Hawthorne’s New Boat
The spring of 1842, shortly after the deaths of John Thoreau and little Waldo, found a tired and sad Emerson managing a different kind of family burden. His step-grandfather, the Reverend Ezra Ripley, had died the previous autumn. Death at the age of ninety did not strike his family as tragic, but to Emerson it seemed the end of an era. “Great, grim, earnest men,”1 Emerson the former minister said to them in his journal, “I belong by natural affinity to other thoughts and schools than yours, but my affection hovers respectfully about your retiring footprints, your unpainted churches, strict platforms, and sad offices; the iron-gray deacon and the wearisome prayer rich with the diction of ages.”
As one of Ripley’s heirs, Emerson became unofficial agent of the Manse and surrounding property and soon needed to find tenants. The seventy-two-year-old clapboard building housed many of his own memories. After his return from a trip to Europe in 1833, he had resided with his mother for a year in Newtown before moving in with the elderly Ripley at the parsonage in October 1834. He lived there until he married Lidian the next year and they moved to Bush with his mother. During his year in the Manse he had written Nature.
In early 1842, Henry’s friend Elizabeth Hoar brought the parsonage’s virtues and availability to the attention of a close friend of hers in Boston—a talented young painter, Sophia Peabody, sister of Elizabeth Peabody who had worked at the Temple School with Bronson Alcott. Sophia was engaged to marry a writer named Nathaniel Hawthorne. On their first visit in May, Emerson greeted the couple-to-be when they came to the front door and raised the massive iron knocker adorned with a sphinx’s head. Outside, the old house’s white coat of paint had long since faded to a dismal gray, but indoors Hawthorne and Sophia loved the parsonage’s high paneling and heavy beams.2 In Ripley’s study, on the second floor above the dining room, the walls dark with generations of soot were typical of what they did not admire about the house. The room was rendered more glum by prints of dour divines who, to Hawthorne’s skeptical eye, looked as if they had grappled with the devil until his satanic majesty had rubbed off on them.
Across narrow Monument Street, in front of the house, rose Poplar Hill, which in one direction provided a fine view of the village and in the other a view of the river and distant mountains. The field beside the house was known to have been the site of an Indian village, and arrowheads and shards of pottery could still be found there. Indoors, from the study’s west window, Hawthorne could see—past the drooping willow that filtered light and brushed against the eaves and glass—Ripley’s extensive orchard and the sparkling river. Hawthorne liked this haven’s “accessible seclusion,” the way their tree-shaded lane distanced the road and reduced carriages and wayfarers to irrelevance. Silently awkward with strangers, Hawthorne was not a misanthrope, but like Henry Thoreau he needed solitude. He had spent years in near-seclusion before meeting Sophia. He admired and worried over the human pageant from the margins, the same vantage point from which Henry disdained it. Until meeting Sophia, Hawthorne had been a solitary watcher, a man who fell silent in groups but loved quiet conversation with one or two friends. Yet here he was hopelessly in love. For the moment, at least, they filled each other’s world and left no need or space for others.
They were pleased with the parsonage, and Emerson rented it to them3 for seventy-five dollars per annum. They needed a quiet hideaway in which Hawthorne could write and they could build a marriage and a family. Emerson needed a tenant but wanted an ideal one, and he thought that in Hawthorne he might have met his goal. A mutual friend observed to Margaret Fuller, “He seems pleased with the colony4 he is collecting.”
Hawthorne was indeed a coup for Emerson’s dream of an artistic community in Concord. Ever since the publication of his 1837 story collection Twice-Told Tales, Hawthorne’s reputation as an American original had been growing. Even Edgar Allan Poe—a young but influential poet, critic, and conjuror of outré fictions—remarked when reviewing Twice-Told Tales, “Upon the whole we look upon him5 as one of the few men of indisputable genius to whom our country has as yet given birth.” Although he complained about Hawthorne’s frequent reliance upon allegory, Poe praised his imagination and style. Both writers were lauded for painstakingly crafting stories that built toward a single powerful effect, leading the creation of a new genre distinct from the rambling, discursive narratives of the eighteenth century. Although the first volume had not sold well because the Panic of 1837 led to the publisher’s closing, a second volume of Twice-Told Tales had been published in late 1841, only a few months before Hawthorne knocked on Emerson’s door.
