Hawthorne Page 7

  Nathaniel and his friends competed in all areas, from class standing to appearance, placing friendly wagers on their future. “If Nathaniel Hathorne is neither a married man nor a widower on the fourteenth day of November, One Thousand Eight Hundred and Thirty-six,” Cilley bet, “I bind myself upon my honor to pay the said Hathorne a barrel of the best old Madeira wine.” He lost, shrugged, and delayed paying his debt as long as he could: he had the makings of a stellar political career.

  Like Pierce, Cilley quickly rose through the Democratic Party, as the Jeffersonian Republicans were called since Jackson’s election. After college Cilley studied law in Thomaston, Maine, and then headed straight to the legislature. Known as a popular and conniving Democrat, he entered the United States Congress in 1836. But he was also steering toward an early and violent death by dueling, “stretched in his own blood,” Nathaniel would write, “—slain for an almost impalpable punctilio!”

  Julian Hawthorne, preparing to write his father’s biography, noted that when Nathaniel went to college, he was muscular and handsome, insubordinate toward the faculty, and condescending toward fellow students. In fact, remarked Julian, his father dominated men like Franklin Pierce, with whom he drank, but never got drunk himself.

  Julian’s observations ring with some small truth. Students who did not know him well remember Nathaniel as a taciturn young fellow, the most diffident member of the class, said one, “shrinking almost like a girl from all general intercourse either in the sports or meetings of his fellow students.” His closest confidant, Horatio Bridge, conjured a somewhat different image, that of Nathaniel strolling by his side through the thick pine-sweet forest, two friends sharing the confidences of undergraduates no longer boys, not quite men.

  Hawthorne too hailed these salad days of early friendship, honoring Bridge in the 1851 dedication to The Snow-Image and Other Stories. It was Bridge who encouraged him, then and later, as a writer when he needed it most. “I know not whence your faith came,” he wrote in loving tribute; “… still it was your prognostic of your friend’s destiny, that he was to be a writer of fiction.”

  Two years younger than Nathaniel, Horatio Bridge was the son of Hannah and James Bridge, the latter a mighty financier as well as trustee of Bowdoin College. Born in Augusta, Maine, and educated there at Hallowell Academy, Bridge was a self-effacing man so tall, said Longfellow, that he “stands and looks plumb-down onto the top of my head.” Clear-eyed and confident, he regarded the world as a safe place if managed in correct, courteous fashion. “Polished, yet natural, frank, open, and straightforward, yet with a delicate feeling for the sensitiveness of his companion,” Hawthorne would describe him, “never varying from a code of honor and principle, which is really nice and rigid in its way.”

  Bridge long remembered his first glimpse of the undergraduate from Salem: a youth with wavy dark hair who cocked his head slightly to the side, his eyes blinking under an awning of heavy eyebrows. With those he didn’t know well, Nathaniel kept his opinions to himself, Bridge recalled, and didn’t put himself forward in any way. On Saturdays when the two of them hired a wagon or a chaise for a drive, Nathaniel never wanted to hold the reins.

  When he chose, however, Nathaniel could rear himself up and intimidate anyone who crossed or mocked him. One ribald evening at the tavern, when he became the butt of a silly joke, Nathaniel coolly accosted the most pugnacious of the group with “so much of danger in his eye,” recalled Bridge, “that no one afterwards alluded to the offensive subject in his presence.”

  Bridge and Nathaniel roamed the woods together, shot pigeon and gray squirrel, or reeled in speckled trout fished from the cold forest stream, “two idle lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowledge now),” said Nathaniel, “doing a hundred things that the Faculty never heard of, or else it had been the worse for us.” On the road to Topsham they recited poetry in the moonlight, Nathaniel sharing his early verse with Bridge while the water from the falls rippled and roared. Such romantic scenes were an essential of college life: young men, secure with one another, far from the anxieties roused by women. When the two young men graduated from Bowdoin, they pledged their loyalty. Nathaniel gave Bridge his father’s gold watch seal, and later, with no diminishment of devotion, would call him “the best friend I ever had or shall have (of the male sex).” Though his junior, Horatio Bridge was something of a father to Nathaniel and always a friend.

