Lost in the Customhouse: Authorship in the American Renaissance

2. Hawthorne's Awakening in the Customhouse

2 · Hawthorne's Awakening in the Customhouse is appropriate that the author of America's next "Sketch Book" is "A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR"another dreamer who loses his head in the abyss of the imagination. In recounting the story of his removal from the Salem Custom House, Nathaniel Hawthorne compared his "decapitated state" to that of "Irving's Headless Horseman, ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried, as a politically dead man ought." 1 The parallel is perhaps more significant than even Hawthorne realized, for the author of The Scarlet Letter (1850) had been, like Irving, a scribbler of many sketches and, like Rip, the "idle" conclusion to generations of busy ancestors. Although his seclusion was initially exaggerated by modern critics, Hawthorne abandoned the world of the novel-and thus the realm of "something "-after writing the abortive Fanshawe (1828) and became-like Irving in The Sketch Book-a "sojourner " in sketches. In fact, The Scarlet Letter was conceived as a sketch, and it was Hawthorne's original expectation that it would be only the central one of several tales in yet another collection. The "romance" that resulted is a watershed in Hawthorne's career as an American writer because it records the point at which he saw something of the "blankness" of his own pages. As with Irving, the lifting of this writer's block was indirectly the consequence of the death of a loved one-in this case, Hawthorne's mother. He began writing The Scarlet Letter shortly after her death, [ 1 9 ] Hawthome's Awakening in the Customhouse for his grief had enabled him to cut through to the nothingness or "neutral territory" of a self-begotten self. This was personified by Hester Prynne in America's second great "tale of human frailty and sorrow." In reaching back in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne doubtless became aware that he had lost a lover as well as a mother in the summer of 1849. Hester's singular blend of maternal and carnal qualities suggests it. Having grown up in Salem without a father to "castrate" him, this now "decapitated surveyor" began to realize in the wake of his three and a half years' literary sleep in the customhouse and in the imminent loss of his mother that he had finally found the proper, and hence personal, context for the guilt he had explored at a more comfortable remove in the numerous sketches he had written. After visiting his mother's bedside the day before her death, he acknowledged a son's natural love for his mother but added that "there has been, ever since my boyhood, a sort of coldness of intercourse between us, such as is apt to come between persons of strong feelings, if they are not managed rightly." 2 Without adopting wholly the Freudian paradigm , we can nevertheless appreciate how the trauma of Elizabeth Hawthorne's death led her son to the second story of the customhouse and the dream of Hester and her Pearl. Hawthorne remembered kneeling that day at :his mother's bedside and shaking "with sobs." He recorded the moment as the "darkest hour" he had ever lived. Yet that moment was contrasted brilliantly in the very next with the "spirit and life" of his daughter Una playing in the grass below his mother's bedroom window. He saw at once in this drama of life and death, he said, "the whole of human existence."3 What he also saw, however, was "the authenticity of the outline" he would claim for The Scarlet Letter (p. 33). As with Irving at his literary apex, the only thing and the very thing Hawthorne required for his genius to pass through the "customhouse" of his imagination was the proper "frame" of experience. For the first and really last time in his writing career he would pass through it, as Melville later suggested, without the bag and baggage of a "nay-sayer" disguised as a yeasayer , or at best one who pretends to survey "something" instead of "nothing" in life. In spite of the moralistic close of Hawthorne's tallest tale, what emerged from the summer of 1849 was the figure of selfbegotten beauty-"Divine Maternity" with a consecration of her own. [ 2 0] Hawthorne's Awakening in the Customhouse Although the customhouse sketch was written after all but the final three chapters of the romance it introduces,4 as Hawthorne attempted to distance himself...