Book Review: Charles Dickens 10 - "Bleak House"



Sketch of Dickens (ca. 1852) by George Richmond

There was a one-year hiatus between the completion of David Copperfield (November, 1850) and the time when Charles Dickens finally set about writing his next novel, Bleak House. Actually, he had come up with the general idea for the new story in February, 1851 – only three months after the previous book – but, in addition to the usual round of family obligations and social events that kept him so very busy, he was further distracted for most of 1851 from starting the new novel by a series of difficult and traumatic events.

The most upsetting of these events were two deaths in the family. In March, Dickens’s father, John, became dangerously ill with a urological problem – probably caused by bladder stones. An operation was done – without anaesthetic – to remove the stones. Dickens arrived on the scene soon after the horrendous procedure was completed. He described the room where his father lay to his wife, Catherine, as “a slaughter house of blood”. John Dickens rallied briefly, but then suffered a steady decline, dying on March 31. Charles was very distressed. He was up three nights in a row, spending most of the time walking around the streets of London thinking about the long and often difficult relationship he had had with his father. He behaved with great tenderness to his mother, Elizabeth, telling her that she could rely entirely on him for the future. And – yet again – he paid off all of his father’s debts. As if that wasn’t enough to deal with, only two weeks later – April 14, 1851 – his daughter Dora Annie died – aged only nine months – after a brief illness. She was the ninth of the Dickens’s ten children.



Tavistock House - no longer standing



The lease on Dickens’s house at Devonshire Terrace expired in 1851. He began looking for a new place in north London – concentrating his search in the Highgate area and around Regents Park. Eventually he found a large, 18-room house – with garden – in Tavistock Square, called Tavistock House. In July he signed a fifty-year lease for the place – paying £1,500 – intending it to be his final home. It wasn’t in very good condition, so Dickens ordered a whole series of renovations, in order to fix up the house to his liking. These repairs, which he supervised closely, took several months, and Dickens decided to hold off serious work on the new novel until the late autumn, or early winter, when the changes were complete and the family was settled in.

Then, Dickens’s wife became ill with a chronic nervous condition. She suffered migraine-type headaches. Charles described her symptoms as “a tendency of blood to the head, and alarming confusion and nervousness at times.” Dickens was solicitous of Catherine’s health. He suggested a “water cure” at Malvern – a popular spa in the nineteenth-century, because of the beneficial effects noted from the water coming out of the Malvern Hills. He took her there – Malvern sits near the border of Herefordshire and Worcestershire – for an extended treatment.



Amateur theatricals produced by Dickens (1852)



Throughout the year Dickens was also deeply involved in more amateur theatricals. As before, he recruited and organised his own troupe – mostly friends and family, but he also engaged the help of a few professional actors this time to fill out the cast. He produced and directed the work, starred in it, organised scenery, costumes, props, and so on. The first production of the year was a royal command performance on May 16 – in front of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert – of the comedy Not So Bad as We Seem, written by his friend Edward Bulwer Lytton. The Queen was amused: “All acted on the whole well,” she wrote in her diary, “Dickens, the celebrated author, admirably …”. The proceeds from these performances were donated to the Guild of Literature and Art, a charity established by Dickens, John Forster and Bulwer Lytton to assist writers in financial difficulties. Later in the year, Dickens took his troupe around the country for half-a-dozen, or so, more performances. These performances included a production of a new farce written by Dickens and playwright Mark Lemon called Mr. Nightingale’s Diary.

Finally, in mid-November of 1851, Dickens and Family were established in the new house in Tavistock Square, and Dickens began work on Bleak House immediately. He told his publisher, Evans, that he would have the first monthly issue of a new novel ready for publication by March. The study Dickens set up was in a large room next to the dining room. The two rooms were separated by sliding doors. When he was busy writing, he would open the doors and walk up and down the two rooms – the entire length of the house. He had the opening chapters finished in December.



Manuscript page from Chapter 46

Once he started serious work on Bleak House, Dickens – as usual – became completely absorbed in its imaginary world. He cut back dramatically on his social engagements, deciding that two public dinners per month were his limit. He was in his study now for four hours a day writing the book, from ten in the morning until two in the afternoon. Once the publication of the book got started, Dickens stayed just one month ahead of each instalment. He set himself the goal of finishing each month’s issue by the twentieth day of the month. That gave him about a week to go through and correct the proofs. He was so firmly set in his writing habits, now, that he could deal with a change of accommodation easily, and still meet his daily quota of words. He had no other choice, really; he had to adapt himself and work quickly, because family obligations had him moving about a lot, and business demands often disrupted his daily writing regimen. During the writing of Bleak House, Dickens was moving between London, Folkestone, Dover and, now, even Boulogne in France. But he kept writing. And once he was into his groove, he did not seem to agonise over its contents. There are very few mentions about the process of writing of the novel in his correspondence, which is unusual for him.

