Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  Originally scheduled for June 27, 1842, the Hawthorne wedding was initially postponed when Sophia fell ill. Hawthorne slid into a depression, short-lived, for not two weeks later, on July 9, the long-anticipated marriage ceremony took place in the Peabody parlor at West Street. Sophia’s friend Cornelia Park braided the bride’s auburn hair, and Sarah Clarke patted down her dress. She was thirty-two, he was thirty-eight: middle-aged. But they were so radiant, particularly Hawthorne, that James Freeman Clarke, who married them, could barely contain himself. He’d expected the author, of whom he’d heard so much, to be old and dry, not handsome or charismatic. But Hawthorne was so nervous that Sophia’s Aunt Pickman hid in an adjoining room so as not to scare him away.

  Apparently none of the Hawthornes or Mannings attended the ceremony, nor is there a record of any of Hawthorne’s friends, although David Roberts gave Hawthorne a half dozen silver spoons and Horace Conolly an heirloom watch belonging to Susanna Ingersoll’s great-grandfather. By and large, though, the wedding was a Peabody affair.

  After the ceremony, the couple boarded their wedding carriage. A gust of summer shower delayed them more than an hour on the road, but they rolled into Concord at five o’clock that afternoon. They walked between the columns of black ash trees on the side of the long path that separated the Old Manse, as Hawthorne called the parsonage, from the road. The house was filled with flowers, vases and baskets brimming with sweet-smelling roses and the white lilies that Elizabeth Hoar and Abigail Alcott, neighbors, had placed on stands made from the roots of trees. Sophia was delirious. “I am the happiest person on this earth,” she wrote her mother the next day. Likewise, Hawthorne wrote to Louisa, “We are as happy as people can be, without making themselves ridiculous.” He sent the reassurances his mother and sisters needed, or he did. “I have neither given up my own relatives,” he reminded them, “nor adopted others.”

  Summer was their honeymoon. After breakfast Hawthorne rambled through the orchard that sloped in the back of the house and down to the drowsy Musketaquid (or Concord) River, returning to the Manse his arms full of lilies and cardinals for his bride. Or he slipped out of bed before dawn to catch the fish they’d eat fried for dinner. He planted vegetables. Green leaves slithered up the beanpoles, and soon his summer squashes appeared, the color of bleached gold. It was the first flush of fatherhood, he wrote, “as if something were being created under my own inspection, and partly by my own aid.”

  Afternoons, the couple raced down the avenue carrying baskets of whortleberries, and for dinner they feasted on peas and tomatoes from the garden, purchasing their milk for four cents a quart and butter for eighteen cents a pound. A young Irishwoman, Sarah, cooked, but when Sarah went home to Waltham for a day, Sophia boiled her first dinner: corn and squash and rice warmed in milk with baked apples from their trees.

  Inside the Manse, Sophia lined the newly papered parlor with flowers and hung one of her paintings on the yellow walls of Hawthorne’s study, helping him arrange the bureau and desk he’d brought from Pinckney Street. She put the little plaster bust relief of Apollo, a wedding gift from Caroline Sturgis, on a shelf, and from then on Hawthorne was Apollo to Sophia, and she to him the sunny incarnation of spring. They lay under the trees in one another’s arms, and when they came back to the house, they recited love poetry to each other, measuring their own bliss against the words of the poets. “We did not think they knew much,” said Sophia, “though once in a while we would find a true word.”

  At night they sat in Hawthorne’s study beneath the astral lamp and Hawthorne read aloud from Shakespeare and Spenser and Milton, the happy couple criticizing Milton’s God but not his earth, which they embraced. Sophia danced to the tune of a music box, a wedding present from Mary. Sexually expressive, she luxuriated in the freedom denied under her mother’s eye. “I would put on daily a velvet robe and pearls in my hair to gratify my husband’s taste,” she announced, and to her mother she gloated that her husband “fills me so completely that there can be no void.” She didn’t transgress too far. “This vigilance & care are comparable only to a mother’s,” Sophia tactfully wrote to Mrs. Peabody, “& exceed all other possible carefulness & watching.”

