Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  As is typical, Hawthorne begins with the donnée, or an image—in this case, the bloody footstep—around which he composes various episodes, each one entered into his notebook on a different day and dated, as if each passage were an entry in a diary. Had he finished the story, he would in all likelihood have destroyed his copybook, erasing his trials, errors, and quandaries once he transcribed his results into clean copy. But he did not. He proceeded by fits and starts after April 1, not writing continuously except for two weeks in May, and even then was unsatisfied. The story was of the American claimant again, which Hawthorne now intended to introduce to his reader as an anecdote he’d supposedly heard at the consulate presented with “touches that shall puzzle the reader to decide whether it is not an actual portrait.” His reader would also have to puzzle over the story, whose hero, Hawthorne noted, should make “singular discoveries, all of which bring the book to an ending unexpected by everybody, and not satisfactory to the natural yearnings of novel-readers.”

  This hero, Middleton, is a politician so disenchanted with civic life that he’s come abroad to refresh himself, much as Franklin Pierce was doing, by returning to the country of his ancestors. (In an early sketch, Hawthorne planned to make his hero a veteran of the Mexican War.) Middleton, moreover, is aware of an old family legend about two brothers in love with the same woman (an inversion of Hawthorne’s relations with the Peabody sisters). In a jealous rage, one brother reputedly killed his sibling on the threshold of the family manor, where, before dying, the slain brother leaves his bloody print. But the slain brother is, in fact, alive, having fled with the woman to America, where he changed his name, “so remorseful, so outraged, that he wished to disconnect with all the past, and begin life quite anew, in a new world.”

  Bemused by it all, Middleton decides to investigate the English branch of the family, descended from a third brother, and in so doing, Middleton realizes his connection to the past: “He rather felt as if he were the original emigrant, who long resident on a foreign shore, had now returned, with a heart brimful of tenderness, to revisit the scenes of his youth, and renew his tender relations with those who shared his own blood.” Also to Middleton’s surprise, he finds he is rightful heir to a titled estate. But here’s the rub. The discovery requires a good deal of turmoil and bloodshed; and the really serious question, from the novelist’s point of view, is “what shall be the nature of this tragic trouble, and how can it be brought about.”

  Hawthorne was stumped. One thing was certain, though. Middleton is Hawthorne’s Hamlet, wondering whether to act or retreat, whether to stir up the past or leave it alone and “withdraw himself into the secrecy from which he had emerged; and leave the family to keep on, to the end of time perhaps, in its rusty innocence; rather than to interfere.” Perhaps Middleton affects a middle way between the desire to dig up the past, taking active responsibility for what he finds there, and the desire to stay aloof, an unmolested spectator distant to alarms.

  Sophia herself had compared Hawthorne to the brooding Dane. “He [Hamlet] lived so completely in his own inner world, that he found it impossible to break forth into a deed of violence, though he was morally convinced he should punish the criminal,” she wrote to Elizabeth. “… To you alone in this world I would say that this made me think of another person of the contemplative, meditative, introspective order—tender also—who would probably do very much as Hamlet did in those circumstances.” Elizabeth knew of whom Sophia spoke.

  In “The Ancestral Footstep,” however, Hawthorne tips the scales, and not toward action. Little good comes from trying to alter the course of events, given our imperfect knowledge of what we do, Hawthorne claimed in his biography of Pierce. “The progress of the world, at every step, leaves some evil or wrong on the path behind it, which the wisest of mankind, of their own set purpose, could never have found the way to rectify.”

  As yet another attempt to justify inaction, or a life lived wholly in the present, “The Ancestral Footstep” hints that Hawthorne was himself unhappy, as always, with his decision. The past intrudes in present life every day, at every juncture, demanding something: the impossible settling of old accounts by means as reprehensible as the initial crime. Again and again, Hawthorne picked at the same psychological issues. But in social terms, these issues weren’t peculiar to Hawthorne. The question of a regrettable past and uncertain future confronted all Americans in 1858: what to do about ancestral crimes like slavery?

  “The moral, if any moral were to be gathered from these paltry and wretched circumstances,” Hawthorne decides in his unfinished “Ancestral Footstep,” “was ‘Let the past alone; do not seek to renew it; press on to higher and better things—at all events to other things; and be assured that the right way can never be that which leads you back to the identical shapes that you long ago left behind. Onward, onward, onward!”

