PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1852

Joshua Glover, a slave, took the Underground Railroad north from Missouri to Racine, Wisconsin, where he was able to get work in a sawmill.1

The reference added into the manuscript for WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS at this point in time by Henry Thoreau, to “one real runaway slave,” may have been a veiled reference to the project with Frederick Douglass, who was yet to purchase his freedom papers, made necessarily surreptitious by the extremely sensitive nature of these two men’s “amalgamation.”

WALDEN: Men of almost every degree of wit called on me in the PEOPLE OF migrating season. Some who had more wits than they knew what to WALDEN do with; runaway slaves with plantation manners, who listened from time to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heard the hounds a-baying on their track, and looked at me beseechingly, as much as to say,– “O Christian, will you send me back?” One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward toward the northstar. Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that a duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens which are made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pursuit of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning’s dew, –and become frizzled and mangy in consequence; men of ideas instead of legs, a sort of intellectual centipede that made you crawl all over. One man proposed a book in which visitors should write their names, as at the White Mountains; but, alas! I have too good a memory to make that necessary.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS MUMPERY

What would a “real” runaway slave be in opposition to? Would there have been something real about, for instance, Henry Williams, whom Thoreau mentioned on October 5, 1851 as “an intelligent and very well- behaved man, a mulatto,” in that he was needing to escape from his Massachusetts circumstances, or would there have been something “unreal” about him, in that his peculiar circumstances were not the most usual ones for a fugitive black American? There seems to be no particular reason other than desperation to presume that Williams was the person spoken of in this passage, which deals with events of the 1845-1846 period during which Thoreau was in residence at the shanty on the pond rather than with later events in the Thoreau

1. Joshua Glover we may take here as a type case of a “real” runaway slave, in explaining why Thoreau inserted that word. Bear in mind that there were a whole lot of people shucking and jiving at that time. If you met a person of color who was representing that he or she needed help because he or she was escaping from slavery, one of the first determinations you would need to make would be, to confirm that this person was not just another of the local free people who were going out every day and soliciting gifts by pretense, in order to avoid having to work for a living. (Can you remember when you passed the lady in the nurse’s white uniform and cap, at the entrance to the supermarket or in the airport lobby, with her basket, soliciting aid for the poor, and had to try to figure whether she was affiliated or not with some official charity? –Well, guess what, that’s not a moral dilemma unique to the 21st Century!) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN boardinghouse in town. Philip Van Doren Stern equated this “one real runaway slave” with the person sighted at the Thoreau boardinghouse in late July 1853 by the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway, but this is clearly spurious as an identification since the passage in question had already been put by Thoreau into its final form six months to a year before that particular fugitive had passed along the Underground Railway, as of WALDEN manuscript version D of 1852. Professor Walter Roy Harding did not bother to speculate as to who in particular this “one real runaway slave” Thoreau mentioned in WALDEN might have been, since (this is my impression from my private chats with the man, and my considered opinion) people of color lacked any named individuality but instead were, as far as he was concerned, all one pot category “interesting item for white people to chat about among themselves.”2

2. Yes, I do fully recognize that this is an exceedingly harsh thing to say about a white scholar’s attitudes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1900

September 10, Monday: For most years we don’t have any record, but early in 1901 someone at the Chicago Tribune made up a list of the lynchings which had occurred in America during the previous year. The list had 117 entries — a lynching, typically a white mob of some size hanging an adult black male, had been occurring every three days or so. Because of this list we know that on this day in Forest City, North Carolina, a black man of unknown name, accused of murder, was lynched, and that on this day in Duplex, Tennessee, Logan Reoms, accused of attempted assault, was lynched.

Philip Van Doren Stern was born in Wyalusing, Pennsylvania to Isidor Stern (1863-1944) and Annie Fisher Van Doren Stern (1869-1946). He would grow up in New Jersey. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1924

Philip Van Doren Stern graduated from Rutgers University, the 1st in his family to attend college. “A great university, a place dedicated to learning and to the betterment of our way of living, has ties not only with the past; it is intimately connected with the present, and it must lay its plans so as to influence the future. Its research furthers industry and agriculture; its graduates produce goods for the world and take on the task of training a new generation to carry on in place of the old.... A university’s work is never done; completion is not within its scheme of things—it deals only in terms of continuity.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1935

October 11, Friday: Marguerite Stern (Robinson) was born in New York City to Philip Van Doren Stern and Lillian Diamond Stern (1903-1979).

