THE OUTER MAN AND THE CREATED 'I'
Ziff, Larzer
BOOKS THE OUTER MAN AND THE CREATED T LARZER ZIFF Young Man Thoreau RICHARD LEBEAUX U. of Massachusetts, $12.50 Thoreau and the American Indian* ROBERT F. SAYRE Princeton University,...
...With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense," Thoreau WaMen, therefore, is the record of the vision quest of a Transcendental savage, and I would like to study it in this way, rather than in reference to the European, Puritan, or Emersonian traditions to which it has often been compared...
...and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent...
...Yet Thoreau the man who had parents, siblings, hopes of marriage, and petty jealousies eludes us far more effectively than any of his contemporaries...
...But it bears comparison with Indian ones because the white fictions of Indian life helped inspire it...
...And another paragraph: (1) if not actually . . . may have been...
...If this sounds mechanical k is because the early chapters of his study are so...
...5) If...
...His The Days of Henry David Thoreau is a documented account of the outer man, an invaluable assemblage of first-hand reports of Thoreau's movements...
...I would like to read a fuller treatment of Thoreau by Lebeaux when he arrives at the point at which he can internalize whatever methodology he adopts and can devote his explicit attention to the incisive reading of the record...
...The book outlives this rocky beginning and a figure does emerge, thanks chiefly to Lebeaux's astute reading of some of the poems in strict biographical terms...
...These latter are at least known, but what is one to make of Lebeaux's emphasis upon the fact that Thoreau was born into "transitional times...
...By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences...
...Walden, again in the first person, is concerned with his famous experiment in living...
...could . . then he might have...
...Since his writings come from a such a conscious effort of the mind, the "I" he constantly offers us is, in this sense, not himself but beside himself...
...Before Lebeaux arrives at the point where Thoreau's recoverable career genererates its own progress his book is dominated by the pattern to which Thoreau must be fitted and the result is unpleasant...
...4) Perhaps . . . could...
...the numbers indicate successive sentences...
...The heart of the book, I think, is Sayre's very provocative interpretation of the most notorious bit of Indian history in Thoreau, his retelling of the Hannah Dustan story in A Week...
...1) It can be hypothesized that...
...A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers speaks in the first person of a journey he took with his brother...
...Sayre argues that as Hannah Dustan imitated die Indians when she killed, so, in Thoreau's mind, all imitators—artists such as himself most prominently—are killers...
...4) Also there may have . . . (5) it might have seemed...
...would have...
...But Sayre knows Indians and Thoreau's savagism as most of us do not and the value of his book is that he not only informs us but drives us back to a reexamination of our attitudes by compelling us back to the inescapable center of our attention, the art rather than the artist...
...It is a white quest...
...What should be a particularized historical location for Lebeaux's necessarily schematic analysis becomes general as well...
...Thoreau and the American Indians wrote...
...But Robert F. Sayre has paid close attention to the matter and has serious doubts about it...
...2) it can suggest . . . (3) If...
...As he recognizes, one cannot prove the non-existence of an intent with the certainty that one can prove its existence, but certainly he has qualified himself beyond others to arrive at an informed opinion, and, on 'balance, he suspects that Thoreau's "Indian Notebooks" were a resource for his writings on 'all the subjects with which he was concerned rather than pointed specifically toward an Indian book...
...The latter he does very well...
...Such a crisis occurred in Thoreau, he knows, because it occurs in all men, and so he places Erik H. Erikson's model Commonweal: 181 of such crises over the known record as a correction grid is placed over a machine-graded examination and reads us the result...
...It is an aesthetic creation, a persona that lacks personality but possesses a tough and flexible consistency derived from its creator's strict attention to his sense of the real that resides behind the apparent of everyday actuality...
...3) But I would contend...
...I am inclined, that is, to argue that Thoreau's sense of the savagery of the artistic act is approving and that he views the wildness of the .artist's attachment to nature as a form of divine cannibalism—the highest tribute to the worshipped object is its ritual slaughter and ingestion...
...Surely Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards before Thoreau and Mark Twain and Henry James after him were born into transitional times also...
...2) So it may have...
...All students of Thoreau know that a number of "Indian Notebooks" (variously numbered and catalogued) are among his remains and believe that he was planning a book about the Indians at the time of his death...
...Here, for example, are the sequence of connections in two representative paragraphs from the early chapters...
...Sayre sees this white woman's resort to murder and scalping for the ostensible purpose of escape from and revenge upon the Indians who murdered her infant as a metaphor of the artist's alienation from nature...
...Sometimes it penetrates beyond these fictions into truth...
...But the "I" of Thoreau, omnipresent is also omnimaking...
...From this I learned something stronger than conjecture...
...It is difficult to disagree with him—even though to agree is to surrender a cherished myth about a great writer who has left us myths in lieu of personality—and yet, of course, it is impossible to accept the case as proved...
...BOOKS THE OUTER MAN AND THE CREATED T LARZER ZIFF Young Man Thoreau RICHARD LEBEAUX U. of Massachusetts, $12.50 Thoreau and the American Indian* ROBERT F. SAYRE Princeton University, $14.50 Just about everything Henry David Thoreau wrote was autobiographical...
...Although he qualifies his contention that Thoreau sometimes parallels Indian myths in his treatment of such matters as creation, still I think that like Thoreau himself Sayre has "Indians on the brain" and overlooks far more likely sources for Thoreau's treatment...
...The body of Sayre's book, however, is not directly concerned with this question—he takes it up at die outset and rounds it off at the close—but with the use Thoreau actually did make of Indian material and it is always lively and suggestive...
...But the compensations provided by his saturation with Indian material are quite marvelous and he enriches the already heady experience of reading Walden by, for example, bringing the Indian view of animals to bear on Thoreau's description of them...
...Hypothesis upon hypothesis further weakened by the introduction of that element which most characteristically gives Erikson's method a strength beyond theorizing, attention to the interplay of personality with historical conditions...
...In the context of the Dustan story, Thoreau wrote, "The talent of composition is very dangerous,—the striking out the heart of life at a blow, as the Indian takes off a scalp...
...To imitate and to civilize," says Sayre, "to civilize and become estranged from nature were all the same...
...We are not wholly involved in Nature...
...It provides us with an everyday Thoreau with which to envelop the missing man who produced the great writings...
...Faced with an author .who is thus always at home but steps out the door to talk with you rather than letting you in, Walter Harding in his monumental researches surrounded Thoreau...
...Even his short piece, "Civil Disobedience," affirms its doctrine on the basis of what "I" did and why "I" did it...
...I am not sure I agree...
...Perhaps this outer man and the created "I" are all we can or should know of Thoreau, but Richard Lebeaux sees a way in...
...and fourteen of the twenty volumes of the 1906 edition of his works are taken up by his journals...
...The furtive Hawthorne who lurks behind the ironic narrators of his novels and stories, told chiefly in the third person, has been sounded, and Emerson's misreputation as an aloof Yankee quickly disintegrates when his writings are placed in the context of his journals and letters as the late Stephen Whicher did in his excellent anthology...
...Thoreau, the man, he believes, grew from the identity crisis of Thoreau the 'adolescent...
Vol. 105 • March 1978 • No. 6
