A 17th-century kind of book

 Henry Seidel Canby has me thinking about 17^th-century writers and the kinds of books they wrote.

Sir Thomas Browne is a wonder to me, though I have trouble describing his books to friends. I started with Religio Medici, which is allegedly about how the training of physicians influences their religious thought. There are so many digressions, a reader sometimes wonders whether the book has anything to do with medicine, religion or the influence of scientific training on thought.

Canby says Thoreau loved that kind of book and tried to write one in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

The book pretends to be a record of a trip, and perhaps it is. But it’s also a collection of poems and short essays posing as a record of a journey. Canby calls it a library of Thoreau’s shorter works.

The remark made me think of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, an alleged novel about a walking tour through Suffolk. The narrator, while walking, thinks about Browne, literature, identity and silkworms. You might think of it as an anthology of Sebald’s shorter essays posing as a record of a trip.

I think it takes a peculiar temperament to write a book like that — and also to read it with appreciation.

You don’t choose your temperament. I suspect that if the 17^th-century book appeals to you, you’ll find a lot of classic novels a slog — and vice versa. Maybe there are personalities broad enough to love both, but generally I’m not among them. I’ve found it difficult, as a reader, to serve two masters.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 272-3.

'Now October has come again'

 I wonder whether any American writer saw as much as Thomas Wolfe.

Louis L’Amour thought Wolfe’s powers of observation were remarkable and cited a passage in Of Time and the River about the coming of October. It’s long — Chapter 39 in the novel. But these paragraphs will give you a sense of it:

 

Now October has come again which in our land is different from October in the other lands. The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling. Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again. The country is so big you cannot say the country has the same October. In Maine, the frost comes sharp and quick as driven nails; just for a week or so the woods, all of the bright and bitter leaves, flare up: the maples turn a blazing bitter red, and other leaves turn yellow like a living light, falling about you as you walk the woods, falling about you like small pieces of the sun, so that you cannot say where sunlight shakes and flutters on the ground and where the leaves.

Meanwhile the Palisades are melting in massed molten colours, the season swings along the nation, and a little later in the South dense woodings on the hill begin to glow and soften, and when they smell the burning wood-smoke in Ohio children say: ‘I’ll bet that there’s a forest fire in Michigan.’ And the mountaineer goes hunting down in North Carolina; he stays out late with mournful flop-eared hounds, a rind of moon comes up across the rude lift of the hills: what do his friends say to him when he stays out late? Full of hoarse innocence and laughter, they will say: ‘Mister, yore ole woman’s goin’ to whup ye if ye don’t go home.’”

 

I’m marking the day. Wolfe was born Oct. 3, 1900, in Asheville, N.C., and died Sept. 15, 1937 of miliary tuberculosis.

• Sources: Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935. Project Gutenberg has it here: 

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301021h.html

Chapter 39 begins Book III.

Louis L’Amour’s remark is in Education of a Wandering Man; New York: Bantam Books, 1989, p. 125.

 

L'Amour on short stories

 Maybe the best parts of Louis L’Amour’s book on self-education are the bits on how he learned to write short stories.

He started with the view that he knew how to write them.

He couldn’t understand why so many were rejected. He eventually decided that all those editors couldn’t be wrong. Something was wrong. with his approach.

Baffled, L’Amour decided to study the masters. In his case, that meant O. Henry, Guy de Maupassant, Jack London and Arthur Conan Doyle. Later, he added Maxim Gorky and Robert Louis Stevenson to the faculty.

L’Amour doesn’t say much about the lessons he learned. His main theme about writing is that no writer really helps another. Writing is something you must learn to do by yourself.

But bit by bit, I got a sense of his process:

• If you’re writing historical fiction, immerse yourself in the era. Read diaries, journals, letters and newspaper accounts. Don’t read one diary. Read 50.

• If you read a lot of first-person accounts, you’ll begin to read between the lines. You’ll begin to get a sense of unexpressed, or barely expressed, hopes, doubts and fears. At that point, you’re in business.

• Soak up the place and time, but don’t borrow incidents. Fiction writers should make up their own.

That last point is interesting and probably explains why I usually write essays, rather than stories.

L’Amour said he wrote more than 100 short stories before he wrote his first novel. He liked the short story and had a collection in his library.

• Source: Louis L’Amour, Education of a Wandering Man; New York: Bantam Books, 1989.

A problem of thought

 The vine crops — mostly squashes — are doing well in the fall garden, but some of the vines look as if they’ve been hit by birdshot. The leaves are not so much a latticework as museums of pinprick holes.

