CHAPTER ELEVEN
Whatever else I may repent of, therefore, let it be reckoned neither among my sins nor follies, that I once had faith and force enough to form generous hopes of the world’s destiny—yes!—and to do what in me lay for their accomplishment; even to the extent of quitting a warm fireside, flinging away a freshly lighted cigar, and travelling far beyond the strike of city-clocks, through a drifting snow-storm.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance
Man never creates, he only recombines the lines and colors of his own existence.
Margaret Fuller, “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain”
CURIOSITIES of the fall season, 1840: Margaret Fuller, resident sibyl, organizes another series of “Conversations” for Boston women. A campaign of hard cider and log cabins pitches the Whig Ploughman of Ohio, William Henry Harrison, into the United States presidency. Orestes Brownson prophesies class warfare. Salem artist Charles Osgood paints Hawthorne’s portrait. And more than five hundred Friends of Universal Reform pour into Boston’s Chardon Street Chapel to dispute scriptural authority, debate the woman question, and damn the institution of slavery.
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, slim autocrat of the breakfast table, disapproves. “We never had a Bohemia in Boston, and we never wanted it.” Most of Boston’s intelligentsia ignore the Chardon Street event, and, as ever, Bronson Alcott marches to his own drummer. “A revolution of all Human affairs is now in progress,” he cries, and withdraws to Concord.
The previous July, Elizabeth Peabody unlocked the door to her new foreign bookshop and lending library at 13 West Street. A stubby cobblestone passage near the Boston Common in a district not quite residential, not quite commercial, West Street would be home to the liberal Unitarian clergy, increasingly disaffected, who pondered intuition, self-culture, and perfection, the watchwords of a new faith born of German philosophic idealism and imported to America largely by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who spoke heresy in public. “God incarnates himself in man,” Emerson declared at Harvard Divinity School; he wasn’t asked to return for thirty years.
Backsliders like Emerson—he’d resigned the pulpit in 1832—craved a more humane form of belief, one that squarely placed divinity in the soul of the individual; goodness already dwelled there. Soon these seekers were identified as the Transcendental Club—the name came from detractors—and variously included Emerson; Bronson Alcott; Emerson’s theological school acquaintance Frederick Henry Hedge; the Reverend James Freeman Clarke, founder of the periodical the Western Messenger; the pacific Reverend George Ripley, editor of the Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature series, translations of French and German philosophy, literature, and theology; the steely Orestes Brownson in his pre-Catholic socialist days; and the fervid William Henry Channing, a mellifluous apple that didn’t fall too far from his illustrious uncle’s tree.
These men welcomed women into the club: the poetic Sturgis sisters, particularly Ellen and the ironic Carolyn; Elizabeth Peabody of course; and the acid-tongued Margaret Fuller, a magnetic intellectual not to be slighted. Mary Peabody didn’t seem interested—her heart was with Horace Mann—and despite her fizzy exuberance, Sophia stayed at the fringe although she adamantly subscribed to the un-Calvinist creed of God’s munificence. Describing a glorious flock of swans to a friend, not Hawthorne, she reddened when he replied that transcendental swans often turn out to be geese. “Did you ever hear of such impertinence?” she wailed.
The club had a magazine, The Dial. Initially edited by Margaret Fuller, it produced its first issue that summer. By fall, though, its business and literary manager, George Ripley, was glum. He’d been reading Albert Brisbane’s Social Destiny of Man, an American rendition of Charles Fourier’s blueprint for social reform. Fourier believed that if left on their own, people would gravitate to the tasks they liked best, and so he proposed to reorganize society by placing congenial individuals into phalanxes, or small communities, where they could work at what they liked to do, benefiting themselves and society at the same time.
Though he was not yet ready to sign up Fourier—that came several years later—the idea of a reorganized society heartened Ripley, who’d been unhappy in a church that, to his mind, perpetuated poverty by turning its cheek. Unitarianism was all well and good as an antidote to Calvinism, but it hadn’t gone nearly far enough when it came to improving social conditions. Ripley made all this clear when he took on the Unitarian pope, Andrews Norton, whose own Harvard Divinity School address, “A Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity,” was intended to expose the transcendentalists, notably Emerson, as the atheists he figured they must be.
