Thirteen years older than Hawthorne and the youngest of his uncles, Samuel Manning was a good-natured man who had failed in business and in farming and these days, working for Robert, found his health to be failing too. For seven years he had battled the tubercular cough that kept him from the travel and horse trading he liked to do. He died on November 17, 1833, one month before his forty-third birthday.
Hawthorne’s breezy storyteller, having hoped to wander the world untroubled, headed home to Salem, chastened and depressed.
“It was only after his return to Salem,” recalled Ebe, “and when he felt as if he could not get away from there, and yet was conscious of being utterly unlike every one else in the place, that he began to withdraw into himself.”
The last installment of The Story Teller, which Hawthorne never reprinted, appears in a sequence called “Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man,” published in July 1837 in the American Monthly Magazine. It features a cadaverous character, Oberon, named for the figure in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or perhaps in Ben Jonson’s masque Oberon; Oberon is also the sobriquet Hawthorne sometimes used when writing to Horatio Bridge.
Hawthorne’s Oberon is mortally ill, but before coughing his last, he begs a friend to burn all the papers in his escritoire. Obliging, the friend saves one journal, which he then reproduces for the reader. It’s a pinched tale of defeat. Damning himself and his journey, Oberon delivers advice that one might have expected from Parson Thumpcushion or Uncle Robert:
Adopt some great and serious aim, such as manhood will cling to, that he may not feel himself, too late, a cumberer of this overladen earth, but a man among men. I will beseech him not to follow an eccentric path, nor by stepping aside from the highway of human affairs, to relinquish his claim upon human sympathy. And often, as a text of deep and varied meaning, I will remind him that he is an American.
The disgruntled character of Oberon also crops up in a sentimental revenge fantasy, “The Devil in Manuscript,” possibly another fragment from The Story Teller, in which he peevishly despairs, “I have become ambitious of a bubble, and careless of solid reputation.” What is writing or the writer’s life? An existence surrounded by shadows, drawing one away from “the beaten path of the world” into “a strange sort of solitude—a solitude in the midst of men—where nobody wishes for what I do, nor thinks nor feels as I do. The tales have done this.”
Collecting his manuscripts “like a father taking a deformed infant into his arms,” Oberon edges toward the hearth. “Would you have me a damned author?” he hysterically demands of his friend, who vainly protests as Oberon gleefully tosses them onto the logs. The papers curl and sputter in the fire, embers popping and sparking and flying up the chimney to spread over the town, which bursts into flame.
Oberon is vindicated. At last the town is ablaze, so to speak, with his work.
If anything, Oberon’s theatrics keep Hawthorne in print, albeit anonymously. He signs “The Devil in Manuscript” as Ashley A. Royce, possibly in comic homage to Edgar A. Poe, and he contributed three stories to the 1836 Token, “The Wedding-Knell,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” and “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” unsigned; ditto contributions to the New-England Magazine, published monthly and which contained at least one of his stories and sometimes as many as three.
Yet a curtain seems temporarily to fall over Hawthorne. Clustered together in Salem since the death of Richard, the Mannings had no occasion to write about themselves in letters, and so very few family documents illumine this period of Hawthorne’s life. The documents that do survive—even the portrait of Hawthorne by Henry Inman—don’t reveal why, for instance, the Hawthornes left their Dearborn Street house to move back to Herbert Street shortly before Samuel’s death. All we know is that Ebe was translating Cervantes’s tales, Louisa making her seasonal visits to Newburyport, and that Hawthorne, thirty-one years old and—to judge by his portrait—intense, continued to live in a diminished household increasingly dominated by women: his two sisters, his mother, his aunt Mary.
He also complained about Salem, took his summer vacations in the country, and later referred to himself with some bitterness as “the obscurest man of letters in America.” He hadn’t achieved much success; in fact, his failed ventures in the book trade left him prey to the wags of “public opinion,” as Hawthorne noted in one of the Story Teller tales, “and felt as if it ranked me with tavern-haunters and town-paupers,—with the drunken poet who hawked his own fourth of July odes, and the broken soldier who had been good for nothing since [sic] last war.”
