Uncertain about the future, he cursed his own obsession with fame as harshly as some members of his family might have. Take the early tale “The Ambitious Guest.” Here, Hawthorne concocts an avalanche to crush, quite literally, a young man’s understandable desire “not to be forgotten in the grave.”
On a chill September night, the young man arrives at the welcoming inn of a rural family, where he eats his supper and then chats with his unpretentious hosts as they gather about a warm hearth. Ambitious and somewhat haughty—“reserved among the rich and great; but ever ready to stoop his head to the lowly cottage door”—the youth is a solitary fellow like Fanshawe. “He could have borne to live an undistinguished life,” Hawthorne writes, “but not to be forgotten in the grave.”
The stranger and the family engage in friendly talk, the stranger insisting that “it is our nature to desire a monument, be it slate, or marble, or a pillar of granite, or a glorious memory in the universal heart of man,” a view not completely shared by his hosts, who nonetheless begin to reveal their own secret wishes. That very night, however, an avalanche obliterates the lot of them, both the simple family and their ambitious guest, and since their bodies are never found, not even a rough tombstone marks their graves with a scrap of remembrance. A mound of snow is their marker, which, like all markers, will eventually disappear.
But their terrible end ironically supplies them with a different kind of memorial: “The story had been told far and wide, and will forever be a legend in these mountains.”
“Who has not heard their name?” Hawthorne asks again, as he did in Fanshawe.
Hawthorne writes of the quest for fame, more obsession than wish, that converts a boyish desire to be appreciated—you will miss me when I am gone—into the youthful fantasies of the ambitious guest. Hawthorne trounces these fiercely, as if he needed to purge himself of his own grandiose ambitions and in so doing protect himself from the shame of failure. The solitary dreamer meets defeat: That’ll show him for aiming so high. Or he’s misunderstood by a cloddish multitude, their incomprehension another form of defeat, though more palatable. Genius is always misunderstood.
“Fame—some very humble persons in a town may be said to possess it:—as the penny-post, the town-crier, the constable &c; and they are known to every body,” Hawthorne comments in an early notebook, “while many richer, more intellectual, worthier persons are unknown by the majority of their fellow citizens.” That Hawthorne already feels neglected and unrecognized—or nullified by scorn—suggests his own expectations were sky high. Little satisfied him. And though the community would not in fact appreciate him fully, Hawthorne collaborated in his own obscurity.
Hawthorne reproaches Fanshawe and the ambitious guest for a yearning he knows too well. Yet reproach is only half the story. Ambition may come before a fall, but anonymity is a fate far scarier, and anyway, as he said of the little group in the mountains crushed by the falling rocks, “Who has not heard their name?”
When Hawthorne visited Uncle Richard in Maine in the fall of 1826, accounts of the Willey disaster froze New England hearts. As a landslide began to crash down the mountainside, the family ran out of the house seeking shelter nearby. They were all killed; their house was unharmed.
Like the Willey family tragedy, which inspired “The Ambitious Guest,” tales of Maine transfixed the young author, who incorporated another Maine legend into “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” a story likely conceived as early as 1825, the year Hawthorne graduated from Bowdoin. That spring was the centennial of the battle at Lovewell’s Pond, an event of such importance that Bowdoin seniors drove from Brunswick to Fryeburg to take part in the celebration. The ignominious battle had already been aggrandized by Bowdoin’s Professor Upham in his nationalistic verse “Lovellspond,” with Henry Longfellow scribbling his own version, “The Battle of Lovell’s Pond,” for the Portland Gazette of 1820:
The warriors that fought for their country—and bled,
Have sunk to their rest; the damp earth is their bed;
No stone tells the place where their ashes repose,
Nor points out the spot from the graves of their foes.
The battle at Lovewell’s Pond was not in fact a valiant affair. In the spring of 1725, Captain John Lovewell and forty-six men slaughtered ten Pequawket warriors as they slept. The massacre, which occurred on the Sabbath, was meant to avenge the death of Lovewell’s family; not coincidentally, Lovewell also intended to bring a satchel full of Pequawket scalps to Boston to collect a considerable bounty, but before he and his little army could even think about the reward, they were ambushed by a large group of Indians. Routed, the troops decamped in a rush, leaving behind three of their wounded for dead. The men survived, however, and told the tale of their abandonment.