  Hawthorne didn’t sit still long enough to write much. In May he was negotiating for a place to rent in Florence for the summer and the means to get there, by way of Spoleto and Perugia. He and Sophia thought they might be able to nose about the countryside without the children (the children could always revisit Italy as adults, they rationalized). In the winter they’d all return to Rome, and the following spring, 1859, they’d go home. Home: “blessed words,” Una skeptically remarked, aware that in her family, plans fluttered as quickly as her adolescent pulse.

  Expectations of Florence ran high, and the trip didn’t disappoint: blood-red poppies and the silvery glisten of olive trees, deep valleys and ravines and white buildings the color of New England snow. “What a land!” said Sophia, always amazed, “where rainbows are broken up, and tossed among the mountains and valleys, just for beauty.” At the suggestion of the sculptor Benjamin Paul Akers, Hawthorne enlisted the assistance of Hiram Powers, another sculptor, who obligingly leaped into action. The Hawthornes, somewhat like strayed sheep, had found their shepherd.

  Across the street from Powers on the Via Fornace, the Casa del Bello was vacant and furnished, the lower floor dotted with as many as fifteen easy chairs in an abundantly frescoed, high-ceilinged set of rooms arranged around a courtyard. One of the three parlors doubled as Hawthorne’s study, delighting him with its view of the green garden that fireflies lit after dark—all for fifty dollars a month. Florence was not only lovely, its air like sherbet, opined Sophia, but cheap, the very “Paradise of cheapness,” observed Nathaniel, “which we vainly sought in Rome.” Their servant charged only six dollars a month, and for one dollar and twenty cents a day, the Hawthornes ordered dinner from a nearby cookshop. Tolerable red wine cost mere pennies, cigars or fresh dark cherries equally reasonable. “What can man desire more!” Hawthorne murmured happily, content for the first time in months.

  Sophia too was happy. Their illustrious neighbors the Brownings, though soon off to France, had welcomed them at Casa Guidi, Elizabeth Barrett petite and expressive, a spiritualist with fairy fingers (Sophia commented) serving the strawberries and cake. Herself a rival invalid, Sophia coughed once in a while, taking umbrage, as of old, when anyone remarked on how well she looked. Still, she admired herself in white muslin, perfect for the steamy weather. The whole family was picture perfect: Una’s own white dress billowed on the sofa while she read Tennyson, Julian busily scribbled his history of shells, and little Rose, now seven, jumped rope in the Boboli Gardens or picked tea roses for her mother.

  “Mr. Hawthorne has become himself again,” Sophia exulted to Mary. “He did not live in Rome, he only existed—besides that he had a perpetual cold. Here I find him again as in the first summer in Concord at the old Manse.” He was writing.

  “Every day I shall write a little, perhaps,” Hawthorne outlined his plans, “—and probably take a brief nap, somewhere between breakfast and tea.”

  Mornings, he sauntered over Florentine streets, stopping here and there, or wandered at leisure through the Uffizi Gallery, returning to the Venus de’ Medici as to a mistress, aghast to learn that Powers, an opinionated ma
n impressed with himself, compared her unfavorably to his own handiwork. Powers tickled Hawthorne. He spouted off about flying machines, Swedenborg, Andrew Jackson, the laying of the Atlantic cable, which Powers could’ve done better—shrewd Yankee talk, said Hawthorne, “full of bone and muscle,” transcribing in his journal the sculptor’s tirades. Yet Powers was conspicuous among American sculptors, having zoomed to fame and a comfortable life after his Greek Slave toured America in 1847 to handsome receipts and a storm of publicity guaranteeing a hit in London. How not? Stripped naked, hands chained, a cross dangling in her rumpled clothing, the five-foot-tall Greek woman is a triumph of prurient eroticism, with everybody allowed to look. And best of all, in her chaste, white-marbleish way, she alludes ever so obliquely to the real-life slavery on everyone’s mind.

