Hawthorne Read online

  But the trip was again postponed. Richard decided the Hathornes ought to wait until the following spring, when his new house would be ready. Having married Susan Dingley, daughter of one of Raymond’s first white settlers, he was building a mansion of his own, thirty-six feet long and thirty feet wide, with four rooms to a floor, so big by Raymond standards that it earned the sobriquet “Manning’s Folly” from startled neighbors, who claimed the glass for its windows came all the way from Belgium.

  Another year passed before the Hathornes finally arrived in Maine in 1816 along with Aunt Mary and Grandmother Manning, who consented to spend the summer. Betsy, however, planned to run the farm Richard had bought in nearby Bridgton—the roads between were passable. The children were ecstatic. There were sheep and hens and sweet country air, completely unlike the smoky fumes of Salem. “Stay here one summer,” Ebe rhapsodized, “& you will not be reconciled to live in any other place.”

  Manning’s Folly, Raymond, Maine (Author's collection)

  Bent on domesticating the sacred wood, Betsy Hathorne defended her decision to go to Raymond to Priscilla Manning, the bossy sister who hated change. “It is true we are deprived of many privileges that you enjoy,” Betsy explained, “it is much to be lamented that their is no settled Minister in this place we endeavour to compensate for the loss of public worship by studying our Bibles and other good books we are favored with I regret more every day the loss of the society of my friends yet I trust we shall be contented and I hope usefull.” To that end, she asked that Priscilla send her furniture and china, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, an edition of Shakespeare, and a dozen silk buttons.

  Her nerve didn’t last. The Mannings, especially Priscilla, pressured Betsy at least to send Nathaniel back to Salem to go to school, which she did reluctantly in the fall of 1816. Winter darkened on the lonely horizon. She coughed. Consumption? She ought to go to Salem too, if only for the winter. Richard didn’t object; the idea of her running the farm had struck him as impracticable anyway. The Hathornes packed their belongings but promised to return as soon as possible.

  In anticipation, Richard built another house across the brook from his. Plain, symmetrical, and large, it cost an immense sum, twenty-three hundred dollars, barn and outbuildings included, no expense spared for the Hathornes. The investment was worth the trouble, for just after Richard lit the fireplaces to take the chill from the boards, Robert arrived in Raymond with Betsy and Nathaniel and Ebe and Louisa. A year and a half had passed; it was now the fall of 1818.

  “I do not feel at all surprised that people think it strange we should remove from Salem,” Ebe primly informed her aunt Priscilla, “but I assure you we are extremely well contented here, and that nothing could induce us to return.” Especially Nathaniel. He tracked bears in the rubbery bush, angled for black-spotted trout at Thomas Pond, and shot partridge with his father’s gun, which Aunt Mary warned him against using so much. In the dry season, he rambled the Sebago’s low-lying shores; that winter he walked for miles on its crunchy surface. And though his residence in Raymond, all told, amounted to less than a year, it swiftly assumed for him, as for his sister, the aura of myth. One could live best out-of-doors in the woods, she would say, just as one had dwelled in the Forest of Arden.

  “I ran quite wild, and would, I doubt not, have willingly run wild till this time, fishing all day long, or shooting with an old fowling-piece; but reading a good deal, too, on the rainy days, especially in Shakspeare and ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ and any poetry or light books within my reach,” he would recall. “Those were delightful days; for that part of the country was wild then, with only scattered clearings, and nine tenths of it primeval woods.”

  Hathorne house, Raymond, Maine (Author's collection)

  According to Ebe, Maine toughened a once delicate brother. “It did him a great deal of good, in many ways,” she remarked in retrospect. “It was a new place, with few inhabitants, far away ‘from churches and schools,’ so of course [he] was taught nothing; but he became a good shot, and an excellent fisherman, and grew tall and strong. His imagination was stimulated, too, by the scenery and by the strangeness of the people; and by the absolute freedom he enjoyed.”

