"What do you talk your hog-latin to me for?" - Melville's characters argue

What I was wondering, when I asked if there is anything in The Confidence-Man except argument, is what to do with all of the argument, all of the disputation and rhetorical slipperiness.  Melville had abandoned the mode that in Moby-Dick was his most original achievement, when he seized on a single object, a single aspect of an object, and riffed on it as long as he could, the trick he learned from reading Sir Thomas Browne.  The meaning of “whiteness,” that sort of thing, the parts a certain kind of reader brags about skipping.

A typical line of The Confidence-Man is not like the descriptions I enjoyed yesterday but more like this:

“To shift the subject, since we cannot agree. Pray, what is your opinion, respected sir, of St. Augustine?”

Then heck if they don't talk about St. Augustine for a while.  Or maybe this is more typical:

“Pun away; but even accepting your analogical pun, what does it amount to?”

Does anyone want to know what the analogical pun is?  It involves caterpillars and butterflies.  I do not see how it is a pun.  Never mind.  Both examples are from Chapter 19, as is the post’s title, the confidence man versus the Missouri bachelor.

The fact is that I do not care much about Herman Melville’s spiritual problems.  I stand off to the side with Nathaniel Hawthorne, as seen in The English Notebooks.  Melville is in England, traveling to Jerusalem (and securing his English copyright to his new novel).  He visits his friend Hawthorne; while walking on the beach they have a long talk:

Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated"; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief.  It is strange how he persists - and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before - in wandering to-and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting.  He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.

Melville’s distress cannot be attributed to the commercial failure of The Confidence-Man, since it had not yet failed.

I do care a lot about what artistic use Melville makes of his spiritual problems.  The Confidence-Man is such an inside-out book that I find myself reading around the exchanges more than worrying about the specifics of the argument.  Why this subject, why now, why with these characters?

In the 1979 article “Melville’s Quarrel with Fiction,” Nina Baym argues – you can tell what kind of critic she is – the kind I like – that the debates are purposefully obscure and irresolute, since they really serve a larger argument:

Apparently bristling with significance, the work plants clues that lead nowhere.  Ultimately we find that we have no questions answered, that we cannot even say what questions have been put.  As the subtitle states, the work is a masquerade.  In The Confidence Man Melville bitterly expresses the sort of truth that can be asserted in a mendacious medium and illustrates the convulsed ways in which it can be expressed. But the truths he speaks are only about fiction and language.

Tomorrow I will follow a clue or two.

Nobody has muddy boots in The Scarlet Letter - Lawrence's Hawthorne - My father hated books

How about one more rummage through D. H. Lawrence’s little book.

A couple of years ago I puzzled over a strange book by William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (1925), an obscurely written historical counterpart to D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature (1923).  Although Williams and Lawrence only directly overlap with chapters on Franklin and Poe, and despite Horace Gregory insisting that Williams’ book does not resemble Lawrence’s (p. xiv), I now see that the Williams book is highly derivative of Lawrence.

WCW briefly turns to Hawthorne, to attack him,  in his Poe chapter, for his realism (“his willing closeness to the life of his locality in its vague humors; his lifelike copying of the New England melancholy,” 228) and his traditionalism (“by doing what everyone else in France, England, Germany was doing for his own milieu, is no more than copying their method with another setting,” 229), meaning that Williams chooses to badly misread Hawthorne (and to give the highly original Poe too much credit for originality).  His misreading was, and perhaps still is, a common one, taking The Scarlet Letter as a treatise on Puritan thought and The Blithedale Romance as an investigation of the Brook Farm utopia and so on – heaven knows what the realist crowd thinks is going on in The Marble Faun – when he is really – I will turn to Lawrence:

Nathaniel Hawthorne writes romance.

And what’s romance?  Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose, and it’s always daisy-time.  As You Like It and Forest Lovers, etc.  Morte D’Arthur.
Hawthorne obviously isn’t that kind of romanticist: though nobody has muddy boots in The Scarlet Letter, either.  (Ch. 7, 88)

What on earth is Forest Lovers?  A bestselling 1898 historical novel by Maurice Hewlett, a writer with a style distinctive enough to earn him a parody in Max Beerbohm’s Christmas Garland, a great honor.

Romance, Hawthorne, Morte D’Arthur – this sounds familiar for some reason.  Perhaps because Lawrence stole it from a post I wrote three years ago!  Reading Studies in American Literature has been a disheartening experience.

Lawrence takes The Scarlet Letter as a parable of sin, primal Adam and Eve stuff.  “Hester Prynne was a devil” (100), but the men are worse, and the elf child Pearl will likely be worse than the men.

And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe.

And then from hour to hour we rot and rot.  (103)

“[O]ne of the greatest allegories in all of literature” (106), Lawrence judges.  That sounds about right.

Listen to this bit.  It is in the Scarlet Letter chapter.  It is a surprising digression. What is it doing here?:

My father hated books, hated the sight of anyone reading or writing.

My mother hated the thought that any of her sons should be condemned to manual labour.  Her sons must have something higher than that.

She won.  But she died first.  (92)

I almost forgot to mention that Jessica at so very very recently read a later (earlier?) version of Lawrence’s book, which inspired me to read it for myself.

The Wuthering Expectation Worst of the Year - eternal discomfiture from Philip Roth, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Gottfried Keller

The worst things I read in 2010:

The delusion – as he now thought of it – had lost its power over him, and so the books only magnified his sense of the hopelessly laughable amateur he was and of the hollowness of the pursuit to which he had dedicated his retirement. (Everyman, Philip Roth, 2006, p. 128)

That’s just – that’s just terrifying.  I wish I hadn’t read it.  Breathe slowly.  Calm.  Calm.

The books in that passage are art books.  The character is an amateur painter.  And I’m not even retired.  Never mind.  Everything’s fine.  That’s not about me.  Onward.

Few amateurs are endowed with a tender susceptibility to the sentiment of a picture; they are not won from an evil life, nor anywise morally improved by it. (The Marble Faun, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1860, Ch. 37, “The Emptiness of Picture-Galleries”)

More pictures, so that’s not so bad.  Still, I can’t help but wonder if there is some distant analogy that I might apply to myself.  The passage is accurate.  I do not have a tender susceptibility to sentiment.  I’m not morally improved by my reading.  As a reader, I have a heart of stone, although passages like this introduce doubt.   But maybe there is no analogy.

On the other hand, I read continually, from morning till evening, and far into the night.  I always read German books, and in the queerest way.  Every evening, I intended on the following morning, and every morning, the following noon, to throw aside the books and get to my work; I even fixed the time from hour to hour, but while I turned the pages of the books, utterly oblivious of time, the hours slipped away, days, weeks and months vanished, as lightly and slyly as if, gently thronging forward, they were stealing away and vanishing with laughter, to my eternal discomfiture.  (Green Henry, Gottfried Keller, 1854, III.8, 368, tr. A. M. Holt)

Oh no.  That’s just – I have to look away.  Too horrifying.  The “work” Green Henry is avoiding is, again, painting.  The reading interferes with what he thinks is his vocation.  It is so much easier to consume art than it is to produce it.  Those hours, those months – those years!  Green Henry is, at this point, a lot younger than I am.  Try not to think about it.

