Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  Human wisdom and effort can’t abolish slavery? What then? Hawthorne still favored a gradual approach, as he indicated in Journal of an African Cruiser. The institution of slavery, though execrable, if let alone, will disappear like a dream, he now said, “by some means impossible to be anticipated, but of the simplest and easiest operation, when all its uses shall have been fulfilled.”

  This is an incredible statement for a man cynical about humanity and its enlightenment. Hawthorne saw no other way. “There is no instance,” he insists, “in all history, of the human will and intellect having perfected any great moral reform by methods which it adapted to that end.” That is slavery is preferable to whatever nefarious system might rise—or be used—to replace it. “The evil would be certain,” Hawthorne continues in his most exhortatory vein, “while the good was, at best, a contingency.” In Blithedale, he wrote almost the same thing: “Little as we know of our life to come, we may be very sure, for one thing, that the good we aim at will not be attained. People never do get just the good they seek. If it come at all, it is something else, which they never dreamed of, and did not particularly want.”

  Hawthorne defends passivity and inaction, the one a psychological state, the other a political one, and both of them consistent with the proslavery argument. Emancipation would inevitably lead to crime, poverty, and bloody violence; and once freed, the emancipated slave would not be able to find a livelihood or a home. Thus, any action taken on behalf of abolition only serves to aggravate the situation of those “whose condition it aimed to ameliorate, and terminating, in its possible triumph—if such possibility there were—with the ruin of two races which now dwelt together in greater peace and affection, it is not too much to say, than had ever elsewhere existed between the taskmaster and the serf.”

  Recall that Hawthorne had written almost the same thing seventeen years earlier in his sketch “Old News,” where he deemed slavery a “patriarchal, and almost a beautiful, peculiarity” of early American life, not admirable, to be sure, but not without its benefit for the slave; an inferior people is better off enslaved. Latter-day Hawthorne fans may want to read him as tongue-in-cheek; in his own days, his sisters-in-law did not. Appalled, Mary Mann and Elizabeth Peabody, realizing they could no longer speak their minds to Sophia, decided that Pierce had led the befuddled romancer down a primrose path of moral obliquity.

  Hawthorne as master ironist, or a naïve romancer out of his element: the evidence suggests he was neither. He meant what he said and knew what he meant.

  Doubtless Hawthorne considered blacks an inferior race, as did most of his New England compeers, whether Oliver Wendell Holmes, at one smug extreme, or Theodore Parker at the antislavery other. Strange and disappointing, though, is Hawthorne’s complete lack of empathy for the slave. His conscious sympathies lay with the laboring white man who would certainly lose his job to an emancipated black man. And doubtless Hawthorne identified with the southern white slaveholder to the extent that he romanticized an agrarian planter class as more cultured and genteel than its busy Yankee counterpart, those no-nonsense industrialists, slick and utilitarian, or their Brahmin brothers, their privileged eyes foggy with reform. Yet like most people, Hawthorne regarded himself as well-intentioned and fair-minded, a neo-Jeffersonian patriot devoted to “preserving our sacred Union, as the immovable basis from which the destinies, not of America alone, but of mankind at large, may be carried upward and consummated.”

  “The biography has cost me hundreds of friends, here at the north, who had a purer regard for me than Frank Pierce ever gained, and who drop off from me like autumn leaves, in consequence of what I say on the slavery question.” Hawthorne wrote to Bridge. “But they were my real sentiments, and I do not now regret that they are on record.”

  In the process of writing Pierce’s biography, Hawthorne decided that Pierce possessed the character of a great ruler. “There are scores of men in the country that seem brighter than he is; but Frank has the directing mind, and will move them about like pawns on a chess-board, and turn all their abilities to better purpose than they themselves could.”

  Hawthorne was wrong on several counts.

  Reviews of Hawthorne’s book split along party lines. The Springfield Republican dubbed it fiction; the Democratic Review liked it, and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine deftly sidestepped politics to speak of literary form. The New York Herald called Hawthorne a hack, and the New York Times, a Whig paper, dismissed Hawthorne as a partisan still harboring a grudge against the village custom house. As for the biography, the Times continued, it exposed the real Frank Pierce: average student, lackluster attorney, unsuccessful soldier, boring speaker, doughface (as southern sympathizers were called) politician: “This is the marrow of Mr. Hawthorne’s panegyric.”

