CHAPTER FIVE
“Old and young, we dream of graves and monuments,” murmured the stranger-youth. “I wonder how mariners feel, when the ship is sinking, and they, unknown and undistinguished, are to be buried together in the ocean—that wide and nameless sepulchre!”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Ambitious Guest”
HAWTHORNE HAD a taste for drama. He burned his first manuscripts, he said, whole quires of them, “without mercy or remorse, (and moreover, without subsequent regret).” He was a man of high standards, rigorous and stern, and like the protagonists in his stories who torch the tales that no one reads, Hawthorne didn’t separate anger from anguish, vengeance from self-punishment, when he felt he had failed. Nor need he have. He was creating a compounded image—artist as pyromaniac, artist as self-hater—to express the complex, incendiary truth of his feelings.
“I am as tractable an author as you ever knew,” he once told an editor, “so far as putting my articles into the fire goes; though I cannot abide alterations or omissions.”
He also portrayed himself as obliging and agreeable, a gentle Nathaniel Hawthorne who, like those charred papers, remains passionately unavailable.
“He always puts himself in his books,” his sister-in-law Mary Mann later declared; “he cannot help it.”
After graduation Nathaniel headed to Salem still vague about a career. He had attended lectures at the Maine Medical School during his senior year, perhaps considering medicine, but Horatio Bridge recalled that Nathaniel had “formed several plans,” unable to settle on any one of them for very long.
In Salem the Manning stagecoaches rattled profitably over New England roads—Robert was active in the business again—and Nathaniel determined to join “Uncle Manning’s counting-house,” as Bridge called the family company. But even before graduating from college, he’d been writing droopy lyrics about the ocean and moonlight (to “cheer the hearts of those that grieve/And wipe the tear drop dry”), and once back on Herbert Street, he stayed in his sunny third-floor chamber all day to write stories unless the afternoon weather was good. Then he’d walk down Essex Street in trim attire, wrapped in his long dark cloak with velvet collar. Or he’d hike along the beach and watch the water crash against the rocks.
He showed Ebe his work and she liked what she saw, the rudiments of a volume to be called Seven Tales of My Native Land, with an epigraph from Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven,” a poem about siblings and separations. Ebe recalled that one of the stories, “Alice Doane,” was about witchcraft, and there was another one, possibly about the sea; the identity of the rest and their dates of composition aren’t certain although Nathaniel had scrawled “The Truant Boy” in his copy of the undergraduate manual the Laws of Bowdoin College, as if auditioning a title for a story. But from what remains, it’s clear that Seven Tales, partly inspired by Washington Irving’s Sketch Book, also bore the stamp of John Neal, whose books Nathaniel had devoured in college. “That wild fellow, John Neal,” Nathaniel later described him, “who almost turned my boyish brain with his romances.”
A Maine native, Neal loudly banged the drum for American literature without frills, a literature of democratic spunk, and he practiced what he preached in a spate of sensationalistic novels intended to shock the complacent Anglophile bourgeoisie. (He was also the first to praise Edgar Allan Poe.) “It is American books that are wanted of America; not English books;—nor books made in America, by Englishmen, or by writers, who are a sort of bastard English,” Neal had proclaimed, reeling from Sydney Smith’s gibe in the pages of the Edinburgh Review, “Who reads an American book?”
Like Longfellow and Cooper, Nathaniel was responding to the clarion call for native writers, at least in terms of subject matter, by making stories out of local history and legend. However, in his earliest stories, plots amble nowhere and the settings, all American, drip with Gothic gloom. Regardless, he was acquiring a grammar of primary images: paired women, fair and foul; fallen trees aglow with green slime; voices wailing in the night; and apparitions that march in ghoulish pageants.
