BOOKS

First Great American Novel

James Buchan

SALEM IS MY DWELLING PLACE by Edwin Havilland Miller Duckworth, f25, pp. 596 Hawthorne's use of symbols distressed Henry James. The armless statues, towers, doves and domes that litter The Marble Faun belonged, James said, 'much more to the surface of his [Hawthorne's] work than to its stronger interest'. As for the famous embroidered 'A' that is pinned to the bosom of Hester Prynne's dress in The Scarlet Letter, James thought a single description would, perhaps, have sufficed: Hawthorne's constant play with the symbol verged on the puerile.

When he came to write The Turn of the Screw, Henry James dispensed even with a symbol as elusive as Hester's 'A'. We simply do not know the nature of the ante- rior offence in The Turn of the Screw, or even if there was one. With this brilliant refinement, the heroic phase of the United States novel comes to a close.

What bored Henry James has fascinated lesser people. Critics and college professors have been working Hawthorne's symbolism for more than a century: the site is scattered with exhausted intellectual technologies. This latest effort puts Hawthorne though the mill of psycho- analysis and a temperamental feminism. It is as if Nathaniel Hawthorne — sweetest of writers and, it seems, of men — had been condemned to stand for eternity on the pillory in the market-place at Salem. Pinned to his dark coat, in place of Hester Prynne's 'A', is an T (for incest) and an 'H' (for homosexual) and an 'F' (for feminist) and, showing signs of haste and carelessness in the sewing, a 'PC':

Yet, with the flair and genius of Charles Ives, Hawthorne has the Americans in Rome sing 'Hail, Columbia!' shortly before a tragic murder, perhaps reminding us that the hymn to America's glories rests upon the blood- stain of the nation's relationship with the Indians.

I don't know how Hawthorne manages to keep his dignity, standing up there, but he does; as Hester does.

It is easy to understand Hawthorne's hold on the American academic imagina- tion. If any novel can be said to be impor- tant, The Scarlet Letter is important. Henry James, in his marvellous memoir of Hawthorne that is quoted at the beginning, said the novel's publication in 1850 was an event of national importance. It engendered a 'satisfaction in the idea of America having produced a novel that belonged to literature and to the forefront of it'.

It burst some kind of American dam: Moby Dick followed in 1851, Walden in 1854, Leaves of Grass in 1855 and, at the journalistic end, Uncle Tom's Cabin. From this distance, and from the British side of the Atlantic, The Scarlet Letter looks like the first trickle of the flood that would eventually capture the mainstream of English-speaking culture. I should add that Hawthorne made the error of living most of his life in Salem, Massachusetts and Concord, Massachusetts, which are within 20 miles each side of Harvard.

The result is that vast biographies of poor Hawthorne appear at 10-year intervals while, amid the teeming monograph literature listed in Miller's biography, I particularly look forward to Kesselring, Marion L. Hawthome's Reading, 1828-1850: Transcription and Identification of Titles Recorded in the Charge-Books of the Salem Atheneum.

To be heard in this academic babble, you have to make a noise. Miller shouts and waves his arms about. In one chapter, on the basis of a plausible reading of letters and poems, he constructs a homosexual encounter between Hawthorne and Melville and even provides a location: 'In the woods near the Stockbridge bowl, with the sphinx-like Monument Mountain visi- ble in the distance'. Miller's fascination with fabulous people making out reminds me of the Andy Warhol of the Diaries. As a `And there we have it — Pan o' chocolate'. literary critic, Miller has sex on the brain.

Yet there is, in the Hawthorne biography, what might be called a literary- clinical problem which might have justified a more disciplined psychoanalytical treatment. than Miller administers. The chief problem is why Hawthorne, after the relative success of The Marble Faun in 1860, was unable to complete another novel.

Henry James, following Hawthorne him- self, blamed this block on the Civil War: Hawthorne was widely considered in aboli- tionist New England as a species of copper- head (i.e. Confederate fellow-traveller) though he may just have been as unworldly in politics as in practical matters. Miller, following other critics whom he scrupulous- ly acknowledges, plunges into the unfin- ished manuscripts with their themes of orphancy, murder and loss, their beautiful, wounded youths and Salem settings and concludes — I think rightly — that Hawthorne's childhood misery simply got the better of him: life does, after all, get harder as you get older. As he turned one way and then the other in search of escape, Hawthorne scribbled: `Twon't do . . . I don't in the least see my way. . Nothing seems to do'. I found these passages in Miller unbearable reading.

At the age of four, Hawthorne lost his father, a sea-captain, who died on the Surinam Coast. He lived, with his mother and sisters, on the charity of uncles. Melville attributes to him a 'Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin'. He seems fascinated and repelled by his Puritan forebears, those persecutors of Quakers and burners of witches. His female characters, notably Hester Prynne, speculate fitfully about a revolution in sex- ual relations which would

establish the whole relation between man and woman on a sure-ground of mutual happiness.

Hawthorne's mother, sisters and children seem to have lived troubled lives.

It is, to say the least, an interesting diag- nostic picture. The trouble is that Miller's account, though it is very long, is incomplete. I would like to know also why Hawthorne started to write: not exactly, as Henry James noted, an obvious career move for the orphaned son of a sea captain in a Salem barely emerged from the 17th century. In fact, Hawthorne's chief creative period is very short: the blockage is already evident half-way through The Marble Faun which disintegrates as a story and ends so vaguely that Hawthorne was obliged later to add a postscript. Hawthorne's problem can probably be best located in this tale of American artists in Rome, but Miller is too busy describing the Rome sky-line in the language of old-fashioned pornography. And it is all a waste of time. The purpose of psychoanalysis is to ameliorate symp- toms rather than to help you say something weird or flashy about the founder of your national literature. Hawthorne's therapy was writing. He helped himself by writing, for a while, and also left posterity some masterpieces. He lies with his sorrows in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord. Let him sleep. Let him sleep.