Hawthorne in Concord by Philip McFarland

Author:Philip McFarland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2004-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

23

CREATING A LIFE

I have been delayed by the necessity of going to Salem,” Hawthorne wrote Pierce from the Wayside on August 6. His sister Louisa’s funeral was the unmentioned cause that had kept the author from moving forward with the candidate’s biography. Earlier, William Pike in Salem had sent along particulars concerning the funeral, but his letter had reached Concord late, so that the ceremony was over before Hawthorne had arrived at the scene. Sophia thought it might have been for the best, given her husband’s sensibilities. Afterward, after the burial in the Manning plot in the Howard Street cemetery, Hawthorne had gone with his surviving sister, Elizabeth, back to her rented room near Beverly before returning to the Wayside. As a remembrance, he brought eight-year-old Una the brooch that her aunt Louisa had been wearing at the time of her drowning. And all the while progress on the task for his friend the presidential candidate had been set aside, although the author was able to write Pierce on his return that he hoped to send along perhaps half of the biography within a week or two.

Writing it was proving to be no easy undertaking. Hawthorne seldom, if he could help it, wrote in the summertime, yet in his grief and in the heat of this August he had to push ahead—on material not congenial to his particular gifts anyway: composing a factual account of a career unfolding in the real world, far from romance, with little about it of the wondrous or enchanting. From the start Franklin Pierce’s life had been prosaic, for the most part the account of a fun-loving child and mediocre student who became a congenial, gregarious politician and military officer before settling in to practice law in a New England town of no great pretensions. Democrats in the past had been able to boast of leaders: Old Hickory, victor at New Orleans, Indian fighter who had defied France and the United States Bank and the Nullifiers; and Young Hickory, Andrew Jackson’s Tennessee protégé Polk, who by standing up to Britain and Mexico had vastly extended the size of the nation. Now they were trying to make of Frank Pierce of New Hampshire another Young Hickory, of the Granite Hills: “We Polked You in ’44; We Shall Pierce You in ’52.” But how were such modest accomplishments as Pierce’s to be molded into something resembling those of his predecessors?

Put another way, Hawthorne’s challenging task regarding Pierce became, in his own words, to account for “how it has happened that, with such extraordinary opportunities for eminent distinction, civil and military, as he has enjoyed, this crisis should have found him so obscure as he certainly was, in a national point of view” at the time of his nomination. And one discovery very early would dismay the biographer: “My heart absolutely sank, at the dearth of available material.” The paucity of letters and articles about his friend was requiring Hawthorne to launch forth telling the thin story with no more than the scantiest ballast of documentation.

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