  Some say that Nathaniel kept a record of his Maine escapades in a diary, the first he ever owned and a present from his uncle Richard, who, in his inscription, urged him to write out his thoughts, some every day, in words as good as he could find, “upon any and all subjects, as it is one of the best means of securing for mature years, command of thought and language.” Several years after Hawthorne’s death, copied selections from this putative diary were sent to Samuel T. Pickard, nephew of John Greenleaf Whittier and part owner of the Portland Transcript in Maine. The packet came from someone who called himself “W.S.,” subsequently discovered to be William Simms or Symmes, a mulatto who lived in nearby Otisfield and an acquaintance of Nathaniel’s.

  Pickard began to publish these excerpts in 1871. Julian, quick to discredit whatever his family did not control, cried fraud and dismissed the excerpts as a “clumsy and leaky fabrication”; even if discovered to be genuine, they were, he said, “singularly destitute of biographical value.” Ebe was not so sure. She remembered some of the incidents recounted in the diary, as did a number of Cumberland County old-timers, and Uncle Robert Manning’s son discovered that Susan Dingley Manning had mentioned Richard’s giving it to Nathaniel.

  Unfortunately, the original diary never surfaced. Symmes assured Pickard he’d bring it to Portland. He didn’t. Pickard, who printed one thousand copies of the diary in 1897, began to have misgivings. Corroborating much of the diary’s information with “old-timers” in Maine, he also learned that the diarist recounted an event that took place in 1828, long after Hawthorne had left there. But the diary did seem written in Hawthorne’s style. Confused, he stopped trying to locate the original and concluded that the whole thing was at the very least “a literary curiosity of the first water, whether Hawthorne’s or the negro’s work.”

  Indeed it is, although most scholars consider the diary a hoax. Admittedly, its prose seems polished, especially Richard Manning’s inscription. Yet we, like Ebe, can’t discard it out of hand. If not by Hawthorne himself, the passages were written by someone who knew him and his family. “I have made this account of the expedition to please uncle Richard, who is an invalid,” comments the diarist, “and cannot get out to enjoy such support, and wished me to write and describe everything just as it happened, whether witty or silly, and give my own impressions.”

  The diarist is knowledgeable about persons and places in or near Raymond, and though this proves nothing, he’s also a whimsical figure, a down east Huck Finn gifted in the rudiments of storytelling. He imagines a conversation between himself and a tired old workhorse: “This morning I saw at the grist-mill a solemn-faced old horse, hitched to a trough. He had brought for his owner some bags of corn to be ground, who, after carrying them into the mill, walked up to uncle Richard’s store, leaving his half-starved animal in the cold wind, with nothing to eat, while the corn was being turned to meal. I felt sorry, and nobody being near, thought it best to have a talk with the old nag, and said, ‘Good-morning, Mr. Horse, how are you to-day?’ ”

  The shadow of Betsy Hathorne darts through these passages too. She’s a solicitous woman capable of laughing at her son’s naïveté and vigilant about his welfare. “Since the loss of my father, she dreads to have any one belonging to her go upon the water,” the diarist remarks. Then Uncle Richard comes to the rescue, finagling her consent for Nathaniel to go on a fishing trip. “I was almost sorry,” admits the diarist, “knowing that my day’s pleasure would cost her one of anxiety.”

  This son, whoever he is, doesn’t quite know how to leave his mother.

  We glimpse Robert Manning fleetingly. Someone preserved a strand of his hair, the color of chestnuts in fall, in a small locket portrait made of him circa 1818. At thirty-four he looks both exhausted and adamant. He stands in front of a flowering t
ree and holds a leaf in his hand.

  Like his siblings Richard and Betsy, Robert wanted to live close to the earth, to produce something, harvest something, claim something in the world as his own. He was no mere stagecoach manager. A man who required order and regulation, he was inventive and, in his own way, extraordinary, for he hoped to convert the wilderness, quite literally, into a garden—an orchard, actually—and he would take whatever time he needed to do it. He started by importing various types of fruit trees to Raymond. And when he realized he’d be staying in Salem more or less permanently, he resigned as director of the family stage business to become its silent partner. Then he turned his attention to the wonderful varieties of pear.

  Over the next twenty-five years, Robert Manning would also improve an assortment of cherry, apple, plum, and peach trees in an undertaking that demanded persistence, patience, and dedication as well as the long view. He helped establish the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and as one of America’s leading pomologists, a veritable prince among them, he dispensed his choicest fruit and seeds to anyone knowledgeable or curious. “An orchard has a relation to mankind,” Nathaniel would write in veiled tribute to Uncle Robert, “and readily connects itself with matters of the heart.”

