The Ghost Sense: Hawthorne and Poe
Why does Hawthorne give us the afternoon hour later than anyone else?—oh late, late, quite uncannily late, as if it were always winter outside?
HENRY JAMES, “The Lesson of Balzac”
Nathaniel Hawthorne was not quite sixty when in 1864 he died suddenly during the Civil War—a war in which he felt no zeal for either side. For at least four years before his death, Hawthorne was tormented by his inability to finish any of his last projected novels and by the oncoming dissolution of the Union. To both of these he reacted with a feeling of personal dread and political helplessness.
The past, usually nearer to Hawthorne than “the Present, the Immediate, the Actual,” was coming apart in his mind even before the guns made it unreal. Hawthorne’s obsessive symbols now seemed to him disconnected, artificial, outworn machinery that he had never before exploited for melodramatic effect (as had Poe). The aborted “romances”—Dr. Grimsbawe’s Secret; Septimius Felton, or The Elixir of Life; The Ancestral Footstep—all projected fantastic themes that Hawthorne could never work out to his satisfaction. They became personal obsessions, failed attempts to put the past into order. Hawthorne dimly recognized that his themes were the turbid past baffling the present. Unable to separate himself from his own symbols, he felt haunted as a man and humiliated as an artist.
One story presented an elixir that would keep a man alive forever. Another featured the print of a bloody footstep left on a house step by a Protestant martyr persecuted by Bloody Mary. Another represented an American in England, there to claim an ancient inheritance. Still another told of a woman’s corpse that in the coffin turned into masses of golden hair. These romances had many interchangeable features—always a sign that an author is pursuing some separable idea from book to book rather than working out a situation in its own terms. Characters were discarded only to pop up again under new names. The cast included spiders, buried treasure, indecipherable markings on tombstones, and gave the impression that Hawthorne had long carried in his mind certain atmospheric “effects” as deadweight. It was not clear from Hawthorne’s indecisiveness, his many desperate attempts to secure a story by making repeated outlines and frantic notes to himself in the margins of his manuscripts, whether he had ever taken his last plots seriously. He may have just felt himself closeted with his own contrivances. But once it had become complicated, plot offered him the chance to work out his rich excursions into existence as a moral mystery.
Even in 1850–51, the time of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, of his sudden success as an author, Hawthorne had never been confident that success would continue. He was distrustful of the literary career in America, sardonic about his own efforts as a “mere storyteller” in preachy New England and among his transcendentalist neighbors in Concord—who could not read him. His sometime neighbor Herman Melville came to identify himself with a tragic young French author’s bitterness: “The literary career seems to me unreal, both in its essence and in the rewards which one seeks from it, and therefore fatally marred by a secret absurdity.” Hawthorne would have agreed with every word. Nothing was more uncertain and “absurd” than to attempt to support a family by the pen. In the preface to The Scarlet Letter—Hawthorne was always writing bluff, blunt, “sensible” prefaces to his novels, as if to assure his countrymen that the real New Englander should not be confused with the “fanciful” and “visionary” author—he admitted that even though his Puritan ancestors would have scorned such an “idler” and “writer of story-books,” “yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine.”
But he was never to be sure that this was entirely so. Had he been accepted and even “forgiven” for telling stories in so many subtle and enigmatic ways that they could have been taken as mischievous, even dangerous to the moral tradition which New England thought special to itself? Of all the many forms and realities of guilt that Hawthorne had taken as his subject matter, none was perhaps so unexpected as that of being a “mere” storyteller in the new Israel whose most famous and self-liberated man of letters, Ralph Waldo Emerson, could not read fiction. Emerson thought that Hawthorne’s reputation was really a tribute to the man, for his romances were “good for nothing.”
Hawthorne continued to live in the country of his imagination long after he had written himself out. From his first stories to the last novel he published, The Marble Faun (1860), his work had been “haunted” by the themes of sin, crime, guilt, murder. There was always some dread secret, some real or projected violation of the human order, some unimaginable solitude in society. What Melville in the 1850s saluted at the center of Hawthorne’s work as “the power of blackness” deteriorated even before the Civil War into some mysterious personal blankness. His isolation expressed itself in a total exasperation with the American political process and the abolitionist sympathies in Concord. He was a pragmatic party Democrat easily made cynical by the jockeying for power. We do not know how much he approved of President Franklin Pierce’s pro-Southern administration, but he owed his consulship in Liverpool to Pierce, his college classmate and lifelong friend. During the Civil War, when Pierce was generally discredited in his native New England, Hawthorne made a point of dedicating to Pierce his English reminiscences, Our Old Home, and summoned up his last strength to defy the outraged protests of Emerson and others.
Hawthorne was living out his last years as a Hawthorne character. He had been an extraordinarily attractive man and was an adored husband; but solitude was always more natural to Hawthorne than “society” of any kind beyond his wife and children—even the amiable superficial society of other authors in Concord and the Berkshires. He was the surliest and most fractious of Yankees, a hermit crab with a Timon-like contempt for his idealistic contemporaries (he excepted Thoreau, as a boating companion) and a gift for tripping up others with his grim silences that disconcerted professionally genial people like Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. This trait amused Emerson, who in Concord was a sacred object. He enjoyed walking with the silent, bilious Hawthorne. “In his conversation, as in his books, you feel there is some bitter fairy, which is biting him all the time, and which he is unable to conceal.”
The mysterious breakdown of Hawthorne’s imaginative capacity suggests the ominousness of a Hawthorne story: everything is suspended until the catastrophe. The catastrophe is usually the one violence in the story, something that human nature has willed after keeping it long withheld, and the disclosure is of some secret long buried within the soul.
