Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  Hawthorne stepped into his new life with noticeably less verve. Each morning, he left the Rock Ferry station at half past nine and crossed the Mersey on a little steamer, arriving at his post about a half hour later. Located in the Washington Buildings on Brunswick Street—“the most detestable part of the city”—the consular office consisted of two rooms on the first floor, one for him and an outer chamber for his treasured clerk, Henry J. Wilding, and the indispensable vice-consul, Samuel Pearce, two Englishmen of experience. Hawthorne’s own office, about twelve feet by fifteen, reminded him of an old-fashioned barbershop. On the walls were nondescript pictures and maps as well as two lithographs, one of Zachary Taylor and one of the Tennessee State House. An American eagle skulked over the mantelpiece, and a barometer pointed hopefully to “Fair.” It continued to rain.

  Hawthorne’s consular duties included various maritime and mercantile tasks, all related to Liverpool’s strategic position in Anglo-American trade. (It was the port of entry for cotton and sugarcane and American politics.) Mostly, though, the consul interpreted protocol, clarified the finer points of maritime law, paid postage on unclaimed letters from Americans, and provided passage home to stranded seamen. He investigated the numerous complaints about the conditions aboard American ships and took the deposition of a battered sailor in Liverpool’s North Hospital. He placed a young American who’d been wandering about the streets in a hospital for the insane, and he arranged the forlorn funeral of an American sea captain who died in a Liverpool boardinghouse. “The duties of the office,” he noted, “carried me to prisons, police-courts, hospitals, lunatic asylums, coroner’s inquests, death-beds, funerals, and brought me in contact with insane people, criminals, ruined speculators, wild adventurers, diplomatists, brother-consuls, and all manner of simpletons and unfortunates, in greater number and variety than I had ever dreamed of as pertaining to America.”

  If anyone came calling for Hawthorne the author (as opposed to the consul), the clerk was to say he was out.

  What Hawthorne liked best was tallying fees. “The autograph of a living author has seldom been so much in request at so respectable a price,” he chortled, constantly aware how little authors were valued at home. It was with pride that he repaid George Hillard the money Hillard had raised after Hawthorne lost his job at the Salem Custom House, and he loaned Horatio Bridge three thousand dollars.

  In September the Hawthornes moved to Rock Park, the affluent housing project near the waterfront, a kind of suburban fortress protected by police guards to keep out the riffraff. Their place was a large stone semidetached structure, three stories high and surrounded by dense hedges, originally renting for two hundred pounds. The landlady lowered the price when she discovered the United States consul had his eye on it, “instead of Mr. Nobody,” said Sophia, “so much influence has rank & title in dear old England.”

  The Hawthornes counted pennies. Tea alone cost a dollar a pound (four-shilling tea was tasteless) and potatoes sold at thirty cents a peck. Though he and Sophia had always hired someone to help with chores or cooking—except during their poorest Manse days—Sophia said their new rank demanded a staff of at least housemaid, nursemaid, cook, and a gardener to tend the rare roses. “We do not live in ‘great style,’ ” Sophia hastily explained to her father, “—neither do we intend to have much company. We really could not afford it.” When Elizabeth put Hawthorne’s income at forty thousand dollars, Sophia quickly trimmed her sister’s sails. “So very far from this is the truth that it really is funny & melancholy at the same time,” she scolded. “And Mr. Hawthorne must lay aside a good part of this income, or we should return ruined.” To Mary she explained that “we live as economically as we possibly can—no carriage—no 24 dinners (dinner of 24) no liveried footmen.” Living in the backwoods of Ohio with her children and Horace, now president of Antioch College, Mary must have raised an eyebrow.

  Hawthorne relied on Ticknor to invest Hawthorne’s earnings as he saw fit. In fact, if not for the money, Hawthorne professed he’d “kick the office to the devil, and come home again. I am sick of it,” he wrote in December, “and long for my hillside, and—what I thought I never should long for—my pen!”

