Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  Elizabeth Peabody later insisted that Hawthorne “knew nothing about slavery,” but he had actually been meditating on it for some time. In his 1835 sketch “Old News,” Hawthorne’s narrator calls slavery “a patriarchal, and almost a beautiful, peculiarity” of colonial days, observing that many emancipated slaves “would have been better advised had they staid at home, foddering the cattle, cleaning dishes—in fine, performing their moderate share of the labors of life without being harassed by its cares.” Freedom is more difficult than bondage, Hawthorne’s ridiculous narrator implies, romanticizing the slavery system almost as if it were a prototype of Brook Farm.

  Whether the narrator speaks for Hawthorne is debatable. Certainly Hawthorne liked to hedge his bets, and his narrators are frequently the butt of his irony. But in a passage Hawthorne omitted when the story was reprinted in 1851, his narrator blandly anticipates Bridge’s similar observation in Journal of an African Cruiser: “Slavery, as it existed in New-England, was precisely the state most favorable to the humble enjoyments of an alien race, generally incapable of self-direction, and whose claims to kindness will never be acknowledged by the whites, while they are asserted on the ground of equality.”

  If racial equality and emancipation are unthinkable, then colonization makes sense. “When the white man sets his foot on the shore of Africa, he finds it necessary to throw off his former prejudices,” Bridge writes in Journal of an African Cruiser. “… In another city, where I might be known to few, should I follow the dictates of my head and heart, and there treat these colored men as brethren and equals, it would imply the exercise of greater moral courage than I have ever been conscious of possessing. This is sad; but it shows forcibly what the colored races have to struggle against in America, and how vast an advantage is gained by removing them to another soil.”

  Though Hawthorne failed to sympathize with any nonwhite population, he nonetheless despised the slave trade, which implicated both North and South. Emerson remarked that the American flag was sewn with cotton threads, and as Bridge points out in his Journal, “It is quite an interesting moral question, however, how far either Old or New England can be pronounced free from the guilt and odium of the slave-trade, while, with so little indirectness, they both share its profits and contribute essential aid to its prosecution.” Again Bridge sounds like Hawthorne.

  Journal of an African Cruiser, then, reflects sentiment of long standing: that northern states are complicit in the slave trade; that Africans, and especially African-Americans, are childlike creatures; that the white man, the flower of civilization, is a hypocritical brute. When Hawthorne read Bridge’s account of how sailors from the Saratoga burned native villages and shot the villagers in retaliation for the death of an American trading schooner’s crew, Hawthorne trembled with anger. “A civilized and educated man must feel somewhat like a fool, methinks, when he has staked his own life against that of a black savage, and lost the game,” he sardonically informed Bridge. “In the sight of God, one life may be as valuable as another, but in our view, the stakes are very unequal. Besides, I really do consider the shooting of these niggers but of very questionable propriety; and am glad, upon the whole, that you bagged no game on either of those days. It is a far better deed to beget a white fellow-creature,” he concluded, “than to shoot even a black one.”

  The incident appears in Bridge’s book. Hawthorne comments in the self-mocking deadpan of his tales and sketches:

  Though the burning of villages may be a very pretty pastime, yet it leaves us in a moralizing mood, as most pleasures are apt to do; and one would fain hope that civilized man, in his controversies with the barbarian, will at length cease to descend to the barbarian level, and may adopt some other method of proving his superiority, than by his greater power to inflict suffering. For myself, personally, the “good old way” suits me tolerably enough; but I am disinterestedly anxious that posterity should find a better.

  Published in June of 1845, two thousand copies in its first edition, Journal of an African Cruiser appeared the same month as the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. The Narrative, not the Journal, became an international sensation.

  Emerson, who shrugged off Hawthorne’s poverty—everyone’s in debt, he said—now dispatched Caroline Sturgis to the Manse as an unofficial boarder. Hawthorne refused to take her money.

  Frantic he couldn’t pay for the trip, Hawthorne took Sophia and Una to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to see Bridge, now supervisor of the Navy Yard there, who said he’d introduce Hawthorne to friends variously placed in the government and sure to help him get a government job.

