In the fall, after Melville had purchased 160 acres and a farm he dubbed Arrowhead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, he and Hawthorne exchanged letters and visits across the country roads, Melville rumbling over to Lenox in his pine-board wagon, drinking champagne foam (a concoction of champagne, beaten eggs, and loaf sugar) at the Hawthorne house and promising “mulled wine with wisdom, & buttered toast with story-telling” in return. In a March snowstorm, Hawthorne drove off with Una and brought to Melville Archibald Duncan’s The Mariner’s Chronicle, a book owned by his uncle Richard: it was a gift of affection and regard.
The friendship had not waned. “I mean to continue visiting you until you tell me that my visits are both supererogatory and superfluous,” Melville wrote Hawthorne, happy to tote from Pittsfield a bedstead and a clock to the red shanty. And Sophia watched with approval as this “fresh, sincere, glowing mind” spoke to Hawthorne about God and the Devil and life “so he can get at the truth,” she said, “for he is a boy in opinion—having settled nothing yet.” Yet there was no “mush of concession” in him, she said.
During a trip to New York that spring, Melville overheard much praise of Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. “So upon the whole, this N.H. is in the ascendant,” Melville reported with a touch of envy. “My dear Sir, they begin to patronize. All Fame is patronage.” Hawthorne was doing well. Not he. He was completing Moby-Dick in a spasm of energy and jitters. “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century,” he predicted, “I should die in the gutter.” But he approved of The House of the Seven Gables (“genialities peep out more”), and Sophia loved it.
Publication was delayed. Fields figured he needed three or four thousand bound copies ready for purchase at the Old Corner Bookstore, it being bad policy to run out of a new book. He expected it to be popular. Having reissued Twice-told Tales, which sold almost two thousand copies, he was creating a market for Hawthorne, as he’d said he would, stolid and powerful as a locomotive, by hawking the novel in the South when he traveled there and making sure every newspaper pirating a copy of the preface to Twice-told Tales ran a wood engraving of Hawthorne’s face.
Hawthorne disliked these although he’d been pleased with Cephas Thompson’s portrait from which they were taken. Painted in Boston in 1850, the portrait depicts Hawthorne as seated, composed, in command of himself and his surroundings. He wears a standing white collar, black coat and waistcoat, and a silk bow-tie. His greenish gray eyes, the color of the sea on an overcast day, meet the spectator in the way a shy man defies his shyness. The forehead is high, the hair thinning. The face itself is long, a smile—or a grimace—playing about his mouth.
Fields commissioned Thomas Phillibrown to make a steel engraving from this portrait, which magnified the sadness in Hawthorne’s eye, or so Sophia thought, but Hawthorne approved enough to have it sent with the presentation copies of The House of the Seven Gables going to friends. Sophia gave Melville a copy.
Fields finally released the novel during the second week of April. “A weird, wild book, like all he writes,” Longfellow remarked, and James Russell Lowell predicted Salem would soon build Hawthorne a monument “for having shown that she did not hang her witches for nothing.” Evert Duyckinck told readers of the Literary World that Hawthorne carries “his lantern, like Belzoni among the mummies, into the most secret recesses of the heart.”
Of the reviewers, most perceptive was Edwin Whipple, if one excuses him for not being able to see what Melville had. To Whipple, the first hundred pages of The House of the Seven Gables were brilliant in conception and execution, combining the humor of “The Custom-House” with the pathos of The Scarlet Letter. But the rest of the book was shaky, the characters weak. Holgrave was a stick and Clifford Pyncheon a nattering bore. From England, however, Fanny Kemble wrote to the Hawthornes that The House of the Seven Gables caused as much of a ruckus as Jane Eyre, and the Athenaeum ranked Hawthorne one of the most original novelists of modern times. Ebe Hawthorne delivered the starchest, best compliment of all: “It is evident that you stand in no awe of the public,” she praised her brother, “but rather bid it defiance, which is well for all authors, and all other men to do.”
