Hawthorne: A Life

Hawthorne: A Life

by Brenda Wineapple
Hawthorne: A Life

Hawthorne: A Life

by Brenda Wineapple

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Overview

Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he was approached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was as mercurial and double-edged as his writing. “Deep as Dante,” Herman Melville said.

Hawthorne himself declared that he was not “one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit” for the public. Yet those who knew him best often took the opposite position. “He always puts himself in his books,” said his sister-in-law Mary Mann, “he cannot help it.” His life, like his work, was extraordinary, a play of light and shadow.

In this major new biography of Hawthorne, the first in more than a decade, Brenda Wineapple, acclaimed biographer of Janet Flanner and Gertrude and Leo Stein (“Luminous”–Richard Howard), brings him brilliantly alive: an exquisite writer who shoveled dung in an attempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then excoriated the community (or his attraction to it) in caustic satire; the confidant of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the United States and arguably one of its worst; friend to Emerson and Thoreau and Melville who, unlike them, made fun of Abraham Lincoln and who, also unlike them, wrote compellingly of women, deeply identifying with them–he was the first major American writer to create erotic female characters. Those vibrant, independent women continue to haunt the imagination, although Hawthorne often punishes, humiliates, or kills them, as if exorcising that which enthralls.

Here is the man rooted in Salem, Massachusetts, of an old pre-Revolutionary family, reared partly in the wilds of western Maine, then schooled along with Longfellow at Bowdoin College. Here are his idyllic marriage to the youngest and prettiest of the Peabody sisters and his longtime friendships, including with Margaret Fuller, the notorious feminist writer and intellectual.

Here too is Hawthorne at the end of his days, revered as a genius, but considered as well to be an embarrassing puzzle by the Boston intelligentsia, isolated by fiercely held political loyalties that placed him against the Civil War and the currents of his time.

Brenda Wineapple navigates the high tides and chill undercurrents of Hawthorne’s fascinating life and work with clarity, nuance, and insight. The novels and tales, the incidental writings, travel notes and children’s books, letters and diaries reverberate in this biography, which both charts and protects the dark unknowable core that is quintessentially Hawthorne. In him, the quest of his generation for an authentically American voice bears disquieting fruit.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780812972917
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 06/29/2004
Pages: 528
Product dimensions: 5.22(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Brenda Wineapple is the author of seven books including The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation, selected by a New York Times book critic as one of the ten best nonfiction works of 2019; Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, a New York Times ‘Notable Book’; and White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting, and a Pushcart Prize, she has also received three National Endowment Fellowships including its Public Scholars Award. Her essays and reviews regularly appear in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The Wall Street Journal. In 2023, she was selected a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

The Prison Door-Introductory

The wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

        T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"


But the past was not dead.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Custom-House"

Guilty. He heard the verdict and flinched. The second-born child of the very famous author had been convicted of defrauding the public, a violation of section 215 of the United States Criminal Code, in the matter of the Hawthorne Silver and Iron Mines, Ltd., Julian Hawthorne, president. Julian's father had written obsessively of crime and punishment and the sins of fathers visited on sons, and here he was, the son, sixty-six years old, hair white as sugar, well known, respected, and guilty-guilty-sitting in a New York City courtroom, sporting a scarlet tie.

Judge Mayer banged his gavel. Staring straight ahead, Julian frowned slightly as befitted a man of his stature and his shame. He, Nathaniel Hawthorne's son, would be imprisoned a year and a day in the United States federal penitentiary in Atlanta, his term set to run from November 25, 1912, the day the public trial began.

Likely his personal trials began much earlier. The great name of Nathaniel Hawthorne will "always handicap you more or less," poet James Russell Lowell had warned. "To be the son of a man of genius is at best to be born to a heritage of invidious comparisons," Henry James Jr. had acknowledged-and placed the Atlantic Ocean between himself and his philosopher father. But at least the younger James wrote fiction, which the elder James did not; comparisons are especially invidious when the son plies the father's trade, as Julian did.

