Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  Hawthorne meddled too. Reading Sophia’s mail, he returned to Elizabeth one of her sermons on abolition without “bothering” his wife about it. “No doubt it seems the truest of truth to you,” he charged; “but I do assure you that, like every other Abolitionist, you look at matters with an awful squint, which distorts everything within your line of vision.” As far as he was concerned, the abolitionists were a mob of rabble-rousers of no good to anyone, least of all the slave. His mind had not changed; if anything, his position had grown more entrenched. “We go all wrong, by too strenuous a resolution to go all right,” he writes in The Marble Faun, reiterating phrases from his Franklin Pierce biography and from “The Ancestral Footstep.” He paraded the same phrases past Elizabeth Peabody. “Vengeance and beneficence are things that God claims for himself,” he scolded her. “His instruments have no consciousness of His purpose; if they imagine they have, it is a pretty sure token that they are not His instruments.”

  No friend of the South, he nonetheless counseled inaction, converting into a moral weapon the passivity he had criticized, year in, year out, in himself. Action, he seemed to be saying, carried with it an inevitable penalty, the same penalty—or myth of penalties—in so many of his stories; even his tales for children are fables of punishment disbursed to the proud and the rich, the vain and the arrogant. Better to do nothing—ignore the prick of conscience—than to unleash the catastrophic unknown, easy to associate with dark-skinned slaves, a strange and alien race; better to hope that Providence would take the problem out of human hands.

  Something else lay beneath Hawthorne’s suave if illogical (and plainly racist) invocation of Providence. He was a fatalist, apprehensive of action—associated with aggression—skeptical of result. And stories like “The Birthmark” reveal a Hawthorne suspicious of the unfettered self strewing its narcissism where it may and eradicating the so-called blemishes of nature. Hawthorne knew, of course, that, unlike Georgiana’s mole, slavery was no natural state of affairs. Little matter. Abolition was slavery’s real foe, its moral urgency another instance of noxious pride. “The good of others, like our own happiness, is not to be attained by direct effort, but incidentally,” he chided Elizabeth Peabody in terms familiar to both of them. “… I am really too humble to think of doing good; if I have been impertinent enough to aim at it, I am ashamed.”

  Since the first days of marriage, Hawthorne had been weaning his bride from her family (and from Emerson), deflating their transcendentalism with prickly humor. “We human beings cannot venture to assert what is ‘highest laws,’ ” Sophia stood up to Elizabeth. “… I know all you would say and do say about Absolute Law—and that men’s laws are not LAW—Yes I know all that—I also have thought about such things, and can also float in a ‘fluid consciousness.’ ” Sophia delivered the final blow. What are higher laws anyway, she charged, but another form of “transcendental slang.”

  Times had changed. Transcendentalism had sprouted in the shale of New Hampshire and on the plains of Kansas, with John Brown its standard-bearer, saluted by Thoreau as “a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles.” A longtime abolitionist, Brown was a humorless man (unlike Thoreau), decisive and without mercy. In 1855 the tall, gaunt Brown, gunpowder in his eye, joined five of his sons (he had sired twenty children) in the bleeding territory of Kansas, arriving in Osawatomie with a wagonload of rifles and artillery sabers. After proslavery forces sacked the city of Lawrence, Brown, then fifty-six, rounded up four sons and two other men to ride out to Pottawatomie County, where they dragged five settlers from their cabins and hacked them to death with cavalry broadswords.

  Boston seemed not to know about the midnight massacre or at least didn’t have all the cold-blooded facts. Or it chose not to know. When Brown went east to raise money, a bowie knife stuck in his boot, the freedom fighter was invited into Boston drawing rooms by velvet-chair abolitionists although a secret group of prominent citizens, including Thomas Higginson and the schoolteacher Franklin Sanborn, were privy to Brown’s plans. In May of 1859, Old Brown, speaking at the Concord Town Hall, inspired so much confidence, observed Bronson Alcott, that the good people of Concord donated to his cause without asking for particulars. “I think him equal to anything he dares,” Alcott himself admitted, “the man to do the deed if it must be done, and with the martyr’s temper and purpose.”

