Quote of the Day (Nathaniel Hawthorne, on the Two Faces of the Public Man)

"No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true."—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)

This Day in Literary History (Melville Meets Hawthorne)

August 5, 1850—In one of the most consequential picnics in American literature, the brooding ex-sailor Herman Melville, searching for a voice that would allow him to burst the mold of his traditional sea fiction, met saturnine, sin-obsessed Nathaniel Hawthorne (in the image accompanying this post) as part of a small literary group that went on a small day’s hike from Stockbridge to Monument Mountain in Western Massachusetts.

The two writers, both living in the Berkshires, found themselves in different stages—even moving in different directions—in their careers at the time of their momentous encounter. 

The 31-year-old Melville, though he had five books to his credit already, had lost readers as he moved away from the conventional realistic mode that had made Typee a bestseller. In contrast, Hawthorne, 15 years his senior, had found his commercial niche at last only a few months before with The Scarlet Letter, a heavily symbolic novel. 

When a rainstorm made the literary picnickers (who also included publisher David Dudley Field and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes) seek shelter, Hawthorne and Melville had an opportunity to talk at greater length, discovering that they were kindred spirits. 

As Melville would shortly put it, in an essay on his new friend: “In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other great masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth—even though it be covertly and by snatches." 

Melville made his most heroic attempt at “the great Art of Telling the Truth” thousands of miles from where he could smell the spray of the Pacific Ocean or hear the cries of the whaling crews that sailed it in a quiet farmhouse deep in Pittsfield, not far from where he encountered Hawthorne. 

 In one way, the millions of readers enthralled by Moby Dick should not be surprised by the distance between the turbulent world Melville created and the tranquil environment in which he did so. For the novelist’s imagination brought all things close to him, with such power that as he looked eastward from his study, he likened the twin peaks of Saddleback and Mount Greylock looming in the distance to the humps of a whale. 

“My room seems a ship’s cabin,” Melville wrote his friend Evert Duychinck, “and at nights when I wake up and hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, and I had better go on the roof and rig in the chimney.” 

One hundred and fifty years after the sailor-turned-novelist moved his family here, RUVs and pickup trucks rumble more loudly and more often down the road that passes Arrowhead, the Melville homestead in Pittsfield, than the haywagons of his day did. 

On the two occasions I visited the home over the last decade, I found that the mountain landscape that inspired the great novelist remains majestically impervious to developers’ depredations. 

Even as a child, years before he bought the property, Melville had found these hills a source of serenity amid the financial catastrophe that overwhelmed his parents. 

Once settled here, he quickly made friends with Hawthorne, who lived in nearby Tanglewood and whose example encouraged him to explore new dark, richly symbolic territory in his fiction. 

 For the next two years, Melville and Hawthorne visited and wrote each other frequently. During this time, Melville wrote Moby Dick, which he dedicated to the older man. 

Longtime readers of this blog know of my fascination with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Now, it might at first seem a bit of a stretch to compare the two Lost Generation authors with Hawthorne and Melville, but I think a case can be made for some fascinating similarities. 

In each case, a younger writer—one who craved action—benefited by direct exposure to an older craftsman, and the results became quickly apparent. 

Melville took his cues from Hawthorne more by example than anything else; Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises benefited greatly from judicious editing by Fitzgerald, who wisely urged his friend to cut almost all of the wise-guy opening that threatened to overshadow reader recognition that the situation of Jake Barnes and his circle was inherently tragic. 

Both sets of writers found common ground by perfectly capturing the prevailing zeitgeist. Fitzgerald and Hemingway, writers with deeply ambivalent views of faith, wrote of characters who tried to find grace in blasted moral landscapes.

Characters in Hawthorne’s and Melville’s most famous novels suffer wounds that initiate wider tragedies. Hawthorne’s Roger Chillingworth becomes guilty of what Hawthorne called “the unpardonable sin” when he tries to discover what is in the soul of the man he rightly suspects of cuckolding him, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale. Melville’s Captain Ahab is literally wounded, so maimed by a past encounter with Moby Dick that he will pursue the great white whale to the far corners of the world—and take every member of his (characteristically American) multicultural crew (except narrator Ishmael) down with the ship in the mad attempt. 

The friendship between Fitzgerald and Hemingway fractured, for a thousand reasons chronicled by themselves and their associates. The more reticent times in which Hawthorne and Melville lived ensured that at this juncture, we’re unlikely to know the precise reasons why they drifted apart after two years. 

The following conjectures have been offered, with varying degrees of probability: 

* Hawthorne was embarrassed by his failure to secure gainful employment for Melville. The author of The Scarlet Letter did not make a huge number of friends, but one was important indeed—Franklin Pierce, winner of the 1852 Presidential election. Hawthorne, the college classmate of the Democratic victor in this election, lent Pierce key support in what is believed to be the first American Presidential campaign biography. Pierce would reward him eventually by naming him the American Consul stationed in Liverpool. Yet, for all that, Hawthorne couldn’t secure a post for Melville, who by this time needed such a job much more than the older man.

