Bewailments, yes; they’d come soon enough. Meantime, Uncle Sam helped to provide an alibi for not writing. “I think, too, I am the less able to write,” he confessed to O’Sullivan, “because a dozen editors of various periodicals, literary and political, are continually teazing me for articles. I have no refuge, save to declare myself no longer a literary man.” Too much popularity and an increased demand for his work made Hawthorne anxious that he couldn’t compete with himself or produce anything resembling what he’d already written. Or write at all.
Yet much as he implicitly liked his job at the Custom House, he detested it. Much as he wanted his credentials as a worker in the world, he hadn’t achieved what he really wanted. When Bancroft praised Hawthorne as the best of the Custom House officers, “Tell it down in Herbert Street,” Elizabeth told Sophia, “—Let the ears of Uncle Robert hear it.” But Hawthorne colored a deep red. “What fame!” he sneered.
“Does Mr. Hawthorne ever write now?” the editor Evert Duyckinck asked Henry Longfellow. Such seemed to be the sense of Hawthorne: that he and his work vanished for long periods. In the fall of 1839, Capen had announced the forthcoming “New-England Historical Sketches” by “N. Hawthorne, Author of ‘Twice Told Tales.’ ” Months passed, no stories. “I have a note to write Mr. Capen who torments me every now-and-then about a book which he wants me to manufacture,” Hawthorne guiltily wrote to Sophia in December of that year, though he informed Longfellow he still meant to do it.
And still hoping for an appointment to the Salem post office, he deputized William Pike, the inspector of the Boston Custom House, as lobbyist. A short, thick man with bushy black hair, Pike was a sallow-looking bachelor, tender and pensive, who believed in ghosts; eventually he became a spiritualist. He also earned a reputation for the hard drinking later associated with Hawthorne. Hawthorne liked him. The best caucus speaker in the district, Pike was also a fixture in the Democratic Party politics of the North Shore and was considered indispensable. But Salem Democrats were a scrappy lot. Though a local leader, Benjamin Browne, supported Hawthorne, another party official, Robert Rantoul, regarded Hawthorne as unreliable, and in any case Rantoul wanted his brother-in-law for the job.
Bancroft had evidently promised Hawthorne the position but couldn’t or wouldn’t pull the necessary strings. “What an astounding liar our venerated chief turns out to be!” Hawthorne raged when Pike told him the news. But Hawthorne advised Pike not to protest. “As long as there is a possibility of his being of use to you, do not compel him to be your open enemy,” he warned. It was the tack he often took. Recalled Pike many years later, one could never tell if Hawthorne was your friend or foe.
In March 1840, when O’Sullivan suggested Hawthorne resign from the Custom House for a clerkship in Washington, Hawthorne said he’d stay in Boston—to be nearer Sophia no doubt. He’d save his money. “I will retire on my fortune—that is to say, I will throw myself on fortune, and get my bread as I can,” he told O’Sullivan. “I ought not to be an office-holder. There is a most galling weight upon me—an intolerable sense of being hampered and degraded.”
Almost a decade later, after he finally got and lost a job at the Salem Custom House, he summarized the “effect—which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every individual who has occupied the position— … that, while he leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from him.” Government employ was a kind of charity, doled out more than earned and death to the soul.
George Hillard, an attorney, was a friend of Elizabeth and Mary Peabody. Slim, serious, witty, and vaguely afraid of women, he graduated Harvard in 1828, taught for a while, wrote for the North American Review, prepared the first American edition of Spenser’s poetry, and never excelled in anything. In 1834 he established a law practice with Charles Sumner, who would be roused to the antislavery cause as Hillard would not, and in 1835 he married Sophia’s friend Susan Howe.
In the fall of 1839, Hillard had asked Hawthorne to lodge with him and his wife on Pinckney Street, a pretty street on Beacon Hill. Hawthorne could meet Sophia there, as he happily informed her; “he thinks matters may be managed so.” By now the Peabodys, or at least the Peabody sisters, knew of the engagement, but Hawthorne was still shielding his family, or himself.