Hawthorne visited Raymond the summer following the Lovewell centennial, complaining about Uncle Richard’s indifference. Probably soon after, he began to write a story, set in Maine, about a young man’s desertion of the surrogate father who, by dying, has rejected him. The surrogate father’s initials happen to be those of Richard and Robert Manning.
And Hawthorne was evidently intrigued by another aspect of Lovewell’s battle, that of the story of men left to die alone in the wilderness with no stone to commemorate them. One of these men became the story’s title character, Roger Malvin. Malvin, mortally wounded, tries to convince his young companion, Reuben Bourne, to save himself from certain death should Reuben, also injured, remain with Malvin in the woods. “I have loved you like a father, Reuben,” Malvin tells him, “and, at a time like this, I should have something of a father’s authority.”
Reuben at first refuses to leave his friend, but then with “no merely selfish motive,” as Hawthorne informs us—subtly directing our attention to the adverb “merely”—Reuben lets Malvin persuade him to go. Rationalizing that he might encounter a party of men who could help, Reuben promises to return to the woods, either to save Malvin’s life or to bury him with a prayer over his bones.
He does neither. Once back in town, Reuben is nursed to health by Malvin’s daughter Dorcas, whom he marries. He doesn’t tell her of her father’s fate nor does he return to the forest to dig the man’s grave. Instead he becomes one of Hawthorne’s incorrigible concealers, hiding the truth of his speckled heart, first from himself and then from those who love him. But the price is high. Reuben sinks into a maelstrom of “mental horrors, which punish the perpetrator of undiscovered crime.”
Forecasting another leitmotif of his later work, that of transformation, Hawthorne focuses on how Reuben’s “one secret thought” changes him to “a sad and downcast, yet irritable man.” His lands lay fallow, his neighbors quarrel with him, his debts mount. His only solace is his son Cyrus, in whom he sees a reflection of himself as he once had been.
When Cyrus is fifteen, Reuben and Dorcas decide to pull up stakes. Inadvertently they travel to the wooded spot where, eighteen years before, Roger Malvin was left for dead. Father and son explore the region, and Dorcus sets up camp. Soon Reuben hears a sound in the underbrush, picks up his rifle, and shoots, aiming toward a spot “not unlike a gigantic gravestone” where Malvin once lay. But it’s not an animal that howls in pain; Reuben has accidentally killed his own son. “The vow that the wounded youth had made,” says the story’s narrator, “the blighted man had come to redeem.”
Fusing psychological obsession with the historical circumstance of something like Lovewell’s battle, Hawthorne in his earliest stories frequently wrote with a pen dipped in the bloody history to which he brought his personal angst. Frontiersman and Indian fighter, Roger Malvin veers into Richard Manning and Grandfather Manning and Robert Manning, kindly men and authoritarians who inevitably fail the boy they try to protect. As for the boy, he betrays his fathers by abandoning them, and in so doing must destroy his younger s
elf.
That said, the strangest part of the story is Dorcas. Daughter, wife, and mother, she is Reuben’s symbolic sister, herself deprived of the fruit of her unholy union with “brother” Reuben. Of course, she is literally innocent of any crime, though not in Reuben’s psyche. And so Reuben’s killing of Cyrus punishes Dorcas as much as Reuben. Pointing to their dead son, Reuben gestures toward the broad rock that is the grave of Roger Malvin and of Cyrus. “Your tears,” he cruelly tells Dorcas, “will fall at once over your father and your son.” She collapses with “one wild shriek.” If Reuben’s “sin was expiated,” it was ransomed by the broken heart of a woman.
Hawthorne was a master of concealment. “Your father kept his very existence a secret, as far as possible,” Ebe told Una. He doled out information when and where he saw fit, never telling his wife, for example, that he’d once written poetry, never mind Fanshawe. And so it’s not surprising to learn that he revealed little about his relation to various women.
As far as his family knew, or wanted to know, no woman in Salem had struck his fancy. To them, he appeared solitary, his habits regular. In the evening, after a walk, he ate a pint bowl of thick chocolate full of crumbled bread, and in the summer substituted fruit for the chocolate. A stalwart Democrat, he argued politics with Ebe at night, or he read, or he played a rubber of whist with Louisa and friends. The family did not venture far from Salem nor from one another.
