Journal-ist

Charles Burchfield was a painter, mostly of watercolors, who kept an almost daily journal for 56 years. Written in pencil, ink and crayon, it amounted to 10,000 manuscript pages and more than 2 million words. J. Benjamin Townsend spent 15 years reading, collating, transcribing and editing the life-in-words, which has housed at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center, in Buffalo, since the artist’s death in 1967. In 1993, the State University of New York published the result: Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, Townsend’s 737-page selection, arranged chronologically within thematic categories. We can be grateful for Townsend’s labors: The generous volume is prudently edited and intelligently annotated, and even readers without an interest in Burchfield or American art can enjoy the journals for what Townsend calls, flat-footedly, their “great social and cultural interest.”

“They also provide,” Townsend writes in his Introduction, “a strikingly late culmination of two major literary genres: the capture in journal form of a vanishing native landscape and the nineteenth-century spiritual autobiography.”

Yes, Townsend is an English professor. In contrast to Burchfield, who is consistently bluff, focused on the near-at-hand and naïvely appreciative of almost everything, Townsend drags in irrelevant references and detects allusions where none exist. His index, for instance, includes six references to Walt Whitman, but all refer to Townsend’s own citations in introductory material. There’s no evidence in the journal that Burchfield read Whitman or even knew who his was. In fact, among 19th-century American poets, Burchfield seemed partial to the school-marm favorites – Longfellow, Bryant and Whittier. Among the moderns he preferred Vachel Lindsay and Robert Frost (whom Burchfield visited in 1924, in Vermont). There are single citations in the index to Eliot and Pound, but again they refer to Townsend’s words, not Burchfield’s.

Burchfield had exceptional taste in literature. He loved the great Russian fiction writers of the 19th century – Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. He read Yeats’ play as early as 1915. He read and appreciated Winesburg, Ohio, when it was published in 1919. He adored Willa Cather, read all of her books as they appeared, and internalized her vision. Here’s a journal entry, ostensibly non-literary, from Oct. 15, 1948:

“The grass colors beautiful – orange yellow, sun-lit, rich reddish brown, pastel shades of pale brown pink, pale ochre, light gray creamy white, and some weed that gave off a slate gray color. With the sunlit fields of dead grass against a blue-black eastern sky, I thought of My Antonia.”

He returned repeatedly to Lewis Carroll, and read all of the prolific John Burroughs and John Muir. He knew Emerson and was deeply read in Thoreau, both Walden and the journals. He identified deeply with Thoreau. Burchfield wrote this passage on July 23, 1914, when he was 21:

“Spend afternoon reading Thoreau’s Walden. From a chance quotation from his `Autumn’ in a magazine which was, in brief, his sole entry for Nov. 14, 1860, -- `Yellow Butterflies Still’ – I expected a book more of a chronology of nature than a philosophical treatise, but the book is nonetheless interesting and vital. In it I find that he was pursued by the same doubts as I am myself and I have derived from him a new courage, for he speaks from having met & conquered the doubts.”

Burchfield first read Moby-Dick in 1924, near the start of the Melville revival, and frequently quoted it in his journal. Townsend says the experience “awakened in him the nationalist heroic spirit.” He reread the novel in 1938, quoted a passage from Chapter CXXXII (“The Symphony”), and wrote: “Nowhere, I believe, but in the Bible, is there such fine writing as that.” Burchfield also repeatedly read Robinson Crusoe, The Call of the Wild and Knut Hamsun’s The Growth of the Soil.

He read Gone With the Wind and saw the movie, and judged it “tiring and exhausting.” On March 6, 1942, he noted of the film: “I am more than ever convinced that to have a [great] work of art, you must first have a great theme.” I wonder if he was consciously echoing Melville’s exhortation in Chapter CIV (“The Fossil Whale”) of Moby-Dick:

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.”

Burchfield graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1916. He never received a conventional liberal-arts education, but his culture was broad. He loved music (especially Sibelius) and movies, and read for the best reasons: pleasure and self-knowledge.