The Portable Hawthorne (Penguin Classics)
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“Hem!—ahem!” quoth the doctor, hoping with one effort to clear his throat of the dregs of a ten-years’ cough. “Matters are not so far gone with me as I thought. I have known mighty sensible men, when only a little age-stricken or otherwise out of sorts, to die of mere faint-heartedness, a great deal sooner than they need.”
He shook his silvery head at his own image in the looking-glass, as if to impress the apothegm on that shadowy representative of himself; and for his part, he determined to pluck up a spirit and live as long as he possibly could, if it were only for the sake of little Pansie, who stood as close to one extremity of human life as her great-grandfather to the other. This child of three years old occupied all the unfossilized portion of good Dr. Dolliver’s heart. Every other interest that he formerly had, and the entire confraternity of persons whom he once loved, had long ago departed, and the poor doctor could not follow them, because the grasp of Pansie’s baby-fingers held him back.
So he crammed a great silver watch into his fob, and drew on a patchwork morning-gown of an ancient fashion. Its original material was said to have been the embroidered front of his own wedding waistcoat and the silken skirt of his wife’s bridal attire, which his eldest grand-daughter had taken from the carved chest of drawers after poor Bessy, the beloved of his youth, had been half-a-century in the grave. Throughout many of the intervening years, as the garment got ragged, the spinsters of the old man’s family had quilted their duty and affection into it in the shape of patches upon patches, rose-color, crimson, blue, violet, and green, and then (as their hopes faded, and their life kept growing shadier and their attire took a sombre hue) sober gray and great fragments of funereal black; until the doctor could revive the memory of most things that had befallen him by looking at his patchwork-gown as it hung upon a chair. And now it was ragged again, and all the fingers that should have mended it were cold. It had an eastern fragrance, too, a smell of drugs, strong-scented herbs, and spicy gums, gathered from the many potent infusions that had from time to time been spilt over it; so that, snuffing him afar off, you might have taken Dr. Dolliver for a mummy, and would hardly have been undeceived by his shrunken and torpid aspect, as he crept nearer.
Wrapt in this odorous and many-colored robe, he took staff in hand and moved pretty vigorously to the head of the staircase. As it was somewhat steep, and but dimly lighted, he began cautiously to descend, putting his left hand on the banister, and poking down his long stick to assist him in making sure of the successive steps; and thus he became a living illustration of the accuracy of Scripture, where it describes the aged as being “afraid of that which is high”—a truth that is often found to have a sadder purport than its external one. Halfway to the bottom, however, the doctor heard the impatient and authoritative tones of little Pansie—Queen Pansie, as she might fairly have been styled, in reference to her position in the household—calling amain for grandpapa and breakfast. He was startled into such perilous activity by the summons, that his heels slid on the stairs, the slippers were shuffled off his feet, and he saved himself from a tumble only by quickening his pace and coming down at almost a run.
“Mercy on my poor old bones!” mentally exclaimed the doctor, fancying himself fractured in fifty places. “Some of them are broken, surely, and methinks my heart has leaped out of my mouth! What! All right? Well, well; but Providence is kinder to me than I deserve, prancing down this steep staircase like a kid of three months old!”
TO JAMES T. FIELDS, FEBRUARY 1864
Dear Fields,
I hardly know what to say to the Public about this abortive Romance, though I know pretty well what the case will be. I shall never finish it. Yet it is not quite pleasant for an author to announce himself, or to be announced, as finally broken down as to his literary faculty. It is a pity that I let you put this work in your programme for the year, for I had alway a presentiment that it would fail us at the pinch. Say to the Public what you think best, and as little as possible;—for example—“We regret that Mr. Hawthorne’s Romance, announced for this Magazine some months ago, still lies upon its author’s writing-table; he having been interrupted in his labor upon it by an impaired state of health.”—or—“We are sorry to hear (but know not whether the Public will share our grief) that Mr. Hawthorne is out of health, and is thereby prevented, for the present, from proceeding with another of his promised (or threatened) Romances, intended for this Magazine”—or—“Mr. Hawthorne’s brain is addled at last, and, much to our satisfaction, he tells us that he cannot possibly go on with the Romance announced on the cover of the Jany Magazine. We consider him finally shelved, and shall take early occasion to bury him under a heavy article, carefully summing up his merits (such as they were,) and his demerits, what few of them can be touched upon in our limited space.”—or—“We shall commence the publication of Mr. Hawthorne’s Romance as soon as that gentleman chooses to forward it. We are quite at a loss how to account for this delay in the fulfilment of his contract; especially as he has already been most liberally paid for the first number.”
Say anything you like, in short though I really don’t believe that the Public will care what you say, or whether you say anything. If you choose, you may publish the first chapter as an insulated fragment, and charge me with $100 of overpayment. I cannot finish it, unless a great change comes over me; and if I make too great an effort to do so, it will be my death; not that I should care much for that, if I could fight the battle through and win it, thus ending a life of much smoulder and scanty fire in a blaze of glory. But I should smother myself in mud of my own making.