Two of the stories likely intended for Seven Tales, “The Hollow of the Three Hills” and “An Old Woman’s Tale,” also demonstrate his early proficiency in creating mood. In “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” for instance, a young woman meets with an old crone in the woods to ask about the fate of loved ones she apparently deserted, and in just a few paragraphs Hawthorne draws on his feelings about abandonment and death, producing a sustained, unremitting study in tone, the fixed mood of the story emanating from repeated auditory images, feet sounding upon the floor and ears measuring the length of a funeral procession: “Then came a measured tread, passing slowly, slowly on, as of mourners with a coffin, their garments trailing on the ground, so that the ear could measure the length of their melancholy array.”
The other story, “An Old Woman’s Tale,” is a rudimentary excavation of the past in which the past is so psychologically and historically immediate it gives the present meaning and depth. The nature of that meaning, however, is not yet plain, even to Hawthorne. As a young couple cuddle in the moonlight, a parade of strange characters suddenly comes into view. One of them, an old woman wearing spangled shoes, begins to dig in the ground with an iron shovel. Then, just as suddenly, the couple wake from what turns out to be their shared dream—for what else was the parade? They discover the shovel. Seizing it, the young man plunges it into the earth. “Oho!—What have we here!” he cries. And here the story abruptly ends, as if its author, himself digging up the past, did not know what he sought or, seeking, might find.
Nathaniel rummaged among the dusty wills and papers carefully preserved in Salem, initiating genealogical and antiquarian investigations that lasted a lifetime. Identifying with the ancient Hathornes, in his imaginative life he began to underplay his connection to the Mannings; if he didn’t much like his father’s side of the family—reputedly he told a friend he wanted no connection to them—he begrudgingly admired their self-regarding vanity, so different from the secular strivings of blacksmiths and bookkeepers.
As a consequence, he relentlessly perused old documents in pursuit of something more personal than source material: patrimony, the kind taken for granted by his college friends. With a self-assurance he did not share, men like Frank Pierce or Stephen Longfellow—and they were not exceptional—could lean on or rebel against living fathers of distinction and marked descent. Hathorne had the descent, not the distinction. His own father had died without rejuvenating the ancestral name. Yet a shabby gentility was better than none, and so Nathaniel carried himself with the melancholy éclat of a young lord burdened by inconsolable loss.
For this he needed a usable past. He consumed public records, travel books, biography, and poetry, as well as great gobs of history. “All really educated men,” he would soon write, “whether they have studied in the halls of a University, or in a cottage or a work-shop, are essentially self-educated.” His reading was prodigious: Edward Clarendon on England, Thomas Hutchinson and Alden Bradford on Massachusetts, John Campbell on Virginia, Daniel Neal on the Puritans, William Allen’s biographical encyclopedia, Jean Froissart’s Chronicles, Cotton Mather’s Magnalia, William Sewell’s History of the Quakers, tattered copies of the Salem Gazette, Francis Bacon, Edward Gibbon, Jeremy Belknap, and the proceedings of the General Court of Massachusetts Bay. He relished old cookbooks, savoring the Yankee dishes of his childhood, and at the Salem courthouse he fondled the pins said to be used by witches, who jabbed them into the flesh of their victims.
Refusing to visit the Salem Athenaeum himself, so Ebe said, he sent her to the library instead. They used Aunt Mary Manning’s borrowing privileges, transferred to him in 1828. “I am sure nobody else would have got half so much out of such a dreary old library as I did,” Ebe declared. “There were some valuable works; The Gentleman’s Magazine, from the beginning of its publication, containing many curious things, and 6 vols. folio of Howell’s State Trials, he preferred to any others. There was also much related to the early History of New England, with which I think he become pretty well acquainted, aided, no doubt, by the Puritan instinct that was in him.”
This Puritan instinct may have influenced the aesthetic credo he started to hammer together and which, though clarified over time, never substantially changed. All his stories, he insists, combine fancy and fact, even when he himself invented the facts. The dreamscape of “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” for example, is one where “fantastic dreams and madmen’s reveries were realized among the actual circumstances of life.” More famously, in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne pretends to stumble on the old red “A” that gives rise to the story.
