It was, you might say, a reality TV show before there was reality TV — before there was TV, period.
When Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) toddled off to the woods outside Concord, Mass., to craft his little shack and “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,” it wasn’t an earnest, humble, guileless journey — even though myth would have it so, myth that has flourished in the 150 years since “Walden” was published Aug. 9, 1854.
It was a stunt, pure and simple. A situation dreamed up to see just what would happen if you took a city slicker with a fancy education and stuck him in a hut in the middle of nowhere with only a fishing pole, a stack of books and a spirit of adventure.
Think “Survivor” without the tribal-council shtick.
“The widespread view that he was a hermit who went to Walden for the rest of his life — that’s just not right,” says Elizabeth Hall Witherell, adjunct English professor at Northern Illinois University and editor of The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, a project shepherding definitive editions of Thoreau’s work to publication by Princeton University Press.
The author’s strategic sojourn “was to give him a point of view, a perspective,” Witherell adds. “He was actually in and out of town all the time. He was visited by friends.”
Thoreau’s bright idea was to live in the woods for a couple of years and, while there, record his ideas and impressions. He wasn’t moving away from the world as much as he was moving toward a place of thoughtful reflection, toward insights later pressed into the pages of “Walden” like colorful leaves.
And contrary to popular notion, Thoreau never claimed the book was an unvarnished record of exactly what transpired there.
“People overlook the fact that `Walden’ is not an autobiography,” says Jeffrey S. Cramer, curator of collections at The Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods. “He’s telling a story in a particular way. He’s a writer, first and foremost.”
Cramer is the editor of a freshly annotated edition of “Walden,” one of at least three new versions designed to commemorate the book’s original publication a century and a half ago. Along with Cramer’s, which is published by Yale University Press and not only cleans up errors that have crept into previous texts but also adds biographical and historical context to Thoreau’s life, there is a new “Walden” from Princeton, featuring an introduction by John Updike, who calls the book “a head-clearing spice”; and one from Houghton Mifflin, which includes photographs of Walden Pond by Scot Miller.
Collecting dust
While universally hailed as a classic, “Walden” has suffered the fate of many a famous book: It’s more read about than read, with more copies purchased than perused. “I’ve always said that `Walden’ and Stephen Hawking’s work are probably the most cited — and least read — works in the 20th Century,” says Witherell. She may know Hawking almost as well as she knows Thoreau, because her husband, Michael Witherell, is director of Fermilab, the high-energy physics facility in Batavia, Ill.
Actually, physics figures into the twist of fate by which the Thoreau project ended up at NIU’s Founders Memorial Library. Undertaken in 1966 to provide authoritative versions of all of Thoreau’s work, including his 47-volume journal, the project commonly follows its editor. When her husband, a particle physicist, took the job at Fermilab in 1999, Elizabeth Witherell — an English professor who had ascended to the editorship in 1980 — brought the Thoreau project to NIU from the University of California at Santa Barbara, where both she and her husband had taught for 16 years.
The Thoreau project (www.thoreau.niu.edu) is more daunting than it might seem. While the author published only two books in his lifetime (“Walden” and “A Week on the Concord and Merimack Rivers,” the latter being the work upon which he toiled while living in that legendary lean-to), Thoreau was a ferociously inspired scribbler. He left towering piles of manuscripts, from letters and drafts to those prodigious journals, all written in a script so tangled and tortured and minuscule that it surely makes readers wish there had been a laptop with Wi-Fi at Walden Pond.
The journals alone will require 16 volumes, of which seven have been published, says Witherell, who typically works from photocopies rather than fragile original manuscripts (although an editor travels to the various libraries to check the final version against the originals). Finishing the journals will entail at least another two decades.
Is it worth it?
“A lot of scholars see Thoreau’s journal as the most important work of his career,” says Witherell, because the journal serves as a sort of perpetual rough draft. “They were the place where he could experiment with putting down life without the constraints of having to polish and fix it.”
Yet everywhere else he was a notorious polisher and fixer, overhauling “Walden” eight times over 10 years — most of the drafts are at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., while the last, which Thoreau sent to his publisher, has never been found — to make it just the way he wanted it.
A slow read
“I don’t know of any writer who spent such care over each word,” says Cramer. “He knew full well that most readers wouldn’t get everything he was putting into it — but he did it anyway.”
As Thoreau wrote in “Walden”: “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”
Yet he seemed to sense somehow that most readers would come to “Walden” twice: First as harried, desperate undergraduates embarked on midnight speed-reads for a quiz in the next day’s English class; and then later as thoughtful, slightly wiser and perhaps a tad bit disillusioned individuals searching for guidance on living a fulfilled life.
He seemed to know that readers a century-and-a-half hence would fasten first on all the catchy lines in “Walden,” memorable sentences such as “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” and “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity” and “Our life is frittered away by detail.”
And then, when they returned to the book, they would look beyond the aphorisms to its core, which includes not only a deep and abiding profundity but plenty of humor. “He was one heck of a funny guy,” confirms Cramer.
Indeed, reading “Walden” without the pressure of it being a homework assignment is a revelation. While the book can occasionally sound like a cross between Deepak Chopra and Andy Rooney — the instructions for living, the tiny complaints about every little thing — it also brims with close observation and intricate detail: “On the third or fourth of May I saw a loon in the pond, and during the first week of the month I heard the whippoorwill, the brown-thrasher, the veery, the wood-pewee, the chewink, and other birds.” Really, now: Can you ever read too much about the wood-pewee and the chewink?
“Thoreau was both a poet and a scientist,” says Witherell, who believes that Thoreau should be ranked among the very best American authors of all time. “Top five, probably. He had such insights about people and how people work — about how to make the choices we have to make to live our lives. Thoreau helps you define what kind of satisfaction you want. He makes you question.
“Circumstances have changed dramatically and we don’t live the way he lived. But we have the same questions.”
