Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  To Fields’s amazement, the dedication didn’t hurt advance sales of Our Old Home. Before its publication date, September 19, he put a second edition to press, and in October he reported that the confounded book continued to sell “bravely.” But Pierce’s name curdled in the mouths of every northerner. Just days before the publication of Our Old Home, a group of soldiers had discovered a letter that Pierce had written to Jefferson Davis in 1860 fomenting secession. If the South seceded from the Union, Pierce had told Davis, fighting would break out in the North, and the Democrats would side with him. “I have never believed that actual disruption of the Union can occur without blood,” Pierce wrote; “and if through the madness of northern abolitionists that dire calamity must come, the fighting will not be along Mason & Dixon’s line merely. It will be within our own borders, in our own streets.”

  According to Elizabeth Peabody, she and Mary Mann subscribed to the Evening Post, which published the treasonous letter on September 19 and then again on October 7. The sisters promptly showed the item to Sophia, who declared the letter a forgery and left their house in a snit. Once home, she sent for the paper, saying Hawthorne wanted to see it. From then on, Peabody insisted, Hawthorne never uttered Pierce’s name to his sisters-in-law. He didn’t denounce him; he just wanted to avoid an argument.

  Early in October, Harper’s Weekly requested that Hawthorne absolve himself of “Pierce’s infamy” by saying he hadn’t known of it when writing his dedication. Hawthorne would do no such thing. “I was very sorry to see what Hawthorne said,” lamented George Curtis on reading the dedication. “He has a kind of moral blindness like color blindness, and except when he insults us all, as in this letter, we can do nothing but spit and pass on.” In the review of Our Old Home that Curtis may have written, he praised Hawthorne’s sinewy style and condemned his point of view: “That one of the most gifted and fascinating of American writers should fail to see, or to care for, the very point of our contest is monstrous.”

  Franklin Sanborn or Moncure Conway expressed bafflement in the pages of Commonwealth, which they coedited. How could Hawthorne call Pierce a patriot, they gaped in disbelief. Like everyone commenting on Hawthorne’s new book, they duly trotted out the references to Addison, Gibbon, and Lamb when characterizing Hawthorne’s graceful style. But grace has its limits: “His perception is quick but partial; he relates better than he observes, and observes better than he generalizes,” said Commonwealth.

  Reviewers relished the book’s personal tone, especially the autobiographical sketch “Consular Experiences,” and the North American Review, among others, praised “images reflected from the mirror and mottled with the intense idiosyncrasies of the writer.” Readers agreed that Hawthorne finds nooks and crannies overlooked by most travel writers; his England exists not on the map but in the evanescent envelope of consciousness. “What was he to Liverpool, or Liverpool to him?” asked Henry Bright.

  But Hawthorne’s decision to pay tribute to Pierce ruffled most every feather. Charles Eliot Norton said the dedicatory letter “reads like the bitterest of satires; and in that I have my satisfaction. The public will laugh. ‘Praise undeserved’ (say the copybooks) ‘is satire in disguise’—& what a blow his friend has dealt to the weakest of our Presidents.” Harriet Beecher Stowe was indignant. “Do tell me if our friend Hawthorne praises that arch traitor Pierce in his preface & your loyal firm publishes it,” she admonished Fields. “I never read the preface and have not yet seen the book, but they say so here & I can scarcely believe it of you—if I can of him.” Calling the book pellucid but not deep, Emerson sliced out its dedication.