Aspiring to be a creative writer, not an antiquarian, Hawthorne implicitly justifies the writing of fiction. It may not serve the useful function of biography or history—works of fact—but without it biography and history are dull, dead, removed, unreadable. “The knowledge, communicated by the historian and biographer,” he explains in his 1830 sketch of Sir William Phips, “is analogous to that which we acquire of a country by the map,—minute, perhaps, and accurate, and available for all necessary purposes,—but cold and naked.” The solution: “Fancy must throw her reviving light on the faded incidents that indicate character, whence a ray will be reflected, more or less vividly, on the person to be described.”
Readers familiar with Hawthorne will recognize his Coleridgean terms: the accurate, if faded, incidents represented by the detailed map, on the one hand, and the illumination of this map by imagination on the other. Almost twenty years later, in the “Custom-House” essay that introduces The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne calls these two spheres “the real world and fairy-land,” or “the Actual and the Imaginary”—implicitly warring factions of experience coaxed into a “neutral territory” by an author sensitive both to inner vision and to outer exigencies.
Yet in all these are “musts”—“A license must be assumed,” “Fancy must throw her reviving light”—one hears a young, conscience-stricken writer plead not just for an audience but for its blessing. Of course, the audience hardest to please was internal. He was never content. Hence comes the story of the burned manuscript.
Devastated by the rejections of the several publishers to whom he’d sent his collection of short stories—one didn’t even bother to read it—he claimed to set fire to Seven Tales. (Although Bridge wasn’t with Nathaniel at the time, he recalled him reacting in “a mood half savage, half despairing.”) In another version of events, Nathaniel hands over the stories to the printer Ferdinand Andrews, owner of the Salem Gazette, expecting to see them in print right away. But when Andrews hesitated, Nathaniel impatiently demanded his manuscript back. Then he torched it. Bridge called him “inexorable.”
He did destroy all early drafts of his prose, obliterating clues to the work’s inception or development. “He did not wish his struggles, his anxieties, the sweat of his brow to be visible,” said Julian. Presumably he put the manuscript of The Scarlet Letter up the chimney as soon as the book was printed, and he may have scrapped early notebooks, since only those dated from 1835—the early Maine diary notwithstanding—have come to light. Similarly, he burned early correspondence and urged friends to do the same. Acutely aware of the power of history, he wanted to control it.
“Knowing the impossibility of satisfying myself, even should the world be satisfied,” he wrote in one of his early stories, “I … investigated the causes of every defect, and strove, with patient stubbornness, to remove them in the next attempt.” Whatever happened to the Seven Tales, whether he burned them or, in all likelihood, incorporated them into his subsequent work, he definitely began again, more determined than ever to earn recognition.
To this end, he changed his name and wrote a novel about fame.
On March 30, 1826, Nathaniel scratched his name onto a glass windowpane at Herbert Street—Nathaniel Hathorne—but for at least a year he’d been playing with his patronymic. In 1825 he practiced signing his name by adding the w over and over again in, of all places, his father’s logbook, to imitate and differentiate himself from the Captain at the same time. Sometime in 1827 he again used the changed spelling, writing out his name, “Nath. Hawthorne, February 28, 1827,” on a copy of the American Bookkeeper. Eventually Louisa and Ebe adopted the new spelling too. “We were in those days about as absurdly obedient to him,” Ebe said.
Horace Conolly, a fellow Salemite, met Hawthorne in New Haven in the fall of 1829. Hawthorne had accompanied his roustabout uncle Samuel to Connecticut to buy horses for the stagecoaches, and at the New Haven inn where they stopped, Conolly recognized Samuel Manning’s name on the register. When Samuel introduced Nathaniel, Conolly observed that he didn’t look like the Salem Hathornes, who were descended from a great-uncle and with whom his family had very little to do. Hawthorne was five-foot-ten, with eyes like lit candles, and when he walked, recalled Conolly, he swung his right arm and tilted his head a little to the left, as if balancing himself aboard a rolling ship—a kind of seaman’s gait. (College acquaintances also remembered the peculiar walk, no doubt developed when he was lame.) “I am glad to hear you say that,” Conolly remembered Nathaniel replying, “for I don’t wish to look like any Hathorne.”
