Fresh Air Fiend

by Paul Theroux

  The subtlest and most eloquent dissent regarding Thoreau's life and writing is Leon Edel's 1970 pamphlet examining Thoreau's personal mythology, stylistic formulas, and ambiguities. Edel sums up Thoreau's as a narcissistic personality. This essay, on a par with the similarly persuasive one by Robert Louis Stevenson, questions the very foundations of Walden — how Thoreau was seldom really alone, nor in the wilderness. Thoreau "had access to his mother's cookie jar in town and enjoyed sundry dinners elsewhere." But Edel, who uncovers distinct pathological traits in Thoreau, mentions Cape Cod only in passing.

  The book has been criticized for containing too much undigested historical material, and for being alternately too lightweight and too learned. At best the critical praise of Cape Cod has been patronizing, and it has not become less so with the passage of time. Even eminent Thoreauvians have sniffed at the book. "Cape Cod is Thoreau's sunniest book—and least profound," the Thoreau scholar Walter Harding has written. "Too deliberately directed at a vulgar audience to represent him at his best," wrote Joseph Wood Krutch. Thoreau, who was fascinated by queer names and bad puns, would undoubtedly have taken his revenge on the critic and made a wooden crutch joke of his name. In Cape Cod we get two groaners: a play on "littoral"/"literal" and a bit of meaningless fun with the Viking "Thor-finn" and the American adventurer "Thor-eau."

  But if it were so woeful and inadequate a book, would it have remained in print for more than one hundred years, and, more to the point, if it were so badly written, would Robert Lowell have bothered to plagiarize it for "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket"? (Lines four to twelve of that prize-winning poem are a direct steal from a brilliant paragraph in the chapter "The Shipwreck.") The book is certainly cranky. It is enjoyable for that reason, and for another—its unexpectedness. The narrative contains the first mention of broccoli growing in America (in "The Wellfleet Oysterman"), and though it was not written as a book, but rather ten pieces based on three short trips, it has an unshakable unity. It seems convincingly like one trip, in the way that A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers seems convincingly like one full week (it was in fact two).

  "I am very little of a traveler," Thoreau once wrote to a friend. It was true. His trips were short, and the distances not great. The farthest he went was to Minnesota. Emerson and Hawthorne got to England and the Continent, Melville to the Holy Land, and Thoreau was well aware that other writers were roaming in India and Turkey. He could be annoyingly defensive: "I know little about the affairs of Turkey, but I am sure that I know something about barberries and chestnuts of which I have collected a store this fall." From time to time Thoreau writes a sentence to which the only response is So what?

  He would probably not have left Concord had it not been necessary for him to find material for his articles and lectures. He did not go far afield. At the time of his Cape travels in 1851, he was supporting himself by lecturing in Medford. His subject: life in the woods at Walden Pond.

  Another spur to his going to Cape Cod was his agreement with Putnam's Monthly to supply five pieces for publication. He tells us on the first page of his book that in all he spent three weeks on the Cape, which seems like nothing. But Thoreau was able to make the most of very little; that quality is the essence of his life. In 1857 he returned to the Cape for another few weeks, but he did not write about it except in his journal. On that last trip he went alone. On the trips that make up Cape Cod he was accompanied by his friend Ellery Channing (who with Sophie Thoreau edited the book after Thoreau died). It was not arduous travel. It seems for the most part to have been not much more than an energetic sort of loafing—rambling and writing about whatever he stumbled over. Thoreau was mistaken for a tramp, for a peddler, and at one point for a bank robber on the run. It is not to belittle his travel to say that it was largely a kind of bumming around, which was the impression he wished to convey.

  And yet he was serious enough about the trip to burden himself with two large reference books: volume 8 of the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society and a gazetteer. From internal evidence, it seems he had a Bible, too. And it is possible that he carried editions of Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Eclogues, because at this time in his life he had resumed reading in Greek and Latin.

  He avoided towns and settlements of any size. When he wanted a bed, he headed for a lighthouse on a cliff or an isolated farm or fishing shack. He liked the undemanding company of Channing. "I feel it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time," he had written in Walden. "To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone." He was self-possessed to the point of sounding selfish, and one gathers that if pressed, he would probably have said that most people behave like fools. He hated walking in settled areas, "but when I come out upon a bare and solitary heath I am at once exhilarated." One of the things that pleased him most about the Cape was that there were so few people, but he had his objections to them, too. "Some of the inhabitants of the Cape think that the Cape is theirs and all occupied by them," he wrote in his journal on his 1857 visit, "but in my eyes it is no more theirs than it is the blackbird's."

  He went to the Cape out of curiosity, but in the course of his travel a great thing happened: Thoreau, the woodsman and landlubber, discovered the sea. "Wishing to get a better view than I had yet had of the ocean" was his stated objective in heading for the Cape. It was a modest wish, but its fulfillment gives this book power, and that is also why it is such a rhapsodic book and so joyous. Thoreau discovered that the sea was a true wilderness and that the only way to know it was to study it from the shore. In the narrative he seems to raise beachcombing to a priesthood.

