CHAPTER TWELVE
He then looked the applicant in the face, and said briefly—“Your business?”
“I want,” said the latter, with tremulous earnestness, “a place!”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Intelligence Office”
OURS IS A STORY never told, said Nathaniel Hawthorne to Sophia Peabody. To him—to both of them—their hearts had been created new for one another. “We are Adam and Eve,” Sophia cried. Family and friends agreed, Margaret Fuller promising the couple “mutual love and heavenly trust,” and their son Julian later declaring they’d found it. Occasionally, however, a skeptic sniggered. To Thomas Higginson—preacher, writer, soldier, activist, and a confidant of Emily Dickinson—the Hawthorne marriage represented nothing more than narcissism à deux: ecstatic, domestic, imprisoning. “Both Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne came to each from a life of seclusion; he had led it by peculiarity of nurture, she through illness; and when they were united, they simply admitted each other to that seclusion, leaving the world almost as far off as before.”
Wedded bliss or blanketed self-absorption; or both? We shall see.
“The execution took place yesterday,” Hawthorne wrote to his sister Louisa the day after the wedding. “We made a christian end, and came straight to Paradise, where we abide at this present writing.”
Louisa had accepted her brother’s decision to marry; not Ebe, who stormed it was unconscionable that their mother hadn’t been told of the engagement of her only son until weeks before his wedding. For three years she’d been deceived; they all had been. What could they do? Ebe informed Sophia that their future association would be congenial, “particularly as it need not be so frequent or so close as to require more than reciprocal good will, if we do not happen to suit each other in our new relationship.” Snippy, she continued, “I write thus plainly, because my brother has desired me to say only what was true; though I do not recognize his right to speak of truth, after keeping us so long in ignorance of this affair.”
Sophia was hurt. “All in good time, dearest,” Hawthorne consoled.
The Hawthornes had pretended indifference to the impending marriage. “I dare say we shall and must seem very cold and even apathetic to you,” Ebe admitted; “but after you have known us a little while it may be that you will discover more warmth and sympathy than is at first apparent.” In this, she echoed her brother’s estimate of family relations: “There seems to be a tacit law,” he had said, “that our deepest heart-concernments are not to be spoken of.”
Then Ebe softened and promised Sophia a reasonably warm welcome at Herbert Street, and Nathaniel assured Sophia that his mother—“our mother”—had suspected the liaison all along.
Hawthorne’s stealth suggests how strenuously he resisted marriage even while protesting the reverse. If initially prompted by the imbroglio with Elizabeth Peabody, he managed to keep his engagement from his family for an abnormal amount of time, and his attitude at Brook Farm—never mind his participation in it—was just as strange; he intended to build a honeymoon cottage although he never told anyone of the plan. Yet Hawthorne did reveal his anxieties in a story, “A Virtuoso’s Collection,” the only tale he wrote before his wedding.
The virtuoso accumulates quaint relics of history and literature—Dr. Johnson’s cat, Robinson Crusoe’s parrot, Nero’s fiddle, Claude’s palette, and Charles Lamb’s pipe—to include in his fantastical museum, itself a kind of story-land place, or emblem of fiction, where the actual and the imaginary meet. As Hawthorne’s symbol of the artist, the virtuoso also resembles the solitary, unmarried Hawthorne and what he fears he’ll become should he stay single, locked in his room at Herbert Street: “cut off from natural sympathies, and blasted with a doom that had been inflicted on no other human being, and by the result of which he had ceased to be human.” This is the virtuoso: pitiless museum-keeper of the human heart.
Probing its depths, afraid of what he might find there, the virtuoso recurs with terrible regularity in Hawthorne’s subsequent work. Great in ambition, small in humanity, frightening and compelling, the virtuoso, nothing himself, hoards what he can to assure himself of his own reality. There is ice, Hawthorne suspects, in the soul of a writer.
And Hawthorne characterizes himself as a virtuoso—or spectral bachelor—in his love letters to Sophia: “Thou art my only reality—all other people are but shadows to me.” Again: “Without thee, I have but the semblance of life. All the world hereabouts seems dull and drowsy—a vision, but without any spirituality—and I, likewise, an unspiritual shadow, struggle vainly to catch hold of something real.” And again: “It is thou that givest me reality, and makest all things real for me.”
Hawthorne bemoaned his alienation especially when he wrote to Sophia from Salem, where the secrecy of the engagement must have bothered or titillated him the most. Anchored in his old chamber, single and secure, Hawthorne recognized the cords binding him fast, too fast. Strong and primitive feelings tied him to his mother and sisters, who were as disinclined to let him go as he was to leave them.
