SOURCE: Hesford, Walter. “‘Incessant Tragedies’: A Reading of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” ELH 44, no. 3 (fall 1977): 515‐24.

[In the following essay, Hesford interprets A Week as a call for faith in response to the incessant tragedies of nature and life.]

There are studies of Henry Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers which begin to do justice to its structure, style, and import. Even the most astute and sympathetic critics¹ have not, however, accounted, I think, for the power, the impression of the book, perhaps because they are generally preoccupied with its merits as a transcendental document. A Week is Thoreau's impressive attempt to confront the “incessant tragedies” (236)² which he perceives and in which he participates; through his perceptions and participation, he fulfills his fate. In Walden, Thoreau works his way beyond fate and tragedy, but in his first book he is concerned with working his way into their phenomenal presence in nature, on the road, in history, in art, and in his personal experience.

Of course A Week introduces us to the vitality and happiness of nature, to such facts as would lead to the conclusion Thoreau drew in “Natural History of Massachusetts”: “Surely joy is the condition of life.”³ Yet this conclusion is not without its ambiguity, if we consider the condition of joy. A rich sentence from the opening chapter of A Week, describing the scene at Bound Rock on the Sudbury River, engages us in such a consideration:

Many waves are there agitated by the wind, keeping nature fresh, the spray blowing in your face, reeds and rushes waving; ducks by the hundred, all uneasy in the surf, in the raw wind, just ready to rise, and now going off with a clatter and a whistling like riggers straight for Labrador, flying against the stiff gale with reefed wings, or else circling round first, with all their paddles briskly moving, just over the surf, to reconnoitre you before they leave these parts; gulls wheeling overhead, muskrats swimming for dear life, wet and cold, with no fire to warm them by that you know of, their labored homes rising here and there like haystacks; and countless mice and moles and winged titmice along the sunny, windy shore; cranberries tossed on the waves and heaving up on the beach, their little red skiffs beating about among the alders;—such healthy natural tumult as proves the last day is not yet at hand.

(5‐6)

Like many scenes in the book, the one at Bound Rock is all‐inclusive, reaching out from the river up through the sky and over to the shores. It reaches out to us: the spray blows in our face. The action takes place in Thoreau's moment of perception, in his continuous present, and in our present: the ducks are “now going off with a clatter.” Thoreau makes this joyous scene ours, but also calls us to acknowledge the perilous condition of joy. In the midst of the “healthy natural tumult,” the muskrats swim “for dear life, wet and cold, with no fire to warm them by that you know of …” Like the Walden phase, “living is so dear,”⁴ the idiom “for dear life” suggests both the richness and riskiness, the beauty and tenuousness of existence. Our enjoyment of the tumult is sharpened by our sense of the struggle for survival it involves.

The vitality of nature is nowhere more evident than in the fish population of the Concord. Thoreau takes plenty of time in “Saturday” to celebrate the life within his native river. On the river bottom there is “a tragic feature in the scenery”: lamprey eels wasting away and dying, “clinging to rocks and stumps of trees for an indefinite period” (31). Thoreau's sympathies, however, are chiefly evoked by the shad, blocked by a dam from migrating up the Concord, yet kept by its instinct just below the dam, “awaiting new instructions” (35). “When nature gave thee instinct,” asks Thoreau, “gave she thee the heart to bear thy fate?” Thoreau naturally sides with the shad in its struggle, shares the burden of its fate, looks forward to a day of liberation (36).

The hard fate of dumb creatures is more pathetic than tragic. When Thoreau becomes a factor in their suffering, however, the drama heightens. Midday Tuesday, Thoreau and his brother find the woods along shore “alive with pigeons.” He hails his fellow sojourners as “greater travelers far than we” (235), but his high opinion of the “handsome birds” does not keep him from shooting one for supper. “It is true,” he admits,

it did not seem to be putting this bird to its right use to pluck off its feathers, and extract its entrails, and broil its carcass on the coals; but we heroically persevered, nevertheless, waiting for further information … we would fulfill fate, and so at length, perhaps, detect the secret innocence of these incessant tragedies which Heaven allows.

