Hawthorne Page 8

  After graduation Nathaniel headed to Salem still vague about a career. He had attended lectures at the Maine Medical School during his senior year, perhaps considering medicine, but Horatio Bridge recalled that Nathaniel had “formed several plans,” unable to settle on any one of them for very long.

  In Salem the Manning stagecoaches rattled profitably over New England roads—Robert was active in the business again—and Nathaniel determined to join “Uncle Manning’s counting-house,” as Bridge called the family company. But even before graduating from college, he’d been writing droopy lyrics about the ocean and moonlight (to “cheer the hearts of those that grieve/And wipe the tear drop dry”), and once back on Herbert Street, he stayed in his sunny third-floor chamber all day to write stories unless the afternoon weather was good. Then he’d walk down Essex Street in trim attire, wrapped in his long dark cloak with velvet collar. Or he’d hike along the beach and watch the water crash against the rocks.

  He showed Ebe his work and she liked what she saw, the rudiments of a volume to be called Seven Tales of My Native Land, with an epigraph from Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven,” a poem about siblings and separations. Ebe recalled that one of the stories, “Alice Doane,” was about witchcraft, and there was another one, possibly about the sea; the identity of the rest and their dates of composition aren’t certain although Nathaniel had scrawled “The Truant Boy” in his copy of the undergraduate manual the Laws of Bowdoin College, as if auditioning a title for a story. But from what remains, it’s clear that Seven Tales, partly inspired by Washington Irving’s Sketch Book, also bore the stamp of John Neal, whose books Nathaniel had devoured in college. “That wild fellow, John Neal,” Nathaniel later described him, “who almost turned my boyish brain with his romances.”

  A Maine native, Neal loudly banged the drum for American literature without frills, a literature of democratic spunk, and he practiced what he preached in a spate of sensationalistic novels intended to shock the complacent Anglophile bourgeoisie. (He was also the first to praise Edgar Allan Poe.) “It is American books that are wanted of America; not English books;—nor books made in America, by Englishmen, or by writers, who are a sort of bastard English,” Neal had proclaimed, reeling from Sydney Smith’s gibe in the pages of the Edinburgh Review, “Who reads an American book?”

  Like Longfellow and Cooper, Nathaniel was responding to the clarion call for native writers, at least in terms of subject matter, by making stories out of local history and legend. However, in his earliest stories, plots amble nowhere and the settings, all American, drip with Gothic gloom. Regardless, he was acquiring a grammar of primary images: paired women, fair and foul; fallen trees aglow with green slime; voices wailing in the night; and apparitions that march in ghoulish pageants.

  Two of the stories likely intended for Seven Tales, “The Hollow of the Three Hills” and “An Old Woman’s Tale,” also demonstrate his early proficiency in creating mood. In “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” for instance, a young woman meets with an old crone in the woods to ask about the fate of loved ones she apparently deserted, and in just a few paragraphs Hawthorne draws on his feelings about abandonment and death, producing a sustained, unremitting study in tone, the fixed mood of the story emanating from repeated auditory images, feet sounding upon the floor and ears measuring the length of a funeral procession: “Then came a measured tread, passing slowly, slowly on, as of mourners with a coffin, their garments trailing on the ground, so that the ear could measure the length of their melancholy array.”

  The other story, “An Old Woman’s Tale,” is a rudimentary excavation of the past in which the past is so psychologically and historically immediate it gives the present meaning and depth. The nature of that meaning, however, is not yet plain, even to Hawthorne. As a young couple cuddle in the moonlight, a parade of strange characters suddenly comes into view. One of them, an old woman wearing spangled shoes, begins to dig in the ground with an iron shovel. Then, just as suddenly, the couple wake from what turns out to be their shared dream—for what else was the parade? They discover the shovel. Seizing it, the young man plunges it into the earth. “Oho!—What have we here!” he cries. And here the story abruptly ends, as if its author, himself digging up the past, did not know what he sought or, seeking, might find.