Ripley now cared less about theological war than about overhauling society, distributing its riches, like sunlight, to everyone. Religion conjoined with democracy: it would be a heaven on earth, the divine made quite real. “The true democratic principle is taking deep root in many hearts, which once loathed the name,” Ripley appealed to George Bancroft; “& if the principle, in its purity, can be made popular with the party, as the party is with the people, we can hardly place bounds to our hopeful trust in the destinies of our country.”
Ripley himself resigned the pulpit in March 1841 to look for a more felicitous way to change the world, or at least a small section of it. Politics and political machinations were too crude, institutional, and urban, so he devised an alternative: utopia on a pretty farm.
When Martin Van Buren, Andrew Jackson’s heir, was not reelected president, that same November, Nathaniel Hawthorne resigned his post at the Boston Custom House, effective January 1, 1841. He’d not serve under Whigs nor be replaced by them.
Briefly he considered starting a magazine with Longfellow but the project never got off the ground. Longfellow didn’t really want a partner—and not a party Democrat in any case—so Hawthorne occupied himself with a history book for children called Grandfather’s Chair.
The structural idea for the book came to him the previous spring when he and David Roberts visited Susanna Ingersoll in her antique house on Salem’s Turner Street. As Hawthorne’s second cousin, Ingersoll knew plenty of family gossip firsthand, which she happily divulged, particularly when it included the story of the house and her claim to it. And it was a grisly tale. After the death of her parents, she had to outfox her uncle John Hathorne, who tried to seize the place, insisting it belonged to him. Word of his rapacious attempt to grab the orphan’s house quickly spread over Salem. “We talk of savages,” the Reverend Bentley had said in dismay. Ingersoll kept the house by never leaving it and ever afterwards remained ensconced under its dark ceilings, as if afraid her uncle might, in her absence, snatch away what she loved best.
Ingersoll mentioned to Hawthorne that the house had once had seven gables. “The expression [seven gables] was new and struck me very forcibly,” Hawthorne told Horace Conolly, whom Ingersoll had adopted as her son; “I think I shall make something of it.” Tickled by the phrase—particularly since he complained he didn’t know what to write about—Hawthorne tucked it away for future use. But he seized on Ingersoll’s suggestion to use her old oak chair as the center of his children’s book.
Hawthorne liked to begin his stories with props, or found objects, as if their “homely reality,” as he says in Grandfather’s Chair, conferred legitimacy on an otherwise frivolous tale. Old newspapers, discarded manuscripts, the mansion of the royal governors, and, in the future, the infamous scarlet letter as well as the house of seven gables: they provide Hawthorne with a dense, tangible pretext for his fiction. So too Grandfather’s Chair, where an elderly fellow recounts for his grandchildren the adventures of a chair—history reproduced as fictive furniture, the actual and the imaginary once again, each partaking of the other.
In this case, the chair, originally manufactured for an English lord, sailed to America on board the Arbella and subsequently served, Grandfather jests, as a seat for both theocratic and democratic rumps, sequentially of course. To Hawthorne, history is evolution, the story of oppression giving way to freedom; this is something like George Bancroft’s teleological history of America, though Hawthorne handily supplied the irony that Bancroft lacks: the more sedentary, the better the ruler.
When Nahum Capen, tired of waiting for Hawthorne to finish his book, apparently withdrew his promise to publish it, Elizabeth Peabody stepped into the breach. She had a printing press in her library at West Street and so was able to publish Grandfather’s Chair by herself in December. Excited, she pushed Hawthorne to write two sequels, which he did. Famous Old People and Liberty Tree appeared in January and March 1841, all printed by Peabody.
Like her, the Salem papers were loyal to the local author and championed his books, but in Boston, they received scant comment. Margaret Fuller wrote a limp notice in The Dial. The gifted author, said she, was squandering his talent.
Perhaps he was. But children’s books were supposed to earn money. Not for Hawthorne. This “dullest of all books,” as he dismissed it, would stoop his shoulders, so heavy were all the unsalable volumes he’d be lugging with him to George Ripley’s hinterland farm.
Undiminished, the winds of change blew through Boston, prickling skin under the starched cotton. “We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform,” Emerson exulted to Thomas Carlyle. There would be no more pauperism, slavery, hypocrisy, no more materialism, selfishness, and no pressure to get a living rather than to live. “It is astonishing what a wide-spread desire there is for a new mode of life,” Sarah Clarke exclaimed to her brother James. If abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison preferred to buckle all social questions to the overriding one of chattel slavery, George Ripley and his brainy wife, Sophia Dana Ripley, opted for community and what he said would be a “more natural union between intellectual and manual labor.”
