Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  Park Benjamin, in his magazine the American Monthly, did likewise. “How few have heard the name of Nathaniel Hawthorne!” Benjamin exclaimed in the fall of 1836. “He does not even cover himself with the same anonymous shield at all times; but liberally gives to several unknowns the praise which concentrated on one would be great, to several unknowns. If Mr. Hawthorne would but collect his various tales and essays into one volume, we can assure him that their success would be brilliant—certainly in England, perhaps in this country.”

  The veil was lifted. And yet Hawthorne reacted with a certain sourness. “In this dismal and squalid chamber, fame was won,” he scribbled from his room in Herbert Street, as if contemptuous of the prize he sought or the way he felt forced to seek it. It wouldn’t be the last time that he wrote of the artist’s sacrifice—in love, life, or human warmth.

  “I fear you are too good a subject for suicide, and that some day you will end your mortal woes on your own responsibility,” Bridge worried. Negotiations for the book weren’t going well. “You have the blues again,” Bridge wrote Hawthorne in October, and begged him not to “give up to them, for God’s sake and your own and mine and everybody’s.” A few days later, Bridge wrote again, nervous about the “desperate coolness” of Hawthorne’s last letter. Bridge would come to Boston. He had a plan.

  Hawthorne didn’t know that Bridge had contacted Goodrich about underwriting the book. “It will cost about $450 to print 1000 vols in good style,” Goodrich had answered Bridge’s query about the expense. “I have seen a publisher, & he agrees to publish, if he can be guaranteed $250—as an ultimate resort against loss. If you will give that guarantee, the thing shall be but immediately in hand.” Delighted, Bridge boarded the Boston stage with the appointed sum and didn’t tell Hawthorne.

  Hawthorne himself could no longer pay for his own publication, as he’d done with Fanshawe; the Manning reserves were dwindling. Since Richard’s death, the family had been selling off most of the Maine property, and in Salem business was terrible. The railroad whistled a death knell to the Manning stagecoach line. Anxious, Hawthorne tried to get his position back with the American Magazine, under new management, to no avail.

  “You will have more time for your book,” Bridge soothed; “there is more honor and emolument in store for you, from your writings, than you imagine. The bane of your life has been self-distrust.”

  “I expect, next summer, to be full of money,” he informed Hawthorne with optimism, “a part of which shall be heartily at your service, if it comes.” Bridge had left the practice of law to build a dam across the Kennebec River, for which he anticipated abundant reward. But a flood would wash out the entire project and destroy the Bridge family mansion, and Bridge would join the United States Navy as a purser, a future he couldn’t of course have predicted in the fall of 1836.

  With charming ignorance, Bridge did predict that the publication of Hawthorne’s book would deluge Hawthorne with offers of “an editorship in any magazine in the country if you wish it.” Perhaps Hawthorne, believing him, refused Goodrich’s most recent offer to ghost another of the Peter Parley books. Or he didn’t trust that Goodrich would pay the three hundred dollars he promised. In either case, Bridge was thrilled. “I rejoice that you have determined to leave Goodrich to his fate. I do not like him.”

  Bound in dark crimson leather, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s first collection of eighteen stories was published by the American Stationers’ Company on March 6, 1837. The stories included some of his finest forays into the macabre, like “The Minister’s Black Veil” and “Wakefield”; historical tales like “The Gentle Boy,” “The Gray Champion,” and “The May-Pole of Merry Mount”; meditative sketches and stories like “Sights from a Steeple” or “Fancy’s Show Box”; and some of the more humorous ones, “A Rill from the Town-Pump” and “Little Annie’s Ramble.” The volume also contained “Sunday at Home,” “The Wedding-Knell,” “Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe,” “The Great Carbuncle,” “The Prophetic Pictures,” “David Swan,” “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” “The Vision of the Fountain,” and “The Fountain of Youth” (later published as “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”). Hawthorne excluded “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” “Young Goodman Brown,” and “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” which he may have considered too revealing, too early, or too autobiographically painful.

  The volume cost a dollar and was called Twice-told Tales, after the lines from Shakespeare’s King John, “Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale,/Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.” All eighteen had been published before and selected, said Hawthorne, as “best worth offering to the public a second time.”

