On three complex and compelling sides to a New England river.
As the presentations and conversations at my
upcoming NeMLA panel will illustrate, rivers have occupied a complex and
central place in the American imagination for centuries. One of the most
exemplary literary engagements with both the realities and the meanings of such
settings focuses on two central Massachusetts rivers: Henry David Thoreau’s
travel and nature book A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). But the Housatonic,
the river that winds its way through the Berkshires, has likewise been the
subject of a couple connected and interesting cultural works: Robert Underwood
Johnson’s poem “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” which illustrates how late
19th century local color (or regionalist) poetry made potent
symbolic use of such regional settings; and Charles Ives’ orchestral “The Housatonic at
Stockbridge,” which uses Johnson’s poem as the text for the third and final
movement in his influential and profoundly American symphony Three
Places in New England (1914).
If Thoreau’s writings partly foreshadowed such regionalist and metaphorical
portrayals of natural settings, however, they also anticipated and overtly
influenced a very different kind of engagement with America’s rivers (and
nature in general): the
environmental movement. And viewed through the lens and concerns of that
movement, the Housatonic represents something similarly distinct: the
destructive influences of industry on the American landscape. Beginning in the
early 1930s, significant quantities of the hazardous chemical
PCB, produced by the nearby General Electric Plant, began to pollute the
river, drastically impacting both its natural life and its usage and role in
local communities for nearly half a century. Thanks to environmental activism,
and to the Clean Water Act
(1972) that is one of the movement’s most enduring legacies, the Housatonic has apparently largely
recovered from the worst of that pollution. But remembering this history
helps us recognize that the realities of American rivers have been as complex
and as significant as any metaphorical use we might make of them.
The third Housatonic history I want to highlight here would seem far less
directly related to the river, but is perhaps the most broadly meaningful in
American culture: the river indirectly helped launch the career of Langston
Hughes, one of our greatest poets. Hughes’ first published poem, completed
when he was only 19, was “The Negro Speaks of
Rivers” (1921); the poem
was published in The Crisis, the
monthly magazine of the NAACP. W.E.B. Du Bois, the creator and editor of The Crisis, had grown up on the
Housatonic in the town of Great Barringon (on which more tomorrow), and would write extensively
later in life about the lifelong passion for rivers that this experience
produced. And while Hughes’ poem needed no specific cause for its
publication—its greatness is only amplified when we realized how young he was
when he wrote it—Du Bois would later write that the poem stood out for him
(among the many submissions he constantly received) in no small measure because
of its deft, multi-layered, historical and cultural and realistic and metaphorical
and crucial use of rivers.
Next Berkshire story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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