Hawthorne also swore to himself6 that he would write another novel—a novel, as he said, because almost no one knew that he had also written the anonymous Fanshawe, inspired by his undergraduate years at Bowdoin College. He published it at his own expense in 1828, when he was twenty-four. Hawthorne kept a tight grip on his privacy, but about this not-at-all scandalous novel he was absolutely secretive, finally gathering up and burning every copy he could find. Not even Sophia knew he had written it.
On their wedding day, the ninth of June 1842, as the carriage from Boston trotted down the avenue of leafy green ash trees, the Hawthornes found the wheel tracks almost overgrown with weeds in the nine months since Ripley’s death. An elderly white horse and a couple of cows wandered the path, noisily munching tall grass. The newlyweds found, however, that at Emerson’s request a garden had been tilled and planted for them. They learned that Emerson had hired John Garrison,7 a Negro handyman who had worked for him before, and an odd young white man named, Hawthorne wrote in his journal, “Henry Thorow.”8 It was one of Henry’s first tasks out in the world following recuperation from his breakdown after John’s death.
Physically, Hawthorne and Henry were antonyms. A trim hundred and fifty pounds at just under six feet tall, with luxuriant dark locks, Hawthorne was legendarily good-looking. When Elizabeth Peabody first met him, she exclaimed to Sophia, “You never saw anything so splendid9 as he is! He is handsomer than Lord Byron!” He had always been too shy to exploit his looks, but Sophia thought him a figure worthy of a classical marble. Hawthorne had been equally dazzled by her—a beautiful woman with chestnut hair and blue-gray eyes, who had been the object of masculine attention throughout her twenties despite health problems, including severe headaches. Soon she inspired an idealized character, a young woman named Alice Vane, in Hawthorne’s story “Edward Randolph’s Portrait”: “She was clad entirely in white, a pale, ethereal creature, who, though a native of New England, had been educated abroad, and seemed not merely a stranger from another clime, but almost a being from another world.”
Intellectually and philosophically, Henry and Hawthorne had more in common. In some ways, Hawthorne’s bent was Transcendental. He thought in metaphors and sought to suffuse most phenomena with moral resonance. Preoccupied with sin and suffering, however, he was inherently less hopeful about the future and the prospects for social change than his new neighbor Emerson, and more hard-headed and realistic in his assessments of humanity. Like Emerson and Henry, he was preoccupied with reflections and shadows and echoes, with the oblique way that a scene’s or incident’s implications could evoke a greater creative or philosophical response than more explicit observations.
Recently he had experienced a vivid example of this propensity in himself. In Boston before his marriage, he had loved to stroll the Common and watch children play at the Frog Pond. Boys sailed accurately detailed schooners and pilot boats across the water, with one boy on the near shore and another on the far, like merchants separated by the Atlantic. At sunset, the Common became the meeting ground of young lovers, dandies in gloves and cane, girls rolling hoops, mothers holding the hand of a small child, and the occasional salty old tar who couldn’t resist critiquing the authenticity of a toy clipper’s draft or rigging. One sunset, Hawthorne watched a full-rigged man-of-war whose every rise on a swell or heel to the breeze seemed like that of an actual ship on the ocean. “There is something that kindles the imagination,”10 he wrote at the time, “more than the reality would.” A real ship would have been grasped immediately by the mind and filed away as a mundane artifact that lacked symbolic resonance. The Lilliputian mimicry of the toy ship, in contrast, was a representation, and thus evoked an absent ideal.
Haunted by his own family’s past, Hawthorne had even created a different identify for himself. Just as David Henry Thoreau had turned himself into Henry David, Hawthorne modified his surname to distance himself from a notorious ancestor. He was born Hathorne, the great-great-grandson of John Hathorne, the son of an early settler in Massachusetts Bay and the only judge who never admitted regret for his role in the witch trials held in the early 1690s in Ipswich, Salem, and elsewhere in Massachusetts. Nathaniel Hawthorne may have changed his name to distance himself from his notorious ancestor, or he may have wanted to return to an earlier English variant of the name. Tracing his ancestry back to the dark early days of America’s first European settlers, and every year celebrating the same birthday as the United States, Hawthorne at times seemed like a walking crossroads of American history.