Two songs for voice and piano by Aaron Copland were performed for the initial time, in the New School for Social Research, New York City, with the composer at the piano: “Vocalise” and “Poet’s Song” to words of Cummings. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1938

February: A tale of a depressed bank worker on the verge of holiday suicide came to Philip Van Doren Stern in a dream and was written up as a short story THE GREATEST GIFT. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1939

Philip Van Doren Stern’s THE MAN WHO KILLED LINCOLN: THE STORY OF JOHN WILKES BOOTH AND HIS PART IN THE ASSASSINATION. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1940

Philip Van Doren Stern’s THE MAN WHO KILLED LINCOLN: THE STORY OF JOHN WILKES BOOTH AND HIS PART IN THE ASSASSINATION was dramatized and staged in New York City. Also, he published his THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

February 12, Monday: Philip Van Doren Stern spoke at a convocation at Rutgers University on the birthday of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, and received an honorary Doctor of Letters. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1941 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1943

Philip Van Doren Stern came to function as general manager of Armed Services Editions, a Pocket Books firm that made paperbacks available to the uniformed services under the rubrics “This is the Complete Book–Not a Digest” (of the 1,227 editions only 79 were shortened) and “Books are weapons in the war of ideas.” All books nominated were subject to the prior veto either of the Army library office under Trautman or the Navy library office under Miss DuBois. Seriously misinformed, Michigan Representative George Anthony Dondero, ranking Republican member of the House Committee on Education and an ally of Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy as well as a great admirer of Republican President Abraham Lincoln, would attack these books as “Communist propaganda.”

Volume #880 was Thoreau’s WALDEN and had not been abridged (by way of contrast, Melville’s MOBY-DICK was Volume G-209 and had been abridged). TIMELINE OF WALDEN WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN December: Philip Van Doren Stern self-printed his short story THE GREATEST GIFT about overcoming thoughts of holiday suicide after it had been rejected by a publisher, and dispatched it as a palm-sized 4,000-word 24-page Christmas booklet to 200 of his friends.

A news item relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: Alan Turing and his team at Bletchley Park near Cambridge, England completed the 1st or “Mark I” version of their “Colossus.” This was a secret special-purpose decryption machine, not exactly a calculator but close. It used 2400 tubes for its logic calculations, and read characters optically from five long paper-tape loops moving at 5000 characters per second. The machine would break the German military message code. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1944

April: Philip Van Doren Stern self-printed palm-sized booklet THE GREATEST GIFT came to the attention of RKO Pictures producer David Hempstead and was shared with Cary Grant, who became interested in portraying the point-of-view character, the man who was able to overcome thoughts of holiday suicide. Therefore RKO Pictures paid $10,000 and obtained the motion picture rights to the story.

The US Army began experimenting with compounds to destroy crops, and within a year would narrow the possibilities down from a long list of more than 1,000 agents to a short list of the 9 most promising ones those containing phenoxyacetic acids. A compound “LN-8” would win out over the other 8 and be put into mass production (LN-8 and another tested compound would later be used to create “Agent Orange”). SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

Part of the 4th LCI Flotilla, while on its way to the UK after taking on supplies at Gibraltar, was engaged by 3 German Condor bombers based at Brest. Each plane dropped 6 bombs and the leading Landing Craft– Infantry of the flotilla was hit and broke apart. Aboard this vessel were a bunch of naval officers and ratings who were hitching a ride back to England to prepare for D-Day. The front part of the vessel, where, unfortunately, all 98 passengers and almost all the crew had gathered, went straight down. None of these men would get a chance to die on the bloody sands of the beaches of Normandy! The rear of the vessel would stay at the surface for so long that it would require naval gunfire to remove it as a hazard to navigation. WORLD WAR II

December: Guy Davenport left high school early and enrolled at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He would study art with Clare Leighton and graduate with a degree in classics and English literature.

Philip Van Doren Stern’s THE GREATEST GIFT, in which a man who wished that he had never been born and was on the border of suicide came to an appreciation of the joy of living, was published with illustrations by Rafaello Busoni, and appeared in Reader’s Scope.

