Speaking for Nature: The Literary Naturalists, from Transcendentalism to the Birth of the American Environmental Movement
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Speaking for Nature: The Literary Naturalists, from Transcendentalism to the Birth of the American Environmental Movement
320eBook
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Overview
Beginning with Thoreau, nature writers not only have influenced our appreciation of the natural world but also have helped to preserve the American wilderness, from the Maine Woods to Yosemite and the Sierra. Writer and activist Paul Brooks presents narrative portraits of great literary naturalists, offering a 200-year history of the country's movement toward conservation. Profiles of leaders in the fight to protect the environment and safeguard our natural heritage include John Burroughs, John Muir, William Beebe, and many others. A new Foreword has been written for this edition by Linda Lear, author of Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature.
"A richly informative book which portrays the nature writers from Henry Thoreau to Rachel Carson who shaped the development of conservation in America." — San Francisco Chronicle
"A brisk and illuminating survey of the naturalists who by their writing moved Americans into the age of ecology." — The New York Times Book Review
"This valuable book reviews the past century of American nature writing from the prose rhapsodies of Thoreau and Muir to the alarm calls of Bernard DeVoto and Rachel Carson . . . writers who have fought bravely and well and have left us a powerful heritage upon which to build." — Boston Globe
"Paul Brooks's gracefully illustrated text, in the very tradition it honors, offers hope that reason and reverence — the poetry of science — will prevail." — Washington Post Book World
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780486795478 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 05/04/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Speaking for Nature
The Literary Naturalists, from Transcendentalism to the Birth of the American Environmental Movement
By Paul Brooks
Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 1980 Walden Woods ProjectAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-79547-8
CHAPTER 1
"The Two Johns": Burroughs and Muir
"There is nothing of age in America but the woods ... That is well worth monuments and ancestors."
— Châteaubriand, Voyage en Amerique, 1836
Vernal equinox, 1911. Theodore Roosevelt, two years out of the White House, is in California delivering a lecture under the auspices of a scientific institute. Before reaching his main theme — his recent African adventures — he brings up a subject that has remained close to his heart throughout all the turmoil of politics and the presidency. What the world needs, he says, is more men with scientific imagination — men who can take the facts of science and write of them with fidelity, yet with such an interpretative and poetic spirit as to make them into literature: "I mean such men and such writers as John Muir and John Burroughs."
Both men were in the audience that evening, Burroughs on one of his rare trips away from his beloved Catskills, Muir on his home ground. Aged seventy-four and seventy-three respectively, with temperaments as different as the tame Catskills and the wild Sierra Nevada, they had introduced thousands of Americans to the joys of outdoor nature. They had developed and popularized the "nature essay": a literary form hitherto cultivated only by a few writers of talent and one of genius, Henry David Thoreau. In one way or another, they had been associated with virtually every American nature writer of their time. Looking back, they could see tangible evidence of what they had accomplished. Burroughs could see it in the hordes of children who crowded around the rear platform of his train, singing and throwing flowers, as he left for home; Muir in the silent wilderness of Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, the national parks that he had worked so hard to create. But looking ahead, they could hardly have anticipated the threats that would arise to everything they held sacred. In 1911 they were standing midway in the century between the death of Thoreau in 1862 and the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. The frontier was officially dead, its obsequies performed by historian Frederick Jackson Turner, but the frontier philosophy persisted, growing more lethal with each advance in technology. On a continent of supposedly limitless resources, conservation was still a novel concept,*promoted by naturalists, by fashionable sportsmen who had noted with alarm the dwindling of the wild game, and fortunately by a few men of power in government. It was barely recognized by the public at large. Whatever hope there might be for the future would depend on men and women like themselves, able to build on the foundation they had laid. Specifically it would depend on the efforts of articulate naturalists who, as Theodore Roosevelt had said, could take the facts of science and transmute them into literature. Americans must be made to recognize the natural world as part of their culture. Preaching, however impassioned, would never do it. Poetry would: that is, in the broad sense of any writing that seizes on the reader's imagination and reveals the poetic truth that lies beneath the scientific fact.