But Sophia beckoned. She offered adulation, connectedness, the lure of ordinary living, fatherhood, children, and a home. Shortly after she and Hawthorne made their engagement public in the spring of 1842, she conceived a plan. They would live in Concord, Massachusetts, the small town three and a half hours by stagecoach from Boston. What better place for Hawthorne, the chronicler of America’s past? Near Concord’s North Bridge, on April 18, 1775, embattled farmers had fired the shots heard round the world. And just half a mile east of the village green, transcendental guru Ralph Waldo Emerson held court in his home while his young friend Henry Thoreau scoured the woods for Indian relics and the apostolic Bronson Alcott composed milky Orphic Sayings for The Dial.
A few miles from the rickety North Bridge was the old weather-beaten parsonage occupied by Emerson’s stepgrandfather, recently deceased. “I devoutly believe that it is one of GOD’s lovely decrees,” cried Sophia, when she learned the place was available. She and Hawthorne visited the musty house in early May, threw open the doors, and were greeted by Emerson himself. “He seems pleased with the colony he is collecting,” an onlooker reported. The deal struck, Emerson dispatched Thoreau to plant a garden for the prospective tenants.
Originally scheduled for June 27, 1842, the Hawthorne wedding was initially postponed when Sophia fell ill. Hawthorne slid into a depression, short-lived, for not two weeks later, on July 9, the long-anticipated marriage ceremony took place in the Peabody parlor at West Street. Sophia’s friend Cornelia Park braided the bride’s auburn hair, and Sarah Clarke patted down her dress. She was thirty-two, he was thirty-eight: middle-aged. But they were so radiant, particularly Hawthorne, that James Freeman Clarke, who married them, could barely contain himself. He’d expected the author, of whom he’d heard so much, to be old and dry, not handsome or charismatic. But Hawthorne was so nervous that Sophia’s Aunt Pickman hid in an adjoining room so as not to scare him away.
Apparently none of the Hawthornes or Mannings attended the ceremony, nor is there a record of any of Hawthorne’s friends, although David Roberts gave Hawthorne a half dozen silver spoons and Horace Conolly an heirloom watch belonging to Susanna Ingersoll’s great-grandfather. By and large, though, the wedding was a Peabody affair.
After the ceremony, the couple boarded their wedding carriage. A gust of summer shower delayed them more than an hour on the road, but they rolled into Concord at five o’clock that afternoon. They walked between the columns of black ash trees on the side of the long path that separated the Old Manse, as Hawthorne called the parsonage, from the road. The house was filled with flowers, vases and baskets brimming with sweet-smelling roses and the white lilies that Elizabeth Hoar and Abigail Alcott, neighbors, had placed on stands made from the roots of trees. Sophia was delirious. “I am the happiest person on this earth,” she wrote her mother the next day. Likewise, Hawthorne wrote to Louisa, “We are as happy as people can be, without making themselves ridiculous.” He sent the reassurances his mother and sisters needed, or he did. “I have neither given up my own relatives,” he reminded them, “nor adopted others.”
Summer was their honeymoon. After breakfast Hawthorne rambled through the orchard that sloped in the back of the house and down to the drowsy Musketaquid (or Concord) River, returning to the Manse his arms full of lilies and cardinals for his bride. Or he slipped out of bed before dawn to catch the fish they’d eat fried for dinner. He planted vegetables. Green leaves slithered up the beanpoles, and soon his summer squashes appeared, the color of bleached gold. It was the first flush of fatherhood, he wrote, “as if something were being created under my own inspection, and partly by my own aid.”
Afternoons, the couple raced down the avenue carrying baskets of whortleberries, and for dinner they feasted on peas and tomatoes from the garden, purchasing their milk for four cents a quart and butter for eighteen cents a pound. A young Irishwoman, Sarah, cooked, but when Sarah went home to Waltham for a day, Sophia boiled her first dinner: corn and squash and rice warmed in milk with baked apples from their trees.
Inside the Manse, Sophia lined the newly papered parlor with flowers and hung one of her paintings on the yellow walls of Hawthorne’s study, helping him arrange the bureau and desk he’d brought from Pinckney Street. She put the little plaster bust relief of Apollo, a wedding gift from Caroline Sturgis, on a shelf, and from then on Hawthorne was Apollo to Sophia, and she to him the sunny incarnation of spring. They lay under the trees in one another’s arms, and when they came back to the house, they recited love poetry to each other, measuring their own bliss against the words of the poets. “We did not think they knew much,” said Sophia, “though once in a while we would find a true word.”
