Hawthorne: A Life

“Septimius” opens in 1775 on the afternoon of the battle of Lexington and Concord, one war a substitute for another, all interchangeable, as Hawthorne contrasts the birth of the Union with what he assumed would be its end. The hero of the story is Septimius Felton, a divinity student of waning faith consumed by his fixation on death, “believing nothing, although a thin veil of reverence had kept him from questioning some things,” like unanswerable riddles, the visitations, Melville had said, speaking of Hawthorne, from which no deeply thinking mind is ever free.

This is Hawthorne’s cri de coeur, uttered while he and, as he supposed, his world faced certain extinction.

Septimius shoots a young British officer on that fateful April day and, rushing to the soldier’s side, cradles him in his arms and takes from him, at the officer’s request, a bloodstained, crumpled page. Though he can’t make it out, the page appears to be a recipe for immortal life, and Septimius, from that moment on, begins a frantic effort to decipher the ingredients. Such mad pursuit is not new to Hawthorne, whose stories tell of quixotic potions and deadly cures; even the ambitious guest, hungry for fame, mortgages the blankness of death with it.

The ambitious guest was punished for his wish to be remembered; but it’s not remembrance that Septimius—or Hawthorne—craves, or not entirely; he wants to wrest some meaning from life, itself too short to offer much. But once he’s concocted the brew, he doesn’t drink it. That fate falls to Sybil Dacy, a woman come to Concord to avenge the death of her lover, the same young British officer Septimius has killed. Unbeknownst to him, she splashes the elixir with poison, but having fallen in love with him, she drains the cup herself, leaving Septimius, mortal, to live out his spate of days all alone.

In fact, in “Septimius” Hawthorne throws open the door to his cabinet of obsessions. A doctor of dubious background eggs Septimius forward; a muscular young soldier contrasts with a meditative, and murderous, student; a crusty old woman, descending from the slave Tituba, cooks up her own rotten liquor; and a legend, that of the bloody footstep, leads once again to an English estate, this time through the slain officer, who happens to be Septimius’s kin. It’s a mixed-up plot, to be sure, but the tale is fundamentally “an internal one,” says Hawthorne, “dealing as little as possible with outward events.”

Melancholia and stark existential dread are the nub of the Septimius story, less about the search for an elixir than about the impossibility of maintaining belief in anything—especially his own work. “We are the playthings and fools of Nature,” Hawthorne recasts King Lear, “which she amuses herself with, during our little lifetime, and then breaks for mere sport.” The “Septimius” manuscripts tell a simple, plangent tale of writing—Hawthorne’s writing, or what he called “the mud of his own making” in a recent letter to Fields.

Hawthorne wrote; he could not write; and he wrote about his failure. “A man no sooner sets his heart on any object, great or small, be it the lengthening out of his life interminably, or merely writing a romance about it,” Hawthorne explains, “than his fellow beings, and fate and circumstance to back them, seem to conspire to hinder, to prevent, to throw in each his obstacle, great or small according to his power.” But like his story, the hindrances were internal. “… Mocking voices call us back, or encouraging voices cease to be heard, when our sinking hearts need them most; so unaccountably, at last, when we feel as if we might grasp our life-long object by merely stretching out our hand, does it all at once put on an aspect of not being worth our grasp; by such apparently feeble impediments are our hands subtly bound; so hard is it to stir to-day, while it looks as if it would be easy to stir to purpose tomorrow.”

Revising the first draft of his story, Hawthorne tinkered with names (Septimius Felton becomes Septimius Norton), pruned the biographical, and twisted the plot as he honed his skepticism to a mean edge. But the second draft proceeded with difficulty, and it’s painful to read. Passage after passage spills with hopelessness. “We are all linked together in a chain of Death, and feel no remorse for those we cause, nor enmity for that we suffer,” Hawthorne comments. “And the Purpose? what is Purpose? Who can tell when he has actually formed one.”

Writing meant everything to Hawthorne and yet cost everything. It was his heart of darkness, an isolation no one could fathom or relieve; it was a source of shame as much as pleasure and a necessity he could neither forgo nor entirely approve. He wondered if Julian was embarrassed by his father’s profession, as Walter Scott’s son reportedly was, and when Rose began to compose stories of her own, Hawthorne stood over her, “dark as a prophetic flight of birds,” she remembered years later. “Never let me hear of your writing stories!” he roared.

