Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  For the last months of her pregnancy, Sophia had taken Una and gone to Boston to the home of Sophia’s sister Mary and her husband, Horace Mann. (Mary had married Mann in 1844.) The Manns were in Wrentham for the summer, where Horace’s sister lived. Hawthorne too stayed at the Mann’s place at 77 Carver Street, commuting to work on the railroad, disembarking in Salem and then going over to Herbert Street, where he bathed and breakfasted before his duties began. It was inconvenient but good for Sophia: near Back Bay, Carver Street was also near Mrs. Peabody and Sophia’s solicitous homeopath, Dr. William Wesselhoeft, as well as far from the Hawthorne women. Sophia tolerated Louisa but felt nervous around Ebe, who lavished too much attention on Una from Sophia’s point of view, sneaking the girl candy and allowing her, against Sophia’s distinct instructions, to pad into Mrs. Hawthorne’s chilly, uncarpeted room. And the Hawthornes had even brought their airtight stoves with them; it was time to move.

  On June 22, 1846, just after sunrise, Sophia gave birth to a baby boy. Called the Black Prince by his father for his dark curls and apple-red cheeks, Julian was not named for almost six months, by which time he’d been carried back to Salem and its best neighborhood. But the house and yard at 18 Chestnut Street were cramped, and as soon as the air blew cold, the Hawthornes huddled indoors, banging into one another. Hawthorne, who had no study, complained he couldn’t write. He couldn’t afford to move either, his expenses in Boston having been greater than he’d anticipated, his Custom House fees less. Salem shipping was in its final death throe.

  Hawthorne had to borrow money to pay off the rent he still owed for the Manse. Sophia owned few dresses and no warm coat, and when the Hawthornes did finally move into a bigger place in the fall of 1847, they refrained from decorating the downstairs parlor and the guest room because they had no money for furniture. Nonetheless, Sophia was pleased. “This small income that comes from external business is far better than our former income which was coined out of fine imaginings & profound searching thoughts,” she declared. “That gold always seemed to me too precious to spend for earthly goods & the pressure upon the brain was too great.”

  The sunny three-story house at 14 Mall Street was large enough to accommodate Hawthorne’s mother and sisters, who may have moved there to help Hawthorne economize, if he was now paying their rent, or to free them from Uncle William. Sophia now claimed not to mind. The Hawthornes were too polite to get underfoot. And she was genuinely grateful her husband could finally establish himself in a study on the third floor, “as quiet up there as if among the stars,” Sophia observed, “& still, yet within my reach.” It had been nearly a year since he’d touched his desk, she said. “He—the poet, the waiter upon the Muse—the heaven gifted seer—to spend his life in the Custom-house & Nursery!”

  As a matter of fact, Hawthorne had been writing, albeit sporadically, publishing occasional reviews in the Salem Advertiser, mainly of books in Duyckinck’s series. Work for the Democratic Review had all but dried up since O’Sullivan had married and sold it, so Hawthorne asked Longfellow to alert him to opportunities “to add something to my income.” And when he repaid a loan from Francis Shaw, the philanthropist who helped finance Brook Farm, he similarly asked Shaw to keep him apprised of opportunities for work, probably editorial.

  Yet Hawthorne strolled Salem streets with a swelling sense of accomplishment, and no doubt he appreciated the irony of his position: by scribbling tales in his lonely bedroom, he’d won a political appointment and, indirectly, a wife and children. He was also secretary of the Salem Lyceum, and he invited to Salem speakers from Daniel Webster to Henry Thoreau. He himself declined invitations, however, especially from Salem’s gentry. Conscious of his rising social cachet, he was confident enough to defy it. “His taste was more democratic than aristocratic,” a Salem writer commented; “he preferred gin to champagne.” Aristocratic Salem felt the snub.

  Local Democrats capitalized on Hawthorne’s association with the party. They submitted Hawthorne’s name as a member of the Democratic Town Committee and advertised him as a delegate to the state party convention. That he did not attend these functions was of no real concern; his name reflected glory. And though he contributed what few reviews he wrote mainly to the Salem Advertiser, the Democratic paper, Hawthorne billed himself as “high & dry out of the slough of political warfare,” or so Sophia alleged to Mary Mann. “… He took his office because it was presented to him, but not a word or look would he be persuaded to give for it as a pledge of action.”