In the broiling months of summer, however, Hawthorne or his sisters often visited relatives in Newburyport, or they ambled over the hard sand at Nahant, where the fashionable rented spacious rooms ventilated by sea breezes. Hawthorne flirted. The “mermaid” shopkeeper of his tale “The Village Uncle” captured his heart for a time. He met her in the seaside village of Swampscott one summer and talked of her incessantly. “At that time,” Ebe dismissively recollected, “he had fancies like that whenever he went from home.” An early model for Phoebe Pyncheon of The House of the Seven Gables, the shopgirl gave Hawthorne a sugar heart, said his sister, but he kept her identity a secret, assuring his family that she came from the local gentry.
“I should have feared that he was really in love with her, if he had not talked so much about her,” said Ebe on another occasion, divulging more about herself than about Hawthorne. Proprietary over the brother she adored, she patrolled his affections like a wary sentinel. Hawthorne returned the compliment. His intense feelings toward Elizabeth—the sister never at a loss for a tart riposte, the sister he aimed to please, his intimate and mentor—may have drawn him to the tacky claptrap of his early guilt-driven fiction. Children of the night, sisters and brothers merge into husbands and wives (“Roger Malvin’s Burial”) or they mingle with the undead in a hodgepodge fable of fratricide, patricide, and incest like “Alice Doane’s Appeal.”
The core of “Alice Doane’s Appeal” was evidently one of the original Seven Tales that Hawthorne revised into a longer story about authorship, and though he didn’t integrate the two sections, the jagged result reveals his frustration with the earlier manuscript. In the revised “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” a narrator recounts Alice’s story one mild June afternoon, having accompanied two female companions to Gallows Hill. These days, he notes, the bloody spot is something of a tourist attraction. Times have certainly changed since 1692. In fact, young boys, heedless of the savage history of the place, come there yearly to honor “they know not what” with a bonfire.
The narrator pulls a manuscript from his pocket. He’d written other such stories, he piteously explains, but he’d tossed them into a bonfire of his own. “Thoughts meant to delight the world and endure for ages,” he observes, “had perished in a moment, and stirred not a single heart but mine.” But he does save one manuscript from the flames, which he then proceeds to read to his companions. It’s the story of “Alice Doane.”
Actually, the story is Leonard Doane’s first-person account of his crimes. Leonard, Alice’s brother, guiltily admits that he killed Walter Brome (“my very counterpart,” says Leonard), a blackguard who taunted the jealous Leonard “with indisputable proofs of the shame of Alice.” What was the chivalrous brother to do? But Leonard killed Walter only to learn that Walter was Leonard’s twin brother. And if that weren’t bad enough, when Leonard looked into his slain brother’s face, he saw the image of his own haplessly murdered father. Yet fratricide and patricide don’t satisfy Leonard’s need for violence and revenge. Still tortured by the idea of his sister’s disgrace—now incest—he feels “as if a fiend were whispering him to meditate violence against the life of Alice.”
At this juncture, the narrator hastily summarizes the rest of the story. Alice and Leonard go to a haunted graveyard where Alice asks the dead Walter to exonerate her. Walter obliges, and there Alice’s story ends.
Not quite: the “appeal” in “Alice Doane’s Appeal” refers to Alice’s plea that Walter attest to her innocence—and it refers to the sexual appeal that drives her brother to murder. But the narrator’s two female companions (“timid maids,” he calls them) don’t get it. They’re too chaste. As a matter of fact, they are bored silly. The narrator’s overheated tale is “grotesque and extravagant,” they say; as grotesque and extravagant, the narrator retorts, as the witchcraft delusion, another instance of erotic madness? The women don’t understand the connection—it isn’t altogether clear—but to the narrator their bafflement is just another example of obtuseness like that of publishers who reject his stories. “We are a people of the present and have no heartfelt interest in the olden time,” he groans in disgust.
