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Reminiscences of Hawthorne and Poe
By Richard Henry Stoddard
REMEMBER seeing the manuscript of Hawthorne's “Blithedale Romance “ lying on Mr. Fields's desk in the old Boston book-shop at the corner of School and Washington streets. That was in the summer of 1851, when besides the person just mentioned I met Mr. E. P. Whipple, the critic, and Colonel Thomas Jefferson Whipple, whom Hawthorne had summoned to Salem to supply him with accurate information for his “Life of President Pierce.” Hawthorne had at this time just begun writing this campaign document, which his good friends and: bitter enemies called his “new romance.” From Boston, Colonel Whipple, Mr. Fields and Young Master Stoddard proceeded by rail to Salem, where we found the Hawthorne family at dinner in a parlor on the left side of the hall. Hawthorne himself sat at one end of the table and I took my place at his right hand, sipping with him a glass of weak claret. His daughters, Una and Rose, and his son Julian, were also at the table: After dinner Hawthorne took me up the well-known hill behind his home, [column 2:] where we chatted a while in a little summer house on the summit of this eminence, talking particularly about his early associates at Brook Farm — Dana, Curtis and Ripley.
On my second visit to the Wayside no one was present when I talked with Hawthorne except his boy, Julian, who, then eight or ten years old, would meddle with pens, ink and paper, to the annoyance of his father. A stronger cigar than I was used to sent me out of doors to cool off. After a walk in the chilly November wind I returned to Boston and thence came to New York.
Hawthorne's first inspiration was Mrs. Radcliffe's “Mysteries of Udolpho,” the weird tales of “Monk” Lewis, and his impossible melodramas, in which Poe's mother appeared, in 1801, as a chambermaid, singing and dancing. As for Poe, I have many unpublished letters of his, and also, among others, some written to him by Mrs. Whitman, who, with others of Poe's female cronies, thought she was the original “Annabel Lee.” Poor Poe! He abused all who served him — Griswold, [page 2757:] John Sartain and Mrs. Kirkland, the last of whom showed me the printed manuscript of “Ulalume,” which did not impress me much, as I frankly told her. That poem appeared soon afterward, I thing in the Whig Review. Poe's needs compelled him to accept $10 for everything he wrote for that periodical — at least so I was assured by Mr. Priestly, a fellow Centurian of strict veracity. I lave also somewhere among my Poe material a letter of Mrs. Clemm, and two or three letters of her daughter, Rosa MacKenzie, for whose benefit I was given a check for $100, which, by the advice of a Baltimore gentleman acquainted with the ‘amily, I sent to her in separate instalments of $25 each.
Hawthorne was different. I never heard that anybody dared send him unearned [column 2:] money while he was surveyor in the Salem Custom House, or at any other time of his life. He was a man who stood well on his own feet. I received several letters from him — one written just before his death in his fifty-ninth year. Another letter, which he wrote after finishing the “Tanglewood Tales,” I may copy out here. It will show the estimate Hawthorne himself placed on these children's books which many persons overlook when they sum up the measure of his work:
DEAR STODDARD — I beg your pardon for not writing before; but I have been very busy, and not particularly well. I enclose a letter from Atherton. Roll up and pile up as much of a snowball as you can, in the way of political interest; for there never was a fiercer time than this, among the office-seekers, You [page 2759:] had better make your point in the Custom House at New York, if possible; for, from what I can learn, there will be a poor chance for clerkships in Washington. I have finished the “Tanglewood Tales,” and they will make a volume about the size of the “Wonder-book,” consisting of six myths — the Minotaur, the Golden Fleece, the Story of [column 2:] Proserpine, etc., etc., etc., done up in excellent style, purified from all moral stains, recreated as good as new or better, and fully equal, in their own way, to Mother Goose. I never did anything else so well as these old baby stories.
In haste, truly yours,
NATH. HAWTHORNE.
NEW YORK CITY.
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - INY, 1902] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - A Poe Bookshelf - Reminiscences of Hawthorne and Poe (Richard H. Stoddard, 1902)