“Happy the man that has such a friend beside him, when he comes to die!” Hawthorne forecast his own end in The Blithedale Romance. Hawthorne chose his old friend for his deathbed companion. Pierce undoubtedly knew it.
It would be a boon, Hawthorne had said to him, to pass away without a struggle. Later, however, Pierce told Sophia that Hawthorne’s only intimation of mortality occurred when he, Pierce, had noted that the wind, blowing from the east, promised a change. “Not in my day,” Hawthorne had replied.
After Hawthorne’s death, Pierce provided, as if by rote, the history of Hawthorne’s last night. Hawthorne had hardly eaten after arriving at the inn; he took a cup of tea with toast and went to bed. At ten Pierce himself climbed upstairs, his room separated from Hawthorne’s by a door, which he left open. The lamp was lit. A few hours passed. Pierce rose and paused at the threshold of the chamber. Hawthorne seemed peacefully asleep, right palm tucked beneath his cheek. At three or four in the morning, Pierce got up again, and this time stole into his friend’s room. Hawthorne lay in the same position, so Pierce placed his hand on his forehead. It was cold.
Pierce sent for a doctor and alerted two guests in the hotel whom he knew. They confirmed what he had felt beneath his fingers. He wired James Fields, not bearing to deliver the news to Sophia with the staccato cruelty of a short telegram.
Later that day, May 19, the birthday of Hawthorne’s father, Pierce was packing Hawthorne’s clothes and noticed an old pocketbook at the bottom of Hawthorne’s valise. In it lay Pierce’s picture.
“I need not tell you how lonely I am,” Pierce would write to Bridge, “and how full of sorrow.”
EPILOGUE
The Painted Veil
Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life; though unreal shapes be pictured there
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
Their shadows o’er the chasm, sightless and drear.
I knew one who had lifted it … he sought,
For his lost heart was tender, things to love
But found them not, alas; nor was there aught
The world contains, the which he could approve.
Through the unheeding many he did move,
A splendour among shadows, a bright blot
Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove
For truth, and like the Preacher, found it not.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sonnet
ELIZABETH PEABODY, who’d introduced Sophia to Nathaniel, was obliged to take him away. To her fell the task of announcing his death.
She traveled to Concord from Boston on the local train, collected Mary at Sudbury Road, and together they walked to the Wayside. They intended to tell Una as softly as they could and let her deliver the blow to Sophia when and however she thought best. It happened differently.
Sophia was downstairs eating her dinner. Hearing footsteps clatter on the piazza, Una jumped from the table. “What’s happened?” she cried, seeing Aunt Mary’s expression. “Papa is gone,” Mary answered. Una didn’t understand. “He is dead, dear,” Mary repeated. From the dining room Sophia heard a commotion and raised her voice to ask what was the matter. Una’s face was the color of paper. Sophia called out again. “She says Papa is dead!” Una wailed.
“No, it’s not true,” Sophia struck out at her sisters, those sisters who, like two Fates, never let her alone. And now they were trying to snip her very life cord. “Go away—it can’t be true—how do you know?” Sophia denied and wept and pleaded. The two sisters disappeared into another room while Rose, tears running down her pink cheeks, hugged her mother. Una sat in white terror, figuring that any minute Sophia would drop dead.
Half an hour later, Sophia had calmed. The mystery had been solved. She saw the hand of God in it. With Hawthorne dying away from home, she’d been spared the ugliness of death—this she didn’t say—and as for Mr. Hawthorne, who’d once skated in the frigid dawn and chopped wood all afternoon, her now shattered husband had been spared a helpless old age. “He peacefully closed his eyes for a quiet earthly slumber,” Sophia decided, “and opened them in the better world, without a motion or jar, without a farewell or a regret.” The book was shut.
Pierce’s letter came. It contained information about Hawthorne’s last day that would become a mantra. Hawthorne had died in his sleep without desiring anything or anyone, hungry only for the rest he’d sought for so long.
Thenceforward Sophia referred to her husband’s death as a euthanasia, or easy passing. The present meaning of the word had not yet come into use.
When Julian learned there was trouble at home, he assumed his mother had been stricken. It never occurred to him his father could die. “He had been frail of late, to be sure, but there seemed to be nothing specific the matter with him,” Julian later remembered, as if uncertain still. Fathers were invincible.
But Julian’s world had cracked open. “Trifling details stood out, meaningless, stones in the desert,” he would recall. James Fields took the dazed boy to Concord in the unhappy rain.
Saturday, May 20, was Rose Hawthorne’s thirteenth birthday. It rained. Franklin Pierce brought Hawthorne’s body back to Boston. Sophia was not to know it had been embalmed.
