Friday, November 4, 2022

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Edgar Allan Poe still gets noticed for the luridness of his stories. Nathaniel Hawthorne is the chronicler of Massachusetts Puritanism. I think he has as an imagination as terrifying as Poe's.  I found a biography online, Hawthorne: A Life. Which I have not had time to do much but take it in bits and pieces., but I think not answer the questions I have of Hawthorne - the terribleness of some of his visions, his Romantic glosses over those visions, the contradictory ways of the man and writer. However, it does seem to recognize the problem of Hawthorne:

With an insight so fine it bordered on the voluptuous, he crafted a style of exquisite ambiguity, of uncompromising passion and stubborn skepticism. Yet his characters are often curiously static, poised between self-knowledge and indifference and, like Hawthorne himself, confounded by what and who they are. For Hawthorne was a man of dignity, of mordant wit, of malicious anger; a man of depression and control; a forthright and candid man aching to confess but too proud, too obstinate, too ashamed to do so; a man of disclosure and disguise, both at once, keen, cynical, intelligent, who digs into his imagination to write of American men and women: isolated in their communities, burdened by their history, riven by their sense of crime and their perpetual, befuddled innocence; people ambitious and vain and displaced and willing, or perhaps forced, to live a double life, a secret life, an exemplary life, haunted and imprisoned, even as his children were—or, in Hawthorne’s terms, as are we all.

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Fields refused to print the piece. “I said probably too precisely what I thought for a moment so near his death,” Curtis exclaimed, and mailed it to Charles Norton, now editor of the North American Review. Norton tried his hand at the paradox of Hawthorne. “His genius continually, as it seems to me, overmastered himself,” Norton observed, “and the depth & fulness of his feelings were forced into channels of expression in which they were confined & against which they struggled in vain.”

Had Hawthorne squeezed refractory emotions into channels much too narrow? No: those channels helped to create emotion by harnessing what they unleashed. And yes, in a way, insofar as Hawthorne outlived his idiom; the idea of romance seemed fusty now, even naïve. The world had altered a good deal since Independence Day, 1804. Hawthorne knew it. But he hankered after dark ancestral houses plunked down in forests, like Arden, where nothing changes, not even rot. This was his stay against nastiness and evil, meaninglessness and damned folly. But no matter its elegance, the fantasy of home—community, consolation, belonging, place—wore thin. Or out. And yet, comfortless, Hawthorne painted a dark corner of the contemporary world: terrifying, terrible, and grand.

We think him quaint for having written of the past. I think we do him a wrong as much as we wrong Poe for being lurid.

sch 10/17/22

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