But it was even more than that. Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne's children seemed to spring from one of Hawthorne's tales, incarnating their father's paradoxes writ large. "To plant a family!" Hawthorne had written. "This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do." It was as if the past always lay in wait, just around the bend. The fortunes of each Hawthorne child uncannily bore out what Hawthorne considered a curse of guilt and grief, of somberness and what we today call depression, as well as talent, penury, pluck, and fortitude, all stitched together in a bright pattern, like Hester Prynne's letter "A."

Hawthorne's firstborn, a daughter, descended directly from literature. Christened Una after Spenser's heroine in The Faerie Queene, she served as the model for Pearl, the precocious child in The Scarlet Letter, and many observers noticed her resemblance to her literary father. Like him, she was handsome, tall, exacting, and remote. "The more I feel the more it seems a necessity to be reserved," said Una at fifteen. Una had worshipped sorrow, said her mother, since the age of six. "It was impossible she should ever be happy," remarked a friend. The sky was too blue, the sun too blazing, her own feelings too hard to bear. She died mysteriously at the age of thirty-three.

Rose Hawthorne, the youngest Hawthorne child, fared better-eventually. After the death of both her parents, a horrible marriage, a feud with her siblings, and the early loss of her only child to diphtheria, Rose fulfilled the unspoken mission of one of the characters in Hawthorne's novel The Marble Faun: she takes communion. As a self-ordained Sister of Mercy, Rose consecrated herself to the poor and the sick, and at the age of forty-four, in 1896, established the charitable organization Sister Rose's Free Home (after St. Rose of Lima) to care for indigent cancer patients. In 1899 she received the Holy Habit of the Third Order of St. Dominic, and two years later, in 1901, the home was incorporated as the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer, still extant today in Hawthorne, New York.

Then there was Julian, in the middle. On Easter Sunday, 1913, he was transported to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. The formal charge against him and his cronies was misuse of the United States Postal Service, a catchall complaint designed to nail the defendants, whose real offense, according to Judge Mayer, wasn't selling shares in a worthless silver and iron mine so much as the exploitation of their recognizable names. "Theirs is the greater crime," spat the New York district attorney, "for they have prostituted them." The general counsel for the Hawthorne mines, former mayor of Boston Josiah Quincy, was cleared of the one conspiracy count against him, but the neurologist Dr. William J. Morton, whose father had discovered ether just before the Civil War, went to jail with Julian.

Julian held his head up high. His conviction disgraced neither him nor his name, he said, just the sleazy people who wished to see him-for some inexplicable reason-go to prison. What else could he say? After his sentencing, he briskly strode from the courtroom into the marshal's office and with remarkable sangfroid pulled out a small cigarette case, which he pushed toward Morton and the fourth accomplice, Alfred Freeman, a petty swindler without a fancy name. Morton stood paralyzed. Freeman circled the room. Hawthorne pocketed his case and shook the hand of a sympathetic well-wisher. "In such extremities," he later noted, "a man's manhood and dignity come to his support."

But when the deputy marshal clicked a pair of steel handcuffs round his wrist, Julian blinked in disbelief and with some confusion walked through the slanting rain to the city jail, a place familiarly known, à la Hawthorne, as the Tombs. "I was sure we should be acquitted," he muttered.

Yet by and large the only son of America's most esteemed novelist maintained a transcendental faith in his own innocence, a trait that linked him more to his tender, doting mother than to his morally particular father, who spent a lifetime probing motives, his own most of all. An epicure of intent, Hawthorne knew what the heart held in thrall. "It is a very common thing," he wrote near the end of his life, "-this fact of a man's being caught and made prisoner by himself." But Julian knew what he was doing when he exploited the Hawthorne name, which he plainly saw as false. Nathaniel Hawthorne: to the public it conjured American probity and success; to Julian it was fraudulent, overblown, hollow at the core.

Dissimulation was the keystone of Julian's career. And inadvertent parody of his father. Nathaniel Hawthorne's writing life was short and well crafted; Julian's, an interminable flood: hundreds of second-rate novels and poems, stories, histories, travel books, reminiscences, essays, even a two-volume biography of his parents, all capitalizing on the eminent patronymic. (With spooky foresight, his father once said of Julian that "his tendencies . . . seem to be rather towards breadth than elevation.") In 1908, when Julian abandoned literature for geology, as the president of the Hawthorne Silver and Iron Mines, Ltd., he managed to write hundreds of promotional letters as well as several promotional books. His energy was amazing.

