The Portable Hawthorne

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Genres: Classics; Literary Fiction; Short Stories

Synopsis

The Portable Hawthorne includes writings from each major stage in the career of Nathaniel Hawthorne: a number of his most intriguing early tales, all of The Scarlet Letter, excerpts from his three subsequently published romances—The House of Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun—as well as passages from his European journals and a sampling of his last, unfinished works. The editor’s introduction and head notes trace the evolution of Hawthorne’s writing over the course of his long career: from the tales, to their apotheosis in The Scarlet Letter, through his popular romances, to his private journals and frustrated attempts at another romance. Readers looking for a critical vantage point from which to see Hawthorne whole—his artistic rise, triumph, and sad decline—can find it in this collection.

 

Release date: November 29, 2005

Publisher: Penguin Classics

Print pages: 464

Sample

Table of Contents

 

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

 

I - THE TALES 1830-1852

EDITOR’S NOTE

MY KINSMAN, MAJOR MOLINEUX 1832

ROGER MALVIN’S BURIAL 1832

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN 1835

THE MINISTER’S BLACK VEIL - A PARABLE 1836

THE MAN OF ADAMANT - AN APOLOGUE 1837

THE BIRTH-MARK 1843

RAPPACCINI’S DAUGHTER - FROM THE WRITINGS OF AUBÉPINE 1844

PREFACES - FROM “THE old MANSE” 1846

TO TWICE-TOLD TALES 1851

TO THE SNOW-IMAGE 1852 - To Horatio Bridge, Esq., U.S.N.

 

II - THE SCARLET LETTER 1850

EDITOR’S NOTE

I - THE PRISON-DOOR

II - THE MARKET-PLACE

III - THE RECOGNITION

IV - THE INTERVIEW

V - HESTER AT HER NEEDLE

VI - PEARL

VII - THE GOVERNOR’S HALL

VIII - THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER

IX - THE LEECH

X - THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT

XI - THE INTERIOR OF A HEART

XII - THE MINISTER’S VIGIL

XIII - ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER

XIV - HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN

XV - HESTER AND PEARL

XVI - A FOREST WALK

XVII - THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER

XVIII - A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE

XIX - THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE

XX - THE MINISTER IN A MAZE

XXI - THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY

XXII - THE PROCESSION

XXIII - THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER

XXIV - CONCLUSION

 

III - THE PUBLISHED ROMANCES 1851-1860

EDITOR’S NOTE

FROM THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES 1851

FROM THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE 1852

FROM THE MARBLE FAUN 1860

 

IV - THE EUROPEAN JOURNALS 1853-1860

EDITOR’S NOTE

FROM THE ENGLISH, FRENCH, AND ITALIAN JOURNALS

 

V - THE LAST YEARS 1860-1864

EDITOR’S NOTE

PASSAGES FROM THE LETTERS AND THE UNFINISHED ROMANCES

 

Suggestions for Further Reading

THE PORTABLE HAWTHORNE

Best known today for his enigmatic tales and the short novel called The Scarlet Letter, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE was born in Salem, Massachusetts, at the dawn of the nineteenth century. After graduating from Bowdoin College, in 1825, he published his first romance, Fanshawe, and, when that failed, turned to writing short stories and prose sketches that, over the next two decades, gradually made him known in America and England. The Scarlet Letter appeared in 1850, followed soon after by The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, each of which increased his international renown. The next seven years he spent with his family in Europe, first as U.S. consul in Liverpool, then as a resident tourist on the Continent. Just prior to the publication of The Marble Faun, his last completed romance, he returned to his home in Concord, Massachusetts, where he spent the remaining four years of his life preparing excerpts from his English journals for publication while trying, unsuccessfully, to finish two more romances, based in part on his years in Europe. After a period of declining health, he died before his sixtieth birthday, while traveling in New Hampshire with his old college friend Franklin Pierce.

 

WILLIAM c. SPENGEMANN is the Hale Professor in Arts and Sciences and Professor of English Emeritus at Dartmouth College. His books include Mark Twain and the Backwoods Angel, The Adventurous Muse, The Forms of Autobiography, A Mirror for Americanists, and A New World of Words. He is also the editor of three Penguin Classics: Henry James’s The American, Herman Melville’s Pierre, and, with Jessica F. Roberts, Nineteenth Century American Poetry.