(236)

As the shad awaits “new instructions,” so Thoreau awaits “further information”; in the mean time, he fulfills fate, and so involves himself in “incessant tragedies.” Though he ends by presenting himself as a subject of heaven doing what is allowed, he begins by vividly detailing his deed, making it appear as brutal as possible, and making himself out to be heroic in his perseverance.

Thoreau engages in the activities—according to some, the activity—of fallen man, and, as such, feels both independence and guilt.⁵ He can assuage his guilt by setting his deed in the context of what goes on under the auspices of Mother Nature and the Heavenly Father:

Nature herself has not provided the most graceful end for her creatures. What becomes of all these birds that people the air and forest for our solacement? The sparrows seem always chipper, never infirm. We do not see their bodies lie about. Yet there is a tragedy at the end of each one of their lives. They must perish miserably; not one of them is translated. True, “not a sparrow falleth to the ground without our Heavenly Father's knowledge,” but they do fall nevertheless.

(236‐37)

Thoreau does nothing more than precipitate the fall, the tragedy that one must see as the common fate, whether one has a natural or a supernatural perspective.

In Walden, Thoreau awakens to the “secret innocence” of nature, passes through the doubt of winter, awakens to the dawn, the spring, and the “perfect summer life” beyond. The cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons, and the cycle of rebirth experienced by the pond reflect and sponsor Thoreau's triumphant liberation. In A Week, the evolutions of nature do not free Thoreau from fate, do not effect the discovery of innocence. Each “sweet day” dies (335), and the voyage ends in the dark of night. In the course of the voyage, summer turns to fall. Throughout the book, we are made to feel that we are enjoying a golden moment on the edge of fall; when it comes, Thoreau makes sure we notice (356‐61). The brothers take a round‐trip on the rivers, but the last sentence of the opening chapter suggests that the symbolic course of the trip is, for Thoreau, like the course of rivers, downstream:

I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is made; the weeds at the bottom gently bending down the stream, shaken by the watery wind, still planted where their seeds had sunk, but ere long to die and go down likewise; the shining pebbles, not yet anxious to better their condition, the chips and weeds, and occasional logs and stems of trees that floated past, fulfilling their fate, were objects of singular interest to me, and at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me.

(11)

The next sentence, which opens “Saturday,” has as subject the inclusive “we.” In the one above, however, Thoreau speaks for himself, speaks of the particular association between his fate and the river.

Thoreau first depicts and creates the complex action of the scene before him. By placing “an emblem of all progress” in opposition to “the lapse of the current,” he makes us suspicious of the surface meaning of both phrases. For “lapse” we might read “flow” or “fall”—the fall could be forward or backward. For “current” we might look beneath “the river's force” and find “present.” When we are then told that this ambiguous movement is “an emblem of all progress,” we suspect that Thoreau has constructed a paradox that suggests that progress is a fall, both temporal and spatial: “time” and “all that is made” partake of this paradox. This reading is encouraged by the description of the river's relation to “all that is made”: weeds flourish and pebbles shine on the bottom, yet to “fulfill their fate” or “better their condition” they must go downstream with everything else; the weeds must die.

Thoreau's decision to join these objects fulfilling their fate is very deliberate: “at last I resolved to launch myself …” He seems the heroic voyager resolute for adventure. But heroism subsides into passivity: he will float whither the bosom of the river will bear him. An initial aggressive, “masculine” drive is followed by submission to the “maternal.” The purpose and direction implicit in Thoreau's resolve are given over to the river—he can now simply “float.” Of course his journey is not directionless, and he travels where and when he intends. Nevertheless, the maternal, passive resolution is not merely a literary convention. To go on the road is to undergo the experience of delivery.

