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Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times
A full-length portrait of one of America's great writers brings to life Hawthorne's experiences and the age he lived in, detailing his courtship of Sophia Peabody and his relationships with Melville, Poe, Emerson, and others
684 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1980
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James R. Mellow
25 books3 followersJames Robert Mellow was an American art critic and biographer.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 6, 2013
After p. 100
Hawthorne is an enigma - for Mellow it seems, and certainly for me. He, Hawthorne, that is, was altogether disinclined to offer personal disclosures of any kind to most anyone, it seems, and equally reluctant to commit them to paper - quite unlike the effusive and ever loquacious Margret Fuller (whom he could just barely abide, by the way). So we have to make due with the bits and pieces that Mellow has scratched together - until we take up another biography, that is.
But I, being me, have to take what's given, fill in the blanks - with suppositions consistent with the information at hand, I hope, and make sense of the entire assemblage of this, that and the other. So the following is what I've come up with for today, at this moment (I feel perfectly free to rearrange my thoughts when my construct doesn't seem to hold any longer).
Hawthorne was born with preternaturally acute powers of observation. He saw every last little detail of persons and places that interested him, and he was also possessed of a hugely capacious and retentive memory. With respect to people, he seems also to have had an extraordinary, innate capacity for empathy. He appears to have been able to read and interpret expression, gesture, posture, tone of voice, minds, as it were, to feel with others, even to project himself into their bodies and minds and to experience what they experienced as they experienced. In addition, he able to connect stimulus and response, to create "models" of persons/personalities as they lived their lives in their times and places. He may not have understood precisely why a certain stimulus produced one response or another as they did, but given the one he could predict the other accurately more often than not. And he remembered it all. Note that I have avoided the use of "sensitive" - and deliberately so.
So what does a person born in 1804 do when those powers, capacities and "gifts" dominate consciousness and they are compelled to observe and to imagine, unable to channel those mental energies into other activities? For one thing, a person of that time and place, so afflicted, could produce narrative - provided, of course, that external circumstances enabled them to acquire the education, time, money, etc., etc. to devote themselves to writing - rather than to the grind of keeping body and soul together.
Which is another point that Mellow seems not to have investigated successfully - through no lack of trying I suspect. But how was it at all possible for Hawthorne to occupy a room in his mother's house for ten years in uninterrupted seclusion while learning to write? Mellow tells us that his father, a ship's captain, died of yellow fever in some distant port, leaving his widow and children nearly nothing. We know that Hawthorne's mother was a member of a very enterprising and affluent family of merchants, tradesmen, etc., etc. And we know that Hawthorne was raised by no one in particular, but rather by a collection of aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, who appear to have spared no expense in raising him. But after they saw him through four years of college, then what? Did they continue to support him for another ten years? Not one word on that subject. Perhaps there's no evidence to adduce, but Mellow might have said as much.
We do know that during that decade Hawthorne produced a steady stream of writing, most of it published anonymously by publishers who neglected to pay him for the pages they printed, and when they did, a pittance that arrived late.
So how did he manage? Mellow doesn't say. Perhaps Miller or Wineapple will.
After p 200
Mellow has elaborated a bit upon the attributes of Hawthorne's personality.
He was a supremely curious individual. Mellow sense of the journals that Hawthorne kept as a young man [T]hey are the record of an observer keenly intent on capturing the human types he met." (p. 148)
Mellow seems to agree with Elizabeth Palmer Peabody's sense of the man (p. 116). She "sensed in the imaginative writer something awe-inspiring - that 'double-action' of Hawthorne's mind, which had the capacity to balance 'the appearance of the moment in the light of the great whole,' the writer's animating principle: a need to fix the moment permanently in all its hard factuality." Meaning, I think, that Hawthorne had to depict persons, places and events in sufficient detail to enable his readers to see and to experience with his characters, and yet to perceive and present the 'eternally human' in them, to extract the principles of "human nature" and experience or at least to delineate types and categories among the persons who eventually became characters or attributes of amalgams of persons whom he encountered. And he seems not to have liked what he discovered very much.
There was also his nearly impenetrable reserve and unalterable reticence. He wrote to his intended, Sophia Peabody, Elizabeth's youngest sister: "I was invited to dine at Mr. [George] Bancroft's yesterday with Miss Margaret Fuller, but Providence had given me some business to do; for which I was very thankful." And again. "Your husband has received an invitation, through Mr. Collector Bancroft, to go to Dr. Channing's tonight. What is to be done? Anything, rather than to go." (p. 170) Etc., etc. Instead, he married Sophia, with whom he retreated as far as humanly practicable from further encounters and engagements - except from the proximity he required for his observations of certain, selected specimens of Homo Sapiens.
