CHAPTER SIXTEEN
This possibility of mad destruction only made his domestic kindness the more beautiful and touching.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Fire-Worship”
THOU DIDST much amiss, to marry a husband who cannot keep thee like a lady,” Hawthorne lamented to his wife. Nomads once again, they would pack their worldly goods and head westward—western Massachusetts, that is—hoping to recover from the agony of the last months.
All of them were tired, especially Sophia; she hadn’t even known where they’d be living come spring. And with the children squealing in her ears, her husband lashed to his desk, requests for lampshades multiplying—Elizabeth had even gone so far as to suggest she paint hand-screens—she collapsed with pleurisy shortly after the publication of The Scarlet Letter.
Life seemed forever changed. The Mall Street household was breaking up. Louisa sorted what to take to Aunt Dike’s, and Ebe went to Manchester, north of Salem, where she could walk along the shore unmolested by busybodies. Hawthorne also wanted to get out of “abominable” Salem. “I detest this town so much that I hate to go into the streets, or to have people see me,” he told Bridge.
They had investigated Portsmouth, New Hampshire, near Bridge and his wife, but not finding anything affordable, Sophia began to consider a place in the Berkshire mountains. Her friend the wealthy Caroline Sturgis had married the wealthy New York broker William Aspinall Tappan in 1847, and they were staying at Highwood, the estate of Anna and Samuel Ward, in the small village of Lenox, population circa fifteen hundred. Having bought property nearby, the Tappans were building their own cottage—as mansions were called locally—on the acreage known as Tanglewood. Caroline Tappan began to recruit Sophia to the Berkshire community: the writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick lived in Stockbridge among a clan of Sedgwicks that included Theodore, the senator, who paced the village green when not in Washington, and Catharine’s sister-in-law Elizabeth, who superintended a well-known school for young ladies in Lenox. Actress Fanny Kemble had purchased a cottage, the Perch, in the woods; Oliver Wendell Holmes’s grandfather kept a farm in Pittsfield; Fanny Longfellow’s family owned property in Stockbridge. The Hawthornes would not be alone.
“To give up the ocean caused rather a stifling sensation,” Sophia admitted; “but I have become used to the idea of mountains now.” Hawthorne wavered. Depressed, dreading further debt, and by no means sanguine about earning his keep, he uneasily imagined himself eating food from his own garden and paying the rent with proceeds from the sale of Sophia’s lampshades. But in the Berkshires there would be no real garden, with snow falling early and fast during the bottomless winter.
Nonetheless, when the Tappans offered the Hawthornes the handyman’s small red house on the edge of their property at no cost, Hawthorne accepted with dignity, stipulating he’d pay fifty dollars for the rent. “I infinitely prefer a small right to a great favor,” he later explained as he folded away his dream of a house by the sea. “Had this wish of his been fulfilled,” Julian would plaintively write years later, “it might have made great differences.”
At the end of May, the Hawthornes chugged into the airy hills, decamping from the train, their clothes soaked in soot, and descended on the Tappans, who brushed the dust from their garments and put the entire east wing of Highwood at their disposal while the red house was being repaired. Julian rode a hobbyhorse covered with real horsehair, and Una walked through jade-green woods, birds bursting into “ecstatic song” (Sophia’s phrase). Hawthorne, worn and weary, lapsed into a nervous fever, his eyes glazed, his face pale as cement. “Belladonna finally conquered the enemy,” Sophia exhaled in relief, “and though he is not so vigorous yet as in former days before the last day began (it is a year now since he was expelled from the Custom House) yet he is reviving very fast.”
About ten days later, an old oxcart lugged the Hawthornes’ furniture through the rickety black gate of their new home, a little red box that sat like a district schoolhouse on the northern end of the Stockbridge Bowl (the familiar name for Lake Mahkeenac). The house was one of the poorest, oldest shanties in Lenox, Ellery Channing later remembered, “with uneven floors, and so ill-built that the wind could not be kept out.” Sophia was delighted.
