Robin can’t go home again. Like it or not, he’s a town boy now. And the town promises success—or failure. “Oh earthly pomp is but a dream,” Nathaniel as poet waxes philosophic, repudiating it; yet he’s no fool. “Those may be my rhymes,” he tells Louisa, “yet they are not exactly my thoughts.” Earthly pomp is gratifying, whatever the commandments of his Bible-thumping relatives, including his mother, who time and again warn against the vanity and uncertainty of the riches of this world. “One thing only is needfull,” she reiterated, “an interest in Jesus Christ, secure that and you will have treasure in Heaven, where neither moth nor rust can corrupt, nor thieves break through and steal.”
Estranged from two worlds—Raymond, Salem—Nathaniel inhabited both. (“Am I here, or there?” Robin asks.) Wishing to please his Manning relatives, especially Uncle Robert—I am almost as tall as he, Nathaniel strutted—he understood he’d have to succeed on Robert’s terms. Was that so bad? Salem offered Mr. Boisseaux’s dancing school; Edmund Kean in King Lear; nearby Boston; and even the satisfactions of Latin, which he liked. None of this existed in Raymond.
So Nathaniel brought Salem and Raymond together in The Spectator, a homemade newspaper he composed for his family, detailing their goings-on in both places. Using the format of the Salem papers, particularly the Gazette, he provided gossip as well as humorous and homiletic essays on topics like benevolence, wealth, courage, and industry—although he didn’t know too much about the latter topic, he said, “it not being one of the attributes of literary men.”
As Nathaniel’s declaration of independence and his passport into literature, The Spectator presents Nathaniel in a new guise. Writing without the veil he adopted in later life—the veil of fiction—Nathaniel introduces himself as the gentleman scribbler, blue-blooded, aloof and indolent, a spectator of the roiling world but not of it, and a success of sorts, though not of the Thumpcushion kind.
But if the literary man is a cultured idler—the posture was then in vogue—he’s also a wastrel, vain and decadent. This is America after all, not the England of Addison and Steele, and despite his chafing, Nathaniel at bottom accepted the Manning credo of practicality and hard work. “How far preferable is the sweet consciousness that we have diligently performed our Duty,” he observes, “to the self reproaches which continually invade us, when we feel that we have idly neglected what should have been performed.… And although the exertions of an industrious man may be fruitless, yet he will have the reflection to console him in Adversity, that no fault of his own rendered him unsuccessful. The idle man will have no such comfort,” he continued, “the many advantages that he has neglected, and the time that he has mis-spent will rise up in judgement against him, and poverty will be embittered by the reproaches of his own conscience.”
At sixteen Nathaniel was articulating his psychological dilemma. The illicit pleasures of indolence, wildness, and autonomy drew him to Maine, associated with his mother and his uncle Richard, that place where he could safely rebel against regulation, usefulness, and enterprise, and even could sport his father’s gun, untoppled by cackling schoolboys who might push him off the podium. But there’s a hitch. As he writes in his Spectator essay, indolence avails nothing but poverty and dependence; it’s the refuge of the lame.
Following his essay on idleness is a companion piece, “On Ambition,” in which he admits that striving “raises man above the brutes, and places him in a station next to that of the Angels.” Naked ambition may be odious and crass, the stuff of pride and Satan’s fall, but Milton’s Satan is not to be ignored or belittled. And Nathaniel was eager for laurels, even if they’d been dipped in sulfur. The problem was that he associated ambition with the materialistic, hard-driving city of Salem.
Idle, ambitious, and damned either way.
“What do you think of my becoming an Author, and relying for support upon my pen,” he would soon query his mother. It was a perfect compromise. Then he paused. “But authors are always poor Devils, and therefore Satan may take them.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Era of Good Feelings
Our court shall be a little academy.
William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost,
quoted by Nathaniel Hawthorne in Fanshawe
I HAVE ALMOST given up writing Poetry,” Nathaniel postured in the fall of 1820. “No Man can be a Poet & a Book-Keeper at the same time.” This was the plaint of the Romantic poet, who claimed that art and business didn’t mix—meaning Nathaniel needed someplace far from the hubbub of Salem, like the Maine woods, to sing his stirring song.
