Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  While Sophia pretended equanimity, Hawthorne did not. “I find it impossible to read American newspapers (of whatever political party) without being ashamed of my country,” he groaned, protesting more than once that if it weren’t for his children, he’d never go back. In Boston federal marshals had nabbed the fugitive slave Anthony Burns, and when Theodore Parker condemned the arrest to a roaring crowd at Faneuil Hall, the crowd swooped down on the courthouse where Burns was being held. The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson butted its thick oak door with a wooden beam. He was clubbed. A shot rang out. A marshal’s deputy was stabbed to death. “Oh how much harm to the wretched slave, these crazy men do!” Sophia wailed. “Mr. Parker was far more the murderer of that officer than the man who shot him.”

  The situation was even worse in Kansas. Proslavery men fought against the abolitionist recruits sent into the territory by New England emigrant aid societies, Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other, according to Stephen Douglas. With Pierce and Douglas backing the proslavery regime, the antislavery Free-Soilers set up their own legislature, claiming that border Missourians—ruffians—were terrorizing voters and rigging the local elections. In the spring of 1856, a posse of proslavery men mobbed the Free-Soil town of Lawrence, Kansas, burned the hotel, sacked the governor’s house, and demolished two antislavery newspaper offices. Pierce’s friend Jefferson Davis, the secretary of war, dispatched federal troops to the territory. Kansas teetered on the brink of civil war.

  In Washington, Sumner inveighed for two days against the crimes in Kansas, drubbing colleagues like South Carolina’s Andrew Butler, a man with chalk-white hair and genteel manners. Two days later, on May 22, Butler’s less dignified protégé, Congressman Preston Brooks, avenged the honor of his slandered kinsman and their state when he entered the Senate chamber, walked over to the wooden desk where Sumner sat, and whacked him senseless with a gutta-percha cane.

  “To say the truth,” Hawthorne groaned again, “there is no inducement to return to our own country, where you seem to be on the point of beating one another’s brains out.”

  Sophia came back to England on June 9, 1856, still coughing. Resuming life in Liverpool was out of the question, so the Hawthornes tumbled here and there—Blackheath, Southport, Old Trafford, Bath—in search of health, recreation, and some ineffable quality associated with home. It was impossible to find.

  His family installed, for the moment, in a boardinghouse run by the parsimonious Mrs. Hume in Shirley, near Southampton, Hawthorne commuted to Liverpool. In July the Hawthornes took over the Bennochs’ place in Blackheath while the Bennochs vacationed in Germany. Blackheath was a pretty suburban enclave within easy reach of London, perfect for Sophia, so glad to be in range of “stupendous, grand London, the epitome of the world, the centre of all things,” that she ventured out at night in a low-cut blue silk carrying a portable respirator. She wanted to meet Jenny Lind.

  The Bennoch place was too small for the family, but Hawthorne placed Una, Rose, and Rose’s nursemaid in rooms nearby and stayed in Blackheath as often as consular business allowed. Like Sophia, he took advantage of London, strolling its narrow streets, relaxed and happy, stopping for ice cream, breakfasting or eating lunch here and there with a small group of literati like Bennoch’s friend Monckton Milnes, Keats’s first biographer and an expert in autographs and pornography.

  Shortly after moving to Blackheath, Hawthorne went to London to call on a countrywoman, Delia Bacon, at her lodging house on Spring Street, Hyde Park. As he stood in Miss Bacon’s third-floor parlor, he thumbed through books on a table, waiting for an elderly woman to appear. Later he remembered being agreeably disappointed. Miss Bacon was dark-haired, intelligent, demure, graceful. With that wild glint in her eye, she might even have been a Hester or a Zenobia. “Unquestionably, she was a monomaniac,” Hawthorne would write. He stayed an hour and rather liked her.

  Delia Bacon was in England intending to prove that William Shakespeare—the ignorant groom—had not authored the plays attributed to him, which were in fact composed by a consortium of revolutionaries including Francis Bacon (no relation) who larded the texts with their secret, seditious codes.

  “I want some literary counsel,” she had written Hawthorne the preceding May, “and such as no Englishman of letters is able to give me.” Thomas Carlyle was sympathetic but ineffectual, so she turned to the American consul in Liverpool—what else should a literary man be doing in official office if not assist a fellow author—and asked him to evaluate a portion of her manuscript.