* * *
Burroughs and Muir had barely set out on their long careers when Thoreau's brief life ended at the age of forty-four. Leaving the crowded church in Concord, Massachusetts, after the funeral, Louisa May Alcott remarked to a friend: "Though he wasn't made much of while living, he was honored at his death." The obituaries were many and impressive, including Emerson's in the Atlantic Monthly. Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers — the only two of his books published during his lifetime — were immediately brought back into print, and four posthumous volumes were compiled from his journal and other writings during the next four years. But as John Burroughs wrote some quarter-century later, Thoreau's fame "was little more than in the bud at that time, and its full leaf and flowering are not yet, perhaps not in many years yet. He improves with age ... The generation he lectured so sharply will not give the same heed to his words as will the next and the next." On first reading, Thoreau could be irritating; time is required "to take off a little of his asperity and fully ripen him ... The world likes a good hater and refuser almost as well as it likes a good lover and acceptor, only it likes him farther off."
Emerson predicted that Thoreau's massive journal, if it were ever published, would produce "a plentiful crop of naturalists." He was right about that; yet the full impact of Thoreau's life and writing, particularly on young readers, would not be felt for another century. And then it was not so much the naturalist as the philosopher of nature that evoked so deep a response in a generation frustrated by the materialism and synthetic standards of the world it had inherited.
Born in 1837, Burroughs was twenty-five years old when Thoreau died. Nothing in his life so far had foreshadowed the national celebrity to whom singing schoolchildren tossed spring flowers. His forebears were dirt farmers, of no cultural pretensions. His father (Burroughs recalled), though a good husband and a worthy citizen, had "no aesthetic sensibility and no manners. The primrose by the river's brim would not have been seen by him at all." A religious bigot, he read nothing but the weekly newspaper and church publications. "Mother, I think, never read a page of anything." However, in the rare moments of escape from running a household of ten children, she would take her son berrying in the hills surrounding the Burroughs homestead in upstate New York, with their flowering meadows and their view of the long sweep of the western Catskills. It was from her that he first derived his feeling for nature, and it was she who defended his right to more schooling, which his father thought would just spoil him as a farmer.
In reconstructing the life of a famous man, biographers like to find some youthful experience which, however trivial it seemed at the time, became the "turning point" of their subject's career. In her Life and Letters of John Burroughs, Clara Barrus, the close companion of his later years, tells of his childhood excitement over the songs and bright colors of birds. "When, at the age of seven or eight, his attention was arrested by a strange bird in the Deacon woods, the experience proved of signal importance: only a small bluish warbler with a white spot on its wing [a black-throated blue warbler], but it challenged him as had no other bird before. Through it he got a glimpse of the world of birds of which he knew nothing; a glimpse which so fired his imagination that he half-resolved to know more about the birds some day." Nor could he ever forget the cloud of passenger pigeons that poured down, one spring morning, into the beech woods till "the air and woods and earth were blue with them ... and the whole world seemed turned to pigeons." (They would become extinct during his lifetime.) These childhood enthusiasms were fortified when, as a young man, he chanced upon Audubon's monumental Birds of America in — of all places — the library of the Military Academy at West Point.
The charm and beauty of birds have, I suspect, lured more men and women into the field of natural history than any other aspect of nature. For Burroughs they remained an abiding passion. Yet he was a writer before he was a naturalist. Here the part of the black-throated blue warbler was played by Ralph Waldo Emerson. At the age of nineteen, Burroughs was teaching school to earn enough money to continue his own education, and writing essays in ponderous Johnsonian style. Then he discovered Emerson. "I read him in a sort of ecstasy. I got him in my blood, and he colored my whole intellectual outlook. He appealed to my spiritual side; his boldness and unconventionality took a deep hold upon me." (One recalls Thoreau's similar reaction on reading Emerson's Nature twenty-two years before.) So great was the impact that Burroughs' first, unsigned article in the Atlantic Monthly, published four years later, was attributed by many readers to Emerson — though surely it resembled Emerson at a very low ebb. Clearly the master's hold on him was too strong. He soon realized that he had better find his own style and his own subject matter — less high-flown philosophy, more about country life and the outdoor world that he knew at first hand — in short, the nature essay. "It was mainly to break the spell of Emerson's influence," he wrote many years later, "and to get upon ground of my own that I took to writing upon outdoor themes."