  Desperate for cash, Hawthorne sued George Ripley—do it “promptly and forcibly,” he instructed Hillard—to recover the down payment he’d made on his Brook Farm house, a note for $530 plus interest. Hawthorne eventually won the suit, though not until the following year, and it’s doubtful that he ever collected the money ($585.90) granted by the court.

  And the Hawthornes had been evicted. This was polite Concord, so they were told their landlord, the Reverend Samuel Ripley, wanted his house back. “We are actually turned out of roof & home,” Sophia sobbed.

  The truth was that they had not paid the rent in a very long time.

  Sophia wrapped up their frayed clothes, the coffeepot, the mattress, the crockery, a looking glass, and all her sadness about leaving the Manse. “I have got weaned from it, however, gradually, by the perplexities that have vexed my husband’s soul for the last year, & have really made the spot painful to him.”

  Uncertain as wandering Arabs, said Hawthorne, he and his family left the gray parsonage, unsure where their tent might next be pitched. Fortunately, O’Sullivan delivered one hundred dollars of the money he owed Hawthorne for his contributions to the Democratic, and with Bridge loaning another sum ($150 now, $100 the previous May), Hawthorne was at least able to ride out of Concord “with flying colors,” as he put it, on the second of October.

  They headed to Herbert Street. They had nowhere else to go. The spare rooms at the Peabody home had been rented. So Nathaniel took his old chamber, and Sophia and Una rented a front room on the lower floor, sixteen by sixteen and nine feet high, right below the Hawthorne parlor. They paid Uncle William Manning, who owned the house, ten dollars each quarter. Sophia was grateful. “I besieged Heaven with prayers that we might not find it our duty to separate, whatever privations we must awkwardly suffer in consequence of remaining together.”

  Restored to his bedroom, the forty-one-year-old Hawthorne must have seen his homecoming as the defeat it was. Once more he’d come back to Salem, a deflated storyteller seeking shelter under his mother’s roof.

  “Here I am again established in the old chamber where I wasted so many years of my life,” he confided to Bridge, reverting to the old refrain. But as of old, there were compensations. “I find it rather favorable to my literary duties,” he added.

  Placing a quire of paper on his desk, Hawthorne began to write, borne back into the past. This time, though, his subject was the gray parsonage, drenched in memory’s afterglow. It wouldn’t be easy.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Salem Recidivus

  “We public men,” replies the showman, meekly, “must lay our account, sometimes, to meet an uncandid severity of criticism.”

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Main-street”

  I AM TURNED OUT of office!” Hawthorne was horrified. It had taken almost two years to get his government post, and now he’d lost it.

  Hawthorne’s appointment as surveyor of the Salem Custom House finally came in March 1846, five months after the Hawthornes had returned to Salem. Prominent Democrats had been besieging Polk. The chairman of the Essex County Democratic Committee had written the president; so had Senator John Fairfield of Maine and Franklin Pierce and the publishers of the Salem Advertiser, who praised Hawthorne as a pure and primitive Democrat, a phrase likely intended as a compliment. Friends like William Pike, Hawthorne’s crony in the Boston Cus
tom House, and Horace Conolly, now chairman of the second congressional district committee, argued that Hawthorne’s appointment would heal party rifts in Salem. Even Benjamin Browne, whose job at the Salem post office Hawthorne had tried to steal, threw his support to the writer. In gratitude, Hawthorne edited Browne’s “Papers of an Old Dartmoor Prisoner” for the Democratic Review. “I have grown considerable of a politician by the experience of the last few months,” Hawthorne sheepishly declared in early March.

  Nor did Whigs oppose Hawthorne’s candidacy. George Hillard backed Hawthorne, and Charles Sumner pleaded with Elizabeth Bancroft: “Poor Hawthorne (that sweet, gentle, true nature) has not wherewithal to live.”

  It was true. With Sophia pregnant again, the baby due in the spring of 1846, Hawthorne was almost frantic. “What a devil of a pickle I shall be in,” he told Bridge, “if the baby should come, and the office should not!” His suit against Ripley had not been tried, so he couldn’t anticipate any cash from that direction, and though the publishers sent him a small royalty from the second edition of Journal of an African Cruiser, he still owed Bridge money.

