Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  Hawthorne had begun to weary of town life, as he’d said of Robin Molineux, wondering if he’d sold his soul for immunity, or easy cash. Then he learned the provisions of the new consular bill wouldn’t take effect for a while because Pierce considered parts of it unconstitutional.

  Hawthorne set down his pen. He decided not to quit his post just yet.

  To economize, he gave up the Rock Park house and dismissed all the servants save Fanny Wrigley, Rose’s nursemaid. From now on his family could live more cheaply in boardinghouses and rented rooms. Trunkloads of household goods were shipped back to America. Sophia was crestfallen. “Now we are fixtures in Liverpool till next spring at least,” Sophia moaned. Italy drifted away into an amorphous future. Having endured the death of her father at a distance, she endured Liverpool beyond all sufferance, despising the Mersey, the fog, the smut, the noxious fumes that rose from the putrid streets. She refused to go outdoors. Night air filled her lungs with peril. She immersed herself in cold water, drank cod-liver oil, and complained that the racking cough that killed her mother had crept into her lungs.

  In June the Hawthornes went to the Royal Leamington Spa in Warwickshire, where they rented a house at 13 Lansdowne Crescent, hoping Sophia might recuperate. (Hawthorne estimated the lodgings would cost only seven guineas a week.) Surrounded by lissome trees, she was calmer, and soon she and Hawthorne began to act like tourists, visiting Warwick, Stratford, Coventry, and the Lake District in July. “I have a right to some recreation,” he defended himself nervously. “I shall be within reach of telegraphic notices, and can always make my appearance at the consulate within a few hours.”

  But Sophia’s cough deepened in Leamington, and when the family returned to Rock Ferry in August, neither she nor Hawthorne was happy. Sarah Clarke visited and took Hawthorne aside to tell him his wife was sicker than he knew; he should not subject her to another winter of clammy damp. It was decided. Sophia should accept O’Sullivan’s offer and go to sunny Lisbon. Hawthorne asked Pierce for a leave of absence.

  As Pierce’s unofficial envoy, Bridge replied to Hawthorne’s request. Pierce would consider giving O’Sullivan’s post to Hawthorne. O’Sullivan had tired of it. Hawthorne rejected the offer. He knew nothing about diplomatic protocol, didn’t speak Portuguese; and he couldn’t afford it in any case.

  Sophia sailed to Portugal without him. “The doctors said I must leave England this winter, if I would escape destruction,” she guiltily told her sister Mary. “So I had no choice, you see—& I tried to behave well—as my life is very important to some persons.” Una and Rose accompanied her, and Julian stayed in England with his father.

  The five of them hugged one another in early October, standing on the wooden deck as the ship’s whistle blew. Hawthorne and Julian walked off the gangplank to the shore, Julian’s little hand in his father’s. “This is the first great parting that Sophia and I have ever had,” Hawthorne acknowledged to himself in bewilderment. Father and son boarded the Southampton train, Hawthorne glimpsing through the window a fragment of rainbow. Then it dropped to darkness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Truth Stranger Than Fiction

  Thus far, no woman in the world has ever once spoken out her whole heart and her whole mind. The mistrust and disapproval of the vast bulk of society throttles us, as with two gigantic hands at our throats!

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

  ALL WOMEN, as authors, are feeble and tiresome,” Hawthorne bitterly exploded. “I wish they were forbidden to write, on having their faces deeply scarified with an oyster-shell.”

  With more and more authors peddling their work, each claiming a readership that threatened his, Hawthorne directed his nasty outburst at the ink-stained Amazons who’d always upset him, now more than ever. There were three hundred thousand copies of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, circulating the first year of its publication, 1852; by comparison, The Scarlet Letter had sold barely seven thousand; the same was true of The Blithedale Romance.

  The admission of women into men’s professions, particularly writing, was another instance of philanthropy run amok. “A false liberality which mistakes the strong division lines of Nature for arbitrary distinctions,” he’d written in “Mrs. Hutchinson,” “and a courtesy, which might polish criticism but should never soften it, have done their best to add a girlish feebleness to the tottering infancy of our literature.”

  Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter, selling forty thousand copies in two months, triggered another blast. “America is now wholly given over to a d—d mob of scribbling women,” Hawthorne cried in 1855, “and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash—and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed.” Better to stay in Liverpool, despite the reduction in revenue, than compete with women who wrote sentimental claptrap about current affairs. They’d trounce him, no question, which was no doubt another reason Hawthorne did not yet resign the consulship, as he often said he would.

  Hawthorne’s anxiety about women writers—and writing generally—tangled him in a paradox. If his fiction did not sell, he was not an adequate provider; if it did, he was writing trash like Stowe and company, which not only violated his definition of romance, it linked him, once again, to the scribbling women he despised. Effete and unread; or popular and a female scribbler, which is to say hack: either way, he was the loser.

  But Hawthorne’s prejudices were at least two-sided. Though he didn’t approve of women authors, he didn’t condescend to them either, and he made the same demands on them as he made on himself: “truth of detail,” combined with “a broader and higher truth.” Of course, a higher truth was exactly what Mrs. Stowe was after, only in her case she defined it as the higher truth of emancipation. Hawthorne’s aims were different. He said he wanted to keep politics out of art, even in Blithedale, a questionable position in this novel, as reviewers of it had been quick to point out—and a Whiggish one, in which the artist is a gentleman, not a politician. But the figure of the artist as uninvolved spectator still suited him.

  Disappointed when he saw a group of pre-Raphaelite paintings, he complained that “with the most lifelike exhibition, there is no illusion.” Mimicry is not art, romance is: the imagination applied to the actual, transporting raw experience beyond itself. Thus defined, romance is a hedge against realism, abject, political, indecent realism, and just what he couldn’t stomach in Julia Ward Howe’s poems, Passion Flowers: “a whole history of domestic unhappiness,” Hawthorne cringed. “What a strange propensity it is in these scribbling women to make a show of their hearts, as well as their heads, upon your counter, for anybody to pry into that chooses!”

  Or, to switch metaphors, the writer is something of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, his outer garment elegantly sewn, with sentences stitched into paragraphs, affected, quaint, a bit outdated and entirely masterful. But passion is a bodice ripper. The Scarlet Letter, as we have seen, is its best example, desire throbbing under the well-articulated surface, much like the anarchical heart that beats beneath Hester’s “A,” each indispensable to the other.

  Hawthorne believed in privacy—no doubt about it—and self-control and discretion, but writing, really good writing, depends on the inmost me stealing forth like a bosom-serpent that crawls out of its hole. Hawthorne knew that. “Be true! Be true! Be true!” he admonishes at the end of The Scarlet Letter. All writers need be true, even women, who do write well when they “throw off the restraints of decency, and come before the public stark naked, as it were”—like Julia Howe. Hawthorne also appreciated Fanny Fern and her snappy satire of the publishing industry, Ruth Hall. “The woman writes as if the devil was in her,” Hawthorne praised Fern; “and that is the only condition under which a woman ever writes anything worth reading.”

  But a proper lady keeps her clothes on, which is why she shouldn’t write. “It does seem to me to deprive women of all delicacy,” he repeated himself to Sophia;
“it has pretty much such an effect on them as it would to walk abroad through the streets, physically stark naked.” Admiring Sophia’s travel journals, he stringently opposed their publication. “Neither she nor I would like to see her name on your list of female authors,” Hawthorne would tell Ticknor. Sophia went on record to agree. “I think it is designed by GOD that woman should always spiritually wear a veil, & not a coat & hat,” she tartly informed Elizabeth Peabody. When Una began to scribble stories—she said she must be a romance writer—Sophia specifically ignored them. “I have such an unmitigated horror of precocious female story tellers & poets,” she said, “—that in every way I pass over with indifference what she does in this way.”

  Shielding her children from the steam pressure of modern life, Sophia plied them with dance and fencing lessons, and she offered French, geography, and music in small doses, rejecting the strenuous regime that had been forced on her. She pushed aside Mary’s objections. “My principle is not to wear out young twigs with hanging millstones on them.”