Meanwhile his personal life had taken a turn which boded no good for either his birding or his writing. He married a girl who despised both, but nonetheless wanted John. Ursula North, according to her sister, was "endowed with a strong will power." John, who was not, harbored doubts till the last minute; on the way to the wedding he sat down to think it over and almost turned back. Proud and aggressive, this nineteenth-century Delilah had already asserted herself by making him cut his hair — esthetically an error, to judge from the handsome daguerreotype taken a short time before. Once married, she apparently continued to live with her family until he could make enough money to set up housekeeping. Only a week after the wedding he wrote her: "I sometimes think I will not make the kind of husband that will always suit you. If I live, I shall be an author." Ursula thought otherwise; he should go to New York City and enter the business world. Her replies to his protestations of love and loneliness were "short and businesslike." He attempted again and again to obey her command but always had to fall back on school-teaching. For a short time he sought to combine writing with the study of medicine, but that failed also. Finally, in 1862, lured by the excitement of the Civil War, he decided to try his luck in Washington. "I believe it is good for us to be apart, don't you?" he wrote to his wife. "I think love increases as does the distance between us."
(This marriage, if such it can be called, somehow endured, perhaps because Burroughs soon began to make money from his writing — enough eventually to satisfy even her. On that happy day in 1911 when — by now a venerable and fabulously successful author — he received the accolade from Theodore Roosevelt and the tribute of flowers from the California schoolchildren, she was properly impressed and thereafter looked upon his work with respect. "My books couldn't do it," he said, "but — well — the fine houses and servants are good for something, after all.")
With the help of Washington friends, Burroughs landed (and then lost) various menial government jobs, till finally he wound up as a clerk in the Currency Bureau of the Treasury Department. For the next ten years he sat at a high desk guarding a steel vault filled with bank notes. "How I reacted against the door of that old safe!" he recalled later. "But the rebound sent me back to the fields and woods of my boyhood." Here in the bowels of the Treasury he wrote the essays that make up the first two of his long series of nature books, Wake-Robin and Winter Sunshine, and here he wrote his Notes on Walt Whitman.
Burroughs' meeting with Whitman was another of those turning points, a sudden source of warmth and companionship for a man who desperately needed both. They met in the fall of 1863, when Whitman was working in the army hospitals. Burroughs had read Leaves of Grass, which Emerson had termed "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed." He also recalled Emerson's description of the poet as "half song thrush and half alligator," and was astonished to find him "a new type of man, a new type of gentleman, a new type of philosopher ... the greatest, sweetest soul I have yet met in this world." They took to each other instantly. Thereafter Burroughs regularly accompanied Whitman on his rambles through the streets of Washington and long walks about the surrounding countryside. The observer of nature and the poet complemented each other. "He thinks natural history, to be true to life, must be inspired, as well as poetry," notes Burroughs after one such expedition. "The true poet and the true scientist are close akin. They go forth into nature like friends ... The interests of the two in nature are widely different, yet in no true sense are they hostile." His association with Whitman undoubtedly broadened and deepened Burroughs' attitude toward nature; in fact, Walt's influence during those formative years can scarcely be exaggerated. "I loved him as I never loved any man," Burroughs recalled much later. "... I owe more to him than to any man in the world ... He was a tremendous force in my life."
Notes on Walt Whitman was both Burroughs' first published book and the first book written about the poet. He saw Whitman as "a return to Nature" and Leaves of Grass as "an utterance from Nature, and opposite to modern literature, which is an utterance from Art." Personally, Whitman was not only a source of literary inspiration to the younger man but a balm to his loneliness. "The more I see of Walt, the more I like him," he writes to a friend. He goes on to say — with perhaps a touch of naïveté — "Walt loves everything and everybody ... He kisses me as if I were a girl." Their warm friendship must have done much to make bearable those long hours outside the cold steel safe. And Whitman, who had collaborated in the little book about himself, also showed a real interest in Burroughs' nature writing. It was he who insisted on naming that first collection of essays Wake-Robin, "I took a number of titles to him, and he held me to that one." In doing so, Whitman sowed the seeds of confusion for generations of readers unaware that "wake-robin" does not refer to a bird being roused from sleep but rather to "the white trillium, which blooms in all our woods, and which marks the arrival of all the birds."
