Culture and Liberty

Writings of Isabel Paterson

Stephen Cox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781412856003
• eBook ISBN: 9781351524315
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Isabel Paterson is widely recognized as an advocate of radical individualism and a prophet of the libertarian movement. She influenced a wide variety of libertarian and conservative writers and public figures, from Ayn Rand to William F. Buckley, Jr. In her own time, Paterson was noted as a literary critic and novelist, and one of the wittiest writers in America. She is best known for The God of the Machine, also published by Transaction.

Culture and Liberty includes many of Paterson's works that are out of print or have never before been published. Stephen Cox collected Paterson's words on themes she favored, illustrating leading features of her accomplishments and her views. Paterson's way of combining individualist ideas with provocative writing made people look forward to her next pronouncement on American culture. Her fame while she lived and worked and the continuing interest in her ideas and writing are monuments to a complex but strongly unified personality.

Paterson remains one of the most distinctive voices in American literary history—as this selection of her writings will indicate. This book is a must read for English majors, literary critics, humanities scholars, and students of American culture.

Part I

Essays and Reviews

1

The True Individualist: Thoreau

It is significant of Thoreau’s genius that among writers of permanent value he loses least by brevity of treatment, so long as it goes to the point. The appropriate work of scholarship, admirably exemplified in this small volume, is that of selection rather than accumulation. Thoreau spent his life trying to strip off superfluities, as if to discover what would be left; should it not be the man himself? That is his final title to fame, for on the whole he succeeded. Singularly, though no one could claim intimacy with him while he lived—“as for taking his arm,” a woman friend declared, “I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm tree”—in the end he stands revealed, near and plain, in full day. If the ghost of Thoreau were now to walk across the fields and woods he knew, one cannot imagine that any one he might encounter need be startled. There should be rather an undisturbed recognition of a natural figure in the landscape, a man where he belonged. So Mr. Whicher* paints him, with fitting economy of description and quotation, using fewer than a hundred pages, yet achieving a full-length critical portrait.¹

In the dry light he preferred for his own vision, the main events of his biography are defiantly matter of fact. Typically, in the Concord group of writers, Henry David Thoreau alone was actually native to Concord. He would be. The exotic French strain in his ancestry was subdued to the New England environment; his father was an independent “ingenious mechanic,” his mother obviously a capable housewife, and the family ambition centered upon giving a superior education to the children. Out of their slender means, Henry was sent to Harvard; with the aid of a scholarship and his own earnings. After graduation, he set up a private school, with his brother John, and did well enough, until John’s uncertain health terminated the venture. At home Henry learned his father’s trade of making pencils, and proved his Yankee birthright by improving the process. He never exhibited any idealistic disregard of money at the expense of others, but paid his own way, and he had enough aptitude for industrial affairs to observe in passing the possibilities of a water power site for factories. Occasionally he did a job of surveying or resorted to tutoring to put himself in funds. Meanwhile, Concord supplied intellectual society. The ambient is perfectly indicated by Mr. Whicher with the compressed information that Thoreau contributed “a poem, and an essay on the Roman poet Aulus Persius Flaccus” to the first number of the Dial, while earning his keep in the Emerson household by “attending to Emerson’s garden and woodpile.” The Massachusetts version of the shepherd of Admetus² was the Transcendental hired man.

It is to be presumed that these desultory occupations were all secondary to an intention to be a writer. Otherwise he might have filled out a pattern of external success in various pursuits which were open to him, with his demonstrated skill of head and hand. Business or a profession, journalism or academic advancement, were within the range of possibilities. The times were propitious. From 1817 to 1862, his term of life, was a period of vast material expansion of the nation, with concomitant opportunity for enterprise, shrewdness and thrift. No doubt he felt the pull of that great spring tide, for he remarked that in his undirected rambles he always found his footsteps turning westward. Yet he refrained from joining the transcontinental migration, as he stepped aside from the industrial drive. Likewise there was a rising literary consciousness, not only the “flowering of New England” but the genesis of an American literature of continental character. Had he struck out to report the country on the grand scale of its physical growth, he might have gained popularity by the incidental flattery to patriotic pride. Instead, he took the back trails and published his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, in the year of the California gold rush, as if to insure that it should be heartily ignored. Seven hundred copies remained unsold, from a first edition of a thousand. He stacked them in the attic and concentrated all the more closely on his own backyard, to write Walden. Apparently nobody quite knew what to make of that either, when it appeared. Like its author, it did not fit into any exact classification. One may call Thoreau a naturalist and be right enough, but it does not describe him completely. He added little or nothing to factual knowledge of nature, or its scientific analysis. His observations are original only in being first hand, sharp and fresh. Neither can he be appraised strictly as an artist in the medium of words who seeks a subject for esthetic form. “Expression is the act of the whole man,” he declared; and “the one great rule of composition is to speak the truth.”³ But the truth is something more than simple objective itemization of things. There was some truth he wanted first to get at, and then to affirm.

