by Robert Root
The difference between the Walden West books (Walden West and Return to Walden West) and the journal books is not simply a change in format—the Walden West books don’t follow the journal sequence—it’s also a shift in focus. Walden West and Return to Walden West are much more reflective, philosophical, chastened. Both are a series of segments alternating between meditations on nature around Sac Prairie and profiles of individual citizens. Derleth doesn’t always make clear when things happened, but I feel the stories he’s telling in Walden West often are set in earlier decades, about people from the previous century who expired in his youth. In Return some of the characters from the journals are the subject of the profiles, Derleth more observant, analytical, detailed about their backgrounds and their fates than in the journal books. Memory runs through both books, the memory of outings around the river and of the individuals he’s met in his solitary walks around town; the nature entries often focus on sounds and odors; and almost all the profiles document lives of quiet desperation, though in Return the subjects aren’t always neurotic and solitary. A number of critics have commented on the slower, more conscientious pace at which Derleth worked on these books, which accounts for their greater power, lyricism, and reflection.
I can’t help but wonder whether A Sand County Almanac contributed to Derleth’s desire to exercise more craft in these books. In his review Derleth emphasized that “A Sand County Almanac is divided into three parts, the first of which is a kind of journal of life on the author’s sand farm weekend refuge, month by month, an account of things seen and heard. The second part consists of random sketches designed to show how Leopold learned that most people were out of step and how he became the ardent conservationist he was. Finally, the third part sets forth a philosophy of conservation.” There is something of a correspondence here with Derleth’s identifying each Walden West book as “An Exposition on Three Related Themes.” Reading Leopold may have inspired Derleth to raise the level of his game in his nonfiction.
Obviously Leopold wasn’t the only influence. Throughout his career Derleth consistently drew upon models from other writers: his Solar Pons series of mysteries were “pastiches” of the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle; his horror stories expanded what he termed the “Cthulhu Mythos” of his friend H. P. Lovecraft; his attention to local characters and community bore resemblances to the midwestern focus of Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson—certainly echoes of Spoon River Anthology and Winesburg, Ohio can be heard in his profiles of individual characters. Derleth’s best works in nonfiction seem to merge the perspective of Masters in particular—he was a friend and at one point, when Derleth was engaged to Marcia Masters, a prospective father-in-law—with the perspective of his most persistent influence, Henry David Thoreau. While Thoreau’s influence on Muir led to a life in wilderness and nature advocacy, his influence on Derleth was more pervasive, even if Derleth’s focus in his nonfiction wasn’t as contained as either Thoreau’s or Muir’s. After all, the Walden West books are titled after Thoreau’s great book, their third theme is a quote from Thoreau, and Derleth even named his son Walden. Among his other books are two poetry titles centered on Thoreau and Walden, And You, Thoreau and Rendezvous in a Landscape; a biography, Concord Rebel: A Life of Henry D. Thoreau; and Walden Pond: Homage to Thoreau, a compilation of three journal entries from trips to the pond in 1938, 1947, and 1965. Thoreau and Walden have significant presence in Derleth’s view of himself and of his world.
Derleth’s reading of Thoreau reinforced both a fondness for nature and a tendency to feel connected to his home ground. His regular contributions to magazines like Trails, Outdoors, Country Book, and The Passenger Pigeon, totaling more than a hundred pieces between 1933 and 1953, are all based on his nature walks around Sac Prairie and the journal entries he compiled about them, as Thoreau’s Walden was. Derleth may have been a novelist, poet, editor, and publisher, but throughout his career he also saw himself as a regional nature writer with a strictly local focus.
