CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
What we call real estate—the solid ground to build a house on—is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests .
…
But, for this short life of ours, one would like a house and a moderate garden-spot of one’s own.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables
THE BOOK is an affliction,” Catharine Sedgwick sniffed at The House of the Seven Gables. “It affects one like a passage through the wards of an insane asylum.”
Hawthorne had returned home, at least in imagination, for the setting of his new novel, and though he insisted in the book’s preface that it had “a great deal more to do with the clouds overhead than with any portion of the actual soil of the County of Essex,” he fooled no one. The setting of the book is vintage Salem, so much so that amateur literary sleuths steeped in New England lore quickly identified Hawthorne’s seven-gabled house as the Ingersoll place on Turner Street.
In The Scarlet Letter, he had focused on his mother and more broadly the complex predicament women faced as wives, mothers, daughters, and sexual beings. In The House of the Seven Gables, he again shook the family tree, this time to confront his paternal legacy: class, heredity, and the all but incestuous business of living in one spot for generations, tyrannies and injustice handed down generation after generation like a congenital disease.
Hawthorne combined Susanna Ingersoll’s story about her Turner Street house with tales about his great-grandfather, the hanging judge, and the malediction supposedly uttered by Sarah Good when the Reverend Nicholas Noyes had called her a witch. “I’m no more a witch than you’re a wizard!” she reportedly cried. “And if you take my life God will give you blood to drink!” Translating this into the prophecy that Matthew Maule, the accused wizard, hurls at his nemesis, Colonel Pyncheon in The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne also dug up the Hathorne legend that a curse—much like Sarah Good’s, much like Matthew Maule’s—had robbed the family of a putative patrimony, nine thousand acres of land in eastern Maine. “The impalpable claim, therefore, resulted in nothing more solid than to cherish, from generation to generation, an absurd delusion of family importance,” Hawthorne explains, as if writing of the family pretensions for which he castigated them and himself.
The book’s main character is a seven-gabled house, its timbers oozy “as with the moisture of a heart” that rises phoenixlike from Hawthorne’s Province-House, another pretentious mansion, and from his “Tales of the Province-House” Hawthorne also took the doddering royalist Esther Dudley, whom he rewrites as Hepzibah Pyncheon, both of them anachronisms. But the mansion is no place of grace. It was built on property stolen twice over, first from the Indians and then from the carpenter Matthew Maule, whose greedy persecutor, Colonel Pyncheon, not only expropriated Maule’s land but brought down Maule’s curse on his family: “The wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief,” Hawthorne announces in the book’s preface: Sophoclean tragedy on a New England stage.
The novel opens on the terrible morning when Hepzibah “is to be transformed into the plebeian woman.” Humiliated and terrified, she barely swallows her pride to open a cent-shop, the only recourse, Hawthorne notes, for a woman in circumstances as diminished as hers. Readying herself and her store for its first customer, poor Hepzibah clumsily drops her gingerbread elephants and scatters a tumbler of marbles over the floor, every awkward attempt to retrieve them an index of her state of mind. The narrator recounts the bumbling operation, barely suppressing his laughter, but if he humiliates the gawky, scowling Hepzibah, Hawthorne deeply pities this woman, so much like relatives of his own, displaced in a rapacious nation “where everything is free to the hand that can grasp it.”
“In this republican country,” Hawthorne writes, “amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning point.” The waves were, of course, cresting on the issues of property and ownership at the bottom of American politics. The Compromise of 1850 had been passed in September of that year to put a lid on the slavery issue by admitting California into the Union as a free state and leaving the question of slavery in New Mexico and Utah to referendum. The Compromise also settled Texas boundary disputes, outlawed the slave trade (not slavery) in the District of Columbia, and mollified the proslavery South with the stringent Fugitive Slave Law (an enactment of Hell, abolitionists called it), which Hawthorne himself was dead against.
In his novel, he concerns himself with the Compromise obliquely and at a distance, as in the case of Jaffrey Pyncheon’s political ambitions or the gingerbread Hepzibah sells, made in the shape of Jim Crow. Instead he focuses on his own demons: hapless aristocrats at loggerheads with their avaricious relatives. For Hepzibah is awaiting the appearance of her defrauded brother Clifford, wrongly incarcerated almost a lifetime by the rich and deceitful cousin Jaffrey.
