Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  But the road to Rome was paved with delays.

  After the Manchester exhibition, the Hawthornes went back to Leamington Spa again, where they’d stayed in the spring and summer of 1855. They expected to leave for France in a week or two, or Sophia and the children would go to Paris while Nathaniel waited in Liverpool for his successor, Nathaniel Beverly Tucker. Events conspired against them. Tucker didn’t come until October, and Hawthorne’s trusted clerk, Henry Wilding, took ill with a nervous fever. With Wilding unavailable, administrative particulars fell to Hawthorne, who wanted to make sure he pocketed everything the government owed him before he left England. So he would stay as long as necessary.

  At last, on November 11, 1857, the Hawthornes put Leamington behind them—but not England. They spent the entire month in London, Sophia and the children having gotten the flu. “It seems as though the fates have decided that we shall never reach the continent,” despaired Ada Shepard, “for cause after cause of delay springs up, and still we stay, stay, stay.” December passed. Not until before sunrise on January 5, their dozen trunks and half dozen carpetbags summarily labeled, did the Hawthorne tribe climb into two hansom cabs and roll through gaslit streets to the railway station. On to France at last.

  Paris was fabulous, for a while. “The splendor of Paris, so far as I have seen, takes me altogether by surprise,” Hawthorne penned in his journal three days later. The grand buildings, gold and Doric, and the motley street life were so different from the austerities of a top-hatted London. For a week, quartered in the excellent Hôtel du Louvre, Hawthorne explored the magnificent, interminable Louvre, just steps away, he traversed stately avenues and busy bookstalls, and he poked his nose into Notre-Dame. But the biting cold made him nostalgic for English drizzle. A generous and kind man, according to Ada Shepard, he was also critical and hard to please. Soon bored with Paris, he railed against the narrow little fireplaces at the hotel, and suddenly the plane trees of the Champs-Elysées looked straggly.

  Longing for home, he and his family packed up again, their piles of luggage bundled into yet another railroad car for yet another journey, vagabonds all over again.

  The Eternal City huddled in January’s icy glare. Hawthorne shivered as he sat in front of one of the big hearths in his ten-room apartment in the Palazzo Laranzani at 37, Via Porta Pincia. “How I dislike the place,” he snarled, “and how wretched I have been in it.” The cold of Paris and the cold of Rome were the meteorological barometer of his distress.

  The Hawthorne entourage had crawled into Rome just two weeks earlier, on January 20, their carriage bowed by a spectacular quantity of luggage, their limbs half frozen, and poor Maria Mitchell, an American astronomer in their party, dumbfounded by Hawthorne’s impracticality, his indecision, his silences. “Had Mr. Hawthorne been as agreeable in conversation as he is in writing,” she remarked in irritation, “it could have made the day pleasant.”

  Arrive they finally did, their vetturino rattling and Julian so hungry he wished the dome of St. Peter’s a mutton chop. Wearily, they settled into Stillman’s Hotel near the buzzing Piazza di Spagna, but within hours, it seemed, Sophia sprang into health, cough gone, headache vanished, and virtually skipped into the city of her dreams. Rome: it was rife with Domenichino, Guido Reni, Raphael, and Michelangelo. John Flaxman had studied there and Washington Allston; Madame de Staël’s Corinne lingered at the fountains with Oswald, as did Margaret Fuller. And now, after years of wishing and hoping, Sophia had her turn at last.

  Indefatigable sightseer, she bounded forth, released from the dolor of England with its fog of consular routine. For Rome opened its arms to women. Women models and sculptors and tourists strolled the crooked streets, an omnipresent Madonna grinning down on all of them. “How could wise and great Mr. Emerson say such a preposterous thing as that it was just as well not to travel as to travel!” Sophia asked in annoyance, “and that each man has Europe in him, or something to that effect?” She tossed her head. “Mere transcendental nonsense—such a remark.”

  Hawthorne lagged behind. Exhausted, crabby, and chilled by a low-grade fever, he wound himself in his overcoat and morosely sat before the fire with an open volume of Thackeray on his lap, which Maria Mitchell suspected he used to ward off noisome intruders.

