Hawthorne in Salem

Van Wyck Brooks:

He had a painter's delight in tone. He liked to throw a ghostly glimmer over scenes that he chose because they were ghostly. It was a taste like Claude Lorrain's for varnish. He liked to study chimneys in the rain, choked with their own smoke, or a mountain with its base enveloped in fog while the summit floated aloft. He liked to see a yellow field of rye veiled in a morning mist. He liked to think of a woman in a silvery mantle, covering her face and figure. A man's face, with a patched eye, turning its profile towards him; an arm and hand extended from behind a screen; a smile that seemed to be only a part of a smile, seen through a covering hand; a sunbeam passing through a cobweb, or lying in the corner of a dusty floor. Dissolving and vanishing objects. Trees reflected in a river, reversed and strangely arrayed and as if transfigured. The effects wrought by moonlight on a wall. Moonlight in a familiar sitting-room, investing every object with an odd remoteness, — one's walking-stick or a child's shoe or doll, — so that, instead of seeing these objects, one seemed to remember them through a lapse of years. Hawthorne could never have said why it was that, after spending an evening in some pleasant room, lighted by a fire of coals, he liked to return and open the door again, and close it and re-open it, peeping back into the ruddy dimness that seemed so like a dream, as if he were enacting a conscious dream. For the rest, he was well aware why he had withdrawn to this little chamber, where there was nothing to measure time but the progress of the shadow across the floor. Somewhere, as it were beneath his feet, a hidden treasure lay, like Goldthwaite's chest, brimming over with jewels and charms, goblets and golden salvers. It was the treasure of his own genius, and it was to find this precious treasure that he had sat at his desk through summer and winter.

The Flowering of New England (1936)

Does anyone still read Van Wyck Brooks? Sometimes I think of inaugurating a series of posts with titles beginning Does Anyone Still Read...? or maybe Doesn't Anyone Still Read...? As far as I can tell, most or all of his books are long out of print. When I was first haunting bookstores and book sales, dog-eared copies of his work were as common as the old Scribner paperbacks of Fitzgerald and Hemingway (both edited, as it happens, by Brooks's childhood friend Max Perkins). But they must have been dated even then, and I can't say that I'm surprised that Brooks's blend of literary biography and cultural criticism has gone out of fashion. Learned as he was — and he seemed to have read and judiciously weighed not only every word of all the major writers and historians but reams of the work of justly forgotten figures as well — his concerns aren't really our concerns today, and his ex cathedra manner and assumption that his readers will already know much that a more modern biographer would feel obligated to explain, in the way of cultural and historical references, can be a bit irritating. The above passage is an example of both his cavalier attitude towards documentation (how does he know in such detail what Hawthorne saw and thought?) and his talent as a writer. There's no bibliography in the book, and the footnotes, which are fairly numerous, are generally devoted to digressions. But the brisk fluidity of his style, and the novelistic brilliance with which he imagines inner lives, should still earn him a few appreciative readers. If nothing else, there are the colorful capsule portraits of figures like the polyglot blacksmith Elihu Burritt, "who made a version of Longfellow in Sanskrit and mastered more than forty languages, toiling at the forge or in the evening" — and who recorded in his diary that he labored twelve hours at the smithy on a day when he felt "unwell." And there are glimpses of a lost cultural world in which women working in Lowell mills "all seemed to know Paradise Lost by heart and talked about Wordsworth, Coleridge and Macaulay in the intervals of changing bobbins on the looms."

Pencils

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts.

We found the Thoreau family plot first, and thought that maybe the offerings of writing implements on Henry's grave might be an allusion to his innovations in pencil manufacture, but as we walked on we saw that the same tribute was afforded to the other writers who are interred nearby.

Louisa May Alcott received by far the most pencils (and a few pens), as well as some corn dollies, flowers, and hand-written notes.

All of these graves (as well as Emerson's, not shown), along with those of many of their family members, lie within a few steps of each other on a little knoll.

Little impalpable worlds

Nathaniel Hawthorne:

One afternoon, he was seized with an irresistible desire to blow soap-bubbles; an amusement, as Hepzibah told Phoebe apart, that had been a favorite one with her brother, when they were both children. Behold him, therefore, at the arched window, with an earthen pipe in his mouth! Behold him, with his gray hair, and a wan, unreal smile over his countenance, where still hovered a beautiful grace, which his worst enemy must have acknowledged to be spiritual and immortal, since it had survived so long! Behold him, scattering airy spheres abroad, from the window into the street! Little impalpable worlds were those soap-bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as imagination, or the nothing of their surface. It was curious to see how the passers-by regarded these brilliant fantasies, as they came floating down, and made the dull atmosphere imaginative about them. Some stopped to gaze, and, perhaps, carried a pleasant recollection of the bubbles onward as far as the street-corner; some looked angrily upward, as if poor Clifford wronged them, by setting an image of beauty afloat so near their dusty pathway. A great many put out their fingers or their walking-sticks, to touch, withal; and were perversely gratified, no doubt, when the bubble, with all its pictured earth and sky scene, vanished as if it had never been.

The House of Seven Gables

Image: Joseph Cornell, Soap Bubble Set (1949-1950), one of a number of works the artist devoted to the theme.