“Perhaps that is one reason why you have expanded your name to Hawthorne,” Conolly surmised. Hawthorne didn’t correct him. Whatever the reason—to revise an old spelling, as Conolly also guessed, or to dissociate himself from his family—he didn’t use “Hawthorne” when he published his first major work, Fanshawe: A Tale.
The book appeared anonymously—in spite of the new name.
Two undergraduate men compete for the attentions of a pretty young woman. One of them is a decent and intelligent fellow, Edward Walcott, tall and good-looking, completely respectable as a scholar, polite, groomed by family and money, and the class poet. The other youth is known only as Fanshawe (a name that suggests the new spelling of Hawthorne). A natural-born aristocrat, Fanshawe is comely, proud, pale, and self-possessed. And he cares less for the stuff of this world than for matters more supernal, for during long meditative nights Fanshawe the scholar sits by his flickering lamp and converses with the dead, who speak to him from the pages of old books.
Harley College, where these undergraduates meet, resembles Bowdoin, and Fanshawe is a college novel about vocation, with its two romantic heroes, Walcott and Fanshawe, representing the choices available to a young man, or a young man as torn as Hawthorne was. Made for and by the world, like Franklin Pierce, Walcott is easy prey to its temptations. He jumps to conclusions. He is jealous, gallant, sensual. He drinks too much, fights too easily. Fanshawe, on the other hand, is the loner hungry for recognition and ashamed of that ravening “dream of undying fame, which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a thousand realities.”
But Fanshawe is distracted from his goals by Ellen Langton, whom Walcott is courting. The daughter of a wealthy merchant who lives abroad, Ellen is presently the ward of the president of Harley College and his wife, two stock characters whose name—the Melmoths—derives from Charles Maturin’s classic of gothic horror, Melmoth the Wanderer. In fact, the plot of the novel depends on a good deal of derivative paraphernalia: an abyss, an abduction, a villainous seducer, a virtuous rescuer, and the requisite denouement at novel’s end, a marriage that restores property to those who already have it. Character, not plot, is Hawthorne’s métier.
So is alliteration, almost to a fault: “The road, at all times, rough, was now broken into deep gullies, through which streams went murmuring down, to mingle with the river. The pale moonlight combined with the gray of the morning to give a ghastly and unsubstantial appearance to every object.” As literary apprentice, Hawthorne employed his classical education and the English prose masters—Addison, Steele, Johnson, Burke, and Gibbon—to forge a style that owed less to Neal’s cheek than to modulation, balance, and subdued antithesis. Phrase next to phrase, separated by commas, build a complex of meaning that at worst seems halting, artificial, and prim. “She knew not what to dread,” Hawthorne writes of Ellen Langton’s abduction; “but she was well aware that danger was at hand, and that, in the deep wilderness, there was none to help her, except that Being, with whose inscrutable purposes it might consist, to allow the wicked to triumph for a season, and the innocent to be brought low.” The author is still green, and his showy epigraphs—Shakespeare, Scott, Thomson, Southey—as well as the novel’s creaky wooden characters threaten to send the whole business, well-constructed sentences and all, over the cliff with the novel’s villain.
To return to the plot: by helping to dispatch the villain, Fanshawe wins the hand of Ellen Langton, which he rejects, refusing to knot the “tie that shall connect” him to the “common occupation of the world.” And so the ambitious narcissist dies before he turns twenty, appropriately punished for his solitary existence.
