Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  Its whistle shrieking, the iron-black railroad delivered the Hawthornes into the small village of West Newton after a twenty-minute ride from Boston, and in a five-minute walk from the depot along the edge of the cow pasture, they arrived at the Mann house. Mary had planted rosebushes in the yard, now crunchy with snow, and had fitted the house with a furnace that toasted the entire downstairs. There was a separate bathing chamber with a pump, and next to that, a water closet. Sophia complained about the steamy air, but Una and Julian preferred modern conveniences to the buckets of cold water in Lenox their parents had called a bath.

  With his family of five to support and Fields irrepressible, Hawthorne shut himself up in his new study, door locked, from breakfast until four every day. Having found an audience, he didn’t wanted to lose it. He meant “to put an extra touch of the devil” into the new book, he confided to Bridge, “for I doubt whether the public will stand two quiet books in succession, without my losing ground. As long as people will buy, I shall keep at work; and I find that my facility of labor increases with the demand for it.” His subject would be Brook Farm.

  Having divested himself of mothers in The Scarlet Letter and fathers in The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne was free to reconstruct “the most romantic episode” of his life, or so he wrote in the introduction to The Blithedale Romance, as the new book would be named. Brook Farm rose up in imagination as “essentially a day-dream, and yet a fact,” he continued, reverting to the way he intermingled fiction and reality in what he defined as romance, that psychological place of grace where idle dreamers and men of the world commingle. After the Berkshire retreat and his tenancy in the house of seven gables, Hawthorne was ransacking the present, or near present. And living in West Newton, in the vicinity of Brook Farm, among aficionados of reform like the Manns and the Peabodys, Hawthorne may have wanted to distance himself from them; he didn’t tell Sophia what he was writing, or if he did, she pretended not to know so as not to tell her family.

  He’d begun his book the previous summer, and with it in mind, and Duyckinck and Melville in tow, he visited the Shaker village in Hancock, Massachusetts. Ushered through the main house by a somber village elder, the men padded over well-oiled wooden floors. Hawthorne was repelled when he peeked into the same-sex dormitories and glimpsed the narrow beds in which two men or two women slept with one another. “The Shakers are and must needs be a filthy set,” he wrote, working himself into a harangue. “And then their utter and systematic lack of privacy; the close conjunction of man with man, and supervision of one man over another—it is hateful and disgusting to think of; and the sooner the sect is extinct the better.”

  Years earlier, of course, he had teasingly threatened to join the Shakers and in stories like “The Canterbury Pilgrims” wrote sympathetically of them, depicting the community more as a refuge from sex than a sexual hellhole; so, too, in “The Shaker Bridal.” There, the Shakers are lost sheep, not reprobates. Now the bloom was off the rose. But Hawthorne was still interested in corporate living—alternative forms of sodality and experimental sexual groups—although he frequently shrank from what engaged him most, reducing his world to spectacle. “Insincerity in a man’s own heart makes all his enjoyments, all that concerns him, unreal; so that his whole life must seem like merely a dramatic representation. And this would be the case, even though he were surrounded by true-hearted relatives and friends,” Hawthorne had written as a young man. Except around Sophia, he hadn’t changed. To give himself was to lose himself, and he couldn’t afford to lose what he wasn’t sure he had in the first place.

  A psychological roman à clef, The Blithedale Romance is a book about male friendship and mesmerism, utopian idealism and erotic women, women authors and passive men, none of them able to confront precisely what they want. Such is the dilemma of Miles Coverdale, Hawthorne’s first-person narrator, who believes he can best hold himself together by holding himself apart and conceives the world as theater, the book’s dominant image. Melancholy and distrustful, this caviling poet is perpetual loner, a prurient bachelor who spurns the desires he affects to embrace. He’s a citizen of somewhere else, as Hawthorne wrote of himself in “The Custom-House,” scuttling between rented rooms in Boston—themselves a metaphor for dislocation—and Blithedale, Hawthorne’s ironic name for Brook Farm, where Coverdale is resident spy.