The narrator is the misunderstood artist par excellence, and he appears in one form or another in stories as dissimilar as Hawthorne’s “The Christmas Banquet” or “The Artist of the Beautiful,” both written a decade after “Alice Doane’s Appeal.” But the structure is similar: an artist brings one of his own creations, usually a manuscript, to someone he admires, and if he reads it aloud, the audience grows drowsy. In the case of “The Artist of the Beautiful,” a baffled public inadvertently helps wreck his creation—much to the artist’s relief. Its destruction ironically confirms what the artist knew all along: he is different from all the rest.
Besides, the artifact (in this case, a mechanical butterfly) deserved to be destroyed. The act of creation is, after all, an act of hubris.
But the artist is angry. And like so many of Hawthorne’s future protagonists, he ritually conjures images of fire, bonfires and furnaces and, later, limestone kilns, as well as lunatics, bloodthirsty magistrates, and the trace of unnameable crimes—whatever it takes—to wake up his sleepy audience with the sneaking suspicion that writing, like sex, is taboo.
CHAPTER SIX
Storyteller
By some fatality, we all seemed to be brought back to Salem, in spite of our intentions, and even resolutions.
Elizabeth Hawthorne
IT WAS A MEAN season. Snow piled high on the narrow streets. The gutters were caked with ice, and at night the wind blew so cold it chilled the floorboards under the carpet. Uncle Samuel coughed a hollow, hacking cough. Betsy Hawthorne complained of exhaustion.
But Robert Manning, now a father, seemed spry and optimistic. His marriage had taken him to the dappled groves of North Salem, where he pruned his trees, imported new varieties of fruit, and built two houses, one for himself and a small gambrel cottage next door, at 31 Dearborn Street, for the Hawthornes. They moved in December of 1828, and Mrs. Hawthorne again fell ill.
“When sorrow is as selfish as hers was, there is no end to its inflictions,” said Mary Mann, who didn’t know her; doubtless this is the period in Betsy Hawthorne’s life that inspired such summary judgment. For Betsy’s years in Maine had taken effort and spunk, as did her Sabbath school of thirty students, and until coming back to Salem, she had not withdrawn from her children, her family, or her church. It was her return to Herbert Street in 1822 that sapped her strength; and the death of her mother seemed to break her spirit.
By 1829 the Widow Hawth
orne was still mired in the lethargy her son would remember as indifference to his writings, though not to him. But he’s an unreliable witness, so sensitive was he to what he considered his shortcomings: three years after college, and this strapping young man still had no discernible vocation. “I, being heir to a moderate competence,” he explained in one of his autobiographical stories, “had avowed my purpose of keeping aloof from the regular business of life. This would have been a dangerous resolution, any where in the world; it was fatal, in New-England.”
And nowhere more so than in Salem.
By that spring Uncle Sam had recovered, and in the late summer Hawthorne joined him on that trip to Connecticut where he met Horace Conolly, who pointed out several of New Haven’s historical monuments to Hawthorne, in the market for good material. Spurred by some friendly reviews of Fanshawe—John Neal himself thought its author promised “a fair prospect of future success”—Hawthorne intended to write fiction steeped, as he said, in “the superstitions of this part of the country.”
He mailed a few of these stories to Samuel Griswold Goodrich, a self-made publishing entrepreneur eager to print native authors like novelist Charles Brockden Brown. Brown was considered by many to be the first professional author in America; he died penniless, not an auspicious beginning for American literature. Goodrich, however, was determined to make something out of—or from—American authors. It was slow going. So he also juggled several more lucrative projects, such as the popular series of children’s books, many ghostwritten, that he churned out under the name Peter Parley. By 1829 he was devoting most of his time to the Parley books and to another moneymaking venture, The Token, a gift book timed to appear each year just before the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.
A feral man with a stout heart and a nose for good writing, Goodrich claimed to have initiated the meeting with Hawthorne. He’d read an anonymous publication—Fanshawe?—“which seemed to me to indicate extraordinary powers,” he said. More likely is that Hawthorne’s Bowdoin classmate the Reverend George B. Cheever, himself a Salem writer, encouraged Hawthorne to approach Goodrich after Hawthorne had complained that no one wanted to publish his book. Goodrich remembered Hawthorne as “unsettled as to his views; he had tried his hand in literature, and considered himself to have met with a fatal rebuff from the reading world. His mind vacillated between various projects, verging, I think, toward a mercantile profession.”
Hawthorne Page 9
