Twice-Told Biography

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (285 pp.)--American Men of Leffers Series--Mark Van Doren--Sloane ($3.50).

In his own lifetime, Nathaniel Hawthorne was known as a novelist, short-story writer, and active Democratic politician; the main event in his political career was his abrupt dismissal from a customshouse job (after charges of dishonesty, incompetence and political corruption), by order of President Zachary Taylor. He was also widely known as the enthusiastic biographer of the inept and unlucky President Franklin Pierce. Hawthorne's praise of his friend Pierce was still ringing in men's ears when Pierce's administration collapsed in fiasco.

For years after his death, Hawthorne was principally famous as the author of children's stories. Generations of schoolchildren read The Great Stone Face without appreciating the political allegory (and the attack on Whig Daniel Webster) that it contained.

Witchcraft et Cetera. Except for Professor George Woodberry, who nearly 50 years ago wrote the life of Hawthorne for the original "American Men of Letters" series, Hawthorne's biographers did not do much research on the facts of his life. Instead, they have speculated and commented, with varying degrees of critical acumen and psychological acuteness, on his published works. One result is that in the past 50 years a series of well-nigh indistinguishable opuses have been written about him. Their general story is that Hawthorne was descended from one of the witchcraft judges of Salem; that his father, a sea captain, died when he was three; that he went to Bowdoin, lived in seclusion after graduation, and published his first stories anonymously. This version of his life has been worn smooth from much handling; it is the classic, rather melancholy picture of the American literary man neglected by his time. It is also traditional and mildly touching, and it presents an image of the ideal man of letters just as Douglas Southall Freeman's R. E. Lee projects the ideal military man. Among U.S. academicians, it is cherished as the schoolboy once cherished Parson Weems's Life of Washington.

In part, Mark Van Doren's new biography of Hawthorne is no exception. When it deals with Hawthorne's life, it follows all the smooth old academic stereotypes. Whenever it touches on Hawthorne's writing, however, the book picks up interest at once. Of The Wives of the Dead, one of the most poignant stories in the English language, he says: "No reader of it will forget the speed with which its interior lights up and stays lit with a significance almost too delicate to name." Such stories do not date, for, as Van Doren says, they deal with timeless events, "and once Hawthorne is truly among them he is master of the simple matter they contain."

And Hard Knowledge. Van Doren's contribution to the subject of Hawthorne thus amounts to an impressive, if interrupted, essay on what Hawthorne had to say and how successfully he said it. That contribution could have been greater if Van Doren had 1) thrown away the biographical passages, or 2) fastened his attention on the man Hawthorne really was.

The accepted version of Hawthorne's life has too long blurred the absurdities and humiliations of his political career, the job-seeking, the deals, the mistakes, the lost election. The power of Hawthorne's fiction was not, after all, the result of a strong, secluded imagination; it came from an awareness of what was happening in the U.S. in his own time, a hard knowledge won by his own work and by his association with people who were trying, with little success, to control events.

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