Salem is My Dwelling Place; A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne. - book reviews

Contemporary Review, Nov, 1993 by Esmond Wright

The Queen has been asked to declare the witches of Salem innocent. Exactly 300 years ago, 20 people in the Massachusetts town were accused of sorcery, nineteen were hanged and one was crushed to death. The request from the Salem Tercentenary Committee was passed on by the Palace to No. 10 Downing Street, which is presumably still considering the matter for inclusion in the royal address to Parliament in October. Since Salem unveiled a memorial statue in July it seems unlikely that Parliament will pronounce a belated verdict on the most infamous witch-hunt in American history: but you never know. After all Britain was also slow to act in 1776 and the fleet too slow to rescue Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781.

The Emeritus Professor at New York University has been more skilful in his timing. His biography goes far to explain how the inward-looking and sensitive Hawthorne born into an old Puritan family and brought up in seclusion became pre-occupied by the events of 1692: a great-great grandfather was a presiding judge in the witch trials and the accursed founder of The House of the Seven Gables. Conscience and guilt are the characteristics too of Hawthorne's finest novel, The Scarlet Letter, and of many of his short stories. His friend and admirer, Herman Melville, spoke of the great power of blackness in him'.

Indeed, his own intellectual and emotional make-up was as complex as that of any of his 'fictional' characters, so that this portrait of him could fittingly go alongside his own creations, as anguished guilt-burdened Calvinist and Yankee - probably one of the first North American writers to be free from English influences, and to be haunted by American themes.

Professor Miller makes clear the gap between Hawthorne and his contemporaries. Though he bought a share in Brook Farm, he was rapidly disillusioned, and was sceptical even savage about their notions of utopias, and about the reality of communal life and the nature of leadership - witness his The Blithedale Romance. Despite his happy marriage and his removal to the Old Manse in Concord, where Emerson had written Nature, he did not share the optimism or the reforming faith of the Transcendentalists. Despite his years as US consul in Liverpool - an appointment he owed to his college friend, Franklin Pierce, on the latter's election to the Presidency - he had written a campaign biography for him - despite his years in Europe, he was never quite a citizen of the world. He was fully aware of the realities of the world of politics around him, but much more so was he the prisoner of his family Puritanism, and of the idea of original sin. If, today, America's sense of guilt focusses on the Black and the Indian, in Hawthorne's world it chose Quakers and witches. Perhaps some little progress has been made?