Hawthorne

by Henry James

Originally published in 1879, Henry James's HAWTHORNE is available once more after being long out of print. In this critique of one literary genius by another, James not only considers Hawthorne as a man and a writer, but he uses his subject as a vantage point from which to present his views on American culture. James assesses the place of the writer in 19th-century America as well as the disparate values of the Old World and the New.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Criticism, 19th Century, Classics, Writing

136 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1879

About the author

Henry James was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady. His later works, such as The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to Impressionist painting.
His novella The Turn of the Screw has garnered a reputation as the most analysed and ambiguous ghost story in the English language and remains his most widely adapted work in other media. He wrote other highly regarded ghost stories, such as "The Jolly Corner".
James published articles and books of criticism, travel, biography, autobiography, and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as a young man, and eventually settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1915, a year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916. Jorge Luis Borges said "I have visited some literatures of East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic compendium of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James."

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I began to read this book for a discreditable reason. I had come across an excerpt somewhere which seemed snide to me, and I acquired the book hoping to find a major “takedown” of one great American writer by another. Why? Human nature, I suppose. “Great One A” condescends to devastate “Great One B,” thus lowering the status of both. But … to what good end? I know, I know. It sounds petty and stupid. But I’m fully capable of petty. And stupid? It’s right in my wheelhouse.

Whatever. Turns out I was dead wrong about the book. It is an affectionate, unpretentious appreciation of one great writer by another, a writer who knows his predecessor’s weaknesses and strengths and isn’t afraid to discuss them.

James is illuminating on the subject of Hawthorne’s journals (writer’s exercises, experiments in description, almost devoid of personality), very good on Hawthorne’s novels (judging The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables as his finest), but I found his most valuable insight in his treatment of the shorter tales.

There he speaks of Hawthorne and his relationship to the Puritan conscience. Having read all of Hawthorne’s shorter tales, I have always been uneasy with the cloak of “dark Romanticism” which has been cast upon the shoulders of Hawthorne. It seems to me he is a smiling, shy sort of fellow, interested in the guilty conscience as a theme, but by no means obsessed by it. I was very pleased to find the great writer Henry James agrees.

Here—as a small taste of the the balance and common sense James bring to his subject—is his treatment of Hawthorne the imaginative creator and his relationship to the Puritan conscience:

He had ample cognizance of the Puritan conscience; it was his natural heritage; it was reproduced in him; looking into his soul, he found it there. But his relation to it was only, as one may say, intellectual; it was not moral and theological. He played with it and used it as a pigment; he treated it, as the metaphysicians say, objectively. He was not discomposed, disturbed, haunted by it, in the manner of its usual and regular victims, who had not the little postern door of fancy to slip through, to the other side of the wall. It was, indeed, to his imaginative vision, the great fact of man’s nature; the light element that had been mingled with his own composition always clung to this rugged prominence of moral responsibility, like the mist that hovers about the mountain. It was a necessary condition for a man of Hawthorne’s stock that if his imagination should take licence to amuse itself, it should at least select this grim precinct of the Puritan morality for its play-ground. He speaks of the dark disapproval with which his old ancestors, in the case of their coming to life, would see him trifling himself away as a story-teller. But how far more darkly would they have frowned could they have understood that he had converted the very principle of their own being into one of his toys!

[Ulysse · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book last summer and have near forgotten most of it now except that it's a biography of Hawthorne, and a good one at that. While reading it, however, I remember thinking: Goddamn Henry James, goddamn you, why do you have to be so great, old sport? Can't you make me dislike you just a little bit, so that I can enjoy these diminishing summer days and not be compelled to read all the time, and thus miss out on the sun setting over a purple sea that is not made of words?

[John Pistelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short 1879 book is Henry James's critical biography of the man who would at the time have been considered his most distinguished precursor in American fiction, Nathaniel Hawthorne. James was early in his career and was moreover writing Hawthorne as the only entry on an American to appear in a series published in Britain on "English Men of Letters"; he is consequently forced to fight on two fronts throughout his text. On the one hand, he struggles to clear a space for himself in American letters by defining himself against his precursor as a member of a more complex, ironic, cosmopolitan, and realistic generation of writers; on the other hand, he must defend the honor of American literature, even of America itself, against the condescension of the erstwhile mother country.

In the first task of guarding against literary subsumption by Hawthorne, James acquits himself with grace and aplomb. It is an exceptionally dignified performance, considering what it might have been—compare, for instance, the sometimes ludicrous vitriol of the later modernists against their own precursors (e.g., Ezra Pound: "From an examination of Walt made twelve years ago the present writer carried away the impression that there are thirty well-written pages of Whitman; he is now unable to find them"). James even manages to recast Hawthorne's faults as virtues. Understanding that Hawthorne will be judged by English or European readers as unsophisticated by the standards of "that quality of realism which is now so much in fashion," that the thinness and simplicity of his fiction's social settings will be found wanting in comparison to Balzac or Flaubert, James nevertheless emphasizes that Hawthorne's very narrowness and intensity of focus make his work all the more valuable as a testimony to its time and place:

His very simplicity has been in his favour; it has helped him to appear complete and homogeneous. To talk of his being national would be to force the note and make a mistake of proportion; but he is, in spite of the absence of the realistic quality, intensely and vividly local.

