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.”