The Diary of George Templeton Strong

After reading a novel set in 1893, I’ve stayed in old New York for the first volume of The Diary of George Templeton Strong. Strong was the son of a lawyer, and a graduate of Columbia University (class of 1838). He was just a little younger than Thoreau, who graduated from Harvard in 1837, and in some ways he was the anti-Thoreau. Both men wrote enormous diaries, but Strong’s was all about politics, his legal career, and the turmoil of life in Manhattan, while Thoreau’s was largely about taking walks in the countryside around Concord, Massachusetts.

Strong’s diary is very entertaining to read, and it’s unfortunate that it’s almost unobtainable. Only the first volume can be checked out of the New York Public Library system. He is probably best known, to those who know him at all, through the entries he made in the Civil War years that were used in Ken Burns’ documentary, and read in the best upper-crust Manhattan tones by George Plimpton. But those excerpts didn’t give a sense of how funny he could be. Here he is griping about the Transcendentalists, on September 25, 1840. (His comments would apply more to characters like William Ellery Channing than they would to Thoreau.)

Tried to read Kent this morning, but his pages, which never were remarkable for order and perspicuity, seemed even more hazy than ever. It was a toss-up between the ex-Chancellor and the Boston transcendentalists. The latter gentry have rather the advantage, by the way, for whereas the Chancellor merely contradicts himself on alternate pages and writes a book as his wife would make a pudding, by taking care to mix the ingredients—eggs, butter, and all—into undistinguishable homogeneity, the Eastern Magi take care to write so that it’s impracticable to know what any one sentence means and no one can therefore safely assert that any two passages are irreconcilable or unconnected, which is very delightful to behold and shows a true Yankee ingenuity in dodging the shafts of criticism. They’re safe behind the thick cotton of the infinite and The Incomprehensible.

As to their enunciation of the fact that “Matter is orbed and spirit is sphered” (or vice versa -- I forget which and it don’t much matter), I do not entirely agree with the pundits aforesaid. The thoughtful mind can never forget that in the polarization of the universal dual the essential idea is first individually evolved, and that from this purely spiritual genesis, extending as it does upwards into the profound and downwards into the exalted (and not according to Locke, vice versa), or in other words from the intensely spirituous, is first seen to emanate the dawnings of the Exotic. Strange, then, that any should be so utterly blind as not to deduce from these self-evident propositions the identity of the Ideal and the truncatedo-conical of the material and the right angulo-hexagonal triangular!

More Jeffrey Ford

I just finished Jeffrey Ford’s novel The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, which is set in New York City in 1893. It’s ingenious and entertaining, and combines the wildly improbable with some well-researched details on portrait painting, old New York, and other matters. If you liked Time and Again, Ragtime, or The Alienist, you should like this—and Ford doesn’t bring on as many distracting cameo appearances by famous names as the latter two books. (The artist Albert Pinkham Ryder does appear as a character, and his painting The Race Track is one of the book’s key images.)

Meanwhile, Jenn has created a website bringing together Ford’s works in a more complete and accessible way than has been done before—and with many links to work that’s available online. It’s called Jeffrey’s World, but the URL is www.thedrownedlife.com, after Ford’s latest collection (discussed here recently). 

A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851

I recently wrote about A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851, and the pros and cons of using it as an introduction to the Journal as a whole. But aside from noting the missing hyena, I didn’t say much about what you will actually find in this cross-section of Thoreau’s great work.

Thoreau seems to have done more sightseeing this year than usual. He went to a menagerie more than once, and he viewed a painted panorama of the Rhine, perhaps planting the seed for this elegiac passage from 1858. He went to Boston Harbor, and sketched the egg cases of skates that washed up on the beach. Thoreau’s 34th birthday left him in a philosophical mood, inspiring an entry that became the “different drummer” passage in Walden.

Thoreau also explored the world of Concord after dark. I’ve quoted here from his account of a moonlight walk he took two years later, but he went on many in 1851, and they produced some evocative writing.

Thoreau also had a lot to say about crickets in 1851. The cricket may have been the animal with the most significance to Thoreau, tied as it is to the turn of the seasons and Thoreau’s themes of resurrection and anticipation. Thoreau noted the first crickets of spring as a promise of warm weather to come, and the last crickets of November left him bereft.

