The Dancing Balloon with Emerson and Thoreau

In the Knox College spring term of 1967, I took a 16th Century English Literature course from Mr. Brady.  At that time we were both on the Faculty Committee for Student Affairs, and our interactions there could be described as inflaming mutual frustration.  Our conflicts would become oddly defined in public in the upcoming fall term.  But whatever bad feelings there might have been at this point did not spill into this course.

I have two surviving papers from this course: one short, the other longer.  I got an A on both.  Brady even included a pun in his comments on the short paper, which was on a poem by Thomas Wyatt, in which a central metaphor was a filesmith's file.  Along with the grade, Brady wrote: "Far superior to the rank and file."  (He did not however get my joking reference to a contemporary novel I was enthusiastic about: Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.) On my longer paper on Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, he disapproved of the "staccato style," but concluded "it's a very good job."  

Truth is I didn't much care for 16th century literature--but it is interesting that the approach I took to the Faerie Queene was to focus on "innocence as the essence of ideal love," carrying on a theme I followed in 20th century writer Scott Fitzgerald in winter term.  One paragraph is worth quoting to indicate my thoughts and feelings on the subject at that time, and for years later:

"Innocence, openness, gentlenesss, are the qualities of love that make it what it is--the conciliator of disparate elements in human experience.  It must often be a fostered innocence, deliberate, treasured.  And it does not always promise perfection, for love blends the mortal and the immortal, but is not wholly of either.  It is poignant."

The chief element of this course that I remember is an assigned book: The Allegory of Love by C.S. Lewis, particularly the first two chapters, on Courtly Love and on Allegory.  Impressions of these lasted beyond the course.

Now I come to the course on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau taught by Douglas Wilson in spring 1967.  The opportunity to read and study these two writers has had perhaps the most lasting effect on my life of any literature course in college.  I can't imagine my life if I hadn't read them that tumultuous spring.  They were a necessary connection to nearly everything that came before, and nearly everything that would come after.

As with the Walt Whitman/Wallace Stevens course the spring before, Doug Wilson's enthusiasm infused this experience.  I can't read any of these writers--Whitman, Stevens, Emerson or Thoreau--without thinking of Doug Wilson.

But even before his knowledge and enthusiasm was displayed in the classroom, Wilson made this course memorable by the choice of books we used as texts.

Emerson's best known works were his essays, and Thoreau's was Walden.  But the specific books Wilson chose both broadened the view of these writers, and placed their work in context.

Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Riverside paperback edited by Stephen E. Whicher, placed Emerson's major essays in the context of his journal entries surrounding the times of their composition.  The book also included Emerson's poems, which Wilson did not neglect in class.  We probably were assigned the Prentice-Hall volume of Emerson criticism, also edited by Stephen Whicher, along with Milton Konovitz.

Similarly, the Norton Critical Editions paperback of Walden and Civil Disobedience included not only the full texts but excerpts from Thoreau's journals, plus reviews and critical essays, ranging from Thoreau's contemporaries (including George Eliot and Emerson) to modern writers and critics, including Van Wyck Brooks, F.O. Matthiessen, Sherman Paul and E.B. White.

Providing further context was what for me was the most valuable addition: H.D. Thoreau: A Writer's Journal, selected and edited by Laurence Stapleton (Dover, which kept Thoreau's entire published journals in print for years, along with other Thoreau books.)  How thoroughly I consumed this volume (for this class and a later independent studies) is indicated by the profusion of underlinings and check marks throughout.  The idea behind the selection was to highlight entries--some of them quite long--that illuminate Thoreau as consciously a writer.

These kinds of contexts not only informed the main texts but made the course more involving, more personal, and more of an adventure.

Unlike Whitman and Stevens,  Emerson and Thoreau came from the same place at the same historical moment--in fact they were close friends for years, and the younger Thoreau even lived for awhile in the Emerson household.  That historical moment involved the Transcendentalist movement, so we had Selected Writings of the American Transcendentalists (Signet paperback) as background (My copy has underlining only in the introduction and first chapter.)

My copy of Thoreau's book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, dates from this time, and it may have been an assigned text.  I also acquired The Portable Thoreau that spring.

My feeling for Emerson and Thoreau was genuine during the course, but my sense of them in history and literary history comes later, as well as the obviously inaccessible knowledge of their role in my personal history.  Surviving papers show concerns somewhat derived from academic questions that were probably prominent at that moment, and an approach that still derives largely from philosophical analysis.