  Coverdale, like Hawthorne, recounts his experiences in retrospect, as if Blithedale/Brook Farm were the vestige of a different, more hopeful, more innocent time. By 1852 the community had long since disbanded. After Hawthorne left, it turned to Fourier for guidance, sputtering along for a while in makeshift phalanxes until bankruptcy and fire razed the place. Utopia folded its tent in 1847, its youthful members having put away childish things, its older members altering their sights. George W. Curtis, a student at Brook Farm in 1842, would sail the Nile and come back with a successful travel book, Nile Notes of a Howadji; Charles A. Dana was en route, via the Whiggish New-York Tribune, to the Sun; and the Ripleys were in New York too, where George himself wrote for Greeley’s paper. Brook Farm hadn’t been such a bad place; certainly it did no harm, its adherents developing how they would, but Hawthorne saw the experiment as doomed to failure from the start. “Persons of marked individuality—crooked sticks, as some of us might be called—are not exactly the easiest to bind up into a faggot.”

  The fictional Brook Farm is assembled from such crooked sticks. The pallid seamstress Priscilla, a washed-out version of Sophia, also resembles Hawthorne’s sister Louisa, meekly devoted to personalities more powerful. Priscilla moonlights as a medium, the Veiled Lady, her occupation deriving from the spiritualism vogue that had sprouted in upstate New York a few years before when the infamous Fox sisters claimed that the “rappings” emanating from underneath the table (they were cracking their knuckles) came directly from the dead. Elizabeth Peabody, a reed in every zeitgeist, had decided Una would make a fine medium. Hawthorne growled that he’d defy all of Hell to disprove the rappers’ testimony, if it came to that.

  For many years Sophia denied that Hawthorne based Priscilla’s half sister Zenobia, another inmate of Blithedale, on Margaret Fuller although eventually she acknowledged that Hawthorne “felt Margaret Fuller’s presence” when writing his book. Zenobia, beautiful and brainy, plaits a white flower in her indignant hair and asks, “Did you ever see a happy woman in your life?” Proud Zenobia is Hawthorne’s hothouse advocate of women’s rights, more seditious and at the outset more successful, it seems, than Hester Prynne. But by drawing on the life of Zenobia’s namesake, the queen of Palmyra, Hawthorne creates a sexy, independent heroine only to cast her in a mawkish melodrama, and he precipitously banishes her and her ideas, sending her to an early and surprising death when Hollingsworth, the radical reformer, rejects her love, and she drowns herself like Ophelia or Martha Hunt.

  The reason is obvious. To Hawthorne, social renegades and apostles of change—even Zenobia—are fanatical monsters of sentiment and vanity. “They have no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience. They will keep no friend, unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot, all the more readily, if you take the first step with them, and cannot take the second, and their third, and every other step of their terribly straight path.” Hollingsworth, single-minded philanthropist committed to the reform of criminals, is true to type. Compounded of William Henry Channing, a dabbler in Brook Farm who preached there in the woods and became, for a while, a prison reformer attractive to a number of women, Sophia included, and the abolitionist Samuel Gridley Howe, who achieved a certain renown by exhibiting his pupil, the blind and deaf child Laura Bridgman (for a time Sophia and Elizabeth Peabody had hoped Hawthorne would write about her), Hollingsworth also bears the gentle imprint of Howe’s best friend and Hawthorne’s brother-in-law, Horace Mann, in whose house Hawthorne finished the book.

  Black-browed Hollingsworth is Hawthorne’s doppelgänger too. The name of Hol
lingsworth is that of a Hawthorne distant relative; Hollingsworth’s profession, that of blacksmith, is the same as that of Hawthorne’s Manning grandfather and uncle Richard. And like all of Hawthorne’s characters, he is an updated rendition of Hawthorne’s other obsessives—Chillingworth, Ethan Brand, the virtuoso—each a man of concentrated purpose twisted by a monomaniacal devotion to some pursuit, be it vengeance, history, sin, or art, but always a “cold, spectral monster which he had himself conjured up, and on which he was wasting all the warmth of his heart, and of which, at last—as these men of a mighty purpose so invariably do—he had grown to be the bond-slave.”

  Mostly, though, Hawthorne drew on himself for Coverdale, whose observations come straight from Hawthorne’s journals. One never really knows why he, like Hawthorne, signs on to the Blithedale community, except perhaps in a spasm of visionary enthusiasm, for like Hawthorne, Coverdale prefers to stay insulated in his rooms, comforted with a good bottle of claret behind a thick curtain of cigar smoke. His métier is concealment; he watches others, himself unseen. (The Blithedale Romance is a book about seeing: women and men hide behind veils, flaunting their invisibility.) Coverdale spies on Hollingsworth and Zenobia from his treetop hermitage, hungrily glimpsing Zenobia’s white shoulder while he denies his naked attraction to her.