Lieutenant Richard Milhous Nixon received orders to proceed from the Pacific theatre of war to the Bureau of Aeronautics (BuAir) at Washington DC. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1945

Philip Van Doren Stern’s THE PORTABLE POE.

January: Philip Van Doren Stern’s THE GREATEST GIFT, in which a man who wished that he had never been born and was on the verge of holiday suicide was brought to an appreciation of the joy of living, appeared as THE MAN WHO WAS NEVER BORN in Good Housekeeping. After having several screenwriters work on adaptations, during this year RKO Pictures, that had purchased the screen rights to the story for $10,000, passed these rights along to Frank Capra’s production company Liberty Films for the same amount of money.

3 The 1st Plutonium239 reprocessing operation began at Hanford, Washington. The US Army ran tests of various 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T mixtures at the Bushnell Army Airfield in Florida (which is now denominated a “Formerly Used Defense Site”). The USA would begin full-scale production of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T (we would have used these chemicals as weapons of total war against Japanese civilian populations, to destroy the enemy’s crops and thus cause general starvation, in 1946 during Operation Downfall had World War II continued). SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

December: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. enrolled in the University of Chicago’s MA program in anthropology. He would work as a reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau.

Philip Van Doren Stern resigned as general manager of Armed Services Editions.

3. Guess what, this is now a Superfund cleanup site! Guess what, the radioactivity on this site is going to be around for awhile! HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1946

Philip Van Doren Stern’s 1938 dream in which a bank teller wished that he had never been born and was on the verge of holiday suicide and then came to be aware of the joy of living was the basis for the Frank Capra movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” starring Jimmy Stewart in a partial hairpiece, Donna Reed, and Lionel Barrymore. The set for the movie was allegedly based on Seneca Falls, New York, but all the snow was fake (3,000 tons of shaved ice, 300 tons of gypsum, 300 tons of plaster, 6,000 gallons of various chemicals). The movie would generate no Academy Awards and in its initial run in the theaters of America would barely return a profit.

December 31, Tuesday: President Harry S Truman signed a proclamation declaring the end of hostilities for World War II.

Jimmy Stewart sent a note of appreciation to Philip Van Doren Stern about his THE GREATEST GIFT, which had become the basis for the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” in which he had played the point-of-view character George Bailey coming back from the brink of holiday suicide. He termed it “an inspiration to everyone concerned with the picture,” adding “the fundamental story was so sound and right.”

The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) took over the American nuclear weapons program from the US Army. Swords into ploughshares! Atoms for peace! Excelsior! ATOM BOMB HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1958

Philip Van Doren Stern’s AN END TO VALOR: THE LAST DAYS OF THE CIVIL WAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1959

Philip Van Doren Stern’s THEY WERE THERE: THE CIVIL WAR IN ACTION AS SEEN BY ITS COMBAT ARTISTS. Also, his SECRET MISSIONS OF THE CIVIL WAR: FIRST-HAND ACCOUNTS BY MEN AND WOMEN WHO RISKED THEIR LIVES IN UNDERGROUND ACTIVITIES FOR THE NORTH AND THE SOUTH. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1961

Philip Van Doren Stern’s SOLDIER LIFE IN THE UNION AND CONFEDERATE ARMIES.

“When one is happy in forgetfulness, facts get forgotten.” — Robert Pen Warren, 1961 THE LEGACY OF THE CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1962

Philip Van Doren Stern’s THE CONFEDERATE NAVY: A PICTORIAL HISTORY. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1963

Philip Van Doren Stern’s ROBERT E. LEE: THE MAN AND THE SOLDIER, A PICTORIAL BIOGRAPHY. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1964

The 24th amendment to the federal Constitution provided that citizens could not be denied the right to vote in presidential or congressional elections because of failure to pay a tax (the so-called “poll tax,” or any other).

