Hawthorne : A Life

Rating:
Summary: The Long Night Is Young
Review: Brenda Wineapple's erudite Hawthorne: A Life (2003) may be the finest literary biography since Victoria Glendinning's Vita: A Life of Victoria Sackville-West (1983). Applying a fierce intelligence and a distinctly modern sensibility, Wineapple both succeeds in illuminating Nathaniel Hawthorne's character without distorting it and maintaining a masterly evocation of the period in which he lived: Hawthorne's 19th Century America and Europe seem both mysteriously distant and entirely familiar and matter - of - fact.

After his father's early death, the young Nathaniel was raised predominantly by women, and strong women - from mother Rose, sister Elizabeth, wife Sophia, and friends Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Margaret Fuller - dominated his life. Wineapple gives thoughtful consideration to Hawthorne's love for and strong attachment to other men, and provides a lengthy portrait of his intimate friendship with college mate and eventual United States President Franklin Pierce. Devotees of 19th century American literature will be entranced by the image of uneasy comrades Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Hawthorne enjoying a rare peaceful moment ice skating together on a frozen Concord pond. Wineapple's examination of Hawthorne's early adulthood reveals that his infamous "long years of seclusion" were considerably less secluded than previously believed; her thorough assessment of Hawthorne's complex racist and misogynist attitudes will probably never be bettered.

From early youth, Hawthorne suffered from a fatalistic perception that he was an authentic outsider, destined to remain more keenly aware than others but also permanently separated on some basic level from the rest of mankind. Despite his physical attractiveness, relatively good position in New England society, obvious intelligence, and eventual happy marriage, Hawthorne never lost his crippling sense of inner and outer solitude. The abundant portraits, daguerreotypes, and photos of Hawthorne provide a metaphorical correlative: Hawthorne appears preternaturally beautiful in the paintings, but looks gaunt, obsessed, and half - crazed - like a Fritz Eichenberg woodcut of Roderick Usher ("Hawthorne sat gazing into the fireplace, his gray dressing gown twisted about his shrinking torso") - in several of the included photographs.

The Furies also pursued Hawthorne in other ways: whether living in urban Salem or rural Concord, Massachusetts or Maine, London or Rome, Hawthorne was constantly unhappy with his home and surroundings, resulting in continual uprootings for himself and his family. Hawthorne ran on and on, only to find his fundamental displeasure with existence awaiting him wherever he settled. It's fair to say that almost every aspect of living distressed the sensitive author in some fashion, ruining his enjoyment of life, nature, and other people. "I should like to sail on and on forever, and never touch the shore again," he wrote. There was no solace anywhere for Hawthorne, who went out with a whimper rather than a bang, withering physically, mentally, and emotionally a little each day, until he was dead at 60.

Correspondingly, Hawthorne's fiction is glutted with symbols of guilt, accusation, and decay, from tarred - and - feathered relatives, black-veiled ministers, disembodied strangling hands, and disfiguring birthmarks to poisoned children, bloody footprints, bedeviled forests, and scarlet letters. As he famously wrote about drowned heroine Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance, "Six hours before, how beautiful! At midnight, what a horror!" In Hawthorne's imagination, the maid really was dead, not sleeping, and images typically associated with innocence, purity, and hope - sylvan woods, children, grade school teachers - are or become pathologically tainted. Hawthorne dwelt claustrophobically in a fallen world; accordingly, he was no admirer of Emerson's transcendentalist philosophy.

Luminaries such as Washington Irving, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allen Poe admired Hawthorne's work, though almost no one appears to have embraced his writing unequivocally. Hawthorne has also had a number of formidable critics, including personal friends Emerson and Margaret Fuller. Wineapple succinctly defines Hawthorne's dolorous, congested, and not - quite - three - dimensional style: "muted irony, authorial detachment, sardonic nonchalance, and modesty mixed with a dollop of hauteur." Having finished The House of The Seven Gables, a friend of Hawthorne's remarked to Emerson that "a cough took up ten pages, and sitting down in a chair six more." Hawthorne, forever haunted by his own past and the past of his country, raised a number of important themes in his work, but rarely explored and defined those themes with more than a childlike gloss, despite the sincerest application of his talents. The problems inherent in Hawthorne's creative processes were only exacerbated by his suspicion that fiction writing was a feminine pursuit and a worthless occupation for a man.