I suppose the title of this post may be a little misleading.  These were all good books.  It’s their content that is unnerving.  Their meaning.

I don’t really read so many bad books.  What were the worst in quality this year?  The first half of Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters (2010), the last half of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890), and the last four-fifths of Susan Ferrier’s Marriage (1818) – the first fifth is high-larious.  These books, or parts of them, may have been pretty poor, but they did not do any harm.  The Grossman book may have done a great deal of good, of the thought-provoking variety.  But those terrifying Roth, Hawthorne, and Keller passages, those I will carry around with me, trying, futilely, to suppress them.

Reducing Hawthorne - a guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Marble Faun marks the end of a Nathaniel Hawthorne project that began more or less when I started Wuthering Expectations.  I am now officially done with Nathaniel Hawthorne.  “Done.”

Two Library of America volumes, Tales and Sketches (1,463 pages of reading text) and Collected Novels (1,242 pages), and The American Notebooks, The English Notebooks, and The French and Italian Notebooks, which add up to maybe 2,000 pages more in the Centenary collected works.  Holy moley, that’s almost 5,000 pages.  Done!

I’m predicting that I will never read Hawthorne’s unfinished manuscripts, or any more of his books for children (two is plenty), or his campaign biography of General Franklin Pierce, so there are some good, solid limits to my completism.  I wish there had been stronger limits.  Although my opinions are almost entirely conventional, perhaps I can help future Hawthorne readers avoid some of my mistakes.

My one unconventional recommendation, first: the recently published selection from Hawthorne’s notebooks, The Business of Reflection, combined with the NYRB Twenty Days with Julian and Bunny by Papa, are simply outstanding reading, and will confound and delight readers with youthful memories of hating The Scarlet Letter. Other readers, too.  With a stroke, 2,000 pages turn into less than 300.

Now, I’m glad I read the whole bulk of the notebooks, but who are we kidding?  The one book of Hawthorne’s I truly wish I had skipped was his apprentice novel, Fanshawe (1828).  Dull, trite, clumsy, clichéd.  Alumni of Bowdoin College might find some of the details of the setting interesting.  He kept it a secret - Hawthorne’s wife did not even know the novel existed until after his death.  The distance in quality between this poor thing and Hawthorne’s first published story, “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” cannot be explained by the passage of two years.  Hawthorne had discovered an essential part of his imagination.  Fanshawe is not recognizable as Hawthorne; that first story is.

What to do about those stories?  The 1,100+ Library of America pages are rewarding, but much too much.  Some pleasantly fat selection is necessary.  Signet Classics has one, The Celestial Railroad and Other Stories, 270 pages, which omits “The Artist of the Beautiful” and “Feathertop.”  And “Foot-Prints on the Sea-Shore.”  Hmm.  Perhaps supplement it with The Selected Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Alfred Kazin, or the Norton Critical Edition, or something like that.  I don’t know.  Don’t be neurotic, like I was, that’s all, unless you’re trying to graph Hawthorne.

My ranking of the four good novels: The Scarlet Letter (1850), The Marble Faun (1860), The House of Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852).  I’m ranking by quality, but quality may mean little more than how much I want to reread them.  The latter two, especially, have all sorts of serious structural and conceptual problems and dud chapters.  They also contain some extraordinary scenes, some of Hawthorne’s best.  Try Chapter 3 of Seven Gables, “The First Customer,” in which an old woman and a plump boy negotiate the sale of a gingerbread cookie, and then another. Marvelous, charming scene, even cute.  How it relates to the building dread of the Ecclesiastian “Governor Pyncheon” chapter, one of Hawthorne’s four or five best pieces, escapes me.

It would be nuts for the reader at all sympathetic to Hawthorne to miss it.  I’ve done a good job slimming down the notebooks and the stories, not so well with the novels.  Still, four novels, three of them quite short, is not exactly a hardship for vigorous book blog readers.  Add in a couple more short books, stories and notebooks, and you're "done," too, except now there will be all sorts of wonderful tales and scenes to revisit.

Whether carved marble is anything but limestone, after all - Hawthorne and impermanence

For some reason, I have been reading a lot of fiction about painters.  The Marble Faun, Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry (1854), a true “portrait of the artist” novel, Philip Roth’s Everyman (2006), Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (1941-2).  Just coincidence – I didn’t even know any but the Keller novel featured painters.  I should have guessed, though, about The Marble Faun, given the self-taught syllabus in art appreciation I was reading in Hawthorne’s notebooks.

Hawthorne had written about artists before.  In my favorite Hawthorne story, “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844), he makes as clear a statement of his own aesthetic principles as possible for a non-theoretical writer.  The artist in the story spends his life creating an artificial butterfly, which is almost immediately destroyed.  Yet the effort has culminated in something perfectly beautiful, and is therefore deeply meaningful.  I find it hard to think of the Library of America edition of Hawthorne’s Collected Novels, the one I have been reading, as a filmy butterfly.  It’s a substantial object, and it will be in print for, as far as I am concerned, forever.

Hawthorne is less sure about that.  In Rome, surrounded by examples of the creative work of the past three thousand years or so, he could not help thinking about what lasts and what does not; what stays beautiful and what does not.  He is merciless about worn frescoes:

But now, unless one happens to be a painter, these famous works make us miserably desperate.  They are poor, dim ghosts of what, when Giotto or Cimabue first created them, threw a splendor along the stately aisles; so far gone towards nothingness, in our day, that scarcely a hint of design or expression can glimmer through the dusk…  But now that the colors are so wretchedly bedimmed - now that blotches of plastered wall dot the frescos all over, like a mean reality thrusting itself through life's brightest illusions - the next best artist to Cimabue, or Giotto, or Ghirlandaio, or Pinturicchio, will be he that shall reverently cover their ruined masterpieces with white-wash! (The Marble Faun, Ch. 33, 1104)

I want to go on record here to cast my vote against Hawthorne – please do not whitewash Giotto frescoes.  Hawthorne contrasts the frescoes with sculpture, themselves indestructible, their beauty much less so:

In the chill of his [a sculptor’s] disappointment, he suspected that it was a very cold art to which he had devoted himself.  He questioned, at that moment, whether sculpture really ever softens and warms the material which it handles; whether carved marble is anything but limestone, after all; and whether the Apollo Belvedere itself possesses any merit above its physical beauty, or is beyond criticism even in that generally acknowledged excellence.  In flitting glances, heretofore, he had seemed to behold this statue, as something ethereal and godlike, but not now. (Ch. 43, 1178-9)

The jeweler in Hawthorne’s story is not a fiction writer, and his butterflies are not fiction.  Hawthorne’s own ephemeral butterflies are something else, little bursts of beauty or feeling or startlement that he tried to create out of packages of words.  In fiction – poetry, like painting, might be different – these small, powerful effects require a great deal of preparation, this enormous apparatus of plot and character and imagery, all of which risk concealing or even crushing the delicacy of the book.  Hawthorne would have recognized the purpose of many of the great abstract painters, of Kandinsky and Rothko, their desperate attempt to remove everything extraneous from the painting, everything that distracts from the essential meaning. 

