Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  On December 4, 1833, Sophia and Mary leaned over the cold iron rail of the brig Newcastle waving goodbye to their family. Delegated Sophia’s chaperone, Mary was to tend the children of La Recompensa, a pastoral hacienda, while Sophia sketched the coffee planter’s family. And it worked; Mary minded the children as Sophia’s cheeks flushed with health, and soon she was sending home long letters full of golden sunrises and lemon groves, which she preferred to the less picturesque aspects of Cuba, like the economic structure of slavery that made her visit—and the hacienda—possible.

  “Her nature was eminently religious, her taste severe, and her dislike to contemplate or discuss repellant subjects was very great,” reminisced her brother Nathaniel. Slavery sickened Mary. Not Sophia. “I do not allow myself to dwell upon slavery for two reasons,” she reported to her family. “One is, it would certainly counteract the beneficent influences, which I have left home and country to court, and another is, that my faith in God makes me sure that he makes up to every being the measure of happiness which he loses thro’ the instrumentality of others.”

  She galloped about on horseback by day and waltzed and flirted by night, much to everyone’s shock. By the time she sailed back to Massachusetts in the spring of 1835, she seemed not just restored but resplendent. Recovery, however, was short-lived. Sophia claimed it had been nothing more than a performance enacted for the benefit of her Cuban hosts.

  Returning to Salem, where the peripatetic family now lived, Sophia came home to a different, duller life on Charter Street, next to the ancient graveyard. The house was three stories high and low-studded, its rooms squat. “It gives queer ideas, to think how convenient to Dr. Peabody’s family this burial-ground is, the monuments standing almost within arm’s reach of the side windows of the parlor,” Hawthorne would remark. And the main characteristic of the place, he noted with some sarcasm, was “a decent respectability, not sinking below the boundary of the genteel.”

  To comfort herself, Sophia converted her bedroom into a palace of art. She displayed her pictures in the best light and arranged everything else with a discerning eye: the fragment of a bas-relief, a cast of Apollo’s head, a flower, or a bunch of dried grass. Herself a painter, Sarah Clarke surveyed the room with solemn approval. Only Sophia could find beauty where no one else would think to look.

  Sophia was innately reverent and saw all glasses as half full, fervently so. Her paintings, too, reflect the roseate view. In them, one sees a serenity, heartless or calm, depending on one’s perspective. In either case, Sophia squelched feeling. A tireless journalizer and letter writer, she crams into her long, prolix sentences a surfeit of cloud, silver-tipped, and dewdrop pink, along with a pell-mell of noble steeds and glorious sunsets or sunrises (it makes little difference), strangling all the fiercer emotions, her own and her reader’s. “Mr. Hawthorne endeavored to discipline my style of expression into his own statuesque and immaculate beauty,” she later noted with calm assurance. The effort was fruitless. Sophia remained a rhapsodist who celebrated nature, God, and eventually her husband—each of whom she substituted readily for the other, for she knew all three on intimate terms.

  By the spring of 1838, Hawthorne was fully installed in Elizabeth Peabody’s social and intellectual world. The Peabodys offered culture without too much affectation: genuine enthusiasm, for instance, over John Flaxman’s illustrations or Spenser, whose tale of St. George in The Faerie Queene Mrs. Peabody had published as a children’s book. And the families drew close. Mrs. Peabody and Mary walked the Salem countryside with Ebe or Louisa Hawthorne and collected anemones, violets, and columbines. The Hawthorne sisters brought books and baskets of peaches to Charter Street for George. Still, Elizabeth Peabody was the linchpin. But she was in West Newton.

  “Mary told Louisa Hawthorne yesterday that she thought they [the Hawthornes] could better appreciate our daily loss than anyone else,” Sophia wrote Elizabeth, “though everybody regretted your departure sincerely.” As compensation, Sophia sent Elizabeth a series of journal-like letters to keep her apprised of family business and the doings of precious Mr. Hawthorne, in whose affairs she slowly began to participate.

  At first she had stood shyly behind her bedroom door when he came to call. “I opened my door, and tried to hear what he said,” she confessed to Elizabeth. Soon she was tiptoeing downstairs to catch a better glimpse of the beautiful face. “He has a celestial expression,” she beamed.

