This long connection of a family with one spot, as its place of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the human being and the locality, quite independent of any charm in the scenery or moral circumstances that surround him. It is not love, but instinct.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Custom-House”
SALEM IS A TOWN obsessed with itself.
The time is 1804; the place, a New England port city. Bright-colored sails snap and rustle in the wind. A scent of nutmeg, clove, and ginger fills the air—that and the acrid fragrance of red wine spilled from Spanish casks. Blowsy men in gold earrings lean on huge kegs of molasses, indifferent to the friendly pastor, the Reverend Dr. Bentley, who saunters beyond the docks to watch for returning vessels. Head bent, the Reverend Bentley wears his broad-brimmed hat, he usually does, and raises his skirts as if to dodge temptation, passing whorehouses and warehouses hunkered near the water’s edge. He nods at the grizzled ship’s captain, official papers stuffed in his seaman’s tin box, and at the wizened merchant who, with pencil in his Yankee hand, is tallying barrels of sugar, fifty thousand pounds from the schooner Speed. Church bells clang. Horses tied to the drays flick their tails, and the wheeling gulls scream with irreverent glee.
Salem: pompous, pious, exotic, and rich.
Called Naumkeag by the local Pawtucket Indians who fished there, Salem—salaam: peace—is a gateway to America, with fifty-four ships, eighteen barks, seventy-two brigs, and eighty-six schooners to its far-flung name. Its seal bears a palm tree, a Parsee, a ship, and the Latin motto Divitis Indiae usque ad ultimum sinum: To the endmost port of the East sail the tall ships. Bandanna handkerchiefs, Sumatran pepper, tea, china, silk, nuts, raisins, figs, olive oil, Indian cotton, and Arabian coffee enter America through Salem, which stocks an international market with tables, saddlery, chaises, and dried codfish, to say nothing of the oak planks, shoes, pickled bacon—and, from the South, tobacco and rice—lugged there for transport on an outbound ship.
Cod-merchant as Midas, a Salem trader tacks a carved gilt fish on every step of the staircase in his mansion.
But the city boasts more than cargo and piles of money, for the salty smell of conscience helps preserve such busy commerce. Generals, jurists, senators, and a secretary of state hail from mighty Salem, their families residing slightly to the north of the waterfront though never far from the creaking windlass. Naturally, the town’s latter-day Puritans disdain outward display. Gilded cod notwithstanding, they live in the well-proportioned houses designed by Samuel McIntire, graceful structures supported by simple pilasters. Their daughters marry well; their sons go to Harvard.
One Salem daughter said no one new ever came there, for Salem had no need of outsiders. Slightly xenophobic, its citizens subsist on one another and their relations, now and in foregoing generations. Pedigree counts as much as money, frequently more; history furnishes a hierarchy of descent not to be gainsaid: who had come to America when and, of course, with whom, which mattered almost as much as what these ancestors did and whose interests—besides the Almighty’s—they served.
Nathaniel Hathorne, as the name was then spelled, belonged to one of Salem’s first families, which meant he was a sixth-generation Hathorne who prayed for redemption at the Congregationalist First Church, where his Puritan great-great-grandfather, William Hathorne, had occupied the first pew. This was important. Said the Reverend Dr. Bentley, Salem’s connoisseur of kinship, “No family had more pride of descent” than the Hathornes. Accordingly, they claimed to bear the coat of arms described in the story “The White Old Maid”: “Azure, a lion’s head erased, between three flower de luces.”
William Hathorne was a man of persecution although—perhaps because—he himself had fled it, Sidney’s Arcadia tucked under his arm, sailing from England to America, some say on the Arbella, with fifty servants in tow. Or so his descendants heard. Hathorne settled in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and arrived in Salem in 1636, induced to relocate in part by the promise of a 200-acre land grant provided he quit the church of Dorchester. He did. A man of sundry and stubborn talents, Selectman Hathorne was a prize. He voted to banish the individualist Reverend Roger Williams from the colony, and soon became Massachusetts Bay delegate to the New England Confederation of colonies, captain in the militia, then major, surveyor, magistrate, and garrulous contributor to the General Court—the very first Speaker in the House of Representatives, said Nathaniel.