Hawthorne reduced to the extent he could – his ghostly, “unrealistic” characters are one way he did it.  I wonder how far he could have gone.  I wonder how far any fiction writer can go.  A bunch of them have spent the past century trying to answer that question, haven’t they?

Artfully and airily removed from our mundane sphere - Hawthorne's last fantasy novel

The Marble Faun (1860) is a book about Rome.  It’s a novel in the sense that some fictional characters, pale as ghosts, slip through the actual Rome in something resembling a story.  The reader demanding realistic depictions of actual people, not abstractions roughly shaped into human form, may not find the book to be a novel at all.  The setting is more real than the people.

Writing about The Marble Faun, I am going to use words like “real” and “actual” as if I mean something by them.  The "real" Rome of the novel is in fact a creation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s imagination, a place he observed, and then put into the prose of his notebooks, and then filtered through his imagination (and through the notebooks) a second time.  When Sophia Hawthorne edited Hawthorne’s notebooks for publication, she omitted a number of scenes, replacing them with some version of “See Chapter X of The Marble Faun.”  A number of scenes are lifted, with minor changes, from the notebooks, and, writing the novel in Rome, Hawthorne could simply go for a stroll if he wanted to double-check his memory.  Still – it’s all a made up version of something real, and the “making up” began as soon as Hawthorne tried to write down what he experienced, long before he used it in his fiction.

I guess I mean something relative.  The fictional Rome, the fictional-but-real buildings and statuary and market stands, are meant to survive some sort of test against reality.  The Rome of1858 is gone, but the descriptions of artworks can still meet (or fail) those tests.  The reader can look for himself and see if Hawthorne got it right.  As he says in the notebooks, repeatedly, frustratedly, he is trying to get it right.

The four or five characters who circle around the plot of the novel are not meant to meet that sort of standard.  They are pointedly unreal.  One may or may not be a faun, another briefly turns into a nymph.  We’re in the imaginative world of The Scarlet Letter, with its elf and vampire and witch.  The difference is the reality of the physical world, of Hawthorne’s Rome.  It’s an inversion of much fiction, where the author convinces us, or lets us convince ourselves, that the characters are genuine people, while all but a few patches of the surrounding world are left as unfinished canvas, for the reader to fill in.  Thus, odd chapters titled “The Emptiness of Picture Galleries” (Ch. 37), in which Hawthorne and the reader and one of the characters spend eight pages appreciating, or failing to appreciate, art.

The disorienting contrast between the spirit characters and the real Rome is intentional, “the effect at which he aimed.”  The Marble Faun is a fantasy novel, an ancestor of John Crowley’s Little, Big (1981) and other fantasies of the not-quite-real.  I am in the “Postscript,” added, soon after publication, to soothe readers who whined about the novel’s lack of a conventionally antiseptic ending:

He [the Author] designed the story and the characters to bear, of course, a certain relation to human nature and human life, but still to be so artfully and airily removed from our mundane sphere, that some laws and proprieties of their own should be implicitly and insensibly acknowledged.

The idea of the modern Faun, for example, loses all the poetry and beauty which the Author fancied in it, and becomes nothing better than a grotesque absurdity, if we bring it into the actual light of day…  As respects all who ask such questions [whether the Faun-like character has furry ears], the book is, to that extent, a failure.

So the book was hardly a failure for me, although it kinda spoils my fun to so directly state, at the very end of the book, what I had been planning to write in my blog post.  I guess I wrote it anyway.

Hawthorne learns to appreciate the cherubs and angels - his Italian notebooks

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Italian notebooks are a conscious act of art appreciation.  Hawthorne, prodded by his wife, spent much of his year and a half in Italy, the part he wrote about in his journal, at least, studying art.  He was not a natural connoisseur.  Appreciation is hard work.

One puzzle to me, reading earlier travelers to Italy, and earlier art critics, was the amount of attention paid to the Vatican’s Belvidere Apollo.  Why did this statue become the summit of ancient artistry?  Once that fact was established, by whatever means, it could only be repeated and reinforced by later writers.  Hawthorne knew those earlier writers, too, but he sometimes fought free of them.  He did the one thing that is so hard to do – he really looked at whatever he was looking at.

I saw the Apollo Belvidere as something ethereal and godlike; only for a flitting moment, however, and as if he had alighted from heaven, or shone suddenly out of the sunlight, and then had withdrawn himself again. (Mar, 10, 1858)

That glimpse is valuable, but Hawthorne has no illusions that it is endlessly repeatable, or that it does not require specific conditions.  His teenage son, during the same trip to the Vatican, reacts like this:

Julian was very hungry, and seeing a vast porphyry vase, forty-four feet in circumference, he wished that he had it full of soup.

That is also a fine piece of art criticism.

I sympathize, perhaps too much, with Hawthorne’s tastes.  Like me, he finds renewed vigor whenever he moves from a museum’s Italians to the painters of the Dutch room.  In the Uffizi:

These petty miracles [Gerard Dou’s flowers, feathers, and eggs] have their use in assuring us that painters really can do something that takes hold of us in our most matter of fact moods; whereas, the merits of the grander style of art may be beyond our ordinary appreciation, and leave us in doubt (nine times out of ten that we look at them) whether we have not befooled ourselves with a false admiration.  Until we learn to appreciate the cherubs and angels that Raphael scatters through the blessed air, in a picture of the Nativity, it is not amiss to look at a Dutch fly settling on a peach, or a humble-bee burying himself in a flower. (Jun. 15, 1858)

What a useful warning for my own reading.  A matter-of-fact mood is my most common mood, and I prefer the Dutch flies in literature to the cherubs.  A good part of the reason I write here is to put some pressure on my tastes, to make sure I don’t always rush past the Raphaels and Titians in order to see my beloved Boschs and Breughels.  And that business about not befooling myself with false admiration – I don’t even want to get into that.

On an unrelated note, the Hawthorne’s spend a lot of time visiting the Roman and Florentine studios of American artists.  One of the sculptures they see I actually know well.  It is Harriet Hosmer’s Beatrice Cenci (1856), which is now a prominent feature of the Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.  A Wuthering Expectations blog post or two may have been written in close proximity to this piece.  Hawthorne’s only comment is that it “did not very greatly impress me” (April 3, 1858, not in the abridged notebooks).  I like it all right!  But I looked at it, and then looked some more.