The Mannings, however, were focused on more prosaic matters, like that of Nathaniel’s future. “We must not have our expectations too much raised about him,” Mary Manning cautioned Betsy with obvious delight, “but his Master speaks very encouragingly respecting his talents &c and is solicitous to have him go to Colleg.” Mary backed the plan, she added, because it promised to make her nephew “worthy & usefull.” With business in Salem slow and nothing for Nathaniel to do, Robert also approved, provided he had the money. Mary did. She supplied one hundred dollars, and Robert raised the rest, leaning on his brother Samuel and sister Priscilla’s husband, John Dike. “So you are in danger of having one learned man in your family,” boasted Nathaniel to his mother.
Within the month he was trudging through glossy snow early each morning to recite his Latin and Greek lessons at the home of Benjamin Lynde Oliver Jr., a literary-minded lawyer who may have considered Nathaniel a future apprentice. Afternoons, Nathaniel left Oliver’s to clerk at the stagecoach office and keep the books for his uncle William. In his free time, he wrote The Spectator and prepared for the dancing school ball with Louisa, now in Salem too. “Much time & money lost to no good purpose I fear,” griped Uncle Robert, doubtless pleased.
Though he enjoyed his various employments, Nathaniel found himself unaccountably depressed. He was chewing tobacco “with all my might, which I think raises my spirits,” he wrote to Ebe in Maine. He chafed under Uncle Robert’s harness. But without him, what would he do? And how could he prove himself? At college? And supposing he was admitted, would he be found wanting once there? “Do not you regret the time when I was a little boy,” he asked his mother. “I do almost.”
He’d have to choose a profession. “Shall you want me to be a Minister, Doctor or Lawyer?” he again queried his mother, sounding anxious. “A Minister I will not be,” he declared, as if guessing her answer; and he rejected law and medicine. “I should not like to live by the diseases and Infirmities of my fellow Creatures.” It was then that he broached the idea of becoming a writer, angling for Betsy’s approval. “How proud you would feel to see my works praised by the reviewers, as equal to proudest productions of the scribbling sons of John Bull,” he wrote to his mother, trying to sweeten her with a bit of swagger.
Whatever his mother replied, his aunts and uncles in Salem were likely horror-struck. “An angel would fail to obtain their approbation,” Ebe grimaced, “unless he came attired in a linsey-woolsey gown & checked apron, and assumed an honourable and dignified station at the washing tub.” Pampered, insecure, and talented, she and Nathaniel aspired to the higher things the Mannings would never countenance, making failure all the more ignominious; it would prove the Mannings right, which Nathaniel and Ebe may have believed they were.
There were many reasons Nathaniel went to a “country college,” as Henry James would later disparage Bowdoin. Partly there was the matter of money. At Harvard a student paid approximately $600 for his first year, whereas at Bowdoin the estimated annual tuition and room cost a more frugal $34, with board averaging $1.75 a week, and sundry expenses only three or so more dollars for two terms. And there was the matter of religion. Bowdoin had not succumbed to that weightless Unitarianism practiced at Harvard. Chartered in 1794, with its first class of seven graduated in 1806, Bowdoin stoutly embraced an unflappable Congregationalism, particularly during the tenure of Jesse Appleton, the current president (though not
for long), who demanded piety as well as Virgil from prospective collegians.
There were other reasons still. The Mannings, even Robert, continued to regard Maine as their spiritual home, and with Bowdoin located in Brunswick, just thirty miles north of Portland—five hours in a bumpy stage—it was close to Betsy Hathorne. “I am quite reconciled to going,” Nathaniel told his mother in the late winter of 1821, “since I am to spend the Vacations with you,” and by spring he was picturing their reunions, “shut out from the world, and nothing to disturb us. It will be a second Garden of Eden.”
But less than a year later, with Nathaniel in college, the Widow Hathorne boarded up her house in Raymond and headed back to Herbert Street, leaving her son to his own devices in the Promised Land.
All the way to Brunswick, Nathaniel fidgeted, so sure he’d fail the college entrance examination that he told Uncle Robert to be ready to take him home. “I encouraged him as much as possible,” Robert reported to the Mannings.