She insisted that it not be transferred to Concord until Monday noon, when it could be conveyed directly to the church, not the Wayside, for the funeral. “Sophia does not wish to think of the body or any of the circumstances,” Mary Mann explained to one of her sons. “Julian & Una do not even consult her but do every thing themselves, and she likes to leave it to them.” Una scribbled a note to the Reverend James Freeman Clarke requesting that he conduct the service. Elizabeth Peabody added a hasty postscript. Sophia, she wrote, “cannot bear to think of any body but you. You must come, dear James.”
From Charles Street, Fields had been contacting Hawthorne’s friends and the members of the Saturday Club. He and Judge Hoar orchestrated the funeral. Sophia asked Annie Fields for help with the widow’s weeds. Annie got her a soft-crowned hat, veil, gloves, and a cloak.
It was raining on Sunday too, but Monday sparkled, the air fresh and sweet, the sky a robin’s-egg blue. The village was thronged with spectators, who strolled arm in arm to the Old Manse, already a tourist site. Some of the onlookers rowed on the lazy river nearby, its bank spread with purple flowers. But at three o’clock, mourners deserted the sunshine and filed into the Church of the First Parish, where Louisa Alcott had arranged the flowers in blazing shades of white: lilies of the valley, Hawthorne’s favorite, and luxurious apple blossoms picked from orchards at the Manse. Huge vases of them stood in each of the church windows. “It looked like a happy meeting,” Oliver Holmes murmured to Emerson.
Bronson Alcott listed some of the mourners in his diary: Henry Longfellow, Louis Agassiz, Charles Eliot Norton, George Hillard, Edwin Whipple, James Russell Lowell. Judge Rockwell Hoar was there of course, and the other Concord neighbors, Emerson, Ellery Channing, Frank Sanborn. “We shall be alone soon,” Charles Sumner wrote Longfellow in despair. David Roberts had come from Boston, and William Pike from Salem with Hawthorne’s remaining uncle, William Manning. Recently injured, Horatio Bridge was absent. Franklin Pierce sat with the family.
Ebe Hawthorne was also absent. Cut deep by the news of her brother’s death, she grieved by herself in Be
verly, the hamadryad alone, too heartbroken to manage Concord.
Hawthorne lay before the pulpit, girdled in lilies and white tea roses braided with orange blossoms. On top of the casket Fields had placed the manuscript of “The Dolliver Romance.” Mary Mann sang, and James Freeman Clarke spoke of Hawthorne’s special gift. He was the friend of sinners not because he excused sin but because he loved the sinner, and he loved perfection too, though he himself never found it. Julian, his hand cold, held on to his mother’s warmer one.
Afterwards Sophia said the service was a festival of life, she and Hawthorne reborn as the new Adam and Eve.
Sixteen pallbearers, eight on a side, carried the casket out of the church. Hawthorne was buried in Sleepy Hollow cemetery under an awning of white pine.
Hawthorne’s personal estate amounted to twenty-six thousand three hundred twenty-two dollars and sixty-one cents. It included eight hundred dollars’ worth of furniture, a two-hundred-dollar library, several shares in local banks, two United States coupon bonds, several promissory notes, and stock in the Boston & Maine Railroad and in the Jamaica Plain Gas Company. The Wayside and its seventeen acres added twenty-five hundred dollars. His copyrights, taken together, were estimated at another twenty-five hundred.
He died with one hundred twenty dollars cash on hand. It wasn’t a tremendous amount but would have kept the almshouse away.
They had watched the flesh melt from his bones, but Hawthorne’s friends were strangely surprised when they heard of his death, which they considered sudden. Perhaps like Julian they regarded him as a fixture, remote to be sure but likely to make himself real or human at some later date. Emerson articulated it best. “I thought I could well wait his time & mine for what was so well worth waiting,” he told Sophia. But even when talking to her, he couldn’t cough up fulsome praise. “As he always appeared to me superior to his own performances,” Emerson continued, “I counted this yet untold force as insurance of a long life.”
In the privacy of his journal, he reminisced about the “tragic element” of Hawthorne “that might be fully rendered, in the painful solitude of the man—which, I suppose, could no longer be endured, & he died of it.”
By and large, literary acquaintances who outlived Hawthorne devoted a good portion of their reminiscences to complimenting his work. “I don’t think people have any kind of true notion yet what a Master he was, God rest his soul!” said James Russell Lowell. “Shakespeare, I am sure, was glad to see him on the other side.” As for his person, they hedged. He was enigmatic, they said, sparing themselves the further admission that Hawthorne was not their friend or, worse yet, that they hadn’t understood him in the least. “It was pleasant to meet Hawthorne on the street in Concord, but I recall no conversation of importance with him, nor did I seek any,” recollected Moncure Conway, “having long felt that his genius was to be got at only in his pages.”
