Irving Howe 1949
Source: American Mercury, March 1949. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the first American writers whose work was of value in itself and not merely as a footnote to national history. He was also one of the first American writers who had a pressing, if unexplicated, notion of what it meant to be an artist - the one passion he seldom denied himself was his need to write. But for his critics there has always been at least one puzzling problem in the study of his career: what was the relationship between his placid life and the agitated quality of his work? He lived quietly; he married a New England maiden of the sort D H Lawrence was later to brand as white-souled; he was tolerably shrewd in business matters and managed to wrench a few jobs from a government notoriously indifferent to its artists. Only his habitual withdrawal from human society might have marked him as ‘different’, but was a recluse so unusual in a New England that had learned to take for granted its wonderful cranks, dreamers and hermits?
His life was conventional, but his work is bold, forever verging on passions he consciously repelled but could not forsake. The Hawthorne who found nude statues distasteful could also write that ‘guilt has its moments of rapture, too’. The Hawthorne who had secluded himself for twelve years after being graduated from college was yet to be drawn to ‘those dark caverns into which all men must descend, if they would know anything beneath the surface and illusive pleasures of existence’. He led a spotless life, but his mind was obsessed by sin - not this or the other sin, but sin in its generalised and universal dimensions, clinging to man like his very skin. True, thoughts of sin had been familiar enough to New Englanders, but could many Puritans have accepted the view of sin held by the creator of Hester Prynne and Miriam Schaefer?
Instinctively, D H Lawrence sensed that in Hawthorne there had burned some of his own dark passion: ‘That blue-eyed Nathaniel knew disagreeable things about the human soul.’ Indeed, he did; again and again the blue-eyed Nathaniel was tempted by the theme that a violation of moral order might be the necessary beginning of mature experience. But it was not out in the open, self-proclaimed, as with Lawrence and Sherwood Anderson; it was devious, hidden, unacknowledged.
Professor Randall Stewart, one of the foremost Hawthorne scholars and the editor of his notebooks, has recently published a short biography: Nathaniel Hawthorne. [1] In some ways, it is a very useful book. Stewart’s account of Hawthorne’s life is both orderly and compressed; it includes some new material though, so far as I can judge, nothing so essential that our vision of Hawthorne need be changed. While valuable as an introductory biography, Stewart’s book is unsatisfactory as serious criticism. Had he used one or another provocative critical approach - intense textual analysis of Hawthorne’s books, psychological probing into his personality, filling in of the sociological background of his era - the book, even if faulty, would have been far more interesting than it is. But Stewart seems so indifferent to the critical difficulties and psychological tangles in his subject that if we did not have his word for it we could hardly believe that the benign gentleman he describes is also the author of The Scarlet Letter.
Let us glance at two central instances of Stewart’s lack of intellectual curiosity. He gravely notes that Sophia Peabody was ‘a semi-invalid’ who ‘suffered from a chronic headache’ before she married Hawthorne and that the headaches ‘abated after marriage’. And that is all. Now it takes no very profound knowledge of modern psychology to realise that Sophia’s symptoms suggest a fairly common pattern of neurotic disturbance. A biographer, even when he legitimately refuses to play the amateur Freud, should at least look into such matters. He need not hazard rash speculations about Sophia’s ‘frigidity’ or Nathaniel’s ‘narcissism’, but he cannot write simply as if Freud had never dented his mind. Or at least he should not.
Of Stewart’s 265 pages only some two dozen are exclusively devoted to Hawthorne’s writing. (One would think that the most important part of a great writer’s life is his writing.) Stewart does notice some of Hawthorne’s ideas, and so far as it goes his discussion of them is quite good. But he treats these ideas as if they were independent abstractions, and fails to judge the novels as works of art in which ideas may be imbedded but which suffer if reduced to bare ideas. What is the pattern and value of The Scarlet Letter as a dramatic structure? Why does The Blithedale Romance shift so sharply in tone about mid-way? Why is Hawthorne’s prose so virile in the former novel and often so vapid and stilted in the latter one? Who is the passionate woman that stalks through most of his novels, soaked in guilt yet far more vibrant than any of his other characters; and what possible relationship does she have to his private life? These are a few of the more obvious problems raised by a reading of Hawthorne’s work, but it would seem that to Professor Stewart they are not consequential or interesting. Or so it appears from his failure to discuss them.
Robert Cantwell, author of Nathaniel Hawthorne: The American Years, [2] is not an academic critic. To challenge the usual sombre portraits drawn by Hawthorne biographers, he has written a quite unconventional biography.