Hawthorne wrote of one of his last projects, The Dolliver Romance, “I cannot finish it unless a great change comes over me; and if I make too great an effort to do so, it will be my death, not that I should care much for that, if I could fight the battle through and win it, thus ending a life of much smoulder and scanty fire in a blaze of glory.” Now his own “catastrophe” was on him: extreme uncertainty, mental dislocation, great difficulty in his physical movements, a marked abdication of his vital resources. The war was his despair, chewing everything up for a national ideal Hawthorne did not believe in. He would have let the South go if it had left peacefully. “New England is as large a lump of earth as my heart can hold.” “I must say that I rejoice that the old Union is smashed. We never were one people and never really had a country since the Constitution was formed.” Only Hawthorne, indifferent to all agitation over slavery, would have been equally contemptuous of the constitutional compromise under which the South counted a slave as three-fifths of a person in determining a state’s representation in Congress.
Nevertheless, a terrible Civil War was raging. No other writer in New England sounded so cold to the national cause. And the war was helping to kill him. The war was a violation and destruction of what little order there was around him. With his usual melancholy dependence on time past as more real than the present, he felt himself sinking into some general confusion. In a disdainfully independent essay for the Atlantic Monthly, “Chiefly About War Matters—by a Peaceable Man,” Hawthorne described a visit to the Southern theater of war without any of the usual patriotic trumpetings. “This dismal time, when our country might seem to have arrived at such a dead standstill.”
In his campaign biography of Pierce (1852), Hawthorne described slavery as “one of those evils which divine Providence does not leave to be remedied by human contrivances, but which, in its own good time, by some means impossible to be anticipated, but of the simplest and easiest operation, when all its uses have been fulfilled, it causes to vanish like a dream.” It would soon vanish, though not like a dream, and Hawthorne might easily have anticipated this as one result of the war. But with his grave faith in doing nothing, Hawthorne found everything about the war painful to his conservative mind. His relief was to find military pomp ludicrous.
Only Hawthorne would have written that the country in general “was more quiet than in ordinary times, because so large a proportion of its restless element had been drawn toward the seat of the conflict.” “The air was full of a vague disturbance.” He sorrowed over the “lines of soldiers, with shouldered muskets, putting us in mind of similar spectacles at the gates of European cities.… Will the time ever come again, in America, when we may live half a score of years without once seeing the likeness of a soldier, except it be in the festal march of a company on its summer tour?” He bitterly anticipated the “preponderance of military titles and pretensions.… It behooves civilians to consider their wretched prospects in the future, and assume the military button before it is too late.” Deriding the mighty preparations for battles which Northern generals were usually too cautious to win, Hawthorne said that
the whole business, though connected with the destinies of a nation, takes inevitably a tinge of the ludicrous. The vast preparation of men and warlike material,—the majestic patience and docility with which the people waited through those weary and dreary months,—the martial skill, courage and caution with which our movement was ultimately made,—and, at last, the tremendous shock with which we were brought suddenly up against nothing at all.
Hawthorne was equally unimpressed by Lincoln. He derided the unpredictable electoral process which permitted the voters to choose a candidate they knew nothing about.
It is the strangest and yet the fittest thing in the jumble of human vicissitudes, that he, out of so many millions, unlooked for, unselected by any intelligible process that could be based upon his genuine qualities, unknown to those who chose him, and unsuspected of what endowments may adapt him for his tremendous responsibility, should have found the way open for him to fling his lank personality into the chair of state,—where, I presume, it was his first impulse to throw his legs on the council-table and to tell the Cabinet ministers a story.
Hawthorne’s equally unflattering remarks about Lincoln’s appearance were suppressed by the Atlantic Monthly when it reluctantly published “Chiefly About War Matters” in July 1862. Since Hawthorne’s lack of patriotic fire made the magazine uneasy, he cheerfully added unsigned footnotes, purporting to come from the editors, that protested passages in his own text. But he denounced John Brown as a “blood-stained fanatic” and roundly declared that “Nobody was ever more justly hanged. He won his martyrdom fairly, and took it firmly.” Then he ridiculed the wartime exaltation of Brown by saying that “any common-sensible man, looking at the matter unsentimentally, must have felt a certain intellectual satisfaction in seeing him hanged, if it were only in requital of his preposterous miscalculation of possibilities.”
Hawthorne saw the war as a totally tragic event and, in failing health and spirits, identified his crisis with the national crisis.
The Present, the Immediate, the Actual, has proved too potent for me. 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, possibly, into a Limbo where our action and its polity may be as literally the fragments of a shattered dream as my unwritten Romance.
Yet had there ever been a time in his life when the social world was less than a grim duty, the political world not repulsive? Hawthorne’s enduring solitude after leaving college in the “dismal chamber” of the Salem home where he had practiced his art, was more than a personal habit; it was a commitment to the wholly mental life of his own characters. What he most despised in John Brown—the “preposterous miscalculation of possibilities”—paralleled what had gone wrong with his own last projects. In each unfinishable novel he was working less with an inherent dramatic situation than with a controlling idea that the characters were to represent and the final catastrophe to make clear. The characters, having this awful symbolic weight to bear, kept turning into each other and getting lost. With so much hanging on the too-abstract “meaning” behind each story, Hawthorne tried for shock effects—a bloody footstep visible after centuries in a stone step, a corpse dissolving into golden ringlets of hair, a villain falling dead after swallowing the elixir he thinks will make him young again.
Allegory, some “higher” meaningfulness and moral purpose, had been central to Hawthorne’s work from the beginning. He was the one great artist of New England’s religion—of people who walked a world where every gesture as well as every action came under the eye of a totally sovereign Deity. The solitude of Hawthorne’s characters was more than physical in the bare, still uncharted world of Boston in The Scarlet Letter, caught between the sea and the wilderness. There everyone felt himself endlessly accountable; the individual knew that his aloneness was of supreme interest to God. Solitude was not exclusion from society but the condition of a life incessantly moralized. The individual was always deliberating, inspecting, and challenging to make sure that a highly suspicious divinity would in fact not exclude him.