  While the press debated the biography’s demerits, Hawthorne went up to Maine to join Pierce at Bowdoin’s commencement and semicentennial celebration. “All my cotemporaries [sic] have grown the funniest old men in the world,” Hawthorne wrote home to Sophia. “Am I a funny old man?” Exhausted from writing, grieving Louisa’s death, tired of Peabody politics, and cranky about domestic life, he had looked forward to the tall academic pines, scented as they were with another era. And he liked spending time with Pierce.

  It seems an unlikely pairing—poky politician, stylish writer; one outgoing, the other introspective—but only at first glance. Hawthorne was more relaxed and jovial, Pierce more considerate and caring, than most people knew. “He is deep, deep, deep,” said Hawthorne of Pierce. Mostly, though, these two men—out of step with their milieu though in step with their times—sought and found in each other the comfort of a thirty-year friendship and the full acceptance neither had quite discovered elsewhere, despite all their success. “I love him,” Hawthorne said. It was a simple statement of easy truth.

  Pierce commissioned George Healy, portraitist of the famous, to paint Hawthorne and paid one thousand dollars, a goodly sum. Pierce, who cherished the picture, kept it on exhibit in Washington during his entire term of office, and for more than a century it remained in the Pierce family, Hawthorne glancing outward, somber, not sad, his eyebrows black as crows, his eyes impenetrable. During the sitting, a visibly nervous Hawthorne grew more comfortable. At his request, Mrs. Healy read one of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s works, or Hawthorne chatted amiably with the painter, comparing notes about their early, unsuccessful days when Hawthorne said he couldn’t afford more than plain wooden furniture that Sophia painted in her artistic way.

  Healy thought Hawthorne looked like a poetical Daniel Webster, if shyer and more feminine, as befitted a writer; perhaps Healy confused the two men and their politics, although several others, like Fields and Ellery Channing, had noticed the similarity. It was flint.

  After Brunswick, Hawthorne rode down the coast to the rocky Isles of Shoals, nine miles off the coast of Rye Beach, New Hampshire, and accessible by ferry from Portsmouth. Pierce introduced Hawthorne at the small hotel, Leighton’s, perfect for escape. He stayed there twelve days, waking each morning to the caw of gulls and the soft sound of water lapping at the shore. White sun and stinging salt burned out his malaise, and back at the Wayside, he said he was ready to start a new romance. It was to be “in the Scarlet Letter vein,” Fields purred with delight.

  “I am beginning to take root here, and feel myself, for the first time in my life, really at home,” Hawthorne confided to Longfellow while he set his sights on foreign shores.

  Tuesday, November 2, 1852, was a day of dull rain and clammy fog in Boston, except for Democrats. Franklin Pierce defeated both his Whig opponent, Winfield Scott, and Free-Soil Democrat John P. Hale, whom he detested. Hawthorne began making plans. Sophia and the children would go to the Manns for Thanksgiving; he invited Pike to join him in Concord for a bachelor’s holiday. They talked politics. The scramble for appointments had begun.

  From distant Concord, Hawthorne pulled Salem’s political levers. He dickered with George Bailey Loring, Democratic Party le
ader, who wanted Ephraim Miller’s position in the Custom House, and he worked to keep Miller in the Custom House, hoping to appease Loring with the postmaster’s job. He backed Nathaniel James Lord, president of the Essex County Democrats, for district attorney and advised Zach Burchmore to go to the Boston Custom House, hoping Loring would then support him. (“Do not let my name be mixed up with the above business,” he admonished Burchmore.) The maneuvering took skill, patience, and circumspection. “A subtile boldness with a veil of modesty over it, is what is needed,” Hawthorne confided to one aspirant. It was the method he used.

  And it worked. Everyone was happy with what they received, including Hawthorne’s ne’er-do-well uncle William Manning, who landed a job as superintendent of repairs—janitor—in the Custom House.