  Bright too was offended, though not about Pierce. Hawthorne talked like a cannibal, he said. Bright couldn’t brook Hawthorne’s cynical, contemptuous (Bright’s words) treatment of the “bulbous, long-bodied, short-legged, heavy-witted” Englishman (Hawthorne’s words), to say nothing of Englishwomen, whom Hawthorne had compared to overblown cabbage-roses “massive with solid beef and streaky tallow” and “made up of steaks and sirloins.” Bright wasn’t alone. Hawthorne’s acrid humor, his jeers at the British class system, at the aristocracy, and at Englishwomen were not meant to please, and they didn’t. “Whether it be that Nathaniel loved our British beer, not wisely, but too well,” retorted Blackwood’s, “and has found that it permanently disagrees with him; or whether the British beef has destroyed his digestion, and left his liver hopelessly deranged, we know not; but the same dyspeptic way of viewing things English accompanies him into all scenes.” Punch also poked fun at Hawthorne—a Liverpool Lovelace—whose indictment of British women must have been a momentary weakness. “Can any created woman be terrible to you?” the magazine reveled in deadpan. “Away, eater of hearts.” Never mind, Mr. Punch soothed. “You are strong enough in your own works to bear being supposed a descendant from a gorilla, were heraldry unkind.”

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, two years before his death. “Things and men look better at a distance than close at hand.” (Library of Congress)

  Daily, Hawthorne was vilified either in letters or in reviews from across the sea. It must seem rather queer to him whose books had always been adored, Una remarked. Sophia wondered how much the “carping” (her term) bothered him. She didn’t know. Fields did. Hawthorne told him not to send any more reviews.

  Having miscalculated the extent of his own hostility, he was startled by the hostility he reaped. “But they do me great injustice in supposing that I hate them,” he told Fields. “I would as soon hate my own people.”

  Except that, in a way, he did.

  “It is impossible to possess one’s mind in the midst of a civil war to such a degree as to make thoughts assume life. I hear the cannon and smell the gunpowder through everything.”

  Though he’d easily plundered his journals for publishable sketches, Hawthorne struggled with his fiction not just because the war rang loudly in his ears or because on some days he felt unaccountably ill. He also knew the days of romance, diction elegant and sentences poised, were numbered. He’d implied as much in The Marble Faun. “I feel as if this great convulsion were going to make an epoch in our literature as in everything else (if it does not annihilate all),” he wrote to Francis Bennoch, “and that when we emerge from the war-cloud, there will be another and better (at least, a more national and seasonable) class of writers than the one I belong to. So be it.”

  This class of writers included Rebecca Harding and William Dean Howells. But the youthful Howells hadn’t written much, and Hawthorne soon tired of Harding’s work, or so Sophia confided to Annie Fields. “Mr. Hawthorne cannot read her [Miss Harding’s] productions now, they are so distasteful to him from her bad style and slimy gloom.”

  Had he lived, Hawthorne himself might have been a charter member in a new class of American journalist, modern, cold, dispassionate, satiric. “Chiefly About War Matters” signaled a new style and direction. But something else was on his mind—immortality, the tacit, impossible aim of him and everyone else in the throes of catastrophe.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  A Handful of Moments

  Thou hast nor youth nor age;

  But, as it were, an after-dinner’s sleep,

  Dreaming on both.

  Measure for Measure, Act 3, Scene 1

  I doubt, if it had been left to my choice, whether I should have taken existence on these terms; so much trouble of preparation to live, and then no life at all; a ponderous beginning, and nothing more.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Septimius” manuscripts

  INSOFAR AS ANYONE can know, Hawthorne knew he was going to die. Soon.

  He hated the war and continued to fear it, disgusted by its slaughter, distrustful of its aim. He sat in his study alone for hours. “There seemed to be a stream rushing past him, which, even if he plunged into the midst of it, he could not be wet,” he wrote not long after cannons blasted in Charleston Harbor. “He himself felt strangely ajar with the human race, and would have given much, either to be in full accord wit
h it, or to be separated from it forever.”

  He was to have his wish.

  Six years after Hawthorne’s death, in 1870, Sophia Hawthorne published her husband’s private notebooks, justifying her decision with a peculiar metaphor: she was an intruder in the writer’s study, rifling through his drawers, hoping to find souvenirs of character in his old journals since they provide an “open sesame” to his work. Knowing the end of Hawthorne’s life is near, biographers too have pored over frazzled papers, sure in retrospect to have discovered a man who exhausted his talent. But unlike the crude claimant manuscripts, the unfinished “Septimius” manuscript is supple, sharp, and, though incomplete, still complex: a series of fragments, as Hawthorne foretold in The Marble Faun, whose “charm lay partly in their very imperfection.” He stopped revising “Septimius” about two-thirds through a second draft and likely intended one more revision to iron out inconsistencies, but as it stands, it’s a work of gritty mourning, national identity, and agnosticism, and it contains the ripest, most coruscating of his satires, including—significant from a biographical point of view—his most seering self-portrait to date.