She hung her reproductions above the mantel and in the bedrooms and halls; she draped crimson curtains over the windows and covered the center table with ruby-red cloth; she placed a purple-and-gold-colored carpet given by Caroline in the small front room and in the low-studded drawing room set out the bowl and pitcher Hawthorne’s father had brought from India. In Hawthorne’s study she arranged the red acanthus-leaf carpet, a secretary, an ottoman, and a cane-bottomed rocker. The rooms were tiny; the house was tiny, but its views were fresh and breezy, and the dining room window, like the one in the upstairs bedroom, looked out on the buttery lake, its color changing by the hour. In the background loomed Monument Mountain, a headless sphinx draped in a rich Persian shawl.
“My house is an old red farm house, (as red as the Scarlet Letter),” Hawthorne wrote to Zachariah Burchmore, a friend from Custom House days. He might as well have been living on the moon as in Lenox. The air was pure, too pure. “I find it very agreeable to get rid of politics and the rest of the damnable turmoil that has disturbed me for three or four years past,” he said; “but I must plead guilty to some few hankerings after brandy and water, rum and molasses, an occasional cigar, and other civilized indulgences of the like nature.”
Come to visit, Horatio Bridge cleared out the barn and hen coop, and he hammered bookshelves and mended tables, but he didn’t think rural solitude healthy for Hawthorne. “He has gone to Lenox, where I fear he will settle down for three or four years,” Bridge confided to Frank Pierce. “Perhaps he may remain there unless, at the end of this administration, he should have a good office tendered him,” he hinted. Released on bail after the Cuban fiasco, O’Sullivan surprised the Hawthornes when he knocked at the red shanty’s door. Hawthorne stayed grumpy. “Mr. Hawthorne thinks it is Salem which he is dragging at his ankles still,” Sophia remarked.
Moody under the best of circumstances, Hawthorne had left friends and family in the wake of embarrassment, penury, and spleen, having endured what Sophia considered the most trying year of his life. It wasn’t quite over. In July came news of Margaret Fuller’s death. She had gone to Europe in 1846 as the New-York Tribune’s foreign correspondent, and once in Italy, set about writing an eyewitness history of the Roman revolution, “the daily bulletin of men and things,” she said. To proper Bostonians, though, Fuller’s name continued to raise eyebrows no matter what she did, even marrying, particularly since she concealed her marriage from friends, who tried to squash vicious gossip. That she gave birth to a son whet the appetite of scandalmongers even more: Fuller’s child must be illegitimate, his father an uneducated bumpkin without talent of any kind. “Think of the dry, forlorn old maid changed into a Marguerita Marchesa d’Ossoli!” snickered Fanny Longfellow. Fuller drew herself up. “I pity those who are inclined to think ill,” she retorted from a distance, “when they might as well have inclined the other way, however let them go.”
With her son ill, the revolution in shambles, and the pope restored, Fuller decided to come home. She sailed with her family from Leghorn on the ill-fated Elizabeth. En route, its captain died of smallpox; and that wasn’t the worst of it. Approaching Fire Island, New York, in the wee hours of July 18, the Elizabeth, hitting a southwestern gale, was dashed into a sandbar. A cargo of Carrara marble split the ship’s hold, and the boat began to crumple into a mass of planks and swollen splints. Women and men jumped overboard, and the crew desperately clung to wooden planks, but Fuller, it was said, refused to leave the deck. Some think that Ossoli had already drowned and she was suicidal. Sophia pictured her sitting with her hands upon her knees, waves breaking over her water-soaked nightdress.
Neither her body nor Ossoli’s was found, and the sailor who tried to swim ashore with their little boy was washed onto the beach that morning with the dead child.
“Oh was ever any thing so tragical, so dreary, so unspeakably agonizing as the image of Margaret upon that wreck, alone,” cried Sophia. Emerson sent Thoreau and Ellery Channing to New York to hunt for Fuller’s body and her manuscript. Channing dried the papers washed up on the shore but found nothing that amounted to a book.
