Hawthorne by Brenda Wineapple

Author:Brenda Wineapple [Wineapple, Brenda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80866-0
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

This Farther Flight

And England, the land of my ancestors! Once I had fancied that my sleep would not be quiet in the grave until I should return, as it were to my home of past ages.…

Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man”

THREE YEARS at the Manse, back to Salem and briefly to Boston, where Julian was born; to Salem yet again; to Lenox, West Newton, and Concord. “Then this farther flight to England, where we expect to spend four years, and afterwards another year in Italy—during all which time we shall have no real home,” Hawthorne mused, sitting quietly in a suburb of Liverpool on a showery evening. He half sighed. “I felt that I should never be quite at home here.”

After banishing himself from Salem in 1850, Hawthorne found no peace anywhere, said Julian: “Partly necessity or convenience, but partly, also, his own will, drove him from place to place; always wishing to settle down finally, but never lighting upon the fitting spot.”

Before departure there was much to do: farewell dinners, a three-week stay in Washington to confer with Pierce, the packing, the waiting, the settling of accounts, and of course the correcting of proofs for Tanglewood Tales, a sequel to A Wonder Book. But one must ask why, just at the point when his career was flourishing—he’d written four books and two volumes of children’s stories within the last three years—why Hawthorne was trading the writer’s life for the drudgery of civil service. Hawthorne wouldn’t publish again for seven more years.

In Concord, Moncure Conway, a starstruck Harvard student, recognized Hawthorne—“Who else could have those soft-flashing unsearchable eyes, that beauté du diable at middle age?”—though Hawthorne’s dapper dress surprised him until he recollected that “Prospero had left his isle, temporarily buried his book, and was passing from his masque to his masquerade as consul at Liverpool and man of the world.” Only to romantics like Conway was the consulship in Liverpool a masquerade, an excuse, a temporary and slightly embarrassing deviation on the path of continued literary acclaim. What Conway and others failed to realize was that Hawthorne needed the consulship as much as he needed to write.

For one thing, there was the money. Writing still seemed to Hawthorne the self-absorbed pastime of a monkish patrician who did not have to bother about how to feed, clothe, and educate three children and to provide for a wife in the manner she deserved. For another thing, Hawthorne was not by nature prolific. “A life of much smoulder, but scanty fire,” he would characterize his career with a modicum of truth. The world of publishing, as Fields demonstrated, was a whistle-stop world; and to keep up, Hawthorne had to be a kind of aristocratic huckster, like Hepzibah in The House of the Seven Gables. He preferred the narcotic of government officialdom: reputable, responsible, lucrative, and far easier than writing.

With its solid floors, cigar smoke, and ribald tales, it was also a world, like the Custom House, into

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