Hawthorne Read online

  Praise for Hawthorne

  A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

  A Newsday Favorite Book of the Year

  A Providence Journal-Bulletin Favorite Book of the Year

  “A vivid account of a highly interesting life.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “In this vivid, almost cinematic portrait of Hawthorne, Brenda Wineapple blends impressive scholarship with fine literary skills to bring new life and a fresh luster to her subject. Her Hawthorne succeeds brilliantly in clarifying our understanding of a sometimes shadowy figure who remains, despite fad and fashion, close to the core of our national heritage in fiction.”

  —ARNOLD RAMPERSAD, Stanford University

  “The shelf of Hawthorne biographies is wide, but Brenda Wineapple’s Hawthorne: A Life stands out as one that breathes life into the dust of the library.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “A scrupulous biography of Hawthorne that does a good deal to restore his portrait’s original colors, while guiding readers back to the novels … and short stories … that shouldn’t be left to gather dust. Wineapple has crafted a smart, revelatory portrait of a complex, contradictory, secretive man, an Adamic figure in American literature.”

  —The Nation

  “A portrait of a crucial time in American letters when the young nation was attempting to forge its own unique voice on the world’s literary stage.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “Wineapple never ceases to probe the artistic processes behind such masterpieces as The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables. A portrait both convincing and memorable.”

  —Booklist (starred, boxed review)

  “Compelling.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Rich in archival details and perceptive analysis … successful in capturing the spirit of the age and commenting on the making of the author.”

  —Library Journal

  “[Wineapple’s] Hawthorne is definitely a different, and vastly more complicated, person than the one you studied in American literature class.”

  —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  “Superb … [a] delicious new biography … make[s] Hawthorne seem a lot more human.”

  —City Pages (Minneapolis)

  “Fresh and reader-friendly.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Riveting, dramatically charged, and elegantly written … impossible to put down.”

  —The Providence Journal

  “Wineapple is a splendid stylist and a master of concision.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Infuses historical fact with lively details … capture[s] a contemporary Hawthorne in all his conflicted glory, rendering him tenderly human … Wineapple does for Hawthorne what David McCullough did for John Adams, freeing him from history that he may walk among us again.”

  —Mobile Register

  “Clearly the best biography of Hawthorne; the Hawthorne for our time … a delight to read from start to end.”

  —SACVAN BERCOVITCH, Harvard University

  “Impressively researched in primary sources, scrupulously cited, amply illustrated with period photographs and well-indexed, this is the work of a talented scholar … [with] a light touch at exploring nuances of character and meaning, and she is blessed—all too rare among literary critics—with a supple, engaging prose style, which is to say the book is filled with insight and is very readable.… Wineapple’s lively, bold, insightful book will reward you many times over.”

  —The Berkshire Eagle

  “Richly detailed and nuanced: a model of literary biography, and an illumination for students of Hawthorne’s work.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  2004 RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACK EDITION

  Copyright © 2003 by Brenda Wineapple

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

  Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks,

  an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously

  in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This work was originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2003.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC,

  for permission to reprint an excerpt from the poem

  “Question of Travel” from The Complete Poems:

  1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983

  by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar,

  Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wineapple, Brenda.

  Hawthorne : a life / Brenda Wineapple.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80866-0

  1. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804–1864. 2. Novelists, American—19th century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS1881 .W53 2003

  813’.3—dc21

  [B] 2002192485

  Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  For Michael Dellaira

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Illustrations

  CHAPTER 1: The Prison Door—Introductory

  CHAPTER 2: Home

  CHAPTER 3: The Forest of Arden

  CHAPTER 4: The Era of Good Feelings

  CHAPTER 5: That Dream of Undying Fame

  CHAPTER 6: Storyteller

  CHAPTER 7: Mr. Wakefield

  CHAPTER 8: The Wedding Knell

  CHAPTER 9: The Sister Years

  CHAPTER 10: Romance of the Revenue Service

  CHAPTER 11: The World Found Out

  CHAPTER 12: Beautiful Enough

  CHAPTER 13: Repatriation

  CHAPTER 14: Salem Recidivus

  CHAPTER 15: Scarlet Letters

  CHAPTER 16: The Uneven Balance

  CHAPTER 17: The Hidden Life of Property

  CHAPTER 18: Citizen of Somewhere Else

  CHAPTER 19: The Main Chance

  CHAPTER 20: This Farther Flight

  CHAPTER 21: Truth Stranger Than Fiction

  CHAPTER 22: Questions of Travel

  CHAPTER 23: Things to See and Suffer

  CHAPTER 24: Between Two Countries

  CHAPTER 25: The Smell of Gunpowder

  CHAPTER 26: A Handful of Moments

  Epilogue: The Painted Veil

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Illustrations

  1. Hawthorne’s birthplace, 27 Union Street, Salem. (Library of Congress)

  2. Manning’s Folly, Raymond, Maine. (Author’s collection)

  3. Hathorne house, Raymond, Maine. (Author’s collection)

  4. Herman Melville. (Library of Congress)

  5. Franklin Pierce, 1852. (Library of Congress)

  6. The Greek Slave, Hiram Powers. Punch, London. (Library of Congress)

  7. Beatrice Cenci, portrait attributed to Guido Reni. (Author’s collection)

  8. Nathaniel Hawthorne, two years before his death. Photograph by Alexander Gardner for Mathew Brady. (Library of Congress)

