He was especially good-looking, said Ebe, “the finest boy, many strangers observed, whom they had ever seen”: dark brown curly hair, flushed cheeks, long-lashed eyes the color of slate or water, depending on his mood. For the rest of his life his appearance attracted attention, embarrassing and pleasing him. And he was proud. Nathaniel once offended Simon Forrester, one of the richest men in Salem and an uncle by marriage on the Hathorne side, by refusing to accept a large coin Forrester had offered him on the street, in public. Forrester angrily informed the Mannings of the boy’s bad manners, and they, obsequious but proud themselves, explained that his mother did not allow the child such large sums of spending money.
In later life, Nathaniel teased his mother about spoiling her three children; Betsy replied it was impossible to spoil such children as him and Ebe. (Louisa was more compliant than the other two.) But Nathaniel obeyed the instructions of his uncle Robert, which shed a little light on the boy’s youth: “Study the hard lessons,” Uncle Robert directed, “learn all you can at school, mind your mother, don’t look cross, hold up your head like a man, and keep your cloths clean.”
On Saturday, April 17, 1813, Grandfather Manning left Herbert Street for Maine, riding by way of Newbury, Massachusetts, where he stopped at a local inn to spend the night. Before sunrise he fell into an apoplectic fit, smacking his head as he hit the hard wooden floor. His family rushed to Newbury in their coaches, but there was nothing to be done. Aged fifty-eight, Richard Manning died the following Monday at noon. The funeral took place the next day, coffin draped in black, at Herbert Street.
Just days before, Rachel Hathorne, Nathaniel’s paternal grandmother, had died. No more would the eight-year-old boy visit her house on Sundays, sit near the chimney, or read Pilgrim’s Progress in a large chair in the corner of the room. “The heart never breaks on the first grave,” he would write; “and, after many graves, it gets so obtuse that nothing can break it.”
Yet Grandfather Manning had at least left his family fairly comfortable, as he’d hoped. The Salem portion of his estate was sizable: the mansion on Herbert Street, an attached store, a plot of land, several carriage houses, three lots on Derby Street near the wharf, and the Union Street stables and business. The Maine holdings consisted of over ten thousand acres of unimproved land “down east,” along with a 150-acre farm in Bridgton, near Raymond, and a house and two lots in Portland. William, the eldest son, would continue to manage the stage business, and Richard Manning III, the second oldest, would oversee the property in Maine at least temporarily. Robert, two years younger than Richard, had opened a broker’s office near the wharves, where he speculated in guns and trading ships. The next in line, John, took to the sea, perhaps hoping to fight in the war against the British. The youngest son, Samuel, worked in the Salem family stables.
But the Manning legacy caused a fault line in the family, imperceptible at first. “Uncle Richard he can grow his own tobacco here, & make his own segars,” Uncle Robert wrote to his nephew from Maine, “and he can sail twenty five miles from Standish to the head of long pond in one direction.” It was decided. Uncle Richard would stay in Maine to manage and expand the family holdings, and Robert would follow suit.
Partially crippled, Uncle Richard had damaged his leg or spine in a carriage accident that occurred sometime around 1810. “I do not forget to complain of my hard fortune, and very often, curse the day in which I was born,” he wrote in his typically half-humorous vein to his sister Betsy. Dyspeptic, kind, scrupulously honest, fond of reading, tobacco, fishing, and freedom, Richard grew increasingly infirm as he aged. But always he loved the deep-sea green of the forest in summer, its white solitude in winter, and its distance from Salem, where everything was ranked—name, church, school, residence, clothes, achievements: no place for a lame eccentric such as he.
Uncle Robert liked Salem, and sure, he said he’d leave it. “I should rather live in the Woods poor than in the City rich,” he protested—far too much. A man of striving, he was uncomfortable with his own ambitions yet unable to renounce them as the more ascetic Richard had, or seemed to have. Besides, he wanted to stay close to their mother and earn her approval, not an easy thing to do. So he put off moving to Raymond, and in the end never did except for extended visits and vacations.
Sitting before his own fire, poking at it with his cane, Richard felt he’d been betrayed. As did Nathaniel; when Uncle Richard left Salem, the loss was as devastating to him as any other he had suffered.