They had departed Salem on the last Friday of September 1822 and reached Bowdoin, via Raymond, on the following Tuesday. Located on a sandy plain near the falls of the Androscoggin River, the college quadrangle consisted of two brick Georgian-style structures, a white belfry at the crown of one of them, and an unpainted—and, as it turned out, unheated—wooden chapel that served as a library for an hour a day. In the background stood a forest of deep-needled pine.
Robert and Nathaniel called on Ebenezer Everett, one of Bowdoin’s trustees, and presented Benjamin Oliver’s letter of introduction. Everett read it, was satisfied, and sent the new student and his uncle to the president’s house. After Appleton’s sudden death, the Reverend William Allen had come to Bowdoin, fresh from the political controversies at Dartmouth University, where he’d briefly been president. The trustees of Dartmouth having dismissed Allen’s father-in-law as president for religious lassitude, the Republicans in the New Hampshire state legislature in turn dismissed the trustees, replacing them with a board of overseers and Allen. A legal battle then ripped throughout the college and the state, with Daniel Webster, crack Federalist attorney and graduate of Dartmouth, successfully arguing before the United States Supreme Court that the New Hampshire legislature had no right to override the original charter of Dartmouth as a private institution. It was time for Allen, a Republican, to get out. He landed at Bowdoin, where he enforced the rules with pharisaical precision and meted out fire and brimstone to the students, who didn’t like him. Nathaniel called Allen “a short, thick little lump of a man.” But the little lump strengthened the faculty and started the medical school. Nathaniel was in capable hands.
At two o’clock Nathaniel appeared before the college authorities, passed his entrance examination, and was assigned to share a room with Albert Mason in a private home near the college. With a freshman class of thirty-eight—Bowdoin’s largest thus far—the dormitory was temporarily full. Uncle Robert hunted for Nathaniel’s trunk, sent to the wrong address, while Nathaniel looked around the village and purchased in the shops the items he needed for his room. Robert paid the bill, regretting he hadn’t brought more money; tuition and board cost what he’d expected, but the outlay for books and furniture left just enough for firewood and some candles. Fortunately, Uncle William had given the boy an extra five dollars, a good thing, especially since his roommate was the son of the Honorable Jeremiah Mason and “has money enough,” Nathaniel observed, “which is perhaps unfortunate for me, as it is absolutely necessary that I should make as good an appearance as he does.”
Never intimate with Mason, Nathaniel rapidly made other friends. “I am very well contented with my situation,” he wrote to Ebe, “and like a College Life much better than I expected”—all the more since his studies allowed plenty of time for wine, cards, and other “unlawful occupations, which are made more pleasant by the fines attached to them if discovered.” By spring President Allen had to contact Mrs. Hathorne to ask her “to induce your Son faithfully to observe the laws of this Institution.” Cushioning the blow, he suggested Nathaniel may have been unduly influenced by a wayward friend, recently dismissed from the college. Nathaniel took immediate umbrage. He alone was the author of his deeds, thank you very much.
He constantly broke the rules. He resented regulations stipulating how far one could walk on the Sabbath and that forbade smoking a “seegar” on the street or consuming alcohol. For if nothing else, the bone-chilling cold of a long Maine winter provided sufficient incentive to drink. Students smuggled alcohol into their rooms, loading extra lamp-fillers with liquor instead of oil. In 1826, the year after Hawthorne’s graduation, twelve thousand gallons of liquor were drunk in the small village of Brunswick, population about two thousand, including women and children; one assumes the figures weren’t altogether different during his residence.
Nathaniel was a charter member of the secret Pot-8-O Club, dedicated to weekly poems and the eating of tubers, or so their constitution alleged; they held meetings in Ward’s Tavern, and refreshments included roasted potatoes and cider polished off, no doubt, with ale, wine, or hard liquor. Similarly, he helped found the Androscoggin Club, another informal organization dedicated to card playing and drinking. Nathaniel and a crony dragged a keg of wine into the forest for a hilarious weekend.
Nathaniel was adjusting to college life, or his version of it. He neglected his recitations and ducked all forms of public worship, including evening and Sunday prayers. Compulsory Bible lessons irritated him. “Meeting for this day is over,” he joked to Ebe, poking fun at the red-hot Calvinism of the place. “We have had a Minister from the Andover mill, and he ‘dealt damnation round’ with an unsparing hand, and finished by consigning us all to the Devil.”