Much of his personal records consists of things he did not do; and those omissions were neither accidental nor trivial. He never married. He gathered no property and sought no formal honors or position. He would not follow, nor would he lead; consistently he refused to be counted in as a member of any group or sect. Cross-grained as a hickory knot, he even resented persuasion from Emerson to convictions he already held. Contrarinesss could hardly go further—nor be more absolutely justified. After all, Emerson compounded with the world sufficiently for modest comfort. Thoreau could do without comfort. Yet he expressly repudiated imitators of his experiment in the simple life. At the least hint of compulsion, coercion, or the mental servility of the second-hand, he shied and backed and braced himself for unconditional resistance.

It must not be overlooked that in certain aspects he presented a faintly risible spectacle. Physically he was no rugged outdoor type, being rather small in stature and perhaps always delicate in health, since he was to die of consumption at forty-five. There is a touch of humor in setting up such a hermitage as Thoreau’s cabin by Walden Pond, so close to an organized community that it could not possibly escape general observation. “He liked to keep out of sight of houses.” Maybe, but he must rather have liked to be seen doing so; for there was space enough in America for a man to get out of sight of houses altogether, if that had been his earnest wish. The hermit of Walden stayed well within the reach of the maternal pantry shelf. Indeed, one cannot but imagine him sauntering by adjacent homesteads in a fairly exasperating manner. A farmer could hardly put in an honest day’s work without Thoreau leaning on the rail fence to inquire why the poor soul wasted his time so laboriously. If this picture is drawn from fancy, it is not unwarranted by Thoreau’s reflections; and rural consciousness is acute for the implications of behavior. It is a slight failure of cosmic justice that none of the wretches thus detected in their sinful indulgence of making a hard living had a chance to read the astounding bit of humbug Thoreau set down in his journal when he let a campfire run wild and set their wood lots and hay meadows ablaze.⁴ A truant schoolboy could have mumbled a better excuse, or at least something less self-righteous; Thoreau squirmed himself out of the responsibility.

For Thoreau was capable of sophistry. He fell into it in a greater matter, with his glorification of John Brown* as a hero; his choice of phrases showed a dangerous aptitude in that dubious art. If his pen had been for hire, he might have served the worst of causes only too well. But he did not set himself against his age without reason. His opposition constituted a true relation to history. Feeling in every fiber of his being the way the world was going, he did not mean to go along. And only a man who was civilized in grain could have become so immediately aware of the inward threat to civilization which was increasing steadily with the visible prosperity and progress of the nation. The moral obligation which prompted him to separate himself from society, as a living symbol of protest, arose from the very conditions which should tend to bring a man into easy contact with his kind. It derived from his sense of history, his classical education, his strong local attachment and his exquisite sensitiveness to personal relations. Reading and writing are not primitive accomplishments; they constitute the art of communication on a high level, the instruments of abstract thought and the means of its continuance in time, linking past and present. Further, Thoreau had taken pains to acquire a working knowledge of the elements of advanced technology, with mathematics and mechanics. In his emotional capacities he was also essentially a normal person. He wrote once in a haunting phrase that justified his ventures in poetry, that he had lost “a hound, a bay horse and a turtle dove” that he was forever seeking. He meant a dear friend, his brother who died young, and the girl he loved and sought to marry. He was never estranged from his own family; and he spent his later years in the house he had helped his father to build. These are the components of a good life within an established framework, open to progress.

Yet as a naturalist his keenest perception was for the scent of the wilderness, of virgin forest, untrodden earth, water from clean far springs, a landscape still largely unshaped by human agencies. The metaphysical overtone in his writings refers most often to this aspect of nature. He sought to take it unaware, to double back and see, as with the eyes of Adam, what kind of universe he inhabited, in order to find his true place in it. “Happy the man who observes the heavenly and the terrestrial law in just proportion.”

