Why Did Thoreau Draw in His Journal?

THE first extant drawing that Thoreau made in his journal, which he began in 1837, is a depiction of a Penobscot spear made of hemlock and bone (Fig. 1). 1 After visiting several Penobscot camped on the banks of the Concord River, in the journal entry for November 26, 1850, he writes: "Their spear. . . " It warranted more than words: it insisted to be drawn. Thoreau stops to draw the tip of the spear, and then he continues writing—"very serviceable. "2 The sentence fragment registers as a caption. This drawing is quite precise; one can see how Thoreau pressed his pen against the paper to create lines thick and thin. What seems like small praise is really admiration. Someone had selected just the right branch: straight and with a convenient knot to give it strength and a little extra heft. Two carved, inward-curving points were sistered in on each side. It was beautifully, economically made. Surely Thoreau had balanced the hemlock spear in his hands. He then notes: "The inner pointed part of a hemlock knot—the side spring pieces of hickory. "3Thoreau uses words to describe what he cannot draw: that the spear is made of hemlock, and the side pieces of hickory. He uses drawing to capture what words cannot: the curve and overall shape of the spear. The anthropologist Tim Ingold suggests that the "observational movements of drawing. . . are at one and the same time movements of description. "5 When writing, one must toggle back and forth between looking and writing; however, when drawing, looking and describing are simultaneous movements of the hand and brain. Drawing, Thoreau discovered, collapses the distance between observing and recording—allowing for, if not a more accurate articulation of the material world, then a more experiential rendition of it. The drawing of the spear is a small but significant shift in Thoreau's practice in his journal. The journal began as a place in which Thoreau stored material for working out what he wanted to write about; it then became what he wanted to write: "the book of Concord, " as William Howarth puts it. 6 Around 1849–1850, Thoreau's journal entries start moving in a new direction, though we can find the seeds of his turn to nature writing and observation earlier. 7 Thoreau continued to quote poets and other writers and to record his encounters with friends, but these passages tend to be incorporated into, or subordinated to, longer and more detailed observations of the natural world. For the rest of the time that Thoreau kept a journal, writing and drawing became for him a coextensive, more sensible way of learning about the natural world. The zoologist Jonathan Kingdon, reflecting on his own drawings in his field notes, describes the act of drawing as "a manifestation of the mind struggling with the meaning of what it encounters and what it wants to explore. "8 In his later journal, as Thoreau tried to balance a vivid literariness with exact scientific observation, the drawings came to play a key role in this exploratory process. 9 In fact, many of Thoreau's journal entries with drawings after 1850 anticipate modern scientific field notes which combine written and sketched observations. Thoreau himself asks: "Might not my Journal be called 'Field Notes, '" a query that he tucks between two observations: "a mass of ice in Walden. . . had cracked off from the main body and blown. . . against the Eastern shore" and "I see a honey bee about my boat" (March 21, 1853). 10 Thoreau never tells us explicitly why he started drawing. However, halfway through the later Journal and around 425 drawings later, Thoreau muses: It is remarkable how suggestive the slightest drawing as a memento of things seen—For a few years past I have been accustomed to make a rude sketch in my journal of plants, ice for example, he describes snowflakes as "beautifully regular six rayed stars or wheels with a centre disk—perfect geometrical figures in thin scales like this far more perfect than I can draw" (January 14, 1853). 20I conclude by examining Thoreau's drawing of a rooster in the seventh manuscript revision of Walden (published 1854). While the style of this drawing is consistent with the drawings in Thoreau's journal, the rooster functions quite differently. I argue that it serves as a graphic metacommentary on Thoreau's attitude toward writing Walden. Thoreau had been fascinated by Indigenous peoples since he was a boy. He and his brother John collected arrowheads. He wrote about Indigenous peoples in his journal and in Walden. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), he imagines a New England ecosystem before the arrival of Europeans and the displacement of Indigenous peoples; in his journal, he imagines a future ecosystem from which Europeans have disappeared, and those indigenous to the land have returned. 21 His most sustained interactions with Penobscot occurred during his trips to Maine (in 1846, 1853, and 1857), his accounts of which were posthumously published as The Maine Woods (1864). Moreover, from about 1847 through 1861, Thoreau embarked on a self-directed course of study of Indigenous history and culture as written by white men. He copied extracts, wrote summaries, and commented on books by William Bartram, Thomas Hutchinson, and John Joscelyn, as well as on ethnological studies by contemporaries like Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. Thoreau preserved his notes in eleven notebooks containing about half a million words altogether—what he called his "Indian books. "22 The question of why Thoreau kept these notebooks has not been satisfactorily answered, although many scholars have speculated (with some hope) that he had in mind to write a book that would prove a corrective to the racist ethnology of his day. Recently, some scholars have maintained otherwise. In writing about Indigenous peoples, Thoreau could be praiseful, dismissive, scornful, or just plain ambivalent. 23 He seems to have preferred Indigenous artifacts and relics—and the idea of Indigenous people—to the people themselves. Such an interest in Indigenous material cultures and beliefs, coupled with a relative lack of interest in living, breathing peoples, was not uncommon in nineteenth-century America. This attitude was often accompanied by a kind of anticipatory nostalgia that mourned the extinction—assumed to be inevitable—of Indigenous peoples. Thoreau came to admire the Penobscot that he met for their particular knowledge about the natural world and their skill in making the woods their home, but he did not extend this admiration to Indigenous societies in general. I argue that Thoreau's choice to draw objects made by Penobscot people—in the same entry, in addition to the spear, he also draws a birch bark water vessel and the parts of a log trap—can be read as an experiment in a tiny anthropology. The first of the "Indian books, " begun in 1847, was completed in the spring of 1850, about six months before he began drawing in his journal. In this November entry, as he sometimes does in the "Indian books, " Thoreau works in a notetaking mode in both form and content: terse sentences, sentence fragments, and list-like passages: drawing A boak-henjo a birch-bark vessel for water–can boil meet in it with hot stones—Takes a long time. Also a vessel of birch bark shaped like a pan. . . very neatly made. . . drawing Log trap to catch many kinds of animals. . . . First drawing there is a Frame then the little stick in which the animal moves drawing presses down drawing as he goes through under the log. Then the crooke stick is hung over the top of the frame drawing what Locke called the "leading qualities of substances, " or the "outward shape" of things, are "best made known by shewing, and can hardly be made known otherwise. For the Shape of an Horse, or Cassuary, will be but rudely and imperfectly imprinted on the Mind by Words, the sight of the Animals doth it a thousand times better. "25Not everyone has the opportunity to observe a horse or a cassowary. A picture, then, achieves what words cannot, which is why Locke suggested that dictionaries ought to include drawings: It is not unreasonable to propose, that Words standing for Things, which are known and distinguished by their outward shapes, should be expressed by little Draughts and Prints made of them. . . . Naturalists, that treat of Plants and Animals, have found the benefit of this way: And he that has had occasion to consult them, will have reason to confess, that he has a clearer Idea of Apium, or Ibex from a little Print of that Herb, or Beast, than he could have from a long Definition of the Names of either of them. 26With respect to practice, Thoreau was quite familiar with the genre of the illustrated natural science treatise. Thoreau knew John James Audubon's Ornithological biography, or An account of the birds of the United States of America (1831–49), as well as his The viviparous quadrupeds of North America (co-authored with Rev. John Bachman, 1851). He browsed the botanicals—the so-called pictorial, or "portrait" studies of plants. The drawings, illuminations, and engravings in such books tended to be static, idealized compositions; Thoreau was quite dismissive of them. 27 Many of the ethnological studies of