With their inveterate affection for dulce et decorum, many of Hawthorne’s contemporaries had to struggle with Hawthorne’s quirks, and though they genuinely respected his work, they despised much of what he stood for: doubt, darkness, and the Democratic Party. Think of it: his era produced Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Sojourner Truth, Garrison, Greeley, Stowe, Walt Whitman, and of course Emerson. So in Hawthorne’s presence—or in their memory of it—friends discreetly sidestepped his political vagaries. William Dean Howells, Lincoln’s campaign biographer, met Hawthorne only once, when he climbed Hawthorne’s hill and talked while Hawthorne companionably smoked his cigar. Howells remembered Hawthorne as shy, affable, impossible to describe. It was like talking to an apparition. “We are always finding new Hawthornes,” Howells later wrote, referring to Hawthorne’s work as well as his person; “but the illusion soon wears away, and then we perceive that they were not Hawthornes at all.”
Said Sophia Hawthorne, “I never dared to gaze at him, even I, unless his lids were down. It seemed an invasion into a holy place. To the last he was in a measure to me a divine Mystery, for he was so to himself.”
But not everyone was as infatuated with Hawthorne as Sophia. Charles King Newcomb, from Brook Farm days, regarded Hawthorne as a “self-centered, self-reproductive, & soliloquial person,” and the women’s rights advocate Caroline Healey Dall called him an egotist. To Charles Norton, Hawthorne was a strange mixture of callousness and sensitivity, and to Louisa Alcott he seemed a “beautiful soul in prison trying to reach his fellow beings through the bars.” He was a puzzlement. “There can be companionship without speech,” insisted Hillard, longtime Whig and faithful friend. Mary Mann made her peace. “He was a man of natural tenderness & imaginative nature,” she declared, “rather than a man of lofty principles.”
He had a penchant for tugging on loose threads yet rued the undone string; he anatomized what most of us try to conceal and pretended disinterest; similarly, he affected to veil his face, which he did not; yet neither did he unburden himself. How could he? His combativeness took myriad forms, guilt transforming his irascibility into satire or subtlety or, at times, sweetness. He mixed together pain and pleasure in one full cup; it was a secret of his art.
He was watchful and wary, decent and courteous and as provincial as Hepzibah Pyncheon, whom he loved and hated as himself. Silence never scared him. He sought fellowship while spurning it, and if taciturn with people he didn’t like, he talked volubly to the friends he loved without embarrassment or regret. Plus, disclaimers notwithstanding, he enjoyed politics and public office, the latter a strange sanctum for a man of poetry, or so said acquaintances who didn’t fret about money or manhood or acknowledge that America intervened in both. “Nobody would think that the same man could live two such different lives simultaneously,” Hawthorne had written his fiancée in 1840.
Once read, his stories never vanish: the minister dons his veil, Wakefield perambulates around London, and the birthmark, like Hawthorne, entices and appalls. Of all writers, female or male, in nineteenth-century America, Hawthorne created a woman, Hester Prynne, who still stands, statuesque, the heroine par excellence impaled by courage, conservatism, consensus: take your pick. Yet there she is. And her creator’s legacy, like hers, is one of success even though Hawthorne apprehended banal failure wherever he looked, particularly in his own desultory career.
James T. Fields swiftly smoothed out the wrinkles in Hawthorne’s reputation. Less than a month after Hawthorne’s death, he prepared to publish “The Dolliver Romance” in the July Atlantic along with a tribute from Oliver Wendell Holmes, and in the August number he featured Longfellow’s poem about Hawthorne’s funeral. In subsequent years, he stoked the Hawthorne fire whenever and however he could, encouraging Sophia to transcribe her husband’s journals for publication and scratching out a small essay of his own. He truly admired Hawthorne’s writing and truly cared for Hawthorne; if he protected his investment by keeping Hawthorne’s name honored and alive, so be it.
Shortly after Hawthorne’s death, his old friend George William Curtis sent Fields an essay commemorating Hawthorne’s life and work. Curtis was by then the brother-in-law of Robert Gould Shaw, having married a daughter of Hawthorne’s early benefactors, Frances and Sarah Shaw. He’d also campaigned for Frémont and Lincoln, and as political editor of Harper’s Weekly he tackled a subject Fields preferred to leave alone. What kind of person could stand by as the country buckled under the weight of cruelty, battle, slavery, and blood, Curtis wondered. “Is he human? Is he a man?”
