When the houseguests departed and the weather cooled, Hawthorne began to write in earnest, even going so far as to puzzle over his new book’s title, which likely he remembered from his visit to Susanna Ingersoll years before: “The House of the Seven Gables.” Fields approved, and so it remained. But it wouldn’t be ready before January, for he wanted to polish many of the passages and make sure each detail was finished “with the minuteness of a Dutch picture,” he said. He also wished to make the book a little lighter than The Scarlet Letter in order to win, he hoped, an even larger audience. To do this, he had to stop writing for a while. “There are points when a writer gets bewildered,” he sighed, “and cannot form any judgement of what he has done, nor tell what to do next.”
Meantime, he rejected an offer from Graham’s to write a new story, he rejected a proposal from Emerson to write for a new magazine, he rejected an offer from Greeley’s Tribune. No longer would he disperse his talents, such as they were, on unprofitable enterprises, thanks to Fields’s business acumen and unconditional support.
He did compose a new preface for Twice-told Tales in his recognizable style: muted irony, authorial detachment, sardonic nonchalance, and modesty mixed with a dollop of hauteur. Affecting to spurn anything as base as self-disclosure, popularity, or ostentation, he drew attention to himself and his career, reminding the reader with just a trace of bitterness that he’d been “for a good many years, the obscurest man of letters in America,” who’d tried his utmost “to open an intercourse with the world.” The author is Oberon, disappointed and unloved but able to console himself with those few but fit readers who, caring for his stories, care for him.
The autobiographical preface is also lightly powdered with self-pity. But Hawthorne wrote sincerely, up to a point. Sensitive to criticism, imagined or real, Hawthorne strikes preemptively, disputing the criticism he pretends to accept. With typical disingenuousness, he wonders how his stories managed to have any vogue at all, and he denigrates his early tales—“pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade”—much in the manner of Poe and Fuller. “Instead of passion, there is sentiment,” he echoes them; “and, even in what purport to be pictures of actual life, we have allegory.” Defiantly, he goes on: “The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.”
Disparagement of this sort is hardly an inducement to turn the page. But Hawthorne knows that Twice-told Tales is being reissued by the most ambitious publisher in Boston. So much for the influence of Fuller or Poe, both of whom were dead. And was his work so pallid? “Every sentence, so far as it embodies thought or sensibility,” Hawthorne smoothly continues, “may be understood and felt by anybody, who will give himself the trouble to read it, and will take up the book in a proper mood.” As Melville had.
In this mild-mannered way, Hawthorne threads his preface with indelible cords of revenge, much like Hester Prynne when she sews her “A” with golden thread. “The spirit of my Puritan ancestors was mighty in me,” he reiterates again and again.
Man of compassion, man of ice; man of forgiveness, man of spite: “Nobody would think that the same man could live two such different lives simultaneously,” Hawthorne once told Sophia, referring to the disparity between his inner and external life. Alienation, duplicity, and the sense of living double, not being what one seems or what others take one to be: these were the hallmark of Hawthorne’s prose, and through it, a persona that “on the internal evidence of his sketches,” he wrote, “came to be regarded as a mild, shy, gentle, melancholic exceedingly sensitive, and not very forcible man, hiding his blushes under an assumed name, the quaintness of which was supposed, somehow or other, to symbolize his personal and literary traits.”
Hawthorne knew what he was doing, he knew these half-truths became him. As did empathy, passion, fiery aggression, and the embittered loneliness of an outsider turned exile, the fugitive alone, a shadow, whether in the company of his beloved family, a responsive readership, or the keen-witted Herman Melville.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Hidden Life of Property
What we call real estate—the solid ground to build a house on—is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests .
…
But, for this short life of ours, one would like a house and a moderate garden-spot of one’s own.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables
THE BOOK is an affliction,” Catharine Sedgwick sniffed at The House of the Seven Gables. “It affects one like a passage through the wards of an insane asylum.”
Hawthorne had returned home, at least in imagination, for the setting of his new novel, and though he insisted in the book’s preface that it had “a great deal more to do with the clouds overhead than with any portion of the actual soil of the County of Essex,” he fooled no one. The setting of the book is vintage Salem, so much so that amateur literary sleuths steeped in New England lore quickly identified Hawthorne’s seven-gabled house as the Ingersoll place on Turner Street.
In The Scarlet Letter, he had focused on his mother and more broadly the complex predicament women faced as wives, mothers, daughters, and sexual beings. In The House of the Seven Gables, he again shook the family tree, this time to confront his paternal legacy: class, heredity, and the all but incestuous business of living in one spot for generations, tyrannies and injustice handed down generation after generation like a congenital disease.
