By Henry D. Thoreau.
Edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer ’56. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2007. 672 pp. $65 hardcover.
Reviewed by Robert DeMaria Jr. ’70
 |
It
has been said that writers don’t make books; books are made by editors,
publishers, printers, binders, paper makers and others involved in the
production. The latest volume in the Princeton Edition of The Writings
of Henry D. Thoreau exemplifies this clever remark while unselfishly
giving pride of place in every way to the writer and his words. The
first 289 pages of Excursions are all Thoreau: no footnotes, no
superior numbers referenced to endnotes, no introductions, nothing but
text.
Occupying the next 360 pages is the “Editorial Appendix.”
This comprises an index, notes on illustrations, acknowledgments, short
titles, library symbols, a historical introduction to the nine pieces
of Thoreau’s writing contained in the volume, a textual introduction
and then, for each piece, a head note, textual notes and several tables
summarizing the editor’s textual decisions in presenting the absolutely
unimpeded text in the first section. To what can one compare this book?
It is like a house in which you enter a series of the most perfectly
finished rooms, but which also contains, out back and out of sight, all
the discarded materials that might have come into the rooms and all the
machinery that made the rooms and their furniture—a well-organized
warehouse and tool shed, substantially larger than the house.
In
addition to being a collection of some of Thoreau’s most delightful
essays, this book is a model of scholarly editing, complete with
instructions. Moldenhauer, who has edited several other volumes in the
Princeton Thoreau, has built the text by consulting “all surviving
authorial manuscripts,” the “printed forms, set from copy prepared by
Thoreau” and “external data” such as Thoreau’s letters, the sources of
his quotations and even “the editorial practices of the publications in
which the essays were initially printed; and information about the
Ticknor and Fields volumes in which the essays were first collected.”
Moldenhauer
presents much of this data in his various notes and tables, but what he
makes of it is a text that comes as close as one can hope to what
Thoreau intended to write. This is what is called an “eclectic” or
“critical” text, and Moldenhauer’s is a critical text par excellence.
In constructing such a document, an editor, using all the materials at
his command, chooses the readings over which the author seems to have
exercised the greatest control and then emends apparently unintentional
errors and unauthorized publishers’ or printers’ impositions on the
authorial work. Moreover, he shows all the choices the author made, so
that the reader can follow in his editorial footsteps or review the raw
data. In doing all of this, Moldenhauer has been so thorough, so
precise and so explicit that his book is perhaps the best primer I have
ever seen on the subject of constructing a critical text.
I
suppose it is only fair to give a little of the credit to Thoreau. The
essays, so perfectly presented, come from various stages of Thoreau’s
all-too-brief life of writing. The first piece, “Natural History of
Massachusetts,” was solicited by Emerson and first published in the
Dial in July 1842, when Thoreau turned 25. The last, “Wild Apples,”
first took shape as a lecture that Thoreau gave in 1860; he prepared
the piece for publication in the Atlantic in 1862, the year of his
death.
Perhaps the most surprising essay in the volume is “A Yankee
in Canada,” Thoreau’s record of a trip to Montreal and Quebec. Thoreau
had enough intensity of perception to turn his back yard into a foreign
land, and he has an easy time of it in Canada. The surprising aspect of
the essay is its attention to the human rather than the natural
landscape. For example, Thoreau’s careful and imaginative description
of the walls of Quebec City seems fresh in comparison to his more
familiar nature writings, though it shares their metaphysical bent.
The
most famous of the essays is surely “Walking.” This piece is the source
of the famous quotation “in Wildness is the preservation of the world.”
It’s nice to know definitively how it should read: it’s not
“Wilderness,” as the Cato Journal and many Web sites have it, but the
slightly archaic, perhaps Elizabethan “Wildness.”
It’s also nice
to know how the quotation should be capitalized: Moldenhauer’s
exhaustive textual apparatus indicates that Thoreau inked in the
capital W in “Wildness” on the manuscript used for setting his essay in
type for the Atlantic. He did not, however, change the lowercase “w” in
“world,” as the Yale Book of Quotations imagines. Thoreau wasn’t just
capitalizing nouns, as writers and compositors did in England until
around 1750; he was putting emphasis on that one word, “Wildness.”
Each
of these discrete textual fine points means something in itself, and
taken all together, they mean a great deal. Because of Moldenhauer’s
hard work, we know, in so far as it can be known, that when we read his
text, we are reading Thoreau. The text is pure Thoreau, but Moldenhauer
deserves a world of credit for making it what it is.
DeMaria is
the Henry Noble MacCracken Professor of English at Vassar College. He
has written or edited many books, including Johnson on the English
Language (1995), which is Volume 18 in the Yale Edition of the Works of
Samuel Johnson.