Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  Fields responded with typical ebullience, buoying Hawthorne’s spirits with his uncorked faith in his talent and reporting from London that he’d successfully managed a deal with Chapman and Hall, Dickens’s publishers, for two hundred pounds—money to help Hawthorne pay for the new house, Sophia happily noted. The publication date was set in advance of the American one to prevent pirating.

  Just weeks after Hawthorne’s forty-eighth birthday in July, The Blithedale Romance sold out its first five thousand copies. Emerson thought the book unworthy of Hawthorne’s talent, but when Melville returned to Pittsfield from Nantucket and found his copy waiting, he wrote to Hawthorne right away. “Especially at this day,” Melville said, “the volume is welcome, as an antidote to the mooniness of some dreamers—who are merely dreamers—Yet who the devel aint a dreamer?”

  Friends praised Blithedale. William Pike compared it favorably to The Scarlet Letter for its penetration into the “the moody silences of the heart.” George Hillard considered Zenobia a splendid creature, and like many of the book’s critics, wished Hawthorne hadn’t gotten rid of her so ruthlessly. Admiring Blithedale’s originality, Washington Irving, to whom Hawthorne had mailed a copy, sent Hawthorne a useful warning: “You have a formidable rival to contend with in yourself, those [earlier] works having attained a height of excellence which it will be difficult if not impossible to surpass, and the public always requiring an author in a new work to surpass himself.”

  By and large, however, reviewers agreed. Hawthorne had not surpassed himself, far from it. Clumsy, sneering, gloomy: they heaped up epithets and in America focused on the novel’s unhealthiness. “Morbid” was a favorite accusation. Even Duyckinck’s Literary World didn’t like the book’s tone, and in England the Westminster Review flogged Hawthorne for denuding politics and morality with superciliousness. “Would he paint an ideal slave-plantation merely for the beauty of the thing, without pretending to ‘elicit a conclusion favourable or otherwise’ to slavery?” the writer—George Eliot?—quotes with contempt from Hawthorne’s preface, comparing Blithedale unfavorably with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s wildly popular Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  Sophia groaned. And she disagreed about Stowe. “I have felt all along that Mrs. Stowe’s book was overrated—that it was not profound but exciting—too much addressed to the movable passions—not to the deeper soul,” she grumbled. “Also that it would do no good to the slave. Time will show.”

  Fields grumbled too. “Let us hope there are no more Blithedales,” he confided to a friend. “The writer of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is getting to be a millionaire.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Main Chance

  Look ever to the main chance. English proverb.

  signed, Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Concord, December 31, 1852

  HIS FACE the shape of a baked potato, Franklin Pierce earned a reputation for sociability—too much sociability, if rumors about his drinking were true. And they were. Sophia Hawthorne didn’t care. “My own experience, in my young girlhood, with the morphine that was given to me to stop my headaches,” she archly announced, “has given me infinite sympathy and charity for persons liable to such a habit.”

  Critics of Pierce included Sophia’s mother. “It is mysterious to me how General Pierce with a face beaming with benevolence & sweetness can enjoy the horrors of battle, the groans of his murdered fellows—the triumphs of blood—,” she had shuddered during the Mexican War. “Smooth it over as you will, it is only legal murder.” Other Boston Whigs were more serene, at least initially. Pierce, they laughed, was nothing but the hero of “many a hard-fought bottle.” Emerson would call him paltry.

  As brigadier general in the Mexican War, the handsome Pierce earned a dubious renown in the battle of Contreras when he was thrown by his horse, which then stumbled and fell on him. His knee and pelvis injured, Pierce fainted from the pain, missed the call to battle, and was called a coward by a subordinate. The label stuck, even though Pierce, hobbling, found a stray horse, rejoined his troops, and fought on until the next day, when, as bad luck would have it, he twisted his injured knee and passed out again.