An equivocal hero of renunciation, Fanshawe leaps forward into the novels of Henry James. And he anticipates Hawthorne’s ethereal loners, the passive clergyman Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter and the half-baked poet Miles Coverdale in The Blithedale Romance, to name just two. With tragic or pathetic consequences, these repressed men transform sexual curiosity into a desire for knowledge. Yet though Hawthorne damns Fanshawe’s maniacal quest, albeit halfheartedly, he patronizes Walcott, whose marriage to Ellen “drew her husband away from the passions and pursuits that would have interfered with domestic felicity; and he never regretted the worldly distinction of which she thus deprived him.”
“Theirs was a long life of calm and quiet bliss,” Hawthorne concludes, mischievously wondering, “—and what matters it, that, except in these pages, they have left no name behind them?”
It matters a great deal. Hawthorne’s novel, after all, bears Fanshawe’s name.
Grandmother Manning died in December of 1826, and her heirs slowly divided the large holdings, five thousand acres in Raymond and the property and stables in Salem, that had helped to support Betsy Hathorne and her children. From this estate Hawthorne earned a small annuity. “It was my fortune or misfortune, just as you please,” he reminisced some years later, “to have some slender means of supporting myself.” In 1828, with his share of the estate, he doubtless paid the Boston publishers Marsh and Capen one hundred dollars to publish his first novel, Fanshawe: A Tale.
But the question of a career—a lucrative career—hung fire.
That may have been the reason he applied for and received an advanced degree from Bowdoin College just after the publication of Fanshawe. Reportedly given to almost anyone making a request three years after graduation, the master of arts degree was conferred on “Nathanaelem Hawthorne” in September 1828. But though he felt he needed the degree, he didn’t know how to make use of it. Horace Conolly remembered Hawthorne’s irritation when asked what he intended to do with himself. “I wish to God I could find out,” he vehemently replied. To Ebe he said he’d been berated by an old Salem woman for “not going to work as other people did,” and Manning descendants calculated “as so much had been done for ‘Nat,’ that it should now be thought time for him to do something for himself.” The Mannings had paid for an education, and something better than writing stories ought to come of it.
Uncertain about the future, he cursed his own obsession with fame as harshly as some members of his family might have. Take the early tale “The Ambitious Guest.” Here, Hawthorne concocts an avalanche to crush, quite literally, a young man’s understandable desire “not to be forgotten in the grave.”
On a chill September night, the young man arrives at the welcoming inn of a rural family, where he eats his supper and then chats with his unpretentious hosts as they gather about a warm hearth. Ambitious and somewhat haughty—“reserved among the rich and great; but ever ready to stoop his head to the lowly cottage door”—the youth is a solitary fellow like Fanshawe. “He could have borne to live an undistinguished life,” Hawthorne writes, “but not to be forgotten in the grave.”
The stranger and the family engage in friendly talk, the stranger insisting that “it is our nature to desire a monument, be it slate, or marble, or a pillar of granite, or a glorious memory in the universal heart of man,” a view not completely shared by his hosts, who nonetheless begin to reveal their own secret wishes. That very night, however, an avalanche obliterates the lot of them, both the simple family and their ambitious guest, and since their bodies are never found, not even a rough tombstone marks their graves with a scrap of remembrance. A mound of snow is their marker, which, like all markers, will eventually disappear.
But their terrible end ironically supplies them with a different kind of memorial: “The story had been told far and wide, and will forever be a legend in these mountains.”
“Who has not heard their name?” Hawthorne asks again, as he did in Fanshawe.
Hawthorne writes of the quest for fame, more obsession than wish, that converts a boyish desire to be appreciated—you will miss me when I am gone—into the youthful fantasies of the ambitious guest. Hawthorne trounces these fiercely, as if he needed to purge himself of his own grandiose ambitions and in so doing protect himself from the shame of failure. The solitary dreamer meets defeat: That’ll show him for aiming so high. Or he’s misunderstood by a cloddish multitude, their incomprehension another form of defeat, though more palatable. Genius is always misunderstood.