If his father obeyed the Muse, Julian served Mammon. On selling his first short story, he thought, "Why not go on adding to my income in this way from time to time?" It seemed easy enough. "I think we take ourselves too seriously," he said of his fellow novelists, and at his death was credited as one of the first American writers to make literature "a bread-and-butter calling." When Henry James published his incisive study of Hawthorne, Julian confided to his diary that James deserved success "better than I do, not only because his work is better than mine, but because he takes more pains to make it so." In public, however, Julian protected himself from James and, more importantly, from his father's literary scruples. "I cannot sufficiently admire the pains we are at to make our work . . . immaculate in form," he declared. Aesthetic niceties are effeminate. Success is a racket.

Broad-chested and handsome-like his father-and with the same high coloring and dark wavy hair, Julian was born "to have ample means," declared his adoring mother. Friends thought she overpraised him, and that his father hadn't praised him enough. Whatever had happened, Julian combined his father's cynicism with his mother's ebullience. He loved women (though he was no feminist), tailored clothes, abundance, and a good scam. Hawthorne dryly assessed his son's character; he ought to join a ministry, he said.

Julian floundered at Harvard, quitting just months after his father's death, his interests inclining more to sport than study. He floundered at the Lawrence Scientific School and at the Realschule in Dresden, where he proposed to study civil engineering with a view toward knocking together a huge fortune in the American West. This plan also went awry. Unlike his father, who had delayed his marriage to Sophia, Julian married at the age of twenty-four and sired ten children, eight of whom survived. But he never had enough, kept enough, saved enough, planned enough.

His insouciance exasperated Rose. That he wouldn't accept a pardon unless William Morton also received one was yet another instance of his irresponsibility, she told his family. "But he is he, so to speak," she said, throwing her hands up. Still, Rose mounted a loyal defense. "I know that he really believed in the mines," she reportedly told Joseph P. Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson's secretary. To Julian, however, she starchily observed, "I am consoled about your personal trials by knowing that you have always adapted yourself to deprivations with the unconcern-or, rather, the manly vigor of one of your remote ancestors."

Coming from Rose, it was an equivocal compliment. She knew their Puritan ancestors whipped, scorched, hanged, and banished women such as herself for views far less heretical than hers. Julian too had disapproved of her vocation, though more amiably than their ancestors would have. After her death, he remembered Rose as a headstrong girl prone to egregious errors of judgment. Her errand in Washington, D.C., on his behalf, was one of these. On April 3, 1913, Mother Alphonsa, as Rose was known, traveled by train to the nation's capital to ask President Wilson to pardon her brother.

"What had I to do with 'pardons'?" Julian was furious. "Pardon for what?" But Rose was determined to restore luster to the Hawthorne name. A band of white cloth pleated across her forehead and stern black robes sweeping about her ample figure, she was every bit as fierce as Hester Prynne and probably just as nervous when she boarded a humid trolley for the White House. Tumulty received her. Strangely affected by the pink-cheeked woman in black and white, he ignored protocol and sent her request directly to the president.

Or said he had. Nothing happened. Public opinion was against Julian. Parole was denied. Not until the following fall, on October 15, 1913, was Julian Hawthorne released from prison. Again, he wore the scarlet tie.

Rose Hawthorne was born when her father was forty-seven. "She is to be the daughter of my age," he remarked, "-the comfort (at least so it is to be hoped) of my declining years." Hawthorne died, however, just before his sixtieth birthday and the day before her thirteenth.

He had called her Pessima. She was mercurial, fastidious, self-critical, and impatient. Explained Sophia in the double-edged terms she perfected, "I think you inherited from Papa this immitigable demand for beauty and order and right, & though, in the course of your development, it has made you sometimes pettish and unreasonable, I always was glad you had it."

Rose wanted to write, but her father's interdiction against the literary life put an end to that. In fact, both parents were wildly ambivalent about the practice of literature, declining to teach their children to read until they reached the ripe age of seven. Sophia was adamant about this. "I have not the smallest ambition about early learning in my children," she declared. And though her two sisters were educators of note and her brother-in-law, Horace Mann, once the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, Sophia refused to hand her children over to schoolmistresses of dubious intent. Hawthorne deferred to her. "The men of our family are compliant husbands," his own sister later scoffed.