New colour for the monthly wrappers

Bleak House, Dickens’s ninth novel, was published by Bradbury & Evans in the usual monthly instalments between March, 1852 and September, 1853. Each issue consisted normally of three chapters – some of them contained four – and cost a shilling. The twentieth, and final, instalment was the usual double issue, priced at two shillings. Each magazine issue of Bleak House came with bluish-green wrappers, instead of the familiar bright green; and this would become the new routine, until Our Mutual Friend, when the publishers returned to the bright-green wrappers. Following the usual lay-out format, the monthly instalments had 32 pages of text and two illustrations by Hablot Knight Browne (‘Phiz’). One of the interesting features of the illustrations that Phiz did for this novel, was an innovative technique he introduced to heighten the sombre mood of the story. For many of the engravings used to illustrate scenes set in the London slums, he created so-called “dark plates” – he machine-ruled the entire engraving plate with very thin parallel lines. The effect was to create a darker tone – a clever and appropriate technique for this brooding story.



Phiz's new technique

Despite the often grim story and sombre mood of the new book – his friend and confidant, John Forster called it “too real to be pleasant” – Bleak House, surprisingly, turned out to be much more successful than its sunny and entertaining predecessor, David Copperfield. The previous book had sold just over 20,000 copies per month. The new novel was selling between 34,000 and 43,000 copies for each issue. Go figure! In total, Dickens was to receive about £11,000 for his latest creation.

Over the next five years (1852-1857), Charles Dickens would write three novels focused on the social life of England. Critics noted a move away from an open-hearted humour towards a more bitter tone – humour there was, still, but it had a much darker tone, focused often on the base and detestable. The personal themes of David Copperfield – to do with love and loss – were abandoned for a more sweeping satire on society as a whole. Dickens was responding to an emerging sense in his culture that there was a dark force at work oppressing society, an “external necessity” pressing in on people at all levels of the social hierarchy. As Mr. Gridley, the “man from Shropshire” – who has been ruined by the corruptions and delays of the Chancery Court – exclaims in despair, “The system! I am told on all hands, it’s the system. I mustn’t look to individuals. It’s the system.”

As always, Dickens’s book deals with topical concerns: specifically, the worst aspects of the English legal system, and the physical sickness of London (caused by its slum dwellings, festering sewage, and toxic water); but, generally, the sense that the whole of society was undermined by a corrupt and unresponsive system of government. The deformations and grotesqueries of individuals reflect the warped condition of society-at-large – the System.

The central issue pushing the plot of Bleak House is a long-standing case of litigation – Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce – making its unending way through the courts of Chancery. It involves a testator who made several, contradictory wills. At that time, the Court of Chancery in London, was a court of equity designed to mitigate the rigours of common law – allowing judges the leeway to apply justice in accordance with natural law. The court was under the nominal control of the Lord Chancellor. The extended backlog of cases was legendary. In the spring and summer of 1851 – when Dickens was pondering the theme and plot of his new book – there were reports in The Times newspaper about the incredible delays which were happening regularly with suits in Chancery. The delays were believed to be caused by corruption of the entire system – and that was Dickens’s own view. As he puts it tartly in Bleak House: “The one great principle of English law is to make business for itself.” Some critics thought the portrayal of the Chancery court in his book was too harsh and exaggerated, but Dickens had personal experience to draw on: he had worked as a law clerk in his youth, and, more recently, he had been a litigant himself in Chancery, seeking to enforce the copyrights that existed on his earlier books. 

(L-R) Harold Skimpole, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Esther Summerson, John Jarndyce and Ada Clare

Bleak House marks a new beginning in Dickens’s literary output. He was never one to stand still and repeat his successes; he would build upon what he had learned from the writing of his previous novels, and then look for new ways to advance his art. In Bleak House, Dickens sought to meld the introverted psychology of David Copperfield with the social analysis and satire of Dombey and Son. He achieved this primarily through the innovative technique of alternating between two narrative points-of-view in telling his story: there is the familiar, omniscient third-person narrator; but there is also the ardent, humble, first-person perspective provided by Esther Summerson. The omniscient narrator tells the story in the present tense. Esther is narrating about events long past – we learn near the end of the book that she is looking back from a seven-year distance at most of the events she is describing. These very different voices balance the narrative evenly: 34 chapters for the omniscient narrator, and 33 for Esther. This was a really daring strategy for Dickens to use, because he usually had difficulty creating interesting and compelling female characters. They either veer towards the irritating or grotesque (Sairey Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewit, for example), or they bore us as mere colourless embodiments of Dickens’s notion of the feminine ideal – compliant, self-abnegating and long-suffering (Agnes Wickfield in David Copperfield). And there certainly are tendencies in Esther’s point-of-view towards the bland and predictable. It is inevitable, given that she is a typical model of the “good” character that Dickens usually favoured – full of the Christian virtues of forgiveness, gentleness and passivity. Nice but not very dramatic. But Dickens seems aware of the danger, and he does show growth and development in her response to life – often surprising us, for example, with her astute and critical judgments of characters and situations (especially so, given her narrow and cloistered experience of life). Nonetheless, many readers were still annoyed by Esther’s always-cheerful, self-denying tone – Charlotte Bronte, for example, creator of a much more real narrative voice in Jane Eyre,  found Esther an overly-meek and cloying figure.