His method might be called biography through atmospheric accretion. He has immersed himself deeply in the social atmospheres of mid-nineteenth century New England and has dredged old records, memoirs and newspapers for the minutiae of life that might lend his book a sense of historical immediacy. He has documented the manners of Hawthorne’s time in such rich detail that one often regrets the appearance in the book of Hawthorne himself - by comparison, Salem seems more vivid.
But soon Cantwell’s method becomes a literary Frankenstein. The sheer outpouring of his material, unsorted and unchannelised, clots one’s powers of reception. Here are a few of the stray items one finds in this biography: the cargo list (including one elephant) of the ship captained by Hawthorne’s father in 1795; a report of the battle off Salem between the Chesapeake and the Shannon in the war of 1812 ('at 3:30 the Shannon bore up... at 4:30 the wind changed to a fresh breeze... at 5:45 the Chesapeake hauled her foresail...); the business worries of his friend, Horatio Bridge, with figures attached; a résumé of the battle of Concord, perhaps included because Hawthorne lived in Concord some 70 years later; a detailed report of the honeymoon of Horace Mann, Hawthorne’s brother-in-law; and a description of the adventures in Cuba of John O’sullivan, editor of a magazine for which Hawthorne wrote, this description breaking into the midst of an analysis of The Scarlet Letter.
While at variance in other respects, both writers develop essentially the same major thesis. Each amasses evidence to prove that Hawthorne could make his way in the world when he had to, that he was not at all moony or Byronic, and that he could make friends with simple folk on his trips through the countryside. Cantwell rejects the prevalent ‘narrow and lop-sided’ portrait of Hawthorne with ‘its angular shadows, its El Greco distortions, its melancholy, its brooding seclusion’, and insists that Hawthorne led ‘an active and vigorous life of considerable excitement and some hazard’. Similarly, though more cautiously, Stewart says that Hawthorne ‘was scarcely the lonely hermit of romantic legend’.
After having attended quite carefully to both writers’ claims, I am unable to see that there was any ‘considerable excitement’ or ‘hazard’ in Hawthorne’s life other than the excitement that floods a great writer’s mind or the hazard of his struggle to remain alive in this world. These seem sufficiently exciting and hazardous to me, but it is clear that Cantwell means something else, something more worldly. He hints, but does not prove, that Hawthorne was a secret government agent, he notes that on a number of his trips Hawthorne happened to visit places where catastrophes had recently occurred. In any case, what is the great virtue of showing that a man blessed with a superb creative imagination was also vigorously ‘normal’ unless there is some distrust of the imagination hidden in Mr Cantwell’s mind?
No serious biographer has denied that Hawthorne’s life was marked by intermittent surface activity. The point is, however, that he repeatedly withdrew from the worldly affairs to which financial need drove him, and in his letters and journals expressed his distaste for them. After he had spent twelve years in the family house at Salem writing stories, he wrote to Longfellow: ‘I have made a captive of myself and put me in a dungeon and now I cannot find the keys to let me out..., there is no fate in this world so horrible as to have no share in its joys or sorrows. For the last ten years I have not lived but only dreamed of living.’ I submit that these sentences explain what is most important for an understanding of Hawthorne the writer, and I find it most curious that neither Stewart nor Cantwell quote them.
No one has seriously maintained that Hawthorne was a tongue-tied hermit, with or without El Greco distortions; critics have claimed that there was a significant split between his external life and his inner creative self. Otherwise, how explain the dark and turbid romances he wrote, their preoccupation with such matters as pride and isolation, sin and retribution? How explain that during the years after his marriage to Sophia, presumably among the happiest of his life, he wrote some of his most sombre stories? The thesis advanced by Stewart and Cantwell fails to stand up in relation to Hawthorne’s work; in fact, they do not even try to re-examine the work in the light of their new approach to the man.
So sober a critic as Austin Warren, editor of the Hawthorne volume of the ‘American Writers Series’, finds that ‘there were at least three Hawthornes: the man of affairs...; the quietly cheerful observer, with a taste for realism...; and last, the hidden spirit who never appeared in company or even revealed himself to his wife and children, the Hawthorne who sat at his desk in a lonely chamber, the haunted mind’. Warren’s version of Hawthorne is preferable to the buoyant bourgeois portrayed by Cantwell and Stewart, not because a haunted mind is so much more fun for the modern intellectual than a normal one might be, but because the work of Hawthorne is so obviously the product of a haunted mind. Only by acknowledging the neurotic, sin-entranced, guilt-heavy Hawthorne is it possible to explain the fact that he wrote his own novels. Hawthorne was Hawthorne, not Washington Irving. And if there must be a choice between El Greco distortions and Franz Hals heartiness, then for Hawthorne the writer it is El Greco who is more relevant.