  He said he would, warning her that he didn’t share her point of view. “But I feel that you have done a thing that ought to be reverenced,” he replied graciously, “in devoting yourself so entirely to this object, whatever it be, and whether right or wrong, and by so doing, you have acquired some of the privileges of an inspired person and a prophetess.” Though Delia Bacon was just the sort of scribbling woman Hawthorne could esteem—all the more since she wrote nonfiction—it’s not clear how much about her he already knew: born on the American frontier in 1811; placed in a foster home in Connecticut; a student of Catharine Beecher’s estimable Female Seminary, where she professed her faith; a teacher and a onetime playwright. In 1831 she had submitted a story, “Love’s Martyr,” for the Philadelphia Saturday Courier’s literary prize that beat out a tale by Edgar Allan Poe. That was the year she published her own version of American history in Tales of the Puritans, influenced, as Hawthorne had been, by John Neal. Then malaria left her with the scourge of all intellectual women, delicate health.

  In 1845 she met with more bad luck. Courted by Alexander MacWhorter, a Yale theology student ten years her junior, Bacon accepted his proposal of marriage. MacWhorter, “too weak to bear the ridicule,” scoffed Harriet Beecher Stowe, “of marrying a woman older than himself,” quickly withdrew the offer. That was a disappointment Bacon could bear. His distributing her love letters among his friends was a humiliation her brother simply had to avenge. Ignoring his sister’s embarrassment, Leonard Bacon, the pastor of the First Congregational Church, pit himself against the divines at Yale College by publicly accusing MacWhorter of personal misconduct. The subsequent ecclesiastical trial acquitted him by a vote of 24 to 23, a victory for Yale College more than for MacWhorter, whom the tribunal reprimanded. It also tacitly acknowledged his guilt, warning him not to try the same stunt again.

  That wasn’t all. Another defender of Bacon, Catharine Beecher, took up the pen for her in a book entitled Truth Stranger Than Fiction, its title yet another humiliation.

  Bacon wasn’t licked. She moved to Boston, where she lectured on history to men as different as George Hillard and William Henry Channing. They loved her. A respected woman in the mold of Margaret Fuller—minus Fuller’s off-putting conceit and her feminism—she devoted herself to genius not her own, namely, whoever it was that wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Convinced more than ever of the hoax, Bacon enlisted the queen of causes, Elizabeth Peabody, and Peabody conveyed her to Emerson. Emerson consented to act as Bacon’s agent and passed her on to Hawthorne, then packing for Liverpool. Hawthorne wasn’t interested.

  No matter; Bacon showed up in London herself, financed by a wealthy lawyer enthralled with her theory. Iconoclasm was contagious, especially among Americans who didn’t mind toppling a British giant, or letting a crackpot woman try. “Delia Bacon, with genius but mad,” was, according to Emerson, one of the two greatest originals “America has yielded in ten years.” The other was Walt Whitman.

  In stodgy London, Bacon attracted supporters like Carlyle, but book publishers were not as amused as he. She canvassed the magazines and with Emerson’s help placed a feisty article, “William Shakespeare and His Plays: An Inquiry Concerning Them,” in the January 1856 issue of Putnam’s Monthly, but despite strong sales, the magazine declined to print her next article. It wanted hard evidence. Bacon was discouraged. And when Emerson lost three of the articles she sent him, she began to doubt his loyalty to the cause. That’s when she
wrote to the American consul.

  “If you really think that I can promote your object, tell me definitely how, and try me,” Hawthorne responded; “and if I can say a true word to yourself about the work, it shall certainly be said; or if I can aid, personally, or through any connections in London, in bringing the book before the public, it shall be done.” He sent ten pounds.

  He did find her book remarkable, if only for its nutty logic. “It is a very singular phenomenon,” he later concluded; “a system of philosophy growing up in this woman’s mind without her volition—contrary, in fact, to the determined resistance of her volition—and substituting itself in the place of everything that originally grew there.” Motivated by his long-standing rivalry with Emerson as well as Bacon herself, he approached several London publishers.