Hawthorne's notebooks for everyone

I asked, and with a bit of research, I received.  I have now read the entirety of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notebooks, maybe 2,000 pages in the Ohio State University Centenary Edition.  Those Centenary volumes are enormous beasts, about half Hawthorne and half apparatus.  Literally unhandy, hard to hold.  And as good as the notebooks are, as good as the writing is, they are disjointed and repetitive and too much of a good thing.  So I had hoped for a selection, a nice 800 page Library of America edition, for example, which I bet will someday exist.  Not that so many more readers will be tempted by that.

In fact, there is a selection of the notebooks available, a 210 page culling of the Centenary Edition that I can recommend to anyone:  The Business of Reflection: Hawthorne in His Notebooks, eds. Robert Milder and Randall Fuller, Ohio State University Press, 2009.

Do you see the problem?  First, I began reading the notebooks in 2007, so the shorter book didn’t exist.  Second, does that title make the book sound like a selection from Hawthorne’s notebook, or a collection of scholarly essays about the notebooks?  That's what I thought it was.  Third, the cover is ugly.

What’s in it?  It has almost everything I want it to have.  Early vacations in Maine and the Berkshires that contain some brilliant character sketches, something I rarely find in Hawthorne’s own fiction.  A sampling of the Brook Farm entries.  The entry (Jan, 23, 1842) that is smoothed out, moralized, and, I think, worsened when it is published as “The Old Apple Dealer.”

For many people, the honeymoon year beginning in the summer of 1842 will be a favorite.  Nathaniel and Sophia set up house in Concord.  Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller and an eccentric handyman , Mr. Thorow, “ugly as sin, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners” (Sep. 1, 1842) drop by now and then.  Hawthorne buys Thoreau’s boat!  Everyone is so happy, genuinely happy.  Literary depictions of happiness, good ones, are not all that common.

The Twenty Days with Julian & Bunny by Papa section, the summer of 1851, is only excerpted, so be sure to track down the separate NYRB edition of that one.

The sections from the Hawthorne family's residence in England and Italy are almost all vacation snaps.  Stratford-upon-Avon, Walter Scott’s mansion, the Lake District.  The slimming down is enormously helpful here.  Herman Melville’s visit is intact, as is the amusing July 30, 1857 entry, in which Hawthorne sees Tennyson at an art exhibit, and resists, barely, the temptation to follow him around, gawking.

I’ll write a bit more about the Italian trip tomorrow.

I still think that there should be an 800 page edition.  And a 400 page edition.  If I were a publisher, I would go broke.  But this is a valuable book, easy to recommend.  Readers who have had not-so-good experiences with Hawthorne’s fiction will be shocked, I predict, at how engaging he is here.  Funny and gloomy, warm and sarcastic, frustrated and inspired, a fine husband and father and a mediocre friend.  Ask your library to buy a copy.  Share the wealth.

Hawthorne's notebooks - too much, not enough

The Blithedale Romance contains an amazing drowning scene, a search for the body of a person feared drowned .  Chapter XXVII, “Midnight.”  Victim’s name omitted:

Hollingsworth at first sat motionless, with the hooked pole elevated in the air.  But, by and by, with a nervous and jerky movement, he began to plunge it into the blackness that upbore us, setting his teeth, and making precisely such thrusts, methought, as if he were stabbing at a deadly enemy.  I bent over the side of the boat.  So obscure, however, so awfully mysterious, was that dark stream, that - and the thought made me shiver like a leaf - I might as well have tried to look into the enigma of the eternal world, to discover what had become of [the victim’s] soul, as into the river's depths, to find her body.  And there, perhaps, she lay, with her face upward, while the shadow of the boat, and my own pale face peering downward, passed slowly betwixt her and the sky!

The chapter has a lot of good writing.  It is drawn not from anything that happened at Brook Farm, where The Blithedale Romance is partly set, but on an entirely separate incident Hawthorne had witnessed, in which a servant girl drowned, probably by suicide.

In the novel, the chapter is a highlight.  The end of the above paragraph seems especially good to me, especially well imagined, but the “nervous and jerky” “stabbing” with the pole is sinister and even the dead shivering simile, “like a leaf,” takes on more life amidst other, actual, shivering leaves.  The atmosphere is functionally oppressive, but see how Hawthorne rubs it in – “obscure” and “mysterious” and “enigma.”  Maybe it’s laid on a bit thick.

I remember the episode, as recounted in The American Notebooks, as being at least as good as the one in the novel.  More clinical, I think.  When I turned to the edition at hand, though, the 1896 reprint of the 1868 Passages from the American Note-books, I couldn’t find it.  Sophia Hawthorne suppressed it.  The entirety of Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny by Papa is also absent.  Help!

Hawthorne’s notebooks contain a great deal of his best writing.  I have read the Centenary editions (Ohio State University) of both The American Notebooks and The English Notebooks, and am eager to read The French and Italian Notebooks.  These are the complete notebooks, with modern critical editing and annotations.  It actually shocks me a little that as charming a book as Julian & Little Bunny was first published in 1972 embedded in one of these ungainly 1,000 page bricks.

I could easily recommend a fat one volume condensation of the Centenary notebooks, if such a book existed.  Library of America?  NYRB?  Hmmm?  As it is, there’s either the Centenary edition, or texts that omit anything Sophia Hawthorne did not want the world to know about her husband.  For example – this is from memory – she excised most of Hawthorne’s references to drinking or smoking cigars, which might be understandable if he were an alcoholic, but I’m talking about a drink and cigar after dinner while on vacation.  She snips out dismayed reactions to Liverpool poverty, a couple of lines about Herman Melville’s tormented atheism, and who knows what else.  She leaves in his complaints about museums, luckily for me.

It’s a paradox.  Sophia’s version is Not Enough.  The complete version is Too Much.  If somebody will solve this problem for me, I’d appreciate it.  I’ll buy a copy, and ask my library to buy another.  Thanks in advance.

Hawthorne the tourist

Odd how so many of the great mid-19th century American writers were so odd.  Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, and so on.  Nathaniel Hawthorne was merely odd imaginatively - merely.  He seems like a good father and husband, a socially friendly fellow, a more than competent bureaucrat.  His extensive notebooks make him seem genial and altogether normal, except for the fact that from time to time he tried to make a living as a professional writer, and, with his odd productions of genius, from time to time succeeded.

The English Notebooks covers 1853 to 1857, when Hawthorne worked at the American consulate in Liverpool.  He was not writing anything for publication, but kept a journal that amounts to 500 or 600 pages, most of it excellent, if soemtimes repetitive.  Hawthorne, and this was true his whole life, did almost all of his journal-writing while on vacation.  He writes little about his day to day activities at the consulate, unless something extraordinary occurs, but fills page after page with detailed descriptions of wherever he took the family on their weekend day trip, whatever was close, by train, to Liverpool.  Hawthorne is especially fond of Chester, which does sound quite nice.  When Herman Melville came to visit, on his way to the Holy Land, Hawthorne immediately took him to Chester.

