by Colm Toibin
On Perry’s insistence, he kept the book close to him for several days as he busied himself with Mérimée’s stories, which he was attempting to translate, and a play by Alfred de Musset that had begun to fascinate him. Beside these, the lack of colour in Hawthorne’s observations, the thinness of his characters and the slow, wooden tone in which he began did not entice Henry to spend more time with the book. He was thus thoroughly unprepared, when he embarked yet again upon its early pages, for what was to follow.
The book’s assault on his senses did not occur immediately, and even as its spell began to work on him he was unaware that he was being pulled in and held. He could not tell at what moment The Scarlet Letter started to glow and take on the same power as one of the novels by Balzac which he had been reading. At intervals, once he had supped with his family and the night wore on, he put the book down, amazed at how Hawthorne had not bothered himself with the daily, petty meanness of New England, the comic idiosyncrasies of speech or deportment or behaviour. Hawthorne had avoided whimsy; he had eschewed pettiness. He had even kept choice and chance at arm’s length and had gone instead for intensity, taking a single character, a single action, a single place, a single set of beliefs and a single development and surrounding them with a dark and symbolic forest, a great dense place of sin and temptation. Hawthorne had not observed life, Henry thought, as much as imagined it, found a set of symbols and images which would set life in motion. From the very sparseness of the material, from the narrowness and frigidity of the society itself, from the very sense of undeveloped relations and uniform, colourless belief, Hawthorne had taken advantage of what was missing in New England and pressed on with a gnarled and unrelenting vision to create a story that now gripped its reader all through that summer’s night.
Most of the books he read could not be discussed with anyone save Perry, or perhaps William, but now at table the next day he could ask his family about Hawthorne. Suddenly, his father became animated. Why, only six months earlier, he had met the novelist in question. When he travelled up to Boston for a meeting of the Saturday Morning Club, to which he had been specially invited, he found Hawthorne among the company. Some of the meeting was unsatisfactory, his father said, because Frederic Hedge could not stop chattering, and chattering high nonsense most of the time, so that it was difficult to hear what Hawthorne had to say. Not that he said much, he was very shy, but more than that, he was rustic and mannerless; he might have been happier saving the hay or walking on forest tracks. The main thing about him, Henry’s father remembered, was that, once the food came, he took no interest in anything else; he buried his eyes in the plate and ate with such voracity that no person dared to ask him a question.
Aunt Kate said that years before in Boston she had known one of Hawthorne’s sisters, who was a pleasant lady, all the more pleasant for being extremely limited. The sister had told her that her brother’s marriage had crowned him, that up to then he had been a recluse, forcing his family to leave his meals outside the locked door of his room. He did not go out during the day, Aunt Kate said, and did not see the sun save through the small window in his room. He seldom chose to walk in Salem, where he lived, except at night. In the dusky hours, she said, his sister had told her that the novelist took walks of many miles along the coast, or else wandered about the sleeping streets of Salem. These were his pastimes, she said, and these were apparently his most intimate occasions of contact with life. And, Aunt Kate added ominously, his sister told her that Nathaniel had never made a single penny from all his work as a writer.
Henry senior then asked Wilky and Bob for their view, since they had both studied at Sanborn with Julian, the novelist’s son. Even Wilky, who was seldom at a loss, could think of nothing to say except that Julian was a very fine fellow. Bob told the table that he had believed until this moment that the elder Hawthorne was a minister. He thought only women wrote stories.
Henry’s mother had not spoken until now. She interrupted the general laughter to say that she had known all of the Hawthorne sisters and that they had told her of an injury Nathaniel received while playing ball which had caused him much pain and difficulty over several years so that he was confined to bed. It was, apparently, this very confinement, she said drily, which led to his becoming a writer.
Having sought out Perry to discuss the book with him and to tell him what he had gathered about its author, Henry discovered that Perry knew more, that Nathaniel Hawthorne had recently travelled much in Europe, especially in England and Italy, that he was not, as Henry’s father had supposed, a country bumpkin, but a serious artist, well read, well travelled, possibly one of the most sophisticated minds in America. Over the rest of the summer, as Henry and Perry prepared to enter Harvard, they read and re-read all of Hawthorne’s books and met most days to share their impressions.
THE WAR, that first summer, seemed oddly distant. Even the proximity of a field hospital at Portsmouth Grove did not bring the conflict any closer. They could, they were told, visit the convalescing soldiers, the invalid troops lying under canvas or in roughly improvized shanties, as onlookers, tourists almost. With Perry, Henry went over in the steamboat, unsure what he would say, or how he would avert his eyes from wounds or missing limbs. On arrival at the camp he noticed the silence at first; he and Perry were unsure whom to approach or if they needed to ask permission to do so. As no one came towards them, they spoke briefly to an unshaven soldier sitting in his underwear on a log outside a tent. His voice was soft, but his tone quite indifferent, and his eyes were drained of all energy. He was content to offer no detailed information, merely that the two visitors were free to speak to anyone or to go anywhere they wished. At the end of the exchange, when they were at a loss to know how to take their leave, Perry gave the soldier a coin which the man hastily put away, looking around him to check if he had been observed.
