Selected Tales and Sketches (4 page)

But the collection was cut up: first by the editorial decision (of Samuel Goodrich) that it was not suitably publishable as a book but might profitably appear serially, in successive numbers of the
New-England Magazine;
and then, according to the dictate of yet another editor (Park Benjamin), that its various tales and sketches would have to appear independently, without the connecting links of setting or narrative situation. One thing thus became very many, each falling out of relation to the others and to some idea of a literary whole. Moreover, each individual thing lost part of its essential self-definition; for, even as Hawthorne's project was about to demonstrate, literary meaning is never so inherent as to defy the rhetorical powers of speaker, occasion, and audience. And so it is not hard to believe the testimony of Hawthorne's sister-in-law (Elizabeth Peabody) that when they “tore up the book,” Hawthorne “cared little for the stories afterward, which had in their original place ... a great deal of significance.”

Yet out they flooded, in the two or three years that followed, in the
New-England Magazine
and elsewhere; to be regrouped, sooner or later, in the various collections Hawthorne's improving luck and growing fame would authorize; but never as the composite cultural whole his all but inviolable historicity had first imagined. Whence our own largely ahistori cal criticisms have had to take them up, one by one, each as some strangely dislocated or remarkably intense thing “in itself.” Or else as fragments of some quaintly localized version of the romantic
bildungsroman
—as if the growth of the artist's own mind were the only available topic of interest.

In fact, however, the enabling cultural premise and even the initial framing construction of “The Story-Teller” have survived the original editorial deconstruction and the subsequent literary misprision: the premise alone, in a suggestive but probably superseded experiment called “The Seven Vagabonds” (not included in this volume); and both together, with clear and operative intention, in an intriguing four-part sketch which acquired the awkward and somewhat pitiful title of “Passages from a Relinquished Work.” “Vagabonds” (1833) sets loose a “strolling gentleman,” eager to become an “itinerant novelist,” among a crowd of show-men, gypsies, and confidence men-idlers all, and all on their way to a Methodist camp meeting, there to divert the sober gentry as they rise up from the “anxious bench” of their sin and salvation; in the very next moment, however, the tale swiftly defeats the idle purpose of this hilarious little pilgrimage with the austere revelation, delivered by the lonely but imposing figure of the “circuit-riding” Methodist himself, that his revival meeting is quite “broke up.” The ending has seemed a bit abrupt, yet the thematic implication is perfectly clear: according to somebody's dichotomy of spiritual culture, the literary career is being set over against the evangelical calling. And then, as if this obvious and painful dialectic could indeed have been missed, the “Fragments” (1834) puts it forth again.

A would-be storyteller elects to break free of the faithful watch of his ministerial foster parent, taking to the road with only his native wit for a saving grace. Instantly, however, he is joined by another would-be liver-off-the-word, an evangelical preacher named Eliakim Abbott. An odd couple, surely; yet henceforth the two will itinerate together, the one preaching salvation to all those who have ears to hear, the other seeking variously to amuse or mildly edify whoever happens to have the price of admission to some village theater. The dichotomy is too cruelly and humorously perfect to be anything but Hawthorne's satiric yet not quite self-pitying version of the problem of secular or “historical” literature in a puritanic or “typological” culture. It even sheds a little light on the tone and bearing of the famous “writer of story books!” passage in “The Custom-House. ”

What follows most immediately from this highly suggestive beginning is, clearly, the Story-Teller's first public performance: an impromptu recitation of a rather tall tale called “Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe” (1834), which used to be taken, in isolation, as evidence of Hawthorne's real gift for local color along with a spurious capacity for gratuitous over-plotting, but which can yet be recovered as an outrageous parody of the philosophical problem of “testimony,” particularly as it relates to the Christian story of a miraculous resurrection. The audience laughs uproariously, at nothing more than the name of the nominal protagonist, even as the Story-Teller deploys the schoolbook (but still potent) skepticism of David Hume; and even as Eliakim Abbott preaches that nearer-home cruci fixion of Christian repentance, to a small congregation in the narrow confines of the local schoolhouse. Suddenly Hawthorne's talent for spiritual dilemma appears terribly up-to-date. Yet perhaps a present cultural situation is also history, whenever we choose to problematize it as such.