The adjudication of crime, particularly illegal fornication, was Hathorne’s forte; heresy, his genius. He pursued Quakers with the inventive zeal of the true paranoid, hunting them “like a blood-hound,” or so it was alleged. He ordered Ann Coleman dragged half naked through town while being lashed with a whip of knotted cords, and under his watch, another poor blasphemer was flogged until his back turned to jelly. For his own pains, William Hathorne received several more grants of land, 240 acres in 1648, 400 in 1654, 640 in 1675. “Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors,” his descendant Nathaniel wryly observed, “and let each successive generation thank him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages.”
William Hathorne earned the approval of his heirs when he defied Charles II’s edict to return to England for a royal reprimand. He’d dressed down the king’s commissioners, insulting the monarch by implication and fomenting a little insurrection to boot. The king took notice and recalled him. A thoroughgoing Massachusetts man though no democrat, Hathorne would not bow and scrape before a temporal sovereign, even one who might revoke the colony’s charter. “I cannot remember the time when I had not heard that the King sent for our forefather … to come to England, and that he refused to go,” said Nathaniel’s sister Elizabeth. An evasive letter was dispatched to the king, who was occupied with other business by the time it arrived, and forever after Hathorne’s heirs invested the Major with a “dim and dusky grandeur,” Nathaniel would write, “… present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can remember.”
For Salem—for Nathaniel—the past was never dead.
How could it be? Salem was where women had dangled from the gallows, and Hawthorne’s great-grandfather had all but tied the rope. If William Hathorne crossed an angry sea, planted crops, catechized infidels, and laid the cornerstone for a new generation, his son, Colonel John Hathorne, outdid his father. As Salem magistrate during the witchcraft delusion of 1692, this flinty chip off a flinty block heard pleas from more than one hundred accused witches, each of whom he presumed guilty. Swift in judgment—hadn’t the “black man” whispered obscenities to village women?—Colonel John mounted his steed and rode out to the stony promontory later known as Gallows Hill, where, unyielding, he surveyed what his ironclad piety had wrought. According to his family, he also brought down a curse on subsequent Hathornes, hurled at him by one of the dying witches.
John Hathorne’s slate gravestone lies in Salem’s oldest cemetery, the Burying Point at Charter Street, where as a boy Nathaniel Hathorne saw it canting slightly forward, still unbowed, even by time. And he listened to what he called “chimney-corner” stories about the deeds, nefarious and otherwise, of militant forefathers, which fascinated him so much that his own published tales, when first collected, were aptly called “twice-told.” What he did not pick up, chimney-fashion, about his Hathorne relatives, he eventually gleaned in the local antiquarian associations or libraries established to conserve—and create—a history of the new republic. (The Boston Athenaeum, eighteen miles from Salem, opened in 1805; the Salem Athenaeum in 1810; and in 1821, when Nathaniel was seventeen, Salem’s Essex Institute began to round up and preserve all the records of the county.)
Inscriptions on family gravestones, fireside yarns, shipping records, quarto-sized logbooks bound in marbled boards: none of these could supply what he sought from his father, whom he barely knew. A seafaring man, Captain Nathaniel Hathorne had died of yellow fever in Surinam in 1808. Gone forever, buried without a Salem marker, he left his four-year-old son as beguiled by genealogy as Salem itself.
Salem was a contentious town. Federalists and Republicans read different newspapers, attended different churches, and for the most part docked their ships at competing wharves. In 1796 Elias Hasket Derby, called “King Derby” by detractors, sued the upstart George Crowninshield because Crowninshield’s wharf jutted out twelve feet too far—farther, that is, than Derby’s.
The dispute wasn’t about size alone. Derby was a Federalist, Crowninshield a Republican. And so Salem citizenry split down party lines. “The jealousy & envy which prevails among merchants, especially in this Town, is fully equal to that supposed to exist among literary men,” remarked the Reverend Bentley, a vocal Jeffersonian, which is to say a Crowninshield man and a liberal.
