Meeting minutes and other evidence

 A problem for historians: What to do when evidence is contradictory?

Herodotus wrestled with the problem. Like most historians, he was divided. He had more than one solution.

People who work for newspapers wrestle with the problem every day. If there is no contradictory evidence, seasoned newspaper folks tend to think something is fishy or something’s been overlooked.

But the technology of our age has changed our notion of evidence. Think of the videos recorded by passersby that give the lie to police accounts of arrests. Before that, there were the Watergate tapes, which contradicted the president’s story that he had done nothing wrong and was being persecuted by the press.

Matthew Wills has an interesting summary in JSTOR Daily of David R. Gibson’s study of meeting minutes. Historians and journalists routinely use the minutes of government meetings. Often, the official minutes aren’t reliable. Here’s Wills:

 

Gibson gives the example of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who “exaggerated his importance as an advocate for the temperate approach that brought the crisis to a peaceful resolution” during the heady days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.

The reason we know this is that Kennedy’s brother, President John F. Kennedy, was secretly taping those National Security Council Executive Committee meetings in which the launch of World War III was seriously contemplated. So there is something to compare RFK’s retelling to.

 

That magic phrase: “something to compare.” Two sources, at least. Not one.

Good reporting doesn’t stop with the first account, which often comes from some spokesman for a government telling ordinary people only what those in power want them to believe.

We live in a time when it seems everything is reported — every action, every thought, every event.

The better question is how much of what we consume is reported well — accurately, completely, briefly, honestly. 

I am one of the dinosaurs that still believes that “objective” reporting is a sensible notion, even if objectivity is a goal not achieved. I also think that good reporting is rare and valuable, and that it’s always been that way.

We’re living in a marvelous age of technology. But all our gadgets can’t compensate for failures in something as fundamental as providing another person an honest report.

• Sources: Matthew Wills, “Beware of the Meeting Minutes: What gets lost when spoken conversations become part of the historical record?” JSTOR Daily, Sept. 28, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/27367987?mag=beware-of-the-meeting-minutes

It’s a discussion of David R. Gibson’s “Minutes of History: Talk and Its Written Incarnations”; Social Science History, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Fall 2022), pp. 643-669, Cambridge University Press.

Blake’s paradox

 One of the recurring themes of this online collection of notes is that writing doesn’t start with questions of craft.

It’s a recurring theme because the problem of what comes before craft eludes me. I can see the frozen nut on the bolt. I just can’t get a wrench on it.

I’m kin to those who think of writing as a way of life, rather than a collection of skills or competencies. And I think temperament has more to do with what any one writer does with his or her time. I don’t think we choose our temperament. In a way, we don’t really choose the kinds of things we like to write or read.

Writing, which combines creation and craft, strikes me as a paradox.

William Blake claimed that a lot of his work was not just inspired but dictated by divine voices. He edited with a heavy hand.

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.

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.

Why Thoreau noticed

 Maybe the key test for biographers is whether they can list their subject’s failures. Here’s Henry Seidel Canby’s list for Thoreau:

 

Failure with his friends, failure to discover the great secret, failure to reach a satisfactory stopping place in his studies of detail, failure to make up his mind how to use his thousands of pages of mixed notebook, essay, and poetic philosophy, troubled him but never disturbed the essential joy in experience. It did not need fame, or even a certainty of achievement, to make him a very happy man in his relations with nature …. He observed, first of all I should say, because he liked to do so.

 

The “great secret” was the quest to find the Transcendental — some spiritual reality behind nature. That project made Thoreau’s observations less scientifically useful than they might have been, at least if your science is biology. But Thoreau, to the extent that he was interested in science, was more anthropologist than biologist. He was more interested in natural places as the home or habitat of people. He began by looking for forces in nature that shaped people.

Eventually, he was just looking, just paying attention to what was there, without worrying much about what might be behind it.

Thoreau recorded the details of the place he knew. He was aware that a lot of his neighbors hardly noticed it. There was no universal agreement about the place. There was no Transcendental reality behind it, at least as far as Thoreau could see. But he found that the place was worth his attention. He didn’t need a reason to go look.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 335-6.

Equinox

 We walked in the woods through bands of rain because we’d been cooped up for a week by the dog’s illness. And how can you stay inside on the equinox?

The forest canopy is still thick. During the heavy bands, the sound of rain in the trees was deafening. During the light bands, you could hear the frogs.

Before we think

 Julian Girdham’s “The Wolf You Feed: an essay on Attention” makes some points I wish I’d made in my notes about noticing. Here are two: 

We have to attend before we can think.

 

It’s essential. You can’t think about what you don’t notice, whether not noticing is a simple failure or an act of willful ignorance.

 

It is increasingly clear to me that in education the question of attention is also an ethical issue.

 

As Girdham puts it, the most disturbing problems we humans face are failures to pay attention. 

There are some lines in the essay I’d love to argue about. I’m not sure what memory is — but I wouldn’t describe it as the residue of thought. (He’s quoting Daniel Willingham, a psychologist.) But I love his description of how a teacher can open a work of art — a poem, for example — to a student who is paying attention. I am interested in how someone who has learned to notice can teach another how much there is to be gained by looking carefully and thinking carefully.