What was to follow along
after
this latter-day definition of the enduring “literary” hegemony of Puritanism will probably never become entirely clear. Evidently our fictional exponent (possibly to be named “Oberon”) and his evangelical antagonist were to wander, in tandem and in tension, all around New England, observing what they found, philosophizing their radical differences, and situating, one way or another, a number of tales which opened the spiritual history of a country many observers declared barren of significance and hence of literary opportunity. Most of the tales and local sketches Hawthorne published between 1834 and 1837 have been more or less plausibly assigned to “The Story-Teller” but, as the significant connections have been impossible to reinvent, such ascriptions have seemed not so much speculative as empty. This collection includes only one compound example of “what might have been”: “The Ambitious Guest” (1835), a moralized tale of what might be called the insecurity of nature, and which appears to echo Jonathan Edwards' infamous “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” is clearly (if partially) prepared for by the “aweful” speculations of a sketch called “The Notch,” which was published as part of a larger unit called “Sketches from Memory by a Pedestrian” (1835). It is just possible that a few other such relationships may yet be discovered among the large assortment of tales and sketches which appeared separately in these years. But for the most part “The Story-Teller” comes down to us more as a cultural idea than as a literary reality.

Yet the idea remains full of critical significance. For one thing, the example of its elaborate narrative plan forces us to recognize the first collection Hawthorne did succeed in publishing as in fact a “miscellany.” The cogently titled
Twice-told Tales
(1837)—which Horatio Bridge silently underwrote, even as his letters volubly tried to cheer up his badly discouraged college chum—really did end Hawthorne's long stint as nameless writer-of-supply for New England magazines and Christmas gift books; and clearly it did much, as the Preface to its third edition (1851) famously confesses, “to open an intercourse with the world.” But it was, in the last analysis, a mere gathering together of a certain range or variety of individual literary productions, without the studied integrity of the earlier projects, and without the framing reminder of cultural origin and local reference which distinguishes the intention of “The Story-Teller.” Its own being is remarkable enough to encourage investigation of its own looser sort of unity. Yet it strongly provokes the inference that Hawthorne had in some measure adjusted his more complex literary ambition to the terms in which his editors, rightly or wrongly, represented his audience. He simplified himself in order to survive.

More particularly, the entire dramatic form of “The Story-Teller” may prompt us to look for some narrator, lending distance and even a certain amount of irony to the most apparently personal of Hawthorne's sketches of the 1830s. Hawthorne's highly authoritative biographer, Arlin Turner, has detected farcical exaggeration in certain “Story-Teller” pieces which lament the bitter fate of “the artist,” so that supposedly confessional pieces like the (excluded) “Devil in Manuscript” (1835) and “Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man” (1837) may exhibit more satire than self-pity. So may “The Haunted Mind” (1835), “Sunday at Home” (1837), and “Night Sketches” (1838)—all of which have been included as (ambiguous) examples of Hawthorne's treatment of the artistic (or otherwise “isolated”) mentality and point of view. Any or all of these may once have been offered by the most fully characterized of Hawthorne's early narrators; certainly none can be read as unmediated autobiography. Evidently—the lesson of “The Story-Teller” suggests—Hawthorne's psychological sketches are far more likely to characterize than simply to confess.

It also appears that the narrator who reveals a bit of his literary biography even as he rehearses the rejected “Appeal” of the original “Alice Doane” is the very Story-Teller, who may as easily share a fact or two with “the real Hawthorne” as does, much later, the notoriously unreliable narrator of
The Blithedale Romance.
Certainly this would help to account for the repeated and otherwise problematic intrusion of the angry teller into the well-composed tale. It might even give us a way to understand why it seems so easy for that teller to end by blaming Cotton Mather for the witchcraft, in a way Hawthorne himself would elsewhere always resist.

