Soon Hawthorne himself was in bed. “I never knew that I had either bowels or lungs, till I came to Rome,” he grimly wrote to Ticknor, “but I have found it out now, to my cost.” Sophia suspected that he too had malaria, although he seemed to be stronger, sipping beef broth, quite unlike the stricken Una, so slow to recover. Weakness shook her hand as she walked with her father down the Corso at Carnival time, two invalids in the pestilential city.
Carnival revelry: not for him. Hawthorne wanted to leave Rome as quickly as possible. Mid-April sounded good. They could hire a carriage to take them to Geneva and Paris, then cross the Channel to England, stop over in London, and swing the Wayside gate open in July. By August he’d be revising his new book and outlining another to pay for the renovations he was imagining now that they’d lived in the Villa Montauto.
It was a good plan, foiled in March. Una had crashed. Dr. Franco diagnosed galloping consumption. “God help us!” Hawthorne scribbled in his pocket diary. He gestured toward Sophia. “I don’t know what will become of her when she loses hope,” he winced. But Sophia, resolute, kept vigil at Una’s side, day and night, for two weeks. “I am going to die now,” the girl murmured to her mother. “There is no use in living,” she repeated. “Goodbye, dear.” Sophia said nothing. Una said “Goodbye, dear” again and faced the wall, waiting for death.
Not healthy herself, Ada replaced Sophia at Una’s bedside while fending off the advances of Dr. Franco, their lecherous homeopath. It must have been a confused, unhappy household. Sophia watched over Una and sidestepped Nathaniel, whose eye she avoided lest they both break down; Ada dodged Dr. Franco, who kept lunging after her for a kiss; Julian raged against fate in the privacy of his room; and Rose, bewildered, lonely Rose, said or did nothing of note. Long afterwards, Julian remembered his father trying hard to keep up appearances, shuffling cards for whist every night until, hammered by grief, he put them down. “We won’t play any more,” he announced.
Early in April, Dr. Franco told Sophia that Una might not survive the night. “It is not natural that the young should die,” she sobbed. “I always knew I was not worthy of her.” It was Sophia’s finest hour. She resolved to tell Hawthorne what Franco had said—“drop the thunderbolts gently at his feet”—and when she did, Hawthorne passed a quivering hand through his hair. “I do not remember what I said then,” she recalled, “but I left him & went back to my post.”
For the sake of Nathaniel and the children, Sophia contrived to stay silent, organized, and stalwart, propped up by the expatriate community that rallied to her side in all the ways meaningful to her, a line of well-wishing carriages constantly at the Piazza Poli door, itself crowded with cards and flowers and fussing friends. Even Mrs. Browning, who rarely emerged from her villa, rushed to the Hawthorne house.
And there was Franklin Pierce, come to relieve her of Hawthorne. The former president and his wife, vacationing in Rome, refused to leave the city until Una improved. At least once a day, sometimes as many as three times, Pierce called at 68 Piazza Poli to draw Hawthorne outdoors. Hawthorne grabbed his hat and meandered with Pierce over the winding streets, two friends of thirty-five years, Pierce attentive lest Hawthorne pout too long. Sophia said she owed her husband’s sanity to him. “No one else could have supplied his place.”
Hawthorne discussed Pierce’s presidential prospects, which seemed nil to Hawthorne, and though Pierce protested he’d never run again—his usual strategy—Hawthorne knew Pierce would likely jump at the chance. Hawthorne didn’t necessarily think it a bad idea. Pierce had fully risen to what the office demanded, he reasoned. True, Pierce had not risen beyond what the office demanded, nor was he a political visionary, but Pierce knew, according to Hawthorne, “with a miraculous intuition of what ought to be done, just at the time for action. His judgment of things about him is wonderful.” Other Americans, most of them, disagreed violently. Said one of the old party faithful who’d since lost faith, “The Kansas outrages are all imputable to him, and if he is not called to answer for them here, ‘In Hell they’ll roast him like a herring.’ ”
Hawthorne didn’t care a fig for such calumny. “I did not know what comfort there might be in the manly sympathy of a friend,” he wrote in his journal; “but Pierce has undergone so great a sorrow of his own, and has so large and kindly a heart, and is so tender and so strong, that he really did us good, and I shall always love him the better for the recollection of these dark days.”