1851 includes an account of Thoreau at a party ("I derive no pleasure from talking with a young woman half an hour—simply because she has regular features"), of the unfortunate accident of “Perch” Hosmer, and his description of the little Irish boy Johnny Riordan on his way to school, a passage that Thoreau reworked repeatedly.

There are also a couple of ominous entries about the local gunpowder mill, foreshadowing the deadly explosion of 1853. On September 4, he wrote, “At the Powder mills--the carbonic acid gass in the road from the building where they were making charcoal made us cough for 20 or 30 rods.” And on September 15 there was this. (Sure enough, it was the kernel mill that blew up first, sixteen months later.)

Found one intermediate boundstone near the Powder mill drying-house on the Bank of the river. The workmen there wore shoes without iron tacks-- He said that the Kernel house was the most dangerous--the Drying house next--the Press house next. One of the Powder-mill buildings in Concord?

The first wood frog

Today’s entry at the Blog of Henry David Thoreau is about the first wood frog of the spring.

I don’t know how many people are familiar with these attractive and unusual frogs. I used to see them on hikes in the Adirondacks, often on a carpet of dry leaves far from any body of water. Their buff color (with a raccoon-like mask) gives them good camouflage. (The photo comes from the conservation site 10,000 Birds .)

If you are a fan of Thoreau and amphibians, you should know about this book (even if you can’t afford it).

The case of the missing hyena

Thoreau’s Journal is one of the great works of art by an American writer. But most people, even readers of Walden, will never try the Journal. It’s just too damn long. So what’s the best way into the world of the Journal? How can you sample enough of it to want more?

One fine introduction is I to Myself, but it is a big book, packed with footnotes, and requires a bit more commitment than is ideal for a first exposure. New York Review Books will be publishing a new selected Journal soon, but I don’t yet know anything about it. The Blog of Henry David Thoreau contains many gems from the Journal, and because it is organized by day of the year, you get a strong sense of Thoreau’s connection to the turn of the seasons. What you don’t get is how each of these entries appeared in its context, as part of a day of writing.

That’s what you get in A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851: a full year sliced like a cross-section from the Journal that he kept from 1837 to 1861. H. Daniel Peck, who introduces the book, says that in 1851 Thoreau had left Walden Pond and was working on revisions of what would be published as Walden, or Life in the Woods. This was also the time when he began to recognize the value of the Journal as a work in itself, and not just a quarry for other published work. Thoreau stopped removing pages from the Journal in order to reshape them into essays and lectures: he copied them out instead, and left the originals in place.

I was a little surprised to see that A Year in Thoreau’s Journal is drawn not from the 14-volume 1906 edition but from the Princeton University edition of Thoreau’s writings. The Princeton version of the Journal began appearing in 1981 and has so far reached volume 8 (1854), which appeared in 2002. (Strangely, though, volume 7—covering 1853-1854—has a publication date of November 2009.)

In A Year, most of the scholarly apparatus has been stripped away, but the text itself appears warts and all, just as Thoreau left it. Even the line breaks seem to have been preserved.

I have mixed feelings about that. It’s interesting to see what he wrote exactly as he wrote it, but this is surely not the way he would want to appear in public. By correcting spelling, smoothing out grammar, removing material used elsewhere, and deleting lengthy passages (some in Latin) that were merely copied from Thoreau’s reading, the 1906 editors were doing the minimum of what Thoreau would probably want. What author would want the public to know he committed (sometimes repeatedly) spellings like gass, lizzards, stomack, trille, beeef, exhumbed, brittish, and even transendental (!).

It puzzled me, though, to read the August 1 passage on Thoreau’s visit to a menagerie, and not see the only indication that he ever saw a hyena!* I’m quoting from the 1906 edition. The sentence in boldface is missing from the Princeton edition. Why?

There was nobody to tell us how or where the animals were caught, or what they were. Probably the proprietors themselves do not know,-- or what their habits are. They told me that a hyena came from South America. But hardly had we been ushered into the presence of this choice, this admirable collection, than a ring was formed for Master Jack and the pony!

So aside from the menagerie with the missing hyena, what’s included in A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851? This post is long enough already, so I’ll take that up another time.

*He had thought about them earlier than this, however. On July 10, 1840, he wrote, “I could tame a hyena more easily than my friend.”