Clifford Pyncheon is prey partly because of the “feminine delicacy of appreciation” that renders him poetic, soft, even voluptuous, and reminds the reader of Hawthorne’s Owen Warfield in “The Artist of the Beautiful.” Clifford, like Owen, is not a manly man; he is an aesthete confused by the crudities of getting and spending. His opposite is the unctuous, aggressive Jaffrey Pyncheon, the man of consummate materialism who never mistakes shadow for substance. In public, Jaffrey beams his waxy smile; in private, he breaks his wife’s spirit on their honeymoon. (Ebe saw the Reverend Charles Upham, Hawthorne’s Custom House nemesis, in Jaffrey’s grin.) Clifford in his damask dressing gown, Judge Jaffrey with his gold-headed cane: the Pyncheon men—victim and victimizer, idealist and materialist—incarnate the poles of conventional manhood for Hawthorne.
Enter Holgrave, the reconciler. A lodger in the house of seven gables, he has what the Pyncheons lack. He is ardent, youthful, and radical, a man at home in the modern world who nevertheless lives in the creaky old house, temporarily of course. “I dwell in it for awhile,” he says, “that I may know the better how to hate it.” Despising the house and what it represents, he wails, “Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?” The plaint comes straight from Hawthorne’s notebooks. “We read in dead men’s books! We are sick of dead jokes, and cry at dead men’s pathos! We are sick of the same men’s diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients!” Build therefore your own house, Holgrave counsels, mouthing the kind of Emersonian self-reliance Hawthorne finds seductive and vapid. But Holgrave’s raison d’être is the very past he hates: he’s Matthew Maule’s descendant, come to nurse ancestral wounds.
Holgrave resembles Hester Prynne, Hawthorne’s ultimate outsider and another character who eventually makes her peace with society, more or less, as Holgrave will. For though he insists that “once in every half century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure, mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors,” he falls in love with the fresh-faced Phoebe, a Pyncheon country cousin recently domiciled in the house.
Tamed by Phoebe (Hawthorne’s pet name for Sophia), Holgrave renounces his wanton ways, declaring himself a conservative eager to set out trees and make fences, even, he says, to build a house for another generation. So the novel closes with Holgrave looking forward. Hawthorne, however, is not so sanguine about Holgrave’s prospects. Adopting Phoebe’s morally neat desire for “a house and a moderate garden-spot of one’s own,” Holgrave does not pick up Hawthorne’s reference to Voltaire or his irony. Cultivating a garden rank with plebeian vegetables and aristocratic flowers may be the best one can do: mitigated pleasures destined for our world.
If one can have even those. Hawthorne has rigged a set of circumstances—a convenient death, a will, an inherited fortune—to remunerate his characters for their troubles, allowing Hepzibah and Clifford and Phoebe and Holgrave to light out for the territory of a romancer’s conjuring, a pastoral world of happily ever after from the contingencies of time or age and the vicissitudes of fortune.
That province of make-believe is the utopian dream that Hawthorne abandoned years before, except in fiction. And one cannot be sure he hasn’t given it up there too. At the conclusion of the novel, he cynically conveys Holgrave and company in a dark-green barouche to Jaffrey Pyncheon’s elegant country-seat, not a garden-spot of their own but another house, redolent both of the past and of what’s to come.
Produced less than a year after The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables is a book of middle age, for time is the novel’s cardinal theme, time and its relentless passage in a world hell-bent on progress. Eyes filmy and dim, Clifford cannot flee himself or his past, and all the newfangled appurtenances—the railroad and the electric telegraph—cannot undo what’s been done. “No great mistake, whether acted or endured, in our moral sphere,” Hawthorne writes, “is ever really set right.”
Doubtless begun as one of the tales to be included with The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables is the first novel Hawthorne produced as such, which helps account for its curious repetitions (the story of Matthew Maule’s martyrdom told more than once) and its almost static temper. Ellery Channing joked to Emerson that Hawthorne took one hundred forty pages to describe an event; “a cough took up ten pages, and sitting down in a chair six more.” But with such set-pieces as a wizened Hepzibah Pyncheon opening her shop or a smug Judge Pyncheon sitting dead in his chair, this singular novel goes where books have not yet tread, stopping time entirely.