In his Introduction to the 1907 Everyman’s Library edition of the novel, G. K. Chesterton observes that Bleak House “is not certainly Charles Dickens’s best book; but perhaps it’s his best novel.” He argues that the author was now a mature writer and this latest novel of his was the best he had ever constructed. Critics often found fault with the construction of Dickens’s books – usually forgetting, perhaps, that they were published in monthly instalments, rather than completed as a whole and then revised and edited before publication. “Of all his books,” Chesterton adds, “it should most please the modern aesthetic critic.” An astute comment – if you peruse the reading lists of university courses on Victorian literature, you will come to the conclusion that Chesterton’s assessment seems the consensus view in today’s academic circles. The leap forward from David Copperfield, Chesterton argues, is towards art – towards a new concern for the style and method of story-telling. Most of Dickens’s previous novels had been rambling, picaresque tales. Bleak House did not share this character of being a string of incidents; it was a cycle of incidents circling around a few symbolic places: Chesney Wold in Lincolnshire, Bleak House in London, and a cluster of residences located near the courts of Chancery.

Frontispiece and Title page from the first edition of Bleak House (1853)

Bleak House has sometimes been referred to as the first of Dickens’s “London Trilogy, three complex and sprawling novels of Dickens’s late period – the other two being Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend. Each, in its way, addresses the seamier side of early and mid-Victorian London – the decrepit and filthy slum housing, the awful sanitation (leading to epidemics of disease), and the inadequacies of the legal system. Each book has its dominant symbol. In Our Mutual Friend it’s the dust-heap (garbage pile); in Little Dorrit it’s the prison; and in Bleak House it is the fog – introduced on the book’s very first page as a permeating condition of the entire capital. When you read the description, you realise Dickens is really talking about smog – but the concept had not been invented yet. But fog is just a symbol of the city’s malaise. The pollution is more serious than that – serving as a breeding ground for epidemics of diseases like smallpox. Characters in the novel get sick; some are paralysed; some are sterile; many are wounded and defaced – physically and emotionally. There are survivors – like Esther, who barely recovers from her brush with smallpox, but many of the characters are left dead or damaged.

Bleak House is a complex novel. The narrative, as we’ve seen, is split between two very different perspectives. The language is dense, allusive and poetic – full of sentence fragments, symbols and strange allusions. It’s not an easy book to read. Dickens’s third-person narrator is not the usual, breezy stand-in for the author himself; he is a more aloof figure than usual. There is a large crowd of minor characters populating the book; and as we move through the story, it’s often tricky keeping track of all its strands and the various relations amongst them. Who knows whom? And who knows who has done what to whom? It’s especially difficult separating the various levels of secret knowledge amongst those characters centred on Chancery Lane. It also takes a long time for the story to gain any momentum – the first hundred pages or so drift by and you wonder where the story might be going. To me, this was definitely a new style for Dickens: much less obvious and didactic, much more muted and restrained.

a first edition of Bleak House (1853)

But there are some familiar narrative strategies at work here. The “turning idea” of the novel is the real identity of one of its central figures – Esther Summerson. This mystery drives the plot forward and pulls together many of the strands involving so many of the minor characters. In this sense, Bleak House is a mystery story, and Dickens brings into its midst Mr. Inspector Bucket (modelled on his friend Chief Inspector Field), a clever but down-to-earth, tenacious police officer. In doing so, he was writing one of the first ‘detective stories’. Near the climax of the mystery he sets up three probable suspects as the perpetrator of a murder. And does a good job telegraphing guilt towards the wrong person.

Despite Dickens’s focus on the inadequacies and corruption of the system, he also shows, as usual, how moral failings affect individual lives. In Martin Chuzzlewit it was selfishness that underlay the problems of the Chuzzlewit clan. In Dombey and Son it was pride that brought down the Dombey family. And here, in Bleak House, it is irresponsibility and neglect that taint many of its character’s lives. Harold Skimpole, for example, is an alarmingly irresponsible and fickle figure. His carefree attitude to the money he spends – but does not have – is presented in a rather light and humorous fashion early on. But as he continues to sponge off other people, and blithely justifies himself to the very people he is exploiting, he quickly turns into a loathsome character. Strangely, Skimpole was based on one of Dickens’s own literary friends – Leigh Hunt – whom he had known for over ten years. Hunt’s friends and family recognised the source of the Skimpole character very early in the run of the book and asked Dickens to tone down the harshness of the portrait. Dickens refused – he had a superlative characterisation in hand, and had already established it in his book; he could not abandon it now. In fact, the portrait became even more pointed and overdrawn. One of the hazards, I guess of befriending a famous writer!




Jo ("Toughey"), the crossing sweeper



And a prime example of the many neglected characters in Bleak House is Jo (“Toughey”), the crossing sweeper. He is a homeless orphan boy. When we first meet him in the novel, he is a squatter in the dilapidated ruins of the slum houses in Tom-all-Alone’s. His menial job is to clear a narrow passage through the mud and manure, so ladies and gentlemen could cross the London streets. Jo is an ignorant and solitary character. There is nobody to care for him, until he falls ill with smallpox. And then Esther takes him home to Bleak House – and almost dies because of her compassion. But that’s not the end of Jo’s travails. As with other oppressed children in previous novels – little Paul Dombey, and little Nell – the sentimental Victorian readership took him to their hearts: he became the most popular character in the book.