  Hawthorne struggled to keep up with all the art talk, so sophisticated and knowing. But “after admiring and being moved by a picture, one day,” he admitted, “it is within my experience to look at it, the next, as little moved as if it were a tavern-sign.” Yet in the Uffizi galleries, he could relax with the Dutch masters, for Dutch realism was neither abject nor a misty ideality perceived, if perceived at all, only by the cognoscenti. “Until we learn to appreciate the cherubs and angels that Raphael scatters through the blessed air, in a picture of the Nativity, it is not amiss to look at a Dutch fly settling on a peach, or a humble-bee burying himself in a flower,” he observed. “For my part,” Hawthorne soon concluded, “I wish Raphael had painted the Transfiguration in this style.”

  Nor did he not see why the two styles couldn’t—shouldn’t—be combined. “Had it not been possible for Raphael to paint General Jackson!” he observed with dry wit. This would be the actual and the imaginary combined, just what he wanted for his new romance; he did not “wish it to be a picture of life; but a Romance, grim, grotesque, quaint,” he said. “… It might have so much of the hues of life that the reader should sometimes think it was intended for a picture; yet the atmosphere should be such as to excuse all wildness.”

  The Greek Slave, Hiram Powers (Library of Congress)

  The romance came haltingly when it came at all. “I feel an impulse to be at work,” he recorded two weeks after arriving in Florence, “but am kept idle by the sense of being unsettled, with removals to be gone through, over and over again, before I can shut myself into a quiet room of my own, and turn the key.”

  Hawthorne caught cold, complained of the heat, grew tired of city life, its art and conversation charming him no longer. More disruption, another illness, and another move. Isabella Blagden, a friend of the Brownings, knew of a villa near hers in Bellosguardo that might be just the thing. Her neighbor Count Montauto, a man long on title and short of cash, had decided to rent his home, “big enough to quarter a regiment,” Hawthorne wrote James Fields, with a wonderful “moss-grown-tower, haunted by owls and by the ghost of a monk,” from which he could look out to the brown Arno Valley.

  The Hawthornes loaded their carpet bags with their clothes and on August 1 climbed the Bellosguardo hill, a mile outside the Roman gate to the north of Florence. Sophia had arranged to rent the Villa Montauto for two months at twenty-eight dollars a month. Marching through dusty streets with Una and Julian, Hawthorne arrived at the villa, found the iron gate locked, located a contadino who scrambled up a ladder and into a window and out again with the keys. The gate swung wide, and Hawthorne ascended the rickety staircase to the wide square tower, from whose battlements he and Julian were soon flinging pieces of lime, watching them fall. The view was fine, peaceful, beautiful, quiet: a spectator’s jewel.

  Each member of the Hawthorne house took a suite of rooms, Hawthorne claiming three on the ground floor, one for a writing closet. He stayed there for several weeks, sketching out a new book until September, when he announced to Fields that he had planned two romances, one or both of which might be ready for the press in a few months—if, that is, he wasn’t in Italy. “I find this Italian atmosphere not favorable to the close toil of composition,” he explained, “although it is a very good air to dream in.”

  In the misty mornings, Hawthorne felt as if the valley itself were dreaming, and at the end of September, as the full moon gleamed softly over the Tuscan hill, it was time to move on. Hawthorne socialized a bit and listened politely as visitants from the spirit world blew through the Florentine valley, overturning tables and conveying messages from the dead. Notified that she possessed the power to interpret their messages, Ada Shepard sent tidings from Sophia’s two dead brothers, her father (recently deceased), and from the garrulous Mrs. Peabody, who reported that she hadn’t seen Byron yet.

  The party over and the spirits departed, Hawthorne shook Hiram Powers’s smooth hand, picked his way through streets scented with green lemon and walked through the Pitti Palace and the Uffizi “with a sad reluctance to bid them farewell forever.” Then he changed his mind. “I am not loth to go away,” he said, “—impatient rather; for taking no root, I soon weary of any soil that I may be temporarily deposited in. The same impatience I sometimes feel, or conceive of, as regards this earthly life.”

  On Friday, October 1, 1858, Hawthorne left the ancient tower in the early morning haze, his sights set again on Rome, Eternal City of memory, art, and contagion.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Things to See and Suffer

  Hawthorne entices, appalls.

