CHAPTER SEVEN
So! I have climbed high, and my reward is small.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Sights from a Steeple”
IN THE OCTOBER twilight, an ordinary Englishman named Wakefield bids his wife a brief farewell, pretending to go on a short trip, but instead rents rooms in a neighboring street and stays there, by himself, for twenty years. His wife slowly accommodates herself to widowhood, never aware that her husband lives around the block or that he spies on her from time to time. “Crafty nincompoop,” Hawthorne calls the man who lives for two decades in limbo, thinking all the while that he’ll soon go home. Then, one day, he does. He walks over to his house, the door opens … and there we leave him.
Published in the New-England Magazine in May 1835, “Wakefield” is more than another creepy story about a man who leaves his wife like Young Goodman Brown, bound for a tryst in the woods. Wakefield is a drab, undistinguished, and unexceptional man—except of course for the twenty-year hiatus in his life, if that’s what one calls it. But to Hawthorne, Wakefield is also an artist—the artist as crafty nincompoop—severed from the world, having abandoned “his place and privileges with living men, without being admitted among the dead.”
For even as he castigates Wakefield, Hawthorne colludes with him, relishing an ordinary man’s extraordinary caprice.
Hawthorne’s best stories penetrate the secret horrors of ordinary life, those interstices in the general routine where suddenly something or someone shifts out of place, changing everything. Parson Hooper puts on his veil, Wakefield takes a little walk, Reuben Bourne tells himself a small lie. At the same time, Hawthorne writes and rewrites a fable of the artist, storyteller extraordinaire and crafty nincompoop alienated from his duller contemporaries by sensibility and vocation, an estranged, filmy figure who gropes with abashed ardor through the twilight, insecure himself but discerning and astute.
Wakefield and Hawthorne’s storyteller are the truncated travelers obliged to return home; too much weirdness is a bad thing. “Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another, and to a whole, that,” as Hawthorne writes, “by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.”
In the frozen January of 1836, Hawthorne was not the outcast of the universe but a denizen of Boston, a clanking metropolis where hammers banged out prosperity from the waterfront up to Charles Bulfinch’s new State House, winking in gold-domed splendor. Houses were sold, torn down, rebuilt, replaced; soil was carted away, hills razed, and warehouses put up near the harbor. Textile investors discussed railroad stock while wagons of green produce clattered toward the wooden stalls at Quincy Market. And Boston women were pretty, their morals good: an unusual combination, said Franklin Pierce.
Hawthorne rambled over the wintry streets. He’d come to town to edit a monthly called the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, published by the Bewick Company. Goodrich, who was affiliated with Bewick, had arranged the job. Elated, Bridge congratulated Hawthorne. “It is no small point gained to get you out of Salem,” he shrewdly observed.
For a salary of five hundred dollars a year, Hawthorne was to collect all the droll or useful knowledge he could find and blend it into short pithy articles to be accompanied, on occasion, by engravings supplied by the publisher. The articles consisted of short biographies of statesmen like George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John C. Calhoun or short squibs about people, places, and odd phenomena, like the notice about a gardener who amputed his own arm with his clipping shears, and the mathematics professor said to self-combust—without consuming too much alcohol. He specialized in the absurd: an account of a nose, studied for phrenological purposes, or the report of stylish New England settlers wearing wigs made from the scalps of Indians, “a truly Yankee idea,” he joked, “—to keep their ears comfortably warm with the trophies of their valour.”
Other than himself, the only other writer was his sister Ebe, whose contributions resemble his, though one can detect her less polished prose style and more federalist politics, as in the profile of Alexander Hamilton, which Hawthorne finished. “I approve of your life,” he told her, “but have been obliged to correct some of your naughty notions about arbitrary government.” Often, though, her work and his merge seamlessly, except in certain cases like his account of the gravestones, a pet obsession, at Martha’s Vineyard, or in his version of Hannah Duston’s captivity and her killing of ten Indians, six of whom were children. “There was little safety for a red skin,” Hawthorne writes, “where Hannah Duston’s blood is up.”
“You should not make quotations,” he instructed Ebe, “but put other people’s thoughts into your own words, and amalgamate the whole into a mass.” Both of them excerpted bizarre tidbits from Blackwood’s, the Westminster Review, or William Dunlap’s History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States. “You may extract every thing good that you come across—provided always it be not too good,” Nathaniel wryly wrote to Ebe; “and even if it should be, perhaps it will not quite ruin the Magazine; my own selections being bad enough to satisfy any body.”