Chapter 18 is a case in point: planting a corpse in his book, Hawthorne halts his story as the narrator speaks of life and death and the sure oblivion that opens beneath our feet. Meantime, our pocket-watches, like Jaffrey Pyncheon’s, tick indifferently on:
There is still a faint appearance at the window; neither a glow, nor a gleam, nor a glimmer—any phrase of light would express something far brighter than this doubtful perception, or sense, rather, that there is a window there. Has it yet vanished? No!—yes!—not quite! And there is still the swarthy whiteness—we shall venture to marry these ill-agreeing words—the swarthy whiteness of Judge Pyncheon’s face. The features are all gone; there is only the paleness of them left. And how looks it now? There is no window! There is no face! An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and murmuring about, in quest of what was once a world!
Is there no other sound? One other, and a fearful one. It is the ticking of the Judge’s watch.
“There is a certain tragic phase of humanity, which, in our opinion, was never more powerfully embodied than by Hawthorne,” Melville remarked. “We mean the tragicalness of human thought in its own unbiased, native, and profounder workings.”
Hawthorne is like the daguerreotypist Holgrave, who wants to reveal people’s characters, not just their looks. Holgrave is a contemporary sorcerer, or romancer, manipulating time, the better to discover its secrets, like Hawthorne does. Calling the novel a romance, as he had in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne says he does not dramatize events unsheathed in the spick-and-span light of common day, like Dickens or Balzac do. Rather, as romancer—an American Walter Scott crossed with Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann (though he would never have said so)—he claims in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, that he, unlike a novelist, manages “his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture,” salting his dish (he changed his metaphor) with “the Marvellous rather as a slight, delicate and evanescent flavor.”
To the extent that Holgrave is a reconciler, he represents the artist who (again like Hawthorne) squares the actual and the imaginary, time and eternity, being and nothingness. To Hawthorne, then the work was balanced, its writing a kind of exorcism, and he consequently considered The House of the Seven Gables “a more natural and healthy product of my mind” than The Scarlet Letter.
Hawthorne finished the book at the end of January, mailed it to Fields, and then suffered the “blue devils” in its wake. “How slowly I have made my way in life!” he wrote to Horatio Bridge. “How much is still to be done!”
“There is a grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes,” Melville bellowed after reading The House of the Seven Gables. “For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,—why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unencumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag.”
In the fall, after Melville had purchased 160 acres and a farm he dubbed Arrowhead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, he and Hawthorne exchanged letters and visits across the country roads, Melville rumbling over to Lenox in his pine-board wagon, drinking champagne foam (a concoction of champagne, beaten eggs, and loaf sugar) at the Hawthorne house and promising “mulled wine with wisdom, & buttered toast with story-telling” in return. In a March snowstorm, Hawthorne drove off with Una and brought to Melville Archibald Duncan’s The Mariner’s Chronicle, a book owned by his uncle Richard: it was a gift of affection and regard.
The friendship had not waned. “I mean to continue visiting you until you tell me that my visits are both supererogatory and superfluous,” Melville wrote Hawthorne, happy to tote from Pittsfield a bedstead and a clock to the red shanty. And Sophia watched with approval as this “fresh, sincere, glowing mind” spoke to Hawthorne about God and the Devil and life “so he can get at the truth,” she said, “for he is a boy in opinion—having settled nothing yet.” Yet there was no “mush of concession” in him, she said.
During a trip to New York that spring, Melville overheard much praise of Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. “So upon the whole, this N.H. is in the ascendant,” Melville reported with a touch of envy. “My dear Sir, they begin to patronize. All Fame is patronage.” Hawthorne was doing well. Not he. He was completing Moby-Dick in a spasm of energy and jitters. “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century,” he predicted, “I should die in the gutter.” But he approved of The House of the Seven Gables(“genialities peep out more”), and Sophia loved it.
Publication was delayed. Fields figured he needed three or four thousand bound copies ready for purchase at the Old Corner Bookstore, it being bad policy to run out of a new book. He expected it to be popular. Having reissued Twice-told Tales, which sold almost two thousand copies, he was creating a market for Hawthorne, as he’d said he would, stolid and powerful as a locomotive, by hawking the novel in the South when he traveled there and making sure every newspaper pirating a copy of the preface to Twice-told Tales ran a wood engraving of Hawthorne’s face.