  Coverdale does admit to loving his masculine rival, Hollingsworth, but when Hollingsworth asks him to “strike hands” and join him in his great reformer’s project so as to “never again feel the languor and vague wretchedness, of an indolent or half-occupied man,” Coverdale casts him off, too terrified to share in life or love. Yet he finds the proposal dangerously seductive and leaves Blithedale so as not to confront it, forever the frosty solipsist clinging to the wayside, treasuring his sterile fantasies above all else. But whatever else he may be, Coverdale is the first modern antihero, an antebellum Prufrock, self-regarding, anxiety-ridden, paralyzed, and mistaken.

  Decidedly one of Hawthorne’s most peculiar books and certainly one of the most unique novels yet written in America, Blithedale is as personal as anything Hawthorne ever produced, a fantasy of what-might-have-been from the conflicted position of what is. The family man with three children, a well-known and admired writer, regards himself as displaced and out of time, a spectator never quite able to get what he wants. Had he not married, he seems to suggest, he might have become the world-weary Coverdale—Holgrave without Phoebe—a writer of lukewarm stuff who permits his “colorless life,” as he says of Coverdale, “to take its hue from other lives.” And with no native inclination toward industry, as he once confided to Sophia, Hawthorne perceives himself as constantly having to battle the dreamy nature he continues to condemn.

  Brook Farm had promised a way out, bringing together dreamers and laborers in a joint-stock company far from the go-getting herd. It didn’t work. To Hawthorne, Brook Farm spawned the same society, peopled by the same problems, he’d hoped to leave behind, his own included. Worse: with its assertive women and womanish men, and men who love men, and women, like Priscilla, who love women like Zenobia, Blithedale is society’s grotesque obverse. “While inclining us to the soft affections of the Golden Age,” Coverdale notes, “it seemed to authorize any individual, of either sex, to fall in love with any other, regardless of what would elsewhere be judged suitable and prudent.” He can’t stand it. “No sagacious man will long retain his sagacity,” he justifies his peremptory leave-taking, “if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning into the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old stand-point.”

  Hawthorne is the one who loses perspective. Blithedale fails precisely because Hawthorne stands too close to his material to shape it. He neither manages to salvage a believable plot from Coverdale’s passive narration nor does he develop the characters enough to rescue them from its improbabilities. Plots within plots, rich men brought low, love triangles, and suicide: the mechanics of intrigue tumble atop one another, as if Hawthorne were Professor Westervelt, the novel’s evil genie, a spiritualist hack who gulls his audience and fleeces them: in other words, a fraud.

  Hawthorne knew his strengths as a writer did not lie in consistently sustained narrative, and for that reason refused to write serially in magazines. “In all my stories, I think, there is one idea running through them like an iron rod, and to which all other ideas are referred and subordinate,” he explained. There is no iron rod in Blithedale. Not even Coverdale could help. He tries to think about the future but fails and, emotionally dead, withdraws from his own subject matter. He rakes through the cold ashes of America’s grand utopian moment with itchy intolerance, so much so that, after the first few chapters of his memoir, Blithedale is no longer integral to his story.

  However, many of Hawthorne’s contemporaries saw in Hawthorne’s new production a social issue stormier than anything as benign as the socialist experiment at Brook Farm. Identifying with Coverdale, the Reverend Theodore Parker, who kept a brace of pistols in his desk to assist fugitive slaves, thought the book written just for him. Friends agreed. Though Parker detested slavery, he did not truckle to abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, and Garrison could be none other than Hollingsworth. “He thinks Garrison will flinch at Hawthorne’s picture of the philanthropist,” Mary Mann reported to her husband with pleasure.

  To Mann and friends, Hawthorne’s quarry in Blithedale was not the counterfeit arcadia of the 1840s nor the troublesome relations between women and men. It was a fractious America, a present-day America, where abolitionists were called philanthropists and fanatics. Blithedale was the abolition movement that Hawthorne adamantly refused to join.