“The traveler must be born again on the road,” writes Thoreau, “and earn a passport from the elements, the principal powers that be for him” (326). The pilgrim in his progress is born again through supernatural grace; the modern traveler has a natural rebirth, the violence of which is associated with his personal history: “He shall experience at last that old threat of his mother fulfilled, that he shall be skinned alive” (326). For Thoreau, as we shall see, there is a further association between the radical yet motherly character of this experience and the experience of history, particularly American history. The rebirth on the road is, to be sure, a joyous occasion and has exciting consequences. The traveler finds himself both on the frontier of “reality” and at the center of the universe (324, 354). He matures, comes out of himself; the road is, above all, “that which invites us to come out of ourselves.”⁶ This process involves, however, a loss of youth, of home, of innocence, a loss deeply felt by someone as attached to all three as Thoreau. The process carries for him the weight of fateful necessity. Furthermore, he realizes the danger that in coming out of himself he will become a divided self; as his self‐consciousness develops, the traveler may grow apart from his natural self, as well as from nature. A Week bears witness to this danger; Walden suggests a rescue.

Like many road books, A Week offers the reader a quantum of past, apprehended time and space that remains apprehensible, here and now, a phenomenal world which the traveler‐author has possessed through vision and imagination. Yet also like many road books, it conveys the difficulty of holding on to time and space and of closing the distance between ourselves and what we desire, what lies forever “out there.” This difficulty, as experienced by the traveler‐author, culminates in a sense of the hard, tragic fate of those who spend their life on the road (326). Only in death do road heroes such as Ahab close the distance and grasp the “reality” they deem themselves fated to seek.

The road is a conventional emblem of a history that is fateful, purposeful, and progressive. In A Week, Thoreau assesses the progress of all history as he assesses his own progress through time and space. Mythology, which preserves and perpetuates the essentials of history, contains the story of the various transformations that gave rise to the human race, and hints of future transformations (165). The manner in which arose the mythology adhered to by Thoreau's audience, “the Christian fable,” makes evident the cost of progress:

With what pains, and tears, and blood these centuries have woven this and added it to the mythology of mankind! The new Prometheus. With what miraculous consent, and patience, and persistency has this mythus been stamped on the memory of the race! It would seem as if it were in the progress of our mythology to dethrone Jehovah, and crown Christ in his stead.

(67)

The fall of an old‐guard god is a melancholy romantic theme, and the rise of the new mythology is catastrophic. This “mythus” itself is essentially tragic: “If it is not a tragical life we live, then I know not what to call it. Such a story as that of Jesus Christ,—the history of Jerusalem, say, being a part of the Universal History” (67). Thoreau expresses the traditional belief that the life of Christ typifies and summarizes the tragedy of each man and the tragedy of all men, the tragedy of history. Thoreau does not express the traditional belief in the ultimate triumph of Christ and the consequent redemption of each man and history. For him, history has a fixed tragic motif, evident in the history of Jerusalem, embossed in an old Roman coin, the “Judaea Capta,” with “a woman mourning under a palm tree,” which, when recovered, “confirms the pages of history” (264).

In A Week, Thoreau is especially interested in recovering American antiquities, and in giving a reading of American history. He claims the rocks and trees as honorable “ruins,” solid evidence of a substantial past. The history that unfolds among the rocks and trees of America is basically, for Thoreau, the story of the conflict of two races, the red and the white. Just as European crops and flowers “supplanted” native ones, so Europeans “supplanted” the native Americans (3, 52‐53). This process is celebrated by the majority of Americans as inevitable and progressive. Nomadic hunters, whose mode of life evinces their fallen condition, are naturally and providentially displaced by stationary farmers, who till the land as God intended. A third, industrial stage of development is, under Thoreau's eyes, within the span of his life, pushing Indian America even further into the past (85, 264).