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Prison Door—Introductory

  The wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, become
s a pure and uncontrollable mischief.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

  And to make an end is to make a beginning.

  The end is where we start from.

  T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

  But the past was not dead.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Custom-House”

  GUILTY. He heard the verdict and flinched. The second-born child of the very famous author had been convicted of defrauding the public, a violation of section 215 of the United States Criminal Code, in the matter of the Hawthorne Silver and Iron Mines, Ltd., Julian Hawthorne, president. Julian’s father had written obsessively of crime and punishment and the sins of fathers visited on sons, and here he was, the son, sixty-six years old, hair white as sugar, well known, respected, and guilty—guilty—sitting in a New York City courtroom, sporting a scarlet tie.

  Judge Mayer banged his gavel. Staring straight ahead, Julian frowned slightly as befitted a man of his stature and his shame. He, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, would be imprisoned a year and a day in the United States federal penitentiary in Atlanta, his term set to run from November 25, 1912, the day the public trial began.

  Likely his personal trials began much earlier. The great name of Nathaniel Hawthorne will “always handicap you more or less,” poet James Russell Lowell had warned. “To be the son of a man of genius is at best to be born to a heritage of invidious comparisons,” Henry James Jr. had acknowledged—and placed the Atlantic Ocean between himself and his philosopher father. At least the younger James wrote fiction, which the elder James did not; comparisons are especially invidious when the son plies the father’s trade, as Julian did.

  But it was even more than that. Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne’s children seemed to spring from one of Hawthorne’s tales, incarnating their father’s paradoxes writ large. “To plant a family!” Hawthorne had written. “This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do.” It was as if the past always lay in wait, just around the bend. The fortunes of each Hawthorne child uncannily bore out what Hawthorne considered a curse of guilt and grief, of somberness and what we today call depression, as well as talent, penury, pluck, and fortitude, all stitched together in a bright pattern, like Hester Prynne’s letter “A.”

  Hawthorne’s firstborn, a daughter, descended directly from literature. Christened Una after Spenser’s heroine in The Faerie Queene, she served as the model for Pearl, the precocious child in The Scarlet Letter, and many observers noticed her resemblance to her literary father. Like him, she was handsome, tall, exacting, and remote. “The more I feel the more it seems a necessity to be reserved,” said Una at fifteen. Una had worshipped sorrow, said her mother, since the age of six. “It was impossible she should ever be happy,” remarked a friend. The sky was too blue, the sun too blazing, her own feelings too hard to bear. She died mysteriously at the age of thirty-three.

  Rose Hawthorne, the youngest Hawthorne child, fared better—eventually. After the death of both her parents, a horrible marriage, a feud with her siblings, and the early loss of her only child to diphtheria, Rose fulfilled the unspoken mission of one of the characters in Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun: she takes communion. As a self-ordained Sister of Mercy, Rose consecrated herself to the poor and the sick, and at the age of forty-four, in 1896, established the charitable organization Sister Rose’s Free Home (after St. Rose of Lima) to care for indigent cancer patients. In 1899 she received the Holy Habit of the Third Order of St. Dominic, and two years later, in 1901, the home was incorporated as the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer, still extant today in Hawthorne, New York.

  Then there was Julian, in the middle. On Easter Sunday, 1913, he was transported to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. The formal charge against him and his cronies was misuse of the United States Postal Service, a catchall complaint designed to nail the defendants, whose real offense, according to Judge Mayer, wasn’t selling shares in a worthless silver and iron mine so much as the exploitation of their recognizable names. “Theirs is the greater crime,” spat the New York district attorney, “for they have prostituted them.” The general counsel for the Hawthorne mines, former mayor of Boston Josiah Quincy, was cleared of the one conspiracy count against him, but the neurologist Dr. William J. Morton, whose father had discovered ether just before the Civil War, went to jail with Julian.

  Julian held his head up high. His conviction disgraced neither him nor his name, he said, just the sleazy people who wished to see him—for some inexplicable reason—go to prison. What else could he say? After his sentencing, he briskly strode from the courtroom into the marshal’s office and with remarkable sangfroid pulled out a small cigarette case, which he pushed toward Morton and the fourth accomplice, Alfred Freeman, a petty swindler without a fancy name. Morton stood paralyzed. Freeman circled the room. Hawthorne pocketed his case and shook the hand of a sympathetic well-wisher. “In such extremities,” he later noted, “a man’s manhood and dignity come to his support.”