And what is fiction anyway? Over and over, Hawthorne grapples with the question in stories like “Fancy’s Show Box,” in his prefaces, his notebooks, in The Marble Faun. “He did not write stories in the usual style, marrying people all off at the end,” Mary Mann remarked. “He hunted out the hidden processes of actions.” Hence come the unsettling conclusions of The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun or the satiric endings of Fanshawe and The House of the Seven Gables; hence, too, comes Hawthorne’s insistence that he writes romance, not sentimental gibberish, not popular books, and decidedly not the beef-and-ale novels of Anthony Trollope, “just as real,” he remarked, “as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business.”

They make themselves at home among their characters and scenery, and know them better than they know anything actual, and feel a blessed warmth that the air of this world does not supply, and discern a fitness of events that the course of human life has not elsewhere; so that all seems a truer world than that they were born in; but sometimes, if they step beyond the limits of the spell, ah! the sad destruction, disturbance, incongruity, that meets the eye; distortion, impossibility, everything that seemed so true and beautiful in its proper atmosphere, and nicely adjusted relations, now a hideous absurdity.

The yellow of the sunset ferments, manifest destiny implodes, and ambitious dreams of grandeur fade to black, obliterated by an avalanche of time, indifference, or triviality. Emerson found Hawthorne pacing on top of the hill. The two men followed his tracks back to the Wayside, Hawthorne remarking “This path is the only remembrance of me that will remain.”

Hawthorne is the chronicler of imagination, an imagination of unbelief and dislocation. Wakefield had come home to find he had none.

Though Sophia represented the person who once upon a time drew him into the daily life he wanted, its warm hearth—and real passion—melting the chill in his heart, Hawthorne hadn’t shown her the proofs of Our Old Home. An anagram he contrived out of her name is not entirely auspicious: “a hope while in a storm—aha!!”

Fortunately for Hawthorne, Sophia never lost her faith. Nor did Fields. When Hawthorne confided the germ of his “Septimius” idea, Fields pushed forward with characteristic brio, hoping to publish installments of the book in the Atlantic. Hawthorne held back. “I don’t mean to let you have the first chapters,” he replied, “till I have written the final sentence of the story.” Regardless, Fields brightly announced in the Atlantic prospectus of 1862 that a new romance by Hawthorne would soon appear, and Edward Dicey later remembered Hawthorne speaking of his new book that same spring, but by the end of 1862 Hawthorne had ceased to mention it and instead siphoned gloom into humor. Bringing Rebecca Harding to Sleepy Hollow, Concord’s new-sprung graveyard, he squatted on the emerald grass and, as she recalled, chuckled. “Yes,” he said, “we New Englanders begin to enjoy ourselves—when we are dead.”

His physical powers were dwindling. Like Sisyphus in reverse, Hawthorne reputedly dragged logs of wood down from the top of his hillside to its bottom in an effort to recover his strength. He agonized about money. “It is a pain to him to be so hard driven in his present unenergetic condition,” Sophia informed her sister Elizabeth, “and he doubts if we can at any rate easily make the ends meet.” He told Ticknor, “I expect to outlive my means and die in the alms-house,” and when Annie Fields one day offered to brush the dust from Hawthorne’s coat, he flinched. “No, no,” he said, “I never brush my coat, it wears it out.” He refused to buy wine for himself, hire someone to help clear the meadow, vacation in the mountains, pay for Una’s music lessons. “I do not know what I shall do with him,” Sophia confessed to Annie.

Age clasped his throat. “It is a new and strange thing to myself to be old,” he wrote in his second “Septimius” manuscript, “& I have not yet convinced myself of it.” If he was young yesterday, why not to-day? Death was everywhere. The soil was drenched in blood, and daily newspapers barked long lists of names. James Lowell had lost two nephews, one of Henry James’s sons—Julian’s friend Wilky—had been wounded, and so had the son of Oliver Wendell Holmes. More than five thousand men died at Antietam, with eighteen thousand wounded or missing. At Gettysburg the casualties had totaled more than forty thousand. “Life, which seems such a priceless blessing, is made a jest, emptiness, delusion, a flout, a farce, by this inopportune Death.”

By the summer of 1863, Hawthorne had abandoned the “Septimius” manuscript. He rationalized the decision in the opening pages of Our Old Home: “The Present, the Immediate, the Actual has proved too potent for me,” he writes. “It takes away not only my scanty faculty, but even my desire for imaginative composition, and leaves me sadly content to scatter a thousand peaceful fantasies upon the hurricane that is sweeping us all along with it.”