Ebe borrowed books from the Salem Athenaeum, distilled the facts she needed, and then sent a packet to Boston. Hawthorne was having a more difficult time because his publishers had neglected to purchase him a share at the Boston Athenaeum so he could use its library. “The Bewick Co. are a damned sneaking set,” he exploded. He asked Uncle Robert to get him books. There never seemed to be enough material. “Ebe should have sent me some original poetry—and other original concoctions,” he complained to Louisa, in charge of his clean collars and shirts. The job was a family affair.
Hawthorne took room and board at Thomas Green Fessenden’s house at 53 Hancock Street, one of the tight, sloping thoroughfares in leafy Beacon Hill, back of the State House. The connection to Fessenden was probably Uncle Robert, who doubtless knew the occasional poet through the New England Farmer, which Fessenden founded and where Manning published his pomology. A dabbler in poetry and politics, the affable Fessenden retired to his jumbled study each evening and invited Hawthorne to comment on the new sections of his interminably long poem, Terrible Tractoration. Hawthorne was fond of the man.
But within the month he was agitated, homesick, and disgusted with the job. “I am ashamed of the whole concern,” he wrote Louisa. Goodrich owed him money, and without it Hawthorne had no cash for the smallest entertainment—a glass of wine and cigar cost nine cents—nor fare for the Salem stagecoach to take him home. “For the Devil’s sake, if you have any money send me a little,” he begged his younger sister. “It is now a month since I left Salem, and not a damned cent have I had, except five dollars that I borrowed from Uncle Robert.”
Meantime, he canvassed for something else, applying to the New-York Mirror, edited by George Pope Morris (famous for the justly forgotten verse “Woodman, Spare That Tree!”). Pierce supplied an introduction to Frank Blair, editor of the Washington Globe, the unofficial newspaper of Andrew Jackson’s administration. Nothing materialized, which left Hawthorne at the mercy of Goodrich, “a good-natured sort of man enough,” Hawthorne said, “but rather an unscrupulous one in money matters, and not particularly trustworthy in anything.”
Life in Boston continued not to go well. By spring Hawthorne had received only twenty dollars of his salary. Regardless, he consented to take another job from Goodrich, this time to ghostwrite one of the Peter Parley books, a two-volume Universal History on the Basis of Geography. Again he turned to Ebe. “If you are willing to write any part of it (which I should think you might, now that it is warm weather) I shall do it.” Hawthorne said he’d give her the one hundred dollars Goodrich offered. “It is a poor compensation,” he admitted, “yet better than the Token; because the kind of writing is so much less difficult.” For eight contributions in the upcoming (1837) Token, published at the end of 1836 and containing “Monsieur du Miroir,” “Mrs. Bullfrog,” “Sunday at Home,” “The Man of Adamant: An Apologue,” “David Swan: A Fantasy,” “The Great Carbuncle: A Mystery of the White Mountains,” “Fancy’s Show Box: A Morality,” and “The Prophetic Pictures,” he was to receive only $108.
The Bewick Company went bankrupt in June. There was no reason—and no money—for Hawthorne to stay in Boston. The August issue of the American Magazine carried his farewell. “The brevity of our continuance in the Chair Editorial will excuse us from any lengthened ceremony in resigning it. In truth,” he testily added, “there is very little to be said on the occasion.”
The surface of the water was as opaque as iron. Dark clouds closed the sky like a fist. Occasionally the sun pried it open, lighting the promontory, and islands, half visible, floated into view. This is how Hawthorne saw the shore when he walked along the beach near Salem, casting small stones into the sea.
Accustomed to Hawthorne’s low moods, Bridge tried his best to cheer him. “Brighter days will come,” Bridge insisted, “and that within six months.”
Hawthorne wasn’t convinced. Nonetheless, after packing the Universal History off to Goodrich, he considered collecting his tales and publishing them as a book. The time seemed right. His audience was expanding. His stories had been reprinted from The Token in papers like Salem’s Essex Register, and when the prestigious Athenaeum reviewed the 1836 Token, it singled out “The Wedding-Knell” and “The Minister’s Black Veil.” “My worshipful self is a very famous man in London,” he proudly informed Ebe.
“What is the plan of operations?” Bridge jubilantly responded to word of Hawthorne’s projected book. “Who [are] the publishers, and when the time that you will be known by name as well as your writings are?”