  True, he had little time to write stories, but he had no real intention of trying. Instead he recorded long accounts of English life. Hawthorne shivered in revulsion, fear, and stupefaction as he walked the Liverpool streets. Winter came on, cold. He saw the raw feet of scantily clad children, a beggar without arms or legs pleading for a sixpence, a woman in a hand wagon (good subject for a romance), and a half-starved, half-frozen boy trying to sell dirty newspapers. Smudged young girls furtively grabbed the coal that fell from carts and hid the precious cargo in their aprons. A man stood barelegged playing a fife hoping for a halfpenny. Hawthorne looked in the apple stalls, fruit not fit for a pig. Appalled and fascinated, he returned home to his warm sitting room fire and wrote, certain he’d “got hold of something real, which I do not find in the better streets of the city.”

  He supposed he might one day transform his casual impressions into fiction since his notebooks had always been a source of stray facts capable of sparking a tale. It was no different now, except that Hawthorne was trying to match his fantasy of England against what he saw. The déjà vu of rural churches came from his reading about them, he told himself. “Or perhaps the image of them, impressed into the minds of my long-ago forefathers, was so deep that I have inherited it; and it answers to the reality.”

  His forefathers were constantly present, sometimes closer than the streetpeople of Liverpool. “My ancestor left England in 1630,” Hawthorne ruminated, “I return in 1853. I sometimes feel as if I myself had been absent these two hundred and eighteen years—leaving England just emerging from the feudal system, and finding it on the verge of Republicanism. It brings the two far separated points of time very closely together, to view the matter thus.” England was the root, he the branch.

  Yet the country was resolutely itself, its gay pageantry repulsive to him, a democrat. And it was strangely soothing too. “How comfortable Englishmen know how to make themselves,” Hawthorne observed, “locating their dwellings far within private grounds, with secure gateways and porter’s lodges, and the smoothest roads, and trimmest paths, and shaven lawns, and clumps of tress, and every bit of the ground, every hill and dell, made the most of for convenience and beauty, and so well kept that even winter cannot disarray it—.” But the puritan in him could never condone smug luxury. “… I doubt whether anybody is entitled to a home in so full a sense, in this world.” To Ticknor, he wailed, “I HATE England.”

  Still, the poets entombed among dim stones in Westminster Abbey had been old friends, and Hawthorne stopped for a night in Lichfield to visit the birthplace of Dr. Johnson. “I set my foot on the worn steps, and laid my hand on the wall of the house, because Johnson’s hand and foot might have been in those same places.” This England, his England, is the place where he came alive so many years ago; this England, his England, is the magic green Forest of Arden, best home of all.

  The English had heard stories. They had read Frederika Bremer’s impressions of the good-looking American author, his nose fine, his eyes clear as the Stockbridge Bowl, and the bitter smile on his lips spoiling the lower part of his face. Others had heard tales of his shyness. William Story told Elizabeth Barrett Browning that Hawthorne spoke only through his pen, and James Fields told his friend Mary Russell Mitford that Hawthorne was so thin-skinned Fields dared not criticize his writing lest he toss it in the flames. And how well Fields remembered those awful days—only four years ago—when the Hawthornes were starving, until, that is, Fields discovered The Scarlet Letter. “Was Hawthorne aware of his Columbus,” Story asked James Lowell. “Browning seemed somewhat to have suspected a rat.”

  In Liverpool, Hawthorne gained a reputation for refusing invitations although he did develop a close friendship with Henry Arthur Bright, the precocious twenty-two-year-old who’d met the author in Concord in t
he fall of 1852. Then, Hawthorne had hardly talked to him, but once in Liverpool he was grateful for his company and all his kindnesses, great and small. “Bright was the illumination of my dusky little apartment, as often as he made his appearance there!” Hawthorne would write. Bright took Hawthorne to the theater, accompanied him on his rambles, brought him magazines, oddments, and gossip, and conveyed to Sophia invitations to country houses. She responded gratefully, sprinkling him with adjectives: “interesting, sincere, earnest, independent, warm and generous hearted; not at all dogmatic, and with ready answers.”