In the previous book, David Copperfield, Dickens had portrayed several interesting female characters. In Bleak House there are a couple of his standard “perfect” feminine types. But he also pens a couple on nasty portraits of female do-gooders. There is the self-righteous Mrs. Jellyby, a “telescopic philanthropist” – another of the irresponsible figures – who neglects her family completely to dirt and disorder, in order to pursue her charitable work for some obscure African tribe. What her abandoned family think, but never utter, is that charity ought to begin at home. And then there is the self-satisfied and arrogant Mrs. Pardiggle, who inflicts her “good works” (really nothing more than moralising) on the poor and drags along her resentful and rebellious children.




Caddy Jellyby confronts Esther about her despair



But then in the figure of Caroline Jellyby (Caddy), Mrs. Jellyby’s eldest daughter, Dickens creates a wonderfully sympathetic portrait of a desperate young woman – yearning for a meaningful life, but with little apparent prospects. Again, it’s the compassionate Esther who takes this forlorn and abandoned creature and provides her with hope and friendship. And with Richard Carstone (one of the Jarndyce wards), Dickens gives a sympathetic portrayal of an irresponsible young man, who is caught in the web of the Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce law suit – amassing a load of personal debt in the expectation of inheriting a small fortune, once the litigation comes to its eventual conclusion. It does, but it is then revealed that £60,000 has been eaten up by the many long years of legal fees.

Bleak House received an ambivalent reception. It sold really well. But critical voices began to murmur their disapproval. The Spectator found Bleak House “dull and wearisome”. The Illustrated London News asked its readers: “What do you think of Bleak House?” It was recognised as something quite different from the author whom people thought they had pinned down. His friend and confidant, the literary critic John Forster, thought it lacked the freedom and freshness of his usual work. Perhaps it did, but from another perspective one might argue that Dickens was taking a more careful and “artistic” (stylish) approach to his prose. Modern critics admire the book – many of them, as we have seen, consider it his very best novel. But they also see it as the beginning of a “dark period” in his attitude and art.

For me, Bleak House was an interesting but dense read. It lacks the exuberance and high comedy of many of Dickens’s more enjoyable books. The grim setting and sombre story establish an appropriately “bleak” mood. And the characters are at the service of the story, rather than stand-alone figures created for sheer fun and frivolity. It is a compelling book, once you get into the heart of the story, but it doesn’t have the same excitement and momentum of previous books to drive the reader forward. Perhaps I need to come back later and read it again – its more restrained virtues may yet be revealed.

[2012 is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Lots of special events and activities are planned in England this year. Back in 2009, my good friend Tony Grant (in Wimbledon, UK) and I did a pilgrimage to three key Charles Dickens destinations - his birthplace in Portsmouth (the house is a Museum), the house he lived at on Doughty Street in London (now the chief Dickens' museum), and the town he lived in as a child on the north-coast of Kent (Rochester). 

These visits inspired me to begin reading through all Dickens's novels. By last summer I had done six, but stalled in the middle of Dombey and Son. I thought what I could do to mark this special year of Dickens was to start again, read through all of his novels inside the year, and blog about them. So this is the tenth of a series.]

Next: Hard Times

[Resources used: "Introduction" to Bleak House by Barbara Hardy (1991); "Introduction" to Bleak House by G. K. Chesterton (1907); Dickens by Peter Ackroyd (1990); "Portraits of Charles Dickens (1812-1870)", an excellent web-page collection of Dickens pictures.  Dickens Portraits ]

Book Review: "Waging Heavy Peace" by Neil Young





Cover of Neil Young's memoir


Neil Young, one of the greatest folk and rock songwriters of the last 45 years, has now discovered – late in his career – the pleasure of writing prose. “This is a great way to live,” he says about the process of getting reminiscences about his life down on paper. “I highly recommend it to any old rocker who is out of cash,” he adds, tongue firmly in cheek – “and doesn’t know what to do next.” It might sound cynical, I suppose, to the naïve reader unable to read between the lines; but the comment is designed precisely to undercut the kind of criticism that might come from those who misconstrue his motives.

Books about rock bands and pop singers, of course, have been flooding the market for fifty-odd years. The majority of them have been hack-jobs – potted histories written by journalists and authors of questionable ability and integrity, who simply mine old newspaper and magazine articles, and offer a mélange of cliché, punditry, and purple prose. Then there are books about the stars by people who were close to them through marriage or family relationship. These are generally ghost-written – and built on extended taped interviews. I’ve read more than my fair share of these. Many are predictably humdrum efforts – but you read them anyway, looking to glean any new tidbit about your favourite artists: A Twist of Lennon (1980), for example, by John’s first wife Cynthia; or Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me (2008), by Patti Boyd.

Another familiar genre is the memoir written (usually ghost-written) by the rock star himself, or herself. Most of these focus primarily on the rock band-lifestyle – replete with tales of debauchery, alcoholism and drug addiction. The more interesting ones include revealing stories about how they navigated their way around music industry sharks, and provide insightful commentary on their music and the culture out of which it sprang. The most memorable of this type that I’ve read – off the top of my head – include those by Eric Burdon (I Used To be An Animal But I’m All Right Now, 1986), Eric Clapton (Clapton: The Autobiography, 2008)), and, of course, Keith Richards (Life, 2010)

Then there are the few autobiographies that are in a class of their own, because their authors – whilst rock stars – really know how to write. Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One (2005), in that regard, is a standout. It’s a mesmerising read. Patti Smith has written brilliantly about her life and friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe in Just Kids (2010). And Pete Townshend has a memoir called Who I Am just released (October 9) that should be a great read – he’s shown himself in the past to be a talented writer of both fiction and non-fiction.

