A Puritan With Passion : SALEM IS MY DWELLING PLACE: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne, <i> By Edward Haviland Miller University of Iowa Press $35; 648 pp.</i>

Parson Hooper, in one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s early stories, takes to preaching his sermons and doing his village errands with a black veil draped over his eyes and nose, like a man hiding some dreadful secret. Worshipers are dismayed; children quake; dying sinners shudder; Hooper’s pulpit oratory takes on an appalling power. Hooper’s fiancee, undeterred, asks him to please show his face to her--just once. He refuses, and the marriage is off. As her footsteps recede, he smiles one of his wintry little smiles. Years pass. Hooper makes a last Gothic deathbed speech and then collapses on the pillow, a smiling corpse. He is buried veiled, his hidden visage doomed to molder forever beneath what Hawthorne calls (rather unfelicitously) an awful piece of crape.

So it is perfectly proper for the word veil and its relatives to occur, by my unofficial count, 62 times in this rewarding new biography of Hawthorne by Edward Haviland Miller. Miller thinks that Hawthorne’s fiction veils no one single guilty secret, but rather multiple overlapping secrets: His work conceals, he says, an “almost prurient interest in sadism, voyeurism, incest, and male terror of sexuality and marriage.”

This may sound excessive, and it is true that Miller’s analysis occasionally overleaps itself. For instance, he does not hesitate to call a butterfly in one of Hawthorne’s better stories a “winged phallus.” When Hawthorne writes about some English factory women leaving a ship, “to the considerable display of their legs,” Miller promptly calls him “a voyeur who had a leg fetish.” A giantess wielding a popgun in a carnival scene in “The Marble Faun” is overzealously glossed as “a phallic earth-mother if there ever was one.”

Nonetheless, Miller is certainly right in implying that sexual distress of some sort is, for better or worse, at work in much of what Hawthorne wrote; in fact, one of the problems with Hawthorne’s fiction is that he repeatedly had to invent believable sources of remorse for his characters without disclosing too much of the frightful cargo, whatever it was, within his own “speckled and spotted” heart.

His relations with men, Miller shows, were complex and ambiguous. He failed to hit it off with Emerson (who, he said disapprovingly, liked to surround himself with “queer and clever young men,” and he seems to have rebuffed male courters after he got married--most notably Herman Melville, who wrote him long infatuated letters promising baskets of Champagne.

On the other hand, he sustained several “adolescently ardent” relationships with Bowdoin College friends such as Horatio Bridge and Franklin Pierce, and his long autobiographical preface to “Mosses From an Old Manse,” one of his story collections, describes in sentimental detail his river idylls with the poet Ellery Channing (“amid sunshine and shadow, rustling leaves, and sighing waters, up-gushed our talk, like the babble of a fountain”) without once mentioning that he was living at the time with a wife and infant in the mossy old Manse.

Howells reported that Hawthorne said he “had never seen a woman whom he thought quite beautiful,” whereas he crowded his fiction with “beautiful” young men, many of them self-portraits. About his own extraordinary looks, contemporaries are unanimous: Trollope reportedly called him “the handsomest Yankee that ever walked the planet.” He was also described, Miller reports, as “hermaphroditical,” “girlish” and as having “a fancy within airy, fragile and sensitive as a maiden’s; the rough hairy rind of the cocoa-nut enclosing its sweet whiteness.”

Bronson Alcott wondered if he wasn’t “a damsel imprisoned in that manly form.” His wife Sophia said that he “hated to be touched more than anyone I ever knew,” but between the ages of 4 and 17, he apparently slept regularly in the same bed with his uncle, Robert Manning, noted pomologist and author of the “Book of Fruits,” who was 20 years older than he. Hester Prynne’s “curiously embroidered” scarlet letter A , the badge of her shame, undoubtedly stands for “Adulteress” and “Art” and “Angel”--but the modern reader, trendily attuned to homosexual code and inundated with safe-sex advertising, may be forgiven for thinking that it might also stand for something vaguely anal.

Hawthorne’s uncertain courtship of Sophia Peabody makes for a fascinating chapter in Miller’s story. For five years after the pair got engaged, Hawthorne wrote her adoring letters from the house he shared with a Boston lawyer, calling her Dove, Dearissima and Belovedest while resourcefully finding ways to delay consummation. Rather than buy a house for the two of them, he spent $1,500 of his limited savings investing in the utopian community of Brook Farm, where he did the usual utopian-community things: “After breakfast,” he wrote Sophia, “Mr. Ripley put a four-pronged instrument into my hands, which he gave me to understand was called a pitch-fork; and he and Mr. Farley being armed with similar weapons, we all three commenced a gallant attack upon a heap of manure.” Anything to put off the wedding day.

Despite Hawthorne’s sexual ambivalences, their marriage, at least until his severe depressions made him unbearably misogynistic, seems to have been loving and happy. Sophia called him her Apollo and itemized his many perfections in letters to her mother. Once he even helped in the kitchen. “Apollo boiled some potatoes for breakfast,” Sophia writes. “Imagine him with that magnificent head bent over a cooking stove & those star-eyes watching the pot!”

Sophia emerges in these pages as more likable, despite her exuberant flaws, than her gloomy husband. She earnestly reads Milton to her 3-year-old, decorates the nuptial bed with designs after Flaxman, douses herself and her shivering family with winter well water every morning in accordance with homeopathic maxims, and later, while her declining spouse broods over ancestral horrors in his rookery, she falls in epistolary love with Annie Fields, the young wife of his editor, bravely writing that she very much enjoys seeing her dressed, “though I love to see you as well in undress.” When editor Fields intervenes, Sophia touchingly writes Annie, “Do you remember me at all, I wonder? Am I a tale that is told?”

Other scholars have been more willing than Miller is to identify a single cause of Hawthorne’s puzzlingly prodigious erotic guilt. Philip Young, in his concise book “Hawthorne’s Secret,” brushes aside homosexuality and proposes heterosexual incest as the key. In the deep Puritan past of Hawthorne’s maternal ancestors lurked a scandal in which two sisters, after “lewd carriages” with their brother, were forced to wear the letter I in public as punishment; and Hawthorne himself, Young cautiously suggests, possibly did some things he later regretted with his jealous and reclusive sister Elizabeth.

Another speculation, tucked away in a footnote to James R. Mellow’s 1980 biography of Hawthorne, is that Hawthorne’s perennial bedmate, Uncle Robert, seduced the young Apollo, thereby possibly becoming, in Hawthorne’s words, “a demon to whom you subjected yourself by some error at the outset of life, and were bound his slave forever, by once obeying him.” Miller, however, dismisses this quite plausible notion with a single chilly sentence: “There is no evidence, however, as some have claimed, that Robert initiated the youth sexually.”

Perhaps Miller’s hauteur here is ascribable in part to some unnecessarily harsh words that his predecessor Mellow has (hidden in another footnote) for Miller’s own 1975 biography of Melville--namely that it “unfortunately reduces what was a complex and creative relationship between (Hawthorne and Melville) to something little better than a seedy sexual adventure.” Thus does the mysterious estrangement between two great American allegorists echo itself in the prickly footnotes of their biographers.

What was Hawthorne’s secret, really? Well, a homosexually incestuous research-triangle involving Nathaniel, Uncle Robert and Elizabeth would be sufficiently eyebrow-raising, if true, to explain Hawthorne’s frequent use of strikingly similar guilt-triads in his fiction. After all, it takes just three scarlet corners to form a Greek A.