The Lesser-Known Aspects of Life (1945-54)

Life in Sac Prairie cannot differ much from life in any other village, apart from superficial regional differences. I thought a long time ago of recording some of the things which never see the light of day in the local weeklies, and so the Sac Prairie Journal came into being...it was meant to be only a record of the lesser-known aspects of life in Sac Prairie. It was never meant for publication...

          -- August Derleth, "Program Note" to Village Year

The first volume of Derleth's published journals was Village Year, published in 1941. Two more appeared before the last volume, Wisconsin Country, came out in 1965. Each volume covers up to three years of life in Sac Prairie and the surrounding country, as observed and recorded by Derleth.

The journal is full of variety. Even more so than in Derleth's novels, there is plenty of acute observation of nature: wildlife, plants, the weather and the changing seasons. And the human inhabitants of the region are put under the microscope and analysed. Comedy and tragedy is played out in equal measure, and recorded. Meeting me at the Royal Blue Store today, Orva Dresen observed, "You know, I think Village Year ought to have been called Village Fear."

Nothing seemed to escape Derleth's eye and comment. In Upper Sac Prairie this evening, I came upon an old sign scrawled upon a wall along a back street: Landon or Bust! Beneath it, someone had subsequently written: Bust then!!

Nothing seemed to escape Derleth's hearing, whether it is the death of his grandmother, or the slanderous comments of the village Roman Catholic priest, or simply the pretensions of some of Sac Prairie's older residents. ...Miss Ilsa Lahman passed: she who has always had delusions of grandeur...walking in her characteristic fashion, as if on eggshells, with the appearance of a slight limp: a hitch, actually. When asked what was wrong with Miss Lahman, Jo Merk replied, "She got that walking up and down the stairs in her medieval air castles."  

Walden Pond: Homage to Thoreau (1968) was a small book containing extracts from the journals describing the three visits that Derleth made to Walden Pond between 1938 and 1965. Derleth compared and contrasted his experience of Walden with that of Henry David Thoreau. Turning over his words in this place where, conceivably, they had taken shape for him, I was made to think of Sac Prairie, where, I suppose, I engage life in somewhat similar circumstances, allowing for a century's advance in time... There are still solitary places in the woods and the marshes around Sac Prairie where, as Thoreau found it at Walden, only a railroad can be seen to remind one of civilization...

Material from the journals also found its way into two of Derleth's finest books (or, rather, what amounts to one book in two volumes): Walden West (1961) and Return to Walden West (1970). These were described as expositions on three related themes:

           I On the persistence of memory.
          II On the sounds and odors of the country.
         III Of Thoreau: The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Derleth explores these themes in a succession of prose-poems alternating with autobiographical fragments and essays about some of the people living alongside him in Sac Prairie.

The prose-poems describe aspects of nature -- a sight, sound, smell: something that triggers a memory, or captures for an instant the landscape or village in the midst of the changing year.

The essays once again show the pains that Derleth took with his research into Sac Prairie history, his observations of other people, and his self-understanding as a creative artist in the place which provided his inspiration. Derleth determined to know the patterns of the world of which he himself was an integral part by choice, determined to seek and find, yet knowing 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.