So who is it exactly we're dealing with? Well, someone rather tediously self-conscious, hesitant - and boring, I'd say, like someone you'd first meet at a small dinner party, perhaps, who is not exactly rude, but clearly communicates through indirection his desire to be elsewhere, who makes no effort whatever to help make the gathering a pleasant experience for anyone, who makes one wonder why he appeared at all, and who seems intent on assuring that no one, but no one, will want anything further to do with him. Or I should say, Mellow's Hawthorne is rather tedious - and boring. Perhaps Miller and Wineapple have made something altogether different of Mr. Hawthorne.
Mellow's Hawthorne isn't so mysterious as his reputation suggests - after all. He's no Poe or Fuller, for certain. No enigma at all. So now I'm wondering: why did Mellow bother? Why did Miller and Wineapple bother? 'Tis a puzzlement. I certainly hope there's an answer in the next 400 pages (of Mellow's beautiful, marvelous prose.), but I will say that I'm more than a little impatient.
At End.
I suppose it would be easy to catalog Hawthorne's peculiarities. So I won't - well - except for just this little one. p. 379. Hawthorne seems to have had a distinct aversion to physical contact. "He hates to be touched more than anyone I ever knew." This from Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, the woman for whom he felt every particle of passion of which he was capable, which at times was entirely overwhelming for him. Odd.
I think it only fair to distinguish biographical narrative from the subject of the narrative. I don't understand why Mellow chose Hawthorne as a subject, but I must say that the only reason I finished this book is that Mellow writes among the clearest, most precise and evocative English prose I've ever read. His research must be exhaustive and definitive. The forward progress of his story is well paced. He introduces relevant detail in easily assimilable packets, as it were, and interlards summary, analysis, conclusions in just the right amounts and in the right points in his chapters so that he has given us something of a page turner - well, given those addicted to biography, perhaps, something of a page turner. So I am giving his book a five-star rating - not because the subject interests me, because it doesn't - at all, but because he has given us a masterful example of biographical narrative.
But this discussion raises two questions in my mind. (1) How is it possible that I find Hawthorne so peculiar and unattractive, and yet respond to Thoreau as warmly as I do - after six or seven biographies? Maybe that's the reason. (2) Are Miller's and Wineapple's Hawthornes any less peculiar and unattractive? They would have to be. We'll see. But if they are, and convincingly so, then I'll have to skim Mellow again to figure out how that could be the case. I really hope I don't have to. Really.
Hawthorne is an enigma - for Mellow it seems, and certainly for me. He, Hawthorne, that is, was altogether disinclined to offer personal disclosures of any kind to most anyone, it seems, and equally reluctant to commit them to paper - quite unlike the effusive and ever loquacious Margret Fuller (whom he could just barely abide, by the way). So we have to make due with the bits and pieces that Mellow has scratched together - until we take up another biography, that is.
But I, being me, have to take what's given, fill in the blanks - with suppositions consistent with the information at hand, I hope, and make sense of the entire assemblage of this, that and the other. So the following is what I've come up with for today, at this moment (I feel perfectly free to rearrange my thoughts when my construct doesn't seem to hold any longer).
Hawthorne was born with preternaturally acute powers of observation. He saw every last little detail of persons and places that interested him, and he was also possessed of a hugely capacious and retentive memory. With respect to people, he seems also to have had an extraordinary, innate capacity for empathy. He appears to have been able to read and interpret expression, gesture, posture, tone of voice, minds, as it were, to feel with others, even to project himself into their bodies and minds and to experience what they experienced as they experienced. In addition, he able to connect stimulus and response, to create "models" of persons/personalities as they lived their lives in their times and places. He may not have understood precisely why a certain stimulus produced one response or another as they did, but given the one he could predict the other accurately more often than not. And he remembered it all. Note that I have avoided the use of "sensitive" - and deliberately so.
So what does a person born in 1804 do when those powers, capacities and "gifts" dominate consciousness and they are compelled to observe and to imagine, unable to channel those mental energies into other activities? For one thing, a person of that time and place, so afflicted, could produce narrative - provided, of course, that external circumstances enabled them to acquire the education, time, money, etc., etc. to devote themselves to writing - rather than to the grind of keeping body and soul together.
