Skimming Walden
Pond
What agitated me so in Kathryn Schulz's New Yorker essay about the
"hypocrite" Henry David Thoreau ("Pond
Scum," October 19, 2015) that it kept me up late, trying to reduce my own
digs down to essential facts? To see, in other words, if the piece said something
trenchant or if, instead, I was simply hurt?
Because I love Thoreau. And because, despite Schulz's belief that the book is
"not well known" or even "seriously read," I actually have gotten through Walden, at least twice,
cover-to-distant-cover, and I've reread many chapters several times more,
studying and writing about and discussing them with others so often that I can
— and often do — quote that "fanatical"
old curmudgeon, even with phrases well beyond the "quote-a-day" quips
that Schulz credits for our (who are "we?") having made him our
"national conscience." And, on top of that, not only did I grow up in
a tiny, rural town in New England (roughly 75 miles northwest of Prospect
Park), but in the early 1970s my parents tried to actually live the ideal: they sold our all-electric house and moved deep into
the woods to a self-sufficient farmstead without plumbing and power. Yes — I
pooped in an outhouse while in high-school. Sure, our house wasn't as Spartan as
Thoreau's, and my Dad did fix the place up eventually, and even though I certainly had no real say in how we
would live, and what for — I mean, this wasn't me driving my "life
into a corner" — and even though my folks were trying that experiment as
much out of financial necessity as they were acting on convictions, the point
is: I have Been There (sort of). Genuine farmhouse. I've read the book (twice,
at least). Studied and quoted it. Pooped outside on frosty mornings. Learned
from experience.
Like Schulz (I think), I was first
introduced to Thoreau by my high school English teacher: a very passionate, civic-minded,
chain-smoking lover of literature and nature who claimed to reread the book
each summer at her camp on the St. Lawrence River. She also knew, the year she
taught us, that she was dying of cancer. So she'd given it her all — teaching was
how she'd chosen to live her final year. Her passion and commitment inadvertently
changed my life. I'd been applying to art schools only at the time, and often I
skipped her class to go to the river with friends on "sketch trips"
(read everything into that), but she would
always corner me afterwards and make me write essays about, say, why drawing
was more important than reading Thoreau.
Such self-correcting exercises I could endure, but the North
Country winter changed everything — nasty cold, bruised-skies,
short days. Wood-stoves. By Christmas break, I'd sketched every dried piece of
fruit and gnarled firewood in the house twice, so I eventually turned to the
assigned Walden, the longest book I'd
ever opened. I read at speech-rate, back then; I heard each word of his spoken aloud
in my head, and perhaps for that reason I took everything to heart, until slowly,
like a winter thaw, "the Judge" (as they'd called him at Harvard) became
one of my closest friends during the longest winter of my life. He was, and is,
excellent company, ever-ready to talk about what to live for —which (as Schulz rightly
notes) most adolescents do, as do truth-seekers of all ages, particularly in
extremity. It sure beat hanging with the local kids that year, inhaling aerosols
in the snow-bank behind the hockey rink.
So that's one reason reading Schulz's
"Pond Scum" stirred me up: I
felt called to defend my loyal, courageous companion. Because when I read the italicized
teaser at bottom of the New Yorker page
— "Why, given his hypocrisy,
sanctimony, and misanthropy, has Thoreau been so cherished?" — I was
just sucked in, as intended, fully expecting the piece to be a bit of retro-1980s
canon-bashing. Which, to some extent, it might be. But I couldn't find any
clear ideology beneath it — just anger. Schulz seemed so pissed, listing
several of the myriad inconsistencies anyone can find by skimming Walden, calling Thoreau a hypocrite for such
small stuff as writing of his "year in the woods" when in fact it's "widely
acknowledged" that he'd actually lived 26 months at the pond. He says as
much himself, in the "Where I Lived" chapter, explaining that he put
"the experience of two years into one" for "convenience"!
Elsewhere, Schulz is upset that Thoreau interrupted his "sham
retreat" to occasionally walk to his mother's, nearby, for cookies.