  Of course he missed Elizabeth. “He had taken your letter out of the post office, and thought it was from New York, but upon opening it, found it was from you. ‘It is from Elizabeth,’ he exclaimed. When I went down, he told me of it, and said he knew it could be from no one else, because it was so full,” Sophia consoled her sister but, unable to control herself, added, “He looked very brilliant. What a beautiful smile he has!”

  Within weeks she was shy no more. She regaled Mr. Hawthorne with her adventures in Cuba, and when he said he might make a story from them, she fluttered with joy. “To be the means in any way of calling forth one of his divine creations, is no small happiness, is it?” she brightly asked Elizabeth, heedless of the answer.

  On and on, she chattered. On and on, she documented Hawthorne’s comings and goings for Elizabeth. He intended to rise every morning at dawn in the beginning of May, Sophia recounted, but the weather was cold and he wasn’t sleeping well. He walked out to South Salem. As for herself, she valiantly battled her headaches, or so she told Mr. Hawthorne the evening he complained about one of his own. But he’d written Elizabeth in spite of it, and it was no small thing for him to do so. “I had a delightful night,” she concluded, “and this morning I feel quite lark-like.”

  Hawthorne intended to go to Boston the following week and maybe to West Newton. When he did, Sophia withdrew to her room, unaware of what ailed her.

  No fool, Elizabeth trembled with fear. “I like to hear the little items about H—” she answered Sophia, “but I am afraid you two girls will cut me out. I delight to have him like you & go to see you—but I am afraid he will forget me—‘Out of sight—out of mind.’ ” Sophia answered placidly. “I am diverted at the idea of our cutting you out, of all things. Mr. H coming there is one sure way of keeping you in mind, & it must be extremely tame after the experience of your society & conversation so that I think you will shine more by contrast.”

  When Elizabeth accidentally ran into Hawthorne at the Tremont House in Boston, Sophia rocked with suppressed anger. “He thought it ‘providential’ that he should meet you as he did,” Sophia sharply wrote her sister. “I told him that you were a most fortunate person—always accomplishing what you wished somehow or other.” Elizabeth retaliated, suggesting that Sophia come to West Newton to assist at the school. “It makes me faint to think of it,” Sophia retorted. “Do not suggest any plans to me, dear, for mercy’s sake.… I do not want to have anything upon my mind to be done. You can have no idea how it wearies me.… I do not want anything expected of me.”

  Sometimes Sophia soothed Elizabeth, reminding her of Hawthorne’s affection: he’d come to dinner just to see Elizabeth, and when he learned she was still stuck in West Newton he cried “too bad,” “insufferable,” “not fair.” Just as often, though, she taunted her sister with a chronicle of Hawthorne’s laughter, his wit, his warmth, his inimitable courtesy. Sophia showed him the letters to her family she’d written from Cuba; he called her the Queen of Journalizers. She gave him a forget-me-not, which he set in a brooch of block crystal, protesting it too fine to wear. He himself told Elizabeth that Sophia was “a flower to be worn in no man’s bosom.” Cold comfort.

  The dance continued, each sister gifted in the art of denial. Insofar as Elizabeth hid her desires from herself, she sublimated them into the very real urge to do good, promote worthy causes, and succor anyone needier or more talented than she—like Hawthorne. She arranged to have Mrs. Hawthorne’s copy of Twice-told Tales rebound, and she conspired with Ebe about a second volume of her brother’s stories. She inf
ormed Sophia that she had talked to Nahum Capen, the bookseller, about Hawthorne’s writing a children’s book. “He has him in his mind—& I hope it will be to some good purposes for the public & I guess it will.” To Emerson, she gave a copy of Hawthorne’s recent sketch “Foot-prints on the Sea-shore,” and in the pages of the New-Yorker defended him against Park Benjamin’s review of Twice-told Tales where he’d suggested Hawthorne (“a rose bathed and baptized in dew”) was not the manly writer required by a new nation. What did Benjamin know? Hawthorne was the American Wordsworth.

  She also persisted in assuming Mary Silsbee her sole rival for Hawthorne’s affections. In fact, she and Hawthorne discussed Silsbee while Sophia eavesdropped on the stairs. “I was astonished to find she did not admire you,” Sophia jabbed; and Mr. Hawthorne “seemed very much inclined to be her defender.”

