Blog for Nov. 8th on "Men Writing in the Early Republic"

David Leverenz's discussion about Nathaniel Hawthorne in this chapter interested me since he was so vexed about the "scribbling women" writers of the antebellum period that I so adore (such as Maria Susanna Cummins, who wrote the bestseller, The Lamplighter, which according to lamplighterpublishing.com, “outsold The Scarlet Letter ten to one in 1850!”

Hawthorne, according to Leverenz, was embarrassed by engaging in the literary marketplace. The authorial persona he tries to create is one of "a retiring and unambitious man who writes only for a few friends, as a gentleman should" (352-53). This definition intrigues me since my understanding of Hawthorne's authorship, via his son's biography Hawthorne and His Circle (1903), is that Hawthorne was a craftsman, dedicating time and space to his writing. In the passage that follows, Julian Hawthorne describes his father's beginning of The Scarlet Letter:

"...the nadir of my father's material fortunes was reached about the year 1849. At that time his age was five-and-forty, and I was three. The causes of this financial depression were several. One morning he awoke to find himself deprived, by political chicanery, of the income of a custom-house surveyorship which for some while past had served to support his small family. Now, some men could have gone on writing stories in the intervals between surveying customs, and have thus placed an anchor to windward against the time when the political storm should set in; but Nathaniel Hawthorne was devoid of that useful ability. Nor had he been able to spend less than he earned; so, suddenly, there he was on his beam-ends. Leisure to write, certainly, was now abundant enough; but he never was a rapid composer, and even had he been so, the market for the kind of things he wrote was, in the middle of the past century, in New England, neither large nor eager. The emoluments were meagre to match; twenty dollars for four pages of the Democratic Review was about the figure; and to produce a short tale or sketch of that length would take him a month at least. How were a husband and wife and their two children to live for a month on the mere expectation of twenty dollars from the Democratic Review--which was, into the bargain, terribly slow pay? Such was the problem which confronted the dark-haired and grave-visaged gentleman as he closed his desk in the Salem custom-house for the last time, and put on his hat to walk home."

Luckily, when he gets home, Hawthorne finds out that his wife has a stash of money set aside. And he is able to write the story that has been haunting him, without finding other work.

"Stimulated by the miracle, he remembered that the inchoate elements of a story, in which was to figure prominently a letter A, cut out of red cloth, or embroidered in scarlet thread, and affixed to a woman's bosom, had been for months past rumbling round in his mind; now was the time of times to shape it forth. Yonder upon the table by the window stood the old mahogany writing-desk so long unused; here were his flowered dressing-gown and slippers down-at-heel. He ought to be able to finish the story before the miraculous savings gave out; and then all he would have to do would be to write others. And, after all, to be rid of the surveyorship was a relief.”

“But matters were not to be run off quite so easily as this. The Scarlet Letter, upon coming to close quarters with it, turned out to be not a story of such moderate caliber as Hawthorne had hitherto been used to write, but an affair likely to extend over two or three hundred pages, which, instead of a month or so, might not be completed in a year; yet it was too late to substitute something more manageable for it--in the first place, because nothing else happened to be at his disposal, and secondly, because The Scarlet Letter took such intimate hold upon the vitals of his heart and mind that he was by no means able to free himself from it until all had been fulfilled. Only men of creative genius know in what glorious and harrowing thralldom their creations hold them. Having once been fairly begun, The Scarlet Letter must inevitably finish itself for good or ill, come what might to the writer of it."

This passage shows that Hawthorne was, and wanted to be, an author who made his living by his work. Julian's description later in the chapter of his father's study and his desk shows it to be a reified space for engaging in the literary marketplace as an author. And he was an author, according to Leverenz's "social definition" -- "someone making a public impact" (353).

So, what perplexes and interests me is that Nathaniel Hawthorne protested that he was an "absurd" man to try and support his family by writing (354). And yet his son's biography, Hawthorne and His Circle, shows clearly that Hawthorne consistently worked at his writing, crafting his stories, in hopes of making a name for himself as an author (and Julian himself asserts his own authorship by writing about his father’s authorship). Julian’s description of the sale of The Scarlet Letter illustrates Hawthorne’s participation in the literary marketplace as an author:

"One day a big man, with a brown beard and shining brown eyes, who bubbled over with enthusiasm and fun, made his appearance and talked volubly about something, and went away again, and my father and mother smiled at each other. The Scarlet Letter had been written, and James T. Fields had read it, and declared it the greatest book of the age."

Therefore, the problem then seems to be one of definition that intersects with questions about the marketplace and notions of masculinity. I am not sure I have an explanation. I just think it is an interesting and perplexing question – was Hawthorne an “author” or wasn’t he?