  The deed was done. On October 16, 1859, in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, Brown and nineteen others, including several of his sons, seized ten slaves and their owner, hoping to spark a slave insurrection. They stormed the squarish federal armory, but rather than strike and flee, Brown and his men stayed near the arsenal for thirty-six hours, an amazing strategic blunder. The local militia quickly cut off any escape route, forcing Brown and his gang to withdraw into a small fire engine house in the armory yard. Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee and a squadron of twelve marines offered Brown a chance to surrender; the next day they battered down the door. Seventeen people died, including two of Brown’s sons, two slaves, the slave owner, a marine, and three residents of Harpers Ferry. Brown, who’d been stabbed with a decorative dress sword, was taken prisoner.

  The country convulsed. The United States Senate issued warrants, including one for Frank Sanborn, who hid for a night at the Wayside, then occupied by Mary Mann. Exonerated, Sanborn gloated, but not over the fate of Brown, who’d been summarily tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. Bells tolled—though not in Concord—on the day of Brown’s execution, a day, Emerson supposedly said, that “will make the gallows as glorious as the cross.”

  This sort of mawkishness, ill informed and dangerous, revolted Hawthorne. “Nobody was ever more justly hanged,” said he. Anyone with a modicum of common sense, he continued, “must have felt a certain intellectual satisfaction in seeing him hanged, if it were only in requital of his preposterous miscalculation of possibilities.”

  Hawthorne delivered this bolt of dry sarcasm after he returned to the Wayside, where he would build himself a third-story tower, twenty feet square, a sky-parlor he called it, modeled roughly on the tower at the Villa Montauto. There, he’d write high above the fray, entering his sanctum through a trapdoor, he told Longfellow, on which he’d plant his chair.

  He was facetious about the trapdoor, to a degree. During much of his adult life, he had tried to simulate the conditions of the prolific early years, melodramatically characterized as spent in the lonely seclusion of his room. He needed seclusion, in other words, in order to write, seclusion and peace of mind. Little by little, he was to have neither.

  “I should like to sail on and on forever, and never touch the shore again,” Hawthorne had presumably told James Fields when they crossed a dark green ocean, heading back to New England, at long last. It had been seven years.

  He’d been apprehensive about his homecoming. “I fear I have lost the capacity of living contentedly in any one place,” he confided to Ticknor. Maybe he should purchase a house near Boston. “I am really at a loss to imagine how we are to squeeze ourselves into that little old cottage of mine,” he fretted, wondering if, on the other hand, he should stay in Concord and build another house—not that he could afford it.

  Nor could he shake off a disabling pessimism. His journal was blank. “I feared his depression of spirits concerning himself would cause a fixed illness,” Sophia would tell Annie Fields. Dark foggy mornings, bone-piercing chill, and everywhere muck: “Surely, the bright severity of a New-England winter can never be so bad as this,” he had hoped when still in England. But on board the ship Europa, he spent most of the trip in his cabin either sick or, more likely, intentionally unavailable to fellow passengers like Harriet Beecher Stowe. After he docked, he saw Longfellow, who thought him bewildered and sad, though tan and fit. “It is the school-boy’s blue Monday,” the poet smiled; “vacation over and work beginning.”

  In Concord he was hustled to Emerson’s for a strawberries-and-cream party with Thoreau and Sanborn, and Emerson soon whisked him to Boston to atten
d the dinners of the Saturday Club, to which he’d been elected. Officially formed in 1855, it was a coterie of men, like Longfellow and James Russell Lowell and Edwin Whipple, come together to exchange witticisms over food and drink the last Saturday of each month. There were no women and no Bohemia at the table, said George William Curtis, just camaraderie and the sense of having-arrived. Hawthorne enjoyed himself. “It is an excellent institution,” he explained to Henry Bright, “with the privilege of first-rate society, and no duties but to eat one’s dinner.”

  Of Hawthorne, it was remembered that he was reserved and attractive—“even if a Democrat.” Henry James Sr. recalled Hawthorne at one of the dinners, eyes pinned to his plate, eating furiously to avoid conversation. “He has the look all the while—, or would have to the unknowing,” James keenly remarked, “—of a rogue who suddenly finds himself in a company of detectives.”

  Hawthorne stood out as an anomaly to a roomful of anomalies.

  Of the Saturday Club’s members and their guests, Hawthorne had little control except the right of refusal: refusal to talk, refusal to come. When Nathaniel Prentiss Banks, outgoing Republican governor of Massachusetts and something of a nativist, was invited to a dinner, Hawthorne declined. “Beyond a general dislike to official people,” Hawthorne gingerly chose his words, “I have no objection to the Governor, and I care very little about his politics; although just now, in the ruin and dismemberment of the party to which I have been attached, it might behove me to show a somewhat stronger political feeling than heretofore;—at least, a strong one enough to preclude me from joining in what I presume to be an acquiescent compliment to the Governor’s public course, as well as to his private character.”