Perhaps I do not find Hawthorne odd because I identify so closely with his constant worry that he is a bad tourist.  Museums he finds particularly deadly, yet he drags himself through them, again and again.  The visit to Walter Scott’s mansion that I mentioned yesterday also included a tour of Scott’s armory, which contained Rob Roy’s rifle and Claverhouse’s pistol and

a thousand other things, which I knew must be most curious, yet did not ask nor care about them, because so many curiosities drive one crazy, and fret one’s heart to death.  (The English Notebooks, May 10, 1856)

He is hardly any happier in the Louvre, where he writes about the visitors and the architecture, but almost nothing about the art, aside from a miniature of Benjamin Franklin.  Some of his anxiety may be more peculiar to a creative person than to the typical tourist, as in this reaction to the Louvre’s enormous collection of pencil drawings:

No doubt, the painters themselves had often a happiness in these off-hand sketches, which they never felt again in the same work, and which resulted in disappointment, after they had done their best.  (The French and Italian Notebooks, Jan. 10, 1858)

Hawthorne later cannibalized the English notebooks for an unfinished novel, and the Italian notebooks for The Marble Faun, but this is probably not anticipatory of Hawthorne’s feelings about his own off-hand sketches.  Probably.

Hawthorne is disappointed by Stonehenge, and baffled by picture galleries, but he does really fall in love with English cathedrals.  He is in Salisbury:

Cathedrals are almost the only things (if even those) that have quite filled out my ideal here in this old world; and cathedrals often make me miserable from my inadequacy to take them wholly in; and, above all, despise myself when I sit down to describe them. (The English Notebooks, June 17, 1858)

He takes to French food easily enough, and recommends its study.  He’s right, of course, but he had been living in England for four years – “sirloins, joints, joints, steaks, steaks, steaks, chops, chops, chops, chops!” (French and Italian, Jan. 10, 1858).  I have just now set foot in Rome with Hawthorne.  If I did not know his biography, I would feel anxious that the sheer bulk of Italian art treasures might literally kill him.  Perhaps the Italian food sustained him.  I’ve heard it is good.

No, I never shall be inspired to write romances! says Nathaniel Hawthorne

Here we have Nathaniel Hawthorne describing his 1856 visit to Walter Scott’s house.  Scott, at this point, had been dead for 24 years, and was the Greatest Novelist Ever.

The servant told me that I might sit down in this chair, for that Sir Walter sat there while writing his romances, "and perhaps," quoth the man, smiling, "you may catch some inspiration."  What a bitter word this would have been if he had known me to be a romance-writer!  "No, I never shall be inspired to write romances!" I answered, as if such an idea had never occurred to me.  I sat down, however.*

Hawthorne, at this point, had written, among other books, three novels and three volumes of stories.  The previous novel, The Blithedale Romance, was three years behind him; his last novel, The Marble Faun, was four years and one long trip to Italy ahead of him.

Yesterday I distinguished, vaguely, between novels and romances, just as Hawthorne and the servant did here.  No definition completely differentiates the two forms, in part because the modern novel has colonized and swallowed up earlier forms, absorbing them into what we call the novel.  Scott himself called the novel “a fictitious narrative… accommodated to the ordinary train of human events,” which ain’t bad but has its problems.**  He is trying to distinguish the novel as he understands it from Gothic fantasies or German fairy stories, all texts that, if long enough, whatever that means, we blithely label novels.  Still – “ordinary”?  Perhaps one could usefully drag in the word “realism,” but I fear that watery concept would not dispel but concentrate the fog.

Well, as a Modernist reading after a century of explicit genre-pushing experimentation, I don’t actually care what a novel is, and I happily call all sorts of strange things novels.  I’m trying to get at what Scott and Hawthorne were trying to get at.  A clue was provided to me by bibliographing nicole’s recent pieces about The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), in which she reminds me that Scott, like Hawthorne, wrote hybrid novels, blends of the ordinary and the extraordinary.  Lammermoor blends old legends, fairy curses, and prophecies of doom with meticulously researched costumes and customs.  Like The Blithedale Romance, Scott’s novel is a stagey book, with the author shuffling a handful of characters and settings, or, to borrow from film, sets.

Now, The Bride of Lammermoor is the most romance-like of the seven Scott novels I have read – Ivanhoe is close, I guess.  Lammermoor is that much closer to Lancelot wandering through the woods in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) or the nobles disguised as shepherds in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1593, more or less) than to Don Quixote or Clarissa.  How much closer?  Uh, you know, that much.  None of this is clear-cut.

Here’s one way I think of the difference – no, a way I imagine the difference.  Every piece of fiction has some sort of complicated relationship with the actual world.  Some texts earnestly mimic the real world, some playfully mock it.  Romances create stronger boundaries between the book’s world and the real world.  A more typical Scott novel, Waverley (1814), say, by using actual historical events and personages, interweaves itself with the real world, while The Bride of Lammermoor is somehow more sealed off from it.  Hawthorne deceptively writes “about” Puritans or Brook Farm, but his novels and stories are hermetic fantasies.  Like I said, this is an imaginative view.  Or – what are some harsher words? – vague, unformed, fallacious, wrong.

* From the long May 10, 1856 entry, Passages from the English Note-books, 1870.

** I found the quotation, ellipses and all, in “Novel, rise of the”, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 5th edition, ed. Margaret Drabble, 1985.

A book with a sort of sluggish flow - an exhibition of a mechanical diorama - The Blithedale Romance, not a novel

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels can be so frustrating, mainly because they are not novels.  Not quite.  The Scarlet Letter is subtitled “A Romance,” and so is The Marble Faun.  The Blithedale Romance puts the word in the title.  Hawthorne is not exactly hiding the fact that he is writing something other than this new-fangled “novel” contraption, that he is looking back at earlier models of prose fiction, and that his books have as much in common with The Fairie Queen or Malory’s Morte d’Arthur as with Charles Dickens or Jane Austen.

I haven’t read The Marble Faun yet, but now that I have read the results of Hawthorne’s most amazing burst of creativity, the one that produced The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of Seven Gables (1851), and The Blithedale Romance (1852), as well as the two children’s books I mentioned yesterday (and also, come to think of it, the 1851 summer journal that is Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny by Papa), my conclusion is that Hawthorne is at his best when he is least novelistic, that the weakest parts of his books are the most novel-like.

His characters, the few he uses, are static and emblematic, and his setting or frame is constrained – tiny, even.  The books consist of a small number of grand scenes, often fantastic pieces of writing that leave me a bit awestruck, held together my more ordinary writing that is little more than novelistic adhesive.  In The Scarlet Letter, the big scenes seem huge, and the connective tissue minimal, while the later novels feel more gristly.

