The Tellers and the Tales: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville

TheTellersandthe Tales: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville RaymonaA. Hull. Nathaniel Hawthorne: TheEnglish Experience, 1853-1864. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980. 307+ xvi pp. DavidKetterer. The Rationale of Deception in Poe. BatonRouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. 285+xv pp. G.R.Thompson and Virgil L. Lokke, eds. Ruined Edenof the Present: Hawthorne, Melville and Poe. C,itica'z Essays in Honor of Darrel Abel. West Lafayette,Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1981. 383+xix pp. ArlinTurner. Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1980.457 +xiv pp. Barrie Hayne Itisnow nearly a quarter of a century since Harry Levin's droll observation tinThe Power of Blackness) that the academic study of Melville had replaced the whaling industry as the principal activity of New England. The interveningyears have done nothing to reverse the process. "Save the Whales" buttonsproliferate, but the notes of "Woodman, Spare that Tree" are sounded lessthese days. The lumber room in which even Moby-Dick was locked up for seventy-five years has now been fully opened for inspection, and even Clare!dusted off for a masterpiece. The Godhead is broken up like the bread of the Supper, and Melville's works are the pieces. Levin's observations, of course, applied as well to the other two authors he was examining, though the oblivion that was cast in Melville's path had neverbefallen Poe and Hawthorne. But we can, even more now,extend Levin's witticism to note that even when the government seems increasingly given to opening the mail, more people are probably writing on Poe than are purloining letters; and that, even in a permissive age, writing on Hawthorne mustbe almost as common if not quite as socially acceptable as committing adultery. As Perry Miller also used to remark, that same quarter century ago, the battle for American literature, in which he had been one of the shock troops, had been all too well won. Thus J. Albert Robbins opens his report on Poe for American Litera,y Scholarship 1979 by noting that the "half a hundred books, articles, and dissertations" on Poe in 1977had risen Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 14,Number 3, Fall 1983,309-14 310 Barrie Hayne to nearly a hundred in 1978, and "subsided" in 1979 to a mere fifty-five. Across the border, happily, a sifting process takes place, and I am fortunate in having before me now four of the best works on these three writers published in the last few years. Early and late, these three writers have drawn a certain kind of criticism: something beyond, but akin to, what Melville himself called "the shock of recognition." Their commentators have tended, more than with even most romantic artists, to see themselves in these three. Baudelaire saw Poe as a Christ recrucified on the cross of American materialism; seventy-five years later Daniel Hoffman began his biography with a childhood identification with Poe, and testified further to his obsession by calling that biography Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. Melville found Hawthorne "deep as Dante," an author to whom Melville himself (most notably in Pierre) was much more clearly attuned; James's strictures on Hawthorne's excessively fanciful streak were clearly a warning to himself; and D. H. Lawrence read Hester Prynne as a kind of Gudrun Brangwen, with Chillingworth and Dimmesdale both emasculated, both equally her victims. And Melville's works have been repeatedly used as doubloons mirroring back the image of the observer; Lawrence again comes to mind in his fascination with the brotherhood on the Pequod, a blueprint for Wilsonian Utopia after 1918. Like Shakespeare, moreover, the "Swan of Avon" to whom Melville also compared Hawthorne, these three writers have, without ceasing to mirror back their commentators' gaze, attracted every kind of criticism, though especially and predictably the biographical and its subgenre the psychoanalytic (the critical method works by projection). Each of the three has had his psyche closely examined, by both amateur and professional clinicians. Joseph Wood Krutch's biography of Poe istaken further byMarie Bonaparte's, which comes with a brief introduction by Freud himself; Hawthorne becomes for Frederick Crews a textbook case of the Oedipus complex in The Sins of the Fathers...