A few weeks ago I happened to pick up another biography: Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein by Brenda Wineapple. Now, about one-third of the way through, I realize that the first third of the book could have been subtitled "The Boston (or Harvard) Years." This first third of the book dovetails nicely with Richardson's William James, who in fact was one of Gertrude Stein's professors. She eventually received a "B" from his one semester course that she took. She did "A" work in the first half of the semester, but "C" work during the latter half, during the opera season.I might be back in a Boston/Harvard/Salem phase with discovering this new biography. I've read the first two chapters and the book is delightful. It's a big book and one I can enjoy for a few weeks, I suppose.
The Biography
Chapter One: Prison Door -- Introductory: the story for Nathaniel and Sophia's three children -- Una (insane), Julian (ne'er do well; ends up in prison; redeems himself); and Rose (a saint).
Chapter Two: Home: the story of Salem, Massachusetts and Nathaniel's forefathers.
Chapter Three: The Forest of Arden: Ebe (Elizabeth) and Nathaniel, from the time he was born until his age of 16; his father died in Sumatra when Nathaniel was four. Many place names in Massachusetts and Maine noted. Paternal grandparent Manning (Maine and Massachusetts) plays prominent role in this chapter. Ebe was very, very bright; self-taught. Nathaniel, not surprising, was a voracious reader; wanted to be a sailor like his dad, before he turned to writing.
Chapter Four: The Era of Good Feelings: college; frittered away his talents. Longfellow gave the commencement speech. Pierce, a close friend, would become the 14th president of the United States (Bowdoin College, in Maine).
Chapter Five: That Dream of Undying Fame: a perfectionist; burned his first manuscripts; headed to Salem after graduation still vague on a career; attended lectures at the Maine Medical School during his senior year; had devoured John Neals' books while in college; Neal was the first to praise Edgar Allen Poe; Neal wanted more American writers, not British writers; added a "w" to Hathorne in 1827, or thereabouts; perhaps to dissociate himself from his family;
Grandmother Manning dies in December, 1826; huge estate divided; Hawthorne earned a small annuity; used cash to pay Boston publishers Marsh and Capen $100 to publish his first novel, Fanshawe: A Tale.
Frustrated with not knowing what to do with his life.
Wrote short stories based on true events in New England, particularly Maine.
During the hot summers, he and his sisters often visited relatives in Newburyport, or ambled over the hard sand at Nahant.
Chapter Six: Storyteller
Begins to write historical fiction; considered quite good in retrospect; set against the colonial-period politics int eh 1730s, 1760s, and 1770s.
Provincial Tales
Chapter Seven: Mr Wakefield
"Wakefield" -- a creepy story
"Hawthorne's best stories penetrate the secret horrors of ordinary life, those interstices in the general routine where suddenly something or someone shifts out of place, changing everything.
1836: Hawthorne now a denizen of Boston; Boston -- a prosperous waterfront; Quincy Market mentioned; "Boston women were pretty, their morals good: an unusual combination, said Franklin Pierce."
Hawthorne was now the editor of a monthly called the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge; much of it short biographies of statesmen like George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, etc. Other than himself, the only other writer was his sister, Ebe
Hawthorne gook room and board at Thomas green Fessenden's house at 53 Hancock Street; but disliked Boston.
The company went bankrupt; no reason for Hawthorne to remain in Boston; back to Salem.
Horatio Bridge finances his first collection of eighteen stories; published by the American Stationers' Company on March 6, 1837. ... "finest forays into the macabre..." meditative sketches; humorous stories. Sold for a dollar and titled Twice-Told Tales after the lines from Shakespeare's King John, "Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale,/Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man." All eighteen had been published before and selected, said Hawthorne, as "best worth offering to the public a second time."
To publicize it, sent a copy to his former classmate Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who wrote a review.
Franklin Pierce, his own star rising, wants desperately to do something for his friend, Hawthorne. Finances a South Seas expedition for Hawthorne, who always yearned to go to sea.
His first love: Mary Crowninshield Silsbee Sparks.
The South Sea expedition went to Charles Wilkes, not Hawthorne.
Hawthorne returns to Salem, again. Puts marriage plans on hold.
Chapter Eight: The Wedding Knell
"Her charity began at home and ended nowhere, her credulity outran her charity, and by the of her long life she knew less about people's motives than her traffic in them might suggest: so Henry James characterized Elizabeth Palmer Peabody in his 1886 novel The Bostonians, callingher Miss Birdseye and giving her a squint. One could see Peabody in those days, riding a Boston streetcar, hair disheveled, spectacles crooked, bonnet cockeyed, and her beaming face upturned. A garrulous commitment to what she called 'the joy of the Ideal' made her insufferable to many -- this she readily admitted -- but she never yielded her principles or her self-respect. At eighty-two she was the sole survivor of her family, its oldest chronicler, and still the benevolent booster of causes, one of which happened to be her brother-in-law, Nathaniel Hawthorne."