At night they sat in Hawthorne’s study beneath the astral lamp and Hawthorne read aloud from Shakespeare and Spenser and Milton, the happy couple criticizing Milton’s God but not his earth, which they embraced. Sophia danced to the tune of a music box, a wedding present from Mary. Sexually expressive, she luxuriated in the freedom denied under her mother’s eye. “I would put on daily a velvet robe and pearls in my hair to gratify my husband’s taste,” she announced, and to her mother she gloated that her husband “fills me so completely that there can be no void.” She didn’t transgress too far. “This vigilance & care are comparable only to a mother’s,” Sophia tactfully wrote to Mrs. Peabody, “& exceed all other possible carefulness & watching.”
“I send up a perpetual thanksgiving to Heaven that Mr. Hawthorne’s vocation keeps him beneath his own vine & figtree within instant reach of eye & voice,” Sophia wrote to Mary Foote, whose husband toiled in a newspaper office. Though the newlyweds didn’t plan to do a thing—no writing, no painting—during the summer, they charted a new routine. Mornings would be for creative work. Downstairs in the dining room, near the kitchen, Sophia had set up her studio, where she would paint, copying Emerson’s print of Endymion; or she would compose long chatty letters to her mother about the joys of marriage while Hawthorne wrote in his study just above her. They would meet at dinnertime and discuss what they’d done, and later in the afternoon Hawthorne might climb back upstairs to read, nap, or write in his journal.
Sitting at his desk in the study at the rear of the house, Hawthorne could glimpse the North Bridge monument, and from another window he gazed down through the apple orchard to the river, his passion for it not unlike Thoreau’s for Walden Pond. As if prophesizing the images in Thoreau’s masterpiece, Walden, Hawthorne in his journal compares the water’s green and blue to an open eye; and bathing in the ponds was like plunging into the sky. “A good deal of mud and river-slime had accumulated on my soul,” he wrote; “but those bright waters washed it all away.” Sometimes the river seemed torpid, sluggish, and muddy. “This dull river,” said he, “has a deep religion of its own.”
As did he. His was a tender pantheism, reverential, tranquil, sexually satisfied—a “world just created,” he observed, happy to see his wife, who met him at the door when he came home from the village. He responded to every change in weather, every scattered sound, in the journal he kept together with Sophia, an extended love letter written at home. Their home was Paradise.
Besides Apollo, Hawthorne was “Adam” or “my lord” to Sophia, and everything in paradise was holy, even the body. “Before our marriage I knew nothing of its capacities & the truly married alone can know what a wondrous instrument it is for the purpose of the heart,” she exulted.
Hawthorne himself confessed that “my life, at this time, is more like that of a boy, externally, than it has been since I was really a boy.” Surprised by physical pleasure, surprised by his sense of freedom, he brushed away more sober thoughts. “It might be a sin and shame, in such a world as ours, to spend a lifetime in this manner; but for a few summer-weeks, it is good to live as if this world were Heaven.”
“The general sentiment that prevails about you is, I find, that you do not wish to see any one,” Mary Peabody accused the newlyweds, “and that you have taken all decent measures to prevent such a catastrophe.” Mary was wrong. Proud to have a home of his own, Hawthorne showed off his house to friends. “I felt that I was regarded as a man with a wife and a household—a man having a tangible existence in the world,” he wrote in his journal.
By mid-August the Manse had opened its doors to a steady stream of guests: the Emersons, Elizabeth Hoar, the Hillards. George Bradford came from Brook Farm, and Louisa Hawthorne, traveling by coach all the way from Salem, stayed three weeks. Mrs. Peabody came, and Frank Farley and David Roberts. Elizabeth Peabody did not; Ebe did not.
Thoreau dined at the Manse. “Agreeable & gentle & meek,” said Sophia. Hawthorne considered him a singular character, wild and sophisticated in his own idiosyncratic way. “He is ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners,” Hawthorne observed. He respected Thoreau’s minute devotion to nature, “and Nature,” said Hawthorne, “in return for his love, seems to adopt him as her especial child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness.” A friend of both men, Ellery Channing, thought them alike in “the stoical fond of their characters,” he said. “A vein of humor had they both; and when they laughed, like Shelley, the operation was sufficient to split a pitcher.”
Averse to small talk in the village, Hawthorne earned the reputation of misfit, as Mary Peabody only too readily pointed out, but in Thoreau he found an accomplice. He praised the younger man’s “Natural History of Massachusetts”—not overly transcendental—published in the July issue of The Dial; he admired his scholarship; his good sense; the way he handled his skiff. In need of money, Thoreau sold Hawthorne his canoe for seven dollars, and Hawthorne asked Epes Sargent, editor of the New Monthly Magazine, to solicit Thoreau’s contribution. He did the same with O’Sullivan and the Democratic Review, which published a review by Thoreau and a short essay before O’Sullivan presciently suggested he write about nature.