Neil Young's memoir, Making Heavy Peace, was released in late September, 2012

Motives for writing a memoir are as varied as the individuals who undertake them. Dylan’s book began as a set of extensive liner notes. Neil Young began his because of a broken toe: “It was the catalyst to get me started,” he says. He couldn’t get about for a while, so he opened up his laptop and started to write. It was a good way to take it easy for a while: “Creative work and writing are relaxing to me,” he explains. Without a set structure or final goal in mind, he proceeds in a random, organic fashion – using a dictum about the writing process that he remembers from his father Scott Young, a successful journalist and author, who told him once: “Just write every day, and you’ll be surprised what comes out.” Which is exactly what he does. When he began writing songs back in his mid-60s, Winnipeg days (with The Squires), Neil adopted the inspired-by-the-muse approach: “I learned to be ready to write when an idea came into my head … I learned to drop everything else and pay attention to the song I was hearing.”  He discovers now, however, that amassing sufficient material for a book-length piece of prose is a more demanding enterprise, requiring a more disciplined method.

Young began writing this book in early 2011. He had recently given up smoking “weed”, because of his doctor’s advice. He decided to give up drinking alcohol as well: “I had never stopped both simultaneously and I thought it might be nice to get to know myself again. I am now the straightest I’ve ever been since I was eighteen.” The straightening out process, though, seems to have interrupted the flow of his song writing. Near the end of the book he points out that he hasn’t written a song for six months – but he has churned out 90,000 words for the book. “I have written this whole damn book straight,” he says. He has done it all alone, and he marvels that “there seems to be no end to the information flowing through me.” Not only that, however; he declares that he will eventually get to fiction: “That is where I am going.” 

 The basic structure for Waging Heavy Peace is to alternate between sections dealing with Neil’s current life – revealing quickly the main obsessions that drive his activities day-to-day – and reminiscences about the past. His “journeys through the past” deal primarily with family, former bands, and long-time friends and colleagues who have worked with him on many of his pet-projects. These journeys of the mind are not arranged chronologically; Young flits forwards and backwards, as the whim takes him, often returning over and over to the same people (his father Scott Young, for example, and his favourite producer and soul-mate David Briggs) and the same bands (The Squires in Fort William; The Mynah Birds in Toronto; and Buffalo Springfield, CSN&Y, and Crazy Horse in southern California).

 

CSN&Y (l-to-r): Graham Nash, Stephen Stills, David Crosby & Neil Young - backstage in Denver, 1974

Neil Young has not had an easy life, despite the fame and fortune he has enjoyed as a 60s rock-icon. He and his family have gone through a series of serious medical problems. Two of Neil’s sons were born with cerebral palsy – Zeke, his oldest (mother was actress Carrie Snodgrass), and Ben (mother is Pegi Young). His daughter Amber (Pegi’s also the mother) has epilepsy. Neil, himself, has had a long series of health issues: he had a bout with polio at the age of six; suffered regular epileptic seizures in his early days in Los Angeles in the late-60s; lived with a back problem that required him to wear a brace – relieved  eventually through surgery; and, more recently, almost died from the complications following surgery for a brain aneurysm – two days later he collapsed on a New York street and almost bled to death when a femoral artery ruptured.

His childhood was disrupted by his parents’ separation in the late 50s. His mother, Rassy, moved to Winnipeg with Neil. His brother Bob stayed in Toronto with his father Scott. Neil referred obliquely to that situation in his song “Crime in the City” (from the Freedom album):

“Now I come from a family that has a broken home;
Sometimes I talk to Daddy on the telephone;
When he says that he loves me, I know that he does;
But I wish I could see him; I wish I knew where he was.”

His mother always supported Neil’s growing interest in music and performing. But his father took a while to recognize his son’s unique abilities. Despite their rather aloof relationship, Neil loved his father and never held a grudge about his philandering ways, which led to the family-breakup. When Neil Young bought his Broken Arrow Ranch in La Honda, California in 1970, he also hired its previous caretaker, Louis Avila, to work for him. Young later wrote the song “Old Man” about Avila. Scott thought the song was written about him. Neil never disabused him of that notion: “… songs are for whoever receives them,” he explains.

Neil and father Scott at the Riverboat in 1969.
Scott later wrote about his relationship with Neil in his book Neil and Me (1984).

Neil Young, of course, is a wealthy man. He uses his money to pursue his many hobbies and obsessions. “I am a material guy”, he confesses. And when he finishes a major project - like an album, or a tour, or a film – he will indulge himself in a special purchase. Often it will be a car. “I am a collector,” he admits: “I collect everything – cars, trains, manuscripts, photographs, tape recordings, records, memories, and clothes.” He likes old cars, large cars – a ’53 Pontiac hearse, here; a ’49 blue Cadillac convertible, there. He built a warehouse on his ranch to hold all his cars. He calls it Feelgood’s Garage; and it has its own mechanic to fix and to service his prized automobiles.