Less than a month after the publication of Our Old Home in the fall of 1863, Sophia reported that Hawthorne was very “negative.” “I am afraid that Concord is not the best place for him,” she confided to Annie Fields, “and that he requires a city-life, with a secure retreat in its midst as well.” But he left home reluctantly and socialized with difficulty. “Una thinks it is the greatest misfortune to him to live so secluded,” Mary Mann reported to her eldest son, “that he ought to be where he cannot help seeing people, and she has the right of it.”

Moncure Conway remembered meeting Hawthorne at the Fieldses’. Hawthorne preferred reading Defoe’s ghost stories in the guest room to joining the company in the parlor. This in itself was not unusual; Hawthorne had long ago earned a reputation as a loner. These days, however, much had changed. His Democratic acquaintances scorned his defense of the war while others detested his sympathy with the South. Yet his political party had been debased by obsequiousness, racism, and sectional strife. Friends, too. John O’Sullivan made no secret of his southern allegiances, and Pierce continued to cleave to his stale interpretation of the Union. “He thus had no party,” Conway concluded of Hawthorne, “—then nearly equivalent to having no country.”

Demoralized, he mounted the steps to his tower to begin another story, also about immortality, and in the fall of 1863 he outlined it for Fields: he’d begin by describing the Wayside and Thoreau, recently felled by tuberculosis—“How Thoreau would scorn me for thinking that I could perpetuate him!”—and then proceed to the tale. Fields leaped. A chapter for the December Atlantic, he queried, going so far as to suggest a title: “The New Tithonus, The Deathless Man.” He knew Hawthorne was worried about taxes and bills—Julian had just entered Harvard—so he promised two hundred dollars for a chapter of it. But as Fields pressed forward, Hawthorne pulled away. Let’s just call the story “Fragments of a Romance,” he countered, and proposed February for the Atlantic installment.

In November, Fields dispatched a check. By then Hawthorne had fallen alarmingly ill. Sophia guessed typhus. Hawthorne suspected some kind of “bedevilment.” He feared he was losing his mind. Thanksgiving passed blankly. “I am amazed that such a fortress as his stomach should give way.” Sophia was confused. Sometimes despondent, at other times she considered Hawthorne merely cranky or slightly indisposed. “He cannot bear anything,” she admitted to Una, “and he must be handled like the airiest venetian glass.”

Understandably, she wanted to minimize his symptoms, and because she fluttered her ailments more dramatically, it was easy to do. But he drained her patience. Homemade remedies failed to nourish his body or hike his spirits. Hawthorne groused about his pens, his writing paper, the weather, the war, and the broken fence on the roadside. Sophia soundlessly placed a book by his plate at teatime, grateful to Fields, who kept Hawthorne well stocked. “He is not a very manageable baby,” she soon complained to Horatio Bridge, “because he has so long been a self-reliant man.”

In December, Hawthorne delivered a listless new tale, “The Dolliver Romance,” to Fields by hand. An elderly apothecary, Dr. Dolliver, dabbles with elixirs, striving “amid the sloth of age and the breaking-up of intellect, to earn the competency which he had failed to accumulate even in his most vigorous days.” Looking backward with half-shut eye, “The Dolliver Romance” perfunctorily draws on Hawthorne’s past, its ghosts unappeased. Dolliver’s name is that of the blind organist at Salem’s First Church who played in Hawthorne’s youth; he lives in the Peabody house, next to the Charter Street graveyard; his shop stands on Main Street; his mentor is Salem’s seventeenth-century physician John Swinnerton. Dolliver’s deceased aunts correspond to Hawthorne’s aunts, one of whom died in her “virgin bloom, another in autumnal maidenhood, yellow and shriveled with vinegar in her blood.” Even Hawthorne’s mother rises again, the “forlorn widow, whose grief outlasted even its vitality, and grew to be a merely torpid habit.”

Hawthorne said he’d never finish “Dolliver” either because he didn’t like it, as he told Annie Fields, or because he knew he couldn’t. Fields rallied him, but once back at home, Hawthorne lay on the couch until noon. Sophia feared the new story would be sad. It struck Annie Fields that way. Hawthorne guessed as much too, but more to the point, he had no idea where he was going with it. So old Dolliver hovers between youth and age, sipping without comprehension the strange elixir that, for a while, shores him against his ruin.

