CHAPTER ONE

A MAN OF OLD SALEM

I

WHAT WAS HE LIKE, THIS man Hawthorne, whose eyes gaze out upon us so quizzically from the old portraits? His reputation has never been higher than it is today, though many of his admirers seem as alien to his spirit as they are to Cooper or Longfellow or Lowell or any of his other contemporaries whom they neglect. He is admired because he used symbols and produced fiction which can be read upon multiple levels, because he was given to literary ambivalences which suggest the kind of hidden depths into which a psychologically oriented age likes to probe. Are these the significant things about him, or is there something more? And are we, perhaps, in some danger of making him over into our own image?

What sort of man was he? What was his experience of life, and what resources did he bring to this experience? How did he live in the world which all men know and in that other world so intimately but obscurely related to it which only the artist can enter? What did the great nineteenth-century discovery of nature mean to him? How did he come through the special ordeal of his time which centered upon the slavery crisis? What did love mean to him? What relationship did he sustain to his God?

Nathaniel Hathorne (later, by his own fiat, Hawthorne) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1804, the second of three children of Nathaniel Hathorne (1775-1808) by his wife, Elizabeth Clarke Manning (1780-1849). His elder sister Elizabeth was born in 1802, his younger sister Mary Louisa in 1808.

The Hathornes traced back to an English yeoman family who were supposed to have taken their name from Hawthorn Hill, overlooking Bray, Berks.! The earliest direct ancestor of the writer who has been definitely identified is Thomas Hawthorne, of East Oakley in the hundred of Bray, who was born about the time of the discovery of America. During the lifetime of the first William (born about 1543), the preferred spelling came to be Hathorne.

The first Hathorne in the new world was the third William (1607-1681), who came over with his brother John between 1630 and 1633, settling first in Dorchester and later in Salem. Both he and his son, John Hathorne (1641-1717), were involved in the persecution of witches and Quakers, but it was not to him but to the Reverend Nicholas Noyes that Sarah Good addressed the words “You’re a liar! I’m no more a witch than you’re a wizard! And if you take my life God will give you blood to drink!” Tradition transferred these words to Rebecca Nurse and had them addressed to Hathorne.

Hawthorne’s father followed the sea and married the daughter of a neighboring blacksmith. The Mannings had come from England in 1689. Elizabeth’s brother Robert operated a profitable stage-coach line between Salem, Marblehead, and Boston and also became noted as a pomologist.

When Captain Nathaniel Hathorne died in 1808 (interestingly enough in Surinam, the scene of one of the earliest English romances, Mrs. Behn’s Oroonoko), he left his widow an estate of $296.21. She returned, therefore, with her children, to the Manning house. When her son was nine, an accident to his foot reduced him to a condition of semi-invalidism for some three years. But in the summer of 1816 Mrs. Hathorne and her children moved to a house owned by her brother at Raymond, Maine, in a heavily wooded area on Sebago Lake, and here her boy, who had already discovered the joys of reading during his invalidism, spent the better part of three years reveling in the delights of wood and field.

In 1825, through his uncle’s generosity, he was graduated from Bowdoin College, after which he returned to Salem and devoted himself to his literary apprenticeship. In 1828 he published anonymously a romance called Fanshawe, but he afterwards disliked this book so much that he not only destroyed every copy he could lay his hands on but never even permitted his wife to become aware of its existence. Meanwhile he was contributing stories, essays, and sketches, for little or no money, anonymously or under a variety of pseudonyms, to The Token, The New England Magazine, The Democratic Review, and other periodicals. Most of these were collected in Twice-Told Tales (1837, 1842), Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), and The Snow-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales (1852). With the help of his sister Elizabeth he edited S. G. Goodrich’s American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge for a period in 1836; the same team wrote or compiled the long-popular Peter Parley’s Universal History, which was published in the same year. Grandfather’s Chair, stories from early American history retold for children, were published by his future sister-in-law, Elizabeth P. Peabody, the very embodiment of Boston enlightenment and reforming zeal, in 1841-42.