  Hawthorne’s friend George Hillard considered Pierce “just an average man—such as are found in every considerable town in the U.S.—of popular manners & convivial habits, but as a statesman, an orator, or even a lawyer, of no account at all.” A mediocrity. Yet Pierce’s early life had been crowned with success. At the age of twenty-seven he had been appointed to the bench of the New Hampshire Supreme Court; in 1833, at the age of twenty-nine, he was elected New Hampshire’s representative to Congress, and in 1837 the blue-eyed politician became the youngest member of the United States Senate. Five years later, though, he tendered his resignation, withdrawing more or less from public office. He declined an appointment in Polk’s administration as attorney general, and he refused to be nominated governor of New Hampshire because, he said, he loved his wife, who mistrusted both politics and her husband’s predilection for hard liquor. It was a lethal combination, obligatory from Pierce’s point of view.

  Franklin Pierce, president-elect, at the age of forty-eight, 1852 (Library of Congress)

  The daughter of Jesse Appleton, Bowdoin College’s second president, Jane Appleton Pierce was a chronically depressed woman, all fire and brimstone turned against herself. Hawthorne didn’t much like her but respected Frank’s devotion, bound as it was with personal tragedy. The Pierces had lost their first child, a son, three days after his birth; their second son died of typhus in 1843 at the age of four; and ten weeks before Pierce’s inaugural as the fourteenth president of the United States, their third son and only remaining child was killed in a train wreck right before their eyes. Jane Pierce had reason to be depressed.

  The heartbreak inevitably affected Pierce’s performance as president, but it never changed his outlook. A Democrat of the Jacksonian school, Pierce stood four-square by states’ rights, limited federal control, and unfettered territorial expansion. He read the Constitution as a strict constructionist, helped purge the Democratic Party in New Hampshire of Free-Soilers, and fully backed all parts of the Compromise of 1850. As Hawthorne bluntly put it, Pierce “dared to love that great and sacred reality—his whole, united, native country—better than the mistiness of a philanthropic theory.”

  Southern Democrats were grateful for his support, and northern Democrats, pleased by his imperturbability, suggested Pierce for the vice presidency in 1852. Pierce insisted that he was still unavailable. It was a good strategy. Politicians, especially New Englanders, weren’t supposed to be too obvious or hungry. “He has a subtle faculty of making affairs roll onward according to his will,” Hawthorne observed, “and of influencing their course without showing any trace of his action.” At the Democratic convention in Baltimore that June, the dark horse candidate was suddenly praised as the party’s unifier, and Pierce won the nomination with 282 votes on the forty-ninth ballot. He received the news by telegram. His wife fainted.

  A farmer from the Granite State was said to predict the future with Yankee foresight. Frank does well enough for New Hampshire, he nodded, “but he’ll be monstrous thin, spread out over the United States.”

  News of Pierce’s nomination quickly reached Hawthorne, who immediately wrote his old friend that “it has occurred to me that you might have some thoughts of getting me to write the necessary biography.” Not wishing to sound too eager (the same strategy Pierce had used), Hawthorne downplayed his qualifications. “I should write a better life of you after your term of office and life itself were over, than on the eve of an election,” he joked. Pierce wasn’t fooled.

  Though another biographer stood in the wings—a Connecticut writer, David Bartlett—Pierce promptly accepted Hawthorne’s offer. Likely he anticipated it. Stopping at the Tremont Hotel in Boston, not far from the Corner Bookstore, Pierce was surrounded by well-wishers, party hacks, politicians, office-seekers, and friends in the plush mahogany public rooms, all of whom he refused to meet,
but he did receive Hawthorne, whom he hadn’t seen in over two years. The dark-browed writer entered the room—or so the story goes—clasped Pierce’s hand, and then flopped on one of the lounges. “Frank,” he said, “I pity you.” Pierce smiled his affable smile. “I pity myself,” he replied.

  After a couple of seconds Hawthorne replied, “But, after all, this world was not meant to be happy in—only to succeed in!”

  Gentlemen of genius and renown (so Sophia said) traipsed in and out of the Wayside volunteering Pierce anecdotes for the biography. And they urged Hawthorne, the candidate’s unofficial prime minister, to exert his influence. Pierce mustn’t be so apathetic; Van Buren and Lewis Cass had been sure they’d be elected, and look what happened to them. “I want you to scare Pierce a little,” pleaded one operative, requesting that Hawthorne arrange meetings between Pierce and Democratic representatives in New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Hawthorne reportedly held a reception at the Wayside, introducing Pierce to local backers.