• Source: Juilan Girdham’s “The Wolf You Feed: an essay on Attention” is here:

https://www.juliangirdham.com/blog/the-wolf-you-feed-an-essay-on-attention

I’ve mentioned Girdham’s newsletter The Fortnightly repeatedly in these notes.

Noticing

 One of the recurring themes of this collection of notes is noticing. It’s possible for a person to go into a crowded room and be so self-absorbed that he notices no one else. The same thing is possible when a person goes into the woods.

Thoreau’s ability to observe — to notice, to attend, to pay attention — is the trait that still astonishes me. Here’s Canby, describing Thoreau in the 1850s:

 

No other man alive could have seen so much. And all this in a mounting excitement, stirred by his sheer love of wild nature, but also by the constant novelty of familiar places growing daily more complex as he penetrated their infinite variety. When he was able to identify the flowers, there were their habitats and times of opening to be studied. Then suddenly he discovered the lichens, and every weathered rock became a museum. Then the grasses, never really seen before, caught his attention, and proved rich and confusing beyond his guess. After that it was the mosses, the mushrooms, the hawks and the owls, the wild ducks, the flora of the swamps, then trees and their succession‚ and so on and on. One can take this Journal from the fifties on, and label each section as the moss year, the tree year, the muskrat year the bullfrog year. Of course they overlap. 

 

I like that outrageous claim. We tend to notice people who are the wealthiest, the most famous, the most powerful. But shouldn’t we wish for ourselves that we see a lot, rather than earn a lot or impress others a lot? Shouldn’t we want to  go through life noticing the world we live in?

And what should we want for our children: “No other person could have made so much money” or “No other person could have seen so much”?

• Sources: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, p. 312.

There are so many posts about noticing it’s hard to find a place to start, but this might do: “Davenport’s search for arrowheads,” March 15, 2022.

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2022/03/davenports-search-for-arrowheads.html

Lucas the cat

 Lucas, our old cat, died. I buried him in the woodlot, a place he loved.

When the Wise Woman adopted him from the animal shelter, the veterinarian told us he was about 3 years old and had a heart problem. The vet predicted Lucas wouldn’t last long.

Lucas was almost 20 when his heart finally failed.

The Wise Woman has always had cats. When she talks to cats, they listen.

I was raised among dogs by dog people. Cats have always been foreign to me.

I crossed some kind of bridge with Lucas.

When he came to live with us, Lucas insisted on sleeping either on me or next to me. When he got hungry, he told me, as if he were afraid to bother the Wise Woman. When service by the waitstaff was slow, he complained to me. If I slept past his breakfast time, he swatted me in the head, not the Wise Woman.

He sat on the seat beside me when I drove the truck as we moved from Galveston to San Antonio. He sat beside me when I drove the truck when we moved to Georgia.

Just about every word of this online collection of notes was written with Lucas curled up nearby. He found my writing to be a dull activity, which pleased him. He saw opportunities for undisturbed naps.

Psychologists say that grief disorients you — if you feel a loss as a great loss, a fundamental loss, you begin to question all your assumptions. You wonder what else you’ve taken for granted and what else could be taken away. You blunder around, confused and lost, for a while.

I buried Lucas almost two weeks ago. I’m just now able to post a note about it.

Who proposed to Henry?

 I love short stories. I especially love a short story about a historical event that is so well researched that it’s hard to tell where the fiction starts. Guy Davenport and Bernard Malamud wrote wonderful specimens.

If you know contemporary writers who are interested in that genre, please pass along a suggestion: I’d love to read a story about who proposed to Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau, 30, was staying at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house while the great man was lecturing in Europe. Thoreau wrote him a letter on Nov. 14, 1847, that reported:

 

I have had a tragic correspondence, for the most part all on one side, with Miss ——. She did really wish to — I hesitate to write — marry me. That is the way they spell it. Of course I did not write a deliberate answer. How could I deliberate upon it? I sent back as distinct a no as I have learned to pronounce after considerable practice, and I trust that this no has succeeded.

 

Thoreau goes on, but that’s the gist of it.

Canby thought it likely that Sophia Foord, 43, was the proposer. But he made a case that it was Margaret Fuller, 37, the first editor of The Dial.

Canby said that he hoped it was Fuller, a brilliant woman who was frequently exasperated by Thoreau and his writing.

To me, the question is: What did any woman see in the man?

Thoreau was not widely viewed as companionable. As Canby described him in another context:

 

A chestnut bur, hiding its sweetness, Thoreau was to most men.

 

Who would pursue a chestnut bur? I would love to meet her.

Fiction writers can get to questions that historians cannot. 

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 261 and 245.

I’ve gone on about this sub-genre of short story. Here are two examples:

“Davenport: ‘John Charles Tapner,’” Nov. 22, 2022.

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2022/11/davenport-john-charles-tapner.html

“Malamud: ‘In Kew Gardens,’” March 20, 2024.

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2024/03/malamud-in-kew-gardens.html

What it's like to write a book

 Here’s Annie Dillard on what’s it like to write a book: 

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.

 

I’m not sure it would be a good idea to share that view with freshmen studying English Composition. It probably wouldn’t have helped me decide what to do with myself.

Still, I wish I’d had a better sense, early in life, of the many different things that writers have tried to do — or could try to do. I wish I’d had a better sense of the possibilities.

 • Source: Annie Dillard, The Writing Life; New York, HarperPerennial, 1990, p. 52.