Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales

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A personal reading project I'm intending to carry out is the reading of everything in Hawthorne's three books of short stories, Twice-Told Tales, Mosses from an Old Manse, and The Snow Image. I'll be used the Library of America omnibus, Tales and Sketches -- my copy should arrive in the mail soon. First up, the first volume. Contents are listed here:

Twice-Told Tales - Wikipedia

Twice-Told Tales is available from Project Gutenberg:

Twice-Told Tales, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

I tend to relish the antiquarian supernatural tale, and expect to find plenty to my taste here. I've read many of these stories already, but for some it's been quite a while, and I imagine some of them are pieces I've never read.

I hope some Chrons folk will like to join me or to contribute here eventually, even if not now.

Now there's a comic book cover for ya.

 

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My copy just arrived & I've read Hawthorne's 1851 preface. I found myself wondering if it might have influenced Lovecraft's occasional excessive depreciation when submitting a story for publication.

 

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Twice-Told Tales leads off with the stirring, patriotic -- I thought of the man in front of the tanks on Tianmen Square -- piece "The Gray Champion." I was reminded too of a little subgenre of fantastic stories, in which a hero of the past returns at a moment of crisis -- Frederick Barbarossa in de Camp and Pratt's Land of Unreason, Holger Danske in Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, and maybe someone in del Rey's Day of the Giants -- which I ought to pick up for a rereading one of these days.

 

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The next two items are "Sunday at Home" and "The Wedding-Knell," the former certainly a sketch, the tale but of a simple plot. I liked both.

"Sunday at Home" is ostensibly about the changing effects of sunlight and the activities around and inside a church on Sunday, when it is open for a morning and an evening service. This aspect of the piece is charming. The piece is, indirectly, about the narrator, who watches through an unobtrusive opening in his chamber curtain. He feels a twinge of misgiving about his home-staying.

"The Wedding-Knell" reads easily as a piece about the ineluctable passing of time. An elderly widow is about to marry once again. Her elderly bridegroom, a lifelong bachelor who'd been disappointed in his hopes of marrying her when he was young, arranges that the bellringer(s) shall toll the bell with funeral notes and shows up in his shroud! But they accept things as they are, before the altar, and are married, and triumphant bell music is heard at last as the newly married couple turns together for the life still remaining to them.

 

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"The Minister's Black Veil" -- this is an admirable story. It reminds me of the way science fiction short stories and some weird stories (maybe like some of Bradbury's?) often used to be -- You take one interesting idea, tell a story that works it out economically, and you're done. In this story, a young pastor appears one Sunday morning with his upper face veiled. He insists upon retaining his veil all his life & is buried with it still covering him. Those classic sf stories often require us to suspend our disbelief a little -- oh, surely, in real life....xyz. Here, too, we might think, Surely someone would have grabbed the veil and pulled it off, or some accident would have occurred in which it was knocked off, etc.; but as we read, we go along with the idea. "Suppose that..."

 

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"The May-Pole of Merry Mount" -- I won't attempt to unpack this one in detail, but would suggest that a good starting point for discussion is that the young married couple accept the prospect of life with the Puritans and the end of the "Merry Mount" community without anguish. The story seems to notice that, before the Puritans arrive, these two have already sensed that, by uniting in marriage and undertaking the responsibilities of adult life, they are not quite part of the Merry-Mounters. The latter, with their animal costumes etc. seem to live without a sense of individual identity, "merged" with nature in a kind of waking dream. I'm influenced here by Owen Barfield on the development of consciousness in mankind.

 

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"The Gentle Boy" is another story contrasting mid-17th-century Puritans with a group differing from them, in this case early-period Quakers, who might passionately disrupt Puritan church services with threats of judgment, etc., under the supposed effects of spiritual inspiration. As far as I know, Hawthorne's imaginary situations are historically plausible. Thus the story -- a bit longer than his typical tale, I think -- is kind of mini-historical novel. Likely enough, Sir Walter Scott was an inspiration to Hawthorne.

This blog piece seems to align with Hawthorne's mise-en-scène.

What Did the Puritans Have Against the Quakers?

(I really like my Library of America Tales and Sketches, but wish it included notes to the stories along the lines of the Penguin Classics.)