  He adjusted to new environs slowly. The locals seemed alien, the language impenetrable, the bread sour, the cigars bad, the monuments chipped and unclean. The city’s small square paving stones tormented his aching feet, fleas pinched him, and every single alley terminated in a piazza where a grotesque fountain squirted jets of water from a ridiculous hunk of sculpture. “Of course there are better and truer things to be said,” he admitted; “but old Rome does seem to lie here like a dead and mostly decayed corpse, retaining here and there a trace of the noble shape it was, but with a sort of fungous growth upon it, and no life but of the worms that creep in and out.”

  Rome as corpse: it was an image to which he would return.

  Looking back to England, he slipped into provincial comparisons. English ruins were better than Roman ruins; Norman churches superior to Italian ones; English damp more tolerable than Roman chill. And like any traveler face to face with sites anticipated for years, Hawthorne reluctantly relinquished his own fancies for the real thing, which never measured up. The golden bubble of St. Peter’s dome loomed larger in daydream, and as for the half-ruined face of the Coliseum, “Byron’s celebrated description is better than the reality.”

  Actually, Rome baffled him. Tin hearts hung at the shrines of saints, Romans urinated near marble monuments, cheap wooden confessionals stood in St. Peter’s: sublime and absurd, devout and heathen, ancient and modern heaped together in a riot. Green peas, onions, cauliflower, apples, almonds, and fish were sold in the nasty Piazza Navona, but in the Borghese gardens, where the tall stone pines looked like islands of green in the air, he could smell the ilex and sweet cypress. “Take away the malaria,” Hawthorne gibed, “and it might be a very happy place.”

  He and Sophia traipsed through the endless galleries to see countless pictures, Sophia wanting to embrace everything, the paintings at the Capitol, the Borghese Gallery, and the Rospigliosi, Sciarra, and Doria Pamphili palaces. Hawthorne bleakly stood in attendance. “There is something forced, if not feigned, in our tastes for pictures of the old Italian school,” he muttered, never criticizing his wife’s aesthetic taste though not exactly sharing her raptures over the innumerable Magdalens, Holy Infants, Crucifixions, and Flights into Egypt. That was bad enough. The “general apotheosis of nakedness” piqued him beyond endurance.

  Hawthorne was a prude. He blanched before the tinted Venus in the English sculptor John Gibson’s studio: “This lascivious warmth of hue quite demoralizes the chastity of the marble,” he cringed, feeling “ashamed to look at the naked limbs in the company of women.” He was also a boor. Unvarnished and unframed pictures depressed him, and he liked the work of Cephas Thompson, who had painted his portrait in 1850, much better than anything else he saw, except maybe very old masters. He hated Giotto. But his parochialism and his harangues weren’t wholly laughable. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he preferred the warmth of Donatello over the slippery, frigid beauty of most classical statues, for when he trudged through the Vatican Sculpture Gallery, “the statues kept, for the most part, a veil around them, which they sometimes withdrew, and let their beauty glow upon my sight.” The illumination swiftly disappeared, leaving nothing in its wake but grubby marble.

  An exception was Praxiteles’ copy of a Faun, or Resting Satyr, in the Capitol and another copy in the Borghese, where Hawthorne mulled over the “strange, sweet, playful rustic creatures, almost entirely human, yet linked so prettily, without monstrosity, to the lower tribes by the long, furry ears, or by a modest tail.” Fit subject for a romance, he reflected, rich and poetical and freakish and “a natural and delightful link betwixt human and brute life, and with something of a divine character intermingled.” Three weeks later, he walked back over to the Capi
toline Museum to look at the Faun again, its androgynous form leaning on a tree trunk, pointed ears lightly sexual, his mouth voluptuous, his entire comportment seductive and amiably sly. Hawthorne thought he might write a short, fantastic tale about it. Grief, desire, cruelty, and the heart-twisting beauty of time past in every stone, every square, every broken brick: slowly Rome began to wear down Hawthorne’s xenophobia, luring him into crevices “which will make me reluctant to take a final leave of it,” he confided to Ticknor as if surprised at himself. Clutching Murray’s Handbook—guidebook of choice for all self-respecting American tourists—he frequently strayed from its proscriptions, moseying along the Pincian or lolling along the banks of the yellow Tiber, stopping to watch a man fish. He drew from his pocket the bronze matchbox Una had given him and lit his cigar as he surveyed the city from the hillside and then descended the Spanish Steps to stop at his bank, Pakenham and Hooker, and read the American newspapers. He reentered the Pantheon to stand beneath the dome that stood open to the sky, silently worshipping nature and art, blue air and icy marble, and at night, with Sophia, he rambled through the city, moonlight sprinkling magic over the Fountain of Trevi (Bernini was an acquired taste) and the grand Arch of Constantine.