Neil in his LincVolt - it's a '59 Lincoln Continental

One of Young’s pet-projects, which he discusses over and over again in this book is the LincVolt. His plan is to take a ’59 Lincoln Continental and turn it into a highly fuel-efficient vehicle running on various forms of clean energy – natural gas, electricity, ethanol. He loves the old cars. With the ’59 Lincoln – 5,000 pounds in weight, 20-feet long – he aims to come up with an engine design and fuel source that will provide 100 miles to the gallon. Eco-friendly luxury! He might even win a prize!

Neil playing 'Old Black' - a '52 Gibson Les Paul. Keep on rockin', man!

Another enterprise that Neil Young has been involved with for many years is developing a mass-market, high-fidelity source of digital sound. His original name for the product was PureTone; but he discovered, long after the fact, that the name was already taken. The new brand-name is Pono. And once the system is up and running, he plans to install it some of his old cars.

Young has always been dissatisfied with digital sound. When CDs were first introduced, he points out, they were delivering only 15% of the frequency response of the original master recording. His ultimate goal is to give kids the chance to hear recorded music with the same audio quality as the music he was listening to in the heyday of analogue sound – by playing and recording the music with non-digitized equipment, via analogue mixing boards, and heard through high-quality speakers. For Neil, it’s not a project, it’s not an enterprise - it's a mission. “Sound is very complex,” he says at one point, “I will not rest until the impact has been made.”

This insistence on traditional quality and high technical standards runs through everything that Neil Young does. He doesn’t use in-ear phones whilst performing, for example – “they are way too sterile and clinical for me; I have to hear the speakers, and the amps, and the hall sound.” And his last album, Americana, was recorded and mastered with analogue equipment onto high-quality tape, before being transferred at the last stage to a digital format. 'Old Black', his '52 Gibson Les Paul, never sounded so good.

Most fans will buy this book for a few main reasons: to get background on Neil Young's life and career; to get a sense of what he’s like as a person; and to learn more about the music they know and love – how it was created and recorded. He delivers on most of these fronts. We read about his early days growing up with both parents in Omeeme, Ontario – in the Kawartha Lakes region:

There is a town in north Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind
I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.

We learn about his life with mother Rassy in Winnipeg, after she separated from Neil’s father, Scott. There’s a lot about his early experiences touring with his first band, The Squires. And some background on his early attempt to break into the Toronto music scene as a solo performer and then with a band called The Mynah Birds. Eventually, he moves to southern California, hooks up with Stephen Stills – first in the great folk-rock band Buffalo Springfield, and then in the rock supergroup CSN&Y (along with David Crosby from The Byrds and Graham Nash from The Hollies). Very soon after hitting the big time as a solo performer in the very early 70s, he moves north of L.A. and buys a large, ranch property (he dubs it Broken Arrow Ranch) near Redwood City, south of San Francisco.

There’s a lot about the music – especially The Squires, Buffalo Springfield and Crazy Horse. He writes over and over about his special friendship with his producer David Briggs. And his relationship with Ben Keith, the pedal steel player he met during the recording of the country-inflected Harvest LP – in a band dubbed The Stray Gators. Young talks about his approach to music as “following the muse”. He says he loves new beginnings and feels he has to shake things up regularly to keep his work fresh. Otherwise he gets tired of his musical self. He has an instinctive feel for his music: “there is a completely different part of my brain used for music, and it feels like I am massaging my soul when I make music.” And he explains how his long-term performing relationship with Crazy Horse is very important to him. He acknowledges that they may not be a great band technically, but there is a special place they get to when they play together: “the Horse and the muse are very good friends,” he concludes.

You read through the book and things jump out at you. Buffalo Springfield broke up because their bass player, Bruce Palmer, got busted. Neil says he was the special catalyst in the group – without him, they were dead. He describes Stephen Stills as a musical genius. It’s well-known that they had a rocky relationship, but he really tips his hat to the man here. He says that Crosby and Nash did not appreciate Stills’ contributions the way that he did. Their electric guitar interplay in live concert was legendary. Listen to “Southern Man” on the CSN&Y album 4 Way Street, for example, to get a taste of their special chemistry. He spent a month preparing himself for a recent Farm Aid Benefit Concert. He’s an album guy: “I still call it an album,” he explains, “because that is what I make. I don’t make CDs or iTunes tracks. I make albums.” [Right on, Neil!]. And when the Massey Hall show from 1971 was recorded by David Briggs, his producer, Briggs tried to persuade Neil to release it as an album: “it’s better than Harvest,” he said. Neil demured; but many years later, when he listened back to those live recordings, during his preparation of the first Archives release, he realised that Briggs, as usual, was right.

There’s lots of intriguing stuff in this book that will delight the Neil Young fan. There are some great photos, but none in colour or on high-quality paper. They appear throughout the book – mostly at the beginning of new sections.  I do find fault with the structure of the book, however; it’s evident that there has been very little editing. The organic growth of the project is appealing at first – as Young alternates between the present day (focused on his current obsessions) and memories of the past. The account of his current interests gets repetitive. And there is no apparent logic to the way he delves into the past – he jumps back and forth, and keeps coming back to the same topics over and over. Despite Neil’s apparent attitude, this book would have been even better with some careful editing.