Ripley spelled out the scheme for Emerson. “Thought would preside over the operations of labor.… We should have industry without drudgery, and true equality without its vulgarity.” The Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education, as the community would formally be called, eschewed rank, status, privilege, and formal attire. It welcomed everyone, farmers, mechanics, writers, and preachers, all “whose gifts and abilities would make their services important”—and whose children, by the way, could be educated in the community school.
The real ticket of admission was camaraderie—that and a share of stock. Ripley proposed the farm be run as a joint-stock company that paid a fixed 5 percent interest to its subscribers, the subscription secured by some two hundred rolling acres, a few buildings, a brook, and a meadow scattered with trees in West Roxbury, a bucolic little village nine miles southwest of Boston. Each share in the association cost five thousand dollars. The interest on the investment, tuition from the community’s prospective school, and the subscribers’ labor—intellectual or manual—would cover room, board, and upkeep.
The government would be democratic. “His own mind, though that of a captain, is not of a conqueror,” Margaret Fuller observed. “Mr. Ripley would never do for a patriarch,” said Sarah Clarke. But the plan couldn’t fail to impress. “The farming is to be conducted on the most liberal and scientific principles of English husbandry,” Clarke explained to her brother, “and the earth is to yield her increase in a style hitherto unknown in New England.” There would be wealth without corruption. “Luxuries are to be common to all and appropriated by none.” The sick and elderly would be cared for, and there would be no hired labor or servants. “Labor is to be alleviated by machinery and good will.” And the place would be ecumenical. “There are to be no religious tests or any other, and he who joins does it upon the principle of co-operation in labor and a desire for social improvement.”
About a dozen people signed on. Emerson did not. “Can I not get the same advantages at home without pulling down my house?” the individualist wondered. But Hawthorne owned no property, and he no longer had an income, having surrendered the Custom House and, with it, the security of his steady wage. He might return to Salem—Ebe insisted Hawthorne always did his best writing there—but the atavistic pull of family threatened his hard-won autonomy. “Whenever I return to Salem,” he anxiously wrote Sophia, “I feel how dark my life would be, without the light that should shedst upon it—how cold, without the warmth of thy love.”
In Salem, under the watch of his mother and sisters, he’d have to confess his engagement.
But he did return there for a while, and sitting in his Herbert Street bedroom that fall, he adroitly composed one of his most seductive stories—again, about himself. “Here sits thy husband in his old accustomed chamber, where he used to sit in years gone by, before his soul became acquainted with thine,” he wrote to Sophia. “Here I have written many tales—many that have been burned to ashes—many that doubtless deserved the same fate,” he continued, imagining the biographer (himself) who might someday visit his room:
He ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here; and here my mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent; and here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all—at least till I were in my grave. And sometimes (for I had no wife then to keep my heart warm) it seemed as if I were already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and benumbed. But oftener I was happy—at least, as happy as I then knew how to be, or was aware of the possibility of being. By and bye, the world found me out in my lonely chamber, and called me forth—not, indeed, with a loud roar of acclamation, but rather with a still, small voice; and forth I went, but found nothing in the world that I thought preferable to my old solitude, till at length a certain Dove was revealed to me, in the shadow of a seclusion as deep as my own had been.
The letter is biblically lyrical, phrases cadenced and perfectly pitched, darks juxtaposed with lights, cold with heat, in which Hawthorne’s half-life is redeemed through admiration and then love, while alliterative sounds—the waste and the waiting and wondering why—reinforce a tale of loneliness that lasts, or has lasted, a long, long time.
Bidding farewell to his mother and his sisters, leaving behind his old accustomed chamber—and his childhood—Hawthorne fancied himself and Sophia in another kind of family, not their own exactly but as confederates of Mr. Ripley’s utopia, where they would build their house. The Ripleys did not frown on private property. Yet Sophia was left behind. Hawthorne rode out to West Roxbury in early April without his intended bride. “Think that I am gone before,” he consoled his secret fiancée, “to prepare a home for my Dove, and will return for her, all in good time.”