Hawthorne steered shy of Emerson. It was an unusual stance, since typically men and women came to Concord to pay homage to the resident sage already known for his sonorous lectures, his heretical book Nature, and his aphorisms. “Life is a progress, not a station,” Emerson reminded his readers in his essay “Compensation.” (A “man without a handle!” Henry James Sr. called him.) Standing erect, he was over six feet tall, with bright blue eyes, craggy nose, and high cheekbones. But his individualistic pith was the fruit of gnarled despair. Two of his brothers had died young; another was mentally ill. And his first wife succumbed to tuberculosis before the couple had been married two years. Fourteen months after her death, Emerson walked out to Roxbury, where she was buried, and opened her tomb. That same year, 1832, he left the pulpit.
After his remarriage in 1835, Emerson moved to Concord with his wife Lydia, whom Emerson renamed Lydian, adding the “n” to her name to make it more euphonious. There, he wrote the transcendentalist bible, Nature, likely starting it at the Manse. It encapsulated the credo of a divine nature, both inner and outer, ordered, infinite, knowable. “We have no questions to ask which are unanswerable,” he claimed. Not entirely true, as he discovered in 1842, when a son died of scarlet fever. “I comprehend nothing of this fact,” he wailed, “but its bitterness.”
The Emersons lived on the dusty Lexington Road in a large white house with green-shuttered windows that burst with afternoon sun as if to remind Emerson that he’d staked his life on light, not the unbelief or grief nipping at his heels. He and Hawthorne were fated to misunderstand each other. When Elizabeth Peabody gave him “Foot-prints on the Sea-shore,” Emerson complained that “there was no inside to it; he & Alcott together would make a man,” and he criticized Twice-told Tales with grudging respect. “It is no easy matter to write a dialogue,” he admitted. “Cooper, Sterling, Dickens, and Hawthorne cannot.” As he came to know Hawthorne, Emerson liked him more, although he remained equivocal about the work. “N. Hawthorn’s [sic] reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact,” Emerson wrote in his own journals, “because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man.”
For his part, Hawthorne described Emerson as “a great searcher for facts; but they seem to melt away and become unsubstantial in his grasp.” The Dial put Hawthorne to sleep, and as to the recent religious controversies pitting Unitarians against transcendentalists, he couldn’t have cared less. He preferred “the narrow but earnest cushionthumper of puritanical times,” he half joked, to the “cold, lifeless, vaguely liberal clergyman of our own day.”
To some extent Hawthorne kept Emerson at bay to needle Sophia, who rushed to Concord to sit at the wise man’s knee. Hawthorne did not fancy sharing his bride’s attentions, and Sophia, alert to Hawthorne’s needs, began to deprecate the Concord sage. Aware of her daughter’s stratagem, Mrs. Peabody warned Sophia not to yield to Hawthorne’s point of view. Hackles up, Sophia retorted, “Our love is so wide & deep & equal that there could not be much difference of opinion between us upon any moral point.” Soon Sophia ventured further. “Waldo Emerson knows not much of love,” she saucily informed her mother. “He also as well as Mr. Hawthorne is great, but Mr. Emerson is not so whole sided as Mr. Hawthorne. He towers straight up from a deep pool—Mr. Hawthorne spreads abroad many branches.”
In return, Sophia didn’t approve of all of Hawthorne’s friends. David Roberts was a bore, with his “Salem inquisitiveness & anxiety to know the price of things.” But in Margaret Fuller the couple found common ground. Dear noble Margaret, as Sophia labeled her, startled the newlyweds one August afternoon when, unannounced, she walked in on them while they were locked in an embrace. Embarrassed, they unclasped and ushered the Queen, another of Sophia’s names for Fuller, into an easy chair, taking her bonnet and begging her to stay for tea. She did, and entertained the Hawthornes with “Sydnean showers of soft discourse,” Sophia fluttered. “She was like the moon, radiant & gentle.”
Hawthorne walked Fuller back to the Emersons’ and confided “he should be much more willing to die than two months ago, for he had had some real possession in life, but still he never wished to leave this earth. It was beautiful enough.” Next day, Sunday, he returned to the Emersons’ to drop off a book Fuller had forgotten at the Manse. On the way home, he saw Fuller, sitting on the ground in the woods, and joined her. Not at all shy in her presence, he talked about the pleasures of getting lost, the crows, the seasons, the experiences of early childhood, the mountains, and anything that seemed to come into his mind until Emerson, taking a Sunday walk, interrupted them. Hawthorne was annoyed.
Now happily married, Hawthorne was more comfortable with Margaret than he ever could have been before.