Philip Van Doren Stern’s THE ANNOTATED UNCLE TOM’S CABIN. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1965

Philip Van Doren Stern’s WHEN THE GUNS ROARED: WORLD ASPECTS OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1970

Philip Van Doren Stern. THE ANNOTATED WALDEN, TOGETHER WITH “CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE” AND A DETAILED CHRONOLOGY AND VARIOUS PIECES ABOUT ITS AUTHOR, THE WRITING AND PUBLISHING OF THE BOOK. NY: Clarkson N. Potter, 19704 TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Pages 4-13, “Walden: The Book And Its Meaning” There is one book in American literature that stands out from all the others because it is so very different from them. It is an intensely individual work, the expression of a man who believed fiercely in himself even though he was constantly tortured by what he considered to be his own shortcomings, weaknesses, and failures. His doubts, however, did not prevent him from criticizing the materialism and apathy that he saw dominating his country. What Henry David Thoreau said more than a century ago still holds true. But today more people—especially younger ones—are likely to heed his message than his contemporaries did. We had had a chance to see how empty the material rewards of an acquisitive society are. “Things are in the saddle and will ride mankind,” Thoreau’s friend and fellow townsman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said. Things have been in the saddle ever since and dominate our thinking and our way of life. Thoreau, whose life bridged the careers of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, saw how his country was betraying the fine promises of its founders. He denounced the Establishment of his time for its gross disregard of human rights. He deplored the poverty-stricken misery of the penniless Irish immigrants who had fled from a potato famine in their own land only to encounter ruthless exploitation and hostility in their new refuge. He was indignant about the Indians, who had been driven ever farther west into territory that nobody wanted. And he reached new heights of eloquence in denouncing slavery and all that it meant. But Walden is far more than a book of social protest, although it is that too. It is an auto biography, a venture into philosophy, and a book about Nature. Most of all it is a work of literature—and a supremely good one, one of America’s best. *** It is as literature that Walden should be judged, for Thoreau thought of himself primarily as a writer. Even his philosophy was subordinate to that. He did not pretend to be a professional naturalist, although he was a perceptive observer and a first-rate note-taker, far better than most professionals in the field, then and now. His writings on natural history belong to art rather than science, even though he did pioneering work in limnology, dendrochronology, ecology, and phenology—all terms that did not even exist in Thoreau’s lifetime. And it must always be remembered that he was an active field-worker at a time when the 4. Distributed by Crown Publishers; new 1992 edition by Marlboro Books/Barnes and Noble. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN natural science were still being shaped. Nor had he had any formal training in them. His education at Harvard was confined to the study of languages, ancient and modern, early English poetry, rhetoric, grammar, philosophy, theology, and history. At college his only encounters with science were optics, electricity and magnetism, and mathematics (as far as calculus). He did have a year in natural history and occasionally listened to lectures on mineralogy and anatomy, but most of his meager scientific education came from books which he read without supervision. His Journal, which is our best key to his thinking and interests, has many more entries bout natural history for the years after 1854, when Walden was published, than it does for the period before that. From late 1845 to early 1854, while Thoreau was working on the manuscript, he was far more concerned with larger human issues than with the details of natural history. Style as well as content has made Walden a classic that is read throughout the world. Pithy, original, and memorable phrases make the book a delight. And beyond these are numerous poetic passages which have endeared Walden to generations of admirers. It is a book that people feel strongly about; even those who do not like it usually say so in forthright terms. Walden appeals to young people, but perhaps it is best appreciated by those who have read it in their youth and then go back to it in later years. True devotees keep returning to it all their lives. How did such a work come into being? One thing is certain; it did not just happen as a casual inspiration. Thoreau spent nearly nine years revising and restructuring his manuscript. He wrote eight versions, yet the never-satisfied author kept making further changes in the page proofs and even in the bound copies of the finished book. There is no doubt that Thoreau took his work seriously. Walden was to be his personal testament, the essence of all he had observed and put down in his Journal, the bringing together of everything he had felt and thought about. His world consisted of only a few square miles around the little town of Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau occasionally did go to other places in the Northeast. He also went to Canada, and he made one last long trip to Minnesota as a dying man in search of health. He never stayed away from Concord any longer than he had to. He came back to it as Antæus did to Mother Earth, for a renewal of strength by contact. Only at the end did that renewal fail, and it may be that by that time Thoreau wanted to die. Much as he loved Concord, he saw its failings and was unsparing in his criticisms of its citizens’ lack of interest in cultural affairs. Nevertheless, this village of 2,249 people held him entranced all his life. He had no desire to go to Europe or to see any of the far places of the earth. Yet he was enormously interested in them and read widely about them, as John Aldrich Christie’s Thoreau as World Traveler (1965) shows. Thoreau may have loved Concord, but he did not fully appreciate all that it had to offer. There was no small town in the Western Hemisphere in which he could have met so many distinguished people on intimate terms. Emerson was there, and for a while at least, so was Hawthorne. William Ellery Channing was Thoreau’s best friend; he knew the Alcotts, and later he met Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, who was to be his biographer. Among the constant stream of visitors were Margaret