No portrait of Hawthorne, said Henry James, ‘is at all exact which fails to insist upon the constant struggle which must have gone on between his shyness and his desire to know something of life; between what may be called his evasive and inquisitive tendencies’. This remark, if taken together with another one by James - ‘Emerson, as a sort of spiritual sun-worshipper, could have attached but moderate value to Hawthorne’s catlike faculty for seeing in the dark.’ - provides a workable basis for Hawthorne criticism. [3]
Throughout his life but especially in the earlier years, Hawthorne was involved in what we should now call a crisis of belief. The prevalent temper of his life-outlook was sceptical; he could summon no large or monolithic enthusiasms, and he was stirred by none of the major causes of his day. In fact, he persistently suspected the intellect as a faculty which, if left to itself and untempered by emotion, could betray men into overestimating their possibilities and powers. Many of his short stories are allegorical variations on this theme; Dr Rappaccini and Ethan Brand are guilty of the ‘sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims’.
Unable to accept the faith of his forefathers but linked to them by emotional ties, Hawthorne believed that, for all the rigidity and rancour of their doctrine, the Puritans had looked deeply into the human soul, far more so than the liberal ministers of his day. He felt too that, no matter how distasteful as a theological doctrine or disastrous as a practical morality, the notion of ‘original sin’ suggested something vastly consequential about human beings and, if reduced from system to insight, could be defended on empirical grounds. As a nineteenth-century American he could not acquiesce in Puritan dogma, but as a man free from much of the fatuity of his time he found the romantic idealism of the Transcendentalists both trivial and unrealistic.
The same problem of belief existed in other fields. He was a political democrat by virtue of his hesitations rather than his convictions; he distrusted reformers, was antipathetic to the Abolitionists, and adhered to that wing of the Democratic Party which tried to patch up a truce with the slave-owning South. In an age glowing with belief, his mind was cluttered with reservations. The breakdown of faith in God, human nature and world progress that was to sweep the world a bit later was already foreshadowed in his life. He did not formalise these opinions but they became the buried foundations for his visible works.
Hawthorne the sceptic was also the recluse who brooded, says Newton Arvin in his excellent Hawthorne, [4] ‘on the black fatalities of human error and vice’ because ‘of his own sombre consciousness of separation from the ways of his fellow men - a consciousness in which the sense of guilt luxuriates like noisome growths in a swamp’. And it seems to me that, though Hawthorne was not nearly so self-conscious about the role of the artist in the world as James was to be, the ‘sombre consciousness’ of which Arvin speaks must to some extent have been the result of his isolation as a writer in his early years. [5]
Yet this is only one side, the more frequently stressed side, of Hawthorne’s creative personality. One cannot read his novels without seeing that in addition to the sceptic and recluse there is the eager searcher into human experience, the Hawthorne that James called ‘inquisitive’. This is the Hawthorne who burrows into moral dilemmas, yearns for the full stream of experience to inundate preconception and dogma, and is simultaneously attracted and repelled by creatures of passion and outlaws of the soul who dare what he himself never dared or desired to dare. Hawthorn’s mind was mild, conventional, rationalistic and with little intellectual power; his creative personality was intensely passionate, eagerly receptive and sometimes even richly chthonic. It would be an oversimplification to see these two strands in invariable opposition, for what one isolates for analysis is always inextricable in actuality. But the two strands, I think, were there.
Something of the sort can be seen in his life, too. His calm years were punctuated by a few adventures, a few raids on experience. Perhaps the most interesting of these was his brief participation in Brook Farm. Most critics have fumbled this incident, not knowing how to explain the fact that Hawthorne, who certainly never agreed with the reformers, threw himself into Brook Farm with immense, though short-lived, energy. Stewart says Hawthorne joined Brook Farm in order to find a way to support his future wife. That hardly seems a sufficient reason, since it is unlikely that the hard-headed Hawthorne could have believed the cooperative farm a good financial investment. Is it not rather more likely that he was seeking, without quite realising it himself, a direct source of human experience, a way of participating in some venture even if it were one about which he could not help being sceptical?
This possible interpretation is reinforced by re-reading of The Blithedale Romance. The novel’s narrator, Coverdale, obviously intended as a mildly ironic self-portrait, recalls his experience at Blithedale (Brook Farm) with a blend of nostalgia and distaste. He cannot accept the ideas that motivated its founders, and is appalled by what he feels was their fanatical, inhuman single-mindedness. Hollingworth, the caricatured reformer, was ‘wasting all the warmth of his heart’ on a ‘cold spectral monster’ to which he had ‘grown to be a bond-slave. It was his philanthropic theory.’