Never again would Pierce receive better or more genuine praise.
May arrived, sweet-smelling and nonchalant. Una’s fever had broken. Thin and wan, she had raised her weary head, cherry-wood hair all gone, lopped off at doctor’s orders. Hands trembling, she had asked for her knitting needles. Dr. Franco was outraged. He forbade her to sew or read or talk, and the Hawthornes must remain in Rome, he insisted, for the recuperation.
But Hawthorne needed a change of air and circumstance almost as much as Una. “He says he should die if he should come to Rome another winter,” Sophia reported to Elizabeth Peabody. He wasn’t well. “The malaria certainly disturbs him, though it is undeveloped.” He walked the Pincian Hill and stood, cigar in hand, looking down at the ancient, complex city. How he hated Rome; how he loved it. “But (life being too short for such questionable and troublesome enjoyments),” said he, “I desire never to set eyes on it again.”
Maybe so, but he was to occupy himself with it—or it with him—for the next six months.
On June 23, 1859, the Hawthornes touched British soil, and once they’d arrived in London, the trusty Bennoch directed the lot of them to a boardinghouse on Golden Square, near Piccadilly. Hawthorne arranged passage to America for mid-August and busied himself with Fields, in London with his second wife, and Pierce, now in London too. Pierce presented Hawthorne with a slim whalebone cane topped in silver for their walks together, past and future. Sophia stayed indoors, having enveloped herself in a nervous headache. “My fatigue is something infinite,” she explained. “All I can do is to sit in parks, and muse over pictures, and preserve silence.”
She had been the only one sorry to leave Rome.
She excused herself from most invitations, and in her absence Hawthorne brought Julian with him to breakfast at the Fieldses’, where they met Mrs. Annie Adams Fields for the first time. She was a bright young woman, and at twenty-five, seventeen years younger than her husband. Slender where Fields was portly, calm where he was talkative, Brahmin where he was plebeian, she had married the publisher in 1854. “I have known her since childhood,” Fields had crowed at the time, “and have held her on my knee many and many a time.” Just a girl then, in five years she had matured into an observant woman independent in thought and action, should she choose to exercise them. She did not. The quintessence of Boston’s Back Bay, Annie Fields was gracious, reserved, literary, secure, and tactful, the perfect idolatrous complement for the city’s liveliest publisher.
She liked Hawthorne. Bashful and mild, she thought him, and thoroughly unpretentious. Speaking in a low voice, he talked about his new novel, face twitching with evident apprehension. Or perhaps infirmity. In any case, he’d prepared friends for his altered appearance. He’d grown a mustache—Sophia said it made him look like a bandit—and his hair was frizzled with gray. The Italian adventure, he told Bennoch, left him wrinkled, shabby, travel-worn, and bald. “He is entirely unchanged in heart & genius,” Pierce loyally reported to Horatio Bridge. “Can anything better be said of any man?”
Fields sold Hawthorne’s new book to the British firm of Smith & Elder, which offered six hundred pounds for the rights. “It was a proposition gratifying to his pride & agreeable enough to his purse and was of course accepted,” Pierce informed Bridge of the deal. But it meant Hawthorne wouldn’t return to America right away, having agreed to stay in England to revise the book and hand it over for typesetting. In turn, Smith & Elder would send advance sheets to Ticknor & Fields. (Again, the issue was copyright. To protect it, the British and American ed
itions of a book had to appear simultaneously.) Since the book wouldn’t be finished at least until the fall, much too late for an Atlantic crossing, Hawthorne would have to stay until spring.
Foiled again. “I think of Mamma,” Una rationalized, “& that comforts me, for I really believe it is the saving of her life to stay.”
For the summer the Hawthornes settled in Redcar, Yorkshire, a fishing village turned seaside resort. “It is as bleak and dreary a strip of sand as we could have stumbled upon, had we sought the whole world over,” Hawthorne cheerily informed Bennoch; “and the gray German ocean tumbles in upon us, within twenty yards of our door.” Far from the fuss of London, he could write as if a young man again striding over Salem Point.