For a while she seemed content. A communal life of toil was no place for a dove, especially one with a headache. She and Mary and her parents had joined Elizabeth on West Street, where Sophia fitted her painting room on the second floor—Elizabeth stocked art supplies as well as books in the shop—and welcomed the excitement from below. In the crowded front parlor, Dr. Peabody sold homeopathic staples like belladonna and sassafras, Fuller held her Conversations, and Washington Allston occasionally stopped by. In the bookshop, transcendentalists grabbed French or German volumes from the shelves while Elizabeth talked up the Brook Farm experiment or, in the back room, printed The Dial.
No transcendental fellow-traveler—although he was sighted at the meetings on West Street—and not a company man in any case, Hawthorne was one of the few charter members of Ripley’s commune, a fact that surprises those onlookers who judge him from afar or in retrospect. “The whole experience stands as a thing apart and unrelated to the rest of his life,” snapped Brook Farm’s historian years later. Hawthorne’s contemporaries were cannier. As Fuller shrewdly noted, “solitary characters tend to out-wardness,—to association,—while the social and sympathetic ones emphasize the value of solitude,—of concentration,—so that we hear from each the word which, from his structure, we least expect.”
Nor must Hawthorne accept the perfectibility of the individual to entertain the romance of West Roxbury. In need of a home, an income, and a place to write, Hawthorne gladly gambled on Ripley’s arcadia. The union of thinker and worker was irresistible to a man whose conscience still carped about idleness and still considered writing a frivolous pastime, no matter how much he wanted to do it. Hoeing and milking and feeding and mulching are honest occupations, chores performed in the cowhide boots of a democratic manhood. Besides, he had to earn his living.
And the whole idea had the ring of O’Sullivan’s vision of democracy, embracing “the essential equality of all humanity.” Such had been Hawthorne’s politics since college, a mix of Jeffersonian agrarianism and Jacksonian populism. “A true democracy tends ever in the direction of liberty, private as well as public,” O’Sullivan wrote, and “all ranks of men would begin life on a fair field, ‘the world before them where to choose, and Providence their guide.’ ”
To complete the circle, O’Sullivan’s chummy meliorism also resembled Elizabeth Peabody’s Christianity, which she used to promote Brook Farm. “The community aims to be rich,” Elizabeth Peabody explained, “not in the metallic representative of wealth, but in the wealth itself, which money should represent; namely, LEISURE TO LIVE IN ALL THE FACULTIES OF THE SOUL.” Religion and politics shook hands, as Ripley had hoped they would. Orestes Brownson sent his son to the Brook Farm school. So did the Bancrofts. As for Hawthorne, he could substitute Peabody’s cloying definition of Brook Farm for O’Sullivan’s more secular version of it, all while scribbling his tales and preparing to build a house for his bride in the habitat of the future.
Elizabeth Peabody did not join the community. Nor did Margaret Fuller. “I doubt they will get free from all they deprecate in society,” Fuller wisely surmised. But Hawthorne grabbed his boots, and Louisa sewed him a blue cotton smock. One of the first pilgrims, he arrived in West Roxbury on April 12. The storm blew east, the snow fell fast and thick. “Spring and summer will come in their due season,” he wrote Sophia, trying to sound optimistic, “but the unregenerated man shivers within me.”
Aging Brook Farmers remembered Hawthorne as beautiful, well built, tall, and taciturn until approached. Then his face opened, friendly, even playful, particularly with the flirtatious women who tossed pillows at him when he stretched out on the sofa and tried to read. Teasing the Brook Farm children, he casually dropped coins behind his back as little boys skipped in his wake. But essentially he was a loner. “He was a sort of humanitarian monk, so to speak, at least before he married,” recalled Charles Newcomb, one of Brook Farm’s youthful boarders. “He was passively, rather than positively, social.”
He inhabited the main farmhouse, dubbed the Hive, where George Ripley stored his vast library of rare books on open shelves. (Later Ripley was forced to sell almost the entire library to pay the community’s huge debts.) Hawthorne’s room was on the first floor. It had its own stove, and from Pinckney Street he brought Sophia’s paintings and the deep red carpet, opulent luxury on a cold morning.
In addition to the Ripleys and Hawthorne, other early-comers included the farmers Frank Farley and William Allen, ready to till the sandy soil, and the Reverend Warren Burton. Slowly, in time, a few more pioneers unpacked their cases. Among them were Mrs. Minot Pratt, Minot Pratt, George Bradford, Lloyd Fuller (Margaret’s brother), the beautiful Almira Barlow and her sons, and Charles Anderson Dana, later the disillusioned publisher of a conservative New York Sun. Rooting from the sidelines, Elizabeth Peabody invited a large group of potential backers to West Street and publicized the cause in the pages of The Dial.
