Walking Home Ground

by Robert Root

  When I look for a way to walk August Derleth’s home ground, it’s to the nature interludes in the Walden West books that I turn.

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  “A memoir of my interior life,” as August Derleth called it in the autographed first edition copy I own, seems a fair description of Walden West. Although the journal books that preceded it, Village Year and Village Daybook, and the ones that followed it, Countryman’s Journal and Wisconsin Country, are largely casual and conversational, they aren’t as intimate or as insistently reflective about his life as Walden West is.

  Those “three related themes”—“the persistence of memory,” “the sounds and odors of the country,” and “The mass of men lead[ing] lives of quiet desperation”—run throughout the book. Derleth’s epigraphs for the book are the quote taken from Thoreau about living deliberately, later carved onto his tombstone, and a line from Pluies (Rains) by Saint-John Perse, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960: “Innombrables sont nos voies, et nos demeures incertaines” (“Innumerable are our ways, and our dwellings uncertain”). Both epigraphs speak to the intentionality behind the book and behind its author’s life. In the prologue, explaining his decision to return permanently to Sac Prairie after a mere six months away, Derleth sounds a Thoreauvian note:

  I set about to write so that I might afford the leisure in which to improve my acquaintance with the setting and the inhabitants—hills, trees, ponds, people, birds, animals, sun, moon, stars—of the region I had chosen to inhabit, not as a retreat, but as a base of operations into a life more full in the knowledge of what went on in the woods as well as in the houses along the streets of Sac Prairie and in the human heart.

  The book proper begins with an italicized section—these interludes, usually reflecting on nature, occur throughout the book—recounting something of Sac Prairie’s past and declaring it to be, in essence, a microcosm of “countless other villages” throughout the country. It is a country, he writes, “to be explored . . . by a walker in its lanes and byways, . . . a walker bent upon knowing the least bird as well as the least fellowman, an explorer of past time as well as of today.” The figure he’s portraying is himself, of course, someone “determined to know the patterns of the world of which he himself was an integral part by choice,” yet someone well aware “that what every man knows about himself and his world is but the most infinitesimal part of knowledge, and what he can know about someone else and someone else’s world is even less than that.” Walking home ground for August Derleth was a different experience than it was for John Muir or Aldo Leopold because Derleth was tied to its past as well as to its present, and to its community as well as to its environment.

  Derleth’s ancestors had come from Zinl, Bavaria, to the United States in 1839 and to Sauk City, Wisconsin’s oldest incorporated village, in 1852. His great-grandfather established a blacksmith shop, which his grandfather and his father ran in their turns, and which was an important site in Derleth’s upbringing. In the early sections of Walden West he talks about the childhood influences of family and teachers, Grandfather Derleth prominent among them. His grandfather often took him fishing at Lodde’s millpond southwest of town and talked to him about life: “He preached honesty and honor and truth, he spoke of the value of money and the need of man to work, which were lessons I never forgot.” Derleth credits Sister Anaclete at St. Aloysius Catholic School with inspiring him to be creative and Sister Isabelle with fostering his interest in both nature and writing. A spinster named Annie Maegerlin gave him clippings of Thornton W. Burgess’s nature stories from which he traces a path “straight to Thoreau by way of Ernest Thompson Seton and John Burroughs.” Derleth in essence charts the path of his creative life in those early segments.

  It was his high school teacher, Miss Frieda Schroeder, who entangled him with Thoreau and Emerson. Derleth admits to having had a crush on the young, attractive woman and being inspired to read classic American literature to win her approval. “I took up Emerson’s Essays, and what I read there and in Walden profoundly influenced the course of my life,” he claims, perhaps because “I was already then conditioned to accept without question what I read in Emerson and Thoreau.” He felt, “There is in every life the right time for enlightenment . . . and I had come to it, and the door had been opened for the light to flow in . . . only such a light as to illumine my own path through the years ahead.” He wrote that what he “found profoundly true in Emerson, I found even more true to my nature in Thoreau’s Walden,” where he discovered “justification for my dawning belief that . . . Sac Prairie was the microcosm that reflected the macrocosm of the world.” These are sentiments that occur elsewhere in his writing, often in almost the same words.

