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.