Not a man much given to travel—he spent six months in Minneapolis before giving up his editing job to return permanently to Sauk City—he made his first pilgrimage to Concord and Walden Pond in September 1938, but he had been keeping a daily journal, as Thoreau did, from much earlier. His archive in the Wisconsin Historical Society Library maintains typed entries from December 14, 1935, to January 11, 1970, a thirty-five-year span. He published his books based on his journals after his first visit to Walden; Village Year also included items from the Outdoors Magazine series between 1934 and 1939, and Village Daybook included more Outdoors items from 1939 to 1941. The second visit to Walden Pond may have incited his interest in really writing a Walden of his own. In Walden Pond, his revised journal entry for September 12, 1947, declares:
For every one who finds his private Walden, there are many thousands who never know a refuge, whose existence is mere resignation, who never learn that the universe is wider than their view of it. To Thoreau his Walden, to me Sac Prairie—a sort of Walden West, in which I have traveled no less widely than Thoreau at Concord, and in which I am involved as much as if not more than he in his village, each taking time to explore his private seas, as well as to improve his acquaintance with the setting and its inhabitants, learning what goes on not only in the woods but also in the hearts of men.
He likely had made that connection years before, but the passage here sounds very much like the moment he felt inspired to write Walden West. Apparently he worked on the book throughout the 1950s, continuing to write and publish other work at his usual prolific pace but also steeping himself in Thoreau.
Derleth’s biography of Thoreau, Concord Rebel, was published in 1960, a year before Walden West. The author’s bio, likely contributed by Derleth himself, makes clear Derleth’s identification with Thoreau: “Derleth’s interest in Thoreau began in his high school days and has been the shaping influence of his life. He lives in Sauk City, Wisconsin, very much in the same way that Thoreau lived in Concord, teaching, lecturing, and writing. He is as familiar with the environs of Sauk City as Thoreau was with those of Concord.” The book’s foreword includes a somewhat curious but rather revealing passage:
“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it,” [Thoreau] wrote, and he went his way through life determined to exact the most from every moment at the least cost in living, and this, despite his limitations—for he was a bachelor, and he made his sacrifices only for himself, which is considerably easier than making sacrifices which might involve dependents in deprivations—he did.
Derleth by this time was a divorced father with custody of his two children. He had married in 1953 and divorced in 1959. One senses in this passage Derleth’s defensiveness over having chosen a life less dedicated to the ideals he felt he drew from Thoreau, a common insecurity among Thoreau’s admirers.
In Walden West, finally completed and published a year after the biography, Derleth gave free rein to his most Thoreauvian instincts, letting the spirit of Thoreau pervade the book’s nature interludes even as he brought a deeper, more lyrical perspective to his familiar observations of community life.
5
August Derleth turned fifty-two in 1961, the year Walden West was published. He had been walking his home ground for five decades and working on the book intermittently for more than a decade. It’s not surprising that the passage of time is a constant theme in its pages. In an interlude titled (in the table of contents but not in the text) “The Process of Renewal,” he talks about one of the “many things we do every spring,” spending afternoons “on the moraine east of Sac Prairie on the far side of the Wisconsin.” He goes there, he claims, “not alone to inspect familiar paths and corners, long-known slopes and valleys, but also to take pleasure in a renewal of acquaintance with places with which some of my earliest memories are acquainted.” The place not only gives him a thorough overview of Sac Prairie but also, through those memories, connects him “to these slo
pes so firmly that I mourn the loss of every tree felled by the woodsmen, each invasion of every turn of the hillside path by the encroaching river, and the alteration of every portion of the landscape there.”
Prior to this he has dwelled on his childhood and his associations of people with place; the nature interludes have focused on the onset of night and the stirring of memory in the odors of the seasons. This interlude on the eastern hills is something of a pivot point. It ends by musing about the way “this place which changes very little from year to year” offers “that illusion of permanence which we all seek so diligently in one form or another throughout life.” The onset of spring in the hills suggests to him “that some aspects of individual existence are immutable” and there he feels the “conviction of continuity,” but he acknowledges, “I know the illusion, I know the infinite erosions and decayings which go on ceaselessly from moment to moment, and to which the mind adjusts so imperceptibly as to obviate them, so that it seems that they have not taken place at all.” He concludes: “I come to a kind of spiritual rebirth on these hills every spring, and I renew it each year despite increasing awareness of death inherent in that rebirth, an awareness which exists independent of volition or conscious act.”