  Nathaniel rummaged among the dusty wills and papers carefully preserved in Salem, initiating genealogical and antiquarian investigations that lasted a lifetime. Identifying with the ancient Hathornes, in his imaginative life he began to underplay his connection to the Mannings; if he didn’t much like his father’s side of the family—reputedly he told a friend he wanted no connection to them—he begrudgingly admired their self-regarding vanity, so different from the secular strivings of blacksmiths and bookkeepers.

  As a consequence, he relentlessly perused old documents in pursuit of something more personal than source material: patrimony, the kind taken for granted by his college friends. With a self-assurance he did not share, men like Frank Pierce or Stephen Longfellow—and they were not exceptional—could lean on or rebel against living fathers of distinction and marked descent. Hathorne had the descent, not the distinction. His own father had died without rejuvenating the ancestral name. Yet a shabby gentility was better than none, and so Nathaniel carried himself with the melancholy éclat of a young lord burdened by inconsolable loss.

  For this he needed a usable past. He consumed public records, travel books, biography, and poetry, as well as great gobs of history. “All really educated men,” he would soon write, “whether they have studied in the halls of a University, or in a cottage or a work-shop, are essentially self-educated.” His reading was prodigious: Edward Clarendon on England, Thomas Hutchinson and Alden Bradford on Massachusetts, John Campbell on Virginia, Daniel Neal on the Puritans, William Allen’s biographical encyclopedia, Jean Froissart’s Chronicles, Cotton Mather’s Magnalia, William Sewell’s History of the Quakers, tattered copies of the Salem Gazette, Francis Bacon, Edward Gibbon, Jeremy Belknap, and the proceedings of the General Court of Massachusetts Bay. He relished old cookbooks, savoring the Yankee dishes of his childhood, and at the Salem courthouse he fondled the pins said to be used by witches, who jabbed them into the flesh of their victims.

  Refusing to visit the Salem Athenaeum himself, so Ebe said, he sent her to the library instead. They used Aunt Mary Manning’s borrowing privileges, transferred to him in 1828. “I am sure nobody else would have got half so much out of such a dreary old library as I did,” Ebe declared. “There were some valuable works; The Gentleman’s Magazine, from the beginning of its publication, containing many curious things, and 6 vols. folio of Howell’s State Trials, he preferred to any others. There was also much related to the early History of New England, with which I think he become pretty well acquainted, aided, no doubt, by the Puritan instinct that was in him.”

  This Puritan instinct may have influenced the aesthetic credo he started to hammer together and which, though clarified over time, never substantially changed. All his stories, he insists, combine fancy and fact, even when he himself invented the facts. The dreamscape of “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” for example, is one where “fantastic dreams and madmen’s reveries were realized among the actual circumstances of life.” More famously, in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne pretends to stumble on the old red “A” that gives rise to the story.

  Aspiring to be a creative writer, not an antiquarian, Hawthorne implicitly justifies the writing of fiction. It may not serve the useful function of biography or history—works of fact—but without it biography and history are dull, dead, removed, unreadable. “The knowledge, communicated by the historian and biographer,” he explains in his 1830 sketch of Sir William Phips, “is analogous to that which we acquire of a country by the map,—minute, perhaps, and accurate, and available for all necessary purposes,—but cold and naked.” The solution: “Fancy must throw her reviving light on the faded incidents that indicate character, whence a ray will be reflected, more or les
s vividly, on the person to be described.”

  Readers familiar with Hawthorne will recognize his Coleridgean terms: the accurate, if faded, incidents represented by the detailed map, on the one hand, and the illumination of this map by imagination on the other. Almost twenty years later, in the “Custom-House” essay that introduces The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne calls these two spheres “the real world and fairy-land,” or “the Actual and the Imaginary”—implicitly warring factions of experience coaxed into a “neutral territory” by an author sensitive both to inner vision and to outer exigencies.

  Yet in all these are “musts”—“A license must be assumed,” “Fancy must throw her reviving light”—one hears a young, conscience-stricken writer plead not just for an audience but for its blessing. Of course, the audience hardest to please was internal. He was never content. Hence comes the story of the burned manuscript.

