Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  “Yes,” says Margaret, gazing upon her, “but who are you? Were you an accomplished human being, were you all that a human being is capable of becoming, you might perhaps have a right to say, ‘I like it therefore it is good’; but, if you are not all that, your judgment must be partial and unjust if it is guided by your feelings alone.”

  Alcott said she might as well have been born in Greece or Rome; she was no New England woman. Her self-regard was so sublime, said another acquaintance, it was virtually inoffensive. And she was as lonely as only an intellectual woman can be. “Womanhood is at present too straitly-bound to give me scope,” she admitted.

  Hawthorne and Fuller had first met two years earlier in Boston after Fuller published her translation of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (the fourth volume in George Ripley’s series). Fuller breathed Goethe, and friends anticipated with pleasure her biography of their transcendentalist precursor but guessed her true gifts were more ephemeral: a riveting physical presence, a propensity to talk, an insatiable curiosity. She knew how to exploit these. Her Conversations were successful and lucrative. With a childlike laugh and a manner alternately clipped or beguiling, Fuller sat on a kind of tripod in a velvet gown, demanding no less of herself than the women assembled before her. What are we, as women, born to do, she wanted to know, and how did we intend to do it.

  “She broke her lance upon your shield,” recalled Sarah Clarke. “No woman ever had more true lovers among her own sex, and as many men she also remembered as equal friends.” But a friendship with Margaret Fuller—for men and women—was fraught with the abrupt, the difficult, the intimate. Few could or would admit their attraction to her was sexual. Emerson, for all his emotional abstinence, deeply loved her; so did Sophia’s mother and her two sisters. Upstaged by yet another sister surrogate, Sophia belittled Fuller, “contorted like a sybil on the tripod—tho! not so graceful as I imagined a greek sybil to be.”

  Himself a jealous man, Hawthorne used humor to defend against Fuller—against, that is, his fascination with her. “Would that Miss Margaret Fuller might lose her tongue!—or my Dove her ears, and so be left wholly to her husband’s golden silence!” he had advised Sophia when she attended Fuller’s second series of Conversations, which he waved aside as “a Babel of talkers.”

  But Sophia got hooked. In the spring of 1841, while Hawthorne pitched hay at Brook Farm, Sophia worshipfully copied Allston’s “Lorenzo and Jessica” and Crawford’s “Orpheus,” which she submitted to Fuller for approval; she composed an essay for Fuller on music, and she wrote a sonnet of steamy adoration called “To a Priestess of the Temple Not Made with Hands.”

  Again Hawthorne intervened. This time he tried to cool Sophia’s ardor by indulging his own. He seemed at first to dismiss Margaret, calling a Brook Farm cow that belonged to her a “transcendental heifer.” “She is very fractious, I believe, and apt to kick over the milk pail.” Yet he couldn’t resist observing that he would be Fuller’s “milk-maid, this evening.” Sophia certainly understood the double entendre.

  A latter-day Mrs. Hutchinson, Margaret Fuller was the impertinent, thoughtful kind of woman Hawthorne admired and avoided, especially since he’d broken his own lance on Mary Silsbee’s shield. Yet Miss Fuller’s cow, against whom the herd had predictably rebelled, “is compelled to take refuge under our protection,” Hawthorne goaded his fiancée. “So much did she impede thy husband’s labors, by keeping close to him, that he found it necessary to give her two or three gentle pats with a shove; but still she preferred to trust herself to my tender mercies, rather than venture among the horns of the herd. She is not an amiable cow,” he concluded; “but she has a very intelligent face, and seems to be of a reflective cast of character.”

  Fuller laughed to find herself at Brook Farm “in the amusing position of a conservative” (the role Hawthorne assigned himself when he wrote The Blithedale Romance, based on his experiences in West Roxbury). Her unalloyed skepticism clearly helped Hawthorne acknowledge his own growing disillusion, and by the time Hawthorne departed Brook Farm in November 1841—again, not six months after his arrival—he and Fuller were friends, Fuller admiring Hawthorne’s psychological acuity, a quality they shared. As for his writing, she didn’t say too much. There was manliness and delicate tenderness, but Hawthorne’s characters were airy, virginal. “This frigidity and thinness bespeaks a want of deeper experiences,” Fuller discerned, “for which no talent at observation, no sympathies, however ready and delicate, can compensate.”