  The section on Miss Schroeder is followed immediately by a long profile of Josephine Merk, the librarian at the public library, who was his friend for many years and whose slow death is recorded in entries of Village Year, and finally by a section on H. P. Lovecraft, who was a correspondent and an influence on Derleth’s work in genre fiction. Derleth claimed that Lovecraft “had found his private Walden, near rural areas of his childhood’s city, Providence, Rhode Island” and had written that “a man belongs where he has roots—where the landscape and the milieu have some relation to his thoughts and feelings, by virtue of having formed them.” Derleth credited Lovecraft, along with Frieda Schroeder and Josephine Merk, with guiding his reading and reinforcing his decision to write about Sac Prairie, “to remain in this western Walden and draw from it my sustenance and strength.”

  Long before Derleth began the conscious effort to compose Walden West, he was practicing the principles it espouses: commitment to native terrain, close observation of natural and social events and behaviors, meticulous recordkeeping of daily experiences. One can read Derleth’s personal journal as a kind of phenology of Sac Prairie, not only of its wildlife but of its citizenry as well. As early as 1939 he published Atmosphere of Houses, a forty-five-page book he claimed was taken from Evening in Spring, a novel that wouldn’t be published until 1941—actually it’s an expansion and enlargement on a theme sounded at only a few different places in the novel. Atmosphere of Houses is nonfiction, centering on houses as a way into the lives of their occupants. In Walden West Derleth returns to that theme: “Often, walking the streets and lanes of Sac Prairie, I have been made to think that houses exist on an extraterrestrial plane—not merely as structures of wood or stone, of glass and brick, but as edifices created by people and events, the people who have lived in them and the events of their existence.” He explains,

  This atmosphere of houses becomes in time an integral part of the night life of the mind of the village dweller; as for instance when one nears a park conscious of the deeper darkness there is in that part of town, so one nears and passes houses with cognizance of their existence in an aura or atmosphere of past time inextricably linked with the present. And in Sac Prairie this was all the more so as the years passed.

  He recalls one summer when he habitually walked from the back street to the main street of Upper Sac Prairie and felt “the atmosphere of houses was as inescapable as the very air I breathed, and indeed a part of that air.”

  This is the distinguishing characteristic of Derleth’s version of Walden—profiles of individuals he encounters are as central to his writing as the natural terrain he wanders. Sometimes the profiles are admiring or affectionate, often they confirm the quiet desperation with which these people lead their lives, but always they are compassionate and empathetic, partly because Derleth himself, for all his gregariousness, feels a bond with the isolated and the solitary. Of such a figure early in the book, Joe Lippert, the riverman who “was a solitary by inclination,” Derleth claims, “when he died at last, he left behind him a legacy so strong that I never walked into the islands along his old paths without the conviction that I might meet him at any moment.” In the houses he describes, the Keysers live and die alone; Harry Mills kills himself over his thwarted love affair with Jenny Baker, who, denied
his love by her parents, never marries; Ella Bickford pines away for a lost love; and a son-in-law in the Cummings house shoots himself and his son is institutionalized. Relatively few of the people Derleth observes without befriending end happily or live without desperation.

  To walk August Derleth’s home ground, then, is not only to walk the hills, prairies, and riverbanks but also to walk village streets and lanes and country backroads. And yet the nature writing in Walden West has a particular intensity and drive. Thirty-six italicized segments break up the profiles and narrative reminiscences in roman (unitalicized) type. As Norbert Blei has observed, in a very shrewd article on the book, “approximately four of these sections appear only indirectly concerned with nature.” He cites the opening interlude, one about a single-track train, one about Christmas cookie cutters, and one about watching Hugo Schwenker at work. The thirty-two interludes concerned with nature tend to concentrate on wildlife—purple martins, grackles, woodcocks, veeries, whip-poor-wills, hawks, peewees, song sparrows, frogs, snakes, the wind—or on odors—the “musk” of the river, the smell of grass, the perfume of spring—or on seasons—autumn, winter, spring, summer, the vernal equinox—or on locations—the Spring Slough, the bottoms, the marshes, the Big Hill.

