In Hawthorne's Shadow: American Romance from Melville to Mailer
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University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in English, North America English Language and Literature 1985 In Hawthorne's Shadow: American Romance from Melville to Mailer Samuel Chase Coale Wheaton College - Norton Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Coale, Samuel Chase, "In Hawthorne's Shadow: American Romance from Melville to Mailer" (1985). Literature in English, North America. 22. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/22 IN HAWTHORNE'S SHADOW This page intentionally left blank ____IN _ HAWTHORNE'S SHADOW AMERICAN ROMANCE FROM MELVILLE TO MAILER Samuel Chase Coale THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Copyright © 1985 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Sales OffICes: Lexington, Kentucky 40506-0024 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Coale, Samuel. In Hawthorne's shadow. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. American fiction-History and criticism. 2. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864-In£luence. 3. Romanticism-United States. I. Title. PS374.H35C6 1985 813'.009'145 84-25792 ISBN 978-0-8131-5174-8 CONTENTS Preface Vll 1. Hawthorne's Shadow 1 2. Melville to Mailer: Manichean Manacles 22 3. Harold Frederic: Naturalism as Romantic Snarl 46 4. Faulkner, McCullers, O'Connor, Styron: The Shadow on the South 63 5. John Cheever: Suburban Romancer 102 6. John Updike: The Beauty of Duality 123 7. John Gardner: Slaying the Dragon 147 8. Joyce Carol Oates: Contending Spirits 161 9. Joan Didion: Witnessing the Abyss 180 10. Hawthorne and the Sixties: Careening on the Utmost Verge 203 Notes 218 Primary Sources 230 Bibliographical Essay 233 Index 237 To Gray and Sammy "A Flood of Sunshine" PREFACE HOW does one become obsessed or at the very least fascinated with cer tain writers and certain fictions? For me it began with a game of cards in my grandmother's green-gabled house in New Haven when I was a child. The game was "Authors," and I remember gazing fixedly at a certain dark and solemn face with dark mustache and darker eyes, staring back at me from the face of the card. Beneath the face was written, "Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter." I tried to imagine how a letter that you would mail could possibly be scarlet, unless ofcourse it was written in blood. I never forgot that brooding face. A native New Englander, I began picking up bits and pieces about Hawthorne and his work through school. When I first read The Scarlet Letter (as a junior in high school?) I found it cumbersome, fascinating, and grim-and loved it. At Trinity College in Hartford, Paul Smith led me through its grim corridors again. But it was Hyatt Waggoner at Brown University, where I arrived in 1965 as a naive and petrified graduate stu dent (I'd applied to other graduate and law schools, attended a law class, hated it, spotted the Brown American Civilization flier pinned to the wall outside the men's room in the bowels of the Trinity English Depart ment, and applied) who confirmed Hawthorne's mastery of style and the dark vision, which I already believed in. The darkness seems to be always with me: Halloween superstitions, autumn nights in Vermont towns, decaying New England seaports, lofty old houses. Hyatt Waggoner con vinced me of the interpenetration of literature and life, of the personal commitment one must make to both in order to make each worthwhile. That's the most ofit. I've been writing this book, in my head at least, for years: bits and pieces here and there, articles on Kosinski, Frost, Faulk ner played off against the unrelenting shadow of our first great American romancer. And if Hawthorne was that, then certainly some of his ideas and his literary form could be extended down to our own day, like the shadow of the past, into contemporary American fiction, however fur tive, however fugitive. Conversations with writers as disperate as John VIl1 IN HAWTHORNE'S SHADOW Cheever and Anthony Burgess contributed to my pursuit, along with hints from John Gardner and Updike's 1979 address at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I hope to show that American romance is far more than a mere disguise for traditional allegory, as some critics of the term have suggested, that it embodies most of the great cultural and moral questions of American society. Romance also reveals the conflicts between the American no tions of history and myth that continue to plague us. In any case it has been both delightful and despairing work-Manichean to the end! And even now the writing hasn't eradicated that dark face on that dark card of more than thirty years ago. It continues to burn red hot, and I'll pur sue it still. Without the time to write, nothing could be written. Therefore I'm very grateful for my Fellowship for College Teachers, 1981-1982, from the National Endowment for the Humanities, along with my spring sab batical from Wheaton College in 1984 and the Andrew W. Mellon Grant Fellowship for the Wheaton College Faculty Development Program, ad ministered by Wheaton, for September through December 1981. Without the boost of such editors as James Dean Young, Arlin Turner, Robert G. Collins, Robert A. Morace, and Kathryn Van Spanckeren, who were responsible for the publication of articles on Joan Didion, William Styron, Harold Frederic and Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Cheever, and John Gardner, I might not have been able to sustain the "long haul" of getting this book written. I want to thank them, their journals, and their publishers (which include Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, American Literature, G. K. Hall, and Southern Illinois University Press) for per mission to reprint in revised form those earlier articles. And I would also like to thank Essays in Literature and The Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal for publishing my articles on The Marble Faun and Hawthorne's American Notebooks. Neal Smith and Tom Woodson at Ohio State University were both helpful and generous when I flew to Columbus to examine Hawthorne's letters in June 1982. Every morning in that third-floor office hidden away in the Ohio State University Library, they would help me sort out notes, addenda, references, and biographical information. At all times they were enthusiastic and a delight to be with. Without the speedy and forever cheerful typing of Alice Peterson at Preface IX Wheaton, none of this would ever have seen the light of day but would have remained forever in Hawthorne's shadow. She transferred all my paragraphs and chapters and footnotes onto the computer as quickly as I supplied them from my ancient portable typewriter-not even electric! at home. And I should mention Gray Coale, who helped insulate me from the rest of the world so that my own obsessions and ideas could both fester and flower. And at day's end, as I staggered out of my study, she would engineer sweet reunions between us, son Sam, Mavro the black lab, and Tanqueray. Such devotion cannot go unrewarded. And when I returned from a jaunt in India with Trinity Square Repertory Company, Gray presented me with a complete new study, designed by friend Bob Pierce. Now there's a vote of confidence! And one final sweeping "thank you" to so many of my friends with whom I talked and debated, to whom I wrote and sent bits and pieces of ideas and plans: to Hyatt Waggoner, who suggested what I should do in arranging the final manuscript (as always his prophecies proved cor rect); to poet-playwright Jim Schevill, critic Robert Morace, poet Craig Challender; to George Hunt, who invited me to speak on Cheever and Hawthorne at LeMoyne College in Syracuse and to talk again with Cheever during his reading and visit there; to Curtis Dahl, Ed Briggs, Toni Oliviero, and Dick Pearce at Wheaton; to members ofUSIA, who allowed me to travel to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Pakistan, and Sweden to tryout my ideas and thoughts; to Maurice Dolbier, literary editor of the Provi dence Journal, who helped me immensely, in writing book reviews, to change my style from the stolid gray prose ofgraduate school to the livelier, more fluid writing (I hope) of personal commitment and enthusiasm; to the students 1 met in Poland and Czechoslovakia, to Andrzej and Iva and Jurek; to all these and more, I am forever grateful, and if 1 have forgotten anyone-and I'm certain I have over the many years of this project-I hope their encouragement and interest in this book will re main undaunted. The shadow lingers, but 1 hope I've grappled with a vital part of it and its long reaches. That has given me the most pleasure. This page intentionally left blank ONE Hawthorne's Shadow "THERE is a fund of evil in every human heart, which may remain la tent, perhaps through the whole of life; but circumstances may arouse it to activity."1 The vision of that heart of darkness, which Nathaniel Hawthorne described in 1836, would never change in his subsequent fic tion.