Neil Young and Patti Smith

You quickly get the sense that Young is a generous and likeable man. He surrounds himself with a large retinue of people to help him with his many hobbies and projects. He revels in his friends and musical associates. He gives thanks and praise to a whole host of key people that he’s known and loved: family, former-girlfriends and ex-wives, band-mates, film-makers, auto-mechanics. Although he still has several key ambitions that keep him looking forward and planning for the future, it’s clear that this book has also had him looking back at his life: “these days,” he admits, “it’s all about closure of this and that for me.”

For Neil Young fans this is a delightful book. You’ll enjoy following him on his “journeys into the past”. You’ll learn a lot. And you’ll appreciate spending time wallowing in the reminiscences of a great Canadian hero. Keep on rockin’, Neil. Long may you run.

Photo Essay: Thoreau and Walden Pond



Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Henry David Thoreau was an American author (essayist, poet and philosopher), surveyor, historian and naturalist.  He was a leading figure in the transcendentalist movement, which flourished in nineteenth-century New England. He is known best for his book Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) and his essay “Resistance to Civil Government” (also known as “Civil Disobedience”). He is considered a key figure in the development of modern environmentalism, and is often thought of as a proto-anarchist. His philosophy of civil disobedience influenced Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts on 12 July, 1817. And he died there on 6 May, 1862. He studied at Harvard University in Boston and worked as a teacher in Concord. He met the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, who introduced him to a wide circle of authors and thinkers who lived in and around Concord, including Ellery Channing. It was Channing who advised him – in March 1845 – to go out into the woods, build a hut, and “begin the grand process of devouring (himself) alive.” He decided to do just that.

On 4 July, 1845, Thoreau moved a couple of miles out of town and began to build his own hut on land owned by his friend and mentor Emerson. The fourteen acres contained a second-growth forest and were located beside Walden Pond.  After two years living in the woods, Thoreau left his hut at Walden on 6 September, 1847. He worked on the manuscript about his experiences there – and his thoughts about their significance – for many years. The resulting book, Walden, or Life in the Woods was finally published in 1854.

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

 

A reconstruction of Thoreau's Walden one-room hut near the entry to Walden Pond State Reservation

On 22 August, 2012, my son Colin and I made a visit to Walden Pond, in order to see the place that had inspired this interesting character to write his influential book. It’s located in Walden Pond State Reservation. To get there, you drive south from Concord on Walden Street (Route 126). Right beside the main parking lot at the entrance to the park, they have built a copy of Thoreau’s Walden Pond hut – using the dimensions and details of its construction from the description he provides in his book.

"I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls."



Inside view of the reconstructed version of Thoreau's hut at Walden Pond



Thoreau’s home at Walden Pond was a one-room hut. It measured 15 feet long (4.5 m) and 10 feet wide (3 m). The door was located at one end of the longer side; the fireplace at the other. There was a window in each of the longer walls, opposite each other. Furnishings inside the hut included a bed, a desk, a chair, and a box for storing dry logs for the fire. The original bed, desk and chair from Thoreau’s hut are now located in the Concord Museum on Lexington Street. Outside the building, there was a woodshed nearby and a cooling cellar dug into the side of a hill. There was no running water, of course; Thoreau would have done his cleaning and washing in the lake.

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." 



A statue of Thoreau in front of the replica hut

Thoreau would have built the hut from materials collected round about him (sand and stones from the edge of Walden Pond, and timber from trees he cut down), materials recycled from an abandoned shack in the vicinity, and supplies he got from town. A writer for a blog called Shelter Seeker has estimated that it cost Thoreau $28.13 to buy the materials he needed to build his hut – that would be about $2,800  converted into today’s money. Most of the construction was done by Thoreau, although he enlisted the help of a few friends when it was time to raise the roof.



“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms …”

Walden Pond is actually a sixty-acre kettle lake

Walden Pond is actually much larger than its name implies. It’s a lake of some substantial size. At its deepest point, it is 31 metres deep (102 feet). Walden Pond has an area of about 60 acres (250,000 square metres), and its perimeter measures 2.7 km (1.7 miles). It is a kettle lake, formed by retreating glaciers gouging a deep gash into the landscape about 11,000 years ago.

I was a bit concerned, as Colin and I approached Walden Pond, that Murphy’s Law would kick in, and the “Pond” would turn out to be a tiny, stagnant piece of over-hyped, over-ripe water. But as we crossed the road and hiked down to the lake, it quickly became apparent that this was an impressive spot – a quiet refuge of great beauty and repose.

“It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.”



There is a beautiful trail all around the perimeter of Walden Pond.



To hike around the lake takes about half an hour. But add on another ten minutes, or so, for a stop at the site of the original hut that Thoreau built near the north-west corner of the lake. It really is a lovely walk. The area is dominated by white pines, which provide shade from the sun, but do not create a dense canopy that filters out a great deal of light and warmth. Both sides of the trail – as you can see in the photo to the left – have a rudimentary wire fence that has been put up to protect the area from erosion. It runs around the entire perimeter of Walden Pond. But there still are regular gaps in the fence which allow access down to the water. And as we made our way around the lake, we encountered individuals and couples using these small access points as tiny beaches from which to enter the water.

"Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind."



A great blue heron in the northern inlet of Walden Pond near Thoreau's cabin



"The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly."