They rented a two-story house—“a nutshell,” Sophia called it—on High Street near the waterfront. Ada Shepard had returned to America but fortunately Fanny Wrigley, Rose’s former nursemaid, had come to help out, for Sophia slept most of the day unless dragged along the beach in her bath chair. Hawthorne disappeared after breakfast for six hours at a stretch, and after dinner he hiked along the shore or took Julian swimming. In the evening he walked out again to the water. “The sea entirely restored Mr. Hawthorne,” Sophia was glad to report to Elizabeth.
In the middle of October, with spirits up and summer over, the Hawthornes went back to Leamington for the winter, and Hawthorne dispatched most of the manuscript (429 pages) to Smith & Elder. “As usual he thinks the book good for nothing, and based upon a very foolish idea which nobody will like or accept,” Sophia reported to Elizabeth after reading a large chunk of it. Aversion aside, he set about finishing it, and accepted Sophia’s minor suggestions, like changing the color of Italian houses, which she said he’d got wrong, and altering the name of a main character from Graydon to Kenyon. On November 9, 1859, he sent the remaining 79 pages to the publisher.
The book had no title. Hawthorne toyed with several, including “Monte Beni; or, The Faun: A Romance.” (“Monte Beni is our beloved Montauto,” Sophia explained to Elizabeth.) He also played with “The Romance of a Faun,” “Marble and Life; a Romance,” “Marble and Man; a Romance,” and his favorite, “St. Hilda’s Shrine,” which Ticknor used when he advertised the book in America. Fields suggested “The Romance of Monte Beni,” but Smith & Elder preferred “Transformation,” which they claimed Hawthorne himself had recommended. He denied it. If anything, he’d offered “The Transformation.” But he went along, begging Ticknor at least to call the American version of the book “The Marble Faun.”
Published as Transformation (a good title) in England on February 28, 1860, the new novel appeared in America, bound in maroon and gold, a week later—still within the copyright limit—as The Marble Faun. The subtitle to both editions had been Fields’s idea: “The Romance of Monte Beni.”
Whatever its title, the novel was so modern it baffled many of its first readers and many contemporary ones too, for age and time and the unbearable illness of Una, or mortality, are its main constituents, all wrenched from Hawthorne’s Italian experiences and his overpowering sense of despair. “A wonderful book,” sighed Longfellow; “but with the old, dull pain in it that runs through all Hawthorne’s writings.”
It’s an exquisite sentence (if a periodic sentence this long can be called exquisite) and lyrical, biblical, confident, heartfelt.
“When we have once known Rome,” Hawthorne writes about two thirds through The Marble Faun,
and left her where she lies, like a long decaying corpse, retaining a trace of the noble shape it was, but with accumulated dust and a fungous growth overspreading all its more admirable features;—left her in utter weariness, no doubt, of her narrow, crooked, intricate streets, so uncomfortably paved with little squares of lava that to tread over them is a penitential pilgrimage, so indescribably ugly, moreover, so cold, so alley-like, into which the sun never falls, and where a chill wind forces its deadly breath into our lungs;—left her, tired of the sight of those immense, seven-storied, yellow-washed hovels, or call them palaces, where all that is dreary in domestic life seems magnified and multiplied, and weary of climbing those staircases, which ascend from a ground-floor of cookshops, coblers’ stalls, stables, and regiments of cavalry, to a middle region of artists, just beneath the unattainable sky;—left her, worn out with shivering at the cheerless and smoky fireside, by day, and feasting with our own substance the ravenous little populace of a Roman bed, at night;—left her, sick at heart of Italian trickery, which has uprooted whatever faith in man’s integrity had endured till now, and sick at stomach of sour bread, sour wine, rancid butter, and bad cookery, needlessly bestowed on evil meats;—left her, disgusted with the pretence of Holiness and the reality of Nastiness, each equally omnipresent;—left her, half-lifeless from the languid atmosphere, the vital principle of which has been used up, long ago, or corrupted by myriads of slaughters;—left her, crushed down in spirit with the desolation of her ruin, and the hopelessness of her future;—left her, in short, hating her with all our might, and adding our individual curse to the Infinite Anathema which her old crimes have unmistakably brought down;—when we have left Rome in such mood as this, we are astonished by the discovery, by-and-by, that our heart-strings have mysteriously attached themselves to the Eternal City, and are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were more familiar, more intimately our own home, than even the spot where we were born!