  “Septimius” opens in 1775 on the afternoon of the battle of Lexington and Concord, one war a substitute for another, all interchangeable, as Hawthorne contrasts the birth of the Union with what he assumed would be its end. The hero of the story is Septimius Felton, a divinity student of waning faith consumed by his fixation on death, “believing nothing, although a thin veil of reverence had kept him from questioning some things,” like unanswerable riddles, the visitations, Melville had said, speaking of Hawthorne, from which no deeply thinking mind is ever free.

  This is Hawthorne’s cri de coeur, uttered while he and, as he supposed, his world faced certain extinction.

  Septimius shoots a young British officer on that fateful April day and, rushing to the soldier’s side, cradles him in his arms and takes from him, at the officer’s request, a bloodstained, crumpled page. Though he can’t make it out, the page appears to be a recipe for immortal life, and Septimius, from that moment on, begins a frantic effort to decipher the ingredients. Such mad pursuit is not new to Hawthorne, whose stories tell of quixotic potions and deadly cures; even the ambitious guest, hungry for fame, mortgages the blankness of death with it.

  The ambitious guest was punished for his wish to be remembered; but it’s not remembrance that Septimius—or Hawthorne—craves, or not entirely; he wants to wrest some meaning from life, itself too short to offer much. But once he’s concocted the brew, he doesn’t drink it. That fate falls to Sybil Dacy, a woman come to Concord to avenge the death of her lover, the same young British officer Septimius has killed. Unbeknownst to him, she splashes the elixir with poison, but having fallen in love with him, she drains the cup herself, leaving Septimius, mortal, to live out his spate of days all alone.

  The external impulse for Hawthorne’s story came from Thoreau, who once remarked that the Wayside had been inhabited by a man who thought he’d never die, and, earlier, from James Lowell, who told Hawthorne of the youthful patriot who axed a wounded British soldier for no apparent reason. He’d written of the latter legend in his preface to Mosses from an Old Manse, and in a sense he was rewriting it now, for “Septimius” incorporates elements of almost all of Hawthorne’s previous work: alchemical or scientific crusades waged in solipsistic splendor; mighty women who drink poison to please, or punish, hapless men; hapless women themselves destroyed for their beauty or their strength.

  In fact, in “Septimius” Hawthorne throws open the door to his cabinet of obsessions. A doctor of dubious background eggs Septimius forward; a muscular young soldier contrasts with a meditative, and murderous, student; a crusty old woman, descending from the slave Tituba, cooks up her own rotten liquor; and a legend, that of the bloody footstep, leads once again to an English estate, this time through the slain officer, who happens to be Septimius’s kin. It’s a mixed-up plot, to be sure, but the tale is fundamentally “an internal one,” says Hawthorne, “dealing as little as possible with outward events.”

  Melancholia and stark existential dread are the nub of the Septimius story, less about the search for an elixir than about the impossibility of maintaining belief in anything—especially his own work. “We are the playthings and fools of Nature,” Hawthorne recasts King Lear, “which she amuses herself with, during our little lifetime, and then breaks for mere sport.” The “Septimius” manuscripts tell a simple, plangent tale of writing—Hawthorne’s writing, or what he called “the mud of his own making” in a recent letter to Fields.

  Hawthorne wrote; he could not write; and he wrote about his failure. “A man no sooner sets his heart on any object, great or small, be it the lengthening out of his life interminably, or merely writing a romance about it,” Hawthorne explains, “than his fellow beings, and fate and circumstance to back them, seem to conspire to hinder, to prevent, to throw in each his obstacle, great or small according to his power.” But like his story, the hindrances were internal. “… Mocking voices call us back, or encouraging voices cease to be heard, when our sinking hearts need them most; so unaccountably, at last, when we feel as if we might grasp our life-long object by merely stretching out our hand, does it all at once put on an aspect of not being worth our grasp; by such apparently feeble impediments are our hands subtly bound; so hard is it to stir to-day, while it looks as if it would be easy to stir to purpose tomorrow.”

