know. One of the great things that he left unfinished was a, was the completion, if it could ever have been completed, of his very detailed and original study of the whole cycle of the seasons, you know, the natural world. And even if

I put it this way, his study of the ecology of Concord, what all the relationships were there. People used to laugh at him. He measured snow depths and he counted tree rings, you know. Okay, they're doing this today. They've been doing it and it produces important scientific information that is both theoretically interesting and practically useful. He was a good observer, a very accurate one with me. Yes, yes. No, one of his troubles was that he did not have in good, you know, during a good deal of the time. The, he didn't quite know where he was going. He didn't have the philosophical and meth, he didn't have the philosophical, at a basis, nor the method worked out for the things that he was doing. It was more of an intuitive choosing

what he would do at any particular time, so that he never, he never brought this material together. And it's barely conceivable, this may be heresy. It's barely conceivable that he wouldn't have been able to draw it all together for perfect scientific relations. But I'm certain that Walden makes clear that he would have been able to draw it together to write an imaginative recreation of what life was like, what living was like in Concord for all things. Then you disagree with the critics who feel that he was falling apart, very much. In the first place, there's no, I see no evidence of that. He died, what was it, eight years, 1862, eight years after Walden was published. In that time, he did quite a bit on the main woods, on Cape Cod. He wrote the papers on John Brown.

He was doing this tremendous amount of work that appears in his journals and notebooks about the Concord world. And from, I forget the date, I can't be accurate about it. But for certainly the last two years of his life, he was practically mortally ill. And for some few years before that, he had not had his full energy, in spite of the fact that he kept living at a pace that a physical pace killed him. What a tuberculosis. Was this a family? Yes, at least one of his sisters died of it. And there's some notion, I think, that his brother had it, his brother died of lockjaw. But it was in the family. It was a lot of family. Yes, 19th century, yes, 19th century. What you say in New England now, we're coming to another point, which I think we might play around with. What is this New England quality we feel in him? You mentioned before we started here the relationship with Frost. And oftentimes when I read Emily

Dickinson, I think, this isn't maybe not a good relationship, but I think of Thorough when I read Emily Dickinson. Well, I can't say too much about that possible relationship because I don't know Emily Dickinson, as I think I know Frost. It seems to me that the obvious, of course the obvious New England relationship there is in both Thorough and Frost. What might be called the furniture is New England. The house is the woodlot. The lily bushes. But over and beyond that, there is, I'm not always sure this is absolutely true of New England, but it's certainly taken as New England. The absolute determination to stand on one's own feet. Even if one isn't going to go quite as far as saying, look, leave me alone. The determination, I think, to face up to whatever is there.

And the accepting of it, the not complaining too much about it, not taking the attitude that somehow or other, somebody's going to do all this for you. This, of course, got Frost in trouble with the sociological critics. In the 30s, he was accused of being hard -hearted, careless of human suffering. But I don't think this is so at all. Frost simply, it seems to me, and this would have been true of Thorough. Look, I'm looking at another aspect of the problem. Thorough was criticized for all not taking part in the great reform movements, everything from vegetarianism to changing the condition of prisoners in New England. All of this good work. But Thorough felt that he had his own business to do. He wasn't hard -hearted. He was one of the most charitable to the poor

suffering Irish up around Concord, helped people get their friends over their families over from Ireland. He didn't like the way the Irish lived very much, but he understood why they lived that way. And he cared about them, was interested in them as individual human beings who had something in them. I would say that we could describe this in New England as Yankee Cussardness. There's a streak of it, which is admirable. I love it. I lived in the Hampshire for 30 summers, and some of my neighbors, they're an hydro -old hen -hunting. And he was a farmer, except he was married and had children, but he was again the government. I don't like the government, how I'd say. And he had this kind of tough mind in this. He was willing to face up to this, that, and the other thing, which I call New England. I think New England, Emily Dickinson said. Well, with Emily Dickinson, going back to that, the little I know, it seems to me that you have the same delight

in, the same playing with metaphor in Thoreau and Emily Dickinson. Though hers tends to be more perhaps elusive than his, at sometimes I think more faithful. Well, are you touching on another point here when the importance of this book, we're talking about as an autobiographical narrative, containing an argument, but it also is a poetic document. Very much so. It's employment, which is poetic. It's a yes, absolutely. But above all, it's a beautifully wrought, imaginative recreation of an experience which has grown and become more valuable into the writer as he looks back on it. All right. But in doing so, he does it in language. I'm talking about the very language itself, the material with which he works. Words are the poetic words, or the words used poetically, used toughly and hard. He doesn't get soft or sentimental.