Hawthorne wrote a number of short stories in which fevered, generally well - intentioned if ethically blind scientists meddle with some aspect of nature in the hope of exerting some control over the processes of life and death. Each tale was an attempt at psychological and spiritual alchemy, but, like his protagonists, Hawthorne failed in his attempts to save himself from the engulfing darkness he felt to be an inevitable and ever encroaching aspect of the human experience.

Rating:
Summary: A great biography
Review: Full of strange families, strange clothes and stranger manners, HAWTHORNE offers all the pleasures of a good 19th century novel but with sharper, livelier prose. Wineapple writes like a witty angel. Every page offers some detail that helps us see or feel or smell another century. She brings us into Hawthorne's world even as she brings Hawthorne into ours.

And the book is full of great characters, not just Hawthorne, but that amiable dullard, Franklin Pierce, the Peabody sisters, Margaret Fuller, weird Delia Bacon -- the first person to argue that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare. Hawthorne is famous for badmouthing women writers, but he surrounded himself with smart women and liked them -- unlike Thoreau or Melville, who were pretty indifferent. Wineapple makes a very convincing case, I regret to say, that the friendship between Hawthorne and Melville was brief and purely literary, with little sexual edge. (Her most interesting detail is that Hawthorne's wife liked Melville better than Hawthorne did.) Wineapple brings Hawthorne very close to us, offering a flesh and blood man whose sunny normalcy was full of chill shadows.

This is one of the best biographies I've read in the past fifteen years, as solid and engaging as COLERIDGE by Richard Holmes or MORNINGS ON HORSEBACK by David McCullough. I cannot praise it too highly.

Rating:
Summary: Poor Hawthorne
Review: How he'd have loathed this biography by Wineapple. Invasive and outrageously distorted when it comes to interpreting what Hawthorne means in his own biographical entries [especially the letters], this volume commits the primitive biographical sin of reach a verdict, first; find the evidence, second. Some of Wineapple's assertions as to what Hawthorne "really" means [often in contradiction to his actual words] are simply preposterous. Thank God for the copious quotings from the great man, himself. The rest? Read quickly; take painkillers.

Rating:
Summary: To Know a Man Too Well
Review: I'm not a big biography reader, so I can't throw out other tomes to compare to this one. All I can say is that it was, amazingly, a page-turner. Wineapple really made me want to know more, and helped me to understand a very, very complicated man, at least as much as it is possible to do so. Obviously meticulously researched, brimming with witty remarks (both Wineapple's and first-person quotes), one of few criticisms I can think of is that the author tried a little too hard to emulate Hawthorne's style, not always transparently. But then, when I read Hawthorne, my sentences tend to grow, too, so maybe that isn't a criticism.

Wineapple's only failing, in my opinion, is her tendency to skip over things she seems to assume we already know, like Sophia's fall on the ice precipitating her miscarriage. She neither disproves it nor states it, just ignores it. It made me wonder what else she left out that I didn't know enough to notice.

My only other comment is a warning - for those (like me) who have been fascinated by Nathaniel Hawthorne since their first exposure to him, beware - to know the man this well, with this much detail, is to demystify him before adoring eyes. He was a man, it turns out, just a man, with failings and foibles. Some, like his racism and sexism, might be excused by the times he lived in, but others, like self-pity and hubris, are timeless. After this book, I pity him more, and worship him less. But his work, as Wineapple points out in the Notes, remains as popular as ever.

Rating:
Summary: To Know a Man Too Well
Review: I'm not a big biography reader, so I can't throw out other tomes to compare to this one. All I can say is that it was, amazingly, a page-turner. Wineapple really made me want to know more, and helped me to understand a very, very complicated man, at least as much as it is possible to do so. Obviously meticulously researched, brimming with witty remarks (both Wineapple's and first-person quotes), one of few criticisms I can think of is that the author tried a little too hard to emulate Hawthorne's style, not always transparently. But then, when I read Hawthorne, my sentences tend to grow, too, so maybe that isn't a criticism.

Wineapple's only failing, in my opinion, is her tendency to skip over things she seems to assume we already know, like Sophia's fall on the ice precipitating her miscarriage. She neither disproves it nor states it, just ignores it. It made me wonder what else she left out that I didn't know enough to notice.

My only other comment is a warning - for those (like me) who have been fascinated by Nathaniel Hawthorne since their first exposure to him, beware - to know the man this well, with this much detail, is to demystify him before adoring eyes. He was a man, it turns out, just a man, with failings and foibles. Some, like his racism and sexism, might be excused by the times he lived in, but others, like self-pity and hubris, are timeless. After this book, I pity him more, and worship him less. But his work, as Wineapple points out in the Notes, remains as popular as ever.