Fuller, Theodore HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN Parker, Wendell Phillips, and—fatefully—John Brown of Osawatomie fame. There were others too, for Boston is only eighteen miles away. Concord, except for its mud and dust, was then at its most beautiful, with fine big houses set back from tree-lined streets, and broad green fields and woods all around. We who live in a strife-torn, heavily polluted, and disaster-threatened age look back at Concord in Thoreau’s time and are likely to think of it as an earthly paradise. It was not, of course, but to some of us it seems that way. Thoreau saw the railroad and the telegraph come into existence and intrude on Walden Pond. He said forthrightly that the huge cloth mills of New England were not operated for mankind to be “well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched.” He realized that an old way of life was passing and that what was replacing it was not necessarily an improvement. He lived at a time when America was beginning to be transformed from a rural economy to an industrialized urban society. It may be that his protests came from his awareness of what the future would bring. We who live in this artificial present seldom think about Nature except to hope vaguely that some part of the natural world will be saved from the crunching jaws of our devastating machines that are equally ruthless with soil, rocks, and living things. We are so overwhelmed with the seemingly unsolvable problems of man that we tend to ignore what is going on beyond our narrow horizon’s rim. And our problems are real and horrifying, more so than any previous generation has had to face. Suddenly our world has become too crowded, and we have found out that creatures that live too closely together tend to become neurotic and destructive. Even worse is the shadow that looms over us for the first time in human history, the unbearable knowledge that mankind can annihilate itself and everything that lives. Sometimes we may be impatient with Thoreau for complaining about the defects of his much simpler world. But it is the very things he complained about that have become the monstrous evils which plague us now. Henry Miller, who once called American an air- conditioned nightmare, edited three of Thoreau’s essays and said of their author: “He appeared at a time when we had ... a choice as to the direction, we, the American people, would take. Like Emerson and Whitman, he pointed out the right road—the hard road.... As a people we chose differently. And we are now reaping the fruits of our choice.... It is too late now to change, we think. But it is not. As individuals, as men, it is never too late to change. That is what these sturdy forerunners of ours were emphasizing all their lives.” Many of our older people seem to believe that America’s destiny has already been determined and that our leaders can pursue no other course than the one they have been following, the one that has led us into an intolerable state of affairs. But young people, ever rebellious, refuse to believe this and demand a radical change. Thoreau has a special appeal to them. He wanted them for his audience. In the second paragraph of Walden he says: “Perhaps these pages are particularly addressed to poor students.” And then, a little later: “How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?” One is never too young or too old to read a book as universal as this one is. For Walden is not merely a printed text to be HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN read; it is an experience to savor. Each contact with it offers us more of its riches. The other nineteenth-century American classics, great as they are, do not convey the intensely personal message that Walden does. Examine them one by one, Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, all of Poe’s work, and Mark Twain’s too, and you will see that they are about people, but other people, never about you. Walden is as personal as a letter from a close friend, a friend who wishes you well. Emerson tries to do this, but the sage of Concord sometimes addresses his audience from too lofty a perch. Whitman comes nearest, for he speaks directly to his fellow men and is deeply concerned about them. But it must be remembered that he sings primarily of himself. Important as these authors are, none of their books has attracted the completely devoted following that Walden has. Even more than Emerson, Thoreau was concerned with the minds and morals of his readers. He was a mentor, a counselor, and an admonisher—a true teacher in every sense of the word. But if he had been only that he would have been forgotten along with countless other well-meaning and helpful advisers. He wrote superbly well, and they did not. It is as a poet and a stylist that Thoreau rises to front rank in American literature. His verse, however, is much inferior to his prose. He never mastered the technical skill that formal poetry requires. And, perhaps sensing his own weakness in that medium, he lost interests in it. Most of his verse was written while he was young. Even before Walden was published he noted that “the strains from my muse are as rare nowadays ... as the notes of birds in the winter.... It never melts into song.” The critic who has best grasped the essential nature of Thoreau’s great book is Charles R. Anderson, who writes about it with great perception in The Magic Circle of Walden (1968). The book has many facets, he says, but its style is even more important than its matter. Therefore, “why not try an entirely new approach and read Walden as a poem, the transformation of a vision into words?” Many Journal entries show that Thoreau thought of himself primarily as a poet. This does not mean that Walden’s best passages should be broken into lines of free verse, nor should one consider it a prose- poem. It can stand by itself, put together just as Thoreau wanted it to be. As Anderson says, “To read it as a poem is to assume that its meaning resides not in its logic but in its language, its structure of images, its symbolism.” “What Thoreau is striving for,” Anderson adds, is “rendered in an intricate series of image-clusters: animal, leaf, food and shelter, the imagery of time, the quest or journey, the cocoon, the circle, and so on.” On page 18 Professor Anderson explains Walden’s complex design: The overall structure of Walden may be likened to that of both a circle and a web. The Spider’s web is too geometric, but it will serve as a useful analogy to begin with. Walden Pond lies at the center as a symbol of the purity and harmony yearned for by man, though unattainable. Radial lines of wit run out from this, cutting across the attractions