Fresh Air Fiend (55 page)

Robinson begins life as a disobedient, hubristic, if clumsy, boy. He is given any amount of advice by his sententious father, the German immigrant to England Herr Kreutznaer, who anglicized his name to Crusoe. The name change, a nice touch in a book full of detail, is the more plausible for its being strange and even unnecessary. As it happens, Defoe also changed his own name, Frenchifying it, for his father's name was plain Mr. Foe. Daniel Defoe was anything but average, but he chose to write about a pretty ordinary, though arrogant, young man who (ignoring his father's Teutonic and pedestrian sermon on the safety of staying home) leaves home and finds himself involved in extraordinary events, beginning just days after his departure, when on his first voyage his ship sinks. Crusoe is not deterred, not even put off by a fairly prescient man who looks him in the eye and says that wherever he goes, he "will meet with nothing but Disasters and Disappointments."

Soon after, battling sea monsters, Crusoe is saved by his servant, Xury. Instead of rewarding him for his efforts, he sells Xury into slavery, and it is only when he is a harassed planter in Brazil that he regrets selling Xury, for he realizes that he could use a slave to help him in his work. He thinks of Xury again in this way on the island. That crudely human logic is one of the most plausible aspects of the novel, and it frequently gives rise to Crusoe's refrain that he can't seem to do anything right. He even claims, at this early stage, that as a tobacco farmer in rural Brazil he is living "like a Man cast away upon some desolate Island, that had no body there but himself."

A few pages later, in one of Defoe's calculated ironies, Crusoe is shipwrecked during a slaving expedition, and he begins to understand the reality behind his desert-island hyperbole, as he becomes a real castaway on an island of real desolation. There is no question that Defoe intended to write a morality tale, but as a prolific writer—four hundred works bear his name—he was well enough acquainted with the public's taste to know that for his story to be believed it needed persuasive detail. Crusoe is not high-minded. He is a rebellious son who is attracted to the risky and the morally doubtful. He is inexperienced, not a Londoner but a young provincial, a Yorkshireman. That he is from a reasonably well-off family makes him seem out of touch and a bit innocent. He keeps reminding us how average he is in being incompetent ("I had never handled a tool in my life") and bungling ("I that was born to be my own destroyer"), and he is not at all religious until he finds a Bible among the tools and seeds and paraphernalia he had rescued from the smashed ship.

He survives by growing and maturing. But he does more than survive—he ends by ruling the island; by becoming, if not wise, then sensible; by acquiring power and using it with understanding. He progresses from being an almost-victim to being an almost-dictator. One of the most satisfying aspects of the novel is that in order to prevail over the natural obstacles of his island, Crusoe has to learn the rudiments of civilization. For this to happen, he must become acquainted with the paradox that his desert island is both a prison and a kingdom—he uses those very words. Early on, he calls himself a prisoner and describes his anguish. Later, he speaks of "the sixth year of my Reign, or my Captivity, which you please." After some time passes and his confidence grows, his hut is a "castle," and with the appearance (and conversion from cannibalism) of Friday, he thinks of himself as a ruler. At last, with his rescue of the Spaniards and Friday's father, he says, "My island was now peopled and I thought myself very rich in subjects; and it was a merry reflection which I frequently made, How like a King I looked." He thinks of himself as an absolute ruler, even a despot, but a benevolent one.

Whenever the subject of
Robinson Crusoe
comes up, the name Alexander Selkirk is mentioned. Selkirk (1676–1721), a Scotsman from the village of Largo, in Fifeshire, was a contemporary of Defoe's. He was a seaman and well-known for his pugnacity—notorious for his having thrown his father down a flight of stairs. During a voyage on a privateer in the Pacific, Selkirk quarreled with his captain and demanded to be put ashore on the remote (and deserted) island of Juan Fernandez, off the coast of Chile. There he remained for four years (1704–9). After his rescue and return to Britain, he became a popular hero. Details of his life as a castaway were published: his living off the land, his thatched-roof huts, his goatskin wardrobe. He said that he hankered for the tranquillity of his simple life on the island. The celebrated essayist Richard Steele interviewed Selkirk and used him as a living illustration of the maxim "He is happiest who confines his wants to natural necessities."