  And he couldn’t write. On Herbert Street, he struggled over a preface for a new collection of short stories that Evert Duyckinck, inspired by O’Sullivan, had solicited on behalf of Wiley and Putnam’s Library of American Books. Nothing materialized. Frustrated, Duyckinck goaded the dilatory author. “MSS! MSS! Mr. Wiley’s American series is athirst for a volume of Tales.”

  The past year had chipped away at his confidence. He answered Duyckinck, apologetic. “I have reached that point in an author’s life, when he ceases to effervesce; and whatever I do hereafter must be done with leaden reluctance, and therefore had better be left undone.”

  Overlooking the self-pity, Duyckinck suggested Hawthorne expand the collection to two volumes. Hawthorne appreciated the offer, particularly since he didn’t think he’d be writing any more stories: self-pity again, but understandable. “It is rather a sad idea,” he said, “—not that I am to write no more in this kind, but that I cannot better justify myself for having written at all.”

  Then, in March, Hawthorne learned he’d been appointed surveyor at the Salem Custom House. His salary—twelve hundred dollars per year plus incidental fees—was modest but allowed for some luxuries, and besides, the job itself entailed no great expenditure of time. His mood considerably brightened, and on April 9, 1846, Hawthorne swore the oath of office fully expecting to be able to write and free himself at last from debt. Six days later he sent the preface “The Old Manse” to Duyckinck, overdue by almost a year.

  “The Old Manse” is an elegiac evocation of time past and passing, for the Manse itself had come to represent a last summer in the haze, lovely, enchanted, doomed to slide into the meaner seasons of obligation and middle age.

  “Ah,” writes Hawthorne, “but there is a half-acknowledged melancholy, like to this, when we stand in the perfected vigor of our life, and feel that Time has now given us all his flowers, and that the next work of his never idle fingers must be—to steal them, one by one, away!”

  The Manse is another of Hawthorne’s old houses, fragrant with the spirit of former tenants and, perched on the banks of the past, fit emblem of his imagination. In the Manse, one is not compelled, Hawthorne explains, to “subserve some useful purpose.” Rather, the writer fishes in the nearby river, picks apples from his orchard, and on a rainy day pokes around a garret stocked with Latin folios and old books bound in black leather. From the upstairs window of his study he dreams of bygone soldiers near the North Bridge, battle smoke barely dispersed in the wind. And he mulls over a tale he heard about a young woodchopper who, happening upon a wounded British soldier, splits his head with an ax for no apparent reason. Out of such stuff are stories made.

  Days at the Manse float on a cloud of leisure, fantasy, and lazy liberty. But the inhabitant of the Manse has matured into a man of regret. He never wrote a novel or produced any great work while living there. “The treasure of intellectual gold, which I hoped to find in our secluded dwelling,” Hawthorne admits, “had never come to light. No profound treatise of ethics—no philosophic history—no novel, even, that could stand, unsupported on its edges. All that I had to show, as a man of letters, were these few tales and essays, which had blossomed out like flowers in the calm summer of my heart and mind. Save editing (an easy task) the journal of my friend of many years, the African Cruiser, I had done nothing else.”

  For his sin, the writer is expelled from the Manse and cast into a world of smiling public men in another edifice, the Custom House. “As a storyteller, I have often contrived strange vicissitudes for my imaginary personages,” he grins, “but none like this.”

  Hawthorne doesn’t say—he can’t say—that he’d maneuvered ceaselessly for this new berth or that the honeymoon years at the Manse may have been conceived from the start as a vacation forced on him by a hostile administration. Nor would he admit that he could never tolerate Eden for too long anyway, or that the Salem Custom House was a retreat no less than the Manse, and not just from economic privation but from the agonies of literature.

  On June 5 Hawthorne’s new collection, Mosses from an Old Manse, was published in two volumes, sold individually or as a set, the title stamped in gold on the spine. In addition to the preface, the collection contained most of the stories written at the parsonage along with “Young Goodman Brown” and “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” reprinted at last. “I am jogging onward in life, with a moderate share of prosperity,” he wrote to Bridge, “and am contented and happy.” Life was good again.