Hawthorne combined Susanna Ingersoll’s story about her Turner Street house with tales about his great-grandfather, the hanging judge, and the malediction supposedly uttered by Sarah Good when the Reverend Nicholas Noyes had called her a witch. “I’m no more a witch than you’re a wizard!” she reportedly cried. “And if you take my life God will give you blood to drink!” Translating this into the prophecy that Matthew Maule, the accused wizard, hurls at his nemesis, Colonel Pyncheon in The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne also dug up the Hathorne legend that a curse—much like Sarah Good’s, much like Matthew Maule’s—had robbed the family of a putative patrimony, nine thousand acres of land in eastern Maine. “The impalpable claim, therefore, resulted in nothing more solid than to cherish, from generation to generation, an absurd delusion of family importance,” Hawthorne explains, as if writing of the family pretensions for which he castigated them and himself.
The book’s main character is a seven-gabled house, its timbers oozy “as with the moisture of a heart” that rises phoenixlike from Hawthorne’s Province-House, another pretentious mansion, and from his “Tales of the Province-House” Hawthorne also took the doddering royalist Esther Dudley, whom he rewrites as Hepzibah Pyncheon, both of them anachronisms. But the mansion is no place of grace. It was built on property stolen twice over, first from the Indians and then from the carpenter Matthew Maule, whose greedy persecutor, Colonel Pyncheon, not only expropriated Maule’s land but brought down Maule’s curse on his family: “The wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief,” Hawthorne announces in the book’s preface: Sophoclean tragedy on a New England stage.
The novel opens on the terrible morning when Hepzibah “is to be transformed into the plebeian woman.” Humiliated and terrified, she barely swallows her pride to open a cent-shop, the only recourse, Hawthorne notes, for a woman in circumstances as diminished as hers. Readying herself and her store for its first customer, poor Hepzibah clumsily drops her gingerbread elephants and scatters a tumbler of marbles over the floor, every awkward attempt to retrieve them an index of her state of mind. The narrator recounts the bumbling operation, barely suppressing his laughter, but if he humiliates the gawky, scowling Hepzibah, Hawthorne deeply pities this woman, so much like relatives of his own, displaced in a rapacious nation “where everything is free to the hand that
can grasp it.”
“In this republican country,” Hawthorne writes, “amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning point.” The waves were, of course, cresting on the issues of property and ownership at the bottom of American politics. The Compromise of 1850 had been passed in September of that year to put a lid on the slavery issue by admitting California into the Union as a free state and leaving the question of slavery in New Mexico and Utah to referendum. The Compromise also settled Texas boundary disputes, outlawed the slave trade (not slavery) in the District of Columbia, and mollified the proslavery South with the stringent Fugitive Slave Law (an enactment of Hell, abolitionists called it), which Hawthorne himself was dead against.
In his novel, he concerns himself with the Compromise obliquely and at a distance, as in the case of Jaffrey Pyncheon’s political ambitions or the gingerbread Hepzibah sells, made in the shape of Jim Crow. Instead he focuses on his own demons: hapless aristocrats at loggerheads with their avaricious relatives. For Hepzibah is awaiting the appearance of her defrauded brother Clifford, wrongly incarcerated almost a lifetime by the rich and deceitful cousin Jaffrey.
Clifford Pyncheon is prey partly because of the “feminine delicacy of appreciation” that renders him poetic, soft, even voluptuous, and reminds the reader of Hawthorne’s Owen Warfield in “The Artist of the Beautiful.” Clifford, like Owen, is not a manly man; he is an aesthete confused by the crudities of getting and spending. His opposite is the unctuous, aggressive Jaffrey Pyncheon, the man of consummate materialism who never mistakes shadow for substance. In public, Jaffrey beams his waxy smile; in private, he breaks his wife’s spirit on their honeymoon. (Ebe saw the Reverend Charles Upham, Hawthorne’s Custom House nemesis, in Jaffrey’s grin.) Clifford in his damask dressing gown, Judge Jaffrey with his gold-headed cane: the Pyncheon men—victim and victimizer, idealist and materialist—incarnate the poles of conventional manhood for Hawthorne.
Enter Holgrave, the reconciler. A lodger in the house of seven gables, he has what the Pyncheons lack. He is ardent, youthful, and radical, a man at home in the modern world who nevertheless lives in the creaky old house, temporarily of course. “I dwell in it for awhile,” he says, “that I may know the better how to hate it.” Despising the house and what it represents, he wails, “Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?” The plaint comes straight from Hawthorne’s notebooks. “We read in dead men’s books! We are sick of dead jokes, and cry at dead men’s pathos! We are sick of the same men’s diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients!” Build therefore your own house, Holgrave counsels, mouthing the kind of Emersonian self-reliance Hawthorne finds seductive and vapid. But Holgrave’s raison d’être is the very past he hates: he’s Matthew Maule’s descendant, come to nurse ancestral wounds.