She also monitored Hawthorne’s activities. “Hawthorne has taken hold with the greatest spirit—& proves a fine workman,” she wrote to a friend. At five o’clock in the morning he blew the horn to wake his sleepy cohorts, and before breakfast milked cows, chopped wood, and loaded manure into carts. Hungry, he devoured the buckwheat cakes, served piping hot at the large table before the hearth, before he returned to the brown fields to hoe and rake and plant till dusk, wearing the thin summer frock Louisa had sewn.
At first he enjoyed himself. He reminded Sophia that physical labor “defiles the hands, indeed, but not the soul,” and to his family he signed his letters “Nath. Hawthorne, Ploughman.” Amused at first, Hawthorne’s family grew annoyed. “What is the use of burning your brains out in the sun, when you can do anything better with them?” queried Louisa. Ebe, too, couldn’t understand why her brother worked so much longer than the mandated three hours a day. “I have never felt that I was called upon by Mr. Ripleyto devote so much of my time to manual labor,” Hawthorne justified himself to another onlooker.
Not only did Brook Farm demand the full, able-bodied commitment of all those, like himself, who wanted the experiment to succeed, but, Hawthorne declared, “there are private and personal motives which, without the influence of those shared by us all, would still make me wish to bear all the drudgery of this one summer’s labor, were it much more onerous than I have found it.”
The private motive was his engagement, still secret, to Sophia. But there was also his writing. Hawthorne intended to crowd his quota of labor into the summer months so that in September he could trade in his dung fork for a pen.
He had already fallen behind. “I have not written that infernal story,” he wailed to George Hillard, having promised a tale for the 1842 Token, which Hillard was editing. Hawthorne begged off. “You cannot think how exceedingly I regret the necessity of disappointing you; but what could be done? An engagement to write a story must in its nature be conditional,” Hawthorne guiltily wrote Hillard in July; “because stories grow like vegetables, and are not manufactured, like a pine table. My former stories all sprung up of their own accord, out of a quiet life. Now I have no quiet at all.”
He had other plans too, and these he thought he could manage. James Munroe, the publisher of Emerson’s Nature, would reissue Grandfather’s Chair as the first in a series of children’s books Hawthorne would edit. Elizabeth Peabody was to negotiate the deal. “We expect to make a great deal of money,” he chortled to Louisa. “I wish Elizabeth [his sister] would write a book for the series.”
Munroe had also consented to an enlarged version of Twice-told Tales. “I confess I have strong hopes of good from this arrangement with Munroe”—Hawthorne was excited, though he tried not to be—“but when I look at the scanty avails of my past literary efforts, I do not feel authorized to expect much from the future.”
Sales meant everything. “How much depends on those little books!” he cried to Sophia. Increasingly dubious about Brook Farm’s fiscal health and increasingly disenchanted with the whole setup, he vowed to resign utopia in November, not six months after he arrived, unless he could be sure that he’d have a house for him and Sophia by spring. “I am becoming more and more convinced, that we must not lean upon the community,” he informed her. “What ever is to be done, must be done by thy husband’s own individual strength.”
But he waffled. By remaining at Brook Farm through fall, Hawthorne reasoned, “I shall see these people and their enterprise under a new point of view, and perhaps be able to determine whether thou and I have any call to cast in our lot among them.” Telling the disappointed Ripleys of his intention to leave, he again reported to Sophia, this time awkwardly, that “the ground, upon which I must judge of the expediency of our abiding here, is not what they [the Ripleys] may say, but what actually is, or is likely to be; and of this I doubt whether either of them is capable of forming a correct opinion.”
Regardless, he purchased two shares in the community, invested five hundred more dollars toward a home, and became a trustee of the estate as well as chairman of its finance committee. “My accession to these august offices does not at all decide the question of my remaining here permanently,” he insisted, firm only in his decision to spend the winter in Boston. Yet as trustee of the estate, he actively helped to mismanage funds, taking two mortgages on the property for five hundred dollars more than the original price of the farm.