  Hawthorne left Brook Farm for the same reason he went there. He misjudged both himself and the situation. He realized the farm could never support him and Sophia. He couldn’t write there. Nor could he tolerate the idea of a cold winter far from Sophia or a future of mind-numbing toil. “The real Me was never an associate of the community,” he justified himself.

  Sophia had been forewarned. “A man’s soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap or in a furrow in the field, just as well as under a pile of money,” Hawthorne had griped. For months he had been cursing physical labor as an enslavement, the scourge of the world, “and nobody can meddle with it, without becoming proportionately brutified.”

  And he cursed the sense of dependency—Brook Farmers called it cooperation—which the community fostered no less than a Custom House sinecure.

  For with all his goodwill toward Brook Farm, he did not share Ripley’s faith in a human nature free of envy or avarice or evil. That too was a fundamental conflict in Hawthorne: as a true democrat, he believed nothing—no moneyed interest, no institution, no government—should intrude on the people’s sovereignty; and yet he didn’t for a moment assume people were basically good. Anyway, to him, sin was a requirement of consciousness.

  If Brook Farm provided Hawthorne no financial cushion, neither did James Munroe. He did not reprint Hawthorne’s children’s stories. Later Hawthorne seemed to blame Elizabeth Peabody for holding out for too much money. Yet he contracted with Munroe and Company in October for a new two-volume edition of Twice-told Tales that paid him 10 percent of the $2.25 retail price. His reputation growing—at least among the cognoscenti—Hawthorne had expected a fair return.

  The book did appear at the end of the year, thirty-nine tales in all, the sketches from the 1837 edition and sixteen more recent ones, including the four Province-House stories as well as five early pieces not published in the original volume, like “The Haunted Mind,” “The Village Uncle,” “The Ambitious Guest,” “The Seven Vagabonds,” and “The White Old Maid.” He still excluded “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” and “Young Goodman Brown.” At Sophia’s suggestion, he also excluded three other stories, “The Man of Adamant,” “Monsieur du Miroir,” and “Mrs. Bullfrog.”

  The collection didn’t sell. “Surely the book was puffed enough to meet with a sale,” Hawthorne despaired. “What the devil is the matter?”

  The reviews were laconic. As expected, O’Sullivan hailed Hawthorne’s style as “a model of simplicity, ease, grace, quiet humor, and seriousness.” In a backhanded way, Longfellow complimented Hawthorne’s not seeing “by the help of other men’s minds” and went on to note the “large proportion of feminine elements” in the stories, referring to the androgynous quality of the writing—and the man—that other reviewers discovered in Hawthorne’s tales: fragility, rage, and a certain coyness, frightening to readers, seductive, inimitable.

  Orestes Brownson regarded Hawthorne with suspicion. He classed Hawthorne “at the head of American Literature” and characterized the tales as “gentle, yet robust and manly; full of tenderness, but never maudlin”; yet he advised Hawthorne to “attempt a higher and bolder strain than he has thus far done.” Edgar Allan Poe agreed about the need for boldness: “These effusions of Mr. Hawthorne are the product of a truly imaginative intellect, restrained, and in some measure repressed, by fastidiousness of taste, by constitutional melancholy and by indolence.”

  Margaret Fuller offered a similar obser
vation, just as harsh. Hawthorne did not “paint with blood-warm colors.”

  Contemporaries respected Hawthorne, they admired him, reviewed him, and they recognized him as one of the most imaginative and strangest writers in America. Yet like Hawthorne himself, they held something in reserve.

  Not Sophia. Her Hawthorne lived on Mount Olympus. Judicious, wise, empathetic, and aloof as no Olympian could ever be, Hawthorne was a poet “who must stand apart & observe,” she told her mother; and to her sister Mary, an agnostic on the subject of Hawthorne, she said over and over that Hawthorne’s purpose “is to observe & not to be observed.”