Holgrave resembles Hester Prynne, Hawthorne’s ultimate outsider and another character who eventually makes her peace with society, more or less, as Holgrave will. For though he insists that “once in every half century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure, mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors,” he falls in love with the fresh-faced Phoebe, a Pyncheon country cousin recently domiciled in the house.
Tamed by Phoebe (Hawthorne’s pet name for Sophia), Holgrave renounces his wanton ways, declaring himself a conservative eager to set out trees and make fences, even, he says, to build a house for another generation. So the novel closes with Holgrave looking forward. Hawthorne, however, is not so sanguine about Holgrave’s prospects. Adopting Phoebe’s morally neat desire for “a house and a moderate garden-spot of one’s own,” Holgrave does not pick up Hawthorne’s reference to Voltaire or his irony. Cultivating a garden rank with plebeian vegetables and aristocratic flowers may be the best one can do: mitigated pleasures destined for our world.
If one can have even those. Hawthorne has rigged a set of circumstances—a convenient death, a will, an inherited fortune—to remunerate his characters for their troubles, allowing Hepzibah and Clifford and Phoebe and Holgrave to light out for the territory of a romancer’s conjuring, a pastoral world of happily ever after from the contingencies of time or age and the vicissitudes of fortune.
That province of make-believe is the utopian dream that Hawthorne abandoned years before, except in fiction. And one cannot be sure he hasn’t given it up there too. At the conclusion of the novel, he cynically conveys Holgrave and company in a dark-green barouche to Jaffrey Pyncheon’s elegant country-seat, not a garden-spot of their own but another house, redolent both of the past and of what’s to come.
Produced less than a year after The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables is a book of middle age, for time is the novel’s cardinal theme, time and its relentless passage in a world hell-bent on progress. Eyes filmy and dim, Clifford cannot flee himself or his past, and all the newfangled appurtenances—the railroad and the electric telegraph—cannot undo what’s been done. “No great mistake, whether acted or endured, in our moral sphere,” Hawthorne writes, “is ever really set right.”
Doubtless begun as one of the tales to be included with The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables is the first novel Hawthorne produced as such, which helps account for its curious repetitions (the story of Matthew Maule’s martyrdom told more than once) and its almost static temper. Ellery Channing joked to Emerson that Hawthorne took one hundred forty pages to describe an event; “a cough took up ten pages, and sitting down in a chair six more.” But with such set-pieces as a wizened Hepzibah Pyncheon opening her shop or a smug Judge Pyncheon sitting dead in his chair, this singular novel goes where books have not yet tread, stopping time entirely.
Chapter 18 is a case in point: planting a corpse in his book, Hawthorne halts his story as the narrator speaks of life and death and the sure oblivion that opens beneath our feet. Meantime, our pocket-watches, like Jaffrey Pyncheon’s, tick indifferently on:
There is still a faint appearance at the window; neither a glow, nor a gleam, nor a glimmer—any phrase of light would express something far brighter than this doubtful perception, or sense, rather, that there is a window there. Has it yet vanished? No!—yes!—not quite! And there is still the swarthy whiteness—we shall venture to marry these ill-agreeing words—the swarthy whiteness of Judge Pyncheon’s face. The features are all gone; there is only the paleness of them left. And how looks it now? There is no window! There is no face! An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and murmuring about, in quest of what was once a world!
Is there no other sound? One other, and a fearful one. It is the ticking of the Judge’s watch.
“There is a certain tragic phase of humanity, which, in our opinion, was never more powerfully embodied than by Hawthorne,” Melville remarked. “We mean the tragicalness of human thought in its own unbiased, native, and profounder workings.”
Hawthorne is like the daguerreotypist Holgrave, who wants to reveal people’s characters, not just their looks. Holgrave is a contemporary sorcerer, or romancer, manipulating time, the better to discover its secrets, like Hawthorne does. Calling the novel a romance, as he had in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne says he does not dramatize events unsheathed in the spick-and-span light of common day, like Dickens or Balzac do. Rather, as romancer—an American Walter Scott crossed with Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann (though he would never have said so)—he claims in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, that he, unlike a novelist, manages “his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture,” salting his dish (he changed his metaphor) with “the Marvellous rather as a slight, delicate and evanescent flavor.”
To the extent that Holgrave is a reconciler, he represents the artist who (again like Hawthorne) squares the actual and the imaginary, time and eternity, being and nothingn
ess. To Hawthorne, then the work was balanced, its writing a kind of exorcism, and he consequently considered The House of the Seven Gables “a more natural and healthy product of my mind” than The Scarlet Letter.
Hawthorne finished the book at the end of January, mailed it to Fields, and then suffered the “blue devils” in its wake. “How slowly I have made my way in life!” he wrote to Horatio Bridge. “How much is still to be done!”
“There is a grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes,” Melville bellowed after reading The House of the Seven Gables. “For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,—why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unencumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag.”
Hawthorne Page 28