Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  Undiminished, the winds of change blew through Boston, prickling skin under the starched cotton. “We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform,” Emerson exulted to Thomas Carlyle. There would be no more pauperism, slavery, hypocrisy, no more materialism, selfishness, and no pressure to get a living rather than to live. “It is astonishing what a wide-spread desire there is for a new mode of life,” Sarah Clarke exclaimed to her brother James. If abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison preferred to buckle all social questions to the overriding one of chattel slavery, George Ripley and his brainy wife, Sophia Dana Ripley, opted for community and what he said would be a “more natural union between intellectual and manual labor.”

  Ripley spelled out the scheme for Emerson. “Thought would preside over the operations of labor.… We should have industry without drudgery, and true equality without its vulgarity.” The Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education, as the community would formally be called, eschewed rank, status, privilege, and formal attire. It welcomed everyone, farmers, mechanics, writers, and preachers, all “whose gifts and abilities would make their services important”—and whose children, by the way, could be educated in the community school.

  The real ticket of admission was camaraderie—that and a share of stock. Ripley proposed the farm be run as a joint-stock company that paid a fixed 5 percent interest to its subscribers, the subscription secured by some two hundred rolling acres, a few buildings, a brook, and a meadow scattered with trees in West Roxbury, a bucolic little village nine miles southwest of Boston. Each share in the association cost five thousand dollars. The interest on the investment, tuition from the community’s prospective school, and the subscribers’ labor—intellectual or manual—would cover room, board, and upkeep.

  The government would be democratic. “His own mind, though that of a captain, is not of a conqueror,” Margaret Fuller observed. “Mr. Ripley would never do for a patriarch,” said Sarah Clarke. But the plan couldn’t fail to impress. “The farming is to be conducted on the most liberal and scientific principles of English husbandry,” Clarke explained to her brother, “and the earth is to yield her increase in a style hitherto unknown in New England.” There would be wealth without corruption. “Luxuries are to be common to all and appropriated by none.” The sick and elderly would be cared for, and there would be no hired labor or servants. “Labor is to be alleviated by machinery and good will.” And the place would be ecumenical. “There are to be no religious tests or any other, and he who joins does it upon the principle of co-operation in labor and a desire for social improvement.”

  About a dozen people signed on. Emerson did not. “Can I not get the same advantages at home without pulling down my house?” the individualist wondered. But Hawthorne owned no property, and he no longer had an income, having surrendered the Custom House and, with it, the security of his steady wage. He might return to Salem—Ebe insisted Hawthorne always did his best writing there—but the atavistic pull of family threatened his hard-won autonomy. “Whenever I return to Salem,” he anxiously wrote Sophia, “I feel how dark my life would be, without the light that should shedst upon it—how cold, without the warmth of thy love.”

  In Salem, under the watch of his mother and sisters, he’d have to confess his engagement.

  But he did return there for a while, and sitting in his Herbert Street bedroom that fall, he adroitly composed one of his most seductive stories—again, about himself. “Here sits thy husband in his old accustomed chamber, where he used to sit in years gone by, before his soul became acquainted with thine,” he wrote to Sophia. “Here I have written many tales—many that have been burned to ashes—many that doubtless deserved the same fate,” he continued, imagining the biographer (himself) who might someday visit his room:

  He ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here; and here my mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent; and here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all—at least till I were in my grave. And sometimes (for I had no wife then to keep my heart warm) it seemed as if I were already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and benumbed. But oftener I was happy—at least, as happy as I then knew how to be, or was aware of the possibility of being. By and bye, the world found me out in my lonely chamber, and called me forth—not, indeed, with a loud roar of acclamation, but rather with a still, small voice; and forth I went, but found nothing in the world that I thought preferable to my old solitude, till at length a certain Dove was revealed to me, in the shadow of a seclusion as deep as my own had been.

  The letter is biblically lyrical, phrases cadenced and perfectly pitched, darks juxtaposed with lights, cold with heat, in which Hawthorne’s half-life is redeemed through admiration and then love, while alliterative sounds—the waste and the waiting and wondering why—reinforce a tale of loneliness that lasts, or has lasted, a long, long time.