Pulling ostensibly damning bits like
this from the chapter on "Economy" — which Schulz finds to be "dry,
sententious, condescending" and "more than eighty pages long" — seems
outright silly. For example, when cataloging all of the appetites from which Thoreau
hypocritically abstained, Schulz misreads his line about the sometimes-over-stimulating
effect of coffee to prove that he shuns even Our Beloved Bean! I honestly shared
Schulz's shock, but then found Appendix VI
of The Maine Woods, where the
ever-thorough Thoreau details an "Outfit for an Excursion," measuring
out the supplies needed for a 12-days' journey for three people, and he says
you must pack three pounds of coffee! That's three jacked
backpackers!
But you see my point. I doubt any writer
of Schulz's chops (her recent piece on the
Cascadia fault is a mind-blower) would seriously leverage such small,
copious contradictions as proof of any writer's being a "jarring" fake.
Thoreau walked his talk. Walden is no
life-hacking experiment, like The 4-Hour
Workweek (to which Schulz alludes), written solely for financial gain and a
bit of celebrity. Anyone reading Thoreau, in his day, also would have known
that Walden Pond was a mere skipping-trip's distance from Concord, that he worked
seven years revising his account of his "year" there, and that he was
a melancholic grump, as "ugly as sin" (according to Hawthorne), who
generally worked for only as long as was needed to fund a life of study, writing,
and travel (by foot). We was also a well-known and outspoken Underground
Railroad abolitionist, and an acutely-principled citizen who was imprisoned for
refusing to pay taxes — more "Occupy" than Ayn Rand — in order to protest
aspects of a government he disapproved of and
wanted to improve. He rooted and tended his beliefs by living them, and Walden is just one product. No one would
read Walden as a blueprint for life anymore
than, say, one might watch Survivor reruns
to learn how to last 40 days of the Australian Outback in swimwear. I doubt any
serious reader would slap shut the covers of Walden and say: Bullshit! The
dude ate cookies!
Still, I got stuck on Schulz's
insistence that Thoreau didn't engage with "eminently human experiences,"
despite such chapters as "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For." If this
were true, what had I been reading in so many pages of Walden? And so, confident the New
Yorker is no product of "the modern, cheap and fertile press" (you've
got to love lines like that?), I
jumped back into "Pond Scum."
Perhaps it was the introduction, which
evokes the Syrian refugee crisis to grab our interest? There, by the very means
Schulz accuses Thoreau of using in his book, Cape Cod , the essay opens
with a dramatic retelling of a shipwreck, in which immigrants wash up on the
shore of their promised land. Schulz's claim that Thoreau "found himself
unmoved" by the sight of the drowned, bloated children he described lying
in makeshift coffins sounded unfair to me, until I read him quoted as saying:
"On the whole, it was not so impressive a scene as I might have
expected." That's ugly. As was Schulz's accusation that he "saw in
loss of life only aesthetic gain." Of course it's understandable that we
pluck quotes from one context to plant in ours, but this was so startling I had
to go back to the original. My suspicion, or perhaps my hope, was that his extremely
polished and deliberate style — what makes him so vital a chronicler of his times — could be seen as an attempt
to make such a horror into something that could withstand a rereading. Something
literary.
So, thanks to Schulz, I took a
side-trip and read the first chapter of Cape Cod . And what I found there was gruesome indeed
— a scene which Thoreau describes with the dispassion of a journalist trying to
convey the truth. Because such horrors truly are incomprehensible. I don't think it reflects too poorly on
Thoreau that he went out of his way on a walking tour of the Cape to witness
this scene — far worse to avoid it entirely — and to interview the locals and
truthfully convey the shock of everyone around, perhaps mirroring their tone.
"This shipwreck had not produced a visible vibration in the fabric of
society," he says, and of one of the farmers he spoke with, he wrote,
"these bodies were to him but other weeds which the tide cast up, but
which were of no use to him." That's cold, but believable, seeing how
little our own refugees have disturbed the marketplace.
How one directs the narrative eye
of any piece of writing is a deliberate choice, and we can be sure that's all
the more true for Mister Only-That-Day-Dawns-To-Which-We-Are-Awake. Should we
choose to give Thoreau the close reading Schulz says we don't, we might here also
see the transparent eye of someone who's published (at personal expense) the
full political, social, and economic resonances of a scene that would otherwise
have been no more than a footnote in local history. Yes, he professes to take his
ultimate solace from the perfection of Nature (with a capital "N",
the Spirit of the Transcendentalists, and somewhat grander than our term today).
The scene's longevity is all the more impressive for his having memorialized it
without photos or other media. As journalism, it compares well to our press around
today's refugees. To say he wrote it purely for "aesthetic gain" may itself
be a "myopic" observation.
Anyway, so opens "Pond
Scum." I soon got Schulz's main point: that "we" — and who "we" are is never clear — have
made a "convenient national hero" of one of the most abject
misanthropes to have ever set booted heel on this fair land. Schulz is not
timid when describing, in deliberately inflammatory terms, the author of Walden ("cabin porn") as "self-obsessed,"
"fanatical about self-control," someone who suffered an "inward
fixation" that flowed from an "unsettling… social and political
vision." (And all that's from just one sentence.) Schulz does curb each side of the essay's argument
with a jarringly-soft acquiescence that Thoreau was "an excellent
naturalist" and such stuff, but I still couldn't stop feeling peevish
about all the bullying until I realized that this might be, in part, a key point? Perhaps Schulz wanted to make a bit
of a splash? I can totally get that!
These days, with all the surface noise that drowns us — and about which, we all
know, Thoreau has much to say — how the hell else are we going to get anyone to
stop and read six near-picture-free pages about some heady old curmudgeon that (Schulz
says) no one even knows? That makes
sense to me.
Thus strengthened, I dove in to reduce
"Pond Scum" to its essentials. But I could not find much else. Beneath
the sour layer of outrage — Hypocrite!
Misanthrope! — I found little in the crater left behind. In the drained
pond-bed, if you will. I use that image deliberately, because the way we clean
our fake ponds out here in Golden
Gate Park
I found the first person used but
once in "Pond Scum," and that in connection with the above-mentioned,
misread quote about coffee. It's actually one of Schulz's best lines — "I
cannot idolize anyone who opposes coffee" — and it had me laughing in
agreement, the first time. But that's tongue-in-cheek, and so, not positing
much. There were some other stand-alone declarations, but they were slippery
upon inspection. For example: "No feature of the natural landscape is more
humble than a pond." Huh? "We" didn't say that, did we? Elsewhere,
I did feel comfortable making an inference, from the note that Elisha Kane was
a best-selling author — supporting the idea that Walden, having sold less, is of lesser value — to imply that, for
Schulz, sales might connote literary
value. So there's that. But elsewhere, where Schulz says Thoreau "wanted
to try what we would today call subsistence living, a condition attractive
chiefly to those not obliged to endure it": Really? Sure, I already know from
experience that pooping outdoors is no fun, but that's still a mighty big lot
to clear with one swing of an axe (if you will). For example, you could read The Mother
Earth News or visit Southern Oregon
or the Maine Woods or do some interviews or research, if you're really
interested in this stuff.
But I am not, overmuch — my
firewood-splitting days are through — and thus, for me, there had to be other reasons why "Pond Scum"
engaged me more, perhaps, than any article I've read all year. Schulz gave me
occasion to reestablish my admiration for a brilliant writer who,
freak-though-he-be, did absolutely nothing but good to anyone. That is true. I,
too, took my turn, in days past, poking fun at him and all the other off-the-grid
end-timers I've known close-hand, but when Schulz says stuff like, "the
physical realities of being human appalled him," I had to stop again, and:
Really? Because when you try to grow your
own food, or build your own shelter, or deliberately experience the seasons
with all of your senses, or even walk one whole long mile to eat your mom's
cookies — well, that all sounds pretty in-the-body to me. Thoreau's
descriptions of so much of his life on the pond are almost embarrassingly
sensual. And that, in fact, was part of the literary experiment that he and his
friends had taken on, back then: trying to reclaim language, re-connect it to
Nature, articulate this new American voice, and to do it all while wide-eyed
and wary lest we fall back and become yet another nation of imperialist
wannabes. That doesn't really make him a "thorough-going
misanthrope," who hates people, government, the Flesh, food, and coffee.
Schulz outlines a few salient bits
from his biography, and begrudgingly acknowledges his professional successes,
in very few sentences. He was good enough a teacher to have Emerson send him to
his brother's family as tutor, and he was caring enough to lose another
teaching job for refusing to cane the kids as ordered by his boss. When his
beloved brother died of lockjaw, in his arms, he suffered sympathetic psychosomatic
symptoms for weeks. He supported his mother and sister once his father died; he
invented a better pencil (but was too hapless to secure the patent); and he also
worked, as necessary, as a surveyor, house-painter, lecturer, handyman, and
journalist. He was deeply engaged with the highest intellects he had access to,
attending the Concord Lyceum, Quaker meetings, and Abolitionist rallies as
possible, and maintaining bumpy relationships with Emerson and the Transcendentalists,
all without ever making more than a few bucks from the best of his intellectual
pursuits. In fact, part of the reason for living in the cabin was to buy time
to finish A Week on the Concord
and Merrimack Rivers. Yes, he was also a mediocre student at
Harvard and a "rigid" teacher and probably not-so-much-fun around the
cider bowl. He was perhaps most odd for having devoted seven of his 44 years to
a literary exercise called Walden. It
is saying too much, however, as Schulz's
"Scum Pond" implies, that Thoreau was the prototype of the American loner — our Declaration of
Independence and "self-evident truths" are probably more responsible
for that. There is no reason to expect anyone experimenting with deliberate solitude
to offer up model social behavior. I can't imagine dropping by the cabin for a
good time, but I might visit to see
if he were real, and to see and hear the woods he describes so movingly in the
book I love, and which Schulz calls "an unnavigable thicket of
contradictions and caprice." Sometimes what you find what you seek.
Thoreau was no hypocrite. His pond
is bottomless. He had strong beliefs and he tested them with his own days. As
his mentor Emerson had once exhorted a graduating class at Harvard Divinity,
Thoreau spoke from a "life passed through the fire of thought." He shared
what he'd learned with whoever might listen, then or now, largely at his own
expense, and he made every effort to do so as beautifully as he could. And it
is what's truthful and beautiful in his work — much of which I see Schulz turning
away from, if not bypassing altogether — that's made him grow in renown, after
his death, as so often happens in American letters. When I went back to Walden, after reading "Pond
Scum," what most kept me reading was Thoreau's voice. It is honest,
rooted, deep, excusably grandiose in places if you're patient, and gently,
thoroughly critical of nearly everything
that can be questioned or observed in life — in the woods, or among
people. It is one voice of many, of
course, but it is gloriously American. And it's never a voice I hear telling me
how to think or what to do, just that I should do both together.
In the end, I went away from
"Pond Scum" not with a broader understanding of Walden, Thoreau, or America, but rather an aftertaste of one individual's
bitterness projecting itself upon another — some Schulz's, and some mine. Where
does the former come from? One possible clue is in Schulz's line, quoted above,
about coffee: "I cannot idolize…." Force is implied. Schulz sounds as if someone
or something has compelled us to make Thoreau our "national
conscience," and I sense it's something bigger and badder than my high
school English teacher. But I don't agree that we have, nor can I find the
bogeyman.
Another clue waits at the end of
this quick read of Thoreau, where Schulz says that "[u]ltimately, it is
impossible to not feel sorry for the author of Walden." "Poor Thoreau," she writes. Pity him.
"We" can easily imagine what
corner Thoreau would have us drive our pity into, and it wouldn't affect his
legacy in the least, because "we" did not "make a classic"
of Walden. Rather, the book has longevity in its very
nature, growing as it has from a gifted mind engaged in close dialogue between
individual and society. Something we three can value and, to be fair, something
which "Pond Scum" has to some extent nurtured. Schulz claims Thoreau
forsook that dialogue, for himself. I say he put more down into it than either
of us.
Is "Pond Scum" one for
the ages? Not likely. But there is one more thing to note, and which I enjoyed at
the meta-level of the essay, where Schulz takes pleasure in a description of Thoreau's
paddling after a loon that bobs underwater upon approach only to pop up elsewhere,
unexpectedly: "It was a pretty game, played on the smooth surface of the
pond, a man against a loon." We have done the same, and there is some
entertainment in that. And if you get a little attention or cash out of it, all
the better. But it's nothing to live for, methinks.
—
The End —
