As more of our staff at Lemuria reads Woodsburner, the more well-loved this novel becomes. An eclectic and eccentric bunch, Zita, Pat, Nan and Ellis have all found Woodsburner to be an impressive debut for novelist John Pipkin. Don’t forget Mr. Pipkin will be here on Tuesday, May 12th for a signing and reading at 5:00 p.m.! (Click here for my blog and here for Ellis’ entry on Woodsburner.)
I still am so intrigued by the life of Henry David Thoreau as a result of reading Woodsburner that I have picked up a new book about Thoreau and his times. The Thoreau You Don’t Know by Robert Sullivan encourages readers to take another look at a man who has been traditionally considered a loner, to be one disconnected with the society and commerce of the world. Sullivan reveals a Henry David who was a flute player at parties, a teacher, a pencil-maker, a man known for his wise-cracks. He also asserts that when Thoreau spoke of “Nature” he spoke of the nature around us, even if it is not a nature calendar: “For a person living in a big city, it’s the ratty-and-partially-green-potpourri-of-life-around-you version of nature . . . and you have to bond with it, even when it is less than extraordinary” (Sullivan 68).
Sullivan explains that there was also an increasing amount of labor unrest in Concord, Massachusetts. Further coloring Thoreau’s world was the Panic of 1837, “a result of speculation and the government’s fiscal policy: after a large expansion of credit and loans and an expansion of the money supply . . . the wheat bubble popped” (61). Many citizens gathered outside Independence Hall in anger and protest against “the banking system, which, many critics felt, allowed the speculating of those with money to the detriment of those who did not have a lot” (61). Gosh, does that sound familiar? Thoreau worried and scribbled budgeting notes just as many of us are doing today with the current economic failure.
One reason I was compelled to read The Thoreau You Don’t Know was because in the Table of Contents there was a chapter entitled: “When the Woods Burned.” However, I was so disappointed when there was not even a mention of the fire until the last paragraph of the chapter. The only mention of the fire related to the fact that Thoreau’s reputation was rather tarnished after the fire, with the locals hissing “woods burner!” However, I am still not finished reading the entire book . . .
I am just haunted by Thoreau’s entry in his own journal in which he describes the occurrence of the fire and his response and rationalization, his description of the fire as a “great spectacle.” And then I ran across an article by Woodsburner author John Pipkin in which he explains how this “great spectacle” of a fire likely influenced Thoreau’s decision to begin his Walden experiment.
After you read Woodsburner, I encourage you to read this article from the online version of The Boston Globe and to read Thoreau’s journal entry on the fire.
After reading Woodsburner, I began to relax and realize that I should not be so serious when reading Thoreau. And when Thoreau was being so serious, I could smile at and find inspiration in his earnestness.
While The Thoreau You Don’t Know is very enlightening, it is surely written for the non-scholar in a conversational style. I find Woodsburner to be a masterfully-inspired novel. Pipkin gives us an “uninterrupted horizon,” a new set of eyes through which to see an iconic man just as Thoreau describes the ability to see life anew, “an uniterrupted horizon,” in “A Walk to Wachusett”:
And now that we have returned to the desultory life of the plain, let us endeavor to import a little of that mountain grandeur in it. We will remember within what walls we lie, and understand that this level life too has its summit, and why from the mountain top the deepest valleys have a tinge of blue; that there is elevation in every hour, as no part of the earth is so low that the heaven may not be seen from it, and we have only to stand on the summit of our hour to command an uninterrupted horizon. (Excerpted from “A Walk to Wachusett”)
Comments are closed.