by Owen J. Hurd
Clemm signed a contract authorizing Griswold to act as Poe’s sole literary executor. In doing so, she unwittingly set in motion the literary world’s most notorious instance of character assassination—for Rufus Griswold was, in fact, “Ludwig.”
An editor, literary critic, and minor contemporary poet, Griswold had an ax to grind with Edgar Allan Poe. In 1842 Griswold had included a few of Poe’s works in an anthology called The Poets and Poetry of America. Griswold also paid Poe, in advance, to write a review of the work. In it, Poe praises Griswold’s “judgment,…dignity and candor,” and describes him as “a man of taste, talent, and tact.” Having said that, Poe proceeded to quibble with Griswold’s judgment, taste, talent, and tact:
We disagree then, with Mr. Griswold in many of his critical estimates…. He has omitted from the body of his book, some one or two whom we should have been tempted to introduce. On the other hand, he has scarcely made us amends by introducing some one or two dozen whom we should have treated with contempt.
Compared to the venomous attacks Poe was capable of, these criticisms seem fairly mild, especially since Poe concluded on an upswing. “Having said thus much in the way of fault-finding,…the book should be regarded as the most important addition which our literature has for many years received. It fills a void which should have been long ago supplied.”
Still, Griswold was perturbed. Perhaps he had hoped to get more for his money. Or maybe he was adept at reading between the lines, because privately Poe called the book “a most outrageous humbug” and then lambasted it and Griswold in a series of public lectures. Publicly Griswold took the high road—at least for the time being. And why not? His book had been a commercial success, regardless of Poe’s tepid review.
Several years later Griswold decided to include Poe in his latest anthology, The Prose Writers of America. “Although I have some cause of personal quarrel with you,” Griswold wrote Poe, “I do not under any circumstances permit, as you have repeatedly charged, my private griefs to influence my judgment as a critic, or its expressions. I retain, therefore, the early formed and well founded favorable opinions of your works.”
This literary spat may have amounted to little, if not for the introduction of a woman’s attentions. Apparently, it was common in the mid-nineteenth century for poets to conduct literary romances with other poets, publishing poems with veiled references and cryptic expressions of ardor, whose meanings would be clear to a small circle of literati. So it was, in the mid-1840s, that Poe and Griswold, both married men, found themselves competing for the literary affections of poet Frances Osgood, herself married to painter Samuel Osgood. Poe eventually backed off, but Osgood’s enduring admiration for Poe may have deepened Griswold’s hatred of his rival.
“I was not his friend,” Griswold later declared, “nor was he mine.” Having secured the rights to publish Poe’s works, Griswold embarked on his plan to defame Poe’s character, saving his most vitriolic slanders for a biographical introduction he appended to The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe. In these pages, many of the enduring falsehoods about Edgar Allan Poe’s life and character were first invented—that “he was known as the wildest and most reckless student of his class” at the University of Virginia, that “his gambling, intemperance, and other vices, induced his expulsion from the university,” and that he was kicked out of West Point and later deserted from the army. While it was true that Poe had a falling out with his adoptive father, John Allan, Griswold, unjustified by any facts, implied it was because Poe had made untoward advances upon Mr. Allan’s second wife. It is impossible to deny Poe’s struggles with intoxicants, but Griswold gleefully recounted and exaggerated many instances of depravity in his introduction.
Griswold reprinted numerous samples of Poe’s correspondence (obtained from Mrs. Clemm). Griswold also forged other letters, making it seem as if Poe were apt to insult his friends behind their backs. Unfortunately, Griswold’s perfidy had the desired effect. Even though some of Poe’s friends defended him, others were stung by the forged letters. And much of Griswold’s fictional biography of Poe was accepted as true and repeated often enough to impugn Poe’s reputation for many generations.
LOOSE ENDS
Maria Clemm lived to regret her decision to entrust Poe’s copyrights to his literary adversary—in more ways than one. The contract with Griswold stipulated that Clemm was to be the sole recipient of profits from the sale of the book. Griswold gave her a half dozen copies of the book to do with as she pleased, but she never received a single penny in royalties.