  In 1838 Manning published The Book of Fruits: Being a Descriptive Catalogue of the Most Valuable Varieties of the Pear, Apple, Peach, Plum & Cherry, for New England Culture, fully illustrated. In it, Manning praises the Hawthorndean apple as a medium-size fruit, remarkably handsome, flesh white and very juicy but not highly flavored: perhaps his perspective on Nathaniel. For try as he might, Robert Manning could not cultivate his nephew as he might an apple or a peach.

  In an early story, Hawthorne invents a comic character, Parson Thumpcushion, the guardian of an orphan boy: “Though he had an upright heart,” says the story’s narrator, “and some called it a warm one, he was invariably stern and severe, on principle, to me.” Robert could be similarly insufferable. He corrected the grammar and spelling of his siblings and shouldered the responsibility—he liked to believe—for the betterment of his entire family. Yet he loved Nathaniel. “The older ‘dear uncle’ grows, the more he will love you,” he once told his nephew, and meant it. To this love, however, he attached various strings, which annoyed the fourteen-year-old rocketing toward independence, gun slung on his back, in the woodlands of Maine.

  To Robert, Maine was no place for a boy in need of an education and, though Robert didn’t say it, refinement. Uncle Richard didn’t exactly object to education—he himself loved books of travel, history, and fiction—but he was leery of Salem pretensions. Betsy was caught between the brothers. The idea of a rural retreat in Maine, a farm, even a meetinghouse where she could hold her Bible class and comfort the unchurched—all this appealed to her. Wanting Nathaniel close by, she helped effect a compromise: Richard’s young brother-in-law Jacob Dingley was being sent to school in Stroudwater, outside Portland, and Nathaniel would go with him.

  The two boys boarded with the Reverend Caleb Bradley, an upright Congregationalist and descendant of the notorious female Indian-slayer Hannah Duston (about whom Hawthorne would later write). Bradley was an eccentric, parsimonious man who liked to knit and sermonize. Needless to say, the boys were unhappy. Richard went to Portland and found them threatening to run away; soon Nathaniel was back in Raymond. But Robert, who poked fun at Nathaniel’s “dolefull complaints no mamma to take care of him,” saw his chance. Mama’s boy must become a man and go back to Herbert Street, this time for good.

  Richard bristled at Robert’s peremptory demand. “I have no chance to send Nathaniel nor is he willing to come to Salem,” he answered. The Mannings ignored him, and Priscilla reserved a place in Salem for Nathaniel at Samuel Archer’s school. He was slated to begin classes after his fifteenth birthday, in the summer of 1819.

  This was a fate even worse than Stroudwater. Nathaniel fired off a salvo to the Salem Mannings, hoping to stave off the inevitable, if only for a little while. He had caught eighteen large brook trout and shot a partridge and a hen hawk, he told Uncle Robert, as if to impress him. “I am sorry you intend to send me to school again,” he added. “Mother says she can hardly spare me.”

  Alas. The woods are no longer exempt from public haunt.

  “He sighs for the woods of Raymond, and yet he seems to be convinced of the necessity of preparing to do something,” Mary Manning reassured Betsy. Nathaniel was back on Herbert Street, where the Mannings cared less about his homesickness than his future. “I have no employment ready for him,” Uncle Robert jested, “however as a last resort we can bind him for 7 years to turn a Cutters Wheel & perhaps better.”

  The adjustment was difficult. “Aunt Mary is continually scolding at me,” Nathaniel complained to his mother. “Grandmaam hardly ever speaks a pleasant word to me.” He was chided, he was rebuked. “If I ever try to speak a word in my defense, they cry out against my impudence,” he protested. And none of the men backed him up. Uncles William and Samuel, having disgraced themselves in a failed business venture, were without much clout. Uncle Robert still spent long periods in Raymond. Hurry back, his nephew pleaded. “It seems very lonesome here,” he said. “There is a pot of excellent guaver jelly now in the house and one of preserved limes and I am afraid they will mould if you do not come soon for it’s esteemed sacrilege by Grandmother to eat any of them now because she is keeping them against somebody is sick and I suppose she would be very much disappointed if everybody was to continue well and they were to spoil.”

  “How often do I long for my gun, and wish that I could again savagize with you,” he wrote his sister Louisa. “But I shall never again run wild in Raymond, and I shall never be so happy as when I did.” His happiness, his gun, his sovereignty, his sisters, his mother: paradise lost in Raymond. “Oh how I wish I was again with you with nothing to do but to go a gunning,” a forlorn Nathaniel lamented, this time to his mother. “But the happiest days of my life are gone. Why was I not a girl that I might have been pinned all my life to my Mother’s apron.”

  Rising at six in the morning to study, he managed to satisfy his Salem teachers and his family, but when he wrote his mother and sisters, he insisted, “I shall never be contented here I am sure.” Raymond was the measure of all he held dear. “I dreamed the other night, that I was walking by the Sebago, and when I awoke was so angry at finding it all a delusion, that I gave Uncle Robert (who sleeps with me) a most horrible kick.”

  It seems appropriate to mention here biographer James Mellow’s speculation, based on this letter, that, “pressed to explain the nature of Hawthorne’s critical experience [of sin], I would suggest that he may have been subjected to some homosexual assault or seduction, perhaps by his Uncle Robert, during the period when the two were sleeping together.” A responsible critic, Mellow knew his conjecture derived not from evidence but from the shaky attempt to pin a meaning on a single remark, one that has more significance today, when uncles and nephews do not normally sleep together, than in 1821, when the Mannings crowded into fewer rooms, having rented part of the house to boarders. Plus, the richly ambivalent relationship between Hawthorne and his uncle Robert Manning resists simple assumptions. And without evidence—we don’t even know what Hawthorne was dreaming—we can as easily assume Nathaniel made a sexual overture toward his uncle rather than the reverse.

  Nor can a single, flat interpretation untangle the imagery of guns and virility—or aggression, comfort, and escape—encircling Nathaniel’s relation to more than one uncle and, later, to other men.

  Whether in Raymond or Salem, Nathaniel was a voracious reader. A young man of his time, he consumed Walter Scott, Ann Radcliffe, the Arabian Nights, Tobias Smollett, William Godwin, Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, the poet James Greenland, Samuel Johnson, James Hogg, Oliver Goldsmith, Byron, Southey, Burns, and Henry Fielding, his taste running to Gothicism, poetry, and social comment. If he had friends, he doesn’t mention them; he rationalized in later years that, “having spe
nt so much of my boyhood and youth away from my native place, I had very few acquaintances in Salem.”

  And there was Ebe. With her he could share his reading and with her aspire to great verse. Or, if not great, at least publishable. “Tell Ebe she’s not the only one of the family whose works have appeared in the papers,” he bragged. Alas, if Ebe’s or Nathaniel’s work was in fact printed, no one knows what or where.

  But some of Nathaniel’s early poems have escaped oblivion, especially those mailed to Louisa in Raymond. A “Departed Genius” molders in his “lowly grave”; a lover mourns his beloved’s death; and with less sanctimoniousness, the poet memorializes his favorite cat. In one didactic poem, a young man leaves home to go to war and finds himself lamenting “that lone cottage, where/The early hours of life flew by,/On wings of youthful ecstasy.” Too late the callow warrior discovers “that Glory’s ray,/Could never bring one happy day.”

  The themes of these productions anticipate motifs in his early fiction: displacement, homesickness, and the vanity of earthly things. In the story “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” for instance, Robin longs for some prelapsarian spot far from the bustle—and temptations—of urban life. At the same time, Robin, like Nathaniel, has been hoping to profit from the good graces of his uncle, a city dweller of some stature, he assumes. He travels to town to earn his favor and “rise in the world,” but, increasingly disillusioned, yearns for the rustic family he left behind in the woods. He imagines them gathering at sunset just before going indoors, “and when Robin would have entered also, the latch tinkled into its place, and he was excluded from his home. ‘Am I here, or there?’ cried Robin, starting; for all at once, when his thoughts had become visible and audible in a dream, the long, wide, solitary street shone out before him.”