The moments of celebration in Walden West are almost always for the recurrence of events in nature—the migrations and behaviors of birds, the regeneration of plants, the return of familiar seasonal odors in the air—while empathy and elegy seem to dominate the profiles of the individuals that populate the social segments of the book. The shift into an italicized nature interlude is a welcome one after a segment on the quietly desperate life of a Sac Prairie citizen, a moment of meditative calm before a return to the people of the community. Derleth muses: “It is significant, I sometimes think, that the facets of nature which quicken my pulse with that awareness of both life and death are inextricably associated with the loneliness of man’s mote-like existence in the cosmos—and acceptance of man’s essential solitude on earth, or by love, or both together, for they are different aspects of the same face.”
Derleth’s home ground, in addition to the villages of Sac Prairie, largely consists of locations along the river. Easiest to access in his youth was undoubtedly what he calls Ehl’s Slough, “down the slope immediately behind the house, east of the street, and comfortably west of the river.” He thinks of it as “almost wilderness country,” because village sounds were muted and the area was surrounded on high ground by trees—maples, poplars, alders—and in the low places by reeds. As he observes, “the slough was all that remained of what had once been a channel of the Wisconsin,” but had been filled in over time until the terrain had formed what everyone referred to as “the Islands”—First Island, Second Island, and Third Island, each cut off from one another by channels that in high water separated them almost entirely and in low water were more like tapering fingers of land reaching out into the river. It was a more accessible and popular location than others where Derleth walked.
A location he speaks of more often is what he refers to as “the marshes.” He reached it by walking along the railroad tracks that arch through Sauk City and cross the river to turn south toward Mazomanie. His approach varied, coming at the location by way of the river bridges or the highway or the east bank of the river. He tells us the area was lowland, with “a rewarding diversity of woods, sloughs, meadows, and marshland, where great fields of Joe-Pye weed shone lavender in later summer and autumn, meadows flamed green in spring, oak groves vied with willows and osiers, and the whole was framed by a low moraine just east of the rounding trestle.” He notes a number of specific sites along the tracks that he and his friend Hugo or earlier others had named: Dead Dog Hole, the Ice Slough, the Spring Slough, “over which curved the long trestle, the brook and the Brook Trestle, . . . the Mid-Meadow Trestle, the Triangle Lane Crossing, and finally Heiney’s Crossing,” this last a turning place to begin the walk back.
The Spring Slough was a special place, “the magnet that drew me afternoons and evenings in the spring, and early in the morning hours of many summer days.” It was on the Spring Slough trestle that Derleth would “read and write and dream, . . . watching the years pass, at first slowly, and then with passing swiftness, and never counted a moment there ill-spent.” In the journal books especially, Derleth records a great deal of byplay with neighbors and acquaintances and fellow townspeople, and the need to have these almost daily moments of solitude in the hills or the marshes is particularly marked. But those journal books have an air of immediacy about them, in part because they are closer in tone and energy to the actual daily journal entries they are drawn from, that Walden West doesn’t have, in part because of its long gestation and in part because of its more reflective perspective.
Derleth perhaps senses that aspect of Walden West when he concludes the book with a final interlude.
Sometimes of evenings there is in the air a quality which makes for the temporary illusion of timelessness. A subtle transference is effected by a fragrance, a scene, a familiar face, a pattern of light and shade, so that the present falls away and seems to merge into those aspects of the past first associated with awareness. Usually it is a fragrance related to change which effects this reversion—the smoke of burning leaves marking the turn of autumn to winter, the indescribable musk of thawing snow, presaging the spring, on which turns the experience of walking into the past.
