The Master (24 page)

He found them as he dreamed of finding them, his father reading and his mother moving quietly about the room.

‘I need to discuss with you my present circumstances,’ he said.

‘Sit down, Harry,’ his mother said, moving to a tall chair by the table and sitting there with her hands joined in front of her.

‘I know that it is time for me to make a choice, and I have given it much thought, but perhaps not enough thought, and I have come to you both to see, perhaps, if you could help me clarify
how I must live my life, what I must do.’

‘Each of us needs to clarify how he must live his life,’ Henry senior said. ‘It is a matter for all of us.’

‘I am aware of that, Father,’ Henry said and then left silence. He knew that his father could not now declare a career for him or suggest that he get up early and go out early. He
had left things open for discussion rather than decision. He could see his father becoming bright-eyed and excited that an ordinary morning with his family in Newport had suddenly been transformed
and was awash with possibility.

No one mentioned the army, but it hovered over the conversation, swooping to eye level now and then; nor did any of them mention his ailment, but it too lingered in the atmosphere. Henry was
careful not to mention anything specific at first, merely his restlessness and his ambition and his need to clarify – he used the word several times – what he might do now.

‘I have become interested in America itself, Father, its traditions and history and indeed its future.’

‘Yes, but that is a subject for all Americans, we all must devote time and energy to the study of our heritage,’ his father said.

‘America is developing and changing,’ Henry said, ‘in ways which are unique and require a serious approach.’

He wondered if the word ‘serious’ had not been a mistake, if it had not suggested that his father’s approach to his chosen subject had been less than serious. His father was
easily wounded, but his mind was too busy now, and his bustling confidence too complete to take offence. Henry watched him pondering the full implications of the last remark and then noticed his
eyes become steely, his expression hard. He loved how his father could change like this and regretted that it occurred so seldom. He did not look at his mother.

‘What is it you wish to do then?’ his father asked.

In that moment Henry senior appeared and sounded like someone powerful, a man with a large private income at his disposal and a high puritan sternness. This, he thought, was how his
father’s own father must have been when plans and money were being discussed.

‘I do not wish to become an historian,’ Henry said. ‘I want to study something with a more specific application. In short, sir, I wanted to discuss with you whether I should
study law.’

‘And keep us all out of jail?’ his father asked.

‘Do you wish to join your brother at Harvard?’ his mother asked.

‘William said it is the best law school in America.’

‘William would not even know how to break a law,’ his father said.

The idea of a changing legal system as part of a changing America, however, began to interest his father the more he spoke on the subject. When he had expounded on it at some length, he seemed
to abandon whatever worries he had about the narrowness of the subject and indeed the confining nature of decisions themselves. The fact that his two eldest sons would spend their time, at his
expense, in libraries while a war for the very survival of American values of freedom and individual rights raged outside, may have occurred to him, but, in Henry’s presence, he did not let
it cloud his new enthusiasm, and his wife, with her mild silence and her smile, also indicated her approval that he should attend Harvard to study law.

N
OW
H
ENRY
had the summer free from his father’s nervous, watchful eyes and his mother’s ministrations. His case had been put to rest. His
parents could occupy themselves worrying about Wilky and Bob and Alice. Henry could savour the stifling heat of his bedroom; he could work with freedom; he could read whatever he liked without the
foreboding that his father would at any moment and without warning appear at his bedroom door and tell him that there was a war on, his country needed him, it was time to submit to army discipline,
to wear a uniform and sleep in barracks and march in file.

In the days after his father agreed that he could go to law school, Henry discovered Hawthorne. He knew his name, of course, as he knew Emerson and Thoreau, and he had glanced at some of his
stories, paying him less attention than the two essayists because of a perceived level of dullness and bareness in the work he had read. They were simple moral tales about simple moral people,
light and slight and tenderly trivial. Both Henry and Sargy Perry, with whom Henry discussed these matters, had agreed that literature at its most valuable and rich and intense was written in the
countries which Napoleon had reigned over and attacked; literature lay in the places where Roman coins could be found in the soil. Hawthorne’s
Twice Told Tales
reminded him and Perry
of just that, tales which could have been told by their aunt about her aunt with all the social detail and sensuous landscape absent.