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This edition first published in Penguin Books 2005

 

 

Selection, introduction and notes copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2005

All rights reserved

 

The text of the selections in this book is that established by The Centenary Edition of the Works of
Nathaniel Hawthorne published by the Ohio State University Center for Textual Studies and Ohio State
University Press. The selections are from the volumes entitled The Scarlet Letter, The House of the
Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe, The Marble Faun, The American Notebooks,
Twice-Told Tales, Mosses from an Old Manse, The Snow Image and Uncollected Tales, The American
Claimant Manuscripts, The French and Italian Notebooks, The Letters 1857-1864, The English
Notebooks 1853-1856, and The English Notebooks 1856-1860. Copyright © 1962, 1964, 1965,
1968, 1972, 1974, 1977, 1980, 1987, 1997 by Ohio State University Press. All rights reserved.

 

Illustrations from Portraits of Nathaniel Hawthorne by Rita K. Gollin,
Northern Illinois University Press, 1983.

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864.
[Selections. 2005]
The portable Hawthorne / edited with an introduction by William C. Spengemann.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

eISBN : 978-1-101-01042-6

I. Spengemann, William C. II. Title.

 

PS1852.S66 2005
813’.3—dc22 2004065791

 

 

 

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Introduction

Hawthorne’s autobiographical preface to Mosses from an Old Manse, ambiguously subtitled “The Author Makes the Reader Acquainted with His Abode,” opens with the following paragraph:

Between two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone, (the gate itself having fallen from its hinges, at some unknown epoch,) we beheld the gray front of the old parsonage, terminating the vista of an avenue of black-ash trees. It was now a twelvemonth since the funeral procession of the venerable clergyman, its last inhabitant, had turned from that gate-way towards the village burying-ground. The wheel-track, leading to the door, as well as the whole breadth of the avenue, was almost overgrown with grass, affording dainty mouthfuls to two or three vagrant cows, and an old white horse, who had his own living to pick up along the roadside. The glimmering shadows, that lay half-asleep between the door of the house and the public highway, were a kind of spiritual medium, seen through which, the edifice had not quite the aspect of belonging to the material world. Certainly it had little in common with those ordinary abodes, which stand so imminent upon the road that every passer-by can thrust his head, as it were, into the domestic circle. From these quiet windows, the figures of passing travellers looked too remote and dim to disturb the sense of privacy. In its near retirement, and accessible seclusion, it was the very spot for the residence of a clergyman; a man not estranged from human life, yet enveloped, in the midst of it, with a veil woven of intermingled gloom and brightness. It was worthy to have been one of the time-honored parsonages of England, in which, through many generations, a succession of holy occupants pass from youth to age, and bequeath each an inheritance of sanctity to pervade the house and hover over it, as with an atmosphere.

As a way of introducing his subject, the old parsonage in Concord, Massachusetts, where he and Sophia went to live following their marriage, the passage seems fairly routine. Looked at closely, however, it can be seen to begin and end in quite different situations and stylistic keys. In the first three sentences, the speaker stands, alongside one or more unnamed companions, at the entry to the cart path that leads away toward the house, off in the distance. What he sees from this vantage point—gateposts, some trees, two or three cows, an old horse—might be seen by anyone who stood beside him, as, indeed, the reader is invited to do. The objects named are what the speaker says they are, nothing more. They do not ask to be taken, the way things in Hawthorne’s stories and notebooks so often do, as “emblematic of something.”

By the sixth sentence, however, the speaker’s situation has changed. Somehow, he has moved inside the house. Now seemingly alone, he looks out the front windows, back at the public highway, where he stood just moments before. Out there, he sees some “passing travellers.” Are they his former companions? Is he, perhaps, still standing among them, still looking up the driveway at the “gray front” of the house? He does seem to be a rather different person now: talking to himself, rather than to the reader, and pondering such meanings as might lie hidden in his new “abode,” or be lent to it, instead of describing its appearance. At first, the house sat before the speaker’s eyes. Now it seems to lie inside his head—to be his head, in fact, its windows his eyes. Out on the road, in the “material world,” gateposts were just gateposts. Here in this dusky interior, removed as it is from “ordinary” existence by “the glimmering shadows” in the middle distance, everything seems “emblematic of something” immaterial, although what that “something” might be in a case like that “veil woven of intermingled gloom and brightness” would not be easy to say.

What we have here are two very different ways of writing: one that Hawthorne called “the style of a man of society” and one he called “the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart.” The former style, he explains in another preface, “has none of the abstruseness of idea, or obscurity of expression” that suffuses the secluded style. Writings of this open, public sort may be imbued with an atmosphere of the “moral picturesque” or touched here and there with a gentle irony, but they “never need translation” into more explicit terms. On the contrary, anything written in this outgoing style “may be understood and felt by anyone who will give himself the trouble to read it.”