The sick soldiers lay inert, half dead, watching the two young men from Newport from the sides of their eyes. What struck Henry first was how young most of them seemed, so soft and raw. As he and Perry separated and each moved alone among the soldiers, he felt a great tenderness for them and a desperate urge to console them. He had expected open wounds and blood and bandages, but what he found instead much of the time were fevers and infections. He went where he thought he could, where a pair of eyes had fixed on him and seemed receptive, where a figure seemed not too fevered to be unreachable and not too hostile. He was careful not to say too much at the beginning in case his voice or his tone, added to his general bearing and his clothes, might appear offensively opulent, but soon it became clear that this did not seem to matter, that, if anything, it added to the shy guarded welcome he received from each of the soldiers he visited.
One of these, he discovered, was younger than he was, a blond youth with clear blue eyes totally devoid of fear or fright. He asked the boy politely how he had been injured, then leaned in close to listen to his reply. The boy said nothing at first, shaking his head from side to side, but soon, as though he had been interrupted and was resuming a previous conversation, he began to speak about how he had not felt the bullet entering his leg, he had not felt it at all, he said, as though that alone were his problem. It was nothing more than a bite from a bug, he said, and it was only when he put his hand down and touched the place, that a terrible burning began.
He had hated the waiting, the boy said, the days sitting doing nothing, getting orders to march one way and then orders to march another way, with rumours all the time and nothing happening. And now, he said, the waiting was all over and he wished he were back waiting again.
Henry told the boy that he was sure he would get better, but the boy neither assented nor demurred. He had learned stoicism, Henry thought, which sat oddly with his youth. The agony had somehow entered into his spirit and rested there, unyielding. Henry wondered if the boy’s parents had been told of his missing limb, or if they knew where their son was. He thought of asking if he wanted a letter written or word sent, but he did not feel he co
uld ask. It was obvious that if the infection did not clear he would have further surgery or he would die, and what Henry could not fathom as he tried to speak naturally and gently to the boy was his calm bravery, his whispering readiness for what was coming.
In the end, when he could think of nothing else, he offered the boy money, which the injured soldier quietly accepted, and he wrote his address at Newport down for him in case he was in need once he had recovered. The boy studied the writing and nodded, unsmiling. Henry did not think he could ask him if he was able to read.
He sat on a deckchair on the steamboat back to Newport that evening, he and Perry keeping apart as the creaking vessel paddled slowly home. While he watched the dwindling light and wallowed in the fading heat, he felt involved for once in an America from which he had kept himself apart. He had listened carefully but he had not known how to respond. He tried to imagine that young man’s life under the canvas, battling for survival, expecting the worst while hoping for home. He tried to conjure up the moment when the surgeon’s knife was solemnly unsheathed and the leg held down, and whatever available morphine and whisky were taken, and the arms were pinned back and the gag put into the mouth. He wanted to hold his young friend, help him now that the worst was over, take him home to his family to be looked after. But he also knew that, as much as he wanted to aid and console the soldier, he wanted to be alone in his room with the night coming down and a book close by and pen and paper and the knowledge that the door would remain shut until the morning came and he would not be disturbed. The gap between these two desires filled him with sadness and awe at the mystery of the self, the mystery of having a single consciousness, knowing merely its own bare feelings and experiencing singly and alone its own pain or fear or pleasure or complacency.
And suddenly now, on this return journey by steamboat in the warm evening, with the view of the soft and settling horizon, the realization of how deeply real and apart this self was came fiercely home to him; how intact and separate this self was once the knife was cutting ruthlessly into the flesh of someone else, into the fat and muscles, the tendons and nerves and blood vessels, the hard bone of another self, the someone in agony who was not you, the someone injured far from home under the canvas. He realized that his own separateness was complete, inviolate, just as the soldier could never know the comfort and privilege which came from being the son of Henry James senior, who had been kept away from the war.
IN SEPTEMBER 1862 his father travelled to Boston with Wilky and there he helped him and his friend Cabot Russell to join the Northern Army. Soon, having lied about his age, Bob James also joined. Wilky and Bob became the focus of all attention. Their most casual observations were treasured and often repeated; any scrap of news about either of the younger brothers was passed on without delay to the older ones.
In Cambridge Henry, after lodging with William for a brief stretch, found himself a small, square, low-browed room with deep window benches where he set about arranging his books with a highly refined system of classification. He walked the country roads around Cambridge and he studied with relish the solitary dwellings on the long grassy slopes under the tall elms; he imagined not only the life within, but how that life could be rendered, how it would be shaped and moulded were a young Hawthorne to pass by.
He joined his brother for meals at Miss Upsham’s at the corner of Kirkland and Oxford Streets, listening to every word uttered by the other diners, enjoying the protection of his voluble brother and not being called on to speak much himself. He loved the spare, dry, witty talk of the theology student; he listened with respect to old Professor Child, whose tone when the war was discussed was as sombre and darkly morbid as the many ballads he had collected.