  But when the deputy marshal clicked a pair of steel handcuffs round his wrist, Julian blinked in disbelief and with some confusion walked through the slanting rain to the city jail, a place familiarly known, à la Hawthorne, as the Tombs. “I was sure we should be acquitted,” he muttered.

  Yet by and large the only son of America’s most esteemed novelist maintained a transcendental faith in his own innocence, a trait that linked him more to his tender, doting mother than to his morally particular father, who spent a lifetime probing motives, his own most of all. An epicure of intent, Hawthorne knew what the heart held in thrall. “It is a very common thing,” he wrote near the end of his life, “—this fact of a man’s being caught and made prisoner by himself.” But Julian knew what he was doing when he exploited the Hawthorne name, which he plainly saw as false. Nathaniel Hawthorne: to the public it conjured American probity and success; to Julian it was fraudulent, overblown, hollow at the core.

  Dissimulation was the keystone of Julian’s career. And inadvertent parody of his father. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing life was short and well crafted; Julian’s, an interminable flood: hundreds of second-rate novels and poems, stories, histories, travel books, reminiscences, essays, even a two-volume biography of his parents, all capitalizing on the eminent patronymic. (With spooky foresight, his father once said of Julian that “his tendencies … seem to be rather towards breadth than elevation.”) In 1908, when Julian abandoned literature for geology, as the president of the Hawthorne Silver and Iron Mines, Ltd., he managed to write hundreds of promotional letters as well as several promotional books. His energy was amazing.

  If his father obeyed the Muse, Julian served Mammon. On selling his first short story, he thought, “Why not go on adding to my income in this way from time to time?” It seemed easy enough. “I think we take ourselves too seriously,” he said of his fellow novelists, and at his death was credited as one of the first American writers to make literature “a bread-and-butter calling.” When Henry James published his incisive study of Hawthorne, Julian confided to his diary that James deserved success “better than I do, not only because his work is better than mine, but because he takes more pains to make it so.” In public, however, Julian protected himself from James and, more importantly, from his father’s literary scruples. “I cannot sufficiently admire the pains we are at to make our work … immaculate in form,” he declared. Aesthetic niceties are effeminate. Success is a racket.

  Broad-chested and handsome—like his father—and with the same high coloring and dark wavy hair, Julian was born “to have ample means,” declared his adoring mother. Friends thought she overpraised him, and that his father hadn’t praised him enough. Whatever had happened, Julian combined his father’s cynicism with his mother’s ebullience. He loved women (though he was no feminist), tailored clothes, abundance, and a good scam. Hawthorne dryly assessed his son’s character; he ought to join a ministry, he said.

  Julian floundered at Harvard, quitting just
months after his father’s death, his interests inclining more to sport than study. He floundered at the Lawrence Scientific School and at the Realschule in Dresden, where he proposed to study civil engineering with a view toward knocking together a huge fortune in the American West. This plan also went awry. Unlike his father, who had delayed his marriage to Sophia, Julian married at the age of twenty-four and sired ten children, eight of whom survived. But he never had enough, kept enough, saved enough, planned enough.

  His insouciance exasperated Rose. That he wouldn’t accept a pardon unless William Morton also received one was yet another instance of his irresponsibility, she told his family. “But he is he, so to speak,” she said, throwing her hands up. Still, Rose mounted a loyal defense. “I know that he really believed in the mines,” she reportedly told Joseph P. Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson’s secretary. To Julian, however, she starchily observed, “I am consoled about your personal trials by knowing that you have always adapted yourself to deprivations with the unconcern—or, rather, the manly vigor of one of your remote ancestors.”

  Coming from Rose, it was an equivocal compliment. She knew their Puritan ancestors whipped, scorched, hanged, and banished women such as herself for views far less heretical than hers. Julian too had disapproved of her vocation, though more amiably than their ancestors would have. After her death, he remembered Rose as a headstrong girl prone to egregious errors of judgment. Her errand in Washington, D.C., on his behalf, was one of these. On April 3, 1913, Mother Alphonsa, as Rose was known, traveled by train to the nation’s capital to ask President Wilson to pardon her brother.

  “What had I to do with ‘pardons’?” Julian was furious. “Pardon for what?” But Rose was determined to restore luster to the Hawthorne name. A band of white cloth pleated across her forehead and stern black robes sweeping about her ample figure, she was every bit as fierce as Hester Prynne and probably just as nervous when she boarded a humid trolley for the White House. Tumulty received her. Strangely affected by the pink-cheeked woman in black and white, he ignored protocol and sent her request directly to the president.