To a certain extent Thoreau participates in the celebration of the triumph of the Anglo‐Saxons over a race whose very extinction could be used as evidence of inferiority (218). As he travels through the river valleys of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, he remembers and draws in the heroic Indian past, but pays tribute to the present work and life of the New England farmers (226, 257); he even pays tribute to Lowell and Manchester, industrial centers that fall in his path, though he is anxious enough to get beyond them. In the main, however, Thoreau sees American progress as tragic. The nomadic hero was pure, heroic, innocent, had similarities, indeed, to Thoreau's image of himself as a youth (55). The extinction of the Indian is associated with the extinction of his old, young self. On the Concord and Merrimack, Thoreau becomes temporarily a nomadic hunter, recaptures the spirit of his old self as he recaptures the spirit of the Indian,⁷ but he is chiefly bent on fulfilling his fate, on being born again, on acquiring a knowledge of history which entails both the knowledge and death of the Indian.

Such knowledge falls within the experience of Hannah Dustan, frontier heroine, an account of whose adventures constitutes the climax of A Week.⁸ She was captured by the Indians in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and taken up the Merrimack into New Hampshire. Resting at a temporary camp, she induced a long‐time captive, an English boy, to ask an Indian how he would kill and scalp an enemy quickly. In the middle of the night, Dustan led her fellow captives to kill and scalp ten Indians, mostly women and children; the boy axed the man who instructed him. Dustan returned down the Merrimack with the scalps, and gathered once again with all her family, except for a baby whom the Indians had silenced by dashing out its brains against an apple tree; “… there have been many,” concludes Thoreau, “who in later times have lived to say that they have eaten of the fruit of that apple tree” (341‐45).⁹

Thoreau rhetorically involves himself and his readers in the experience of his fellow Merrimack travelers, in the utilization of Indian knowledge to grow into manhood at the expense of the Indian,¹⁰ in the eating of the bloody apple, the first fruit of history, the fruit which lured man out of paradise and into knowledge and history. The Dustan episode occurred, Thoreau informs us, “since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost” (345). It contains the material, it seems for an American version of Paradise Lost, and Thoreau is ready enough to be Milton,¹¹ informing his “epic” voyage with the dramatic strain of tragedy, perhaps already knowing that in his life at Walden he has the material for an American version of Paradise Regained. Thoreau, of course, plays both Adam and Christ. Hannah Dustan plays a kind of American Eve. As Eve is the mother of mankind, of universal history (346‐47), so the pioneer heroine is the mother of American history, and, as such, initiates Thoreau and his reader into the nature of our common heritage.

The radical initiation commonly suffered on the road into history is particularly and repeatedly suffered, Thoreau asserts, by the writer: “The talent of composition is very dangerous,—the striking out the heart of life at a single blow, as an Indian takes off a scalp. I feel as if my life had grown more outward when I can express it” (351). As the road offers the excitement of outward growth, so does the practice of writing, a practice to which the young Thoreau has committed himself. Along with the excitement comes the fear of losing the old, inward, integral self, the fear of losing life to art. A Week, as Thoreau's first book, is a public confirmation of his commitment to art, and it is not fortuitous that it devotes many pages to the nature and history of poetry. Thoreau's fate is deeply involved with this subject, and it is fitting that he should include it in the account of his fateful journey.

Thoreau at times refuses to scalp himself, rebels against his fate, wants to live rather than write (186‐87, 354, 365). He regrets the supplanting of deeds by words: “The word which is best said came nearest to not being spoken at all, for it is cousin to a deed which the speaker could have better done. Nay, almost it must have taken the place of a deed by some urgent necessity, even by some misfortune, so that the truest writer will be some captive knight after all” (107‐08). Thoreau finds the imprisoned Sir Walter Raleigh the type of the good writer. He has confidence that his own captivity will ultimately prove productive, but still regards it as something of a misfortune, a tragedy. He is also upset that over the course of history the position of the poet has fallen from one of preeminence, and that the “summer of English poetry, like the Greek and Latin before it, seems well advanced towards its fall” (391); there is now “a catastrophe implied, and a tragic element in all our verse” (394). On the road from summer to fall, Thoreau fears he is entering upon his career in a period of literary decline. He almost seems to look forward to an apocalyptic winter when it will be his task to resurrect ruins and interpret runes (392).