  This is also the subject of a poem he wrote after his Cape experiences:

  My life is like a stroll upon the beach

  As near the ocean's edge as I can go;

  My tardy steps its waves sometimes o'erreach,

  Sometimes I stay to let them overflow.

  ...

  I have but few companions on the shore:

  They scorn the strand who sail upon the sea;

  Yet oft I think the ocean they've sailed o'er

  Is deeper known upon the strand to me.

  The middle sea contains no crimson dulse,

  Its deeper waves cast up no pearls to view;

  Along the shore my hand is on the pulse,

  And I converse with many a shipwrecked crew.

  It is a clunky poem, but the point is plain in the egotistic certainty of the apostrophizing narrator: the man on the shore has the most intimate knowledge of the deep sea. Can this be so? In Thoreau's terms it is likely, because he is not dealing with surfaces—not the sailor's preoccupation with storms, winds, and currents—but with inner states, and depths; the bottom of the sea. The last line of the poem is literally true, for the first chapter of Cape Cod is scattered with shipwrecked corpses.

  After the dry observation of the Cape landscape, Thoreau moves his travel narrative nearer the water and begins to write a hymn to the seashore. He must have known that in travel terms this was virgin territory and that his insights were quite original and striking. "Objects on a beach, whether men or inanimate things, look not only exceedingly grotesque, but much larger and more wonderful than they really are." Far-off rags look like cliffs, human bones are enlarged and imposing, and one particular corpse he saw "had taken possession of the shore, and reigned over it as no living one could."

  In an almost perverse way he seems to celebrate the grotesqueness of what we now call found objects. He makes a majestic surrealism of the experience. He is not calling for a mere acceptance of the grotesque but rather much more: we must find it beautiful: "I saw that 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 sublime beauty still."

  There are other moods of the grotesque, too: the pilgrim-father theology he finds ridiculous in "The Plains of Nauset," the comic castaways
and the freakishness in "The Wellfleet Oysterman" (they are the human equivalent of the flotsam and jetsam he finds in the tidewrack), and the lengthy description of the fish that swallowed a certificate of church membership in "The Beach Again." He seems to be describing scenes from another world, and one can imagine that a great deal of his enthusiasm arose from the fact that this strangeness was so close to home.

  Scenes like these disturbed his editor at Putnam's, George William Curtis, who felt that Thoreau was belittling Cape Codders. And he found Thoreau's religious discussions "heretical." Thoreau sent the articles to Curtis in 1852, but Curtis was obviously fussed by them, because he demanded cuts and dithered until 1855 before starting publication. When Thoreau saw that Curtis had made further cuts on his own initiative, he reacted snappishly and withdrew the balance of the pieces. Only three installments had appeared. Nevertheless, he had partly fulfilled his intention: his Cape Cod lectures were among his funniest and best received. We have Emerson's word on that: "The Concord people laughed till they cried."

  It is impossible to tell which single trip of the three inspired in Thoreau the notion that he was writing about the sea, not the land. The book unifies his impressions. After the articles began to be serialized, he was writing to his friend H. G. O. Blake, "Come by all means (to North Truro), for it is the best place to see the ocean in these States." By then he had just about abandoned his botanizing and bird watching, and had become a beachcomber and gazer at the sea. In a definite sense he had turned his back to the land. It is a very Cape Cod stance, this eternal watching from the shore. When people say the Cape is small and insignificant, the Cape Codder laughs, because he knows that the Cape is vast—it includes all the sea around it.

  Almost from the first page of the book, Thoreau seems to be casting around for a subject. So he interests himself in everything. The wrecked ship of Irish immigrants furnishes him with a motif, but he moves on to other matters: the useless facts in guidebooks, the contradictions of organized religion, the derivation of words (though he is wrong about "gulled"), the occurrence of algae and kelp. At first he is looking for the grotesque in a rather forced way, but he was fortunate in the shipwreck and fortunate in meeting the Wellfleet oysterman. Yet people are not his subject. He seems to be on the track of something much odder.

  By "The Beach Again" he has become more reflective. He is enchanted by the power of the sea and its relationship to the shore. That is his great discovery, that the shore is the only way to understand the sea—not a voyage in the open sea, but a stroll on the sand. There, everything is revealed. "The sea, vast and wild as it is, bears thus the waste and wrecks of human art to its remotest shore. There is no telling what it may not vomit up. It lets nothing lie."

  Watching closely, he sees that the sea is not blue but every other color—purple, green, dark, even "wine-colored," as his favorite author proclaimed. The land is vulgar, but the sea is subtle; it inspires reveries of distant places, and Thoreau becomes lyrical. It has depths. This commonplace Thoreau turns into a nuance, and he relates it to Walden Pond ("more than one hundred feet deep"), and he concludes, "The ocean is but a larger lake," echoing the last line of Walden, "The sun is but a morning star."