Sophia calmed herself. “I am really glad she died,” she concluded without feeling, “—there was no other peace or rest to be found for her—especially if her husband was a person so wanting in force & availability.”
Evert Duyckinck, soon to visit the red shanty, remarked that Sophia Hawthorne looked like Margaret Fuller though she definitely seemed cut from much sturdier cloth.
The day Margaret Fuller’s ship was tossed to bits, Herman Melville’s aunt handed him a copy of Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse.
It was an auspicious gift, for the two men were soon to meet at a picnic arranged by their Stockbridge neighbor, David Dudley Field. On a Friday in early August, Field was returning to the Berkshires from New York when he happened to see Evert Duyckinck and the essayist Cornelius Mathews on the train. hey were going to spend a few days with Melville and his family on the Pittsfield farm owned by Melville’s cousin.
James T. Fields and his wife were scheduled to stop by the Hawthornes’ that same week, and Oliver Wendell Holmes was vacationing at his summer home. Why not arrange a climb up Monument Mountain with the literati and their guests, Dudley Field wondered. He’d do it.
The date was set for Monday, August 5, a day soon to be promoted as an American Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (without the scandal): Hawthorne, fully clothed, pursues the Great Carbuncle while Herman Melville, Mr. Neptune, rapturously pursues Mr. Noble Melancholy. It’s a good story: friendship forged in the blue mountains between two of the most singular of all American writers, attended by a retinue of lesser-knowns. Cornelius Mathews wrote the first account of it for Duyckinck’s Literary World; revelers convene in the summer sun before a thunderclap and a sheet of rain send them scampering. Gaily, they all yell out puns and rhymes as they run for cover. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Mr. Town Wit) is the most droll; James T. Fields, the most inept (his patent leather shoes slip on the slick stones); and Herman Melville is the daredevil who sprints from rock to jutting rock.
The party descended the cliffs to reassemble at Dudley Field’s home, where Field supplied dry clothes, a three-hour dinner, and a good deal of wine. According to Duyckinck, Dr. Holmes baited the group with witticisms about Englishmen being superior to Americans. Melville stoutly defended the Americans while Hawthorne looked amiably on. Later James Fields remembered that Hawthorne took the part of the American.
Afterwards the group headed over to Ice-Glen, a mountain cranny, for another lark led this time by Joel Tyler Headley, a popular historian, who depicted the “remarkable literary column,” as did Fields twenty-five years after the fact. “Hawthorne was among the most enterprising of the merrymakers,” Fields claimed; “and being in the dark much of the time, he ventured to call out lustily and pretend that certain destruction was inevitable to all of us.” The cleft was so deep that nothing melted within, Hawthorne observed, and looked “as if the Devil had torn his way through a rock & left it all jagged behind him.” Grumbling about his bulky size, Fields again slid on the stones. Dr. Holmes shouted, If you’d give your authors another 10 percent, you wouldn’t have so much fat.
Of the group, Melville captured Sophia’s fancy. “Mr. Typee is interesting in his aspect quite,” she told Elizabeth, referring to Melville’s first book. “I see Fayaway in his face.” Besides Typee, the young author had published four other books: a novel, Omoo, had appeared in 1847, a year after Typee, and like it was based on his experiences as a sailor in the South Seas, this time in Tahiti and Eimeo; his novel Mardi came out in 1849, the same year as his autobiographical Redburn (Defoe on the ocean, Duyckinck said). Just recently White-Jacket had appeared, and now he was trying to write a strange sort of a book about whaling, having grown tired of his reputation as the writer who’d lived among cannibals.