Faithful to his fate, Thoreau acquires the personal experiences necessary for his career: “Who,” he asks, “has ever heard the Innocent sing?” (329). The accumulated lessons of nature, the road, history, and art are borne out in Thoreau's own brief span of life to date. The death of his fellow traveler, his dear brother John, less than three years after their voyage together, is the greatest single tragedy he has to bear; the weight of it can be felt throughout his book. It is handled delicately, implicitly, in the elegiac mode, but with ample feeling and force to make the reader aware of Thoreau's great sense of loss. This sense of loss is compounded by a sense of guilt he seems to feel, perhaps in particular for having spoiled his brother's chance for marriage (311),¹² perhaps in general for not being strong enough in his love for him to keep him ever present. In A Week, Thoreau recalls a dream he had Wednesday night which assuages his particular guilt (315), and a moment of love he shares with his brother midday Wednesday sponsors reflections on friendship in which he releases his hopes and fears of loving someone closely (285).

The Friend is, for Thoreau, a New World, almost impossible to discover and more impossible still to possess (278‐81). The attempt to do both is a suitable subject for a road book with a tragic plot. The daily enacted drama of friendship, Thoreau asserts, “is always a tragedy,” though none want to acknowledge it (281). This drama unfolds even, or especially, in the relation between the most worthy friends: “There may be the sternest tragedy in the relation of two more than usually innocent and true to their highest instincts” (292). Thoreau here seems to hold the possibility for tragedy in esteem; it ennobles life. This does not keep him, however, from taking to heart catastrophes catalyzed by a loss of innocence, a loss of faith, an absence, or death.

In one's own lifelong quest for a friend, for another self, it is ultimately one's heart which is at stake:

Mencius says: “If one loses a fowl or a dog, he knows well how to seek them again; if one loses the sentiments of his heart, he does not know how to seek them again … The duties of practical philosophy consist only in seeking after those sentiments of the heart which we have lost; that is all.”

(280)

Even at Walden, where Thoreau fulfills his duties most thoroughly, he is not entirely successful in recovering his lost sentiments.¹³ On the Concord and Merrimack, as he increases his distance between his old and new self, he is in a better position to give voice to his loss. It is integral to his time on the road.

A Week integrates the “incessant tragedies” of nature, the road, history, art, and personal experience into a tragic strain that constitutes a constant undercurrent in the book. Thoreau also offers ways of riding out this undercurrent. “There is something even in the lapse of time,” he claims, “by which time recovers itself” (374). If one deliberately participates in the lapse, one has hopes for recovery; it is important not to retreat: “Everywhere ‘good men’ sound a retreat, and the work has gone forth to fall back on innocence. Fall forward rather on to whatever there is there” (78).¹⁴ It is necessary to fall into experience, to front reality, and save one's scalp if one can (324). One must eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, which is a “tree of knowledge of good and evil” (387). Only experiential knowledge, such as Newton acquired under an apple tree, is valid and sustaining (389‐90). The final act of the returning voyages in A Week is a confirmation of their participation in experiential knowledge: “we leaped gladly on shore, drawing [our boat] up and fastening it to the wild apple tree, whose stem still bore the mark which its chain had worn in the chafing of the spring freshets” (420). The brothers share in the “flood experience” of spring as they share in the fall experience, fasten their boat to the apple tree. Thus concludes the book.

The brothers land in the dark. This makes their glad leap on shore all the more an apparent, emblematic leap of faith. Faith also sustains one in the face of “incessant tragedies.” It is instinct, the “faith” of the shad, that empowers it to maintain its struggle against the dam (35‐36). The road that holds together on a rainy day and supports the brothers in their journey seems to Thoreau “like faith” (318), and it is faith that enables the pilgrim hero to proceed and triumph over adversity and criticism (414‐15). Love is also efficacious toward this end: “I know of no redeeming qualities in myself but a sincere love for some things,” writes Thoreau, “and when I am reproved I fall back on to this ground” (54). This seems to contradict his admonition to “fall forward … on to whatever there is there,” but love as well as experience brings him in contact with the ground of reality. Furthermore, it gives him the ability to celebrate as well as assimilate the phenomenal world.