  More pleasing was the welcome-home banquet for Hawthorne arranged by Ticknor and Fields, who invited both Pierce and the Saturday Clubbers, who deplored him. Pierce was a lout. “He is used to public speaking, and so he public-speaks in tête-à-tête, doing the appropriate gestures,” James Russell Lowell lampooned the former president. The sleek and jaunty Lowell was editor of the Atlantic Monthly, anew literary periodical with a decided antislavery, anti-Pierce bias, though its publishers, the firm of Phillips and Sampson, capitalized more on the literary than the political scene. Dr. Holmes, Emerson, the historian John Lothrop Motley, Whipple, and Stowe had all been canvassed as early contributors, as had Hawthorne; and in England so had Rossetti, Ruskin, and Mrs. Gaskell.

  Hawthorne had declined this invitation too. When Lowell pestered him again in the summer of 1859, he received the same polite refusal. But Ticknor had purchased the floundering magazine (for ten thousand dollars), and Fields exercised his charm. Hadn’t Hawthorne said he’d like to do something with his English journals? Hawthorne responded with a chuckle, throwing back Fields’s earlier admonishments against magazine work, but promised to write a piece soon.

  On the lookout for female writers, Fields also tried Sophia. “I am very anxious that not only the author of sundry great books which you and I and the public like so much should write for ‘The Atlantic’ but that his wife should also send some papers for its pages,” he gallantly declared. Startled, Sophia dashed off an unambiguous reply. “You forget that Mr. Hawthorne is the Belleslettres portion of my being, and besides that I have a repugnance to female authoresses in general, I have far more distaste for myself as a female authoress in particular.” Only the threat of starvation, she coyly added, would bring her before the public.

  “Perhaps I may yet starve her into compliance,” Hawthorne told Fields. “I have never read anything so good as some of her narrative and descriptive epistles to her friends.” But to Bennoch, he more fully bared his feelings. “I don’t know,” he said, “whether I can tolerate a literary rival at bed and board.”

  Mr. Wetherbee and Mr. Watts set to work on the small, dank Wayside, extending it upward by three stories and to the west by two. Bronson Alcott raced over from his place next door, called Orchard House and nicknamed Apple Slump by the Hawthornes, and cut paths and planted gardens in the rear of the house, lopping off branches of trees as he chatted about grapes and the consanguinity of people and plants. For ten dollars Henry Thoreau surveyed the property, Julian in tow, where the dozens of fir trees and larches shipped from England had taken root.

  Indoors, a hodgepodge of boxes and lumber and trunks littered the rooms. Hawthorne was wretched, said Mary Mann, but Sophia kept serene and calm, “doing exactly as she pleases.” “Mrs. H is as sentimental and muffing as of old,” Louisa Alcott observed, “wears crimson silk jackets, a rosary from Jerusalem, fire-flies in her hair and the dirty white skirts with sacred mud of London still extant thereon.” When the cook proved unsatisfactory, Hawthorne refused to eat if Sophia entered the kitchen. Una took charge.

  The Alcotts, except Bronson, were generally churlish on the subject of their neighbors. “Una is a stout English looking sixteen year old with the most ardent hair and eyebrows, Monte Bene airs and graces and no accomplishments but riding,” said Louisa. She was wrong. Una’s accomplishment was anger, aggrieved and ferocious. Sophia had agreed to let Julian attend Frank Sanborn’s Concord school even though she objected to coeducation as “bad for her darling son,” Sanborn recalled, “whose character she did not quite appreciate.” Una was another affair. Emerson asked why Una did not go to Sanborn’s school and laughed aloud at the reason: there was to be no coeducation for girls.

  “Her Byronic papa forbid her to distinguish herself in any manner again,” observed Louisa Alcott pointedly, “and she is in a high state of wrath and woe.” Sophia conferred with a physician. Raging, Una consulted with the doctor privately, reporting in jubilation to a Salem cousin that he “is going to talk to Papa and tell him his mind, and then I shall be free as air!” (Papa was then visiting Pierce in New Hampshire.) And she’d be in Salem soon, she added; any longer in “this killing place,” and she’d explode in “brain fever.”