So much solitude lived in anxious self-confrontation and self-study meant a totally interior life. Consciousness could become an infliction. It finally did to Hawthorne, an artist who had to balance his characters’ incessant mental striving against their high sense of purpose. He was entirely matter-of-fact about a world that was legendary. The crux of the matter was that his people were always so alone; they felt damned. And so did he. Emerson, despite his dismissal of Hawthorne’s fiction, may have guessed the agony of Hawthorne’s last years when he wrote on hearing of his death, “I thought there was a tragic element in the event, that might be more truly rendered—in the painful solitude of the man, which, I suppose, could no longer be endured, and he died of it.” To be that much alone was to be in contradiction. The subject Hawthorne inherited was the purposefulness (once one came under the sovereign eye of God) that actual life and human passion could no longer demonstrate. Allegory was inherent to his characters. They practiced it every day, for the human world was to find its justification only in the moral order.
But what if that moral order did not really exist? had come to seem a human construction like any other? The memory of so much “order” and purpose, once set by the supreme mind that created the universe, remained with people long after the sacred connection had vanished. The life once lived as allegory could disappear into history, becoming fragments to be put together only in a story. The ancestral religion had in fact turned its ancient duties and inflictions into legend, the matter of New England, a remote regional culture like that of the Basques or the Celts.
What Hawthorne seized as his natural subject was New England’s historic remoteness, New England as a legend to itself after the ancient fires of belief had burned out in the nineteenth century. Utterly opposed to Emerson, Hawthorne did not believe that in the absence of the church, man’s natural faith asserts itself. Personally indifferent to religion, Hawthorne kept the old Puritan distrust of society and Nature. Nature in the human heart, not in Concord woods, was really quite terrible. Moreover, New England Democrats were never aroused by democracy as the promise of equality. Few things were less to Hawthorne’s taste than Emerson’s blithe assurance to his listeners that any farmer or small trader was potentially a genius like himself. Hawthorne distrusted the American people politically and excluded most American types from his fiction. He did not think that literature consisted of personal ideals. His lifelong insecurity as a professional author reflected his suspicion of the public as well as of publishers. He was more isolated even than Poe, who had to work the public through magazines. To write dramatic fiction in a New England that had remained self-righteous while doubting religion—that was simply not natural. Only in New England could so pure a work of art as The Scarlet Letter have aroused a busybody minister to cry out, “There is an unsound state of public morals when the novelist is permitted, without a scorching rebuke, to select such crimes and to invest them with all the fascination of genius and all the charms of a highly polished style.”
But only in New England could The Scarlet Letter have been written. From the beginning, when he spent ten—or was it twelve?—years in his Salem room learning to write “tales,” Hawthorne instinctively fixed on New England as his tradition, his subject, his fate. He tried for many years to interest publishers in collections of interrelated tales variously called Seven Tales of My Native Land, Provincial Tales, The Storyteller. The publishers, as it usually happened, wanted only Hawthorne’s best stories. The rascally book merchant Samuel C. Goodrich took for his gift annual The Token in 1832 “The Gentle Boy,” “The Wives of the Dead,” “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” without Hawthorne’s name so as to deceive readers into the belief that they were getting several authors instead of just one. It was not until Twice-Told Tales (1837) that Hawthorne’s name appeared over his works.
Hawthorne’s fixation on New England, his sense of solitude as a fatality—not least in his own life—and above all his sense that we are determined, located in ourselves forever, by the past as human sinfulness, acting on us as second nature, was to make him a puzzle to the realists who came after the Civil War. What is special in Hawthorne is the belief that even though no moral order may exist, the responsibility for it has fallen on the sinner himself. So his relation to it in faithless times is problematical, endlessly difficult. It is some strange preoccupation that we must live with. There is nothing to guide us in this “forest” (a refrain in Hawthorne) but the heart. “Heart” is as central in Hawthorne as “soul” is to the transcendentalists. It stands for the loneliness of sexual love and its attendant affections, constrained by the spell of the past that still makes many of the living unable to love. The struggle to love makes Hester and Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter more dramatic than any newly “liberated” self rebelling against nineteenth-century convention.
Hawthorne would have agreed with Marx: the dead generations weigh on the living like an incubus. Unlike Marx, Hawthorne felt that the past, not the future, was his opening to the imagination. He did not trust the future in America; the buoyancy and thrust of nineteenth-century ambition never interfered with his creative bent. Hawthorne is not modern: the drama in his works is located in the past or is wholly determined by it. In his last desperate period the historical pitch of his mind became his curse. Almost everything in Hawthorne turns on old legends, myths, chronicles, “twice-told tales,” “mosses from an old manse,” England as “our old home.” The Blithedale Romance (1852) is the only one of his four major novels that is concerned wholly with issues and personalities of Hawthorne’s own nineteenth-century America, still struggling with pastoral images of itself that were soon to be destroyed in the fires of the Civil War. The Scarlet Letter is of course a story of seventeenth-century Boston. The House of the Seven Gables, though set in nineteenth-century Salem, is about the hold of the past on some elderly characters and the struggle of the young to free them from the “grip” (a favorite word in Hawthorne) of the past. The last novel Hawthorne published in his lifetime, The Marble Faun, laid in contemporary Italy, is really about the unlosable past, the baleful and ominous past that stands in the way of two pairs of ill-matched and unbelievable lovers. The past represents guilt—guilt for the past. The way out is dark, uncertain, a labyrinth like the narrow passages, dreamlike monuments, and tombs of historic Rome.
Even after his marriage, Hawthorne felt himself a prisoner of his native Salem. Sophia Hawthorne said it was “dragging at his ankles.” But as imaginative dream and subject material, he could not leave it alone. In “The Custom House,” preface to The Scarlet Letter, he wrote that the village lingered in his mind with “only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses, and walk its homely lanes.” He was no sooner back for a visit to the “dismal chamber” in Herbert Street than he took out his quire of paper and prepared “to cover it with the accustomed nonsense.” The imaginative connection with the past was instantaneous, a kind of fatality. Hawthorne was not a “historical” novelist. (As Faulkner said, the past is not even past.) But the fascination in Hawthorne is that the past is all determination and all picture. One can never forget, from The House of the Seven Gables, the innocent Matthew Maule on the scaffold, the halter around his neck, crying out to horrible Governor Pyncheon on horseback, grimly watching him, “God will give you blood to drink!” It is the enduring leitmotif of the novel.
In an early sketch for a story that never really came off, “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” Hawthorne harks back, as he often did, to the hanging of “witches” on Gallows Hill.
In the rear of the procession rode a figure on horseback, so darkly conspicuous, so sternly triumphant, that my hearers mistook him for the visible presence of the fiend himself; but it was only his good friend, Cotton Mather, proud of his well won dignity, as the representative of all the hateful features of his time; the one blood-thirsty man, in whom were concentrated those vices of spirit and errors of opinion, that sufficed to madden the whole surrounding multitude. And thus I marshalled them onward, the innocent who were to die, and the guilty who were to grow old in long remorse—tracing their every step, by rock, and shrub, and broken track, till their shadowy visages had circled round the hill-top, where we stood. I plunged into my imagination for a blacker horror, and a deeper woe, and pictured the scaffold—
Hawthorne called himself not novelist but “storyteller” and described what he wrote as “romances” in those prefaces to his books that were apologies for his strange calling and his attempts to bridge the gap between himself and his audience. As a storyteller, choosing to represent psychic situations rather than to explain them, Hawthorne suggested uncertainties where there had always been God’s truth; he drew shadows and hinted at abysses where there had always been clarity; he strained to find images of the imponderable, the blackness, and the vagueness, even the terror that waits in what he called “the dim region beyond the daylight of our perfect consciousness.”
In Hawthorne’s best work—his short stories and his first two novels, The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables—the past still possessed the unity, dominion, force formed by Puritanism. Hawthorne told his publisher James Fields that, The Scarlet Letter “being all in one tone, I had only to get my pitch and could then go on interminably.” It was so much of one piece, he said, that by keeping so close to its point, it was “diversified no otherwise than by turning different sides of the same dark idea to the reader’s eye.”
Edgar Allan Poe insisted that “unity of effect” was the highest aim of literature and was possible only in short forms like the tale and the lyric poem. This was the public version of Poe’s obsessive belief that the artist must manipulate his audience. “Unity of effect” was a hypothetical idea, subjective rather than esthetic; Poe was always too conscious of his audience and of his need to absorb it into his will.
Hawthorne, by contrast, wrote The Scarlet Letter as if hypnotized by it. With his usual need to protect his feelings, he pretended to scoff at his own efforts. Seventeenth-century Boston produced in him a concentrated force of impression—the scaffold on which the book opens and concludes, the town imprisoned between the ocean and the forest, the scarlet letter itself, the mirror, the pillory, the jail, the “sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats,… assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.” The past fell into shape—a marshalling of images that developed into a single figure, putting the past into relief. The reader can look at it from every side, as if it were a piece of sculpture. This is a freedom that Poe never willingly gave his reader.
The dramatic logic and progression of The Scarlet Letter, the overwhelming sense it exerts on the reader of the harsh Puritan past as the “dark necessity” that works on everyone’s life, the particular way in which images of the past are felt by us as present psychological and human inflictions—this effect is so keen and inexorable that Hawthorne’s “ghost sense,” as Eliot called it, becomes the psychic stream in which we live. But Hawthorne has not, like Eliot, been torn from the past; he is clearly afraid of it. It is more of a “ghost” than Eliot knew. There is in Hawthorne’s best stories a subtle removal from the past he has called up. He just cannot sever himself from it. Puritanism is America’s Middle Ages, and in Hawthorne its details are finally as ungraspable as those gargoyles on Gothic cathedrals, those knotted images in Dante, that are so much the mind of another period that we never fully see them, however cleverly we explain them.
There are many writers, far more removed from us in time, who reach us more directly than Hawthorne does. If the historical sense, as Eliot put it in a famous essay, consists in bringing certain past works into the daylight of present consciousness, then Hawthorne is not easily assimilable by us. That is why there are so many theological and psychoanalytical interpretations of Hawthorne—they fill the vacuum created by our modern uncertainty about the use and relevance of Hawthorne’s art.
What this means, in terms of that art, is that Hawthorne’s images of the past are autonomous yet cling to their original texture. Something irrecoverable of the past clings to them, as in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and “Young Goodman Brown.” There is indeed a “dim region beyond the daylight of our perfect consciousness.” Hawthorne’s “ghost sense” can be a turning of the present into the past—for the delight of the dream itself, for the sense of severity, the “brass studded spikes on the door of the prison house.” Far from turning the past into still another symbol of ourselves, Hawthorne’s art relies on his extraordinary pictorial sense. The rose bush set against the dismal prison door at the opening of The Scarlet Letter and the intimidating gleam of the swords and armor in “The Governor’s Hall” chapter are as startling as the scarlet of the letter, Pearl’s “crimson velvet tunic, of a peculiar cut, abundantly embroidered with fantasies and flourishes of gold-thread.” In the hall “there was a steel headpiece, a cuirass, a gorget, and greaves, with a pair of gauntlets and a sword hanging beneath; all, and especially the helmet and breastplate, so highly burnished as to glow with white radiance, and scatter an illumination everywhere about upon the floor.” In “Young Goodman Brown” flame is at the heart of the forest; in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” even before we come to the brilliant scene, lit up by torches and the prostitutes’ red petticoats, of the major’s public undoing,
a redder light disturbed the moonbeams, and a dense multitude of torches shone along the street, concealing by their glare whatever object they illuminated. The single horseman, clad in a military dress, and bearing a drawn sword, rode onward as the leader, and, by his fierce and variegated countenance, appeared like war personified; the red of one cheek was an emblem of fire and sword; the blackness of the other betokened the mourning which attends them.
