Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  At the end of this story, Hawthorne’s narrator tremulously says goodbye to his Province-House guide, an old codger named Bela Tiffany—beautiful fancy—deciding “not to show my face in the Province-House for a good while hence, if ever.” The clock of the Old South Church tolls the passing of the hours, but the modern democrat will no longer hide under the eaves of the old house, daydreaming about the past. What choice does he have? Renouncing Bela Tiffany and the Province-House, the narrator steps into the light.

  For now.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Romance of the Revenue Service

  But Adam, being of a calm and cautious character, was loath to relinquish the advantages which a single man possesses for raising himself in the world. Year after year, therefore, their marriage had been deferred.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Shaker Bridal”

  NOW THAT Mary Silsbee was engaged, more than ever friends assumed a romantic connection between Elizabeth Peabody and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Sophia too. “I rejoice with my whole heart in H’s sentiments towards you,” Sophia informed Elizabeth. The glorious Hawthorne was nothing more to her, she said, than a “thousand brothers in one.” But she’d fallen in love.

  And Hawthorne had become a Peabody family staple. “I wish you could see him now he [has] grown so easy,” Mary wrote a friend, “and he talks more & comes out of his den every day.” Susan Burley, a wealthy friend of the Peabodys, was financing an edition of Hawthorne’s story “The Gentle Boy,” which would be published by George Palmer Putnam, a Peabody cousin; and the text would be accompanied by an engraving based on a sketch by Sophia.

  Hawthorne’s sacred “Word,” she exulted, uttered “through my fingers in the face of Ilbrahim!”

  Despite her headaches, Sophia was attending Miss Burley’s Saturday night salons on the strong arm of her handsome squire, who protested he couldn’t do without the Burley ritual. And back on Charter Street he met the eccentric poet Jones Very, a sensitive young man on the verge of madness. “No two could be more different,” observed Mary, “but they take great interest in each other.” Hawthorne asked Very if he found much sympathy for his work among the public. Very smiled. “Does the earth always speak to her children?” Elizabeth Peabody noticed that in Very’s presence, Hawthorne wasn’t petulant. She was relieved.

  In December of 1838, The Gentle Boy: A Thrice-told Tale appeared. Sophia winced. The engraver had botched her design. Hawthorne mollified her somewhat, inscribing her copy of the publication with typical gallantry. What he called “her kindred art” doubled the value of his little tale; he was so kind, so self-effacing. And the small book contained a dedication to her—in print, no less—in which he said that Washington Allston, “the first painter in America,” had praised Sophia’s original sketch. The author tipped his hat to the artist: “If, after so high a meed,” Hawthorne wrote, “the Author might add his own humble praise, he would say that whatever of beauty and of pathos he had conceived, but could not shadow forth in language, has been caught and embodied in the few and simple lines of this sketch.” Though a rueful, stilted pose, it was at least flattering.

  And it tickled Sophia. She let him read the last installment of her Cuban adventures and coyly scribbled a note. His commendation and regard had given her journals significance, she teased. “Now does that not equal your Dedication? And surpass it in being overshadowed by seclusion from the world—a private testimony of friendship & deference from me to you for which the public is none the wise.”

  Deference, seclusion, friendship in which no one is the wise: Sophia Peabody and Nathaniel Hawthorne understood one another.

  “I am afraid he never will be happy here,” Elizabeth Peabody declared. Still fearing Hawthorne might abscond to Washington, she tried to snag a government sinecure for him in Boston with “little time & work—& having abundant leisure & liberty.” Of course, the spoils system was despicable, she admitted, “but for the life of me, whatever is the illiberal apostasy of it, I cannot help being glad. It would be better off for him to be in Boston than here.” She hoped to make Ebe her ally. “Besides—he can come & see us on the Railroad,” she said, “—& we will make him enter into some engagements to that effect—will we not?”

  Without hesitation, Peabody wrote to Orestes Brownson, a feisty Unitarian minister recently appointed the steward of the Chelsea Marine Hospital, and asked him to plead Hawthorne’s case to George Bancroft, collector of the Port of Boston and Massachusetts Democratic boss on the lookout for party loyalists. Brownson did what Peabody requested, and Bancroft replied he’d gladly supply Hawthorne with an office—would have done so already, he implied, but supposed Hawthorne the “sort of a man who would by no means accept one.” Such was Hawthorne’s reputation: aloof.