  Even Rome’s expressive Catholicism, visible everywhere, began to thaw Hawthorne’s Protestant frost. Peasant and soldier, each entered a church and kneeled before a shrine to ask the mediation of some saint, too humble to plead to God directly. “In the church of San Paulo yesterday I saw a young man standing before a shrine, writhing and wringing his hands in an agony of grief and contrition,” Hawthorne observed. “If he had been a protestant, I think he would have shut all that up within his heart, and let it burn there till it seared him.” American expatriates muttered in gossipy consternation that the Hawthornes genuflected before false gods.

  Hawthorne made no special friends like Bright or Bennoch in Rome, although he liked Thompson and he respected another Massachusetts man, William Wetmore Story, whose character he studied in his notebooks, for he was as interested in the makers of art as in their work. American artists, in particular, were flocking to the Eternal City, where there was an abundance of marbles, models, and skilled labor, all for a pittance. But they came too because Rome was far, far away from home, where, as Story put it, “the sky itself is hard and distant.”

  Friend to both Margaret Fuller and James Lowell, who were not friends of one another, Story was at the center of the American art colony in Rome, where he successfully navigated—or helped spawn—its internecine rivalry. (“Their public is so much more limited than that of the literary men,” reasoned Hawthorne, “that they have better excuse for these petty jealousies.”) A Salem native and the son of the late Supreme Court justice Joseph Story, William Story and his wife, Emelyn, had lived in Rome on and off since 1847, becoming permanent expatriates in 1856 when Story threw over his career in the law for poetry and sculpture.

  The Storys occupied ten stately rooms on an upper floor in the sumptuous Barberini Palace, sheltered from Roman weather by exuberant palms. “With sparkling talents, so many that if he choose to neglect or fling away one, or two, or three, he would still have enough to shine with;—who should be happy, if not he?” mused Hawthorne, wondering if Story had actually been blessed with too much. “The great difficulty with him, I think, is a too facile power,” he observed cannily; “he would do better things, if it were more difficult for him to do merely good ones.”

  Bald, bearded, slightly gray, and slender, Story had just begun his massive statue of Cleopatra when he first ushered the Hawthornes into his studio, separate from his home, on the Via Sistina. “He is certainly sensible of something deeper in his art than merely to make beautiful nudities and baptize them by classic names,” pronounced Hawthorne. “I cannot say now what I think of the Cleopatra, but I am proud of it as an American work,” Sophia remarked patriotically, “—and I think it will render immortal William Story.”

  Like all of the other expatriate sculptors, Story drenched himself in the neoclassicism beloved by expatriates and partly inspired by the archaeological findings of the last thirty or so years, including the discovery of the Venus de Milo in 1820. Plus, neoclassicism suited an American Protestant middle class: elegant, uncluttered, edifying, and silent, if one was for it, or the frozen tedium of sublime dummies, if one wasn’t. Devoid of ostentation, the high-minded work of the American neoclassicists praised heroic deeds, heroic suffering, and American history. Hawthorne looked at Joseph Mozier’s famed Pocahontas and his Wish-ton-Wish, modeled after a character in James Fenimore Cooper, but preferred Mozier’s somewhat less pretentious schoolboy mending a pen. The sculptor’s “cleverness and ingenuity appear in homely subjects,” observed Hawthorne, “but are quite lost in attempts at a higher ideality.”