of the purely pragmatic or sensual life. And these radials are looped with circle after concentric circle of aspiration toward the ideal life of heaven—which is also mirrored in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN central pond. But Thoreau was too much a poet to be content with a mechanical design. These figures—the spider’s web and the formal Euclidean circle—are suggestive merely. Like the orientals he sought an asymmetrical pattern that would satisfy the esthetic sense of form and still remain true to the nature of experience, art without the appearance of artifice. The circle in Walden is less the obvious cycle of the seasons than a number of subtly suggested circular figures, overlapping as well as concentric. (This design is treated fully in a later chapter.) The web is but another name for the intricate lines of relationship that shape the total structure. But all are so woven together that the whole vibrates when any part is touched, and the ultimate motion is toward circumference. Few works of the creative imagination are more successfully unified. Few have their meaning more embedded in a complex pattern of words. Walden is a poem, though rendered in the guise of prose. Walden is a very great poem, one of America’s greatest, for it expresses the noblest ideals to which this country might have aspired. That it did not attain them is a tragedy that affects the entire human race. And Walden is a poem in the primeval mythic sense, as Reginald L. Cook (1965, page 98 f.) points out: “There are at least two Waldens. One is the homely, circumstantial, and actual record; the other is ancient, ritualistic, and hieratic.... The theme of the reactualization of the archetypal gestures of archaic man—the gestures of baptism and planting and harvesting, or curative ceremonials and re-birth—and their ritualistic evidences appear as naturally as the pickerel in the pond. The more searchingly Walden is read with Jane Harrison’s statement concerning ‘the darker and older shapes’ in mind the more various the shapes appear.... Interpreted in this light these passages complement and re-enforce an extra-Christian dimension in Walden. It can then be read on two levels most rewardingly to the imaginative reader. There is the level of the dramatic present and the level of the prehistoric past.” Walden is a difficult book. It cannot be skimmed through or read lightly. It is all meat, compact and solid. To get from it all that it can yield requires careful reading, rereading and concentrated study. It is worth the effort, for it has almost anything you can want—practical advice, facts about natural phenomena, anecdotes about people, philosophical speculation, and—for those who are attuned to such things—intimations of immortality, poetic insight, and the thrill that words can give when they have been chosen and arranged by a master who endows them with more than their apparent meaning. To have read Walden many years ago is not enough, no matter how well you may think you remember it. You are a different person now who will get different meanings from it if you read it again. Walden should never be put away; it is a book to keep close at hand so it can be referred to often. In it are depths below depths, vistas beyond vistas, an opening and closing of doors that lead to corridors and rooms stored with treasure beyond counting. But the treasure has to be searched for. Charles Anderson has described it, but even with the clues he gives, each reader has to go on his own quest. Like HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN all spiritual quests this one should be rewarding in itself. This much can be promised: that hidden in Walden —and buried deep within it— is another book that few readers even suspect is there. Only those who bring to Walden the necessary sensitivity and the ability to understand implied meanings will reach the central book that is artfully concealed beneath outer wrappings of nature writing, facts and figures about house building, and other seemingly irrelevant things. (They are not irrelevant.) Like poetry, Walden can be appreciated to its full extent only by those who respond to symbolism, suggestion, and association. A hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove are there to help readers on their way, but those readers must be able to recognize their guides when they see them, for they will not be labeled as such. (Nothing is.) The road is hard, the terrain perilous, the effort great, but the reward is beyond computing. (It would wreck anything so simple as a computer.) But seldom is so great a chance, so challenging a challenge given. Let the search begin, then stick to it manfully, always remembering that: At the heart of this inner secret book is Walden itself, but this Walden is no ordinary New England pond. It is a small bit of paradise that existed only in its creator’s mind, so you will have to re-create it in yours. It belongs with literature’s many lands of the heart’s desire, with the Forest of Broceliande where Merlin and Vivian still live, with the fairyland where Midsummer Night’s Dream forever casts its magic sell. These imaginary places may seem to be as insubstantial as moonbeams, yet they outlast time and transcend reality. The reader who is going to be won over by Walden will hear the musical hum of the wind blowing through the telegraph wire harp as he approaches a Concord that never was. In the countryside around Walden the trees are greener, the snow whiter, and the crystal-clear water of the pond bluer than anywhere else. In this enchanted forest the animals are friendly — as one would expect them to be. Here the flowers are forever in bloom, and the air is so exhilarating that just to breathe it is to make one want to renounce all previous life. Yet there is wildness here too, a psychic frenzy of the kind that the worshipers of Pan experienced when they ran unrestrained through the dark woods searching for the god of passion and rebellion. But Walden’s magic works only on those who are prepared to surrender themselves to it. To others it will be just another book full of words and phrases that have little significance. They literally will not be able to see the forest for the trees— and to them the trees will be just so much lumber to be calculated in board feet and sawed into planks for building fences. After reading Walden, men who have been leading lives of quiet desperation may become less desperate when they find out what is troubling them. And even those who feel that the odds are against them may realize that “there is more day to dawn” and that “the sun is but a morning star.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1972