Dimmed only by the death of Sophia’s brother George that fall, the romance moved secretly forward, the lovers enjoying more freedom after Hawthorne moved to Pinckney Street. Sophia oversaw the decoration of his rooms, selecting a velvety rug, “the most beautiful carpet, that ever was seen short of Brussels,” to warm his feet, and donating two of her oil paintings, a luminous landscape of Lake Como and another one of Lake Maggiore, to rest his eye. He surveyed the place. It was his castle, “bought,” he said, “for the time being, with the profits of mine own labor.” In his parlor he put his new writing bureau between the two windows and arranged his bookcase to stand on top of it. Evenings, he sat in his haircloth armchair before a coal fire that burned companionably in the grate. And he slept well in his bedroom on the mattress he preferred to a feather bed. “I do not get intolerably tired any longer; and my thoughts sometimes wander back to literature, and I have momentary impulses to write stories. But this will not be, at present.” Instead he fantasized about his future home and the shelves he’d line with books like the good edition of Coleridge he’d just bought.
Two lamps with copper-colored shades threw a soft light on the page when he wrote to Sophia in the evening, long letters, alternately ardent and jolly, tender and arch, always earnest, always receptive. She, his sunny-hearted savior, had converted him from spectator to lover, from ghostly shade to palpable substance. She was the one person who convinced him that he was flesh, alive, unalienated. “Thou only has taught me that I have a heart—thou only hast thrown a light deep downward, and upward, into my soul. Thou only hast revealed me to myself; for without thy aid, my best knowledge of myself would have been merely to know my own shadow—to watch it flickering on the wall, and mistake its fantasies for my own real actions.”
His confessions of love teetered between the formulaic and the heartfelt, the sportive and the passionate, depending on his mood. “Indeed, we are but shadows—we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream—till the heart is touched.” Sophia: artless, spontaneous, unconditional in her love, even “unlearned,” as Hawthorne rather brutally observed. “Your wisdom is not of the earth,” he wrote; “it has passed through no other mind, but gushes fresh and pure from your own, and therefore I deem myself the safer when I receive your outpourings as a revelation from Heaven. Not but what you have read, and tasted deeply, no doubt, of the thoughts of other minds,” he added hastily, suddenly conscious of the insult festering in the compliment; “but the thoughts of other minds make no change in your essence, as they do in almost everybody else’s essence.”
Yet as the lovers drew closer, stealing kisses whenever they met, Hawthorne also warned his fiancée to “grant me freedom to be careless and wayward—for I have had such freedom all my life.” He could be unapproachable, intractable, even insensitive. “Thy husband is a most unmalleable man.” And moody: “Lights and shadows are continually flitting across my inward sky,” he said, “and I know neither whence they come nor whither they go; nor do I inquire too closely into them.”
But she melted the reserve he felt even in the company of his family. “I cannot gush out in their presence,” Hawthorne explained to her, “—I cannot take my heart in my hand, and show it to them. There is a feeling within me (though I know it is a foolish one) as if it would be as indecorous to do so, as to display to them the naked breast.”
She had not won them over. In Salem, Hawthorne’s sisters received her coolly. Perhaps they guessed the engagement, hurt they had not been told. More than a year had passed since that fateful day at the Boston Common. It was now the spring of 1840 and Sophia herself began to resent the secrecy, but Hawthorne tersely reminded
her of those “untoward circumstances.”
He might also have warned her that their literary foreplay was to stretch over another two years. Two long years: it was as if Hawthorne was testing Sophia’s resolve while determining the extent of his own.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The World Found Out
Whatever else I may repent of, therefore, let it be reckoned neither among my sins nor follies, that I once had faith and force enough to form generous hopes of the world’s destiny—yes!—and to do what in me lay for their accomplishment; even to the extent of quitting a warm fireside, flinging away a freshly lighted cigar, and travelling far beyond the strike of city-clocks, through a drifting snow-storm.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance
Man never creates, he only recombines the lines and colors of his own existence.