I mean to come to Boston soon, not for a week, but for a single day, and then I can talk about my Sanitary prospects more freely than I choose to write. I am not low-spirited, nor fanciful, nor freakish, but look what seem to be realities in the face, and am ready to take whatever may come. If I could but go to England now, I think that the sea-voyage and the “Old Home” might set me all right.
This letter is for your own eye, and I wish especially that no echo of it may come back in your notes to me.
Your friend,
Nath1 Hawthorne
Suggestions for Further Reading
W. H. Auden once said that “If an author is of real importance, all of his books should be read, the minor works as well as the masterpieces, the failures as well as the successes”; for the enduring force of the latter can best be felt in contrast to the diminished currency of the former. In Hawthorne’s case, this desideratum can be met quite readily by way of the now complete Centenary Edition of the Works (Ohio State University Press, 1962-1988), which includes all of his writings known to have survived, either in print or in manuscript. Each volume of this edition, or set of linked volumes, also contains a “Historical Commentary” that the inexpert reader may find usually helpful.
About Hawthorne and his works, there has been published since his death a good deal more than he himself ever wrote, much of it purporting to account (biographically, historically, psychologically, or culturally) for his best-known writings or else to explain their meanings. Among these countless biographies, commentaries, and interpretations, a few items stand out.
Still the most persuasive attempt to integrate Hawthorne’s life and writings is Mark Van Doren’s Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York, 1949; repr. 1957). In The Sins of the Fathers (New York, 1966), Frederick Crews’s Freudianism, then devoutly held but since loudly renounced, allowed a purchase on the tales never before approached and seldom equaled since. Kenneth Dauber proposes a useful way of reading Hawthorne’s emblematic prose in Rediscovering Hawthorne (Princeton, NJ, 1977). Two essays by Jorge Luis Borges help to clarify the ways in which that prose captures and conveys meaning: “From Allegories to Novels” (in Selected Non-Fictions, New York, 1999) explains the difference between true and debased allegory; “Nathaniel Hawthorne” (in Other Inquisitions, Austin, TX, 1965; repr. New York, 1966) demonstrates the inadequacy of any words but Hawthorne’s own to state his fictional meanings. An unusually a
pproachable and attractive “Hawthorne” appears in the relevant chapters of Carlos Baker’s Emerson Among the Eccentrics (New York, 1996): one who might drop in from next door to borrow a cup of sugar.
In more ways than one, the most interesting commentaries on Hawthorne are those by his fellow American novelists, contemporary and later: Herman Melville’s “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850), Henry James’s Nathaniel Hawthorne (1879), and John Updike’s “Nathaniel Hawthorne” (in his More Matter; New York, 1999, pp. 499-509).
Some of the themes touched on in the Introduction and Editor’s Notes to this volume get expanded treatment in the pertinent chapters and bibliographical essays of The Adventurous Muse (New Haven, CT, 1977) and The Forms of Autobiography (New Haven, CT, 1980; rev. 1982), both by the editor.
Ordinarily, a list like this one would include a biography of the writer, of which there are several to choose from. None of them, however, has quite taken to heart Hawthorne’s insistence that his essential self lies not in his documentable doings and circumstances so much as in his seemingly least self-referential imaginings. Especially ill served by the generic tendency of literary biography to locate a writer’s life in his or her everyday affairs and to mine the writings for reflections of, or clues to, that often otherwise unremarkable life, Hawthorne often emerges from narratives of his life as someone unlikely to have written his works; while the works made to divulge information about the life end up only slightly resembling what he wrote. As James M. Cox once wisely insisted, Hawthorne’s life reflected his art, not the other way around. He invented Sophia in his tales before he ever met her and often thought of her thereafter as a character in one of his stories. For these reasons, those who would know Nathaniel Hawthorne should read him, rather than about him.
Those who do read him with the sort of attention he requires and deserves will sometimes find revealing things said about him in the most unexpected places. Nowhere are Hawthorne’s writings and their motives, before and after The Scarlet Letter, better described than in the final volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, where Marcel announces his artistic purposes and duties. Nowhere is the breakthrough from the balked tales to The Scarlet Letter better explained than in Isak Dinesen’s “overwhelming lesson to all artists! Be not afraid of adversity; do not shrink from the fantastic. Within a dilemma, choose the most unheard of, the most dangerous solution. Be brave, be brave!” By reading Hawthorne carefully, one can learn to read much else.
1 Another clergyman in New England, Mr. Joseph Moody, of York, Maine, who died about eighty years since, made himself remarkable by the same eccentricity that is here related of the Reverend Mr. Hooper. In his case, however, the symbol had a different import. In early life he had accidentally killed a beloved friend; and from that day till the hour of his own death, he hid his face from men.