The Unity of Hawthorne‘s Twice-Told Tales

THE UNITY OF HAWTHORNE‘S TWICE-TOLD TALES J. Donald Crowley* I Writing to Longfellow on March 7, 1837, the day the first edition of Twice-Told Tales was published, Hawthorne, in his typically selfdeprecatory way, apologized for inflicting his “‘twice-told’ tedious­ ness” on his old college acquaintance and then went on to remark that “The present volume contains such articles as seemed best worth offering to the public a second time.” 1 For that collection, the first book to carry his name on the title page, he selected eighteen of the forty-three tales and sketches which had been published separately -and anonymously or pseudonymously-in newspapers, mag­ azines, and gift-book annuals during the previous six years.2 Al­ though there is no record that Hawthorne made such a judgment about the 1842 collection, it seems reasonable to assume that he would have said much the same thing when, expanding it to two vol­ umes, he told for a second time twenty-one additional pieces. Taken together, these stories comprise nearly two-thirds of the sixty-six tales and sketches written before 1842 and known to have survived.3 There is nothing to suggest that nineteenth-century readers saw any reason to quarrel with Hawthorne’s choices, and as late as 1939 Bertha Faust could describe the 1837 collection as one which, “though small, was thoroughly representative, and gave an accurate impression of Hawthorne’s manner in its then modest range. It was a fair and favorable presentation.”4 More recent critics have had other views, however, perhaps best summed up in what one has called the need to explain “that still astonishing phenomenon, the Twice-Told Tales.”5 The Twice-Told Tales is “astonishing” even at this late date, but not because so much has been written about the collection per se— al­ most nothing has. The volumes have only recently become a point of critical bewilderment. Not having discovered “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” until the 1950s (Matthiessen does not even allude to the tale in American Renaissance), critics realized as if for the first time that, although Hawthorne had written the tale before 1830, he did *J. Donald Crowley, Professor of English at the University of Missouri, has written numerous essays on Hawthorne and has edited Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage as well as a critical edition of Robinson Crusoe. He is also the editor of several volumes in the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. 36 J. Donald Crowley not see fit to acknowledge it until 1851 when he hastily gathered to­ gether nearly all his vagrant, half-forgotten pieces for The SnowImage , and Other Twice-Told Tales. This discovery in turn led quick­ ly to a heightened sense of the discrepancy between the date of com­ position and first separate printing of other tales and their inclusion in a collection. Why did the 1837 and 1842 volumes not contain Hawthorne’s other highly prized tales, “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” first printed in the Token for 1832, and “Young Goodman Brown,” which appeared initially in the New-England Magazine in April, 1835? The question is finally unanswerable, but it has had embar­ rassing implications for most Hawthorne scholars, given the fact that, among other pieces in the two volumes, Hawthorne selected what are to modern taste such obviously inferior and disappointing ones as, say, “Little Annie’s Ramble,” “David Swan,” “The Vision of the Fountain,” “The Sister Years,” and “Edward Fane’s Rose­ bud.” Indeed, some readers find it difficult to believe that the same man who could write “Molineux” could also have written many of the other tales. “And yet, when all is said and done,” comments one, “there is much about Hawthorne that is unsatisfactory. . . . There remains The Scarlet Letter and a handful of stories. And there re­ mains the question: why are they so good and the rest so bad?”6 If Hawthorne’s remark to Longfellow in 1837 is a basically accurate and reliable statement of his assessment of his own work, his selec­ tion of tales and sketches for Twice-Told Tales illustrates dramat­ ically the radical difference between the value he put on his work and the...