LITERATURE LOST IN THE THICKETS
Published: February 15, 1987
(Page 2 of 3)
Still, the impulse - earthward toward a genuine congress with the life of American lands - was valid, and under the continuing influence of European Romanticism it was incrementally strengthened through the succeeding three decades. In ''Rachel Dyer'' (1828), the literary lightning rod John Neal noted the trend and predicted that American places apparently bereft of all tradition and character would yield ''abundant and hidden'' sources of literary fertility to authors with sufficient insight to drive the plowshare of imagination down into them. In his novel of the Salem witch scare, Neal himself came close.
But more than Neal and more than Irving and Cooper and Hawthorne, too, it was the lonely iconoclast Thoreau who actually did this and so inaugurated the literature of place in national letters. Instead of lamenting the fact that he couldn't rewrite the ''Georgics'' and like Virgil speak confidently of the happiness of knowing the country gods of his native Mantua, Thoreau determined to make a literature out of the homely facts of his place and time. As early as 1839 - seven years before he began on ''Walden'' - he wrote in his journal that the wise man does not restlessly wish himself ever elsewhere but rather ''each moment abides there where he is.'' As he walked the woods and swamps of Concord or drifted in his boat, apparently aimless, on the surface of Walden Pond, it seemed to him that America was all restlessness and haste and that even the most settled portions of it were yet truly undiscovered. Spiritually speaking, Americans were still confined to that Atlantic beachhead and had not gone beyond so superficial a position to make real entry.
In ''Walden'' Thoreau took his own advice and found that in abiding there where he was, he had truly discovered far more than merely the shores of America. In cultivating his beanfield hard by the Lincoln Road, Thoreau struck down with his hoe through the layers of recent history, through the hidden lives of Irish laborers and black squatters to Indian arrowheads and beneath these at last to the bedrock of the New World. Ploughing in ground his village neighbors thought unpromising, he had in fact driven deep into the American earth and had taken imaginative possession of his portion of it. His harvest was a book that, like a pebble tossed into his pond, widened from the intensely local to the national and even the international. At last it was mythological, for he had succeeded in re-creating in his own time the ancient numinous sense of place, had become the Cecrops of that place.
''Walden,'' as we know, wasn't a commercial success, and Thoreau as an author wasn't, either. Some of his neighbors found his wayward efforts laughable. But George William Curtis, writing after the publication of ''Walden,'' correctly drew the lesson it had to teach American writers, saying that if others would study their own places as carefully as Thoreau had his, ''New England would seem as poetic and beautiful as Greece.''
Others, too, drew the lesson, even if not directly from Thoreau. The regionalists, many of them close to authentic folk sources, learned to make literature out of where they were and what they knew of their places, and this movement came to magnificent culmination in Mark Twain. In 1874, William Dean Howells had asked his friend for something for The Atlantic Monthly, and in thinking over what he might write, Twain suddenly came upon the vast treasure of the Mississippi, buried in his memory and beneath the apparently unpromising life of the seedy little town of his boyhood years. ''Life on the Mississippi'' and ''Huckleberry Finn'' showed American writers finally and forever that personally ancient stores of memory could supply everything requisite for literature, no matter where a writer happened to live, no matter how seemingly unforgiving and unsung the landscape. Memory, the experience of things undergone, could creatively join with the place of that experiencing and serve for that humus of mythology and deep historicity American writers lacked. THUS a later writer, Willa Cather, so unlike either Thoreau or Twain, could come to a similar conclusion, however hard her way to it. Uprooted in childhood from the fond hills and copses of her ancestral Virginia, Cather was plunked down amidst the treeless stretches of south-central Nebraska, a place, so she was later to recall, that seemed to her ''as bare as a piece of sheet iron.'' Not surprisingly, when she had escaped Nebraska for the East to become a writer, her first fictions were tales of resistance: artistic types set against their hostile prairie environment. It was not until she had encountered the ancient Anasazi ruins of the Southwest in 1912 that Cather could come to more creative terms with her prairie home place.
She had fallen in love with the Southwest, and as always, love had inspired imagination. More, it had provoked memory. Those long-silent structures she'd encountered in Arizona's Walnut Canyon had nothing to do with her personal history in a direct, blood sense. But in a larger, generic sense they had everything to do with her: they spoke eloquently of the history of the human race and of the often difficult, precarious accommodations human cultures must make with their environments. Her admiration for this particular accommodation thrust her back on her own past, to those accommodations on the prairie to which she herself had borne witness. ''Life began for me,'' she said, ''when I ceased to admire and began to remember.'' So, she turned back to Nebraska with a different eye, to the recollection of childhood friends, to the stories of pioneer life, the stark, unrhymed poetry of those lives. She saw the great land of the Divide anew, saw that it too had its songs, and determined that she herself would learn to sing them.