  He liked pre-Raphaelite poetry, Balzac, and flowers, and though he wrote an occasional piece for the Westminster Review—later for the Examiner and Athenaeum—Bright had no pretensions of a literary career. Instead he was the cream of the Liverpool merchant class, educated at Trinity, a Liberal, a Unitarian, and in 1857 a partner in the family shipping business, Gibbs, Bright, & Company. He was also a humanitarian. He published a pamphlet, Cruelties on High Seas, to try to protect sailors from physical and emotional abuse on board ship, and he shared Hawthorne’s interest in politics, particularly as they were unfolding in America. Another of his pamphlets, Free Blacks and Slaves: Would American Abolition be a Blessing?, answered its own question with a definite no.

  Buffering the consul from Liverpool society, Bright looked to Hawthorne as to a father, and Hawthorne responded, tenderly cuffing him when he wrote a milk-warm review of De Quincey, that “poor old man of genius,” Hawthorne cried in sympathy, “to whom the world is in arrears for half-a-century’s revenue of fame!” Bright hadn’t served the old man at all. “You examine his title-deeds, find them authentic, and send him away with the benefaction of half-a-crown!”

  The callow youth made Hawthorne feel spry himself. He and Sophia had begun to shave a couple of years from their ages, and when Elizabeth Peabody sent congratulations on Sophia’s birthday, Sophia erupted. Never refer to her age, nor to Hawthorne’s. “He wants to know nothing about the birth days you are so fond of.”

  Hawthorne put the matter somewhat differently. “I have had enough of progress,” he wrote Longfellow; “—now I want to stand stock still; or rather, to go back twenty years.”

  By and large, Hawthorne was a diligent consul, attending to affairs of office with dispatch and decorum. During his first two years in office he hardly left his post, so scrupulous was he about any imputation of impropriety; he did not travel or sightsee beyond the boundaries of Liverpool, and each day spent almost eight hours at his dingy desk. In the summer of 1854, when Sophia and the children went to the Isle of Man for two weeks to recover from whooping cough, Hawthorne joined them only on weekends. His desires were simple: perform well, avoid attention, count his money.

  Nothing is perfect, particularly in government service, and even the most conscientious consul is not above reproach. About two hundred soldiers, shipwrecked from the United States vessel San Francisco, landed in Liverpool in need of passage home, but since they were soldiers, not sailors, they did not fall under the jurisdiction of the consul, who didn’t quite know what to do with them. According to Hawthorne, when the ship’s officers requisitioned two thousand dollars to furnish provisions, he supplied the items himself, dispatching his clerk to make the purchases, and he found temporary lodging for the soldiers, which, according to Sophia, he paid out of pocket.

  The soldiers’ transportation to America was more ticklish. Hawthorne telegraphed James Buchanan, American minister to Great Britain, to ask if Buchanan would take over the matter. Replying that the troops fell outside his purview, Buchanan passed the buck back to Hawthorne, suggesting he open an account at Baring Brothers for the soldiers’ relief. Furious, the captain of the San Francisco went to see Buchanan, and someone leaked to the American press that Hawthorne had avoided all responsibility for the soldiers, having referred everything to his clerk, an Englishman, no less. Moreover, if the San Francisco’s captain hadn’t traveled to London to importune Buchanan, no action on behalf of the shipwrecked soldiers would have been taken at all.

  Hawthorne himself was furious. But he knew that to exonerate himself he would have to shift responsibility back onto Buchanan—not a good political move—so he sent exculpatory letters to Bridge and Ticknor, instructing them to publish them if, and only if, necessary. Ticknor and Bridge knew what to do. They leaked Hawthorne’s letters to the press in just the right proportions, and the affair soon passed over, leaving Hawthorne’s reputation and his cordial relations with Buchanan intact.

  The affair left Hawthorne slightly shaken. He did not want to repeat the Salem Custom House debacle. This was a “devilish good office,” he told Ticknor again and again. He’d netted ten thousand dollars in almost a year, a tidy sum, and could salt away even more—if “those Jackasses at Washington (of course I do not include the President under this polite phrase) will but let it alone.”

