Hawthorne Read online

  For Salem—for Nathaniel—the past was never dead.

  How could it be? Salem was where women had dangled from the gallows, and Hawthorne’s great-grandfather had all but tied the rope. If William Hathorne crossed an angry sea, planted crops, catechized infidels, and laid the cornerstone for a new generation, his son, Colonel John Hathorne, outdid his father. As Salem magistrate during the witchcraft delusion of 1692, this flinty chip off a flinty block heard pleas from more than one hundred accused witches, each of whom he presumed guilty. Swift in judgment—hadn’t the “black man” whispered obscenities to village women?—Colonel John mounted his steed and rode out to the stony promontory later known as Gallows Hill, where, unyielding, he surveyed what his ironclad piety had wrought. According to his family, he also brought down a curse on subsequent Hathornes, hurled at him by one of the dying witches.

  John Hathorne’s slate gravestone lies in Salem’s oldest cemetery, the Burying Point at Charter Street, where as a boy Nathaniel Hathorne saw it canting slightly forward, still unbowed, even by time. And he listened to what he called “chimney-corner” stories about the deeds, nefarious and otherwise, of militant forefathers, which fascinated him so much that his own published tales, when first collected, were aptly called “twice-told.” What he did not pick up, chimney-fashion, about his Hathorne relatives, he eventually gleaned in the local antiquarian associations or libraries established to conserve—and create—a history of the new republic. (The Boston Athenaeum, eighteen miles from Salem, opened in 1805; the Salem Athenaeum in 1810; and in 1821, when Nathaniel was seventeen, Salem’s Essex Institute began to round up and preserve all the records of the county.)

  Inscriptions on family gravestones, fireside yarns, shipping records, quarto-sized logbooks bound in marbled boards: none of these could supply what he sought from his father, whom he barely knew. A seafaring man, Captain Nathaniel Hathorne had died of yellow fever in Surinam in 1808. Gone forever, buried without a Salem marker, he left his four-year-old son as beguiled by genealogy as Salem itself.

  Salem was a contentious town. Federalists and Republicans read different newspapers, attended different churches, and for the most part docked their ships at competing wharves. In 1796 Elias Hasket Derby, called “King Derby” by detractors, sued the upstart George Crowninshield because Crowninshield’s wharf jutted out twelve feet too far—farther, that is, than Derby’s.

  The dispute wasn’t about size alone. Derby was a Federalist, Crowninshield a Republican. And so Salem citizenry split down party lines. “The jealousy & envy which prevails among merchants, especially in this Town, is fully equal to that supposed to exist among literary men,” remarked the Reverend Bentley, a vocal Jeffersonian, which is to say a Crowninshield man and a liberal.

  In 1804 the Federalists staged an Independence Day procession. The plumes on their headgear swayed in the summer breeze, and their bayonets glinted, brazen in the sun. Not to be outdone, the Republicans assembled at the courthouse to march down Essex Street, their own banners flying, to the East Church, which displayed, among the July flowers, portraits of Governor Endicott, Minister Higginson, and Salem’s first merchant, Captain George Corwin. The congregation then prayed for God and Jefferson, and the cannons smoked until sundown.

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

  From 27 Union Street one could hear the guns roaring on the Common if one listened carefully. Likely no one did. There, in the upstairs bedroom, two families celebrated deliverance of a more personal sort: Nathaniel Hathorne was born to the raven-haired beauty Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne and her seagoing husband Nathaniel.

  The Manning pastor, the Reverend Bentley, had married the child’s parents three years earlier, on August 2, 1801. The bride, Betsy Manning, was then twenty-one years old and two months pregnant, a fact that raises eyebrows among literary detectives nosing after the origins of Hester Prynne, since her pregnancy forced to consummation a courtship that had stretched out for six or more years.

  Her future husband’s prospects may have caused the delay. Though Hathorne was a good enough sailor, his maritime rise was neither meteoric nor lucrative. At the time of his marriage, Hathorne at twenty-six still hadn’t been promoted to captain, meaning he didn’t command his own ship or enough money to buy a house of his own; he was no cod-prince. So the newlyweds settled in the smallish Hathorne home on Union Street, where Hathorne’s widowed mother Rachel, his unmarried brother, and his three unmarried sisters all lived.