“Fame—some very humble persons in a town may be said to possess it:—as the penny-post, the town-crier, the constable &c; and they are known to every body,” Hawthorne comments in an early notebook, “while many richer, more intellectual, worthier persons are unknown by the majority of their fellow citizens.” That Hawthorne already feels neglected and unrecognized—or nullified by scorn—suggests his own expectations were sky high. Little satisfied him. And though the community would not in fact appreciate him fully, Hawthorne collaborated in his own obscurity.
Hawthorne reproaches Fanshawe and the ambitious guest for a yearning he knows too well. Yet reproach is only half the story. Ambition may come before a fall, but anonymity is a fate far scarier, and anyway, as he said of the little group in the mountains crushed by the falling rocks, “Who has not heard their name?”
When Hawthorne visited Uncle Richard in Maine in the fall of 1826, accounts of the Willey disaster froze New England hearts. As a landslide began to crash down the mountainside, the family ran out of the house seeking shelter nearby. They were all killed; their house was unharmed.
Like the Willey family tragedy, which inspired “The Ambitious Guest,” tales of Maine transfixed the young author, who incorporated another Maine legend into “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” a story likely conceived as early as 1825, the year Hawthorne graduated from Bowdoin. That spring was the centennial of the battle at Lovewell’s Pond, an event of such importance that Bowdoin seniors drove from Brunswick to Fryeburg to take part in the celebration. The ignominious battle had already been aggrandized by Bowdoin’s Professor Upham in his nationalistic verse “Lovellspond,” with Henry Longfellow scribbling his own version, “The Battle of Lovell’s Pond,” for the Portland Gazette of 1820:
The warriors that fought for their country—and bled,
Have sunk to their rest; the damp earth is their bed;
No stone tells the place where their ashes repose,
Nor points out the spot from the graves of their foes.
The battle at Lovewell’s Pond was not in fact a valiant affair. In the spring of 1725, Captain John Lovewell and forty-six men slaughtered ten Pequawket warriors as they slept. The massacre, which occurred on the Sabbath, was meant to avenge the death of Lovewell’s family; not coincidentally, Lovewell also intended to bring a satchel full of Pequawket scalps to Boston to collect a considerable bounty, but before he and his little army could even think about the reward, they were ambushed by a large group of Indians. Routed, the troops decamped in a rush, leaving behind three of their wounded for dead. The men survived, however, and told the tale of their abandonment.
Hawthorne visited Raymond the summer following the Lovewell centennial, complaining about Uncle Richard’s indifference. Probably soon after, he began to write a story, set in Maine, about a young man’s desertion of the surrogate father who, by dying, has rejected him. The surrogate father’s initials happen to be those of Richard and Robert Manning.
And Hawthorne was evidently intrigued by another aspect of Lovewell’s battle, that of the story of men left to die alone in the wilderness with no stone to commemorate them. One of these men became the story’s title character, Roger Malvin. Malvin, mortally wounded, tries to convince his young companion, Reuben Bourne, to save himself from certain death should Reuben, also injured, remain with Malvin in the woods. “I have loved you like a father, Reuben,” Malvin tells him, “and, at a time like this, I should have something of a father’s authority.”
Reuben at first refuses to leave his friend, but then with “no merely selfish motive,” as Hawthorne informs us—subtly directing our attention to the adverb “merely”—Reuben lets Malvin persuade him to go. Rationalizing that he might encounter a party of men who could help, Reuben promises to return to the woods, either to save Malvin’s life or to bury him with a prayer over his bones.
He does neither. Once back in town, Reuben is nursed to health by Malvin’s daughter Dorcas, whom he marries. He doesn’t tell her of her father’s fate nor does he return to the forest to dig the man’s grave. Instead he becomes one of Hawthorne’s incorrigible concealers, hiding the truth of his speckled heart, first from himself and then from those who love him. But the price is high. Reuben sinks into a maelstrom of “mental horrors, which punish the perpetrator of undiscovered crime.”
