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.

Goldenrod stands

 The goldenrods are blooming, and I’m taking note of the big stands. They are spectacular now. But I want to check on them again this winter, when the dead, dry stems are harder to spot.

I want to learn more about the galls that grow on goldenrod stems.

You can see the galls now — most are the size of a taw or a golf ball. The gall is caused by the goldenrod gall fly, Eurosta solidagninis. The adult fly, smaller than a housefly and sporting brown and khaki camo, doesn’t have a functional mouth, so it doesn’t live long. The flies mate and lay eggs on goldenrods in spring.

Georgia has about 35 species of goldenrod, genus Solidago. The fly prefers some, meaning it can discriminate species better than I can. It’s a humbling thought if you were raised, as I was, on the notion that humans are exceptional.

The tiny larvae hatch quickly and dig into the stem of the plant, eating as they go. The larvae release a chemical that the plant takes to be a growth hormone. The goldenrod produces a gall of soft, edible tissue around the larvae. Through the winter, the larvae eat and grow and change forms as insects do. Since the adult fly can’t chew its way out of the gall, the grub eats a passage almost to the surface of the gall, leaving a membrane-thin hatch.

The gall seems like a safe place for a grub. But it’s not.

Two kinds of wasp prey on fly larvae.

Eurytoma obstusiventris catches the grub before it can burrow into the goldenrod and lays an egg inside it. The wasp egg hatches inside the fly larva and eats its way out. If you’ve seen the movie Alien, you’ve got the gist of it.

The other wasp, Eurytoma gigantea, has a long egg-laying tube called an oviposter and deposits her egg directly into the gall. The wasp larva grows up in the gall, eating plant tissue, until it blunders into the fly larva and eats it too — a bit of extra protein.

A beetle, Mordellestina unicolor, lays eggs on goldenrod. The larvae hatch and eat their way into the galls. Opinion seems to be divided on whether the beetles eat only plant tissue or eat the fly and wasp larvae too.

One other thing — the detail that interests me: Two birds that are common at our feeders have discovered that goldenrod galls are good sources of protein-rich food in winter.

Downey woodpeckers and Black-capped chickadees loot the galls.

If you see a gall that has a hole in it that looks as if it were made by a neat shop teacher with a drill, you’re looking at the work of a woodpecker.

If you see a gall that looks as if it’s been mauled by a shop student with a pickax and crowbar, you’re looking at the work of a chickadee.

I’ll check in on the goldenrods this winter. I want to see which is primary pillager in our neighborhood: the woodpecker or the chickadee.

• Source: I was put on to this story by Chris Helzer’s post “What’s Really Going On Inside Those Galls?? (It’s Not Just Fly Larvae” at The Prairie Ecologist, March 8, 2023. It’s here:

https://prairieecologist.com/2023/03/08/whats-really-going-on-inside-those-galls-its-not-just-fly-larvae/

Rustlers

 I met the only cattle rustlers I’ve known in a professional capacity. I was young reporter, and the rustlers were in a county jail in East Texas. Cherokee County, I think.

Rustlers are daring, cunning, dangerous criminals — at least in Hollywood. The two I met were “good ol’ boys,” meaning that everyone knew them well enough to hope someone else would give them a job. Both rustlers were broke and unemployable but knew where to borrow a gooseneck trailer. They consumed beer while working on an elaborate plan. The planning and drinking went on for hours. They awoke the next morning, hungover in jail, baffled that the plan had failed.

One of the rustlers had been hooked, kicked and stomped — mama cows defend their calves with the daring, cunning and ruthlessness that impresses Hollywood.

The motive was money. Even then, 10 pairs — a pair being a cow and a calf — might get you $10,000. That was close to a year’s wage in town. You could buy a small frame house on a country road for that.

But money aside, rustling was a serious legal business in Texas, where money is never an aside. The only thing the rustlers said in their own defense involved class. The man who owned the cattle was wealthy, and the rustlers were just scraping by. They saw themselves as Robin Hoods, though they didn’t plan to share the wealth. It just seemed right that they should have some of it.

If you ask me, any political party that represents the wealthy classes and espouses populism is playing with fire. But that’s another story.

As you can see, the rustlers didn’t make for much of a story. It would have been funny except they were looking at decades in prison.

The Old Editor was exasperated by the quality of the local criminal class and was prone to speaking in dialect when he was exasperated. He declared that all accounts of all crimes could begin with the same statement:

 

Earl and Joe Bob was drinking at the Hard Times and Misery Saloon when they was overcome by an idea.

 

I got to thinking about the rustlers because I’ve known another kind of rustler far better. He was a flower rustler.

It’s illegal in Texas, and probably in most other states, to remove wildflowers from public lands. The flower rustler knew that but was unrepentant. He was also daring and cunning.

He transplanted wildflowers in his yard until he didn’t have grass to mow. The wildflowers seeded the whole neighborhood.

He was the rustler that captured my attention. But I doubt Hollywood would be interested.

The first chilly day

 It was the first chilly day, 63 degrees when we started, heading from Alexander Lake to South River. We’ll have warmer days next week and in October. It’s like that in the Piedmont, as if the weather can’t decide whether it’s summer or fall. 

The woods are full of yellows (goldenrods and crownbeards), purples (beautyberries and mistflowers) and whites (mostly late boneset).

Dogfennel, Eupatorium capillifolium, is blooming. The white flowers are tiny.

The stands we saw were taller than I am. The plants looked like 6- to 7-foot feathers swaying in a light wind.

I think dogfennel plants are beautiful. People in the United Kingdom put them in borders. One variety won an award from the Royal Horticultural Society.

But dogfennel is a weed in Georgia. If you ask about it, people are apt to tell you how to kill it.

The other book

 Canby talks of Thoreau’s famous books but also repeatedly mentions the other book, the one in the Journal but never written. 

Formless the Journal is, but not futile, since good books have been drawn from it. And it is probable that there is one book more, and the best of its kind, to be put together by some laborious and self-sacrificing student, from the confusion of its lengthy narrative.

 

It’s a book about place. Canby had in mind the Rev. Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne and William Howitt’s The Book of the Seasons; or, The Calendar of Nature. Somewhere in “the thickets of iterative detail” in Thoreau’s Journal is a first-rate book about a place.

 

The result awaits the labors of an editor of genius.

 

Canby is a peculiar biographer on many counts. I read him because I trust his instincts on Thoreau, not the easiest personality to read. And I think Canby’s right about this.

I think of Wittgenstein’s enormous Nachlass and the books that scholars have mined from it since his death. Canby published his biography in 1939, and since then some wonderful books have been written about places and the idea of place. You’ll find entries in this online collection of notes on writers like Nan Shepherd, Robert Macfarlane, Scott Russell Sanders, Aldo Leopold, Ronald Blythe and Roger Deakin, all of whom tried to get at a sense of place.

I think such books are built by accretion — by the accumulation of layers and layers of detail. That is what Canby saw in Thoreau’s Journal.

The art of such a book is the art of the mosaic. The hundred or thousand details chosen must be good in themselves. But they also must make a larger picture.

It seems to me that Canby sometimes imagines the extraction of the other book from the Journal as the work of some poor graduate student and sometimes the work of an editor of genius.

Like Moses, he could see the promised land but couldn’t quite get there.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 336.