  Often in these interludes the hour is late, evening or night; usually the narrator is a solitary walker, content to be an observer of the natural world, content to be alone in his sauntering. The italicized segments make up less than a fifth of the book—yet, mixed within his reflections and narratives about his own life and the lives of fellow townspeople, these interludes bring a restorative sense of calm. What Derleth notices and records in his ramblings on the outskirts of his town helps center him. He identifies with the lives of quiet desperation his neighbors lead, but the natural world he goes out into makes him feel less solitary, more connected to something lasting, something less desperate.

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  When you read the works of a single author, it’s often easy to isolate that writer from the community of writers to which he belonged. I’m struck by the proximity of Fountain Lake Farm, the shack, and Sac Prairie to one another and curious whether these writers affected one another. John Muir arrived in Wisconsin two years after Henry Thoreau left the woods at Walden Pond; and when Thoreau died, in 1862, Muir was a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin. Muir studied with James Davie Butler, who, according to Edwin Way Teale, was a friend and disciple of Ralph Waldo Emerson, introduced Muir to the writing of Emerson and Thoreau, and encouraged Muir to keep a journal. Muir came to know Emerson and in later years visited the graves of both Emerson and Thoreau, whose portraits he kept on the mantel of his home in California. References to Thoreau pop up in Muir’s writing; one of Muir’s early essays seems particularly indebted to the essay “Walking,” and Muir biographer Frederick Turner claims that Muir “could quote whole passages from [Thoreau’s] works, especially Walden.” Emerson reportedly had said, “Muir would be the perfect man to edit Thoreau’s works.”

  When John Muir died in 1914, Aldo Leopold was twenty-seven, a Yale graduate in forestry working for the US Forest Service in New Mexico, who would come to Wisconsin in 1924. Leopold was familiar with the writing of both Thoreau and Muir. He cites each of them in A Sand County Almanac, and, shortly before his sudden death on Muir’s birthday in 1948, he proposed that Muir’s boyhood farm site be designated a state natural area. One curious concurrence of events was Leopold’s study of cranes on Endeavor Marsh along the west bank of the Fox River, several miles from where Muir grew up. We can’t make too much of that coincidence except to note that in 1935, years after Leopold wrote “Marshland Elegy,” the earliest piece in what became A Sand County Almanac, he found his own farm site along the Wisconsin River and began the work that might restore his land to the condition in which Muir had first encountered his.

  That same year, farther downstream on the Wisconsin, August Derleth, a twenty-six-year-old graduate of the University of Wisconsin, where Muir had gone to school and Leopold was teaching forestry management, had settled into a life centered in the community into which he’d been born and raised, his Sac Prairie. During the time remaining to Leopold, roughly twelve years, Derleth’s nature writing would appear scattered across various magazines, in two books drawn from his journals, and in The Wisconsin: River of a Thousand Isles (1942), his contribution to the Rivers of America series.

  The two men seemed to have had contact only during one short period. On May 27, 1943, Leopold wrote to Derleth complimenting him on The Wisconsin and mentioning a few individuals he thought worthy of Derleth’s attention as “notables” from the Wisconsin River region. Leopold also enclosed correspondence from Louis Clas. Leopold had been charged with evaluating Clas’s proposal to donate to the University of Wisconsin land on Bergen’s Island, across the river from Sauk City. Leopold wrote to Derleth, “I wonder if you would tell me by scribbling one sentence at the bottom of this letter whether you see in his island any notable or biological values.” He specifically assured Derleth that he needn’t explain his reasons but, “if your reply indicates a doubt,” Leopold would be willing to withhold judgment “until we can talk the thing over.”

  There seems to be no record of Derleth’s side of the correspondence, but Leopold’s letters to Derleth are archived, and Derleth’s conversation with Clas is mentioned in Derleth’s journal. The entry for June 6, 1943, remarks that Clas, then eighty-two, walked out to Derleth’s house that morning “to discuss the disposition of the Class [sic] acreage on Bergen’s Island, which had been offered to the University of Wisconsin, and about which Aldo Leopold had written him. He had also written me.” Clas claimed that he had persuaded various nieces and nephews to renounce any claim to the property and expressed an eagerness to be rid of it before he died. The man stayed an hour and a half, giving a rambling account of his memories of the island, and when he left, Derleth only commented, “Thereafter I returned to my work, considerably behind.”