In stories recently published, like “The Haunted Mind,” he dropped the image of the open road for the metaphor of small spaces. Like Fanshawe, the artist burrows within himself, remote and watchful and separated for better or worse from ordinary people and events. “In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon.”
A sodden sky hangs over Hawthorne’s eeriest tales like the visor of guilt and remorse dimming the features of so many of his characters—or the blanket of anonymity covering the name of their author. And with a psychological insight that reveals even as it conceals—much like Hawthorne’s fictional method—his stories delineate human character with a truly awful power of insight, as William Henry Channing would call it, into the unnameable strangeness of the everyday. Nowhere is this more true than in “The Minister’s Black Veil,” when, for some unexplained reason, Parson Hooper, a bachelor about thirty years old, arrives one Sunday at the meetinghouse, his face wrapped in a black veil of “two folds of crape.” Hiding his features except his mouth and chin, the veil “probably did not intercept his sight, farther than to give a darkened aspect to all living and inanimate things.”
“He has changed himself into something awful, only by hiding his face,” a parishioner mumbles. With a gesture made more frightful by its inexplicable simplicity, Parson Hooper is a walking symbol—of what, no one can decide. Nor will he enlighten anyone as to why he wears his strange veil. Elizabeth, his fiancée, begs him to lift it just once. He refuses, and she leaves him. After a while the townspeople become so spooked they begin to doubt his very existence. “I can’t really feel as if good Mr. Hooper’s face was behind that piece of crape,” says the sexton. How odd, comments one prescient woman, “that a simple black veil, such as any woman might wear on her bonnet, should become such a terrible thing on Mr. Hooper’s face!”
Separating himself from everyone in a performance that draws attention to himself, Parson Hooper, veiled as a woman is veiled, is a parable of the artist: Hawthorne the storyteller embarks on a solitary journey that takes him, again and again, back home, where he burns his manuscripts and, tortoiselike, wears anonymity like a shell. “Have I dreaded scorn like death, and yearned for fame as others pant for vital air,” the storyteller cries, “only to find myself in a middle state between obscurity and infamy?”
Obscurity and infamy, the Scylla and Charybdis of his temper, motivate the storyteller’s journey, and because Hawthorne himself experienced writing as a kind of exhibitionism—the gist of “Mrs. Hutchinson”—he made much of hiding, or pretending to hide. “So far as I am a man of really individual attributes, I veil my face,” he would write in subsequent years; “nor am I, nor have ever been, one of those supremely hospitable people, who serve up their own hearts delicately fried, with brain-sauce, as a tidbit for their beloved public.” Dreading obscurity but half ashamed of his ambition and his profession, he wraps anonymity about him like a dark cloak, itself a kind of monastic identity that protects him from—terrifying to consider—nothing at all.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mr. Wakefield
So! I have climbed high, and my reward is small.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Sights from a Steeple”
IN THE OCTOBER twilight, an ordinary Englishman named Wakefield bids his wife a brief farewell, pretending to go on a short trip, but instead rents rooms in a neighboring street and stays there, by himself, for twenty years. His wife slowly accommodate
s herself to widowhood, never aware that her husband lives around the block or that he spies on her from time to time. “Crafty nincompoop,” Hawthorne calls the man who lives for two decades in limbo, thinking all the while that he’ll soon go home. Then, one day, he does. He walks over to his house, the door opens … and there we leave him.
Published in the New-England Magazine in May 1835, “Wakefield” is more than another creepy story about a man who leaves his wife like Young Goodman Brown, bound for a tryst in the woods. Wakefield is a drab, undistinguished, and unexceptional man—except of course for the twenty-year hiatus in his life, if that’s what one calls it. But to Hawthorne, Wakefield is also an artist—the artist as crafty nincompoop—severed from the world, having abandoned “his place and privileges with living men, without being admitted among the dead.”
For even as he castigates Wakefield, Hawthorne colludes with him, relishing an ordinary man’s extraordinary caprice.
