An Instinct for the Lugubrious

IN AN EARLY chapter of his biography of Hawthorne, James R. Mellow remarks somewhat apologetically that few family anecdotes survive from the author's childhood. In the next few sentences, Mellow goes on to relate five such anecdotes, not one of which provides any useful information about Hawthorne's disposition or character. One of Mellow's vignettes concerns Hawthorne's reaction to a bothersome neighboring woman: "Take her away!" the young Nathaniel apparently cried, "She is ugly and fat, and has a loud voice!"

According to Mellow, this story credits Hawthorne with "a rather severe case of fastidiousness at an early age." With similar insight, Mellow describes how, on unexpected occasions, the child would declaim a line from Richard III: "Stand back, my Lord, and let the coffin pass!" This, Mellow maintains, proves that the young Hawthorne "had a dramatic instinct for the lugubrious." These stories are cute, and like most family anecdotes the first few serve their purpose when no real information survives. Nevertheless, they reveal little of substance about the character of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Like much of Mellow's book, they are unnecessarily detailed and frustratingly superficial.

Mellow has a passion for anecdote, and an extraordinary talent for the exposition of superficial detail. Even for a book of over 600 pages, the amount of unnecessary information he includes is often astounding. In addition to narrating events in Hawthorne's life, for example, Mellow frequently describes exactly what Hawthorne wore. During cold winter mornings in Lenox, Mellow reveals, the author sat in his study wearing an old purple dressing gown made by his wife Sophia. Hawthorne's wardrobe also had its formal side, we discover, although at one time he refused to wear "the white muslin cravat then in fashion." Mellow provides similarly telling details about Hawthorne's diet--at one dinner he ate cutlets, fricassees, ragouts, tongue and chickenpies--and about his wife's wardrobe (Sophia's first ball dress, a "superb brockade," was "paletinted, low-neck, and short-sleeved"). Other minor details abound from the cost of Hawthorne's trip from Rome to Florence (95 scudi, with an additional five crowns for the tip) to the name of Isa Blagden's lapdog (Frolic).

This kind of information can be interesting, and would be justified if Mellow had accompanied it with a more perceptive analysis of Hawthorne. Unfortunately, his genuine insights into Hawthorne's character and writings are few. Despite what seems to be painstaking research and a breadth of historical reference, Mellow remains unwilling or unable to take the risks of interpretation necessary to successful biography. He describes people and events in considerable detail, only to suggest nothing about their possible effect on Hawthorne.

A good deal of his information comes from the author's letters and notebooks, which he quotes and paraphrases at great length in the text. In his account of Hawthorne's visit to Niagara Falls in 1832, he mentions, somewhat fastidiously, that the author felt an initial sense of disappointment upon viewing the falls; but he makes no attempt to assess Hawthorne's deeper reaction to Niagara, which represented, for many mid-nineteenth-century Americans, the symbol of the American sublime. Towards the end of the book, Mellow describes Hawthorne's increasingly reclusive nature on the basis of remarks from his letters, but he offers no explanation for the change in Hawthorne's behavior. Nor, aside from several asides about the nature of their sex life, does he provide any useful illumination of Hawthorne's relationship with Sophia.

ON THE FEW occasions when Mellow attempts a more penetrating analysis, his conclusions are disappointingly banal. In his discussion of Hawthorne's early tales, he paraphrases "Rappaccini's Daughter" at some length, only to prove that the author "was fascinated by the ambiquity and deceptiveness of evil"--an insight which any student would reach after 15 minutes of reading.

In The Scarlet Letter, Mellow maintains, there is "something awesome about the manner in which Hawthorne fuses art and human sinfulness." Mellow even suggests, in an absurd simplification of Hawthorne's complex understanding of sin, that the sense of evil which pervades The Scarlet Letter resulted from Hawthorne's bitterness after failing to retain his appointment in the Salem Custom House. Mellow's analysis of The Blithedale Romance is similarly superficial, and makes the mistake of crediting Hawthorne with remarks that are made by his narrator. At the end of his discussion of Hawthorne's novels, Mellow concludes, somewhat simplistically, that "there was an obsessive side to Hawthorne's fictional situations."

The title of the biography seems to indicate that the book will place Hawthorne in his proper historical context. Hawthorne numbered among his acquaintances some of the most well-known literary and political figures of the mid-nineteenth century, English as well as American. But Mellow's treatment of the author's contemporaries is also disappointing. Throughout the book, he indulges in long asides describing the literary currents and political conflicts in Hawthorne's day, yet he rarely makes any attempt to place Hawthorne in their midst. He offers no interpretation of Hawthorne's relationship to the Transcendentalists, only observing that "the politics of Concord, transcendental or otherwise, were never to Hawthorne's liking." Bronson Alcott, one of the most famous of the transcendental teachers, lived down the street from Hawthorne's home in Concord; yet the most telling detail that Mellow discloses about the relationship between the two men is that Hawthorne's wife helped Alcott's daughter to mark her clothes with indelible ink.

In one of the greatest disappointments of the book, Mellow manages to reveal little about the curious friendship between Hawthorne and Herman Melville. He discusses Melville's fondness for Hawthorne at some length, and provides a useful glimpse of Melville's slightly odd attachment to the older writer; but Hawthorne's feelings about Melville remain a mystery.

In 1883, almost 20 years after Hawthorne's death, his son Julian paid a brief visit to the aging, little-known Melville in New York. Intent on gathering material for his biography of his parents, Julian asked Melville for recollections about his relationship with Hawthorne senior. Melville seemed reluctant to discuss the matter, and sadly shook his head when Julian encouraged him to describe his visits to the Hawthorne home. In the course of their conversation, however, the author made one puzzling remark: "He was convinced Hawthorne had all his life concealed some great secret, which would, were it known, explain all the mysteries of his career." Melville, probably still harboring some resentment against the reserved Nathaniel, had his own reasons for making this assertion; yet his statement holds a certain grain of truth.

For most of us, Nathaniel Hawthorne remains an elusive figure, difficult to describe and even harder to understand. Intensely private and somewhat reclusive from his earliest years, Hawthorne concealed his own personality as successfully as many of the veiled characters in his stories. He is a difficult subject for any biographer, and Mellow deserves credit for his prodigious research; but after all that labor, the enigma of Hawthorne remains just as impenetrable.