Contempt bred of familiarity

Halfway through her biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Brenda Wineapple offers a formula to which she is prepared, apparently, to commit herself: “Man of compassion, man of ice, man of forgiveness, man of spite.” But she gives more evidence of Hawthorne’s ice and spite than of his compassion and forgiveness.

Hawthorne was, according to the image she conveys, a miserable, whining man, aloof, self-obsessed, determined to be unhappy. Wherever he lived, he wanted to be somewhere else. On one page Wineapple calls him a prude and a boor, on other pages a racist. Has she lived too long with him? I wonder. Biographers often grow to dislike their subjects. Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost’s official biographer, came to detest him long before completing the second volume of the biography. Wineapple seems to have wearied of her subject and become exasperated with his debility.

It’s hard to say what she especially dislikes in Hawthorne. With a wife and three children, he needed money and kept on grasping for it, but he can’t be blamed for that. He resented the fact that his genius went unrecognized, except by a few friends. He did not write popular fiction, and he was appalled by the success of the “damned mob of scribbling women” -- as he called them -- who did.

The jobs he got were political appointments: measurer of coal and salt at the Boston Custom House from 1839 to 1841, surveyor of the Salem Custom House from 1846 to 1849, American consul in Liverpool from 1853 to 1855. These jobs were lucrative and required little work of him; they put money in his purse, which he and his family spent in London, Rome and Florence. In June 1852, when his friend Franklin Pierce was nominated as the Democratic candidate for president of the United States, Hawthorne offered to write a campaign biography of him, an offer Pierce accepted. Hawthorne kept his eye on the main chance.

But I don’t think Wineapple is distressed by such acts of prudence. She is incensed by his passivity and the moral claim he made for it. “The good of others, like our own happiness,” Hawthorne told Elizabeth Peabody on Oct. 8, 1857, “is not to be attained by direct effort, but incidentally: I am really too humble to think of doing good, if I have been impertinent enough to aim at it, I am ashamed.” In “Chiefly About War Matters,” he wrote (in 1862): “No human effort, on a grand scale, has ever yet resulted according to the purpose of its projectors. The advantages are always incidental. Man’s accidents are God’s purposes. We miss the good we sought, and do the good we little cared for.”

Quoting such sentences, Wineapple wants to cuff Hawthorne about the ears, but what drives her to the extremity of dismay is his attitude toward slavery and abolition. “I have not, as you suggest, the slightest sympathy for the slaves, or, at least, not half so much as for the laboring whites, who, I believe, as a general thing, are ten times worse off than the Southern negros,” Hawthorne told Zachariah Burchmore in July 1851. In 1835, Hawthorne has the narrator of “Old News” refer to slavery as “a patriarchal, and almost a beautiful, peculiarity” of Colonial times, and say that many emancipated slaves “would have been better advised had they staid at home, foddering the cattle, cleaning dishes -- in fine, performing their moderate share of the labors of life without being harassed by its cares.” “No doubt about it,” Wine- apple writes, “to Hawthorne, blacks and Italians and Jews are inferior to Anglo-Saxons, whom he doesn’t much like either.”

But Hawthorne’s attitude on the question of slaves was not as simple as “no doubt about it.” He did not condone slavery, as Wineapple acknowledges. But he thought abolition would make the condition of blacks worse: It would result, he wrote in “The Life of Franklin Pierce,” in “the ruin of two races which now dwell together in greater peace and affection, it is not too much to say, than had ever elsewhere existed between the taskmaster and the serf.” Hawthorne’s idyll was indeed supremacist but it was not merely silly.

Wineapple doesn’t bring forward the more agreeable side of Hawthorne’s character: his playfulness with his wife and children, his gregariousness when he was at leisure with friends. He had more friends than a man as dismal as Wineapple describes could be expected to have, notably John O’Sullivan, Herman Melville, Margaret Fuller (though he was nasty to her memory after her tragic death), Pierce and James T. Fields, the publisher who got Hawthorne whatever public success he achieved. The mourners who attended Hawthorne’s funeral make an impressive list. He can’t have been merely a sourpuss with “the embittered loneliness of an outsider turned exile, the fugitive alone, a shadow.”

It seems to me that Wineapple has prematurely -- or in weariness -- settled upon an image of Hawthorne, exemplar of ice and spite, and has let this image govern her reading of his fiction. Faced with ambiguous stories such as “The Minister’s Black Veil” and “Egotism, or, The Bosom-Serpent,” she resolves the ambiguity by interpreting them as “a parable of the artist”: “Parson Hooper puts on his veil, Wakefield takes a little walk, Reuben Bourne tells himself a small lie. At the same time, Hawthorne writes and rewrites a fable of the artist, storyteller extraordinaire and crafty nincompoop alienated from his duller contemporaries by sensibility and vocation, an estranged, filmy figure who groped with abashed ardor through the twilight, insecure himself but discerning and astute.”

The trouble with this “fable of the artist” is that once it is told as alienation, it ceases to be interesting; no fable has been told so often. The further trouble is that it presents Hawthorne as a writer who could not imagine anything distant from his own experience, taking dictation from whatever has happened to him. Wineapple implies that Hawthorne could only add one piece of his experience to another and hope that the sum would look as if it were fully imagined. She says of “Rappaccini’s Daughter”: “Like most of Hawthorne’s fiction, ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ is a biographical palimpsest. Dr. Rappaccini is Sophia’s father and Waldo Emerson. (Concord busybodies said Lidian Emerson was poisoning herself with medicine extracted from several plants.) Rappaccini is also Fuller’s father, whose stiff-backed education of Margaret was as destructive, if as well-intentioned; he’s Uncle Robert, another horticulturist of decided purpose, and he’s Hawthorne, the father-gardener, who fusses over his wife’s diet and her health. Yet Hawthorne erases most of his sources, even the discernible literary ones -- his recent reading of Montaigne’s essays, Eugene Sue’s fiction, Frances Calderon de la Barca’s ‘Life in Mexico,’ and Shelley’s ‘The Cenci.’ ”

This is cheating, as it is in those critics who say that difficult modern poems are about the difficulty of writing modern poems. I have more time for William Empson, who read “The Minister’s Black Veil” as a story about Parson Hooper’s addiction to masturbation and the guilt of it. At least this is more worth thinking about, while reading the story, than the usual boring stuff about the alienation of the artist in the 19th century.

I don’t think Wineapple is secure in her interpretation of Hawthorne. This may account for the strange mixture of styles in her writing. Much of the book is ordinary, decent standard English, as in the passages I’ve quoted. But a lot of it is in the style of romantic fiction. “The Eternal City huddled in January’s icy glare,” meaning that it was cold in Rome that January: “Head bent, the Reverend Bentley wears his broad-brimmed hat, he usually does, and raises his skirts as if to dodge temptation, passing whorehouses and warehouses hunkered near the water’s edge.”

Nonsense: no evidence for any of this, except maybe the hat. “Perhaps he took her hand then, warm and small in her wintry glove.” Perhaps, perhaps not. “Age clasped his throat.” It what? “Liverpool loomed on the shore, warehouses standing like upended coffins in an overcast dawn.” Maybe: I doubt it. Hawthorne wrote romances, but that doesn’t justify his biographer in writing romantic sentences. And then, presumably to enrich the mixture, Wineapple uses demotic American, pretending that the past tense of “tread” is “tread,” not “trod,” and that “like” has wiped out “as” just as “that” has displaced “who” and “whom”: “like Hawthorne does,” “like Dickens or Balzac do,” and “the man that he kills.” I wish that Wineapple had practiced the English she knows best, and trusted its urbanity. *