It rained in late summer. Hawthorne’s spirits drooped. Sophia cheered him. “Thus, even without the support of a stated occupation, I survive these sullen days, and am happy,” he wrote in relief. Warm summer days were numbered.
“I suspect he is lazy about writing—is he not?” Nathan Hale Jr., the editor of the Boston Miscellany, asked Evert Duyckinck. “He wrote me one article but has been shy of saying anything about another—although purse grew lean in obtaining the first.”
Happy in marriage, his new home, and his sense of sheer belonging, Hawthorne realized he could not support a family simply by selling barrels of fruit from a rented orchard or by harvesting bushels of potatoes from a garden planted by someone else. To have a place, one must work to keep it. Before the wedding, Hawthorne had traveled to Albany to talk with John O’Sullivan, now a state legislator, and agreed to continue writing for the Democratic Review. In March he had sent Hale “A Virtuoso’s Collection.” But of late he hadn’t been doing much.
The Peabodys knew of Hawthorne’s shaky finances, especially Elizabeth. When Samuel Soden, the publisher of the Boston Miscellany, decided to replace Hale as editor, she immediately suggested her brother-in-law. Mary sent Sophia the news, along with Elizabeth’s exasperating instructions to hold out for a salary of one thousand dollars a year, paid monthly. It didn’t matter. Henry Tuckerman, a mediocre essayist and travel writer, got the job, rejecting Poe’s “The Tell-tale Heart” first thing.
Margaret Fuller tried to help. Perhaps her sister and Ellery Channing, soon to be married, could board with the Hawthornes. Hawthorne said no even though he’d already invited George Bradford to board at the Manse. Bradford had declined. Hawthorne told Fuller he wanted to spare Sophia unnecessary housework so she could be free to paint and sculpt; and then there was the real reason: four sensitive people under one roof “would take but a trifle to render their whole common life diseased and intolerable.” Hawthorne liked Channing up to a point. “The lad seems to feel as if he were a genius,” he laughed, “and, ridiculously enough, looks upon his own verses as too sacred to be sold for money.”
The coffers remained empty.
Death, too, prowled on the outskirts of Arcady. On October 10 Uncle Robert died, the cause attributed to palsy. Hawthorne quickly extemporized. He could never get to Salem in time for the funeral, nor could he leave Concord with the harvest now in progress—the apples were a source of income—and he was trying to write a sketch from his old journals (“The Old Apple-Dealer”) for Epes Sargent. Still beholden to Uncle Robert, Hawthorne no doubt remembered with resentment Robert’s disappointment in him. He’d come to Salem pretty soon, he told Louisa, maybe toward the end of the month.
Nathaniel and Sophia did leave Paradise for Salem and Boston later that fall, family and the shade of Robert Manning calling Hawthorne back to his old accustomed chamber—and the warmth. The Manse’s long central corridor created a pleasant draft in summertime, but in October the frosty place smelled of bruised apples and dead leaves. “It is a very cold house,” remarked Sophia, rapidly stitching robes of wadded flannel. They purchased three airtight stoves, all they could afford. Detestable, Hawthorne thought them. Longing for an open fireplace, he made nostalgia the subject of a new Democratic Review sketch, “Fire-Worship.” “The inventions of mankind are fast blotting the picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful out of human life,” he groaned; even the destructive was in jeopardy: “The mighty spirit, were opportunity offered him, would run riot through the peaceful house, wrap its inmates in his terrible embrace, and leave nothing of them save their whitened bones.”
No more. Captive within an iron-bellied stove, fire can no longer thaw hands as cold as the virtuoso’s. “A person with an ice-cold hand,” Hawthorne had written in his notebooks, “—his right hand; which people ever afterwards remember, when once they have grasped it.” Ice-cold, too, is the heart yearning for firesides, forever bygone. Alien, detached, isolated, this ice-man again crystallizes Hawthorne’s fear of what he himself might be or, without Sophia, have become. Soon he’ll populate the happy groom’s fiction in great number.
Hawthorne could easily despise Concord, with its rolling meadows and deep woods, its donnish Whigs and do-gooders, “bores,” he said, “of a very intense water.” No sunbaked sailors roamed the street, earrings aglitter; no day laborers hauled masts and hurled epithets by the wharves; no brothels squat waterside. Instead Concord was a Hall of Fantasy, its dreamy corridors reaching all the way to Cambridge, where Longfellow had finished his small yellow packet of antislavery poems. And it swept over the hallowed streets of Beacon Hill, protesters cried out against the trumped-up arrest of mulatto George Latimer, jailed in Boston without a warrant.