This would be the fate, they felt, of anyone who tried to write about New England lives, they would have to confront the thinness of the social air, the absence of a system of manners and the
presence of a stultifying system of morals. All of this, he thought, would make any novelist miserable. There was no sovereign or court, no aristocracy, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen,
no palaces, nor castles, nor manors, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no literature, nor
novels, no museums nor pictures, no political society, nor sporting class. If these things are left out, he thought, for the novelist everything is left out. There is no flavour, no life to
dramatize, merely paucity of feeling represented in paucity of tradition. Trollope and Balzac, Zola and Dickens would, he felt, have become bitter old preachers, or mad hairy schoolmasters had they
been born in New England and condemned to live amongst its people.

Henry was thus surprised when Perry spoke with awe of
The Scarlet Letter
, which he had just finished reading. Perry insisted that Henry must read it immediately, and seemed disappointed a
few days later when Henry still had not begun the book. Henry had, in fact, tried the opening pages and found them almost laughably ponderous, and then had been easily distracted by something else
and left the novel aside. Now, trying once more, he believed that the semi-comic tone of the opening, with its talk of prisons and cemeteries and sweet moral blossoms, arose from the lack of a
proper background, a varied social world. Hawthorne had replaced artistry with solemnity. This was, he thought, a puritan virtue, of which Henry’s grandfather, he was told, had been in full
possession. He did not mind, he told Perry, reading about puritans, and he did not even mind having ancestors who embodied their virtues, but he did object somewhat to a book in which they and
their virtues, if you could really call them that, had seeped into the tone, the very architecture of the work itself.

On Perry’s insistence, he kept the book close to him for several days as he busied himself with Mérimée’s stories, which he was attempting to translate, and a play by
Alfred de Musset that had begun to fascinate him. Beside these, the lack of colour in Hawthorne’s observations, the thinness of his characters and the slow, wooden tone in which he began did
not entice Henry to spend more time with the book. He was thus thoroughly unprepared, when he embarked yet again upon its early pages, for what was to follow.

The book’s assault on his senses did not occur immediately, and even as its spell began to work on him he was unaware that he was being pulled in and held. He could not tell at what moment
The Scarlet Letter
started to glow and take on the same power as one of the novels by Balzac which he had been reading. At intervals, once he had supped with his family and the night wore
on, he put the book down, amazed at how Hawthorne had not bothered himself with the daily, petty meanness of New England, the comic idiosyncrasies of speech or deportment or behaviour. Hawthorne
had avoided whimsy; he had eschewed pettiness. He had even kept choice and chance at arm’s length and had gone instead for intensity, taking a single character, a single action, a single
place, a single set of beliefs and a single development and surrounding them with a dark and symbolic forest, a great dense place of sin and temptation. Hawthorne had not observed life, Henry
thought, as much as imagined it, found a set of symbols and images which would set life in motion. From the very sparseness of the material, from the narrowness and frigidity of the society itself,
from the very sense of undeveloped relations and uniform, colourless belief, Hawthorne had taken advantage of what was missing in New England and pressed on with a gnarled and unrelenting vision to
create a story that now gripped its reader all through that summer’s night.

Most of the books he read could not be discussed with anyone save Perry, or perhaps William, but now at table the next day he could ask his family about Hawthorne. Suddenly, his father became
animated. Why, only six months earlier, he had met the novelist in question. When he travelled up to Boston for a meeting of the Saturday Morning Club, to which he had been specially invited, he
found Hawthorne among the company. Some of the meeting was unsatisfactory, his father said, because Frederic Hedge could not stop chattering, and chattering high nonsense most of the time, so that
it was difficult to hear what Hawthorne had to say. Not that he said much, he was very shy, but more than that, he was rustic and mannerless; he might have been happier saving the hay or walking on
forest tracks. The main thing about him, Henry’s father remembered, was that, once the food came, he took no interest in anything else; he buried his eyes in the plate and ate with such
voracity that no person dared to ask him a question.