Exasperated by Hawthorne’s deliberate anonymity, Bridge had decided to review the new (1837) Token for the Boston Post and unmask the author of eight of its tales—the finest in the book—as Hawthorne. “It is a singular fact that, of the few American writers by profession, one of the very best is a gentleman whose name has never yet been made public, though his writings are extensively and favorably known,” wrote Bridge. “We refer to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Esq., of Salem, the author of the ‘Gentle Boy,’ the ‘Gray Champion,’ etc. etc.”
Park Benjamin, in his magazine the American Monthly, did likewise. “How few have heard the name of Nathaniel Hawthorne!” Benjamin exclaimed in the fall of 1836. “He does not even cover himself with the same anonymous shield at all times; but liberally gives to several unknowns the praise which concentrated on one would be great, to several unknowns. If Mr. Hawthorne would but collect his various tales and essays into one volume, we can assure him that their success would be brilliant—certainly in England, perhaps in this country.”
The veil was lifted. And yet Hawthorne reacted with a certain sourness. “In this dismal and squalid chamber, fame was won,” he scribbled from his room in Herbert Street, as if contemptuous of the prize he sought or the way he felt forced to seek it. It wouldn’t be the last time that he wrote of the artist’s sacrifice—in love, life, or human warmth.
“I fear you are too good a subject for suicide, and that some day you will end your mortal woes on your own responsibility,” Bridge worried. Negotiations for the book weren’t going well. “You have the blues again,” Bridge wrote Hawthorne in October, and begged him not to “give up to them, for God’s sake and your own and mine and everybody’s.” A few days later, Bridge wrote again, nervous about the “desperate coolness” of Hawthorne’s last letter. Bridge would come to Boston. He had a plan.
Hawthorne didn’t know that Bridge had contacted Goodrich about underwriting the book. “It will cost about $450 to print 1000 vols in good style,” Goodrich had answered Bridge’s query about the expense. “I have seen a publisher, & he agrees to publish, if he can be guaranteed $250—as an ultimate resort against loss. If you will give that guarantee, the thing shall be but immediately in hand.” Delighted, Bridge boarded the Boston stage with the appointed sum and didn’t tell Hawthorne.
Hawthorne himself could no longer pay for his own publication, as he’d done with Fanshawe; the Manning reserves were dwindling. Since Richard’s death, the family had been selling off most of the Maine property, and in Salem business was terrible. The railroad whistled a death knell to the Manning stagecoach line. Anxious, Hawthorne tried to get his position back with the American Magazine, under new management, to no avail.
“You will have more time for your book,” Bridge soothed; “there is more honor and emolument in store for you, from your writings, than you imagine. The bane of your life has been self-distrust.”
“I expect, next summer, to be full of money,” he informed Hawthorne with optimism, “a part of which shall be heartily at your service, if it comes.” Bridge had left the practice of law to build a dam across the Kennebec River, for which he anticipated abundant reward. But a flood would wash out the entire project and destroy the Bridge family mansion, and Bridge would join the United States Navy as a purser, a future he couldn’t of course have predicted in the fall of 1836.
With charming ignorance, Bridge did predict that the publication of Hawthorne’s book would deluge Hawthorne with offers of “an editorship in any magazine in the country if you wish it.” Perhaps Hawthorne, believing him, refused Goodrich’s most recent offer to ghost another of the Peter Parley books. Or he didn’t trust that Goodrich would pay the three hundred dollars he promised. In either case, Bridge was thrilled. “I rejoice that you have determined to leave Goodrich to his fate. I do not like him.”
Bound in dark crimson leather, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s first collection of eighteen stories was published by the American Stationers’ Company on March 6, 1837. The stories included some of his finest forays into the macabre, like “The Minister’s Black Veil” and “Wakefield”; historical tales like “The Gentle Boy,” “The Gray Champion,” and “The May-Pole of Merry Mount”; meditative sketches and stories like “Sights from a Steeple” or “Fancy’s Show Box”; and some of the more humorous ones, “A Rill from the Town-Pump” and “Little Annie’s Ramble.” The volume also contained “Sunday at Home,” “The Wedding-Knell,” “Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe,” “The Great Carbuncle,” “The Prophetic Pictures,” “David Swan,” “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” “The Vision of the Fountain,” and “The Fountain of Youth” (later published as “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”). Hawthorne excluded “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” “Young Goodman Brown,” and “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” which he may have considered too revealing, too early, or too autobiographically painful.
The volume cost a dollar and was called Twice-told Tales, after the lines from Shakespeare’s King John, “Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale,/Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.” All eighteen had been published before and selected, said Hawthorne, as “best worth offering to the public a second time.”
