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THE MIRRORS OF BIOGRAPHY,THE MIRRORS OF FICTION: HENRY JAMES’ HAWTHORNE

In 1883, when I was writing a biography of my father, I called on Melville in a quiet side-street in New York, where he was living almost alone. He greeted me kindly, with a low voice and restrained manner; he seemed nervous, and every few minutes would rise to open and then shut again the window opening on the yard. At first he was disinclined to talk; but finally he said several interesting things, among which the most remarkable was that he was convinced Hawthorne had all his life concealed some great secret, which would, were it known, explain all the mysteries of his career. Julian Hawthorne, “ Hawthorne at Lenox”1

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and make it one’s own. Henry James, Preface, What Maisie Knew 2

In his American Notebooks for 1836, Nathaniel Hawthorne has an entry whose suggestion of his life’s seclusion, and essential privacy, might, even now, serve as a caution to would-be biographers. Listing possible storylines, as became his custom, he writes: “A recluse, like myself, or a prisoner, to measure time by the progress of sunshine

1 Julian Hawthorne, “Hawthorne at Lenox”, Booklover’s Weekly, 30 December 1901: reprinted in The Melville Log, ed. Jay Leyda, NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1951, II, 782. See also Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Circle, NY and London: Harper and Brothers, 1903, 32-3. 2 Henry James, Preface to What Maisie Knew, In the Cage, The Pupil, NY: Scribner’s, 1908, xix. 104 Gothic to Multicultural through his chamber.” 3 It is the “like myself” that lays down the marker. For whether out of his own nineteenth century, or of a later date – B.F. Traven, J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon come to mind – few American literary figures can have made the seclusion he was born to, and the self-guardedness that came in its wake, quite so insistently their insignia, an almost all-pervading taste for keeping the self hidden from the inquiry of others. Melville may or may not have had it right in speculating to Julian Hawthorne about his father’s concealment of “some great secret”, but the aptness of the idea is striking: a Hawthorne for ever distanced, self-masked, not unlike his own fictional creations from Hester Prynne to Zenobia, Arthur Dimmesdale to Ethan Brand.4 The persistence of his feeling on this score can be gauged from a later jotting in the American Notebooks for August 1851, after a visit to the Shaker village of Hancock, Massachusetts. He excoriates as “hateful and disgusting” the Shakers’ “utter and systematic lack of privacy; their close junction of man with man, and supervision of one man over another”.5 This will to privacy, if not always as vehemently expressed as in the Shaker episode, held twice-over. In life, it points to the reclusive New Englander who dwelt deep and ancestrally in, or around, Salem, Massachusetts (most notably from 1825 to 1837 in the “chamber under the eaves” at house mother’s house), before his blissful marriage to Sophia Peabody in 1842 and the family’s later residences in England and Italy. In art, it speaks to the tactics of indirection, the truly singular obliquity, of his fiction -- foremost The Scarlet Letter as his best-known work but no less so his other principal romances and stories. In life, and despite Hawthorne’s canonical rise to fame or even the spate of modern biography, the “Inmost Me”, as he invokes it in “The Custom-House”, remains no doubt infinitely to his posthumous satisfaction a kind of bequeathed knot or riddle.6

3 Nathaniel Hawthorne, American Notebooks, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1972, VIII, 24. 4 Melville’s relationship with Hawthorne has long been a major source of speculation in itself. Apart from “Hawthorne and His Mosses” his part in the encounter includes the effusive letters of 1850-51, the dedication of Moby-Dick to Hawthorne, the portrait of Vine in his verse-epic, Clarel, and the late poem “Monody”. 5 Hawthorne, American Notebooks, VIII, 465. 6 Key modern biographies include Newton Arvin, Hawthorne, Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1929; Robert Cantwell, Nathaniel Hawthorne: The American Years, NY: