Over the last few decades, however, that foundation has been steadily shrinking until his fame now rests almost entirely on a few tales and The Scarlet Letter. Without those, he would lie in the graveyard of defunct literary reputations, alongside scores of writers famous in their day but of interest now only to historians of literary taste. Instead, he stands as firmly today on the pedestal of literary renown—if for somewhat different reasons—as he did in the 1860s.

The question is, what keeps the tales and The Scarlet Letter flying out of the bookstores when Evangeline, a poem that made Longfellow rich, has gone out of print, and when the terms predominant in Hawthorne’s great works—sin, guilt, confession, innocence—have lost virtually all but their legal meanings? What interest, for that matter, can a contemporary reader take in the writings of a man addicted to the sentimental grotesqueries of gothic fiction, frightened to death of female sexuality, indifferent to slavery, hostile to Jews, obsessed with respectability, and given to incessant moralizing? If “Art,” as Ezra Pound said, is “news that stays news,” what remains newsworthy about the naughty midnight rambles of Goodman Brown or the adultery of Hester Prynne?

If the persistent appeal of the tales and The Scarlet Letter can be located anywhere in particular, it must be said to lie in the combined stylistic economy and semantic resonance of Hawthorne’s undiluted poetic voice and the unplumbed mystery this language evokes—an unspoken, otherwise unspeakable subject that lurks behind the veil of every announced concern, begging to be called forth yet refusing all invitations to make itself known. This, at any rate, is what sustains our interest in things like Blake’s tiger, Coleridge’s ancient mariner, Melville’s whale, Whitman’s soul, Wallace Stevens’s emperor of ice-cream, and T. S. Eliot’s children in the trees. These are, as Eliot put it, all symbols of “the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer.”

While the tales and The Scarlet Letter are more than enough to keep the name Hawthorne alive all by themselves, we should remember that this Hawthorne has a fraternal twin: the “man of society” who wrote the sketches, allegories, and prefaces; who found the tales inscrutable and The Scarlet Letter too somber; who supplied reams of padding for the published romances; and who went on publishing journalism when the “secluded man” had forgotten how to converse with “his own mind and heart.” Above all, this is the Hawthorne who amassed the European journals, long buried in manuscript collections or available only in edited selections but now widely available in three hefty volumes of The Centenary Edition. The Hawthorne on display here is the one his family and friends were permitted to know: clearheaded, witty, opinionated, moody, fiercely judgmental, and bent on speaking his mind on every subject as plainly as possible.

Although readers of these two Hawthornes have tended to call one of them or the other the “real” Hawthorne, there is really no reason to take sides in the matter. Poet, journalist: each of these Hawthornes has his peculiar merits—profound genius on the one hand, dazzling skill on the other. Hawthorne himself could not finally choose between them. To the “man of society,” the phantoms of the haunted mind seemed merely hallucinatory. To the secluded dreamer, the “ordinary” world seemed superficial, incomplete. Rather than silence one or the other of these contestant voices, he spent much of his career looking for a way to wed them, thus to produce a complete being at once true to itself and fully acceptable to society. Whether that entailed burrowing far enough into himself to rediscover the outside world in an altogether new light or allowing himself to be rescued from the dungeon of his heart by a dovelike woman, he could never finally decide. Neither, then, should the reader who wants to know all of Nathaniel Hawthorne there is to be known.

Except for his brief and shadowy apprenticeship, as recorded in Fanshawe—a book best left to specialists—the moving story of Hawthorne’s writing life, as it looks from this time and place, unfolds in the selections for this volume: his rise to literary eminence in the tales, his arrival at that artistic pinnacle in The Scarlet Letter, his decline as a writer of fiction in his next three published romances, his emergence as a top-flight essayist in the European journals, and, in his last years, his collapse as a romancer in the unfinished stories, despite his undiminished vitality as a journalist in his very last publications.

 

A lot has happened to “Nathaniel Hawthorne” since Malcolm Cowley compiled the first Portable Hawthorne back in 1948, much of it since 1969, when Cowley revised and expanded his original edition to take advantage of recent scholarship. On the supply side, volumes of material then held in manuscript collections have become generally available in the now complete Centenary Edition of the Works, sharpening Hawthorne’s authorial profile. On the receiving end, Hawthorne’s readership has changed even more, rethinking what it is that lends a writer the sort of status these Portables recognize and foster. Whereas Cowley could pretty much assume widespread agreement among his readers regarding Hawthorne’s literary greatness, today’s editor, owing to the recent proliferation of critical schools and of materials deemed worthy of literary regard, can count on no such unanimity of opinion. What could once be taken for granted must now be argued for and demonstrated: Hawthorne’s continuing, if somewhat altered, claims upon the notice and admiration of serious, attentive readers.

Chronology

1804 NH born in Salem, Massachusetts, to Nathaniel and Elizabeth (Manning) Hathorne, two years after his sister Elizabeth.

1808 His sea-captain father dies of yellow fever in Surinam. His younger sister, Louisa, is born, and the family moves in with grandfather Richard Manning, in Salem.

1813 Uncle Robert Manning becomes guardian to the family on the death of Richard. NH is laid up at home for more than two years with an injured foot.

1818-20 The Hathornes move to the Manning farm in Raymond, Maine. NH away at school in Portland and Salem.

1821-25 NH completes his A.B. degree at Bowdoin College, where he makes lifelong friends of Franklin Pierce, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Horatio Bridge. He returns to Salem after graduation to live with his mother and sisters.

1828 NH publishes Fanshawe anonymously at his own expense, then recalls it, never to mention it again.

1829-35 Now spelling his name Hawthorne, NH publishes a dozen or so tales and sketches in various periodicals, at first anonymously or pseudonymously, eventually signed.

1836 NH moves to Boston to become editor of The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, which soon folds, sending NH, unpaid, back to Salem. With his sister Elizabeth, he writes Peter Parley’s Universal History, On the Basis of Geography.

1837 Twice-told Tales, his first collection of short pieces, is published, with a secret subvention from Horatio Bridge. NH meets Sophia Peabody, his future wife. He begins to publish in the Democratic Review.

1839 NH returns to Boston as measurer in the customhouse there. He proposes to Sophia.

1840 He completes three books for children: Grandfather’s Chair, Famous Old People, and Liberty Tree.

1841 He resigns from the Boston Custom House and returns to Salem. He joins the utopian community at Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in search of an affordable residence for himself and Sophia, but leaves before the year is out.

1842 NH and Sophia marry and move into the Old Manse, in Concord, Massachusetts. An expanded edition of Twice-told Tales is published.

1844 The Hawthornes’ first child, Una, is born at the Old Manse.

1845 NH edits Horatio Bridge’s Journal of an African Cruiser. The Hawthornes move back to Salem.

1846 NH appointed surveyor at the Salem Custom House. The family moves to Boston, where their second child, Julian, is born, then once again back to Salem. Mosses from an Old Manse is published.

1849-50 NH is dismissed from the Salem Custom House.