By June about six or seven hundred copies of the one thousand printed had sold, and then these “awful times”—the ghastly depression that followed the Panic of 1837—virtually halted all sales. By the next year the American Stationers’ Company was bankrupt and Hawthorne’s book was remaindered.
The book was, however, a succès d’estime, “spoken of in the highest terms by discriminating gentlemen here and at Cambridge,” said the publisher. Hawthorne’s friend Caleb Foote wrote in the Salem Gazette that he admired Hawthorne’s “fine moral tone,” and Thomas Green Fessenden commended Hawthorne’s “sedate, quiet dignity displayed in his diction” in the New England Farmer. The Boston Daily Advertiser enjoyed the lighter stories, such as “Little Annie’s Ramble” or “A Rill from the Town-Pump,” and recommended “The Minister’s Black Veil” for its “more fearful interest.” Most readers liked “The Gentle Boy,” and even Bridge said he felt as though he’d never read it before: “It had the credit of making me blubber a dozen times at least during the two readings which I have given it.” Bridge himself wrote a piece for the Augusta (Maine) Age differentiating Hawthorne’s style from that of John Neal: “There is little or none of what is often termed powerful writing, i.e. ranting, and foaming at the mouth—lacerating the reader’s nerves, and as it were, taking his sympathies by storm.”
Uniformly, reviewers approved Hawthorne’s style as graceful, his humor as gentle, and his fancy as “aerial,” even too aerial, Bridge had criticized, though he added that “this very fault is, to a delicate taste, one of the greatest beauties.” Park Benjamin went so far as to characterize “the soul of Nathaniel Hawthorne” as “a rose bathed and baptized in dew,” a maddening, insulting phrase with an innuendo that Hawthorne caught. Admiring his penchant for American subjects, none of the reviewers mentioned the satire embedded in stories like “The Gray Champion,” where Hawthorne speaks of “the veterans of King Philip’s war, who had burnt villages and slaughtered young and old with pious fierceness, while the godly souls through the land were helping them with prayer.” Similarly, they ignored the way Hawthorne yoked verbs or participles to nouns for jarring effect, as in the case of the “Quakers, esteeming persecution as a divine call to the post of danger” in “The Gentle Boy,” or the recurrent dark forests, dusky mantles, and guilt-stained hearts in which Hawthorne transforms a troubled consciousness into concrete emblems difficult to interpret, the case of the minister’s black veil being the most obvious. And though reviewers compared Hawthorne to Charles Lamb and Joseph Addison, they did not invoke Mandeville, Voltaire, Bacon, Swift, or Montaigne—moralists and satirists who obviously influenced Hawthorne and whose frequently harsh view of human nature matched his own.
To help promote the book, Hawthorne sent a presentation copy of Twice-told Tales to his former classmate Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, along with a flattering letter. “We were not, it is true, so well acquainted at college, that I can plead an absolute right to inflict my ‘twice-told’ tedious-ness upon you,” Hawthorne wrote; “but I have often regretted that we were not better known to each other, and have been glad of your success in literature.” Longfellow replied immediately and with typical largesse. “Though something more than ten years have elapsed since we met face to face,” the poet said, “I have had occasional glimpses of you in the Token, and the New England Magazine; and in all good faith be it said, these glimpses have always given me very great delight.” Longfellow then promised to review the book in the North American Review, an eminent publication for the literary gentry.
Although the review didn’t appear until July, its extravagant praise hurled Hawthorne (“a new star”) into the company of angels (“the heaven of poetry”) on syrupy wings of equivocal esteem (Twice-told Tales was a “sweet, sweet book”). Hawthorne’s spirits flagged. The newspapers had been tepid, he thought, and many puffs had come from friends. Some buyers refused to purchase a collection of “twice-told” tales still available elsewhere. And Bridge had been wrong. No one handed Hawthorne any editorial post on the basis of his wonderful new book. In fact, money was tighter than ever, his prospects grimmer.
Franklin Pierce, his own star rising, decided Hawthorne needed a change of air. Recently elected to the United States Senate from New Hampshire, Pierce knew of the South Sea expedition recently authorized by Congress, a kind of scientific, navigational, and commercial junket set to circumnavigate the globe as early as the spring. This was Hawthorne’s chance, at last, to explore the sea, not as a sailor but as the expedition’s historian. Pierce contacted Bridge, who promised to deliver “the whole Maine delegation” on Hawthorne’s behalf, and Bridge mailed a copy of Twice-told Tales to Jonathan Cilley, now representing Maine in Congress. He also approached Jeremiah Reynolds, who he supposed would run the expedition, describing Hawthorne as modest and diffident, decidedly “not subject to any of those whims and eccentricities which are supposed to characterize men of genius.”