How Elizabeth Peabody and Hawthorne first met is not known. Silsbee and Hawthorne were probably still a couple when Peabody met the author. It's possible Peabody's meddling interrupted/ruined the affair.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," Ralph Emerson -- p. 102.
Elizabeth Peabody sought (and succeeded in finding) the identity of the author of Twice-Told Tales.
Hawthorne enters the Peabody world.
The story of Elizabeth Peabody, Bronson Alcott's Boston's progressive Temple School. Elizabeth was Alcott's assistant. Worked tirelessly for no pay; published a book about the unconventional school in 1835; a warehouse fire destroyed all the copies; lost any profit she might have gained. The appearance of handsome Nathaniel Hawthorne rekindled Elizabeth's considerable zest for uncommon projects and unusual people. And that he now wanted to write a children's book was nothing she'd like better.
The story of Horace Mann, secretary of Massachusetts' new board of education about a series of children's books.
A graphic of the Peabody family in 1835: Mrs Elizabeth Peabody; Dr Nathaniel Peabody; Elizabeth and Nathaniel Peabody; George, Sophia, Mary, and Wellington Peabody.
West Newton, Massachusetts, ten miles west of Boston, mentioned, p. 112.
Chapter Nine: The Sister Years
the story of the Peabody sisters, and the family
before the revolution, grandfather Palmer very influential and wealthy
General Joseph Palmer, the grandfather, cultivated the enmity of John Hancock, who confiscated the Palmer home, Friendship Hall, after the Revolution and "sent the Palmers packing"
Elizabeth Palmer (daughter of the disgraced general) married Nathaniel Peabody, the son of an unlettered New England farm, she took refuge in his ancestry, his forebears having touched American soil in 1635
the couple's first child, Elizabeth, born in 1804, the same year as Nathaniel Hawthorne
Mary: 1806
Sophia: 1809
then came the boys: Nathaniel, 1811; George, 1813; Wellington, 1815 (named after the English victory at Waterloo)
1819: last child, a daughter, Catherine, lived only 7 weeks
sons did badly; two died early; all failures
mother and daughters did very, very well
Mary: pretty; Elizabeth: smart; Sophia: neither, resented both her older sisters, takes up art
Peabody home: 53 Charter Street, Salem
Hawthorns and Peabody's close familes
the Silsbee-Peabody-Hawthorne triangle again told
Chapter 10: Romance of the Revenue Service
Mary Silsbee engaged; rumors of romantic connection between Elizabeth Peabody, Nathaniel
Sophia illustrates Nathaniel's stories
epistolary relationship between Nathaniel and Sophia -- he in Boston, she in Salem
Elizabeth spends time near Emerson in Concord, MA
political appointee, Nathaniel Hawthorne appointed inspectorship, Boston Custom House
detested his government job; pretended to like it; made lots of money
folks around him wondered if he was still writing
two more years of letter-writing between Sophia and Nathaniel, to test her resolve, apparently
Chapter 11: The World Found Out
1840.
An important chapter.
The engagement (Sophia and Nathaniel) continues.
Margaret Fuller, resident sibyl, organizes another series of "Conversations" for Boston women.
Their magazine, The Dial.
Whig Ploughman of Ohio, William Henry Harrison -- president.
Salem artist Charles Osgood paints Hawthorne's protrait.
Friends of Universal Reform pour into Boston's Chardon Street Chapel to dispute scriptural authority, debate the woman question, and damn the institution of slavery.
Elizabeth Peabody opens her foreign bookshop and lending library at 13 West Street, near Boston Common -- an area not quite residential; not quite commercial; area would become home for liberal Unitarian clergy, increasingly disaffected, who pondered intuition, self-culture, and perfection, the watchwords of a new faith born of German philosophic idealism and imported to America largely by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who spoke heresy in public; spoke at Harvard Divinity School and not invited back for 30 years
Chapter 12: Beautiful Enough
Sophia and Nathaniel marry; surprises Hawthorne's family; very angry with his "betrayal"
Move into the Old Manse, Concord, MA
Hawthorne earned reputation as a misfit; found an accomplice in Henry David Thoreau
Emerson's first wife dies; remarries; second wife Lydia (Lydian)
Emersons lived on dusty Lexington Road
Hawthorne an outcast in Concord; felt himself to be a failure
Sophia's first pregnancy ends in miscarriage
Chapter ends with birth of their first child, a baby girl they named Una, for Spenser's vision of purity
Chapter 13: Repatriation
Poor, penniless, evicted from their home in Concord
Return to Salem; back to Herbert Street
Nathaniel takes an upstairs room; Sophia and baby rent a room down below
Chapter 14: Salem Recidivus
Hawthorne appointed surveyor of the Salem Custom House; President Polk
Salary allowed for some luxuries
Sophia pregnant with second child
Continues to write
Texas admitted into the Union, December 1845; Polk sends Zachary Taylor into Mexico
Sophia's second child: 1846; baby boy, Julian, not named for almost six months
Moved into a bigger house on 14 Mall Street
More and more successful at writing
The origins of The Scarlet Letter
"Margaret Fuller, Una Hawthorne, the Kraitsir affair; Puritans, pariahs, and in Salem, a household of women: the scene is set for The Scarlet Letter."
