The American Autobiography Trilogy
A Comment for Students to Read
Prepare for an extraordinary reading experience.
In this trilogy of American autobiographies, you will
find three of my favorite books—classics all, steeped in
genius, glittering with literary brilliance, and pivotal in
American history. They have been my good friends for
many years, and I have visited them as often as I could to
hear their latest news.
For a young reader coming to these books for the
first time, these books are a three-part time machine that
takes us back before the founding of the democracy in
1776 and walks us forward through the hideous violence
of slavery almost to the beginning of the Civil War.
These are stories about young people, told from
their own memories. Both Franklin and Douglass begin
by describing their boyhoods, and Thoreau describes a
famous adventure he undertook when he was a young
man. These three men led lives that were vastly different
from our own. There were no highways, no cars, no
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electric lights, no airplanes, no movies, no television,
and no computers. Their stories shed light on the power
of modern technological revolutions because the three
writers’ lives were more like one another’s than any of
them are like ours. In many ways life changed little
between Franklin and Thoreau.
For Franklin, Douglass, and Thoreau, reading was
vital. Books were their source both of knowledge and of
entertainment. Both Franklin and Douglass tell detailed
stories of their endeavors to become literate, and yet their
situations could not have been more different because in
Douglass’s case it was illegal for him, a slave, to learn to
read or write. In Walden, Thoreau spends entire chapters
on the importance of books and on the care with which
they must be read—deliberately, he says.
To read these books is to visit more than a vanished
America and vanished individuals; it is a chance to
soak in the English language of the revolutionary and
antebellum times, in the vocabulary, phrases, and tones
of an English that we no longer speak but that we can
experience from reading and which is a secret training
for a library of great literature from the past two hundred
years.
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26 $ Michael Clay Thompson
The American Autobiography Trilogy
Vocabulary Prestudy
Here are twelve words common to all three novels:
apprehension: n. fear
ascertain: v. find out for certain
conjecture: n. a guess
latter: adj. the second, the later one
manifest: adj. obvious
nigh: adv. near
notwithstanding: prep. in spite of
precept: n. an authoritative rule of conduct
reproof: n. disapproval, criticism
singular: adj. unique, odd
tedious: adj. tiresome, boring
thither: adv. there
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The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
A Comment
If Benjamin Franklin were alive, I would tremble to
write a word about him. His incisive retort to anything
I might say, I would dread to hear. Even now, more
than two hundred years after Franklin’s death, I slink
toward the task of a comment with trepidation, as
though stepping into a perceptual minefield. Whatever
I say, I would like to get right, but how can anyone draw
confident conclusions about such an elusive spirit?
Am I over-cautious about discussing this American
icon? On the surface, his book seems straightforward
enough: a candid and emotionally reserved account of
major episodes in his life. To our disappointment, the
autobiography ends before reaching the dramatic story
of the Revolution, which we long in vain to hear.
Yes, the Autobiography seems straightforward enough,
but seems is the right word. Behind the seeming candor
of the Autobiography’s surface—right behind it and dimly
visible, moving with veiled alertness—we sense the wink
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of genius, the suppressed wink of the cagiest of men,
composing a seeming autobiography that he knew would
be read not only by his family but by posterity.
The wink of genius. Evil genius? No, but careful,
self-conscious writer, yes. For all of his rags-to-hard-work
routine, Franklin was no rube, no ingenuous innocent
merely transcribing what he could remember of his poor
boy’s struggle up the ladder of American society. He
was no ordinary poor boy, no urchin. From his earliest
years, he was a monster reader, and he does not let us
forget that. He was clever and alert enough to make
his fortune in Philadelphia; to become America’s first
great diplomat; to conduct experiments in electricity;
to develop the Franklin stove, Poor Richard’s Almanac,
fire departments, and public libraries; to organize the
Pennsylvania militia; to impress social magnates who
could promote his career; to establish the University of
Pennsylvania; to become Governor of Pennsylvania; to
assist the Revolutionary cause and become a founding
father, helping to draft the Declaration of Independence;
to watch his words; and to take care for how his actions
would seem.