Rufus Griswold continued his career as a literary critic and anthologist, but his personal life was dogged by misfortune. He divorced his second wife—who, due to a physical deformity, was incapable of sexual intercourse—and remarried, but his third marriage would be turbulent and short-lived. A female poet with whom Griswold had a falling out encouraged the second wife to challenge the validity of the divorce, which she did, leading to an ugly scene in divorce court. Griswold’s third wife left him in the wake of the publicity. His house was also destroyed in a gas explosion; Griswold suffered burns and lost seven of his fingernails. Later, informed that his daughter was killed in a train wreck, Griswold arrived on the scene to learn that she had survived, though she suffered severe injuries. Griswold died of tuberculosis in 1857.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Diplomat, Vagabond, Copperhead
Maybe it’s because his most famous works are set in early colonial times, but it’s easy to forget that Nathaniel Hawthorne was not a seventeenth-century Puritan but a man of the nineteenth century. Born on July 4, 1804, he was a contemporary of New England’s thrice-named literati: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—as well as the nominally deficient Herman Melville. Hawthorne lived through the War of 1812, the construction of the Erie Canal and the transcontinental railroad, the Mexican-American War, the California Gold Rush, and most of the Civil War.
By 1852, Hawthorne’s most enduring works were already in print and garnering respectable reviews. But as many writers of serious fiction have learned, good reviews don’t pay the bills. As hundreds of thousands of copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were snatched up throughout the United States and other countries, The Scarlet Letter (published in 1850) sold only about ten thousand copies in its first decade in print. Sales of The House of the Seven Gables (1851) were lackluster, and The Blithedale Romance (1852) was a complete bust.
Hawthorne had a family to feed, so he fell back on the tried-and-true strategy employed by many a nineteenth-century novelist of limited means and transferable skills: He angled for a political appointment. Lucky for him, he happened to be an old school chum of Franklin Pierce, who was at the time running for president of the United States on the Democratic ticket. In 1852 Hawthorne wrote a campaign biography for his Bowdoin College buddy, in the hopes that once elected Pierce would reward the hard-up writer with an ambassadorship or some similar position. Pierce won the election and appointed Hawthorne the foreign consul to England in 1853.
At first Hawthorne was enthralled with the opportunity to return to his ancestral homeland. A few months of workaday realities in dismal, damp Liverpool quickly spoiled any illusions. Hawthorne’s consular duties included helping Americans abroad who found themselves in legal and financial straits, which often brought him into contact with less savory members of society: sadistic ship captains, ignorant and degenerate sailors, prostitutes, insane persons, and so on.
However dreary and depressing, these four years represented the most profitable period of Hawthorne’s life. In addition to a salary, Hawthorne was entitled to a payment of two dollars each time he signed off on a shipment of commodities destined for American shores.
“The autograph of a living author,” Hawthorne reflected in his notebook, “has seldom been so much in request at so respectable a price.”
The Hawthornes left Liverpool with savings of about $30,000—equal to about $900,000 in current val
ues. From there it was off to Italy. The peripatetic Hawthornes moved from Rome to Florence, then back to Rome, occupying numerous residences in each city. He had high hopes for each place before he got there, but each time the appeal quickly evaporated. Hawthorne managed to write a novel, The Marble Faun (1860), during the family’s gypsy-like existence in Europe. Though little read today, this book turned out to be Hawthorne’s bestselling book during his lifetime.
Returning to the United States in 1860, Hawthorne and his family settled into their newly renovated and expanded lodgings at Wayside in Concord. Hawthorne, however, felt increasingly isolated by his politics. A loyal Democrat, he was opposed to the abolitionist cause. At a time when Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, and the like were casting antislavery militant John Brown as a martyr to the cause of abolition, Hawthorne showed Brown little sympathy, saying, “Nobody was ever more justly hanged.”