  The matter of Hawthorne writing a campaign biography, however, was to be kept quiet—probably until The Blithedale Romance was published, so as not to prejudice reviewers.

  Hawthorne’s publishers had contracted to bring out the campaign biography, paying Hawthorne a flat fee of three hundred dollars. With Fields abroad, Hawthorne had been consulting with the firm’s senior partner, William Davis Ticknor. Six years younger than Hawthorne, he looked older, almost paternal, his forehead sloping down from a shiny pate and a fringe of white whiskers coating his chin like a bib. Ticknor’s daughter thought him handsome, as daughters do, but his look, like his manner, was understated and subdued. A milder man than Fields though no less charming, Ticknor was cordial, sharp-witted, adept with balance sheets, accounts, patrons, and writers. Hawthorne trusted him.

  And Ticknor fully backed Pierce. Fields’s politics, insofar as he was political at all, may have inclined elsewhere. (Fields’s biographer insists unconvincingly that Fields inclined to nothing but literature.) Hawthorne cautiously explained that he simply must write the campaign biography of a friend with whom he’d been “intimate through life.” Besides, he added gratuitously, tipping his hand, “I seek nothing from him.”

  Indeed he should not, snorted Louisa Hawthorne. At the Salem depot, she bumped into Horace Conolly and David Roberts on the platform, the two of them bursting with talk of the exotic diplomatic posts Hawthorne should receive at the hand of a President Pierce. She dismissed the conjectures in a huff. Its mention soiled her skirts. Roberts thought her ridiculous. She didn’t care. “I told him I hoped he would have nothing to do with an office,” she proudly reported to Ebe.

  If Louisa’s disdain represented the family’s view—politics paved the way to hell, not glory—small wonder that Hawthorne kept his worldly aspirations to himself.

  After much hesitation, Louisa decided to come to the Wayside, choosing the most indirect route possible. She would stop in Concord when coming home from Saratoga Springs, New York, where she and her uncle John Dike would take the waters. Then they’d steam down the Hudson River from Saratoga to New York aboard the Henry Clay, and Louisa would head up north to Concord by herself.

  On the afternoon of July 28, a calm and sunny day, the Henry Clay raced a rival ship, the Armenia, on the river, steam belching, crew scurrying, passengers cowering. Out of control, the Clay soon slammed into the Armenia. People screamed. Metal ripped, wood crackled, but the Clay continued the race. A wall of flame leaped from the boiler room. Men and women ran for the lifeboats. There were none. Fire licked the wheelhouses. The steamer couldn’t slow down. It plowed forward, heading straight for the riverbank. A group of passengers huddled together and waited for the crash. Others leaped into the water, hoping to swim for their lives. Many jumped to their deaths, Louisa Hawthorne among them.

  As soon as he could, John Dike telegraphed Salem. He reclaimed a small brooch, a mourning pin, stained and blackened by the salt water. William Pike did not carry it when he caught the early train for Concord. He traveled alone and light. The railroad coach dropped him near the Wayside gate shortly before seven in the morning. Sophia had not yet come down for breakfast, but seeing Pike through the window, she called out his name and waved him onto the piazza. There he stood, flushed and nervous, when she and Hawthorne opened the door. Louisa is dead, drowned, he blurted out the story. Hawthorne listened, face leeched of color. Write Pierce, Hawthorne told Pike; he’d have to delay the biography. Then he shut himself in his study.

  That afternoon one could glimpse him plodding on the hilltop at the rear of the house, hands clasped behind his back, head sunk.

  Hawthorne went to Salem, but with Pike confused about the time of the service, he arrived too late for the funeral. “I was glad,” Sophia placated herself, “it would have been so painful for him to go through any ceremony & to hear all the Calvinistic talk.” Mrs. Peabody warned Sophia to keep her rationalizations to herself. Ebe seemed dazed. Hawthorne escorted her back to Beverly, where she now lived, in a chaise.

  If Hawthorne dreamed that the Wayside might soothe his restless soul, Louisa’s death sent him in search of distant pastures yet again. No longer did he equivocate about the matter of a consular post. As he told William Ticknor, “We are politicians now; and you must not expect to conduct yourself like a gentlemanly publisher.” The gloves were off.

  Ticknor began to advertise Hawthorne’s Life of Pierce in August knowing that the rival campaign biography would preempt Hawthorne’s. But Hawthorne’s slim book, 144 pages in all, bore the most prestigious imprimatur in America, that of Ticknor, Reed and Fields, and, of course, that of Hawthorne himself, whose other work Ticknor cagily advertised on the frontispiece.

  “Being so little of a politician that he scarcely feels entitled to call himself a member of any party,” Hawthorne introduces himself in the biography. He is a cordial nonpartisan concerned only for the welfare of his country and does not voluntarily undertake the writing of the book. Politics are “too remote” from the romancer’s “customary occupations.”

  Whigs chuckled. Such a suave introduction: it was Hawthorne’s newest romance.

  He continued. His task, as he saw it, was to explain why Pierce, despite all his civil and military appointments, remained so little known. (Who is Franklin Pierce, cried the newspapers, and how had a man of Pierce’s passable talents risen so high?) Hawthorne, however, interpreted Pierce’s failings as proof of good character. The man may not be a brilliant strategist, a brilliant orator, or a natural leader; but he is of great heart and conviction, earnest, steadfast, generous, a man who waits “for the occasion to bring him inevitably forward,” Hawthorne claimed; bumptious, yes, but steady, manly, whole, and far preferable to Dimmesdale or Hollingsworth.

  Not to the Manns. To them, Pierce was a knave, “a thorough, unmitigated, irredeemable pro-slavery man,” Horace Mann stormed. How could Hawthorne back him? Mary Mann said Hawthorne was writing the biography only out of friendship. Mann wanted to know whether his brother-in-law would ignore the need—the anguish—of enslaved millions for mere personal considerations. “Is Hawthorne such a man?”

  Hawthorne was. “If he makes out Pierce to be either a great or a brave man, then it will be the greatest work of fiction he ever wrote,” Mann declared. Certainly Hawthorne didn’t share Pierce’s views. But he did. To one who never felt quite at home, the symbolic loss of one—the dissolution of the Union—was intolerable. Conceived in liberty and hope, the Union was the only rationale possible for a bloody, fratricidal American revolution that pitted not just governments but family members against one another. And despite satires depicting American vulgarity, avarice, and idiocy, Hawthorne could just as easily summon a rhetoric of manifest destiny, the country as hallowed experiment, the Constitution its covenant.

  To Hawthorne, the Constitution must never be sundered or sullied by the stupidity of common mortals who set themselves up as gods, like the witch judges or the tuneless mobs that tarred and feathered Tories or the oppon
ents of slavery, like Whig senator William Seward, waving the banner of what he in his arrogance calls a “higher law.” For the Constitution preserves the Union precisely by keeping its various elements in check, ensuring the rule of law and order essential to the social good and preventing mass hysteria, demagoguery, and the petty tyranny of petty men.

  Like Daniel Webster, Hawthorne considered the Compromise of 1850 the best means of protecting the Constitution from abolitionist agitators in the North and the slaveholding intransigents of the South. No surprise, then, that in the campaign biography he portrayed Pierce as the “unshaken advocate of Union, and of the mutual steps of compromise which that great object unquestionably demanded.” As for the Fugitive Slave Law he once berated, Hawthorne fell prudently silent. So did Pierce.

  Yet Hawthorne didn’t for a minute condone slavery. Rather, he considered himself a hardheaded realist who understood, as the impractical philanthropists did not, that once passed, the Compromise laws—all of them—needed to be upheld. “The fiercest, the least scrupulous, and the most consistent of those, who battle against slavery,” Hawthorne insisted, “recognize the same fact that he [Pierce] does. They see that merely human wisdom and human efforts cannot subvert it, except by tearing to pieces the Constitution, breaking the pledges which it sanctions, and severing into distracted fragments that common country, which Providence brought into one nation through a continued miracle of almost two hundred years, from the first settlement of the American wilderness until the Revolution.”