  Himself a historian of note and shrewd party operator, Bancroft doubtless knew Hawthorne’s credentials, not just as a teller of tales but as a Democrat who, if not active in local caucuses, hadn’t traveled too far from their reach. Not only did Hawthorne have the support of O’Sullivan and his powerful Democratic Review, but good friends in Salem like David Roberts, years later a Salem mayor, supported Hawthorne. And the appointment of a writer was good politics.

  So Bancroft made an offer, the inspectorship at the Boston Custom House. Hawthorne stalled. Afraid his ambivalence would spoil her plans and offend Bancroft, Peabody rushed forward to reassure him. Perhaps she’d painted Hawthorne as too reclusive; but it was she, not Hawthorne, who regretted his leaving “the quiet of nature which has done so much for his genius,” or so she explained to Bancroft’s wife, Elizabeth Bliss Bancroft, an old friend. Nor had she meant to imply that Hawthorne refused to act “an ordinary part in life.” Not at all: Hawthorne himself “spoke with much earnestness of the necessity of action among men—as a means of healthiness.” As for party politics, she frankly didn’t think him interested, but “as a matter of Sentiment as well as habit,” he supported the Democrats in the Van Buren administration.

  In January, Bancroft appointed Hawthorne measurer of coal and salt at the Boston Custom House at fifteen hundred dollars a year, three more hundred than he’d have received as inspector. Hawthorne cringed.

  It may not have been the job itself that bothered him; he may have simply been waiting for O’Sullivan, hoping he could wangle something for him at the Salem post office so that he could stay near Sophia. Sitting in the square parlor with Elizabeth, Hawthorne jumped to his feet when her sister Mary entered the room. “And how is Sophie?” he instantly asked, extending his hand. For he’d been walking over to Charter Street almost nightly, pulling the little bell. Sophia was in Boston for a few weeks to stay with friends and study sculpture with Shobal Clevenger. He wrote Bancroft and accepted the job. He’d go to Boston the very next week.

  He called on her frequently. Beautiful calls they were, she sighed. “He wants to come every day,” she wrote to Elizabeth, “etiquette alone prevents him.” The only invitation he turned down—and not for the first or last time—was her invitation to hear Emerson lecture. But he refused so gallantly; he’d much rather hear Sophia describe it than sit through it himself.

  Late one nippy winter afternoon, the couple strolled through the Commons on their way to visit a friend of Sophia’s as the last ribbons of light played on the snow. Hawthorne confessed he’d just as soon continue walking with her, the two of them alone. Perhaps he took her hand then, warm and small in her wintry glove.

  “January Fourth 1839,” Hawthorne had scrawled in his journal in huge letters. The lovers had spoken.

  Hawthorne stayed in Boston and Sophia jogged back to Salem on a bumpy stage or in the newer railway cars. Living in different cities, the couple met infrequently, or so it seemed, seeing one another when Hawthorne went to Herbert Street. “I had a parting glimpse of you, Monday forenoon, at your window,” he wrote to Sophia in March, “—and that image abides by me, looking pale, and not so quiet as is your wont.” Sitting alone in his room at Somerset Place, where he was boarding—rooms evident
ly found by relatives—Hawthorne wrote to his beloved, his snow-white Dove, his inspiration and spiritual sustenance. “My surest hope of being a good man,” he wrote the Dove, “and my only hope of being a happy man, depends on the permanence of our union.”

  The courtship was epistolary. In his letters Hawthorne soared at the thought of their last or future meeting, marveled at his newfound joy, and just as often crashed to earth, certain that Sophia couldn’t really love his poor stupid self. He strutted, he careened, he pranced. “How did I live before I knew you—before I possessed your affection!” He flexed his newfound authority. “It is I who have the charge of you,” he reminded her, “and that my Dove is to follow my guidance and do my bidding. Am I not very bold to say this?” In midsummer he wrote to her that he and she were married, rhetorically that is. “I felt it long ago; and sometimes, when I was seeking for some fondest work, it has been on my lips to call you—‘Wife’!” The divine Dove metamorphosed into “naughty Sophie Hawthorne,” whom he yearned to hold in his arms. “I would not give up the hope of loving and cherishing you by a fireside of our own, not for any unimaginable bliss of higher spheres,” Hawthorne wrote to her, “swollen,” he said, “with pent-up love.” One assumes she knew what he meant.