  But she had tired of ethereal love. “I love thee transcendantly,” Hawthorne had assured her, offering little assurance in this, the third year of their underground romance. Hawthorne shuttled between Boston and Salem, between Sophia and bachelorhood, and though no longer a tenant of Brook Farm, his sojourn there suggests he was more unsure about marriage than he knew.

  Once married, would he be able to write? To Sophia, he declared he wished nothing more than to leave the darkness of his room on Herbert Street “where my youth wasted itself in vain.” Yet in this squalid chamber, fame had been won, on this pine table, near the old chest of drawers and the mahogany-framed mirror. For better or worse, this owl’s nest of quiet solitude was where he composed his stories, safe and snug—and beyond the call of sex or entanglement. When the editors of the short-lived magazine Arcturus asked him for a tale, he said he doubted he should write anymore, “at least, not like my past productions; for they grew out of the quietude and seclusion of my former life; and there is little probability that I shall ever be so quiet and secluded again.”

  Marriage threatened everything he associated with writing. “During the last three or four years, the world has sucked me within its vortex,” he noted; “and I could not get back into my solitude even if I would.”

  He dithered. Tell your mother and sisters of our engagement, Sophia admonished her dilatory lover in early 1842. Dodging her request, he retorted, “I do not think thou canst estimate what a difficult task thou didst propose to me.” He tried to explain. “Thou wilt not think that it is caprice or stubbornness that has made me hitherto resist thy wishes. Neither, I think, is it a love of secrecy and darkness. I am glad to think that God sees through my heart, and if any angel has power to penetrate into it, he is welcome to know everything that is there.”

  Having changed the subject, he followed the thread of his own argument. “It is this involuntary reserve, I suppose, that has given the objectivity to my writings. And when people think that I am pouring myself out in a tale or essay, I am merely telling what is common to human nature, not what is peculiar to myself. I sympathize with them—not they with me.”

  Defensive, especially after the reviews of Twice-told Tales, Hawthorne half admitted what Sophia later surmised. “Mr. Hawthorne hid from himself even more cunningly than he hid himself from others,” she would remark.

  But they would marry, of that she was sure. And she succeeded at last. Hawthorne told his family of the engagement. The upstairs chamber at Herbert Street would be his no more.

  Or so he thought.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Beautiful Enough

  He then looked the applicant in the face, and said briefly—“Your business?”

  “I want,” said the latter, with tremulous earnestness, “a place!”

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Intelligence Office”

  OURS IS A STORY never told, said Nathaniel Hawthorne to Sophia Peabody. To him—to both of them—their hearts had been created new for one another. “We are Adam and Eve,” Sophia cried. Family and friends agreed, Margaret Fuller promising the couple “mutual love and heavenly trust,” and their son Julian later declaring they’d found it. Occasionally, however, a skeptic sniggered. To Thomas Higginson—preacher, writer, soldier, activist, and a confidant of Emily Dickinson—the Hawthorne marriage represented nothing more than narcissism à deux: ecstatic, domestic, imprisoning. “Both Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne came to each from a life of seclusion; he had led it by peculiarity of nurture, she through illness; and when they were united, they simply admitted each other to that seclusion, leaving the world almost as far off as before.”

  Wedded bliss or blanketed self-absorption; or both? We shall see.

  “The execution took place yesterday,” Hawthorne wrote to his sister Louisa the day after the wedding. “We made a christian end, and came straight to Paradise, where we abide at this present writing.”

  Louisa had accepted her brother’s decision to marry; not Ebe, who stormed it was unconscionable that their mother hadn’t been told of the engagement of her only son until weeks before his wedding. For three years she’d been deceived; they all had been. What could they do? Ebe informed Sophia that their future association would be congenial, “particularly as it need not be so frequent or so close as to require more than reciprocal good will, if we do not happen to suit each other in our new relationship.” Snippy, she continued, “I write thus plainly, because my brother has desired me to say only what was true; though I do not recognize his right to speak of truth, after keeping us so long in ignorance of this affair.”