If you look, you’ll see the vines are covered with bristly little bugs. If you snipped off small bits of a pipe cleaner and scattered them through the vines, you’d recognize the picture.

The problem with poisons is not so much a problem of chemistry as a problem of thought. We connect the damage to something we value, the squash vine, with something we can see, the visible bugs.

If we made a more serious effort, we’d find that the damage is caused by aphids, which are tiny and hard to see. The bugs we can see are the larvae of ladybugs. Each might eat 400 aphids before it becomes an adult.

Everyone seems to know that ladybugs are beneficial in the garden in some way. Most people don’t seem to know what that looks like. Ironically, some gardeners reach for poisons at the first sight of beneficial insects.

There might be a lesson in this garden story about how we Americans, especially, are trained to reach for solutions to all the problems that confront us.

And a word against

 As much as I like Henry Seidel Canby’s Thoreau, the book is dated. It was published in 1939.

One example: Canby devotes a section to James Russell Lowell’s essay on Thoreau. The essay, originally an untitled review in The North American Review and published as “Thoreau” in My Study Windows, is part appreciation, part takedown.

In Canby’s day, Lowell’s essay was influential. It had to be addressed.

I’m not sure anyone would find it useful today.

Before I dropped out of high school, I was required to read a Lowell essay and was bewildered. I dug myself an early grave in English class by wondering why we were reading it. Was this the best Americans could do in those days?

Ironically, I am one of the last true believers in the canons of literature. I believe we ought to have common reading lists, things we can share, discuss and argue about. Reading the greats, near greats and less greats helped me. Reading some of these books helped me understand things about the culture I would not have figured out on my own. It helped me understand that some of the writers who inspire me don’t do much for other people. It helped me understand that if it’s possible to inspire sympathy in readers, it is also possible to inspire antipathy.

All this is good to know. But at 15, I was just starting. I’d just discovered the wonders of Emerson and Thoreau. I wanted to read them, rather than Lowell, Hawthorn and Poe.

I can’t remember the details of the argument with my English teacher or even the essay we argued about. I have been using the new technological wonders to try to find out which Lowell essays were included in high school textbooks of the early 1970s. I’d like to see if that essay is as bad as I once thought.

Wisdom would say: Let it go.

Maybe I will.

I love Canby’s book. But it’s only fair to warn you that there are sections in it that you’ll probably just have to let go.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958. The section on Lowell’s essay is on pp. 289-92.

A word for a dated biography

 Why does anybody read a biography of Henry David Thoreau published in 1939? Shouldn’t each new generation make a fresh assessment of the thinkers who’ve influenced us?

I think so. But I also think that Henry Seidel Canby, who wrote for my grandfather’s generation, had a remarkable sympathy for Thoreau. I trust Canby’s instincts in interpreting a difficult personality, one not easily understood.

That sympathy comes out in odd places. Here’s one example:

Young Henry conducted his famous experiment at Walden Pond when Ralph Waldo Emerson bought 14 acres. There was talk of a shrewd landowner selling a briar patch to a philosopher. Thoreau’s friend Ellery Channing called the place “Briars.”

Thoreau was to clear some of the land — and there’s blood involved in clearing briars — to make room for a bean field and cabin.

That I knew. But I didn’t know that when the experiment was over and Thoreau moved back to town, he planted pines in his bean field, wanting to see the traces of man erased and the ways of nature restored.

Canby says a true story is always the best argument for how to live a good life. I like that story about the way Thoreau chose to live.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, p. 245.

Early autumn

 The feel of autumn takes a while to seep in. It’s not, like the equinox, a precise astronomical event.

I often hear the word “melancholy” in describing it. But that seems off to me. The feeling is more thoughtful than sad. The main thought is that some things — well, a lot of things — are coming to an end.

In the garden, we moved the tomatoes that are in pots into the greenhouse. The tomato vines in the raised beds are still healthy, but I’m fighting the caterpillars of the Carolina sphinx moth for the last crop. The caterpillars — also known as tobacco hornworms because of the red-orange horn on the tail —  can take the leaves and stems off a tomato vine about as fast as experienced thieves can take hubcaps off a car.

The caterpillars are beautiful — green with seven diagonal white stripes, trimmed in black. Those that survive will become beautiful moths.

We use no poisons, and the usual philosophy is to grow enough for all. But I draw the line at tomatoes. To me, it’s OK if some things come to an end sooner than others.