This consideration may well bring us back to the most obviously historical, explicitly Puritan contents of “The Story-Teller.” “Young Goodman Brown” does not by itself worry the conditions of its own telling; that, one suspects, has been part of its supposedly “timeless” power to fascinate and reveal. Yet we can easily imagine it as associated with the locale of Salem Village, which itself continues to stimulate the practice of psychohistory; and surely it is not amiss to wonder why the narrator raises only the problem of “dream,” when the story itself retells the wondrous tale of “specter evidence” with assured historical authority. A similar and even more unsettling question attaches to “The Minister's Black Veil,” which the alert reader may well associate with the decades (and the themes) of the “Great Awakening,” but which the narrator offers as a somewhat more general—and sentimental—parable of painful solitude and pleasant society. More insistently still, “The Gray Champion” (1835) seems almost a case study in apparent narrative inconsistency, its oratorical conclusion broadly honoring the typological formula of Puritan politics the tale everywhere else portrays as paranoia. Most obviously, perhaps, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” demands to be studied from the narrative perspective as firmly as from the historical: just whose authority is supposed to sponsor the tidy lesson in comparative colonization that is attached to the entirely fictional confrontation between a mythicized Governor Endicott and his misplaced “Priest of Baal”? And who wrote—to edit whose enthusiasm—the fey little footnote which exists to assure the decently empirical reader that, of course, nothing quite like the story's central symbolic event ever really took place? Perhaps the literary strategy of these tales is every bit as deep as their historical plot.

A simpler point remains cogent: from “The Story-Teller” as from the “Provincial Tales,” Hawthorne's historical fictions survive
as historical,
just as they do survive. Full of explicit reminders of the events and personages of the past, they invite and reward the attempt to trace out their pattern of allusion. “Goodman Brown” implies the “spectral” theme of Cotton Mather almost as plainly as it pronounces his name. The “Black Veil” amply evokes a sunny but backslidden world that both demands and resists the power of some darkly conscientious awakening to the “true” sight of sin. The “Champion” draws the logic of providential vindication so tight it almost snaps—in the face of George Bancroft. And the “May-Pole” tries to force its honest reader to question the import and the power of an allegory that goes back to the very foundation of puritanic America. And when we put these tales beside Hawthorne's “provincial” histories, and add to them the half-dozen or so historical tales that appeared a year or two later, we are clearly in possession of the most authoritative and “survivable” achievement of Hawthorne's first period.

Yet evidently Hawthorne had meant there to be more. Not more tales of colonial and provincial history, necessarily, though here too some discoveries may yet be made; but more in the way of dramatic directive to cultural location. And with that a sense of what it might mean to retell the stories (if not quite the events) of the Puritan and Revolutionary past, in the midst of a bourgeois, democratic, and somewhat bumptious present, so that an available “Story-Teller” might fairly have prevented modern criticism from ever conceiving Hawthorne as a writer who fled from reality to imagination, or who treated the past as nothing more than fugitive fancy's temporal realm. Arguably he had begun that way, somewhere in his early and the century's middle twenties. But by 1835 he had fully mastered an art of history as subtle and self-aware as anything ever attempted in fiction.

 

The remainder of Hawthorne's career as “story-teller”—as opposed to his later appearance as our prime exemplar of the self-divided “romance-novel” —may be summarized much more briefly. Not because the tales and sketches of his second, “Old Manse,” period are greatly inferior to those of his original, elongated, and still somewhat murky “Salem” phase. But because the outlines of his life and literary interests are much clearer at this later moment; and because his thematic relation to the “transcendental” concerns of his Emerson-inspired 1840s is altogether manifest and plausible. Hawthorne republished and added to his miscellaneous
Twice-told Tales
in 1842 and again in 1851; but the story of his next significant literary venture is well and strategically told by the fully public and suitably arranged contents of his
Mosses from an Old Manse
(1846).