There is no evidence that Defoe ever met Selkirk, but as a journalist he obviously knew the story, and Selkirk was undoubtedly the inspiration for
Robinson Crusoe.
Although Selkirk was apostrophized as a simple-lifer, he was in effect no more than a survivor in extraordinary circumstances. The differences between Crusoe and Selkirk are more significant than the similarities. Selkirk's story is a fairly straightforward tale of survival on a barren island, while Crusoe's is at once a story of atonement and colonization; it is about becoming civilized—at least in eighteenth-century terms, when forcible conversion and slave trading were regarded as elements of civilization.

Selkirk was a pirate who remained a pirate. Crusoe, also an unruly son, is supremely disobedient; his experience on the island (at the mouth of the Orinoco) is both his punishment and his reward, as his island prison is transformed into his kingdom. Crusoe epitomizes perspective. The issue of survival is secondary to the whole debate circling around the matter of point of view, which is summed up in his stating that on the island, "I entertained different Notions of Things." Ambition, arrogance, and greed got him into this fix; rationalism gets him out of it. When he sees the futility of riches on the island, the meaning-lessness of money, the vanity of hoarding, and when he reaches the conclusion "that the good Things of this World are no farther good to us, that they are for our Use," he is on the way to salvation.

The odd thing is that Selkirk is usually represented as a kind of marvel, and of course he wasn't. He was just the singular fellow who returned to tell his tale of solitary survival. Crusoe insists that the reader see him as unexceptional, but as a vivid warning, a living example of the ills of man, beset by hubris and discontent: "I have been in all my Circumstances a Memento to those who are touched with the general Plague of Mankind."

Crusoe is only solitary for part of his ordeal. The dramatic and poignant appearance of the footprint and the serious meditation that follows is one of the episodes that lift this novel to another level of meaning. It also shows Defoe as someone who could speak in the plainest, most convincing way about tools and seeds and grape growing while at the same time being capable of the most profound rumination about the invasion of solitude and society and the definitions of space and time.

Crusoe had lamented his solitude earlier, but no sooner has he conquered it and prevailed over his isolation than he has to reckon with the complexities of human company. The footprint is the beginning of this test of his understanding and the end of his Eden. What follows is like an allegory of the Ascent of Man, for he has to cope with cannibalism, aggression, warfare, and the competitive instinct. By overcoming these obstacles, Crusoe grows stronger. And yet, though he is a hero in a literary sense, he is not heroic in his deeds. His most persuasive quality is his humanity; he is the congenital bumbler who is challenged by circumstances to become competent. And one might add that though the Bible strengthens him, he does not become visibly religious until Friday appears, and then he is sanctimonious.

If
Robinson Crusoe
were a story about holding out against the odds, then everything would hinge on Crusoe's rescue. But this is not the case. By mastering himself, Crusoe masters the island and makes a world of it. He progresses in an almost evolutionary sense from a lowly creature precariously clinging to life at the edge of the island, to being the dominant species on it; he moves from castaway to colonizer. At the end, Crusoe is both, as he says, a king and a "Generalissimo." Defoe's point is that Crusoe need not be rescued, which is emphasized by the fact that no sooner has he been scooped up and told his story than he returns to the island and prospers. It is a success story, of fall and rise. It is also a narrative of purification, with downright details as well as something approaching the spiritual. Not surprisingly, this novel has been in print and popular for almost three hundred years.

W
E ARE CONSTANTLY
told how normal and honorable Thoreau was, yet it seems that we would get much further in understanding him if we began by conceding that he was an odd fish, full of peculiar conceits. He was a loner, and like many loners he was capable of a kind of horrid humor. I think Henry James was mistaken when he described Thoreau as "imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial—he was parochial." But the judgment contains some truth. Thoreau himself said he was possessed of a "crooked genius."