Hawthorne disliked these although he’d been pleased with Cephas Thompson’s portrait from which they were taken. Painted in Boston in 1850, the portrait depicts Hawthorne as seated, composed, in command of himself and his surroundings. He wears a standing white collar, black coat and waistcoat, and a silk bow-tie. His greenish gray eyes, the color of the sea on an overcast day, meet the spectator in the way a shy man defies his shyness. The forehead is high, the hair thinning. The face itself is long, a smile—or a grimace—playing about his mouth.
Fields commissioned Thomas Phillibrown to make a steel engraving from this portrait, which magnified the sadness in Hawthorne’s eye, or so Sophia thought, but Hawthorne approved enough to have it sent with the presentation copies of The House of the Seven Gables going to friends. Sophia gave Melville a copy.
Fields finally released the novel during the second week of April. “A weird, wild book, like all he writes,” Longfellow remarked, and James Russell Lowell predicted Salem would soon build Hawthorne a monument “for having shown that she did not hang her witches for nothing.” Evert Duyckinck told readers of the Literary World that Hawthorne carries “his lantern, like Belzoni among the mummies, into the most secret recesses of the heart.”
Of the reviewers, most perceptive was Edwin Whipple, if one excuses him for not being able to see what Melville had. To Whipple, the first hundred pages of The House of the Seven Gables were brilliant in conception and execution, combining the humor of “The Custom-House” with the pathos of The Scarlet Letter. But the rest of the book was shaky, the characters weak. Holgrave was a stick and Clifford Pyncheon a nattering bore. From England, however, Fanny Kemble wrote to the Hawthornes that The House of the Seven Gables caused as much of a ruckus as Jane Eyre, and the Athenaeum ranked Hawthorne one of the most original novelists of modern times. Ebe Hawthorne delivered the starchest, best compliment of all: “It is evident that you stand in no awe of the public,” she praised her brother, “but rather bid it defiance, which is well for all authors, and all other men to do.”
On May 20, 1851, just about a month after the publication of The House of the Seven Gables, Sophia produced what Hawthorne called “a little work”—a new baby. Squalling and kicking, Rose Hawthorne entered the world, “the daughter of my age,” her forty-six-year-old father remarked wryly, “if age and decrepitude are really to be my lot.”
Sophia had definitely wanted another child; her sister Mary had three. It’s not clear what Hawthorne wanted. According to Elizabeth Peabody, Sophia claimed that her husband was so anxious over her health he thought she should bear only three children, each after a prescribed interval. The story, even if true, smacks of apology. Nonetheless, something prompted Elizabeth Peabody to conclude that “Mr. Hawthorne’s passions were under his feet,” as if he had none.
Whatever transpired in the bedroom, Hawthorne’s insistent worries about how to feed a growing family contributed in no small measure to his blues. “I have never yet seen the year, since I was married, when I could have spared even a hundred dollars from the necessary expense of living,” he told Peabody when she tried to make him buy life insurance. The House of the Seven Gables sold for a dollar, with Hawthorne receiving a 15 percent royalty, but despite the advance brouhaha, sales lagged, and Fields couldn’t peddle the English rights. Hawthorne, who earned just a little over one thousand dollars the first year of publication, had to draw on his account with the publisher to settle old debts.
Sophia was tired, the baby cried, and always a tight fit, the little red shanty began to shrink even further. The walls were too thin, the ceilings too low. And Hawthorne was lonely for his friends. All winter, the snow was deep, the paths impassable. In spring, the muddy lanes were hard to navigate. “I feel remote, and quite beyond companionship,” he complained to Longfellow. The fans who opened his gate were a nuisance. He generally refused invitations, and he seldom went to the village except to visit the post office. Joseph Smith, a Stockbridge resident, remembered Hawthorne’s rare appearance in town. “Mr. Hawthorne, even for a man of letters, leads a remarkably secluded life,” Smith observed. “I’m afraid the de’il will carry him off if he walks so much in solitary places,” Caroline Tappan joshed.