Upset and ambivalent, he retired to his room. September was passing, and he hadn’t lifted his pen. “I have not the sense of perfect seclusion,” he told Sophia, “which has always been essential to my power of producing anything. It is true, nobody intrudes into my room; but still I cannot be quiet.” He walked along the Needham road or at the edge of the meadow, feet sinking into the spongy soil. He climbed a pine tree and afterwards wrote of it in his journal, as if to capture the moment when the gold of fall turned a wintry gray. “The woods have now assumed a soberer tint than they wore at my last date,” he described the October landscape. “Many of the shrubs, which looked brightest a little while ago, are now wholly bare of leaves.… None of the trees, scarcely, will now bear a close examination; for then they look ragged, wilted, and of faded, frost-bitten hue; but at a distance, and in the mass, and enlivened by sunshine, the woods have still somewhat of the variegated splendor which distinguished them a week ago.” He wrote as of the community itself: beautiful at a distance, wilted on inspection, and revived by confidence, however ill placed. “It is wonderful what a difference the sunshine makes; it is like varnish, bringing out the hidden veins in a piece of rich wood.”
Day after day, he loitered, he scribbled in his journal, he rambled over the broad countryside. He traveled to West Street, to Salem, and back to Brook Farm. He rode with William Allen to Brighton to the cattle fair on a crisp morning, inspecting cows and heavy-yoked oxen, the gentlemen farmers and the field hands. He chatted amiably with Emerson and Margaret Fuller in a little glade near the woods. He surveyed from a distance the games of the participants and their picnics. “The grown people took part with mirth enough—while I, whose nature it is to be a mere spectator of sport and serious business, lay under the trees and looked on.” He kept distances, drew boundaries. But he had come to like Fuller.
She was not a simple woman, not a tactful woman, not even a kind woman. Her manner was slightly deprecating, her absorption egotistical and intense. She was also brilliant, fascinating, and in her own time prized as a sizzling conversationalist whose physical presence alone defied assumptions about feminine passivity. Yet though she dressed beautifully and loved ornament, she struck friends as plain, or so they later said. And her voice had a rough nasal quality, said others, implying that her ceaseless, presumptuous talk gave offense. Edgar Allan Poe noted that when she spoke “her upper lip, as if impelled by the action of involuntary muscles, habitually uplifts itself, conveying the impression of a sneer.” Fuller’s naked ambition repelled the men who might have been, or were, attracted to her.
Born in 1810, Fuller read Latin at six, taught school, wrote lugubrious essays, and like her mother, a semi-invalid, suffered from migraines to escape the control of her father, a four-term congressman and amateur scholar of exacting standards. When Elizabeth Peabody left the Temple School, Fuller worked as Bronson Alcott’s assistant, learning how conversation could be used as a tool of intellectual discovery that pushed auditors beyond where they thought they could go. Sarah Clarke recounted a typical exchange that took place during Fuller’s Conversations for women. One of them, insisting upon her right to judge things by her feelings and ignore “the intellectual view of the matter,” said “I am made so, and I cannot help it.”
“Yes,” says Margaret, gazing upon her, “but who are you? Were you an accomplished human being, were you all that a human being is capable of becoming, you might perhaps have a right to say, ‘I like it therefore it is good’; but, if you are not all that, your judgment must be partial and unjust if it is guided by your feelings alone.”
Alcott said she might as well have been born in Greece or Rome; she was no New England woman. Her self-regard was so sublime, said another acquaintance, it was virtually inoffensive. And she was as lonely as only an intellectual woman can be. “Womanhood is at present too straitly-bound to give me scope,” she admitted.
Hawthorne and Fuller had first met two years earlier in Boston after Fuller published her translation of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (the fourth volume in George Ripley’s series). Fuller breathed Goethe, and friends anticipated with pleasure her biography of their transcendentalist precursor but guessed her true gifts were more ephemeral: a riveting physical presence, a propensity to talk, an insatiable curiosity. She knew how to exploit these. Her Conversations were successful and lucrative. With a childlike laugh and a manner alternately clipped or beguiling, Fuller sat on a kind of tripod in a velvet gown, demanding no less of herself than the women assembled before her. What are we, as women, born to do, she wanted to know, and how did we intend to do it.
“She broke her lance upon your shield,” recalled Sarah Clarke. “No woman ever had more true lovers among her own sex, and as many men she also remembered as equal friends.” But a friendship with Margaret Fuller—for men and women—was fraught with the abrupt, the difficult, the intimate. Few could or would admit their attraction to her was sexual. Emerson, for all his emotional abstinence, deeply loved her; so did Sophia’s mother and her two sisters. Upstaged by yet another sister surrogate, Sophia belittled Fuller, “contorted like a sybil on the tripod—tho! not so graceful as I imagined a greek sybil to be.”