About history: today I see Emerson and Thoreau partly in historical context--a context I can feel, imaginatively, that I could not back then.  My feel for this history begins with imagining the historical contexts of my parents and grandparents generation, and the generation before that.  That takes me into the latter 19th century.  The Civil War era was not of much interest to me when I was young.  I grew up in western Pennsylvania, where the French & Indian war was fought, and in a town named after a general of the American Revolution.  That period was somewhat alive. In grade school I greatly admired Thomas Jefferson.  But even this period was merely "long ago," along with Davy Crockett and Robin Hood.

Even in college, historical periods were discrete and unconnected coalitions of facts and personalities.  In literature I was interested in the writer, not the period. I recall Mr. Wilson asking the class at one of our first Emerson/Thoreau meetings, who was President in the 50s?  I immediately said Eisenhower.  Of course he meant the 1850s.  But that combination of numbers meant nothing to me.  I was interested in what Thoreau and Emerson had to say to me NOW.  We were the Now Generation, after all.  But part of it was a failure of imagination because of a lack of experience: i.e. I was young.   Some of my contemporaries in college had that historical sense.  I did not. As I used to say in the 1990s, I got interested in history when I'd had some.

 A short paper wound its way through Emerson's essay on Art, with reference to contemporary trends in art, of which I actually knew little.  My final paper on Emerson was more ambitious, returning to the theme of innocence (footnotes include references to a book called Radical Innocence by Ihab Hassan, though I have no memory of it--some credit Hassan with the term "postmodernism"), the nature of good and evil, and Transcendentalism vs. existentialism.  The paper is interesting but mostly an emotional mess, clearly written with a distracted mind and a broken heart. It marks the low point of my spring affair, as well as a surfeit of other influences--the aftereffects of campus visits by Gary Snyder and John Cage among them.

 After this course at Knox, I acquired various collections of Emerson, including several old hardbacks: a Greystone Press edition of essays, the Modern Library abridgement of his journals, and a Chelsea Classics edition of Representative Men.   

To a paperback edition of Thoreau: The Major Essays (Dutton), I added new editions of some late Thoreau works: Faith in a Seed (Island Press 1993, edited by Bradley P. Dean), which calls itself Thoreau's Last Manuscript, at least until Wild Fruits:Thoreau's Rediscovered Last Manuscript (Norton 1999, also edited by Bradley P. Dean.)  I also got a few more books on the transcendentalists,  including Philip F. Gura's 2007 history, American Transcendentalism.

I also received (as review copies) several in the series of Yale University Press annotated Thoreau volumes, but I didn't care for the format (two columns of text, with annotations on both sides of them, plus a lot of white space.)  I did hold onto one of them--I to Myself, a selection from the journals.

But my major new adventure into Emerson and Thoreau began when I read a review by John Banville in the New York Review of Books of December 3, 2009. The review began with the greatest opening sentence of any review I've ever read, and quite possibly my favorite sentence ever.  It is: "Surely mankind's greatest invention is the sentence."

I've been wrapping my head around that ever since.

The review was of First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process by Robert D. Richardson.  This slim book also became one of my favorites.  And it introduced me to Richardson as biographer.

Over the next year or so I read his big three: Emerson: The Mind on Fire  (U. of CA 1995), Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (U. of CA 1986) and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Houghton Mifflin 2007.)  They led me as well to Richardson's selections of William James essays and of Emerson's essays, lectures and poems.  All three of the biographies are excellent in approach and as writing.

Emerson and Thoreau continue as living influences among contemporary American writers of various kinds, including the science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, the one fictionist whose books I buy immediately on publication.  In his Science in Washington trilogy (which he more recently edited into a single volume, Green Earth), one of his principal characters stumbled on a website called Emerson for the Day, and so quotations from Emerson and Thoreau became part of the text. (That website didn't actually exist, but for some years afterwards it did, because of those books.  I did a version of it on this site for awhile.) Then when Robinson visited Arcata several years ago, he advised his audience to read an entry in Thoreau's journals every morning, as he does.

There's much more that could be said about the influence of Emerson and Thoreau, and I will have a little more in my post on the upcoming summer of 67. But I will say this much here: in retrospect, it is evident that for me, Emerson and Thoreau were both a bridge from earlier literary enthusiasms, and a counter-example.  They were an American version of the English Romantics, and therefore a link to all that echoed in the Romantics (Wordsworth's "something more deeply interfused,/ Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,/And the round ocean and the living air,/And the blue sky, and in the mind of man/A motion and a spirit, that impels/All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,/And rolls through all things...")

But Emerson and certainly Thoreau went beyond the pastoral identification with innocence as in Spenser or even Shakespeare, to reclaim nature itself and the beauty and essentiality of the wild in the world and in the human soul ("In wildness is the preservation of the world"--Thoreau.) That notion links them forward to poet-ecologist Gary Snyder and ecologist-poet Paul Shepard, and back even farther than English literature goes, to the Native American and other Indigenous and original cultures developed in the far past.