To block the reinstatement, Upham drafted a huge document, a “Memorial of the Whigs of Salem in regard to Mr. Hawthorne.” The case against Hawthorne was scrupulously mounted. Not only had Hawthorne as surveyor superintended discrepancies in pay, which Upham itemized, he had demanded his own officials kick back their extra salary to pay party dues and support the Salem Advertiser—sheer and incontrovertible improprieties. Boston Whigs began to huff and puff and then to backpedal. “I was yesterday informed upon authority which I cannot distrust, that Mr. Hawthorne has been, while in office, the agent of party measures of the most objectionable character, acting perhaps rather as the instrument of other than for his own impulses, but in such a manner as to destroy all claim to the plea of neutrality.” Edward Everett retracted his letter of support.
All the Sturm und Drang, bitter and intense, makes one wonder what really motivated the attack on Hawthorne, a man Salem knew well, or too well. There is no simple or completely satisfying answer. Enmity in Salem was, as ever, historical; Sophia speculated that George Devereux conspired against Hawthorne “on account of an ancient family feud between Hawthornes & Devereux!” But the animus against Hawthorne seems personal, not just historical and decidedly not abstract. Charles Upham, who had promised Hawthorne immunity should administrations change, was motivated by injuries near at hand, and Horace Conolly went so far as to cross party lines to jockey for Hawthorne’s removal. Even Hawthorne’s friend Caleb Foote voted to dump him.
Evidently Hawthorne’s position as a writer-politician infuriated these men, who preferred artists to know their place and keep to it. If Hawthorne wanted to be a writer, fine; but he couldn’t be a writer and a backroom politician at the same time. So with the political means at their disposal, Hawthorne’s foes sent the man of letters packing, straight back to the dreamy region he had vainly claimed as his defense.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Scarlet Letters
I am a citizen of somewhere else.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
HAWTHORNE HAD returned to Salem like a bad penny, he said, only to find himself ignominiously cast out of the job he’d sorely wanted. Then, following close on the heels of that failure, came the death of his mother. Sorrow, loss, bitterness, and shame: they helped complete The Scarlet Letter, the book toward which all Hawthorne’s earlier work had been tending, a book as sleek as a Greek tragedy and as passionate as anything Hawthorne wrote, before or after.
Hawthorne also wished to muster all his literary skill to avenge himself on his enemies, “to make such a defence to the Senate as will ensure the rejection of my successor,” as he told Horace Mann, “and thus satisfy the public that I was removed on false or insufficient grounds. Then, if Mr. Upham should give me occasion—or perhaps if he should not—I shall do my best to kill and scalp him in the public prints.”
He’d have to wait. In July, when the temperature shot to one hundred degrees, his mother had lain in her bed, half-conscious and unable to breathe. Sophia sat at her bedside, fanning off flies. Hawthorne kept at a distance while his desolate sisters whisked past him, though occasionally he tiptoed into his mother’s darkened room. Late in the day, on July 29, he crept over the threshold and stood stock-still. His mother had shrunken in just the last forty-eight hours. Louisa motioned to a nearby chair, but Hawthorne kneeled at his mother’s bedside. Stretching out her frail hand, which he clasped, she murmured something that sounded like a request to take care of his sisters. Tears scalded his eyes. “I tried to keep them down;” he wrote in his journal, “but it would not be—I kept filling up, till, for a few moments, I shook with sobs.” He stayed in the darkened room a long time. “Surely it is the darkest hour I ever lived,” he moaned.
“I love my mother,” he had also confided to his journal; “but there has been, ever since boyhood, a sort of coldness of intercourse between us, such as is apt to come between persons of strong feelings, if they are not managed rightly.” In some ways, mother and son remained afraid of one another after all these years, or at least of the intensity of their feelings. But there they were. Sophia recognized them. “There was the deepest sentiment of love & reverence on both sides,” she said.
Through an opening in the curtains, Hawthorne spied his young daughter playing outdoors, curls coppery in the warm sunlight. “And then I looked at my poor dying mother; and seemed to see the whole of human existence at once, standing in the dusty midst of it.”
Shaken, he left the room. He wasn’t able to recover himself. Sophia diagnosed brain fever. His soul seemed crushed, his heart pierced. Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne died two days later.