Encouraged to paint by her artistic mother, Rose dutifully studied art until Sophia's death in 1871, and then she cut loose, sort of. Barely twenty, she quickly married George Parsons Lathrop, a twenty-year-old aspiring writer. But if Rose believed she was replacing her parents by replicating their wonderful marriage-artist to writer-she was utterly mistaken. "Love is different from what I supposed and I don't like it," admits a character in one of her short stories. She did write after all.

George Lathrop got a job as assistant editor at the Atlantic Monthly, the showcase for much of his father-in-law's work, and when he lost the post he and Rose drifted to New York, where they nibbled at the edge of the literary set. Often dressed in yellow, her favorite color, Rose was soon known as a passable if gloomy poet and indifferent author of short stories, her best production fittingly called "Prisoners." George, a conventional and reasonably prolific writer, was known as a drunk.

The Lathrops converted to Catholicism, but religion didn't help their failing marriage, and after much soul-searching, Rose separated from her husband in 1895. Una suspected abuse. Then, in a volte-face that Julian found "abrupt and strange," Rose chose to rededicate her life to "usefulness." To Rose, however, it was her father's fine-grained appreciation of suffering that motivated her. "He was as earnest as a priest," she said, "for he cared that the world was full of sorrow & sin." Certainly Hawthorne's last illness had cast a pall over his youngest child; and in 1887 she was devastated yet again by the premature death of poet Emma Lazarus, a cherished friend.

This stiffened her purpose once and for all. On May 19, 1898, the thirty-fifth anniversary of her father's death, she clipped her auburn hair and stowed the leftover tufts under a linen cap. Henceforth she dressed in an austere monkish gown. "I gave up the world," she said, "as if I were dead." She swore off men and earthly things, and for the rest of her life lived productively in a community of faithful women. "From close observation I have learned something about the true courage of women," she had written years earlier.

Her choice reflecting a condition of her parents' lives-intimate friendships with members of the same sex-Rose started one of the first hospices in America in a tenement house on Scammel Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where she nursed the dying poor. Proceeds from a memoir of her father, published in 1897, supported her in this, and with Alice Huber, a "life-helper" (her word), she opened Sister Rose's Free Home in a three-story red brick building at 426 Cherry Street. Unlike her siblings, Rose managed to remake Nathaniel Hawthorne's legacy into something of her own. "

Table of Contents

Illustrationsix
Chapter 1The Prison Door--Introductory3
Chapter 2Home13
Chapter 3The Forest of Arden29
Chapter 4The Era of Good Feelings43
Chapter 5That Dream of Undying Fame58
Chapter 6Storyteller73
Chapter 7Mr. Wakefield86
Chapter 8The Wedding Knell101
Chapter 9The Sister Years113
Chapter 10Romance of the Revenue Service126
Chapter 11The World Found Out139
Chapter 12Beautiful Enough157
Chapter 13Repatriation178
Chapter 14Salem Recidivus191
Chapter 15Scarlet Letters206
Chapter 16The Uneven Balance218
Chapter 17The Hidden Life of Property232
Chapter 18Citizen of Somewhere Else245
Chapter 19The Main Chance256
Chapter 20This Farther Flight269
Chapter 21Truth Stranger Than Fiction282
Chapter 22Questions of Travel296
Chapter 23Things to See and Suffer311
Chapter 24Between Two Countries328
Chapter 25The Smell of Gunpowder343
Chapter 26A Handful of Moments362
Epilogue: The Painted Veil376
Notes383
Selected Bibliography473
Acknowledgments487
Index491

Interviews

A Conversation with Brenda Wineapple

Q: Next year is the 200th anniversary of Hawthorne's birth. What does he have to tell us in the 21st century?


A: We live today in a world rife with terrorism driven by religious fanaticism, and no one conveys better than Hawthorne how religion or ideology can induce hysteria, violence, and cruelty. He wrote scathingly of the witchcraft delusion that possessed the men and women of Salem and turned them into the persecutors and rank murderers of their neighbors. Fanaticism, whether of his Puritan ancestors or of the abolitionists, was repugnant to Hawthorne. And no one has more than Hawthorne to tell us, too, about the flip side of fanaticism—self-doubt, guilt, self-hatred.