During the lectures, Henry paid as much attention as he could to the subject in question, but mainly he examined his fellow students, studying the types, weighing the expressions from the dull and vaguely handsome to the memorable and remarkable. He sought to let his eyes do the thinking for him, deciphering the faces, the smiles and scowls, the ways of walking and moving, and transforming them into characters and temperaments. Most of his fellow students were New Englanders, and he could easily detect in their solemn faces during the lectures, in their lack of softness or easy humour, in the way they composed themselves and walked, that their ancestors had stood in pulpits and preached with fervour the difference between right and wrong, and that they had been brought up in homes where such principles were firmly established.
Now, as they sat through law lectures, a shadow hung over them, the shadow of the war for which they had not volunteered, a war never mentioned among them unless there was fresh and urgent news. They did not look like young men who would easily accept or give orders, or march in unison, or have their limbs amputated. They believed in the Union and the abolition of slavery as they believed in God, but they also believed in their own freedom and privilege. They knew that abolition was a noble cause, and they included it in their prayers; at the same time they took notes and read large tomes to prepare themselves for their future. Looking at them, Henry found, was easier than talking to them. In their physiognomies he saw a boyish rectitude guarding the rest of them like a great stone wall.
While Henry attended his lectures assiduously, he barely opened a book on the law. Instead, he read Sainte-Beuve, he wandered into Lowell’s lectures on English and French literature, he listened to Emerson, when he came to Boston, attacking slavery. He went to the theatre. He steeped himself in whatever life Cambridge and Boston had to offer. The war was a faint sound which at intervals became louder and a few times piercingly close. One day in Harvard he had seen his cousin Gus Barker, clearly home on leave, in the distance but he had not run after him, believing that he would see him in the days that followed. But he did not see him and when Gus was shot dead in Virginia, he could not reconcile the memory of his cousin, his skin so white and his eyes so brimming with expectation, his body so full of coiled strength, with the idea that he had been broken and destroyed by a bullet, that he, so young and unready, had been wrenched asunder with pain, and left lying there as others passed by before he was buried in a distant place where no one knew him.
His mother, when she wrote telling him the news of Gus, said that she had also written to William. As Henry went to his next meal at Miss Upsham’s he did not know what he might say to William about their cousin, and he noticed as William came into the dining room a look of dark embarrassment crossing his face. He found himself shaking William’s hand, and this made the unease between them even worse. William nodded at him gravely. Neither of them could say anything. It was only when William told Professor Child that their cousin had been killed in Virginia by a sniper’s bullet that the spell was broken and Gus Barker’s death could be discussed.
‘All the doomed young men,’ Professor Child said, ‘all of them healthy and brave, and leaving those who loved them far behind, lying dead on the battlefield while the war goes on.’
Henry wondered if Professor Child was quoting from a ballad or if he was attempting to speak naturally. He noticed that William had tears in his eyes.
‘The best went to war,’ Professor Child said, ‘and the best were cut down.’
Sometimes, during these meals at Miss Upsham’s, Professor Child seemed on the verge of stating that those who remained at home, including his fellow diners at Miss Upsham’s, were cowards, but then he appeared to restrain himself.
In the months that followed neither William nor Henry ever mentioned the name of Gus Barker to each other. Each of them felt, Henry guessed, a guilt which they did not wish to admit to, or discuss.
WHEN HENRY went to visit Wilky at Readville he could not believe that this soft companion of his childhood should have mastered, by mere aid of his own gaiety and sociability, such mysteries and such hardships as the army offered. To become first a happy soldier and then an easy officer was, it seemed to Henry, for his younger brother an exercise in liking his fellow man. He later remembered his brother’s
companions as laughing, welcoming and sunburnt youth, who, like his companions in law school, seemed to bristle with Boston genealogies, but, despite this, had taken to army life, displaying an openness, a joy in the outdoors and even a jokiness that belied their upbringing and background. The hospital camp at Portsmouth seemed very far away and, as he left that day to return to Harvard, he felt that a long war, or even a bloody one, was a distant prospect from the picture of golden order and good feeling that he had just witnessed.
His mother transcribed the parts of Wilky’s letters which she judged most informative or most edifying or most alarming and included them in her letters to Henry and William. In January Wilky wrote home about a malignant fever called malaria which was affecting both armies. ‘Two weeks ago,’ he wrote, ‘we buried two of our company in three days, and a great many have been taken sick with it.’ He managed to sound both impatient for action and impatient for home, but what Henry took from the letters more than anything was his brother’s idealism and belief in the rightness of his cause and his readiness to fight for it. Wilky wrote and his mother transcribed,
I am very well and in capital spirits, but now and then rather blue about home. If things don’t look more promising than they do now by the end of next May, I fear very much we shall not see home, for the government will I expect make an appeal to the 300,000 nine-months men to stay three months longer, that their services are really needed. What could they say to an appeal emanating from such a high place and for such a high cause. For myself, I am content to stay if the country needs it, but it would come hard I assure you.
Henry imagined his mother writing this out, having carefully selected it. He knew that she would have been in two minds about sending it as it suggested clearly where duty lay. She added nothing and Henry contented himself with the idea that she, as much as he or William, had engineered this state of affairs in which Wilky and Bob represented the James family in the war.