But he confronts the thing, I think, mind you, an axe or a farm or anything. So, harshly and concretely, it becomes in time poetic. It becomes resonant, like Blake staring in a not -hole until he became terrified. And I think Thorough does that. And if you say he uses metaphors so amazingly throughout here, is this a great web of metaphor in Walden? It doesn't, that point being made much of today. Well, yes. One of the main metaphors that many of the critics are interested in, it seems to me, is the metaphor of the seasons. Yeah. It begins in the summer, goes through fall and winter, and comes back to spring. And a good many critics stress this somewhat more strongly than I want to, that it's a book about, you might say, the rebirth of the spirit. Well, maybe this is terribly

prosaic, but the book begins with the summer, because that's when he got there. It does not begin with the summer, in order to have it end up in the spring, in order to prove that this was rebirth. The facts precede any symbolic interpretation of it. Well, it could be a coincidence, but it's still insignificant. Certainly, it could be, it may, it's very important, I think, to the sensitive reader who feels this. Certainly, the seasonal, the wonderful seasonal development was terribly important to throw, because as he was making it bigger, as he enlarged this book, what he did, the greatest amount of enlarging is in fall and winter. He's got summer, he had summer pretty well, and then he had some fall, very little fall, a little summer winter, and then the great passage on spring, on spring. That was, most of it's in the first version, but he had to put in great amounts of fall and winter to fill up not because he had a certain length he

wanted to go, but because as he went back to it, he saw, well, the fall isn't in there. The changing of the leaves, the pla, for example, the plastering of his house, which he did only in the fall. And then he builds up the story of, well, his chapter on housewarming, which tells how the fall comes on. And former inhabitants was in the original, but the other half of the chapter and winter visitors was not, because when you first, it's a commonplace in autobiography, I think, that in most of them, the early years are the best. Yes, that's a good observation. And this, I think, is oriented the fact that time has sived out the stuff. Well, now, when he... When you grow senile, you think of your early years, you don't... Well, he didn't get senile. You stopped suggesting things like that. But when he was at the pond, he could not see the experience adequately. It,

as he went on, though, through 48, 49, 50, on to 54. And he was writing, he was making little changes in this book, right up to the last version. During that time, he was rereading it and feeling what was missing, noticing what was missing. At the same time, he was noting his daily experience in the journals. And I'm convinced that this helped to remind him of the book, and he would take stuff, and he would go back and put it in the book. Well, I think that's a very important point. incidentally, the Walden pond, we have a picture of it. I think people might like to see a bit of Walden pond. Isn't Walden pond... Is there something stirring now about trying to save it from exploitation of one kind or another? Yes, there's a save Walden committee in Concord, Massachusetts, that is fighting a legal battle against certain state officials. Oh, you have... There's some of the woods, you can see the pond in the distance. This shows up beautifully in color, and those of you who have color sets are fortunate. Black and white, it gets a little bit mixed up, but it's still a still a beautiful pond, although they do have bathing

there now in other facilities, don't they? Well, people can send money into save Walden pond, is it Concord? Save Walden committee, Concord, Massachusetts. Well, they can still help save it if they want to. Yes, they want to, yes. That's it, I think that if they need most of it. Walden pond, they probably would. Yes, well, it's still a beautiful place, and the number E .B. White's visit to it. Yes. Well, this has been a very pleasant survey, certainly a survey, a hasty one, of a very great book, Walden by Henry David Tharrow. And I want to thank you, Lindsay, only for coming and being with us and talking about your book, The Making of Walden. Well, I'll talk about Tharrow anytime.