Hawthorne’s best stories penetrate the secret horrors of ordinary life, those interstices in the general routine where suddenly something or someone shifts out of place, changing everything. Parson Hooper puts on his veil, Wakefield takes a little walk, Reuben Bourne tells himself a small lie. At the same time, Hawthorne writes and rewrites a fable of the artist, storyteller extraordinaire and crafty nincompoop alienated from his duller contemporaries by sensibility and vocation, an estranged, filmy figure who gropes with abashed ardor through the twilight, insecure himself but discerning and astute.
Wakefield and Hawthorne’s storyteller are the truncated travelers obliged to return home; too much weirdness is a bad thing. “Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another, and to a whole, that,” as Hawthorne writes, “by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.”
In the frozen January of 1836, Hawthorne was not the outcast of the universe but a denizen of Boston, a clanking metropolis where hammers banged out prosperity from the waterfront up to Charles Bulfinch’s new State House, winking in gold-domed splendor. Houses were sold, torn down, rebuilt, replaced; soil was carted away, hills razed, and warehouses put up near the harbor. Textile investors discussed railroad stock while wagons of green produce clattered toward the wooden stalls at Quincy Market. And Boston women were pretty, their morals good: an unusual combination, said Franklin Pierce.
Hawthorne rambled over the wintry streets. He’d come to town to edit a monthly called the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, published by the Bewick Company. Goodrich, who was affiliated with Bewick, had arranged the job. Elated, Bridge congratulated Hawthorne. “It is no small point gained to get you out of Salem,” he shrewdly observed.
For a salary of five hundred dollars a year, Hawthorne was to collect all the droll or useful knowledge he could find and blend it into short pithy articles to be accompanied, on occasion, by engravings supplied by the publisher. The articles consisted of short biographies of statesmen like George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John C. Calhoun or short squibs about people, places, and odd phenomena, like the notice about a gardener who amputed his own arm with his clipping shears, and the mathematics professor said to self-combust—without consuming too much alcohol. He specialized in the absurd: an account of a nose, studied for phrenological purposes, or the report of stylish New England settlers wearing wigs made from the scalps of Indians, “a truly Yankee idea,” he joked, “—to keep their ears comfortably warm with the trophies of their valour.”
Other than himself, the only other writer was his sister Ebe, whose contributions resemble his, though one can detect her less polished prose style and more federalist politics, as in the profile of Alexander Hamilton, which Hawthorne finished. “I approve of your life,” he told her, “but have been obliged to correct some of your naughty notions about arbitrary government.” Often, though, her work and his merge seamlessly, except in certain cases like his account of the gravestones, a pet obsession, at Martha’s Vineyard, or in his version of Hannah Duston’s captivity and her killing of ten Indians, six of whom were children. “There was little safety for a red skin,” Hawthorne writes, “where Hannah Duston’s blood is up.”
“You should not make quotations,” he instructed Ebe, “but put other people’s thoughts into your own words, and amalgamate the whole into a mass.” Both of them excerpted bizarre tidbits from Blackwood’s, the Westminster Review, or William Dunlap’s History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States. “You may extract every thing good that you come across—provided always it be not too good,” Nathaniel wryly wrote to Ebe; “and even if it should be, perhaps it will not quite ruin the Magazine; my own selections being bad enough to satisfy any body.”
Ebe borrowed books from the Salem Athenaeum, distilled the facts she needed, and then sent a packet to Boston. Hawthorne was having a more difficult time because his publishers had neglected to purchase him a share at the Boston Athenaeum so he could use its library. “The Bewick Co. are a damned sneaking set,” he exploded. He asked Uncle Robert to get him books. There never seemed to be enough material. “Ebe should have sent me some original poetry—and other original concoctions,” he complained to Louisa, in charge of his clean collars and shirts. The job was a family affair.
Hawthorne took room and board at Thomas Green Fessenden’s house at 53 Hancock Street, one of the tight, sloping thoroughfares in leafy Beacon Hill, back of the State House. The connection to Fessenden was probably Uncle Robert, who doubtless knew the occasional poet through the New England Farmer, which Fessenden founded and where Manning published his pomology. A dabbler in poetry and politics, the affable Fessenden retired to his jumbled study each evening and invited Hawthorne to comment on the new sections of his interminably long poem, Terrible Tractoration. Hawthorne was fond of the man.