 

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"Little Annie's Ramble" sees sights that attract a small child's (a daughter of Hawthorne) on a walk in (I suppose) Boston. The father is refreshed by the child's interest and innocence. This was pleasant to read, but I've enjoyed more Hawthorne's American Notebooks. I wonder if the sketch wasn't "worked up" from notebook passages. In the context of Twice-Told Tales it's a pleasant stretch of sunshine between two darker pieces, "The Gentle Boy" and (coming up next) "Wakefield."

 

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"Wakefield" is outstanding. Nothing "supernatural" happens in it, and yet it possesses an eerie quality. A London man decides to stay away from his wife for a week, though he has led her to expect him back after only a few nights away. He puts off his return for twenty years. Readers today would call this a "psychological" study, while Hawthorne's word is "moral."

It reminds me a little of the story Sam Spade tells about the man he was hired to trace, who had abruptly decided to walk away from his marriage and job. Spade discovers that, after various adventures, he ended up in Tacoma, living very much as he had at first.

A reader of "Wakefield" may wonder where the money came from. Wakefield's wife lives on at their home and the money must be coming from somewhere. Nothing is said of Wakefield continuing at his old employment (where, surely, his wife would look for him) or of his finding new work, etc.; if he doesn't need to work for a living, he must still need to make withdrawals from his original bank -- or at least one, to transfer funds to a different bank, and so on. But one isn't inclined to object much. Incidentally, Hawthorne says his story was based on something he read, as a true account, in a newspaper or magazine.

 

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"The Great Carbuncle" and "The Prophetic Pictures" come next. "Carbuncle" is an allegory, and I would be sorry if I had to conclude that a literary form that has pleased so many readers and been attractive to so many writers and artists were something I had no use for. However, this one was something I read dutifully, for the most part, rather than eagerly. There is a bit of description of a mountaintop view and mist that was very nice. "Prophetic Pictures" is a Gothic type of story that didn't seem successful on its own terms because the climax, which should have been thrilling and also should have seemed well prepared for, wasn't and didn't. It's not a complete flop, but seems to me something that would likely be forgotten if its author weren't remembered for other things.

 

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"David Swan" is a slight tale about a young man who falls asleep by the roadside and is passed by people who might have changed his life if he'd been awake or if some other thing hadn't happen; he never suspects. I liked it. I liked also "Sights from a Steeple," which speaks to the interest most people feel, I suppose, in a high point of vantage from which to observe the passing scene. Most of what the observer reports has to do with people, and how different his opinion is from that of the villain (played by Orson Welles) atop the Ferris wheel in The Third Man.

 

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"The Hollow of the Three Hills," a brief, grim tale of witchery in a secluded spot, won Poe's approval, while Longfellow liked the romantic "Vision of the Fountain," which you could say is about the coalescence of young-love imagination and reality. "The Toll-Gatherer's Day" is like "Sights from a Steeple," an observer who finds pleasure in watching, but not being much involved with, people in the passing scene.

 

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"Fancy's Show-Box" was another story appreciated by Poe. It reminded me of Dickens's Christmas Carol, in that the protagonist is, by uncanny visitors, shown things from his own life designed to quicken him to a change of mind. He's never committed any actual crime -- ah, but what ideas has he played with in his heart? What do these things reveal about the kind of person he really is?

Readers today will likely have a condescending attitude towards the story, finding it moralistic and old-fashioned. If only, instead, we could catch up to it. Instead we think that the great problem is white male privilege, or enforcement of immigration laws, or some other problem "out there" and capable of being fixed by political control and legal reform.

 

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What a pleasure to read again "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment." I particularly relish the description of the doctor's quasi-magicianal study, with the skeleton that rattles, the lady in the portrait who takes a step out of her frame, and the bust that cries "Forbear!", when someone ventures to touch a forbidden book. It's like something out of John Bellairs. I wasn't thinking of a movie when I thought of that, but of Bellairs' books.

I did remember, though, a film adaptation of this story -- I think from back when I was a high school teacher.

 

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There are four "Legends of the Province-House," introduced by paragraphs of description of the Boston edifice. Reading those paragraphs, I wondered if they helped a young H. P. Lovecraft to develop his antiquarian taste. One could almost believe that HPL himself was the writer.