These views were completely out of sync with Hawthorne’s Transcendentalist neighbors and most of his relatives. One of Hawthorne’s sisters-in-law, Mary Peabody, had hidden a Brown conspirator in her attic. Elizabeth Peabody attempted to win the release of another conspirator. Hawthorne’s neighbors, the Alcott family, actually welcomed John Brown’s daughters and, later, a fugitive slave, into their home.
Hawthorne opposed the war because he felt it was a violation of states’ rights for the North to impose the abolition of slavery on the South. Once the war broke out, Hawthorne showed no interest in preserving the Union.
“For my part I don’t hope, nor indeed wish, to see the Union restored as it was. Amputation seems to me much the better plan, and all we ought to fight for is the liberty of selecting the point where our diseased members shall be lopped off.” For Hawthorne it was a matter of cultural and economic dissonance. “We never were one people, and never really had a country since the Constitution was formed.”
During the war years Hawthorne traveled to Washington, DC, and even met Abraham Lincoln in person at the White House. Hawthorne seemed bemused by Lincoln’s contradictory presence. His “physiognomy is as coarse a one as you would meet anywhere in the length and breadth of the States,” Hawthorne observed, but his appearance was redeemed by “a kindly though serious look out of his eyes, and an expression of homely sagacity, that seems weighted with rich results of village experience.” Mustering scant praise, Hawthorne concluded, “On the whole, I like this sallow, queer, sagacious visage, with the homely human sympathies that warmed it; and, for my small share in the matter, would as [gladly] have Uncle Abe for a ruler as any man whom it would have been practicable to put in his place.”
Further complicating Hawthorne’s reputation was his enduring loyalty to the vastly unpopular Franklin Pierce, who persisted in speaking out against the war. The former president was even found to be corresponding with Confederate president Jefferson Davis, to whom he made seditious comments. Despite all this, Hawthorne inexplicably insisted on dedicating his most recent book—a memoir of his days in England—to his friend Pierce. Exasperated fellow New Englander Franklin Sanborn wrote, “Hawthorne has behaved badly and is a Copperhead of the worst kind.”
Hawthorne’s enigmatic behavior further constricted an already small circle of friends. Sickly, reviled by the abolitionists, and underappreciated as a writer, Hawthorne was depressed and unable to write. His wife suggested a trip to lift his spirits, so Hawthorne and his best friend Pierce began a journey through the New England countryside. They didn’t get far. Stopping at a hotel, the feeble Hawthorne died in his sleep on May 19, 1864, Franklin Pierce at his side.
LOOSE ENDS
Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia, moved with her children to several locations in Europe, before she died in 1871. She was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery in London.
When Franklin Pierce died in 1869, his will included a bequest for the children of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Hawthorne’s son Julian also became a novelist. Though virtually unknown to modern readers, his works were more popular and enjoyed better sales than his father’s. That didn’t stop him from seeking additional ways to augment his income. Julian became a principal investor in a silver mine. He and other corporate officers were later found guilty of scheming to sell worthless shares in what turned out to be a fictitious operation. He served a prison sentence for fraud.
Hawthorne’s oldest daughter Una was engaged to be married, but when her fiancé died at sea she became a nun. Una died in 1877 at the age of thirty-three and was buried alongside her mother in London.
Hawthorne’s youngest daughter Rose Hawthorne married and had one son, who died in childhood. After becoming estranged from her husband, Rose also joined a convent, establishing the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne in 1900. She died in 1926.
In 2006 the remains of Sophia and Una Hawthorne were reinterred alongside the grave of Nathaniel Hawthorne at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.
Herman Melville’s Descent into Obscurity
When Moby-Dick was first published in 1851, Herman Melville secretly hoped that the book would launch him into the literary stratosphere, making him the preeminent author of his time. He wrote impassioned letters to his mentor, the more famous Nathaniel Hawthorne, expressing his aspirations—and doubts—about Moby-Dick’s prospects.
“Though I wrote the Gospels in this century,” Melville bragged to Hawthorne, “I should die in the gutter.”