  Hoping to earn more money and broaden his readership, Hawthorne sent advance copies to Margaret Fuller in New York, where she wrote for Horace Greeley’s New-York Daily Tribune, as well as to Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Tuckerman, and Rufus Griswold, the tubercular editor of Graham’s. The response was mostly favorable. Notices in Graham’s Magazine and the Harbinger complimented the book, with William Henry Channing emphasizing Hawthorne’s tragic vision: “No masks deceive him. And plainly, the mockeries of life have cost him sleepless nights and lonely days.” Lest Hawthorne’s reputation as a Democrat nettle readers, Charles Wilkins Webber, writing in the American Whig Review, recommended Mosses as “the specific remedy for all those congestions of patriotism which relieve themselves in uttering speeches.”

  In her large review, posted on the front page of the Tribune, Margaret Fuller refused to give a full-throttled endorsement to Hawthorne’s work; this, after her hesitant review of Twice-told Tales, may account for the chill soon to settle over her friendship with the Hawthornes. Commending stories like “The Birth-mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and “Young Goodman Brown,” she nonetheless found Hawthorne’s style “placid” and his command of language “indolent.” The coup de grâce: “Hawthorne intimates and suggests, but he does not lay bare the mysteries of our being.”

  Eight years after Fuller’s premature death, Hawthorne retaliated with vitriolic pleasure. Writing in his notebooks in 1858, he characterized his former friend as lacking “the charm of womanhood” and a humbug, talented, yes, but arrogantly determined to “make herself the greatest, wisest, best woman of the age; and to that end, she set to work on her strong, heavy, unpliable and, in many respects, defective and evil nature, and adorned it with a mosaic of admirable qualities, such as she chose to possess.” Continuing for pages, he savored his own portrait of the woman he once cared for: “But she was not working on an inanimate substance, like marble or clay; there was something within her that she could not possibly come at, to recreate and refine it; and by and by this rude old potency bestirred itself, and undid all her labor in the twinkling of an eye. On the whole, I do not know but I like her the better for it;—the better, because she proved herself a very woman, after all, and fell as the weakest of her sisters might.”

  Hawthorne rewrote Margaret Fuller’s life, the ambitious guest as fallen woman.

  Fuller wasn’t alone in criticizing Hawthorne’s work.
Edgar Allan Poe liked Hawthorne’s precision and fluency but not the hermetic, rarified quality of the stories. Scorning the New England drawing rooms and the dainty prose applauded there, Poe tendered his advice: “Get a bottle of visible ink, come out from the Old Manse, cut Mr. Alcott, hang (if possible) the editor of The Dial, and throw out of the window to the pigs all his odd numbers of The North American Review.”

  With Texas admitted into the Union in December 1845, James K. Polk ordered American troops, led by Zachary Taylor, to cross the border into Mexico. To John Quincy Adams, the invasion was morally reprehensible, but to John O’Sullivan, America was simply spreading freedom and democracy, like spilled ink, over the continent. O’Sullivan wanted no bloodshed, but Polk didn’t seem to mind and in the spring of 1846 declared all-out war.

  That same spring, Hawthorne was climbing the wide granite staircase of the Salem Custom House, a massive brick building that overlooked the ocean, its small windowed cupola bright on a sunny morning and with a huge gilt eagle, arrows and thunderbolts in each claw, poised to take flight from its roof. Each morning, Hawthorne entered the arched doorway at about ten o’clock, looked at the morning papers, and swapped stories with the custom officers, chairs tipped back, until the ships arrived.

  He liked his new life and joked to George Curtis, former Brook Farmer and Concord resident, that he’d use the Custom House barge as a private yacht. Ellery Channing came to visit, watching in awe as Hawthorne tread the docks, proof glass in hand, and tested the strength of the rum to be exported to the African coast. Natives shall have “as good liquor as anybody gets from New England,” the new surveyor insisted. Just as often, though, the docks were empty and there was nothing to do. The officers hung around, talking, smoking, reading the papers. Hawthorne might write a couple of letters until one o’clock, when he descended the Custom House steps and walked home to Herbert Street.