“My Lord, stand back, and let the coffin pass.” As a young boy, recalled Nathaniel’s sister Ebe, her brother frequently recited this line from Richard III. It seems a strange choice—except that for him the procession of coffins had become a terrible commonplace. In one of his early Salem sketches, he describes a busy waterfront, a military parade, and a funeral cortege, the psychological axis of his youth.
Actually, the whole of Richard III resonated with the boy. After the death of Grandfather Manning (officially Richard Manning Jr.), lame Uncle Richard—Richard Manning III—competed for the Manning throne and won, but only by making Maine his kingdom. Shakespeare’s Richard III: malformed, robbed by nature, a villain to be sure; and crippled Uncle Richard: paterfamilias absconditus, a kind of hero and, for having abandoned his nephew, a kind of villain too.
Less than six weeks after Uncle Richard left Salem for good, Nathaniel injured his foot at school while playing, Ebe said, with a bat and ball. He took to crutches for the next fourteen months—that is, when he walked at all, which he often refused to do. It was an early rebellion, self-punitive and vindictive, in protest against the loss of his male guardians. No one had heard from his uncle John in quite some time, though he’d reportedly been spotted in New York City, bound for the Great Lakes to “work at his Trade.” That was all. With Grandfather Manning dead and Uncle Richard gone and John feared lost, Nathaniel himself threatened to run away forever, recalled his sister. Unable to do this, he did the opposite. Like Uncle Richard, he committed himself to immobility.
Paralysis and aggression, twin handmaidens of a conflicted psyche: in his early stories, they appear as relatives and doubles, as in “The Gentle Boy,” where patriarchal Puritans resembling William Hathorne harass the gentle Ilbrahim, an orphaned Quaker child. Paternal persecutors will invariably crop up in Hawthorne’s work and so will characters like Ilbrahim’s malicious friend, who cunningly breaks Ilbrahim’s spirit. “Like a lame man of low stature and gravely appareled, with a dark and twisted countenance, and a bright, downcast eye,” this satanic trickster—himself lame—destroys his double, the gentle child, with an aggression so deadly, it engenders the very passivity it loathes.
Affording him a certain guilty pleasure, the injury kept Nathaniel the center of attention. “Nathaniel was particularly petted,” Ebe remarked almost sixty years later, “the more because his health was then delicate and he had frequent illnesses.” Fearing an incurable deformity in Betsy’s darling son and the sole grandson of the Mannings, they consulted a series of doctors. “Everybody thought that, if he lived, he would always be lame,” Ebe recalled. Under the guidance of Dr. Smith of Hanover, New Hampshire, the family tried to invigorate his leg by dousing his foot with cold water. Legend says they poured water from a window on the second story onto the foot, which they then encased in a specially fitted boot.
All treatments failed.
The embargo hadn’t prevented war with Great Britain, and the war dragged on. There was talk of an armistice, but in April 1814 horses from Uncle William’s stable conveyed men and women to the gunhouse on Salem Neck as the United States frigate Constitution retreated into Marblehead Harbor. In June, the British burned an American ship in Beverly. Then came news of the destruction of vessels off Cape Ann and Scituate. Hotly contested in Salem—Federalists and Republicans madder than ever—war-talk distracted the town, which nervously awaited a British invasion. Nathaniel unheroically limped about the garden both despising and relishing his helplessness. On his tenth birthday
he stayed home, a child apart, listening, downcast, to the martial Independence Day celebration nearby, where boys toting bayonets turned into little men.
Robert and Priscilla Manning, in particular, respected education and sent all three Hathorne children to school, but after Nathaniel’s injury, his teacher, Joseph Worcester, the future lexicographer, went to the Manning house to hear him recite his lessons privately. “One of the peculiarities of my boyhood was a grievous disinclination to go to school,” Nathaniel later said, “and (Providence favoring me in this natural repugnance) I never did go half as much as other boys, partly owing to delicate health (which I made the most of for the purpose).” Delicate health, other boys: Nathaniel regarded himself as peculiar, even bizarre—entitled, and diminished by the entitlement.