Published in 1871 by the Boston firm of Hurd & Houghton (later Houghton, Mifflin), Wake-Robin made an immediate hit. Burroughs' name was already known. Most of these essays had appeared as magazine articles, principally in the Atlantic Monthly, which had printed the first chapter, "The Return of the Birds," as a lead article six years earlier. The Atlantic's editor, William Dean Howells, was prepared to like Wake-Robin and he did. "The dusk and cool and quiet of the forest seem to wrap the reader of his book, and it is a sort of summer vacation to turn its pages ... Perhaps it would be difficult not to be natural and simple in writing of such things as our author treats of ... but Mr. Burroughs adds a strain of genuine poetry, which makes his papers unusually delightful, while he has more humor than generally falls to the ornithological tribe," Other reviewers drew comparisons with Thoreau's essays and with Gilbert White's Natural History of Selbome. And though it may be true, as Bliss Perry once remarked, that Burroughs did not find his own voice till some years later, the essential elements were all here, enhanced by the freshness and undercurrent of enthusiasm which so often colors an author's first book.
The opening chapter, "The Return of the Birds," is followed by "In the Hemlocks," which contains the well-known passage on one of America's finest songbirds, beginning: "Ever since I entered the woods, even while listening to the lesser songsters, or contemplating the silent forms about me, a strain has reached my ears from out the depths of the forest that to me is the finest sound in nature — the song of the hermit thrush. I often hear him thus a long way off, sometimes over a quarter of a mile away, when only the stronger and more perfect parts of his music reach me; and through the general chorus of wrens and warblers I detect this sound rising pure and serene, as if a spirit from some remote height were slowly chanting a divine accompaniment. This song appeals to the sentiment of the beautiful in me, and suggests a serene religious beatitude as no other sound in nature does." (No doubt the symbolism of the hermit thrush in Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" was inspired by his country walks with Burroughs.) This gentle essay was followed by a rather uncharacteristic account of an Adirondack deer hunt — with a cold-blooded description of revolver practice on a rabbit — and by essays on the spring bird migration in Washington, on trout fishing in the Catskills, on the bluebird, and on the joys of ornithology. With the exception of his literary and philosophical essays, Wake-Robin touches on most of the subjects that, in the next fifty years, would provide material for innumerable magazine pieces and twenty-seven volumes. These would reach a vast audience and make their author one of the best loved of all American writers. More important, they would open a window on the natural world for thousands of young readers who would, when they grew up, have the fate of this world in their hands. (In old age Burroughs remarked: "Whenever I see young men walking through the country like that [i.e., with camping equipment on their backs] I sometimes flatter myself that maybe my books have had a share in sending them forth.") In the words of a friend, he created "an army of nature-students." They and their successors have been fighting our conservation battles ever since.
Not that Burroughs was a born fighter, like John Muir. He was a man of peace who assiduously cultivated the contemplative life. With the publication of Wake-Robin he had found his métier. "As a youth I was a philosopher; as a young man I was an Emersonian; as a middle-aged man I am a literary naturalist, but always I have been an essayist." He was only thirty-nine years old when the distinguished editor of Scribner's Monthly, Richard Watson Gilder, went out on a critical limb: "John Burroughs is one of the half-dozen or less prose writers who are adding anything vital by means of books to the thought and life of the country."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Speaking for Nature by Paul Brooks. Copyright © 1980 Walden Woods Project. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Beginning with Thoreau, nature writers not only have influenced our appreciation of the natural world but also have helped to preserve the American wilderness, from the Maine Woods to Yosemite and the Sierra. Writer and activist Paul Brooks presents narrative portraits of great literary naturalists, offering a 200-year history of the country's movement toward conservation. Profiles of leaders in the fight to protect the environment and safeguard our natural heritage include John Burroughs, John Muir, William Beebe, and many others. A new Foreword has been written for this edition by Linda Lear, author of Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature.
"A richly informative book which portrays the nature writers from Henry Thoreau to Rachel Carson who shaped the development of conservation in America."—San Francisco Chronicle
"A brisk and illuminating survey of the naturalists who by their writing moved Americans into the age of ecology."—The New York Times Book Review
"This valuable book reviews the past century of American nature writing from the prose rhapsodies of Thoreau and Muir to the alarm calls of Bernard DeVoto and Rachel Carson . . . writers who have fought bravely and well and have left us a powerful heritage upon which to build."— Boston Globe
"Paul Brooks's gracefully illustrated text, in the very tradition it honors, offers hope that reason and reverence—the poetry of science—will prevail."—Washington Post Book World
Dover (2014) republication of the edition originally published by the Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1980.
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