  As a temporary compromise—they didn’t want Una in Salem just yet—her parents offered to send her to Mary Mann, now living on Sudbury Road, about a mile away. Later Hawthorne himself would bring Una to Ebe’s in Montserrat, and in September the two of them could visit Horatio Bridge and his wife. But in Portsmouth, Una thrashed and screamed. She had to be restrained. And no one knew why. Had a stifling letter from her mother set her off? Or her father’s repressive solicitude? Had some delicate mechanism, damaged in Rome and strained by adolescence, finally broken?

  At the Wayside, Louisa Alcott and her mother tended Una’s bedside, for Sophia was traveling in New Hampshire with Mary Mann. A Concord homeopath prescribed cold-water baths. Poor Una, screaming again, this time when dunked in a tub of frigid water. Hawthorne sent for Dr. Osgood, a noted Boston physician, who wisely suggested a change of scene, and Una went back to Mary Mann’s. Concord folk whispered madness. Hawthorne was unnerved. “His spirits are so shocked that he thinks he cannot recover from it,” Sophia said.

  In desperation herself, Mary Mann hired Mrs. C. M. Rollins, a “phreno-pathist” who juggled phrenology, magnetism, and the galvanic battery, a primitive form of shock therapy. Mrs. Rollins attributed Una’s malady to a liver complaint and “slight affection of the heart,” exacerbated by Roman fever. Una was subdued, her family mollified. In fact, Hawthorne was so impressed, he tried the battery himself.

  “I lose England without gaining America,” the melancholy Hawthorne wrote to Francis Bennoch.

  When the carpenters left, he clambered up the steep wooden staircase to his tower-garret and for months closeted himself there while the family below adjusted to Concord life. Defeated, Una attended Bronson Alcott’s series of “Conversations” at Mr. Sanborn’s (one dollar for six), and at home, said Ellery Channing, she sewed coarse towels like a penitent. Julian hiked to Sanborn’s school, and on Sundays, Sophia read the Bible to the children, huddled in the “Chapel,” a small alcove where the front door had been before the renovation. Weekdays, she mended hoops, wrote letters, visited her sisters on Sudbury Road, and over time p
ainted her designs on all the woodwork, chairs, tables, pedestals, whatever would take her brush. She encouraged the children to do the same.

  Callers, including Ticknor and Pierce, opened the front gate and wiped their boots on the piazza. Or Hawthorne saw them in Boston, his top hat over his thinning hair when he headed to the Old Corner Bookstore, where he smoked with Ticknor behind the green curtain separating the shop and the offices. Or he strolled up Beacon Hill and stopped by the Fieldses’ cozy Charles Street home. Sophia recorded these small events in her diary as well as flushed sunsets and blizzardy evenings when Nathaniel read Walter Scott aloud, Ticknor having sent a set of the “Waverley” novels for the new bookshelves.

  Mostly, though, he stayed aloft. Hawthorne never goes out, said Bronson Alcott, who saw him only by chance when at the Wayside or on the sled paths, where Hawthorne scurried “as if he feared his neighbor’s eyes would catch him as he walked.” The Sage of Apple Slump was a chronic talker, and Hawthorne was likely dodging an hour’s harangue. “He seems not at home here in his temperament and tendencies,” Alcott continued, wiser than he knew, when he heard Hawthorne was writing about England. “See how he behaves, as if he were the foreigner still, though installed in his stolen castle and its keeper, his moats wide and deep, his drawbridges all up on all sides, and he secure from invasion.”

  As promised, Hawthorne reworked an essay from his English journals, published in the October 1860 Atlantic as “The Haunts of Burns,” about visiting the homestead of the Scottish poet, and he’d been scavenging English journals for a new romance, reworking “The Ancestral Footstep” into a story about the “unconquerable interest, which an American feels in England, its people, and institutions.”

  This time the protagonist is an orphan, Ned Etherege, plucked from an almshouse by a strange doctor who lives with his niece in a cobwebby place that abuts a graveyard, like the Peabody house and the Charter Street cemetery. No surprise, then, that Ned grows up fantasizing about “hereditary connections and the imposing, imaginative associations of the past, beautifying and making venerable the mean life of the present,” even as he, an American democrat, tells himself “not to be ashamed of springing from the lowest, but to consider it as giving additional value and merit to every honorable effort and success that he had thus far made, in the struggle of life.”