Which is another point that Mellow seems not to have investigated successfully - through no lack of trying I suspect. But how was it at all possible for Hawthorne to occupy a room in his mother's house for ten years in uninterrupted seclusion while learning to write? Mellow tells us that his father, a ship's captain, died of yellow fever in some distant port, leaving his widow and children nearly nothing. We know that Hawthorne's mother was a member of a very enterprising and affluent family of merchants, tradesmen, etc., etc. And we know that Hawthorne was raised by no one in particular, but rather by a collection of aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, who appear to have spared no expense in raising him. But after they saw him through four years of college, then what? Did they continue to support him for another ten years? Not one word on that subject. Perhaps there's no evidence to adduce, but Mellow might have said as much.
We do know that during that decade Hawthorne produced a steady stream of writing, most of it published anonymously by publishers who neglected to pay him for the pages they printed, and when they did, a pittance that arrived late.
So how did he manage? Mellow doesn't say. Perhaps Miller or Wineapple will.
After p 200
Mellow has elaborated a bit upon the attributes of Hawthorne's personality.
He was a supremely curious individual. Mellow sense of the journals that Hawthorne kept as a young man [T]hey are the record of an observer keenly intent on capturing the human types he met." (p. 148)
Mellow seems to agree with Elizabeth Palmer Peabody's sense of the man (p. 116). She "sensed in the imaginative writer something awe-inspiring - that 'double-action' of Hawthorne's mind, which had the capacity to balance 'the appearance of the moment in the light of the great whole,' the writer's animating principle: a need to fix the moment permanently in all its hard factuality." Meaning, I think, that Hawthorne had to depict persons, places and events in sufficient detail to enable his readers to see and to experience with his characters, and yet to perceive and present the 'eternally human' in them, to extract the principles of "human nature" and experience or at least to delineate types and categories among the persons who eventually became characters or attributes of amalgams of persons whom he encountered. And he seems not to have liked what he discovered very much.
There was also his nearly impenetrable reserve and unalterable reticence. He wrote to his intended, Sophia Peabody, Elizabeth's youngest sister: "I was invited to dine at Mr. [George] Bancroft's yesterday with Miss Margaret Fuller, but Providence had given me some business to do; for which I was very thankful." And again. "Your husband has received an invitation, through Mr. Collector Bancroft, to go to Dr. Channing's tonight. What is to be done? Anything, rather than to go." (p. 170) Etc., etc. Instead, he married Sophia, with whom he retreated as far as humanly practicable from further encounters and engagements - except from the proximity he required for his observations of certain, selected specimens of Homo Sapiens.
So who is it exactly we're dealing with? Well, someone rather tediously self-conscious, hesitant - and boring, I'd say, like someone you'd first meet at a small dinner party, perhaps, who is not exactly rude, but clearly communicates through indirection his desire to be elsewhere, who makes no effort whatever to help make the gathering a pleasant experience for anyone, who makes one wonder why he appeared at all, and who seems intent on assuring that no one, but no one, will want anything further to do with him. Or I should say, Mellow's Hawthorne is rather tedious - and boring. Perhaps Miller and Wineapple have made something altogether different of Mr. Hawthorne.
Mellow's Hawthorne isn't so mysterious as his reputation suggests - after all. He's no Poe or Fuller, for certain. No enigma at all. So now I'm wondering: why did Mellow bother? Why did Miller and Wineapple bother? 'Tis a puzzlement. I certainly hope there's an answer in the next 400 pages (of Mellow's beautiful, marvelous prose.), but I will say that I'm more than a little impatient.
At End.
I suppose it would be easy to catalog Hawthorne's peculiarities. So I won't - well - except for just this little one. p. 379. Hawthorne seems to have had a distinct aversion to physical contact. "He hates to be touched more than anyone I ever knew." This from Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, the woman for whom he felt every particle of passion of which he was capable, which at times was entirely overwhelming for him. Odd.
I think it only fair to distinguish biographical narrative from the subject of the narrative. I don't understand why Mellow chose Hawthorne as a subject, but I must say that the only reason I finished this book is that Mellow writes among the clearest, most precise and evocative English prose I've ever read. His research must be exhaustive and definitive. The forward progress of his story is well paced. He introduces relevant detail in easily assimilable packets, as it were, and interlards summary, analysis, conclusions in just the right amounts and in the right points in his chapters so that he has given us something of a page turner - well, given those addicted to biography, perhaps, something of a page turner. So I am giving his book a five-star rating - not because the subject interests me, because it doesn't - at all, but because he has given us a masterful example of biographical narrative.