  But if Hawthorne seemed distraught, Elizabeth laid the cause at Silsbee’s feet. She accused her of “coquetting” and even risked Hawthorne’s friendship by saying so.

  It was a messy, three-sided affair, and Hawthorne understandably left no account of it. But that spring, 1838, images of bright green vegetation and pungent honeysuckle steal into his notebooks along with excerpts copied from Sophia’s Cuban letters. And noting his plan to take a secret trip to western Massachusetts and New York, he recalled a poem by Robert Southey, The Curse of Kehama. “On visiting a certain celestial region, the fire in his heart and brain died away for a season,” he observed of its main character, “but was rekindled again on returning to earth. So may it be with me, in my projected three months seclusion from old associations.”

  No one knew where he was headed except his friend David Roberts. He informed the Peabodys that he hadn’t even told his mother. He’d receive no letters nor write any—this, Sophia understood, was directed at Elizabeth. He wouldn’t even visit Elizabeth before he left. And he’d change his name, so no one could find his grave should he die.

  The romantic storyteller sallies forth, insisting he be left alone, far from the confusions of desire.

  “A story to show how we are all wronged and wrongers, and avenge one another; as a man is jilted by a rich girl, and jilts a poor one,” Hawthorne wrote in his notebook. After his return to Salem in the fall of 1838, Mary Silsbee announced that she was engaged to Jared Sparks and officially put an end to her romance with Hawthorne. Careful not to wound his pride, she declared she must “break off all intercourse” with him. Hawthorne asked her to burn his letters. She said she would.

  He closed the door of her house, heart jangling, with the “sense that all had been a mistake—that I never really loved—that there was no real sympathy between us—and that a union could only insure the misery of both,” he confided to John O’Sullivan. She meant honorably by me, he said, not quite sure what went wrong with him, with her, with them.

  For solace he walked over to the Peabody house at Charter Street where Sophia reigned, convalescent and serene, a woman of great weakness and equal strength. Much like Hawthorne’s own invalid mother but more urbane and sensual—and far more talkative—she sketched Hawthorne’s likeness one December evening in 1838, the fire flickering warmly in the parlor. He tried to sit motionless, joking that in time his face might change so much she wouldn’t recognize him. Even in heaven. But Sophia’s saw the world—topaz, shimmering, immutable—with her inner eye. She smiled. “See if I don’t!” she replied.

  The “fervor scribendi” had been upon Mr. Hawthorne, said Sophia, and he was furnishing sketches and stories to the Democratic Review at a fairly regular rate. In 1838 the January and March numbers of the magazine had contained two sketches, “Foot-prints on the Sea-shore” and “Snow-flakes,” and in May the first of four “Tales of the Province-House” appeared, followed by a second installment that July. In the September issue O’Sullivan published Hawthorne’s portrait of Cilley along with his story “Chippings with a Chisel,” and then the last two of the Province-House quartet, written after his secret trip, came out in December 1838 and January 1839.

  Written during Hawthorne’s imbroglio with Silsbee and the Peabodys, the four Province-House tales reflect his changing sense of himself as an author and a man. The husk of the story is historical, although that too mirrors an internal drama expressed best in the image of the Province-House, the former mansion of the royal governors, currently a tavern, where past and present commingle. It’s an image—that of the house—to which Hawthorne will often return.

  At the Province-House bar, his narrator, a citizen of Boston, hears a series of stories about several early inhabitants of the house, their defeats, self-deceptions, vanities, or small acts of heroism. In “Howe’s Masquerade,” the first and weakest of the tales recounted by the narrator, a ghostly pageant interrupts Sir William Howe’s masked ball to foretell the end of British rule. Inspired by Sophia’s account of cleaning a painting by Murillo, the second story, “Edward Randolph’s Portrait,” takes place after the fateful decision of the British to quarter troops in Boston. The third tale, “Lady Eleanore’s Mantle,” is the story of the arrogant Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe, supposedly the cause of a smallpox epidemic in America after her arrival, and finally “Old Esther Dudley” tells of the last royalist to dwell in the old house.