Those who trouble to read Hawthorne’s writings in his esoteric style, however, have their work cut out for them. Obscurely figurative, rather than transparently literal, these “written communications of a solitary mind with itself” always “need translation” into plain language. Seeming always to mean something else, they fairly beg to be interpreted, although no interpretation ever manages, quite, to empty them of meaning.

Attempts at translation are always worthwhile, though, for of the two styles this one has the potential to be “profound” and hence to become “deeply and permanently valuable.” What Hawthorne called his “photographic” style might serve “to open an intercourse with the world,” but only his “thoughtful or imaginative” style would do for a writer who, like himself, is “burrowing to his utmost ability into the depths of our common nature . . . and who pursues his researches in that dusky region, as he needs must, as well by the tact of sympathy as by the light of observation.”

These two very different voices might be said to bespeak two different “Hawthornes”: the one known to his family and friends, and one that, except as “shadowed forth” in his emblematic fictions, remained hidden from all inquiring eyes, even, it seems, from his own. One of his acquaintances doubtless spoke for many others when he confessed, “I love Hawthorne. I admire him; but I do not know him. He lives in a mysterious world of thought and imagination which he never permits me to enter.” Hawthorne felt this division in himself no less sharply. In a letter written before their marriage, he told Sophia his idea of recording a single day, first, in his “external” life and then in his “inward” life. “Nobody,” he said, “would think that the same man could live two such different lives simultaneously.”

Had he written those parallel diaries for Sophia, he would have had to use for the first his public style and for the second his private, emblematic style. All “talk about his external habits . . . and other matters entirely upon the surface,” he insisted, “hide the man instead of displaying him.” Anyone at all curious to learn anything “essential” about him “must make quite another sort of inquest, and look through the whole range of his [imagined] characters, good and evil.”

Those who did seek him there often found the view disturbing. When his son, Julian, grew old enough to read the tales, he could not recognize in them the man he had known as his father. Even Hawthorne himself sometimes found that persona strange. Looking over the tales he had chosen for one of his collections, he told his publisher, “My past self is not very much to my taste, as I see it in this book.” He must have known at the time, he supposed, what the tales were intended to mean; but reading them now, through the outward-looking eyes of the “man of society,” he could neither recall what that was nor recover it from the words on the printed page.

Two styles—one transparently circumstantial, the other enigmatically portentous—bespeaking two Hawthornes, the first a popular journalist, the second a withdrawn poet: in the light of this duality, his whole career can be traced, from Fanshawe, his first known publication, to Our Old Home, the last of his writings he saw in print, and the excerpts from an unfinished, unfinishable work that appeared under the title “Scenes from ‘The Dolliver Romance,’ ” shortly after his death. When the career is surveyed in these terms, a number of critical issues come into somewhat clearer focus: his reasons for suppressing Fanshawe; the differences among the one hundred or so short pieces he published in periodicals between 1830, when he took up that form, and 1852, when he abandoned it; the unmatched power of The Scarlet Letter; the dissipation of that force in the romances he published thereafter; the abrupt change in his notebooks and journals, beginning around 1850; and his inability to finish another romance after The Marble Faun, even as he went on publishing successful journalism.

Then, too, when read in this light, and in the order of their publication, his writings tell a coherent, memorable story, instead of merely huddling together under two covers, the way selections for anthologies like this one are apt to do. It is a classic sort of tale, with a rising action, a resounding climax, a falling action, and a conclusion “of intermingled gloom and brightness.” As in so many of his own stories, the main character here is an artist possessed of magical powers and given to rash undertakings that lead to ambiguous conclusions.

Just where this story begins is somewhat unclear. When Hawthorne was seventeen and away at school, he asked his mother in a letter what she would say to his becoming a writer. The earliest evidence we have of his actually being one, however, appeared three years after his graduation from Bowdoin college, with the publication of Fanshawe, which he may have begun there. In any case, he had the novel printed anonymously, at his own expense, and then withdrew it almost immediately, never to mention it again. Even his wife learned of it only after his death.

Why he repudiated this story can only be guessed, but it seems that the literal, if somewhat affected, style of the narrative will not get at a subject that keeps cropping up along the way, only to be dismissed each time: the consequences, good as well as bad, that might result from a beautiful young woman’s fall from virtue. This devilish theme, it appears, could be handled only with emblematic tongs.