In 1804 the Federalists staged an Independence Day procession. The plumes on their headgear swayed in the summer breeze, and their bayonets glinted, brazen in the sun. Not to be outdone, the Republicans assembled at the courthouse to march down Essex Street, their own banners flying, to the East Church, which displayed, among the July flowers, portraits of Governor Endicott, Minister Higginson, and Salem’s first merchant, Captain George Corwin. The congregation then prayed for God and Jefferson, and the cannons smoked until sundown.
Hawthorne’s birthplace, 27 Union Street, Salem (Library of Congress)
From 27 Union Street one could hear the guns roaring on the Common if one listened carefully. Likely no one did. There, in the upstairs bedroom, two families celebrated deliverance of a more personal sort: Nathaniel Hathorne was born to the raven-haired beauty Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne and her seagoing husband Nathaniel.
The Manning pastor, the Reverend Bentley, had married the child’s parents three years earlier, on August 2, 1801. The bride, Betsy Manning, was then twenty-one years old and two months pregnant, a fact that raises eyebrows among literary detectives nosing after the origins of Hester Prynne, since her pregnancy forced to consummation a courtship that had stretched out for six or more years.
Her future husband’s prospects may have caused the delay. Though Hathorne was a good enough sailor, his maritime rise was neither meteoric nor lucrative. At the time of his marriage, Hathorne at twenty-six still hadn’t been promoted to captain, meaning he didn’t command his own ship or enough money to buy a house of his own; he was no cod-prince. So the newlyweds settled in the smallish Hathorne home on Union Street, where Hathorne’s widowed mother Rachel, his unmarried brother, and his three unmarried sisters all lived.
Old even by Salem standards, the gambrel house had been built sometime before 1700 by Benjamin Pickman and had sheltered Hathornes since 1756, when Daniel Hathorne (the writer’s grandfather) had married Rachel Phelps. Betsy Hathorne was familiar with it. The Hathorne place sat directly behind the newer Manning residence on Herbert Street, one separated from the other by a large patch of garden. Not surprisingly, the Mannings and the Hathornes saw one another often; they rode out together to Essex, Massachusetts, for the ordination of the local minister, and two of Betsy’s brothers, William and Robert, occasionally bought shares in various sailing vessels. Robert Manning put over one hundred dollars into the voyage of the brig Nabby from which his brother-in-law Nathaniel Hathorne never returned.
Yet the families differed in crucial respects. Betsy’s parents, Richard and Miriam Lord Manning, had come to Salem from nearby Ipswich and Essex, and though they traced their lineage back to the early settlers of Massachusetts, they dealt mainly in metals and horseflesh, not witches and General Courts. A former gunsmith and blacksmith, Richard Manning was far more prosperous than the Widow Rachel Hathorne of Union Street. In fact, by the year of his daughter’s marriage to Hathorne, Manning had bought all available property, except the Widow Hathorne’s, on Union Street and the adjacent Herbert Street, where he had built a three-story, commodious, and nondescript family mansion (as the place was known) right next to his stables. He was also hitching horses to his own stagecoach line, the Salem and Boston, which had the best team in New England.
Betsy sang in the choir at the Reverend Bentley’s East Church, which tilted not just toward Jefferson but toward Unitarianism, though once married, she worshipped at her husband’s church, where she was baptized in 1806 along with her children. Endowed by temperament with a sense of depravity better suited to the Congregationalists, Betsy Hathorne forbade her children to read any but religious books on the Sabbath. She was a bashful, inhibited woman averse to exuberance. Or so her son indicated, noting the “strange reserve, in regard to matters of feeling, that has always existed among us.” Nonetheless, she wielded considerable power, and during periods of stress, indecision, or calamity, wrapped herself in illness, which she wore like a shroud, frightening the children, who may have feared she’d vanish like their father had.