  Not true of another Salem native, Louise Lander, who asked Hawthorne to sit for her. She modeled his head for a bust altogether too idealizing, commented Maria Mitchell. Lander insisted on puffing out Hawthorne’s cheeks where several missing teeth had sucked them hollow. Years later, Julian Hawthorne alleged that an American art critic, deciding that the lower part of the face had been incorrectly molded, instructed the marble cutters to change it, Lander and Hawthorne being out of town at the time. “The likeness was destroyed,” recalled Julian; “and the bust, in its present state looks like a combination of Daniel Webster and George Washington.”

  In early 1858 Lander basked in the Hawthornes’ hospitality, rambling with Sophia through various artists’ studios or joining the family for dinner and an evening of Beethoven. Like many of her countrywomen, Lander walked around Rome with astounding ease. “A young woman, living in almost perfect independence, thousands of miles from her New England home, going fearless about these mysterious streets, by night as well as by day, with no household ties, no rule or law but that within her,” Hawthorne marveled, “yet acting with quietness and simplicity, and keeping, after all, within a homely line of right.” Lander was not alone. She was part of what Henry James, writing of William Story, condescendingly named “that white Marmorean flock” of women artists daring to be themselves—and daring to compete with men.

  One of these women, the twenty-eight-year-old Harriet Hosmer—Hatty to friends—had been in Rome since 1852, one of the “jolly bachelors” who lived in Charlotte Cushman’s large house on the Corso. A former student of John Gibson, she shared his studio on the Via Fontanella, near the Spanish Steps, where she entertained the gawking public in men’s clothing, a man’s shirt, collar, tie, and a close-fitting brown jacket “like a boy,” observed Maria Mitchell, “buttoned by boy buttons and furnished with boy pockets.” On top of short vivacious hair she planted a little black velvet cap. “She was indeed very queer,” commented Hawthorne, “but she seemed to be her actual self, and nothing affected nor made-up; so that, for my part, I give her full leave to wear what may suit her best, and to behave as her inner woman prompts.” Una sniffed, “I think Miss Hosmer altogether too masculine, and did not take a fancy to her at all.”

  Una bristled at the idea of emancipated women. So did William Story. “Hatty takes a high hand here with Rome,” Story wrote, distilling his annoyance, “and would have the Romans know that a Yankee girl can do anything she pleases, walk alone, ride her horse alone, and laugh at their rules.” Such liberty galled him almost as much as Hosmer’s vulgar, enviable commercial sense. Her star sculpture, a roguish Puck sitting on a toadstool, was replicated by the hundreds and sold prodigiously, especially to British aristocrats.

  Hosmer petrified expatriate competitors still shaken by the specter of Margaret Fuller, who invited salacious prattle eight years after her death. Joseph Mozier bubbled with slander about Fuller and her handsome moron of a husband, “entirely ignorant even of his own language,” sneered Mozier, “scarcely able to read at all, destitute of manners; in short, half an idiot.” No manuscript of Fuller’s had been lost in the sinking of the Elizabeth; it was her literary powers that bottomed way before the boat ha
d sailed. Hawthorne recorded the vitriol in his journal with certain pleasure, and when published years later by Julian, these comments set off a nasty scandal of their own. But Hawthorne had softened his tone. “The amelioration of society depends greatly on the part that women shall hereafter take,” he wrote a few weeks later in a new romance. He rather liked the idea; then again, he didn’t.

  Engulfed by art and artists and the heavy weight of the past, Hawthorne tried reaching for his pen. A recurring cold kept him in bed in the morning, sick and tired. The overcast or showery weather continued, and despite the incessant sightseeing and journalizing, he jotted in his pocket diary that he “did nothing of importance, as usual.”

  “I doubt greatly whether I shall be able to settle down to serious literary labor as long as I remain abroad,” he warned Ticknor; “at all events, not in Italy.” Yet at about the same time as his tête-à-tête with Mozier, he was sketching out the idea of a romance. “Mr. Hawthorne commenced a new book yesterday,” Ada Shepard marked the calendar on April 13, even though Hawthorne had already started two weeks earlier. “None of us yet know what its subject is to be.”

  This new book comes down to us as “The Ancestral Footstep,” a title bequeathed by Rose Hawthorne and her husband when they published the extant manuscript in 1882, eighty-eight pages from a copybook, with some missing leaves, and interesting for its raw incompletion. The disarray throws light onto Hawthorne’s messy worktable.