For the next couple of decades, Hawthorne divided his considerable energies between hack writing (including a half-dozen books for children) and the production of short pieces for annual gift books, monthly magazines, and newspapers. These short pieces fall into three more or less distinct categories. There are “sketches,” like “My Visit to Niagara” and “The Old Apple-Dealer,” snapshots of picturesque scenes and characters rendered in his “photographic” style and tinted with conscious “artistry.” Then there are “allegories” like “The Celestial Railroad” and “Earth’s Holocaust,” moral lessons hiding in plain sight behind fictional stage settings. Last come Hawthorne’s “tales,” imagined stories like “Young Goodman Brown” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” involving fictive characters in emblematic situations and told entirely in the secretive, poetic style. While the sketches mean little if anything more than they say outright, and the allegories put fiction at the service of meanings statable in their own terms, the tales strive, through fictive actions, with uncertain success, to uncover the meanings buried within them.

The tales led Hawthorne straight to The Scarlet Letter, his only novel written, as they are, entirely in his poetic style. Virtually every word in the story of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale comes bearing another meaning, one that generations of readers have tried to capture in literal terms, but that has finally defeated every attempt to detach it from the figures that seem its only adequate means of expression. When all is said and done, perhaps the only way to say all that The Scarlet Letter does is to recite it verbatim. Hawthorne remembered doing just that, right after finishing the story. “I read the last scene to my wife,” he recalled some years later, “—tried to read it, rather, for my voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean, as it subsided after a storm. . . . I think I have never overcome my adamant in any other instance.”

Whatever meaning Hawthorne may have drawn from that reading—and conveyed to Sophia, who went straight to bed, he was pleased to note, with a sick headache—he never wrote another story like it. To avoid any risk of doing so, he wrote only one more tale, “Feathertop,” which is really an allegorical caricature of the man he blamed for his dismissal from the Salem Custom House, and went back to writing romances in the formerly discarded manner of Fanshawe: stories about the (managed) triumph of innocence over guilt; all of them employing essentially the same characters and beefed up to salable girth with larger and larger helpings of journalistic copy.

During the seven years he spent in Europe, between The Blithedale Romance and The Marble Faun, Hawthorne turned exclusively to writing a journal of his travels and sightseeing in England and on the Continent. He had always kept a notebook of ideas for stories, but now he took to writing long descriptive entries, volumes of them, all in an essayistic style as pure, in itself, as the poetic style of The Scarlet Letter. Upon his return to America, he tried writing fiction again in the long-dormant emblematic style of the tales but found himself unable to finish anything. Seemingly arbitrary and factitious, rather than necessary to the expression of the writer’s inchoate ideas, his emblems mean next to nothing—either to the reader or, apparently, to the writer.

Journalism, on the other hand, continued to flow from his pen with seeming ease. While revising sections of his English journals, first for serial publication, then together in the volume called Our Old Home, he recorded a visit to Washington, D.C., and the battlefields of Virginia for Atlantic Magazine. In steady decline since The Scarlet Letter, the poetic style was dead by 1862, as he himself would be less than two years later. Whether that cryptically eloquent language perished because Hawthorne’s health was failing or he wasted away because it had is not an altogether impudent question. It was, as he insisted, the “essential” part of himself—the part he lived entirely in words.

From the moment that Hawthorne began signing his works, each new publication made his name better known, increasing his fame as the basis for it expanded. Over the last few decades, however, that foundation has been steadily shrinking until his fame now rests almost entirely on a few tales and The Scarlet Letter. Without those, he would lie in the graveyard of defunct literary reputations, alongside scores of writers famous in their day but of interest now only to historians of literary taste. Instead, he stands as firmly today on the pedestal of literary renown—if for somewhat different reasons—as he did in the 1860s.

The question is, what keeps the tales and The Scarlet Letter flying out of the bookstores when Evangeline, a poem that made Longfellow rich, has gone out of print, and when the terms predominant in Hawthorne’s great works—sin, guilt, confession, innocence—have lost virtually all but their legal meanings? What interest, for that matter, can a contemporary reader take in the writings of a man addicted to the sentimental grotesqueries of gothic fiction, frightened to death of female sexuality, indifferent to slavery, hostile to Jews, obsessed with respectability, and given to incessant moralizing? If “Art,” as Ezra Pound said, is “news that stays news,” what remains newsworthy about the naughty midnight rambles of Goodman Brown or the adultery of Hester Prynne?