  Over and over, Hawthorne pit his newfound lusty wife against his angelic Dove, but the divide lay in him, not in her, and would not be easily bridged. He approached; he backed off. There was no talk of an immediate marriage. They would wait. In fact, they wouldn’t even tell anyone of their feelings; quite the reverse: they took pains to conceal the affair, particularly from his family. They wrote one another every two weeks, his letters arriving on alternate Saturdays, so that no one would suspect anything more than a casual friendship, and Sophia sent her letters to the Custom House, handwriting disguised so that Hawthorne’s “brother measurers” wouldn’t guess the author was a woman.

  Such elaborate chicanery seems odd unless one imagines that all of them—Peabodys, Hawthornes, Elizabeth, Nathaniel, Sophia—assumed that Elizabeth had some prior stake in Nathaniel, or that she supposed, as all of them did, that she and Nathaniel were engaged. Moreover, Sophia and Hawthorne were both complicit in the deception, as if they had something to hide. “I have great comfort in such thoughts as those you suggest,” Hawthorne responded to one of Sophia’s letters, “… that we have not cultivated our friendship, but let it grow.” They had not sought their “friendship”; it sought them. Was this a sop to an overfine conscience, to the sense they’d betrayed Elizabeth? We don’t know. Hawthorne burned Sophia’s letters to him, hundreds of them, before sailing to England in 1853; and if he hadn’t already destroyed Elizabeth’s, he surely did so then. “What a trustful guardian of secret matters fire is!” he breathed in relief. “What should we do without Fire and Death?”

  To male friends, Hawthorne dissembled far less. Mary Silsbee’s upcoming marriage prompted him to tell O’Sullivan he had neither resentment nor regrets, “having fallen in love,” he put it, “with somebody else.” She wasn’t Elizabeth Peabody; that he made clear. “She is a good old soul,” he patronized Peabody to O’Sullivan, “and would give away the only petticoat, I do believe, to anybody that she thought needed it more than herself.”

  That summer, when Elizabeth failed to find Hawthorne at an exhibition at the Athenaeum—“a thing I had set my heart upon—not a little”—Sophia consoled her with a clipped sentence, remarkable for its restraint. “I am very sorry that you were disappointed in not meeting Mr. H. at the galleries,” she had replied.

  Weary of teaching, Elizabeth had decided to spend a few weeks near her friend Emerson’s house in Concord, Massachusetts, to recuperate, and afterwards she said she intended “to enjoy such elements of enjoyment as have never before been within my reach—you know what I mean.” Today, her intention is unclear: what enjoyments did she anticipate? Did she think she would soon be reunited with Hawthorne? And if so, she must immediately be told about his engagement to Sophia.

  She was. She took the news gamely, assuring Sophia she didn’t see marriage in her own future anyway, a prophecy as it turns out. Reassured, Sophia answered, “I have often doubted whether you considered your destiny as the proper one— … & I am thankful to have you say that you think it is.” As for her own destiny, she couldn’t resist crooning. “Now I am indeed made deeply conscious of what it is to be loved.”

  Still, Hawthorne and Sophia continued to keep their romance hidden. “We will wait patiently and quietly,” Hawthorne wrote to his sweetheart, “and He will lead us onward hand in hand (as He has done all along) like little children, and will guide us to our perfect happiness—and will teach us when our union is to be revealed to the world.” If she balked, he stayed resolute. “The world might, as yet, misjudge us,” he counseled; “and therefore we will not speak to the world.”

  Elizabeth Peabody too stayed mum, even in later life when she contrived an official version of events, plausible from her vantage point. “It is true that for the first three years after Hawthorne became known to and a visitor in our family, it was rumoured that there was probably an engagement between him and me for we were manifestly very intimate friends, and Sophia was considered so much of an invalid as not to be marriageable by any of us, including herself and Hawthorne.” By the time of the actual marriage, she continued, the gossip had stopped—which seems to have been the plan.