  By June about six or seven hundred copies of the one thousand printed had sold, and then these “awful times”—the ghastly depression that followed the Panic of 1837—virtually halted all sales. By the next year the American Stationers’ Company was bankrupt and Hawthorne’s book was remaindered.

  The book was, however, a succès d’estime, “spoken of in the highest terms by discriminating gentlemen here and at Cambridge,” said the publisher. Hawthorne’s friend Caleb Foote wrote in the Salem Gazette that he admired Hawthorne’s “fine moral tone,” and Thomas Green Fessenden commended Hawthorne’s “sedate, quiet dignity displayed in his diction” in the New England Farmer. The Boston Daily Advertiser enjoyed the lighter stories, such as “Little Annie’s Ramble” or “A Rill from the Town-Pump,” and recommended “The Minister’s Black Veil” for its “more fearful interest.” Most readers liked “The Gentle Boy,” and even Bridge said he felt as though he’d never read it before: “It had the credit of making me blubber a dozen times at least during the two readings which I have given it.” Bridge himself wrote a piece for the Augusta (Maine) Age differentiating Hawthorne’s style from that of John Neal: “There is little or none of what is often termed powerful writing, i.e. ranting, and foaming at the mouth—lacerating the reader’s nerves, and as it were, taking his sympathies by storm.”

  Uniformly, reviewers approved Hawthorne’s style as graceful, his humor as gentle, and his fancy as “aerial,” even too aerial, Bridge had criticized, though he added that “this very fault is, to a delicate taste, one of the greatest beauties.” Park Benjamin went so far as to characterize “the soul of Nathaniel Hawthorne” as “a rose bathed and baptized in dew,” a maddening, insulting phrase with an innuendo that Hawthorne caught. Admiring his penchant for American subjects, none of the reviewers mentioned the satire embedded in stories like “The Gray Champion,” where Hawthorne speaks of “the veterans of King Philip’s war, who had burnt villages and slaughtered young and old with pious fierceness, while the godly souls through the land were helping them with prayer.” Similarly, they ignored the way Hawthorne yoked verbs or participles to nouns for jarring effect, as in the case of the “Quakers, esteeming persecution as a divine call to the post of danger” in “The Gentle Boy,” or the recurrent dark forests, dusky mantles, and guilt-stained hearts in which Hawthorne transforms a troubled consciousness into concrete emblems difficult to interpret, the case of the minister’s black veil being the most obvious. And though reviewers compared Hawthorne to Charles Lamb and Joseph Addison, they did not invoke Mandeville, Voltaire, Bacon, Swift, or Montaigne—moralists and satirists who obviously influenced Hawthorne and whose frequently harsh view of human nature matched his own.

  To help promote the book, Hawthorne sent a presentation copy of Twice-told Tales to his former classmate Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, along with a flattering letter. “We were not, it is true, so well acquainted at college, that I can plead an absolute right to inflict my ‘twice-told’ tedious-ness upon you,” Hawthorne wrote; “but I have often regretted that we were not better known to each other, and have been glad of your success in literature.” Longfellow replied immediately and with typical largesse. “Though something more than ten years have elapsed since we met face to face,” the poet said, “I have had occasional glimpses of you in the Token, and the
New England Magazine; and in all good faith be it said, these glimpses have always given me very great delight.” Longfellow then promised to review the book in the North American Review, an eminent publication for the literary gentry.

  Although the review didn’t appear until July, its extravagant praise hurled Hawthorne (“a new star”) into the company of angels (“the heaven of poetry”) on syrupy wings of equivocal esteem (Twice-told Tales was a “sweet, sweet book”). Hawthorne’s spirits flagged. The newspapers had been tepid, he thought, and many puffs had come from friends. Some buyers refused to purchase a collection of “twice-told” tales still available elsewhere. And Bridge had been wrong. No one handed Hawthorne any editorial post on the basis of his wonderful new book. In fact, money was tighter than ever, his prospects grimmer.