  “I send up a perpetual thanksgiving to Heaven that Mr. Hawthorne’s vocation keeps him beneath his own vine & figtree within instant reach of eye & voice,” Sophia wrote to Mary Foote, whose husband toiled in a newspaper office. Though the newlyweds didn’t plan to do a thing—no writing, no painting—during the summer, they charted a new routine. Mornings would be for creative work. Downstairs in the dining room, near the kitchen, Sophia had set up her studio, where she would paint, copying Emerson’s print of Endymion; or she would compose long chatty letters to her mother about the joys of marriage while Hawthorne wrote in his study just above her. They would meet at dinnertime and discuss what they’d done, and later in the afternoon Hawthorne might climb back upstairs to read, nap, or write in his journal.

  Sitting at his desk in the study at the rear of the house, Hawthorne could glimpse the North Bridge monument, and from another window he gazed down through the apple orchard to the river, his passion for it not unlike Thoreau’s for Walden Pond. As if prophesizing the images in Thoreau’s masterpiece, Walden, Hawthorne in his journal compares the water’s green and blue to an open eye; and bathing in the ponds was like plunging into the sky. “A good deal of mud and river-slime had accumulated on my soul,” he wrote; “but those bright waters washed it all away.” Sometimes the river seemed torpid, sluggish, and muddy. “This dull river,” said he, “has a deep religion of its own.”

  As did he. His was a tender pantheism, reverential, tranquil, sexually satisfied—a “world just created,” he observed, happy to see his wife, who met him at the door when he came home from the village. He responded to every change in weather, every scattered sound, in the journal he kept together with Sophia, an extended love letter written at home. Their home was Paradise.

  Besides Apollo, Hawthorne was “Adam” or “my lord” to Sophia, and everything in paradise was holy, even the body. “Before our marriage I knew nothing of its capacities & the truly married alone can know what a wondrous instrument it is for the purpose of the heart,” she exulted.

  Hawthorne himself confessed that “my life, at this time, is more like that of a boy, externally, than it has been since I was really a boy.” Surprised by physical pleasure, surprised by his sense of freedom, he brushed away more sober thoughts. “It might be a sin and shame, in such a world as ours, to spend a lifetime in this manner; but for a few summer-weeks, it is good to live as if this world were Heaven.”

  “The general sentiment that prevails about you is, I find, that you do not wish to see any one,” Mary Peabody accused the newlyweds, “and that you have taken all decent measures to prevent such a catastrophe.” Mary was wrong. Proud to have a home of his own, Hawthorne showed off his house to friends. “I felt that I was regarded as a man with a wife and a household—a man having a tangible existence in the world,” he wrote in his journal.

  By mid-August the Manse had opened its doors to a steady stream of guests: the Emersons, Elizabeth Hoar, the Hillards. George Bradford came from Brook Farm, and Louisa Hawthorne, traveling by coach all the way from Salem, stayed three weeks. Mrs. Peabody came, and Frank Farley and David Roberts. Elizabeth Peabody did not; Ebe did not.

  Thoreau dined at the Manse. “Agreeable & gentle & meek,” said Sophia. Hawthorne considered him a singular character, wild and sophisticated in his own idiosyncratic way. “He is ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners,” Hawthorne observed. He respected Thoreau’s minute devotion to nature, “and Nature,” said Hawthorne, “in return for his love, seems to adopt him as her especial child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness.” A friend of both men, Ellery Channing, thought them alike in “the stoical fond of their characters,” he said. “A vein of humor had they both; and when they laughed, like Sh
elley, the operation was sufficient to split a pitcher.”

  Averse to small talk in the village, Hawthorne earned the reputation of misfit, as Mary Peabody only too readily pointed out, but in Thoreau he found an accomplice. He praised the younger man’s “Natural History of Massachusetts”—not overly transcendental—published in the July issue of The Dial; he admired his scholarship; his good sense; the way he handled his skiff. In need of money, Thoreau sold Hawthorne his canoe for seven dollars, and Hawthorne asked Epes Sargent, editor of the New Monthly Magazine, to solicit Thoreau’s contribution. He did the same with O’Sullivan and the Democratic Review, which published a review by Thoreau and a short essay before O’Sullivan presciently suggested he write about nature.

  Hawthorne steered shy of Emerson. It was an unusual stance, since typically men and women came to Concord to pay homage to the resident sage already known for his sonorous lectures, his heretical book Nature, and his aphorisms. “Life is a progress, not a station,” Emerson reminded his readers in his essay “Compensation.” (A “man without a handle!” Henry James Sr. called him.) Standing erect, he was over six feet tall, with bright blue eyes, craggy nose, and high cheekbones. But his individualistic pith was the fruit of gnarled despair. Two of his brothers had died young; another was mentally ill. And his first wife succumbed to tuberculosis before the couple had been married two years. Fourteen months after her death, Emerson walked out to Roxbury, where she was buried, and opened her tomb. That same year, 1832, he left the pulpit.