  No sooner had the Hawthornes settled in West Newton than Hawthorne was ready to leave. The winter was especially severe. Sophia stopped her home instruction of Una and Julian to drive through pathless snow each day and tend to her now bedridden mother, who grew feebler by the hour. When the snow began to melt, stale water spewed into the house from defective drains. Sophia fretted about the disease that might invade her own little circle, Mr. Peabody came to spread lime on the ground, and Hawthorne worried about paying the rent. “He is very anxious to get into a home of his own, where his mind will be free to follow the calling on which his bread depends,” Mrs. Peabody commented, ready to let them go.

  In February they wrapped themselves in flannel and wool and rode by sleigh to Concord to inspect the old Alcott place, “Hillside,” so named for the steep incline at the rear of the house, at the top of which stretched a dark wood of locust trees, acacia, and tall dark pine. In years to come, Hawthorne would love that hill, climbing it and pacing the ridge for hours, or lying down under an umbrella of tree to dream about unwritten books.

  A wizard gardener, Alcott had cut terraces into the hill, planting flowers and vegetables in manicured profusion. Ice now covered the brown tufts of branch and the withered vines hung over the house, the raggediest he’d ever seen, Hawthorne said, and he promptly offered to buy it for fifteen hundred dollars. Hawthorne rechristened it “The Wayside.” “I never feel as if I were more permanently located than the traveller who sits down to rest by the road,” he mused. The words were prophetic.

  Built before the Revolutionary War, the old clapboard farmhouse shook with the clatter of wagon wheels, so close was it to the Lexington road. Inside, the ceilings hung low and damp. Sunshine crawled into corners only at rare intervals, and though Alcott had built extra rooms, new stairs, a shower-bath, and a veranda, the house felt boxy, and small, even smaller than the red shanty. It was a mess, too. Not fit for a menagerie of cattle, Sophia moaned, wrinkling her nose at the residue of the Alcotts and whatever creatures had been inhabiting the place since they’d left.

  There was no time to lose. The Manns were returning to Massachusetts, and the house had to be made spick-and-span for the new inhabitants. Sophia went to Concord with the three children on the first Sunday in June, took a large room at the Middlesex Hotel, and hired a ha
ck to drive over to the Lexington road, where she had employed a woman to clean and a man to do the heavy lifting. She and her workers dragged out the mattresses stored in the barn, swept and washed the floors, and varnished the oak walls to a happy gloss. The next day she found two more women to help her wash windows. The water was pure, the pump quiet, and Sophia bragged that within weeks her skin looked like whipped marble.

  A pretty grapevine curled over the front porch and the honeysuckle twisted around the piazza. Locust trees in white blossom covered the hillside. For her husband’s study, Sophia bought a lapis and gold rug that she laid carefully on the floor just before Hawthorne opened the gate—his gate—to the first house he’d ever owned.

  Sophia had proudly hung her portrait of Endymion in his workroom and set up a pedestal for the bust of Apollo. There wasn’t much furniture since his desk and secretary had been sold in Lenox. No matter. On the first of May, he’d finished the last part of the manuscript and scrawled its tentative title, “Hollingsworth: A Romance,” on the first page, sending it to Whipple for a preliminary glance. (Fields had gone to Europe to recover from the death of his wife.) Whipple later recalled that he offered a few suggestions, mainly about Hollingsworth—that, for instance, he ought to be punished more severely for his brutal rejection of Zenobia. “I hate the man ten times worse than you do,” Hawthorne presumably replied, “but I don’t now see how such a nature can feel the remorse he ought to feel.” According to Whipple, though, Hawthorne modified the book’s conclusion enough to satisfy him—and the public.

  The book’s title had to be changed too. Fields nixed “Hollingsworth.” Hawthorne weighed other options: “Zenobia” was an impossibility, since a novel by that name had just been published. “ ‘Miles Coverdale’s Three Friends’;—this title comprehends the book, but rather clumsily,” Hawthorne said. “ ‘The Veiled Lady’—too melodramatic; and, besides, I do not wish to give prominence to that feature of the romance. ‘Priscilla’—she is such a shrinking damsel that it seems hardly fair to thrust her into the vanguard and make her the standard-bearer. ‘The Blithedale Romance’—that would do, in lack of a better.”