As predicted, instead of cementing his reputation, the publication of Melville’s magnum opus marked the beginning of his slow, steady slide into critical and popular oblivion. The novel got a few respectable reviews, but most critics were either confused or downright offended by the book. The first published review called Moby-Dick “so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature.” Another critic deemed the book “a monstrous bore.” Sizing up Melville’s most recent output, a third critic thought he discerned a trend toward “increasingly exaggerated and increasingly dull” works.
“The truth is,” the anonymous reviewer continued, “Mr. Melville has survived his reputation. If he had been contented with writing one or two books, he might have been famous, but his vanity has destroyed all chances for immortality, or even a good name with his own generation.”
Melville may have counted on more sympathetic treatment in The Literary World, especially since the review was composed by his friend, editor Evert Duyckinck. But even one of Melville’s allies had difficulty figuring out if Moby-Dick was “fact, fiction, or essay.” The best Duyckinck could say was that the book was “a most remarkable sea-dish—an intellectual chowder of romance, philosophy, and natural history.” Duyckinck was less impressed with the character of Captain Ahab, who, he complained, was “too long drawn out.” Adding, “If we had as much of Hamlet or Macbeth as Mr. Melville gives us of Ahab, we should be tired even of their sublime company.”
It’s no surprise that sales were anemic from the start. It took five years to sell the first printing of twenty-five hundred copies, and about twenty years to sell out the second printing of just fewer than three thousand copies. By comparison, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Melville contemporary Harriet Beecher Stowe, sold three hundred thousand copies in its first year. It wasn’t always this way for Melville. His first book, Typee (1846), a semiautobiographical account of adventures on the high seas and among Polynesian cannibals, was written for a broader, less discerning audience. It garnered enthusiastic reviews and enjoyed brisk sales. When the sequel, Omoo, appeared in the following year, four thousand copies sold in its first week on the market. The downward sales trend began with Mardi, Redburn (both 1849), and White-Jacket (1850) and continued with Moby-Dick and his next few novels—each one more artistically ambitious than the last, delving into metaphysical depths unsounded by average readers, and each one greeted with increasing levels of befuddlement and disdain.
There were times when reviewers completely threw up their hands, admitting that they did not understand a word of Melville’s books. Critics saved their most splenetic co
mmentary for Melville’s next novel, Pierre, Or the Ambiguities, calling it “chaotic,” “puzzling,” “wild, inflated, repulsive,” “immoral,” and “a prolonged succession of spasms.”
“That many readers will not” read this book, one reviewer cuttingly remarked, “is in our apprehension not amongst the ‘ambiguities’ of the age.”
Not even Duyckinck could find anything nice to say about Pierre. Finding the book maddeningly inscrutable, he longed for the days when Melville played “the jovial and hearty narrator of the traveller’s tale of incident and adventure.” In other words, why couldn’t he go back to writing harmlessly entertaining picaresques like Typee?
The consecutive failures embittered Melville, leading him to wonder if he’d ever find a large audience capable of appreciating his genius. On a more practical level, it also meant that he would probably have to get a real job. For a while, he tried lecturing and writing short stories for publication in magazines. Neither one of these pursuits proved terribly successful or profitable. Melville grew depressed, turning inward and increasingly to drink. There were rumors that he beat his wife, Lizzie, and once threw her down a flight of stairs. To protect his daughter from her drunken, abusive husband, Lizzie’s father offered Melville a thousand dollars to go on vacation—solo. The struggling writer readily swallowed his pride and took to the sea for an extended trip to Europe and the Holy Land.
And then the Civil War began. Like Hawthorne, Melville abhorred the violence of war, but Melville lacked the partisanship that got his mentor into so much hot water. He began writing poems about the war—personal, heartfelt expressions of sorrow, despair, the horrors of modern warfare, and the muted joys found in victories. No longer motivated by the marketplace, Melville crafted dozens of poems on the war’s pivotal events such as the hanging of John Brown; the battles of Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg; and Sherman’s March. By the end of the conflict Melville had an impressive collection of verse, which he arranged to have published in book form. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War was relatively well received by critics, but the book was once again a commercial failure.