Reading The Blithedale Romance finally helped me see the theatricality of Hawthorne’s novels.  The Blithedale Romance is particularly packed with performances and costumes.  The utopian community at the center of the novel is itself like a play, with the poets and intellectuals playing the role of farmer.  I wonder where Hawthorne gets this.  From Shakespeare, maybe?  In his notebooks, I don’t remember much interest in the actual theater.

It’s not that the great scenes are themselves like something from the stage (although the center of The Scarlet Letter, the Dimmesdale’s vigil in Chapter 12, actually takes place on a stage).  The extraordinary “Governor Pyncheon” chapter from The House of Seven Gables depends on a particular sense of the passage of time that would be impossible to imitate in a play.  What might be my favorite scene in The Blithedale Romance has a similar static structure.

It’s Chapter 17, “The Hotel.”  The narrator has left the utopian farm and is sitting in a hotel room, where, for an entire chapter, he does nothing.  Or close to it – “The gradual waste of my cigar accomplished itself with an easy and gentle expenditure of breath.”  He also fails to read a novel, a book which was “of the dullest, yet had a sort of sluggish flow, like that of a stream in which your boat is as often aground as afloat.”  I don’t think he’s describing his own book.  Otherwise, the narrator sits, looks out the window, and listens, pausing to “enjoy the moral sillabub until quite dissolved away.”*

He hears the guests and the kitchen clatter and clocks and fire bells.  “A company of the city soldiery, with a full military band, marched in front of the hotel, invisible to me, but stirringly audible both by its foot-tramp and the clangor of its instruments.”  And, most weirdly:

In some public hall, not a great way off, there seemed to be an exhibition of a mechanical diorama; for three times during the day occurred a repetition of obstreperous music, winding up with the rattle of imitative cannon and musketry, and a huge final explosion.  Then ensued the applause of the spectators, with clap of hands and thump of sticks, and the energetic pounding of their heels.

Hawthorne’s own stories often remind me of the exhibition of a mechanical diorama.  In “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844), the culmination of the artist’s life is the creation of a delicate mechanical butterfly.  I’m not sure that the novel is really meant to contain mechanical butterflies, and I fear I sometimes crush them between the pages.  But Hawthorne’s novels are not really novels, so it’s all right.

* Maybe I’ll make sillabub for Thanksgiving.  Or syllabub, or sabayon, or zabaglione – lemon sillabub, probably, rather than moral sillabub.

The effect is like bedaubing a marble statue with paint - Hawthorne meddles with classical myths

Since I ended last week with a cutesy 19th century sex joke, it is only appropriate that I begin this week with another, this time from a book for children.

So King Cadmus dwelt in the palace, with his new friend Harmonia, and found a great deal of comfort in his magnificent abode, but would doubtless have found as much, if not more, in the humblest cottage by the wayside.  Before many years went by, there was a group of rosy little children (but how they came thither has always been a mystery to me) sporting in the great hall, and on the marble steps of the palace, and running joyfully to meet King Cadmus when affairs of state left him at leisure to play with them. (1381)

It’s between the parentheses. The joke. Look, I didn’t say it was a great joke. It's just unexpected. 

The source of that passage is the story “The Dragon’s Teeth” from Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys (1853) by Nathaniel Hawthorne, his second collection of Greek myths adapted for children.  I’m not entirely sure why I read it, or its predecessor A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1852).  No, I do know.  The neurotic satisfaction of completeness.  What I don’t know is why I do not more actively combat my neuroses.  The two short kiddie books fill out the valuable Library of America Tales and Sketches of Hawthorne, which would be almost 1,200 pages without them, plenty long, but what’s another 300 pages on top of that heap.

If I had read these books as a child, I suspect I would have loved them, but I read lots of mythological stories, so I won't vouch for any other child's response.  I almost wonder if I did read some of these - a phrase or image here and there nagged at me - but who knows.  At their worst, Hawthorne makes some profound tales twee and trivial; at his best, he keeps the essence of the original while cleverly shaving off some of the less savory parts.  The first book, The Wonder Book, has a frame in which children, and a skeptical adult, comment on the stories:

"Eustace," remarked Mr. Pringle, after some deliberation, "I find it impossible to express such an opinion of this story as will be likely to gratify, in the smallest degree, your pride of authorship.  Pray let me advise you never more to meddle with a classical myth.  Your imagination is altogether Gothic, and will inevitably Gothicize everything that you touch.  The effect is like bedaubing a marble statue with paint.” (1254)

If I understand the current ideas about Greek statuary correctly, that last complaint has become doubly ironic.

Two good reasons for an adult to look at these stories.  First, The Wonder Book is part of the background of the delightful Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny by Papa, recommended to anyone, anywhere.  Second, just skip to the last two pages of The Wonder Book, where the inventor of the stories mounts Pegasus to visit Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes and Herman Melville, “shaping out the gigantic conception of his ‘White Whale’” (1301), before flying to Boston to have Ticknor & Co. publish A Wonder Book and becoming one of “the lights of the age,” a process that will take "about five months."

"Poor boy!" said Primrose, half aside. "What a disappointment awaits him!" (1302)

Page numbers from that Library of America book.

The Wuthering Expectations Best of 2009

Three extra-large Humiliations were crossed off my list: Walden, The Scarlet Letter, and The Flowers of Evil, all highly rewarding.  Let's set those aside, though. 

Some fleeting highlights:

1. Thoreau recommends the "rich sweet cider" of the frozen-thawed apple.  "Your jaws are the cider-press."  ("Wild Apples").

2.  Charles Baudelaire smashes an itinerant glass saleman's backback of samples with a flower pot, just to hear the smash ("as of lightning striking a crystal palace"), to introduce some beauty into this ugly world of ours. "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!"  (Paris Spleen, "The Bad Glazier").

3. We spend eighteen hours or so sitting next to Judge Pyncheon.  Hawthorne tells us about the Judge's big day.  They're going to nominate him for Governor!  Why won't Judge Pyncheon move?  "Rise up, Judge Pyncheon!" (Chapter 18 of Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables).

4. A Kazakh railroad worker battles his prize bull camel.  We gaze upon a sturgeon; the sturgeon gazes upon us.  (Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years).

5.  All that Yiddish literature, so much, so good.  The futile attempt of I. L. Peretz's poor student to come up with a story that's not about the blood libel. ("Stories").  Hodl's farewell to her father, Tevye the Dairyman.  "Let's talk about something more cheerful.  Have you heard any news of the cholera in Odessa?" (Sholem Aleichem, "Hodl," Tevye the Dairyman).

6.  Arthur Hugh Clough can't get milk for his coffee.   ("Amours de Voyage").

7.  Cranford, Silas Marner, Villette.  Three perfect novels, allowing for some variety in one's standards of perfection.  The methods varied, too: Eliot compressed, Gaskell tied up loose ends, and Brontë pushed, hard.  If I end up marvelling more at Villette, it's because it is so complex, and because after just a bit of looking at secondary souces I have developed the crackpot notion that I possess an original idea about the novel.  Forthcoming in 2010, if I can bring myself to do the work, which I mightn't.

