Read Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976 for Free Online Page B

minute, from self-admiration.

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    Thoreau
    THE INDIVIDUALIST
    5/7/49
    MAY 6TH IS THE SADDEST DAY in the year for us, as it is the day of Thoreau’s death * —a grief from which we have not recovered. Henry Thoreau has probably been more wildly misconstrued than any other person of comparable literary stature. He got a reputation for being a naturalist, and he was not much of a naturalist. He got a reputation for being a hermit, and he was no hermit. He was a writer, is what he was. Many regarded him as a poseur. He was a poseur, all right, but the pose was struck not for other people to study but for him to study—a brave and ingenious device for a creative person to adopt. He posed for himself and was both artist and model, examining his own position in relation to nature and society with the most patient and appreciative care. “Waiden” is so indigestible that many hungry people abandon it because it makes them mildly sick, each sentence being an anchovy spread, and the whole thing too salty and nourishing for one sitting. Henry was torn all his days between two awful pulls—the gnawing desire to change life, and the equally troublesome desire to live it. This is the explanation of his excursion. He hated Negro slavery and helped slaves escape, but he hated even more the self-imposed bondage of men who hung chains about their necks simply because it was the traditional way to live. Because of a few crotchety remarks he made about the factory system and because of his essay on civil disobedience, he is one of the early Americans now being taken up by Marxists. But not even these hard-working Johnnies-come-lately can pin him down; he subscribed to no economic system and his convictions were strong but disorderly. What seemed so wrong to him was less man’s economy than man’s puny spirit and man’s strained relationship with nature—which he regarded as a public scandal. Most of the time he didn’t want to do anything about anything—he wanted to observe and to feel. “What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?” he wrote—a sentence that is 100-proof anchovy. And when he died he uttered the purest religious thought we ever heard. They asked him whether he had made his peace with God and he replied, “I was not aware we had quarrelled.” He was the subtlest humorist of the nineteenth century, a most religious man, and was awake every moment. He never slept, except in bed at night.
    WALDEN
    12/28/46
    THE MOST RECENT EDITION of “Waiden” is a Dodd, Mead book containing a hundred and forty-two photographs by Edwin Way Teale. It is an amusing specimen for hard-shelled Thoreauvians. In it they can hear one naturalist speaking to another across a hundred years. Mr. Teale supplies, in addition to the pictures, an excellent introduction and some back-ground notes for each chapter. Carrying a camera, and probably bent on elevating his life by a conscious endeavor, he went out to the pond to make a photographic record of where Thoreau lived and of what he lived for. Mr. Teale rose early to catch the mists above the water. He lay in wait for the ice to break up in spring. He went out and took pictures of Brister’s Spring and of Fair Haven Hill. He walked the tracks of the Fitchburg. He closed in on ground nut and swamp grass, on johnswort and wild grape. He even fired point-blank at a bean row and scored a direct hit.
    â€œWaiden” is, of course, not a book that can be illustrated. The Concord woods are both tamer and wilder than they were in 1845, and besides, Thoreau was writing not about beans but about the meaning of beans—which is hard to photograph. A person who is about to encounter the text of “Waiden” for the first time should buy a small, unadorned edition, such as the pocket Oxford, which will allow him to travel light and on a high plane. I rather imagine that Henry Thoreau would feel that Mr. Teale, roaming the