Himself a jealous man, Hawthorne used humor to defend against Fuller—against, that is, his fascination with her. “Would that Miss Margaret Fuller might lose her tongue!—or my Dove her ears, and so be left wholly to her husband’s golden silence!” he had advised Sophia when she attended Fuller’s second series of Conversations, which he waved aside as “a Babel of talkers.”
But Sophia got hooked. In the spring of 1841, while Hawthorne pitched hay at Brook Farm, Sophia worshipfully copied Allston’s “Lorenzo and Jessica” and Crawford’s “Orpheus,” which she submitted to Fuller for approval; she composed an essay for Fuller on music, and she wrote a sonnet of steamy adoration called “To a Priestess of the Temple Not Made with Hands.”
Again Hawthorne intervened. This time he tried to cool Sophia’s ardor by indulging his own. He seemed at first to dismiss Margaret, calling a Brook Farm cow that belonged to her a “transcendental heifer.” “She is very fractious, I believe, and apt to kick over the milk pail.” Yet he couldn’t resist observing that he would be Fuller’s “milk-maid, this evening.” Sophia certainly understood the double entendre.
A latter-day Mrs. Hutchinson, Margaret Fuller was the impertinent, thoughtful kind of woman Hawthorne admired and avoided, especially since he’d broken his own lance on Mary Silsbee’s shield. Yet Miss Fuller’s cow, against whom the herd had predictably rebelled, “is compelled to take refuge under our protection,” Hawthorne goaded his fiancée. “So much did she impede thy husband’s labors, by keeping close to him, that he found it necessary to give her two or three gentle pats with a shove; but still she preferred to trust herself to my tender mercies, rather than venture among the horns of the herd. She is not an amiable cow,” he concluded; “but she has a very intelligent face, and seems to be of a reflective cast of character.”
Fuller laughed to find herself at Brook Farm “in the amusing position of a conservative” (the role Hawthorne assigned himself when he wrote The Blithedale Romance, based on his experiences in West Roxbury). Her unalloyed skepticism clearly helped Hawthorne acknowledge his own growing disillusion, and by the time Hawthorne departed Brook Farm in November 1841—again, not six months after his arrival—he and Fuller were friends, Fuller admiring Hawthorne’s psychological acuity, a quality they shared. As for his writing, she didn’t say too much. There was manliness and delicate tenderness, but Hawthorne’s characters were airy, virginal. “This frigidity and thinness bespeaks a want of deeper experiences,” Fuller discerned, “for which no talent at observation, no sympathies, however ready and delicate, can compensate.”
Hawthorne left Brook Farm for the same reason he went there. He misjudged both himself and the situation. He realized the farm could never support him and Sophia. He couldn’t write there. Nor could he tolerate the idea of a cold winter far from Sophia or a future of mind-numbing toil. “The real Me was never an associate of the community,” he justified himself.
Sophia had been forewarned. “A man’s soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap or in a furrow in the field, just as well as under a pile of money,” Hawthorne had griped. For months he had been cursing physical labor as an enslavement, the scourge of the world, “and nobody can meddle with it, without becoming proportionately brutified.”
And he cursed the sense of dependency—Brook Farmers called it cooperation—which the community fostered no less than a Custom House sinecure.
For with all his goodwill toward Brook Farm, he did not share Ripley’s faith in a human nature free of envy or avarice or evil. That too was a fundamental conflict in Hawthorne: as a true democrat, he believed nothing—no moneyed interest, no institution, no government—should intrude on the people’s sovereignty; and yet he didn’t for a moment assume people were basically good. Anyway, to him, sin was a requirement of consciousness.
If Brook Farm provided Hawthorne no financial cushion, neither did James Munroe. He did not reprint Hawthorne’s children’s stories. Later Hawthorne seemed to blame Elizabeth Peabody for holding out for too much money. Yet he contracted with Munroe and Company in October for a new two-volume edition of Twice-told Tales that paid him 10 percent of the $2.25 retail price. His reputation growing—at least among the cognoscenti—Hawthorne had expected a fair return.