On May 20, 1851, just about a month after the publication of The House of the Seven Gables, Sophia produced what Hawthorne called “a little work”—a new baby. Squalling and kicking, Rose Hawthorne entered the world, “the daughter of my age,” her forty-six-year-old father remarked wryly, “if age and decrepitude are really to be my lot.”
Sophia had definitely wanted another child; her sister Mary had three. It’s not clear what Hawthorne wanted. According to Elizabeth Peabody, Sophia claimed that her husband was so anxious over her health he thought she should bear only three children, each after a prescribed interval. The story, even if true, smacks of apology. Nonetheless, something prompted Elizabeth Peabody to conclude that “Mr. Hawthorne’s passions were under his feet,” as if he had none.
Whatever transpired in the bedroom, Hawthorne’s insistent worries about how to feed a growing family contributed in no small measure to his blues. “I have never yet seen the year, since I was married, when I could have spared even a hundred dollars from the necessary expense of living,” he told Peabody when she tried to make him buy life insurance. The House of the Seven Gables sold for a dollar, with Hawthorne receiving a 15 percent royalty, but despite the advance brouhaha, sales lagged, and Fields couldn’t peddle the English rights. Hawthorne, who earned just a little over one thousand dollars the first year of publication, had to draw on his account with the publisher to settle old debts.
Sophia was tired, the baby cried, and always a tight fit, the little red shanty began to shrink even further. The walls were too thin, the ceilings too low. And Hawthorne was lonely for his friends. All winter, the snow was deep, the paths impassable. In spring, the muddy lanes were hard to navigate. “I feel remote, and quite beyond companionship,” he complained to Longfellow. The fans who opened his gate were a nuisance. He generally refused invitations, and he seldom went to the village except to visit the post office. Joseph Smith, a Stockbridge resident, remembered Hawthorne’s rare appearance in town. “Mr. Hawthorne, even for a man of letters, leads a remarkably secluded life,” Smith observed. “I’m afraid the de’il will carry him off if he walks so much in solitary places,” Caroline Tappan joshed.
Sophia welcomed callers from Boston come to see the Tappans, but if too many people, especially literary ones, were to flock to the Berkshires, she complained to her mother, “I dare say we shall take flight.” It was an uncommon outburst. Sophia didn’t want to leave Lenox although Hawthorne longed to inhale ocean breezes, pace the moist docks, plunge his feet into the sand. And talk with his buddies. “He seems older, & I think he has suffered much living in this place,” Ellery Channing reported to his wife after seeing Hawthorne in Lenox. “… I think he has felt his lack of society.”
He returned to work. He still considered the children’s market a lucrative one, and since Fields’s republication of his juvenile tales (renamed True Stories) enjoyed a press run of forty-five hundred, he expected even more of a profit for a new children’s book. It took Hawthorne only six weeks to write his irresistible retelling of classical myths, A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys.
Later in the summer, Sophia headed for West Newton with Una and the baby, leaving Hawthorne alone with the frisky Julian, now five, and their black cook, Mrs. Peters. The two males—one sturdy and small, the other almost six feet tall—walked daily to the lake, where they amused themselves flinging stones into the water and picking wildflowers. Julian was especially thrilled when Melville, galloping down the road, stopped, bent down, and scooped him up into the saddle. Melville stayed through tea, and after supper he and Hawthorne smoked cigars in the sacred precincts of the sitting room, talking deep into the night about “time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters.”
In Melville’s presence, Hawthorne yea
rned even more for the magically curative powers of the sea. Should his writing turn profitable, he fantasized, he might buy a house by the coast. He asked friends to look for something priced between fifteen hundred and two thousand dollars, if not on the ocean then with easy access to it. “I find that I do not feel at home among these hills, and should not like to consider myself permanently settled here,” he explained to William Pike. To Sophia, he dropped the veil. “I hate Berkshire with my whole soul, and would joyfully see its mountains laid flat.”
