Nathaniel Hawthorne: Hawthorne's Struggle and Romance with Salem
by Nancy Brewka ClarkNathaniel Hawthorne called himself a writer of romances, allegorical tales of times long past with supernatural overtones. Yet many of the stories he wrote came right out of the pages of his own family history in Salem, Massachusetts. Hawthorne was still struggling to relieve himself of the heavy psychic burden of his family's past. Puritanism had shaped his first full-length romance written in 1850, The Scarlet Letter, with its emphasis on secret sin, pride, vengefulness and shame. The House of the Seven Gables, in 1851, continued to deal with this burden in its opening lines that described a witch's curse on a Puritan magistrate who choked to death on his own blood.
While Hawthorne said he felt guilty for sharing the blood of not only witchcraft judge John Hathorne but also of sadistic Puritan magistrate William Hathorne—Nathaniel restored the Elizabethan 'w' to the name when he was in his twenties—he felt even more shame for not measuring up to their concept of success. These two ghosts of his Calvinist Protestant ancestors haunted Hawthorne with their creed that God rewarded His chosen people with prosperity.
In The Custom House, his introduction to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne imagined his 17th century forefathers sneering at him as "a writer of story-books," calling him an "idler" who disgraced the family tree, a "degenerate fellow" whose occupation is little better than "a fiddler's!"
If he believed being a writer was a less than honorable profession in the long-dead eyes of his Puritan ancestors, Hawthorne still consoled himself with the thought that he had inherited their determination to succeed. Unfortunately, unlike them, Nathaniel Hawthorne believed he couldn't succeed in Salem. He felt the town was suffocating him, and blighting his spirit. "Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil."
His roots went deep in Salem soil, back to when the town was just a handful of thatched huts in the midst of a former Native American settlement called Naumkeag, when Englishman William Hathorne made his way up from Boston to join original settler Roger Conant there in the 1630s.
William made a name for himself in the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a stern magistrate of the Crown's justice when he ordered the public whipping of Quakers whose only crime was daring to infringe on Puritan turf, their ultimate solution being finally to flee to Rhode Island. He was also a shrewd businessman who made a fortune in the fur trade and purchased vast tracts of land stretching up into what is now Maine.
William's son John was one of three specially appointed judges to preside at the Salem witch trials of 1692. When the court allowed spectral evidence from a handful of hysterical teenaged girls who then testified that the disembodied spirits of the accused had tortured them physically, twenty men and women, were executed.
Although Judge John Hathorne died a wealthy man in 1717, his successors lost both money and land with each passing generation until it really did seem as if the family name had been cursed. Nathaniel's grandfather, known in local folklore as Bold Dan'l, was an 18th century privateer, a legalized pirate who was encouraged by the rebellious provisional government of Massachusetts to attack British ships and plunder them during the Revolution, but even he couldn't refill the family coffers.
By the time Nathaniel was born on the 4th of July 1804, the family holdings had dwindled to a gambrel-roofed two-family dwelling on rough-and-tumble Union Street, one block up from the wharves.
His mother, Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne, lost even that house, it's now on the grounds of the House of the Seven Gables complex on Turner Street, when her sea captain husband, also named Nathaniel, died of a fever in Surinam in 1808, leaving her with Elizabeth, six, Nathaniel, four, and an infant, Mary Louisa.
Swathed in the widow's weeds she would wear for the rest of her life, Elizabeth Manning Hathorne moved back to her parents' place on Herbert Street. It was literally a trip of just a few feet, since she had married the boy next door, but for her son, it was light years away from the life he had known with a once-happy mother.
The Manning house may not have had a curse on it but Nathaniel always called it Castle Dismal, reflecting the way he saw his life from the age of six years on. Years later when his mother lay dying, Hawthorne confessed in his journal in an entry dated July 29, 1849, "I love my mother; but there has been, ever since boyhood, a sort of coldness of intercourse between us, such as is apt to come between persons of strong feelings if they are not managed rightly."
Somewhere in the course of the forty-one years of widowhood remaining to her after she moved to the Herbert Street house, Elizabeth Hathorne was given the appellation "madame," perhaps in a veiled reference to her aloofness.
Nathaniel's sea-faring father, described by a Salem sailor as "the sternest man that ever walked a deck," had actually written poetry about his once-vivacious beauty of a wife in the margins of the logbooks he kept as captain of his brother-in-law's vessels. Perhaps the irrepressible urge for creative writing was passed down through his genes, because as a teenager Nathaniel tried his hand at writing poetry too.
"I saw where in the lowly grave
Departed genius lay;
And mournful yew-trees o'er it wave,
To hide it from the day."