Sophia welcomed callers from Boston come to see the Tappans, but if too many people, especially literary ones, were to flock to the Berkshires, she complained to her mother, “I dare say we shall take flight.” It was an uncommon outburst. Sophia didn’t want to leave Lenox although Hawthorne longed to inhale ocean breezes, pace the moist docks, plunge his feet into the sand. And talk with his buddies. “He seems older, & I think he has suffered much living in this place,” Ellery Channing reported to his wife after seeing Hawthorne in Lenox. “… I think he has felt his lack of society.”
He returned to work. He still considered the children’s market a lucrative one, and since Fields’s republication of his juvenile tales (renamed True Stories) enjoyed a press run of forty-five hundred, he expected even more of a profit for a new children’s book. It took Hawthorne only six weeks to write his irresistible retelling of classical myths, A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys.
Later in the summer, Sophia headed for West Newton with Una and the baby, leaving Hawthorne alone with the frisky Julian, now five, and their black cook, Mrs. Peters. The two males—one sturdy and small, the other almost six feet tall—walked daily to the lake, where they amused themselves flinging stones into the water and picking wildflowers. Julian was especially thrilled when Melville, galloping down the road, stopped, bent down, and scooped him up into the saddle. Melville stayed through tea, and after supper he and Hawthorne smoked cigars in the sacred precincts of the sitting room, talking deep into the night about “time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters.”
In Melville’s presence, Hawthorne yearned even more for the magically curative powers of the sea. Should his writing turn profitable, he fantasized, he might buy a house by the coast. He asked friends to look for something priced between fifteen hundred and two thousand dollars, if not on the ocean then with easy access to it. “I find that I do not feel at home among these hills, and should not like to consider myself permanently settled here,” he explained to William Pike. To Sophia, he dropped the veil. “I hate Berkshire with my whole soul, and would joyfully see its mountains laid flat.”
There was little argument from Sophia. She and Caroline Tappan had been quarreling without words for several months. Sophia thought Caroline (like Ebe) induced Una to deceive and disobey, and while Sophia was in West Newton, Caroline had been dropping by the red farmhouse, arms heavy with newspapers and books to loan Hawthorne for his next novel. Perhaps she stayed too long, ruffling Sophia’s feathers more. Caroline responded by asserting droit du seigneur. She had seen the Hawthornes’ servant, Mary Beekman, carrying a basket of fruit and peremptorily asked if the fruit was to be given away or sold, the latter a breach of etiquette, to be sure, and an abuse of her largesse. She sent a note to Sophia; wouldn’t Sophia prefer to receive kindness than assume rights? she asked.
“The right of purchase is the only safe one,” Hawthorne sharply replied, referring not to the fruit but to his demeaned position as tenant farmer. He wanted a roof of his own, his own garden-spot, and Tappan provided just the excuse he needed. “I am sick to death of Berkshire,” he sputtered to Fields. “… I have felt languid and dispirited, during almost my whole residence.”
Within two weeks Hawthorne took off for Boston and put in motion plans to remove his family from the hated hills.
“Did Mr. Hawthorne tell you all the reasons why we are disenchanted of Lenox?” Sophia was soon asking Mary Mann.
Since Mary and her family were bound for Washington, Horace having been reelected to Congress on the Free-Soil ticket, Mary had offered to rent their place in West Newton to the Hawthornes. They had declined. The price was too high, and thinking they might stay in the Berkshires another two years—the length of the presidential term—they figured they’d take Fanny Kemble’s house, offered for the same rent they paid the Tappans. But they didn’t. They bolted.
Reasons other than Tappan apples hustled the Hawthornes from Lenox. “When a man is making his settled dispositions for life, he had better be on the mainland, and as near a rail-road station as possible,” Hawthorne confessed to Bridge, meaning more than he let on. With the presidential election upcoming in 1852, Hawthorne wanted to be a stone’s throw from Boston, partly to keep his political hat close to the ring. Like him, many Democrats had been biding their time in local caucuses, hoping their time would come again soon; if they could reunite the party, they might recapture the presidency, and after the sudden death of New Hampshire favorite Levi Woodbury in September—just when Hawthorne decided to return to the Boston area—they thought Frank Pierce might be their man. Hawthorne may have heard from Pierce himself that he would consider a bid, and in any case, William Pike and Zachariah Burchmore, still active in the cause, each kept an eye on the prize.