Simultaneously Coverdale, looking back from his withered bachelorhood, is proud that at least once in his life he was bold enough to plunge. ‘Whatever else I repent of’, he insists, ‘let it be reckoned neither among my sins or my follies that I once had force and faith enough to form generous hopes of the world’s destiny...’ Yet he is neither sentimental nor deluded by these memories: he realises how difficult it is for an intellectual to participate in social ventures and he knows too that what one hopes may begin as a raid on experience can become an evasion of it. ‘I was beginning to lose the sense of what kind of world it was, among innumerable schemes of what it might or ought to be.’
When we turn to Hawthorne’s novels and stories, do we not find that they too, like his life, are characterised by persistent but inconclusive skirmishes with an elusive demon of experience? On the one hand, he tried to abstract the patterns of life into allegory; he was familiar enough with Puritan dialectic to be able to see one thing as an emblem of another. But where he wrote allegories, as in most of his short stories, his work was usually thin and mechanical, lacking the shock of contingency, the luxury of incident which one expects in fiction, and lacking any group of credible characters. On the other hand, when he tried to work up conventional realistic effects in The House of Seven Gables, he succeeded well enough but soon realised that the novel of social manners was not for him.
His finest work was done when he steered a course between allegory and surface realism, blending aspects of both but subordinating them to what we might call, for lack of a better name, his ‘moral realism’. The Scarlet Letter, a work of sustained passion, is in its way a deeper invasion of reality than Hawthorne ever negotiated in his life, at Brook Farm, in Italy where he came in middle age to find and hesitate before the sensuous warmth of Italian art, or anywhere else. As with all great writers, the energies of life were subsumed into art. Parts of The Blithedale Romance and The Marble Faun also reach this level of profound passion, in which Hawthorne’s prose becomes wonderfully concrete and intense.
In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne comes into closest relationship with that centre of experience he always sought. Despite all the formal disavowals with which Hawthorne surrounds her, Hester Prynne is a living creature superior to all moral codes, just as life is superior to all theories about it. The palpable, what Henry James would call the felt experience, triumphs over the theoretic shadow. Hawthorne may write that Hester lived with ‘Shame, Despair and Solitude’ but what lives in the novel is her pride and courage, her cry that, ‘What we did has a consecration of its own. We felt it so!’
Much the same is true of the other novels. As Philip Rahv has pointed out in an essay on Hawthorne in his book Object and Image, [6] there glides through Hawthorne’s novels the figure of a ‘dark lady’ who is the repository of all of his fascination for women of passion, as contrasted with the unsensual New England maidens. He feared and rejected the dark ladies but yet made them the most vivid characters in his romances. As we might phrase it now, his unconscious wishes endowed the dark ladies with a vividness and reality which his censorious consciousness would wish to repress. Miriam Schaefer in The Marble Faun suffers an unhappy end, but, somewhat like Milton’s Satan, she remains in the reader’s mind as the embodiment of those emotions and yearnings that must have seethed in Hawthorne but which he dared not acknowledge.
And so we find that Hawthorne, who hardly conquered many areas of experience in real life, turned to his inner self, there to release, and in turn inhibit, the passions and perceptions by means of which he could write his romances of moral choice and disorder. The evidence from his books would indicate that his self was rent by deep and painful conflicts, but in objective, external works of art he found a means of reconciling them. As with all great artists, imagination became the pathway to and the enlarger of experience.
1. Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1948.
2. Robert Cantwell, Nathaniel Hawthorne: The American Years, Rinehart, New York, 1948.
3. These James quotations are taken from his book-length study of Hawthorne, which can be found in Edmund Wilson’s anthology, The Shock of Recognition: The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made It, Doubleday, Doran, New York, 1943. James’ study remains the best available. In Wilson’s book may also be found D H Lawrence’s perceptive remarks on Hawthorne in his Studies in Classic American Literature, Thomas Seltzer, New York, 1923, as well as articles on Hawthorne by Poe and Melville.
4.> Newton Arvin, Hawthorne, Little, Brown, Boston, 1929.
5. I should add, in passing, that in my opinion Hawthorne, though isolated for years, was not ‘alienated’ from his society as a good number of contemporary writers seem to be. Hawthorne may have felt his role as an artist imposed an undesirable separation on him, but there is no reason to believe that he found himself at fundamental odds with the society of his time.
6.> Philip Rahv, Image and Idea: Fourteen Essays on Literary Themes, Laughlin, Norfolk, 1949. Howe misquotes the book’s title - MIA.