But this discussion raises two questions in my mind. (1) How is it possible that I find Hawthorne so peculiar and unattractive, and yet respond to Thoreau as warmly as I do - after six or seven biographies? Maybe that's the reason. (2) Are Miller's and Wineapple's Hawthornes any less peculiar and unattractive? They would have to be. We'll see. But if they are, and convincingly so, then I'll have to skim Mellow again to figure out how that could be the case. I really hope I don't have to. Really.
March 21, 2020
The best traditionally styled "cradle to grave" biography of Hawthorne out there. It reads beautifully with great insight into Hawthorne's private life as well as great analysis of his works and how they fit into the pattern and concerns of his life. I devoured its nearly 600 pages of prose within a week.
Hawthorne was difficult to know deeply and did not have a prurient or scandalous personal life, which might lead to a dry biography. But once Hawthorne starts writing early on, I still found myself deeply interested in his progress as a literary light. Like his best work, there was something archetypal yet deeply secretive about the man. It should also be noted that Mellow was deeply concerned with painting a portrait of the literary scene during Hawthorne's life, hence the title. So we also learn about Thoreau, Emerson, Longfellow, and most surprisingly, Melville. It appears that Melville absolutely lionized Hawthorne as Hawthorne lionized disgraced former President Franklin Pierce.
As I also suspected, Hawthorne captured something preternatural and primal about early America in the best of his writing: our Puritanical roots about sin but our shame at concealing that sin that is within us all. This leads to a "hidden life", a facade of steadfastness that hides our inner failings. In this way, Hawthorne's writing was deeply psychological while also artificial in the sense of mid-19th century writing was artificial. Its facade seems perhaps to be artificial but reveals hidden depths at its best. A completely edifying biography and one of the best literary biographies I have read.
Hawthorne was difficult to know deeply and did not have a prurient or scandalous personal life, which might lead to a dry biography. But once Hawthorne starts writing early on, I still found myself deeply interested in his progress as a literary light. Like his best work, there was something archetypal yet deeply secretive about the man. It should also be noted that Mellow was deeply concerned with painting a portrait of the literary scene during Hawthorne's life, hence the title. So we also learn about Thoreau, Emerson, Longfellow, and most surprisingly, Melville. It appears that Melville absolutely lionized Hawthorne as Hawthorne lionized disgraced former President Franklin Pierce.
As I also suspected, Hawthorne captured something preternatural and primal about early America in the best of his writing: our Puritanical roots about sin but our shame at concealing that sin that is within us all. This leads to a "hidden life", a facade of steadfastness that hides our inner failings. In this way, Hawthorne's writing was deeply psychological while also artificial in the sense of mid-19th century writing was artificial. Its facade seems perhaps to be artificial but reveals hidden depths at its best. A completely edifying biography and one of the best literary biographies I have read.
February 5, 2017
What I really want is for a biography to feel like a novel and yet be true, and this book does that perfectly. I became so enamored of minor characters (and major ones such as Sophia Peabody Hawthorne and Herman Melville) that I wanted to read biographies of them, too, especially if they could be written by the late, much missed James R. Mellow. I will never look at any of the literary and political figures of the mid-19th century the same way, which is to say that I can never dismiss them as the wooden figures they once seemed to be, as two-dimensional as their faces on a pack of Author cards. They all live, breathe, hope and suffer now in a complicated, richly peopled world, especially Hawthorne, his wife Sophia, President Franklin Pierce, and Charles Sumner.
October 5, 2024
As I told my students, "I love you all enough to read this so you don't have to."
I'm no stranger to long and involved biographies, but this one was a bit of a slog. It was 600 pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne when he was about 400 pages worth of interesting. Or perhaps, it's not the subject but the biographer who is at fault here.
In saying all that, I recognize that I'm in the minority--Mellow's book is highly regarded, but to me it felt very impersonal, including details that felt insignificant and uninteresting, while leaving out things of great importance. I felt as if I finished the book still not knowing who Hawthorne was.
I'm no stranger to long and involved biographies, but this one was a bit of a slog. It was 600 pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne when he was about 400 pages worth of interesting. Or perhaps, it's not the subject but the biographer who is at fault here.
