For lovers of 'Walden,' a glimpse of the artist's hand
CONCORD -- After picking her way among the bathers on the small beach, Carolyn Roberts, with her son, son-in-law, and two grandchildren, had entered the woods and followed the path on the north shore of Walden Pond, until she reached the rectangle of stones set in the ground, marking the spot where Henry David Thoreau lived alone from 1845 until 1847.
Recently moved from Springfield, Mo., to Belmont to be near her family, Roberts had come for the first time to the place immortalized in "Walden, or Life in the Woods," which may be the most famous work of American literature. While her grandchildren played nearby, she looked at the marker with the inscription, "Go thou my incense upward from this hearth, and ask the gods to pardon this clear flame," and recalled reading "Walden" in high school.
"There was a pleasant, quiet feeling you had when you were finished," she said. "It was very important. He seemed to be a quiet man who loved nature, who didn't like to be in a hurry."
Walden Pond has had its countless pilgrims, and "Walden" its readers, throughout the world since it was first published, 150 years ago next month. This summer, "Walden" lovers can do something they could never do before: after visiting the site of the house in Thoreau Cove, they can drive around the corner and look at an original manuscript.
For the first time, the Huntington Library of San Marino, Calif., which owns most of Thoreau's papers, has lent the 45 pages of "Version G" of "Walden" -- pages attributed by scholars to the seventh and last draft of the book known to exist -- to the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods. The manuscript, opened so that two pages are visible, will be on display in a glass-topped case through Sept. 13 in an exhibition called "Walden Comes Home: The Sesquicentennial of an American Classic." At the same time, Houghton Mifflin, whose predecessor Ticknor & Fields published "Walden" in 1854, is issuing a commemorative edition for $28.12 -- a half-cent less than Thoreau spent building his house.
"We are very cautious about lending original materials," said Sue Hodson, the Huntington's curator of literary manuscripts, by telephone from California. "When the Thoreau Institute came to us, we began to feel it was something we ought to do. It's such an important anniversary. To send the manuscript home, where it was created, was a compelling reason."
The exhibit is in the Henley Library at the institute, on Baker Farm Road, just over the Concord/Lincoln town line, about a half-mile from the pond. The Walden Woods Project, founded in 1990 by rock musician Don Henley, has so far bought and preserved 140 acres of land around the pond, much of it associated with Thoreau. The library, built in 1998, houses scholarly materials related to Thoreau and his world, and the institute offers educational programs to promote conservation of natural places around the country.
The manuscript pages, encased in Mylar sleeves, are covered thickly with Thoreau's famously difficult script. The first page (not on display) is the title page, with Thoreau's famous epigram, "I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticlere [sic] in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up." The name "chanticlere" is split, and between the two halves is Thoreau's whimsical doodle of a crowing rooster. Page by page, one sees the writer's emendations and strike-throughs in pencil, and one easily imagines him in his little house, head bent, scribbling away by day -- or by firelight as the wind swished in the pines. Most of the first draft is believed to have been written at the pond.
For someone like Jeffrey S. Cramer, curator of collections at the Thoreau Institute and a Thoreau scholar, "to actually hold the manuscript in your hands is thrilling." Cramer's own fully annotated edition of "Walden" will be published next month by Yale University Press.
No one knows what happened to the eighth and final draft of "Walden," which was sent to the printer. It is likely that Ticknor & Fields never returned it. "You can bet if he had got it back," said Lawrence Buell, professor of literature at Harvard, "he would have kept it. He was careful about keeping and filing his papers." It took five years for the 2,000-copy first printing to sell out.
When he died in 1862, Thoreau's papers went to his sister, Sophia, and when she died in 1876, to her brother's friend, H.G.O. Blake. After that they passed through various hands and left the state, until they were acquired by St. Louis collector Keeney Bixby. California railroad magnate Henry E. Huntington, a fanatical collector of art and American literary manuscripts, acquired them from Bixby in 1918, a year before he founded his library. Besides more than 2,000 manuscript pages of "Walden," which Thoreau revised obsessively over almost a decade, the Huntington collection also includes "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," "The Maine Woods," and other Thoreau works.
In an interview after the opening reception for the exhibition last week, Henley reiterated that the idea of the Walden Woods Project, besides raising money to acquire parts of surrounding land still in private hands, is to encourage people around the country to work to preserve local Waldens, the threatened special wild places in their own neighborhoods. Of the manuscript, he said, "It seemed fitting to us, on the 150th anniversary, that it come home to the place where it was created."
Listening to Henley, who lives in Dallas, it becomes clear that there is a kind of virtual "Waldenness" that is transferrable. An English major in college, he had loved "Walden," yet, he said, "I never thought of it as a real place. It seemed mythical." He first saw the pond in March 1990, when he offered his support to a local group trying to stop two big real estate developments planned nearby. Since he founded the project, more than $30 million has been raised. About 70 percent of the 2,688 acres known as Walden Woods is protected.
That a small-town boy from Texas, who made it big in the music business, could be so moved by "Walden" demonstrates that Henry David Thoreau has no local limits, and never goes out of fashion. His enduring popularity has four discrete "strands," in Buell's view -- Thoreau as peaceful contrarian, Thoreau as advocate of simplicity, Thoreau as environmentalist, and Thoreau as gifted writer.
"'Walden' is the most carefully revised text in American history, with eight stages over almost a decade," Buell says. "It is accessible, full of pithy expressions." Yet the style and content is intricate, he says. "You can read and re-read, and still not get to the bottom of it."
Cramer makes an attempt to dive deep in his new annotated edition. A single sentence in the chapter called "The Pond in Winter" concerns the pickerel that fishermen catch and place in water-filled "wells" in the ice: "They, of course, are Walden all over and all through; are themselves small Waldens in the animal kingdom, Waldenses." In two footnotes, Cramer explains that Thoreau is making a four-part pun. The trapped fish are "walled-in" by the banks of the pond as well as by walls of ice, and as "Waldenses," they are inhabitants of Walden. He is apparently also alluding to the "Waldenses," a small oppressed religious sect in the 16th century that sought "walled-in" refuges in the Alps.
There are more than Buell's four Thoreaus, of course. Henley says his favorite is the inquisitive and intense one, "who didn't want to be on his deathbed thinking he had not lived to the fullest, who wanted to get to the marrow of life and understand our purpose here and the nature of existence." For Carolyn Roberts, it's the quiet and unhurried Thoreau. For others, it's the Thoreau who was the enemy of slavery, the Thoreau who warmly welcomed friends to his little cabin, the Thoreau who could build a cabin cheaply with his own hands, or the one who liked to lie on his back in a drifting rowboat in the middle of the pond, and when he felt the boat bump shore, liked to look up to find out where he was.
As in the glassy pond itself on a still morning, you can look into Thoreau and see a reflection of the person you might like to be. Henley put it well when he said, "Thoreau was everyman, and he chose Walden to be his everyplace."
David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com. 