But she was literate and intelligent and lovely, with exquisite manners, an aristocratic deportment, and according to one of her daughters, the same “capacity for placid enjoyment” as Nathaniel. An observer remarked she “looked as if she had walked out of an old picture,” her large gray eyes “full of sensibility and expression.” Nathaniel, her son, apparently resembled her, especially his sensitive (some called it weak) mouth.
Five years older than Betsy, the writer’s father, Nathaniel Hathorne, was born on May 19, 1775. He followed the sea, as his father and brother had. If not as striking as the persecutors, the nautical Hathornes weren’t a colorless crew. Hathorne’s father, “Bold Daniel,” had fought the British in 1776 from the deck of his privateer the True American, and when the old salt died twenty years after that, in 1796, the flags in the port of Salem flew at halfmast. By then his son Mate Hathorne was walking the decks of ships like King Derby’s America, famous for lugging from India the first elephant ever seen in the United States. But Mate Hathorne was focused on treasures of a different kind: “In Storms when clouds obscure the Sky/And thunders roll and lightning fly/In the midst of all these dire allarms/I’ll think dear Betsey on thy Charms.” Charming Betsy was fifteen.
On learning of Betsy’s engagement, Old Captain Knight had reputedly said to her father, “I hear your darter is going to marry the son of Captain Hawthorne [sic]. I knowed him: he was the sternest man that ever walked a deck!” Yet when compared with Salem’s stern sailors and wily merchants, Mate Hathorne himself seems fairly undistinguished, even in looks: five feet, ten and a half inches tall, slightly built, and supposedly “inclined to melancholy, and of a reticent disposition.” His son, the writer, traced his tendency toward seclusion to his father. Granite, he said, was his legacy.
Obviously Nathaniel wanted some connection with a father who left little. Hathorne had brought home blue crockery from China, monogrammed with “NH” painted in gold and passed down to his son; a punch bowl from Calcutta, some scattered meteorological observations, and a verse or two in his logbooks, which young Nathaniel saved, fantasizing over his father’s few exploits, such as a near battle, when first mate on the Herald, with a French privateer. From these books he learned not much more, just that his father had seen creatures of land and sea, silver birds and Cape pigeons, and that Hathorne had kept a leaf from a cabbage tree and two shoots of a three-needle pine.
Having shipped for Sumatra, Hathorne was at sea when his first child, Elizabeth (nicknamed Ebe), was born on March 7, 1802. Nor was he at Union Street two years later when Nathaniel was born on the Fourth of July; and he would never see his third child, Maria Louisa, born on January 9, 1808. He had to sail. The sea was his livelihood, his calling, his future, and the future of his family.
In 1804, after the birth of his son, Hathorne came back to Salem a captain at last and soon earned a coveted membership in Salem’s East India Marine Society for having navigated his ship round Cape Horn. But in Salem the tides were turning. In 1807 sixty-one ships left for the West Indies and South America, sixty-three for Europe, ten for India and China; later that year President Jefferson levied the embargo that would bleed the town. In 1808 no ships sailed from Salem. Docks stood idle, planks soggy with disuse, and soup kitchens soon fed over a thousand of the unemployed.
On December 28, 1807, just days before the embargo took effect, Captain Hathorne shipped out on the 154-ton brig Nabby. Now the father of three, he no longer circumnavigated the globe. The gesture didn’t save him. Sometime between the birth of Louisa (as Maria Louisa was known) and March 1808, he took ill in Surinam with the dreaded yellow jack. He didn’t last a fortnight. On April 10, Betsy’s father, Richard Manning, asked the Reverend Bentley to say a prayer for his son-in-law. A few invoices aboard the Nabby were all that remained of Hathorne, age thirty-two. His son had not turned four.
“I remember very well that one morning my mother called my brother into her room, next to the one where we slept, and told him that his father was dead,” Ebe would recall. Nathaniel seldom spoke about his father or his death. Years later, though, Sophia Hawthorne insisted that the captain had “died in India very suddenly from being detained late in the country in the evening in a linen dress. On which account he took violent cold and the Indian fever. His funeral was gorgeous.”