There was little argument from Sophia. She and Caroline Tappan had been quarreling without words for several months. Sophia thought Caroline (like Ebe) induced Una to deceive and disobey, and while Sophia was in West Newton, Caroline had been dropping by the red farmhouse, arms heavy with newspapers and books to loan Hawthorne for his next novel. Perhaps she stayed too long, ruffling Sophia’s feathers more. Caroline responded by asserting droit du seigneur. She had seen the Hawthornes’ servant, Mary Beekman, carrying a basket of fruit and peremptorily asked if the fruit was to be given away or sold, the latter a breach of etiquette, to be sure, and an abuse of her largesse. She sent a note to Sophia; wouldn’t Sophia prefer to receive kindness than assume rights? she asked.
“The right of purchase is the only safe one,” Hawthorne sharply replied, referring not to the fruit but to his demeaned position as tenant farmer. He wanted a roof of his own, his own garden-spot, and Tappan provided just the excuse he needed. “I am sick to death of Berkshire,” he sputtered to Fields. “… I have felt languid and dispirited, during almost my whole residence.”
Within two weeks Hawthorne took off for Boston and put in motion plans to remove his family from the hated hills.
“Did Mr. Hawthorne tell you all the reasons why we are disenchanted of Lenox?” Sophia was soon asking Mary Mann.
Since Mary and her family were bound for Washington, Horace having been reelected to Congress on the Free-Soil ticket, Mary had offered to rent their place in West Newton to the Hawthornes. They had declined. The price was too high, and thinking they might stay in the Berkshires another two years—the length of the presidential term—they figured they’d take Fanny Kemble’s house, offered for the same rent they paid the Tappans. But they didn’t. They bolted.
Reasons other than Tappan apples hustled the Hawthornes from Lenox. “When a man is making his settled dispositions for life, he had better be on the mainland, and as near a rail-road station as possible,” Hawthorne confessed to Bridge, meaning more than he let on. With the presidential election upcoming in 1852, Hawthorne wanted to be a stone’s throw from Boston, partly to keep his political hat close to the ring. Like him, many Democrats had been biding their time in local caucuses, hoping their time would come again soon; if they could reunite the party, they might recapture the presidency, and after the sudden death of New Hampshire favorite Levi Woodbury in September—just when Hawthorne decided to return to the Boston area—they thought Frank Pierce might be their man. Hawthorne may have heard from Pierce himself that he would consider a bid, and in any case, William Pike and Zachariah Burchmore, still active in the cause, each kept an eye on the prize.
So too Hawthorne. Neither Free-Soiler nor abolitionist, he commended Burchmore for not defecting to the antislavery movement—as he had not, steering much the same course as when he edited Journal of an African Cruiser. “I have not, as you suggest, the slightest sympathy for the slaves,” he reassured Burchmore; “or, at least, not half so much as for the laboring whites, who, I believe, as a general thing, are ten times worse off than the Southern negros.”
With his opposition to the antislavery movement, Hawthorne embarrassed many of his acquaintances and later his fans. “How glad I am that Sumner is at last elected!” he wrote Longfellow about the protracted fight to send that Free-Soiler to the United States Senate. “Not that I ever did, nor ever shall, feel any pre-eminent ardor for the cause which he advocates,” he crisply added, “nor could ever have been moved, as you were, to dedicate poetry—or prose either—to its advancement.” Nonetheless, he signed a Free-Soil petition protesting the Fugitive Slave Law. A firm believer in states’ rights, he regarded any law absurd that ceded control to the federal government, particularly one that allowed slave owners or their representatives to enter free states, arrest runaways—kidnap them, according to the abolitionists—and haul them back South like so much bundled hay. “This Fugitive Law is the only thing that could have blown me into any respectable warmth on this great subject of the day.” He paused—“If it really be the great subject.”
Elizabeth Peabody smiled to learn of Hawthorne’s signature, but as far as he was concerned, in so doing he had “bade farewell to all ideas of foreign consulships, or other official stations.” He said he didn’t care a “d—for office,” suggesting the opposite.
The Mann offer began to sound good. Visiting West Newton, Hawthorne temporized. From there, he and Sophia could more reasonably look at last for their own place. “Ticknor & Co. promise the most liberal advances of money, should we need it, towards buying the house,” he reassured his wife and himself.