  Bidding farewell to his mother and his sisters, leaving behind his old accustomed chamber—and his childhood—Hawthorne fancied himself and Sophia in another kind of family, not their own exactly but as confederates of Mr. Ripley’s utopia, where they would build their house. The Ripleys did not frown on private property. Yet Sophia was left behind. Hawthorne rode out to West Roxbury in early April without his intended bride. “Think that I am gone before,” he consoled his secret fiancée, “to prepare a home for my Dove, and will return for her, all in good time.”

  For a while she seemed content. A communal life of toil was no place for a dove, especially one with a headache. She and Mary and her parents had joined Elizabeth on West Street, where Sophia fitted her painting room on the second floor—Elizabeth stocked art supplies as well as books in the shop—and welcomed the excitement from below. In the crowded front parlor, Dr. Peabody sold homeopathic staples like belladonna and sassafras, Fuller held her Conversations, and Washington Allston occasionally stopped by. In the bookshop, transcendentalists grabbed French or German volumes from the shelves while Elizabeth talked up the Brook Farm experiment or, in the back room, printed The Dial.

  No transcendental fellow-traveler—although he was sighted at the meetings on West Street—and not a company man in any case, Hawthorne was one of the few charter members of Ripley’s commune, a fact that surprises those onlookers who judge him from afar or in retrospect. “The whole experience stands as a thing apart and unrelated to the rest of his life,” snapped Brook Farm’s historian years later. Hawthorne’s contemporaries were cannier. As Fuller shrewdly noted, “solitary characters tend to out-wardness,—to association,—while the social and sympathetic ones emphasize the value of solitude,—of concentration,—so that we hear from each the word which, from his structure, we least expect.”

  Nor must Hawthorne accept the perfectibility of the individual to entertain the romance of West Roxbury. In need of a home, an income, and a place to write, Hawthorne gladly gambled on Ripley’s arcadia. The union of thinker and worker was irresistible to a man whose conscience still carped about idleness and still considered writing a frivolous pastime, no matter how much he wanted to do it. Hoeing and milking and feeding and mulching are honest occupations, chores performed in the cowhide boots of a democratic manhood. Besides, he had to earn his living.

  And the whole idea had the ring of O’Sullivan’s vision of democracy, embracing “the essential equality of all humanity.” Such had been Hawthorne’s politics since college, a mix of Jeffersonian agrarianism and Jacksonian populism. “A true democracy tends ever in the direction of liberty, private as well as public,” O’Sullivan wrote, and “all ranks of men would begin life on a fair field, ‘the world before them where to choose, and Providence their guide.’ ”

  To complete the circle, O’Sullivan’s chummy meliorism also resembled Elizabeth Peabody’s Christianity, whic
h she used to promote Brook Farm. “The community aims to be rich,” Elizabeth Peabody explained, “not in the metallic representative of wealth, but in the wealth itself, which money should represent; namely, LEISURE TO LIVE IN ALL THE FACULTIES OF THE SOUL.” Religion and politics shook hands, as Ripley had hoped they would. Orestes Brownson sent his son to the Brook Farm school. So did the Bancrofts. As for Hawthorne, he could substitute Peabody’s cloying definition of Brook Farm for O’Sullivan’s more secular version of it, all while scribbling his tales and preparing to build a house for his bride in the habitat of the future.

  Elizabeth Peabody did not join the community. Nor did Margaret Fuller. “I doubt they will get free from all they deprecate in society,” Fuller wisely surmised. But Hawthorne grabbed his boots, and Louisa sewed him a blue cotton smock. One of the first pilgrims, he arrived in West Roxbury on April 12. The storm blew east, the snow fell fast and thick. “Spring and summer will come in their due season,” he wrote Sophia, trying to sound optimistic, “but the unregenerated man shivers within me.”

  Aging Brook Farmers remembered Hawthorne as beautiful, well built, tall, and taciturn until approached. Then his face opened, friendly, even playful, particularly with the flirtatious women who tossed pillows at him when he stretched out on the sofa and tried to read. Teasing the Brook Farm children, he casually dropped coins behind his back as little boys skipped in his wake. But essentially he was a loner. “He was a sort of humanitarian monk, so to speak, at least before he married,” recalled Charles Newcomb, one of Brook Farm’s youthful boarders. “He was passively, rather than positively, social.”