He also had pedigree. “He is married to a daughter of Judge Shaw—Judge Lemuel Shaw,” Sophia bragged to her mother, “& has a child of a year & half—Malcolm. He is of Scotch descent—of noble lineage—of the Lords of Melville & Leven, & Malcolm is a family name.” In America the family had distinguished itself during the Revolution, with one grandfather dumping tea in Boston Harbor and the other raising his musket in defense of Fort Stanwix. But those days were long gone. Melville’s father, a wholesaler of high-class imports, had died bankrupt when Herman was twelve, forcing him to leave school and work as a bank clerk, a sales clerk, and a schoolteacher. He studied civil engineering and surveying but found no employment on the Erie Canal project, as he’d hoped, so in 1839 set sail on a merchant ship bound for Liverpool, as recounted in Redburn. Back at home, he again taught for a while, traveled to Illinois, and then signed on to the Acushnet, a whaler headed for the South Seas. In 1842 he jumped ship in the Marquesas, and eventually returned, after a series of remarkable adventures, to Boston as a sailor in the United States Navy.
Hawthorne liked the bushy-bearded young man—utterly himself—and asked him to spend a few days at the red house. Generally suspicious of literary men (Longfellow was an exception), Hawthorne much preferred the retired sea dogs of Salem to any highfalutin tribe in Concord or the Berkshires. Plus, like Melville, he loved the sea, which represented raw adventure and a test of manhood perfectly balanced by death, certain and uncertain.
And here Melville was, bearded and bronzed, a man who led the kind of life Hawthorne could only dream about: afloat on some craft or other, battling typhoons and enduring doldrums, dropping anchor in exotic, distant lands. Mixing with salts, young and old, on board ship, men and women on land, Melville was the coxswain, not a dry-docked Custom House inspector, come back to tell all, striding off the gangplank into a garret where he could dip his pen into the inkpot and be, of all things, a writer. He was also a willing acolyte, fourteen years Hawthorne’s junior, fatherless, and so hungry for literary companionship that he eagerly projected onto the older author the preoccupations assailing him while he wrote his book about whales.
“We landsmen have no variety in our lives,” Hawthorne once said of himself. Ready to drink a bottle of brandy and “talk ontological heroics” in the barn, Melville struck Hawthorne as unashamed, sexual, tender, and individual, a spendthrift stylist and prolific author liberally “tolerant of codes of morals that may be little in accordance with our own,” Hawthorne had written in his review of Typee. Melville was no landsman.
When Duyckinck returned to New York City, he carried the first installment of Melville’s review of Mosses from an Old Manse.
Though it’s not clear when Melville began the review, whether before or after meeting Hawthorne, it’s obvious that Melville was smitten with Hawthorne and his work. “Already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul,” Melville lustily writes. Pretending to be a Virginian on vacation in New England, he says he’s just read Hawthorne’s book while lying on the new-mown clover near the barn. And he’s ecstatic. “He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him,” Melville writes of Hawthorne, “and further and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.”
The eroticism is unmistakable; so too Melville’s canny perception of Hawthorne’s work, “the rich and rare distilment of a spicy and slowly-oozing heart,” he called it. Without compunction, Melville dares liken Hawthorne to Shakespeare—“Some may start to read of Shakspeare and Hawthorne on the same page”—since most readers don’t really understand either writer anyway, their insights being too grave, ornery, and hard to swallow whole. “For in this world of lies,” Melville utters in crescendo, “Truth is forced to fly like a sacred white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other great masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth—even though it be covertly and by snatches.”
Melville will set the record straight. “For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side—like the dark half of the physical sphere—is shrouded in blackness, ten times black.” Melville understands despondency and vile doubt; they stalk him too, and he knows that what most reviewers term morbidness is the clear-eyed admission that all the tanks have been drained. It’s a perception that “derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin,” he continues, “from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance.”
Melville’s Man of Mosses (as he referred to Hawthorne in his review) is a man of brooding unbelief.
Was he writing of Hawthorne or himself? With insatiable hunger, Melville devoured the world, and when he wrote of Hawthorne, he wrote of both of them. For in his magniloquent prose, Melville pictured Hawthorne as a mate bobbing like him on the troubled seas of publishing, recognition, and posterity. “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay,” he would confide to his new friend. “Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot.”
