Currently Reading
December 25, 2005
Hawthorne in Concord by Philip McFarland.
Nathaniel Hawthorne has always been a favorite, and I have mentioned before that the Web has some excellent Hawthorne resources. But this book is revealing Hawthorne the person, and, so far in the telling, he is as loving and kind as a person as he was talented and probing as a writer. The book opens with his marriage to Sophia Peabody. In a love letter to Sophia three years earlier, he had imagined their new life together. “Oh, beloved, if we had but a cottage, somewhere beyond the sway of the East Wind, yet within the limits of New-England, where we could be always together, and have a place to be in—” What more could lovers want? “Nothing-save daily bread, (or rather bread and milk; for I think I should adopt your diet) and clean white apparel every day for mine unspotted Dove. Then… I could not be other than good and happy, when your kiss would sanctify me at all my outgoings and incomings, and when I should rest nightly in your arms.”
When I was an undergraduate, a poetry instructor told us to write a poem of place. I was living in a rambling old brick house in New Bedford. It had probably been a nice house once, but now it was student housing, and really, nothing much to write about. But I was a dogged and unimaginative student, so I went with what I had. I learned the house was built in 1842, and the only thing noteworthy I could come up with about 1842 was that it was the year “Hawthorne was married.” My poem was a pitiful little thing, but little did I know how important that single detail was. And now I do, thanks to the fine writing of Philip McFarland.
Posted by Bill Trippe at December 25, 2005 7:53 PM