It’s difficult to know whether she fabricated the story or whether Hawthorne himself had embroidered the truth for her benefit and his, the reality of his father’s death having been so harsh. And hard financially. Captain Hathorne had died intestate, leaving his widow with the 4 percent owed from the Nabby’s voyage, amounting to $427.02 and from which she paid more than $200 to cover such sundry expenses as the minister’s eulogy and the digging of a grave.
“He left very little property,” remarked Ebe of her feckless father, “and my grandfather Manning took us home.”
In later years, Nathaniel remarked that he should have been a sailor; and until the age of sixteen he’d actually hoped to become one, much to his mother’s horror.
His earliest compositions were said to have been sea stories about bronzed pirates and hardy privateers, perhaps modeled on Byron’s Corsair, and in two youthful poems he did marshal his fledgling talent to extol the ocean’s awful strength: “The billowy Ocean rolls its wave/Above the ship-wreck’d Sailor’s Grave.” Those missing at sea, he wrote in another poem, are “those for whom we weep,/The young, the bright, the fair.”
Such stuff might be standard for an adolescent who loped along the shore on a spring afternoon, but Hawthorne had lost his father to the water and spoke of the sea as a place of comfort, destruction, and wonder, of adventure and male bonding, a place salutary but ultimately unknowable, unreachable. “Of what mysteries is it telling?” he would ask in a sketch, “Foot-prints on the Sea-shore.” “Of sunken ships, and whereabouts they lie?” Ebe recalled two lines of a song in one of her brother’s earliest stories, possibly about pirates: “The rovers of the Sea, they were a fearful Race,” and in copying one of his father’s logbook entries, he rewrote his father’s observations in what seems the first sentence of an adventure tale: “The weather not looking prudent to run over the shoals tonight, we are determined to wait for good weather and fair wind.”
A friend recalled that Hawthorne’s love for the sea “amounted to a passionate worship,” and another said that as an adult he resembled the wharf rats of his youth and “looked like a boned pirate.” Hawthorne said of himself that his breath “came fresh from the wilderness of ocean.” Several of Hawthorne’s closest friends had lost their own fathers to the sea or made their livings from it at one time or another. He returned to it as often as he could.
Richard Manning drove his horse hard. It was necessary for such a man, who frequently traveled between Salem and a small settlement, Raymond, in the district of Maine. In early winter, roads the color of tobacco juice filled with drifts of snow, making them impassable. Spring was no better. Mud, ankle deep, sucked horses’ hooves into slimy ruts.
Manning pushed on. As far as he was concerned, Raymond might well have been a suburb of Salem, which in a way it was. Promised in 1690 to Captain William Raymond and other residents of Beverly, Massachusetts, for services rendered in a (failed) expedition to Quebec, the Maine property lay twenty miles northwest of Portland and bordered the great, gleaming Sebago Pond, which, like Maine itself, was part of Massachusetts. Maine was not a separate state.
Mean in winter, gorgeous in summer, its ponds teeming with fish and its forests with game, trees hung heavy with sugar pear, fields awash in berries, Raymond was the Land of Promise. That’s what the Mannings called it. Speculators from Beverly and Salem had purchased large tracts of land there, though few of them wanted to relocate. Instead they discussed their holdings over spiked punch at Salem’s Sun Tavern and in 1795 appointed Richard Manning their tax collector. It was a profitable post. From it, Manning acquired huge parcels of real estate at rock-bottom prices.
So he rode hard. He wanted to do “everything,” as he said, “in my powre for my Children.” He and his wife, Miriam, had raised nine children at 12 Herbert Street, and the family was still growing. For the summer after Captain Hathorne’s death, Betsy had crossed the garden with her three children to join her parents, eight unmarried siblings, a great-aunt, a servant, and a passel of scampering cats who lived there. “There were four Uncles and four Aunts, all, for many years, unmarried, so that we were welcome in the family,” Ebe reminisced.