James implies that a Balzac would have struggled to produce novels like Lost Illusions if he had had to take New England small-town life as his subject matter, with its lack either of Europe's medieval survivals (church, aristocracy) or of its ultramodern developments (industrialization and urbanization). In Hawthorne's most famous passage, James gives us a seriocomic list of everything the early nineteenth-century American writer did not have to write about:

No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class—no Epsom nor Ascot!

Precisely these absences were considered by eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century writers to be advantages: Franklin, Crèvecœur, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman were certainly grateful to live in a country unencumbered by ruined abbeys or aristocratic racecourses. But they were not novelists, and the novel was invented—according to the strictures of high realism to which the young James adhered—to anatomize a complex society and to analyze the human being as social animal. Without a complex society to portray, spending most of his life in small towns and villages, Hawthorne had recourse to symbolism and psychology. And while James cannot stop himself from judging that Hawthorne, even in his masterpiece (The Scarlet Letter), exhibits "a want of reality and an abuse of the fanciful element," he also concedes that it could hardly have been otherwise.

While we might see James as influenced by contemporaneous naturalist ideas in judging Hawthorne so completely a product of his environment, we could also consider this book an ahead-of-its-time exercise in postcolonial criticism—an examination of the difficulties and opportunities for the writer in a newly-born country still culturally dominated by the empire and lacking in the full development of its own political and social powers. James's tone wavers between the admiring and the patronizing when he writes of Hawthorne as "the last of the old-fashioned Americans," above all in "in the vagueness of his sense of social distinctions and his readiness to forget them if a moral or intellectual sensation were to be gained by it" (in one passage, James apologizes to the sensitive English reader because in one of his stories Hawthorne refers to a tavern-keeper as a "gentlewoman"!). James seems overall, though, to mourn the passing of a generation so ingenuously and innocently democratic as that of Hawthorne, the Transcendentalists, and, indeed, James's own parents.

The postcolonial critic, however, usually gets around to censuring the national bourgeoisie for its complacency, and James is no different—nor, surprisingly, is his verdict on Hawthorne's Jacksonian America really so different from our own. James predictably but very gingerly upbraids Hawthorne for his politics—he was a lifelong Democrat, making him, by the time of the Civil War, a northern moderate opposed to abolitionism and eventually opposed to the war itself—but the judgment extends to the entirety of antebellum white America (or New England, anyway—America seems largely to mean New England for the purposes of this book) as James notes when he argues for the Civil War as a decisive break in the national character:

[The good American] has eaten of the tree of knowledge. He will not, I think, be a sceptic, and still less, of course, a cynic; but he will be, without discredit to his well-known capacity for action, an observer. He will remember that the ways of the Lord are inscrutable, and that this is a world in which everything happens; and eventualities, as the late Emperor of the French used to say, will not find him intellectually unprepared. The good American of which Hawthorne was so admirable a specimen was not critical, and it was perhaps for this reason that Franklin Pierce seemed to him a very proper President.

James seems to have taken his tree-of-knowledge metaphor literally: he expelled himself—forever, in the end—from the New World's garden, becoming a good American by becoming no American at all.

To return from politics to literature: there is obviously much of Hawthorne in James's fiction, despite the later author's choice of European cosmopolitanism over American provincialism and of realism over romance. Isabel Archer is the daughter of Hester Prynne (almost literally, considering the fate of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter) while The Bostonians comes straight out of The Blithedale Romance. James's description of Hilda from The Marble Faun could caption his own whole procession of besmirched Protestant madonnas from Daisy to Milly:

This pure and somewhat rigid New England girl, following the vocation of a copyist of pictures in Rome, unacquainted with evil and untouched by impurity, has been accidentally the witness, unknown and unsuspected, of the dark deed by which her friends, Miriam and Donatello, are knit together. This is her revelation of evil, her loss of perfect innocence. She has done no wrong, and yet wrongdoing has become a part of her experience, and she carries the weight of her detested knowledge upon her heart. She carries it a long time, saddened and oppressed by it, till at last she can bear it no longer.

James even unwittingly (and amusingly) foretells his own destiny in writing of Hawthorne's stylistic development:

[The Scarlet Letter] is admirably written. Hawthorne afterwards polished his style to a still higher degree, but in his later productions—it is almost always the case in a writer's later productions—there is a touch of mannerism.[1]

Finally, James's balanced assessment of Hawthorne's temperament—"The play of [his] intellect was light and capricious, but the man himself was firm and rational"—is a welcome contrast not only to the French critic James is explicitly arguing against, who saw Hawthorne as a kind of Poe-like nihilist, but also to Melville's projection of Hawthorne as an author who said "NO! in thunder," a strange thing to claim about a writer whose central symbol is ambivalence embroidered. If you miss Hawthorne's rationality, you miss the irony that preserves his fantasy from decaying into mere sensationalism—you miss the novelistic temper behind the romancer. This was not lost—little was—on James.