Even Hawthorne’s friend George Hillard, flat-footed defender of the Constitution, began to sweat, so troubled was he by the violation of Latimer’s civil rights. The Latimer case sparked a violent outburst against returning fugitive slaves to their putative masters, with John Greenleaf Whittier composing abolitionist verse and the old guard nervously defending the letter of the law. Slavery had seemed an abstraction, something odious practiced somewhere else. Now white slaveholders prosecuted fugitive slaves in the capital of Boston, and slavery had come home.
Yet many New Englanders persisted in thinking slavery a southern problem, which is how Hawthorne largely regarded it. And he didn’t give a fig for abolition, laughing at it in his sketch “The Hall of Fantasy,” in which an abolitionist brandishes “his one idea like an iron flail.” In this satire, Hawthorne also surrounds Emerson with fawning acolytes, “most of whom,” Hawthorne gibes, “betrayed the power of his intellect by its modifying influence upon their own.” By contrast, the narrator of the sketch, a newcomer to the Hall of Fantasy, is a Democrat who archly claims to “love and honor” such men as Alcott and Jones Very and Washington Allston; maybe he does, but only when he praises John O’Sullivan’s opposition to capital punishment does he drop his supercilious tone.
Hawthorne had no close friends in Concord, and its residents, men like Emerson, good and intelligent men of serious purpose, struck Hawthorne as somewhat pretentious and spoiled, or like Ellery Channing, as amiable featherheads. Hawthorne sighed. “These originals in a small way, after one has seen a few of them, become more dull and common-place than even those who keep the ordinary pathway of life.”
Displaced, Hawthorne took aim at his public-spirited neighbors, the poets, reformers, and woolly transcendentalists of sanguine persuasion, and assailed by errant knights, vegetarians, Adventists, Grahamites, and abolitionists—residue of the evangelical movement known as the Second Great Awakening—he salted his prose with misanthropic sarcasm. In “The Procession of Life,” the narrator caustically sorts people into categories, a strange pastime under any circumstance, though in this case the criterion isn’t rank or achievement, just disease, sorrow, crime, and dislocation. And lambasting financiers, social distinctions, or silk-gowned professors, he mocks American democracy. “These factory girls from Lowell,” he declares, “shall mate themselves with the pride of drawing-rooms and literary circles—the bluebells in fashion’s nose-gay, the Sapphos, and Montagues, and Nortons of the age.”
His astringency reveals a deep, pervasive pessimism originating not just in his earlier reading of Swift and Mandeville, satirists of deep dye, or his recent perusal of Voltaire but in Hawthorne’s perception of himself as an outsider removed, in this instance, from the shallow fuzziness of reform. Hawthorne’s was a world of hard angles, first and forever.
Winter grew cold. Louisa hoped her brother might be selected for the Salem post office, and though Hawthorne doubted he would, he assured his family that he’d receive a political appointment in a matter of months. He and Sophia ate their first Thanksgiving dinner alone, fortified by one another. In the next months, while she gaily slid on the frozen river, he skated, darting away from her in long sweeping curves. Or, wrapped in his cloak, he was sometimes joined on the ice by Thoreau and Emerson. Sophia watched them. But on a snowy afternoon, the sky leaden, the light in the Old Manse slanted downward.
“All through the winter I had wished to sit in the dusk of Evening, by the flickering firelight, with my wife, instead of beside a dismal stove. At last, this has come to pass; but it was owing to her illness, and our having no chamber with a stove, fit to receive her.”
In February 1843 Sophia suffered a miscarriage. Fast recovering, she chirped that “men’s accidents are God’s purposes.” Hawthorne scribbled the consolation into his journal, and like childish vandals, he and Sophia scratched it onto the window of his study.
Hawthorne now sat at his desk in earnest. With no government job forthcoming, he didn’t appear in public until two in the afternoon, when he trudged through the piled-up snow to the Athenaeum and read for an hour. After peeking his head into the post office, he walked back home for an early tea and to chop the wood he could not afford to buy. Mornings, often before dawn, he skated—“like a schoolboy,” he told his friend Margaret Fuller—and evenings, he read to Sophia as usual. A cold house was no place for guests so the couple entertained one another. “I do suppose that nobody ever lived, in one sense, quite so selfish a life as we do,” Hawthorne admitted, content.
Each day he returned to his study “with pretty commendable diligence,” he noted with satisfaction, even though he disparaged what he did there. “I might have written more, if it had seemed worth while; but I was content to earn only so much gold as might suffice for our immediate wants, having prospects of official station and emolument, which would do away the necessity of writing for bread.”