Yes, Franklin knew exactly what he was writing. The
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Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin has that dangerous
I’m-just-a-country-boy faux modesty familiar to anyone who
has seen the knowing smile of a country sage. Franklin
seems modest...sometimes.
Seems. The locus classicus for the verb is surely Act
I, scene 2 of Hamlet. Hamlet’s insufficiently bereaved
mother Gertrude worries about the prolonged depression
Hamlet is suffering after the death of his father. She asks
Hamlet why his father’s death seems so particular with
him. Hamlet’s response is a rebuke:
Seems, madam, Nay, it is. I know not “seems.”
’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passeth show—
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
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The Narrative of Frederick Douglass
A Comment
You are not the same afterwards, after you read this
narrative, this brilliant collection of Frederick Douglass’s
memories. Reading Frederick Douglass is like going to
the Grand Canyon for the first time; you think you know
what to expect because you have seen postcards, but then
you arrive at the rim of the canyon, and you stare into
the ghastly abyss of the thing. You had no idea. You feel
disoriented. You thought....
You knew it would be big, but....
You feel like a piece of dust at a football stadium.
You stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon, and it is
as if the sky below is as big as the sky above. You scarcely
know which way is up.
This feeling of cognitive dissonance—of feeling your
complacent, innocent preconception ripped away like a
stupid little thing, a silly thing—is a grand epiphany, a
great disturbance in your inner force. You need time to
adjust to the difference between the real Grand Canyon
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and the Grand Canyon of your fatuous little postcards.
You keep thinking, “But, but, but....”
You feel, somehow, that you have been stupid.
And nothing you think of can fit what you are seeing
into anything you ever assumed. Your assumptions must
be rebuilt. The Grand Canyon changes you, and not
conversely.
The Grand Canyon is not ordinary. You cannot
prepare for it. You cannot anticipate it by examining
photographs. You cannot travel to brace yourself by
seeing similar landscapes. To see something similar, you
would have to go to Mars and see the Valles Marineris.
On Earth, the Grand Canyon has no analogies, and
there is no language that can articulate it. Ordinary
English has no resources for such a geometry. The only
words that we have to represent the Canyon are pitiful,
bootless things, paltry things, skinny nouns such as
canyon, gulch, gorge, abyss, cliff—conventional words like
that. There is no real noun for what the Grand Canyon
is, just as there is no real noun for The Narrative of
Frederick Douglass.
Autobiography? No.
Narrative? No.
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Memoir? Oh, please.
We arrive at The Narrative of Frederick Douglass
imagining, as in the case of the Grand Canyon, that we
already know what to expect. We know that the narrative
is an autobiography, and we know it was written by a
former slave, and we know that it is about slavery, and
we think we know about slavery because slavery was
“covered” in our American history textbooks.
Covered. Ironically, that may be the right word.
Our standard textbooks do not look slavery in the eye,
and there is little in general education that can prepare
us for the strength of mind of Frederick Douglass. Even
slavery could not suppress a genius of his magnitude.
In the full violence of American slavery, when it was a
potentially capital crime for a slave to learn to read and
write, Douglass accomplished his own education with a
combination of stealth, discipline, and talent. He knew
that slave owners kept slaves down by keeping them
ignorant, and the slave owners, clearly, knew it too.
The truth—which we deserve, which we have a right
to know, and which Frederick Douglass committed his
genius to articulating—is that a brutal form of slavery
took place in the United States.
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Walden
A Comment
...we must laboriously seek the meaning of
each word and line, conjecturing a larger
sense than common use permits out of what
wisdom and valor and generosity we have.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
It would take a book longer than Walden to discuss
the meaning of Walden, so let me spend a few pages on
the reading of Walden and the value of Thoreau’s book
to the education of someone seeking the life of the mind.
A Chinese pupil came to the master and asked the
master to teach him how to play his stringed instrument.
“Yes,” the master replied, “I will.” The pupil was
overjoyed, and the master continued, picking up the
light instrument and playing a single, clear note. “For
the first year,” the master said, “play this note.”