  Literary friends also looked to Hawthorne for their ration of spoils. Richard Stoddard, a young poet Hawthorne had met the previous summer, wanted an office of some sort; Charles Wilkins Webber asked for help with an appointment in South America; Ellery Channing hoped to go to Rome or Naples; and with Pierre, his new novel, a disaster, Melville half hoped for a foreign post. In November he visited Concord, and soon afterwards Hawthorne took Melville’s name to Washington. Nothing came of Hawthorne’s efforts on Melville’s behalf, and it’s impossible to know how strongly he pushed, though for years he felt guilty about not succeeding. “However, I failed only from real lack of power to serve him,” he later told himself on seeing Melville again, “so there was no reason to be ashamed.”

  As for himself, Hawthorne was reasonably certain he’d be given the consulship in Liverpool. He spoke longingly of England, noted Henry Bright, a young Englishman visiting Concord, and Hawthorne explained to Bridge that he’d received “several invitations from English celebrities to come over there; and this office would make all straight”—meaning it was a position he could afford, given the salary and fees. Fields sulked. “We shall have no more romances from his pen at present.”

  Sophia pretended not to know of Hawthorne’s plans, or if she did, kept mum so as not to distress her mother. But Mrs. Peabody died in early January. Two months later, in March, news of Hawthorne’s assignment hit the newspapers. Ecstatic at the prospect of Europe—at long last—Sophia shunted aside criticism, real and perceived, about Hawthorne’s appointment. He had not jockeyed for it, she snapped; it belonged to him by right. Not that the plum of a post had anything to do with Pierce’s friendship or the biography, she asserted with sticky innocence. “Bargain & sale are not terms or ideas to influence such a man as he or my husband & since I know it & them, I do not care a fig what low minded people may say or think up on the subject.”

  On March 26, 1853, the United States Senate approved Pierce’s nomination of Nathaniel Hawthorne as United States consul in Liverpool. Hawthorne accepted the position. He torched old letters and papers, as well as hundreds of letters Sophia had written him before they married. It was a key gesture: covering his traces so as to reinvent the past.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  This Farther Flight

  And England, the land of my ancestors! Once I had fancied that my sleep would not be quiet in the grave until I should return, as it were to my home of past ages.…

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man”

  THREE YEARS at the Manse, back to Salem and briefly to Boston, where Julian was born; to Salem yet again; to Lenox, West Newton, and Concord. “Then this farther flight to England, where we expect to spend four years, and afterwards another year in Italy—during all which time we shall have no real home,” Hawthorne mused, sitting quietly in a suburb of Liverpool on a showery evening. He half sighed. “I felt that I should never be quite at home here.”

  After banishing himself from Salem in 1850, Hawthorne found no peace anywhere, said Julian: “Partly necessity or convenience, but partly, also, his own will, drove him from place to place; always wishing to settle down finally, but never lighting upon the fitting spot.”

  Before departure there was much to do: farewell dinners, a three-week stay in Washington to confer with Pierce, the packing, the waiting, the settling of accounts, and of course the correcting of proofs for Tanglewood Tales, a sequel to A Wonder Book. But one must ask why, just at the point when his career was flourishing—he’d written four books and two volumes of children’s stories within the last three years—why Hawthorne was trading the writer’s life for the drudgery of civil service. Hawthorne wouldn’t publish again for seven more years.

  In Concord, Moncure Conway, a starstruck Harvard student, recognized Hawthorne—“Who else could have those soft-flashing unsearchable eyes, that beauté du diable at middle age?”—though Hawthorne’s dapper dress surprised him until he recollected that “Prospero had left his isle, temporarily buried his book, and was passing from his masque to his masquerade as consul at Liverpool and man of the world.” Only to romantics like Conway was the consulship in Liverpool a masquerade, an excuse, a temporary and slightly embarrassing deviation on the path of continued literary acclaim. What Conway and others failed to realize was that Hawthorne needed the consulship as much as he needed to write.

  For one thing, there was the money. Writing still seemed to Hawthorne the self-absorbed pastime of a monkish patrician who did not have to bother about how to feed, clothe, and educate three children and to provide for a wife in the manner she deserved. For another thing, Hawthorne was not by nature prolific. “A life of much smoulder, but scanty fire,” he would characterize his career with a modicum of truth. The world of publishing, as Fields demonstrated, was a whistle-stop world; and to keep up, Hawthorne had to be a kind of aristocratic huckster, like Hepzibah in The House of the Seven Gables. He preferred the narcotic of government officialdom: reputable, responsible, lucrative, and far easier than writing.