The book did appear at the end of the year, thirty-nine tales in all, the sketches from the 1837 edition and sixteen more recent ones, including the four Province-House stories as well as five early pieces not published in the original volume, like “The Haunted Mind,” “The Village Uncle,” “The Ambitious Guest,” “The Seven Vagabonds,” and “The White Old Maid.” He still excluded “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” and “Young Goodman Brown.” At Sophia’s suggestion, he also excluded three other stories, “The Man of Adamant,” “Monsieur du Miroir,” and “Mrs. Bullfrog.”
The collection didn’t sell. “Surely the book was puffed enough to meet with a sale,” Hawthorne despaired. “What the devil is the matter?”
The reviews were laconic. As expected, O’Sullivan hailed Hawthorne’s style as “a model of simplicity, ease, grace, quiet humor, and seriousness.” In a backhanded way, Longfellow complimented Hawthorne’s not seeing “by the help of other men’s minds” and went on to note the “large proportion of feminine elements” in the stories, referring to the androgynous quality of the writing—and the man—that other reviewers discovered in Hawthorne’s tales: fragility, rage, and a certain coyness, frightening to readers, seductive, inimitable.
Orestes Brownson regarded Hawthorne with suspicion. He classed Hawthorne “at the head of American Literature” and characterized the tales as “gentle, yet robust and manly; full of tenderness, but never maudlin”; yet he advised Hawthorne to “attempt a higher and bolder strain than he has thus far done.” Edgar Allan Poe agreed about the need for boldness: “These effusions of Mr. Hawthorne are the product of a truly imaginative intellect, restrained, and in some measure repressed, by fastidiousness of taste, by constitutional melancholy and by indolence.”
Margaret Fuller offered a similar observation, just as harsh. Hawthorne did not “paint with blood-warm colors.”
Contemporaries respected Hawthorne, they admired him, reviewed him, and they recognized him as one of the most imaginative and strangest writers in America. Yet like Hawthorne himself, they held something in reserve.
Not Sophia. Her Hawthorne lived on Mount Olympus. Judicious, wise, empathetic, and aloof as no Olympian could ever be, Hawthorne was a poet “who must stand apart & observe,” she told her mother; and to her sister Mary, an agnostic on the subject of Hawthorne, she said over and over that Hawthorne’s purpose “is to observe & not to be observed.”
But she had tired of ethereal love. “I love thee transcendantly,” Hawthorne had assured her, offering little assurance in this, the third year of their underground romance. Hawthorne shuttled between Boston and Salem, between Sophia and bachelorhood, and though no longer a tenant of Brook Farm, his sojourn there suggests he was more unsure about marriage than he knew.
Once married, would he be able to write? To Sophia, he declared he wished nothing more than to leave the darkness of his room on Herbert Street “where my youth wasted itself in vain.” Yet in this squalid chamber, fame had been won, on this pine table, near the old chest of drawers and the mahogany-framed mirror. For better or worse, this owl’s nest of quiet solitude was where he composed his stories, safe and snug—and beyond the call of sex or entanglement. When the editors of the short-lived magazine Arcturusasked him for a tale, he said he doubted he should write anymore, “at least, not like my past productions; for they grew out of the quietude and seclusion of my former life; and there is little probability that I shall ever be so quiet and secluded again.”
Marriage threatened everything he associated with writing. “During the last three or four years, the world has sucked me within its vortex,” he noted; “and I could not get back into my solitude even if I would.”
He dithered. Tell your mother and sisters of our engagement, Sophia admonished her dilatory lover in early 1842. Dodging her request, he retorted, “I do not think thou canst estimate what a difficult task thou didst propose to me.” He tried to explain. “Thou wilt not think that it is caprice or stubbornness that has made me hitherto resist thy wishes. Neither, I think, is it a love of secrecy and darkness. I am glad to think that God sees through my heart, and if any angel has power to penetrate into it, he is welcome to know everything that is there.”
Having changed the subject, he followed the thread of his own argument. “It is this involuntary reserve, I suppose, that has given the objectivity to my writings. And when people think that I am pouring myself out in a tale or essay, I am merely telling what is common to human nature, not what is peculiar to myself. I sympathize with them—not they with me.”
Defensive, especially after the reviews of Twice-told Tales, Hawthorne half admitted what Sophia later surmised. “Mr. Hawthorne hid from himself even more cunningly than he hid himself from others,” she would remark.
But they would marry, of that she was sure. And she succeeded at last. Hawthorne told his family of the engagement. The upstairs chamber at Herbert Street would be his no more.
Or so he thought.