8.  The moment in Flaubert's "A Simple Heart" when they put the stuffed parrot - no, you'll have to go see for yourself.  Is this story the best thing Flaubert ever wrote?  Talk about perfection.

I just want to keep going.  The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan.  Edouard Mörike's  Mozart's Journey to Prague.  Gérard de Nerval's Sylvie.  "The benediction of the air."  John Galt!

I should skip this last part.  No, it's eating at me, since I just read it.  Worst of the year:  the second half of A Study in Scarlet (1887), the first Sherlock Holmes novel.  The Holmes-free Utah section is so, so bad, an undramatic jangle of clichés.  It's not only terribly written on its own, but once we return to Holmes, its dreadfulness has somehow even soaked into Watson's journal, tainting the rest of the novel.  The first half was all right!

The up-to-date technogeek Nathaniel Hawthorne

I currently credit Nathaniel Hawthorne with two literary first uses. His 1843 sketch "The Old Apple-Dealer" is, to my knowledge, the first literary mention of the railroad, while the 1851 The House of the Seven Gables introduces photography to literature via a daguerreotypist.

Come to think of it, there's another - "The Old Apple-Dealer" is merely set in a railroad station. The first literary train ride is from just slightly later in 1843, in "The Celestial Railroad," Hawthorne's clever update of The Pilgrim's Progress. Turns out you can't just ride the train to Heaven.

Maybe I should mention that I don't actually quite exactly think these works are really the first mentions of these subjects in all of fiction, not to mention poetry, not to mention other belletristic essays and whatnot. The world, it is big. But if you know of an earlier candidate, please put it in the comments. If it's a daguerreotypist or other photographer, earlier or later, please add it to Terry Vertigo's bibliography of fictional photographers, as well. He's got a 100 year gap between Hawthorne and Anthony Powell that needs filling.

And I have a larger point, which is that I never think of Nathaniel Hawthorne as Mr. Up-to-the-minute, keen observer of what's new and now. Dickens and Balzac, for example, those are the eagle-eyed journalists of the big picture. But Dickens doesn't put a character on a train until Chapter 20 of Dombey and Son, published in 1846 or 1847, (oops, untrue - see correction below)* and his first mention of the subject is earlier in the same novel. Oddly, Dickens has to have someone build the railroad, in Chapter 6, before any of his characters can ride on it, an unusually literal way of constructing a fictional world. See nicole's post here for a really fine passage from that chapter.

I don't remember Balzac using the word "railroad" until Cousin Bette, 1846, and then it always has the word "bond" after it. The context is always investing. No one actually sets foot on a train. Maybe somewhere in the sixty plus installments of The Human Comedy I have not read there is a daguerreotypist or a train ride or two, maybe even one earlier than Hawthorne's. Although railroad construction started late in France for various reasons, not until 1842 on any significant scale, so Hawthorne probably trumps Balzac there.

The House of the Seven Gables actually devotes a paragraph to the issue of technological novelties. Clifford has been in prison for decades, so everything is new to him:

"As regarded novelties (among which cabs and omnibuses were to be reckoned), his mind appeared to have lost its proper gripe and retentiveness. Twice or thrice, for example, during the sunny hours of the day, a water-cart went along by the Pyncheon House, leaving a broad wake of moistened earth, instead of the white dust that had risen at a lady's lightest footfall; it was like a summer shower, which the city authorities had caught and tamed, and compelled it into the commonest routine of their convenience. With the water-cart Clifford could never grow familiar; it always affected him with just the same surprise as at first." (Ch. XI)

This is followed by a bit about, yes, railroads, "the obstreperous howl of the steam-devil." Much of Hawthorne's work, much of his imaginative life, takes place in the colonial history of New England. But there's this other side of Hawthorne that didn't fit my image of him.

* UPDATE: I forgot about the short American train ride in Martin Chuzzlewit, Chapter 21, another fine scene for the reader with a taste for Dickens' America fantasia. This chapter came out in serial form in September 1843, so it's quite close to Hawthorne. But "The Old Apple-Dealer" was published in January 1843, and "The Celestial Railroad" in May 1843. Check my work here. Thank goodness my error didn't spoil my Dombey and Son joke. The Americans can build their own railroads; Dickens has to build the English ones himself.

Back from Salem - now what?

I'm back from a short trip to Salem and Boston. Funny that zhiv was there a day or two ahead of me. Salem has two major Nathaniel Hawthorne landmarks, the Custom House, featured in the introduction to The Scarlet Letter, and an odd 17th century mansion the exterior of which Hawthorne borrowed for The House of the Seven Gables. Whoever owns the House of Seven Gables also owns Hawthorne's childhood home. Hawthorne's wife, Sophia Peabody, came from an important Salem family.


So I suppose I should have picked up a lot of important insights into Hawthorne's work. But I did not actually quite make it inside of any of those buildings. I walked by them. I saw the 1840 portrait of Hawthorne in the Peabody Essex Museum. The Salem Maritime National Historic Site, which owns the Custom House, was instructive. Salem was really very nice. Very pleasant. But ma femme et moi are not the most, let's say, aggressive tourists. We stroll, and sit in coffee shops, then see if there's time left for anything else before dinner.

I did learn a fair amount about The House of the Seven Gables through the method of reading it, although I don't have much to say about it here. It didn't seem to be quite the complete conception that I saw in The Scarlet Letter, although I'm reserving judgment on that. And it does have, among its many felicities, the unbelievable Chapter XVIII, "Governor Pyncheon," in which we and the narrator stand vigil beside a corpse for eighteen hours or so. It's a tour de force, even show-offy, a display of writerly facility that rivals anything in his earlier work. I kind of knew about the main set-pieces of The Scarlet Letter, but I had no idea "Governor Pyncheon" existed. What a treat.

I had planned to write about the mysterious Gérard de Nerval all this week, but I'm not sure I have the fortitude at the moment, between the draining travel, and that giant pile of steamed clams at The Barnacle in Marblehead, and the genuine Italian wedding that was the point of the whole trip. Nerval's work, some of it, is so difficult:

The Thirteenth comes back... is again the first,
And always the only one - or the only time:
Are you then queen, O you! the first or last?
You, the one or last lover, are you king?...

Yikes. That's the first stanza of the sonnet "Artemis," one of The Chimeras, as translated by Peter Jay. More of that next week, or never. The rest of this week: I have no idea.

In Salem for a few days, plus a request regarding sympathetic characters

I'll be in Salem and other points near Boston for a few days. Perhaps I'll see the House of Seven Gables in the flesh. Or the wood, I guess. Anyway, no posting tomorrow.

A commenter inspired me to think a little more about the issue of sympathetic characters. Maybe I should actually say at some point why I don't have much use for them. So I'll think about that.

But what about the other side? Does anybody know of any full-throated defenses of sympathetic characters? Blog posts, articles, books, whatever? What I mean is, what is the aesthetic defense of the sympathetic character.