Unlike Henry, who gloried in autonomy but admitted to loneliness, at least within the confines of his journal, and unlike Emerson, who often communicated with Lidian by means of notes carried from room to room by servants, Hawthorne saw the world through a romantic haze and felt himself now part of an indivisible couple. They had been secretly engaged since New Year’s Day 1839, and as recently as the first week of June, Sophia had postponed the wedding because of one of her recurring illnesses. Despite her worry that health would prevent her from being the best possible wife for her dashing husband, finally they had married, in the parlor of the family’s home and her sister’s establishment, called Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s West Street Bookstore. The talented and dynamic Elizabeth was later business manager of The Dial. “We are as happy as people can be,11 without making themselves ridiculous,” Hawthorne wrote to his sister a month later, “and might be even happier; but, as a matter of taste, we choose to stop short at this point.”
This new secluded, romantic life was a world away from the exhausting and disappointing months in 1840 that Hawthorne had spent hoeing the barren soil at Brook Farm, where his thousand-dollar contribution earned him an assignment to shovel a mountain of manure. The months of backbreaking work in bitter cold, the meager provisions, the dissent among his fellows—all seemed like a nightmare now in this generous new life. Among his acquaintances, utopian dreams were discussed from lecture podium to dinner table and during long rambles through the woods in which dreamers hoped to found a just community. But Hawthorne had found his utopia on his own, with one other person—Sophia. The pleasures of the marriage bed had come as a glorious revelation to a man who had once bet a friend that he would remain a lifelong bachelor. “Would that my wife would permit12 me to record the ethereal dainties, that kind Heaven provided for us, on the first day of our arrival!” he exclaimed in the privacy of their shared journal. “Never, surely, was such food heard of on earth—at least, not by me.”
Like the fictional Alice Vane in the story she had inspired, Sophia was a talented artist.13 With no reputation of her own yet, she had sold numerous impressive copies of famous works, to help feed Boston’s post-Puritan appetite for artwork. Most of the Hawthornes’ cheap furniture was ordinary maple, so Sophia made it colorful and unique by painting on it. A cherub cavorted on the dressing table; Venus rose from the washstand; Michelangelo’s prophets and sibyls held court on the dining room wall. On the bed’s headboard Sophia painted a striking copy of a seventeenth-century Roman fresco by Guido Reni—his famous Aurora, a parade of classically robed figures and chariot-pulling horses flying through the air, their saffron and coral hues heralding the arrival of the goddess of dawn above a sleeping blue earth. Years earlier, Thomas Carlyle’s wife had sent a print of this very painting to Lidian Emerson as a wedding gift. Numerous glimpses of it had inspired Henry to begin a poem that he never finished, as a tribute to his favorite time of day: “The slumbering sea with the day’s impulse heaves, / While o’er the western hill retires the drowsy night. . .”
Hawthorne settled into Ripley’s study. They banished gloom with bright paint and a bronze vase of ferns; the gold-colored paper hangings would have struck Ripley as indecently cheerful. Hawthorne imagined old Ezra’s ghost peering in the windows and moaning in confusion. He joked that perhaps posthumous outrage was behind the inexplicable sounds they heard around the house—an occasional clatter in the kitchen, a pounding like a workman’s repairs in the study, even a piece of paper being crumpled near them in the bedroom as Hawthorne lay half asleep. Hawthorne’s ragtag collection of books, mostly from discount-stall foraging, stood upright on the shelves. He was the first occupant of the study who did not write sermons. There Ezra Ripley had scrawled three thousand and Ralph Waldo Emerson had crafted his own secular sermon. At times Hawthorne felt that his fictions seemed light14 and airy beside the solemn thoughts whose memory lingered in the shelves.
On the last day of August, a wet Thursday, Henry rowed the green-and-blue Musketaquid up the river to the Hawthornes’ house. Around him trees waded in floodwaters, their lower boughs dipping into the current, and the scarlet caps of cardinal flowers bobbed just above the surface on what had been the bank. Henry left his boat with a young man on the riverbank and walked up to eat dinner with the Hawthornes. After the pleasant and talkative meal, which included the first muskmelons and watermelons harvested from the garden that Henry had planted at Emerson’s behest before the newlyweds moved in, Hawthorne and Henry strolled along the sopping riverbank. The boat was now on the opposite shore. Henry shouted to the man minding it, who rowed it back across the river.