The site of Thoreau's cabin discovered in 1945 by Roland Robbins

The exact site of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond was discovered by the archaeologist Roland Robbins in 1945. He had a rough idea where it would have been from close reading of Thoreau’s book, Walden, or Life in the Woods, and notes made by Thoreau's friend, William Ellery Channing. He began digging in the likeliest spot, using a two-foot steel probe and a shovel. Within six inches of the surface he began finding bricks – lots of bricks. Then he found some bricks with white plaster attached. And on November 11 he found the proof he was after, the foundation stone of the hut’s chimney. Re-reading Walden later he realized that the date he completed his dig, 12 November, 1945, was exactly 100 years after the day Thoreau had completed the construction of his home in the woods.

“In any weather, at any hour of the day or night,
I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too;
to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future,
which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.”

  

Looking down the slope towards Walden Pond

The nine concrete posts you see in the photo to the left mark out the perimeter of Thoreau’s rectangular cabin. The site is at the bottom of a gentle slope, in amongst a stand of second-growth white pines. If you continue south from here, the land slopes down further for another hundred yards or so to the edge of the lake – a short walk to his source of water for drinking, washing and cleaning. To the left of the site is a mound of stones and a wooden plaque with the famous Walden quote explaining why Thoreau came to live in the woods. Nearby, he dug a cold-cellar into the hillside.



The spot inside the site of Thoreau's cabin where the chimney foundation was laid



A secluded access to the lake

When you walk down to Walden Pond from the road, the first thing you see is a public beach. During the summer months the beach is full of families enjoying a swim in the clean water of this attractive lake. But as you walk away from the beach and hike along the trail which winds around the edge of Walden Pond, you move into a quiet area of the park. There are small access points from the fenced trail to the lake at regular intervals; and every other one of these served as a mini-beach for individuals or couples who want to swim in a more private, quieter location. There were steps down to the water on the native rock. The whole mood, for me, in these spots, was one of quiet contemplation in a refreshing and invigorating scene of natural beauty. I couldn’t help thinking of devout hindus in Benares (Varanasi) stepping down the stone ghats into the sacred waters of the Ganges! For those who venerate Henry David Thoreau as a great soul and a wise philosopher, a dip in Walden Pond must conjure up a similar feeling of awe.

"I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

 

So our morning visit to Walden Pond was an inspiring event. After hiking along the trail to the site of the Thoreau’s cabin, I asked Colin if he wanted to retrace our steps back (the shorter option), or to continue on all around the lake. He chose to walk the entire trail. I was glad. And it seemed to me that, even though he didn’t have the historical and literary background to underpin the experience, he could feel the special aura of the place.

"However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names."

Thoreau's grave in Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

In the early afternoon, we visited Sleepy Hollow Cemetery to see the final resting places of several famous Concord authors: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott and, of course, Henry David Thoreau. Just as Westminster Abbey, in London, has its Poets’ Corner, so the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery has its authors’ corner. And it’s an imposing spot – in the back of the place. After parking the car, you have to walk up a very steep pathway to a ridge. The graves of Alcott and Thoreau are very simple – Thoreau’s is marked with a tiny tombstone, around which are strewn mementoes left by his admirers. Lots of pencils and pens!

"As if you could kill time without injuring eternity."

Thoreau's bird book - Wilson's American Ornithology



Now, if you are really serious about covering all the angles on Henry David Thoreau and Walden Pond, you will also have to visit the Concord Museum. It’s close to the cemetery. You come back into town and then drive a mere half-kilometre south-east on Lexington Road. There is a section in the museum devoted to the town’s eminent authors. This first photo taken at the Museum shows Thoreau’s copy of Wilson’s American Ornithology. He used this popular book on American birds all the time – citing it often in his Journal. He wrote lists of birds he had seen in the book’s margin, and pressed specimens of plants he had identified between its pages.

"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone."

Keys from the Concord Jail



These keys come from the Concord Jail. About three weeks after Thoreau began his experiment in the Walden Pond woods – late-July, 1845 – he encountered the local tax collector, who demanded six years of delinquent poll taxes. Thoreau refused to pay, citing his opposition to slavery and the current Mexican-American War. He argued that he wasn’t going to give the government money that might be used to fund those immoral enterprises. He was thrown into jail overnight for his perceived impertinence. He was released the next day after an aunt, against his will, paid the overdue taxes on his behalf.

This event had a big impact on Thoreau’s thinking. In early 1848, he gave some lectures about “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government” – explaining the reasoning behind his tax revolt. He revised these lectures later into an influential essay called Resistance to Civil Government (also known as Civil Disobedience). The essay was published in book-from in May, 1849 and would have a significant influence on like-minded activists like Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.


“So long as a man is faithful to himself, everything is in his favor, government, society, the very sun, moon, and stars.”

Items from Thoreau's Walden Pond cabin




Finally, here is the

actual bed, desk and chair from Thoreau’s small cabin at Walden Pond.

There are other interesting reasons to visit Concord, Massachussetts, besides the chance to investigate places associated with the life of Henry David Thoreau. But, if you are planning to visit just for the sake of all-things-Thoreau, you will not be disappointed. He  was the focus of only part of my day there, but it was, nevertheless, a definite highlight.

"To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust."

Sources:  "The Man Who Found Thoreau" by James Dodson in the May 1985 issue of Yankee; "Henry David Thoreau's Cabin" from the Shelter Seeker website.