With his irritating self-assurance, no sooner has Thoreau intimated that he is down-to-earth and interested only in the habits of wood-chucks than he begins to quote Homer, in Greek, and sometimes at great length (eight Homeric excursions in his little
Cape Cod
book, for example). He frequently talks of country matters in a way that makes him sound pedantic. Few of his jokes are truly witty. He affects not to like other people or human settlements and can, in saying so, sound misogynistic. He is surprising; he can also be swiftly persuasive.

Some of these qualities characterize
Cape Cod
and are what makes it such an unusual and interesting book. It is unusual even by Thoreau's standards, because it is good-natured about the bleakest of subjects, only glancingly about the Cape (its real subject is the sea), and contains more reverie than actual experience. It appeals to me especially for its location, my own home ground, which is very near Thoreau's. That is one of the most difficult of all travel subjects, the journey near home—Concord is only about sixty-five miles from the Cape. It was a form Thoreau excelled at;
Walden
is another example. Few travel writers have managed this well. Its spirit is summed up in Thoreau's deliberate pronouncement, "I have traveled a good deal in Concord."

Given its modest intention, it is surprising that so much criticism has been leveled against
Cape Cod.
This seems especially cruel since the book is hardly known to the general reader of Thoreau's work. I would guess that many people who have read
Walden,
and know that Thoreau made pencils for a living, and that he influenced Mahatma Gandhi in his essay on civil disobedience, and that his dying words were "Moose ... Indian," are unaware of the existence of
Cape Cod.

All the criticism of the book is posthumous, since the chapters that comprise it were articles that were collected only after Thoreau's death (of tuberculosis, at the fairly early age of forty-five). Henry James was out of sympathy, and dismissive—but what did James know of the outdoors? James Russell Lowell simply reached the wrong conclusions: "Thoreau had no humor, and this implies that he was a sorry logician." Those who knew Thoreau—except for Ellery Channing, his boon companion—found the man a difficult friend and his trips somewhat mystifying. Although cautiously appreciative, Emerson found Thoreau aggressive, and in his essay on the man explained it in a forthright way: "There was something military in his nature not to be subdued."

The subtlest and most eloquent dissent regarding Thoreau's life and writing is Leon Edel's 1970 pamphlet examining Thoreau's personal mythology, stylistic formulas, and ambiguities. Edel sums up Thoreau's as a narcissistic personality. This essay, on a par with the similarly persuasive one by Robert Louis Stevenson, questions the very foundations of
Walden
— how Thoreau was seldom really alone, nor in the wilderness. Thoreau "had access to his mother's cookie jar in town and enjoyed sundry dinners elsewhere." But Edel, who uncovers distinct pathological traits in Thoreau, mentions
Cape Cod
only in passing.

The book has been criticized for containing too much undigested historical material, and for being alternately too lightweight and too learned. At best the critical praise of
Cape Cod
has been patronizing, and it has not become less so with the passage of time. Even eminent Thoreauvians have sniffed at the book. "
Cape Cod
is Thoreau's sunniest book—and least profound," the Thoreau scholar Walter Harding has written. "Too deliberately directed at a vulgar audience to represent him at his best," wrote Joseph Wood Krutch. Thoreau, who was fascinated by queer names and bad puns, would undoubtedly have taken his revenge on the critic and made a wooden crutch joke of his name. In
Cape Cod
we get two groaners: a play on "littoral"/"literal" and a bit of meaningless fun with the Viking "Thor-finn" and the American adventurer "Thor-eau."

But if it were so woeful and inadequate a book, would it have remained in print for more than one hundred years, and, more to the point, if it were so badly written, would Robert Lowell have bothered to plagiarize it for "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket"? (Lines four to twelve of that prize-winning poem are a direct steal from a brilliant paragraph in the chapter "The Shipwreck.") The book is certainly cranky. It is enjoyable for that reason, and for another—its unexpectedness. The narrative contains the first mention of broccoli growing in America (in "The Wellfleet Oysterman"), and though it was not written as a book, but rather ten pieces based on three short trips, it has an unshakable unity. It seems convincingly like one trip, in the way that
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
seems convincingly like one full week (it was in fact two).