The Spirit of the Huckleberry: Sensuousness in Henry Thoreau

Bruce Whiteman is Head of Rare Books at the McGill University Libraries
and author of The Invisible World Is in Decline, Books II to IV.

Victor Carl Friesen has taught English at various colleges and universities, and this study of Thoreau is, like many a scholarly book, a revision of his doctoral dissertation. Friesen is particularly qualified as a Thoreau scholar, for his personal interests extend well beyond literature to include natural history, a subject very much at the centre of Thoreau’s writing.

One cannot complain of The Spirit of the Huckleberry, as one can of so many theses-transformed-into-monographs, that its style would have repelled its subject. Friesen has chosen to write in a relatively straightforward manner, largely free of jargon and the anfractuosities of academic prose, and his choice makes reading the book a pleasant rather than an arduous task.

Friesen has singled out as one key to Thoreau’s life and work his immense joy in and dependence on his senses. Beginning with his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Thoreau’s writing exhibits not merely the practical skills of the learned naturalist but a highly developed degree of sensuousness that directs both his subject matter and his style. Friesen explores this emphasis and its influence on Thoreau’s views on economics, nature mysticism, science, and so on. While The Spirit of the Huckleberry is in no sense an exhaustive study — nor does it pretend to be — it nevertheless illuminates an aspect of Thoreau’s work that hitherto has been insufficiently remarked.