  Apparently, though, Derleth did respond to Leopold. On June 8, Leopold wrote back to thank Derleth for his willingness “to take a look at the place with me” and promised to write “shortly, proposing a particular time.” In an undated handwritten note to Derleth on the same letterhead stationery as the typed letters, sent on a Thursday, Leopold promised he would call at Derleth’s place that Saturday, “in the hope that you can show me Mr. Clas’ island.” Leopold likely would have been on his way to or staying at the shack over the weekend.

  Derleth makes no mention in his journal of having met with Leopold or visiting Bergen’s Island with him. But on July 9, Leopold wrote to Clas, turning down his offer. “I have looked over the island in company with Mr. August Derleth, who kindly showed me the property lines and the vegetation,” Leopold wrote, mentioning that “Mr. Derleth pointed out to me that even in the absence of any immediate use, the maintenance costs would be negligible” and assuring Clas, “Personally, I am keenly appreciative of the things the island has on it, particularly the wahoo, woodcock, and partridge.” Derleth received a copy of this letter, and Leopold sent him a further explanation a few days later: “I found that the University has a fixed policy against accepting gifts of land for which it has no foreseeable use. That knocked out our island.”

  No further mention of Derleth shows up in Leopold’s archives, but in Derleth’s I find the review he wrote of A Sand County Almanac for his “Minority Report” column in the Capital Times, dated November 5, 1949. It’s a very positive, enthusiastic review of both the book and the writer. Derleth wrote, “All genuine conservationists throughout Wisconsin and the Midwest generally realized that in the death of Aldo Leopold Wisconsin lost one of its most able men in the field of conservation.” Leopold’s book was “one of those rare volumes to which sensitive and intelligent readers will turn again and again,” a book “certain to become a minor nature classic, and a milepost in conservation literature.” He admired the way Leopold “makes one see and hear the aspects of earth he sees and hears—the sk
unk coming from hibernation in dead of winter, the carp exploring the inundated land, the gabbling of migratory geese, the sky dance of the woodcock, the upland plover, trout fishing, etc.” He quotes liberally from Leopold’s foreword, letting the author’s words carry the most weight, and concludes that the book deserves a place on bookshelves beside Thoreau and Burroughs and other nature writers.

  Though Leopold was clearly the more learned and scientifically educated of the two men, Derleth was thoroughly knowledgeable about the flora and fauna of Sac Prairie and the islands and bottomlands along the Wisconsin River. I suspect that, on the occasion of their tour of Bergen’s Island, they made amiable company, the tall, burly writer in his thirties and the slender, solid professor in his fifties. They likely followed Derleth’s route from his house on Lueders Road to the railroad trestle and crossed to the island that way. I can imagine them standing on the trestle looking off at Bergen’s Island and wish someone had been around to photograph the moment; I’d also like to see a picture of Derleth at the shack, taking a look at what Leopold and his family were up to, sitting with Leopold on a Leopold bench against the front wall. As of this moment, however, I have no evidence that Derleth ever visited the shack.

  There’s no reason to think that Derleth had any impact on Leopold’s writing. But it’s possible that Leopold’s writing had some impact on Derleth.

  Derleth tended to write and to publish as quickly as he could. His prolific output of historical novels, mysteries, horror stories, juvenile books, biographies, histories, and poems is virtually the first fact anyone ever learns about him. He had an outsized ambition in regard to his Sac Prairie Saga, which at one point was to comprise fifty novels, and he drew upon his voluminous journals for some of the nonfiction books he compiled. To read the journal books consecutively (though not in the order published) is, in essence, to cover the years 1935–1942 in Derleth’s life and the life of his community: Village Year covers December 1935–December 1938; Village Daybook, January 1939–December 1940; Wisconsin Country, 1941; and Countryman’s Journal, 1942.