Kenneth Walter Cameron’s THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS AND MINERVA (Hartford CT: Transcendental Books).

Philip Van Doren Stern’s HENRY DAVID THOREAU: WRITER AND REBEL.

5 Stanley Cavell, in THE SENSES OF WALDEN (1st edition), explicated the “Economy” chapter which provides the matrix for Thoreau’s mysterious parable of the lost hound, bay horse, and turtle-dove:

5. Stanley Cavell. THE SENSES OF WALDEN. San Francisco CA: North Point Press, 1972 In rereading Walden twenty years after first reading it, I seemed to find a book of sufficient intellectual scope and consistency to have established or inspired a tradition of thinking. One reason it did not is that American culture has never really believed in its capacity to produce anything of permanent value — except itself. So it forever overpraises and undervalues its achievements. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

WALDEN: In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate. I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.

He grasped this as a deconstruction of the human sense of loss. There is really, in life’s ledger, no such thing as red ink designating a loss entry, or parentheses designating a minus entry. Every entry in our Register of Life is a black-ink positive piece of life, is an affirmative record of something that is being lived.

The The WALDEN other parable analyses

The difficulty in keeping us at the point of departure, and on our own, is one reason he [Thoreau’s narrator] says, “I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity.” That is, I do not know whether I have finally been able to leave you sufficiently alone, to make you go far enough to find us both.... [Later, HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN Cavell speaks of the “secrets of the trade”: “Let us go back to those secrets, for he identifies them with his losses, in his perhaps most famously cryptic passage. I have no new proposal to offer about the literary or biographical sources of those symbols. But the very obviousness of the fact that they are symbols, and function within a little myth, seems to me to tell us what we need to know. The writer comes to us from a sense of loss; the myth does not contain more than symbols because it is no set of desired things he has lost, but a connection with things, the track of desire itself.... It is a gain to grow, but humanly it is always a loss of something, a departure. Like any grownup, he has lost childhood; like any American, he has lost a nation and with it the God of the fathers. He has lost Walden; call it Paradise; it is everything there is to lose. The object of faith hides itself from him. Not that he has given it up, and the hope for it; he is on the track. He knows where it is to be found, in the true acceptance of loss, the refusal of any substitute for true recovery.... The little myth of the hound, horse, and turtledove refers to “one or two” — viz., travelers, hence strangers - who had heard and seen what he has lost, and seemed as anxious to recover them as if the losses were theirs. Here the writer fully identifies his audience as those who realize that they have lost the world, i.e., are lost to it. The fate of having a self –of being human– is one in which the self is always to be found; fated to be sought, or not; recognized, or not. My self is something, apparently, toward which I can still stand in various relations, ones in which I can stand to other selves, named by the same terms, e.g., love, hate, disgust, acceptance, knowledge, ignorance, faith, pride, shame. In the passage in question, Walden’s phenomenological description of finding the self, or the faith of it, is one of trailing and recovery; elsewhere it is voyaging and discovery. This is the writer’s interpretation of the injunction to know thyself. His descriptions emphasize that this is a continuous activity, not something we may think of as an intellectual preoccupation. It is placing ourselves in the world. That you do not know beforehand what you will find is the reason the quest is an experiment or an exploration.