  Old even by Salem standards, the gambrel house had been built sometime before 1700 by Benjamin Pickman and had sheltered Hathornes since 1756, when Daniel Hathorne (the writer’s grandfather) had married Rachel Phelps. Betsy Hathorne was familiar with it. The Hathorne place sat directly behind the newer Manning residence on Herbert Street, one separated from the other by a large patch of garden. Not surprisingly, the Mannings and the Hathornes saw one another often; they rode out together to Essex, Massachusetts, for the ordination of the local minister, and two of Betsy’s brothers, William and Robert, occasionally bought shares in various sailing vessels. Robert Manning put over one hundred dollars into the voyage of the brig Nabby from which his brother-in-law Nathaniel Hathorne never returned.

  Yet the families differed in crucial respects. Betsy’s parents, Richard and Miriam Lord Manning, had come to Salem from nearby Ipswich and Essex, and though they traced their lineage back to the early settlers of Massachusetts, they dealt mainly in metals and horseflesh, not witches and General Courts. A former gunsmith and blacksmith, Richard Manning was far more prosperous than the Widow Rachel Hathorne of Union Street. In fact, by the year of his daughter’s marriage to Hathorne, Manning had bought all available property, except the Widow Hathorne’s, on Union Street and the adjacent Herbert Street, where he had built a three-story, commodious, and nondescript family mansion (as the place was known) right next to his stables. He was also hitching horses to his own stagecoach line, the Salem and Boston, which had the best team in New England.

  Betsy sang in the choir at the Reverend Bentley’s East Church, which tilted not just toward Jefferson but toward Unitarianism, though once married, she worshipped at her husband’s church, where she was baptized in 1806 along with her children. Endowed by temperament with a sense of depravity better suited to the Congregationalists, Betsy Hathorne forbade her children to read any but religious books on the Sabbath. She was a bashful, inhibited woman averse to exuberance. Or so her son indicated, noting the “strange reserve, in regard to matters of feeling, that has always existed among us.” Nonetheless, she wielded considerable power, and during periods of stress, indecision, or calamity, wrapped herself in illness, which she wore like a shroud, frightening the children, who may have feared she’d vanish like their father had.

  But she was literate and intelligent and lovely, with exquisite manners, an aristocratic deportment, and according to one of her daughters, the same “capacity for placid enjoyment” as Nathaniel. An observer remarked she “looked as if she had walked out of an old picture,” her large gray eyes “full of sensibility and expression.” Nathaniel, her son, apparently resembled her, especially his sensitive (some called it weak) mouth.

  Five years older than Betsy, the writer’s father, Nathaniel Hathorne, was born on May 19, 1775. He followed the sea, as his father and brother had. If not as striking as the persecutors, the nautical Hathornes weren’t a colorless crew. Hathorne’s father, “Bold Daniel,” had fought the British in 1776 from the deck of his privateer the True American, and when the old salt died twenty years after that, in 1796, the flags in the port of Salem flew at halfmast. By then his son Mate Hathorne was walking the decks of ships like King Derby’s America, famous for lugging from India the first elephant ever seen in the United States. But Mate Hathorne was focused on treasures of a different kind: “In Storms when clouds obscure the Sky/And thunders roll and lightning fly/In the midst of all these dire allarms/I’ll think dear Betsey on thy Charms.” Charming
Betsy was fifteen.

  On learning of Betsy’s engagement, Old Captain Knight had reputedly said to her father, “I hear your darter is going to marry the son of Captain Hawthorne [sic]. I knowed him: he was the sternest man that ever walked a deck!” Yet when compared with Salem’s stern sailors and wily merchants, Mate Hathorne himself seems fairly undistinguished, even in looks: five feet, ten and a half inches tall, slightly built, and supposedly “inclined to melancholy, and of a reticent disposition.” His son, the writer, traced his tendency toward seclusion to his father. Granite, he said, was his legacy.