Forecasting another leitmotif of his later work, that of transformation, Hawthorne focuses on how Reuben’s “one secret thought” changes him to “a sad and downcast, yet irritable man.” His lands lay fallow, his neighbors quarrel with him, his debts mount. His only solace is his son Cyrus, in whom he sees a reflection of himself as he once had been.
When Cyrus is fifteen, Reuben and Dorcas decide to pull up stakes. Inadvertently they travel to the wooded spot where, eighteen years before, Roger Malvin was left for dead. Father and son explore the region, and Dorcus sets up camp. Soon Reuben hears a sound in the underbrush, picks up his rifle, and shoots, aiming toward a spot “not unlike a gigantic gravestone” where Malvin once lay. But it’s not an animal that howls in pain; Reuben has accidentally killed his own son. “The vow that the wounded youth had made,” says the story’s narrator, “the blighted man had come to redeem.”
Fusing psychological obsession with the historical circumstance of something like Lovewell’s battle, Hawthorne in his earliest stories frequently wrote with a pen dipped in the bloody history to which he brought his personal angst. Frontiersman and Indian fighter, Roger Malvin veers into Richard Manning and Grandfather Manning and Robert Manning, kindly men and authoritarians who inevitably fail the boy they try to protect. As for the boy, he betrays his fathers by abandoning them, and in so doing must destroy his younger self.
That said, the strangest part of the story is Dorcas. Daughter, wife, and mother, she is Reuben’s symbolic sister, herself deprived of the fruit of her unholy union with “brother” Reuben. Of course, she is literally innocent of any crime, though not in Reuben’s psyche. And so Reuben’s killing of Cyrus punishes Dorcas as much as Reuben. Pointing to their dead son, Reuben gestures toward the broad rock that is the grave of Roger Malvin and of Cyrus. “Your tears,” he cruelly tells Dorcas, “will fall at once over your father and your son.” She collapses with “one wild shriek.” If Reuben’s “sin was expiated,” it was ransomed by the broken heart of a woman.
Hawthorne was a master of concealment. “Your father kept his very existence a secret, as far as possible,” Ebe told Una. He doled out information when and where he saw fit, never telling his wife, for example, that he’d once written poetry, never mind Fanshawe. And so it’s not surprising to learn that he revealed little about his relation to various women.
As far as his family knew, or wanted to know, no woman in Salem had struck his fancy. To them, he appeared solitary, his habits regular. In the evening, after a walk, he ate a pint bowl of thick chocolate full of crumbled bread, and in the summer substituted fruit for the chocolate. A stalwart Democrat, he argued politics with Ebe at night, or he read, or he played a rubber of whist with Louisa and friends. The family did not venture far from Salem nor from one another.
In the broiling months of summer, however, Hawthorne or his sisters often visited relatives in Newburyport, or they ambled over the hard sand at Nahant, where the fashionable rented spacious rooms ventilated by sea breezes. Hawthorne flirted. The “mermaid” shopkeeper of his tale “The Village Uncle” captured his heart for a time. He met her in the seaside village of Swampscott one summer and talked of her incessantly. “At that time,” Ebe dismissively recollected, “he had fancies like that whenever he went from home.” An early model for Phoebe Pyncheon of The House of the Seven Gables, the shopgirl gave Hawthorne a sugar heart, said his sister, but he kept her identity a secret, assuring his family that she came from the local gentry.
“I should have feared that he was really in love with her, if he had not talked so much about her,” said Ebe on another occasion, divulging more about herself than about Hawthorne. Proprietary over the brother she adored, she patrolled his affections like a wary sentinel. Hawthorne returned the compliment. His intense feelings toward Elizabeth—the sister never at a loss for a tart riposte, the sister he aimed to please, his intimate and mentor—may have drawn him to the tacky claptrap of his early guilt-driven fiction. Children of the night, sisters and brothers merge into husbands and wives (“Roger Malvin’s Burial”) or they mingle with the undead in a hodgepodge fable of fratricide, patricide, and incest like “Alice Doane’s Appeal.”