In saying all that, I recognize that I'm in the minority--Mellow's book is highly regarded, but to me it felt very impersonal, including details that felt insignificant and uninteresting, while leaving out things of great importance. I felt as if I finished the book still not knowing who Hawthorne was.
January 21, 2013
July 30th, 1/2 past 10 O'Clock
Una takes a strong and strange interest in poor mother's condition, and can hardly be kept out of the chamber -- endeavoring to thrust herself into the door, whenever it is opened... There is something that almost frightens me about the child -- I know not whether elfish or angelic, but, at all events, supernatural. She steps so boldly into the midst of everything, shrinks from nothing, has such a comprehension of everything, seems at time to have but little delicacy, and anon shows that she possesses the finest essence of it... In short, I now and then catch an aspect of her, in which I cannot believe her to be my own human child, but a spirit strangely mingled with good and evil, haunting the house where I dwell. The little boy is always the same child, and never varies in his relation tome.
3 O'Clock, P.M. Julian is now lying on the couch in the character of sick grandmamma, while Una waits on him as Mrs. Dike. She prompts him in the performance, showing a quite perfect idea of how it should all be. "Now, stretch out your hands to be held." "Will you have some of this jelly?" Julian starts up to take the imaginary jelly. "No; grandmamma lies still." He smacks his lips. "You must not move your lips so hard." "Do you think Una had better come up?" "No!" "You feel so, don't you?" His round, curly head, and rosy face, with a twinkling of a smile upon it, do not look the character very well. Now Una is transformed into grandmamma, and Julian is mamma, taking care of her. She groans and speaks with difficulty, and moves herself feebly and wearisomely -- then lies perfectly still, as if in an insensible state... It recalls the scene of yesterday to me, with a frightful distinctness; and out of the midst of it, little Una looks at me with a smile of glee. Again, Julian assumes the character. "You're dying now," says Una, "so you must lie still." "I shall walk, if I'm dying," answers Julian, whereupon he gets up, and stumps about the room with heavy steps. Meantime, Una lies down on the couch, and is again grandmamma, stretching out her hand, in search of some tender grasp, to assure herself that she is still on the hither side of the grave...
Una takes a strong and strange interest in poor mother's condition, and can hardly be kept out of the chamber -- endeavoring to thrust herself into the door, whenever it is opened... There is something that almost frightens me about the child -- I know not whether elfish or angelic, but, at all events, supernatural. She steps so boldly into the midst of everything, shrinks from nothing, has such a comprehension of everything, seems at time to have but little delicacy, and anon shows that she possesses the finest essence of it... In short, I now and then catch an aspect of her, in which I cannot believe her to be my own human child, but a spirit strangely mingled with good and evil, haunting the house where I dwell. The little boy is always the same child, and never varies in his relation tome.
3 O'Clock, P.M. Julian is now lying on the couch in the character of sick grandmamma, while Una waits on him as Mrs. Dike. She prompts him in the performance, showing a quite perfect idea of how it should all be. "Now, stretch out your hands to be held." "Will you have some of this jelly?" Julian starts up to take the imaginary jelly. "No; grandmamma lies still." He smacks his lips. "You must not move your lips so hard." "Do you think Una had better come up?" "No!" "You feel so, don't you?" His round, curly head, and rosy face, with a twinkling of a smile upon it, do not look the character very well. Now Una is transformed into grandmamma, and Julian is mamma, taking care of her. She groans and speaks with difficulty, and moves herself feebly and wearisomely -- then lies perfectly still, as if in an insensible state... It recalls the scene of yesterday to me, with a frightful distinctness; and out of the midst of it, little Una looks at me with a smile of glee. Again, Julian assumes the character. "You're dying now," says Una, "so you must lie still." "I shall walk, if I'm dying," answers Julian, whereupon he gets up, and stumps about the room with heavy steps. Meantime, Una lies down on the couch, and is again grandmamma, stretching out her hand, in search of some tender grasp, to assure herself that she is still on the hither side of the grave...
December 30, 2009
The Scarlet Letter takes a beating on this site (and in general nowadays). I understand why, to an extent. It is, like it's protagonist, deeply flawed. A strange and quiet book written by a strange and quiet man. But also one of the most elegantly structured novels written to date and vastly underappreciated by the modern reader. This book along with Mathiessen's American Renaissance are terrific companion pieces to Hawthorne's canon; offering insight into the merit of his work and detailing the events and environment that influenced it.
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