  Emily Dickinson

  APPROACHING the city, St. Peter’s radiant in the sky-blue distance, the Hawthornes asked their driver—they called him the Emperor—to stop the horses. One by one they stepped out of the carriage. Sophia went first. “ROME ROME ROME.” Only capital letters would do. “I can now understand the irresistible attraction it has to those who return a second time,” she cried. “Now that I have known it once, Rome certainly does draw into itself my heart,” Nathaniel admitted.

  Incorrigible realist, he added, “Besides, we are to stay here six months.”

  Quite a long time, noted the imperturbable Sophia, “to such Arabs as we have been lately.”

  The Hawthornes climbed back into the carriage, the Emperor cracked his leather whip, and six horses, heads bent forward, galloped toward the Porta del Popolo.

  He now liked the crowded Corso, a noble street, he said. He scaled the marble steps of the Capitoline Museum without a murmur and marched valiantly through the picture galleries. Even the roasted chestnuts, sold on the street, tasted good to him.

  The lodgings were satisfactory. That helped. Cephas Thompson had found the Hawthornes a seven-room apartment at 68 Piazza Poli. Equipped with a facsimile of a Franklin stove and plenty of carpets—there had been none in the Palazzo Laranzani—it promised warmth, especially in Hawthorne’s study, and comfort. Late at night, when the city fell quiet, Hawthorne could hear the splash of the Trevi Fountain, just a block away, as he drifted to sleep.

  The American colony welcomed them, the Storys, Hatty Hosmer, Joseph Mozier, and of course Thompson, the latter bursting with the Louisa Lander scandal. Lander, it seems, had been living with a man on “uncommonly good terms” and posing as a model in risqué clothes, it was said, to show off her good figure. Punctilious, the American expatriate community appointed William Story to interview anyone who could vouch for Miss Lander’s drowning reputation, and Hawthorne rather hoped Lander would acquit herself. She wouldn’t stoop to such folly and refused to be interviewed.

  So the Hawthornes turned their backs. “Miss Lander’s life (as she truly observes) lies between her Maker and herself,” Hawthorne conceded in a formal letter, perhaps never sent. Until she cleared her name, he continued, his prose as rigid as toy soldiers, his pronouns third-person stiff, the Hawthornes simply could not admit her to their home. “Any attempt at social intercourse with her former friends (especially where young people and children are included in the number) should have been preceded by a full explanation and refutation of those reports,” Hawthorne declared.

  Lander left Rome.

  Hawthorne�
��s good mood fell apart. Lander’s disgrace, the pitiless drizzle, another bout of grippe: Rome flattened the soul. “I have suffered more in Rome from low spirits than almost anywhere else,” he told Franklin Pierce. Yet the persistent influenza and distemper—sporadic, provoking—paled next to the long death struggle of Una.

  It began on the Thursday after their arrival. Sophia was descanting about Praxiteles’ Faun in her journal. Suddenly she dropped her pen mid-sentence and snapped the book shut. Five days later, on October 26, slimy rain clung to the windows, and Una burned with fever.

  They moved her into Hawthorne’s study. She first was diagnosed incorrectly and then—correctly—with malaria, or Roman fever, a disease that smolders, subsides, and then darts back to rack the body with chill, the mind with delirium. Una rallied and relapsed. She chanted “like a tragic heroine,” her father despaired, “—as if the fever lifted her feet off the earth.” Every two hours she was given quinine. “The ill effects of the large doses … were probably quite as lasting and injurious as those of the fever itself,” Julian concluded, with good reason, years later.

  In three weeks, she seemed well enough to take a drive with Mrs. Story, but at the end of November her face flushed purple and her temperature shot back up.

  Malaria probably toppled Ada Shepard in January. With Sophia exhausted from nursing both girls, Hawthorne still managed somehow to closet himself in his study, writing an hour or two each day on a romance begun the day of Una’s illness. “I have been trying to tear [it] out of my mind,” he told Fields; writing kept him from going mad. In February he finished a rough draft. “As for my success, I can’t say much,” he wrote to Fields; “indeed, I don’t know what to say at all. I only know that I have produced what seems to be a larger amount of Scribble than either of my former Romances, and that portions of it interested me a good deal while I was writing them; but I have had too many interruptions, from things to see and things to suffer, that the story has developed itself in a very imperfect way, and will have to be revised hereafter.”