Margaret Fuller, “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain”
CURIOSITIES of the fall season, 1840: Margaret Fuller, resident sibyl, organizes another series of “Conversations” for Boston women. A campaign of hard cider and log cabins pitches the Whig Ploughman of Ohio, William Henry Harrison, into the United States presidency. Orestes Brownson prophesies class warfare. Salem artist Charles Osgood paints Hawthorne’s portrait. And more than five hundred Friends of Universal Reform pour into Boston’s Chardon Street Chapel to dispute scriptural authority, debate the woman question, and damn the institution of slavery.
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, slim autocrat of the breakfast table, disapproves. “We never had a Bohemia in Boston, and we never wanted it.” Most of Boston’s intelligentsia ignore the Chardon Street event, and, as ever, Bronson Alcott marches to his own drummer. “A revolution of all Human affairs is now in progress,” he cries, and withdraws to Concord.
The previous July, Elizabeth Peabody unlocked the door to her new foreign bookshop and lending library at 13 West Street. A stubby cobblestone passage near the Boston Common in a district not quite residential, not quite commercial, West Street would be home to the liberal Unitarian clergy, increasingly disaffected, who pondered intuition, self-culture, and perfection, the watchwords of a new faith born of German philosophic idealism and imported to America largely by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who spoke heresy in public. “God incarnates himself in man,” Emerson declared at Harvard Divinity School; he wasn’t asked to return for thirty years.
Backsliders like Emerson—he’d resigned the pulpit in 1832—craved a more humane form of belief, one that squarely placed divinity in the soul of the individual; goodness already dwelled there. Soon these seekers were identified as the Transcendental Club—the name came from detractors—and variously included Emerson; Bronson Alcott; Emerson’s theological school acquaintance Frederick Henry Hedge; the Reverend James Freeman Clarke, founder of the periodical the Western Messenger; the pacific Reverend George Ripley, editor of the Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature series, translations of French and German philosophy, literature, and theology; the steely Orestes Brownson in his pre-Catholic socialist days; and the fervid William Henry Channing, a mellifluous apple that didn’t fall too far from his illustrious uncle’s tree.
These men welcomed women into the club: the poetic Sturgis sisters, particularly Ellen and the ironic Carolyn; Elizabeth Peabody of course; and the acid-tongued Margaret Fuller, a magnetic intellectual not to be slighted. Mary Peabody didn’t seem interested—her heart was with Horace Mann—and despite her fizzy exuberance, Sophia stayed at the fringe although she adamantly subscribed to the un-Calvinist creed of God’s munificence. Describing a glorious flock of swans to a friend, not Hawthorne, she reddened when he replied that transcendental swans often turn out to be geese. “Did you ever hear of such impertinence?” she wailed.
The club had a magazine, The Dial. Initially edited by Margaret Fuller, it produced its first issue that summer. By fall, though, its business and literary manager, George Ripley, was glum. He’d been reading Albert Brisbane’s Social Destiny of Man, an American rendition of Charles Fourier’s blueprint for social reform. Fourier believed that if left on their own, people would gravitate to the tasks they liked best, and so he proposed to reorganize society by placing congenial individuals into phalanxes, or small communities, where they could work at what they liked to do, benefiting themselves and society at the same time.
Though he was not yet ready to sign up Fourier—that came several years later—the idea of a reorganized society heartened Ripley, who’d been unhappy in a church that, to his mind, perpetuated poverty by turning its cheek. Unitarianism was all well and good as an antidote to Calvinism, but it hadn’t gone nearly far enough when it came to improving social conditions. Ripley made all this clear when he took on the Unitarian pope, Andrews Norton, whose own Harvard Divinity School address, “A Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity,” was intended to expose the transcendentalists, notably Emerson, as the atheists he figured they must be.