He had no job and no income. Horatio Bridge asked John Jay, American attorney for Blackwood’s Magazine, if Hawthorne might become an occasional contributor. O’Sullivan sent another hundred dollars of the money he still owed the author, and Sophia had saved some of the Custom House salary, at least enough for bread and rice. She didn’t quail. She didn’t mind accepting donations from friends like Ann Hooper or Francis and Anna Shaw, whether in cash or clothes. Nor did she shrink from peddling her artwork. With Elizabeth acting as unofficial agent, Sophia began to handdecorate lampshades, painting mythological scenes copied from John Flaxman’s illustrations to sell to acquaintances in Boston. “I hope to get money—from people of refined taste & full purses,” she happily announced.
Lampshades sold at five and ten dollars apiece couldn’t feed a family for very long. George Hillard passed the hat among friends, from whom he collected a substantial sum. He did not mean to insult Hawthorne, he wrote when he mailed Hawthorne the draft. “It is only paying, a very imperfect measure, the debt we owe you for what you have done for American Literature.” Hawthorne read Hillard’s letter while walking home from the post office. Again tears burned his eyes as his face reddened in gratitude and the cold January wind.
As Hillard suspected, Hawthorne took the gift hard. “It is something else besides pride that teaches me that ill-success in life is really and justly a matter of shame,” Hawthorne thanked his friend. “I am ashamed of it, and I ought to be. The fault of a failure is attributable—in a great degree, at least—to the man who fails.” He was the man who failed.
James T. Fields was the man who succeeded. Son of a ship’s captain who, like Hawthorne, lost his father at an early age, in 1849 Fields was just thirty-two and already a publishing meteor. From his native Portsmouth, New Hampshire, he’d come to Boston in 1832 as an ambitious, energetic boy, smart and well read but too poor for college. He apprenticed himself to the booksellers Carter and Hendee, whose Boston location was already famous as the Old Corner Bookshop at the juncture of Washington and School Streets. When Carter and Hendee sold out to William Davis Ticknor, Fields was included in the bargain, and by 1843 the indispensable Fields was junior partner, having brought De Quincey and Tennyson to America with lucrative results; soon the firm was considered the most prestigious imprint in the country.
This self-made litterateur was soon granted admittance to Boston’s blue-hearted elite. Few could resist his sterling taste or commercial shrewdness. He was genial, loyal, and tactful. He was also a mediocre poet. Invited to speak at the Salem Lyceum while Hawthorne was its secretary, in the spring of 1849, he soon requested a story from Hawthorne for The Boston Book, a compilation of work by local authors. Hawthorne supplied “Drowne’s Wooden Image.” Evidently this is how they met.
Contact between the two men must have been amiable, for when Fields learned of Hawthorne’s dismissal from the Custom House, he instantly called on several politicians he knew—Fields made a habit of knowing influential people—to rally their support. Rebuffed, as he later recounted, he clambered aboard the Salem train to flush more stories out of Hawthorne. Hawthorne sat despondently at Mall Street, warming himself near the stove, spirits sunk. Fields inquired about his work. Hawthorne muttered there was none. Fields asked again, promising to print two thousand copies of anything Hawthorne gave him.
Hawthorne adamantly in
sisted he had written nothing, a strange response for a man chained to his desk that fall. “He writes immensely,” Sophia had reported to her mother. “I am almost frightened about it.” Nine hours a day every day, Hawthorne exorcised the scourge of the past months. But according to Fields’s memoirs, Hawthorne brushed the young editor aside.
Defeated, Fields tramped down the wooden stairs. In his version of events, Hawthorne scrambled after him, and before Fields reached the bottom, the author pressed a roll of manuscript in Fields’s hand, The Scarlet Letter nearly finished. On the train back to Boston, Fields read the story and returned to Salem like a bullet, having realized he possessed something more spellbinding, and salable, than just another tale about the Puritans.
Slated for a collection of a half dozen stories to be called “Old-Time Legends, Together with Sketches Experimental and Ideal” (Hawthorne’s original title for the book), The Scarlet Letter would secure both Hawthorne’s and Fields’s respective reputations as eminent writer and purveyor of eminent writers.