Indigenous peoples that Thoreau read contained professional illustrations and engravings of Indigenous artifacts, and Thoreau copied some of these into his "Indian books. "28 Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that Thoreau was moved to draw the objects that the Penobscot showed him. However, some naturalists whom Thoreau read employed much simpler engravings and sketches—and more suitable models for his own field notes. See, for example, the drawings on the board behind Agassiz lecturing at Harvard (Fig. 2). Charles Lyell, in his Principles of Geology (1837), describes a newly-formed ravine, the result of deforestation and erosion. He points us to a woodcut "from a drawing which I made on the spot. "29 In Lachesis Lapponica: A Tour in Lapland (1732), Carl Linnaeus draws the plant Pedicularis (lousewort), but also includes drawings of an anthropological sort, such as of a Sámi haœp (small boat). 30 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe included drawings in his Die Italiänische reise (Italian Journey, 1816, 1817), an account of his travels in which his main interest was studying plants. All of these sketches are, to borrow Thoreau's language, "very serviceable. " Fig. 2. —Louis Agassiz, by Carleton Watkins, c. 1870. (The New York Public Library Digital Collections). As art, Thoreau's drawings cannot be compared to, say, William Blake's etchings and engravings or to John Muir's sketches and illustrations. Jeffrey Cramer, Curator of Collections at the Walden Woods Project's Thoreau Institute, says that an artist once came to the library to research Thoreau's drawings and then dismissed them as having no aesthetic merit. However, the composer and artist John Cage, a lifelong reader of Thoreau, used the drawings to inspire his own artwork and music; he possessed an intimate knowledge of the Journal and appreciated the value of seeing words and images in tandem. Cage described the drawings as "beautiful in the sense that a good deal of modern art is beautiful. "31 Many of the journal drawings might remind one of John Lennon's or James Thurber's doodle-drawings, and a few capture in just a sweep of a line what Picasso could. Along with Agassiz, Lyell, and Linnaeus, Thoreau used drawing as a means of discovery, and sometimes created something beautiful, even compelling. Still, to borrow the words of Scott McCloud, their intention was not to amplify meaning and symbol; rather, they understood that a simple line drawing can clarify structure and actuality by means of "amplification through simplification. "32While I am leery of generalizations, it seems that once Thoreau began with that Penobscot spear and other objects, discovering and clarifying the unusual through drawing continued to motivate him. For example, three months later, Thoreau went on a different kind of anthropological excursion, this time to a textile mill in Clinton, Massachusetts. In his January 2, 1851 entry, he described some of the machinery that he saw, and drew a copper trough used in making cotton thread. Here, as in his description of Indian artifacts, Thoreau seems more interested in materials and technologies than in the people using them. About a week later, Thoreau drew to scale a single green briar thorn (the native Smilax rotundifolia), writing: "The thorn of this vine is very perfect like a straight dagger. "33 I wonder why this thorn caught Thoreau's attention; perhaps it first caught his greatcoat. Much more visible in winter, maybe the thorn was worth noting because of its miniature perfection. Besides, it conjured up a simile too irresistible for the poet Thoreau to let pass: like a straight dagger. Almost two and half months later, Thoreau drew a series of "ice flakes. " He is interested in the natural processes that shaped these unusual ice formations: "They looked like a fleet of a thousand mackeral fishes under a press of sail careering before a smacking breeze. "34 Simile—the favored device of both poets and naturalists, crucial to conveying the physicality of whatever is under observation—takes on Homeric proportions. Five months later, Thoreau drew a swamp white oak that had been broken and blown down by a storm. Thoreau draws how the oak, still alive but supine, sprouts suckers—not so uncommon, granted, but the vertical drive to survive is impressive (June 3, 1851). A month later, he wonders what "that flower of the lowlands now with a peculiar leaf" could be. 35 Several days later, he speculates (correctly; perhaps he looked it up) that the plant is Thalictrum (meadow-rue, which has distinctive clubbed lobes). Then he draws the plant again, as if to fix it