  Devastated by the rejections of the several publishers to whom he’d sent his collection of short stories—one didn’t even bother to read it—he claimed to set fire to Seven Tales. (Although Bridge wasn’t with Nathaniel at the time, he recalled him reacting in “a mood half savage, half despairing.”) In another version of events, Nathaniel hands over the stories to the printer Ferdinand Andrews, owner of the Salem Gazette, expecting to see them in print right away. But when Andrews hesitated, Nathaniel impatiently demanded his manuscript back. Then he torched it. Bridge called him “inexorable.”

  He did destroy all early drafts of his prose, obliterating clues to the work’s inception or development. “He did not wish his struggles, his anxieties, the sweat of his brow to be visible,” said Julian. Presumably he put the manuscript of The Scarlet Letter up the chimney as soon as the book was printed, and he may have scrapped early notebooks, since only those dated from 1835—the early Maine diary notwithstanding—have come to light. Similarly, he burned early correspondence and urged friends to do the same. Acutely aware of the power of history, he wanted to control it.

  “Knowing the impossibility of satisfying myself, even should the world be satisfied,” he wrote in one of his early stories, “I … investigated the causes of every defect, and strove, with patient stubbornness, to remove them in the next attempt.” Whatever happened to the Seven Tales, whether he burned them or, in all likelihood, incorporated them into his subsequent work, he definitely began again, more determined than ever to earn recognition.

  To this end, he changed his name and wrote a novel about fame.

  On March 30, 1826, Nathaniel scratched his name onto a glass windowpane at Herbert Street—Nathaniel Hathorne—but for at least a year he’d been playing with his patronymic. In 1825 he practiced signing his name by adding the w over and over again in, of all places, his father’s logbook, to imitate and differentiate himself from the Captain at the same time. Sometime in 1827 he again used the changed spelling, writing out his name, “Nath. Hawthorne, February 28, 1827,” on a copy of the American Bookkeeper. Eventually Louisa and Ebe adopted the new spelling too. “We were in those days about as absurdly obedient to him,” Ebe said.

  Horace Conolly, a fellow Salemite, met Hawthorne in New Haven in the fall of 1829. Hawthorne had accompanied his roustabout uncle Samuel to Connecticut to buy horses for the stagecoaches, and at the New Haven inn where they stopped, Conolly recognized Samuel Manning’s name on the register. When Samuel introduced Nathaniel, Conolly observed that he didn’t look like the Salem Hathornes, who were descended from a great-uncle and with whom his family had very little to do. Hawthorne was five-foot-ten, with eyes like lit candles, and when he walked, recalled Conolly, he swung his right arm and tilted his head a little to the left, as if balancing himself aboard a rolling ship—a kind of seaman’s gait. (College acquaintances also remembered the peculiar walk, no doubt developed when he was lame.) “I am glad to hear you say that,” Conolly remembered Nathaniel replying, “for I don’t wish to look like any Hathorne.”

  “Perhaps that is one reason why you have expanded your name to Hawthorne,” Conolly surmised. Hawthorne didn’t correct him. Whatever the reason—to revise an old spelling, as Conolly also guessed, or to dissociate himself from his family—he didn’t use “Hawthorne” when he published his first major work, Fanshawe: A Tale.

  The book appeared anonymously—in spite of the new name.

  Two undergraduate men compete for the attentions of a pretty young woman. One of them is a decent and intelligent fellow, Edward Walcott, tall and good-looking, completely respectable as a scholar, polite, groomed by family and money, and the class poet. The other youth is known only as Fanshawe (a name that suggests the new spelling of Hawthorne). A natural-born aristocrat, Fanshawe is comely, proud, pale, and self-possessed. And he cares less for the stuff of this world than for matters more supernal, for during long meditative nights Fanshawe the scholar sits by his flickering lamp and converses with the dead, who speak to him from the pages of old books.

  Harley College, where these undergraduates meet, resembles Bowdoin, and Fanshawe is a college novel about vocation, with its two romantic heroes, Walcott and Fanshawe, representing the choices available to a young man, or a young man as torn as Hawthorne was. Made for and by the world, like Franklin Pierce, Walcott is easy prey to its temptations. He jumps to conclusions. He is jealous, gallant, sensual. He drinks too much, fights too easily. Fanshawe, on the other hand, is the loner hungry for recognition and ashamed of that ravening “dream of undying fame, which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a thousand realities.”

  But Fanshawe is distracted from his goals by Ellen Langton, whom Walcott is courting. The daughter of a wealthy merchant who lives abroad, Ellen is presently the ward of the president of Harley College and his wife, two stock characters whose name—the Melmoths—derives from Charles Maturin’s classic of gothic horror, Melmoth the Wanderer. In fact, the plot of the novel depends on a good deal of derivative paraphernalia: an abyss, an abduction, a villainous seducer, a virtuous rescuer, and the requisite denouement at novel’s end, a marriage that restores property to those who already have it. Character, not plot, is Hawthorne’s métier.

  So is alliteration, almost to a fault: “The road, at all times, rough, was now broken into deep gullies, through which streams went murmuring down, to mingle with the river. The pale moonlight combined with the gray of the morning to give a ghastly and unsubstantial appearance to every object.” As literary apprentice, Hawthorne employed his classical education and the English prose masters—Addison, Steele, Johnson, Burke, and Gibbon—to forge a style that owed less to Neal’s cheek than to modulation, balance, and subdued antithesis. Phrase next to phrase, separated by commas, build a complex of meaning that at worst seems halting, artificial, and prim. “She knew not what to dread,” Hawthorne writes of Ellen Langton’s abduction; “but she was well aware that danger was at hand, and that, in the deep wilderness, there was none to help her, except that Being, with whose inscrutable purposes it might consist, to allow the wicked to triumph for a season, and the innocent to be brought low.” The author is still green, and his showy epigraphs—Shakespeare, Scott, Thomson, Southey—as well as the novel’s creaky wooden characters threaten to send the whole business, well-constructed sentences and all, over the cliff with the novel’s villain.

  To return to the plot: by helping to dispatch the villain, Fanshawe wins the hand of Ellen Langton, which he rejects, refusing to knot the “tie that shall connect” him to the “common occupation of the world.” And so the ambitious narcissist dies before he turns twenty, appropriately punished for his solitary existence.

  An equivocal hero of renunciation, Fanshawe leaps forward into the novels of Henry James. And he anticipates Hawthorne’s ethereal loners, the passive clergyman Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter and the half-baked poet Miles Coverdale in The Blithedale Romance, to name just two. With tragic or pathetic consequences, these repressed men transform sexual curiosity into a desire for knowledge. Yet though Hawthorne damns Fanshawe’s maniacal quest, albeit halfheartedly,
he patronizes Walcott, whose marriage to Ellen “drew her husband away from the passions and pursuits that would have interfered with domestic felicity; and he never regretted the worldly distinction of which she thus deprived him.”

  “Theirs was a long life of calm and quiet bliss,” Hawthorne concludes, mischievously wondering, “—and what matters it, that, except in these pages, they have left no name behind them?”

  It matters a great deal. Hawthorne’s novel, after all, bears Fanshawe’s name.

  Grandmother Manning died in December of 1826, and her heirs slowly divided the large holdings, five thousand acres in Raymond and the property and stables in Salem, that had helped to support Betsy Hathorne and her children. From this estate Hawthorne earned a small annuity. “It was my fortune or misfortune, just as you please,” he reminisced some years later, “to have some slender means of supporting myself.” In 1828, with his share of the estate, he doubtless paid the Boston publishers Marsh and Capen one hundred dollars to publish his first novel, Fanshawe: A Tale.

  But the question of a career—a lucrative career—hung fire.

  That may have been the reason he applied for and received an advanced degree from Bowdoin College just after the publication of Fanshawe. Reportedly given to almost anyone making a request three years after graduation, the master of arts degree was conferred on “Nathanaelem Hawthorne” in September 1828. But though he felt he needed the degree, he didn’t know how to make use of it. Horace Conolly remembered Hawthorne’s irritation when asked what he intended to do with himself. “I wish to God I could find out,” he vehemently replied. To Ebe he said he’d been berated by an old Salem woman for “not going to work as other people did,” and Manning descendants calculated “as so much had been done for ‘Nat,’ that it should now be thought time for him to do something for himself.” The Mannings had paid for an education, and something better than writing stories ought to come of it.