  Each morning of the academic year, the students huddled in the chapel before breakfast to praise their Creator while bed-makers cleaned their rooms. Then, after they ate, at nine o’clock they returned to their dormitories to plow into Xenophon, Herodotus, Thucydides, Isocrates, Demosthenes, Livy, and extracts from Pliny’s letters, along with algebra, geometry, and English grammar. Before noon they went to another recitation, and then a third before sundown, and finally evening prayers, all in the icy chapel. On Sunday evenings they recited from the Bible.

  By their senior year they had digested Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Dugald Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, William Paley’s Evidences of Christianity, and Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion. They also read the celebrated Mineralogy of Bowdoin’s own Professor Nehemiah Cleaveland. They studied no modern languages or history.

  On Wednesdays students declaimed their lessons in the chapel. Nathaniel did not. One college acquaintance recalled that Nathaniel’s “timidity prevented him from appearing well as a recitation Scholar; and besides he had but little love for the College curriculum as a whole.” Bridge thought so too. “He stood hardly above mediocrity,” Bridge recalled, “in declamation he was literally nowhere.” Latin was the exception. “In Latin and Greek, when he got his lessons, his translations were elegant; and as a writer both of Latin and English he stood at the head of the class, his themes always receiving the highest marks.” Benjamin Oliver had taught his pupil well, and Nathaniel performed whenever he knew he could excel. Otherwise he shirked his schoolwork or, in the case of French, studied on his own with a private tutor.

  Most of his peers knew that he intended to write fiction. Nathaniel, who would soon write short profiles of historical figures, may have profited somewhat from President Allen, who had compiled the first dictionary of American biography, a huge, albeit conventional, tome. Allen also wrote poetry, hymns, and sermons, and taught Dr. Johnson and Thomas Gray, among Nathaniel’s preferred authors. Other influential teachers may have been the friendly Thomas Cogswell Upham, a favorite among undergraduates, who arrived at Bowdoin Nathaniel’s senior year. Though Upham’s specialty was commonsense philosophy, in 1819 he had published a volume of poems, American Sketches, about New England—“enchanting topicks,” he explained in the preface, “for the pencil.”

  The brilliant professor of rhetoric, oratory, and political economy Samuel P. Newman (said to be a closet Unitarian) remembered Nathaniel’s essays. They were so good, he asked Nathaniel to read aloud. Years after Nathaniel left Bowdoin, Newman could recall a young man of “reluctant step and averted look” who approached his door with “girlish diffidence.” The author of a standard book on rhetoric—still used today—Newman probably helped Nathaniel shape his polished, almost classical style; himself a modest man, Newman took no credit for Hawthorne’s later success.

  But except for Bridge’s, most of the recollections about Nathaniel at Bowdoin resemble Jonathan Cilley’s: “I love Hawthorne, I admire him; but I do not know him. He lives in a mysterious world of thought and imagination which he never permits me to enter.”

  For vacation during his freshman year, Nathaniel returned to Raymond and put out the issue of The Spectator that praised idleness and ambition. This was also the season of Ebe’s reputed engagement and of his mother’s decision to forsake Maine.

  In the spring of 1822, Betsy packed clothes, kitchenware, and bedding into trunks that were lifted onto sturdy wagons, leaving her furniture and of course the house that Richard himself now called “Manning’s Folly.” She didn’t care.
She was in a hurry, though the reasons aren’t clear. Likely her mother, Nathaniel’s grandmother, expected her to come home; her health was failing. But Betsy’s children thought she should stay in Raymond. “I know that in one week after your return [to Salem] you will regret your present peaceful home,” Ebe warned.

  Betsy’s defection seems to have adversely affected Nathaniel. Gambling again, he flirted with suspension until he scared himself—or realized that Robert might actually yank him out of college. He curbed his drinking, or said he did. “As steady as a Sign post, and as sober as a Deacon,” he described himself to Ebe, who suspected he was lying. She was right. The fines mounted. By the spring of the following year, 1823, he owed the college almost half his tuition for broken windowpanes, damage to his room, and for tavern-hopping on Saturday night. So egregious were his crimes that in July of that year the executive government of the college again alerted Nathaniel’s family.

  His braggadocio, like his mischief, was mostly boyish, trivial, and forgettable, and though the college authorities were annoyed, Nathaniel did not have to forfeit his place in an exhibition planned for the fall of his senior year, where he read his Latin exercise, “De Patris Conscriptus Romanorum,” in which he argued that the Roman senate is like a father, responsible for his children. In turn, the children bow to their father’s rule. But times and fortune change: fathers overstep their authority, and the sons mutiny. In retaliation, the fathers repress the sons’ rebellion until foreign armies, threatening to destroy Rome, unite all Romans in a common cause.

  The enemy repulsed, fathers and sons set to bickering again. And though Augustus salvages some of the senate’s former reputation, truth be told, the fathers are nothing but a diminished race of insignificant men.

  This seems Nathaniel’s parable of the present.

  During his first year at Bowdoin, a fire wrecked much of Maine Hall, his dormitory, at which time he moved into Mrs. Adams’s house on Maine Street, across from the campus. During his second year, he returned to the dormitory, now repaired, but for his last two years at college Nathaniel stayed in the Dunning house on Federal Street at the corner of Cross, where Bridge ate his meals. He reached his room, on the second floor, by an outside staircase. He often stopped at the top step to toss down a few blueberries to the town boys below, and from his window watched for the pretty girl across the street to answer the door.

  But neither high jinks nor the Latin exercises he enjoyed nor the girl across the street warded off periodic bouts of gloom. “I verily beleive [sic] that all the blue devils in Hell, or wherever else they reside, have been let loose upon me,” he wrote Ebe in the fall of his senior year. This time he wasn’t posing, at least not completely. “I am tired of college, and all its amusements and occupations. I am tired of my friends and acquaintances, and finally I am heartily tired of myself.”

  Bridge remembered that though Nathaniel “rarely sought or accepted the acquaintance of the young ladies of the village, he had a high appreciation of the sex.” But Nathaniel’s pockets were so empty that he despaired of ever having female company. “My term bills remain unpaid for more than a year past,” he declared. “I do not ask for money, but I thought it best that you should know how delightful are my prospects.”

  Prospects, the future: Uncle Robert’s upcoming marriage was another blue devil. No more could Nathaniel count on Robert’s purse, which, despite strings, had stayed open. Even his spanking new cane and shiny gold watch chain, worn to impress the rural freshmen, didn’t chase away the blues. He avoided his classes. He wrote a few lines of poetry—four in all, he said—and then said he burned them. Raymond was no fun at vacation. “Uncle Richard seemed to care nothing about us,” Nathaniel reported to Ebe in the summer of 1825, “and Mrs. Manning was as cold and freezing as a December morning.”

  In July of his senior year, Nathaniel, who had just celebrated his twenty-first birthday, was summoned to President Allen’s office. Despite Nathaniel’s class ranking, Allen explained, his repeated absences would cost him a speaking part at commencement. “I am perfectly satisfied with this arrangement,” Nathaniel blustered, “as it is a sufficient testimonial of my scholarship, while it saves me the mortification of making my appearance in public at commencement.” Then he nervously added, “Perhaps the family may not be so well pleased with it,” and asked Ebe to tell him what they thought.

  If the idea of going to college had daunted him, the idea of leaving it was just as bad, particularly since he’d sabotaged his own place at commencement. “The family had before conceived much too high an opinion of my talents,” he told Ebe, “and had probably formed expectations, which I shall never realize. I have thought much upon the subject, and have finally come to the conclusion, that I shall never make a distinguished figure in the world, and all I hope or wish is to plod along with the multitude.”

  Lest anyone mistake his meaning and offer consoling compliments, he added that he did not “say this for the purpose of drawing any flattery from you, but merely to set Mother and the rest of you right, upon a point where your partiality has led you astray.” If disingenuous, he was genuinely demoralized. And he struck out at his most important benefactor. “I did hope that Uncle Robert’s opinion of me was nearer to the truth, as his deportment toward me never expressed a very high estimation of my abilities.”

  Angry with his family for their lofty expectations, angry with Uncle Robert for his supposed low ones, Nathaniel was angriest with himself. He fell far short of what he thought himself capable; he had disappointed his family and betrayed their trust. Plus, he had fulfilled his own worst fears about his abilities.

  Bridge declined to contribute a senior class silhouette to what Nathaniel called the Class Golgotha, and said that Nathaniel refused to too—even though one does exist in the class annals. He wasn’t the renegade Bridge made him out to be. Bridge was probably right, though, when he recalled that he and several other friends, also forbidden to speak at commencement, formed a band of premium misfits called the Navy Club for reasons Bridge didn’t recall. They met at the tavern, drowned their sorrows, and assigned titles to each other. Nathaniel was Commander.

  The graduation took place on September 7, 1825, a bright day, with one or two clouds brushing the sky. A large crowd poured into Brunswick in coaches, phaetons, and chaises, all parked on Maine Street, where vendors set up stands to sell fruit pies, gingerbread, and root beer. Thirty-seven members of the class of 1825 dressed themselves in black silk robes borrowed from neighboring clergy and marched to the platform erected near a grove of pine and fir. Each youth likely scanned the audience, looking for a familiar face. Was Uncle Robert there? It’s doubtful he would have missed the great event, unless to punish his nephew for having lost his part in the program. And if Robert didn’t attend, Betsy Hathorne couldn’t, for Robert would have provided her transportation. Uncle Richard was housebound.

  Had she deigned to come, Ebe would have laughed at President Allen’s depressing sermon, “Humility,” designed to remind the graduates of their worthlessness. Maybe the class of 1825 didn’t care. They were a remarkable group, then and later: their number included three future congressmen, a renowned clergyman, the African-American governor of Liberia, and a United States president. And along with Hawthorne, there was Longfellow, unassuming and kind, whose heart, as he’d himself admitted, had a southern exposure.

  Longfellow delivered the commencement address, “Our Native Writers,” a last-minute substitution for a talk about the impostor poet Thomas Chatterton.

  “Already has a voice been lifted up in this land,” Longfellow intoned; “—already a spirit and a love of literature are springing up in the shadow of our free political institutions.”

  Seated nearby, Nat Hathorne must have listened carefully as Longfellow spoke of the secret ambition lodged like a thorn in his own heart.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  That Dream of Undying Fame

  “Old and young, we dream of graves and monuments,” murmured the s
tranger-youth. “I wonder how mariners feel, when the ship is sinking, and they, unknown and undistinguished, are to be buried together in the ocean—that wide and nameless sepulchre!”

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Ambitious Guest”

  HAWTHORNE HAD a taste for drama. He burned his first manuscripts, he said, whole quires of them, “without mercy or remorse, (and moreover, without subsequent regret).” He was a man of high standards, rigorous and stern, and like the protagonists in his stories who torch the tales that no one reads, Hawthorne didn’t separate anger from anguish, vengeance from self-punishment, when he felt he had failed. Nor need he have. He was creating a compounded image—artist as pyromaniac, artist as self-hater—to express the complex, incendiary truth of his feelings.

  “I am as tractable an author as you ever knew,” he once told an editor, “so far as putting my articles into the fire goes; though I cannot abide alterations or omissions.”

  He also portrayed himself as obliging and agreeable, a gentle Nathaniel Hawthorne who, like those charred papers, remains passionately unavailable.

  “He always puts himself in his books,” his sister-in-law Mary Mann later declared; “he cannot help it.”