  Obviously Nathaniel wanted some connection with a father who left little. Hathorne had brought home blue crockery from China, monogrammed with “NH” painted in gold and passed down to his son; a punch bowl from Calcutta, some scattered meteorological observations, and a verse or two in his logbooks, which young Nathaniel saved, fantasizing over his father’s few exploits, such as a near battle, when first mate on the Herald, with a French privateer. From these books he learned not much more, just that his father had seen creatures of land and sea, silver birds and Cape pigeons, and that Hathorne had kept a leaf from a cabbage tree and two shoots of a three-needle pine.

  Having shipped for Sumatra, Hathorne was at sea when his first child, Elizabeth (nicknamed Ebe), was born on March 7, 1802. Nor was he at Union Street two years later when Nathaniel was born on the Fourth of July; and he would never see his third child, Maria Louisa, born on January 9, 1808. He had to sail. The sea was his livelihood, his calling, his future, and the future of his family.

  In 1804, after the birth of his son, Hathorne came back to Salem a captain at last and soon earned a coveted membership in Salem’s East India Marine Society for having navigated his ship round Cape Horn. But in Salem the tides were turning. In 1807 sixty-one ships left for the West Indies and South America, sixty-three for Europe, ten for India and China; later that year President Jefferson levied the embargo that would bleed the town. In 1808 no ships sailed from Salem. Docks stood idle, planks soggy with disuse, and soup kitchens soon fed over a thousand of the unemployed.

  On December 28, 1807, just days before the embargo took effect, Captain Hathorne shipped out on the 154-ton brig Nabby. Now the father of three, he no longer circumnavigated the globe. The gesture didn’t save him. Sometime between the birth of Louisa (as Maria Louisa was known) and March 1808, he took ill in Surinam with the dreaded yellow jack. He didn’t last a fortnight. On April 10, Betsy’s father, Richard Manning, asked the Reverend Bentley to say a prayer for his son-in-law. A few invoices aboard the Nabby were all that remained of Hathorne, age thirty-two. His son had not turned four.

  “I remember very well that one morning my mother called my brother into her room, next to the one where we slept, and told him that his father was dead,” Ebe would recall. Nathaniel seldom spoke about his father or his death. Years later, though, Sophia Hawthorne insisted that the captain had “died in India very suddenly from being detained late in the country in the evening in a linen dress. On which account he took violent cold and the Indian fever. His funeral was gorgeous.”

  It’s difficult to know whether she fabricated the story or whether Hawthorne himself had embroidered the truth for her benefit and his, the reality of his father’s death having been so harsh. And hard financially. Captain Hathorne had died intestate, leaving his widow with the 4 percent owed from the Nabby’s voyage, amounting to $427.02 and from which she paid more than $200 to cover such sundry expenses as the minister’s eulogy and the digging of a grave.

  “He left very little property,” remarked Ebe of her feckless father, “and my grandfather Manning took us home.”

  In later years, Nathaniel remarked that he should have been a sailor; and until the age of sixteen he’d actually hoped to become one, much to his mother’s horror.

  His earliest compositions were said to have been sea stories about bronzed pirates and hardy privateers, perhaps modeled on Byron’s Corsair, and in two youthful poems he did marshal his fledgling talent to extol the ocean’s awful strength: “The billowy Ocean rolls its wave/Above the ship-wreck’d Sailor’s Grave.” Those missing at sea, he wrote in another poem, are “those for whom we weep,/The young, the bright, the fair.”

  Such stuff might be standard for an adolescent who loped along the shore on a spring afternoon, but Hawthorne had lost his father to the water and spoke of the sea as a place of comfort, destruction, and wonder, of adventure and male bonding, a place salutary but ultimately unknowable, unreachable. “Of what mysteries is it telling?” he would ask in a sketch, “Foot-prints on the Sea-shore.” “Of sunken ships, and whereabouts they lie?” Ebe recalled two lines of a song in one of her brother’s earliest stories, possibly about pirates: “The rovers of the Sea, they were a fearful Race,” and in copying one of his father’s logbook entries, he rewrote his father’s observations in what seems the first sentence of an adventure tale: “The weather not looking prudent to run over the shoals tonight, we are determined to wait for good weather and fair wind.”