in his memory (July 19, 1851). In the Journal, the drawings of human-made objects are far outnumbered by drawings of natural objects and phenomena. Thoreau was interested in the ingeniousness of made things; however, he became increasingly taken with the ingeniousness of the more-than-human world. Perhaps Thoreau would not have begun his inquiries into the natural world through the act of drawing had it not been for his encounter with the Penobscot. By showing him their spear and their other made objects and naming them in their own words, perhaps they challenged Thoreau to explore a different mode of knowing, in which words and images, however rude, combine. Seven years after he began to draw in his journal, Thoreau read Ruskin's Elements of Drawing (1857). Some of Ruskin's dicta may well have resonated with Thoreau. For example, Ruskin warns that if one does not observe the quiddities of things, one will never be able to draw a tree branch or even a stone accurately. Ruskin declares: "I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love Nature, than teach looking at Nature that they may learn to draw. "36 Surely Thoreau concurred. Ruskin also offers advice for determining "the distance from your eye at which you wish your drawing to be seen. "37 Thoreau never drew anything that took up a whole page (as botanical artists do, often to depict a plant to scale). Instead, Thoreau commonly integrated a drawing into a line of writing: words and images are to be apprehended together, as in his drawing of a snowflake, above, and, of a red squirrel that appears to vibrate with energy within the surrounding text (Fig. 3). Sometimes, drawings seem to grow organically out of letters and words, and occasionally become entangled with words altogether, filling the same space. Some drawings are suggestively spare and simple—an undulating line, or a series of dots. The majority are quite evocative. See, for example, Thoreau's rendering of a storm: in just a few curved strokes, Thoreau captures the sweep of rain on the horizon (Fig. 4). One of the pleasures of reading Thoreau's Journal is turning the page and being surprised by a drawing. Fig. 3. —"Red squirrel, " December 16, 1855; MS Volume XIX (MA 1302: 25) (courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library). Fig. 4. —"Dark, windy clouds, with rain falling thus beneath, " April 24, 1857; MS Volume XXIII (MA 1302: 29) (courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library). Thoreau also produced more articulated drawings, such as the ones that he made of a hen hawk feather and an oak leaf. 38 In the context of the entry, both the feather and the leaf function as metonyms for hawk and oak, but they are also self-contained, well-wrought, and singular objects on their own—an effect emphasized by how they are set off from the text (Fig. 5). Fig. 5. —"The tail-coverts of the young hen hawk, " and "The scarlet oak leaf!" November 11, 1858; MS Volume XXVIII (MA 1302: 24) (courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library). Thoreau's reflections in this entry focus on summer's remains and what makes November November in New England. "This is the month of nuts and nutty thoughts, " Thoreau jests. 39 The day is measured by a progression of encounters with the occupants of the natural world: loon, river, cricket, snow flea, water, dogwood, cranberry vine, willow, duck, grass, snipe, water bug, white birch, meadowsweet, gooseberry, rose, sallow, pitcher plant, cistus. After recording who and what he saw, Thoreau changes the subject and reaches (I am imagining) for two objects ready-to-hand: the hawk feather and the scarlet oak leaf. He draws the feather. Absent the hawk, Thoreau contemplates the color markings on the feather, which are "not only beautiful but of a peculiar beauty, " noting that few "mortals" ever get to see a feather up close, for nature "finishes her works above men's sight. " Why peculiar? The word works in two directions for Thoreau, for it can denote both the unusual as well as the distinctive. And perhaps Thoreau had in mind that there is no obvious reason for such beauty—at least, in anthropocentric, "mortal" terms. Thoreau then draws the leaf, exclaiming after: "The scarlet oak leaf!" Absent the tree, he spins out a nimble conceit comparing the leaf's "curves he draws his oak leaf firmly he also collected live and dead specimens of insects, birds, and animals, some of which died in captivity, some of which he dissected, and some of which he released back into the woods or ponds. He transformed his attic room in the family home into a small cabinet of local curiosities. So consigned, a tooth, a shell, a feather, or a bird's nest is transformed into an exotic object—a treasure. Thoreau sometimes drew in the field, but more often than not, he drew from memory what he could not carry. 