But within the month he was agitated, homesick, and disgusted with the job. “I am ashamed of the whole concern,” he wrote Louisa. Goodrich owed him money, and without it Hawthorne had no cash for the smallest entertainment—a glass of wine and cigar cost nine cents—nor fare for the Salem stagecoach to take him home. “For the Devil’s sake, if you have any money send me a little,” he begged his younger sister. “It is now a month since I left Salem, and not a damned cent have I had, except five dollars that I borrowed from Uncle Robert.”
Meantime, he canvassed for something else, applying to the New-York Mirror, edited by George Pope Morris (famous for the justly forgotten verse “Woodman, Spare That Tree!”). Pierce supplied an introduction to Frank Blair, editor of the Washington Globe, the unofficial newspaper of Andrew Jackson’s administration. Nothing materialized, which left Hawthorne at the mercy of Goodrich, “a good-natured sort of man enough,” Hawthorne said, “but rather an unscrupulous one in money matters, and not particularly trustworthy in anything.”
Life in Boston continued not to go well. By spring Hawthorne had received only twenty dollars of his salary. Regardless, he consented to take another job from Goodrich, this time to ghostwrite one of the Peter Parley books, a two-volume Universal History on the Basis of Geography. Again he turned to Ebe. “If you are willing to write any part of it (which I should think you might, now that it is warm weather) I shall do it.” Hawthorne said he’d give her the one hundred dollars Goodrich offered. “It is a poor compensation,” he admitted, “yet better than the Token; because the kind of writing is so much less difficult.” For eight contributions in the upcoming (1837) Token, published at the end of 1836 and containing “Monsieur du Miroir,” “Mrs. Bullfrog,” “Sunday at Home,” “The Man of Adamant: An Apologue,” “David Swan: A Fantasy,” “The Great Carbuncle: A Mystery of the White Mountains,” “Fancy’s Show Box: A Morality,” and “The Prophetic Pictures,” he was to receive only $108.
The Bewick Company went bankrupt in June. There was no reason—and no money—for Hawthorne to stay in Boston. The August issue of the American
Magazine carried his farewell. “The brevity of our continuance in the Chair Editorial will excuse us from any lengthened ceremony in resigning it. In truth,” he testily added, “there is very little to be said on the occasion.”
The surface of the water was as opaque as iron. Dark clouds closed the sky like a fist. Occasionally the sun pried it open, lighting the promontory, and islands, half visible, floated into view. This is how Hawthorne saw the shore when he walked along the beach near Salem, casting small stones into the sea.
Accustomed to Hawthorne’s low moods, Bridge tried his best to cheer him. “Brighter days will come,” Bridge insisted, “and that within six months.”
Hawthorne wasn’t convinced. Nonetheless, after packing the Universal History off to Goodrich, he considered collecting his tales and publishing them as a book. The time seemed right. His audience was expanding. His stories had been reprinted from The Token in papers like Salem’s Essex Register, and when the prestigious Athenaeum reviewed the 1836 Token, it singled out “The Wedding-Knell” and “The Minister’s Black Veil.” “My worshipful self is a very famous man in London,” he proudly informed Ebe.
“What is the plan of operations?” Bridge jubilantly responded to word of Hawthorne’s projected book. “Who [are] the publishers, and when the time that you will be known by name as well as your writings are?”
Exasperated by Hawthorne’s deliberate anonymity, Bridge had decided to review the new (1837) Token for the Boston Post and unmask the author of eight of its tales—the finest in the book—as Hawthorne. “It is a singular fact that, of the few American writers by profession, one of the very best is a gentleman whose name has never yet been made public, though his writings are extensively and favorably known,” wrote Bridge. “We refer to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Esq., of Salem, the author of the ‘Gentle Boy,’ the ‘Gray Champion,’ etc. etc.”
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