  A friend recalled that Hawthorne’s love for the sea “amounted to a passionate worship,” and another said that as an adult he resembled the wharf rats of his youth and “looked like a boned pirate.” Hawthorne said of himself that his breath “came fresh from the wilderness of ocean.” Several of Hawthorne’s closest friends had lost their own fathers to the sea or made their livings from it at one time or another. He returned to it as often as he could.

  Richard Manning drove his horse hard. It was necessary for such a man, who frequently traveled between Salem and a small settlement, Raymond, in the district of Maine. In early winter, roads the color of tobacco juice filled with drifts of snow, making them impassable. Spring was no better. Mud, ankle deep, sucked horses’ hooves into slimy ruts.

  Manning pushed on. As far as he was concerned, Raymond might well have been a suburb of Salem, which in a way it was. Promised in 1690 to Captain William Raymond and other residents of Beverly, Massachusetts, for services rendered in a (failed) expedition to Quebec, the Maine property lay twenty miles northwest of Portland and bordered the great, gleaming Sebago Pond, which, like Maine itself, was part of Massachusetts. Maine was not a separate state.

  Mean in winter, gorgeous in summer, its ponds teeming with fish and its forests with game, trees hung heavy with sugar pear, fields awash in berries, Raymond was the Land of Promise. That’s what the Mannings called it. Speculators from Beverly and Salem had purchased large tracts of land there, though few of them wanted to relocate. Instead they discussed their holdings over spiked punch at Salem’s Sun Tavern and in 1795 appointed Richard Manning their tax collector. It was a profitable post. From it, Manning acquired huge parcels of real estate at rock-bottom prices.

  So he rode hard. He wanted to do “everything,” as he said, “in my powre for my Children.” He and his wife, Miriam, had raised nine children at 12 Herbert Street, and the family was still growing. For the summer after Captain Hathorne’s death, Betsy had crossed the garden with her three children to join her parents, eight unmarried siblings, a great-aunt, a servant, and a passel of scampering cats who lived there. “There were four Uncles and four Aunts, all, for many years, unmarried, so that we were welcome in the family,” Ebe reminisced.

  According to relatives, the atmosphere in the Manning house resembled that of a noisy tavern, family members taking sides in the civil and religious controversies riling the rest of Salem. Betsy’s sister Mary and her brother Samuel joined her at the Hathornes’ Congregationalist First Church. Betsy’s two other siblings, Priscilla and Maria, considered the First Church a little lax, so they worshipped with the more orthodox Trinitarians at the Tabernacle. The Manning parents stayed at Bentley’s East Church. It was a singular case, marveled the Reverend Dr. Bentley, of a family internally divided. Brother Robert usually sided with Priscilla; Richard, yet another brother, spent much of his time in the rustic wilds of Maine, where he hoped to erect his own church—Congregationalist.


  Doctrinal distinctions aside, the Mannings, like their fellow citizens, knit religion into the fabric of their enterprising lives, their ambition to get ahead, to own more land or stagecoaches or horses or fruit trees than any one else, to prove themselves equal to Salem’s snobbish upper crust, to rise on the social ladder and yet make themselves of use, to disseminate the Bible and remind one another in perpetuity of their fallen nature, their need for redemption. “All have something to repent of,” Mary Manning, the eldest sibling, pertly told her brother Richard.

  None of this was lost on young Nathaniel, who complained about the hard wooden pews at the First Church and the ugly bust of John Wesley at home. Reputedly he removed the bust from its pedestal in the dead of winter and filled it with water through a hole in its bottom. He waited for the water to freeze, assuming Wesley would burst like a pitcher. Wesley stayed intact. But Nathaniel drank in the lilting cadence of Scripture and stored up its parables, repeated often at Herbert Street, which he prized for the fine stories they were. At the idea of damnation, however, he squirmed; though protest was unavailing.

  The outward particulars of Nathaniel’s early life seem unexceptional: he fought with a chum at school; he liked parades and fires; he teased the household cats and his younger sister. At one time he owned a pet monkey, which, when it died, he buried in the garden. He played in the Manning stables with a younger cousin, bouncing on the chaises, and supposedly plagued his family with theological questions: Who made God? Did Adam and Eve eat baked beans? Was John Calvin a Christian?