In the paragraphs that follow, as he walks the streets in the present he muses on the feeling of being the adolescent who walked these streets in the past, on the sense that figures from the past might readily appear before him, on the way the slightest sight or sound or odor might trigger memory. “Perhaps these moments are integral in an existence close to the familiar scenes of childhood and youth, wherever there is a continuity of living,” he writes. “They do not come with nostalgia, they come without warning; suddenly the chance of the moment, the place, the scene, the familiar sensual experience combine, and the present becomes fleetingly once more the past.” He concludes the book pondering the reason for such recurring experiences:
Perhaps it is the subconscious yearning for past time, for a time of irresponsibility, which lays traps for the unwary, the longing for a return to the dark, enclosing place, the intimacy of being lost to alien eyes, of being secret and alone, which may be another expression of the desire to be merged with all things, with earth itself, an awareness not of timelessness as such, but of the obliteration which is both death and the merging into time, the moment behind is the moment that has died, as were it knowledge that death always lurks behind, and before, the unknown, and beyond the unknown somewhere death at full circle, life and death being one.
Walden West, in its profiles of Sac Prairie townspeople, is largely a book of the dead. It makes sense that Derleth, who is aware at the time of his writing the book that Derleths have been in Sac Prairie for more than ten decades and he himself has passed half a century there, would be unable to avoid thinking about losses. In spite of his tendency to focus so much on his interior life, August Derleth’s home ground is not centered on the natural world but encompasses it along with the life of the community he has been bound up with. In that sense, unlike John Muir and Aldo Leopold perhaps, August Derleth is someone very much more like all the rest of us.
6
Return to Walden West claims to be an exposition on the same three themes as Walden West, but its shifts in tone and emphasis make it more of a “spiritual autobiography” or “memoir of my inner life” than the first book was. Very much a valedictory book, Return places Derleth himself among those leading lives of quiet desperation by adding a preoccupation with change, loss, and isolation to its themes. Sounding more Thoreauvian throughout its interludes, at book’s end Derleth offers a kind of metaphysical summing up by measuring himself against Thoreau’s example.
The profiles of townspeople in Return to Walden West include individuals familiar as living characters in the journal books, but from the “Apolo
gia” that opens the book, it’s clear Derleth sees himself as someone who, from childhood, “was lost forever to the world in which men engaged life in momentous concerns and affairs, charmed away by the world intimately near to my senses.” He claims the whole of his life was an effort “to live out that special enchantment and explore that world where the major concerns of other men did not matter—not fame or wealth or the pursuit of other phantoms conjured up by hope or love, valor or avarice.”
In the book’s first interlude, Derleth tells us, “In the course of my walks in the hills or marshes,” he sometimes felt “a sense of utter harmony with all things,” as if “I was one with the least grain of sand and the hawk soaring aloft, one with the mouldering log and the blossoming violet, . . .—and one, too, with an invisible anima, a spirit of place and time knowing neither beginning nor end.” The ending of the interlude is elegiac and mournful, referring to “those brief periods of ecstasy that made me one with all earth and sky, dust acknowledging dust in all the shapes into which dust is moulded from one state of being to another, season to season, generation to generation.”
The expectation of impermanence sounds throughout the interludes. For example, walking the streets at night with a view of the village in one direction and the prairie and night sky in the other, Derleth feels as if city lights and stars marked “in a real sense the limits of my universe,” but adds, “there was so much to be learned in the small universe of Sac Prairie, and so little time in which to learn it.” In another interlude, on night sounds, he writes of “the step of the night-walking solitary marking off another moment of his allotted time before he returns to dust.” The nature interludes are, as in the earlier book, observant and celebratory, focusing on plum trees, maples, cherry trees, wild crabapple, field sparrow, nighthawks, killdeer, bittern, hawks, swamp owl, frogs, toad song, morels, stars, snow, and fog; but, particularly in those instances where he dwells on the places familiar to him in his wandering, he emphasizes his sense of solitude in tones that suggest isolation.