19th Century Outsider

CONSCIOUSNESS IN CONCORD (243 pp.) --Henry David Thoreau, with notes and a commentary by Perry Miller--Houghton Mifflin ($4).

J. Pierpont Morgan the elder made the purchase of a yellow pine box in 1909. Legend had it that the box was carpentered by Henry David Thoreau in his dying year (1862). Loosely fitted in this wooden frame were 38 manuscript notebooks in which the author of Walden had kept his monumental (nearly two million words) Journal, written in the course of 24 years. The box also offered a mystery. It concerned a missing notebook dating from Thoreau's 23rd year (1840), in which the strongest love interest of the Concord bachelor's life was supposedly blighted. Discovered some time between 1909 and 1912, the "lost journal" did not find its way into the pine box (now part of the Pierpont Morgan Library) until 1956. Though it clarified nothing of Thoreau's love life, it did at least strengthen the claim that his precise, craftsmanlike hand had fashioned the box, for the 39 notebooks made a snugly perfect fit.

Now published for the first time under the title Consciousness in Concord, the "lost journal" is a minor tribute to the inspired eccentric that was Henry Thoreau. In miniature, the book shares the fascination of the Journal as a whole, which was somehow conceived as alms for oblivion--Thoreau's bribe to posterity to pay more attention to him than his Concord neighbors and writing peers had.

Time v. Eternity. There is in this fragment Thoreau's reverence for Nature as a living Bible: "Nature is right, but man is straight. She erects no beams, she slants no rafters, and yet she builds stronger and truer than he." There is the mystical quest of the Absolute: "Speech is fractional, silence is integral." Thoreau early loathed the time-serving bondage in which he pictured most of his fellow men as trapped, leading lives of quiet desperation: "What is sacrificed to time is lost to eternity." Regarding newspaper-reading as a monstrous waste of time, Thoreau later played the punster with this epigram: "Read not the Times. Read the eternities."

As a transcendentalist, Thoreau saw spirit at the heart of matter. But he was never so genteel as to gag at reality. "Let a man reserve a good appetite for his peck of dirt," he wrote, "and expect his chief wealth in unwashed diamonds." At 23, Thoreau was already grappling with the central dilemma of his life, how to know himself and be himself under the raised eyebrow of conformist society: "It is always easy to infringe the law--but the Bedouins of the desert find it impossible to resist public opinion."

Discord in Concord. Over the years Henry Thoreau, no Bedouin, managed to rile public opinion and raise discord in Concord. He stunned his fellow transcendentalists ("Strictly speaking," said Henry, "morality is not healthy"). The religious-minded called him an infidel ("One world at a time," whispered Thoreau when a friend came to his deathbed to speak of the next world). "Practical men" resented his wry critiques of industrial progress; he said about railroads: "When the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed it will be perceived that a few are riding but the rest are run over." Poets thought him too science-minded. Conservatives found his Civil Disobedience subversive. Radicals and reformers regarded him as antisocial. The good citizens of Concord simply called him a loafer who had thrown away a Harvard education.

But Thoreau's prickly Yankee integrity preserved him from the academic gentilities, transient utopianisms and dated rhetoric of his literary day. In a brilliantly perceptive critical introduction to Consciousness in Concord, Perry Miller, professor of American literature at Harvard, suggests that the secret of Thoreau's success was failure.

"I Am My Destiny." He had only two books published during his lifetime. Of the 1,000-copy edition of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, printed at Thoreau's own expense, 706 were remaindered to the author, giving rise to his quip, "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself." Walden barely earned back its printing costs. Thoreau failed in his friendships, even sniped at his patron Emerson as too patronizing. He did not marry. The girl he may have courted, Ellen Sewall, was ordered by her minister father to chill the young man's ardor by mail. He had an abortive career as a teacher and flopped as a lecturer.

Thoreau took these rebuffs as a kind of Calvinistic election to genius. In the "lost journal" he wrote: "Defeat is heaven's success . . . I am my destiny." Thus he went on grandiosely confusing himself with the universe, but in the process creating, if not philosophy, a work of art. Editor Miller's introduction and the notebook itself reveal Thoreau's lonely posturings (with only himself for an audience), the careful carpentering of supposedly spontaneous phrases (with posterity firmly in mind). Consciousness in Concord adds up to a memorable sketch of America's "village Apollo."

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