  Then, unbidden, an awful thought bangs at the door: “You are deluding yourself. You are toiling for no end.”

  Revising the first draft of his story, Hawthorne tinkered with names (Septimius Felton becomes Septimius Norton), pruned the biographical, and twisted the plot as he honed his skepticism to a mean edge. But the second draft proceeded with difficulty, and it’s painful to read. Passage after passage spills with hopelessness. “We are all linked together in a chain of Death, and feel no remorse for those we cause, nor enmity for that we suffer,” Hawthorne comments. “And the Purpose? what is Purpose? Who can tell when he has actually formed one.”

  Writing meant everything to Hawthorne and yet cost everything. It was his heart of darkness, an isolation no one could fathom or relieve; it was a source of shame as much as pleasure and a necessity he could neither forgo nor entirely approve. He wondered if Julian was embarrassed by his father’s profession, as Walter Scott’s son reportedly was, and when Rose began to compose stories of her own, Hawthorne stood over her, “dark as a prophetic flight of birds,” she remembered years later. “Never let me hear of your writing stories!” he roared.

  And what is fiction anyway? Over and over, Hawthorne grapples with the question in stories like “Fancy’s Show Box,” in his prefaces, his notebooks, in The Marble Faun. “He did not write stories in the usual style, marrying people all off at the end,” Mary Mann remarked. “He hunted out the hidden processes of actions.” Hence come the unsettling conclusions of The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun or the satiric endings of Fanshawe and The House of the Seven Gables; hence, too, comes Hawthorne’s insistence that he writes romance, not sentimental gibberish, not popular books, and decidedly not the beef-and-ale novels of Anthony Trollope, “just as real,” he remarked, “as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business.”

  He took pleasure in Trollope’s work. But it wasn’t for him. Like Septimius, Hawthorne mistrusts the sturdy fibers of the actual world—the stuff of realism, to say nothing of the facile stuff of human progress, human order, and human knowledge. “In short, it was a moment, such as I suppose all men feel (at least, I can answer for one),” admits Hawthorne in his “Septimius” story, “when the real scene and picture of life swims, jars, shakes, seems about to be broken up and dispersed, like the picture in a smooth pond, when we disturb its smooth mirror by throwing in a stone; and though the scene soon settles itself, and looks as real as before, a haunting doubt keeps close at hand, as long as we
live, asking—‘Is it stable? Am I sure of it? Am I certainly not dreaming? See; it trembles again, ready to dissolve.’ ”

  Nor are romance writers themselves exempt from doubt—and self-doubt:

  They make themselves at home among their characters and scenery, and know them better than they know anything actual, and feel a blessed warmth that the air of this world does not supply, and discern a fitness of events that the course of human life has not elsewhere; so that all seems a truer world than that they were born in; but sometimes, if they step beyond the limits of the spell, ah! the sad destruction, disturbance, incongruity, that meets the eye; distortion, impossibility, everything that seemed so true and beautiful in its proper atmosphere, and nicely adjusted relations, now a hideous absurdity.

  The yellow of the sunset ferments, manifest destiny implodes, and ambitious dreams of grandeur fade to black, obliterated by an avalanche of time, indifference, or triviality. Emerson found Hawthorne pacing on top of the hill. The two men followed his tracks back to the Wayside, Hawthorne remarking “This path is the only remembrance of me that will remain.”

  Hawthorne is the chronicler of imagination, an imagination of unbelief and dislocation. Wakefield had come home to find he had none.

  Though Sophia represented the person who once upon a time drew him into the daily life he wanted, its warm hearth—and real passion—melting the chill in his heart, Hawthorne hadn’t shown her the proofs of Our Old Home. An anagram he contrived out of her name is not entirely auspicious: “a hope while in a storm—aha!!”