  Mary’s husband had also entered government service. After the death of John Quincy Adams, Horace Mann had been elected to complete Adams’s term in Congress, and the following fall, 1848, Mann ran for the seat himself, backed by a coalition of Cotton (proslavery) and Conscience Whigs. The Manns and the Hawthornes disagreed on political matters, especially slavery; like the Hawthornes, the Manns weren’t abolitionist but they did want to stop the extension of slavery and to meliorate the condition of the slave as rapidly, and legally, as possible.

  Waiting for her husband to return from Washington, Mary Mann provided room and board to Chloe Lee, an African-American student refused lodging everywhere else. Sophia appreciated Mary’s “Christian motive” but protested loudly when Mary invited Miss Lee to dinner. Unthinkable. “I think your white guests have rights as well as your black one,” Sophia seethed. “I could scarcely eat my supper, so intolerable was the odor wafting from her to me.” Black skin, as she pointed out to her benighted sister, “is the one natural barrier between the races.”

  Of her husband’s response to this or similar episodes, Sophia said nothing. Nor does Hawthorne himself offer his own account of the dinner. But Rose Hawthorne, having heard of the Chloe Lee incident, would recall that “once, at the table of Horace Mann, he [her father] was expected to sit down to dinner with a Negro slave. He did; but that table lost its attractiveness for him, thenceforth.”

  In his third-floor study at Mall Street, away from the racket and the merciless baby linen, Hawthorne wrote every afternoon.

  “When shall you want another article?” Hawthorne asked Charles Wilkins Webber at the end of 1848. Webber was starting a new magazine, the American Review. “Now that the spell is broken, I hope to get into a regular train of scribbling.”

  It’s likely he sent Webber “The Unpardonable Sin,” later known as “Ethan Brand,” the story of a man who searches everywhere to discover the worst mankind can do. Elizabeth Peabody had rejected the tale as too morose for her own journal, Aesthetic Papers; Henry Thoreau’s lecture “Resistance to Civil Government” (subsequently titled “Civil Disobedience”) was more to her taste. So Hawthorne substituted “Main-street,” a historical overview of Salem told by a showman-artist who exhibits scenes from the past with a turn of a mechanical crank: one rotation and William Hathorne orders the whipping of the Quaker Ann Coleman, ten stripes in Salem, ten in Boston, and ten in Dedham; two turns and the Salem witches march up Main Street to Gallows Hill. Hawthorne’s Salem forebears were on the loose again.

  Hawthorne was composing quite a bit. When he came downstairs after a stint of writing, he brought his journal with him to record the movements of his children. Una was of special interest. Mercurial and alternately imperious and gentle, affectionate and tempestuous, she scampered helpfully about the house until reprimanded, and then she threw herself against the walls, uncontrollable. If her parents locked her in a room, she emerged sassy and willful. “In short, I now and then catch an aspect of her,” Hawthorne writes, “in which I cannot believe her to be my own human child, but a spirit strangely mingled with good and evil, haunting the house where I dwell.” By contrast, Julian was steady, good-natured, forgettable: “The little boy is always the same child, and never varies in his relation to me.” But Una reflected back her father’s turmoil, his ambition, his frustration, even his ennui. “I’m tired of little Una Hawsorne,” the child cried.

  Wondering if this child was beautiful or terrible—the same question Giovanni had
posed in “Rappaccini’s Daughter”—Hawthorne would change Una into Pearl, the illegitimate daughter of Hester Prynne, a spritelike, demonic girl, source both of salvation and of bleak terror.

  If Una stirred Hawthorne’s imagination, so did Elizabeth Peabody’s newest protégé, Dr. Charles Kraitsir, a Hungarian linguist whose theory was that language, functioning as an image of the human mind, reveals the essential unity of all peoples. “If it [language] is Babel,” Kraitsir wrote, “it is because men have abandoned themselves to chance, and lost sight of the principle by which language was constructed.” In 1846 Peabody had published his knotty pamphlet, Significance of the Alphabet, and in Aesthetic Papers tried hopelessly to explain his theory.