42 The portable world, however, often made it home and then into the journal. While some species of birds and rats collect random and sometimes shiny objects, what other creature besides homo sapiens collects the body parts of other creatures? 43 How might collecting bones or driftwood—dead parts of once-living entities—gather nature into culture? Like Adam naming the animals, does collecting parts of once-living things serve as an exercise in domination? Or, collecting may be a redemptive practice; the collector, as John Clifford says: "discovers, acquires, salvages objects. "44 One may hope to save a thing from loss or destruction. Perhaps such a belief is only a pretext. Susan Stewart, for example, argues that the museum offers "an illusion of a relation between things" which "takes the place of a social relation. "45 Jane Bennett, however, argues that some of us humans are able to experience a kind of "sympathy" with things because we are attuned to their "capacity to impress. " She urges us to consider that some of us have meaningful relations with things, not as any sort of substitute for a human relation, but as a significant experience in itself. 46 Thus a museum of natural history or a private collection of organic objects may well be testaments to a human desire for a relation with the more-than-human world. We have become stranded on one side of a divide of our own making, and feathers and leaves and other objects serve as small bridges. This is, I am aware, the most benign explanation of our desire, located in the visual, the tactile, and in the ebb and flow of the emotions for things given by—or stolen from—the natural world. Specimens, that is, objects that are not only themselves, but stand in for a whole, and drawings—also themselves, also representational—may well only offer the simulacrum of a connection. Or, more positively, perhaps the possessing of a feather (or the drawing of one) is meaningful enough. Either way, Thoreau came to know this: I have no idea that one can get as correct an idea of the form Pandion haliaetus) soar overhead, most likely just returning from points south. Thoreau's osprey is one of a handful of drawings of raptors in the Journal (Fig. 6). Gathering them together, as I do below, reveals his overall purpose in drawing them: he desires to distinguish among the different species as they are fast on the wing against the sky. Fig. 6. —"Fish-hawk, " April 28, 1858; MS Volume XXVIII (MA 1302: 34) (courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library). As he does while looking at the Penobscot spear, Thoreau counts on words when he can, and on image-making when he cannot: I see the fish-hawk again. . . as it flies low directly over my head—I see that its body is white beneath– rather, the osprey was a pretext for waxing poetical. In "The Natural History of Massachusetts" (1842), Thoreau writes that the osprey is seen at this season sailing majestically over the water. . . It sails the air like a ship of the line, worthy to struggle with the elements, falling back from time to time like a ship on its beam ends. . . I have by me one of a pair of ospreys. . . measuring more than two feet in length, and six in the stretch of its wings. Nuttall mentions that "The ancients, particularly Aristotle, pretended that the ospreys taught their young to gaze at the sun". . . There is the tyranny of Jove in its claws, and his wrath in the erectile feathers of the head and neck. 49It appears that, while writing the "Natural History, " Thoreau had Thomas Nuttall's A Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and Canada (1832–34) to hand—and perhaps, a dead osprey; note that Thoreau writes "have by me. " He dips his pen into lyrical ink. The bird likened to some ship of the air is a common enough trope, and Thoreau deploys it with all the earnestness of an undergraduate. He slides into his own observations for a moment, and then concludes with a flourish. Compare this flight of fancy to this later journal passage on the osprey, written thirteen years later: Saw a large bird far over the Cliff hill. . . I soon made out to be a fish-hawk advancing. Even at that dist. half a mile off I distinguished its gull like body— (piratelike fishing body fit to dive) & that its wings did not curved upward at the ends like a hen hawk's. . . but rather hung down. It came on steadily. . . with long & undulating heavy wings with an easy sauntering fl