  Franklin Pierce, his own star rising, decided Hawthorne needed a change of air. Recently elected to the United States Senate from New Hampshire, Pierce knew of the South Sea expedition recently authorized by Congress, a kind of scientific, navigational, and commercial junket set to circumnavigate the globe as early as the spring. This was Hawthorne’s chance, at last, to explore the sea, not as a sailor but as the expedition’s historian. Pierce contacted Bridge, who promised to deliver “the whole Maine delegation” on Hawthorne’s behalf, and Bridge mailed a copy of Twice-told Tales to Jonathan Cilley, now representing Maine in Congress. He also approached Jeremiah Reynolds, who he supposed would run the expedition, describing Hawthorne as modest and diffident, decidedly “not subject to any of those whims and eccentricities which are supposed to characterize men of genius.”

  Bridge’s Hawthorne was a tame soul, eager for the political appointment and too honorable to maneuver for himself: a gentleman and a scholar.

  Hawthorne was overjoyed. Bridge, concerned that he may have raised Hawthorne’s hopes too high, cautioned him not to “set your heart wholly upon this cast” and reminded him that even if he didn’t receive the appointment, “you will be much better; for having made interest among many of the high officers and high privates in the land, your reputation will be of course extended, and the same men will feel bound to help you again, if called upon.”

  Besides, he added, Frank Pierce will never rest until he does something for you.

  Dreaming of Orange Harbor, near the coast of Tierra del Fuego, Hawthorne also dreamed of marriage. That the South Sea expedition would lead him far from any prospective bride didn’t faze him. Hawthorne was adept at linking marriage to flight: witness the careers of Goodman Brown and Wakefield or the fact that the Reverend Mr. Hooper dodges his betrothed with a veil. In “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” newlyweds encounter a somber John Endicott, who casts a shadow over their happiness, and the couple in “The Wedding-Knell” marry at the door of a tomb.

  Hawthorne was thirty-two, robust, good-looking, and eligible. And despite his disappointment over Twice-told Tales, its publication ultimately boosted his morale. Having unveiled himself, and with his own hopes about the future rising, Hawthorne turned his attention to love.

  Bridge had not married and wouldn’t until 1845. Pierce had. In 1834 he wed Jane Appleton, the daughter of Bowdoin’s second president. And Jonathan Cilley, who married Deborah Prince in 1829, congratulated the bachelor Hawthorne on the publication of Twice-told Tales with a gibe. “What! suffer twelve years to pass away, and no wife, no children, to soothe your care, make you happy, and call you blessed.” Hawthorne may have agreed, or thought he did. Perhaps the time had come for more changes, he hinted to Bridge. Bridge shuddered. “Why should you ‘borrow trouble’?”

  The tone of Hawthorne’s correspondence provides a tentative answer. Too long a seclusion, he confided to Longfellow, had made him a prisoner of himself. “For the last ten years, I have not lived, but only dreamed about living,” he wrote his cosmopolitan classmate, now a Harvard professor as well as a linguist and a poet of balmy, accomplished verse. But he, Hawthorne, had seen so little of the world that “I have nothing but thin air to concoct my stories of, and it is not easy to give a lifelike semblance to such shadowy stuff. Sometimes, through a peep-hole, I have caught a glimpse of the real world; and the two or three articles, in which I have portrayed such glimpses, please me better than the others.”

  The self-dramatization presents Hawthorne’s biography in miniature as he no doubt believed it to be: a man alone, unappreciated, timorous, an owl afraid of the light, rarely venturing forth until dusk, withdrawn from society into the nocturnal world of fantasy. “I have made a captive of myself and put me into a dungeon,” Hawthorne continues his letter to Longfellow; “and now I cannot find the key to let myself out—and if the door were open, I should be almost afraid to come out.”

  It’s a masterpiece of hyperbole. Yet the emotion is real.

  As Hawthorne acknowledged, the door had opened, or at least it stood ajar. “I have now, or soon shall have, one sharp spur to exertion, which I lacked at an earlier period; for I see little prospect but that I must scribble for a living.” Was the spur entirely financial? Not really. Aware that time was passing, that spring he confided to Bridge that he had decided to marry.

  Astounded, Bridge sent no congratulations. “I confess that, personally, I have a strong desire to see you attain a high rank in literature,” he stuffily replied. “Hence my preference would be that you should take the voyage if you can. And after taking a turn round the world, and establishing a name that will be worth working for, if you choose to marry you can do it with more advantage than now.”