  The alphabet and language—the letter “A,” in fact—would be a theme of The Scarlet Letter, though Hawthorne is less interested in the origin of language than in its manifold interpretations. People may be alike, but when they express themselves, the results are often perplexing and ambiguous, as he suggests, sending Pearl’s skulking father into the night where he sees the letter “A” emblazoned across the sky, his guilt writ large. “But what shall we say,” Hawthorne reasons, “when an individual discovers a revelation, addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of record! In such a case, it would only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul’s history and fate.”

  As Hawthorne mulled over ideas soon to become The Scarlet Letter, Kraitsir’s theories were ultimately of less interest to him than the salacious details of the man’s domestic life: a loveless marriage, an abandoned wife, and the hapless daughter that Elizabeth Peabody, in her headlong way, decided to rescue.

  To Peabody, Kraitsir leaped directly from the pages of Jane Eyre; he was Mr. Rochester dogged by an uncaged Bertha, for Kraitsir’s wife was the incurable madwoman who, according to Peabody, “has broken all the commandments,” meaning she seduced several students while Kraitsir was teaching at the University of Virginia. “I wonder he do not divorce himself from a woman who has dishonored him,” Sophia marveled with reason. He did not. Instead Kraitsir quit his job, deposited his wife and daughter in Philadelphia, and settled himself in Boston, where he thrived under Elizabeth Peabody’s protection, quaking, claimed Peabody, lest the crazy Mrs. Kraitsir rush into his new classroom one day, shiny knife in hand.

  Peabody figured she could free Kraitsir of his troubles by assuming guardianship of the child, and with this delirious scheme in mind, she boarded a train for Philadelphia, a flurry of skirts, to inform Mrs. Kraitsir of her plan. The meeting was a disaster. Incensed, Mrs. Kraitsir followed Peabody back to Boston, where Peabody and Kraitsir tried to have her committed to the McLean Asylum. Mrs. Kraitsir rallied friends; the friends rallied the press.

  Cited as the third party in a failing marriage, Peabody found herself at the center of a sensational storm. “Every body seems to think Dr. Kraitsir very dilatory, weak, even craven not to justify himself & Elizabeth by the revelation of the whole,” Sophia tartly told her mother. Former supporters of Peabody averted their eyes while the penny press made a pretty penny, Peabody said, at her expense. “Though everybody respectable take our part,” she claimed, “they do not come out in the newspapers, because this is vulgar they think.”

  Her name pilloried, her honor questioned, Peabody did not bow her head. She refused to exonerate herself in a public statement. “Wondrous strength and generosity of a woman’s heart,” Hawthorne would soon write in The Scarlet Letter, as if referring to Peabody’s tenacious defense of a very weak man.

  Margaret Fuller, Una Hawthorne, the Kraitsir affair; Puritans, pariahs, and in Salem, a household of women: the scene is set for The Scarlet Letter.

  Biographical legend insists that The Scarlet Letter was composed in a white heat after Hawthorne lost his job at the Custom House. Sophia, however, stated otherwise. “The Photographic study of the children in 1848 was at the very time he was writing The Scarlet Letter!” she recalled shortly after Hawthorne’s death, “when he used to come from his labor of pain to rest by observing the sports and characteristics of the babies and record them.”

  Actually, it does appear that Hawthorne began The Scarlet Letter and possibly The House of the Seven Gables before the Custom House debacle. Horace Conolly distinctly remembered Hawthorne composing “at odd times, when he felt in the vein, as he called it. This [The House of the Seven Gables] and the ‘Scarlet Letter’ were written both, in Mall St.,” recollected Conolly, “during the years 1846–7 and 8.” Again Sophia corroborates Conolly’s version of events. Having finished “The Unpardonable Sin,” Hawthorne started another story, she said, or “rather went on with another, & finally it grew so very long that he said it would make a little book—So he had to put that aside & begin another.” Presumably this was the first draft of one or both of his early novels. But everything was shelved when the clamor of 1848 reached up to his third-floor study.

  Free trade, free labor, free soil, free men and women: 1848 was a year of revolutions abroad and at home. “Kings, princes and potentates flying dismayed to the right and left, and nation after nation rising up demanding freedom,” actress Fanny Kemble reported from Europe. That July, in America, more than three hundred women and men assembled in Seneca Falls, New York, in the boiling heat to demand suffrage, equal pay, and a woman’s right to divorce and own property. In Buffalo the next month, Free-Soilers, as they were called, split the Democratic Party. Riding high on the Wilmot Proviso, which forbade slavery in the territory acquired from Mexico, these antislavery Democrats from New York lined up with Conscience Whigs to choose Martin Van Buren as their presidential candidate, so fed up were they with Lewis Cass, the Democratic Party nominee, and politics as usual.