The first legend, "Howe's Masquerade," describes a ghostly pageant of British colonial rulers departing from the governors' mansion as General Washington's troops approach Boston. The Library of America edition of Hawthorne's Sketches and Tales doesn't include notes on the various figures -- which are not necessary, but could add to the reader's enjoyment of a piece such as this.

 

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The second "legend" is "Edward Randolph's Portrait," with a suggestion of a Dorian Gray-type painting (long before Wilde's novel). Pleasing antiquarian atmosphere.

 

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The third "legend" is "Lady Eleanore's Mantle," a macabre effort that might remind one a little of Poe's "Masque of the Red Death." The moral emphasis is unlike Poe, however.

 

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The fourth "legend" is "Old Esther Dudley," about a woman who was permitted to remain in the Province House as a caretaker, an ancient royalist surviving into days of the independent republic. It is written with some sympathy and suggests that Esther Dudley became a kind of living ghost.

All of the "Legends" were worth reading, with a kind of dreamy antiquarian quality. Many readers today would probably like the relatively intense "Lady Eleanore's Mantle" the most.

I do think the set gains by being read as a quartet of stories, with the narrative and descriptive introductions, etc., but some readers might feel the pace of this material is too leisurely for their taste.

 

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Reading "The Haunted Mind," I'm struck by how remote it must be from the experience of most people today, especially those who have grown up with smartphones and the like. The piece is written, unusually for Hawthorne, in the second person. You awaken in the small hours, having gone to bed at 11:00. You're no longer very tired, and at first you're half-awake, half-dreaming. You become awake enough to look through a frosty window at silent streets and a church steeple. It's a time for reverie.

Reverie! A casualty of our technological age, because, of course, the first thing many people would do, waking in the night, once conscious enough, would be to reach for a device with which to check for messages, and to scan headlines and, perhaps, do a little online window-shopping. For many people, reverie must be an almost unimaginable thing, and, for many of these, reading Hawthorne's sketch wouldn't make them wish they knew what it was like. Guilt and shame? Not productive emotions. Wish for one lifelong love? "Relationships" are contingent and contractual; important, but not the only important thing or, perhaps, even the most important thing as compared to career, social justice, being a global citizen, etc. The "you" in the sketch evidently expects to remain in the town where he is. But for many of us, the airport beckons, the credit card is not yet maxed out, and -- whoa, there's a new Facebook posting from one of my Fb friends, who's furious about Trump and Elizabeth Warren. Hmm, check the fridge for a snack and write a reply. As for Hawthorne's notion of looking through the frosty window at a bright star in the cold sky -- our aggressive street lighting will make that to be an experience unlikely to occur...

Of course, I'm being satirical above, but with, I think, quite a bit of truth. What a difference! Again: there's the sense that much of Hawthorne's writing (like that of Wordsworth and others) proceeded from reverie. Now we are apt to think of writing as something you study in college or workshops, etc. -- or that (slam poetry?) is a bursting-forth of feeling.

Is reverie itself almost a bygone thing, so far as the culture is concerned? I suppose it is. I should make a distinction between daydreaming and reverie. Daydreaming is, I suppose, liable to be a kind of self-serving imaginative riff on present circumstances. For example, when I am washing dishes and find myself imagining how I could have fired off a retort that would really have gone home in a quarrel with someone -- that's daydreaming. If I'm vacuuming and also thinking about buying a new boxed set by some old-favorite band, that's more daydreaming that it is reverie. Reverie as Hawthorne describes it seems to be, or to be more likely to allow for, a quiet becoming-conscious-of memories, sensory impressions, etc., although one probably feels oneself to be relaxed rather than really trying to pay attention or to work something out.

Here's a Wordsworth poem, probably familiar to many people, relating to reverie:

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth

 

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"The Village Uncle" is an agreeable mediation on age, reminding me a little of some of Blake's poem "The Echoing Green."

Old John, with white hair
Does laugh away care,
Sitting under the oak,
Among the old folk,
They laugh at our play,
And soon they all say.
‘Such, such were the joys.
When we all girls & boys,
In our youth-time were seen,
On the Ecchoing Green.’