In subsequent years he also spoke of a humiliating boyhood incident. During school recess he’d climbed onto a stage in the classroom to make a little speech, and a group of bigger boys had pulled him down. Whether apocryphal or not, the story suggests that Hawthorne had been mortified when he wanted to excel—or show off. From then on, unless forced, he refused to stand and declaim.
Taking refuge, then, from the activities he feared in an infirmity he loathed, the boy unconsciously identified not just with the men but with the women of his household, particularly his mother and two sisters. Thus Nathaniel’s handicap became his fortunate fall into literature, according to his sister Ebe. Instead of pursuing the ragtag parade of schoolboys with muskets, Nathaniel could study Milton and Pope and James Thomson, lying at home on the carpet, where he built a house of books for the cats. He read Rousseau, deemed improper, or Byron, and he dreamed of faraway places. “If he had been educated for a genius,” said Ebe of her brother, “it would have injured him excessively. He developed himself.”
Doubtless Ebe had a point. Nathaniel compensated for his deprivations by constructing an imaginary counterworld over which he exercised supreme control. “He used to invent some long stories wild and fanciful, and to tell us where he was going when he grew up,” recalled Ebe, “and of wonderful adventures he was to meet with.” Though lame, he determined to travel far from home like the men in his family, his father, grandfather, his uncle John, even uncle Richard—and to die young. Such fantasies of liberation, as well as of malice and of revenge, sustained him. And not surprisingly, he writes of journeys frequently in later life, although escape is unrealized, truncated, or punished.
By the winter of 1815, Nathaniel’s condition miraculously improved after his mother decided to decamp to Maine with her children and her sister Mary. Thrilled by the news, Uncle Richard—in a weird, proto-Freudian burst of weapons and lameness and limbs—promised that as soon as Nathaniel arrived, he’d give him the gun that had once belonged to Captain Hathorne.
CHAPTER THREE
The Forest of Arden
There is no use of life, but just to find out what is fit for us to do.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Septimius Felton”
OF THE THREE Hathorne children, Ebe was the dazzler. Certainly her brother thought so, recounting stories about her precocity, the way, for instance, she walked and talked at a mere nine months. Regardless, Ebe remains somewhat of a cipher in the Hawthorne chronicles, relegated to the back rooms of literary history, where she lingers, an American hamadryad of untapped potential inhibited by family, environment, and her own sardonic self.
She loved nature and books, particularly Shakespeare, whom she read assiduously at the age of twelve, and by adolescence her wit was dry, her humor pungent. She usually cut straight to the marrow, telling the truth and damning the Devil. (Of Emerson and Thoreau, she said: “I have a better opinion of their taste than to suppose that they really do think as they profess to.”) And though she affected to do little, she excelled in most everything she did. She studied languages with ease, Spanish, French, and German. “You are learning astronomy, a learned little Lady studying the stars,” exclaimed Uncle Robert with pleasure, prodding his niece forward—he called her a “female Newton”—even while holding her back. “Remember two [sic] much Learning is a Dangerous thing, but I know you will learn that only which is usefull for you.”
Ebe spent a lifetime rebelling against the “usefull.” Uncle Richard observed that “Elizabeth in particular cannot bear to think of doing any kind of Work,” and an early teacher who praised her exactness scolded her sloth. “Useful knowledge, unless for immediate practical application, is the most useless of all,” Ebe declared; on another occasion she warned a cousin that “if you ever write a book, take care that it be with no intention to be useful.” Over the years, little changed. Sophia Hawthorne took notable offense. “Elizabeth is not available for every-day purposes of pot-hooks and trammels, spits and flat-irons,” she once complained.
Ebe rose late. She avoided obligatory social calls. “People can talk about nothing tolerable but their neighbor’s faults,” she grimaced at fourteen. She considered letter writing demoralizing as well as ruinous to the style, and she abhorred cant, superstition, and organized religion. “The only argument for the inspiration of the Bible that has any weight with me is that it is readable,” she announced, “which other religious books are not.” Instead she liked newspapers. “The very best way to forget our own peculiar vexations is to consider those of other people,” she proclaimed, “and other people’s affairs in general, and especially the course of public events.”