Hawthorne and Henry climbed in. Henry rowed equally well with one paddle or two, and Hawthorne admired his calm and instinctive control. In reply Henry bragged that when Indians had visited Concord a few years earlier, he realized that without instruction he had hit upon an Indian-style method of paddling a canoe. But the rough little Musketaquid was not as graceful as a canoe.
To Hawthorne’s surprise, Henry said that he wanted to sell the boat, apparently without mentioning that he and John had built it together. He asked only seven dollars. Hawthorne agreed, wishing that he could buy Henry’s boating skills as cheaply.
The next day Hawthorne wrote at length about Henry in his journal:
Mr. Thorow dined with us yesterday.15 He is a singular character—a young man with much of wild original nature still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own. He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty. He was educated, I believe, in Cambridge, and formerly kept school in this town; but for two or three years back, he has repudiated all regular modes of getting a living, and seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men—an Indian life, I mean, as respects the absence of any systematic effort for livelihood.
On Friday, Hawthorne was picking up windfall apples in the orchard with Sophia and Louisa—the part-time servant they barely managed to employ—when he looked around to see Henry rowing across the hay field toward them. The swollen river had flooded the ground where men had wielded scythes a week or two before. Delivering the boat to its new owner, Henry floated above the earth, with the sky reflected around him in the brown floodwaters.
Hawthorne stepped into the boat. This sort of talent did not come naturally to him, although Henry assured him that if he relaxed the craft would move in whichever direction he willed. Hawthorne was skeptical. When pulling hard on two oars, he could propel the boat in approximately his desired direction. With one oar, however, switching it from side to side, Hawthorne failed so dismally that he was mortified to find Sophia watching on the bank. The enchanted craft lurched first toward one shore and then the other, pivoted as if to consider going upstream or down, then chose a third direction. Henry took over to demonstrate again. As soon as the oar was in his hands, the boat turned docile and obedient. Hawthorne thought perhaps it had yet to transfer its affection to its new master and decided that it was unlikely he would venture as far in this craft as Henry had. Recently Hawthorne had informed his journal, “A perfect pond-lily is the most satisfactory of flowers.” He renamed the Musketaquid the Pond Lily.
Henry walked off homeward, leaving behind the boat in which he and John had rowed the Merrimack. Almost exactly nine months had passed since that ordinary morning when John nicked his finger while shaving. As the ache of loss receded, Helen had advertised in the Concord Freeman that she was opening a private school in Concord to teach young ladies piano, needlework, and painting. Apparently there was little interest, however, and she abandoned the idea.
After he bought the boat from Henry, Hawthorne experienced another powerful demonstration of his own imagination’s response to nature. Over the next few weeks, as autumn crept in, Hawthorne spent less time rambling across Concord’s wooded hillsides. In love with the new perspective brought to him by the Pond Lily, he spent his free hours on the water. On the afternoon of the seventeenth of September, less than three weeks after purchasing the boat from Henry, left alone after Sophia and her mother walked over to the Emersons’, Hawthorne took the boat out by himself.
Rowing with difficulty against a quarrelsome northwest wind, he explored the north branch of the Concord. Every time he stopped paddling, the wind swept the boat around. Only in the shelter of a high wooded hill was he able to pause, because both the wind and current did. He passed a phalanx of aspens and elders leaning low toward the water as they marched down a high bank—“the Indian name of which I have forgotten,”16 he later wrote in his journal, “although Mr. Thorow has told it to me.” Vines wound around the trees. This stretch of the river felt as secluded and primordial as any that might have flourished before the arrival of Europeans.
Already some trees were wearing their autumn scarlet and gold. Now and then a leaf floated lazily down to the surface of the water and revolved slowly in the current. Trees cast deep shade except where sunlight angled through leaves. The scene was as beautiful as any that Hawthorne could recall, but when he glanced at its reflection he found it even more stirring. “I am half convinced,” Hawthorne wrote in his journal, “that the reflection is indeed the reality.”17 Somehow the mimicry was more what his spirit yearned for.