My own contribution to the theory of literary influence is less psychedelic than Eliot's ("the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past"), Borges's ("every writer creates his own precursors"), or Bloom's ("influence is influenza—an astral disease"), even though they well illuminate those moments in which Hawthorne sounds like James. But perhaps my homely contribution will be more practically persuasive: I think strong writers overcome the anxiety of influence by adopting modes that startlingly combine those of the most disparate of their major precursors.[2]

In the best work of James's middle years, for example, he seems to have proceeded as if he were Jane Austen writing The Scarlet Letter or Nathaniel Hawthorne writing Pride and Prejudice. Bereft of a broad social canvas and moreover tormented by extreme Puritan inwardness, the early American writer dug deeply rather than venturing widely. This seems to have been James's hint to tunnel a deep burrow into the English or European social novel and excavate the psyche's symbols. James turns the socially realist novel inside out, lining drawing-room walls and urban streets with his character's inner lives. In his excellent Portrait of a Novel, Michael Gorra argues that James's Portrait of a Lady is the hinge text that swings modern fiction from Middlemarch to Mrs. Dalloway. James could never have accomplished this without the example of Hawthorne, whose fiction—however local, however provincial—became world literature in the hands of his successor.
_________________________

[1] James's own sometimes scarcely readable late style, though, is more a pummeling than a touch of mannerism.

[2] The harder it is to imagine making the combination work, the greater the literary rewards will be. Feel free to take this as a writing prompt, by the way. What if Edith Wharton wrote Paradise Lost? What if J. G. Ballard wrote Daniel Deronda? What if Zora Neale Hurston wrote Blood Meridian?

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finished: 04.09.2018
Genre: essay/biography
Rating: B-
#RIPXIII
Conclusion:
If you don't have the time to read a long biography about Hawthorne
this is the perfect book to at least give you an impression of the author.
It is just 176 pages. Do be prepared for Henry James and his writing style. His writing can at times be full of pretentiousnesss and self-indulgent verbiage. Sometimes I needed to 'cut to the chase' to reach more important or more interesting things in the book. (aka skimming).

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

James dissects a Puritan legacy. Hawthorne adds luster to a joyless and parochial cultural desert.

[Richard Epstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

James on Hawthorne: who could ask for anything more. This is the book in which James famously explains what's missing from American life: "no sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church . . . no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses . . . nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals . . . no Oxford . . . no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class . . . no Epsom nor Ascot."

[Brittany {conjuringpages} · Rating 5 out of 5]

RTC- I adore James and Hawthorne so it was quite the delight to read James praise Hawthorne and give such interesting perspectives!

[Mark Stephenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read The Scarlet Letter so early in life and (read no James until my college years) so it was interesting indeed to read this monograph on Hawthorne by James and utterly surprising to percieve how greatly indebted James was to this outstanding American author - especially obvious as I read The Blithedale Romance and began reading The Marble Faun. Very touching are James comments on the Civil War!

[Paul Jellinek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderfully written and brilliantly perceptive, Henry James's critical biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, written fairly early in James's career, gives us some invaluable insights into Hawthorne's work--and helps us to appreciate just how profoundly James's own writing (like Melville's) was influenced by the author of "The Scarlet Letter" and "The House of the Seven Gables." Left me with an even greater appreciation for both of these truly great American writers.

[Vildan Y. · Rating 3 out of 5]

feeling the dizziness of James...you gonna have just a complicated theory of placin the works of Hawthorn...but I like it tough, when he tries very hard to justify the "dulness" of Nathaniel which I have never felt...at least what I felt is less than the emotion I got from the works of James, himself...

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this - what could be better, one of my favorite authors writing sensitively about another?? James isn't just a fanboy, but he has a generous appreciation of Hawthorne's work. Nice to read after The Other Book that was so mean spirited.

[Laura]

4* The Turn of the Screw
3* The Jolly Corner
3* The Art of Fiction
3* Roderick Hudson
4* The American
4* The Beast in the Jungle
2* Lady Barbarina and Other Tales
3* The Madonna of the Future
4* A Little Tour in France
3* What Maisie Knew
4* The Aspern Papers
2* The Real Thing
2* The Bostonians
4* The Portrait of a Lady
4* The Wings of the Dove
4* The Ambassadors
3* Washington Square
4* Daisy Miller
TR The Tragic Muse
TR The Spoils of Poynton
TR Hawthorne
TR The Pupil
TR The Princess Casamassima
TR The Great Good Place
TR Nona Vincent
TR The Art of the Novel
TR The Middle Years
TR Ghost Stories
TR The Ivory Tower
TR Italian Hours
TR Nona Vincent
TR The Great Good Place

About Henry James:
3* Henry James: A Life in Letters
3* Henry James at Work
3* The Real Henry James
TR A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women & His Art
TR The Realists: Eight Portraits: Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Galdos, Henry James, Proust
TR The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad