Hawthorne in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life,Drawn from Recollections,Interviews, and Memoirs by Family,Frie

[ A Conversation about Hawthorne at the Concord School of Philosophy in 1880]

[A Conversation about Hawthorne at the Concord School of Philosophy in 1880] [Franklin B. Sanborn] Over his long and varied career as a teacher in Concord, journalist, abolitionist and social reformer, prolific reporter of Transcendentalism in New England, and biographer of Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and others, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (1831–1917) earned immense respect from his contemporaries . Today, however, his reputation is mixed at best. For although as a second-generation Transcendentalist he—probably more than anyone else— transmitted the intellectual fervor of the movement’s founders to twentiethcentury readers, Sanborn had an unfortunate tendency to rewrite history, usually to his own advantage. That does not appear to be a problem in Sanborn’s following account of the unscheduled conversation about Hawthorne that occurred in July 1880 during the second season of the Concord School of Philosophy. Here, Sanborn is on his best behavior as a journalist as he records what must have struck all in attendance as the most important public discussion of Hawthorne’s life and writing held in the sixteen years since the author’s death. On the platform with Sanborn, who moderated the conversation, were Bronson Alcott and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and both were in their best talkative moods. William Sloane Kennedy, George Parsons Lathrop, and William Henry Channing, who were in the audience, actively contributed their own anecdotes, insights, and reminiscences relating to Hawthorne to the conversation. Nothing seemed to be off limits as the conversation unfolded: Hawthorne’s character, early life, relation to his parents and his own family, life in Concord and abroad, complex attitude toward American culture, and sense of personal and authorial isolation all receive detailed comment. Sanborn appreciated the importance of what he witnessed at the Concord School of Philosophy. In the article he immediately wrote for the Boston Herald , from which the text that follows is drawn, he added three subtitles in bold lettering below “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” his title for the piece: “Conversation about the Author of ‘The Scarlet Letter’”; “His Friends Tell the Story of His Life Anew”; “Fresh Facts about the Great Romancer.” Two days later Sanborn’s [195] [195] XZ hawthorne in his own time [196] abridged versions of the original appeared in the Springfield Republican (8 [3 August 1880]: 1–2) and the New-York Tribune (6 [3 August 1880]: 2–4). But the excitement of the moment did not end there. A year later, Kennedy, who was troubled by the disposition among the conversation’s participants to separate Hawthorne’s art from his inner life, published “The Seclusion and Isolation of Hawthorne,” a decidedly psychoanalytic reading of the subject, in The Californian (4 [August 1881]: 124–26). Arguing that introspection and reflection were the sources of his genius, Kennedy said that Hawthorne wrote about the truth of life as he discovered it within himself during his most “despondent moods”: “In the gleaming sunny chambers of his fantasy were many doors opening abruptly upon the dark, inane, and ghost-haunted region of despair, and if occasionally he permitted the dim phantoms to troop through the opened doors, it was . . . that he might group them, sketch them, and then wave them back” (125). According to Kennedy, the “conclusion and the moral” of his life and writings “Hawthorne would say to be this: Sedulously avoid everything that tends to destroy sympathy and love in your breast. This was the course Hawthorne himself pursued. . . . He saw the danger of isolation in time to avoid it, and in his Dramas of Sorrow he . . . warned others against the danger, and helped them to avoid it” (126). The surprises at the Concord school of philosophy this season have been numerous and memorable. The various sessions have often been brilliant beyond expectation. While the lectures have been good, the conversations following them have often been better than the lectures themselves,even the lecturers often saying their best things unconsciously at this time.But the surprise of surprises came yesterday morning.It had been expected that Prof. Benjamin Peirce would lecture, but . . . he was too ill to fulfil his engagement. Many knew this . . . but some came to hear the conversation on Hawthorne that was to take the place of Prof.Peirce’s lecture,and among them a member of the Herald’s staff.It was easy to foresee,on looking over the audience,that persons were present who, if they could be induced to tell what they knew of the great romancer,could impart the deepest interest to the...