By this time Hawthorne had met and fallen in love with Sophia Peabody, of Salem and Boston, and on July 9, 1842, they were married and went to live in the Old Manse, beside the Revolutionary battlefield at Concord. There their first child Una was born on March 3, 1844, and there, despite their poverty, they were idyllically happy. Poverty had already delayed their marriage and driven Hawthorne to employment in the Boston Custom House from 1839 to 1841, and in 1841, even more surprisingly, to participation in the famous experiment in communal living which George Ripley, George Bradford, and others were conducting at Brook Farm in West Roxbury. He had hoped that Brook Farm would solve his financial problem and make it possible for him to establish a home for Sophia more quickly than he could achieve it in any other way, but this hope was not realized.

In October 1845 the Hawthornes left the Old Manse and returned to Salem, where their only son Julian was born on July 14, 1846. From 1846 to 1849 Hawthorne served in the Salem Custom House, and it was not until the Whigs turned him out that he settled down to write The Scarlet Letter (1850). Though this book was produced under the most difficult conditions possible—Hawthorne’s mother died during its composition—it ushered in his only great period of fecundity, being followed in 1851 by The House of the Seven Gables and in 1852 by The Blithedale Romance (which was based upon Brook Farm memories), to say nothing of the two volumes of Greek myths retold—A Wonder Book (1851) and Tanglewood Tales (1853)—and his campaign Life of Franklin Pierce (1852).

Meanwhile, there had been changes in the life of the Hawthornes. From May 1850 until November 1851 they occupied the Little Red House at Lenox, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, and here their third and last child Rose was born on May 20, 1851. During the winter of 1851-52 they occupied the house of Mrs. Hawthorne’s brother-in-law Horace Mann, at West Newton, Massachusetts, where Hawthorne wrote The Blithedale Romance. In May 1852 they returned to Concord, having purchased Bronson Alcott’s Hillside, which Hawthorne renamed The Wayside.

How much longer Hawthorne’s productive period would have lasted if Franklin Pierce had not rewarded him for his campaign biography by appointing him to the lucrative American consulate at Liverpool is anybody’s guess. Hawthorne accepted—even sought—the post because, in spite of his now securely established fame, his income was not large enough to enable him to feel confident about the future. The Hawthornes sailed from Boston on July 6, 1853.

Hawthorne resigned his consulate late in the summer of 1857 but did not leave England until January 5, 1858, when, with his family and their new governess Ada Shepard, he left for Paris and Italy. Between November 1858 and the spring of 1859 Una was very ill with Roman fever, which for a time caused her life to be despaired of and which seems permanently to have wrecked her health. In May 1859 the family returned to England, from which they did not return to America until late in June, 1860. The Marble Faun (or Transformation, as they called it in the English edition) was written in Italy and England in 1859 and published early in 1860; this was the only ripened aesthetic fruit of the European years. Our Old Home (1863) was based on Hawthorne’s English notebooks; these, like his other notebooks, were published in part by Mrs. Hawthorne, but the complete texts of the English and American notebooks have appeared only in our own time, and we still await the complete text of the French and Italian notebooks.

After returning to Concord, Hawthorne added what he hoped would be an Italianate tower to The Wayside and struggled hard to write an English romance about a bloody footstep, a missing heir, and an American claimant to a great English estate, but his health was broken and he was not able to achieve his aim. “The Ancestral Footstep” he had abandoned in England when the idea for The Marble Faun came to him. Septimius Felton, which has a Concord-Revolutionary War setting, and in which the other themes are less important than the search for an elixir of life, was afterwards edited by Una Hawthorne with assistance from Robert Browning, and Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret was published as Julian Hawthorne arranged it. As far as it goes, “The Dolliver Romance” is generally considered a more successful treatment of recalcitrant materials than its predecessors, but only three fragments of this work had been written when death came.

After the outbreak of the Civil War, in the...