  Eager to get on with it, Bacon moved to Stratford, convinced that she should clinch her case by opening Shakespeare’s tomb, where she figured she might find the documents Francis Bacon had buried there. She stole into the Holy Trinity Church one evening, a candle and a lamp in her hand, and sat by Shakespeare’s grave but did nothing until the oil in her lamp burned low and she fumbled out of the church. Sophia Hawthorne was crestfallen. Bacon’s quixotic enterprise ended with a whimper.

  Disappointed with herself, Bacon railed at Hawthorne. He had betrayed her, she believed, just like all the rest, when he said she should accept money from her brother Leonard; how dare he think she’d take anything from a nonbeliever? Insulted by Hawthorne’s suggestion, she had to accept another five pounds—filthy lucre—from him. Bewildered and a bit offended himself, Hawthorne pledged to continue to help her publish her book. “The more absurdly she behaves,” he confided to Bennoch, whom he had enlisted as intermediary, “the more need of somebody to help her.”

  Hawthorne would neither cast Bacon off nor take credit when he secured a publishing contract from Parker and Son. Nor would he balk at assuming financial responsibility for her book, which Parker required as a condition. (To cover his investment, Hawthorne demanded that Ticknor bring out half the agreed-on copies—five hundred in all—doubtless hoping to offset inevitable losses.) He also consented to write a preface for the book, another crucial item for the negotiations with Parker. “How funny, that I should come in front of the stage-curtain, escorting this Bedlamite!” he said to Bennoch.

  But his attention, like his affection, was divided. With the Bennochs re-occupying their house in the fall, the Hawthornes had to pitch their tent elsewhere. “It is a strange, vagabond, gypsey sort of life, this that we are leading; and I know not whether we shall finally be spoilt for any other,” Hawthorne reflected wistfully. The wind howled bleakly as he and his family resettled in the coastal resort of Southport, twenty miles north of Liverpool, where Sophia could inhale ripe, salty air and Hawthorne travel home by rail each night from the office.

  Their rooms at 15 Brunswick Terrace faced the great promenade and the sea, and Sophia was comfortable for a while in their two shabby floors. Small donkey carts pulled her over the beach, and the saltwater baths subdued her dry cough. It then started to rain. Melville came and went in the drizzle en route to the Holy Land in search of succor. His literary ebullience soured by failure, Melville dimly hoped Hawthorne might help place his new book, The Confidence-Man. “He certainly is much overshadowed since I saw him last,” Hawthorne observed somewhat regretfully, inviting him to Southport, where he stayed for three days. Temporarily warmed by reminiscence, cigars, and a tumbler of ale, the two men sat and talked, not quite comfortable in a hollow among the hills. “If he were a religious man,” Hawthorne astutely observed in his journal, “he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.”

  A few days later, he took Melville to Chester and they walked along the wall, ate veal pies in a confectioner’s shop, toured the cathedral. They puffed on cigars and drank stout at the Yacht Inn, where they were shown the window on which Jonathan Swift had etched a screed against the clergy with the diamond of his ring. Melville had a good time.

  But the flowers of friendship had faded. Melville was no longer young and hopeful, an acolyte in love.

  Melville stowed his trunk at the consulate and sailed a few days later with only a carpet bag. “I do not know a more independent personage,” commented Hawthorne with elegiac affection. The two men saw each other once more, when Melville claimed his trunk. Hawthorne did not record the final meeting.

  In a matter of weeks the Hawthornes were restless. Southport was seedier than they thought, the surrounding countryside marshy and flat, and Sophia was bored. Elizabeth had offered to come to England to help out, but Sophia said she’d hate such “an utterly stupid, uninteresting, lonely place, where there is no society, no life, no storied memories, & no scenery.” Hawthorne would nod. “Our life here has been a blank,” he groused, astray and adrift.

  In the winter of 1857, thieves broke into their house, taking nothing more than a few silver cups, a spoon, a shoulder of mutton, and Hawthorne’s topcoat and boots. A few days later two men were arrested while pawning Hawthorne’s clothes. “I rather wished them to escape,” he remarked.

  Escape was on his mind. On February 13, 1857, he resigned as consul, effective six months later on the last day of August. He’d have spent four years in office, which is what he’d intended, his purse not bursting but full enough so that he could head with clear conscience for Italy, where the exchange rate happened to be quite good.

