Significant cultural achievements in their own way, each of these brief sketches serves as an important marker of Hawthorne’s growing historical interest and precision.

Finally, of course, as even these three sketches tend to predict, it was on Puritanism that Hawthorne did choose to throw the light of his historical intelligence most fully and repeatedly. Yet clearly he must be thought of as choosing. Knowledge came from study and, as always, genius came from genius. But some considered project, provincial or otherwise, is clearly at issue in Hawthorne’s repeated and increasingly subtle attempts to antholo gize his early uses of American materials. So that, when the major tales of the Puritans do eventually emerge from the uncertain light of the famous “haunted chamber” of Hawthorne’s family house in Salem—to which he returned, from Bowdoin, in 1825, and in which he read and wrote for the better part of the next twelve years—they must be thought of as coming as much from knowledge and conscious intention as from bias, as validly from the historical as from some other, more romantic form of imagination.

“Alice Doane’s Appeal” self-consciously situates its gothic extravagance in precise relation to the mad logic of the Salem witchcraft of 1692: Leonard Doane does indeed, in the memorable formulation of Frederick Crews, “murder his personified wish”; but the rationale of this murderous aberration is specifically related to rumors of the Devil’s insidious power of “spectral” simulation, so that the murdered man only seemed guilty of the deeds that tempted the fantasy of the murderer himself. “Young Goodman Brown” (1835) puts the capstone on Hawthorne’s literary use of this peculiar Puritan theme of “specter evidence,” as some pitiable yet far too culpably innocent protagonist “sees” absolutely everyone at a witch meeting that only he has verifiably set out to attend. All of this is somehow predicted by New England’s own notorious witchcraft authority, Cotton Mather: the Devil can indeed appear “as an angel of light,” or in the shape of an innocent person; God Himself may permit it as a test of the faith of the elect. All of this is superstitious or hysterical by the sober standards of enlightened reason. And yet before scapegoating Mather, Hawthorne appears to have felt, one had better decide if it expressed some fundamental tendency of human instinct or animal faith. Otherwise the past was all too simply mad.

Nor, as our argument has so far implied, is Hawthorne’s psychology of witchcraft anything but a part of his total achievement in the area of historical re-cognition. “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1836) and “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” (1836) stand out from the remaining “Puritan” group, providing (between them) as provocative and authoritative an account as we have had of the now cooperating, now contending styles of puritanic piety and politics. And there are other tales as well, just less significant in their literary power to do history. But most of these come along a moment later in Hawthorne’s extended first period of artistic enterprise. And some account of Hawthorne’s third and most complex project of organized self-collection may be required to get the full context and scope of their determined historicism.

 

Along with “Goodman Brown” and many others, Hawthorne’s tales of the “May-Pole” and the “Black Veil” spilled forth as part of the virtual flood of publications that followed the breakup, in 1834, of yet another projected collection—“The Story-Teller.” Once more, unhappily, a subtle and multiform literary intention was atomized by editorial fiat; and once more, maddeningly, its reconstruction lies just beyond the reach of surviving evidence. What does survive, however, clearly indicates that Hawthorne had labored very carefully, over a span of four or more years, to put together a work which would collectively embody an extended commentary on the emergent state of American culture. And though, as always, “the might-have-been is but boggy ground to build on,” all the signs suggest that when certain arbiters of popular taste vetoed the publication of “The Story-Teller” as such, American literature lost one of its most sophisticated narrative experiments.

What Hawthorne delivered to a prospective publisher (early in 1834, apparently) was the completed manuscript of a proposed two-volume work in which many individual tales and localized sketches were all set within a rather precise and dramatically significant frame: some concrete “narrator” —a well-identified personage, with a history and developing story of his own—was to deliver each of the individual literary productions, and each was to be associated with some particular and well-evoked though as yet “unstoried” American place; furthermore, some unfolding thread of travel and of story was to connect all the more specific manifestations of the story-telling art. Perhaps Hawthorne was deliberately trying to domesticate the example of Washington Irving’s very popular Sketch-Book (1820), which called up the storied places of England even as it borrowed a few very old, probably archetypal folk tales for relocation in the Kaatskil region of upstate New York. In any case, some principle of situationality or “world liness” was clearly trying to insist on itself, in relation to even the most imaginative of literary performances. Evidently a mind haunted by reverie and recollection was to be given a local habitation and a name.

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.