  Van Buren didn’t carry a single state. Instead Zachary Taylor, a Whig, won the presidency in November. Hawthorne read the handwriting on the wall. Aware that he’d alienated a number of Democrats and that Salem Whigs wanted him out, he began to plot his defense. He was a writer, not a politician. How dare he be removed from office on political grounds? He asked Hillard to mobilize prominent Whigs in his behalf, and he began to do the same.

  It was no use.

  On June 8, 1849, Hawthorne received the telegram. He had been fired.

  In Boston with the children, Sophia had not yet heard. “She will bear it like a woman,” Hawthorne informed Hillard, “—that is to say, better than a man.”

  Foul, cried the press, when it learned Hawthorne had been sacked. “An act of wanton and unmitigated oppression by the Whigs,” charged William Cullen Bryant’s New York Evening Post, a Democratic paper. “There stands, at the guillotine, beside the headless trunk of a pure minded, faithful, and well deserving officer, sacrificed to the worst of party proscription,” reproved the Boston Post, and the Albany Atlas yelped that “the man who would knowingly commit such an act would broil a humming bird, and break a harp to make the fire.”

  Dissenters laughed, contemptuous both of the issues and of Hawthorne’s profession. “Not one of Mr. Hawthorne’s ‘twice told tales’ has been more repeated than the sickly sentimentality evinced when a ‘literary man’ is turned out of office. He has no more right to be pensioned than an honest, hard working day laborer.”

  But testimonials flooded the Secretary of the Treasury’s office in Washington. “The office has given us a compliment to letters & genius, & I earnestly hope it may be continued on the same generous & graceful policy,” claimed Rufus Choate, a Whig conservative. The scholar George Ticknor, also a conservative, said he detested all forms of patronage but regretted Hawthorne’s poverty, and as for politics, “I am satisfied that while he is a Democrat, he is a retired, quiet, and inoffensive one.” Another supporter called Hawthorne an elegant gentleman devoted only to literature, and Democratic firebrand John O’Sullivan testified,
“I should as soon have dreamed of applying to a nightingale to scream like a vulture, as of asking Hawthorne to write politics.”

  Hawthorne spoiled for a fight. “If they will pay no reverence to the imaginative power when it causes herbs of grace and sweet-scented flowers to spring up along their pathway,” he warned, “then they should be taught what it can do in the way of producing nettles, skunk-cabbage, deadly night-shade, wolf’s bane, dog-wood.” Charged with malfeasance, he shot back that he had never written political articles, nor had he undertaken any overtly political action except voting. (He couldn’t deny his appointment had been political, though.) He did not pay Democrats in the Custom House more than Whigs, he said. As for the allegation that he had actively sought office, he denied that too, requesting Hillard to publish his full rebuttal in the Boston Advertiser under the rubric of a letter to a friend. “He seems to be all in a rouse,” said Elizabeth Peabody.

  By the end of June, there seemed to be a stay of execution: “He is either to be reinstated if he will consent—or to be presented with a better office,” Sophia thought. Angry, Hawthorne considered compromise unacceptable; he kept the job or nothing.

  With Hawthorne intransigent, the Whigs redoubled their effort under the direction of the smooth-talking Reverend Charles Wentworth Upham (“that oily man of God,” Charles Sumner reportedly called him). The Whig Ward Committee reconvened, unanimously declaring Hawthorne a two-bit politician and party hack who screamed nonpartisanship when his job was threatened.

  Haranguing continued on both sides. Hawthorne wanted the surveyor-ship back. It was a matter of pride. Upham wanted him gone. He had his own pride to consider. And that Hawthorne had also intervened for Zachariah Burchmore, secretary of Salem’s Democratic Party, when Burchmore almost lost his job, raised the stakes even higher. Local Whigs argued that Hawthorne’s apolitical posture was a charade “supported by all the talent which Mr. Hawthorne may have possessed.”