Recognizing a fellow traveler when he met one, Melville boldly predicted that Hawthorne augured greatness for American literature. Washington Irving was a grasshopper compared to him. “Let him write like a man, for then he will be sure to write like an American,” Melville boomed, sounding like John O’Sullivan and Emerson, who sounded like one another. “Let us away with this leaven of literary flunkeyism toward England.” As for Hawthorne, he is the flesh and blood of the land. The scent of beech and hemlock and tar is in his soul, where Niagara roars and the prairies stretch far and wide.
Hawthorne may have hoodwinked the multitude with his tidy tales, but he didn’t outfox everyone; certainly not Herman Melville. “For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand,” Melville declared, “and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.”
Melville’s magnetism held the entire Hawthorne family in its grip long after Hawthorne and Melville ceased to see one another. Said Julian Hawthorne in retrospect, “There were few honester or more lovable men than Herman Melville.”
“A man with a true warm heart & a soul & an intellect—with life to his finger-tips—earnest, sincere & reverent, very tender & modest,” Sophia described him. “—And I am not sure that he is not a very great man—but I have not quite decided upon my own opinion.”
Houseguest at the red shanty, Melville was the essence of good manners, “careful not to interrupt Mr. Hawthorne’s morning when he was here,” Sophia reported to her mother. “He told me he was naturally so silent a man that he was complained of a great deal on this account; but that he found himself talking to Mr. Hawthorne to a great extent—He said Mr. Hawthorne’s great but hospitable silence drew him out—that it was astonishing how sociable his silence was.”
Herman Melville (Library of Congress)
When Sophia learned that Melville wrote the review of Mosses in the Literary World, he could do no wrong. “He is an invaluable person, full of daring & questions, & with all momentous considerations afloat in the crucible of his mind,” she again described him. “He tosses them in, & heats his furnace sevenfold & burns & stirs, & waits for the crystalization with a royal indifference as to what may [toss up], only eager for truth, without previous prejudice. This ocean-experience has given sea-room to his intellect, & he is in the mere boyhood of his possibilities.”
When he spoke, she said, people and places and even objects sprang to life. Melville told the Hawthornes a story about a man and a large oak cudgel, and shortly after Melville left the house, she found herself looking in the bedroom for the stick. “When conversing, he is full of gesture & force, & loses himself in his subject—There is no grace nor polish—once in a while his animation gives place to a singularly quiet expression out of these eyes, to which I have objected—an indrawn, dim look, but which at the same time makes you feel that he is at that instant taking deepest note of what is before him—It is a strange, lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique.”
Sophia seemed to praise Melville more than her husband did, although he appreciated Melville’s work. “No writer ever put the reality before his reader more unflinchingly than he does in ‘Redburn,’ and ‘White Jacket,’ ” Hawthorne wrote to Duyckinck. “ ‘Mardi’ is a rich book, with depths here and there that compel a man to swim for his life.” Melville was no ordinary writer, but Hawthorne did wish the younger man wouldn’t seem in such a blasted hurry: “One scarcely pardons the writer for not having brooded long … so as to make it a good deal better.” For many years this was the standard criticism of Melville’s work.
During the next fifteen months the two men enjoyed a friendship that echoes in the halls of American literature, where it’s been probed, sexualized, and moralized, Hawthorne cast as a repressed and withholding father-figure, ungenerous to a fault, and Melville, needy son, rebuffed by the elder writer. Whenever Melville effused, Hawthorne shrank, or so it seems.
Melville loved Hawthorne, of this there can be no doubt. And Hawthorne loved his male friends; he didn’t need to categorize or condemn his feelings, or to fear them. He also cared for Melville. But Hawthorne did not love Melville, not the way—whatever way that was—that Melville needed love.
