The Midgie
Letter from Connecticut
Cannae-dae?
Tom Hubbard
After an absence of 18 years, I've been revisiting old haunts here in the nutmeg state of Connecticut. You might wonder what this has to do with David Harvie's lament (SR, 9 February) for western Scotland's indifference to its literary and industrial past. By the way, eastern Scotland shares such faiblesse: during Fife Council's 'Year of Culture' in 2010, there was no official invocation of Robert Henryson, the Dunfermline schoolmaster and medieval makar who has been (elsewhere) claimed as the greatest tragic poet between Dante and Shakespeare.
Mr Harvie cited the textile industry on the River Leven. In the fall of 1993 I took a bus from the UConn campus, intending to explore the old mill town of Willimantic. The experience turned out to be pure dead melancholic. This had been America's 'thread capital', but was not now the kind of place you would want to linger in after sundown. In the days when the thread-mills were still thriving, poor Puerto Rican workers were lured up to the state with promise of good wages. Then the industry went into decline. A colleague's wife, a social worker, told me of her encounters with Latino unemployment and heroin addiction.
Vast looming structures by the river had long displayed smashed windows; you could imagine the wind whistling through these eldritch monsters. The former art deco cinema – you had an inkling that it had been a splendid building in its time – was paint-peeled and dank. I entered an ill-lit Latino convenience store in one of the decayed 'gingerbread houses': there was hardly anything on the shelves. It brought to mind the old Eastern Europe. Grass grew through the abandoned railroad tracks. J K Galbraith's 'private affluence and public squalor'? There was much private squalor forby.
Returning a few weeks ago, I was heartened to see how Willimantic had picked itself up. It was a lesson in civic pride. There's now a museum devoted to the thread industry, and the surviving mill buildings have been converted to spaces for artists, craftsmen, and other smallholders. One of these bastions of American local ecosocialism, the Co-op foodstore, occupies ample space downtown; I recalled its original earnest huddle in a cramped corner of Main Street.
The fine 1905 post office building, long empty, is now home to a pub-restaurant called the Willimantic Brewing Company: it's an atmospheric place with its wood-panelling, a bar counter that stretches into forever, and house-'crafted' nectar. The 'gingerbread houses' are now rightly publicised as classics of American domestic architecture.
I don't want to indulge in grass-is-greenery: although now better-stocked, the smaller stores are still dimly lit, a problem for those of us with delicate eyesight. And I'm told that the drug scene has by no means disappeared. But after my Rip Van Winkle reawakening to Willimantic, I'm moved to echo David Harvie in calling for Scotland to arise from its long slumber of cannae-dae.
Novelist and poet Tom Hubbard is currently Lynn Wood Neag distinguished visiting professor of Scottish literature at the University of Connecticut. The job title initially referred to 'British' literature, but they decided that an improvement was in order. He will be sending regular despatches to SR.