Bridge’s Hawthorne was a tame soul, eager for the political appointment and too honorable to maneuver for himself: a gentleman and a scholar.
Hawthorne was overjoyed. Bridge, concerned that he may have raised Hawthorne’s hopes too high, cautioned him not to “set your heart wholly upon this cast” and reminded him that even if he didn’t receive the appointment, “you will be much better; for having made interest among many of the high officers and high privates in the land, your reputation will be of course extended, and the same men will feel bound to help you again, if called upon.”
Besides, he added, Frank Pierce will never rest until he does something for you.
Dreaming of Orange Harbor, near the coast of Tierra del Fuego, Hawthorne also dreamed of marriage. That the South Sea expedition would lead him far from any prospective bride didn’t faze him. Hawthorne was adept at linking marriage to flight: witness the careers of Goodman Brown and Wakefield or the fact that the Reverend Mr. Hooper dodges his betrothed with a veil. In “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” newlyweds encounter a somber John Endicott, who casts a shadow over their happiness, and the couple in “The Wedding-Knell” marry at the door of a tomb.
Hawthorne was thirty-two, robust, good-looking, and eligible. And despite his disappointment over Twice-told Tales, its publication ultimately boosted his morale. Having unveiled himself, and with his own hopes about the future rising, Hawthorne turned his attention to love.
Bridge had not married and wouldn’t until 1845. Pierce had. In 1834 he wed Jane Appleton, the daughter of Bowdoin’s second president. And Jonathan Cilley, who married Deborah Prince in 1829, congratulated the bachelor Hawthorne on the publication of Twice-told Tales with a gibe. “What! suffer twelve years to pass away, and no wife, no children, to soothe your care, make you happy, and call you blessed.” Hawthorne may have agreed, or thought he did. Perhaps the time had come for more changes, he hinted to Bridge. Bridge shuddered. “Why should you ‘borrow trouble’?”
The tone of Hawthorne’s correspondence provides a tentative answer. Too long a seclusion, he confided to Longfellow, had made him a prisoner of himself. “For the last ten years, I have not lived, but only dreamed about living,” he wrote his cosmopolitan classmate, now a Harvard professor as well as a linguist and a poet of balmy, accomplished verse. But he, Hawthorne, had seen so little of the world that “I have nothing but thin air to concoct my stories of, and it is not easy to give a lifelike semblance to such shadowy stuff. Sometimes, through a peep-hole, I have caught a glimpse of the real world; and the two or three articles, in which I have portrayed such glimpses, please me better than the others.”
The self-dramatization presents Hawthorne’s biography in miniature as he no doubt believed it to be: a man alone, unappreciated, timorous, an owl afraid of the light, rarely venturing forth until dusk, withdrawn from society into the nocturnal world of fantasy. “I have made a captive of myself and put me into a dungeon,” Hawthorne continues his letter to Longfellow; “and now I cannot find the key to let myself out—and if the door were open, I should be almost afraid to come out.”
It’s a masterpiece of hyperbole. Yet the emotion is real.
As Hawthorne acknowledged, the door had opened, or at least it stood ajar. “I have now, or soon shall have, one sharp spur to exertion, which I lacked at an earlier period; for I see little prospect but that I must scribble for a living.” Was the spur entirely financial? Not really. Aware that time was passing, that spring he confided to Bridge that he had decided to marry.
Astounded, Bridge sent no congratulations. “I confess that, personally, I have a strong desire to see you attain a high rank in literature,” he stuffily replied. “Hence my preference would be that you should take the voyage if you can. And after taking a turn round the world, and establishing a name that will be worth working for, if you choose to marry you can do it with more advantage than now.”
The fatherly, brotherly, and jealous advice fell on deaf ears. Hawthorne was enamored of a Salem belle.
At fourteen Nathaniel Silsbee weighed anchor as captain’s clerk and became everything denied to Captain Hathorne, his contemporary. By nineteen he was steering a small sloop of forty tons, and by 1795 he owned a share in the vessels at his command. He married Mary Crowninshield, daughter of a Salem cod-prince, and he entered politics, serving eighteen years in the United States Congress, first as a representative from Massachusetts and then as its senator. He retired in 1835.