According to relatives, the atmosphere in the Manning house resembled that of a noisy tavern, family members taking sides in the civil and religious controversies riling the rest of Salem. Betsy’s sister Mary and her brother Samuel joined her at the Hathornes’ Congregationalist First Church. Betsy’s two other siblings, Priscilla and Maria, considered the First Church a little lax, so they worshipped with the more orthodox Trinitarians at the Tabernacle. The Manning parents stayed at Bentley’s East Church. It was a singular case, marveled the Reverend Dr. Bentley, of a family internally divided. Brother Robert usually sided with Priscilla; Richard, yet another brother, spent much of his time in the rustic wilds of Maine, where he hoped to erect his own church—Congregationalist.
Doctrinal distinctions aside, the Mannings, like their fellow citizens, knit religion into the fabric of their enterprising lives, their ambition to get ahead, to own more land or stagecoaches or horses or fruit trees than any one else, to prove themselves equal to Salem’s snobbish upper crust, to rise on the social ladder and yet make themselves of use, to disseminate the Bible and remind one another in perpetuity of their fallen nature, their need for redemption. “All have something to repent of,” Mary Manning, the eldest sibling, pertly told her brother Richard.
None of this was lost on young Nathaniel, who complained about the hard wooden pews at the First Church and the ugly bust of John Wesley at home. Reputedly he removed the bust from its pedestal in the dead of winter and filled it with water through a hole in its bottom. He waited for the water to freeze, assuming Wesley would burst like a pitcher. Wesley stayed intact. But Nathaniel drank in the lilting cadence of Scripture and stored up its parables, repeated often at Herbert Street, which he prized for the fine stories they were. At the idea of damnation, however, he squirmed; though protest was unavailing.
The outward particulars of Nathaniel’s early life seem unexceptional: he fought with a chum at school; he liked parades and fires; he teased the household cats and his younger sister. At one time he owned a pet monkey, which, when it died, he buried in the garden. He played in the Manning stables with a younger cousin, bouncing on the chaises, and supposedly plagued his family with theological questions: Who made God? Did Adam and Eve eat baked beans? Was John Calvin a Christian?
He was especially good-looking, said Ebe, “the finest boy, many strangers observed, whom they had ever seen”: dark brown curly hair, flushed cheeks, long-lashed eyes the color of slate or water, depending on his mood. For the rest of his life his appearance attracted attention, embarrassing and pleasing him. And he was proud. Nathaniel once offended Simon Forrester, one of the richest men in Salem and an uncle by marriage on the Hathorne side, by refusing to accept a large coin Forrester had offered him on the street, in public. Forrester angrily informed the Mannings of the boy’s bad manners, and they, obsequious but proud themselves, explained that his mother did not allow the child such large sums of spending money.
In later life, Nathaniel teased his mother about spoiling her three children; Betsy replied it was impossible to spoil such children as him and Ebe. (Louisa was more compliant than the other two.) But Nathaniel obeyed the instructions of his uncle Robert, which shed a little light on the boy’s youth: “Study the hard lessons,” Uncle Robert directed, “learn all you can at school, mind your mother, don’t look cross, hold up your head like a man, and keep your cloths clean.”
On Saturday, April 17, 1813, Grandfather Manning left Herbert Street for Maine, riding by way of Newbury, Massachusetts, where he stopped at a local inn to spend the night. Before sunrise he fell into an apoplectic fit, smacking his head as he hit the hard wooden floor. His family rushed to Newbury in their coaches, but there was nothing to be done. Aged fifty-eight, Richard Manning died the following Monday at noon. The funeral took place the next day, coffin draped in black, at Herbert Street.
Just days before, Rachel Hathorne, Nathaniel’s paternal grandmother, had died. No more would the eight-year-old boy visit her house on Sundays, sit near the chimney, or read Pilgrim’s Progress in a large chair in the corner of the room. “The heart never breaks on the first grave,” he would write; “and, after many graves, it gets so obtuse that nothing can break it.”