  With its solid floors, cigar smoke, and ribald tales, it was also a world, like the Custom House, into which men could escape, pretending they were youthful and unencumbered and successful in whatever ways success mattered or didn’t. Sure, Hawthorne had said Uncle Sam robbed him of his manhood and the ability to stand on his own, but the Custom House had once represented manhood too: a steady income, a definable niche, and the community of seamen, like Hawthorne’s father, formerly at the center of Salem life. Of course, government appointments are ephemeral, and Hawthorne reckoned that an eventual rotation of office would oblige him to return to his writing desk, as if he had no choice but to revert to the vocation he profoundly loved but respected only in fitful doses.

  The consulship thus promised to resolve the conflict between the artist and the laborer much as Brook Farm had—but at a better wage and with the premium of prestige due a man of middle age. Hawthorne calculated he might save as much as thirty thousand dollars after four years in office. Since merchandise sailing from the port of Liverpool to America required the consul’s signature, and since each signature paid the consul a two-dollar fee, Hawthorne could “bag” (his term) enough gold to return to America to write unimpeded by financial worry.

  And anyway, what to write? After The House of the Seven Gables, history—his own or the nation’s—no longer inspired him, and he’d long ago stopped scribbling small masterpieces like “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” or “The Minister’s Black Veil.” He’d ceased writing stories of twisted love like “The Birth-mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and Coverdale was yet another crafty nincompoop on yet another pilgrimage: no more. When Fields prepared to republish Mosses from an Old Manse under the Ticknor and Fields imprint, Hawthorne reread his tales with dismay. “I am a good deal changed since those times; and to tell you the truth, my past self is not very much to my taste, as I see myself in this book.” But his present self had produced the disappointing Blithedale, and though the campaign biography served him well, it was a one-time occupation.

  “The American stamp is pretty strong on you,” Ellery Channing observed of Hawthorne, referring to his work. “Could you feel at ease in European circumstances
?” he asked. The question was academic. Hawthorne booked staterooms for himself, his family, and two servants on the Cunard paddle-wheel steamer Niagara, bound for Liverpool, and they sailed from Boston on July 6, 1853, two days after Hawthorne’s forty-ninth birthday. The next day, as the vessel chugged out of Halifax, four cannons fired a salute to the new consul. The die was cast.

  “I do not like England,” Una Hawthorne moped. Her father didn’t much like it either. “To tell you the truth,” he wrote William Ticknor, “I believe we are all very homesick.”

  Liverpool loomed on the shore, warehouses standing like upended coffins in an overcast dawn. It rained constantly, a brown, half-hearted, chilly rain that shook the bones. With William Ticknor as temporary factotum, the Hawthornes disembarked onto the sopping dock, tired and nervous and excited after their ten-day journey. They collected their trunks and carpetbags and piled into a cab, but their rooms weren’t yet ready at Mrs. Blodget’s genteel boardinghouse, a Fields recommendation, so for the next ten days they huddled indoors at the Waterloo Hotel, shrinking from the city’s soiled air. Sophia and the children caught cold.

  Liverpool was poor, crowded, soggy, and drab, a city on the edge of Empire. They couldn’t possibly live there. They crossed the Mersey—“the color of a mud-puddle,” Hawthorne griped—for the suburb of Rock Ferry and registered at the Royal Rock Hotel, a fine hostelry, more what they had had in mind, with its broad walks and mannerly flowers and the nearby park where furry donkeys waited politely in a row. “There we shall remain,” Sophia declared, “till we find a house & home.”

  Sophia recovered her breathlessness, wooed by English pomp and rural opulence. The coaches of a well-to-do Liverpool merchant whisked the Hawthornes outside the grimy port to a country manor, Poulton Hall, about three miles distant, where a merchant lived among twenty-five bedrooms and two sisters sensible enough to praise The Scarlet Letter as the most moral book they’d ever read. At another manor, they dipped their fingers in bowls of blue Bohemian glass and dined on fish, turkey, and chicken served by elegant footmen in full-court dress who held the shining domes of silver dishes. Hawthorne had already given three speeches at affairs of note, Sophia happily buzzed, including a dinner with His Worship the city mayor at the Town Hall. “People who have not heard of Thackeray here, know Mr. Hawthorne,” Sophia wrote to her father. England had its satisfactions.