Hawthorne’s attention to allegory is incessant; as James said in his biography, it amounted to “importunity.” With so much symbolizing and symbolism at our disposal, contemporary critics have had no trouble showing what Hawthorne should have known about his symbols. But for all Hawthorne’s symbolizing (and even his anxious moralizing), such extraordinary scenic effects as the grappling for Zenobia’s body at the end of The Blithedale Romance, the aged, pathetic, shrivelled brother and sister in The House of the Seven Gables fleeing their house, and the night scenes of Rome in The Marble Faun become the imaginative space in Hawthorne’s work, a perfect historical dreamwork, which is his real achievement.
Everyone recognizes that whatever is most profound in New England is somehow bound up with Puritanism. In Hawthorne we see an artist’s natural emancipation from it and also a Victorian’s turning back to it as the material of legend, an allegory of the human heart. The automatic moralizing of the New England mind, the sententiousness of its intellectual manner in its nineteenth-century descendants, the consciousness of being God’s elect that is evident in Emerson’s belief that his orphic manner could instruct a “plain” people—these realities were turned by Hawthorne into fanciful, elusive, symbolic elements of human nature. But surrounded by so many moralists and religionists who thought they commanded the reality principle, Hawthorne created more memorably than he did anything else a sense of the unreality of existence—its doubleness, its dreaminess, its unrealizability except through the symbol-haunted tale. In Hawthorne, Puritanism returned to its secret core: the hidden God, not just the all-sovereign one; the ungraspable God, not just the lawgiver and taskmaster whom the anxious Puritan, not altogether sure of his salvation, had constantly to satisfy. Reality for the storyteller was like the forever unknown God who lies beyond our ken and may be “hidden” because He is beyond our ken.
It was this sense of the elusive, of the mystery right before our eyes, that made the remarkable writer who thought himself archaic haunting to the late James. James had begun by agreeing that Hawthorne was archaic, and as he confessed in his autobiography, he wanted him out of the picture. There is an obvious parallelism to Hawthorne in the heavy symbolism of late novels like The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl and in the intense self-scrutiny of characters who in the international leisure class have as much time as the Puritans did for perpetually examining their conscience. But when Eliot on James’s death defined as the “Hawthorne aspect” their feeling for the “deeper psychology” (apparently every nineteenth-century novelist lacked this except two Americans), he was really upholding the peculiar isolation on which so much American literature rests.
Eliot thought that Hawthorne’s distinction was his ability “to grasp character through the relation of two or more persons to each other; and this is what no one else, except James, has done.” Obviously Eliot was still defining himself as an American poet when he wrote this; his enthusiasm for James’s The Sense of the Past was peculiar but strangely apt in the context of the “Hawthorne aspect.” Just as Hawthorne could not finish his last works, so James left unfinished a wholly mental romance like The Sense of the Past. The theme of a young man’s exchanging places with the subject of an ancestral portrait and stepping into the world of a hundred years before leads to so many unreal gyrations of plot that it is easy to see why James left it unfinished: he had nowhere to go. What is most chilling about this wholly mental construction is that James was contriving his “sense of the past.” He had nothing like Hawthorne’s saturation in a definite time and place.
Hawthorne’s tales affect us as primitive memory. Certain episodes we seem to have dreamed in common. Of all the American classics, Hawthorne is still the standard for those readers who think that a piece of writing should have the mysterious authenticity and the self-sufficient form of a dream.
It is an odd fact—to those who do not know America from within—that this wholly modern society should have produced as its rarest, profoundest artists writers who were most concerned with the inner life, with the many strange theaters for mental consciousness alone. Although our writers have naturally found their abundant subject matter in unprecedented transformations, one operating force had to be the struggle with ancestral symbols. Many ghosts haunted the American mind in the nineteenth century. Whatever transcendentalists might say of their kinship with divine Nature, Hawthorne was to portray the half-remembered forest as the repository of what is forever unknown, inhuman, unrecognizable.
Hawthorne—like Poe—became a kind of virtuoso in the fiction of the inner life: the only novelist from New England as subtle as Emerson and Dickinson. He was able to present in the current style the extraordinary burden on the New England mind of the past, its moral introspection, its unending self-confrontation. Poe, his only equal in the “tale,” was really a convert to esthetic medievalism, an apologist for slavery, order, and hierarchy, a writer of “grotesques and arabesques” who saw the power of blackness as personal damnation and a way of practicing literary terror. It is the force of the repressed that Poe made his drawing card, the power not of the past but of the dead, as phantoms preying on unsleeping guilt.
Hawthorne remained a child of Puritanism, rooted in the village, the theocracy, the rule of law, the numbing force of convention. Poe, by contrast, is forever homeless, landless, seeking a visionary home in some Platonic heaven of eternal Beauty, writing his most poignant poems out of a profound homesickness that operated as a curse.
Damnation was a great stimulator of literary effect. No one would ever match Poe’s ability to share his terror with the reader. In a sense Poe never felt that he lived here; his contempt was absolute. As a lordly instructor of the susceptible American people (who made their education out of magazines, as Poe found in them his livelihood and his one chance to enthrall and bamboozle), Poe was still caught up in his favorite pose of being someone Other—a great public personage trailing his mysterious origins, like Alexander Hamilton from the West Indies or Count Rumford (Benjamin Thompson) from Massachusetts. Poe’s haunted castles are all European, like his alter ego, Dupin, the private genius of detection who inaugurated a genre by telling the dumb police where to look.
But if the stage trappings are European, the sense of personal isolation is all too familiar—and even magnified by the abstractness of his ambition and his grandiloquence. Baudelaire, who thought he was Poe’s double, nevertheless understood that
dazzling a young and unformed country by his mind, shocking men who considered themselves his equals by manners, Poe was fated to become a most unhappy writer. Rancors were aroused, solitude settled around him. In Paris, in Germany, he would have found friends; in America, he had to fight for his bread. Thus his drunkenness and nomadic habits are easily explained. He went through life as if through a Sahara desert, and changed his residence like an Arab.
“The terror of which I write,” Poe needlessly admonished his contemporaries, “is not of Germany, but of the soul.” The most expert American critic of his time, a poet so routinely professional that his famous effects are more those of a virtuoso musician indifferently tootling away than those of a thinker in poetry, a mesmerist in his ability to spellbind and intimidate the reader, Poe was of course right to believe in the Romantic cult of genius. To demonstrate his originality in all genres and the sciences, however, Poe had to erect his literally fantastic abilities on his own wretchedness. Eureka, his one-man theory of the universe, his supreme effort to put existence and cosmology together as Melville would do in Moby-Dick and Whitman in Leaves of Grass, is a dazzling catastrophe. Which, as we know from his longest, most sustainedly brutal, least “supernatural” fiction, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, he thought the universe to be.
Pym is anything but the “pure” fiction Poe said he delighted to write and of which he thought himself the master. It is artificially prolonged, mechanical to a degree, and it suspends the reader on such a chain of crises (several of them borrowed from sailors’ narratives) that despite violent excitements, it remains the strangest possible chronicle. Pym (the monosyllable rings in our mind like “Poe”) is a dummy without individual mind or emotion. Any craft he gets into suddenly ensnares him, and everyone else on board, in dangers more extreme and complex than could have been fabricated by anyone but Edgar Allan Poe.
Nevertheless, Pym—like so much in Poe—is “remarkable” and startling. Because it is not “supernatural” until the very end, when in the Antarctic it stops short on “a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men,” it is repeatedly and satisfyingly frightening. As always with Poe at his most fervid, we are held down (quite literally in one stowaway scene), narrowed to the confrontation that is Poe’s necessary image of life. We are brought to see life as nothing but anxiety; for the story consists of one near-fatal disaster after another, from which not only Arthur Gordon Pym but we are saved at the last possible moment.
Pym is a young man of whom we get to know nothing. In himself (and, so far as Poe cared to go into the matter, to himself) Pym is less a person than the occasion of the most desperate encounters. He no sooner goes to bed after a drinking party with his friend Augustus Bernard than this friend (so drunk that he is walking in his sleep) routs him out of bed to go sailing in the middle of the night.
It was blowing almost a gale, and the weather was very cold—it being late in October. I sprang out of bed, nevertheless, in a kind of ecstasy.…
… I perceived at once that, in spite of his assumed nonchalance, he was greatly agitated. I could see him distinctly by the light of the moon—his face was paler than any marble, and his hand shook so excessively that he could scarcely retain hold of the tiller. I found that something had gone wrong, and became seriously alarmed.
That something had gone wrong is definitely an understatement. As the gale dismasts and splinters their boat, Augustus is “insensible” and Pym ties him—and himself—up to keep them from drowning. Whereupon a whaler rides over them, and though they are picked up almost dead, they recover quickly enough to appear at Augustus’s home for breakfast without having to say a word about their escapade.
These rapid shifts, climactic and anticlimactic to the point of farce, are characteristic of Poe’s excited quickness of mind. They intimidate and even awe us through Poe’s self-hypnotizing genius for the unexpected detail. It was the most natural thing in the world for his characters to be in extremis. A sentence like “It is hardly possible to conceive the extremity of my terror” ran off his pen as a matter of course. “Never while I live shall I forget the intense agony of terror I experienced at that moment. My hair stood erect on my head—I felt the blood congealing in my veins—my heart ceased utterly to beat.…”
What will never seem a matter of course is Poe’s ability to imagine what Pym looked like after the whaler had obliterated the skiff to which he had tied himself before passing out:
It appeared that one of the timberbolts having started and broken a passage through the copper, it had arrested my progress as I passed under the ship, and fastened me in so extraordinary a manner to her bottom. The head of the bolt had made its way through the collar of the green baize jacket I had on, and through the back part of my neck, forcing itself out between two sinews and just below the right ear.
That on returning to shore Pym is able to trot off cheerfully to breakfast, without a sign of injury, is as improbable as what happened to his neck. But we accept the first because we understand early in the story that Pym’s eating breakfast is not of the slightest significance. Only the far-out, the totally bizarre and unexpected, counts for Poe. When, as with “the head of the bolt” making its way through Pym’s neck, something so violent occurs on the human body, Poe’s fascination with infliction does not so much suspend our disbelief as it arrests us—and then just as quickly lets us go. Poe’s ability to imagine not only extremes but a succession of them was his genius. As a critic he insisted that a plot should be constructed as perfectly as God made the universe: “we should aim at so arranging the incidents that we shall not be able to determine, of any one of them, whether it depends from any one other or upholds it.” This hardly pertains to Pym, which has no plot and is a chain of episodes.