  Sophia was hurt. “All in good time, dearest,” Hawthorne consoled.

  The Hawthornes had pretended indifference to the impending marriage. “I dare say we shall and must seem very cold and even apathetic to you,” Ebe admitted; “but after you have known us a little while it may be that you will discover more warmth and sympathy than is at first apparent.” In this, she echoed her brother’s estimate of family relations: “There seems to be a tacit law,” he had said, “that our deepest heart-concernments are not to be spoken of.”

  Then Ebe softened and promised Sophia a reasonably warm welcome at Herbert Street, and Nathaniel assured Sophia that his mother—“our mother”—had suspected the liaison all along.

  Hawthorne’s stealth suggests how strenuously he resisted marriage even while protesting the reverse. If initially prompted by the imbroglio with Elizabeth Peabody, he managed to keep his engagement from his family for an abnormal amount of time, and his attitude at Brook Farm—never mind his participation in it—was just as strange; he intended to build a honeymoon cottage although he never told anyone of the plan. Yet Hawthorne did reveal his anxieties in a story, “A Virtuoso’s Collection,” the only tale he wrote before his wedding.

  The virtuoso accumulates quaint relics of history and literature—Dr. Johnson’s cat, Robinson Crusoe’s parrot, Nero’s fiddle, Claude’s palette, and Charles Lamb’s pipe—to include in his fantastical museum, itself a kind of story-land place, or emblem of fiction, where the actual and the imaginary meet. As Hawthorne’s symbol of the artist, the virtuoso also resembles the solitary, unmarried Hawthorne and what he fears he’ll become should he stay single, locked in his room at Herbert Street: “cut off from natural sympathies, and blasted with a doom that had been inflicted on no other human being, and by the result of which he had ceased to be human.” This is the virtuoso: pitiless museum-keeper of the human heart.

  Probing its depths, afraid of what he might find there, the virtuoso recurs with terrible regularity in Hawthorne’s subsequent work. Great in ambition, small in humanity, frightening and compelling, the virtuoso, nothing himself, hoards what he can to assure himself of his own reality. There is ice, Hawthorne suspects, in the soul of a writer.

  And Hawthorne characterizes himself as a virtuoso—or spectral bachelor—in his love letters to Sophia: “Thou art my only reality—all other people are but shadows to me.” Again: “Without thee, I have but the semblance of life. All the world hereabouts seems dull and drowsy—a vision, but without any spirituality—and I, likewise, an unspiritual shadow, struggle vainly to catch hold of something real.” And again: “It is thou that givest me reality, and makest all things real for me.”

  Hawthorne bemoaned his alienation especially when he wrote to Sophia from Salem, where the secrecy of the engagement mu
st have bothered or titillated him the most. Anchored in his old chamber, single and secure, Hawthorne recognized the cords binding him fast, too fast. Strong and primitive feelings tied him to his mother and sisters, who were as disinclined to let him go as he was to leave them.

  But Sophia beckoned. She offered adulation, connectedness, the lure of ordinary living, fatherhood, children, and a home. Shortly after she and Hawthorne made their engagement public in the spring of 1842, she conceived a plan. They would live in Concord, Massachusetts, the small town three and a half hours by stagecoach from Boston. What better place for Hawthorne, the chronicler of America’s past? Near Concord’s North Bridge, on April 18, 1775, embattled farmers had fired the shots heard round the world. And just half a mile east of the village green, transcendental guru Ralph Waldo Emerson held court in his home while his young friend Henry Thoreau scoured the woods for Indian relics and the apostolic Bronson Alcott composed milky Orphic Sayings for The Dial.

  A few miles from the rickety North Bridge was the old weather-beaten parsonage occupied by Emerson’s stepgrandfather, recently deceased. “I devoutly believe that it is one of GOD’s lovely decrees,” cried Sophia, when she learned the place was available. She and Hawthorne visited the musty house in early May, threw open the doors, and were greeted by Emerson himself. “He seems pleased with the colony he is collecting,” an onlooker reported. The deal struck, Emerson dispatched Thoreau to plant a garden for the prospective tenants.