Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography/Nathanial Hawthorne in His Times

...As a teacher, principally at Duke University...

...No wonder that the casualness of Brook Farm upset Hawthorne and that the "right" way to proceed, in his fiction, is often presented as being with the status quo...

...Thus did one of our greatest novelists help to shape the political character that continues to dominate much of our national life and to impede any substantial change in the social order.e in the social order...

...as editor of American Literature, the major scholarly periodical in that discipline...

...Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography, by the late Arlin Turner, is a fitting memorial to a life-long student of the novelist...

...Earlier critics and biographers failed to do justice to the significance of Hawthorne's public life, concentrating instead on his long seclusion as an apprentice writer and his personal reticence among the more talkative Concord Brahmins...

...Turner chooses "to place Hawthorne's works, a good portion of them, in the context of his life" and to leave readers, "to supply their own interpretations and applications...

...Mellow does so in a way that is always interesting, in prose that is vigorous and resonant, never merely impressionistic or clever...

...A statement about his hatred of "disorder, broken rules, and weariness of discipline" by his youngest child, Rose, later a Dominican nun and founder of hospitals for the terminally ill, has some bearing here, also...

...James R. Mellow's Hawthorne in His Times, as the title suggests, places the novelist clearly in the midst of these events and the distinguished personages with whom he lived, showing Hawthorne as a man shaped by-in agreement with or in conflict with-the dominant ideas of his age...

...Hawthorne appears to have been more concerned with the social implications of Hester Prynne's rebellion in The Scarlet Letter, for example, than he was with the moral implications of her sin, and he speaks satirically about Hol-graves's anarchism, in The House of the Seven Gables, before that young rebel is "saved" by Phoebe Pyncheon...

...his important friendship with Melville, with its erotic overtones and, then, the characteristic breaking away...

...It is central to the rhetoric of the best and most influential 19th century artists, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, as well as Hawthorne and Melville...

...political appointments to custom houses in Boston and Salem and, after the election of his college friend, Franklin Pierce, to the presidency, to a consulship in Liverpool, 1853-57...

...his lecturing a New Orleans clergyman after he spent a week in a Liverpool brothel and then had to borrow money from Hawthorne in order to return home...

...Such pertinent biographical details from both biographies send the reader back to the novels with a new understanding of how and why Hawthorne dealt with various Aspects of human life, including questions about the nature of society and the future of the American nation...

...One can refer to Turner's book with confidence, in verifying dates, places, and events and the bearing they have on the career of the writer...

...Numerous others commented on his good looks-Anthony Trollope was quoted as swearing Hawthorne as "the handsomest Yankee that ever walked the planet"-and on his reticence...

...Michael True MATHANIEL HAWTHORNE maintains his place among America's most enduring writers, and justifiably so, since few understood so early and plumbed so deeply the peculiar genius of the American character...

...Particularly vivid scenes dramatizing Hawthorne's productive and eventful life include those of the author caring for his children while Sophia is away visiting her sister, the wife of Horace Mann...

...his happy marriage to Sophia Peabody, the daughter of a prominent Salem family, in 1842...

...Few, also, have been so consciously political in their fiction, and any attempt to substantially alter the social structure of this country must attend to the powerful conservative rhetoric of his fiction...

...There is little interpretation of events or of the fiction...

...A portrait done in 1840, shortly before his marriage to Sophia Peabody, shows Hawthorne, in the words of his sister-in-law, "in all the splendor of his young beauty...

...Edward Dicey, an English critic of the time, wrote that' 'the whole nature of Hawthorne shrank from the rough wear and tear inseparable from great popular movements of any kind," adding that' 'the details of a popular agitation were strangely offensive to him...

...Each, in his own way, was suspicious of the revolutionary aspirations of Thomas Paine, William Lloyd Garrison, and their followers, and Hawthorne, particularly, in his friendships and in his fiction, indicated a similar conservatism toward radical reformers-feminists, abolitionists, and anarchists-in his day...

...He takes time, without interrupting the narrative, to give brief introductions as well to Hawthorne's many literary associates, Fuller, Alcott, Thoreau, and Melville, as well as members of the Saturday Club...

...Returning home, after travel through France and Italy with his family, Hawthorne spent his last years, before his death in 1864, as a writer particularly of nonfiction, as a member of the famous Saturday Club-with Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, and Longfellow-and in several political skirmishes in the loyal defense of the unpopular Pierce...

...Emerson, who knew him for more than twenty years admitted never having really won his friendship, and Jonathan Cilley, a college friend, said Hawthorne lived "in a mysterious world of thought and imagination which he never permits me to enter...

...his complaints about nudity in painting and sculpture-man's clothes "are as natural to him as his skin, and sculptors have no more right to undress him than to flay him...

...and as author of two previous books on Hawthorne, Turner made numerous contributions toward this generation's appreciation and understanding of his subject, and his biography presents that knowledge in a straightforward and readable manner...

...Since Randall Stewart's biography and his equally important edition of Hawthorne's notebooks, in the 1940's, however, we have a better understanding of the relationship between his dominant aesthetic and the highly political nature of his moral tales...

...By 1845, Mellow says, Hawthorne "had acquired the talent for rationalization by which political careers were sustained," and had cast his lot, for various reasons, with the conservative wing of the Democratic party...

...It is the work of a scholar, cautious, perhaps, or at least modest before a man whose fiction responds to the preoccupations of successive generations of readers and to a variety of interpretations...

...The principal events in Hawthorne's life, in addition to the publication of his major novels and short stories between 1837 and 1860, included his time at Brook Farm, the basis of his satiric portrait of that experiment, in The Blithedale Romance...

...These two excellent, but very different biographies cast still more light on this interesting aspect of a great novelist and short story writer and, in turn, on the nature of American culture-how it works and how, over a period of time, it maintains itself in a variety of ways...

...Anyone who challenged that order was likely to find himself or herself roundly criticized...

...NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE IN HIS TIMES James R. Mellow Houghton Mifflin, $19.95, 684 pp...

...Neo-conservatism is not so "neo," in other words, to the American scene...