What he took out of the social order, when he walked into the woods, was a developed human being, carrying within himself the resources of a complex culture, for an ultimate adjustment. He was re-enacting personally the discovery of the New World. The great idea which America represented was never that of a return to savagery. It was the logical conviction that since man is by nature a rational, moral and spiritual being, his natural condition must be that of a civilized person. And as those attributes can be exercised only in the highest degree of freedom, then clearly unless humanity had been sent to the wrong planet freedom should be attainable here and now. “One world at a time.”⁵ Thoreau’s protest was an act of patriotism, a declaration of true faith and allegiance to his country as to the unique chance which had been offered mankind to become what it ought to be. Therefore he conceived it to be his duty to orient himself, to touch a reality of which he could say: “This is, and no mistake; and then begin.”

Essentially the things he would not do were all one thing. He would not yield to the drift of expediency. He would set his course by compass and pole star.

For it was precisely during Thoreau’s lifetime that the American mind swung away from principle to what is curiously called the practical, as a guide to conduct. The tendency was evident in many ways, from the tame external conformity to “public opinion” which amounts to no one having any opinion, to a decline in mental courage for systematic intellectual speculation. Because the problem was already in existence, the shift became most apparent on the issue of slavery. It would take a volume to trace the process of change on this one question, but the revealing word of the period is compromise.

Thoreau would have none of it. If he were expected to tolerate an avowed evil for material reasons, his answer was that he could live with a minimum of possessions, but not without self-respect. If it were for the sake of society, he asked what kind of society could be had on such terms. But his most acute insight was exhibited in his rejection of the cult of philanthropy. He was “revolted by humanitarian projects for doing good to one’s fellow men.”⁶ The benefactor approached with a halter in hand. Every argument of the humanitarian—the plea of security, of uplift, of the duty of the privileged to assist their inferiors and the inability of the unprivileged to help themselves—was put forth in Thoreau’s day to excuse slavery: and it fits the case as well as any other. Thoreau was neither to be trapped nor coaxed.

And he was quite practical enough to identify unerringly the means by which slavery must be instituted and maintained. It is the political power. Hence his fixed antipathy to government in such extension, as the manifest foe of all good men. He admitted no authority which would compel him to contribute to a wrong. His refusal to pay the poll tax was formal notice that he did not consent.

But a fatal result of compromise had already taken effect. When men govern themselves by principle, they can study disinterestedly the function of organization, having an end in view. That is truly practical, for practical action is that which serves a purpose. Expediency is the dodging of purpose, of a definite conclusion. Political science was practically forgotten by avoidance. Thoreau never got so far as to examine the positive means of preserving freedom in association. The example he gave was negative or passive—“civil disobedience.” This is in fact a pre-political method. Gandhi borrowed “non-co-operation” from Thoreau. Political science is unknown to the Orient; such deficiency is the cause of the weakness of the East as compared to the West. The sole alternative is irrational violence. This again is the sinister alliance so often seen between the pure phrasemaker, the self-styled idealist, and the exponent of brute force. Thoreau’s defense of John Brown’s aimless raid (the act of a man scarcely sane, and involving sheer murder), was such a lapse. If John Brown had been right, Thoreau himself should have followed the same course. He never did. And one cannot but suspect that Thoreau knew there was something terribly wrong with his position at this point, else he would not have taken care to cloak his sanguinary protagonist with the fictitious authority of an official title, as “Captain” John Brown. Further, when the Civil War presently broke out, Thoreau “resented the fact that he was obliged to hear about it.” He was a sick man, near to death; and he had got only half way to the truth he sought. One must know not only what not to do but what to do.

Likewise the mass of notes he had made remained unwrought into permanent form. He had cleared his site, gathered much honest stuff for building, but Walden was his one structural achievement—a lodge in the wilderness. There is irony in Mr. Whicher’s prefatory comment: “Though Walden Pond is preserved as a state reservation, it is no longer a refuge of the spirit.” Hast thou found me, O mine enem...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• A Note on the Text
• Abbreviations and References
• People Mentioned
• Part I Essays and Reviews
• Part II Letters
• Index