Q: Hawthorne is one of America's best-known writers. What was your biggest surprise in writing about him?

A: I was most surprised at his politics—in particular his nefarious views about slavery, since they have largely been papered over or ignored. Here was a man of great moral sensibility who came of age in the era that produced a bumper crop of political idealists: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, Horace Greeley, Walt Whitman. Yet, Hawthorne's strongest political enthusiasm was for Franklin Pierce, arguably one of this country's worst presidents. Pierce, who occupied the White House from 1853 to 1857, was America's Pétain, seemingly blind to the evils of slavery both before and during the Civil War.

Perhaps naively, we assume that because our great writers have a capacious view ofhumankind, they vote the same way we do. But some of our most admired literary figures had abominable politics—Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, to name just two. And so it was with Hawthorne on the matter of slavery: we're shocked not only by his views but that he stood almost by himself in opposition to his literary peers.

If there is one thing to be said in favor of Hawthorne's overt racism, as distinguished from the more covert racism of his anti-slavery friends, it is that he was genuinely worried what would happen to the slaves after emancipation in a country as racist as ours. Given the history of race relations in the century following the Civil War, that concern was prescient.

Q: In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne created perhaps the most celebrated heroine in American literature, Hester Prynne. On whom was she modeled, and what accounts for the powerful impact she has had?

A: Of all the canonical American authors of the mid-nineteenth century, only Hawthorne created memorable women characters, and certainly his supreme achievement was Hester Prynne. A number of his friends and relatives contributed to Hester, prominent among them the feminist Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne's mother and younger sister, and his rabble-rousing sister-in-law Elizabeth Peabody. But most of all Hester is Hawthorne himself. He says as much in the essay that introduces The Scarlet Letter, when he tells of trying on the scarlet letter, which burns his chest. He drops it quickly to the floor. In other words, Hawthorne identifies with Hester as an outcast brought low by a society she both respects and reviles. Hawthorne felt the same way, especially after he was fired ignominiously from his post at the Salem custom house just before he wrote the novel. For a man who lived much of his life in poverty, that was a cruel blow, and the pain and alienation he felt accounts to some degree for the power of the book.

Q: Hawthorne's novels and stories have not lacked for admirers. But are there any that strike you as particularly ripe for rediscovery?


A: My prime candidate would be an essay, "Chiefly About War Matters," published in The Atlantic in 1862. It summarizes Hawthorne's tangled political views in a style reminiscent of Jonathan Swift and in some ways anticipates the playful and self-satirical wit of the new journalism of the 1970s, more than a century later. Had Hawthorne lived past 59, I believe he would have forged a new genre commensurate with the changing America he inherited.

Q: Hawthorne was a notoriously private, shy, even anti-social, figure. Did that present a special challenge in writing this biography?

A: That's the myth of Hawthorne, not the reality. Hawthorne may have been reticent, but the women around him weren't, and Hawthorne wrote about himself, his friends, his passions, constantly—in letters, in journals, and most of all, in his novels. "He always puts himself in his books," said his sister-in-law Mary Mann. "He cannot help it." The impression of Hawthorne as a withdrawn figure may largely reflect the fact that he simply didn't like many of his literary peers.

Q: Your first biography was of the New Yorker correspondent Janet Flanner and your second of Gertrude and Leo Stein. What led you to a writer as different from them as Hawthorne?


A: After writing about two unusual women, it seemed time to write about a canonical male. Few women have, and as a result, most biographies of the white males of the 19th century are largely devoid of women. As the first female biographer of Hawthorne, I confront the only major nineteenth-century American author before Henry James to make women the central figures of his novel and to write about illicit love, marriage, motherhood, women's rights, and spiritualism.

In a sense, too, this book was a homecoming for me. I was born in Boston and have spent most of my life in New England. Essex County, Massachusetts, where I grew up, has changed from Hawthorne's time, but not all that much: I know the streets Hawthorne rambled, the salt air he breathed, the hills he climbed and the green, quiet woods. Like him, I know the Commons, the churches, the color of the flinty sky during long New England winters. Those bright New England falls, harsh east winds, gracious homes, widow walks, and decayed wharves are part of our common birthright.

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