Hawthorne died in 1864; the war had not ended, and Hawthorne’s peers did not yet know how or when it would. But they knew of Hawthorne’s reluctance to rally to their great cause and join in what Curtis believed was civilization’s lurching struggle toward freedom. “What other man of equal power,” Curtis demanded, “who was not intellectually constituted precisely as Hawthorne was, could have stood merely perplexed and bewildered, harassed by the inability of positive sympathy, in the vast conflict which tosses us all in its terrible vortex?” Curtis had n
o answer except to regard his beloved Hawthorne as a faunlike Donatello, locked in his tower. Dry and indifferent but without pride or arrogance, Hawthorne loved humankind in the abstract, not the particular. “His genius obeyed its law,” Curtis concluded weakly.
Fields refused to print the piece. “I said probably too precisely what I thought for a moment so near his death,” Curtis exclaimed, and mailed it to Charles Norton, now editor of the North American Review. Norton tried his hand at the paradox of Hawthorne. “His genius continually, as it seems to me, overmastered himself,” Norton observed, “and the depth & fulness of his feelings were forced into channels of expression in which they were confined & against which they struggled in vain.”
Had Hawthorne squeezed refractory emotions into channels much too narrow? No: those channels helped to create emotion by harnessing what they unleashed. And yes, in a way, insofar as Hawthorne outlived his idiom; the idea of romance seemed fusty now, even naïve. The world had altered a good deal since Independence Day, 1804. Hawthorne knew it. But he hankered after dark ancestral houses plunked down in forests, like Arden, where nothing changes, not even rot. This was his stay against nastiness and evil, meaninglessness and damned folly. But no matter its elegance, the fantasy of home—community, consolation, belonging, place—wore thin. Or out. And yet, comfortless, Hawthorne painted a dark corner of the contemporary world: terrifying, terrible, and grand.
Acknowledgments
For permission to quote from various archival material, for their assistance and their good cheer, I am grateful to the following people as well as to the collections they so ably represent: Thomas Knoles, Curator of Manuscripts, at the American Antiquarian Association; to William A. Wheeler; Daria D’Arienzo, Head of Archives and Special Collections at the Amherst College Library; Nina Myatt at Antiochiana, the Antioch College Library Archives; Susan Snyder at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Richard H. F. Lindemann, Director of the Bowdoin College Library, as well as Ian Graham, Dianne Gutscher, Susan Ravdin, and Carolyn Moseley; and at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Laura J. Latman, Registrar; my dear friend Patricia C. Willis, Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature, at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and Stephen Jones; Rodney Philips, Stephen Crook, Philip Milito, and, more recently, Diana Burnham and Isaac Gewitz, curator, all of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library; Roberta Zonghi, Keeper of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Boston Public Library; the staff at Trinity College Library, Cambridge University; Jean Ashton, Director, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University; Leslie P. Wilson, Curator, Special Collections, at the Concord Free Public Library; and Frederick Peña of the Grolier Club. I’m also very grateful to Leslie A. Morris, Curator of Manuscripts at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, and to Jenny Rathbun and the entire staff; to Leah Owens and other members of the staff as well as Sara S. Hodson, Curator of Literary Manuscripts at the Huntington Library; to Mary M. Wolfskill, Head, Reference and Reader Service Section, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, and to the research staff in prints and reproductions; to Nicholas Noyes, Head of Library Services, and Bill Barry of the Maine Historical Society; to Nicholas Graham of the Massachusetts Historical Society; the staff at the Minnesota Historical Society; to Christine Nelson, Curator of American Literary Manuscripts at the J. Pierpont Morgan Library; to the helpful staff at the National Archives; to David Smolen, Special Collections Librarian, and Wayne L. Gallup of the New Hampshire Historical Society; to Wayne Furman as well as the staff of the New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, the Laura Johnson Papers and the Duyckinck Family Papers; to the staff at the Notre Dame Archives; to Geoffrey D. Smith, head of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Ohio State University Library; to Carolle Morini, Heather Shanks, Christine Michelini, and Marc Teatum at the photographic division of the Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum; as well as Jane Ward, former curator, and Irene V. Axelrod, Head Manuscript Librarian, and the entire staff at the Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum; to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; to Barbara Thorpe, Raymond Village Library, Raymond, Maine; to Kathleen Banks Nutter and the staff at the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; to Roberto G. Trujillo, Head of Special Collections, and John E. Mustain, Green Library, Stanford University; the staff at the Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Alderman Library, University of Virginia; Michele Ostrow, Alex Rogers, and Tara Wenger at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; to Robert N. Matuozzi, Manuscripts Librarian, Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Holland Library, Washington State University; and to the staff at Special Collections, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
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