  After his remarriage in 1835, Emerson moved to Concord with his wife Lydia, whom Emerson renamed Lydian, adding the “n” to her name to make it more euphonious. There, he wrote the transcendentalist bible, Nature, likely starting it at the Manse. It encapsulated the credo of a divine nature, both inner and outer, ordered, infinite, knowable. “We have no questions to ask which are unanswerable,” he claimed. Not entirely true, as he discovered in 1842, when a son died of scarlet fever. “I comprehend nothing of this fact,” he wailed, “but its bitterness.”

  The Emersons lived on the dusty Lexington Road in a large white house with green-shuttered windows that burst with afternoon sun as if to remind Emerson that he’d staked his life on light, not the unbelief or grief nipping at his heels. He and Hawthorne were fated to misunderstand each other. When Elizabeth Peabody gave him “Foot-prints on the Sea-shore,” Emerson complained that “there was no inside to it; he & Alcott together would make a man,” and he criticized Twice-told Tales with grudging respect. “It is no easy matter to write a dialogue,” he admitted. “Cooper, Sterling, Dickens, and Hawthorne cannot.” As he came to know Hawthorne, Emerson liked him more, although he remained equivocal about the work. “N. Hawthorn’s [sic] reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact,” Emerson wrote in his own journals, “because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man.”

  For his part, Hawthorne described Emerson as “a great searcher for facts; but they seem to melt away and become unsubstantial in his grasp.” The Dial put Hawthorne to sleep, and as to the recent religious controversies pitting Unitarians against transcendentalists, he couldn’t have cared less. He preferred “the narrow but earnest cushionthumper of puritanical times,” he half joked, to the “cold, lifeless, vaguely liberal clergyman of our own day.”

  To some extent Hawthorne kept Emerson at bay to needle Sophia, who rushed to Concord to sit at the wise man’s knee. Hawthorne did not fancy sharing his bride’s attentions, and Sophia, alert to Hawthorne’s needs, began to deprecate the Concord sage. Aware of her daughter’s stratagem, Mrs. Peabody warned Sophia not to yield to Hawthorne’s point of view. Hackles up, Sophia retorted, “Our love is so wide & deep & equal that there could not be much difference of opinion between us upon any moral point.” Soon Sophia ventured further. “Waldo Emerson knows not much of love,” she saucily informed her mother. “He also as well as Mr. Hawthorne is great, but Mr. Emerson is not so whole sided as Mr. Hawthorne. He towers straight up from a deep pool—Mr. Hawthorne spreads abroad many branches.”

  In return, Sophia didn’t approve of all of Hawthorne’s friends. David Roberts was a bore, with his “Salem inquisitiveness & anxiety to know the price of things.” But in Margaret Fuller the couple found common ground. Dear noble Margaret, as Sophia labeled her, startled the newlyweds one August afternoon when, unannounced, she walked in on them while they were locked in an embrace. Embarrassed, they unclasped and ushered the Queen, another of Sophia’s names for Fuller, into an easy chair, taking her bonnet and begging her to stay for tea. She did, and entertained the Hawthornes with “Sydnean showers of soft discourse,” Sophia fluttered. “She was like the moon, radiant & gentle.”

  Hawthorne walked Fuller back to the Emersons’ and confided “he should be much more willing to die than two months ago, for he had had some real possession in life, but still he never wished to leave this earth. It was beautiful enough.” Next day, Sunday, he returned to the Emersons’ to drop off a book Fuller had forgotten at the Manse. On the way home, he saw Fuller, sitting on the ground in the woods, and joined her. Not at all shy in her presence, he talked about the pleasures of getting lost, the crows, the seasons, the experiences of early childhood, the mountains, and anything that seemed to come into his mind until Emerson, taking a Sunday walk, interrupted them. Hawthorne was annoyed.

  Now happily married, Hawthorne was more comfortable with Margaret than he ever could have been before.

  It rained in late summer. Hawthorne’s spirits drooped. Sophia cheered him. “Thus, even without the support of a stated occupation, I survive these sullen days, and am happy,” he wrote in relief. Warm summer days were numbered.

