The title of Andrew Menard’s personal, meditative book on Henry David Thoreau as a modern writer and environmentalist is instructive: Learning From Thoreau isn’t a book about Thoreau, so much as a recounting of Menard’s evolving discovery of what Thoreau means to him. His lens is modern science, art, and literature, as well as his own background as a conceptual artist. One of his chief claims for Thoreau as a modernist is the latter’s “desire to elevate nature by featuring its most humble aspects.” Menard compares this aesthetic to that of Any Warhol, who mastered the everyday materials of life. Thoreau is famous for saying, “I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess in Concord.” In his wonderfully associative prose, Menard compares this statement to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s analysis of this phenomenon as “arranging what we have always known.”
However, as Menard studiously documents, Thoreau’s walks were a daily experiment in seeing, in learning how to see, and his knowledge was a cumulative arrangement of variety and repetition arising from a background of sameness. All of his experiments took place within the ten-mile radius of Concord, a deforested colonial town divided into woodlots, whose famous pond was surrounded by few trees. Within this small world, Thoreau developed a philosophy of what constituted the American spirit and set it apart from England, as well as what was uniquely American in the land.
I should say at this point that Menard’s book is much like Thoreau’s life aesthetic: he revisits the same observations multiple times and not always with freshness. His approach to learning from Thoreau is additive rather than sequential or necessarily synthesizing. I sometimes found the repetitions of essential points confusing because they were stated somewhat differently and I wondered whether they were clarifications, refutations of previous minor points, or new parts of the arguments. Ultimately, I concluded that Menard was allowing himself the luxury of being transformed by his encounters with Thoreau, Walden, and Walden Pond.
In the opening chapter “Concord,” one learns that prior to 1750 or so, only the British used the term “American” to refer to the “primitive” land and people they had colonized. By the time of the Stamp Act crisis of 1764, the colonists turned the vague slur into an appellation of pride and identity. Thoreau clearly adopted this mantle, while many of his literary compatriots were still dependent on British critical approval, even as American writers were considered secondary to those in Britain. As his friend and mentor R.W. Emerson famously noted, “self-reliance is precisely that secret, to make your supposed deficiency redundancy.”
Menard is thorough in disabusing readers of romantic myths about the author of Walden. Thoreau was not a folksy American out of a Norman Rockwell painting; he was more a solitary figure out of Edward Hopper. The lovely wooded pond at Walden comprised mostly treeless wood lots. Colonial New England was deforested. The current thinking, according to Menard, is that Thoreau probably had some form of high-functioning autism (he cites Darwin, Kant, and Wittgenstein as fellow sufferers!). We probably all know by now that Thoreau walked to town often, had home cooked meals at his mother’s house, and made an enemy of himself in Concord (and that doesn’t begin to describe how people felt about him after he accidentally set the woods on fire). But he loved Concord and became the proponent of the modern environmental movement that advocates the importance of staying at home versus traveling. In terms of American identity, Thoreau stated his dislike of English topiary and fussy hedges, citing the beauties of our natural landscape. He regarded claims about the quintessential American nature of wilderness as ridiculous – those who made that claim, he said, missed the genius of the local wilderness in their own backyards. Menard asserts that Thoreau’s love of Concord was a form of civil disobedience, a stand for simplicity against the romantic notions of the wild West.
Thoreau had a somewhat radical notion (for its time) of what it meant to be an American writer. Concord was where he lived – and it was also a place he invented in his work, as every writer does for whom place is a major concern. As Menard notes, Concord was a place of “perpetually remembered possibility,” what Dickinson would call “carrying a circumference,” and what Faulkner would inhabit in Yoknapatawpha County. In his sojourn at Walden, Thoreau was trying to stake out new turf for himself as an American writer. Menard makes the case that Thoreau’s aesthetic was based on juxtapositions, edges, interruptions, and displacements. Thoreau apparently saw the language he was born to as imported, colonial, and oppressive. I was surprised to read that it wasn’t until 1846, midway through his stay at Walden, that the United States finally signed a treaty that ended all British claims to territory below the 49th parallel. American writers were often ignored until they could prove that their work had been published in Britain or reprinted in a British journal.
Menard makes the case that Thoreau’s stay at Walden wasn’t a romantic gesture; rather, it was the interval he needed to find his distinctly American writer’s voice. In what seems a bit startling now, Thoreau mocked the trilling of Keats’ nightingale as a meme for American poetry. As he pointed out, we don’t have nightingales. Absorbed in the science of American land, he was prescient about the naming of things in nature and the difference between the name of an object and the object itself. Menard cites Gertrude Stein and Borges in his discussion of Thoreau’s fixation of the specificity of scientific language. In a leap that initialy seemed surprising, but held up, Menard connects Thoreau to Czeslaw Milosz who, like Thoreau, claimed the superiority of the senses as a vehicle for knowing reality: “We live in a world of languages — painting, music, cinema, poetry. But besides that language, there is a reality. That reality can be defined as everything that is not captured by our language but is directly perceived by our senses. I believe that reality is the great measure of art. It judges art.” For Thoreau, perception of reality was synesthetic, to use Menard’s characterization. The process of seeing and experiencing nature was a full body act, an egoless submission to the world and its laws. Thoreau wrote: “Every new flower that opens, no doubt, expresses a new mood of the human mind. Have I any dark or ripe orange-yellow thoughts to correspond?”
Occasionally, Menard makes statements that I wish he had developed further. He discusses the elisions and omissions and jumpy editing of Walden in a comparison with the works by other artists: William S. Burrough’s Nova Express (1964), Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955-59), Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), and Takashi Murakami’s In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Trail of a Rainbow (2014). I would like to have had a chance to explore these connections. It might be the meditative style of this book to simply mention these links — and my issue may be more of an academic concern — but these are big and interesting claims.
Menard’s eye as a conceptual artist is keen in his discussion of modern works of art, particularly Monet’s painting Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond. He is quite astute about Thoreau’s place both as a poet and a scientist, and about the development of his lyrical talent. He rightly singles out Thoreau’s preoccupation with the interval between the familiar and the unfamiliar, what Menard calls “the interval of recognition.” Learning From Thoreau, in fact, occupies just such an interval. Menard’s fresh personal encounter with Thoreau reassesses the familiar and exposes the unfamiliar in ways that change our perception of an American icon.
[Published May 1, 2018 by the University of Georgia Press. 192 pages, $26.95 paperback]