  The three strongest stories also chronicle Hawthorne’s recent emotional turmoil. Take “Lady Eleanore’s Mantle,” composed after his romance with Silsbee ended. Hawthorne introduces a pale young suitor called Gervase Helwyse, the name of Major William Hathorne’s grandson and the man to whom the major bequeathed half his estate. This ersatz Hawthorne prostrates himself before the queenly Lady Eleanore, who responds with mirthful derision, placing her dainty foot on his craven form: “Never, surely, was there an apter emblem of aristocracy and hereditary pride,” writes Hawthorne, “trampling on human sympathies and the kindred of nature.” Yet Helwyse—hell-wise—somehow knows that proud Lady Eleanore’s mantle carries the scourge of smallpox within its ruffles and that the highborn woman will be brought low, though not before she contaminates everyone in her reach.

  Love is a contagious disease, its carrier woman. Beloved and deplored, she is inevitably damned—except when she appears in the kinder, more ineffectual guise of Alice Vane in “Edward Randolph’s Portrait.” Alice is a “pale, ethereal creature,” childlike and wayward, with an “enthusiasm for sculpture and painting” much like Sophia. Gazing on the dingy portrait of Edward Randolph, the tyrant who revoked the first provincial charter, she understands that years of grime—and crime—have dulled his image. And so she advises her uncle, Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson, to heed the painting’s symbolic meaning. If Uncle Hutchinson quarters British royal troops in Boston, his image will likewise be tarnished. But Alice Vane warns in vain—Hawthorne doesn’t mind the pun—and Hutchinson, himself a writer of history, cannot see it when it’s staring him straight in the face. He is a good man but remiss, like Alice, who lives in a world of black and white, dark pictures and spotless ones.

  If these Province-House legends speak of Hawthorne’s divided heart—his attraction to the arrogance of a Mary Silsbee and to the more playful, less fearsome charm of Sophia Peabody—they also reveal his allegiance to mistresses of another sort: the shadowy past and the sunlit present. Like the old Province-House, or Hawthorne’s image of it, the past is rich, provocative, dark, and deep, an imagined place where the writer can lose himself for days and years. But he hates it too. The past is musty and bottomless, and his researches into its nooks and crannies deprive him, so he feels, of contact with the living, breathing world. “We are no longer children of the Past!” shouts a character in “Old Esther Dudley”; the outburst ricochets through Hawthorne’s work. For Hawthorne wants to live in the present, to love in the present, to find inspiration in the buzzing, grimy, sensual world of female and male that is the present. And this is the world he gives up when locked in his squalid chamber.

  There is also a political component in Hawthorne’s conflict. A Democrat since college, Hawthorn
e deliberately shared, or tried to share, the democrat’s vision of a better, more equal society, one not dominated by a privilege, caste, or group but welcoming to white workers, republicans and patriots all; it’s a vision of a world where nothing is predetermined, everything possible. And it is O’Sullivan’s seductive, sunshiny republicanism, dismissive of original sin and a wicked human nature. Yet however attractive, progressive, and presumably benign the vision, for Hawthorne contemporary life is loud, vulgar, and tobacco-stained, crammed with faceless warehouses, smarmy politicians, and shabby oyster shops. It’s even taken over the Province-House.

  The terrible conflict between past and present—the nostalgic pull of one, despite its darkness and doom, and the noisy, liberating tug of the other—is Hawthorne’s great subject.

  Mary Silsbee and the Peabodys—both Elizabeth and Sophia—helped yank Hawthorne out of the cloistered world of Herbert Street, where his two sisters and his mother regressed into the primitive habits of childhood, the past, the touchy sense of family pride propped up by chimney-corner legends. In “Old Esther Dudley,” the fourth story of the Province-House quartet, Hawthorne writes as if to them:

  Your life has been prolonged until the world has changed around you. You have treasured up all that time has rendered worthless—the principles, feelings, manners, modes of being and acting, which another generation has flung aside—and you are a symbol of the past. And I, and these around me—we represent a new race of men, living no longer in the past, scarcely in the present—but projecting our lives forward into the future.

  When Governor Hancock upbraids the poor deluded royalist Esther Dudley, we cannot help hearing Hawthorne chastise both his family and himself. Esther Dudley is a woman born of his own anxiety. Unable to embrace wholeheartedly the radical slogan of the Democrat, with its ecstatic sense of progress, Hawthorne pauses on the threshold of the present, loyal to the Esthers he loves: his mother Elizabeth, his sister Ebe, himself and his own fondness for grandees of a lost generation. But he also condemns the silly aristocrat Esther Dudley for her myopic allegiance to the old order.