Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he was
approached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was as
mercurial and double-edged as his writing. "Deep as Dante," Herman
Melville said.
Hawthorne himself declared that he was not "one of those supremely
hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried,
with brain sauce, as a tidbit" for the public. Yet those who knew
him best often took the opposite position. "He always puts himself
in his books," said his sister-in-law Mary Mann, "he cannot help
it." His life, like his work, was extraordinary, a play of light
and shadow.
In this major new biography of Hawthorne, the first in more than a
decade, Brenda Wineapple, acclaimed biographer of Janet Flanner and
Gertrude and Leo Stein ("Luminous"-Richard Howard), brings him
brilliantly alive: an exquisite writer who shoveled dung in an
attempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then excoriated the
community (or his attraction to it) in caustic satire; the
confidant of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the United
States and arguably one of its worst; friend to Emerson and Thoreau
and Melville who, unlike them, made fun of Abraham Lincoln and who,
also unlike them, wrote compellingly of women, deeply identifying
with them-he was the first major American writer to create erotic
female characters. Those vibrant, independent women continue to
haunt the imagination, although Hawthorne often punishes,
humiliates, or kills them, as if exorcising that which enthralls.
Here is the man rooted in Salem, Massachusetts, of an old
pre-Revolutionary family, reared partly in the wilds of western
Maine, then schooled along with Longfellow at Bowdoin College. Here
are his idyllic marriage to the youngest and prettiest of the
Peabody sisters and his longtime friendships, including with
Margaret Fuller, the notorious feminist writer and intellectual.
Here too is Hawthorne at the end of his days, revered as a genius,
but considered as well to be an embarrassing puzzle by the Boston
intelligentsia, isolated by fiercely held political loyalties that
placed him against the Civil War and the currents of his time.
Brenda Wineapple navigates the high tides and chill undercurrents
of Hawthorne's fascinating life and work with clarity, nuance, and
insight. The novels and tales, the incidental writings, travel
notes and children's books, letters and diaries reverberate in this
biography, which both charts and protects the dark unknowable core
that is quintessentially Hawthorne. In him, the quest of his
generation for an authentically American voice bears disquieting
fruit.
"From the Hardcover edition."
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