  What land there is on the Cape is ideal, because it is neutral, barren, and seems to encourage reflection. At times it looks as if the Cape is not a real landscape at all but a trembling mirage. Here, in this insubstantial place, a person may stand and view the subtlety of the sea. He does not say so plainly, but toward the end of the book Thoreau implies that Cape Cod is little more than a beach. That is its chief glory, its only importance.

  I think this is the reason the book is not better known. People have read Cape Cod hoping to confirm their impressions of the place, wishing to follow the progress of the traveler, looking to compare the Cape today with what it was more than a hundred years ago. And what does Thoreau give them? Waves breaking on the shore, and seaweed, and some corpses: flotsam. It was only by turning his back to the Cape that he discovered his real subject, but in that way he lost any chance for a wide readership, for he had ceased to be topographical.

  And yet by concentrating on the sea, his imagination was enlivened, and he explains the bewitchment of looking seaward from a beach. A beach is a place of ceaseless activity, of sudden surprises, of drama. "Even the sedentary man here enjoys a breadth of view which is almost equivalent to motion."

  There can be no question of the attraction that the sea had for Thoreau. He makes this clear in the chapter "The Sea and the Desert," which is the high point in the book—the last chapter, "Provincetown," is flatter and no more than an extended epilogue. Thoreau was a man with one foot in Eden. He liked the idea of wilderness, of the untampered-with landscape, of virgin forest. The revelation that makes this book special among travel books and unique in Thoreau's own work is that its subject is the sea, because the sea is a wilderness. It was the wilderness that Thoreau could not quite match in any of his travels, and it made him revise his opinions of what wilderness actually is. He is specific on this point: "I think that [the ocean] was never more wild than now. We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.... The ocean is a wilder ness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters."

  The subject, the point of view, the hyperbole, even the imagery, make this journey near home extraordinary and bring Thoreau closer to his exact contemporary Melville. It is not only the darkness and strangeness of the sea that excite Thoreau's mind, but also the fact that he is writing about it with such simplicity and innocence. It is the voice of Ishmael in Moby-Dick, another loner. And when at the end Thoreau says of the Cape, "A man may stand there and put all America behind him," he is expressing the yearning of Ishmael. That most unThoreauvian sentiment is the statement of a man longing to get away. On this trip more than any other, Thoreau discovered a sense of freedom. To him, Cape Cod was not a territory to be explored; it was a vantage point.

  The Secret Agent: A Dangerous Londoner

  AT FIRST, Joseph Conrad did not dare to call his book a novel. He traveled to Montpellier in February 1906 with his small family, telling himself that he was composing a short story, entitled "Verloc," the name of the central character. As always, he wrote slowly, in a stubborn mood of exasperation and uncertainty, laboring in a foreign language.

  When he sat down furtively to begin, Conrad was forty-eight years old. Long before, he had been in the French merchant marine. He now lived in England, spoke English, and had been married for nine years in a sort of mismatch to Jessie, a dull and bovine Englishwoman (whom he had met while lodging in her mother's boarding house). A novelist and former ship's captain, he was an unlikely candidate for domesticity. He was a remote and somewhat unwilling father of a sickly boy.

  Verloc, "a man well over forty," was furtive and foreign. Long before, he had been in the French artillery. He now lived in England, spoke English, and had been married for seven years in a sort of mismatch to Winnie, an incurious and silent Englishwoman (whom he had met while lodging in her mother's boarding house). An agent provocateur and a former convict, he was an unlikely candidate for domesticity. He was a remote and somewhat unwilling foster father to his wife's younger brother, a hypersensitive boy.

  This fictional Verloc was a fairly amorous, not to say priapic, individual, and his sentimental nature had been his undoing more than once. He had made frequent trips to France. So had Conrad—to write—and, just before setting out on this particular trip, Jessie had disclosed to him that she was pregnant. This news embarrassed him ("at my venerable age"), as though a secret of his sexuality had been revealed.

  The short story "Verloc" developed into a long story, a kind of thriller, became a series of episodes, grew to something resembling a novel, was retitled The Secret Agent and serialized in a magazine at the end of 1906, then elaborated to its present form—and in its expansi
on it became not just plumper but somewhat misshapen. It was published as a book in 1907. It concerned a plot to blow up Greenwich Observatory, in southeast London and was based on an actual event that took place in 1894, when Conrad, living in London and working on Almayers Folly, read about it in The Times and The Morning Leader. The book received a mixed reception from the critics, and it sold badly. Conrad called it "an honorable failure."

  Quite late in the action of the story, a character says, "From a certain point of view we are here in the presence of a domestic drama."

  It is easy to see why, and it is wonderful to reflect on how in writing what was in effect the world's first political thriller—spies, conspirators, wily policemen, murders, bombings, and in a London wearing a suitably gloomy expression for these misdeeds—Conrad was also giving artistic expression to his domestic anxieties: his overweight wife and problem child, his lack of money, his inactivity, his discomfort in London, his uneasiness in English society, his sense of exile, of being an alien. It is also a portrait of Russian wickedness, and that had a deeply personal resonance for Conrad too. He had reasons to regard the Russians as satanic.