The tension of leaving—of having left—resolved by the pleasure of coming back: here and in the entire novel, Hawthorne expresses his deep ambivalence about Rome, for Rome to Hawthorne had become something beyond itself and its daily annoyances, something beyond the noise and confusion and the long sweep of history; it had become dear in the ways that home is dear and home is hateful, both for the very same reasons.
Rome, Salem, Hawthorne: the past is never dead. In Rome the physical evidence of the past is written into every paving stone, making it for Hawthorne a fitting emblem of romance. And Italy itself exists as much in the imagination as in the real world, as Hawthorne writes in the preface to The Marble Faun; it’s “a sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would not be so terribly insisted upon, as they are, and must needs be, in America.” As was his wont, Hawthorne repeated, almost verbatim, the definition of romance in “The Custom-House” as something that takes place “between the real world and fairy-land,” and Rome is that place.
It’s also a rotting corpse, which suggests, by implication, the death of romance.
Hawthorne had used the image of the corpse before, not just in his notebook entries but in The House of the Seven Gables, where Holgrave wails that the past sits on the present like a giant’s dead body. In that book, however, the past inhabits the present in a predictable, almost orderly fashion: the misdeeds of one generation creating havoc in the next and, obversely, Holgrave reincarnating the best of Matthew Maule. Rome is different; it’s a “casual sepulchre,” streets piled with “continually recurring misfortunes” stacked on top of one another willy-nilly and depressing even to the most adroit storyteller—like Hawthorne—who encounters a “heap of broken rubbish”—his term, not Eliot’s—wherever he looks. Meaninglessness lurks in every fallen column, chipped statue, dim fresco, all “far gone towards nothingness.” Art is nothing but a “crust of paint over an emptiness,” and a “pit of blackness … lies beneath us, everywhere”: thoughts of a brain in a dry season.
No matter how one reads The Marble Faun—and there are myriad ways to analyze it—its author seems distraught and depressed. Conscious that he hasn’t “appeared before the Public,” as he puts it, in seven or eight years, Hawthorne is aware that much has changed. He has changed; it has changed. And he knows he must match or exceed his previous novels, as Washington Irving had bluntly said; it’s the curse of a popular author. But he felt old and tired. He constantly complained of languor or ennui. “It is strange that, when he never was ill before in his life, he should suffer so much from colds, &c., in Italy,” Ada Shepard remarked. He lie
d about his age. Applying for his Italian passport in 1857, he gave it as fifty-one—he was then fifty-three—and Sophia’s as forty-two; she was forty-eight.
Earlier in life, Hawthorne had taken solace in nature. No more; the sky is unattainable, and though the Alban Mountains stand far from “all this decay and change,” as he writes in The Marble Faun’s opening chapter, they don’t compensate for the depredations of time. “We all of us, as we grow older, lose somewhat of our proximity to Nature,” rationalizes Kenyon. “It is the price we pay for experience.” Another character, disillusioned, disagrees. Experience teaches nothing. Nature teaches nothing. “ ‘The sky itself is an old roof, now,’ answered the Count; ‘and, no doubt the sins of mankind have made it gloomier than it used to be.’ ”
Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, and the Count of Monte Beni, a.k.a. Donatello: Hawthorne uses the four characters to structure this long, discursive book. The first and last chapters bear their four names, as if to say that events in between have changed all of them. Regardless, there is something abstract about the novel, something inert: too much change amounts to stasis, it seems; and so it is with character, like that androgynous faun carved in marble.
Modeled loosely on William Story, the man of marble, cold and stiff, is Kenyon, the American sculptor who anchors the novel’s plot but, except for his occasional moralizing, isn’t much of a force within it. Although he wishes to “climb heights and stand on the verge of them,” Kenyon is an artist without style, locked into a moral code and afraid to take a risk. Rather, Donatello, the young Count of Monte Beni, takes the plunge—or, more literally, initiates his own inevitable fall into experience, having left a Tuscan home “guiltless of Rome” and come to the Eternal City, where he falls in love with the mysterious, guilt-ridden Miriam.
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