This book has of course been reviewed. Here is what Professor George Hochfield had to say in Summer 1988 about what Professor Cavell had to offer (http://www.jstor.org/stable/27545930): Modern writers on Henry David Thoreau, when they begin their work, invariably perform a ritual act: by one means or another they surrender all claim to irony. Stanley Cavell, for example, at the outset of his very influential THE SENSES OF WALDEN (1972) tells his readers in all seriousness, “This writer is writing a sacred text.” From that point on, what hope is there for a perspective on Thoreau that keeps him in human scale? To Cavell, Thoreau is a “prophetic” writer; his book is “scripture.” The ironic impulse is henceforth repressed, and Cavell is forced to deal with certain simple truths in extraordinary tortuous ways. There is a simple truth, for example, which many readers of WALDEN have more or less reluctantly acknowledged — namely that for long stretches WALDEN is a bore. Cavell, to his credit, is the only modern Thoreauvian (so far as I know) who is willing to admit this. “It cannot, I think, be denied that WALDEN sometimes seems an enormously long and boring book.” But having HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN forsworn irony, Cavell must proceed to deny what cannot be denied by adding: “I understand this response to WALDEN to be a boredom not of emptiness but of prolonged urgency.” The repression of irony appears to be an act of devotion or faith. It permits the reader to “yield to Thoreau’s words,” as Cavell says, and to invent satisfactory redefinitions (“prolonged urgency”) of plain realities (boredom). Just why Thoreau should elicit such a response from sophisticated readers is not at all clear. Perhaps it has something to do with his own implacable humorlessness, his fierce concentration on the themes of “purity” and “elevation,” his scorn for ordinary human weakness. There is something appealing here to the deskbound scholar. Thoreau presents the hero of WALDEN in an absolute, unqualified light. He seems to demand a total commitment. Take him or leave him. And critics of our time have chosen for the most part to take him. It is not wholly unlike the response one occasionally finds in an undergraduate reader, who is ready to throw on his knapsack and head for the woods. Thoreau can exert the fascination not merely of a writer, but of an actor in a cultural mythology. For this reason the question of whether or not Thoreau is a boring writer is not entirely unworthy of consideration. It permits us, at least temporarily, to ignore the heroic (or “prophetic”) mode. And it may help sustain the irony required to confront so demanding a figure. Here in evidence is a passage reasonably characteristic of Thoreau in WALDEN: A man who has at length found something to do will not need a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet, —if a hero ever has a valet,— bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soirées and legislative halls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? The theme is a tired one, and Thoreau’s treatment only enhances its fatigue. It is an extended cliché which Thoreau struggles to carry through under the pressure of duty. There is absolutely nothing in this passage of redeeming literary value. Nor do I detect in the boredom it induces any sense of “prolonged urgency.” Thoreau goes on like this for pages, in a manner of relentless adolescent moralizing. But he was thirty-seven when WALDEN was published. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1973

Philip Van Doren Stern’s EDGAR ALLAN POE, VISITOR FROM THE NIGHT OF TIME. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN

1984

July 31, Tuesday: All US Marines except embassy guards, after a pointless 533-day “intervention,” departed from Lebanon.

After 4 days of meetings in Beijing, Chinese and British officials came to agreement about the future of Hong Kong.

Philip Van Doren Stern died of a heart attack in Sarasota, Florida at the age of 83. The body would be placed in the Jewish Center of Venice Cemetery in Venice, Florida with the grave of his wife Lillian Diamond Stern (who had died in 1979).

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2017. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: July 19, 2017 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.