Many of the men in Nathaniel’s class were headed toward careers in government, and the college itself was subject to the political winds blowing outside academe. In 1819 the Era of Good Feelings, as the years of James Madison’s administration had been called, was about to end. Missouri’s application for admission to the Union had ignited an acrimonious political debate about whether Missouri would become a free or a slave state, and as everyone knew, the Missouri decision would shift the balance of power in the Senate, exposing yet again the moral contradiction at the heart of the Republic: slavery. The issue, as Jefferson famously said, rang a firebell in the night.
The clang had been heard from Missouri to Maine, particularly since the province of Maine, wishing to separate from Massachusetts, had applied for statehood. In 1820, Maine was admitted to the Union on Missouri’s coattails in the famous Compromise that temporarily banked the fire; Maine entered a free state, Missouri a slave state, and slavery was forbidden above 36° 30’ north latitude, Missouri excepted, and permitted below.
The country’s political divisions were reflected at Bowdoin in its rivalrous literary societies. Several of the professors as well as the more conservative, Federalist, and respectable undergraduates joined the Peucinian, which boasted a library of twelve hundred volumes. The Peucinians included Alfred Mason and the young Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose father was a college trustee. Longfellow’s more dissolute brother Stephen joined the rowdier, newer, more dissident Athenaean Society (their smaller library, though founded first, contained about eight hundred books), a pack of “Young Bowdoin” Jeffersonians who in 1824 backed Andrew Jackson for president. Nathaniel Hathorne, an Athenaean, served on the society’s standing committee.
His closest friends were three other Athenaeans, each of whom entered public service as Jacksonian Democrats. One of them, Franklin Pierce, became the fourteenth president of the United States—either the worst or the weakest president, said Ralph Waldo Emerson, ever elected. Hawthorne and Pierce were friends for a lifetime.
At college Nathaniel liked the ambitious men of action who hoped to dedicate their lives to principle by serving their country and, in the case of Pierce, by following in the footsteps of their fathers. Pierce’s father Benjamin, a staunch Republican, was a Bunker Hill veteran and New
Hampshire governor known to his Federalist detractors as a “noisy, foul-mouthed, hard-drinking tavern keeper.” The elder Pierce was probably an alcoholic, and his son resembled him in this, minus the noisy, foul mouth.
Pierce started his career young. Born and raised in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, he entered Bowdoin at just sixteen in 1820, the year before Nathaniel. Dreaming of glory on the battlefield, he drilled Bowdoin undergraduates, Hawthorne included, among the pines. With a fair complexion, blue eyes, and light brown hair that sometimes fell forward in a raffish way, he was a handsome and popular man, his carriage erect, his personality warm, his sympathy real and affecting. Even his enemies in later years—and there were many—commented on his compassion. Not the abolitionists; they despised him.
He was honest, too—no small feat in a man headed for the presidency. Or honestly obtuse. A Bowdoin tutor, seeing Pierce’s slate during an algebra quiz, asked him how he’d gotten his answer. “I got it from Stowe’s slate,” Pierce replied. He frittered away the first two years of his academic career, and in his third year ranked at the absolute bottom of his class. Bucking for more failure, he disappeared from recitation. His friends begged him to return, and for some reason college authorities ignored his delinquency. Touched by all the solicitude, Pierce vowed to mend his ways and from then on burned the midnight oil—not alcohol—every night, waking before dawn to study some more. He graduated fourth in his class.
Another Athenaean was Jonathan Cilley, the grandson of a Revolutionary War patriot who worked his way through college, his father having died in 1808. Nathaniel considered Cilley’s mind practical—perhaps to a fault—and after Cilley’s death recalled the innate oratorical skills that “seemed always to accomplish precisely the result on which he had calculated.” President of the Athenaeans, Cilley was slim and sharp-featured and crafty, his geniality generous and well-managed. Yet, insisted Nathaniel, his real talent lay, like Pierce’s, in his “power of sympathy.” Only two years his senior, Cilley acted as an “elder brother” to Nathaniel, who would idealize him as possessing the “simplicity of one who had dwelt remote from cities, holding free companionship with the yeoman of the land.” But Cilley was no rube, and Nathaniel knew it.
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