Thoreau in Cape Cod: A Book Review

The Walden Woods Project was founded, oddly enough, by Don Henley, whose "take it easy" vibe sits uncomfortably with the restless author he is reissuing. The Eagles inhabited a world, Robert Christgau once observed, where hate was inadmissible: it wasn't admitted into their universe, and you didn't admit to it. Thoreau certainly admitted to feeling quite a lot of hate, not just for a government that he considered a war machine, but also on occasion for his neighbors and companions. Thoreau's writings sometimes give us such a good dose of revulsion from society that he seems to have deserved his reputation for misanthropy. When, for example, he ridicules those ever-busy men who "spend their whole lives almost, a-fishing," he writes sentences that could just as well have appeared in Walden: "Better go without your dinner, I thought, than be thus everlastingly fishing for it like a cormorant."

But Thoreau follows this precept with self-irony: "Of course, viewed from the shore, our pursuits in the country appear not a whit less frivolous." The move into wry self-reflection is typical of this book, and might even be called the dominant mood of Cape Cod. Right from the opening pages, we learn that Thoreau conceives of his book as a series of reflections on mortality, which he presents with a mix of somber irony and dry humor that rarely exudes bitterness, contributing to a sense of New England as a place that links someone like Edward Hopper to Annie Proulx, whose The Shipping News is perhaps a bit like a nineteenth-century Transcendentalist version of Cape Cod.

Thoreau presents himself in self-deprecating terms as a beachcomber, a sort of mock-hero whom he punningly dubs "Thor-eau." However, his purpose in combing the beaches is a somber one: he is there primarily to look for wreckage, including human bodies that have washed ashore from accidents at sea. Thoreau never mentions Margaret Fuller by name, but when he is describing the tragic sight of corpses floating ashore, we know that the great Cambridge-born fellow Transcendentalist, who died in a shipwreck, must have been on his mind. Urged by their mutual friend Emerson, Thoreau had made a long trip in 1850 to Fire Island, New York, to locate Fuller's body as well as any manuscripts that may have washed ashore after the wreck of the Elizabeth. Thoreau was able to find only unidentifiable bones.

Thoreau's first trip to the Cape in October 1849 coincided with a major shipwreck, in which one hundred emigrants fleeing famine-starved Ireland died when the St. John from Galway wrecked on a bar off Cohasset. When Thoreau stopped in Cohasset on his way south to the Cape two days after the wreck, he witnessed the putting of recovered bodies into coffins. To say that Thoreau's reaction to the sight is, as the introduction to this volume states, "a tough, unsentimental account" is an understatement. He describes seeing a young woman who had become "a coiled-up wreck of a human hulk," but later concludes that it was "not so impressive a scene as I might have expected." Thoreau's reaction seems to exemplify for him a desirable transmutation of sympathy into an aesthetic response to the scene: "the beauty of the shore itself was wrecked for many a lonely walker there, until he could perceive, at last, how its beauty was enhanced by wrecks like this, and it acquired thus a rarer and sublimer beauty still." The ocean's sublime beauty, Thoreau seems to be saying, brings to mind a kind of beauty indifferent to human purposes. Such a reaction is all the more understandable when we remember that the consumptive Thoreau was always brooding on his own impending mortality.

The people of Cape Cod form another part of the ecology of the place. In fact, the geography seems more changeable to Thoreau than the people. While Thoreau records debate on whether the dimensions of the Cape may be changing due to the ocean's incursions, he notes that local histories of the people are mostly just compilations of previous histories. Things don't change, and the Cape dwellers take pride in it, considering themselves "first people." Their status conflicts turn less on wealth than length of residence. (That doesn't mean, though, that Thoreau has forgotten who the real first people of the Cape were: he recounts the seizure of Eastham from the Indians in sharply satirical terms.)

In their different ways of capturing the people of the Cape, the interaction of Thoreau's text with Scot Miller's fine photographs, which can be viewed online here, becomes especially interesting. While Miller gorgeously photographs many features of the natural landscape corresponding to Thoreau's descriptions, he necessarily gets more daring when he tries to find modern-day equivalents for Thoreau's oyster- and lighthouse-men. In a chapter where Thoreau records a then-conventional account of visiting a centenarian witness to the American Revolution, Miller gives us a portrait of a silver-haired artist from the same town. Where Thoreau notes the absence of fellow tourists -- perhaps "the time will come when this coast will be a place of resort," but "probably it will never be agreeable … to the fashionable world" -- Miller presents an image of the historic Days' Cottages in Truro. I'll leave it to you to decide whether such relationships between text and images are intended as correspondences or divergences. This is one of the most interesting features of the Walden Woods Project's outstanding edition.

This is a very funny book, too. Along with Melville, Thoreau puns more meaningfully than perhaps any other major American writer. He records that "I did not taste fresh fish of any kind on the Cape, and I was assured that they were not so much used there as in the country. That is where they are cured, and where, sometimes, travellers are cured of eating them." Reflecting on his education at Harvard, Thoreau recalls "a classmate who fitted for college by the lamps of a lighthouse, which was more light, we think, than the university afforded." Less humorously, the same metaphor plays host to an extraordinary reverie in which Thoreau records his visit with his companion to an old charity-house intended to shelter shipwreck victims:

we put our eyes, by turns, to a knot-hole in the door, and, after long looking, without seeing, into the dark, -- not knowing how many shipwrecked men's bones we might see at last, looking with the eye of faith, knowing that, though to him that knocketh it may not always be opened, yet to him that looketh long enough through a knot-hole the inside shall be visible, -- for we had had some practice at looking inward, -- by steadily keeping our other ball covered from the light meanwhile, putting the outward world behind us, ocean and land, and the beach, -- till the pupil became enlarged and collected the rays of light that were wandering in that dark (for the pupil shall be enlarged by looking; there never was so dark a night but a faithful and patient eye, however small, might at last prevail over it), -- after all this, I say, things began to take shape to our vision, -- if we may use this expression where there was nothing but emptiness, -- and we obtained the long-wished-for insight. … Indeed, it was the wreck of all cosmical beauty there within.

In this deliberately archaic language, Thoreau describes what he saw there. I'll leave it to you to get this fine book so you can find out for yourself.