  As for Elizabeth, her good heart—as well as her flair for rationalization—lifted her above selfishness like a magical petticoat, although if need be, she’d give that away too—Hawthorne was right—without a second thought.

  Hawthorne had accepted his government appointment “with as much confidence in my suitableness for it, as Sancho Panza had in his gubernatorial qualifications.” Tongue in cheek, he enumerated for Longfellow a list of the Custom House sketches he’d write: “Nibblings of a Wharf-Rat,” “Trials of a Tide-water,” “Romance of the Revenue Service.” But he was still hoping to write a compendium of historical sketches for Nahum Capen’s series of children’s books.

  Actually, though, he produced very little. His only story was a minor effort, “John Inglefield’s Thanksgiving,” for O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review, and though he hoped to publish the expanded volume of Twice-told Tales, spurred on by Elizabeth Peabody, he dallied. When he wrote at all, he wrote love letters to Sophia. “Uncle Sam is rather despotic as to the disposal of my time,” Hawthorne justified himself to Longfellow. Though his tasks demanded attentiveness, they didn’t consume him day and night. Mornings, he walked over narrow cobblestone streets to the wharves to weigh and measure cargoes of coal, pacing the deck of the schooners pulled into the harbor. And he could smoke a cigar, stare at the blue sky, and make notes for his journals, watching as young women—girls really—disembarked from British ships to head north to the red brick textile mills of Lawrence, Lowell, and Haverhill. “To stand on the elevated deck or rail of a ship,” Hawthorne observed with some pleasure, “and look up at the wharf, you see the whole space of it thronged with trucks and carts, removing the cargoes of vessels, or taking commodities to and from stores.”

  If there was no work to do, he read the Morning Post, a Democratic paper, or strolled over to the Boston Athenaeum and thumbed through the magazines. In a few hours he’d stretch his long legs again, walking back to the Custom House to see if he was needed or if a letter from Sophia had arrived. Nights, he returned to Somerset Place, washed the soot from his face, and then trotted downstairs to argue politics with a cousin, also a boarder. He often ate alone at a local oyster shop, rushing home to write a message, once again, to his blessed Dove.

  He said he couldn’t compose fiction because, working for the government, he felt he no longer owned himself; but that wasn’t the whole story. Hawthorne held on to his government job not just because he needed the money or because the country ignored its artists—though both were true—but because he liked it. He felt rejuvenated at the docks: the bustle, the sheer movement of men, or the looping
of the gulls and, below, the dark ships’ bellies, where the coal was stowed. All this brought him close to the young clerks and laborers who sweated at real jobs for quantifiable results. “Henceforth forever,” he wrote Sophia in overblown terms, “I shall be entitled to call the sons of toil my brethren, and shall know how to sympathize with them, seeing that I, likewise, have risen at the dawn, and borne the fervor of the mid-day sun, nor turned my heavy footsteps homeward till eventide.” No effete cavalier was he. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Custom House officer, was a man of substance, practical and proficient, solid and sound.

  And he was in fact earning more than he had anticipated—fortunately, since he was dreaming of marriage again. Congress entitled him to collect fees for measuring salt and coal, which meant he could double his salary. “If I ever come to be worth $5000,” he chuckled, “I will kick all business to the devil,—at least, till that be spent.” It was a sentiment he’d repeat in later years as he swung like a pendulum between the two poles of commerce and art. He sensed as much. Writing to Sophia after a full day at the Custom House, he observed,

  It was exhilarating to see the vessels, how they bounded over the waves, while a sheet of foam broke out around them. I found a good deal of enjoyment, too, in the busy scene around me; for several vessels were disgorging themselves (what an unseemly figure is this—“disgorge,” quoth as if the vessels were sick at their stomachs) on the wharf; and everybody seemed to be working with might and main. It pleased thy husband to think that he also had a part to act in the material and tangible business of this life, and that a part of all this industry could not have gone on without his presence. Nevertheless, my belovedest, pride not thyself too much on thy husband’s activity and utilitarianism; his is naturally an idler, and doubtless will soon be pestering thee with his bewailments at being compelled to earn his bread by taking some little share in the toils of mortal man.