Sophia later disputed Fields’s account of events partly out of pique. “I have heard that he has made the absurd boast that he was the sole cause of the Scarlet Letter being published!!!!” she guffawed in 1871. “Or that he encouraged Mr. Hawthorne that it was a good book!! This is entirely a mistake. It was Mr. Whipple, the clever critic, and really literary man of careful culture, who came to Salem with Mr. Fields and told him what a splendid work it was—and then Mr. Fields begged to be the publisher of it.”
Whether on his own or encouraged by his friend and literary consultant Edwin Whipple, Fields launched a collaboration between himself and Hawthorne that lasted the rest of Hawthorne’s life. For Hawthorne, the timing was right. He had lost his most recent literary ally, John O’Sullivan, to reckless political and economic ventures, like the asinine attempt to invade Cuba that temporarily landed him in jail. And Hawthorne needed literary allies, whether Goodrich or Bridge or Elizabeth Peabody, to clap him on the back and promote him or his work however they could. The wonder is not that Hawthorne needed them but that they were there. Just when O’Sullivan and Bridge retreated, Fields appeared as if on cue.
Hawthorne sent him an introductory essay to include with the book. “In the process of writing,” he informed Fields, “all political and official turmoil has subsided within me, so that I have not felt inclined to execute justice on any of my enemies.” Justice was served: in his introduction, Hawthorne skewers with Daumier-like wit the desiccated Whig officers at the Custom House, thick-witted political appointees grown even more dull on the job. As he promised Horace Mann he would, Hawthorne dispatches his enemies without compunction and yet claims, with false modesty, that he always kept “the inmost Me behind its veil.”
“The Custom-House,” as the captious essay was called, reveals a good deal about Hawthorne and his professional uncertainties. Convinced that a government sinecure dried up his ability to write—or ready to say it had—Hawthorne claims he considered resigning. “My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it.” Leaning on the strong arm of the Republic, he’d sold his independence—and compromised his writing—for “a little pile of glittering coin out of his Uncle’s pocket.” The sacrifice cost him self-respect. “I endeavoured to calculate how much longer I could stay in the Custom-House,” Hawthorne rationalized after the fact, “and yet go forth a man.” The irony is that he’s then fired, his situation resembling “that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered.”
The “decapitation,” as he provocatively called his firing, revived him. He could now compose—in the full tide of anger. Ambivalent scribbler no longer, Hawthorne is avenger, scalper, judge, and adjudicator, working “as if the devil were in me,” said he, “if it were only to put my enemies to the blush.”
Hawthorne said he purchased steel pens and ink, determined to become “a citizen of somewhere else,” by which he meant a literary man. But his imagination is no salutary place, cozy and forgiving, and as we have seen, Hawthorne wasn’t particularly comfortable there with the ancestors—all male—who peer scornfully over his shoulder just as he settles at his desk. “What is he?” he hears them snort. “A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in life,—what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation,—may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!”
In “The Custom-House” and in The Scarlet Letter—indeed, in all his work—Hawthorne soothed his nagging conscience by staking out that middle ground, as we have seen, he called a “neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.” In this neutral territory, moonlight falls on familiar objects, remaking them “so they lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect.” Here, Hawthorne is neither petty bureaucrat nor low-down fiddler; nor is he the soulless purveyor of objects and emotions. Rather, the dim coal fire brings warmth to “the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness.” Snow-images and ice figures have become real people at last.
He continues the saga. Rifling through the attic of the Custom House, he uncovers a treasure more valuable than anything in the garret of the Old Manse. He finds a muse in the eighteenth-century person of Jonathan Pue, a far more tolerant ancestor than any of the grim Hathornes. He was also a Custom House surveyor and, like Hawthorne, an amateur antiquarian. In a whimsical conceit, Hawthorne pretends to have found Pue’s papers one rainy day among the dusty records stored and forgotten in the Custom House attic. With them is a mysterious relic, a bit of tattered cloth shaped like the letter “A.” Puzzled, Hawthorne clutches it to his own breast, as if to array himself in its meaning or infuse it with his own, but the red letter scorches him and he drops it to the floor.