  The fatherly, brotherly, and jealous advice fell on deaf ears. Hawthorne was enamored of a Salem belle.

  At fourteen Nathaniel Silsbee weighed anchor as captain’s clerk and became everything denied to Captain Hathorne, his contemporary. By nineteen he was steering a small sloop of forty tons, and by 1795 he owned a share in the vessels at his command. He married Mary Crowninshield, daughter of a Salem cod-prince, and he entered politics, serving eighteen years in the United States Congress, first as a representative from Massachusetts and then as its senator. He retired in 1835.

  Named for his wife, Silsbee’s daughter Mary, born in 1809, was a glamorous flirt whose wit shone bright in Washington and Boston, where she was known as “the Star of Salem.” Her “intellectual style of beauty,” mooned Longfellow, “leads one captive.” Another acquaintance, Sarah Clarke, thought Mary “a grave & beautiful Greek in contour & expression. Her hair is done up like that of a statue & her smile reveals depths of internal beauty.” But Mary Silsbee had her critics, one of them highly incensed that Silsbee, vamping for attention, would willingly forgo “much that is lovely and beautiful in a woman’s character.”

  After the death of her mother, Mary Silsbee began to write plaintive, lachrymose poems to relieve the sorrow that gnawed at her for the rest of her busy, active life. Doubtless, many people continued to be offended by her beautiful hauteur—they probably didn’t know the poetry—although just as many continued to flatter her. Others did both, like the historian and minister Jared Sparks, her former beau, who jilted Silsbee but, after his wife died, came courting again. The eventual marriage of the future Harvard president and the former Star of Salem proved long and happy.

  Unfortunately, most information—or gossip—about Mary Silsbee comes from Elizabeth Peabody, Hawthorne’s future sister-in-law. “She was a handsome girl, a great coquette, a mischief-maker, a fearful liar,” Peabody told Julian Hawthorne. Peabody’s appreciable resentment makes sense: she was at one time devoted to Jared Sparks and then to Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose heart, according to Peabody, Silsbee nearly crushed.

  It was Mary Silsbee whom Hawthorne had been hoping to marry. With her father out of the Senate and her mother dead, the bereft Silsbee evidently unburdened her heart to the bashful bachelor with the deep-set eyes who, she later said, had published one of her poems, “Take Back the Flower,” in a tale of his. What’s more, the title of another of Silsbee’s early poems, “The Maniac Mother,” appears in Hawthorne’s notebooks.
<
br />   But their romance is difficult to reconstruct. Hawthorne did plan to talk over the idea of marriage with Bridge when he visited him in Maine that summer, 1837, a last communion of bachelors in the promised land. “My circumstances, at least, cannot long continue as they are and have been,” he wrote in his journal, reiterating what he’d told Longfellow and doubtless thinking about the need to secure a steady income or how difficult it would be to wed an heiress who, again according to Peabody, insisted that he first raise three thousand dollars.

  The South Sea expedition having gone to Charles Wilkes, not Jeremiah Reynolds, a landlocked Hawthorne celebrated his thirty-third birthday with Bridge in July, staying with him in Augusta along with Bridge’s French tutor, Monsieur Schaeffer, a talkative and cheery man with the unfortunate task of teaching French to blockheads. “Then here is myself, who am likewise a queer character in my way,” Hawthorne wrote in his journal, “and have come to spend a week or two with my friend of half-a life-time;—the longest space, probably, that we are ever destined to spend together; for fate seems to be preparing changes for both of us.” Boyhood regained, he fished for trout in the ice-blue brooks near Augusta and inhaled the sweet green of pine. He practiced his French with Monsieur Schaeffer and in the evenings ate bread slathered with cheese and eggs or cold mutton and ham and smoked beef, the three men “so independent, and untroubled by the forms and restrictions of society.”

  “Of female society I see nothing,” Hawthorne noted with pleasure and relief. The men talked of Hawthorne’s stories—of “The Minister’s Black Veil” in particular, which Monsieur Schaeffer had translated—and of sex. Monsieur Schaeffer, observed Hawthorne with some surprise, “has never yet sinned with woman.” (Had Hawthorne? The “yet” sounds as though he had.) “We live in great harmony and brotherhood—as queer a life as any body leads, and as queer a set as may be found anywhere.”