  They would not. A new agreement between Britain and America allowing merchandise to travel to Canada without the consul’s signature reduced Hawthorne’s fees by one-quarter. And John O’Sullivan, the American chargé d’affaires in Portugal, brought Hawthorne word of change slated for the diplomatic corps. If passed by Congress, new consular laws would direct the American consul in Liverpool to hand over all fees to the government and then to subsist on a fixed salary of seventy-five hundred dollars, not nearly enough, declared Sophia, for a family of five—and a consul’s family at that. “For God’s sake, bestir yourself,” Hawthorne wrote to Ticknor, “and get everybody to bestir themselves, to restore matters to the former footing. I am not half ready to begin scribbling romances again, yet.”

  Hoping Pierce might forestall passage of the bill so that he could come home flush, he really didn’t want to alter his situation: the money was good; the work, though boring, wasn’t difficult; he didn’t miss writing. Bridge and Ticknor lobbied on Hawthorne’s behalf, but the bill slouched toward passage regardless.

  As far as Bridge was concerned, Hawthorne’s talents were buried in Liverpool. He asked Ticknor to mobilize Hawthorne’s literary friends, like Longfellow, to encourage him to get back to work, real work. “H. ought to go to Italy, and write.”

  An American claimant searches for patrimony and permanence, much like the many claimants Hawthorne met in the consul’s office. They were mostly deluded individuals, convinced of their kinship to British nobility on the basis of an old mug or an illegible document. But if their absurd claims seemed pathetic, Hawthorne recognized in them the tag end of a comparable wish.

  “The American shall be a person of high rank, who has reached eminence early: a Governor; a congressman; a gentleman; give him the characteristics and imperfections of an American gentleman,” Hawthorne mused. The threat of the consular bill sent Hawthorne back to fiction, his subject the American abroad, a comparison of New World and Old. “He shall, I think, be unmarried,” Hawthorne continued his ruminations. “He searches for relatives, burrows in books of records, consults heralds; for there is a misty idea, as in so many cases, that a great estate and perhaps title is due to him.”

  Hawthorne would endow the American with a secret powerful enough to destroy the English branch of the family, but he didn’t know what the secret was or how it could be used: family misdeeds, centuries old, to demonstrate the bankruptcy of aristocratic institutions? But were these institutions so bad? Sometimes he trembled at the thought of a place “where no change comes for centuries, and where a peasant does but step into his father’s shoes, and lead just his father’s life, going in and out over the old threshold, and finally being buried close by his father’s grave, time without end.” And then he added, “Yet it is rather pleasant to know that such things are.”

  “Royalty,” he observed on another occasion, “has its glorious side.”

  His attitude toward England was ambivalent, hotly so. Perhaps therein lies the claimant’s secret, an insatiable yearning for another place that left him perpetually homeless. But since Hawthorne could not consciously recon
cile his conflicted sense of England—his sense of belonging, his sense of displacement—the secret remained unnamed.

  In April of 1855, he was playing with yet another idea for a story, having heard the legend of a bloody footstep in the entrance of Smithells Hall. “The tradition is that a certain martyr, in Bloody Mary’s time, being examined before the then occupant of the Hall, and committed to prison, stamped his foot in earnest protest against the injustice with which he was treated,” Hawthorne jotted the tale in his notebooks. “Blood issued from his foot, which slid along the stone pavement of the hall, leaving a long footmark printed in blood; and there it has remained ever since, in spite of the scrubbings of all after generations.”

  The image was tailor-made for Hawthorne, who’d considered the idea of a footstep soaked in blood in the early 1840s as a possible starting point for a story. Now its appeal was amplified by the image of a man stamping his foot in anger and frustration, like Rumpelstiltskin. For Hawthorne was frustrated. He’d been happy of late, he noted querulously—“more content to enjoy what I had; less anxious for anything beyond it, in this life”—but he couldn’t shake loose a recurrent dream. He was at school, realizing he’d been there far too long and had “quite failed to make such progress in life as my contemporaries have; and I seem to meet some of them with a feeling of shame and depression that broods over me, when I think of it, even at this moment.”