  He inhabited the main farmhouse, dubbed the Hive, where George Ripley stored his vast library of rare books on open shelves. (Later Ripley was forced to sell almost the entire library to pay the community’s huge debts.) Hawthorne’s room was on the first floor. It had its own stove, and from Pinckney Street he brought Sophia’s paintings and the deep red carpet, opulent luxury on a cold morning.

  In addition to the Ripleys and Hawthorne, other early-comers included the farmers Frank Farley and William Allen, ready to till the sandy soil, and the Reverend Warren Burton. Slowly, in time, a few more pioneers unpacked their cases. Among them were Mrs. Minot Pratt, Minot Pratt, George Bradford, Lloyd Fuller (Margaret’s brother), the beautiful Almira Barlow and her sons, and Charles Anderson Dana, later the disillusioned publisher of a conservative New York Sun. Rooting from the sidelines, Elizabeth Peabody invited a large group of potential backers to West Street and publicized the cause in the pages of The Dial.

  She also monitored Hawthorne’s activities. “Hawthorne has taken hold with the greatest spirit—& proves a fine workman,” she wrote to a friend. At five o’clock in the morning he blew the horn to wake his sleepy cohorts, and before breakfast milked cows, chopped wood, and loaded manure into carts. Hungry, he devoured the buckwheat cakes, served piping hot at the large table before the hearth, before he returned to the brown fields to hoe and rake and plant till dusk, wearing the thin summer frock Louisa had sewn.

  At first he enjoyed himself. He reminded Sophia that physical labor “defiles the hands, indeed, but not the soul,” and to his family he signed his letters “Nath. Hawthorne, Ploughman.” Amused at first, Hawthorne’s family grew annoyed. “What is the use of burning your brains out in the sun, when you can do anything better with them?” queried Louisa. Ebe, too, couldn’t understand why her brother worked so much longer than the mandated three hours a day. “I have never felt that I was called upon by Mr. Ripley to devote so much of my time to manual labor,” Hawthorne justified himself to another onlooker.

  Not only did Brook Farm demand the full, able-bodied commitment of all those, like himself, who wanted the experiment to succeed, but, Hawthorne declared, “there are private and personal motives which, without the influence of those shared by us all, would still make me wish to bear all the drudgery of this one summer’s labor, were it much more onerous than I have found it.”

  The private motive was his engagement, still secret, to Sophia. But there was also his writing. Hawthorne intended to crowd his quota of labor into the summer months so that in September he could trade in his dung fork for a pen.

  He had already fallen behind. “I have not written that infernal story,” he wailed to George Hillard, having promised a tale for the 1842 Token, which Hillard was editing. Hawthorne begged off. “You cannot think how exceedingly I regret the necessity of disappointing you; but what could be done? An engagement to write a story must in its nature be conditional,” Hawthorne guiltily wrote Hillard in July; “because stories grow like vegetables, and are not manufactured, like a pine table. My former stories all sprung up of their own accord, out of a quiet life. Now I have no quiet at all.”

  He had other plans too, and these he thought he could manage. James Munroe, the publisher of Emerson’s Nature, would reissue Grandfather’s Chair as the first in a series of children’s books Hawthorne would edit. Elizabeth Peabody was to negotiate the deal. “We expect to make a great deal of money,” he chortled to Louisa. “I wish Elizabeth [his sister] would write a book for the series.”

  Munroe had also consented to an enlarged version of Twice-told Tales. “I confess I have strong hopes of good from this arrangement with Munroe”—Hawthorne was excited, though he tried not to be—“but when I look at the scanty avails of my past literary efforts, I do not feel authorized to expect much from the future.”

  Sales meant everything. “How much depends on those little books!” he cried to Sophia. Increasingly dubious about Brook Farm’s fiscal health and increasingly disenchanted with the whole setup, he vowed to resign utopia in November, not six months after he arrived, unless he could be sure that he’d have a house for him and Sophia by spring. “I am becoming more and more convinced, that we must not lean upon the community,” he informed her. “What ever is to be done, must be done by thy husband’s own individual strength.”