Yet Grandfather Manning had at least left his family fairly comfortable, as he’d hoped. The Salem portion of his estate was sizable: the mansion on Herbert Street, an attached store, a plot of land, several carriage houses, three lots on Derby Street near the wharf, and the Union Street stables and business. The Maine holdings consisted of over ten thousand acres of unimproved land “down east,” along with a 150-acre farm in Bridgton, near Raymond, and a house and two lots in Portland. William, the eldest son, would continue to manage the stage business, and Richard Manning III, the second oldest, would oversee the property in Maine at least temporarily. Robert, two years younger than Richard, had opened a broker’s office near the wharves, where he speculated in guns and trading ships. The next in line, John, took to the sea, perhaps hoping to fight in the war against the British. The youngest son, Samuel, worked in the Salem family stables.
But the Manning legacy caused a fault line in the family, imperceptible at first. “Uncle Richard he can grow his own tobacco here, & make his own segars,” Uncle Robert wrote to his nephew from Maine, “and he can sail twenty five miles from Standish to the head of long pond in one direction.” It was decided. Uncle Richard would stay in Maine to manage and expand the family holdings, and Robert would follow suit.
Partially crippled, Uncle Richard had damaged his leg or spine in a carriage accident that occurred sometime around 1810. “I do not forget to complain of my hard fortune, and very often, curse the day in which I was born,” he wrote in his typically half-humorous vein to his sister Betsy. Dyspeptic, kind, scrupulously honest, fond of reading, tobacco, fishing, and freedom, Richard grew increasingly infirm as he aged. But always he loved the deep-sea green of the forest in summer, its white solitude in winter, and its distance from Salem, where everything was ranked—name, church, school, residence, clothes, achievements: no place for a lame eccentric such as he.
Uncle Robert liked Salem, and sure, he said he’d leave it. “I should rather live in the Woods poor than in the City rich,” he protested—far too much. A man of striving, he was uncomfortable with his own ambitions yet unable to renounce them as the more ascetic Richard had, or seemed to have. Besides, he wanted to stay close to their mother and earn her approval, not an easy thing to do. So he put off moving to Raymond, and in the end never did except for extended visits and vacations.
Sitting before his own fire, poking at it with his cane, Richard felt he’d been betrayed. As did Nathaniel; when Uncle Richard left Salem, the loss was as devastating to him as any other he had suffered.
“My Lord, stand back, and let the coffin pass.” As a young boy, recalled Nathaniel’s sister Ebe, her brother frequently recited this line from Richard III. It seems a strange choice—except that for him the procession of coffins had become a terrible commonplace. In one of his early Salem sketches, he describes a busy waterfront, a military parade, and a funeral cortege, the psychological axis of his youth.
Actually, the whole of Richard III resonated with the boy. After the death of Grandfather Manning (officially Richard Manning Jr.), lame Uncle Richard—Richard Manning III—competed for the Manning throne and won, but only by making Maine his kingdom. Shakespeare’s Richard III: malformed, robbed by nature, a villain to be sure; and crippled Uncle Richard: paterfamilias absconditus, a kind of hero and, for having abandoned his nephew, a kind of villain too.
Less than six weeks after Uncle Richard left Salem for good, Nathaniel injured his foot at school while playing, Ebe said, with a bat and ball. He took to crutches for the next fourteen months—that is, when he walked at all, which he often refused to do. It was an early rebellion, self-punitive and vindictive, in protest against the loss of his male guardians. No one had heard from his uncle John in quite some time, though he’d reportedly been spotted in New York City, bound for the Great Lakes to “work at his Trade.” That was all. With Grandfather Manning dead and Uncle Richard gone and John feared lost, Nathaniel himself threatened to run away forever, recalled his sister. Unable to do this, he did the opposite. Like Uncle Richard, he committed himself to immobility.
Paralysis and aggression, twin handmaidens of a conflicted psyche: in his early stories, they appear as relatives and doubles, as in “The Gentle Boy,” where patriarchal Puritans resembling William Hathorne harass the gentle Ilbrahim, an orphaned Quaker child. Paternal persecutors will invariably crop up in Hawthorne’s work and so will characters like Ilbrahim’s malicious friend, who cunningly breaks Ilbrahim’s spirit. “Like a lame man of low stature and gravely appareled, with a dark and twisted countenance, and a bright, downcast eye,” this satanic trickster—himself lame—destroys his double, the gentle child, with an aggression so deadly, it engenders the very passivity it loathes.