  Nor did she want Una, in particular, to learn of slavery. “The repose of art is better for her now than the excitement of human wrongs and rights,” Sophia reprimanded Elizabeth, who sent letters stuffed with stories of abuse and degradation. Una obeyed her parents but despaired of her ignorance, and soon she was complaining of a pain in her head. Overprotected, melancholy, and approaching puberty, she thought she might be losing her mind.

  “Life has never been light and joyous to her,” her father commented with regret and doubtless some recognition.

  John O’Sullivan resided with his wife, mother, and sister-in-law in a grand house in one of Lisbon’s most desirable neighborhoods. He employed a staff of ten, rode in a carriage lined with cerulean damask, and frequently entertained royalty in the starched blue uniform he buttoned high, his white collar barely visible. His only ornament was the uniform’s gold buttons with the United States seal. He appeared at court with his family and their houseguest, Mrs. Hawthorne, whom he introduced to the king. She wore a violet brocade trimmed with lace and purple ribbons, and around her neck she tied a black velvet ribbon hung with a diamond pendant that twinkled in the light. Hawthorne had told her to spare no expense.

  “Oh, my wife, I do want thee so intolerably,” he pined for Sophia. “Nothing else is real, except the bond between thee and me. The people around me are but shadows. I am myself but a shadow, till thou takest me in thy arms, and convertest me into substance.” Hawthorne as ghost: it was the familiar cry. And after Sophia sailed to Portugal, he tossed in his dreary bed at night, plagued by forebodings of desertion and death. “I have learned what the bitterness of exile is, in these days,” he confided to his journal as fall crept into winter, “and I never should have known it but for the absence of my wife.” When Sophia praised O’Sullivan as being as radiant as the sun, Hawthorne sullenly reminded his wife that he had a heart that burned hot for her.

  “Heretofore,” he added glumly, “thou has had great reason to doubt it.”

  Liverpool had taxed the marriage. Sophia had been miserable. Hawthorne did not write, travel, or come home for eight long hours a day, a separation Sophia detested, having married a man who, she’d thought, would stay close by her side. The rancid city had offered little in the way of amusement and even less in the fulfillment of expectations; at most, the Hawthornes had attended a couple of dinners and visited a couple of manorial homes. A talisman, the English porcelain they’d purchased had arrived in Massachusetts broken to bits. Sophia had been inconsolable. “What a millstone I was in England,” Sophia confessed from Portugal, “but with what divine patience you bore up beneath my weight.”

  Lonely, guilt-ridden, and depressed, Hawthorne treated himself to a twenty-day vacation in London at the end of March. His cicerone was Fields’s friend Francis Bennoch, a merchant prince, generous and deferential without being obsequious, somewhat like Henry Bright though closer in age to Hawthorne. Born in Scotland in 1811, Bennoch cultivated literary or artistic people and, in the case of the painter Robert Haydon, helped support them financially. He also wrote a little poetry himself. Commuting each day from his suburban home to his wholesale silk and ribbon firm in London, he scribbled verses in the railroad carriage, oblivious to the clack and bounce. In 1841 he published a book of poems, The Storm and Other Poems. Wordsworth recommended against a literary career, but Bennoch hadn’t harbored any illusions about his talent. He remained a trader, a speculator, and a local politician, maintaining, as Hawthorne did not, an easy intercourse between art and economy—until his firm’s bankruptcy in 1857 indicated his talent did not lie in business either.

  Julian Hawthorne remembered Bennoch as one of the best-looking men in England, his forehead steep, his brow bushy, and his “sparkling black eyes full of hearty sunshine and kindness.” (The description makes him sound like Hawthorne.) Rose Hawthorne recalled a short, fat man who sounded like a pack of chickens when he chuckled at his own jokes, which he often did. He was sitting in his London office in the early spring of 1856 when Hawthorne walked through the door, much changed since the two men had been introduced two years earlier. Bennoch hardly recognized him. He was heavier, his hairline had veered farther north, and the strands of hair around his ears shimmered with demonstrable silver. But the face retained its smoothness, the eyes their inward look.

  “I never saw a man more miserable,” Bennoch recalled many years later; “he was hipped, depressed, and found fault with everything; London was detestable; it had but one merit—it was not so bad as Liverpool.” To prove Hawthorne wrong, Bennoch showed him the curiosities, like Barber Surgeon’s Hall and St. Giles Church in Cripplegate, and he stage-managed Hawthorne’s entrance into literary society, inviting him to a dinner at the Milton Club, where Hawthorne met the editor of the London Illustrated News, the songwriter Charles Mackay, and S. C. Hall, the editor of the Art Union Monthly Journal. After Hawthorne delivered a speech—he disliked public speaking but was rather good, provided he drank enough—he went to a supper party at the home of Eneas Dallas, editorial writer for the Times. “They have found me out,” Hawthorne reported to Sophia, “and I believe I should have engagements for every day, and two or three a day, if I staid here through the season.”

  At Mackay’s invitation, Hawthorne met the writer Douglas Jerrold at the Reform Club, and at a dinner at the lord mayor’s arranged by Bennoch, Hawthorne sat mesmerized by the lord mayor’s beautiful sister-in-law until he was again called upon to speak. Afterwards he decided he’d made fool of himself: talking “in one’s cups” was a ridiculous custom. Bennoch also contrived a series of expeditions that included a military camp in Hampshire, a meal with the author Martin Tupper in Surrey, and in Hastings a meeting with Theodore Martin and his wife, the actress Helena Faucit. A botheration and a satisfaction, Hawthorne called the engagements, pleased with himself and hoping Sophia would be pleased—or envious.

  Unperturbed by London’s literary establishment, as long as it excluded Tennyson, Thackeray, Eliot, and Dickens, Hawthorne relied completely on Bennoch for his entry into it. “If this man has not a heart, then no man ever had,” Hawthorne said. His feelings about Bennoch never changed, and Bennoch entered Hawthorne’s spangled pantheon—Bridge, Pierce, O’Sullivan, Fields—as a “friend whom I love as much as if I had know him for a life-time.”

  Dissension, the pop of gunfire, and confused alarms that rose and fell: slavery’s fire bell clanged not just in the night but during the day, every day. Hawthorne was glad to be in England. “If anything could bring me back to America, this winter, it would undoubtedly be my zeal for the Anti-slavery cause,” he quipped dryly in December of 1855; “but my official engagements render it quite impossible to assist personally.”

  Pierce’s presidency had been a sorry disaster, fiasco following abysmal fiasco. Particularly abominable was the Kansas-Nebraska bill. Introduced by Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas (partly because the senator hoped to maneuver a transcontinental railroad through his state
), the bill allowed the inhabitants of the Nebraska territory, which included Kansas, their own referendum for or against slavery. In so doing, the bill effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and allowed slavery to extend its reach into territories previously considered untouchable. Charles Sumner condemned the bill as a slaveholders’ plot; Douglas retorted that Senator Sumner represented “the pure unadulterated representatives of Abolitionism, Free Soil-ism, and Niggerism.” William H. Seward, the savvy antislavery senator from New York, tried to outmaneuver Douglas by urging southern Whigs to demand total repeal of the compromise.

  “I must say that the tone and standard of public morals at Washington are very, very low,” George Hillard, a Whig, glowered. “The antislavery Seward and the proslavery Douglas are alike calculating, ambitious, and time-serving.” The poet William Cullen Bryant, editor of the Democratic New York Evening Post, denounced the bill as despicable, and George Bancroft called “this cruel attempt to conquer Kansas into slavery … the worst thing ever projected in our history.” It passed in May of 1854 with Pierce’s blessing.

  Sophia Hawthorne was among the minority who embraced, or said they did, an impartial view. “How insane all America seems to us about the Nebraska bill,” she disdainfully informed Mary Mann. Pierce had supported the bill to preserve the Union and maintain the sovereignty of states’ rights. To Mary Mann, the old saw was objectionable. But Sophia informed her sister with a certain contemptuousness that she knew certain “persons”—Hawthorne?—“angelic in goodness & humanity & of the purest motives, who agree with the advocates of this bill. Not because it promotes the extension of slavery—of course not,” she quickly added, “—but because they think it constitutional & right—& that it would be a ruinous precedent to legislate against it.” Mary assumed that Pierce had bamboozled Hawthorne once again.