Finally, art, though it precipitates one into tragedy, is ultimately a stay against it. In Walden, the triumph of art is figured in the career of the artist of Kouroo; it is a triumph over time.¹⁵ In A Week, the triumph eventuates through time. At the end of the book, Thoreau positions the writer on the shore of the sea into which all rivers and all life run, trying to interpret its silence, a silence which has engulfed Thoreau's brother even as it will engulf the writer himself. Artists have never succeeded in their interpretive efforts, but the effort continues: “we will go on, like those Chinese cliff swallows, feathering our nests with the froth which may one day be bread of life to such as dwell by the seashore” (420). Into the nest, the work of art, may be woven all the strands of tragedy time washes ashore. It will nonetheless eventually serve as “bread of life,” sustaining both the writer and those who read his book.

Notes

1. I think the two best discussions of A Week are: Sherman Paul, The Shores of America (Urbana, Illinois: Illinois Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 191‐233; Jonathan Bishop, “The Experience of the Sacred in Thoreau's Week,” ELH, 33 (1966), 66‐91.

2. Page references in this paper are to: Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906).

3. Henry David Thoreau, “Natural History of Massachusetts,” Excursions and Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), p. 106.

4. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), p. 90.

5. The young Shelley gave fervent expression to the belief that man's fallen condition stems from the roasting and eating of flesh. See “Notes on Queen Mab,” Complete Poetical Works (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1914), pp. 816‐25. It is interesting that Natty Bumppo laments the “wasting” of (passenger) pigeons on a grand scale, and not without cause, for the species was extinct by the end of the century. See James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers (New York: New American Library), pp. 231‐39.

6. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Orion Press, 1964), p. 11.

7. On the river, Thoreau also becomes involved with fishermen and canal‐boat men (20‐37, 221‐26), men who lead heroic outdoor lives which excited Thoreau as a youth, who belong to a dying breed; their occupations have a natural quality which Thoreau seems to fear might be lacking in the occupation he has chosen to pursue.

8. Both Leslie Fiedler and Richard Slotkin discuss the centrality of the Dustan episode to A Week, though not with the greatest concern for accuracy. See Leslie Fiedler, Return of the Vanishing American (New York: Stein and Day, 1968), pp. 105‐16; Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 522‐24.

9. Thoreau is actually condensing and paraphrasing here a piece of local history included in B. L. Mirick's History of Haverhill: “We have been informed by a gentleman, that he has heard from his grandmother, who lived to an advanced age, often relate this fact, and that she had frequently eaten apples that grew on the same tree.” See B. L. Mirick, The History of Haverhill (Haverhill, Mass.: A. W. Taylor, 1832), pp. 88n.

10. I am not claiming that the Indians in fact originally taught the white man how to scalp.

11. The young Thoreau shared with Milton both the desire to do heroic service and the fear that his talents were not yet well spent (186‐87, 366).

12. For speculations concerning the relationship between the Thoreau brothers and Ellen Sewall, the woman they both supposedly wanted to marry, see Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), pp. 106‐27; Walter Harding, The Days of Henry David Thoreau (New York: Knopf, 1966), pp. 94‐104.

13. The passage from Mencius seems related to Thoreau's famous perplexing announcement in Walden: “I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on their trail” (Walden, p. 17).

14. Thoreau also finds that “good men” involve themselves and society in tragedy by allowing themselves to be used as tools of institutions: “Herein is the tragedy: that men doing outrage to their proper natures, even those called wise and good, lend themselves to perform the office of inferior and brutal ones. Hence comes war and slavery in; and what else may not come in by this opening?” (136). This is one tragedy Thoreau takes pains to avoid.

15. Walden, pp. 326‐27.