A Real Man's Life

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: THE AMERICAN YEARS (499 pp.)--Robert Cantwell --Rinehart ($6).

For the first time since Henry James put his hand to it, in 1879, the task of writing Hawthorne's biography has been undertaken by a born novelist of distinction. James wrote in England, in all the panoply of his handsome prose, and with a good deal of Old World "side"; but he did not have much to add to the story of Hawthorne's life. He knew it, and called his book a "critical essay."

Robert Cant well's portrayal of Hawthorne is superior to James's in warmth and scope; it is free of James's overtones of worldly condescension; and whatever it may lack of James's awesome artistic judgment it makes up for in freshness, and in the imaginative grasp of a real man's life and character. After Cantwell's work, the image that Americans have had of Hawthorne will never be quite the same again.*

Robert Cantwell's two novels, Laugh and Lie Down and Land of Plenty, were recognized as remarkably gifted in the early '30s and remain among the few novels of the depression still worth reading. He joined the staff of TIME in 1935, and began his researches in Hawthorne in 1939 when, at the beginning of the war in Europe, he picked up Hawthorne's Our Old Home and reread it "with a sense of wonder . . . at the close application of his insights" into England. The present book (the first volume of two) ends with the fame and. security that came to Hawthorne in 1850, when he was 45, on the publication of The Scarlet Letter.

"The American Years" were those in which, in the accepted version, Hawthorne's life was most shadowy--when he "lived in seclusion ... in his town of Salem, a seclusion certainly grave, if not morbid, obsessed with the Puritan sense of guilt and haunted by a family curse, writing his wonderful stories that no one knew he had written, working at the dull routine of the Custom House to provide for his family, and emerging in his early middle age ... to take part in a contemporary world he had scarcely known existed." Says Robert Cantwell: "Such a portrait, with its angular shadows, its El Greco distortions . . . is in itself an interesting product of the American imagination ... but I found it less and less like Hawthorne the more I learned of him."

The Gift & the Burden. Out of a thorough steeping in Hawthorne's Notebooks and in his journalistic work, which James and many others have loftily disregarded or deplored, and in family records and diaries never touched before, Cantwell has retouched that portrait. These sources have enabled Cantwell to take his subject out of the shadows, to estimate sensitively the influences that formed him, and to recreate the New England life about him.

Hawthorne's imagination was, to put it simply, both the gift and the burden of his life. He was "deep," and brainy enough to see and explore with detachment the dangers, for one of his heritage, in the life of imagination. For generations that heritage had been profoundly Puritan. After his sea-captain father died of yellow fever in Surinam, his mother lived in Salem as a recluse; his uncle, Robert Manning, took charge of Nathaniel's education and alienated the boy thoroughly. He became evasive and apparently indolent, writing in puns and private language to his sisters, even writing invisibly, in skim milk--a trick that later seemed symbolic of some of his tales. His vivid older sister Elizabeth, who seemed the genius of the family, troubled his imagination. "His early stories," Cantwell observes, "deal often with the rather mortifying masculine experience of encountering women whose sexual experience is greater than his own."

Madeira & Marriage. At Bowdoin College Hawthorne solemnly bet his friend Jonathan Cilley a barrel of Madeira wine that he, Hawthorne, would be unmarried twelve years later. He won the bet. For a modern biographer it is almost superfluous to note the sexual distrust, as well as the calculation, in this resolve. What is more important is the lucid analysis, through fiction, that Hawthorne gave to such matters (and indeed to his whole Puritan background) in the years that followed.

After graduation, at which his classmate Henry Wadsworth Longfellow read a paper on the need for a native American literature, Hawthorne went home to his mother's house in Salem and worked at writing. In nine years he borrowed over 700 books from the Salem Athenaeum, a library whose nucleus men like his father had captured, as privateersmen, from the English. Cantwell has looked up the Hawthornes' library record. He deliberately studied New England, reading among other things the files of Salem newspapers during Hawthorne's lifetime. "The books," Cantwell writes, "provide an almost weekly record of his whereabouts for nine years. The legendary mystery of these years is in itself dissipated by them." His tales kept appearing in magazines, unsigned.

"The most important thing, he thought, was to keep the imagination sane." And he was sane; he was, as Cantwell puts it, hard as nails. His concentrated life made him "a silent, slow-spoken man, his habitual expression one of quietly listening. He dressed carefully and well. He kept a notebook . . ." From his desk and his books he sallied forth regularly with the notebook to see the world--once, in 1830, taking a trip on the Erie Canal. This was during the summer of a scandalous murder trial in Salem; Cantwell construes Hawthorne's journey as a "flight"--perhaps from the ordeal of giving testimony that might have injured people he knew.

"The Freshness of My Heart." Some of the most original and beautiful pages in Cantwell's biography are those devoted to Sophia Peabody, the shy Salem beauty with whom Hawthorne finally fell in love. She was an artist, one of three glowing Peabody girls, and had lived for almost two years on a sugar plantation in Cuba among the gallantries and luxuries of the old Spanish society.

When Hawthorne went to Boston in 1839 to check cargoes for the customs, they corresponded. For several years before they were married Hawthorne wrote to her as her husband; once, at his insistence, she signed herself in a corner in a small, scared hand "Sophia Hawthorne." In his letters were passages like the sweetest speeches in Shakespeare:

Let us content ourselves to be earthly

creatures, And hold communion of spirit in such

modes

as are ordained to us . . .

In one letter he wrote of himself with a profundity that biographers have misinterpreted but have not surpassed:

"If I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude. But living in solitude till the fullness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart. I used to think I could imagine all passions, all feelings, and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know! Indeed we are but shadows; we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream--till the heart be touched."

With his marriage in 1842 Hawthorne became ready for his greatest work, The Scarlet Letter, and four years later, after poverty and happiness in Concord and in Salem, he wrote it, grew sick over it, and let it be published in a hurry with the long introductory essay on the Salem Custom House--an essay, then, of political significance and courage--acting as a kind-of "lightning rod" to keep the full shock of his masterpiece from the public. Imagination and the life of Salem had interpenetrated. Wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes: "He has done it, and it will never be harsh country again ... A light falls upon the place not of land or sea! How much he did for Salem!"

-*Nineteen forty-eight would be a big Hawthorne year. Nathaniel Hawthorne, a biography by Brown University's Randall Stewart, will be published this month (Yale; $4). The Portable Hawthorne (Viking; $2), edited by Malcolm Cowley, and Theodore Maynard's A Fire Was Lighted (Bruce; $3.50), a biography of Hawthorne's daughter, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, have appeared earlier.

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