It appears that Hawthorne began both The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables before he was fired as surveyor/Boston Custom House; probably 1846 - 1848, while living on Mall Street
Chapter 15: Scarlet Letters
Returned to Salem like a bad penny; fired from job; his mother dies. Depressed. No job. No income.
Sophia sold artwork; lampshades. Accepted gifts of clothes, money to survive. Sophia did not mind.
Saved by a successful publisher: James T. Fields.
Fields sought Hawthorne out. Collaboration between Hawthorne and Fields lasted a lifetime.
The Scarlet Letter published March 16, 1850, to wide and continuous acclaim; huge success; printings sold out.
Fired from the Boston Custom House: fortunate for America.
Chapter 16: The Uneven Balance
Despair; move to western Massachusetts with his wife Sophia
Tanglewood in the Berkshires, western Massachusetts
Margaret Fuller sails home from Europe on the ill-fated Elizabeth; en route, the captain dies of smallpox; hit a sandbar; a cargo of marble split the ship's hold; Fuller refused to jump; drowned; neither her body nor Ossoli's never found; their child also drowned
On the day Margaret Fuller died; Herman Melville received a copy of Mosses from an Old Manse (Hawthorne) from Melville's aunt; an auspicious gift; Hawthorne and Melville met shortly after that
Melville writes glowing review of Hawthorn's Mosses from an Old Manse; from then on, in Sophia's eyes, he could do no wrong
Very close relationship developed between older Hawthorne and younger Melville (sexual?)
Chapter 17: The Hidden Life of Property
now writing House of Seven Gables; returns to Salem in his imagination
in The Scarlet Letter, he had focused on his mother and more broadly the complex predicament women faced as wives, mothers, daughters, and sexual beings; in The House of Seven Gables, he again shook the family tree, this time to confront paternal legacy: class, heredity, adn the all but incestuous business of living in one spot for generations, tyrannies and injustices handed down generation after generation like a congenital disease
produced less than a year after The Scarlet Letter
a book of middle age, for time is the novel's cardinal theme, time and its relentless passage in a world hell-bent on progress
very, very long-winded; wordy; "40 pages to describe an event, a cough took up 10 pages, and sitting down in a chair six more."
publication delayed; finally released second week of April, 1851
in May, he was 46 years old, and a new baby born
despite his literary success, still fairly poor
strong believer in states rights; opposed the antislavery movement
excited about a move to West Newton, MA
Melville gives Hawthorne an inscribed copy of Moby-Dick
Chapter 18: Citizen of Somewhere Else
His publisher Fields continues to publish his works, but "neither the notoriety of The Scarlet Letter nor the critical success of The House of the Seven Gables could sweeten Hawthorne's bitterness over the years of neglect and anonymity that he believed he's suffered
no sooner had the Hawthornes settled in West Newton than Hawthorne was ready to leave
visited "Hillside' in Concord; bought it for $1,500, and re-named it "The Wayside"
publishes The Blithedale Romance; Emerson not impressed; Melville was (or least said he was)
Chapter 19: The Main Chance
1852, age 48
racist
his close friend Franklin Pierce elected president; he hoped he would get the foreign posting in Liverpoool; Hawthorne gets it -- the US consul in Liverpool
Chapter 20: This Farther Flight
expects to be in Liverpool for four years (his history up to then: "three years at the Manse, back to Salem and briefly to Boston, where Julian was born; to Salem yet again; to Lenox, West Newton, and Concord." Now to Liverpool, England
but once there, the family is homesick; they don't like Liverpool
very expensive; counted their pennies; tea lone cost a dollar a pound
in Liverpool, Hawthorne earned a reputation for refusing invitations
Sophia is ill (tuberculosis?); to sunnier climate needed;
offer to take position in Lisbon; Hawthorne said no; Sophia went to Portugal alone
Chapter 21: Truth Stranger Than Fiction
"All women, as authors, feeble and tiresome," Hawthorne bitterly exploded. 'I wish they were forbidden to write, on having their faces deeply scarified wit an oyster-shell." With more and more authors peddling their work, each claiming a readership that threatened him, now more than ever. There were 300,000 copies of Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, circulating the first year of its publication, 1852; by comparison, The Scarlet Letter had sold barely 7,000; the same was true of The Blithedale Romance.