Rating:
Summary: Professor Wineapple deserves an A for her great biography!
Review: Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was an enigma wrapped in a mystery. Hawhthorne the scion of Salem Mass.Puritans was a man who lived his life within his tortured guilt-ridden soul. The great nineteenth century author of such gems as "The Scarlet Letter", "The House of the Seven Gables", "The Blithedale Romance","The Marble Faun" and classic short stories comes vividly alive in this superbly crafted, researched and well written account. Wineapple is that "rare apple": an academic English professor who writes clear prose understandable by the popular reading public.
Hawthorne was a complex man who kept his thoughts interior until he spilled out his concerns on the page. He was a supporter of the Democratic party meaning he was opposed to abolitionism, felt whites were the superior race and had an almost unnatural love for our 14th President Franklin Pierce (one of our worst chief executives!).
Hawthorne's tale includes many interesting folks from his beautiful artistic wife Sophie and her fascinating sister Elizabeth Peabody (who may have been in love with Nathaniel)!
The third Peabody sister wed famed educational reformer Horace Mann.
Hawthorne's children were fascinating from the etheral oldest daughter Una to the troubled Julian to the youngest child Rose who opened the first hospice for indigent cancer patients.
Famed literary stars such as Emerson, Thoreau and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are players in this story with colorful anecdotes from the pen of Wineapple. The early feminist Margaret Fuller is also discussed with acuity. Herman Melville who was Hawthorne a secretive man is chronciled as his hero worship of the Salem author led him to dedicate Moby Dick to the older man.

Rating:
Summary: Professor Wineapple deserves an A for her great biography!
Review: Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was an enigma wrapped in a mystery. Hawhthorne the scion of Salem Mass.Puritans was a man who lived his life within his tortured guilt-ridden soul. The great nineteenth century author of such gems as "The Scarlet Letter", "The House of the Seven Gables", "The Blithedale Romance","The Marble Faun" and classic short stories comes vividly alive in this superbly crafted, researched and well written account. Wineapple is that "rare apple": an academic English professor who writes clear prose understandable by the popular reading public.
Hawthorne was a complex man who kept his thoughts interior until he spilled out his concerns on the page. He was a supporter of the Democratic party meaning he was opposed to abolitionism, felt whites were the superior race and had an almost unnatural love for our 14th President Franklin Pierce (one of our worst chief executives!).
Hawthorne's tale includes many interesting folks from his beautiful artistic wife Sophie and her fascinating sister Elizabeth Peabody (who may have been in love with Nathaniel)!
The third Peabody sister wed famed educational reformer Horace Mann.
Hawthorne's children were fascinating from the etheral oldest daughter Una to the troubled Julian to the youngest child Rose who opened the first hospice for indigent cancer patients.
Famed literary stars such as Emerson, Thoreau and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are players in this story with colorful anecdotes from the pen of Wineapple. The early feminist Margaret Fuller is also discussed with acuity. Herman Melville who was Hawthorne a secretive man is chronciled as his hero worship of the Salem author led him to dedicate Moby Dick to the older man.

Rating:
Summary: An exemplary biography of a preeminent man of letters
Review: This thoughtful and graceful biography of Nathanial Hawthorne cogently captures his human complexity, which in turn reflects the polarities of the American character and experience that he vividly described in his self-styled romances: head and heart, reason and emotion, reality and imagination, materialism and transcendentalism, Puritanism and Quakerism, republicanism and federalism, states' rights and national union, slavery and abolition, heritage and freedom, tradition and independence. Brenda Wineapple's book skillfully chronicles Hawthorne's early and recurrent poverty, peripateticism, Hamlet-like indecisiveness, ambivalence about writing, and tendency to observe rather than to participate in life; and, like a Dickens novel, her work presents the author's family and distinguished circle of friends as fully developed and plausibly motivated characters: Franklin Pierce, Emerson, Melville, and, at a greater remove, Stowe, Whitman, and Poe. This volume's evident scholarship - it contains more than one hundred pages of notes - is expressed in a highly palatable style that is also educative in its unobtrusive use of words sufficiently uncommon (e.g., atavistic, coruscate, metonymic, sodality, solipsistic, treacle) to cause some readers to consult their dictionaries frequently. In sum, this work is the triumphant achievement of an ambitious undertaking.