Affording him a certain guilty pleasure, the injury kept Nathaniel the center of attention. “Nathaniel was particularly petted,” Ebe remarked almost sixty years later, “the more because his health was then delicate and he had frequent illnesses.” Fearing an incurable deformity in Betsy’s darling son and the sole grandson of the Mannings, they consulted a series of doctors. “Everybody thought that, if he lived, he would always be lame,” Ebe recalled. Under the guidance of Dr. Smith of Hanover, New Hampshire, the family tried to invigorate his leg by dousing his foot with cold water. Legend says they poured water from a window on the second story onto the foot, which they then encased in a specially fitted boot.
All treatments failed.
The embargo hadn’t prevented war with Great Britain, and the war dragged on. There was talk of an armistice, but in April 1814 horses from Uncle William’s stable conveyed men and women to the gunhouse on Salem Neck as the United States frigate Constitution retreated into Marblehead Harbor. In June, the British burned an American ship in Beverly. Then came news of the destruction of vessels off Cape Ann and Scituate. Hotly contested in Salem—Federalists and Republicans madder than ever—war-talk distracted the town, which nervously awaited a British invasion. Nathaniel unheroically limped about the garden both despising and relishing his helplessness. On his tenth birthday he stayed home, a child apart, listening, downcast, to the martial Independence Day celebration nearby, where boys toting bayonets turned into little men.
Robert and Priscilla Manning, in particular, respected education and sent all three Hathorne children to school, but after Nathaniel’s injury, his teacher, Joseph Worcester, the future lexicographer, went to the Manning house to hear him recite his lessons privately. “One of the peculiarities of my boyhood was a grievous disinclination to go to school,” Nathaniel later said, “and (Providence favoring me in this natural repugnance) I never did go half as much as other boys, partly owing to delicate health (which I made the most of for the purpose).” Delicate health, other boys: Nathaniel regarded himself as peculiar, even bizarre—entitled, and diminished by the entitlement.
In subsequent years he also spoke of a humiliating boyhood incident. During school recess he’d climbed onto a stage in the classroom to make a little speech, and a group of bigger boys had pulled him down. Whether apocryphal or not, the story suggests that Hawthorne had been mortified when he wanted to excel—or show off. From then on, unless forced, he refused to stand and declaim.
Taking refuge, then, from the activities he feared in an infirmity he loathed, the boy unconsciously identified not just with the men but with the women of his household, particularly his mother and two sisters. Thus Nathaniel’s handicap became his fortunate fall into literature, according to his sister Ebe. Instead of pursuing the ragtag parade of schoolboys with muskets, Nathaniel could study Milton and Pope and James Thomson, lying at home on the carpet, where he built a house of books for the cats. He read Rousseau, deemed improper, or Byron, and he dreamed of faraway places. “If he had been educated for a genius,” said Ebe of her brother, “it would have injured him excessively. He developed himself.”
Doubtless Ebe had a point. Nathaniel compensated for his deprivations by constructing an imaginary counterworld over which he exercised supreme control. “He used to invent some long stories wild and fanciful, and to tell us where he was going when he grew up,” recalled Ebe, “and of wonderful adventures he was to meet with.” Though lame, he determined to travel far from home like the men in his family, his father, grandfather, his uncle John, even uncle Richard—and to die young. Such fantasies of liberation, as well as of malice and of revenge, sustained him. And not surprisingly, he writes of journeys frequently in later life, although escape is unrealized, truncated, or punished.
By the winter of 1815, Nathaniel’s condition miraculously improved after his mother decided to decamp to Maine with her children and her sister Mary. Thrilled by the news, Uncle Richard—in a weird, proto-Freudian burst of weapons and lameness and limbs—promised that as soon as Nathaniel arrived, he’d give him the gun that had once belonged to Captain Hathorne.