  Franklin Pierce sought and lost the Democratic Party nomination for president to James Buchanan, who ran against a splintered Whig Party. A remnant of the Whigs rallied around Millard Fillmore on the anti-Catholic, nativist American Party ticket; the rest went over to John C. Frémont and the newly organized Republicans, an amalgam of Conscience Whigs and disgruntled Democrats all galvanized by Pierce’s failed Kansas policy. “Free Speech, Free Press, Free Soil, Free Men, Frémont, and Victory,” their slogan ran.

  Whether or not Frémont won, observed Evert Duyckinck, “the moral victory at any rate will be for Free Soil.”

  But since Pierce’s political life was over, so was Hawthorne’s.

  Hawthorne was lying when he said the whole thing mattered little to him. He detested both the Free-Soilers who abandoned the Democratic Party and the proslavery forces of its southern wing. “For the sake of novelty, and to put down the Southerners,” he rasped to Ticknor, “I should like well enough to try Frémont; but it would be a dangerous experiment for the country.” And Sophia believed the white supremacist propaganda about the slave rebellions Frémont’s election would indubitably incite “because the negroes received an idea or instruction that he would aid them with an army.”

  Buchanan won. “The country will stand, & … Mr. Buchanan will be wise & strong,” Sophia consoled Mary Mann.

  With Pierce leaving office and his own departure imminent, Hawthorne felt far less compunction about dodging consular business, which meant he could gratify pleasures long deferred. He and Sophia and Julian traipsed through Yorkshire at Easter time, to Lincolnshire and New-stead Abbey in May, to Glasgow and Dumbarton Castle and Loch Lomand and Edinburgh in the summer. (Cranky with so much sightseeing, Una was left behind with Rose and a servant.) At the end of July, the entire family quit Southport, renting rooms near Victoria Station in Old Trafford, outside of Manchester, so Hawthorne could finish out his term while the rest of the family explored Prince Albert’s exhibition of British art in the immense hymn to iron and glass erected for the occasion.

  Hawthorne also quit himself of Bacon, having finished the preface to her book. “No man or woman has ever thought or written more sincerely than the author of this book,” he wrote, damning Bacon’s undertaking with half praise. She wanted him to rewrite his lukewarm endorsement; Hawthorne refused, and Bacon’s publisher reneged. Bennoch saved the day, coaxing Groombridge and Sons, publisher of the Westminster Review, to bring out Bacon’s tome, The Philosophy of the
Plays of Shakspere Unfolded, in the spring of 1857. Hawthorne paid twenty-five pounds toward advertising.

  The press savaged the book as wild and silly and dull, and Hawthorne’s preface was taken to be ironical. “I do not repent what I have done,” he had written Ticknor. Without Shakespeare, Bacon’s paranoia lost its object. She stopped eating, dressing, and changing the linens on her bed. The mayor of Stratford contacted Hawthorne, as American consul, and Hawthorne wrote to Leonard Bacon, paid her bills, and arranged a September passage back to America. By then Bacon, completely mad, had to be committed to a private sanatorium.

  Hawthorne would salute Delia Bacon. “I fell under Miss Bacon’s most severe and passionate displeasure, and was cast off by her in the twinkling of an eye,” he later recalled, carefully choosing his words. “It was a misfortune to which her friends were always particularly liable; but I think that none of them ever loved, or even respected, her most ingenuous and noble, but likewise most sensitive and tumultuous character, the less for it.”

  So much for female authorship: it seemed a cruel object lesson, even for a sensitive writer who cast off his own tumultuous women, like Zenobia, in the twinkling of an eye.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Questions of Travel

  Continent, city, country, society:

  the choice is never wide and never free.

  And here, or there … No. Should we have stayed at home,

  wherever that may be?

  Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel”

  MR. H. CAME this evening, and I was quite surprised to see so handsome a man as he is. He has the most beautiful brow and eyes, and his voice is extremely musical,” exclaimed Ada Shepard, a student of languages fresh out of Antioch College come to Europe to tutor the Hawthorne children. The Hawthornes were the most charming couple, Sophia as wise as Elizabeth Peabody, although, thank goodness, more conventional. Lovable Una, her hair the color of cherry wood, read everything with a comprehension far beyond her thirteen years; at eleven Julian was a Hercules in miniature; and if not so remarkable, Rose was at least sweet.