The core of “Alice Doane’s Appeal” was evidently one of the original Seven Tales that Hawthorne revised into a longer story about authorship, and though he didn’t integrate the two sections, the jagged result reveals his frustration with the earlier manuscript. In the revised “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” a narrator recounts Alice’s story one mild June afternoon, having accompanied two female companions to Gallows Hill. These days, he notes, the bloody spot is something of a tourist attraction. Times have certainly changed since 1692. In fact, young boys, heedless of the savage history of the place, come there yearly to honor “they know not what” with a bonfire.
The narrator pulls a manuscript from his pocket. He’d written other such stories, he piteously explains, but he’d tossed them into a bonfire of his own. “Thoughts meant to delight the world and endure for ages,” he observes, “had perished in a moment, and stirred not a single heart but mine.” But he does save one manuscript from the flames, which he then proceeds to read to his companions. It’s the story of “Alice Doane.”
Actually, the story is Leonard Doane’s first-person account of his crimes. Leonard, Alice’s brother, guiltily admits that he killed Walter Brome (“my very counterpart,” says Leonard), a blackguard who taunted the jealous Leonard “with indisputable proofs of the shame of Alice.” What was the chivalrous brother to do? But Leonard killed Walter only to learn that Walter was Leonard’s twin brother. And if that weren’t bad enough, when Leonard looked into his slain brother’s face, he saw the image of his own haplessly murdered father. Yet fratricide and patricide don’t satisfy Leonard’s need for violence and revenge. Still tortured by the idea of his sister’s disgrace—now incest—he feels “as if a fiend were whispering him to meditate violence against the life of Alice.”
At this juncture, the narrator hastily summarizes the rest of the story. Alice and Leonard go to a haunted graveyard where Alice asks the dead Walter to exonerate her. Walter obliges, and there Alice’s story ends.
Not quite: the “appeal” in “Alice Doane’s Appeal” refers to Alice’s plea that Walter attest to her innocence—and it refers to the sexual appeal that drives her brother to murder. But the narrator’s two female companions (“timid maids,” he calls them) don’t get it. They’re too chaste. As a matter of fact, they are bored silly. The narrator’s overheated tale is “grotesque and extravagant,” they say; as grotesque and extravagant, the narrator retorts, as the witchcraft delusion, another instance of erotic madness? The women don’t understand the connection—it isn’t altogether clear—but to the narrator their bafflement is just another example of obtuseness like that of publishers who reject his stories. “We are a people of the present and have no heartfelt interest in the olden time,” he groans in disgust.
The narrator is the misunderstood artist par excellence, and he appears in one form or another in stories as dissimilar as Hawthorne’s “The Christmas Banquet” or “The Artist of the Beautiful,” both written a decade after “Alice Doane’s Appeal.” But the structure is similar: an artist brings one of his own creations, usually a manuscript, to someone he admires, and if he reads it aloud, the audience grows drowsy. In the case of “The Artist of the Beautiful,” a baffled public inadvertently helps wreck his creation—much to the artist’s relief. Its destruction ironically confirms what the artist knew all along: he is different from all the rest.
Besides, the artifact (in this case, a mechanical butterfly) deserved to be destroyed. The act of creation is, after all, an act of hubris.
But the artist is angry. And like so many of Hawthorne’s future protagonists, he ritually conjures images of fire, bonfires and furnaces and, later, limestone kilns, as well as lunatics, bloodthirsty magistrates, and the trace of unnameable crimes—whatever it takes—to wake up his sleepy audience with the sneaking suspicion that writing, like sex, is taboo.