Ripley now cared less about theological war than about overhauling society, distributing its riches, like sunlight, to everyone. Religion conjoined with democracy: it would be a heaven on earth, the divine made quite real. “The true democratic principle is taking deep root in many hearts, which once loathed the name,” Ripley appealed to George Bancroft; “& if the principle, in its purity, can be made popular with the party, as the party is with the people, we can hardly place bounds to our hopeful trust in the destinies of our country.”
Ripley himself resigned the pulpit in March 1841 to look for a more felicitous way to change the world, or at least a small section of it. Politics and political machinations were too crude, institutional, and urban, so he devised an alternative: utopia on a pretty farm.
When Martin Van Buren, Andrew Jackson’s heir, was not reelected president, that same November, Nathaniel Hawthorne resigned his post at the Boston Custom House, effective January 1, 1841. He’d not serve under Whigs nor be replaced by them.
Briefly he considered starting a magazine with Longfellow but the project never got off the ground. Longfellow didn’t really want a partner—and not a party Democrat in any case—so Hawthorne occupied himself with a history book for children called Grandfather’s Chair.
The structural idea for the book came to him the previous spring when he and David Roberts visited Susanna Ingersoll in her antique house on Salem’s Turner Street. As Hawthorne’s second cousin, Ingersoll knew plenty of family gossip firsthand, which she happily divulged, particularly when it included the story of the house and her claim to it. And it was a grisly tale. After the death of her parents, she had to outfox her uncle John Hathorne, who tried to seize the place, insisting it belonged to him. Word of his rapacious attempt to grab the orphan’s house quickly spread over Salem. “We talk of savages,” the Reverend Bentley had said in dismay. Ingersoll kept the house by never leaving it and ever afterwards remained ensconced under its dark ceilings, as if afraid her uncle might, in her absence, snatch away what she loved best.
Ingersoll mentioned to Hawthorne that the house had once had seven gables. “The expression [seven gables] was new and struck me very forcibly,” Hawthorne told Horace Conolly, whom Ingersoll had adopted as her son; “I think I shall make something of it.” Tickled by the phrase—particularly since he complained he didn’t know what to write about—Hawthorne tucked it away for future use. But he seized on Ingersoll’s suggestion to use her old oak chair as the center of his children’s book.
Hawthorne liked to begin his stories with props, or found objects, as if their “homely reality,” as he says in Grandfather’s Chair, conferred legitimacy on an otherwise frivolous tale. Old newspapers, discarded manuscripts, the mansion of the royal governors, and, in the future, the infamous scarlet letter as well as the house of seven gables: they provide Hawthorne with a dense, tangible pretext for his fiction. So too Grandfather’s Chair, where an elderly fellow recounts for his grandchildren the adventures of a chair—history reproduced as fictive furniture, the actual and the imaginary once again, each partaking of the other.<
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In this case, the chair, originally manufactured for an English lord, sailed to America on board the Arbella and subsequently served, Grandfather jests, as a seat for both theocratic and democratic rumps, sequentially of course. To Hawthorne, history is evolution, the story of oppression giving way to freedom; this is something like George Bancroft’s teleological history of America, though Hawthorne handily supplied the irony that Bancroft lacks: the more sedentary, the better the ruler.
When Nahum Capen, tired of waiting for Hawthorne to finish his book, apparently withdrew his promise to publish it, Elizabeth Peabody stepped into the breach. She had a printing press in her library at West Street and so was able to publish Grandfather’s Chair by herself in December. Excited, she pushed Hawthorne to write two sequels, which he did. Famous Old People and Liberty Tree appeared in January and March 1841, all printed by Peabody.
Like her, the Salem papers were loyal to the local author and championed his books, but in Boston, they received scant comment. Margaret Fuller wrote a limp notice in The Dial. The gifted author, said she, was squandering his talent.
Perhaps he was. But children’s books were supposed to earn money. Not for Hawthorne. This “dullest of all books,” as he dismissed it, would stoop his shoulders, so heavy were all the unsalable volumes he’d be lugging with him to George Ripley’s hinterland farm.
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