His pockets stayed empty. “It is rather singular that I should need an office,” Hawthorne complained to Bridge; “for nobody’s scribblings seem to me more acceptable to the public than mine; and yet I shall find it a tough match to gain a respectable support by my pen.” Epes Sargent had offered Hawthorne five dollars per page for anything he might submit to the New Monthly Magazine, and Hawthorne tried to charge the same amount to James Lowell, editor of the recently founded Pioneer, but Lowell couldn’t pay anywhere near that, and what he could pay, he paid slowly. So did Sargent and the Democratic Review, where Hawthorne earned only twenty dollars each for articles like “The Old Apple-Dealer” or a story like “The Antique Ring.” And because he himself owed money, he couldn’t send funds to his sisters or mother. His paltry finances kept him close to home, unable even to go to Boston. “It is an annoyance; not a trouble,” he swaggered for Sophia’s benefit in their jointly kept journal, though he did regret his meager income—and meager output—as well as the fact that no one remunerated him fairly for what he did manage to provide.
Hawthorne wanted to write two juvenile storybooks under O’Sullivan’s auspices, believing New York a lucrative venue for publishing. But he didn’t. Nor could he motivate himself to write anything for Poe’s projected magazine, Stylus. He turned down the chance to compose more stories for the Boys’ and Girls’ Magazine, which had published his children’s fable, “Little Daffydowndilly” (about dillydallying), and though he consented to contribute to the popular Graham’s Magazine, hoping to pocket its generous fee, he dawdled. Pressure made him tense.
“Could I only have the freedom to be perfectly idle now—no duty to fulfil—no mental or physical labor to perform—I could be as happy as a squash, and much in the same mode,” he scribbled in his journal. “But the necessity of keeping my brain at work eats into my comfort as the squash-bug do into the heart of the vines. I keep myself uneasy, and produce little, and almost nothing that is worth producing.” More likely Hawthorne did not quite know what he wanted to do, and he still hoped for a political appointment, traveling to Boston and Salem when he could afford to go to jockey for it.
But nothing eased his sense of failure. Either he accused himself of not writing enough or he considered what he wrote trivial: the busy conscience was a cruel taskmaster, impossible to please. Still, through 1843, Hawthorne’s sketches and tales appeared regularly, and by the end of the year, with Sophia six months pregnant, Hawthorne sat in his study all morning and in the afternoon until sunset, having stocked the pages of the Democratic with stories like “The New Adam and Eve,” “Egotism; or, The Bosom-Serpent,” “The Procession of Life,” “The Celestial Rail-road,” “Buds and Bird-Voices,” and “Fire-Worship.” Though his pace slackened slightly in 1844, he did publish “Earth’s Holocaust” in Graham’s and “Drowne’s Wooden Image” in Godey’s Lady’s Book. Destitution and the imminent birth of a child had smashed through his inhibitions, or what he often termed his torpor.
But stories printed for a few dollars a page could not feed a family. Sometime after leaving the Old Manse, he quipped that he had hoped “at least to achieve a novel,” if not some more serious writing while he lived there. He wrote no novel. Yet he did start what may have been conceived as a book of interrelated tales, subtitling two of them “From the Unpublished ‘Allegories of the Heart.’ ”
He’d been speculating about the project for quite a while—the heart allegorized as a cavern, he jotted in his notebooks. “At the entrance there is sunshine, and flowers growing about it. You step within, but a short distance, and begin to find yourself surrounded with a terrible gloom, and monsters of divers kinds; it seems like Hell itself.” But with a series of tales about the misalliances of men and women, Hawthorne was writing stories unlike those about bachelors, wanderers, and masqueraders, and different too from his recent satiric sketches.
Take “The Birth-mark,” published in Lowell’s Pioneer and written not six months after his marriage, during Sophia’s first pregnancy. A young scientist insists on removing the crimson birthmark on his wife’s left cheek that galls and obsesses him; it’s the “sole token of human imperfection,” says he. With sexual anxiety thinly disguised as cosmetology, he prepares a stupefying concoction, which his wife obediently drinks. The fatal red mark disappears, but the potion kills her: the ideal cannot exist in disembodied form. This is the lesson that Aylmer, the scientist, has to learn. “Our creative Mother,” Hawthorne writes, “while she amuses us with apparently working in the broadest sunshine, is yet severely careful to keep her own secrets, and, in spite of her pretended openness, shows us nothing but results. She permits us indeed, to mar, but seldom to mend, and, like a jealous patentee, on no account to make.”
A slap at Emerson and transcendentalism, “The Birth-mark” is also a murder story in which a man confronts marriage, and hence sexuality, with horror. Equally, he wants to prevent a birth. In this sense, Hawthorne’s story is also a fantasy of abortion. The scientist kills his wife and what she produces so that he in some way can remain alone, untrammeled, asexual, and free from responsibility.
