Hawthorne: A Life [Hardcover]

And the book is full of great characters, not just Hawthorne, but that amiable dullard, Franklin Pierce, the Peabody sisters, Margaret Fuller, weird Delia Bacon -- the first person to argue that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare. Hawthorne is famous for badmouthing women writers, but he surrounded himself with smart women and liked them -- unlike Thoreau or Melville, who were pretty indifferent. Wineapple makes a very convincing case, I regret to say, that the friendship between Hawthorne and Melville was brief and purely literary, with little sexual edge. (Her most interesting detail is that Hawthorne's wife liked Melville better than Hawthorne did.) Wineapple brings Hawthorne very close to us, offering a flesh and blood man whose sunny normalcy was full of chill shadows.

This is one of the best biographies I've read in the past fifteen years, as solid and engaging as COLERIDGE by Richard Holmes or MORNINGS ON HORSEBACK by David McCullough. I cannot praise it too highly.

Wineapple's only failing, in my opinion, is her tendency to skip over things she seems to assume we already know, like Sophia's fall on the ice precipitating her miscarriage. She neither disproves it nor states it, just ignores it. It made me wonder what else she left out that I didn't know enough to notice.

My only other comment is a warning - for those (like me) who have been fascinated by Nathaniel Hawthorne since their first exposure to him, beware - to know the man this well, with this much detail, is to demystify him before adoring eyes. He was a man, it turns out, just a man, with failings and foibles. Some, like his racism and sexism, might be excused by the times he lived in, but others, like self-pity and hubris, are timeless. After this book, I pity him more, and worship him less. But his work, as Wineapple points out in the Notes, remains as popular as ever.

After his father's early death, the young Nathaniel was raised predominantly by women, and strong women - from mother Rose, sister Elizabeth, wife Sophia, and friends Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Margaret Fuller - dominated his life. Wineapple gives thoughtful consideration to Hawthorne's love for and strong attachment to other men, and provides a lengthy portrait of his intimate friendship with college mate and eventual United States President Franklin Pierce. Devotees of 19th century American literature will be entranced by the image of uneasy comrades Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Hawthorne enjoying a rare peaceful moment ice skating together on a frozen Concord pond. Wineapple's examination of Hawthorne's early adulthood reveals that his infamous "long years of seclusion" were considerably less secluded than previously believed; her thorough assessment of Hawthorne's complex racist and misogynist attitudes will probably never be bettered.

From early youth, Hawthorne suffered from a fatalistic perception that he was an authentic outsider, destined to remain more keenly aware than others but also permanently separated on some basic level from the rest of mankind. Despite his physical attractiveness, relatively good position in New England society, obvious intelligence, and eventual happy marriage, Hawthorne never lost his crippling sense of inner and outer solitude. The abundant portraits, daguerreotypes, and photos of Hawthorne provide a metaphorical correlative: Hawthorne appears preternaturally beautiful in the paintings, but looks gaunt, obsessed, and half - crazed - like a Fritz Eichenberg woodcut of Roderick Usher ("Hawthorne sat gazing into the fireplace, his gray dressing gown twisted about his shrinking torso") - in several of the included photographs.

The Furies also pursued Hawthorne in other ways: whether living in urban Salem or rural Concord, Massachusetts or Maine, London or Rome, Hawthorne was constantly unhappy with his home and surroundings, resulting in continual uprootings for himself and his family. Hawthorne ran on and on, only to find his fundamental displeasure with existence awaiting him wherever he settled. It's fair to say that almost every aspect of living distressed the sensitive author in some fashion, ruining his enjoyment of life, nature, and other people. "I should like to sail on and on forever, and never touch the shore again," he wrote. There was no solace anywhere for Hawthorne, who went out with a whimper rather than a bang, withering physically, mentally, and emotionally a little each day, until he was dead at 60.

Correspondingly, Hawthorne's fiction is glutted with symbols of guilt, accusation, and decay, from tarred - and - feathered relatives, black-veiled ministers, disembodied strangling hands, and disfiguring birthmarks to poisoned children, bloody footprints, bedeviled forests, and scarlet letters. As he famously wrote about drowned heroine Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance, "Six hours before, how beautiful! At midnight, what a horror!" In Hawthorne's imagination, the maid really was dead, not sleeping, and images typically associated with innocence, purity, and hope - sylvan woods, children, grade school teachers - are or become pathologically tainted. Hawthorne dwelt claustrophobically in a fallen world; accordingly, he was no admirer of Emerson's transcendentalist philosophy.

Luminaries such as Washington Irving, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allen Poe admired Hawthorne's work, though almost no one appears to have embraced his writing unequivocally. Hawthorne has also had a number of formidable critics, including personal friends Emerson and Margaret Fuller. Wineapple succinctly defines Hawthorne's dolorous, congested, and not - quite - three - dimensional style: "muted irony, authorial detachment, sardonic nonchalance, and modesty mixed with a dollop of hauteur." Having finished The House of The Seven Gables, a friend of Hawthorne's remarked to Emerson that "a cough took up ten pages, and sitting down in a chair six more." Hawthorne, forever haunted by his own past and the past of his country, raised a number of important themes in his work, but rarely explored and defined those themes with more than a childlike gloss, despite the sincerest application of his talents. The problems inherent in Hawthorne's creative processes were only exacerbated by his suspicion that fiction writing was a feminine pursuit and a worthless occupation for a man.

Hawthorne wrote a number of short stories in which fevered, generally well - intentioned if ethically blind scientists meddle with some aspect of nature in the hope of exerting some control over the processes of life and death. Each tale was an attempt at psychological and spiritual alchemy, but, like his protagonists, Hawthorne failed in his attempts to save himself from the engulfing darkness he felt to be an inevitable and ever encroaching aspect of the human experience.