He peruses the scroll of faded manuscript in which the scarlet token had been rolled. These curled pages contain the letter’s eerie history, diligently collected by Pue from aged persons who recalled the letter’s bearer. Do right by this woman’s tale, admonishes Surveyor Pue, sounding like Hamlet’s ghost. And thus the irrepressible Hester Prynne is born.
Conceived as a story, The Scarlet Letter was written “all in one tone,” said Hawthorne. “I had to get my pitch, and then could go on interminably.” Finished after the death of his mother, The Scarlet Letter is Hawthorne’s tribute to her, written with grief, guilt, and unabashed freedom.
Though its prose is slightly formal, its phrasings aphoristic and rhythmically exact, the story’s smoldering emotions are so volatile that Hawthorne regulates them in the book’s shapely design. The tale of Hester Prynne unfolds in twenty-four short chapters, with the first, twelfth, and the last symmetrically organized around the scaffold on which Hester appears to suffer for the crime of adultery. Similarly, the plot of the story shuttles between interior and exterior locations—one chapter, for example, is called “The Interior of a Heart”—suggesting how the private and public worlds are so often at tragic variance.
Condemned by the vigilant magistrates of colonial Boston to wear the scarlet badge of shame, Hester climbs onto the scaffold in the book’s opening scene, more proud than penitent, a bright red letter “A” on her breast, a young baby in her arms. Self-reliant and brave, Hester conceals the identity of her lover, the pious and passive Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, but though she protects him from civic disgrace, she can’t save him from the scourge of his own guilty self. Gifted with eloquence and steeped in weakness, Dimmesdale is pale, obsessive, and craven; he refuses to take responsibility for his crime, rationalizing that men such as he retain such “zeal for God’s glory and man’s welfare, they shrink from displaying themselves black and filthy in the view of men; because, thenceforward, no good can be achieved by them.”
The rationalizations are wasted upon the man to whom he confides them, none other than Hester’s long-lost husband, now called Roger Chillingworth. Chillingworth arrives in Boston just as his wife, holding another man’s child, stands dishonored before the town. Hester immediately recognizes him as he raises his finger to his lips, signaling her to keep quiet. She says nothing, thereby colluding with the man who will wreak vengeance on her lover.
Characters bound together by love and hate keep one another’s secrets. Chillingworth tells Hester, the young wife he emotionally abandoned, that “we have wronged each other,” and if he does not forgive her betrayal—Chillingworth is not a man of mercy—he at least recognizes that “between thee and me, the scale hangs fairly balanced.” But as Hester knows, Chillingworth intends to expose her lover and uncover his secret sin, even if that means he must possess Dimmesdale’s soul, steal into his dreams, violate his most private self. Exquisite connoisseur of revenge, Chillingworth becomes Dimmesdale’s constant companion, his physician and adviser, his friend and housemate.
Figuratively, Chillingworth, no less than Hester, is Dimmesdale’s lover and Hawthorne’s double. “Mr. Dimmesdale, whose sensibility of nerve often produced the effect of spiritual intuition, would become vaguely aware that something inimical to his peace had thrust itself into relation with him,” writes Hawthorne. “But old Roger Chillingworth, too, had perceptions that were almost intuitive; and when the minister threw his startled eyes towards him, there the physician sat; his kind, watchful, sympathizing, but never intrusive friend.”
The literary sources of The Scarlet Letter, from Walter Scott to Goethe to William Cowper to Andrew Marvell, Cotton Mather, Thomas Hutchinson, and Joseph Felt (chronicler of Salem), Hawthorne had completely digested, making them, like his characters, resolutely his. And certain elements of the story had been in place for a while. In his 1837 tale “Endicott and the Red Cross,” Hawthorne wrote of a woman condemned to wear the telltale “A” who, like Hester Prynne, embroiders the shameful symbol with insolent golden thread, and a germ of Hester Prynne existed in his “Mrs. Hutchinson,” published seven years before “Endicott.” “Edward Fane’s Rosebud” (published anonymously in 1837) tells of a young woman married to an older man, like Hester and Chillingworth; later, a distinguished clergyman keeps his hand over his breast in “Egotism; or, the Bosom-Serpent,” and the fiendlike Ethan Brand serves as the prototype of Chillingworth, who takes after Hawthorne’s virtuoso collector and Dr. Rappaccini. The list goes on.
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