Aunt Kate said that years before in Boston she had known one of Hawthorne’s sisters, who was a pleasant lady, all the more pleasant for being extremely limited. The sister had told her
that her brother’s marriage had crowned him, that up to then he had been a recluse, forcing his family to leave his meals outside the locked door of his room. He did not go out during the
day, Aunt Kate said, and did not see the sun save through the small window in his room. He seldom chose to walk in Salem, where he lived, except at night. In the dusky hours, she said, his sister
had told her that the novelist took walks of many miles along the coast, or else wandered about the sleeping streets of Salem. These were his pastimes, she said, and these were apparently his most
intimate occasions of contact with life. And, Aunt Kate added ominously, his sister told her that Nathaniel had never made a single penny from all his work as a writer.

Henry senior then asked Wilky and Bob for their view, since they had both studied at Sanborn with Julian, the novelist’s son. Even Wilky, who was seldom at a loss, could think of nothing
to say except that Julian was a very fine fellow. Bob told the table that he had believed until this moment that the elder Hawthorne was a minister. He thought only women wrote stories.

Henry’s mother had not spoken until now. She interrupted the general laughter to say that she had known all of the Hawthorne sisters and that they had told her of an injury Nathaniel
received while playing ball which had caused him much pain and difficulty over several years so that he was confined to bed. It was, apparently, this very confinement, she said drily, which led to
his becoming a writer.

Having sought out Perry to discuss the book with him and to tell him what he had gathered about its author, Henry discovered that Perry knew more, that Nathaniel Hawthorne had recently travelled
much in Europe, especially in England and Italy, that he was not, as Henry’s father had supposed, a country bumpkin, but a serious artist, well read, well travelled, possibly one of the most
sophisticated minds in America. Over the rest of the summer, as Henry and Perry prepared to enter Harvard, they read and re-read all of Hawthorne’s books and met most days to share their
impressions.

T
HE WAR
, that first summer, seemed oddly distant. Even the proximity of a field hospital at Portsmouth Grove did not bring the conflict any closer. They
could, they were told, visit the convalescing soldiers, the invalid troops lying under canvas or in roughly improvized shanties, as onlookers, tourists almost. With Perry, Henry went over in the
steamboat, unsure what he would say, or how he would avert his eyes from wounds or missing limbs. On arrival at the camp he noticed the silence at first; he and Perry were unsure whom to approach
or if they needed to ask permission to do so. As no one came towards them, they spoke briefly to an unshaven soldier sitting in his underwear on a log outside a tent. His voice was soft, but his
tone quite indifferent, and his eyes were drained of all energy. He was content to offer no detailed information, merely that the two visitors were free to speak to anyone or to go anywhere they
wished. At the end of the exchange, when they were at a loss to know how to take their leave, Perry gave the soldier a coin which the man hastily put away, looking around him to check if he had
been observed.

The sick soldiers lay inert, half dead, watching the two young men from Newport from the sides of their eyes. What struck Henry first was how young most of them seemed, so soft and raw. As he
and Perry separated and each moved alone among the soldiers, he felt a great tenderness for them and a desperate urge to console them. He had expected open wounds and blood and bandages, but what
he found instead much of the time were fevers and infections. He went where he thought he could, where a pair of eyes had fixed on him and seemed receptive, where a figure seemed not too fevered to
be unreachable and not too hostile. He was careful not to say too much at the beginning in case his voice or his tone, added to his general bearing and his clothes, might appear offensively
opulent, but soon it became clear that this did not seem to matter, that, if anything, it added to the shy guarded welcome he received from each of the soldiers he visited.