If the persistent appeal of the tales and The Scarlet Letter can be located anywhere in particular, it must be said to lie in the combined stylistic economy and semantic resonance of Hawthorne’s undiluted poetic voice and the unplumbed mystery this language evokes—an unspoken, otherwise unspeakable subject that lurks behind the veil of every announced concern, begging to be called forth yet refusing all invitations to make itself known. This, at any rate, is what sustains our interest in things like Blake’s tiger, Coleridge’s ancient mariner, Melville’s whale, Whitman’s soul, Wallace Stevens’s emperor of ice-cream, and T. S. Eliot’s children in the trees. These are, as Eliot put it, all symbols of “the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer.”

While the tales and The Scarlet Letter are more than enough to keep the name Hawthorne alive all by themselves, we should remember that this Hawthorne has a fraternal twin: the “man of society” who wrote the sketches, allegories, and prefaces; who found the tales inscrutable and The Scarlet Letter too somber; who supplied reams of padding for the published romances; and who went on publishing journalism when the “secluded man” had forgotten how to converse with “his own mind and heart.” Above all, this is the Hawthorne who amassed the European journals, long buried in manuscript collections or available only in edited selections but now widely available in three hefty volumes of The Centenary Edition. The Hawthorne on display here is the one his family and friends were permitted to know: clearheaded, witty, opinionated, moody, fiercely judgmental, and bent on speaking his mind on every subject as plainly as possible.

Although readers of these two Hawthornes have tended to call one of them or the other the “real” Hawthorne, there is really no reason to take sides in the matter. Poet, journalist: each of these Hawthornes has his peculiar merits—profound genius on the one hand, dazzling skill on the other. Hawthorne himself could not finally choose between them. To the “man of society,” the phantoms of the haunted mind seemed merely hallucinatory. To the secluded dreamer, the “ordinary” world seemed superficial, incomplete. Rather than silence one or the other of these contestant voices, he spent much of his career looking for a way to wed them, thus to produce a complete being at once true to itself and fully acceptable to society. Whether that entailed burrowing far enough into himself to rediscover the outside world in an altogether new light or allowing himself to be rescued from the dungeon of his heart by a dovelike woman, he could never finally decide. Neither, then, should the reader who wants to know all of Nathaniel Hawthorne there is to be known.

Except for his brief and shadowy apprenticeship, as recorded in Fanshawe—a book best left to specialists—the moving story of Hawthorne’s writing life, as it looks from this time and place, unfolds in the selections for this volume: his rise to literary eminence in the tales, his arrival at that artistic pinnacle in The Scarlet Letter, his decline as a writer of fiction in his next three published romances, his emergence as a top-flight essayist in the European journals, and, in his last years, his collapse as a romancer in the unfinished stories, despite his undiminished vitality as a journalist in his very last publications.

 

A lot has happened to “Nathaniel Hawthorne” since Malcolm Cowley compiled the first Portable Hawthorne back in 1948, much of it since 1969, when Cowley revised and expanded his original edition to take advantage of recent scholarship. On the supply side, volumes of material then held in manuscript collections have become generally available in the now complete Centenary Edition of the Works, sharpening Hawthorne’s authorial profile. On the receiving end, Hawthorne’s readership has changed even more, rethinking what it is that lends a writer the sort of status these Portables recognize and foster. Whereas Cowley could pretty much assume widespread agreement among his readers regarding Hawthorne’s literary greatness, today’s editor, owing to the recent proliferation of critical schools and of materials deemed worthy of literary regard, can count on no such unanimity of opinion. What could once be taken for granted must now be argued for and demonstrated: Hawthorne’s continuing, if somewhat altered, claims upon the notice and admiration of serious, attentive readers.

Chronology

1804 NH born in Salem, Massachusetts, to Nathaniel and Elizabeth (Manning) Hathorne, two years after his sister Elizabeth.

1808 His sea-captain father dies of yellow fever in Surinam. His younger sister, Louisa, is born, and the family moves in with grandfather Richard Manning, in Salem.

1813 Uncle Robert Manning becomes guardian to the family on the death of Richard. NH is laid up at home for more than two years with an injured foot.

1818-20 The Hathornes move to the Manning farm in Raymond, Maine. NH away at school in Portland and Salem.

1821-25 NH completes his A.B. degree at Bowdoin College, where he makes lifelong friends of Franklin Pierce, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Horatio Bridge. He returns to Salem after graduation to live with his mother and sisters.

1828 NH publishes Fanshawe anonymously at his own expense, then recalls it, never to mention it again.

1829-35 Now spelling his name Hawthorne, NH publishes a dozen or so tales and sketches in various periodicals, at first anonymously or pseudonymously, eventually signed.

1836 NH moves to Boston to become editor of The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, which soon folds, sending NH, unpaid, back to Salem. With his sister Elizabeth, he writes Peter Parley’s Universal History, On the Basis of Geography.