Named for his wife, Silsbee’s daughter Mary, born in 1809, was a glamorous flirt whose wit shone bright in Washington and Boston, where she was known as “the Star of Salem.” Her “intellectual style of beauty,” mooned Longfellow, “leads one captive.” Another acquaintance, Sarah Clarke, thought Mary “a grave & beautiful Greek in contour & expression. Her hair is done up like that of a statue & her smile reveals depths of internal beauty.” But Mary Silsbee had her critics, one of them highly incensed that Silsbee, vamping for attention, would willingly forgo “much that is lovely and beautiful in a woman’s character.”
After the death of her mother, Mary Silsbee began to write plaintive, lachrymose poems to relieve the sorrow that gnawed at her for the rest of her busy, active life. Doubtless, many people continued to be offended by her beautiful hauteur—they probably didn’t know the poetry—although just as many continued to flatter her. Others did both, like the historian and minister Jared Sparks, her former beau, who jilted Silsbee but, after his wife died, came courting again. The eventual marriage of the future Harvard president and the former Star of Salem proved long and happy.
Unfortunately, most information—or gossip—about Mary Silsbee comes from Elizabeth Peabody, Hawthorne’s future sister-in-law. “She was a handsome girl, a great coquette, a mischief-maker, a fearful liar,” Peabody told Julian Hawthorne. Peabody’s appreciable resentment makes sense: she was at one time devoted to Jared Sparks and then to Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose heart, according to Peabody, Silsbee nearly crushed.
It was Mary Silsbee whom Hawthorne had been hoping to marry. With her father out of the Senate and her mother dead, the bereft Silsbee evidently unburdened her heart to the bashful bachelor with the deep-set eyes who, she later said, had published one of her poems, “Take Back the Flower,” in a tale of his. What’s more, the title of another of Silsbee’s early poems, “The Maniac Mother,” appears in Hawthorne’s notebooks.
But their romance is difficult to reconstruct. Hawthorne did plan to talk over the idea of marriage with Bridge when he visited him in Maine that summer, 1837, a last communion of bachelors in the promised land. “My circumstances, at least, cannot long continue as they are and have been,” he wrote in his journal, reiterating what he’d told Longfellow and doubtless thinking about the need to secure a steady income or how difficult it would be to wed an heiress who, again according to Peabody, insisted that he first raise three thousand dollars.
The South Sea expedition having gone to Charles Wilkes, not Jeremiah Reynolds, a landlocked Hawthorne celebrated his thirty-third birthday with Bridge in July, staying with him in Augusta along with Bridge’s French tutor, Monsieur Schaeffer, a talkative and cheery man with the unfortunate task of teaching French to blockheads. “Then here is myself, who am likewise a queer character in my way,” Hawthorne wrote in his journal, “and have come to spend a week or two with my friend of half-a life-time;—the longest space, probably, that we are ever destined to spend together; for fate seems to be preparing changes for both of us.” Boyhood regained, he fished for trout in the ice-blue brooks near Augusta and inhaled the sweet green of pine. He practiced his French with Monsieur Schaeffer and in the evenings ate bread slathered with cheese and eggs or cold mutton and ham and smoked beef, the three men “so independent, and untroubled by the forms and restrictions of society.”
“Of female society I see nothing,” Hawthorne noted with pleasure and relief. The men talked of Hawthorne’s stories—of “The Minister’s Black Veil” in particular, which Monsieur Schaeffer had translated—and of sex. Monsieur Schaeffer, observed Hawthorne with some surprise, “has never yet sinned with woman.” (Had Hawthorne? The “yet” sounds as though he had.) “We live in great harmony and brotherhood—as queer a life as any body leads, and as queer a set as may be found anywhere.”
In August, after a short visit to Cilley in Thomaston, Hawthorne returned to Salem without any mention of a paramour in his journals.
And he seems to have put the marriage plan on hold. Perhaps Bridge convinced him to wait, or he realized he wasn’t ready to run with the common herd. Perching himself on a cliff by the shore, he again tossed pebbles at the shadows below, and in a journal entry, possibly written a few months later, he sounds eerily like Wakefield: “A man tries to be happy in love; he cannot sincerely give his heart, and the affair seems like a dream;—in domestic life, the same;—in politics, a seeming patriot; but still he is sincere, and all seems like theatre.”
Exile and voyeur, not terribly sure of himself, between two worlds, Wakefield is Hawthorne’s ghost, his semblable, his brother, pausing at the threshold. And yet he was the author of Twice-told Tales, no longer anonymous, and poised for some kind of change.