Essays of Henry D. Thoreau
an annotated edition by Jeffrey S. CramerYale University Press, 2013 Jeffrey Cramer, curator of collections at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods, has followed up his magnificent annotated edition of Henry David Thoreau's Walden (by far the best edition currently available of that weirdly central work of American literature, and somewhat surprisingly the prettiest as well) with an annotated edition of Thoreau's essays. The new volume - bright white to offset the Walden's somber monochrome - is wonderfully produced by Yale University Press: the pages are split vertically between text and annotations, with Thoreau's column taking the wider portion and neatly boxed, and the whole thing has a pleasing air of permanence about it. It's too big to make for comfortable use while tramping around Walden Woods themselves or sitting by Walden Pond (for such occasions a battered paperback is always best, preferably one with no annotations at all), but it seeks to live on a library shelf, hefty and consultable on late at night when all thought of rambling has fled, or in the rampaging heat of the day, when even Walden Pond's shade provides no relief.The volume contains the fifteen short prose pieces most commonly associated with Thoreau, including "Wild Apples," "A Winter Walk," and "Resistance to Civl Government," the essay that's become known as "Civil Disobedience." Also included of course are Thoreau's various Abolitionist writings, from "Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum" to his two essays on John Brown to his still-startling "Slavery in Massachusetts."Despite the countless times these essays have been collected and reprinted since Thoreau's death, the most prominent merit of Cramer's exhaustive editorial work is to remind us just how strange they remain. Some of that counter-intuitive strangeness, in fact maybe a great deal of it, was the product of unseemly artifice on the part of its author, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once acidly pointed out:
The trick of his rhetoric is soon learned. It consists of substituting for the obvious word & thought its diametrical antagonist. He praises wild mountains & winter forest for their domestic air; snow & ice for their warmth; villagers & wood choppers for their urbanity and the wilderness for resembling Rome & Paris. With the constant inclination to dispraise cities & civilization, he yet can find no way to honour woods & woodsmen except by paralleling them with towns & townsmen.
But even artifice to one side, there's no denying the need for annotation if a reader seeks to know these pieces as their author knew them. Thoreau was very widely read, and he's fiercely, almost extravagantly allusive in his published work. George Fox, Thomas Browne, George Herbert, Archimedes, and Gerald of Wales - plus Milton and Carlyle in copious quantities - can be found jostling for space in only a few pages' length, and Cramer chases down every last proper noun. Nothing in these pieces need remain a mystery unless the reader, seeking the rhythm of the prose rather than the extent of the erudition, wants to keep his mysteries about him. The dense book-talk of "Thomas Carlyle and His Works" (a tantalizing glimpse of the riches Thoreau might have provided posterity if he'd had the grit to be a regular book reviewer) is thickly encrusted with notes, whereas with a slighter, more personal piece like "A Walk to Wachusett" there's much less need.In all things this volume finds the perfect balance. It's certainly the finest edition of Thoreau's essays ever publicly printed.