So too Hawthorne. Neither Free-Soiler nor abolitionist, he commended Burchmore for not defecting to the antislavery movement—as he had not, steering much the same course as when he edited Journal of an African Cruiser. “I have not, as you suggest, the slightest sympathy for the slaves,” he reassured Burchmore; “or, at least, not half so much as for the laboring whites, who, I believe, as a general thing, are ten times worse off than the Southern negros.”
With his opposition to the antislavery movement, Hawthorne embarrassed many of his acquaintances and later his fans. “How glad I am that Sumner is at last elected!” he wrote Longfellow about the protracted fight to send that Free-Soiler to the United States Senate. “Not that I ever did, nor ever shall, feel any pre-eminent ardor for the cause which he advocates,” he crisply added, “nor could ever have been moved, as you were, to dedicate poetry—or prose either—to its advancement.” Nonetheless, he signed a Free-Soil petition protesting the Fugitive Slave Law. A firm believer in states’ rights, he regarded any law absurd that ceded control to the federal government, particularly one that allowed slave owners or their representatives to enter free states, arrest runaways—kidnap them, according to the abolitionists—and haul them back South like so much bundled hay. “This Fugitive Law is the only thing that could have blown me into any respectable warmth on this great subject of the day.” He paused—“If it really be the great subject.”
Elizabeth Peabody smiled to learn of Hawthorne’s signature, but as far as he was concerned, in so doing he had “bade farewell to all ideas of foreign consulships, or other official stations.” He said he didn’t care a “d—for office,” suggesting the opposite.
The Mann offer began to sound good. Visiting West Newton, Hawthorne temporized. From there, he and Sophia could more reasonably look at last for their own place. “Ticknor & Co. promise the most liberal advances of money, should we need it, towards buying the house,” he reassured his wife and himself.
Sensing his urgency, she quickly acquiesced. “I begin to unlove the lake now I think it has done harm to Mr. Hawthorne & my chief desire is to get as far from it as possible, when a little while ago it caused a real pang to think of leaving it.”
In the fall, they sold much of their furniture at auction, including Hawthorne’s mahogany writing desk, and gathered the remaining household goods, leaving behind their five cats and a sorrowful Melville. There was nothing to be done about Melville, of course; he had a family of his own. Early in November, Hawthorne met Melville for dinner at the Lenox hotel, and that night Melville presumably gave Hawthorne his inscribed copy of Moby-Dick, cooked, Melville hinted, partly at Hawthorne’s fire. “I have written a wicked book,” Melville was to tell him, “and feel spotless as a lamb.” The letter (lost) that Hawthorne wrote in praise of Moby-Dick drove the younger author to rapture: “Your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s,” Melville surged with hopeful intimacy, demanding in the next breath, “Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life?”
Melville was doomed to disappointment. It came first in Duyckinck’s patronizing notice of Moby-Dick in the Literary World. “What a book Melville has written!” Hawthorne wrote Duyckinck in protest. “It hardly seemed to me that the review of it, in the Literary World, did justice to its best points.” If Hawthorne volunteered to review it, Melville waved him aside. “Don’t write a word about the book,” he admonished. Hawthorne took Melville at face value. Melville lovers never forgave him.
Leaving the Berkshires, Hawthorne began slowly to pull away from the parched Berkshire sailor who ceaselessly sought answers to questions his contemporaries did not pose. “It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting,” Hawthorne commented five years later in a searching analysis of Melville—and of himself. “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.”
A man who himself knew of desert places, Hawthorne must have wondered whether he faced them with Melville’s soul-rending honesty. “But truth is ever incoherent,” Melville had told him, “and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a bit stunning.” Hawthorne warded off Melville’s tribute with a characteristic blend of hard-shell irony and finical decorum. Melville, said he, is “a person of very gentlemanly instincts in every respect, save that he is a little heterodox in the matter of clean linen.”
On a sunless November morning, the Hawthorne wagon lumbered out of the red shanty. Julian, twisting around in his seat, looked back and saw their five household cats sitting on the ridge of the hill, abandoned to the gray snowflakes.
“I suppose it is Sophia’s plan,” the waspish Ebe Hawthorne wrongly surmised; “it is so much like the Peabodys never to be settled.” She was half right in her second guess: “If Nathaniel buys a place she will have some excuse for leaving it in a year or two.”