Thereby hangs a tale of a different code of
consciousness, a different sense of what you are doing
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when you read.
It is easy to read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden too
fast. To read a page of Walden at the run-on pace typical in
a classroom—two minutes per page, perhaps—beginning
each sentence a second after the previous sentence...that
would be like the absurd eating pace at an annual hot
dog-eating contest: a hundred dogs in ten minutes.
No, the time it takes to read Walden is not the time
it takes to say the words of Walden. It cannot be a wordeating contest.
If you want a meaningful awareness of what you have
read, of the spot that Walden occupies in intellectual
history, then you must slow down. You must read at the
speed of oh, not springing to the next paragraph before
liking the one you are on. As Thoreau says, you must
laboriously seek the meaning of each line.
By laboriously, he means something good.
Thoreau himself models good reading in the way he
studies the natural environment of the lake. He does not
simply walk past everything with his mind on something
else. Instead, he walks to things. He stops, and looks,
and keeps looking. He says that “I frequently tramped
eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an
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appointment with a beech tree, or a yellow birch, or an
old acquaintance among the pines.” In a like spirit we
must read Thoreau’s book the way he read the book of
the lake and keep our appointments with his paragraphs.
We must read no faster than the speed of oh. This is
true for many—if not all—great works, but it is particularly
true of Thoreau’s Walden because Thoreau is not
exactly, we might say, on the level. We have to keep an
eye on him. Like Polonius, he uses indirections to find
directions out. Like an ancient Greek oracle, Thoreau
speaks in riddles and paradoxes (“I have travelled a
good deal in Concord”), in metaphors and angles. He
grumbles, pointedly, “in this part of the world it is
considered a ground for complaint if a man’s writings
admit of more than one interpretation.” As this suggests,
Walden is often ambiguous, and it is always multi-leveled,
with seeming substance dissolving before our eyes as it is
revealed to serve as the background of a metaphor. Such
a style presents problems (ask Oedipus).
These problems of subtle style in this unconventional
book are made more acute by the insidious force of our
expectations that lead our minds in false directions. If
we are not careful when we read, we look for what we
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expect, and then we judge a book based on whether or
not its text gives us what we expected. We risk wanting
all books, in other words, to fit within the dimensions of
our present mind.
In this silly plan, Thoreau does not cooperate.
One summer day I went to the Freer Gallery in
Washington, D.C., to reexamine the Chinese landscapes
in one of the cool rooms. I wanted to look at the
landscapes more deeply than I had before, more softly,
and I resolved to sit and look and keep looking until I
saw something. I sat for hours, mystified, before I realized
that I was not really looking at the paintings after all; I
was searching for what I expected to find in paintings.
I was expecting the paintings to satisfy my assumptions.
I wanted them to conform to what I already thought. I
wanted them to contain elements that I already knew
about, in my omniscience. What I had really been
looking at for hours were my own assumptions. What if
these ancient masterpieces were offering me something
that I did not yet know to look for? I had to stop making
my inquiry about me and start making it about them.
It was for them to teach me, and not conversely.
I had to become silent.
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I changed my question and began to ask, “What do
I see? What is there? What does this painting contain?
What are the painting’s terms?” It was then, when I did
what Thoreau calls “the discipline of looking always at
what is to be seen,” that I saw what I had not seen before,
when I looked at the painting instead of at myself. Walden
is like that; we cannot apply our current checklists to it
because Thoreau brings us something new. He operates
beyond our amateur checklists.
When we read Thoreau, we must look “for what is to
be seen.”
Thoreau calls for honest observational awareness, a
state of objectivity in which instead of projecting your
ideas out into your vista, you quiet yourself and allow
the vista to come into your awareness, bringing with it its
ten thousand things, of which you had been, as Thomas
Hardy says in “The Darkling Thrush,” “unaware.”
When you slow down and calm down and sit down,
Walden appears to you in various guises, like a lake scene
in the changing light. It is multifaceted and throws off
resemblances in many directions.
For example, Walden reminds me of William Butler
Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” In that poem
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