* Melville grew too emotionally needy for the reticent Hawthorne. Coming to Arrowhead as a best-selling writer of adventure stories—a kind of combination of Sebastian Junger and John Irving—Melville proceeded to write at breakneck speed a series of challenging metaphysical novels and short stories. But he also could be, as Hawthorne’s beloved wife Sophia noted, “generally silent and uncommunicative.” Hawthorne’s brilliance drew the younger man out of his shell, something that Melville acknowledged in a tone that more than one modern critic has described as “homoerotic”: “Already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him.” The handsome Hawthorne had felt squeamish about being stared at by female admirers openly on the street; can you imagine his discomfort, in that more straitlaced time, about being the object of an unabashed male’s adulation?

* Melville’s literary and personal situation was deteriorating so drastically that he might not have felt he could reach out to Hawthorne. Melville’s follow-up to Moby Dick, Pierre, with its hints of incest, still has the capacity to shock today. In its time, it must have seemed like an act of literary self-immolation. Neighbors and relatives were remarking this time on his habit of working relentlessly at night, leaving him exhausted and depressed the next day, and his tendency toward metaphysical speculation in his novels. In recent years, scholarly speculation has grown that Melville might have been an alcoholic and a wife-beater.

This Day in Literary History (Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter” Published)

March 16, 1850—Nathaniel Hawthorne, born on the Fourth of July, became the first author of a truly great novel with an American setting and themes with The Scarlet Letter, which was published on this date by William D. Ticknor & Co. (later renamed Ticknor & Fields).

His classic—expanded, at the suggestion of his publisher, from a short story into longer form—described one quintessentially American dilemma—the conflict between community mores and individual freedom—and was written in the face of another with particular relevance today: how to make money when you’ve lost your job.

Unlike 21st-century Americans, Hawthorne did not lose his job because of lying, cheating Wall Street types but because of lying, cheating political hacks. True, he wasn’t the convivial type in his post at the Salem Customs House. 

But, as Louise Hall Tharp noted in The Peabody Sisters of Salem, Hawthorne was innocent of unsubstantiated complaints used to oust him from his job: that he preferred fellow Democrats to Whigs; that his writings were overtly political; and even that he had been “loafing around with hard drinkers.”

Remarkably, the loss of employment freed Hawthorne to pursue his bliss. In six weeks, wearing what wife Sophia called the “shining look” he had in the throes of creative inspiration, he had crafted a “romance” (a term he preferred to “novel”) carefully plotted, deep with psychological overtones, and pointing the way toward a different form of national fiction that exchanged the simple form of allegory for the more ambiguous but richer mode of symbolism.

In the last decade, I’ve visited two Massachusetts sites associated with Hawthorne: the “Old Manse” in Concord, occupied by him and Sophia right after they were married, and the “House of the Seven Gables” in Salem, the inspiration for his follow-up to The Scarlet Letter.

Hawthorne was never really at home anywhere, though. In Concord, he was ideologically unsuited to the Transcendentalist impulse of fellow residents Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott.

And Salem may have been where Hawthorne was born, where he worked (at the Customs House, in the late 1840s) and where the Puritan ancestors who haunted his imagination (including one of the hanging judges of the Witchcraft Trials) had settled. 

But the novelist wanted to be rid of it at all costs. "I detest this town so much that I hate to go into the streets or to have the people see me,” he wrote.

That’s the kind of Gloomy Gus the melancholic writer was. Why was he so sensitive about having “the people see me”? 

A large proportion of those people, I gather, were women so startled by his good looks that they had to restrain themselves from openly staring. I can just hear all my male readers saying, “I don’t understand—what’s the problem with that?”

A college professor of mine who taught Hawthorne in an American literature class posted in his office a cartoon that depicted a crowd of Puritan women with dour faces and scarlet A’s on the breasts of their gowns—except for one female at the center, smelling broadly. She had an A+.

The humor aside, The Scarlet Letter features one of the most vibrant heroines in our entire national canon. In the triangle involving Hester Prynne, her lover, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, and her husband Roger Chillingworth, Hester alone emerges as persistently resilient, brave and unrevengeful.

In her collective biography of the Concord literati, American Bloomsbury, Susan Cheever offers up editor and pioneering feminist Margaret Fuller as a possible model for Hester. 

Both women were outsiders because of scandalous affairs that produced children out of wedlock, but by the time he wrote his novel Hawthorne looked on Fuller with a good less sympathy than he did his fictional heroine.

A character is often far more an admixture of different real-life elements than biographers might admit. For certain aspects of Hester’s persona—her deep and abiding passion, her selflessness, the sense of initiative that sustains a sensitive, haunted lover—Hawthorne need have looked no further than Sophia.

This talented artist from a progressive family devoted herself to Hawthorne's needs and those of their three children. No better example can be found than in her reaction to her husband’s dismissal from his job.

Sophia more than fulfilled Nathaniel’s expectation that she would take the bad news “better than a man.” 

Once he finished telling her, according to Tharp, she opened up a drawer in her desk and presented him with $150, which she had managed to save through creating lamp shades and fire screens. She assured him that additional household economies she would practice would keep them going.

And so it occurred. Hawthorne was able to concentrate on a work that sold out its first-edition run of 2,500 copies in a mere two weeks, and that remains an indispensable text on the morally murky American past, with sins—sexuality that creates individual chaos, vengefulness and hypocrisy in the larger community—difficult, perhaps impossible, to expiate.