This early example of Hawthorne's outlook, if not his style, was mailed to his uncle Robert Manning's house near Sebago Lake in Raymond, Maine, where Madame Hathorne and his two sisters had been living since 1816. Because the Manning family operated a successful livery service between Boston, Salem, and points north, there was money to spare for a country home. The only problem was that the four Manning brothers were always too busy working to take a vacation.
Madame Hathorne had taken advantage of the situation and moved herself and all three of her children out of dusty, clamorous Herbert Street to the wholesome air of the northern woods. In 1816, Nathaniel was still recuperating from a serious foot injury received while playing stickball in Herbert Street over a year before, and the family believed, rightfully as it turned out, that he would regain his health in Maine.
Nathaniel always remembered with great wistfulness how he lived for a time in a boy's paradise of hunting, skating, fishing and swimming. He also read the books his uncles provided, his favorites being Puritan Paul Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the novels of Sir Walter Scott, Shakespeare, and the Bible.
Eventually his foot healed and the sketchy education Nathaniel was receiving in Maine met with the disapproval of his Uncle Robert, who was willing to foot the bills to send his only nephew to college. The protesting Nathaniel was shipped back to Salem to be tutored for admission to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, an institution with a much cheaper tuition than nearby Harvard's and a strong Protestant Congregationalist bent.
In a letter to his mother dated March 13, 1821, even though Nathaniel began by saying, "I have not yet concluded what profession I shall have," the sixteen-year-old went on to make it crystal clear what he planned to do when he grew up, and it didn't have anything to do with churches: "Being a minister is of course out of the question. I should not think that even you could desire me to choose so dull a way of life. Oh, no, mother, I was not born to vegetate forever in one place, and to live and die as calm and tranquil as a puddle of water....Oh that I was rich enough to live without a profession! What do you think of my becoming an author, and relying for support upon my pen? Indeed, I think the illegibility of my handwriting is very author-like. How proud you would feel to see my works praised by the reviewers.... But authors are always poor devils, and therefore Satan may take them."
In due course, Hawthorne went off to Bowdoin, where his major accomplishment, along with receiving his bachelor's degree in 1825, was making two lifelong friends, Horatio Bridge and Franklin Pierce. Both men would bail him out of financial and emotional difficulty time and again as Hawthorne struggled with his career choice. As to why he wanted to be a writer, even he himself couldn't explain it.
In a short autobiographical piece written for The National Review in 1853, Hawthorne wrote, "On leaving college, in 1825, instead of immediately studying a profession, I sat myself down to consider what pursuit in life I was best fit for. My mother had now returned, and taken up her abode in her deceased father's house, a tall, ugly, old, grayish building (it is now the residence of half a dozen Irish families), in which I had a room. And year after year I kept on considering what I was fit for, and time and my destiny decided that I was to be the writer that I am."
In 1828 he self-published Fanshawe, a romance about college days, but regretted it to the point where he burned every copy he could find and demanded his family and friends do the same. "When we see how little we can express," he wrote in his journal years later, "it is a wonder that any one ever takes up a pen a second time."
In that 1853 autobiography, Hawthorne further reflected, "Having spent so much of my boyhood and youth away from my native place, I had very few acquaintances in Salem, and during the nine or ten years that I spent there, in this solitary way, I doubt whether so much as twenty people in the town were aware of my existence."
He went on with relentless irony, "I had read endlessly all sorts of good and good-for-nothing books, and in the dearth of other employment, had early begun to scribble sketches and stories, most of which I burned…My long seclusion had not made me melancholy or misanthropic, nor wholly unfitted me for the bustle of life; and perhaps it was the kind of discipline which my idiosyncrasy demanded, and chance and my own instincts, operating together, had caused me to do what was fittest."
The letters of Hawthorne's college friend Horatio Bridge do much to spell out the misery Hawthorne was suffering during this period of creative incubation, as well as the letters from the editors of the struggling publications to which he was submitting his work.
S.G. Goodrich, publisher of The Token Magazine in Boston, wrote on May 31, 1831, "I have made very liberal use of the privilege you gave me as to the insertion of your pieces…As they are anonymous, no objection arises from having so many pages by one author, particularly as they are as good, if not better, than anything else I get."
The short stories appearing anonymously in that issue, "The Wives of the Dead," "Roger Malvin's Burial," "Major Molineaux," and "The Gentle Boy," all harked back to Puritan times and the repressive atmosphere of gloom which hung over the little outposts of the New World.