Sensing his urgency, she quickly acquiesced. “I begin to unlove the lake now I think it has done harm to Mr. Hawthorne & my chief desire is to get as far from it as possible, when a little while ago it caused a real pang to think of leaving it.”
In the fall, they sold much of their furniture at auction, including Hawthorne’s mahogany writing desk, and gathered the remaining household goods, leaving behind their five cats and a sorrowful Melville. There was nothing to be done about Melville, of course; he had a family of his own. Early in November, Hawthorne met Melville for dinner at the Lenox hotel, and that night Melville presumably gave Hawthorne his inscribed copy of Moby-Dick, cooked, Melville hinted, partly at Hawthorne’s fire. “I have written a wicked book,” Melville was to tell him, “and feel spotless as a lamb.” The letter (lost) that Hawthorne wrote in praise of Moby-Dick drove the younger author to rapture: “Your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s,” Melville surged with hopeful intimacy, demanding in the next breath, “Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life?”
Melville was doomed to disappointment. It came first in Duyckinck’s patronizing notice of Moby-Dick in the Literary World. “What a book Melville has written!” Hawthorne wrote Duyckinck in protest. “It hardly seemed to me that the review of it, in the Literary World, did justice to its best points.” If Hawthorne volunteered to review it, Melville waved him aside. “Don’t write a word about the book,” he admonished. Hawthorne took Melville at face value. Melville lovers never forgave him.
Leaving the Berkshires, Hawthorne began slowly to pull away from the parched Berkshire sailor who ceaselessly sought answers to questions his contemporaries did not pose. “It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting,” Hawthorne commented five years later in a searching analysis of Melville—and of himself. “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.”
A man who himself knew of desert places, Hawthorne must have wondered whether he faced them with Melville’s soul-rending honesty. “But truth is ever incoherent,” Melville had told him, “and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a bit stunning.” Hawthorne warded off Melville’s tribute with a characteristic blend of hard-shell irony and finical decorum. Melville, said he, is “a person of very gentlemanly instincts in every respect, save that he is a little heterodox in the matter of clean linen.”
On a sunless November morning, the Hawthorne wagon lumbered out of the red shanty. Julian, twisting around in his seat, looked back and saw their five household cats sitting on the ridge of the hill, abandoned to the gray snowflakes.
“I suppose it is Sophia’s plan,” t
he waspish Ebe Hawthorne wrongly surmised; “it is so much like the Peabodys never to be settled.” She was half right in her second guess: “If Nathaniel buys a place she will have some excuse for leaving it in a year or two.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Citizen of Somewhere Else
It was impossible, situated as we were, not to imbibe the idea that everything in nature and human existence was fluid, or fast becoming so; that the crust of the Earth, in many places, was broken, and its whole surface portentously upheaving; that it was a day of crisis, and that we ourselves were in the critical vortex.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance
As PROMISED, Fields kept the pot boiling. He published an illustrated Wonder Book in November, paying a 15 percent royalty, and he dug Hawthorne’s early pieces out of old Tokens for a new volume, The Snow-Image and Other Twice-told Tales, that appeared in December. A trim collection of fifteen stories and sketches, the latter contained “Main-street” and “Ethan Brand” and the two weaker stories, “The Great Stone Face” and “The Snow-Image,” all written after Hawthorne left the Manse; though it also included “The Devil in Manuscript” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” it was the flimsiest demonstration of Hawthorne’s talent to date and the least popular commercially.
But he felt he was finally on the map and could now be generous. In the dedicatory letter prefacing The Snow-Image, Hawthorne named Horatio Bridge as the knight-errant who, by subsidizing Hawthorne’s first collection, had single-handedly rescued him from oblivion. “If anybody is responsible for my being at this day an author, it is yourself,” he thanked Bridge. Yet neither the notoriety of The Scarlet Letter nor the critical success of The House of the Seven Gables could sweeten Hawthorne’s bitterness over years of neglect and anonymity that he believed he’d suffered. “I sat down by the wayside of life,” Hawthorne wrote, “like a man under enchantment, and a shrubbery sprung up around me, and the bushes grew to be saplings, and the saplings become trees, until no exit appeared possible, through the entangling depths of my obscurity.”
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