One useful approach is via the history of the novel, especially the rise of the sentimental novel, the discovery by writers of the use of the sympathetic character. There must also be ethical arguments. Would Wayne Booth be a useful place to look for this sort of thing?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. This is probably an overly ambitious project, but who knows.

But here the tale has surely lapsed into the improbable - Hawthorne's audacity

In Chapter XII of The Scarlet Letter, "The Minister's Vigil," Rev. Dimmesdale is afflicted by Poe's Imp of the Perverse, and mounts the pillory in the town square in order to purge his sins. He's in public, but not really, since it's the middle of the night and no one can see him.

Hester Prynne and her elf-child Pearl somehow find there way onto the platform as well, where they hold hands in a circle. Just as Dimmesdale tells the elf that they cannot actually appear in public together, that "the daylight of this world shall not see our meeting," a meteor appears "with the distinctness of mid-day." Lesson: do not mess with the elf-child.

Ignoring the "Custom-House" introduction, the meteor appears in the exact center of the novel. In the Library of America edition, at least, on the exact pages at the center (250-1).* A page later, Hawthorne goes too far, as Dimmesdale sees the meteor as "an immense letter, - the letter A, - marked out in lines of dull red light." It's Henry James who thought this went too far.

I wonder if an older Henry James still agreed. Isn't this just another turn of the screw, Hawthorne pushing his symbolic structure to its imaginative limits. Hawthorne does this again and again in The Scarlet Letter, for example in that incredible description of Pearl in the woods, which culminates with "A wolf, it is said--but here the tale has surely lapsed into the improbable--came up and smelt of Pearl's robe, and offered his savage head to be patted by her hand." (Ch. XVIII) Even the narrator thinks the wolf goes too far. But the author knows better, and leaves it in. That the narrator and author are the same person is merely a detail.

One can turn a screw to the point where the wood splits and is ruined. Still, one mark of greatness - I have seen this again and again - is an author taking that one extra step that a lesser writer fears. Too implausible, too corny. Too audacious.

* The Scarlet Letter is structured exactly - exactly - on Syd Field screenwriting principles. "The Minister's Vigil" is Plot Point 2, the meeting in the forest in Plot Point 3, and so on.

Why am I supposed to hate The Scarlet Letter?

I just finished The Scarlet Letter a couple of days ago. I'd never read it before. It turns out to be - what's the technical literary term? - awesome. Chapter XII, "The Minister's Vigil" - holy cow, what a piece of writing. Virtually nothing in Hawthorne's short fiction, almost entirely written before The Scarlet Letter, prepared me for the artistic quality of the best parts of this novel.

The impression I have picked up, here and there, is that this novel is much hated. Is this some lingering reaction to high school forced-feeding? I'm very glad, so so glad, that I was not assigned this book in high school. My understanding of fiction was a little narrow then. A little - to go back to my discussion of Gautier - utilitarian.

I was leafing through a book of snippets of essays on Hawthorne and came across a passage by Mark van Doren that I should have written down, since now I have to paraphrase it. Van Doren granted that The Scarlet Letter had some psychological acuteness and some symbolic resonance, but claimed that it is most valuable for Hawthorne's insightful understanding of Puritanism. Now, this strikes me as completely absurd, almost a crime against the notion of literature. The high school Amateur Reader might have agreed with van Doren, I'm afraid. I would have assumed that we were reading The Scarlet Letter because it complemented our 11th grade American history curriculum. It would help us learn about Puritans.

I might not have thought of it quite that way, but I did see fiction as a sort of sugar-coating to make the pill of useful historical information less bitter. Since I like useless - sorry, useful - historical information pills anyway, the Flintstones shape was not really necessary for me, but I would not have complained. I thought Moby-Dick worked very well as a way to learn about the whaling industry and 19th century sea-faring. And I was right about that, but, a little narrow, huh?

I also knew that there was such a thing as escapist literature, fantasy literature, The Hobbit and The Phantom Tollbooth and whatnot, very enjoyable. What a revelation, some years later, to understand that every novel is a fantasy novel. Different novels intersect with the actual world in different ways, and those intersections are often of great interest. But they're all imaginative creations. Even the parts that aren't made up are made up. And this is all aside from the fact that The Scarlet Letter features a witch, a vampire, and an elf-child.

Henry James, from his little book Hawthorne (1879):

"The faults of the book are, to my sense, a want of reality and an abuse of the fanciful element--of a certain superficial symbolism. The people strike me not as characters, but as representatives, very picturesquely arranged, of a single state of mind; and the interest of the story lies, not in them, but in the situation, which is insistently kept before us, with little progression, though with a great deal, as I have said, of a certain stable variation; and to which they, out of their reality, contribute little that helps it to live and move." (Ch. 5)

I would say that the second sentence is exactly right, while the first is more a matter of artistic judgment. For me, the novel has no more reality than it requires, and superficial symbolism is one of Hawthorne's primary subjects, what the book is actually about.

This is a short week for me, due to some coincidentally Hawthorne-related travel, so I won't spend more than another day on The Scarlet Letter. In the meantime, please, fill me in. What am I missing?

Hawthorne's annual short story productivity - converting what was earthly, to spiritual gold

My favorite Hawthorne story is "The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844), an allegory about Hawthorne's own creative life. An inventor tries to create some sort of device of perfect beauty. He fails, gives up, tries again, fails, gives up, tries again. In the end, he succeeds, but not before surrendering all ambition and desire for approval. His creativity becomes sufficient in itself.

My perception is that Hawthorne got better over time. Better at what? Descriptive passages, characterization, fleshing out his fictional world. Not necessarily better at handling ideas or concepts. His conceptual germs were still hit or miss. I think that in the first part of his career, Hawthorne mistook his talents. "The Artist of the Beautiful" is partly about his discovery of the nature of his own creativity. I don't want to get into this more now - see the latest Malcolm Gladwell piece in The New Yorker.

The artist in the story works in bursts and then stalls out for a while, just like Nathaniel Hawthorne. Look, I made a graph of the publication of Hawthorne's short stories over time:



Let's see, what's going on here. Hawthorne published a small mountain of stories from 1835 to 1838, including some famous ones like "Young Goodman Brown." From 1840 to 1841, he published some children's books and lived at Brook Farm for eight months. In 1842, Hawthorne got married and moved to the Old Manse (pictured) in Concord. Marriage, or Thoreau, or genteel poverty, got him writing stories again.

Next, he decides he needs to work for a living. He publishes nothing, writes almost nothing, for three years. Then he writes and publishes three novels in rapid succession (the first one, The Scarlet Letter (1850) is pictured), along with a few more stories and a couple more children's books. Then nothing, again, for five years. No more short stories, ever.

Since it's Halloween, I also put Hawthorne's very last short story, "Feathertop" (1852), on the graph, about a pumpkin-headed scarecrow who comes to life. It's one of his best, and is good Halloween reading.