Goodrich, the publisher who had shown a mild interest in what came to be Twice-told Tales, dragged his feet, discouraging the insecure Hawthorne. On October 16, 1836, Bridge wrote to Hawthorne, "You have the blues again. Don't give up to them, for God's sake and your own and mine and everybody's. Brighter days will come, and that within six months." On October 22nd, he was writing, "I have just received your last [letter], and do not like its tone at all. There is a kind of desperate coolness in it that seems dangerous. I fear that you are too good a subject for suicide, and that some day you will end your mortal woes on your own responsibility."
It was Bridge who secretly backed the publication of Twice-Told Tales and persuaded fellow Bowdoin graduate Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to review it for Boston's elite readership. The book even got a favorable review in London, much to Hawthorne's astonishment and satisfaction. In the journal he kept alongside the other papers in his little room beneath the eaves of the Herbert Street house, he commemorated the publication with the comment, "In this dismal chamber Fame was won."
But neither fame nor fortune favored the book and on Christmas Day 1836, Bridge was writing to Hawthorne, "Whether your book will sell extensively may be doubtful, but that is of small importance in the first book you publish. At all events, keep up your spirits till the result is ascertained; and my word for it, there is more honor and emolument in store for you from your writings than you imagine."
Bridge felt the urge to delve further into his feelings about his good friend's pessimism. "The bane of your life has been self-distrust…I have been trying to think what you are so miserable for. Although you have not much property, you have good health and powers of writing, which have made and can still make you independent…It seems to me that you never look at the bright side with any hope or confidence. It is not the philosophy to make one happy."
Then, in a change of tone, Bridge brought up a subject with a fascinating history. "I doubt whether you ever get your wine from Cilley. His inquiring of you whether he had really lost the bet is suspicious." The reference is to Jonathan Cilley, a Bowdoin classmate who, upon their graduation back in 1825, had wagered a barrel of Madeira wine that Nathaniel Hawthorne would be married by November 14, 1836.
Even though he was painfully shy, Hawthorne was so handsome that he had stopped a Gypsy woman dead in her tracks on a snowy road in Brunswick, something his friends had witnessed and never stopped ribbing him about, endlessly repeating her awestruck words, "Is he a man or an angel?" Such good looks were bound to ensnare Hawthorne in an early marriage, his friends teased.
Horatio Bridge had held onto the written wager and had informed Cilley that he had lost. In turn, Cilley had written to Hawthorne on November 17th, "Bridge informs me that 'you are about to publish a book, and are coming into repute as a writer very fast.' I am gratified to hear it; but just now it would have pleased me more to have heard that you were about to become the author and father of a legitimate and well-begotten boy than book. What! Suffer twelve years to pass away, and no wife, no children, to soothe your care, make you happy, and call you blessed…Don't fail to send me your book, on pain of my not paying the barrel of wine…I have no doubt it will be good, but I assure you I'll find fault with it if I can."
Hawthorne's bachelor state was about to change, however. Sophia Peabody, a Salem artist whose family had once lived next door to the Hathornes on Union Street prior to her birth, came into his life just when the bitter gloom of the previous twelve years was lifting with the publication of Twice-told Tales.
Sophia's bluestocking sister Elizabeth Palmer Peabody recognized the name of this rising literary star as someone their mother had once taught in her neighborhood dame school, and invited Hawthorne to the Peabody house on Charter Street. (The old colonial, now a run-down boarding house, is still standing right next door to the Charter Street Burial Ground where Judge John Hathorne's grave is a tourist attraction.)
When Hawthorne finally arrived, it had actually taken him a full year to get around to it, on a chilly night in the November of 1837 accompanied by his two unmarried sisters, Elizabeth dashed upstairs to tell Sophia that the reclusive author was "handsomer than Lord Byron," but Sophia didn't think that was a good enough reason to get out of bed.
At twenty-eight, Sophia Amelia Peabody had experienced several schoolgirl crushes on older men, including her doctor and her minister, and a handful of prospective suitors that left her stone-cold. Plagued by wrenching headaches which her father, a failed physician, attributed to the arsenic and opium he had dosed her with as a cranky teething baby, she had vowed never to marry.
One of six children in a family dominated by their educated mother, another Elizabeth, Sophia had been encouraged to develop her painting and drawing with tutors in both Salem, where she had lived as a girl, and in Boston, where the family had lived off and on ever since. Her father, mild-tempered, absent-minded and never one to pursue a patient for an unpaid fee, had actually been one of the physicians who had failed to cure little Nathaniel of his limp, which did nothing for his lack of self-esteem or his wife's opinion of his abilities.
Although she had shown little imagination in her artwork, Sophia had become an excellent copyist, and had even lived on her own briefly in a suburban Boston boarding house before succumbing to her mother's pressure to return home. Mother Peabody favored Sophia over all her children, because Sophia was sweet, obedient, and never mustered enough energy to rebut her opinions, as her two older daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, did.