Although in youth she enjoyed a bracing sleigh ride or an unhurried sojourn in Newburyport with her cousins, in later life she withdrew from society, devoting herself to a translation of Cervantes, never finished, and to walking alone in the forest collecting flowers and ferns. “I am something of a wild creature,” she admitted, “and it would suit me just as well to die alone, as wild creatures do.” She did. She never married, by choice it seems; certainly her rich good looks—jet hair, gray eyes, skin the color of an eggshell—must have attracted many suitors. “I should not like to feel as if much depended upon me,” she acknowledged on the eve of her brother’s wedding.
A faint whiff of disappointed romance rises at Ebe’s name, although no concrete evidence links her to any broken engagement. There is, however, the predictable supposition that “it was a love disappointment, as it [Ebe’s seclusion] began after a visit she had made of three weeks in Newburyport, where she had met an interesting gentleman, who, she expected, would come to see her in Salem.” He never did. Several family letters loosely connect her to a well-off widower, Captain Jeremiah Briggs, a keen-witted cohort of Uncle Robert, more his age than hers; so does some of Hawthorne’s earliest writing. “The beautiful Miss E. M. Hathorne,” he remarks in the family newspaper he printed, “formerly of this place [Maine], had consented to enter the holy state of Matrimony, in company with Capt. Jeremiah Briggs, a young gentleman of rank and accomplishments.” Nathaniel may have been ribbing her, but Briggs married another in 1831.
As her nephew Julian would say, there was simply no foothold in life for one such as she.
She adored her only brother. He adored her. “She is the most sensible woman I ever knew in my life, much superior to me in general talent,” he wrote in adulthood, trying to land her a job. But he was awed by her, even jealous. “I suppose she would not have the ghost of a chance in literature,” he remarked, as if he secretly hoped she wouldn’t. To him, Ebe was brilliant and dangerous. “The only thing I fear is the ridicule of Elizabeth,” he reportedly said. And that he transformed her into a fabulous being, capricious and ephemeral, reveals how deeply she entered his imagination: “You must never expect to see my sister E. in the day-time, unless by previous appointment, or when she goes to walk,” he would warn his fiancée. “So unaccustomed am I to daylight interviews, that I never imagine her in sunshine; and I really doubt whether her faculties of life and intellect begin to be exercised till dusk.”
As children, the two siblings read each other’s literary efforts with genuine interest, sending secret messages in a basket rigged between t
heir two rooms on Herbert Street, his on the third floor and hers on the second. But she was a severe critic, he later said, unamiable in her tastes.
Doubtless, too, Nathaniel envied the privileges Ebe enjoyed or that he imagined she did, both as elder sibling and the particular prize of her uncles, especially Uncle Robert, whom he grew to resent. For Uncle Robert would never wrench Ebe, a girl, from her beloved mother, as he would Nathaniel.
Betsy Hathorne was a languishing widow bonded to the memory of her dead husband. Or so testified Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Nathaniel’s sister-in-law, in later years. Believing the rumors spread by Salem busybodies, Peabody insisted the Widow Hathorne “made it the habit of her life never to sit down at a table but always eat her meals above in the chamber she never left. For this, she was constantly criticized & (blamed) condemned by the neighbours, including connections of the family.” A Manning descendant rebutted her claim. If the Hathornes took their meals upstairs, they did so for reasons of economy—as well as privacy, rare in a household so large.
This last reason seems truer. And the Widow Hathorne did dream of escaping the hullabaloo of Herbert Street by “improving property of our own.” She was referring to their property in Maine. To her, the future lay in its rugged wilderness, where, as a missionary of the backwoods, on Sundays she might teach Scripture to the local residents.
But with the move postponed, indefinitely it seemed, Nathaniel relapsed. Out came the crutches, pieces of wood added to lengthen them, since the boy was growing tall. “You say he is worse than I am,” Uncle Richard wrote to Robert. Richard had recently fractured his collarbone. Linked once again, Nathaniel and his uncle convalesced at the same rate, both of them on the mend in the spring of 1815, when the move was back on track, and a jubilant Nathaniel, mounted on one of the Manning nags, galloped around town.
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