Yet Melville left his mark on Hawthorne. Characterizing Holgrave in The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne drew upon his neighbor: scantily educated, left early to his own guidance, a former country schoolmaster and a man who “had never lost his identity, homeless as he had been—continually changing his whereabouts.” Of course, Melville figures much more importantly in Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, where Hawthorne incorporates him into the character of brawny Hollingsworth: “There was something of the woman moulded into the great, stalwart frame of Hollingsworth,” Hawthorne writes; “nor was he ashamed of it, as men often are of what is best in them.”
In that novel, Coverdale’s rejection of Hollingsworth’s bid for friendship gives rise to the flat-footed speculations about Hawthorne’s rejection of Melville. There’s no real evidence for this. Hawthorne’s letters to Melville do not survive, a fact that leads nowhere, especially not to the assumption that Melville destroyed them in a pique of unrequited love. He likely burned them at Hawthorne’s behest, as Hawthorne’s other friends—Peabody, Pierce, Bridge—all would.
But Melville was—is—an engulfing spirit whose whirlpool of feelings sucked in everything and everyone near him. He plummeted from doubt to depression or leaped from desire to enthusiasms as broad as his compassion, as grievous as his solitudes, as polymorphous as his experiences on board ship or in the South Sea Islands. Whatever Melville told Hawthorne of all this, whatever Hawthorne surmised, or whatever he feared about Melville, Hawthorne was a fastidious man who depended on regulation—regular living, regular loving, rituals of predictable routine—as if to contain or curb his own sense of the underside of things, that stuff of terror and despair and dissolution (or so he thought). He constantly flirted with it in his work, but he also wanted a life of pattern, order, comfort, much like many of his beleaguered characters. In fact, the allure of his best prose derives from the tension between regulation and psychological—even ontological—pandemonium. Over and over, Hawthorne reassured himself that he preferred the road taken: “Persons who have wandered, or been expelled, out of the common track of things, even were it for a better system, desire nothing so much as to be led back,” he writes in The House of the Seven Gables. “They shiver in their loneliness, be it on a mountain-top, or in a dungeon.”
And Hawthorne’s male friends—Horatio Bridge, John O’Sullivan, and Frank Pierce—were men who negotiated the world by defending themselves in ways Melville could and would not. They were men comfortable with their ability to compete with others and men whose ambitions facilitated Hawthorne’s rather than got in his way.
Melville read Twice-told Tales, telling Duyckinck that “their deeper meanings are worthy of a Brahmin. Still,” he added, “there is something lacking—a good deal lacking to the plump sphericity of the man. What is that?—He does’nt patronise the butcher—he needs roast-beef, done rare.” Hawthorne’s work—a little light and delicate—needed meat on the bone.
It didn’t matter. In one of those rare acts of literary generosity and friendship, Melville would dedicate Moby-Dick, his novel of metaphysics and whaling, to Hawthorne “in token for my admiration of his genius.”
Two men, differently timed, together for a brief interlude; and they’d write far different books when each returned to his study. Hawthorne called Moby-Dick a book with a gigantic conception; it was the kind of book he’d never write.
The publication of The Scarlet Letter had salvaged Hawthorne’s pride and helped to fill his purse, but he had a new book to finish, barely begun, that worried him. And Fields was at his elbow. “You are aware how much depends upon getting ready in season,” he nudged. “I intend this fall to sell a good many thousand for you of whatever you choose to give the public.” Hawthorne resisted. “I must not pull up my cabbage by the roots, by way of hastening its growth,” he replied with a touch of asperity.
Yet Hawthorne trusted Fields, who continued to insinuate himself into Hawthorne’s career—or, rather, he determined that the former short story writer should have one. Fields kept the lid open on his cashbox so far as Hawthorne was concerned, should he need to borrow on credit. He acted as impresario, talking up Hawthorne’s talents, his future, even his physique. “His form is only second to Daniel Webster’s in robustness,” Fields would tell a friend, hastening to add that “he blushes like a girl when he is praised.” He rallied Hawthorne’s spirits. “We intend to push your books a-la-Steam Engine,” he said, “and do better for you than any other house.” Fields was reissuing the entire Grandfather’s Child series originally published by Elizabeth Peabody as True Stories from History and Biography and Biographical Studies. After the publication of Hawthorne’s new novel, which he wanted to advertise as soon as possible, Fields planned to reprint Twice-told Tales with a new author’s preface. And he persuaded Hawthorne to round up more stories for yet another collection to appear after writing his book of children’s stories, A Wonder Book.