  But he waffled. By remaining at Brook Farm through fall, Hawthorne reasoned, “I shall see these people and their enterprise under a new point of view, and perhaps be able to determine whether thou and I have any call to cast in our lot among them.” Telling the disappointed Ripleys of his intention to leave, he again reported to Sophia, this time awkwardly, that “the ground, upon which I must judge of the expediency of our abiding here, is not what they [the Ripleys] may say, but what actually is, or is likely to be; and of this I doubt whether either of them is capable of forming a correct opinion.”

  Regardless, he purchased two shares in the community, invested five hundred more dollars toward a home, and became a trustee of the estate as well as chairman of its finance committee. “My accession to these august offices does not at all decide the question of my remaining here permanently,” he insisted, firm only in his decision to spend the winter in Boston. Yet as trustee of the estate, he actively helped to mismanage funds, taking two mortgages on the property for five hundred dollars more than the original price of the farm.

  Upset and ambivalent, he retired to his room. September was passing, and he hadn’t lifted his pen. “I have not the sense of perfect seclusion,” he told Sophia, “which has always been essential to my power of producing anything. It is true, nobody intrudes into my room; but still I cannot be quiet.” He walked along the Needham road or at the edge of the meadow, feet sinking into the spongy soil. He climbed a pine tree and afterwards wrote of it in his journal, as if to capture the moment when the gold of fall turned a wintry gray. “The woods have now assumed a soberer tint than they wore at my last date,” he described the October landscape. “Many of the shrubs, which looked brightest a little while ago, are now wholly bare of leaves.… None of the trees, scarcely, will now bear a close examination; for then they look ragged, wilted, and of faded, frost-bitten hue; but at a distance, and in the mass, and enlivened by sunshine, the woods have still somewhat of the variegated splendor which distinguished them a week ago.” He wrote as of the community itself: beautiful at a di
stance, wilted on inspection, and revived by confidence, however ill placed. “It is wonderful what a difference the sunshine makes; it is like varnish, bringing out the hidden veins in a piece of rich wood.”

  Day after day, he loitered, he scribbled in his journal, he rambled over the broad countryside. He traveled to West Street, to Salem, and back to Brook Farm. He rode with William Allen to Brighton to the cattle fair on a crisp morning, inspecting cows and heavy-yoked oxen, the gentlemen farmers and the field hands. He chatted amiably with Emerson and Margaret Fuller in a little glade near the woods. He surveyed from a distance the games of the participants and their picnics. “The grown people took part with mirth enough—while I, whose nature it is to be a mere spectator of sport and serious business, lay under the trees and looked on.” He kept distances, drew boundaries. But he had come to like Fuller.

  She was not a simple woman, not a tactful woman, not even a kind woman. Her manner was slightly deprecating, her absorption egotistical and intense. She was also brilliant, fascinating, and in her own time prized as a sizzling conversationalist whose physical presence alone defied assumptions about feminine passivity. Yet though she dressed beautifully and loved ornament, she struck friends as plain, or so they later said. And her voice had a rough nasal quality, said others, implying that her ceaseless, presumptuous talk gave offense. Edgar Allan Poe noted that when she spoke “her upper lip, as if impelled by the action of involuntary muscles, habitually uplifts itself, conveying the impression of a sneer.” Fuller’s naked ambition repelled the men who might have been, or were, attracted to her.

  Born in 1810, Fuller read Latin at six, taught school, wrote lugubrious essays, and like her mother, a semi-invalid, suffered from migraines to escape the control of her father, a four-term congressman and amateur scholar of exacting standards. When Elizabeth Peabody left the Temple School, Fuller worked as Bronson Alcott’s assistant, learning how conversation could be used as a tool of intellectual discovery that pushed auditors beyond where they thought they could go. Sarah Clarke recounted a typical exchange that took place during Fuller’s Conversations for women. One of them, insisting upon her right to judge things by her feelings and ignore “the intellectual view of the matter,” said “I am made so, and I cannot help it.”