Maria Susanna Cummin's The Lamplighters, selling 40,000 copies in two months, triggered another blast.
still in Liverpool, England
slavery issue
Pierce's presidency was a sorry disaster
particularly abominable was the Kansas-Nebraska bill that effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and allowed slavery to extend its reach into territories previously considered untouchable
Sophia returns to England, 1856, still coughing; hated being away from Nathaniel
the story of Catherine Beecher and Delia Bacon
Bacon shows up in London; Emerson: "Delia Bacon was one of two greatest originals America had yielded in ten years." The other was Walt Whitman.
Delia Bacon was in London to provide that William Shakespeare -- the ignorant groom -- had not authored the plays attributed to him
Delia Bacon moved to Stratford, hoping to open Shakespeare's tomb and finding Francis Bacon's manuscripts there; failed
Melville visited Hawthorne; Melville on his way to the Holy Land
Pierce loses nomination for re-election; Hawthorne's political life was over
Buchanan new nominee; wins
Hawthorne did, in the end, praise Delia Bacon
Chapter 22: Question of Travel
the Grand Tour begins, I guess
before leaving Liverpool, a month in London
then Paris
then Rome: a 10-room "apartment" in the Palazzo Laranzani at 37, Via Porta Pincia; winter
"Rome baffled Hawthorne"
by spring, ready for Florence
end of chapter: set sights on Rome, again
Chapter 23: Things to See and Suffer
Una "crashes"; "galloping consumption"; Una survives (for now)
summer, 1859, back on British soil
for the summer, the Hawthornes settled in Redcar, Yorkshire, a fishing village turned seaside resort
The Marble Faun; it is Hawthorne's last completed novel; the novel was somewhat of a disappointment for his readers; vague ending
Chapter 24: Between Two Countries
Settles in Concord; already pining for England, summer of 1860; living at Wayside in Concord
family discord of issue of slavery; for or against it, then another issue, going to war over slavery
1857: Dred Scott, a Missouri slave, Supreme Court stunning decision -- blacks were nothing but slavery
Sophia: unremitting in her racism
Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln debates
Hawthorne: also a racist; favored slavery
the Brown (age 56) massacre in Lawrence, Kansas -- Brown took four sons and two other men, territory of Kansas, arrived in Osawatomie where proslavery forces had sacked the town; rode out to Pottawatomie County, dragged five settlers from their cabins and hacked them to death; midnight massacre; Boston was not aware of it at first
Brown goes east; raises money in Boston; in May, 1859, spoke at Concord Town Hall;
October 16, 1859, Harpers Ferry, VA; Brown and 19 others, including several of his sons seized ten slaves and their owner, hoping to spark a slave insurrection; stormed the federal armory; rather than strike and flee, Brown and his men stayed at the arsenal for 36 hours; strategic blunder; Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee and a squadron of 12 marines offered Brown a chance to surrender; 17 people died; the country convulsed; Brown tried, found guilty, hung to death
new periodical: Atlantic Monthly; antislavery, anti-Pierce bias; capitalized more on literary than the political scene; canvassed as early contributors: Dr Holmes, Emerson, the historian John Lothrop Motely, Whipple, and Stowe, and Hawthorne; in England: Rossetti, Ruskin, and Mrs Gaskell
Hawthorne declined the invitation (Atlantic Monthly)
Una, ill, surviving; attends Bronson Alcott's series of "Conversations" at Mr Sanborn's
Hawthorne becoming in a recluse in his tower at the top of his house (Wayside)
Bronson Alcott mentioned he never saw Hawthorne
Hawthorne eventually re-worked his journals from England and published in the October 1860 Atlantic
Abraham Lincoln elected with less than 40% of the popular vote; did not carry one southern state; one by one, the southern states began to secede
Hawthorne loved his country, he hated it, wanted to flee, but to where would he flee?
Hawthorne worn out from four years in Liverpool, just wanted to write
Saturday, April 13, 1861: Sophia shouted that Fort Sumter and the South had fired on each other; Hawthorne put away his manuscript
Chapter 25: The Smell of Gunpower
Hawthorne credited James T Fields with helping him find an audience; thanked his friend in 1861; Hawthorne now 57
No comments:
Post a Comment