When the houseguests departed and the weather cooled, Hawthorne began to write in earnest, even going so far as to puzzle over his new book’s title, which likely he remembered from his visit to Susanna Ingersoll years before: “The House of the Seven Gables.” Fields approved, and so it remained. But it wouldn’t be ready before January, for he wanted to polish many of the passages and make sure each detail was finished “with the minuteness of a Dutch picture,” he said. He also wished to make the book a little lighter than The Scarlet Letter in order to win, he hoped, an even larger audience. To do this, he had to stop writing for a while. “There are points when a writer gets bewildered,” he sighed, “and cannot form any judgement of what he has done, nor tell what to do next.”
Meantime, he rejected an offer from Graham’s to write a new story, he rejected a proposal from Emerson to write for a new magazine, he rejected an offer from Greeley’s Tribune. No longer would he disperse his talents, such as they were, on unprofitable enterprises, thanks to Fields’s business acumen and unconditional support.
He did compose a new preface for Twice-told Tales in his recognizable style: muted irony, authorial detachment, sardonic nonchalance, and modesty mixed with a dollop of hauteur. Affecting to spurn anything as base as self-disclosure, popularity, or ostentation, he drew attention to himself and his career, reminding the reader with just a trace of bitterness that he’d been “for a good many years, the obscurest man of letters in America,” who’d tried his utmost “to open an intercourse with the world.” The author is Oberon, disappointed and unloved but able to console himself with those few but fit readers who, caring for his stories, care for him.
The autobiographical preface is also lightly powdered with self-pity. But Hawthorne wrote sincerely, up to a point. Sensitive to criticism, imagined or real, Hawthorne strikes preemptively, disputing the criticism he pretends to accept. With typical disingenuousness, he wonders how his stories managed to have any vogue at all, and he denigrates his early tales—“pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade”—much in the manner of Poe and Fuller. “Instead of passion, there is sentiment,” he echoes them; “and, even in what purport to be pictures of actual life, we have allegory.” Defiantly, he goes on: “The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.”
Disparagement of this sort is hardly an inducement to turn the page. But Hawthorne knows that Twice-told Tales is being reissued by the most ambitious publisher in Boston. So much for the influence of Fuller or Poe, both of whom were dead. And was his work so pallid? “Every sentence, so far as it embodies thought or sensibility,” Hawthorne smoothly continues, “may be understood and felt by anybody, who will give himself the trouble to read it, and will take up the book in a proper mood.” As Melville had.
In this mild-mannered way, Hawthorne threads his preface with indelible cords of revenge, much like Hester Prynne when she sews her “A” with golden thread. “The spirit of my Puritan ancestors was mighty in me,” he reiterates again and again.
Man of compassion, man of ice; man of forgiveness, man of spite: “Nobody would think that the same man could live two such different lives simultaneously,” Hawthorne once told Sophia, referring to the disparity between his inner and external life. Alienation, duplicity, and the sense of living double, not being what one seems or what others take one to be: these were the hallmark of Hawthorne’s prose, and through it, a persona that “on the internal evidence of his sketches,” he wrote, “came to be regarded as a mild, shy, gentle, melancholic exceedingly sensitive, and not very forcible man, hiding his blushes under an assumed name, the quaintness of which was supposed, somehow or other, to symbolize his personal and literary traits.”
Hawthorne knew what he was doing, he knew these half-truths became him. As did empathy, passion, fiery aggression, and the embittered loneliness of an outsider turned exile, the fugitive alone, a shadow, whether in the company of his beloved family, a responsive readership, or the keen-witted Herman Melville.