But what episodes! Violent storms, shrieking drunkenness, murder with axes, murder by drowning, death from heat prostration, hunger and thirst ending in cannibalism. Yet none of these butcherings, stabbings, battles, and man-made earthquakes is so devastating as the account, soon after Pym is safely restored to shore, of how Augustus Bernard hides Pym aboard his father’s ship, the Grampus. It never occurs to Poe to give us any very convincing explanation of why Captain Bernard will not tolerate another young man on board; what interests Poe is not motive but sensation. Augustus stows Pym into the tiniest possible space, thus inviting the reader into a box that is not just Pym’s hiding place but represents Poe’s favorite horror—burial alive. To be trapped in a world altogether foreign to it was to Poe the condition of genius. The superior intellect tests itself by enduring the tomb, proves itself by describing every facet as such horror has never been described before, and raises itself through the power of mind alone.
Poe’s obsession with “premature burial” can easily be traced to every form of confinement, early and late, that a character so frightened and proud had to endure. But its central meaning is made clear in the cherished details and didactic tone that Poe brings to the contemplation of such horror. This was a man for whom every particle of his consciousness was infinitely precious, much as he felt buried in it. Poe so urgently surrendered his “human” and emotional immaturity to the act of thinking that he called his season in hell the “thinking age” and wondered if men before him had ever thought at all. “Thinking” to Poe was more a test than a result. It was a form of showmanship, but even more it was ultimate proof of identity. Thinking alone enabled him to escape from some persisting sense of isolation, of exile, of having been put away. It was a retrieval from death to a life that raised one’s self-esteem to the highest power. It thrived on agony.
Every occasion for thinking became a test—testing is repeated in Pym to the point of hysteria. Freud said that the emotional life is characterized by repetition. Pym has no emotional life, just visceral reactions to butchery and the like. What dominates the story is Poe’s own insatiability: his need to set a problem for his character, to prolong it to the last endurable moment—and to dash quickly on to another.
The main ordeal in Pym begins with Augustus Bernard’s leading his friend down through increasingly narrow spaces to the hold and the box that will be his hiding place. First Augustus shows Pym a cabin
fitted up in the most comfortable style—a thing somewhat unusual in a whaling-vessel.… The ceiling was full seven feet high, and, in short, everything appeared of a more roomy and agreeable nature than I had anticipated. Augustus, however, would allow me but little time for observation, insisting upon the necessity of my concealing myself as soon as possible.
They descend into the hold down a trap concealed by a carpet, make their way through the darkness with a small taper, and at last, “after creeping and winding through innumerable narrow passages,” reach an ironbound box, “such as is used sometimes for packing fine earthenware.”
It was nearly four feet high, and full six long, but very narrow. Two large empty oil casks lay on the top of it, and above these, again, a vast quantity of straw matting, piled up as high as the floor of the cabin. In every other direction around was wedged as closely as possible, even up to the ceiling, a complete chaos of almost every species of ship-furniture, together with a heterogeneous medley of crates, hampers, barrels, and bales, so that it seemed a matter no less than miraculous that we had discovered any passage at all to the box.
Pym has reached his true home. “My companion now showed me that one of the ends of the box could be removed at pleasure. He slipped it aside and displayed the interior, at which I was excessively amused.” This coffin contains a mattress, books, blankets, a large jug full of water, three or four immense bologna sausages, cordials and liquors. It reminds the reader of the Egyptian tomb stored with everything the dead would need in the next world. Since the story line consists of the most contrary sensations in tandem, Pym proceeds “immediately to take possession of my little apartment, and this with feelings of higher satisfaction, I am sure, than any monarch ever experienced upon entering a new palace.”
The watch Augustus thoughtfully left him quickly runs down. Soon Pym will not know whether it is day or night or how many days and nights he has spent in his box. As is natural to a Poe character, Pym at first finds half-suffocation interesting. It is susceptible to subtle differentiations, it stimulates the reasoning power, it is not only Poe’s highest proof of power but just now Pym’s one power. Pym’s patience seems unnatural only if one forgets how many thoughts can occur to a man buried alive.
Pondering in this manner upon the difficulties of my solitary and cheerless condition, I resolved to wait yet another twenty-four hours, when, if no relief were obtained, I would make my way to the trap, and endeavour either to hold a parley with my friend, or get at least a little fresh air through the opening, and a further supply of water from his stateroom.
Sick with thirst, he falls into a stupor and has dreams “of the most terrific description.” These dreams are rather too terrific, overcolored nightmares that fail to impress us. What does work is the unbearable sharpness of Pym’s “thinking faculties” as he tries to discover what has happened to Augustus. (He does not know that a mutiny has broken out above.) He feels increasingly blocked by the stowage on every side. In the most excruciatingly drawn out suspense, he has to find and then decipher in darkness a message that Augustus has thoughtfully sent down with Pym’s dog Tiger.
The cipher is another of Poe’s favorite obsessions; like entombment, it requires for a solution to the problem some special display of reasoning power. Poe certainly piles it on. Pym in the darkness has to read a message not very conveniently threaded on the dog’s back. First Tiger tries to tell Pym that he bears a message by lying on his back with his paws uplifted. Thinking that the dog may be signalling an injury, Pym examines his paws. Thinking him hungry, he feeds him a large piece of ham—which the dog devours, then promptly returns to his “extraordinary manoeuvres.” Thinking him thirsty, and “about adopting this conclusion as the true one,” Pym finally, not neglecting to give us every step in his reasoning, gets to the paper fastened beneath the left shoulder of the animal. Which he has now to read in darkness.
What to do next I could not tell. The hold was so intensely dark that I could not see my hand, however close I would hold it to my face. The white slip of paper could hardly be discerned, and not even that when I looked at it directly; by turning the exterior portions of the retina towards it, that is to say, by surveying it slightly askance, I found that it became in some measure perceptible.
In vain his brain revolves
a multitude of absurd expedients for procuring light—such expedients precisely as a man in the perturbed sleep occasioned by opium would be apt to fall upon for a similar purpose—each and all of which appear by turns to the dreamer the most reasonable and the most preposterous of conceptions, just as the reasoning or imaginative faculties flicker, alternately, one above the other.
He places the slip of paper on the back of a book, collects the fragments of phosphorus matches together upon the paper, and with his palm rubs the whole over quickly yet steadily. Nothing. In rage he tears the paper and throws it away. Then he comes to his senses, finds a small piece of the note, holds it to Tiger’s nose so that the dog will bring him another piece, figures out that the other side of the paper must contain writing, and eventually, after a more extensive investigation of the thickness of the paper than would occur to anyone except a prisoner studying every crevice of the window through which he plans to make his escape, recovers a fragment of the warning Augustus had sent down. There has been a mutiny above. Pym must “lie close.”
Dostoevsky, though admiring of Poe, complained that his “fantasticalness” was merely external. “Not fantastic should he be called but capricious.… He chooses as a rule the most extravagant reality, places his hero in a most extraordinary or psychological situation, and, then, describes the inner state of that person with marvellous acumen and amazing realism.” Dostoevsky concluded that Poe’s imagination was too material. “Even his unbounded imagination betrays the American.”
Baudelaire, to the contrary, thought Poe a victim of America. Poe was too concerned with the ideal not to suffer from his native land. His vision was of “paradise—a unique land, superior to all others, as Art is to Nature, where Nature is reformed by the dream, where it is corrected, embellished, remodelled.”
Dostoevsky and Baudelaire were both right. Poe spent so many of his days in a private hell that his most touching poems and some of his most visionary stories look directly at “paradise.” In Pym his bitter longing for another world shows itself, all too brutally, in the shock after shock of violence that men and the sea administer to the survivors on the Grampus. That voyage ends in cannibalism. Pym, as always, is rescued just in time for him to be flung into more adventures. He never initiates any of them but is moved about so as to show Poe’s longing for what the Romantics called the “untrodden.” Poe the self-declared “scientist,” the insatiable analyst, the inventor of the detective story, the spellbound captive of his own imagination, finally carries Pym to the bottom of the world, the Antarctic. Nothing is left to discover. This is the famous and enduringly mysterious conclusion: “And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.”
Why that figure at the end? Poe did not extend or explain; the shock at which he always aimed had turned up as an effect on himself, leaving him nothing more to say. The passage begins as a threat of extinction and nothingness, then veers to a vision that leaves us gasping. Poe has his triumph. As he solemnly affirmed in the equally extraordinary conclusion to his theory of the universe, Eureka, the universe was all in God’s mind, and man in “this thinking age” had become God. There was no universe except as the mind created one.
Unlike Poe, Hawthorne did not believe that hell was a state of mind; one of his most impressive characters is the Devil in us, the Devil as the other side of a small-town existence. Poe’s characters seek order desperately; Hawthorne’s are weary of it. It is this small-town, “provincial-land” background of Hawthorne’s fiction, the dominating image of the Salem that was hateful to him but unlosable in every crooked corner, that makes the same impression on us as Joyce’s dark old Dublin and Kafka’s cabalistic Prague. Only Joyce and Kafka have duplicated Hawthorne’s power to invest one’s rigid, creepy, boringly stultified home town with the force of a religion that has lost every attraction to a writer except its ancestral markings. The restrictiveness of the setting has pushed the characters into a wholly mental existence. Poe’s characters make speeches at each other; each supreme egotist does not quite believe he faces another. In Hawthorne people just talk to themselves more than they do to other people, talking to others only to report what they have already told themselves. And they talk to others as though they were talking to themselves.
This is Puritanism, where the space around each individual existence reaches up to the Great Ruler and Taskmaster. But it is dense with the probings and preoccupations that led so many Puritans to count up their failings at the end of the year as if reporting to an invisible court. This is literally a communing of the self with the self in a world where the individual in his solitude is more real to himself than anything else is.
The “public” speech of Hawthorne’s characters is intensely formal, as indeed everything pertaining to style is in Hawthorne. There is so little public world—so few institutions, especially of the English kind that young Henry James lamented the absence of in Hawthorne and thought essential to the modern social novel. Puritanism put the greatest possible strain on the individual, for by its scheme of things he was convinced of the total depravity of mankind yet had to find a chink in this darkness, some outlet to salvation, in the report of worthiness that his incessant effort at probity was meant to impress God with. James did all he could with the realistic novel, and then he found himself in old age back in a world like Hawthorne’s where the human mind must pursue itself as the external world comes more and more unstuck.
This is the situation portrayed over and again in Hawthorne—as it is in many stories out of Catholic Ireland and in many European Jewish writers brought up to find their material in orthodoxy. All perceptions become troubling to the sinner convinced of his sinfulness, even when he disbelieves in the moral order that once supported the idea of sin. Where everything was once an image of God’s omnipresence, commonplace things show the rule of strangeness. Hawthorne’s addiction to masks and veils—emblems, shadows, ruins, blackness—his need of fiction machinery involving the American claimant to an English estate, the missing will, the bloody footprint left on the threshold of the noble mansion, the scaffold, the pillory, and the forest, show how instinctively he thought of obstructions to be cleared as claims upon the past that could never be satisfied. Hawthorne, a strikingly uncooperative imagination in a “new” country, recognized that men could never discharge ancestors from their minds. The past contained the one secret they were always looking for.