  “I suspect he is lazy about writing—is he not?” Nathan Hale Jr., the editor of the Boston Miscellany, asked Evert Duyckinck. “He wrote me one article but has been shy of saying anything about another—although purse grew lean in obtaining the first.”

  Happy in marriage, his new home, and his sense of sheer belonging, Hawthorne realized he could not support a family simply by selling barrels of fruit from a rented orchard or by harvesting bushels of potatoes from a garden planted by someone else. To have a place, one must work to keep it. Before the wedding, Hawthorne had traveled to Albany to talk with John O’Sullivan, now a state legislator, and agreed to continue writing for the Democratic Review. In March he had sent Hale “A Virtuoso’s Collection.” But of late he hadn’t been doing much.

  The Peabodys knew of Hawthorne’s shaky finances, especially Elizabeth. When Samuel Soden, the publisher of the Boston Miscellany, decided to replace Hale as editor, she immediately suggested her brother-in-law. Mary sent Sophia the news, along with Elizabeth’s exasperating instructions to hold out for a salary of one thousand dollars a year, paid monthly. It didn’t matter. Henry Tuckerman, a mediocre essayist and travel writer, got the job, rejecting Poe’s “The Tell-tale Heart” first thing.

  Margaret Fuller tried to help. Perhaps her sister and Ellery Channing, soon to be married, could board with the Hawthornes. Hawthorne said no even though he’d already invited George Bradford to board at the Manse. Bradford had declined. Hawthorne told Fuller he wanted to spare Sophia unnecessary housework so she could be free to paint and sculpt; and then there was the real reason: four sensitive people under one roof “would take but a trifle to render their whole common life diseased and intolerable.” Hawthorne liked Channing up to a point. “The lad seems to feel as if he were a genius,” he laughed, “and, ridiculously enough, looks upon his own verses as too sacred to be sold for money.”

  The coffers remained empty.

  Death, too, prowled on the outskirts of Arcady. On October 10 Uncle Robert died, the cause attributed to palsy. Hawthorne quickly extemporized. He could never get to Salem in time for the funeral, nor could he leave Concord with the harvest now in progress—the apples were a source of income—and he was trying to write a sketch from his old journals (“The Old Apple-Dealer”) for Epes Sargent. Still beholden to Uncle Robert, Hawth
orne no doubt remembered with resentment Robert’s disappointment in him. He’d come to Salem pretty soon, he told Louisa, maybe toward the end of the month.

  Nathaniel and Sophia did leave Paradise for Salem and Boston later that fall, family and the shade of Robert Manning calling Hawthorne back to his old accustomed chamber—and the warmth. The Manse’s long central corridor created a pleasant draft in summertime, but in October the frosty place smelled of bruised apples and dead leaves. “It is a very cold house,” remarked Sophia, rapidly stitching robes of wadded flannel. They purchased three airtight stoves, all they could afford. Detestable, Hawthorne thought them. Longing for an open fireplace, he made nostalgia the subject of a new Democratic Review sketch, “Fire-Worship.” “The inventions of mankind are fast blotting the picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful out of human life,” he groaned; even the destructive was in jeopardy: “The mighty spirit, were opportunity offered him, would run riot through the peaceful house, wrap its inmates in his terrible embrace, and leave nothing of them save their whitened bones.”

  No more. Captive within an iron-bellied stove, fire can no longer thaw hands as cold as the virtuoso’s. “A person with an ice-cold hand,” Hawthorne had written in his notebooks, “—his right hand; which people ever afterwards remember, when once they have grasped it.” Ice-cold, too, is the heart yearning for firesides, forever bygone. Alien, detached, isolated, this ice-man again crystallizes Hawthorne’s fear of what he himself might be or, without Sophia, have become. Soon he’ll populate the happy groom’s fiction in great number.

  Hawthorne could easily despise Concord, with its rolling meadows and deep woods, its donnish Whigs and do-gooders, “bores,” he said, “of a very intense water.” No sunbaked sailors roamed the street, earrings aglitter; no day laborers hauled masts and hurled epithets by the wharves; no brothels squat waterside. Instead Concord was a Hall of Fantasy, its dreamy corridors reaching all the way to Cambridge, where Longfellow had finished his small yellow packet of antislavery poems. And it swept over the hallowed streets of Beacon Hill, protesters cried out against the trumped-up arrest of mulatto George Latimer, jailed in Boston without a warrant.