The deadly ambivalence about women and, more broadly, sexual bodies and fatherhood suffuses most of the stories that Hawthorne wrote in these years. Another example, though far less accomplished—and less sadistic—is another tale in the projected “Allegories of the Heart” series, “Egotism; or, The Bosom-Serpent.” Revamping a popular sixteenth-century legend, Hawthorne coils a snake about the heart of the Poe-like Roderick Elliston, the tale’s main character, who understandably shuns the general population because of his bizarre affliction. Soon, though, he wants to be noticed. “All persons, chronically diseased,” writes Hawthorne, “are egotists, whether the disease be of the mind or the body.”
To Hawthorne, the desire for recognition is a curse. Ambition, fame, and la gloire are sins of commission in Hawthorne’s world. Thus, the greater Roderick’s fame, the greater his torment: it’s as if Hawthorne was writing the allegory of himself, an ambitious guest unhappy under his dark veil and miserable without it.
So Roderick Elliston seeks the solace of fellow sufferers. Searching for the symptoms of his own disease in everyone he meets, Roderick hopes to “establish a species of brotherhood between himself and the world,” for he needs to believe that he does belong somewhere, that he’s not a complete monster or deformed oddball; that he is, in effect, a man. Yet what is manhood? Elliston sees his masculinity grotesquely mirrored in ambitious statesmen, distinguished clergymen, and wealthy merchants, each of whom harbors a secret serpent. Even the envious author, who disparages the books he could never write, nurtures his own slimy snake, one that, Hawthorne jests, “was fortunately without a sting.”
By seeking this fraternity, Roderick is able to sidestep the implications of his condition: Roderick is pregnant. For though Hawthorne states early in the story that the bosom-serpent symbolizes jealousy, he never bothers to make the nature of Roderick’s jealousy concrete or believable—unless procreation is its primitive source. That is, Roderick’s bosom-serpent isn’t just a symbol of his manhood; the snake transforms Roderick into a woman, with a creature alive inside him that’s “nourished with his food, and lived upon his life.”
Written during Sophia’s first pregnancy and miscarriage, Hawthorne’s story conveys all the fears of coming fatherhood: that the creature about to be born is predatory, threatening; that the miracle of creation is mixed with sex and death; that a man can never do what a woman does, despite, in Hawthorne’s case, an unsettling, overwhelming identification with women: his mother, his sisters, even Sophia. It’s no surprise that Hawthorne’s Roderick cannot be rid of his serpent until his wife, Rosina, appears almost willy-nilly at the story’s hasty conclusion. But the ending is psychologically astute. Rosina rescues Roderick by reassuring him of his masculinity.
Bosom-serpents within the body and birthmarks on it refer again to Hawthorne’s obsession with disclosure, or that which is written and borne on the body. In another story, the superbly intricate “The Artist of the Beautiful,” published in the Democratic in 1844 but written around the time his first child was due, Hawthorne admixes sexuality and childbirth into a parable of art and artistry. The artist of the story’s title is the watchmaker Owen Warland, renowned for the delicate ingenuity applied “always for purposes of grace, and never with any mockery of the useful.” Loving “the Beautiful” and attempting to render a perfect depiction of it, “refined from all utilitarian coarseness,” Owen might just as well have been a poet, a painter, or a sculptor, or so the story’s narrator tells us. He might even have been Hawthorne, whose “demand is for perfection,” said Sophia, “& nothing short can content him.”
There is something self-centered about Owen, something infantile, insulated, and vain. With his diminutive frame, his ladylike fastidiousness, and his flapping nerves, Owen Warland is an effeminate anomaly in a world that gauges manliness, and hence productivity, by the girth of a blacksmith’s big arm or the heft of his wallet.
When Annie Hovenden, whom Owen thinks he loves, marries the good-natured, thick-skinned blacksmith Robert Danforth, Owen becomes ill, gains weight, grows plump—after which episode he does eventually succeed in crafting (giving birth) to a beautiful little thing, a mechanical butterfly, perfect, lifelike, the consummation of his dreams. He brings his creation to Annie and Robert, themselves now the parents of a sturdy little child. The lovely butterfly flickers about the room, and just when it’s ready to land, the child snatches it and crushes it in his little fist.
Owen is presumably defeated, his creation smashed, his butterfly vanquished not by Danforth or Annie or her scornful father but by a human child. Nature’s real creation, suggests Hawthorne, threatens to overshadow, if not utterly destroy, the artist’s.
After a winter of fierce cold, scant food, and little money, on March 3, 1844, Sophia Hawthorne endured ten hours of labor. She finally gave birth to a baby girl and named her Una, for Spenser’s vision of purity. She had red hair.