The new year, 1864, dawned gray and icy. Frost crinkled the windowpanes of the Wayside. Longfellow was slowly emerging from the horrible death of his wife at Craigie House, in Cambridge, where they had been happily living until one hot day in July when, while sitting in the library, Fanny Longfellow had dropped a lit match or drop of burning wax onto her light summer dress. It whooshed into flame. She ran to Longfellow’s study, where he woke from his nap and threw a rug over her, holding it close with his own body, to try to put out the fire. She died the next day.

Doubled over in sorrow for three long years, Longfellow, sensing the mood of a fellow sufferer, proposed to Fields that he and Ticknor arrange a small dinner with Hawthorne, just the four of them, “two jovial Publishers, and two melancholy authors.”

Fields drove out to frozen Concord the first week of January. Hawthorne sat gazing into the fireplace, his gray dressing gown twisted about a shrinking torso. Pierce journeyed from New Hampshire. “I cannot help thinking that mental causes are at the bottom of his illness.” Mary Mann decided Hawthorne’s Copperhead views would kill him. “I suppose he would rather die than recant, whatever may be his convictions.” Ebe recommended he wear heavier clothes and consume animal food, and Ticknor wanted to take the broken-down author to Havana. In the interim, he bought him an easy chair.

No one knew what to do, no one knew what was wrong, and at this remove, his devastating array of symptoms is hard to diagnose. Some biographers have reasonably suspected cancer, others a brain tumor; Hawthorne was soon unable to walk or write without shaking. But with a boring pain in his stomach and a rumble in his intestines, Hawthorne may have had ulcerative colitis or an infection acquired in Italy, where his complaints first surfaced and which he later treated by fasting, causing malnutrition. Several descendants speculate about dysentery or the developing stages of syphilis. Odd, though, is the resemblance between Hawthorne’s symptoms and those of his uncle Richard Manning and, it seems, his uncle Robert. “This mode of death has been an idiosyncrasy with his family,” Hawthorne wrote in The House of the Seven Gables, one of his eeriest foreshadowings.

In February he announced to Fields that he was clear-eyed and ready for the future, small though it may be. There was to be no new romance. “Say to the Public what you think best, and as little as possible,” Hawthorne instructed Fields, his humor briefly rekindled at his own expense: “… ‘Mr. Hawthorne’s brain is addled at last, and, much to our satisfaction, he tells us that he cannot possibly go on with the Romance announced on the cover of the Jany Magazine.” Doubtless Field did not laugh.

In March, Emerson came to visit, full of talk about inner strength. Hawthorne was too weak to pull on his boots; his illness, whatever the cause, had entered its terminal stage.

Assisted by Sophia, he traveled to Boston again aboard the smoky local train and informed David Roberts that he would’ve liked to have seen his children fully grown, though he would not. Annie Fields recorded him commenting in low tones that “I think we could bear it if we knew our fate. At least I think it would not make much difference to me now what became of me.” He was wraithlike, shriveled, spectral. His eyesight was blurred, his hearing dull, his hand trembly. At night Annie Fields heard the floorboards creak. Hawthorne was pacing.

It seemed impossible that the stalwart William Ticknor, only fifty-three, a publishing giant and good man come to take an enfeebled Hawthorne on a journey for his health, it seemed impossible that William Ticknor would die in Hawthorne’s stead, as if the gods determined to toy with Hawthorne one last time.

During his mission of mercy, Ticknor’s seemingly robust health sputtered under the weight of a cold caught sometime before he left Boston. The cold deepened to pneumonia in the bitter rains pummeling New York. Hawthorne, however, felt better, or said he did, writing to his daughter Rose that he’d been swallowing oysters whole, a feat of appetite intended to reassure his family; who knows if it was true.

Blanched and haggard, he trekked from the little train station in Concord to the Wayside, face streaming with sweat and guilt. The last ribbon of hope had disappeared. The gleam had gone from his eye, Sophia said. Only weariness, infinite weariness, hung on.

Hawthorne could no longer walk across the room without tottering. He could not digest food. The pain in his stomach kept him from lying down at night. Yet he managed to ask George Hillard to organize his finances, and before journeying with Ticknor had stipulated that Ebe should receive $180 per annum from his estate. Years later, Rose remembered that her father began to burn old letters and to make small farewell speeches to Una and Sophia, though they did not understand the import at the time.

Fewer than two weeks after Ticknor’s death, Hawthorne insisted on another trip, as if to simulate a motif from his stories—or duplicate his trip with Ticknor and this time get it right. The widowed Franklin Pierce, whose own health had been precarious, was available. This pleased Sophia, although Bronson Alcott, who’d recently seen Hawthorne at his gate, thought him far too ill for travel. But Sophia naïvely—or desperately—put stock in the curative power of a private carriage rolling by boyhood haunts, the two chums then revived at the Isles of Shoals, where Hawthorne could sniff the salty sea. In confidence, she begged Pierce to convince her husband that he wouldn’t spend his last days in the almshouse, as he feared. Not just money but the necessity of gainful employment hounded him, the Furies never placated by former success. “He has become very nervous and intolerable to himself,” said Mary Mann, “which makes him distressing to others.”

Sophia asked Fields, also confidentially, if he could arrange for Dr. Holmes to examine Hawthorne on the sly.

In “Dolliver,” he writes of death: “He had the choice to die, and chose it.”

Gossips supposed that Hawthorne and Pierce consumed too much alcohol the night Hawthorne died, drink as fatal as any imagined potion. And they didn’t even know that two months earlier he’d commented regretfully—or prophetically—that men no longer came together to get drunk. “Think of the delight of drinking in pleasant company,” he had said to Annie Fields, “and lying down to sleep a deep strong sleep.”

“Men die, finally, because they choose not the toil and torment of struggling longer with Time, for mere handsfull of moments,” Hawthorne wrote. He may have sipped a final elixir with Pierce or, worn out, may have folded a secret remedy into his portmanteau to season his last drink quite decisively. “His death was a mystery,” Ellery Channing maintained. Elizabeth Peabody weighed in, as was her wont, recollecting that just before his death Hawthorne had said, “A man’s days are in a man’s hands.”

The morning of Hawthorne’s funeral, she remarked that he very much wanted to die before he turned sixty. He was fifty-nine.

Like the end of one of his best tales, any account of Hawthorne’s death is inconclusive. Even so, everywhere he left clues as if he were the weird epicenter of his most ambiguous work, his life—as indeed he was.

About two weeks earlier, on Tuesday, May 10, a carriage stopped at the Wayside gate. Hawthorne looked shrunken and battered, but he stepped out of the house in military posture, upright and unaided. In Rose Hawthorne’s memory her father stood one last time “like a snow image of an unbending but an old, old man.” Sophia covered her face with her hands and wept. “My father did not like to die,” Rose recalled, “though now he wished to do so.”

Pierce joined Hawthorne in Boston, and the two friends sped to Andover, Massachusetts, to see Pierce’s sister-in-law and then to Concord, New Hampshire, where they waited for the weather to clear. When the clouds scattered, they headed to Franklin, Laconia, and Center Harbor. At sunset on Wednesday, May 18, their coach rumbled into Plymouth.

Hawthorne had grown so frail he had to be lifted out of the carriage—Sophia was never told this—and into the huge, white-shingled Pemigewas-sett Inn. Remnants of daylight streamed through the windows. Shadows lengthened. Pierce signed the brown leather guest register for both of them.

“Happy the man that has such a friend beside him, when he comes to die!” Hawthorne forecast his own end in The Blithedale Romance. Hawthorne chose his old friend for his deathbed companion. Pierce undoubtedly knew it.

It would be a boon, Hawthorne had said to him, to pass away without a struggle. Later, however, Pierce told Sophia that Hawthorne’s only intimation of mortality occurred when he, Pierce, had noted that the wind, blowing from the east, promised a change. “Not in my day,” Hawthorne had replied.

After Hawthorne’s death, Pierce provided, as if by rote, the history of Hawthorne’s last night. Hawthorne had hardly eaten after arriving at the inn; he took a cup of tea with toast and went to bed. At ten Pierce himself climbed upstairs, his room separated from Hawthorne’s by a door, which he left open. The lamp was lit. A few hours passed. Pierce rose and paused at the threshold of the chamber. Hawthorne seemed peacefully asleep, right palm tucked beneath his cheek. At three or four in the morning, Pierce got up again, and this time stole into his friend’s room. Hawthorne lay in the same position, so Pierce placed his hand on his forehead. It was cold.

Pierce sent for a doctor and alerted two guests in the hotel whom he knew. They confirmed what he had felt beneath his fingers. He wired James Fields, not bearing to deliver the news to Sophia with the staccato cruelty of a short telegram.

Later that day, May 19, the birthday of Hawthorne’s father, Pierce was packing Hawthorne’s clothes and noticed an old pocketbook at the bottom of Hawthorne’s valise. In it lay Pierce’s picture.

“I need not tell you how lonely I am,” Pierce would write to Bridge, “and how full of sorrow.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

A Handful of Moments